France, Germany, Italy, Poland and the United Kingdom are being considered as a potential core capable of advancing European defence beyond the slow pace of traditional institutional mechanisms. This is the goal of the Munich Security Conference’s European Defense Roundtable, which stops in Rome today after meetings in Munich, Paris and Ditchley Park in the UK.
The initiative, organised in Rome by the Munich Security Conference together with the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI), takes place at Palazzo Orsini, the official seat of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta’s Embassy to the Holy See. High-level representatives from governments, armed forces, academia and industry of the five E5 countries are at the table. The Italian think tank delegation includes president Michele Valensise, director Marco Simoni, Nicoletta Pirozzi and Alessandro Marrone.
The project’s origin was explained this morning by MSC president Wolfgang Ischinger during a press meeting hosted by the German ambassador to Italy, Thomas Bagger, attended by Adnkronos. “We began thinking about this at the start of the year, before the February conference,” he said. Ischinger clarified that the idea comes from the MSC, a private independent foundation, not from the German government: the aim is to find a format to promote the idea of European defence beyond existing EU and NATO structures.
The choice fell on the E5—five European countries that together concentrate a significant share of the continent’s political, military and especially industrial capacity. “You cannot defend Europe without an industrial base,” Ischinger stressed, citing capabilities in Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy and France and noting Poland’s rapid growth, which has pushed its military spending to some of the highest levels in the Alliance relative to GDP.
The series was launched at the MSC in Munich in February. Paris hosted the second meeting in May and Ditchley Park near Oxford the third. Rome is therefore the fourth stop. Ischinger announced that Warsaw will follow in mid-October and a final meeting will take place in Germany, hosted by Defence Minister Boris Pistorius, likely in the second half of November.
Ischinger said European construction must now confront a role for which its institutions were not originally designed: deterrence and response to external military threats. “The European project, more generally, has somewhat stagnated,” he observed, recalling an era when political figures such as Hans‐Dietrich Genscher and Emilio Colombo launched major common initiatives. Today, he added, “we are entering a new world” and external threats have become “very, very serious.”
Decision speed is also a problem. The tools built from the 1950s onward for European economic and political integration, the German diplomat noted, are not necessarily the most suitable for a Union called upon to deter possible military aggression, and this represents an “enormous” and “existential” challenge.
Ischinger also used a provocative image to describe the weight of individual European states in the new international system. He recalled an old joke that in Europe there are “two kinds of countries: the small ones and those that have not yet realised they are small.” Viewed from China, where he recently visited, the EU appears as “a group of dwarf states,” he said. “I am not referring only to states with small populations: Italy and Germany are small too.” The consequence, he warned, is that “if we do not seriously push the European project forward, creating the capacity to act—and more Europe, not less—then it should not surprise us if we are unable to defend our interests.”
According to Ambassador Bagger, Italy has taken on growing weight in the continental security debate, thanks not only to political stability but also to industrial capabilities in arms production, technology, space and engineering.
Ischinger pointed to the reports by Mario Draghi and Enrico Letta as potential blueprints to strengthen Europe. The problem, he concluded, is no longer producing proposals—“talking about them is easy, promoting them is relatively easy. Making decisions is not.” The MSC, he said, intends to act as a “catalyst” to move matters from discussion to action.
Read also