The Iraqi conflict and the incapacity of the European Union to express a single position both at the political and the military level have re-ignited the debate on the need to equip the EU with a genuine common foreign and security policy. Alongside this, or perhaps preparatory to it, the European Policy of Security and Defence (EPSD) could be the right means to convince the governments of the Fifteen and of the future Twenty-Seven to coordinate their own foreign policy, also with a view to redefining relations between EU, NATO and the USA. In fact the EPSD already exists in EU legislation. The first attempt to develop a joint European defence system was made in 1954 with the proposal to establish the European Community of Defence; but the opposition of General De Gaulle led to the failure of the project, the reason why the issue remained on the back burner throughout the Cold War. The situation changed with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the impoverishment of the role of NATO, the organization which all or almost all the satellite countries of the former USSR and members of the dissolved Warsaw Pact have progressively joined or entered into association with. Following the initial plan of the Treaty of Maastricht (1992) progressively to incorporate a common defence policy in common foreign and security policy, the incorporation in the EU of the Union of Western Europe – hitherto considered the “armed wing” of the European Communities – led to the provisions of the Treaty of Amsterdam (1997) and Nice (2000) and subsequent European Councils that have defined the current EPSD.
