Western European Union to close down as EU takes over military role

Apr 1, 2010, 11:51 GMT

   Brussels - The Western European Union (WEU), a European military cooperation alliance of the postwar era, is to close down by mid-2011 as its role has been largely superseded by the European Union, EU diplomats said Thursday.

   The decision was taken late Wednesday by the 10 participating nations of the WEU, which are also EU and NATO members - Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Britain.

   'The WEU has ... accomplished its historical role. In this light we ... have collectively decided to terminate the Treaty, thereby effectively closing the organization,' a joint statement said.

   Founded in 1954 in the wake of France's refusal to create a European Defence Community with a single European army, the WEU was meant to ensure mutual assistance to member states under aggression - reinforcing already existing commitments under the NATO umbrella.

   But WEU member states stressed that with the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, which contains a mutual assistance clause for EU states under military aggression, 'a new phase in European security and defence begins.'

   They also noted that the EU had taken on another function of the WEU, that of organizing military and police missions in crisis areas.

   The WEU had been active in the late 1980s in the Persian Gulf, sending a mission to clear mines laid in the context of the Iraq-Iran war, and in the 1990s in the Balkans, contributing to policing of the military embargo that had been placed on former Yugoslavia countries.

   Since 2000, with the creation of the common security and defence policy, the EU has managed these types of missions directly, sending soldiers and policemen in Kosovo, Bosnia, Middle East, Georgia and off the coast of Somalia.

   'Dissolving the (Western European) Union was absolutely the right decision to avoid a duplication of tasks,' an EU diplomat told the German Press Agency dpa.

   The WEU should be wound up 'preferably by the end of June 2011,' its member states declared, after a 'social plan' is enacted to settle retirement and severance pay issues of its current 65 employees, based in Brussels and Paris.