The European Defence Union: An Article-by-Article Commentary

The European Defence Union has been under construction for several years within a worrying security context. It depends fundamentally on EU law: i.e. both the rules laid down by the Member States in the Treaties and those adopted by the European institutions, as the European Union’s approach is no longer limited to the highly intergovernmental Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). Instead, it encompasses and goes beyond the CSDP, extending to the so-called ‘Community’ or ‘supranational’ sphere, from which defence was long excluded.

The European Defence Union transcends the distinction between the supranational and intergovernmental spheres, and therefore has to be understood not only from the perspective of the Treaty on European Union (TEU), which governs the CSDP, but also from the perspective of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) and the Treaty establishing the European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC Treaty, known as the Euratom Treaty). This publication has three parts, each dedicated to one of these Treaties. The analyses focus both on the provisions of these Treaties and the various secondary acts that apply to defence, the most recent being the EU Regulation establishing the European Defence Industry Programme (EDIP). Taken together, these shape the contours of the European Defence Union.

At a time when security issues are once again a major concern for European citizens and their governments, and when the question of the emergence of genuine common defence – an existential issue for Europe – is being raised, this publication is aimed at practitioners, policy-makers (both national and European), defence experts and academics (students, PhD students, teachers and researchers). They will find here a novel, law-based approach to examining European defence.