Meeting chaired by Thierry de Montbrial, President, Ifri.

Working language: English

Read two recent studies of the Ifri :

In Europe, not ruled by Europe: Tough love between Britain and the EU, Vivien PERTUSOT, Note de l'Ifri, March 2013

Discussions of a potential “Brexit”, the United Kingdom leaving the European Union, have sparked debate in Britain, and also across Europe, intensified by the UK veto of the “fiscal compact” at the European Council in December 2011. What sounded like the absurd pipedream of a few hard-core eurosceptics a couple of years ago has now become a genuine possibility. This study argues that this state of affairs does not originate from a deliberate strategy by the UK or its European partners. Rather they have set themselves on diverging paths, one leading to more integration, the other at best to the status quo - actually a form of relative disintegration - or to less integration. The more the gap widens, the less improbable a “Brexit” appears

Defence Reform in the United Kingdom: A Twenty-First Century Paradox, John LOUTH, Focus stratégique, n° 43, Ifri, march 2013

The context of budgetary constraint offered a strong incentive for the 2010 Coalition Government to improve its management of defence equipment. Before that, the previous Labour governments already focused on smart acquisition so that the procurement process could reach a trade-off between military performance, the R&D costs and the purchase value. Thus, several smart acquisition reforms aimed at importing private sector skills and behaviours into the defence public domain. By building its logic around public-private partnership (PPP), smart acquisition can be apprehended as an interlocking of three factors: organisation, the high level of process and body of knowledge, and the people who promoted and enacted its processes, behaviours and objectives. Due to organisational confusion, ineffective project management and unclear objectives, successive UK governments have failed to manage operational and financial risks, cost overruns and diseconomies.