Following a two day summit in Tolouse, French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder agreed to push for a new European rapid reaction force that would provide the European Union the "autonomous means" to deal with crises in the "new strategic environment" that exists after the Kosovo conflict. The French and German leaders reportedly discussed how to build on last year’s Anglo-French St. Malo defense agreement, which provides for European military action in coordination with NATO but independent of the U.S., and the five nation Eurocorps, established in 1993. The two leaders also called for the earliest possible political solution to the crisis in Kosovo, and Chirac insisted that there could be no peace deal that did not involve agreement with Moscow.

While Schroeder and Chirac met in Tolouse, European defense ministers met informally on Friday in Bonn, at the invitation of German Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping, to discuss both the Kosovo conflict and plans to integrate the Western European Union as a security arm of the European Union by the end of 2000. The defense ministers are reportedly hurrying to hammer out the details of an integration plan before a June 3 European Union summit in cologne. According to Scharping, the defense ministers also discussed the need for a diplomatic resolution of the Kosovo crisis, noting that there was a consensus against escalation to a ground war.

The force obviously driving these meetings is the current gridlock of the Kosovo conflict. The European members of NATO have increasingly shown their displeasure at U.S. dominance of the planning and negotiations up until this point. In a broader sense, they see the current state of the conflict as a prime example of how U.S. political and strategic objectives have become too divergent from their own objectives in the aftermath of the Cold War. As NATO’s primary defensive mission became less immediate and clear, NATO members sought to develop a proactive role for the organization. However, in the absence of Russian tanks poised to pour through the Fulda Gap, Washington and Europe’s political and strategic concerns no longer necessarily coincide. In fact, in Kosovo – the first major experiment in a proactive NATO – Europe now sees U.S. leadership as contributing only to gridlock. If the U.S. is the problem, then the solution must be for Europe to create a military arm that could act independently of U.S. leadership.

However, while the divergent interests of the U.S. and Europe may be irritating European leaders in the current conflict, it also foreshadows the ineffectiveness of any future European military body. Leaving aside the technical weaknesses of Europe in areas such as airlift and satellite intelligence, the main problem facing an independent European force, is that it would fall prey to exactly the same divisions that have undermined NATO’s ability to act decisively in an offensive situation. NATO was designed to provide for the common defense, a simple goal easily agreed on. NATO’s problem is not U.S. intransigence and erratic decision-making, it is the fact that, when acting offensively, it must build up a political consensus for every tactical goal, plan and method of implementation. Without the United States, the consensus problem will remain, with just one less position to reconcile and a great deal less resources to implement any eventual compromise. Europe does not speak with one voice, and WEU attempts to act proactively will inevitably suffer from the same difficulties that have plagued European integration.