Common Defense, a Failed Legacy

The day 17 March 2025 will be one that is remembered. Hemingway died. No, not the Hemingway you read in school. John "Paddy" Hemingway was the last veteran of the Royal Air Force who survived the Battle of Britain. For a brief period between 1940 and 1941, the United Kingdom was the only major power standing against Hitler as Nazism ran amok on the continent. Pilots like Paddy soon became an eternal symbol of resistance against evil. Over the next three years, British and American air power devastated Germany as their armies liberated Western Europe. Liberators soon turned into guarantors of peace and freedom in the West fearful of Soviet military aggression. 

The Anglo-American security umbrella became a permanent feature of the European defense architecture in the North-Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) from 1949. NATO is known as a collective defense pact, but it was the direct legacy of the Anglo-American liberation of Western Europe. The proverbial Article 5 calling an attack against one an attack against all has remained, in fact, mainly a commitment of the United Kingdom and the United States to defend Europe. Italian or (West) German troops were not expected to come to the rescue of others; post-war constitutions even prohibited their deployment abroad. NATO countries on the frontlines of the Cold War, from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean (after the accession of Greece and Turkey in 1952) stood guard on their own borders with conscript armies and with the backstop of American and British air and ground forces and, crucially, nuclear deterrence. During the building of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis, 400,000 US soldiers were stationed in Europe. The British Army of the Rhine, formed only three months after the end of World War II, over the next four decades maintained a size equal to the total UK land army of today. NATO was not a truly collective enterprise, no real standing together. The defense burden remained large while the Soviet military threat persisted, but burden sharing was never equal. Most member states spent between three and 4% of their GDP on defense, but the three thermo-nuclear powers, France, the UK and the US, spent twice as much. The key to common European defense, namely the capacity and willingness to come to the rescue of others by forces deployed abroad remained alien to most European countries. “Together, we stand with Ukraine.” Yes, but we are offended if asked to send troops into harm’s way even as peacekeepers. Countries on the new frontlines of the old-new Cold War are hastily rearming, for their own protection, while expecting London and Paris to “do the heavy lifting” and Washington to “provide the backstop.” Not much has changed in 80 years. 

Contemporary public opinion echoes these sentiments. A recent survey by the Monitoring Democracy Observatory of the Department of Social and Political Sciences at Bocconi University suggests that while the majority of Italians (73.4%) call for stronger common European defense, most believe that global military powers are still the guarantors of stability. Only 17% recognize the role of multilateral institutions like the EU and the UN as paramount. “The free world needs a new leader,” EU foreign-policy chief Kaja Kallas recently declared, but history is no good omen for pan-European defense outside the Anglo-American security umbrella. France, frustrated with its junior role in the post-war Western alliance, proposed an autonomous European Defence Community with the armed forces of the Benelux states, France, Germany and Italy. The Treaty of Paris was signed on 27 May 1952, but its ratification was thwarted by the French National Assembly on 30 August 1954. With the death of Stalin and the end of the Korean War, the danger of war in Europe was less imminent. Some saw the treaty as a threat to national sovereignty, others lamented the exclusion of Britain. Eventually, France agreed to the remilitarization of Germany within NATO while the number of American troops on French soil doubled. Repeated plans for the creation of a rapid-reaction force within the European Union since the 1990s have suffered a similar fate. 

As the menace of Russian aggression re-emerged, so did calls for stronger European defense. But so far calls remain calls and we await actions. Together, we stand — but we only stand a chance if our British and American friends remain keen on defending us, so it seems. Thank you, Paddy!