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THE STATE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION
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Origins and development of a European
defence policy
The need to address the issue of security and
defence has been a part of the European project
since the outset. Shortly following the signing of
the Treaty of Paris to create the European Steel
and Coal Community (ESCC) in 1951, a propos-
al to create a European Defence Community was
put forward in an international context that was
increasingly dominated by two opposing power
blocs and concerns about the Soviet threat. The
project ultimately failed in 1954, due to France’s
decision not to ratify the treaty following the
death of Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev’s new
policy of peaceful coexistence.
It would be more than 30 years – after the
fall of the Berlin Wall and the disappearance of
the Soviet bloc – before a new security and de-
fence initiative would be launched. It was the
Maastricht Treaty on European Union, in 1992,
that transformed what had been an economic
organisation into a political one, providing the
basis for the gradual development of an inter-
governmental Common Foreign and Security
Policy (CFSP).
The Treaty of Amsterdam in 1999 created
the position of High Representative for CFSP, a
role filled by Javier Solana for the first ten years.
(This post was the forerunner of the current po-
sition of High Representative for Foreign Affairs
and Security Policy.) It also established the
European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP),
with the EU using armed forces for overseas cri-
sis management operations for the first time.
Since then, 34 civilian-military crisis manage-
ment operations have been conducted, of
which almost half are ongoing.
The current CSDP has its foundations in dis-
cussions in the European Convention of 2002-
2003, which addressed the need to deepen and
reform central aspects of Europe’s role in the
world, establishing three major initiatives: the
Defensive Alliance, Permanent Structured
Cooperation and the European Defence Agency.
For the first time, the CSDP was formalised in
the Constitutional Treaty that came out of the
Convention. However, the Constitutional Treaty
was rejected in referendums in France and the
Netherlands in May and June 2005, respectively,
and was never ratified. Despite this rejection,
the substantive elements of the treaty – and, in
particular, those relating to Europe’s role in the
world and the CSDP – were revived in the Lisbon
Treaty, signed in December 2007.
European Union defence policy in the
Treaty of Lisbon
The Treaty of Lisbon took a big step towards
addressing, for the first time, the issue of pro-
viding the EU with permanent defence struc-
tures that went beyond ad hoc crisis manage-
ment mechanisms. It improved the existing
institutions of the ESDP, expanding the range of
situations in which Petersberg tasks could be
conducted (extending them to include terrorism
prevention). It also allowed an EU mission to be
entrusted to a single member state or group of
member states, and simplified the procedures
for funding missions.
At the same time, the Treaty of Lisbon estab-
lished the new CSDP institutions: the Defensive
Alliance (art. 42.7 TEU); Permanent Structured
Cooperation (art. 42.6 TEU) and the European
Defence Agency (art. 42.3 and 45 TEU), de-
signed to strengthen cooperation in the sphere
of military capacity. Another innovation was the
“solidarity clause”, to prevent and react to ter-
rorist attacks or natural or man-made disasters
(art. 222 TFEU).