Their Own Army?

Philip H. Gordon

From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2000

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Summary:  Europe is about to create a unified military force. Done wrong, it could strain transatlantic relations and weaken European defense.

Philip H. Gordon is Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies and Director of the Center on the United States and France at the Brookings Institution. He served as Director for European Affairs at the U.S. National Security Council from 1998 to 1999.

MAKING EUROPEAN DEFENSE WORK

At the end of this year, Europe is scheduled to take its first serious steps toward creating a credible unified military force. The clock began ticking at a December 1999 summit in Helsinki, Finland, where the leaders of the European Union (EU) announced their intention to create a rapid reaction force able to act autonomously, send up to 60,000 troops abroad within two months, and sustain them for at least a year. They also announced plans to create a new Political and Security Committee, a Military Staff able to advise EU leaders, and a Military Committee of defense chiefs modeled on NATO's. Coming after decades of failed attempts to build a meaningful European military capability, the Helsinki declaration was widely heralded as a sign of Europe's new willingness to take more responsibility for its own defense and perhaps even project power independently. The new structures are scheduled to be in place by the end of this year.

Apart from the hoopla surrounding it, this latest initiative seems more serious than its many predecessors, for three reasons. First, the United Kingdom, whose forces are necessary to any credible European military, is engaged wholeheartedly for the first time. Second, the Kosovo conflict brought home to Europeans just how militarily dependent on Washington they are and will remain unless big changes are made. And third, the Helsinki declaration is not a call to revive the eternally moribund Western European Union (WEU) -- Europe's ostensible defense arm -- but a plan to transfer responsibility for defense and security to the EU, an organization backed by real political will and momentum.

If done right, the development of a serious EU defense force could be a good thing for all concerned -- reducing American burdens in Europe, making Europe a better and more capable partner, and providing a way for Europeans to tackle security problems where and when the United States cannot or will not get involved. If done badly, however, the EU project risks irrelevance as an empty institutional distraction -- or even worse, a step back toward the situation in the Balkans in the early 1990s, when separate European and American strategies and institutions led to impotence and recrimination. The advantages of an EU better able to act forcefully and independently must therefore be weighed against the danger that the new initiative could exacerbate differences between Europe and America, duplicate costly NATO structures and assets, alienate NATO's non-EU members such as Turkey, Norway, and Poland, and create prematurely the illusion of European military self-reliance.

This is not to say that a case cannot be made for Europeans' taking over full responsibility for their own security sometime in the future. One good reason for the EU initiative is to lay the groundwork for such a contingency should it ever become necessary. As deeply engaged as the United States is today, it cannot guarantee that it will remain so forever. If America ever needs to pull its troops out of Europe ...

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