After nine months of meetings behind closed doors, during which even the parliaments of the six nations involved didn't know what was going on, the French Foreign Ministry last week announced the tentative size and shape of the new European army. It had been a French idea in the first place; unwilling to let the Germans have an army of their own, the
French had proposed, and Britain and the U.S. somewhat reluctantly accepted, the notion of a multilingual, continental army, to serve alongside U.S. and British troops in SHAPE. By the end of 1953, said the French last week, this Army will have some 1,000,000 men. About half, or 590,000 of them, will be organized into combat divisions, the rest will be service and support troops. The divisional breakdown: 14 French, 12 German, 12 Italian, and five from Benelux (Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg).
All of Germany's troops would be part of this international army, but France proposes to keep out six of her own divisions, principally for use in Indo-China. Each division will be composed of officers and men from one nation only. Internationalism will begin at the corps level. Running the whole show will be a European army headquarters, responsible to Dwight Eisenhower's SHAPE staff on the same level as NATO's separate British and American army components. European divisions will number only 13,000 men, instead of 18,000 as in a U.S. division. This satisfies a French desire to keep German units small; it is also argued that smaller divisions are better suited to European conditions.
Militarily, such a machine, though cumbersome, should work (in Korea, 17 nations are welded together without too much trouble). The big obstacle lies in deciding how and by whom this new army should be financed and equipped, a problem which is sure to bog down in wrangling assemblies, difficult currency barriers and widely variant tax systems.
Political direction of the army, as now proposed, will probably lead to as much international squabbling as its financing. It will presumably rest with a cumbersome combination of high commission, general assembly and council of ministers. If, as its backers hope, the European army is to be a strong first move towards unifying Europe politically, the tail will have to wag the dog mightily to do so.