History of the ESDI
13. Debate over the nature, size and structure of
the 'European pillar' of NATO has been around as long as the Alliance
(the phrase itself is attributed to President Kennedy). It has
always been driven by two primary concerns which essentially represent
two sides of the same dollar cointhe degree to which Europe
can and should rely on the USA to guarantee European security,
and by so doing implicitly accept US leadership; and the extent
to which the USA is prepared to underwrite the cost of defending
Europe or whether that burden should be divided differently, at
the risk of some US disengagement from Europe. Attempts in the
early 1950s to make Europe more self-sufficiently secure produced
the proposal to create a treaty-based European Defence Community,
pre-dating the other European Communities. The UK was prepared
to support but not participate in this. A treaty was signed in
Paris on 27 May 1952 between Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Italy,
the Netherlands and West Germany to establish an EDC (which in
effect provided for the creation of a single European army). It
received strong support from the US, but French concerns over
national sovereignty and German rearmament eventually led to rejection
of the treaty in the Assemblée Nationale in 1954.
14. Following this setback, attention returned to
the Brussels Treaty, which had been signed in 1948 by Belgium,
France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the UK. A large part of
its purpose had been to facilitate the establishment of a transatlantic
alliance and, once the Washington Treaty had been signed in 1949,
the Brussels Treaty Organisation was rapidly absorbed into NATO.
Following the failure of the EDC initiative the Paris Protocol,
signed in October 1954, adapted the Brussels Treaty and brought
Italy and West Germany into the newly-designated Western European
Union (WEU). In 1955 West Germany acceded to NATO, which removed
much of the raison d'être of the WEU. With the UK's
accession to the EC in 1973 most of its remaining roles disappeared.
Over the following decade the WEU almost completely ran out of
steam.
15. In the early 1980s, in response to the failure
of the Genscher-Colombo initiative to bring security and defence
within the EC's European Political Cooperation process (the EPC,
precursor to the CFSP), there was an intergovernmental initiative
to 'revitalise' the WEU, which resulted in the Rome Declaration
of October 1984 in which the Ministers
... underlined their determination
to make better use of the WEU framework in order to increase cooperation
between the member states in the field of security policy ...[28]
In October 1987, the WEU Ministerial Council
adopted the 'Hague Platform' on European security interests, which
declared that the signatories were
... convinced that the construction
of an integrated Europe will remain incomplete as long as it does
not include security and defence.[29]
and which stressed their resolve
... to strengthen the European
pillar of the [North Atlantic] Alliance.[30]
Subsequently, in March 1990, two further Members
of the Alliance, Portugal and Spain, acceded to the WEU.
16. Despite these initiatives, the WEU remained in
the late 80s and early 90s very much in the background of European
security, receiving much less attention than NATO.
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