Since the early 1990s, the international community finds itself confronted with a series of ethnic conflicts. They differ significantly from the inter-state wars of the Cold War era. The new conflicts are increasingly fought by paramilitary forces instead of regular armies, which often do not respect humanitarian laws and use attacks on civilians as a means to achieve their objectives.

The real problems for Europe began with the civil war in Bosnia. After years of diplomatic struggles, the United Nations sent peacekeepers into the area. The operation failed in its mission to protect civilians because the blue helmets found themselves too lightly armed amidst fighting factions which would not recoil from genocide and ethnic cleansing. After Bosnia, the Balkans kept on burning. Milosevic, the dove of peace at Dayton, still had one job to do – the conquest of Kosovo for the Serbs. The massive violation of human rights, the imminent danger of genocide and the defeat of diplomacy in Kosovo meant a breaking point in Green approaches to questions of war and peace.

The Green dilemma
The question whether, and if yes, how military force may be used to defend international law and human rights, is one of the most difficult and controversial issues in today’s foreign politics. It has especially occupied the minds of the Greens. European Green parties have their roots in the peace movement and have found it difficult to accept armed intervention as a means to stop conflicts. At the beginning of the 1990s the average Green party member would oppose the use of force because of a deep abhorrence of the ‘terror of war’. According to the convictions of pacifism, military force is no suitable means to solve a conflict but only contributes to its escalation and causes innocent deaths. The early peace movement, especially in Germany, saw its responsibility in preventing another war like the one incited by Nazi-Germany. Later, pacifists protested against the Vietnam War and other military interventions that would mainly serve the economic and strategic interests of the Western countries. The arms race between the two super powers and the danger of a nuclear ‘holocaust’ formed the driving force of yet another generation of peace activists.

But then the Berlin Wall came down, the bipolar world was turned upside down and Green parties had to find an answer to a violently breaking apart of Yugoslavia, to brutal ethnic wars in Africa and, most recently, to terrorism. The Gulf War of 1991 was the last ‘classic’ war where Green opposition to military intervention was still tenable because operation ‘Desert Storm’ was largely motivated by economic interests. The first signs of doubt came with the tragedy in Bosnia where Greens had pleaded long before for an active conflict prevention strategy. Some felt for an intervention to break the siege of Sarajevo. The turning point for many was reached with the Serb aggression in Kosovo. Not only did they witness human suffering of an unprecedented degree, but also had the Greens in countries like Germany, France and Belgium just taken seats in the government. This meant that whatever their decision on military intervention would be, it would have enormous consequences. If they supported the use of force, they would also be responsible for all its possible negative effects – innocent victims, refugees, destroyed infrastructure and what have you. If they spoke out against it while their coalition partners were in favour, their government would be most likely to fall. Yet even the Dutch Greens, which were in the opposition, felt that only the threat of air strikes would make Milosevic stop his aggression against the Albanians in Kosovo. In their eyes, diplomacy was already defeated. While negotiations took place, the Serb army simply continued with bringing its troops into position. Many Green parties set aside their fundamental principles for the first time and supported the launching of limited air strikes against Serb military targets. Joschka Fischer, Green foreign minister in Germany has put the Green dilemma into the following words: ‘We will be held responsible if we don’t do anything. But we will also be responsible for what we do.’

Although ‘Kosovo’ has caused bitter debates within Green parties on the legitimacy and effectiveness of the use of force then, it led the majority of the Greens to the conclusion that also in the future there will be situations when all other options have failed and military means will have to be considered as a last resort.

Why Europe needs its own military capacity
Non-state, privatised violence as it manifests itself in civil and ethnic wars and terrorism is a threat to world peace and to European stability and welfare. Therefore, it is in the EU’s interest to be able to react to conflicts especially in its own backyard. Conflicts create ideal conditions for organised crime such as trafficking in human beings, weapons or drugs which will not halt at EU-borders. Costs to take care of refugees and to finance reconstruction have proven to be high. Strengthening the rule of law is a necessary pre-condition to stable international relations, trade and investment and not only a moral obligation. A perception by warlords that violence and brutality pays would erode the principles of international governance.

The Balkan-debacle has made clear that the European Union missed a strategic view on how to tackle these new sorts of conflict. Nearly each member state followed its own policy, based on yearlong sympathies with one ethnic group or the other. Consequently, the European Union’s policy was highly contradictory, ‘too little, too late’ and not taken seriously by the fighting parties. The European leaders realised that a common foreign and security policy was absolutely necessary if the Union wished to protect the continent from war, violence and instability. The ability to enforce that policy, based on human rights and international law, would turn out to be decisive for the success of crisis management.

An own military force will enable the European Union to react more aptly to the new realities in international relations. National defence systems do not provide an answer to the threats of non-state and ethnic violence. Furthermore, the development of a common military capacity will put Europe in the position to play its own role on the international stage, giving it the possibility to act where NATO, in other words the United States, is not willing to act. Take, for instance, the Balkans. The US is becoming more reluctant to keep committing its forces there. This is exactly the place where a European military force would be needed first, in order to preserve peace and help the countries come closer to the European Union.

The European Union is a strong economic power, the largest donor in developing countries. Much more than the US, Europe focuses its foreign and security policy on conflict prevention, human rights, development co-operation, multilateralism and the promotion of the rule of law for instance through an International Criminal Court. These are our strengths and they should be the basis for a stronger European role in international relations. Military means and power play are sometimes necessary, and we will need to work on them, but they are by far not the most suitable ways to conduct international relations. Therefore, from a Green point of view, the EU and the US should share responsibilities. Let them both do what they are good at. The US gets things done through power play. Military might gives it that extra clout to pursue its foreign policy objectives. But this does not mean that the EU has to try to become an equal military power to the US. To be a reliable and effective ally the EU should develop a credible mix of foreign policy instruments, including the possibility to act militarily, yet focused on its strengths: Talking, talking and talking, finding a compromise and paying. It has worked in Macedonia, where Europe engaged early in active diplomacy, used economic incentives and committed troops – not to fight, but to disarm, yet with a considerable military backing should things go wrong. There are also good signs in rebuilding Afghanistan. Paraphrasing the words of the late American president Roosevelt, one could say: "Let us speak softly, let them carry a big stick".

This does not mean that Europe has the ambition to carry out military operations against the will of the US. Agreement with NATO on the desirability of an operation will be necessary since the EU would have to draw on NATO assets such as command structure, intelligence and transport facilities. Yet Europe has to become more self-confident as concerns its own political role in the international arena. Let’s see it as a modern couple – their relationship will become dull once the one only takes the decisions and the other only follows obediently. Sooner or later dissatisfaction will get the better of faith. But don’t let them want to be exactly the same – it will be one continuous power struggle.

Having its own intervention capacity will give the EU more might vis-à-vis fighting parties which are only led by the rationale of power. In this sense, the availability of military means has a deterrent function, additional to political, economic and financial sanctions. Then there are military tasks such as in Bosnia and Macedonia where European soldiers are deployed with the consent of the governments in order to maintain order and stability in former conflict ridden areas. Finally, there is enforcement - an armed intervention without the authorities agreeing to it. One should keep in mind that only in a very limited number of cases will an armed intervention achieve objectives that outweigh the enormous costs of human casualties, destruction of infrastructure and possible incitement of more violence. Therefore, for the Greens, armed interventions are only permissible and viable in response to grave human rights violations such as systematic torture or rape, ethnic cleansing or (the risk of) genocide, to protect humanitarian aid workers or to separate fighting factions in order to find a political solution to the conflict.

Why the Greens support a common European security policy
It goes without saying that preventing a conflict or, if it has broken out already, applying civil instruments is a much more effective manner to tackle the causes of violence and to strengthen Europe’s own security. The founding fathers of the EU understood that economic co-operation would be a means to prevent war. Now that the EU is also a community of political, legal, social and environmental values which has realised its objective of ‘No more war’ , it must promote this broad concept of security in potential crisis areas. In this respect, European enlargement with the countries of Central- and Eastern Europe can be called the biggest conflict prevention project to date.

Fortunately, conflict prevention today plays a much bigger role in European foreign policy than some years ago. Questions like ‘What is conflict prevention anyway? Are you just kind of sitting around singing ‘Kumbaya’ and holding hands?’ are not being asked anymore. On the contrary, just about each European institution now publishes its own report on what the EU is doing and should do in the future to strengthen its capacity to prevent conflicts. The European Parliament even mentioned conflict prevention and civilian crisis management as the most prominent tasks of a common European security and defence policy. This change of focus, at least on paper, can be attributed to the tireless ‘lobbying’ of Green parties and numerous non-governmental organisations.

In practice, however, much needs to be done yet. Poverty and inequality belong to the root causes of conflict. If conflict prevention really is to be the core objective of Europe´s foreign and security policy, the EU has to put much more effort behind a sound economic and social development in less developed countries. This is not only a foreign relations affair. Ministers and commissioners of agriculture, trade and the environment should think twice if their policies possibly distort markets in third countries or put pressure on economic, social or ecological structures.

Stronger commitment to conflict prevention also means that the EU needs to raise its budget for external policy in order to be able to commit an integrated package of economic, political and civil resources in a crisis area. And it is not only financial. Member states need the political will to take steps that further the cause of conflict prevention, even if their own economic interests are at stake. This applies especially to the possibility to suspend trade and association agreements with parties that commit grave violations of human rights.

One way to integrate all civilian efforts in conflict areas could be the establishment of a European Civil Peace Corps. This idea of the Greens has been put forward by the European Parliament as early as 1999 but has still not been taken up by the other institutions. Such a European Civil Peace Corps could serve as a clearing house for the training and deployment of civilian specialists to carry out practical peace-making measures such as mediation, confidence-building between the warring parties, distribution of non-partisan information, de-traumatization, rehabilitation and improving the human rights situation, including human rights accompaniment.

Which European security policy do the Greens want?
The gap between the Green ideas of how to deal with conflicts and the current plans of the European member states is surely bridgeable. If the EU devotes the same effort to achieving the goals it has set itself regarding conflict prevention and civil crisis management, the Greens would see a major part of its policy realised. Another crucial point for the Greens when it comes to military involvement is the prime role of international law. Among the Europeans there seems to be considerable agreement on the necessity of an appropriate mandate from the UN Security Council authorising the use of force. In highly exceptional circumstances in which grounds for military action are overwhelming and the Security Council is in a deadlock, the international community should be able to intervene at the express request of the Secretary General of the United Nations. The Greens would go one step further and demand that governments involved in such an operation would have to be willing to have their decisions and actions tested afterwards by the International Court of Justice.

Wholehearted Green support of a European security policy will further be linked to the future developments in four specific areas:
-     The development of a common strategic vision
-    The control on the production and proliferation of weapons
-    No increase of defence expenditure
-    The realisation of democratic control

The development of a common strategic vision.
After the Balkan failure, the EU has learned a lesson concerning the necessity of one European policy in that region. Things have improved considerably in dealing with the crisis in Macedonia. Yet in other conflicts, that one line is still far to seek. Look at the Middle East. If the EU member states cannot even agree on when and which diplomatic and economic pressure to apply, what do we need troops for? This is not an argument against working on a military capacity. It is a plea to strengthen our efforts to put our norms and values, our interests and constraints back on the table and define a line beyond which we will use the instruments at our disposal, like diplomatic measures, like the suspension of trade or development agreements and, as a very last resort, the deployment of troops in order to stop a war.

Then more thinking needs to be done on when, where and how Europe would send its rapid reaction force. In 1999, the member states defined some principal ideas on its possible missions, the so-called Petersberg tasks. The EU wants to be able to carry out humanitarian and rescue tasks, peacekeeping tasks and combat-force tasks in crisis management, including peacemaking. This year the Spanish government has made an attempt to add combating terrorism to that list, so far without success. But which concrete recent or potential operations would be covered by the Petersberg-tasks? Would Europe participate in an intervention like the one in Afghanistan to destroy the infrastructure of terrorists? What about an operation like the bombing of the Serbs in the Kosovo war? Is separating the fighting forces in the Great Lakes area in Central Africa within the geographical scope of the European security and defence policy?

The Greens would see two limitations at this point. Firstly, in the short run, that is in the following ten years, peace enforcement without the consent of the parties on the ground would be a too ambitious objective. The EU will not have the means to carry out such a robust operation. Peace keeping, like the current missions in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia would be more obvious. Maybe even in the Middle East once a peace agreement has been signed. Yet once Europe has sent its soldiers to one or two of these areas, it will have none left for any other mission. Although Europe has two million personnel under arms, it can only deploy a fraction of it, because the rest is not trained well enough for such operations or may not be deployed because they are conscripts or because they have just been on mission. In 1999, the EU had promised 30.000 troops for peacekeeping in Kosovo and had great problems in mobilising this number, although it represents less than two percent of overall European manpower.

Secondly, fighting terrorism should not be added to the tasks of a European rapid reaction force. The building of the international coalition was seized by many countries with an internal conflict to jump on the bandwagon and call for support against their own terrorists. The EU can certainly work better together to prevent chemical, biological or even nuclear attacks. But to track down terrorists and to put them to justice is, generally speaking, not a task of a military force, but of the police and justice system. Equally important is tackling the roots of terrorism, like poverty, like inequality, like a deep feeling of frustration. We cannot stop every maniac that is determined to die and take innocent civilians with him. But we can strive for sustainable development, for the respect of human rights, for conflict prevention in our foreign policy. This should also apply for countries which are key partners in the anti-terror-coalition or which are important economic players.

Apart from developing a vision on the use of different instruments, the EU member states, especially the bigger ones such as Germany, France and Britain, still have to get used to ‘thinking European’. Although Javier Solana, the High Representative for Europe’s common foreign and security policy, is doing his best to convey one European message, the member states still greatly follow their own foreign policies. France and Britain, for instance, are not willing to give up their seats in the UN Security Council to make room for one European membership. Germany, although a strong advocate of European integration, secretly hopes to get its own Security Council chair. Besides, September 11th and the American intervention in Afghanistan have made it clear that the three find themselves more relevant than the rest of the European Union. They came together in their own mini-summits and they were the only ones regularly to be consulted by the US on the steps to take in Afghanistan.

Christoph Bertram, director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), has even suggested that because Solana is doing too good a job, he provides the member states with an excuse not to commit themselves more to making Europe a stronger player in the world. Yet this is exactly what is needed to get a message across the Atlantic. With the intervention in Afghanistan, many European NATO-members felt not involved or even informed enough by the US. The expansion of NATO membership, although pushed by the US for strategic reasons, will make operational decision-making within NATO even more burdensome for the US. In case it is attacked once more, it will probably exercise its right of self-defence outside NATO structures again. This will strain transatlantic solidarity, since European NATO members who contribute their political support or even troops to the US, will not have a say in the conduct of military actions and might well be embarrassed by it. For instance by the great number of civilian casualties the US is willing to make in order to minimise the risks for its own soldiers. European solidarity might well be put under strain as well, in case the bigger member states decide to co-ordinate their support to Washington in têtes-à-têtes, thus creating faits accomplis for smaller NATO members.

The only way to avoid growing rifts, between the US and its European allies, between the bigger and smaller European states, might well be to make the EU an obligatory forum to discuss every deployment of European troops even if it is formally based on a NATO-decision of self-defence. It should no longer be possible for Tony Blair to discuss US plans to attack Iraq – falsely identified as self-defence – with president Bush, while refusing to broach the subject with his colleagues in the European Council, as happened in Spring 2002. This kind of behaviour plays in the hands of those in Washington who want to ensure American hegemony by keeping Europe divided. It strengthens the 'hawks' who are the least inclined to listen to good advice from Europe, not even if it is conveyed by the prime minister of the UK.

The control on the production and proliferation of weapons
The development of certain new military instruments, such as transport capacities or satellites, will be necessary to be able to deploy a European intervention force that is not entirely dependent on NATO. Yet the decision on which weapons or strategic goods to develop should be exclusively based on what is needed and not on what gives the biggest push to national economies. The armaments industry should be made subject to the rules of the internal market. Currently, defence industries only survive because of subsidies and hardly selective export policies.

Europe should not develop and use weapons that have a disproportional negative impact on civilians. This includes cluster bombs, landmines and, of course, weapons of mass destruction such as biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. Instead of diminishing the role of nuclear weapons, the United States is giving them a prominent place in their latest strategic plans. The Bush administration sees ‘rogue states’ that supposedly develop nuclear, chemical or biological weapons and give shelter to networks of terrorists as the greatest threat to national security. Small, tactical nuclear weapons must give the US the capacity to hit and destroy underground storage places of weapons, headquarters or hiding places of combatants. These plans make clear that for the US nuclear weapons are no longer merely a deterrent, but a real option in the fight against terrorism. Europe should not be afraid to disagree with the US on this point. When the line between nuclear and non-nuclear weapons becomes blurred, current disarmament initiatives will fail and certain states, probably the ones that make the US consider such steps, will feel inclined to try and develop similar arms. In this context, Europe´s own nuclear powers, France and Britain, should give a clear signal that nuclear disarmament is the direction Europe is heading at.

Apart from keeping production of arms within proportion, Europe should also make sure that weapons do not fall in the wrong hands. While the EU is taking great pains to develop a common military force for the worst case scenario, it fuels this scenario by selling arms to regions in crisis. This could even lead to a situation where European ‘blue helmets’ that have been deployed to contain a conflict are being attacked by warring parties using weapons ‘Made in Europe’. In theory, European countries do not export any military equipment to countries with armed conflict, countries that seriously violate human rights, countries that threaten peace in the region and countries that host terrorist networks. However, secrecy around arms exports makes one assume that in practice, those rules are more than once circumvented. As a result, ministers can not be held accountable on their compliance with the various proliferation regimes. The Greens commit themselves to struggling for more transparency around arms exports. Eventually, the EU arms export code should be made into a legally binding instrument, that is enforceable by the European Commission and the European Court of Justice and which falls under the scrutiny of the European Parliament.

Special attention should be paid to the trade of small arms which have made more victims in the armed conflicts of recent years than heavy weaponry. Small arms are cheap and readily available even to civilians, legally or illegally. To tackle the problem, both the ‘demand’ and the ‘supply’ side have to be addressed. Confidence building, disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration should all be part of a broad strategy. But the EU also has a more direct responsibility as a seller of small weapons. Legal trade of light weapons also falls under the EU arms export code. It goes without saying that no arms should be supplied to paramilitary forces. According to the Greens, more should be done to counter illicit arms transfers for instance through adopting and enforcing legislation that requires the registration and licensing of arms brokers, including regulations on manufacturing, importing, exporting, transferring, and facilitating transfers. In the wake of September 11th , this seems even more imperative in order to cut off lines of supply to terrorist organisations.

No increase of defence expenditure
If the European countries would restructure and pool their military resources, they could make defence spending much more effective. With the end of the Cold War, a conventional attack on countries of the European Union has become very unlikely. However, national armies are still mainly designed for national defence tasks. The new tasks of the European security and defence policy will require much more flexible, small scale intervention capacities. Therefore, obsolete military means and structures that are only useful in case of an ‘old fashioned’ invasion by tanks and ground forces, should be phased out rapidly. Furthermore, national governments should not buy or participate in the development of any new, expensive equipment without considering its added value for Europe. The resulting savings could be spent on new resources for the European rapid reaction force.

Additionally, the member states of the European Union should find better ways to co-operate with one another. To date, Europe spends around 60% of what the US spends on defence, yet its military capacity equals only 10%. A large sum is needed in each country to fund administrative structures, maintenance systems and old conventional forces. More European co-operation will make a distribution of tasks possible, meaning that countries can specialise, can use facilities together and can join their efforts in research and development. Consequently, defence spending would become more effective and military budgets would not need to be increased.

The realisation of democratic control
The European security and defence policy as outlined in this chapter, although not all-encompassing, is certainly ambitious. As stated earlier, it requires a truly common foreign policy. The ambitions to make CFSP and ESDP more effective will falter however, if the EU does not start making progress in democratising both policy domains. The fact that foreign and military policy are sensitive subjects does not mean that the conditions of transparency and parliamentary scrutiny do not apply. On the contrary. It is precisely because these can be matters of life and death, that we may not neglect the question of how the public, the press and parliamentarians can prevent and correct grave mistakes. Democratising the foreign and security policy, thus the second pillar, should be a top priority for the Convention, the forum of governmental, parliamentary and civil society representatives which will, until the first months of 2003, work out a blueprint on the future institutional make-up of Europe.

Some governments, such as the Dutch, envisage strengthening the position of Solana by bestowing him with a formal right of initiative. A modest proposal, but it once more raises the question why such a powerful political figure cannot be held to account in public.
The question of democratic accountability will pose itself in an acute way once we are confronted with an EU action which – God forbids! – fails miserably, perhaps even entailing substantial loss of lives. It is an unbearable thought that, if the present institutional architecture remains unchanged, the members of the Council will have a good chance to escape (national) parliamentary censure by hiding behind each others' back – helped by the secrecy of the Council's deliberations - while Solana cannot be called to account, let alone sacked, by any parliament. A major foreign or military policy disaster, perhaps a new Srebrenica, the responsibility for which is taken by or assigned to no one, will deal a blow to the EU's credibility and diminish its capacity to learn from mistakes.

Therefore many European Greens see no alternative but to incorporate Solana's responsibilities into the European Commission. "Solana" and "Patten" should merge and become vice-president of the Commission. Thus, the EU's foreign and security policy supremo would be accountable to the European Parliament. Of course, this greatly strengthens his or her position vis-à-vis national capitals, the more so if the unanimity requirement in the Council is loosened. In fact, strengthening the supranational dimension of CFSP and ESDP, with power and accountability going hand in hand, is the only option we have if we really want the EU to speak and act coherently on the world stage. The upcoming enlargement and the growing risks it entails of deadlock in the Council give extra weight to this argument. Adversaries of supranationalisation should realise that the alternative integration method, building a directoire of the bigger member states, is unacceptable to the smaller member states. Their nuisance power, especially after enlargement, should not be underestimated by the big three, four or five.

In parallel to the merger of the positions of Solana and Patten, the EU's budget should be made flexible enough to absorb the costs of CFSP and ESDP operations. This way, the European Parliaments budgetary powers would stretch into the second pillar, and member states which contribute troops or equipment to ESDP operations can be compensated for the costs they incur.

Bold as these proposals might be, they stop short of a plea for a fully integrated European army. Sending out troops, let alone into combat, requires a degree of legitimacy that, at this stage of European integration, only national institutions can provide. Thus, in my view, a decision by the EU Council, on a proposal by the Commission, to engage in a military operation should first require the consent of the European Parliament. Subsequently, the decision by any national government to commit troops to such an operation should require the consent of its national parliament, by an absolute or even two-thirds majority. Such a 'double key' is perfectly conceivable and befits the serious nature of the engagement.

This proposal of a double parliamentary check should allay the fears of national parliamentarians, especially in Germany, who are wary of involving the European Parliament in the ESDP or even CFSP, because this might undermine their right to approve the army's participation in military operations outside NATO territory. On the contrary, in discussing the institutional shake-up of the second pillar and the new division of competencies it requires between the European and the national level, the German Parlamentsvorbehalt, which is the right of the national parliament to oppose, can and should be held out as an example to other EU member states. Especially to those neighbour countries where decisions on war and peace are taken in a quasi-dictatorial way.

Of course, those politicians and opinion leaders - in Germany, in other big member states and even in some small ones – who resist a more supranational, democratically controlled foreign, security and defence policy might also be motivated by the assumption that there is still, or again, a prominent role to be played for their nation in the old concert of powers. This is both an overestimation of the influence any individual European state can wield on the world stage, and an underestimation of the damage that such an endeavour will inflict to the project of European Union.

Challenges
Having outlined the Green view of a desirable European security and defence policy and having touched upon its moral dilemmas concerning the use of force, let me conclude by putting forward some challenges that Europe and the Greens will have to face.

Green parties found themselves in deep internal struggles again in discussing the prospect of armed intervention in Afghanistan. Most national Green parties formulated a strategy of conditional support. As long as the military actions fulfilled the criteria of precision, proportionality and effectiveness, the Greens would support them. Yet some days later, it turned out that interpretations of whether the air strikes still complied with these terms, differed greatly. Soon the Greens were divided again in ‘Realo´s’ and ‘Pacifists’. With a party that feels so strongly about conscientious politics it is unthinkable that one day it would change its policy of ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ into blind backing of whatever military operation. However, the Greens will remain with the problem of finding a common judgement regarding the effectiveness of military actions when information on misses and victims is scarce and biased. It will be one of the greatest challenges for the Greens to adhere to its principles and at the same time behave as a reliable and steadfast partner in difficult decision making.

For the European Union challenges lie much more in actually achieving the goals it has set itself. The headline goal of having 60.000 soldiers and the necessary equipment ready for deployment in 2003 will most probably not be reached. This is not so much a question of missing financial means but more of the time and perseverance that is needed to reform national conscription armies into lean and well-equipped peace keeping forces. As long as the EU is not able to make use of NATO´s resources – which is the case right now as both Turkey and Greece are throwing up obstructions - not even the lower-level operations as the envisaged replacement of NATO in Macedonia will be possible.

Last, but not least, decision making after the enlargement of the European Union with up to 13 new members will become even more difficult. If the principle of unanimity in the Council is maintained, defining resolute common positions will be nearly impossible. Fortunately, it is now in our own hands to give the EU a real capacity to act – if we use the Convention to make Europe’s foreign and security policy genuine European, transparent and accountable.

Joost Lagendijk is Member of the European Parliament for the Dutch GreenLeft, chairman of the Turkey delegation of the European Parliament and speaker on security issues and the Balkans for the Green/EFA group in the European Parliament.
This article has been written with the co-operation of Ute Seela and Richard Wouters.