Their Own Army?

MAKING EUROPEAN DEFENSE WORK

At the end of this year, Europe is scheduled to take its first serious steps toward creating a credible unified military force. The clock began ticking at a December 1999 summit in Helsinki, Finland, where the leaders of the European Union (EU) announced their intention to create a rapid reaction force able to act autonomously, send up to 60,000 troops abroad within two months, and sustain them for at least a year. They also announced plans to create a new Political and Security Committee, a Military Staff able to advise EU leaders, and a Military Committee of defense chiefs modeled on NATO's. Coming after decades of failed attempts to build a meaningful European military capability, the Helsinki declaration was widely heralded as a sign of Europe's new willingness to take more responsibility for its own defense and perhaps even project power independently. The new structures are scheduled to be in place by the end of this year.

Apart from the hoopla surrounding it, this latest initiative seems more serious than its many predecessors, for three reasons. First, the United Kingdom, whose forces are necessary to any credible European military, is engaged wholeheartedly for the first time. Second, the Kosovo conflict brought home to Europeans just how militarily dependent on Washington they are and will remain unless big changes are made. And third, the Helsinki declaration is not a call to revive the eternally moribund Western European Union (WEU) -- Europe's ostensible defense arm -- but a plan to transfer responsibility for defense and security to the EU, an organization backed by real political will and momentum.