What would European defence look like if NATO were to disband or become ineffective? In the latest paper in CEPR’s Europe 2050 series, Daniel Fiott (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) treats this as a serious thought experiment rather than a remote contingency. His starting point is that the EU, in its current form, is not an obvious substitute for NATO: it lacks integrated command structures, strategic leadership, military capabilities and a nuclear deterrent, and excludes key military powers such as the UK and Türkiye. A “Europeanised NATO” without the US would face equally formidable political challenges, since no single European state possesses the military weight or political legitimacy to replace American leadership. Fiott’s central argument is that the answer lies in an underused and underappreciated instrument already embedded in EU law: Article 42(7) TEU, the Mutual Defence Clause. Rather than a symbolic commitment invoked once, by France in 2015, it is a binding obligation capable of serving as the legal foundation for a genuine European collective defence system, provided it is given the institutional substance it currently lacks: common defence planning, capability targets, contingency plans, command arrangements and a force generation process. None of this requires treaty revision. What it requires is an avant-garde of willing member states prepared to begin that planning work within the existing EU legal order, treating the Clause not as a reactive fallback but as the organising principle of European defence to 2050.
Centre for Economic Policy Research
Daniel Fiott 