War of attrition over EU defence policy

Date: 24/06/1999

RATHER like the grim trench warfare of the First World War, the battle to create a defence and security policy for the EU promises to be long and hard.

Despite the attention-grabbing headlines after the Cologne summit about the Union turning into a military superpower, closer analysis shows that the EU will have to confront a number of difficult issues to get its new security policy off the ground, including decision-making arrangements, the question of democratic legitimacy and a major reorientation of defence spending priorities.

Divisions over exactly how the new policy will operate are underlined by the differing attitudes towards the problem among opinion-formers in individual member states.