I was recently having a discussion with my friend, a young Spanish lady, and we somehow came upon the topic of the European Union. While we only lingered on the subject for a few moments, the European Union has occasionally popped back into my mind at various points since then. The European Union has created a monetarily unified economy that is greater than the size of America’s GDP, yet the European Union is highly divided, and is even dysfunctional in many ways.
The causes of this division and dysfunction have their root in a wide range of reasons, going from the differences in national governance that still exist (and help set the stage for conflict) to the much more mundane reality that the EU’s central governance is largely bureaucratic, undemocratic, and weak. With that said though, there is one another, and often overlooked, reason why the EU hasn’t become a European superpower of sorts: NATO.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization shares much of its membership with the EU, and vice versa. In fact, there is only one member of the EU which is not a member of NATO or NATO’s Partnership for Peace program (which seeks to build relationships with non-NATO states and establish partnerships between the country and NATO)- Cyprus, which has chosen not to join NATO or the Partnership for Peace due to political disputes with Turkey (a NATO member). Such extensive membership in NATO has helped prevent the EU from gaining power in several important policy areas, most notably defense. While EU Battlegroups exist, the EU Battlegroup is both small (in terms of both total number of troops and active number of troops) and limited in scope, while NATO is much more encompassing and comprehensive. After all, why should the EU have a military while NATO exists?
In 1957, Karl Deutsche coined the term, “security community” to describe a group of states so intertwined together that war would never occur, and this aptly describes Europe today. Europe is so bound together that the idea of another great war on the European continent between the members of the EU is laughable indeed. However, it should be noted that the EU does not form the core of the European security community, but rather NATO does. NATO has been the glue that forged the bonds between Western European nations in the beginning of the Cold War and then held those bonds tight, even after the dissolution of the USSR.
The EU has been a welcome development emerging from this tight knit community, but the EU can never hope to achieve its full potential without redefining the European security community, in one way or another, to ensure that it is the EU that forms the basis of the community.