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Tuesday, March 10, 2015

The Illusion of an Independent EU Army

The Illusion of an Independent EU Army
The oldest item on the European list of utopian integration topics is a federal superstate. The second oldest is the creation of an EU army. Despite the obvious hopelessness of getting such a thing started and of making it work, this latter idea has been remarkably resilient.
If the Ukraine crisis is the reason why Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, reanimated the idea on March 8 in an interview with a German newspaper, then talk about an EU army might be useful. The proposal points at the strategic weakness of the old world in an increasingly dangerous environment. Juncker’s suggestion could even be seen as a sign that Europeans are starting to understand the nature and size of the threat that has emerged in their Eastern neighborhood.
In reality, the EU is light-years away from such plans. There are many reasons for that. European countries openly state that the limited military ambition they harbor might be better hosted inside NATO than within the EU. Equally importantly, defense budgets are already under stress, and precious few of the funds required to set up a meaningful independent EU operational capability are available.

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