June 16 2008

President Nicolas Sarkozy will on Tuesday set out ambitious plans to give the European Union a bigger role in defence despite the institutional crisis triggered by Ireland’s rejection of the EU treaty.

In legislative proposals, France will call for the EU to be given its own structures to plan and run military operations, despite opposition to such a move in Britain, which fears such a capability would overlap and compete with the Nato military alliance.

Mr Sarkozy will also call for Europe to pool vitally needed logistical resources and will risk triggering controversy in some capitals by suggesting military transport aircraft could be pooled under a single EU command. It also wants EU countries to pool air-to-air refuelling and transport helicopters.

Until now, Mr Sarkozy has stressed the need to increase Europe’s capabilities rather than create new institutional structures. But the white paper reaffirms France’s long-standing desire for the EU to have a “permanent and autonomous strategic planning capacity”. It adds: “The development of international intervention by the EU also requires a stepping up of the means to plan and lead military operations.”

There is already a putative EU military staff based in Brussels, but its role consists essentially of giving strategic advice to Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign policy supremo, while military operations are run out of either Nato or national headquarters, and the UK wants to keep it that way. Some British officials had hoped a compromise between London and Paris could be found on the issue of planning by confining it to co- ordination of Nato military operations and the EU’s police and judicial activities.

But the white paper makes clear that France’s ambitions remain intact. “If we don’t have the means to influence strategic planning the Americans will say ‘What is all this about?’,” said an official who helped draw up the white paper.

France, which takes over the EU presidency on July 1, wants the bloc not only to meet its promise of making available 60,000 men for overseas missions of up to a year, but simultaneously to earmark troops for up to three long-term peacekeeping operations.