MSC Hosts Roundtable and Publishes Report on European Defense

Following up on the debates at the Munich Security Conference (MSC) 2023, the MSC will organize a European Defense Roundtable in Visby, Sweden, on June 27-28, at the beginning of the Almedalen Week 2023. The roundtable will assemble a selected group of decision-makers and experts from government and military, parliament, academia, the think tank community, and the private sector. Taking place at the very end of the Swedish EU Council Presidency and two weeks ahead of the NATO Summit in Vilnius, participants will draw lessons from Russia’s war against Ukraine and discuss options to deepen European defense cooperation and bolster NATO’s European pillar. A public session, focused on Sweden’s role in European defense, will be open to the broader audience of the Almedalen week, which is a political festival and democratic meeting place for dialogue and exchange taking place on the Swedish island of Gotland. Our event can be followed via livestream.  

European defense has come a long way since February 2022 – but nowhere far enough given the caesura that is Russia’s war against Ukraine. European countries face two monumental challenges at once: readying and replenishing their own forces to adapt to a fundamentally altered security environment while arming Ukraine in its fight against Russia. To this end, several states have announced increases in their defense budgets. But European defense still faces an abundance of hurdles, ranging from dependencies, to fragmentation, to a lack of standardization. It is high time to move from the analysis of well-known problems to possible solutions. The central question for European defense will be how to translate greater spending into more and relevant output. This requires a joint understanding of which capabilities are needed for the armed forces to stand their ground in the battlefield of the future. It also raises questions of how procurement should be organized in the decades to come and whether Europeans can square national interests with the need for joint approaches.  

On the occasion of the European Defense Roundtable in Visby, the MSC will also launch a special edition of the Munich Security Report on European defense, which builds on previous work on this topic. Against the backdrop of the fundamentally altered security and geopolitical environment, the report asks whether European states are doing enough to live up to this Zeitenwende and proposes a to do list to bolster European defense in the short and longer term. The report will be published on June 28 on our website. In case of interest in an earlier embargoed version, please reach out to us via press@securityconference.org.