Lorenzo Maria Pacini
The EU cannot pursue a common defense not because it lacks the courage, but because its very institutional structure is designed to prevent the emergence of a unified will regarding the use of force.
The Western European Union: Defense as an empty shell
Continuing our critique of the European Common Defense project, we will review the historical milestones of the various attempts to establish it.
A few months after the defeat of the EDC, the 1954 Paris Agreements transformed the Brussels Treaty into the Western European Union, with the accession of Germany and Italy. The WEU was a stopgap solution: it maintained a European forum for defense issues, but without equipping it with the resources to develop command-and-control capabilities. Subordinate to NATO from its inception, the organization played a purely nominal role for decades. Its very existence illustrates the mechanism: every time Europe attempts to create a defense instrument, it constructs it in such a way that it cannot compete with NATO-and therefore cannot replace it.
The decade following the collapse of the EDC confirmed this diagnosis. Charles de Gaulle, having returned to power in 1958, dealt a fatal blow to the spillover dynamic: the "empty chair" crisis, France's withdrawal from NATO's integrated command in 1966, and the demand for an autonomous nuclear strike force. Paradoxically, the European leader most hostile to American hegemony was also the most hostile to European integration: because, in the eyes of the Gaullists, both curtailed French national sovereignty. The lesson is instructive. Autonomy from the external hegemon, when pursued, was done so on a national rather than a European basis-precisely the path that made a common defense impossible. The external and internal strangleholds swapped roles without ever loosening their grip.
Maastricht, Petersberg, and the Atlantic Ceiling
The awakening came with the end of the Cold War, but it was an awakening that confirmed the limitations. The 1992 Maastricht Treaty introduced the Common Foreign and Security Policy as the second pillar of the Union, explicitly intergovernmental in nature. That same year, 1992, saw the Petersberg Declaration define the tasks the WEU could carry out: humanitarian missions, peacekeeping, and crisis management. What these tasks include-and what they exclude-is significant. They include crisis management outside its borders; they exclude territorial defense, which is left to NATO. Europe carves out for itself the role of a civilian power and manager of peripheral crises, but explicitly renounces the function that defines a state: defending its own territory. The "Atlantic ceiling" is codified in the treaties.
The Yugoslav crisis of the early 1990s laid bare this contradiction with brutal clarity. Faced with a war in its own backyard, Europe proved incapable of acting; the war in Bosnia did not end until 1995, following U.S. and NATO intervention. Luxembourg's Foreign Minister Jacques Poos had proclaimed that Europe's hour had come; but "Europe's hour" turned out to be the hour of its impotence. Kosovo, in 1998-99, repeated the pattern: European "" were more willing than the Americans to send ground troops, yet unable to deploy fifty thousand men despite the sheer size of their armies on paper.
It was from this double failure in the Balkans that, at the Saint-Malo summit in December 1998, the Franco-British shift emerged that would give rise to the European Security and Defense Policy. Tony Blair shifted Britain's historic Atlanticist stance and accepted that the Union must develop an autonomous military capability. But here, too, the ceiling held firm. U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright laid out the three conditions-the famous "three Ds": no decoupling from NATO, no duplication of its structures, and no discrimination against non-EU NATO members. The ESDP was thus born with the permission of the very power it was meant to emancipate: it could exist as long as it did not undermine NATO. European strategic autonomy is conceived, from its very inception, as subordinate to the approval of those who render it superfluous.
The Treaty of Nice in 2000 formalized this framework, transferring the functions of the WEU to the Union and creating the political-military structures-the Political and Security Committee, the Military Committee, and the Military Staff. The goal was set for a rapid reaction force of up to 60,000 troops, deployable within 60 days. On paper, this was a significant step. In essence, as noted by the very legal experts who have studied its evolution, the Treaty of Nice did not provide political guidance for the development of the Union's military role: the doctrines shaping the ESDP were defined in a piecemeal fashion by NATO and European military staffs, not by political institutions. European defense was growing as a technical apparatus lacking political leadership-which is another way of saying it was growing within a stranglehold.
The illusion of post-Lisbon integration
The 2009 Treaty of Lisbon represents, on a formal level, the most advanced stage of defense integration. It introduces the solidarity clause and the mutual assistance clause in the event of armed aggression; elevates the European Defense Agency to treaty status; and establishes Permanent Structured Cooperation. The replacement of the acronym ESDP with ESDP-C, and later PSDC, signals the ambition to strengthen the identity-defining element. But a close reading of the provisions reveals the usual double-edged structure: what one hand gives, the other takes away.
The mutual assistance clause in Article 42(7) sets forth an obligation for Member States to assist one another in the event of an attack, but-as commentators acknowledge-it has no implications for the Union's institutional and military structures or for its common capabilities, and therefore creates no obligation on the part of the EU as such. The obligation is between states, not toward the Union; and the same article reaffirms that, for NATO members, the Alliance remains the foundation of their collective defense. The European defense framework established by the Lisbon Treaty is an architecture that multiplies clauses and structures without ever shifting the decision-making center away from intergovernmental unanimity. Every CSDP decision requires the consent of all; every state retains a veto; no European institution possesses its own forces or can request them unilaterally.
Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) had been conceived as the most promising instrument: it was supposed to allow a vanguard of states with superior military capabilities to integrate more deeply. Activated only in 2017, after Brexit removed the British veto, PESCO has proved to be of little practical relevance, in part precisely because almost everyone-26 out of 27 states-joined it, thereby undermining its vanguard logic. The instrument designed to overcome the paralysis of unanimity has been neutralized by unanimity itself: in order not to exclude anyone, the vanguard approach was abandoned. The system has metabolized the antibody.
The forces the Union can theoretically call upon are the Battlegroups, multinational units of about 1,500 troops, theoretically ready for rapid response since 2007. They have never been deployed. This formula sums up the entire situation: a military instrument that exists on paper, equipped with a deployment procedure, yet is never used because deployment requires a unanimous political decision that no one can ever reach. The gap between nominal capability and operational will-that "capability-expectations gap" that the literature has been diagnosing for thirty years-is not a technical flaw to be corrected; it is the phenomenal manifestation of the dilemma: capabilities remain nominal because the will is structurally jammed, and the will is jammed because the system requires unanimity while the external umbrella makes it unnecessary to overcome that requirement.
At this point, it is necessary to precisely identify the internal constraint. Within the Union's legal framework, defense belongs to a special category to which the ordinary Community method does not apply. The CFSP and the CSDP have, from the outset, been policies in which Member States retain full sovereignty. Article 42(2) of the Treaty on European Union provides that the common security and defense policy will lead to a common defense when the European Council, acting unanimously, so decides. In other words, common defense is an objective contingent upon a unanimous decision that has never been taken, and whose adoption would then require ratification by each Member State in accordance with its own constitutional rules. Three overlapping levels of veto-unanimity in the European Council, the decision itself, and national ratifications-govern this process.
This is not a procedural flaw. It is the way the Union is constituted. As the most insightful constitutional theory has observed, an army lies at the heart of every political community capable of deciding its own fate: the monopoly on legitimate force is the attribute of the sovereign state, and a European army would draw the Union toward statehood. But the Union is not a state and does not claim a monopoly on force. It is-in the most convincing theoretical description-a democracy: a community in which a plurality of peoples govern themselves together without constituting a single people, and in which each people retains jurisdiction over its essential functions, including national security.
This leads to a conclusion that the rhetoric of strategic autonomy prefers to ignore. The Union cannot pursue a common defense not because it lacks the courage, but because its very institutional structure is designed to prevent the emergence of a unified will regarding the use of force. In military matters, the will remains fragmented into twenty-seven national wills, each with a veto, each protective of its own sovereignty. Those who lament the absence of political will are mistaking the effect for the cause: the will does not exist because the system is constructed to prevent it from arising. And here, the internal constraint is linked to the external one. Sovereign fragmentation is sustainable only because there is an external guarantor that compensates for collective impotence; and the external guarantor has an interest in ensuring that fragmentation persists, because a militarily united Europe would be a less compliant ally. The rhetoric of strategic autonomy, coined precisely at this juncture, goes nowhere because it sets a goal that the two constraints, together, render unattainable with the tools at hand.