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IEP Lunch Debate with Christian Schmidt: “State and Perspectives of European Security and Defense Policy”

left to right: Dr. Barbara Lippert, Dr. Mathias Jopp (both IEP), Christian Schmidt

State Secretary Schmidt presented an extensive overview of the devel­opment of the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) and the placed new security challenges of the changed strategic environment following the end of the East-West Conflict in connection with the construction of EU struc­tures, strategies and capabil­ities for operative crisis management in the German Federal Ministry of Defence, 20 November 2006 at 12:30 in the Jean Monnet Building, Bunde­salle 22, 10717 Berlin. Schmidt empha­sised extensive progress reached in the three areas — structure, strategy and capabil­ities. He especially under­lined the signif­i­cance of the European Defense Strategy (EDS), which since December 2003 has formed the conceptual framework for the CFSP and the ESDP.

In the German EU Council Presi­dency starting on 1 January 2007, Schmidt sees a “welcome chance to be actively involved in the devel­opment of the CFSP and ESDP from a privi­leged position.” The continued pursuit of the EU Consti­tu­tional Treaty also brings great benefits in this area, since some of the reforms envisioned in the area of CFSP are aimed at strength­ening the coherence, conti­nuity and efficacy of European crisis management and thus also the effec­tiveness of the ESDP (e.g. through the new office of the Foreign Minister of the EU). At the same time, the ESDP is a visible integration project that “produces a sense and an identity for the European citizen”, something which could also be signif­icant to the revival of the Consti­tu­tional Treaty.

Some concrete steps to be taken during the German EU Council Presi­dency identified by Schmidt included the stabil­i­sation of the Western Balkans (especially with respect to the new Kosovo mission of the EU), the further devel­opment of military capabil­ities on the path to the imple­men­tation of the Headline Goal 2010 (in the form of work on the so-called Progress Catalogue, which lists progress and deficits of previous capabil­ities and compares with self-imposed goals), and the improvement of civil-military agreement in the planning and imple­men­tation of opera­tions as part of the Civil Military Coordi­nation (CMCO) concept, which has the goal of assuring a “frictionless and syner­getic cooper­ation” of all civil and military actors. In addtion, cooper­ation with the partners in the framework of an “effective multi­lat­er­alism” should be improved and the cooper­ation between the EU and the United Nations should be developed further, oriented toward future practice.