An EU intervention force

The Christian Democrat Dutch foreign minister Maxime Verhagen calls in the national daily De Volkskrant for the establishment of a permanent European intervention force to ensure a better response to crises: "The need to supplement military power with civil power is great. For an integrated approach in which defence, development aid cooperation and diplomacy reinforce each other you need judges, police officers, diplomats and development experts working together. Yet it's not easy to implement this soft power, there are many coordination problems. ... Much is to be gained by making this process as efficient as possible. ... Therefore I call for a national reserve of experts, with a good infrastructure and financed by a clear national mandate, which can be quickly mobilised for European operations. The quality of our missions must improve if we want to leave the 'triumph of improvisation', as critics of European missions recently called it, behind us."

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