Abstract
On 25 June 2018, ministers from nine European countries met in Luxembourg to sign a Letter of Intent (LoI) on the development of the new European Intervention Initiative (EI2). The creation of the EI2 had been proposed nine months earlier by French President Emmanuel Macron in his ‘Initiative for Europe’ speech at Paris’s Sorbonne University. According to Macron, recent initiatives to boost the EU’s underdeveloped defence dimension needed to be supplemented with the EI2, which would help European countries ‘to better integrate’ their armed forces ‘at every stage’. However, the exact nature of the EI2 remained unclear until its launch, as did its relationship to existing structures and initiatives within the EU and its relationship to NATO. In public, senior French officials described it in vague terms, which raised more questions than answers. In October 2017, for example, French Minister of the Armed Forces Florence Parly said that the EI2 would be a ‘quick and operational process’ for putting together forces from different European countries if necessary. This paper analyses the development and purpose of the EI2, and examines just how valuable the initiative is likely to be. It also seeks to contribute to the embryonic but rapidly growing literature on the initiative, which has been spearheaded primarily by think-tankers.
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