Madam, - I read the series of articles by Karen Devine on neutrality (November 25-27) with great interest, and commend you for tackling this important subject in such depth. However, there are a large number of inaccuracies in Dr Devine's final article ("Protecting neutrality in a militarised EU", November 27th) which greatly undermine her arguments and give a misleading description of Irish neutrality and EU defence policy.
Here are just five examples:
1. Dr Devine says Ireland was not invited to join Nato in 1949. Ireland was invited to join Nato, but the government refused because of its constitutional claim on Northern Ireland - it couldn't join a military alliance with a country that was occupying part of its territory. The then foreign minister, Seán MacBride, later asked the US for a bilateral defence pact instead, but Washington wouldn't consider it since it wanted a collective agreement with Europeans, not bilateral agreements.
2. The Berlin Plus agreement between the EU and Nato was not agreed in 1994, since EU defence policy didn't even exist in practice until 1999. Berlin Plus was agreed only in 2002 and has nothing to do with Combined Joint Task Forces.
3. The EU operation in Congo in 2003 was not a Berlin Plus mission — it was an autonomous EU operation and did not involve Nato in any way.
4. The six neutral member-states did not seek to eliminate the mutual assistance article in the Lisbon Treaty. Contrary to what Dr Devine writes, the sentence in the treaty protecting the specific nature of some national defence policies (meaning the six neutrals) has full legal weight, since it is the second clause in the same treaty article. It is also worth considering why the Swedes, Finns and Austrians are so supportive of EU defence policy, and are entirely comfortable with the mutual assistance clause - as the Finnish foreign minister, Alexander Stubb, recently explained to the Oireachtas subcommittee on Ireland's future in the European Union.
5. The idea of a "defence G6" is not a French government proposal — it was proposed by a French MP (Pierre Lellouche) in a newspaper article. This "defence G6" group does not exist, not least because four of those six (Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain) do not and will not spend 2 per cent of their GDP on defence.
More generally, the author continually implies that the EU is (or will become) a military alliance, which is not the case, legally or politically - the mutual assistance clause in the Lisbon treaty would not turn the EU into a military alliance, and there can be no EU "common defence" unless all member-states agree. In other words, Ireland has a veto over any future common defence proposals and this power is enshrined in the Lisbon treaty. Moreover, Irish law says that the Irish government cannot agree to EU common defence without the consent of the Irish people through a referendum.
In addition, EU defence is not a policy of "militarisation" as described by Dr Devine. The EU's broad approach to international security matches the Irish approach, namely that no international security challenge is purely military, nor can they be tackled using only military means. For example, fewer than one third (seven out of 23) of EU operations have used military personnel; the remaining 16 operations have deployed civil personnel, such as ceasefire monitors in Georgia and border guards in Gaza.
Finally, and most significantly, Dr Devine did not explore why the UN keeps asking and mandating the EU to help with peacekeeping, such as the current Irish-led EU peacekeeping operation in Chad. The aim of EU defence policy is to help the United Nations to resolve conflicts based on international law, in particular by deploying peacekeepers at the UN's request, and every EU operation has been deployed on the basis of a UN mandate. This is why successive Irish governments have fully supported EU defence policy since it matches the long-held aims of Irish foreign policy.
As the former UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, told the National Forum on Europe in 2005: "I welcome the development of the EU capabilities in the context of the European Security and Defence Policy, and the progress that we are making together in the field of crisis management. . . I want to leave you in no doubt of how important strengthened EU capacities are to the UN. The EU is in a position to provide specialised skills that our greatest troop contributors may not be able to give us and to deploy more rapidly than we can. Many people are alive today because of the French-led operation Artemis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which in turn handed over to the UN." - Is mise le meas,
DANIEL KEOHANE,
Research Fellow,
European Union Institute for Security Studies,
43 Avenue du Président Wilson,
Paris.