ABSTRACT
Since the end of the Second World War, repeated attempts have been made in Western Europe to achieve a common European defence policy. This chapter shows how, after the failure of the European Defence Community in 1954, ambitions for a common defence policy went silent until a renewed desire for European defence integration emerged in the Assembly of the Western European Union (WEU) in the 1970s and 1980s. More particularly, this chapter analyses how the Assembly of the WEU assumed an informal role in defence policy cooperation that helped the major European air forces and their governments to accomplish multilateral cooperation in air and space fields, up to the point when a first concrete result was achieved in the 1980s with the European Fighter Aircraft. The chapter demonstrates how WEU members shared informally their perception of the organisation and its value for European cooperation outside the official institutional framework of European institutions. Such informal meetings between delegates paved the way towards the formal renovation of the WEU during the 1980s, which gave a fillip to the European integration process in the area of defence cooperation during pivotal years for the post-1945 international system.
