Twenty-five years ago, UK premier Tony Blair and France’s president Jacques Chirac stepped aboard the visiting British destroyer HMS Birmingham in the Breton port of St Malo to sign an Anglo-French defence pact that would be open to all EU countries. We Europeans have been here before, of course. With the threat from Putin’s Russia and the costs of rebuilding their national armies staring Europeans in the face, the unthinkable is at least worth considering. Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland are to combine their airforces so that their 250-plus military aircraft become a unified command.īringing together aircraft is obviously easier than creating a new army, but it may be a pointer to the future. Sooner or later, some form of ‘euroforce’ is likely to be formally discussed now that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is widening into a protracted cold war, with hardened European frontier defences instead of the Iron Curtain.Ĭoncentrating Europeans’ underfunded and neglected armed services into a single striking force has much to recommend it, and four Scandinavian countries are taking a significant first step towards that. Yet the idea refuses to go away, and is edging back onto the EU agenda. Defence experts have long explained that merging national forces is impossible because they each have their own proud military history and traditions, not to say that they embody national independence and sovereignty. The notion of a ‘European army’ has been around for years, although widely rejected as crazy and impractical. Giles Merritt asks whether EU countries’ panicky and uneven responses to Putin’s war against Ukraine may yet revive support for a ‘European army’.
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