It is not difficult to understand the hesitancy on the part of many Europeans when it comes to establishing a single, unified pan-European army, talk of which has lately been in the news with some European politicians proposing it.
Any army is costly and difficult to manage and always subject to political influence, but forming a unified European army, or for the purposes of this article a European Defense Force or EDF, would be a tremendous leap of faith for smaller countries such as Denmark (where I am now) to make.
The reason is that it would place their forces under the command of larger nations, thereby requiring them to give up a measure of sovereignty or at least, control.
Then there is the very basic issue of accepting the "Three Musketeers" approach to defense (all for one, and one for all) which would subject them to joint decision-making and cede more power to the larger nations over the small ones.
Obviously, an equitable system would be needed to ensure that each country would have a voice, even if that voice had less actual influence in how forces were marshalled, apportioned and committed to specific tasks.
At present, it is up to each European nation with a standing army, navy and air force to see that they are properly equipped and funded so as to carry out their respective missions, whatever those missions might be.
Before any boots touched the ground or any aircraft were fueled or ships provisioned, each country joining an EDF would need to assess its current capabilities and ascertain what kind of support it could best give, how much money it would spend and finally, and perhaps most importantly, how many military personnel it was ready to commit to such a force.
This last aspect, the size of a country's force, is going to be one of the big stumbling blocks to creating an equitable EDF. Currently, out of the 44 European countries, only 15 still have active conscription (compulsory service).
Europe's largest potential foe, Russia, has compulsory service for all young men who reach the age of 18.
Russia has between 850,000 and a one-million-man standing army and nearly two million reservists.
By comparison, all the NATO member countries' soldiers and personnel total 3.5 million. France has 205,000; the U.K. 194,000; Germany 184,000; Italy 170,000; The Netherlands 41,000; Belgium 23,000; Norway 17,000 and Denmark has 16,000, just to name a few.
While conscription is bound to be an issue for the new EDF, logistics will be another as forces will probably be needed to defend possible vulnerable future targets like the three Baltic nations of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia or even Poland or Finland if Russia is the aggressor and that conventional warfare is the preferred method of engagement rather than nuclear.
Europe is currently involved in several undeclared wars. One is the ongoing sabotage of underwater communication and energy cables. Another is cyber attacks from government-sponsored and other actors within the continent and from outside European borders such as China or North Korea.
It must be said that Europe is not new to military cooperation. The Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) was headed by U.S. General Dwight Eisenhower in 1943 and included several European nations. Six years later, NATO was formed with participation of 30 European countries.
Two of those European countries (France and the U.K.) possess nuclear weapons and all countries except Iceland have standing armies that cooperate with one another. European nations also second military personnel to the United Nations to assist in peacekeeping operations. Therefore, Europe is no stranger to military cooperation on a regional and global scale. But the creation of an EDF would require turning an important page in military cooperation history.
Massive investments would need to be made by each country, requiring a political consensus along with creating a command and control structure that would work successfully and seamlessly to deliver a credible deterrent to any aggressor that had its eye on advancing its national interests extraterritorially or militarily.
Europeans would need to put their own national interests aside in favor of a NATO-like "Article 5" commitment clause that defines the casus foederis (the case for the treaty) that commits each member state to consider an armed attack against one member state to be an armed attack against them all.
How did we get here without an EDF?
It's a fair question, especially considering all that's happened in Europe since the end of the Second World War and the end of the Cold War.
After all the conflicts in Europe, the largest of which was WWII, followed by the break-up of Yugoslavia, the war between Albanians and Serbs over Kosovo and, of course, the current Russian war against Ukraine, it would seem obvious that Europeans would have already reached the point where they agreed that an EDF was necessary.
Granted, there were many military strategists and politicians alike who had been encouraging such a force for years, but it wasn't until the current Munich Security Conference that the unspoken was actually spoken by Ukraine's president about the need for the establishment of a unified EDF.
Does Europe recognize the threats its continued fragmentation pose? Do Europeans truly value their own democracies and the security of their neighbors enough to join together and make the necessary investments in an EDF that would be a bulwark against further aggression by any country willing to risk the lives of its own young men to die for some real estate?
One would hope so and soon.
European history is sadly filled with the bodies of millions who have laid down their lives to satisfy the desires of tyrants and the whims of monarchs whose thirst for territory led them to wage war against those unable to defend themselves. It's time for a paradigm shift and the realization that the principle of subsidiarity also extends to one's neighbors especially when it comes to the defense of liberty.
Stephen Helgesen is a retired career U.S. diplomat specializing in international trade who lived and worked in 30 countries for 25 years during the Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, Clinton, and G.W. Bush Administrations. He is the author of fourteen books, seven of which are on American politics, and he has written over 1,400 articles on politics, economics and social trends. He can be reached at: stephenhelgesen@gmail.com
Image: Ssolbergj / Sodacan, via Wikipedia (border added) // CC BY-SA 3.0
