EUobserver, EU crisis management operations should be approved by all member states, according to the Swedish and Finnish foreign ministers.
In a joint article in Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, they reject the Constitution's proposal that a limited number of member states should be empowered to take on crisis handling operations on their own.
The two ministers – Laila Freivalds (Sweden) and Erkki Tuomioja (Finland) write that they are “prepared to study proposals to strenghten the EU common foreign and security policy”.
But they go on to reject the proposal of the Convention that a limited number of member states should be allowed to conduct complex crisis operations, as this would present a risk of “causing disruption within the Union on issues of foreign policy”.
The two foreign ministers declare that they are “positive to the fact that the new Constitutional Treaty, more clearly than today, will signal that European security and defence policy will include a very broad spectrum of peace-promoting activities”.
“We want the EU to continue to develop as a political alliance with reciprocal solidarity, not as a military alliance with binding defence guarantees”, they write, adding that they support the idea of “a new solidarity clause on a voluntary basis, which will at the same time express the political solidarity that already exists today between the EU members”.
The clause applies in case of a terrorist attack or a similar catastrophe in one of the EU member states.
Sweden and Finland are not members of NATO.
