The declaration on defence spending issued this week by the European Commission, the European External Action Service, and the European Defence Agency (EDA) is both important and predictable. A taskforce has laboured over the declaration and accompanying documents for months, but it offers little that was not already known, or indeed that the EDA has not been saying since its creation in 2004.

The member states of the European Union do not spend enough money on defence. What money they do spend, they spend on the wrong stuff (mostly people rather than equipment or research). The upshot is that Europe’s defence capability is inadequate and the member states are wasting some of their effort in duplication.

For those who are opposed to European military adventures overseas, this might sound like good news. But if the aim is to constrain foreign policy, there are surely smarter ways to do it than merely ensuring impotence. Besides, it is not just adventures outside European territory that are constrained. Europe’s internal security is weakened. And European industry (and jobs) miss out from a failure to spend on research and development (R&D). And for lack of European options, some European governments are even spending their defence budgets with non-European suppliers.

Many, though not all, national governments, have to change their perception of what the defence budget is for, even if that is a hard lesson to learn at a time of high unemployment. They currently treat their defence budget as a sort of public employment agency: almost half of the EU’s member states are spending more than 60% of their respective defence budgets on personnel, whether military or civilian. A re-allocation could give a significant boost to R&D. Equally unproductively, some member states also use their defence budgets to preserve jobs in uncompetitive defence industries. The Commission and the EDA rightly want to open up defence procurement and nudge the member states to something closer to a European market.

National behaviour has been driven largely by what governments perceive as their self-interest. But their short-termism blinds them to the longer-term consequences, which is a decline in overall defence effectiveness.

The struggle for the Commission and the European External Action Service is to persuade national governments that their longer-term self-interest – for their economies, their jobs and their security – lies in greater cross-border co-operation.

There are already some pioneering cross-border projects, particularly in aerospace, but there are not enough.

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The timing is in some ways propitious for a change of approach. Current economic adversity and the consequent constraints on public spending make the economies offered by European co-operation more attractive than ever. That said, European defence and security has long been blighted by freeloading. European allies have relied too much on the United States, and within Europe, some countries have relied on others – notably France, the United Kingdom and Poland – to provide the firepower.

At the end of this year, the European Council is scheduled to discuss defence and security policy. Between now and then, the EU’s member states have to come to terms with reality. The EU documents published this week provide a reminder of what they already know. It is time the lesson was taken to heart.