Italian Foreign Minister Calls For EU Army
The Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani has called for the creation of an EU Army in a recent interview with Italian newspaper La Stampa. Tajani said this when citing the current instabilities facing the security of the continent:
‘If we want to be peacekeepers in the world, we need a European military. And this is a fundamental precondition to be able to have an effective European foreign policy…In a world with powerful players like the United States, China, India, Russia – with crises from the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific – Italian, German, French or Slovenian citizens can only be protected by something that already exists, namely the European Union.’
The concept of European Army is nothing new. In 1950, France proposed a European force that would have seen Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and Holland join to create an EA Army made of the ‘inner six’. That would have acted to defend the continent from the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The treaty establishing the European Defence Community (EDC) was signed but not ratified by the member nations.
More recently in 2004 the EU Battlegroup was established, which is comprised of various European nations, with Matla being the only EU member to not participate in contributing to the battlegroup. Since 2005 the battlegroup has had over 35 incarnations. With the most recent being the Visegrád Battegroup that is comprised of Polish, Czech, Hungarian and Slovakian personnel. The next battle group is expected to be formed in 2025. In 2016, the 414 Tank Battalion was formed, it is made up of both German and Dutch personnel and at the time of its creation was considered a step towards a European Army. In 2021, Josep Borrell told journalists a 5,000 strong “rapid response force” should be formed.
The idea has regularly been raised, however, and the ongoing war in Ukraine refocusing Europe’s leaders on military matters. Currently the defence is of the European Union is decided by the member states militaries themselves.