ABSTRACT
After the ‘turn of 1989’ and in the late Nineties, the European Union was once again talking about a ‘European Security and Defence Identity’. From the Cologne European Council to the Lisbon Treaty, the Union reaffirmed the willingness to develop capabilities for autonomous military action and to create a common ground for security among its member states, drawing on civilian and military assets. The end of the Cold War gave new strength to the idea of recasting defence policy on a European scale, alongside the mature path of economic integration. A common defence might be the essential support and main instrument of a common foreign policy, which was also yet to be determined. The strategic turn of the new century and the spreading of global and insidious threats, made the need for integration more urgent. ‘Defence’ joined ‘security’, multiplying the levels of interaction and integration of national systems, once again insufficient in the face of new challenges. As happened at the dawn of the Cold War, European countries are called to face a common future, this time backed by strong Community institutions but still bound to national structures and national sovereignty traditions. Europe appears still incomplete, fuelling a new scepticism built on the recall of the past, and precautionary closures impatient for supranational logic. A common ‘Security and Defence Identity’ has still to take root but it has been a part of the European project from its very beginning, as a response to the systemic turn at the end of the Second World War, which reshaped Europe’s physiognomy and balances, recasting its components, nations and empires in a dominant Western perspective. The discursive dimension of Europe in post-1945 military rhetoric that is dealt with in this chapter inevitably compares with the present, and raises the issue of the incapacity of individual European nation-states to face the new threats of global instability. The failure of EDC may represent a mirror for the future. However, beyond the path from that original failure of a European military community, stand the ‘integrative effects’ of NATO military structures in the making of Europe in a long-term perspective, until today. Under the rhetoric of the West and NATO integrated policy, shared practices have developed, essential to the common European structures of the future.
