British defence minister Michael Fallon has said the UK would veto the creation of EU military capabilities so long as it remained a member of the bloc.
Reacting to ideas on closer EU defence cooperation, discussed at the Bratislava summit on Friday (16 September), he told The Times, a British newspaper: “That is not going to happen”.
“We are full members of the EU and we will go on resisting any attempt to set up a rival to Nato”.
He said Britain had always “been concerned about unnecessarily duplicating what we already have in Nato”.
He added that: “We will go on being committed to the security of the European continent … We are not going to back out of our commitment to keeping Europe secure, but we don’t want to see unnecessary bureaucracy at the EU level when we have got it in Nato”.
The remaining 27 EU leaders met in the Slovak capital without the UK in the first such format since the Brexit referendum in June.
Proposals for what Germany has called an EU “defence union” and others have called an “EU army” included the creation of an EU military HQ, with medical aid and logistics capabilities, that would command EU crisis missions.
Andrew Rettman