Limited energy resources, EU member countries’ budget capabilities impaired by the financial and debt crisis, Brexit, or the migration crisis that is causing serious consequences, are but a few serious challenges that the Union is going to face within the short-term perspective. One ought not forget about the increasingly powerful and meaningful threats to the Project Europe: rampant terrorism, increasing military activity of Russia (including its actions in eastern Ukraine, Crimea, or on the Sea of Azov), as well as the ambivalent (to say the least) attitude of the current President of the USA towards NATO. Even these few challenges and threats ought to cause for an increase in the decisive and, later on, organizational effort for the purpose of transforming the EU into an entity that shall be able to counteract and react to them. The intention of the author of this article is to provide an attempt to answer the question whether the indicated process is actually taking place.

The European Economic Community/European Union was born as an economy-oriented organization, which was to facilitate rebuilding of the Old Continent after WWII through extensive cooperation, particularly in trade. However, the appetites of the state leaders were growing along the progress of the integration processes; the economic success was an argument for further integration of the European countries. Due to this, the organization was given the ability to make decisions and influence decision-makers at the national level in subsequent spheres that earlier were the sole prerogative of states. Still, for many years EU members determinedly guarded their competences regarding broadly understood security, predominantly defence. Successive attempts to accelerate integration in this area were not effective enough to develop a real common defence policy. One of the last initiatives, Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO), is supposed to help change this situation. It is therefore necessary to pose several questions: What is PESCO? What is EU members’ attitude towards developing this form of cooperation? What does this cooperation look like at the early implementation stages? What factors determine the involvement of the ‘old’ and ‘new’ EU member states? This article is an attempt to answer these questions.