The concept of a European army -separate and entirely apart from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization-has been in and out of the news for at least 10 years.

A small conference on a standing army for Europe occurred five years ago at Weimar in former East Germany. Reports Britain's The Independent: "In the town of Weimar in 1991 the foreign ministers of Germany, France and Poland gathered to inaugurate a new alliance. Their meeting went almost unnoticed by the rest of Europe, but the foreign ministers of the three countries have continued to meet annually to devise a common security concept."

Some British observers now talk of a new axis, an alignment of France, Germany and Poland. Britain has not been included in annual discussions of the alliance. Margaret Thatcher, former British prime minister, consistently opposed a common European army that would be an essential component in a European federal state with its own foreign and defense policy.

The idea of some Euro-federalists is to merge all the national sovereign armies (including Britain's) into a single supranational force with the German heartland at its natural geographic center. But, as the Independent article pointed out, "France, Germany and Poland have repeatedly been the area for European aggression and war."

Memories of this area tend to be of armed conflict. Could some of these events in central Europe eventually result in history repeating itself? (Sources: The Independent, The Sunday Telegraph.)