As the European Union and NATO continue to face common challenges, they also welcome the continued cooperation and reinforcement. Both sides support crisis management as a tool towards international peace and security and they also endorse defense capability development where requirements overlap working with and for the benefits of all member states. The European Council has recently endorsed progress on a total of 74 actions that support the common set of proposals to guide the EU-NATO cooperation. The key objective to security and defense efforts by both organizations is securing Europe by fostering an equitable sharing of the burden.
The roadmap of 74 actions that was conceived at the last year’s summit of the Alliance in Warsaw, Poland, specified common themes such as military mobility, counter-terrorism, women, peace and security. The EU-NATO cooperation is more narrow and includes the following areas: hybrid threats, defense capabilities, defense industry and research, supporting partners’ capacity building, exercises, cyber security, operational cooperation including maritime issues, and strengthening political dialogue between EU and NATO.
Hybrid threats that are among the areas of key importance cover 20 out of 74 proposals for cooperation in this area, which is also reflected in the intensity of EU-NATO cooperation. In parallel, both organizations are planning exercises that are to take place in November 2018. The objective is to synchronize the two organizations’ crisis response activities in a hybrid context. At the same time, NATO and EU personnel are working together to ensure coherence and synergies between the mutual efforts to improve military mobility and both sides also continue dialogues on industry matters, which includes regular updates on related activities.
