After Ashdown was refused the opportunity to continue the family tradition in Afghanistan, he went to work as Javier Solana's right-hand man as Director-General for External and Politico-Military Affairs at the General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union, a position he holds today.
Cooper is also considered to have been instrumental in the creation of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), originally introduced as the European Security and Defence Identity at the NATO foreign ministers meeting in Berlin in 1996 where it was agreed that the Western European Union (WEU) would oversee its creation within NATO structures.
The ESDP is now effectively run by the High Representative of the Common Foreign and Security Policy of the European Union, Javier Solana, whose chief lieutenant Cooper is. The ESDP was first tested on the ground in Macedonia in 2003 when it took over for NATO and has remained the EU's main defense and military arm.
Macedonia, the second victim of NATO's 1999 war against Yugoslavia, was the prototype for the EU supplanting NATO occupation and interdiction forces, with the former's EUFOR Concordia succeeding the latter's Operation Allied Harmony.
In 2004 NATO again handed over a protectorate, Bosnia, under its Stabilisation Force (SFOR) to the EU and its EUFOR Althea operation.
In 2008 NATO started transitioning its Kosovo Force (KFOR) command, alone authorized under UN Resolution 1244, to the European Union's Rule of Law Mission (EULEX), drawing harsh condemnation from Serbia and Russia.
In November of last year NATO turned over the far-reaching naval interdiction EUNAVFOR Operation Atalanta in the Gulf of Aden and the Horn of Africa to the EU, which was described as "something entirely new for the EU because it is taking place far from Europe itself....Operation Atlanta is an ambitious project. The area of sea to be policed is enormous...."
(Radio Netherlands, November 21, 2008)
The joint EU-NATO "civilizing mission" to "ungoverned spaces" in the pre-modern and modern world is constantly expanding.
Earlier this month Giampaolo Di Paola, Chairman of NATO's Military Committee, enlarged on the triadic EU-NATO-US worldwide mission by heralding the "need for a new form of world governance in which NATO, the EU, and other major international organisations have a part to play."
(ADN Kronos International [Italy], February 13, 2009)
What sort of world governance is meant and who the intended and self-appointed guardians of it are is worth an examination in some depth.
Officials in Brussels and Washington routinely invoke the term international community when it suits their purposes - and just as regularly ignore the wishes of the true community of nations when it doesn't.
The combined population of all 27 EU member states is under 500,000,000, less than a twelfth of the human race.
If the numbers from NATO states that aren't in the EU - the US whose 300,000,000 occupants match 40% of the EU number, Canada, Norway and Iceland - are added, the total is still barely over 800,000,000, less than one-seventh of humanity.
The main EU and European NATO states are the former colonial powers - Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands and Denmark and the second, 'place in the sun' contingent of Belgium, Italy and Germany.
Starting with trade missions that soon became monopolies, shortly afterward including military outposts and eventually complete economic, political and military subjugation, the major Western powers carved out broad expanses of territory in Asia, Africa, North and Central and South America and all of Oceania as their respective domains and spheres of influence.
Many NATO and EU states still retain the vestiges of that scramble for the world, especially overseas and other non-contiguous, mainly island, possessions originally seized from indigeneous inhabitants.
Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Denmark and the United States are in that category.
