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The European Union has dramatically announced an unprecedented €800 billion package to rearm the continent, claiming it is up to European leaders to challenge Russia and bring about peace. But Professor Bill Durodié reveals the ‘sorry truth’: the EU’s Defence Readiness Roadmap 2030 is nothing more than bureaucratic delusion.
The EU is a master of technocratic processes but is fundamentally ‘unable to deliver or inspire’. Talk of executing the Roadmap ‘at pace and scale’ is ‘just that – talk’. Rather than fostering a culture of risk-taking and innovation, the EU is constantly trapped in the present and past, ensuring it is ‘not a player’ on the global stage.
The failure is profoundly political: in every serious crisis, the EU’s members have tended to ‘go their own way’, highlighting a complete lack of cohesion. European leaders engage in ‘grandstanding talk’ to provide their ‘domestic audiences with a semblance of purpose’, even as they ignore the deepest vulnerability. After years of excluding and rejecting its own citizens, the EU has eroded the necessary foundations of loyalty and duty. War is about spirit as much as kit, and if no one is willing to fight, quadrupling defence spending has ‘no consequence’.
The challenge is not one of mere financing or regulations, but one of personal and collective commitment. The European Union is unfit for this task.
About the author
Professor Bill Durodié is a Visiting Professor for MCC Brussels.
Bill is Visiting Professor to MCC Brussels and Chair of Risk and Security in International Relations at the University of Bath. He previously held posts in British Columbia, Canada and at NTU in Singapore, as well as at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom and in the War Studies Group of King’s College, London. Since 2014 Bill has also been a Visiting Professor to the China Executive Leadership Academy Pudong, one of China’s top-level Party schools. In 2017, following in the steps of former US secretary for homeland security, Michael Chertoff, and the UK minister of state for universities and science, David Willetts, he became the eighth person and first alumnus to give the Vincent Briscoe Annual Security Lecture at Imperial College London. French by origin, he has lived in the UK for much of his life and currently resides in Oxford with his wife and three young sons, two of whom sing for the Choir of Magdalen College there. He views the establishment of MCC in Brussels as essential for shaking-up institutional complacency, both there and further afield.
