User:Boreas74/EUDF
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Copy of deleted article Military of the European Union
Military of the European Union | |
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Organisations |
|
Equipment | 546 ships, 2,448 aircraft & 7,490 battle tanks |
Personnel | |
Active personnel | 1,823,000 (2014)[1] |
Expenditure | |
Budget | $226.73 billion (2016)[1] |
Percent of GDP | 1.42% (2014)[1] |
The military of the European Union comprises the various cooperative structures that have been established between the armed forces of the member states, both intergovernmentally and within the institutional framework of the union; the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) branch of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP).
The policy area of defence is traditionally the domain of individual sovereign states. The main military alliance in Europe remains the intergovernmental North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), which presently includes 22 EU member states together with four non-EU European countries; Iceland, Norway, Albania, Montenegro as well as the United States and Canada and Turkey. Although long impeded by concerns relating to national sovereignty and potential duplication of existing NATO structures, European defence integration has intensified in the beginning of the 21st century, bringing about the deployment of numerous CSDP operations and the establishment of a European Defence Agency (headed by the High Representative) as well as EU battlegroups. The latter have however never been engaged in operations, and other, recent initiatives of military integration, such as the European corps, gendarmerie force and air transport command are at present intergovernmental and outside the CFSP framework of the union.
Article 42 of the Treaty on European Union provides for substantial military integration within the institutional framework of the union:[2]
- Article 42.2 provides for complete integration, which would require unanimity in the European Council of heads of state or government and has as such been blocked by the United Kingdom, which is the main opponent of EU defence integration[3], in particular. (The United Kingdom is however scheduled to withdraw from the union in 2019.)
- Article 42.6 enables the armed forces of a subset of member states to establish Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) between themselves. In December 2017. 25 Member states of the European Union agreed to establish PESCO.
However the debate has intensified by the standoff between the EU and Russia over Ukraine, Brexit and the presidency of Donald Trump in the US. With new calls for an EU military by EU commission president Jean-Claude Juncker and by other European leaders and policy makers like the head of the German parliament's foreign policy committee Norbert Röttgen, saying an EU army was "a European vision whose time has come".[4][5] The mutual defence clause, Article 42.7, was invoked for the first time in November 2015 following the terrorist attacks in Paris, which were described by French President François Hollande as an attack against Europe as a whole.[6][7]