(Source: IRIS – Sten Rynning,Professor, University of Southern Denmark) – National Expectations Regarding The European Defence Fund : The Danish perspective
Denmark supports and has a certain vision for the European Defence Fund (EDF):
– It believes the EDF is first and foremost a tool for enhancing defence industrial competition and economies of scale in Europe—as opposed to seeing in the EDF an embryonic European defence union.
– It believes small and medium sized enterprises and projects—as opposed to big flagship projects—are key to Danish and European innovation and industrial development.
– It is not ready to fight for a sizeable EDF budget, believing that the overriding priority is to encourage budget discipline at the EU level and hence to limit the size of EU budget.
– It is supportive of Europeanization without political discrimination and would like all non-EU NATO allies to belong to the European security architecture, broadly conceived. It is satisfied with EDF provisions for the inclusion of third countries— such as the United States or Norway—but would be opposed to any attempt to draw wider political implications hereof, such as building a European Defence Union from the EDF core. (…)
In matters of EU and defence, Denmark’s position is Gaullist in character: Denmark has a lot of political sensibility tied to sovereignty, and while Denmark is all for practical – economic and industrial – cooperation, high matters of defence are best left for governments cooperating on a case-by-case basis outside institutions with a federalist flavour. It is a peculiar vision but nevertheless one on which Denmark has delivered substantially: it has committed to a culture of “military activism” that has brought its troops to operational frontlines and led to close partnerships with the United Kingdom and France. Thus, Denmark has been militarily active not inside but alongside the EU in Mali and off the Somali coast, and Denmark joined the informal French-led European Intervention Initiative from the outset in 2019. Denmark has a Gaullist reservation concerning the defence implications of the political vision of “EU strategic autonomy” but it also has a European vision of sorts, which is to promote the vibrant and coordinated activism of European nations in the context of transatlantic partnership. The vision excludes EU defence policy but does comprise a competitive defence industrial base and extensive cooperation among the countries willing and able to lead from the front in operations. Hence, Denmark will for the foreseeable future support the EDF as a Defence Internal Market capacity building mechanism and in parallel support the informal, operations-anchored defence cooperation that France has encouraged with EI2 and which the United Kingdom as a non EU country will favour as well.
Read Armament Industry European Research Group (Ares) Paper # 49’s Abstract In Full >>> https://www.iris-france.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/ARES-49.pdf
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