Four days after Russia illegally invaded Ukraine, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced that “for the first time ever”, the EU would “finance the purchase and delivery of weapons… to a country that is under attack”. A few days earlier, she had declared the EU to be “one union, one alliance” with NATO.
Unlike NATO, the EU is not a military alliance. Yet, from the outset of this war, it has been more concerned with militarism than diplomacy. This was not unexpected.
The Lisbon Treaty provided the legal underpinning for the EU to develop a common security and defence policy. Between 2014 and 2020, some €25.6bn* of the EU’s public money was spent beefing up its military capacity. The 2021-27 budget established a European Defence Fund (EDF) of nearly €8bn, modelled on two precursor programmes, which for the first time allocated EU funding to the research and development of innovative military wares, including highly controversial arms that rely on artificial intelligence or automated systems. The EDF is but one aspect of a much broader defence budget.
