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As NATO leaders gather for their summit in Brussels, environmental researcher Lesley McCarthy looks at what Europe is putting at risk in its response to Donald Trump’s threats and demands.

Talk of an integrated European army has been around for nearly a decade but statements by President Trump both before and since his election have given the idea an increased sense of need and urgency. During the 2016 US Presidential election, as Donald Trump repeatedly stated that ‘NATO is obsolete’, a number of plans to create a pan European, mobile and rapid defence force –and the transport infrastructure to support it- were moving forward. There is not intended to be any American involvement. 

In December 2017, 25 of the 28 EU member states signed up to the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) agreement to increase defence co-operation. But President Macron in particular did not believe it was sufficiently ambitious, so France and Denmark launched the European Intervention Initiative (EI2) in order to build a what it calls a ‘common strategic culture’, as part of a broader effort to ensure Europe’s ‘autonomous’ operating capabilities, complementary to NATO.

At European Union level in November 2017, a little over a year after Trump's election, Federica Mogherini, the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy began to send papers to the European Parliament and Council arguing that ‘Improving Military Mobility in the European Union’' could be achieved by ‘upgrading’ roads to a military standard so that roads can have dual usage, both civilian and military. She informed them that ‘there is both an opportunity and a strategic need to fully exploit civilian/military synergies....’ and there is a need to do this because ‘the rapid and swift movement of military personnel and equipment across the EU is currently hampered by a number of physical, legal and regulatory barriers, such as infrastructure that cannot support the weight of a military vehicle’. An ingenious argument, to say the least.

If ‘physical, legal and regulatory barriers’ hold up military movement, or even the creation of military worthy roads, where exactly is the 'civilian and military synergy’? However, the High Representative continues, all and any problems can be solved by assessing current infrastructure and defining infrastructural standards ‘that also take into account military requirements’. Such an analysis, she argues, ‘would enable the EU to develop an infrastructural standard that integrates the military profile for multimodal transport’. The laws and regulations that are initially called ‘barriers’, are overcome in three short pages, it may not be so easy in practice.

Superficially the High Representative's idea is appealing. After all, multi-use roads are the norm, as they have always been. The earliest known built road, the Great or Royal Road of Persia, was later appropriated by Alexander of Macedon and his army. Roads built for military purposes soon get used by civilians, such as the Roman roads or the tourist routes that Napoleon unintentionally created across the Alps.

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But civilians are not able to access ‘military roads’ at the same time as the military. The soldiers have to leave first. In Britain the promised dual use of roads around the US missile base at Greenham Common actually meant that the American army and air force could use the roads at will, whilst civilians were prevented from doing so.  The journalist Duncan Campbell discovered in the tense days of the early 1980s, that the police were to be used to prevent civilians access to roads during the movement of cruise missiles. As a veteran of the protests at Greenham Common, I have personal experience of what happens when the military embark on manoeuvres. Junctions are closed off without warning, people are physically and even violently removed from the roads; everything stops -except for the army.

The High Representative has concerns about the vulnerability to an airstrike of armed forces left stationary by inadequate transport infrastructure. But what is her definition of ‘vulnerable’? It appears not to include the vulnerability of the unprotected civilian population who will invariably be even more exposed and almost certainly prevented from escaping. Even during peacetime manoeuvres, those in need of medical care could be unable to access it due to road closures, which will also quickly disrupt modern ‘just in time’ food distribution. Synergy between civilian and military uses of roads is repeatedly claimed, in these proposals, but there is little evidence of it.

So, what exactly are the ‘legal and regulatory barriers and other procedures’ that the High Representative refers to?  She says that they prevent decisions being made quickly and troops and equipment moving ‘swiftly and smoothly’.  One regulatory barrier considered especially problematic, as it is referred to repeatedly, is the regulation of the movement of dangerous goods.  Here the argument is particularly disingenuous.  A follow up paper, published in March 2018, notes that the military is subject to different regulations to civilians when moving such goods.

The High Representative argues that this ‘divergence from civilian rules requires ad hoc authorisations and creates delays’.  Yet in the same paragraph she points out that civilian regulation is subject to ‘a complex set of international conventions and United Nations recommendations’. So, aligning the military with civilian requirements would simply move the military from one set of requirements which cause delays to another.

The major ‘upgrading’ of roads being proposed is no small task. Since the end of the Cold War, roads and bridges have not been built to accommodate heavy military vehicles.  In former Warsaw Pact countries, the infrastructure is particularly fragile. Indeed, the proposals put forward suggest a need for a comprehensive pan European network of 'dual use' roads which would meet military requirements. As roads cannot be re-enforced from above this would require not the ‘upgrading’ of roads but the tearing up and re-building them. In many places, it would be simpler and cheaper to create entirely new roads, near to the existing ones. Some such projects would require full environment impact assessments and possibly even public inquiries.

Planning regulations, across Europe, not only include the rights of the public to consultation but a requirement that public input is actively sought. The High Representative’s proposals imply that deciding which roads and bridges need upgrading can be achieved by the end of 2018, and ‘action’ could be undertaken by 2020,  only a year later. Such 'action' is unlikely to be more than preliminary planning proposals, not the actual building of roads implied, unless EU legislation is ignored.

It is now generally accepted that new and upgraded roads attract vehicles.  But these proposed roads are in search of an army. At times of military manoeuvres, local populations will to all intents and purposes be under military command. Civil rights, including freedom of information and of movement, protections of human health and the environment tend to disappear when soldiers are in charge, yet who else could be in charge of an army on the move? Yet these papers imply that such rights and protections can also be jettisoned in order to create the roads in the first place, as it is unlikely that such a road network could be built in the next decade, let alone within the year implied, without a major loss of civil rights and health and environment protections. Hostile campaigns by local and pan European environmental and human rights groups are inevitable.

The proposed roads are the antithesis of the sustainable development supposedly promoted by the EU, failing environmental, social and financial tests. In terms of the environment, the proposal contradicts the European Parliament’s commitment to reduce carbon emissions from all transport related projects. The Commission has reflected this commitment in the proposals laid out in the draft budget for 2021-27.  But, ‘Transport and Environment’ a EU umbrella group has criticised the Commission for committing to fighting climate change in one policy statement but then allocating funds to projects that undermine EU climate goals. Socially, it would endanger hard won rights to information and consultation. Financially the cost appears not to have been even estimated but would clearly be enormous.

Yet the high cost could be part of the attraction for some. If these roads can be classified as military expenditure, it would help the European members of NATO meet their spending target of 2% of GDP.  Military necessity could also be used as a political imperative for funding new infrastructure in member states, where the EU is otherwise threatening to withhold money because of their failure to comply with European legal norms. It could also be used to justify negating civil rights. The overall question is ‘why is this being proposed at all?’  Is the High Representative trying to justify her role? Is it an attempting to fulfil President Juncker's belief in ‘the imperative of creating a fully-fledged European Defence Union by 2025’? Is it trying to appease President Trump and his demand for increased military expenditure or creating a fall-back position of a more integrated military machine in Europe that’s capable of operating without American support?

An open, honest and difficult discussion in Europe, on how to deal with increased Russian aggression, is needed, particularly when it is denied by the US President. However, these proposals do not contribute to that, coming as they do from an entirely military perspective and based on illogical and contradictory arguments.

 

 

 

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