The Western European Union (WEU; French: Union de l'Europe occidentale, UEO) was an international organisation tasked with implementing the Modified Treaty of Brussels (1954), an amended version of the original 1948 Treaty of Brussels. The WEU was established by seven Western European nations during the Cold War.
Since the end of the Cold War, WEU tasks and institutions have been transferred to the Common Security and Defence Policy which is being framed for the geographically larger and more comprehensive European Union. This process was completed in 2009, when a solidarity clause between the member states of the European Union which was similar (but not identical) to the WEU's mutual defense clause, entered into force with the Treaty of Lisbon. The states party to the Modified Treaty of Brussels consequently decided to terminate that treaty on 31 March 2010, with all the remaining WEU's activities to be ceased within 15 months. On 30 June 2011 the WEU was officially declared defunct.
Read more about Western European Union: Organisation, Participating States
Famous quotes containing the words western, european and/or union:
“The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one’s own growing inner self.... The mind’s dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality.”
—Harold Bloom (b. 1930)
“We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“The man whose whole activity is diverted to inner meditation becomes insensible to all his surroundings. If he loves, it is not to give himself, to blend in fecund union with another being, but to meditate on his love. His passions are mere appearances, being sterile. They are dissipated in futile imaginings, producing nothing external to themselves.”
—Emile Durkheim (1858–1917)