Europe's news in English

COPY LINK

MILITARY

France signs deal with UK for anti-ship missiles

Britain and France will develop new anti-ship missiles in a €600-million ($830 million) project that stems from a major defence cooperation agreement, Britain's Ministry of Defence said on Thursday.

Published: 27 March 2014 17:21 CET

France signs deal with UK for anti-ship missiles

Britain and France have signed a deal for anti-ship missiles. Photo: AFP

Britain and France will develop new anti-ship missiles in a €600-million project that stems from a major defence cooperation agreement, Britain's Ministry of Defence said Thursday.

The multi-national group MBDA has been awarded the contract to produce the helicopter-mounted missiles, which use sophisticated homing technology to attack small and medium-sized targets.

The Royal Navy will use them on its new Wildcat helicopters.

The deal is the first collaborative project announced since an Anglo-French summit held at RAF Brize Norton airbase in late January between Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Francois Hollande.

Britain hailed the deal as "a significant step in joint working on complex weapons between the two nations".

MBDA chief executive Antoine Bouvier said the deal "takes us into a new era of cooperation which will allow us to make significant savings in future programmes".

The group brings together British defence group BAE Systems, the European group Airbus and Finmeccanica of Italy.

Britain's Defence Secretary Philip Hammond and his French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian signed an outline agreement for the project at the Brize Norton summit.

But the deal is part of a wider programme of defence cooperation announced by Cameron and then-French president Nicolas Sarkozy at a summit in London in November 2010.

Under the Lancaster House agreement, Europe's two biggest militaries agreed to cooperate on joint projects to increase efficiency and seek savings.

The British government has slashed its defence budget as part of its programme of cuts in public spending.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.

Become a Member to leave a comment.

Erdogan links Swedish Nato approval to Turkish EU membership

“First, open the way to Turkey’s membership of the European Union, and then we will open it for Sweden, just as we had opened it for Finland,” Erdogan told a televised media appearance, before departing for the NATO summit in Lithuania.

Erdogan said “this is what I told” US President Joe Biden when the two leaders spoke by phone on Sunday.

Turkey first applied to be a member of the European Economic Community — a predecessor to the EU — in 1987. It became an EU candidate country in 1999 and formally launched membership negotiations with the bloc in 2005.

The talks stalled in 2016 over European concerns about Turkish human rights violations.

“I would like to underline one reality. Turkey has been waiting at the EU’s front door for 50 years,” Erdogan said. “Almost all the NATO members are EU members. I now am addressing these countries, which are making Turkey wait for more than 50 years, and I will address them again in Vilnius.”

Sweden’s prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, is due to meet Erdogan at 5pm on Monday in a last ditch attempt to win approval for the country’s Nato bid ahead of Nato’s summit in Vilnius on July 11th and 12th.

Turkey has previously explained its refusal to back Swedish membership as motivated by the country’s harbouring of people connected to the PKK, a Kurdish terrorist group, and the Gülen movement, who Erdogan blames for an attempted coup in 2016.

More recently, he has criticised Sweden’s willingness to allow pro-Kurdish groups to protest in Swedish cities and allow anti-Islamic protesters to burn copies of the Quran, the holy book of Islam.

In a sign of the likely reaction of counties which are members both of Nato and the EU, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that the two issues should not be connected.

“Sweden meets all the requirements for Nato membership,” Scholz told reporters in Berlin. “The other question is one that is not connected with it and that is why I do not think it should be seen as a connected issue.”

Malena Britz, Associate Professor in Political Science at the Swedish Defence University, told public broadcaster SVT that Erdogan’s new gambit will have caught Sweden’s negotiators, the EU, and even Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg off guard.

“I think both the member states and Stoltenberg had expected this to be about Nato and not about what the EU is getting up to,” she said. “That’s not something Nato even has any control over. If Erdogan sticks to the idea that Turkey isn’t going to let Sweden into Nato until Turkey’s EU membership talks start again, then Sweden and Nato will need to think about another solution.”

Aras Lindh, a Turkey expert at the Swedish Institute of Foreign Affairs, agreed that the move had taken Nato by surprise.

“This came suddenly. I find it hard to believe that anything like this will become reality, although there could possibly be some sort of joint statement from the EU countries. I don’t think that any of the EU countries which are also Nato members were prepared for this issue.”

Url copied to clipboard!