1 THE EUROPEAN UNION’S GLOBAL ROLE Ben Tonra 1 Introduction The end of the twentieth century witnessed yet another turning point in the development of the EU’s global role. The long-standing gulf between Atlantic and Continental -centred models of European security was tentatively bridged. The United Kingdom, as the pre-eminent Atlanticist power in Europe, had long insisted that European and transatlantic security was a seamless whole that would be weakened by any self-conscious effort to define European security outside the context of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation alliance. French policy makers, by contrast, insisted that while the Alliance was crucial, Europe had to provide for its own security and then establish a true Atlantic partnership with the United States, a partnership predicated upon equality. The December 1998 Anglo-French summit at St Malo did not, perhaps, provide for a full reconciliation of these positions but it did converge upon at least one common point; that the EU needed to develop a military capacity to sustain a coherent, effective and credible European foreign and security policy (Howarth, 2000; M. Smith, 2001). This consensus led directly toward a series of EU summit agreements first outlining and then giving substance to the creation of a European Security and 1 Thanks to colleagues of the EU Commission funded FORNET academic research network on EU foreign policy (www.fornet.info ) for their incisive comments on an early draft of this chapter which was presented as a paper to their Working Group on Theories and Approaches to the CFSP at the London School of Economics and Political Science.