Richard Whitman / Sep 2026
Photo: European Union, 2026
Ideas in European security can have a long shelf life. The European Security Council is a good example. The idea has been knocking around since the end of the cold war. German and French foreign ministers publicly proposed it in 2016 with Macron and Merkel also endorsing its creation, and think tanks have continued to produce detailed blueprints for it. For most of the decade that followed it sat on the shelf. This week it gained new political impetus. In her State of the Union address, Ursula von der Leyen said the Commission would set out its ideas for making a European Security Council a reality, with partners such as Canada, Norway, Ukraine and the United Kingdom.
This is welcome. It is also the point at which the idea is most vulnerable.
The case for a European Security Council (ESC) is straightforward. Europe’s principal security actors do not map onto the membership of any single organisation. NATO ties them to Washington, just as Washington is stepping back. The EU leaves out the UK, Norway, and Ukraine. The European Political Community gathers forty-odd states twice a year and produces atmospherics rather than decisions. The ad hoc coalitions that have multiplied since 2025, from Lancaster House to the Coalition of the Willing, have the right people in the room but no continuity. Each is convened afresh and negotiates its own terms.
Why should the idea succeed now when it stalled before? Earlier proposals foundered for three reasons. The American guarantee still felt dependable. Brexit was raw. No continent-wide emergency forced the question. All three conditions have changed. American retrenchment is now a demonstrated posture rather than a hypothesis. The UK–EU reset has made British participation expected rather than awkward. Russia’s war on Ukraine looks set to continue indefinitely. Most importantly, a functioning nucleus already exists: the Coalition of the Willing meets regularly at the leaders’ level. The task is not to invent an ESC but to consolidate what is already emerging.
This is why the Commission’s intervention needs careful handling. It matters because it signals that Brussels no longer sees such a body as a threat to the Union’s institutions. However, much of the ESC’s value could come from not being an EU body. Europe’s core security problem is less about how the Union makes decisions than about who sits inside it. Suppose the ESC turns out to be the European Council with guests, where non-EU partners are invited to endorse positions the 27 have already settled. London, Oslo, and Kyiv will then treat it as exactly that.
What would work? In a paper published this week by the Swedish Institute for European Policy Studies, I set out a design based on four features.
First, it should be a format rather than an institution. It would be launched by a political declaration rather than a treaty, with a lean secretariat and no legal personality.
Second, its core should be small, around seven to ten members. France, Germany, the UK, and Ukraine would be permanent anchors. Norway would have a seat, and rotating EU seats would ensure that Nordic-Baltic, Southern, and Central-Eastern voices are heard, and an EU institutional seat would represent the Union. Turkey would participate on an issue-by-issue basis.
Third, it should decide by “consensus minus one,” so that a single reluctant member can abstain without paralysing the rest.
Fourth, it should have clear output. These would include a standing joint threat assessment, agreed common positions that members carry into NATO and EU councils, a capability plan that gives existing instruments the direction they lack, and a protocol for crisis consultation among them. It would be a caucus, not a rival.
Von der Leyen’s version differs in one telling respect: Canada. The logic of including Canada is clear, since Ottawa is now one of Europe’s most willing partners. My proposal envisioned Canada, alongside the United States, to an annual expanded transatlantic session rather than giving it a permanent seat. The problem would be that the case for additional members sounds reasonable, but a council that keeps adding members becomes the European Political Community under a different name.
One proposal in the speech requires careful handling. The speech’s Emergency Security Protocol, a European equivalent of NATO’s Article 4, is an intra-EU mechanism and should not be conflated with the ESC.
For the UK, the lesson is not to wait for an invitation. The surest way to prevent the ESC from becoming a ‘Brussels’ creation is for the co-convenors of the Coalition of the Willing to shape it from the outset. A joint political declaration by Paris, Berlin, London, and the EU would give it the right ownership from day one.
Von der Leyen has made a bold gesture in supporting the creation of a European Security Council. Creativity is now needed in Europe’s capitals to give the idea impetus.
