EU Defense Cooperation
Why Europe has struggled to build a common defense capability, how Russia's invasion of Ukraine transformed the debate, and the relationship between EU defense and NATO.
Decades of Ambition, Limited Results
The idea of European defense cooperation is as old as the EU itself. The European Defence Community was proposed in 1950 but killed by the French parliament in 1954. Since then, EU defense has progressed in fits and starts. The Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) allows the EU to deploy civilian and military missions, and the EU has conducted over 30 such missions since 2003, mostly small-scale training and advisory operations in Africa and the Balkans.
However, the EU has no standing army and no integrated command structure comparable to NATO's. Defense spending decisions remain firmly with national governments. The result is a fragmented European defense landscape where 27 member states maintain separate forces, procurement programs, and defense industries, producing enormous duplication and inefficiency. Europe collectively spends roughly a third of what the US spends on defense but gets far less capability per euro due to fragmentation.
