Europe must stand up for itself

Date: 22/04/1999

When leaders of the 19 NATO countries meet in Washington this weekend, the most pressing issue will be how to complete the campaign in Kosovo as soon as possible and bring an end to Slobodan Milosevic's barbaric ethnic cleansing.

But amid the agonising about the best way forward in Serbia, summiteers will also address an issue which will have a significant impact on Europe's hopes of ensuring peace and security in the next century.

NATO's 50th anniversary summit could give EU leaders the signal they need to move ahead with plans to give Union member states the ability to launch military action regardless of whether other members of the alliance, including the US, want to join in.

NATO members who are not in the EU have genuine concerns about allowing Union forces to use NATO assets for military campaigns. These range from US worries about military hardware being needed for other global emergencies to complaints from Turkey that it would effectively be writing the EU a “blank cheque” while being barred from full membership of this new western military alliance.

Yet solutions can and should be found to avoid details scuppering a major step forward in efforts to secure peace and security in Europe in the new millennium.

As the Bosnian crisis showed, if the world waits for Washington to realise that the Balkans is its problem as much as Europe's even though EU countries are ready and willing to intervene, tens of thousands of lives can be lost in the interim.

The Anglo-French initiative agreed at St Malo last December amounted to an historic bid to enable the EU to act independently of NATO where necessary. The declaration said the Union should have the “capacity for autonomous action” and should be able to “approve military action where the alliance as a whole is not engaged”.

Although the aims of the St Malo declaration have still to be translated into concrete measures - something which will not take place until after the Cologne summit in June, at the earliest - it showed the willingness of at least two major EU countries to take greater responsibility for European peace and security by committing troops to intervene where necessary in crisis zones.

While a situation must be avoided in which EU soldiers do the dirty work and take all the risks of a ground campaign while US generals direct the war from headquarters thousands of kilometres from the battle zone, the time has come for the Union to shoulder responsibility for security in its own backyard.

This should be welcomed by Americans weary of carrying the economic and political burden of military intervention. The only losers would be any future Milosevics.