Over the past year, it has become increasingly common to bump into men in military uniform crossing the Rond-Point Schuman, a traffic island which serves as the European Union's spiritual heart. Their presence in Brussels testifies to the EU'S efforts to develop a military identity, to bolster its legal and economic power. For years the gibe has been that the Union is an "economic giant and a political dwarf". Since 1999, however, the EU has been committed to building a common defence policy—with some military clout to back it up. An EU military arm, it is argued, would foster Europe's "ever closer union" and offer a pragmatic response to the possibility that the United States may soon demand that Europeans do more of the security jobs on their own continent, for example in the Balkans.
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