My dear friends, good day to you!
Ursula von der Leyen yesterday described a Europe faced with cyberattacks, sabotage, drones, threats against critical infrastructure and an international environment in which security can no longer be considered a given and proposed a “European Article 4,” modeled on NATO, so that when a member state faces a serious threat to its national security, the 27 convene and coordinate their response. She also revived the idea of a European Security Council.
Entirely commendable are her proposals. Except that Europe has been discussing variations of them for decades. The idea of a European Security Council has been discussed, in various forms, since the 1980s, resurfaced after the Iraq war and again in the previous decade, without advancing. The obstacles were always known: the reluctance of states to cede powers in security and defense and the fear of overlap with NATO.
Except that the world did not wait for Europe to decide.
War is being waged in Ukraine. Hybrid attacks have reached the interior of Europe. Critical infrastructure and undersea cables are targets, while von der Leyen herself referred to incidents in Denmark, Lithuania and Poland.
For Greece and Cyprus, moreover, all this is neither new nor a theoretical discussion. It is a reality of decades.
Since 1995 Turkey has maintained an official threat of war against Greece in the event of an extension of Greek territorial waters to 12 nautical miles in the Aegean. Thirty-one years later, the casus belli remains and Europe continues to treat Turkey as a … candidate member state, although it has “frozen” the process.
In Cyprus things are even more stark. More than half a century after the Turkish invasion of 1974, about 37% of the territory of the Republic of Cyprus, a member state of the European Union, remains under Turkish military occupation. And Turkey continues to be a country candidate for accession to the European Union.
These things cannot be swept under the rug of new councils and protocols.
The European Union of about 450 million inhabitants and one of the largest economies in the world does not have a permanent army. For its military operations it relies on the capabilities made available to it by the member states, while decisions on the common security and defense policy generally require unanimity.
This, however, is only the institutional side of the problem. Because in practice Europe has not demonstrated that it has the common political will to treat the security and territorial integrity of every member state as the concern of the entire Union.
A Europe that wants to be a global political and economic pole, but is unable to turn its size and wealth into common power, will continue to depend on others for its security. Thus, what we still lack is not another Article 4.
Articles exist. Treaties exist. Councils exist. Declarations of solidarity exist. What is missing is the treatment. We have had the diagnosis for years. Our people say it more simply: whoever does not want to knead, sifts for a thousand years.
Except that the threats are already here. And against them, aspirin is not enough.