Introduction
Its time has come, at last, albeit overdue.
Advocates of the European Union becoming a military power have been fully aware of the strength of political commitments to retain pre-eminent national competences for defence – under a NATO umbrella. Only some almighty, unforeseeable geo-political shock could possible change this. Putin and Trump have together between them now delivered just this big Black Swan happening, even as if coordinated.
Putin has invaded another independent European state, Ukraine. He openly threatens even nuclear war if his objective of subjugating or wrecking this state is frustrated by Western military action, or political action such as NATO membership for Ukraine1.
Trump admires Putin. He would pull out US support for Ukraine on day 1 if he gets re-elected in November, and says that Putin can do “what the hell he wants” in any NATO member state that is not paying enough for defence2.
The 1952 European Defence Community
It has taken 72 years to reach this point, after France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux trio signed the European Defence Community (EDC) treaty in May 1952, but which was abandoned after France failed to ratify it. The impetus for the treaty had come in 1950 with speeches by Winston Churchill advocating “a European Army under a unified command” and René Pleven, prime minister of France “creation for the purpose of common defence, of a European Army tied to the political institutions of a united Europe”, and a Resolution of the Council of Europe calling for “the immediate creation of a unified European army subject to proper European democratic control”3.
The signed EDC treaty was a full 85-page text detailing all institutional and decision-making provisions4. Its main features may be recalled in order to reflect on how far it still looks relevant, and whether some modernized variant might now be proposed.
The core proposal was for nationally homogenous ‘Groupements’ or ‘basic units’ of army, air force, and naval forces to be integrated under the full wartime powers of command of the Supreme Commander of NATO. The treaty authors had, however, the foresight to imagine something like a Trump presidency of the US. “If NATO should cease to be in effect …. the member states shall by agreement among themselves decide upon the authority to which the command and employment of the European Defense Forces should be entrusted” (Article 18.4).
The institutional structure of the EDC anticipated that of the European Economic Community and subsequent European Union, with a Council, a parliamentary Assembly, a Commission (‘Commissariat’), a Court of Justice and a common budget. Its decision-making provisions saw a three-layer system for actions requiring a simple majority, a qualified majority, or unanimity.
The EDC was to be responsible, beyond its integrated wartime command structure, for standardised military procurement and elaboration of common military doctrines and training, all directions in which today’s European Defence Agency is seeking to go, with seminal but still only small steps only so far.
While the EDC treaty was signed by the six founding member states of the subsequent European Economic Community, it was to remain open for enlargement like today’s European Union for the accession of any other European state.
Further anticipating contemporary conditions, the UK declined to join the proposed EDC because of its excessive (for the UK) supranational character. However a parallel treaty was prepared for mutual defence between the UK and the member states of the EDC.
The long and winding path of European federalisation
Defence is the missing link in any design for the EU to become a more or less recognizable federation, and effective actor on the world stage. The EU has often been viewed as a unique, unidentified flying object in terms of its political system, with no final resting point in view. However, in practice, it has over the decades been moving gradually, with bumps along the road, along parallel paths of deepening in a federalizing direction with the single market and single currency, and widening with enlargement of its membership. But the EU is not unique in going down this parallel path.
The US long had its parallel processes of federalization and enlargement, starting with 13 founding states around 250 years ago, with progressive enlargements for new states taking place still in the 2Oth century with New Mexico and Arizona in 1912, and Alaska and Hawaiii in 1957. The US had to experience a terrible civil war ending only 159 years ago to resolve the competition between the confederal preferences in the south and federal preferences in the north, an analogous competition resonating in the EU today. The Federal Reserve Board as a proper central bank was only fully established in 1913 after a series of bank failures and panics. The foundations of US fiscal federalism were only created when the Great Depression of the 1930s triggered the New Deal and the beginnings of federal social benefits including unemployment compensation5.
By comparison the European Union has evolved very fast over the last 68 years since the European Economic Community (EEC) was founded in 1957 with the Treaty of Rome, leading on to the merger in 1965 of the EEC with Euratom (founded also in 1957) and the Coal and Steel Community (founded earlier in 1951). The Customs Union was started in 1968. The first attempt at monetary union was the Werner Plan proposal of 1970.
When this collapsed there began deeper reflections on the need for fiscal underpinnings of an economic and monetary union. In 1977 a group of experts, chaired by Sir Donald MacDougall, reported ‘On the role of public finance in European integration’, concluding that based on the experience of mature federal monetary unions, a sustainable European monetary union would require expanding the budget from the then 0.7% of GDP to 2 to 2.5% with a capacity to handle major macroeconomic shocks and redistribute fiscal resources from rich to poorer states and regions6. This was to be for a purely civilian budget, whereas if there were to be a European competence for defence this would cost a further 2.5% to 3 % of GDP. The MacDougall report was royally ignored as irrelevant by ministers of finance and central bankers. The budget only began to grow beyond farm spending after Jacques Delors argued successfully that his plan to complete the single market by 1992 would only survive with a serious expansion of the Regional Fund to help the weakest regions and states7.
The first political leader to propose that the EU’s budget would have to grow along the lines of the MacDougall report was Emanuel Marcon in his September 2017 speech at the Sorbonne shortly after he was first elected President of France. The major expansions of the EU budget and borrowing powers only then came with classic ‘shocks’, notably with €450 billion of funding to save the Eurozone in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, and the €750 billion Recovery and Resilience Fund following the global Covid pandemic of 2019-2020. The latter saw the EU’s budget ceiling raised ‘temporarily’ to 2% of GDP, although there are already voices suggesting that there will have to be a Recovery and Resilience Fund 2.08.
The time has come for a major European defense initiative, driven politically by the combination of threats expressed by Putin and Trump. Such an initiative, under the name of a European Defence Union, would be a key systemic development of the EU in a federal direction.
A European Defence Union
Inspiration may be taken from the attempted European Defence Community of 1952, but the future has to be something different, and so let it be called the European Defence Union. Indeed the EU has got beyond talking about communities and thinks in terms of multiple unions (monetary, capital market, energy, digital etc.). A defence union would carry the EU another huge step deeper into federal territory.
The latest shock, Putin’s war against Ukraine, for the first time, opens up seriously the debate about the EU becoming a military power. EU member states have until recently been spending only 1.5% of GDP on average on defense9. This begins to change with Germany now raising its defence budget to the Nato 2% of GDP target. Trump’s credible threat to oblige Europe to pay for its own defence, and Putin’s credible threat to Europe’s strategic security (in Ukraine and beyond), looks like the EU needs to expand defence spending way beyond the NATO target of 2% of GDP, more likely to 3% (the US spends 3.5%). But then will arise the question of (?) how this burden will be shared between the EU and member state budgets.
The full development of a European defence force will be a hugely complex and progressive process (with some aspects addressed in other chapters of this volume.) For the present, a few main issues are highlighted.
Procurement. The case for a major common, rationalised procurement effort is clear. The needed huge expansion of spending on defence capacities would have a major impact on the industrial-military sector: member states with the strongest industrial-military enterprises would provide the foundations to rely on for those with limited industrial-military capacities. Funding should, therefore, be at the European level, as would be the enhanced security benefits. Procurement is the immediate operational priority to get EU-funded weapons and ammunition from anywhere to Ukraine, with huge amplification and deepening of the European Peace Facility (EPF) and Act in Support of Ammunition Production (ASAP)10. Since the war in Ukraine is for the EU a proxy war, without frontline military participation, it is also a plausible starting point, with important links to industrial policy and single market policies. Procurement can be scaled up rapidly, while working on the complex process of standardisation of weapons and restructuring of the industrial-military complex.
Dedicated forces and command structures. The 1952 European Defence Community proposal was radical, for total integration of armies, navies and air forces in integrated European defense forces. This proved too much politically in 1952, as it would still be today.
But the next move has to go way beyond the failing EU Battlegroups initiative. Its shortcomings have been well identified and analysed: the refusal of troop-contributing nations to meet their very minor commitments to contingents of 1,500 troops, the short-run 6-monthly duration of commitments, and more broadly the lack of military-operational, and adequate financial and political conditions in place11. The embryonic Battlegroups initiative has to be replaced by real integration of greatly increased and dedicated land, air and naval forces, with fully developed command and control structures.
The Strategic Compass documents of 202212 proposed a Rapid Deployment Capacity of 5,000 troops, taking over from the failing Battlegroups initiative. But this is still only small-scale incrementalism, whereas the realities of the war in Ukraine are demanding something on a different scale. A European Defence Union could see the permanent commitment of substantial parts of total military resources of member states. For example, a member state with total forces of 100,000 personnel might be called upon to commit 50,000 or half to the Union. There would be rotation of these forces in and outside the Union’s force structure, still leaving also a margin for bilateral actions.
Budget and burden-sharing. The running expenses of the Union’s committed forces, including the procurements, would be for the EU budget, in an amount of around 2% of GDP. The logic would be to allow flexibility for the scale of member states commitments, with a range between the strongest military powers in the EU to the smallest and militarily minimalist and even neutralist member states, while avoiding free-riding. There would be a multi-year adjustment period in which all member states (including the non-Nato member states) would be converging on the 2% of GDP spending target. Contributions to funding the European Defence Union would need to take account of the wide range of current national defence spending levels from 1.5% to 2.5% of GDP.
Institutional organisation. A primary choice would have to be made between an EU-level organisation, or something closer to the Eurozone or Schengen model for a coalition of the willing and able, to the exclusion, for example, of small neutral states (Ireland, Malta, and Cyprus, with Finland and Sweden as reminders of how these things can change). The EU level choice would have the advantage of avoiding free-riding as regards budgetary funding. On the other hand the Eurozone or Schengen model would facilitate decision-making reliant on the unanimity of participating states. The Schengen model has also the interesting feature of including some non-EU states, relevant maybe for non-EU Nato member states such as Norway and the UK.
Conclusions
The time has come for a major European defence initiative, driven politically by the combination of threats expressed by Putin and Trump. Such an initiative, under the name of a European Defence Union, would be a key systemic development of the EU in a federal direction, adding to the already effectively federal single market and single currency. The war in Ukraine shows this to be an urgent necessity, taking over from the EU’s timid incrementalism so far in military affairs. The 1952 European Defence Community, which failed to be ratified, may still provide inspiration, although not all of its features are plausible for today or tomorrow. These are all issues to be debated and ultimately for democratic political choice, with a quintessential role for the European Parliament and its elections.
