The European Union as an International Security Actor: Challenges for Democratic Accountability

The ability of the European Union (EU) to directly command and control military and police forces for external security engagements is a recent novelty. Since the end of the Second World War, some European countries had a vision of European integration involving cooperation not in the economic and political spheres alone, but also in the foreign, security and defence fields. An expression of this desire was the signature of the Brussels Treaty in 1948, which resulted in the establishment of the Western European Union (WEU). ¹ Yet from the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957 to the end of the 1980s, the EEC did not coordinate the security and defence policies of its member states.