Things I learned from this Nicolas Gros-Verheyde post on the Airbus A400M:
– Delivery of the large military transport aircraft could be further delayed by 3-4 years.
– The EU already has an institution, the Western European Union (WEU), that could theoretically function as the kind of “super-EU” I’ve mentioned previously, as a way of bypassing the institutional weakness of the enlarged Union.
That weakness was further exacerbated by the fall, yesterday, of the government of Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek in the middle of the Czech Republic’s EU presidency, damaging the Czech EU presidency’s already fragile credibility, and further threatening the ratification hopes of the Lisbon Treaty.
The WEU was primarily a precursor institution to EU defense (PESD), and has essentially been dormant since 1999. Something tells me we might start hearing more about it should the faultline between Eastern and Western Europe continue to undermine the Union’s coherence.