While waiting for the heavy administrative and judicial machine which regulates the steps of the EU to start moving towards the concrete implementation of the 315 billion Euro distributive plan bearing his name, Jean-Claude Juncker re-launched on March the 8th a Sunday’s trial balloon regarding an unexpected subject: the creation of a united European army. Here all senior federalists can rejoice, including me. France, that had conceived the European Defence Community (EDC, i.e. European integrated Armed Forces), rejected its own newborn baby at the end of an Homeric debate taking place in the overheated arena of Palais Bourbon, on August 30th, 1954, since the idea of a European army, as conceived according to the supranational ideas of Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman, was ill-supported by the grand battalions of Gaullism and of the French Communist party (both major players in France’s political arena at that time). Moreover, under the pressure from Washington, D.C., Paris accepted to replace the EDC (with the active complicity of London) with a sort of military substitute, guaranteed on the intergovernmental level: the Western European Union (WEU).
Only the innermost circle of initiators can now try to explain, 60 years on, to what purpose that union has served, other than to rearm Adenauer’s Germany, strictly watched over to placate the French worries. Nowadays we can discuss more freely about the late honourable WEU experience, since it has completely disappeared from the European scene. Let’s skip over the somewhat funny and pretentious initiatives of the past concerning the Franco-German cooperation, and the more or less surreptitious ones on the occasions of the European reforms that followed, up to the moment of the Lisbon Treaty which currently governs the EU. The latter does provide for a Common Foreign and Security Policy, CFSP, inherited by previous treaties, supplemented by a common security and defence policy (CSDP). The “Siamese twins”, the CFSP and the CSDP, are like the late intergovernmental-type WEU. The first is notable for its inefficiency, even if the High Representative now embodying it is striving to emphasize her role. The second, the CSDP, is simply inexistent, even if the Lisbon Treaty explicitly planned that it would define “progressively a common policy leading to a European Defence”, supported by specific dispositions: “permanent structural cooperation”, a European Defence Agency, etc.
Apparently, when Juncker mentions a “European army”, he thinks of a new initiative that does not necessarily fit into the narrow juridical frame of past treaties. In fact, he tries to open a fundamental discussion. To ask questions about a future European army is in fact, whatever one might think, really to pose the issue of the political authority on which the former must depend. We find ourselves facing the core issue of European federalism, as in the 1950s. Honestly speaking, are the European governments prepared to handle such a debate in the year 2015? Germany, undoubtedly so – since we cannot ignore that Juncker expressed the idea after he had consulted Angela Merkel; as well as Mariano Rajoy’s Spain, although the electoral consensus has started to shift in Madrid; Poland and the Baltics, probably so, since they all share the neighborhood with Putin’s Russia, the Ukrainian chronicles considered. This is also true for Italy, which is preoccupied for the chaos in Libya and the maritime traffic going on so close to its ports; as well as is the case of other partners, like Belgium. But we must consider further evidence: the small and neutral EU member-states do not wish to participate in such a move. None of the potentially interested EU members would engage in this without NATO support, meaning that the highest authority is pre-eminently American. The UK, from its own perspective, would not hesitate to ground the initiative, which it considers to be a pregnancy to be miscarried. France, as the Netherlands (though for different reasons), would jealously watch, even if it agrees in principle, over its full national sovereignty. This is why its tendency will be to favour the implementation of an experimental defence force.
All this notwithstanding, the European army remains a potentially mobilizing goal and a realistic project on three conditions: the demonstration of a political will, which seems to be scarce; the joint effort of a considerable number of EU member-states fully endorsing the project, thus making it credible; a guaranteed broad consent by the majority of the parties concerned. Hence, Juncker’s trial balloon deserves attention, regardless of what we consider to be a deafening silence echoing throughout the media and national chancelleries alike. But what does the European Parliament say about all this?
Translated by Alon Helled