European Security: the Fracture

In late 2019, Jean-François Drevet sounded the alarm in this magazine (issue 433) on the risks the European Union was running by not building a genuine common defence capacity. Facing a variety of tensions with Turkey and a weakening of the role of the Atlantic Alliance against a background of US disengagement, the EU can no longer rely on the ‘soft power’ that built its reputation. On the one hand, that policy, based on the defence and dissemination of European values (democracy, human rights), is no longer systematically applied; on the other, by responding too little to the various threats emerging on its Eastern and Southern flanks, the Union runs the risk of losing credibility at the geopolitical level. Hence this call from Jean-François Drevet to establish a European system of security and defence that meets current challenges, a system able to incorporate an operational military element: a hard power to complement the soft.