European Army: Reality or Fiction?

Abstract

Several years after the end of the Second World War an agreement was made for regulating all details of the future European army. The plan was formatting European army with soldiers from France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries, having unique uniforms and a strict command structure. It was planned creation of а Commission composed from nine representatives from the member-states. One of the competencies of the Commission was planned to be bringing decisions about sending an army to the front. The work of this Commission should have been controlled by a European Parliament composed of MPs from the member states. The agreement was the military units at a lower level to be purely nationally organized, and the officers who would command them to be from different member states. Many things were ready for this ambitious project of the post-war Europe which in the summer of 1954 collapsed due to resistance from the French parliament. Since this European defence community was not brought into light, the European Army's plans have ``ad acta`` for decades. Today they are back on the table. The reasons for that are numerous: the US Government under Donald Trump lack of interest for Europe, the growing Russian threat to the continent and the withdrawal of the UK from the EU in 2019 have sparked a new momentum in this European Union's project. The aim of this research is through a retrospective analysis of the last 20 years, or more concrete from the Treaty of Nice, through the Treaty for Establishing the Constitution and the Lisbon Treaty to determine the development of the idea for creating a common European army and what are the reasons why this project didn`t work in the past. All this is necessary in order to be able to give predictions how the idea for common European army will develop in the future.