Europe needs a new military structure to coordinate its combined operations, five EU nations said in a joint communique after a meeting in Paris on November 15. The foreign and defense ministers of France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain published the document to “confirm our readiness to foster an ambitious European policy in the field of security and defense.”
Poland’s foreign minister Radek Sikorski was surprisingly clear on his reasons for wanting a military. “If the EU wants to become a superpower, and Poland supports this, then we must have the capability to exert influence in our neighborhood. … Sometimes we must use force to back our diplomacy,” he said, according to the EU Observer.
