Germany and France to EU: Stay out of arms export policy

The defence ministers from Germany and France both declared that the European Union has absolutely no role to play in weapons export decisions, issuing a clear rebuke to European Commission ambitions to ease trade within the EU weapons market.

Weapons export decisions are “exclusively” the preserve of national governments, and the EU and the European Commission “have no role to play in this regard”, German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said on Thursday evening at a joint press conference with his French counterpart, Sébastien Lecornu.

The remarks demonstrate strong and united opposition from the EU’s two most important members to the Commission’s push to loosen export controls within the EU in order to fast-track arms production. The EU executive has proposed allowing countries to skip obtaining approval before reselling key sensitive components used in weapons manufacturing.

Many countries control how weapons and other sensitive products can be used, and retain the right to veto the further resale of defence equipment to third countries.

France has for months opposed the idea of loosening those rules within the EU, as Euractiv first reported earlier this spring. Paris has argued that the move goes beyond existing agreements on transfers of defence-related products within the EU – and would effectively strip France of the right to control and keep track of where critical components end up.

But despite those protests from Paris, the Commission has kept pitching the idea of loosening export rules, most recently last month in its package to ease regulation on the defence sector, known as the “defence omnibus“. The Commission also announced plans to revise the existing intra-EU transfer directive, which governs trade in defence-related products within the bloc, sometime in the coming months.

Pistorius’s remarks, however, clearly bolster France’s opposition to those changes.

“There is no question of the European Commission interfering in the competences of the member states, especially when it comes to arms exports,” Lecornu said.

(bts, aw)