Development of the European Union single arms market

The European Union is one of the leading arms producers in the world. Defence industry of the EU has a capability to produce wide range of arms systems, therefore there is a high demand for these systems both on the internal and external market. For defence companies in the EU the internal market is considered to be the main one, however now the EU arms market can be described as fragmented market of the member states. The integration of the EU in defence sphere is also connected with the development of the EU single arms market that should increase competition, efficiency of arms development and production and reduce the duplication. The goal of this paper is to analyze the process of the EU single market development. This issue has a limited coverage in the works of foreign and, above all, Russian researches. The volume of sources, especially on the states internal arms procurement is also limited, so it is only possible to analyze the import/export data prepared by SIPRI. According to SIPRI data, the EU states are not among the leaders in arms import, but even existing arms import volume is mainly of the other EU states or of the US origin. So, this confirms that the EU has the developed defence industry and the only state that is able to compete with internal arms producers is the US which is also the one of the main EU partners in this sphere. However, for the internal arms producers there are some difficulties with the access to the all-national arms markets of the EU member states. Due to the protectionism of the member states applied to the national arms producers they have advantages in states arms procurement. The EU tried to solve this issue by the introduction of Defence Directive and Transport Directive that would open member states markets and simplify procedures connected with arms procurement. Nevertheless, member states still have the opportunity to ignore these Directives, mainly Defence Directive that obliges countries to hold tenders for the arms procurement, by using 346 Article of the Treaty on Functioning of the EU. This article allows not sharing information on arms tenders as this information is related to essential interests of their security. Together with this activity the EU applied another approach - to promote joint arms development and production through different programs including European Defence fund. The expectation is that states will be more willing to buy the arms produced in other countries, if these arms are the result of joint efforts. To sum it up at this moment the single arms market of the EU is not developed, despite the efforts of the EU. It seems that the success of the EU activities in this direction depends on the willingness of the member states to establish the priority to the EU interests in the sphere of defence and security rather than national ones. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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