Euro-Army Should Fill Us with Fear
by Christopher Booker

Some kind of immortality might be accorded a comment made last week by Austria's finance minister, Karl-Heinz Grasser, that a meeting of EU finance ministers had made considerable progress, but largely "in the wrong direction". Their purpose was to discuss a proposal that France and Germany should be allowed to drive a double-decker bus through the rules of the Growth and Stability Pact, on which the credibility of the euro depends.

As the running of the eurozone sinks into chaos, with its largest economy - Germany - mired in recession, the EU now seems to be making the wrong kind of progress in all directions. A report by the pan-European business organisation Eurochambres predicts that, on current projections, the EU economy will only catch up with the present performance of the American economy by 2056 - and even that is dependent on the improbable condition that the EU's productivity grows at an annual rate 0.5 per cent faster than that of the United States.

Meanwhile Nick Witney, the former senior Ministry of Defence official who now heads the new European Defence Agency, last week wrote to The Telegraph to deny my report that he is playing a key role in building up an "EU defence identity" separate from both NATO and the USA. Mr Witney must hope that we don't read his evidence to a House of Lords committee last year in which he agreed that his agency's purpose is to promote the European Security and Defence Policy, whose objective is a "European defence identity".

It was disingenuous of him to claim in his letter that he is only concerned with co-ordinating defence procurement. Nowadays, as he well knows, it is precisely the nature of the armed forces' electronics and weapons systems that dictates who they can fight alongside. At the centre of EU defence planning is the Future Rapid Effects System (FRES) which will create a family of vehicles and weapons systems co-ordinated through the EU's GALILEO satellite programme. If the British Army is reorganised around FRES, as Mr Witney's former ministry wants, it will be equipped to fight alongside other EU forces, but not alongside the Americans.

The real danger Britain now faces, through our breakneck integration with the EU's defence and procurement policy, is that our Armed Forces may soon be as effective as the Growth and Stability Pact. And that will be no joke at all.
The Sunday Telegraph, 13th March 2005