Sixty years ago, on 17 March 1948, the Brussels Treaty was signed, thus laying the foundations of the European defence process. The Treaty was modified in 1954 and Western European Union (WEU) came into being. The key provision of the modified Brussels Treaty is Article V, which stipulates: ‘If any of the High Contracting Parties should be the object of an armed attack in Europe, the other High Contracting Parties will, in accordance with the provisions of Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, afford the Party so attacked all the military and other aid and assistance in their power.’ At around the same time another collective security organisation was taking shape, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the transatlantic military alliance established on 4 April 1949, Article 5 of whose founding treaty also provided for a collective response to an attack on individual members. According to Article IV of the modified Brussels Treaty, the WEU ‘shall work in close cooperation with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’. The development of WEU and NATO, both primarily created for collective defence, has subsequently been in terms of crisis-management activities. As we approach the 60^th anniversary of the Brussels Treaty the question arises as to where this is all leading.

Milestones Along the Road to European Defence

Over the past 60 years, that collective defence provision has been invoked only once, with the historic invocation of NATO’s Article 5 following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States. It can be argued with some justification that this achievement is precisely the result of the West’s very successful deterrence policy over the Cold War period, for first use of nuclear weapons had as its corollary Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), which ultimately made military intervention unlikely.

In the post-Cold War period, security policies in Europe in the early 1990s could be described as ‘multifaceted’. A number of frameworks existed for handling European security and defence matters, among them Western European Union, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), NATO and, last but not least, the European Union with its emergent defence dimension. Western European Union, which had been given an integral role in establishing Europe’s defence capability, drew up the Petersberg tasks in 1992. These covered a wide spectrum of activity and included humanitarian, rescue, peacekeeping and crisis-management missions. At the same time, on 7 February 1992, the Maastricht Treaty established three pillars of the European Union, the second of which was Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). In parallel, the idea was advanced at the 1996 NATO summit in Berlin of creating a European Security and Defence Identity in NATO. A key development made since has been the so-called ‘Berlin-plus’ agreements, which gave first WEU and later the EU the possibility of drawing on NATO assets for military missions sponsored by them. The Petersberg tasks were later incorporated in the CFSP under the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam. However, whilst these small steps helped speed up defence integration in Europe it was not until the Bosnian genocide and the Kosovo conflict that Europeans woke up to the urgency of having the capability to act together quickly and efficiently, using military force if needed. This awareness of their inability to act became the driving force propelling the CFSP forward.