Core of EU Army Takes Shape

The transatlantic political rift widened this week when Germany, France and two other European Union countries agreed to form a military general staff. At a summit meeting not far from NATO headquarters in Brussels, the leaders of the four countries endorsed a joint military planning initiative which they described as the core of a future European army.

French President Jacques Chirac, whose country has been taking a barrage of U.S. criticism for opposing the Iraq war in the United Nations, said that only a strong defense policy would enable Europe to deal with the United States as an equal. This stance was supported by German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and the two other participants in Tuesday's summit, Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt and Luxembourg Premier Jean-Claude Juncker.

The European quartet insisted that its military planning initiative wasn't directed against the United States. Chirac, Juncker and Verhofstadt, however, explicitly rejected a world order dominated by the lone superpower, a view that had been espoused only the previous day by British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The four summit participants drew immediate fire from Britain, Spain and Italy, EU countries which officially supported the U.S.-led Iraq war despite intense public opposition.

This intervention, launched without UN approval, is regarded as the first test of a one-year-old U.S. policy of preemptive strikes against countries seen by U.S. planners as potential threats.

Spain's foreign minister warned the Brussels summit participants against dividing the European Union. The idea of an EU army, once envisaged by the stillborn Western European Union, has been in limbo for decades. During the Cold War, the mutual threat of Soviet communism made collective security under the U.S.-led NATO alliance the only credible strategy for western Europeans. The parting of the Iron Curtain more than a decade ago and, especially, the new U.S. policy have now challenged this status quo.

The leaders of the four continental European countries, which roughly match the geographic domain of Charlemagne's Frankish empire, presented their proposed military cooperation as an open model which other EU countries could join. It was also depicted as a complement to the Atlantic alliance in meeting “the challenges of the 21st Century,“ rather than as a rival to NATO.

The summit participants agreed to proceed with their military integration in seven areas. One was the establishment of a military planning and deployment body, the apparent equivalent of a joint general staff. Training of military officers would be pooled and a common defense erected against atomic, biological and chemical weapons. Belgian and Luxembourg combat units would join an existing German-French brigade, envisaged as the nucleus of a new European force.

Possibly the most significant point of agreement was the proposed formation of European strategic air command by mid-2004. France is a nuclear power with a presence in Africa, South America and the South Pacific. The European rocket program and the Toulouse-based EADS aircraft manufacturer also offer means of delivery. Yet the four summit countries, which are the industrial heart of Europe, are entirely surrounded by EU or NATO allies.

Germany and France have traditionally formed the vanguard of EU political integration, an idea which has met mounting resistance around the fringes of Europe. Even those countries which have adopted the common currency are more inclined to regard the EU as mostly a free-trade zone with the benefit of agricultural and development subsidies financed largely by Germany. Military and political integration at the core of Europe would confront them with a clear choice between their economic interests and political instincts.

The cohesion of the four summit countries is also open to question. The U.S. and British governments have singled out France for intense political criticism in what some commentators have described as a divide-and-conquer tactic. Since their Iraq victory, U.S. officials have demonstratively sought a dialog with Germany, which hosts U.S. military bases and has a weaker national identity than France.