The EU army is a myth

In Ireland the idea of an EU army is sometimes talked about. In Brussels it is not. It is a kind of phantom, like the supposed Turkish accession to the EU that haunted the Brexit debate in the United Kingdom, which does not correspond to current reality or the foreseeable future.

EU defence co-operation centres on often-frustrated efforts to get national EU armies to train together and to increase the interoperability of their equipment.

The motivating rationale for this is that in any eventual conflict, EU countries would be on the same side and would therefore need to react together. In common with any area of EU co-operation, the other driving factor is the idea that combining forces would make Europe one of the world’s most powerful actors, whereas national states working alone would be too small to have a hope of influencing global affairs to their liking.

Like United Nations peacekeeping missions, these are joint projects that involve combinations of national armies working together – they are not an EU army and this is not proposed.

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What is happening, however, is that the EU has grown closer to Nato.

“Russia’s war against Ukraine has had two unintended consequences. It has strengthened both our organisations, the EU and Nato, and it has brought us closer together,” said European Council president Charles Michel this week.

The ideas of an EU army and co-operation with Nato are often lumped together in Ireland as all part of one nebulous push towards militarisation – but these two things are actually in conflict.

Michel was speaking alongside European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen and Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg at Nato’s headquarters in Brussels, as the three declared a new EU-Nato declaration of co-operation in areas ranging from cyber security to defence research.

All three made clear that the decision of Sweden and Finland to join the alliance was a watershed. Nato will now cover 96 per cent of the citizens of the EU, Stoltenberg noted.

Ireland, Austria, Cyprus and Malta remain outside the alliance. For these, the EU-Nato declaration encourages “the fullest possible involvement of the EU members that are not part of the Alliance in its initiatives”.

I asked Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence Micheál Martin whether there was room in the EU for a state that did not want closer co-operation with Nato, and whether there was a public mandate for such co-operation, given that the citizens assembly about defence he suggested as Taoiseach has not yet happened.

“The prospect or the capacity of a country to go it alone isn’t very real,” he said in response. “There’s an overlap in membership between EU Member States and Nato, so it makes sense to co-operate.”

It is a case for co-operation on pragmatic grounds. Underinvestment in Irish defence has left Ireland with such negligible basic capacities in things such as cyber defence and marine patrols that we do indeed rely on allies to help us out in protecting national assets. But it’s unclear whether this is the result of a deliberate policy choice or the accidental outcome of neglect.

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The ideas of an EU army and co-operation with Nato are often lumped together in Ireland as all part of one nebulous push towards militarisation – but these two things are actually in conflict.

The United States does not want an want an EU Army. It wants stronger European national armies, within an alliance that it can continue to dominate.

Opinions about this in Europe differ. The “strategic autonomy” camp, referred to in shorthand as France, has long advocated that Europe should reduce its dependency on the US. In defence, but not only – economically, too.

The Atlanticists – crudely, the states closest to Russia, who see Nato and ultimately the US nuclear arsenal as their ultimate security guarantor – insist that any EU defence co-operation and development should be done in sync with Nato, and should not rival or duplicate the alliance.

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The EU-Nato agreement seemed to echo the Atlanticist position, so much so that it led the Financial Times’ correspondent to ask “Is true strategic autonomy dead, or has it just been put on the shelf?”

Mr Michel responded with the current mantra: that the two go hand in hand. “We are reinforcing the EU, we’re reinforcing Nato,” he said.

But there was no papering over the significance of an endorsement by the EU chiefs of a declaration stating that the role of stronger European defence is to be “complementary to, and interoperable with, Nato”.

It was an acknowledgment that EU efforts to become self-sufficient in defence have failed, and that the invasion of Ukraine has made clear that Europe continues to rely for security on the US.