The push for common European defense has exposed a fault line that could prove fatal to EU cohesion: northern and southern member states have fundamentally different security priorities and radically different capacities to pay for them, "Hvylya" reports, citing a new Foreign Affairs analysis.
Hugo Bromley, an Applied History Research Fellow at Cambridge, argued that under the current EU system, common defense spending would amount to fiscal transfers from Germany and the Netherlands to France, Greece, Italy, and other countries with high spending needs. The likely beneficiaries "have a wide variety of legitimate security concerns, mostly in the Eastern Mediterranean, Middle East and North Africa, which have little to do with the Russian threat."
Asking German and Dutch taxpayers to fund these commitments indefinitely risks a dangerous backlash. And the pressure would flow both ways. Northern member states would likely seek cuts to southern welfare programs as part of any defense spending push - a dynamic German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul hinted at last month. The popular reaction to such cuts, Bromley warned, would be vast.
A new treaty to establish common defense would only deepen these divisions. Several EU member states are either outside NATO and committed to neutrality, or openly sympathetic to Russia. Treaty change for common defense, the scholar argued, "would destroy the delicate framework of cooperation that binds northern and southern Europe together."
Bromley's proposed solution was to abandon the pursuit of equal percentage-based spending targets across the EU. Defense commitments should instead vary depending on fiscal space and voter appetite. The states of northern Europe and NATO's eastern flank, he noted, are both the most willing and the most able to increase their defense budgets in response to the Russian threat.
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