The arms industry shapes European policies way beyond the military

Not content with the European Defence Fund, the arms industry now demands unlimited access to sustainable finance, a move that would further threaten peace and the fight against climate change, writes Mark Akkerman and Laëtitia Sédou.

Mark Akkerman is a researcher at Stop Wapenhandel, and Laëtitia Sédou works as an EU project officer at the European Network Against Arms Trade (ENAAT).

At the European Defence Agency Annual Conference two weeks ago in Brussels, all present EU leaders – Commission President Von der Leyen, Council President Michel and High Representative Borrell – pledged their commitment to the European arms industry. 

Speaking about the upcoming European Defence Industrial Strategy, von der Leyen announced a consultation phase in which “we will ask our industry how we can best support it”, while Michel and Borrell urged for more orders for and more private investments in arms companies to ramp up production capacities.

These calls exemplify the success of the industry’s lobby efforts and the increasingly close ties it fosters with policy-makers, a process which has sped up since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 but has been going on for years.

The foreseeable consequences – more arms exports for wars, human rights violations, and a further attack on the climate – are at best ignored or swept aside if not wanted and promoted.

The largest EU arms companies, particularly Airbus, Leonardo and Thales, and major lobby organisations like ASD-Europe have had hundreds of meetings with the European Commission and members of European Parliament in the last decade.

The European Commission established a new Directorate-General for the Defence Industry and Space (DG DEFIS), headed by Commissioner Thierry Breton, former CEO of ATOS, who created a permanent dialogue between the Commission and industry, allowing dozens of defence and aerospace companies and business associations to give input on a wide range of EU policies.

This is broader than military and security policies as the industry also wants its say in sustainable investment policies or proposals about access to critical raw materials.

EU institutions, headed by the European Commission, have warmly embraced arms industry representatives as partners in policy-making rather than as commercial lobbyists looking to maximise revenues and profits.

As a consequence, the influence of the industry can be seen in many EU policies, including the establishment of funding instruments such as the European Defence Fund (EDF), the Act in Support of Ammunition Production (ASAP) and the European Defence Industry Reinforcement through standard Procurement Act (EDIRPA), with combined budgets of over €8.5 billion

Presented as necessary to boost European security, the first aim is to increase the industry’s global competitiveness, in other words, more arms exports to non-EU countries, a goal also served by easing export rules at national levels.

More financial support and fewer arms export restrictions are longstanding wishes of the arms industry, which have been on the radar of the EU since their prominent inclusion in the 2016 report of the Group of Personalities.

This official advisory committee, dominated by representatives of arms companies and lobby organisations, laid the base for the EDF.

The oppressive, war crimes committed and human rights violating regime of Saudi Arabia has been the top destination for EU arms exports for years, including the whole period of the Yemen War. In many other instances, European arms are also fuelling war, international conflict, repression, human rights abuses, forced displacement, poverty and climate change.

The new funding instruments’ emphasis on more exports and plans to ease export rules will only exacerbate this.

And while the world came together at COP28 in Dubai in one of the final opportunities to stop climate change from making the world unlivable for many, especially in the Global South, the EU puts increasing pressure on private financial institutions to set sustainable investment policies aside for the benefit of the arms industry, downplaying its significant contribution to GHG emissions.

Just last month, the EU ministers of Defence released an impassioned statement to this end, echoing the arms industry’s repeated demands to gain more access to private money. Earlier this year, in the ASAP Regulation, the EU already called upon its member states not to let environmental and social regulations hamper an increase in munition production.

Meanwhile, the labelling of the arms industry as ‘socially harmful’ in a proposal for the EU social taxonomy has been retracted under great pressure from the arms industry. 

This is what the current boom of new policies and support instruments for the EU arms industry will actually mean: more profit for arms producers and their shareholders, more arms for authoritarian regimes and warmongers, more power for the policy-makers who act as lap dogs for the industry, at the cost of more deaths, violence, destruction, repression and an increasing climate crisis around the world, for which poor, marginalised and oppressed communities, most in the Global South and non-white, will pay by far most of the price.

The world cannot afford more war, militarisation and global warming, it desperately needs dialogue, diplomacy and climate justice to survive. For this, the EU must abandon its disastrous dead-end journey towards, in the words of Breton, ‘becoming a war economy‘, return to its origins as a peace project and firmly close the doors to the arms industry.