Europe's leaders have stuck by plans to develop their own joint defence forces while taking care to reassure Washington. At the end of two days of summit talks, they underscored that NATO has been the basis of 'our collective defence for 50 years and should remain so.'

Prime Minister Berlusconi said the EU members were unanimous in their conviction that the EU needed to be equipped with an appropriate security and defence policy. British premier Tony Blair spoke to allay strong American doubts, insisting he would not let European integration plans undermine the Atlantic alliance.

"Let me make one thing very clear to you: I will never put at risk NATO." Danuta Hübner is foreign minister of NATO member Poland, by far the largest of the future EU members. She is tipped to be Warsaw's commissioner in Brussels.

"We should see European defence as an extremely important challenge - task - to develop, but not (by) creating parallel structures, parallel systems which could undercut what we have today: NATO."

France, Germany, Luxembourg and Belgium agreed in April to set up a military planning headquarters independent of NATO for EU crisis management missions.

Belgian premier Guy Verhofstadt said the four countries behind the initiative did not intend to create any competition with NATO. It would be for autonomous EU operations, which would need their own GHQ. For the moment, how to set that up was still being discussed.

[Source: Euronews.net]

That's rich coming from Blair - how does he square that statement with the massive defence budget cuts that have just been announced?

And this comment:
""We should see European defence as an extremely important challenge - task - to develop, but not (by) creating parallel structures, parallel systems which could undercut what we have today: NATO."
is just plain daft when one considers that not all current and future EU member states are members of NATO, and not all members of NATO are part of the EU...

I really don't get the worries about an EU army and NATO. Heck rewrite the treaty to say EU instead of the specific countries. And since the EU seems to be fond of exceptions the neutral countries do not need to worry. ;) After all an EU army won't be one homogenous combat unit.