No foreign and security policy without parliamentary control
National Party Board member Helmut Scholz commented on Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s plans for a speedy installation of joint European armed forces:
"When European armed forces are established this poses the danger that parliamentary control over the armed forces at national level gets increasingly undermined while the European Parliament does not play any part in it whatsoever. Decisions are then only made at government level. Foreign and security policy will then be the playground of heads of state and government alone. This must not happen.
"These plans by the Foreign Minister (SPD) constitute a consistent implementation of the Treaty of Lisbon which decrees a combination of military capabilities. This is also one reason why DIE LINKE rejected the reform treaty."
DIE LINKE saw no need for having European armed forces, underlined Helmut Scholz. "Not a combination of military capabilities creates more security but rather an orientation of the European Union at peace. Even though the enormous waste of financial and material resources Steinmeier addressed is true the answer he now gives points in the wrong direction: What matters is not a continued establishment of EU battle groups and army structures but rather a structural non-aggression capability of the existing structures and a corresponding conversion of the national contingents.
"More intertwining of political EU and NATO decision-making structures is the wrong way” Scholz noted in conclusion, "just as wrong as the secret diplomacy with which the foreign ministers of Germany and France try to restart the EU motor: Abolishing the French nuclear weapons would be a more convincing joint starting point for a security policy initiative in the framework of the EU CFSP.”