CIAO DATE: 10/2013
May 2011
EGMONT – The Royal Institute for International Relations
On 31 March 2010 the ten Member States of Western European Union (WEU) announced that the last organs, staffs and activities of that institution would be laid to rest by 30 June 2011. Having resiled from the Modified Brussels Treaty (MBT) of 1954 which created WEU as a successor to the Western Union of 1948, these nations are now working to dispose of the staff, premises and archives at WEU’s Brussels offices and its Parliamentary Assembly in Paris. Little public interest has been shown in these moves, perhaps because WEU’s operational and political work had already been taken over by the European Union (EU), in the frame of its new European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), at the end of 1999. Why get rid of WEU’s last vestiges precisely now? This study addresses the question, and seeks to assess WEU’s achievements and legacies by reviewing its 57-year career from cradle to grave. Modest though WEU’s own role may have been, it has been intimately linked with one of the great policy challenges of the post-war world: the search for a distinct and effective form of ‘European defence’. The original Brussels Treaty of 1948, creating a permanent guaranteed defence relationship between the UK, France and the Benelux countries, was a vital step towards the realization of the North Atlantic Alliance. When the attempt to create an even more deeply integrated European Defence Community including Germany broke down in 1954, WEU was created as a self-confessed pis aller. Its treaty, the MBT, still contained absolute mutual guarantees but from the start WEU left the operative work of defence to NATO. It fulfilled useful tasks in cementing the post-war order, but then sank into slumber until the mid-1980s. When first reawakened, it became a talking-shop for a core group of West Europeans, helping them cope with the trans-Atlantic strains of the time and developing some sense of Europe’s shared and distinct security interests.
Resource link: Death of an Institution. The end for Western European Union, a future for European defence? [PDF] - 688K