France will reportedly launch a deployable European military crisis force outside of existing European Union efforts. French defence ministry sources said on April 5 that Paris has been in touch with a dozen countries, including Germany, the Netherlands, Britain and Denmark, about the initiative, holding a working group to outline the idea in March.
“It would not be within the European Union and would allow countries outside it, like Britain, to be part of it,” one source was quoted as saying by the Reuters news agency.
The sources declined to name the countries that would be at a launch ceremony in Paris in June, but said it did not mean countries could not join it a later stage.
According to Reuters, the idea aims to bring together European countries with a military capacity and political desire to collaborate on planning, carry out joint analyses of emerging crises and to react to them quickly.
The source said its aim was to try to anticipate future crises, be it military conflicts or humanitarian such as the recent storms that hit the Caribbean, and avoid situations whereby one country would be forced to intervene alone, as France did in Central African Republic and Mali.
French President Emmanuel Macron has broadly outlined the idea to have a rapid European intervention force by the end of the decade.
