European Defence and NATO: From Competition to Co-operation to Replacement?

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Abstract

The project to endow the European Union (EU) with its own defence capacity and policy is now (at least) some 30 years old. Although it was adumbrated in the late 1980s via the reactivation of the Western European Union (Rees, 1998), it began life in the early years of the Clinton presidency as the European Security and Defence Identity (ESDI), which sought to empower European forces as a distinct military capacity with its own chain of command from inside the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (Howorth, 2000, pp. 22–30). In 1998, the Franco-British summit in Saint-Malo launched the project that was to become the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). The summit Declaration blurred the link with NATO by stating that ‘the Union must have the capacity for autonomous action, backed up by credible military forces, the means to decide to use them, and a readiness to do so, in order to respond to international crises’ (Joint Declaration on European Defence, 1998). The word ‘autonomous’ was launched.

For over 25 years, the EU has striven to transform the Saint-Malo Declaration into reality (Howorth, 2014). That quest has taken on a bewildering variety of forms, but underlying all of them has been the challenge of clearly defining the relationship between CSDP and NATO. The CSDP project has faced three major obstacles, which have persisted over time. First is the very fact that NATO existed: what precise role was there for CSDP? Second is the reality that every US president since George H. W. Bush has actively opposed greater European autonomy. And third is the fact that the EU's member states could not agree either on the nature of the defence project or on how to play the transatlantic card.

During the 2000s, the EU's more Atlanticist states, led by the United Kingdom, insisted that CSDP was little more than a regional crisis management capacity. NATO itself would – and should – continue to take responsibility for collective defence. Other member states, most notably France, did not exclude the prospect of CSDP eventually becoming a much more robust European capacity, capable of aspiring to genuine autonomy of action. To some, this implied competition with NATO. Yet France, which had left NATO's integrated military command in 1966, rejoined it in 2009. The objective, according to Hubert Védrine's official report on reintegration, was to be the ‘Europeanisation of NATO’ (Védrine, 2012). What did that imply? In a private conversation, Védrine told me that the expression was merely an aspiration. It had no substantive meaning.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)156-168
Number of pages13
JournalJournal of Common Market Studies
Volume63
Issue numberS1
Early online date31 Jul 2025
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 30 Nov 2025

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Business and International Management
  • General Business,Management and Accounting
  • Economics and Econometrics
  • Political Science and International Relations

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