Exchange of views with Josep BORRELL FONTELLES, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission in charge of a stronger Europe in the World, on a Strategic Compass for the EU on the subject of the new military Strategic Compass for the EU

Committee on Foreign Affairs

exchange of views

Subcommittee on Security and Defence

BORRELL FONTELLES, Josep (PSE, ES, EC)

EP AFET and SEDE joint debate - Exchange of views with HRVP Josep BORRELL FONTELLES on a Strategic Compass for the EU

SOUNDBITE (Spanish), Josep BORRELL FONTELLES, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the EC in charge of a stronger Europe in the World, Thank you, Natalie. Thank you to all of the members of the parliament for having invited me so quickly after the Council in its formation of defence and foreign ministers approved the Strategic Compass. Certainly this approval is a crucial moment, I won't say it's a historical moment because we use that term too often here in Brussels. But undoubtedly it is a pivotal moment because this is the first time that the 27 member states have agreed on a document which is both concrete and enforceable. Its goal is clear, and it can be, and I hope that it will be fully implemented. By approving the Strategic Compass, we are sending a strong signal of our unity and our determination to act together, to give reason to the expressions that we very often use on the geopolitical nature of our union and our strategic capacity to wield power. This is the result of two years of intense work both both in Brussels and in the 27 capitals. And I would like to thank you for the exchanges that we've had with the European Parliament. You've all been so inspiring and really driven this work forward. Civil society and the academic community as well are to be recognised.

SOUNDBITE (Spanish), Josep BORRELL FONTELLES, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the EC in charge of a stronger Europe in the World, The conference starts off by giving a very dour image of the world that we live in, and that evaluation is based on joint action of the intelligence services of all member states. And it's fundamental because we cannot have an external and security policy without a common assessment and evaluation of the threats and risks that we are facing. That's what we call the culture of the common strategy. This has been possible. This threat analysis was made possible by the collaboration of 27 member states intelligence services.

SOUNDBITE (Spanish), Josep BORRELL FONTELLES, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the EC in charge of a stronger Europe in the World, This was not publicised, but it will have to be done periodically on a regular basis because of course, the threats will change, some will intensify like what we are seeing right now in Ukraine, but others will spread, will reduce or will change in strength.

SOUNDBITE (Spanish), Josep BORRELL FONTELLES, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the EC in charge of a stronger Europe in the World, And as I've mentioned, Ukraine. Let me speak about the situation as an element that has changed the world in which we live radically. It has changed the way that we have seen the world over the past several years. And I hope that it is also a moment when alarm bells have rung and which will show us that when we say Europe is in danger, this was something that was said when the first vision of the Strategic Compass was presented. At that time it was taken almost like a marketing slogan or a joke.

SOUNDBITE (Spanish), Josep BORRELL FONTELLES, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the EC in charge of a stronger Europe in the World, But what we are seeing today has really shown us that this statement is true. It's not just Ukraine's independence that's at stake. It's not just Europe's security. It's also the survival of a rules based world where might does not make right. But the implications of the war in Ukraine are already in the text that we had been working on. It was already reflected. We already were aware of the threat of Russia.

SOUNDBITE (Spanish), Josep BORRELL FONTELLES, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the EC in charge of a stronger Europe in the World, Amongst all of the many threats that we were facing, not just classical military threats, but what we are now calling hybrid threats, cyber attacks. Disinformation and false news campaigns. All of this falls within a strategic context that is dangerous. And what we have to do is acknowledge the truth and the reality of these threats.

SOUNDBITE (Spanish), Josep BORRELL FONTELLES, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the EC in charge of a stronger Europe in the World, I think that we are making our union more capable of acting as a security provider. It doesn't sound good in Spanish, but I think everyone knows what I mean. Something, someone an institution that helps us to feel safer with respect to the threats that face us. The It Compass is actionable. is enforceable. It's something that can be implemented. It must be implemented. And if we do not do this, the effort would have been wasted. It proposes 50 concrete actions with concrete application periods. And that is a novelty. It's a novelty because up until now there was discourse. But the discourse was not a guide for action and it had not been accepted by all 27 member states. Now, this is a legal act to which everyone is committed and it is published in the official journals throughout the European Union.

SOUNDBITE (Spanish), Josep BORRELL FONTELLES, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the EC in charge of a stronger Europe in the World, The document is structured into four parts. The first is the means of action. The second is how we can improve safety and resiliency of the Union, its member states and its citizens. And the third third is the capacities which are required and for which we require investment and innovation. And the fourth section is how we can strengthen our partnerships. The most classical one that we think of as NATO. But that's not our only partner and how we can be a better partner. So that these partners want to work with us.

SOUNDBITE (Spanish), Josep BORRELL FONTELLES, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the EC in charge of a stronger Europe in the World, So let me just make a few comments on these four axes. I think we need to be able to act faster when there is a crisis. There are 18 missions throughout the world right now mobilising four thousand men and women. We have to strengthen our capacity to deploy missions and carry out operation, increase their efficiency on the ground. But we have to go beyond this. And this is why we have proposed this ability to deploy a force. Well, let's not say force, let's use the word capacity or capacities of forces. So we think capacity is a more generic word to use here.

SOUNDBITE (Spanish), Josep BORRELL FONTELLES, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the EC in charge of a stronger Europe in the World, It covers the different aspects of the actions that we would have to take. But we must be able to deploy up to 5000 troops in an environment that is not collaborative, which means that we also want to be able to carry out combat missions. This is something that is perfectly planned for in the treaty but has never been done by the European Union. We need to strengthen our command structures and our military mobility. The second block is more safety and that extends to new territories where security is in jeopardy. I'm talking about the external space, cyberspace and maritime issues far from our coast. These are our new battlegrounds, The sea, the Internet and space.

SOUNDBITE (Spanish), Josep BORRELL FONTELLES, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the EC in charge of a stronger Europe in the World, These are the fields where many of the wars of the future will be fought. We are facing increasing threats today and we are facing enemies not just bombing our land, but our minds. The mind is also a battleground. It's also a field that can be conquered and we must strengthen our capacity to stand up to that. So we have to develop hybrid instruments like our rapid response systems. Systems for dealing with cyber attacks and information manipulation and interference in our political processes.

SOUNDBITE (Spanish), Josep BORRELL FONTELLES, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the EC in charge of a stronger Europe in the World, We need to develop our naval presence in areas of interests, develop a space strategy for security and defence, and we must combine our maritime and air presence so that we can be stronger as a whole.

SOUNDBITE (Spanish), Josep BORRELL FONTELLES, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the EC in charge of a stronger Europe in the World, Third of all, we have to invest. Currently, the European Union is spending about two hundred billion, or two trillion euros, we need to increase this by five percent since 2019. But in 2014 it was at its lowest level. And since then, perhaps because the Russian threat already had erupted with Crimea, we have tended to increase this and we will have to continue doing this in the future. There have been concrete decisions made by some member states that highlight the fact that we have to move in that direction, not just in response to the attack, the Russian attack against Ukraine, but also because there is a structural hole in our defence.

SOUNDBITE (Spanish), Josep BORRELL FONTELLES, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the EC in charge of a stronger Europe in the World, For instance, only 11 percent of our procurement, our purchasing of defence materiel, is done through co-operative processes between member states. The other 90 percent is done by every member state independently. And it's not enough because we would already set a goal of thirty five percent. The European Defence Agency, which is the institution that must be best known and I hope that you can all get to know it better. We have had this to support our common defence and they had established that thirty five percent of purchases should be done in a coordinated and collective manner, but it's only 11 percent. That means that we are not as efficient as we should be.

SOUNDBITE (Spanish), Josep BORRELL FONTELLES, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the EC in charge of a stronger Europe in the World, We need to spend more, but it will not be enough to just spend more. It might be counterproductive if we don't do this in a cooperative manner and avoid a duplication which are currently rampant and so that we could kind of avoid lacking in capacity. For instance, in the case of air refuelling, we notice that we have a significant lack here in the case of Libya and also our capacity to act military capacity is very often lacking in some places and in some other places things are repeated. So there are redundant expenses. We must invest in novel technology, reduce what we now refer to as defence gaps and industrial and technological dependency.

SOUNDBITE (Spanish), Josep BORRELL FONTELLES, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the EC in charge of a stronger Europe in the World, Today, there are many critical minerals, absolutely critical minerals, which Europe does not really produce. And once we break away from our dependency for oil and gas, we will be facing new dependencies related to the ongoing technological revolution. We already have tools for cooperation, EDF and so on. But we have to work harder to increase interoperability and reduce fragmentation.

SOUNDBITE (Spanish), Josep BORRELL FONTELLES, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the EC in charge of a stronger Europe in the World, Finally, partnership, of course, with the U.N. and NATO and regional organisations, the African Union in particular, the U.S., of course, Canada, Norway and the United Kingdom are partners as well. And this is fundamental to our immediate neighbours Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, the Eastern Balkans, the Sahel. We have to work with them. Alone we cannot do everything. We must work with our partners. I think the most important is NATO at the moment. And this document makes it absolutely clear that we will act in a complementary manner and not subsid NATO.

SOUNDBITE (Spanish), Josep BORRELL FONTELLES, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the EC in charge of a stronger Europe in the World, We will only act on our own when there is no other option. A stronger Europe strengthens NATO and NATO continues to be the biggest instrument of collective defence of member states. I want to focus on that point. The role of NATO in Europe's collective defence is something that we are not debating, but we would like to complement NATO. And I think that the response to the war in Ukraine is a clear demonstration of how the European Union and NATO can act together to our mutual benefit to increase the efficiency of the Atlantic Treaty.

SOUNDBITE (Spanish), Josep BORRELL FONTELLES, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the EC in charge of a stronger Europe in the World, Let me say now, everything is about to start. We've spent two years writing, writing in a way that would allow all 27 member states to feel represented in the text that they have committed to implement. But now is when we are really starting because we have to go from words to action and implement what we have proposed. And it will be up to me with your help to ensure that it is implemented well, to ensure that we keep our promises, that we respect deadlines, that we develop the tools required so that this is not just one more of the many documents that we produce.

SOUNDBITE (Spanish), Josep BORRELL FONTELLES, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the EC in charge of a stronger Europe in the World, It's the first one that we have produced that intends to guide action. But the action has to take place and it will be in good hands with within the hands of member states because defence continues to be a governmental competency. The commission has limited competency when it comes to the civil aspect of defence and it has a financial capacity to support the defence industry. But defence, as in the capacity to deploy a military force and defend oneself from military threats, is still a governmental competency. And so this falls under the Council's remit. And this is why the Foreign and Defence Council joined to approve this document. And I am counting on you counting on the European Parliament to ensure that the strategic compact remains high on the agenda.

SOUNDBITE (Spanish), Josep BORRELL FONTELLES, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the EC in charge of a stronger Europe in the World, To ensure that citizens understand what it is because they don't necessarily understand the complexities of what we are doing but they must understand the need for Europe to also be a force that can contribute to their stability and to peace in the world.

SOUNDBITE (Spanish), Josep BORRELL FONTELLES, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the EC in charge of a stronger Europe in the World, I am sure that I can continue to enjoy the support that I have enjoyed over the past two years of my work. And now we have to take the work to the fields, to the factories, to our citizens. We have to show them through the coordination of member states under this compas that will show true North for the European Union and EU that can act in the future of the world. Thank you for your assistance and I am sure that I will continue to have it in future.