European Defence and NATO: From Competition to Co‐operation to Replacement?
Journal: JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies
Year: 2025

The project to endow the European Union (EU) with its own defence capacity and policy is now (at least) some 30 years old. Although it was adumbrated in the late 1980s via the reactivation of the Western European Union (Rees, 1998), it began life in the early years of the Clinton presidency as the European Security and Defence Identity (ESDI), which sought to empower European forces as a distinct military capacity with its own chain of command from inside the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (