The story of European integration began with defence. The Treaties of Dunkirk (1947), and especially of Brussels (1948), were primarily geared to forging a security community which would banish any further prospect of war. But the demands of sovereignty and the sheer complexity of European security problems, including early German rearmament and the need for a transatlantic alliance, ruined the first attempt at defence integration, the European Defence Community, in the early 1950s. Thereafter, for almost fifty years, defence was a taboo subject within a purely European context. But now, in 2001, the European Union (EU) is planning to inaugurate...

The notion that ‘Europe’ – meaning, to all intents and purposes, the countries comprising the various postwar integration projects (EEC/EC/EU) – should legitimately aspire to construct its own security narrative in a state of relative autonomy from the United States is by no means a post-St-Malo phenomenon. As early as the last years of the Second World War, planners in both London and Algiers/Paris devised schemes for the creation, in a postwar world, of a security community involving the main countries of Western Europe.¹³ These schemes for what became known as the ‘Western Union’ underpinned the defensive treaties of 1947...

In the months between St-Malo and the Cologne EU Council meeting of June 1999, the German presidency was instrumental in bringing together the different strands of the embryonic CESDP in a coherent political-military project whose implementation is currently in train. ⁷⁰ The defence and security project was predicated on the resolve of the European Council to give the Union the wherewithal to ‘play its full role on the international stage’⁷¹ in the context of what was announced as an increasingly proactive Common Foreign and Security Policy. It was explicitly presented as a major new step in the direction of European...

There are four main sets of issues which will determine the future itinerary of the project launched over the past year under the abbreviation CESDP. The first has to do with the eventual military scale and ambition of the project. How big is it likely to become, and what is the significance of size? The second set of issues has to do with the geographical scope of the new project. Is its deployment to be strictly limited to the EU’s ‘near abroad’, or could the European rapid reaction force be deployed well beyond the EU’s borders, and into Africa, the...

As will be clear from the foregoing, CESDP has some way to go before it fulfils the expectations of its creators. There will be many problems en route and the journey will be long and complicated. Nevertheless, three factors in particular suggest that, however daunting the current and future problems, the chances are that, unlike in the past, this time some viable form of CESDP will emerge. First, the degree of political will which has been generated in Europe behind this project, ever since the St-Malo summit in December 1998, is considerable. It has acquired an inner dynamic, rather in...