THE STATE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION. Reforming Europe in a time of war

The European Union on the global stage. European strategic autonomy 97 opt-in the European Security and Defence Policy, ending its outsider status that lasted for decades. This shows also, that popular opinion on EU security policy might have changed after the Russian attack and traditional political stances can be changed. The same applies to NATO, where Sweden and Finland, two countries that traditionally were neutral, have joined the alliance in light of their revised threat perception. Last, but not least, the cooperation between EU member states and the United Kingdom has improved.Although Brexit and the ensuing debates had for some years poisoned the waters be- tween London and the EU, the war showed the necessity for cooperation and introduced a sense of shared destiny at least in light of a common adversary. On an institutional level, the war revealed the Janus-headed principle of the EU decision-making-pro- cess. As described above, the Union was able to impose considerable sanctions on Russia in a swift manner, when the political momentum was opportune and all member states agreed. That made for an even more impressive reaction, since the Russian government ob- viously was not anticipating such a decision supported by all member-states. However, when the imminent shock about the aggression subsided and political considerations came into play again, the problems of unanimity came to the fore again. As long as individual member-states can bend decisions their way to serve short-term political aims or even influence electoral de- liberations, the EU won’t be a force to be reckoned with on the international level. This is not new insight, but the need to change this, has become far more immi- nent. The German government for example as renewed its aim, to introduce qualified majority voting into the security policy of the EU and others are supporting this. This seems still unrealistic, bearing in the mind the im- portance the veto has especially for smaller member states of the EU. But it could lead to a renewed effort of building a grouping inside the EU, that shares not only the threat perceptions, but also how to mover forward from them, perhaps in form of a Permanent and Struc- tured Cooperation (PESCO) to proceed. This would be a vanguard towards a more integrated European security policy, side-lining the unanimity principle. The political pressure of the war, could thus lead to differentiated levels of integration in the EU according to overlapping strategic cultures following the example of the EUFOR Crisis Responses operation Core (Biscop 2022: 9). The war has also brought change on the level of capabilities. Since the shock about interstate war on the border of the European Union has brought the focus back on national defence capabilities, some major de- cisions have been taken. What obviously stands out, is the decision of the German government to invest € 100 bn in its defence budget over the coming years and per- manently spend more than 2 per cent of GDP for that purpose (Scholz 2022). Although the German defence budget had already been raised since 2014, this injection of major resources will make the country the biggest defence spender in Europe, by a considerable margin. Other member states have also decided to invest more in armaments.This will change the capabilities of European member states in the foreseeable future, allowing them to shoulder more responsibility in NATO and provide more capabilities for the EU. However, the more profound change, this investment initiative will be able to bring about, is a stronger integra- tion of European armies. With the investment decisions taken at a similar time, there is a chance to align at least the procurement of more costly material and thus make use of scale effects for the benefit of budgets all over Europe.At the same time, many European member states have emptied their depots of older weapon systems to support the Ukrainian army in their effort to defend themselves against the Russian attack. Taken together, this offers the opportunity to build interoperability into the different European armies from the beginning by pro- curing systems together, making use of the new financial instruments the European Union is providing for defence and ending the existing systems of a multitude of arms systems, that have been used in the different European armies, making cooperation and common operations nearly impossible. With these efforts combined with the