Year XXXIX, Number 1, March 2026

Pier Virgilio Dastoli

President of Italian European Movement.

To address Europe’s security needs, it is essential to establish strategic autonomy and a common defense framework, supported by a supranational budget and democratic oversight.

September 4, 2025

On August 19, 1954, Alcide De Gasperi passed away, and many commentators wrote that his death marked the inevitable end of the European Defense Community (EDC). The EDC’s original purpose was to enable the reconstitution of the armed forces of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) within the framework of a European Political Community (EPC). The alternative would have been its reconstitution under American hegemony, opposed to the Soviet empire. The French proposal in the Pleven Plan, announced in October 1950, was not aimed at creating a European pillar of NATO, nor at planning a war against the Soviet Union. Rather, it sought to lay the foundations of what we now call “European strategic autonomy,” which at the time meant creating an integrated European army to replace national armies – an idea initially met with skepticism, if not outright hostility, by the United States.

However, the EDC could only have been viable within a European political and democratic framework – namely, a genuine federal European Political Community, as proposed by Alcide De Gasperi on Altiero Spinelli’s advice through Article 38 of the EDC Treaty draft.

The EDC collapsed, along with the EPC, due to the short-sightedness of French nationalist parties on both the right and the left, and also because of Italy’s apathy in postponing treaty ratification.

Today, discussions focus on security guarantees for Ukraine – primarily strengthening its armed forces and, secondly, ensuring European security through naval, land, and air forces ready to respond (using UN terminology, for peace enforcement missions under Chapter VII of the UN Charter) should Russia fail to honor peace agreements – not merely after a ceasefire, but following a fair and lasting peace settlement. These guarantees must also extend to neighboring independent and sovereign states.

Since NATO cannot provide such European security guarantees, and because these concerns primarily involve European interests, the coalition of thirty-five “Willing States” formed last March at the initiative of Macron and Starmer goes far beyond the EU framework. It is therefore worth considering the model of a new EDC, created in parallel with the European Union – similar to the Schengen Agreements, negotiated and concluded outside the then European Communities between 1985 and 1999 to abolish internal border controls. Defense, deterrence, and peace enforcement activities must be established with the essential condition that military decisions are not left to chiefs of staff but entrusted to a supranational political body.

These agreements, which also involved non-EU states and which we celebrate today on their fortieth anniversary, served as a genuine laboratory that led to the creation of the “Schengen acquis,” later incorporated into EU law through the Amsterdam Treaty of 1999. A similar path was followed years later with police cooperation under the Prüm Agreements and, most notably, with the Treaty on the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), which remains outside the EU framework but was deemed compatible with the Treaties by the Court of Justice (Pringle judgment).

The key element in creating a defense laboratory negotiated in parallel with the EU is recognizing its instrumental role in achieving the objectives of Article 21 TEU within the framework of a Common Foreign and Security Policy, ultimately leading to a common defense. In this perspective, it would be entirely logical to foresee the use, in appropriate forms, of EU institutions – including the Court of Justice – and to provide for an article analogous to “42.7” for mutual solidarity, consistent with Article 51 of the UN Charter, similar to the provision in the Treaty on European Union, while also incorporating contributions from third countries such as the United Kingdom and Ukraine.

Defense, deterrence, and peace enforcement activities should be binding under the new EDC, with the indispensable corollary that military decisions cannot rest solely with chiefs of staff but must be subject to a European democratic political authority, supported by a supranational budget – not a mere sum of national budgets – thus overcoming unanimity constraints within a system of shared sovereignty.

The new EDC/EPC could initially be entrusted to a High Authority, as was the case with the ECSC, whose head would report regularly to the European Parliament and its Defense Committee, just as the Eurogroup President and the ECB President periodically and transparently engage with the Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee, involving delegations from national parliaments.

Since the European defense dimension must be accompanied – or better, preceded – by a strong signal of European commitment to peace, justice, and fundamental rights, the European Union and its three political institutions (European Parliament, European Council, and European Commission) should revive the proposal presented by President Sergio Mattarella to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe: convening a second Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe through a joint interinstitutional declaration, fifty years after the signing of the Helsinki Final Act.