Resolution now available on reconciling defence spending and investments in people

The position:

1. Encourages a further deepening of partnerships with strategic allies, including NATO, the UN, OSCE, Canada, and with European countries like the UK and Norway.

2. Calls upon the EU and its Member States to ensure the necessary defence investments to ensure Europe’s capacity to defend its territory and citizens, while maintaining cooperation with NATO and further partners and reinforcing the European Defence Union (EDU) as a complementary pillar of regional security.

3. Emphasises that staffing shortages in the armed forces and civilian defence sectors must be urgently addressed, with investments in personnel recruitment, retention, training and professional development, ensuring fair working conditions for all military and civilian staff involved in defence efforts.

4. Stresses that security and defence extend beyond the armed forces to societal resilience; in line with the recent Niinistö report ‘Safer Together’, it must span to civil defence to include the protection of critical infrastructure, emergency preparedness, and coordinated responses to hybrid threats across the EU – requiring additional public investments to build these capacities.

5. Insists that defence spending increases must not come at the expense of cuts to public services, social security systems, education, healthcare, pensions or employment programmes, which remain indispensable to Europe’s socioeconomic fabric.

6. Recalls that deficits to no more than 3% of the national GDP and public debt levels to below 60% of national GDP should remain the target for all Member States in the European economic governance. Sustainable public debt targets over time must remain at the core of the EU’s economic governance framework as restricting budgetary debts to manageable levels is the basis for fiscal prosperity.

7. Stresses therefore that the EU and its Member States should take further joint measures to combat unethical tax avoidance and illicit tax fraud, by means of both regulatory adjustments and increased capacities for national tax administrations through a recruitment of more staff, in order to help finance additional defence spending needs.

8. Supports, in addition, reforms in EU taxation frameworks to ensure that excessive windfall profits of large multinational enterprises contribute adequately to national and EU budgets to raise public revenues to finance necessary public investments including in the area of defence.

9. Advocates, beyond, for reinforced cooperation among EU Member States in joint defence procurement, research, innovation, and industrial capacity-building to create economies of scale, avoid duplications, and maximise the efficiency of increased defence budgets.

CESI Secretary General Klaus Heeger said: "Europe seemingly faces a dilemma: We need to invest in defence to ensure our mere security against Russia, and we need to carry out major investments in workers, families and citizens at the same time - while public budgets are drained and ever increasing debts are a no-go. As CESI, we propose to use fair taxation instruments to help fund both."

The full resolution is available here.