European forces have traditionally worked together, but that’s ‘completely different’ from a war fighting army, says a defense expert.
News Analysis
Before he clashed with President Donald Trump at the White House on Feb. 28—Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called for the creation of a European armed force.
“I really believe that [the] time has come. The armed forces of Europe must be created,” Zelenskyy told world leaders at the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 15.
In January 2024, the Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani told La Stampa newspaper he wanted to see an EU army, but there has been little appetite for it until now.
Could the European Union—perhaps with the addition of Britain, which left the bloc in 2021—end up creating its own army, and would it mean NATO withering on the vine?
Ronja Kempin, a senior fellow in the European Union research division of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (Stiftung Wissenschaft under Politik), told The Epoch Times she tended to agree with Zelenskyy on the need for a European army.
“Everything is in flux,” Kempin said. “The Europeans have to design their security without the U.S. for the very first time in the last 75 years. So why not be brave now and come up with some really bold ideas?”
Tim Ripley, a defense analyst and author of “Little Green Men: The Inside Story of Russia’s New Military Power,” told The Epoch Times that the “quantum difference” between NATO and a European army would be the absence of the United States.
The cornerstone of NATO is Article 5, which obliges each member to come to the collective defense of other members if they are attacked.
“You could have an organization that looks a bit like NATO. Maybe it’s called the European Treaty Organization, and it has an Article 5 for defense … but it doesn’t include the United States,” Ripley said. “That’s really what the European army really means, if you take it to its logical conclusion.”
He said the simplest way of creating a European army would be for the United States to simply leave NATO.
‘American Clean Break’
“The neatest thing, if it is an American clean break, is to do a sort of a Brexit-type solution, where you just take the [United States] flag down, obviously there’ll be a lot less money because the Americans provided 25 percent or whatever of the budget,” Ripley added.
But Kempin said, “If we were to think about a European army, that means an EU army.”
She said one of the arguments in favor was that there was a lot of money being invested in defense in Europe, and she pointed to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s announcement on Tuesday of a ReArm Europe plan, which could boost defense spending in the 27-member bloc by 800 billion euros ($841 billion).
“We know that if we were to integrate both militarily and physically, when it comes to manpower, it would save a lot of money,” Kempin said.
“You could also argue that it would give the European Union much more credibility … because no individual member country of the EU, and that includes Britain, can withstand the pressure that comes out of Russia or could successfully fight a war against Russia.”
The European Union has 27 member countries and does not include Britain, Norway, Turkey, or Iceland, which are members of NATO.
A handful of European countries—Serbia, Belarus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Ukraine—are neither in NATO nor the EU.
Belarus is a firm ally of Moscow, while Serbia is culturally close to Russia, although it is keen to join the EU for economic reasons.
‘The Question of Legitimacy’
Building a European army, Kempin said, requires confronting a question about which country’s parliament would be willing to hand over the power to go to war, or deploy its military, to the European Commission.
“The hardest part for the EU is the question of legitimacy,” Kempin said. “Who will decide the possible deployment of such forces? Within the member states you have such different legislation.”
Ripley said Europe had been fairly united on Ukraine.
“So far every European country, bar Hungary, has stuck to the line of backing Ukraine’s sovereignty,” he said.
He added that Britain and France have pledged to take said part in a force to guarantee Ukraine’s security and the winner of the German election, Friedrich Merz, the leader of the Christian Democrats, had been “quite robust.”
“So it’s not completely beyond the realm of possibilities that a new European alliance could take shape,” Ripley said.
But Kempin said the problem with an EU army is that some member states, like Hungary and Slovakia, had been what she called “troublemakers” and might balk at the idea, and it might be left to a “pioneer group” of countries that were more firmly anti-Moscow.
This is not the first time a European army has been proposed.
European Army Floated in 1952
In 1952 an agreement was signed to set up the European Defense Community, which would have merged the armies of the six European Economic Community countries—France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands—and created a standing army, a European Army, of 100,000 men.
Two years later, the French National Assembly rejected the plan.
Kempin said the French were wary of the idea of rearming Germany, so soon after World War II.
France was one of the founding members of NATO in 1949 but in 1966 President Charles de Gaulle, a former general who had led the so-called Free French forces during WWII, decided to withdraw France from NATO’s integrated command.
On the French government website it says, “Following the positive vote of the National Assembly, France officially announced its full participation in NATO military command structures at the Strasbourg/Kehl summit in April 2009.”
In 1963, De Gaulle and Adenauer created the Eurocorps, which was originally a Franco-German force, and later Belgium, Spain, and Poland joined. Austria, Greece, Italy, Romania, and Turkey are now “associated nations” of Eurocorps.
Ripley said the EU also set up the European Defense and Security Identity in the 1990s, and in 2007 it formed the European Union battlegroups, which were designed for peacekeeping and humanitarian operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina and elsewhere.
The EU also has a naval force, which has been involved in anti-piracy efforts off the coast of Somalia, and has also operated against people smugglers near Libya.
“So there is some tradition of European, non-NATO operations, outside NATO structure,” Ripley said. “And involving the European Union, there is some institutional track record in this, but whether it’s a warfighting army, that’s completely different.”
Would Soldiers Die for Europe?
Kempin said, “The question I am always asking is, ‘Are we at the point already now where we are willing to die for the European Union?’ And this is so far the biggest stumbling stone. When it comes to the deployment of soldiers, that is the hardest part.”
She said it would be almost impossible to have an integrated European Union army unless each member state were willing to give up some of its sovereignty.
Another big question, she said, is who would provide the nuclear deterrent to Russia if the United States withdraws its so-called nuclear umbrella, which currently shelters every country except Britain and France, which have their own atomic weapons?
“Everyone would have preferred the American nuclear umbrella to a possible French nuclear umbrella,” Kempin said. “In Germany, I think we always have the argument that as long as France is not willing to join NATO’s nuclear planning group, they lacked credibility.”
“But the scenario could be that if the Americans totally withdraw their nuclear arsenal, then you could argue [that] the best that we can possibly have is the French,” she added. “And we better take that rather than being sorry.”
The split between Europe and the United States over Ukraine became more pronounced on Tuesday when Trump paused all military aid to Kyiv.
Trump said at the White House on Monday, “We’ve given them much more than Europe, and Europe should have given more than us.”
Congress has allocated $174.2 billion for Ukraine since the war started, according to the Congressional Research Service.
The overall EU support for the Ukrainian army is estimated at 48.7 billion euros ($50.8 billion), according to the EU’s website.
Ripley said the second Trump administration is still in its early days, and that it may be that the president was just testing the waters with NATO and the European Union.
He said the key would be the NATO summit in June in the Netherlands, where Trump is “supposed to turn up.”
“Does he turn up? Does he say he’s a member of the gang? He’s got to stand up and say, ‘I believe in this stuff,’” Ripley said.
“When he actually turns up in front of all those 31 other leaders and they say ‘Are you part of this team?’ And he says ‘No’, that’s where it translates from random Trumpisms into something that he’s going to stick to.”
Kempin said if Europe can’t rely on the United States anymore, it is “a clear call for maturation of the Europeans in security and defense politics.”
Reuters contributed to this report.