The year 1999, shows an EU trying to form its own military.

European bloc reels from fraud crisis
European Union to form a military force
Kosovo aid can't ignore Serbia, Russia says


• 3/17/1999 - European bloc reels from fraud crisis by The Associated Press.
      Brussels, Belgium -- European leaders scrambled to plug the hole left by the abrupt resignation of the entire 20-member European Commission after a report on fraud and sloppy management.
      The departure of the European Union's executive body plunged the bloc into a crisis days before a summit to overhaul union finances.
      German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, whose country currently holds the union presidency, flew to Brussels to talk with outgoing Commission President Jacques Santer.
      "We have a very competent parliament, a council and presidency," Schroeder said.    "Europe is not without leadership."
      Santer said he and the 19 other commissioners will stay on until successors are appointed.    Britain, Belgium and other members said they would reappoint commissioners untainted by criticism in the report.    The investigation found no evidence any commissioner personally engaged in fraudulent activities, but said they failed to crack down on subordinates.
      One who seems certain not to be around is former French Prime Minister Edith Cresson, the research commissioner who was the prime target of accusations of cronyism and mismanagement over several years in the report.
      The resignations were hailed by governments that hoped they would lead to reform.
• 6/4/1999 - European Union to form a military force by Craig R. Whitney, The New York Times.
      Cologne, Germany -- The leaders of 15 European countries decided to make the European Union a military power for the first time in its 42-year history, with command headquarters, staffs and forces of its own for peacekeeping and peacekeeping missions in future crises like those in Kosovo or Bosnia.
      Long an economic giant, the European Union has a common currency, the euro, in 11 countries.    But when it comes to foreign and defense policy, Europe does not even have a telephone number, as Henry Kissinger observed.    All that will change by the end of 2000, the 15 leaders vowed a 60,000 strong, five-nation Eurocorps based in Strasbourg, France, with a human voice behind it.    That could be Javier Solana of Spain, now secretary general of NATO, whose candidacy for the job was on the leader's agenda.
      "The union must have the capacity for autonomous action, backed up by credible military forces, the means to decide to use them, and a readiness to do so, in order to respond to international crises without prejudice to actions by NATO," the European leaders declared.
      President Jacques Chirac of France and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain claimed neither in Bosnia nor Kosovo where European countries, whose total armed forces exceed those of the United States in size, could not project military power enough to halt the violence.    All 15 leaders agreed to absorb the functions of a 10-nation Western European Union, a long-dormant European defense alliance founded a year before NATO in 1948.
      All 10 members of the WEU -- Britain, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Germany and Greece -- already belong to both NATO and the European Union.    Denmark does, too, but only has observer status in the smaller European defense organization, as do four other European Union members, Austria, Ireland, Finland and Sweden, which are neutral or nonaligned and do not belong to NATO.
      With Germany's unification in 1990, the Treaty of European Union, negotiated at the end of 1991, committed the Europeans to a common currency and a common foreign and security policy and defense policy, building on the common market they created in 1957.    They reaffirmed those aspirations in another treaty signed in 1997, and succeeded in launching the euro at the start of this year.
      The recent issue was spurred when Americans sent in armed forces to help them in Bosnia in 1995, thus finding a need that Europe should be taken more seriously on the world stage.    They are also concerned that the United States has only 100,000 troops in Europe, and that influence may not always be there.
  
• 6/20/1999 - Kosovo aid can't ignore Serbia, Russia says - U.S., allies oppose Milosevic getting reconstruction funds - by The Boston Globe.
      Cologne, Germany -- Russia, seeking to protect Slobodan Milosevic's regime, blocked world leaders from completeing a multi billion-dollar Kosovo rebuilding plan that would have excluded aid to a Serbia under Milosevic's control.    The United States and its allies do not want to give reconstruction money to states strained and damaged during NATO's bombing campaign such as Belgrade as long as Milosevic remains president of Yugoslavia.
      Because of the timing of this year's summit of seven leading industrialized nations and Russia, known as the Group of 8, the Kosovo issue has dominated the talks, in that the conduct of one man should not penalize 10 million Serbs.
  
  

Last updated January 31, 2004.