Changes from resolution motion to resolution motion joint

Removed52. Insists that urgent needs cannot wait for the next MFF; insists that innovative solutions for finding additional funding must be considered without delay, including:

Added38. Calls for the EU to adopt a global and coherent approach to external aid in all of its dimensions, with much stronger alignment between common foreign and security policy (CFSP) and CSDP objectives and instruments; considers that the strategic environments in which many EU CSDP missions are present are radically deteriorating, which demonstrates the need for the white paper to ensure flexibility in a 360 degree approach to European security that strives towards building a credible and capable deterrence capacity for the Member States, and ensures that Member State civilian and military personnel can deter and respond rapidly to the growing threat environment;

Removed(a) re-prioritising existing EU funds,

Added39. Considers that the CSDP must strongly participate in the fight against hybrid warfare against partner countries, particularly candidate countries; is deeply worried by the sharp increase in hybrid attacks, including sabotage, cyberattacks, information manipulation and election interference, with the objective of weakening the EU and its candidate countries; calls on the EU Member States to consider appropriate deterrence and countermeasures, including through the use of Article 42(7) TEU; calls, furthermore, on the Member States to pool resources and expertise in the field of cybersecurity; strongly advocates the development of a unified European approach to cyber forces; further insists on the swift creation of joint European cyber capabilities; recalls the increasing threats of cyber warfare and underlines the need for the EU to establish an EU cyber defence coordination centre to monitor, detect and respond to cyberthreats in real time;

Removed(b) investing in the defence sector by making it explicitly eligible under the European Regional Development Fund and the Cohesion Fund, while leaving the regions and Member States free to decide whether to make it a priority according to local needs;

Added40. Insists on the need to improve the CSDP’s ability to identify, prevent and counter information manipulation aimed at hindering the EU’s external action; reiterates its calls to establish an effective horizontal strategic communications strategy adapted to all EU channels;

Removed(c) making it easier and faster to re-purpose funds from one project to another,

Added41. Calls for the creation of an ‘EU crisis response air fleet’ under the CSDP, comprising military transport aircraft held at EU level and made available to Member States for EU deployments, the transport of equipment or troops (military mobility), or in the event of emergency evacuations – as shown by the capability gap during the withdrawal from Afghanistan – as well as for civil security missions, based on a model similar to the European Air Transport Command;

Removed(d) exploring the possibility of adjusting EU funding criteria to give new prominence to security criteria in allocating spending;

AddedCoherence and sovereignty

Removed53. Underlines that a ‘popular loan’ would not only mobilise the European families’ savings, but also unify the 450 million European citizens around the need to improve our collective security; stresses that this popular loan should be organised with the same rules and advantages in all the 27 Member States and could give a common sense of belonging to the nations of the EU;

AddedCoherence

Removed54. Is of the opinion that national recovery and resilience plans should be amended to allow for new defence funding;

Added42. Expects the European External Action Service (EEAS) to carry out comprehensive and uncompromising reviews of CSDP missions and operations, taking into account, in particular, the feasibility of their respective mandates in relation to the resources allocated, the staff recruitment method for missions and operations, especially on the link between the skills required and the different profiles, as well as the rationalisation of resources and the management of missions and operations, transparency in calls for tender, activities and results obtained, lessons learnt from best practice and difficulties encountered; asks the Council, on the basis of these reviews, to take decisions aimed at adapting or abandoning ineffective missions and strengthening the most useful missions; believes that the governance of evaluation and the control of CSDP missions and operations must be improved;

Removed55. Recommends the identification of new resources that could require contributions from the Member States as part of a new EU debt programme along the lines of the NextGenerationEU plan, following on from the idea of ‘defence bonds’, to complement the Commission’s Re-Arm Europe plan, if necessary;

Added43. Believes that the EU should develop wartime economic cooperation contingency plans with close partners to ensure mutual support in the case of large-scale security crises involving them directly, and should deepen wartime economic dialogues with European and global partners to provide early warning of hard, hybrid and cyber threats, and foster mutual support planning, the protection of critical infrastructure and maritime safety;

Removed56. Reiterates, in line with the Commission’s Re-Arm Europe plan, its call for the EIB, other international financial institutions and private banks in Europe to invest more actively in the European defence industry, as speeding up security and defence investments in the EU would leverage private funding and have a strong signalling effect as regards other investors and market operators;

Added44. Calls for the EU to further accelerate the implementation of military mobility; believes that the EU has to move from ‘mobility’ to ‘military logistics’; stresses the need for significant investment in military mobility infrastructure to enhance cargo airlift capabilities, camps, fuel infrastructure through depots, ports, air, sea and rail transport platforms, railway lines, waterways, roads, bridges and logistic hubs; stresses that this must be done in cooperation with NATO by drafting a strategic plan for developing mobility; calls for the rapid implementation of the technical arrangement signed under the aegis of the European Defence Agency Cross-Border Movement Permission, the harmonisation of customs formalities and the preparation of a centralised and justified lifting of road and rail traffic standards in the event of a crisis situation;

Removed57. Calls on the EIB in particular to re-evaluate its list of excluded activities, to adjust its lending policy to increase the volume of available funding in the field of security and defence, and to investigate the possibility of issuing earmarked debt for funding security and defence projects;

Added45. Believes that, in order to create a favourable ecosystem for the European defence industry, the EU must decide on a united and clear long-term vision for the European defence industry in order to provide visibility to the industry and ensure that priority needs are addressed;

Removed58. Calls for the development of emergency procedures for projects established in response to major crises or wars whereby the EU, jointly with the EIB, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the Council of Europe Development Bank, can enable banks to use faster processes to support projects necessary in crises or wars; calls for the EU also to consider amending the Treaties to allow the use of capital from the European Stability Mechanism for Europe’s war economy;

Added46. Stresses that EDIP must actively facilitate the participation of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and new market entrants through simplified access to funding; emphasises that EDIP should be designed as a stepping stone towards greater European sovereignty in defence production; suggests that successful Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) and European Defence Fund (EDF) projects be prioritised along the line of known capability gaps and that sufficient funding be ensured for projects that have proven to deliver; reiterates its call on the Member States to provide an implementation report on PESCO projects to Parliament at least twice a year;

Added47. Is deeply convinced that the EU-level instruments should prioritise and massively increase support for SMEs and start-ups in the dual-use and defence sector; stresses the need to support SMEs and start-ups in bringing successfully tested prototypes to the market, including the scaling up of production; underlines the need to bridge the current funding gap as regards these important steps that would strengthen the EDTIB, including in close cooperation with the Ukrainian technological and defence industrial base;

Added48. Urges the EU to increase coherence between existing and future EU instruments, in particular between PESCO, on demand consolidation, and the EDF, on programmatic roadmaps; between the European Defence Industry Reinforcement through common Procurement Act (EDIRPA), on joint procurement, and the Act in Support of Ammunition Production (ASAP), on industrial ramp-up; between EDIP, on the identification of dependencies, and the EDF, on the resolution of identified dependencies; or within EDIP itself, on coherence within the instrument of the implementation of actions related to the consolidation of demand and supply;

Added49. Calls for a significant increase in common procurement by the Member States of required European defence equipment and capabilities; calls on the Member States to aggregate demand by procuring defence equipment jointly, with the possibility of granting the Commission a mandate to procure on their behalf, ideally ensuring a long-term planning horizon for the EDTIB, thus improving the EDTIB’s production capacities and the interoperability of the European armed forces, and making efficient use of taxpayers’ money through economies of scale;

Added50. Welcomes the proposal for European Defence Projects of Common Interest on the development of common capabilities that go beyond the financial means of a single Member State; believes that these projects should be used to support the industrial and technological capacities that underpin the major common priorities of several Member States and in fields such as strategic enablers, particularly in space and European air defence, to act on the whole spectrum of threats, military mobility, in particular strategic and tactical air transport, deep strikes, drone and anti-drone technologies, missiles and munitions, and artificial intelligence, in order to develop sovereign infrastructure and critical enablers; emphasises that pragmatism must prevail due to the sheer number of priorities and the need to mobilise new resources; considers, in that regard, that the EU should focus on rapidly available and proven European technologies that reduce our dependencies and improve our security; highlights the need to support the development of pan-European value chains in EU defence cooperation by incorporating companies throughout the Union and to boost competitiveness in the sector by various means, such as mergers and champions; considers, furthermore, that instead of focusing on fair return, our defence policies should encourage the growth of EU centres of excellence;

Added51. Calls for the further development of an EU defence industrial policy to improve existing and develop defence-specific instruments where necessary, and to optimise the use of non-defence-specific instruments for the purposes of the EDTIB;

Added52. Recalls the need to ensure coherence in EU public policies, which must not generate obligations contradictory to the overall defence objectives, especially during a security crisis, where the concept of ‘strategic exception’ should be introduced; calls for the creation of a genuine defence environment in favour of defence that could support industrial ramp-up efforts by taking better advantage of the multi-sectoral Commission instruments by screening, reviewing and, where needed, revising existing ones to ensure that they do not undermine EU defence policy objectives;

Added53. Recommends the establishment of a security of supply regime, including joint strategic stocks of raw materials and critical parts, to ensure the availability of raw materials and components needed for the production of defence products, and to allow production cycles to be ramped up faster and shortened; calls for the Commission to be tasked with the mapping and monitoring of the EDTIB, with the aims of protecting its strengths, reducing its vulnerabilities, avoiding crises and providing it with an effective and efficient industrial policy;

Added54. Proposes that relevant defence-related entities/activities be allowed access to InvestEU and other EU funds, taking advantage of EU defence as a job creator; insists that defence-related entities/activities be prioritised as appropriate, with the support of the Chips Act and the Critical Raw Materials Act; believes that the simplification efforts announced by the Commission must fully encompass the defence sector; calls on the Commission to leverage the full dual-use potential of space technologies, considering space as both a new operating domain and a critical enabler of multi-domain operations; underlines that the EU currently has a substantial gap in space capabilities compared to its main competitors and stresses that, in order to address this gap in space technologies, already existing flagship projects (i.e. Copernicus and Galileo) should be enhanced for defence applications; suggests, furthermore, that the EU should urgently pursue the development of its IRIS2 constellation, together with the development of further EU common projects, for example, for space domain awareness and space-based missile early-warning applications;

Added55. Insists on the need to ensure geographical coherence by taking stock of the will of the EU and the UK, first and foremost to build security guarantees for Ukraine and become closer security partners, and to sign a joint declaration with concrete engagements and structured dialogue in order to strengthen EU-UK cooperation on the full range of foreign and security challenges facing the continent, the budgetary and regulatory conditions of which remain to be negotiated, and keeping in mind the importance of the decision-making autonomy of the EU; underlines, in this regard, the importance of closer cooperation on information and intelligence sharing, military mobility, security and defence initiatives, crisis management, cyber defence, hybrid threats, foreign information manipulation and interference and in jointly addressing shared threats;

Added56. Calls for more coherence in support of companies by reducing unnecessary administrative burdens and cutting red tape, and ensuring much easier access for small- and mid-cap companies within the defence sector; underlines the need to review, simplify and harmonise the current framework for export licences and intra-EU transfer licences, as well as for cross-certification of equipment, as one of the priorities to foster better cooperation within the market and among Member States;

Added57. Encourages a common European certification scheme for weapons systems and a move beyond the current system of national certification in order to speed up the introduction of weapons systems into the armed forces of Member States;

Added58. Calls for greater coherence in governance as CSDP must become the key instrument of a powerful Europe; considers that this requires a real link in governance between the Member States, the Vice-President of the Commission / High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (VP/HR) and the Commissioners; urges the Member States to overcome the complexity of decision-making processes in the governance of European defence; calls for the creation of a council of defence ministers and for the move from unanimity to qualified majority voting for decisions in the European Council, the Council of Ministers and EU agencies such as the EDA, excluding military operations with an executive mandate; calls, in the meantime, for the use of Article 44 TEU in the creation of a horizontal task force on defence in the Commission; calls for increased democratic accountability through enhanced oversight by Parliament;

Added59. Proposes the strengthening of Parliament’s oversight and scrutiny role, in line with the expansion of the EU’s role in defence; calls for the appointment of a Parliament representative to the new Defence Industrial Readiness Board proposed in EDIP, as there is currently none provided for;

AddedSovereignty

Added60. Stresses that the creation of a single European defence market is a priority, as the fragmentation and lack of competitiveness of the European industry have so far hampered the capacity of the EU to assume more responsibility as a security provider; recalls that the concept of a ‘defence market’ implies a full recognition of its specificity and an appropriate and coherent application of EU public policies; recalls that European preference should be the aim of achieving this single ‘market’ by strictly linking territoriality and the added value generated in this territory;

Added61. Strongly believes that European preference should be the cornerstone of all EU policies related to the European defence market, as a strategic imperative aimed at protecting European expertise, in order to strengthen European defence capabilities on a long-term basis and as EU taxpayer money must create added value on EU territory; underlines that the European preference principle must be reflected in EU defence regulations in clear and unambiguous eligibility criteria both for entities and for products;

Added62. Rejects a scenario in which EU funds contribute to perpetuating or deepening dependences on non-European actors, both for production of capabilities or their deployment;

Added63. Urges the Member States to stop invoking Article 346 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union as a means of avoiding the application of the Procurement Directive (2009/81/EC), thus undermining the common market for defence; calls on the Commission to review the Directives on the transfer of defence-related products and defence procurement as well as the inter-community transfer directive (2009/43/EC) with a view to strengthening the common market for defence and introducing flexibility with regard to crisis situations like the one we are currently facing;

Added64. Calls on the Commission to design a better-resourced, more strategic and more efficient successor to the European Defence Fund that supports common research and innovation in defence all along the supply chain and to lay the conditions to address technological challenges: advanced persistent threats, artificial intelligence and machine learning, quantum computing, the internet of military things, security, supply chain attacks, zero-day exploits and cloud security; calls for the establishment of an EU agency, inspired by the US’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, as part of the European Defence Agency, which should be solely responsible for supporting research in emerging and disruptive technologies, equipped with an adequate amount of venture capital;

AddedFinance and investments

Added65. Is concerned that, without a substantial increase in defence investment, the EU’s security and defence objectives will not be reached, both in terms of military support for Ukraine and the improvement of our common security; highlights the fact that the cost of non-preparedness for the most extreme military contingencies would be much higher than the cost of decisive EU preparedness; calls for the EU and its Member States to work and agree on concrete ways and means to achieve a short- to long-term substantial increase in public and private investment in defence and security;

Added66. Considers that, in the EU’s next multiannual financial framework (MFF), defence spending lines will have to reflect the new ‘ready for the most extreme military contingencies’ priority;

Added67. Insists that urgent needs cannot wait for the next MFF; insists that innovative solutions for finding additional funding must be explored without delay, such as investing in the defence sector, making it easier and faster to repurpose funds from one project to another, and exploring the possibility of adjusting EU funding criteria to give new prominence to security criteria in allocating spending;

Added68. Welcomes the five-point ‘ReArm Europe’ plan proposed by the Commission President on 4 March 2025;

Added69. Strongly supports the idea that EU Member States must increase their defence and security financing to new levels; notes that some Member States have already increased their defence spending to 5 % of GDP and insists that the current security environment and the multiple, complex and evolving security threats require Member States to increase their defence spending to at least 3 % of GDP;

Added70. Welcomes the proposals made in the recent Niinistö report as regards the financing of European defence; supports the establishment of a defending Europe facility and a securing Europe facility; equally welcomes and supports the proposal to establish an investment guarantee programme based on the model of InvestEU with open architecture to trigger private sector investment and to issue a ‘European preparedness bond standard’;

Added71. Is of the opinion that national recovery and resilience plans should be amended to allow for new defence funding; calls for these investments to also address vulnerabilities in both military capabilities and the social fabric, empowering us to fight all threats to our values, social model, security and defence;

Added72. Urges the Member States to support the establishment of a defence, security and resilience bank to serve as a multilateral lending institution designed to provide low-interest, long-term loans that can support key national security priorities such as rearmament, defence modernisation, rebuilding efforts in Ukraine and the buying back of critical infrastructure currently owned by hostile non-EU countries;

Added73. Calls for a system of European defence bonds to be explored for financing large-scale military investments up front; calls, similarly, for the use of unused ‘coronabonds’ for defence instruments to be explored, to complement the Commission’s ‘ReArm Europe’ plan, as the EU is now experiencing a pressing need to boost security and defence to protect its citizens, restore deterrence and support its allies, first and foremost Ukraine;

Added74. Reiterates, in line with the Commission’s ‘ReArm Europe’ plan, its call for the European Investment Bank (EIB) and other international financial institutions and private banks in Europe to invest more actively in the European defence industry; calls, in particular, for an urgent revision of the EIB’s lending policy and immediate flexibility to remove current restrictions on financing defence, and for the possibility of issuing earmarked debt for funding security and defence projects to be investigated;

Added75. Calls on European Council President António Costa to immediately convene the European Council, based on the conclusions of the white paper, so that EU leaders can agree on immediate and far-reaching decisions to implement the European Defence Union as laid out in Article 42(2) TEU and elaborate on the measures identified in the white paper;

Added76. Welcomes the outcomes of the special European Council of 6 March 2025 and asks the Member States to act decisively during the upcoming March Council meeting;

Added77. Notes that the above is without prejudice to the specific character of the security and defence policy of certain Member States;

78. Instructs its President to forward this resolution to the European Council, the Council, the Vice-President of the Commission / High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, the President of the Commission and competent Commissioners, the EU security and defence agencies and the governments and parliaments of the Member States.