Paris, 16 June 2010 – The European Union should opt for a lightweight, à la carte arrangement for those of its members wishing to participate in permanent structured cooperation (PSC) in security and defence, the Assembly said on Wednesday.

Presenting a report entitled “Permanent structured cooperation under the Lisbon Treaty – reply to the annual report of the Council”, the Earl of DUNDEE (United Kingdom, Federated Group) recalled that in 2003, the EU had adopted a headline goal: to be able to deploy a 50 000 to 60 000-strong force within two months and sustain for it for one year. But that goal was nowhere near reached because of a lack of resources and slow and cumbersome decision-making.

More recently, the Lisbon Treaty had made provision for permanent structured cooperation but the terms of Article 2 of the relevant protocol were “too vague and for the most part too subjective to be used for the definition of quantifiable participation criteria”, he explained.

Lord DUNDEE said that the two main concerns among EU member states regarding possible forms of defence cooperation were firstly that their national defence requirements may not be served properly by cooperation over armaments production; and secondly the disparities in size and strengths of the different states. If the aim was to avoid creating a gap between the two categories of member state, all of them should be able to participate. But this would mean setting PSC criteria so undemanding that it would raise the question of whether there was any point in “permanent structured cooperation in the first place”.

The report submitted to the Assembly advocated an à la carte approach which offered scope for cooperation among willing member states either in the operational sphere under the chairmanship of the Director-General of the EU Military Staff, or in the area of capabilities and equipment under the chairmanship of the Director of the European Defence Agency (EDA). The report also called for maximum flexibility in engaging in such cooperation on a case-by-case basis, both for projects and member participation.

But this solution as it applied to equipment would work only if an efficient, transparent and properly funded system were set up under the EDA in order to run the cooperation and thus enable Europe to catch up where it had fallen behind, Lord DUNDEE said.