Europe’s defence problem is political, not legal

Article 42.7 looks strong, but who will pull the trigger?

Lately there has been renewed discussion of a European defence alliance, either as a stand-alone replacement for NATO, to be set up wholly separately, or as an entity within NATO, lying dormant until the required time when it could be activated. Both are premised on the basic concern that the existing NATO structure that has acted as the main pillar of Europe’s defence for roughly the last 75 years is no longer something we can rely on now that the United States openly toys with refusing its obligations to come to the defence of other members.

In this context, some European leaders have started to point towards the EU’s Article 42.7 as an alternative mutual defence pact. Specifically, the law states that “If a Member State is the victim of armed aggression on its territory, the other Member States shall have towards it an obligation of aid and assistance by all the means in their power”.

As a legal instrument, it has much to be admired. Indeed, on paper it is actually stronger than NATO’s famous Article 5, which is more ambiguous about whether and to what extent allies need to come to each other’s aid.

However, we should be under no illusions about the challenge here. The problem is not a legal/formal one. Considering the respective legal distinctions of Article 42.7 versus Article 5 would miss the point. Indeed, the organisational structures as a whole are largely secondary to the two elements that have historically made NATO effective: the political and the practical.

For the first part, the strength of NATO was always that the US gave a clear political signal to all would-be foes that it was ready and willing to back up its commitment to the alliance with Europe with significant military force. Moscow was kept out of NATO countries by the very justified fear that a military offensive would lead to direct conflict with the United States. Any such conflict would be impossible to limit or contain as the US would not be able to countenance any compromise on the absolute defence of all of free, democratic Europe. The risk of nuclear escalation and mutual annihilation was therefore real.

And while it is true that we have seen the political will in Washington erode and crumble, it does not follow automatically that political will from within Europe has risen, or will in the future.

For decades, governments in Eastern Europe put their trust in Washington because they did not believe that Western European states had the stomach for a fight with Russia. There has been some reorientation recently, but more out of necessity than out of a real confidence that Paris or Berlin are now ready to take a firm stand against the imperialist expansionism that drives Moscow. There have certainly been steps in the right direction, with Western Europe willing to provide important military support to Ukraine and impose escalating sanctions on Russia since 2022. France offering to extend its nuclear deterrent is also a critical development (even if the implementation of this concept is still mostly unfinished). But there remains an open question of just how far Western Europe would go and whether this really extends to open war. The discussions around the ‘coalition of the willing’ for Ukraine have mostly served to underline how nervous governments still are, as they hesitate to commit any meaningful force to even a peacekeeping mission and try to find any loophole or caveat to avoid direct conflict with Russia.

The second part of NATO’s strength meanwhile lies in the practical realm. NATO is built around a US core, under US command, with allies integrated into this through regular joint training and exercises. It is this military structure and on the ground implementation, rather than NATO’s formal bodies, that turn the alliance from simply a list of members into an effective fighting force. Those exercises take place regularly and accustom the members of NATO to the ways of working together such that if a war ever did break out that required the full mobilisation of NATO, we know that it would be able to act as a single coherent unit and not a disparate collection of individual armies.

The reality is that the EU/Europe has nothing to match this. Of course many European armed forces are used to working together, but in conjunction with the United States, invariably with the latter taking the leading role. Training and shared military culture based on purely European forces carrying out joint operations is much more limited.

It is good that European governments are increasingly recognising the challenge of a fraying NATO, but discussions on any alternative will go down a rabbit hole if they focus too much on legal structures and the question of which organisational umbrella to sit under. What is needed most of all is the learning and experience of fighting together, such that the reality would already be second nature, backed up by the political will to give the order to shoot to kill, accepting whatever consequences would follow. Without both of these, any European alternative or supplement to NATO will fail to match the original.