Brussels, January 2003 - Crisis in Moldova as regime crumbles. Rioting in the streets, civil war threatens. Thousands of refugees on move westwards. Humanitarian disaster looms. Isolationist US Congress says "it's none of our business". Following UN appeal, EU prepares to intervene with rapid reaction force. Irish troops to join first wave . . .

It could well happen. In Helsinki two months ago, EU leaders agreed that by 2003 they should be able to deploy rapidly a 60,000-strong peacekeeping force drawn from member-state armies. It should be sustainable for a year. To give effect to that decision, the member-states have moved with unusual rapidity to establish new structures in Brussels and to give the Union an embryonic military staff. Negotiations will begin soon with NATO about borrowing aircraft and other equipment.

In the EU capitals, ministers for defence are being asked to earmark substantial contingents for potential deployment in such a force.

For Ireland, as with other memberstates, that will mean a very substantial commitment. Currently, close on 9 per cent of the Defence Forces are on duty abroad at any one time. To sustain long-term operations, up to three times that number will have to be available and trained to function effectively in a multinational context. Their equipment and communication systems will need to be inter-operable, their command and control capable of being integrated into international structures.

The co-ordination of such changes, the establishment of a common doctrine and the drawing up of rules of engagement will have to be part of the planning process for Partnership for Peace.

Such rapid EU developments are proof to the neutrality lobby of the disingenuousness of the Irish Government. This may not be the standing European army run by Brussels they warned of, but it is a European army.

And the purpose, they say, is not just the humanitarian/crisis management role - the so-called Petersberg tasks - agreed in Maastricht, but a larger endeavour, to project the EU on the world stage as a military superpower. Neutral Ireland is being sucked in.

Alongside institutional preparations, the internal EU political balance on security issues is also changing with the defection of Austria from the ranks of the neutrals, or militarily non-aligned as they are now more commonly described.

The new Austrian government wants an EU treaty amendment which would require member-states to come to one another's defence if attacked. If the Austrians are not successful, and they will certainly not be successful this time, they say they will "look at other defence options, including NATO membership".

Last week, one Austrian diplomat insisted tongue in cheek that somehow Austria would sign up to NATO all the while insisting it was still neutral, but it would not be a definition of neutrality that would be recognisable to anyone else.

Yet, while the argument about mutual defence guarantees is by no means central to the current debate about building up the EU's military peacekeeping capacity, it has not gone away altogether.

Underpinning the rush of central and eastern European states to join the EU is the desire for "soft" security guarantees - even without explicit promises that new members will be defended, they feel safer in the shelter of the EU club.

And Romano Prodi a few days ago shocked more than the neutrals with comments in Latvia on their security preoccupations, declaring that "any attack or aggression against an EU member nation would be an attack or aggression the whole EU; this is the highest guarantee".

In reality, it was a political promise which had no treaty status but in truth, it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which EU member-states would not come to the defence of one of their number if it was attacked. Even Irish governments have in the past indicated that they would put the issue to the Dail.

Such assumptions, however, have largely remained unspoken and Mr Prodi's words will do little to rebut Russian claims that the EU and NATO eastern enlargement processes are the same thing. Nor does it help Ireland's claim, and that of both Finland and Sweden, that the rapid development of an EU military capacity is entirely about Petersberg tasks.

Indeed, where do Petersberg Task obligations end and mutual defence understandings begin? Do they include, for example, military assistance to member-states facing domestic upheavals? What of operations that start as one thing and end as another? What are the range of operations our volatile neighbours are likely to challenge the EU with in the next 10 years?

Some of the less controversial, smallscale scenarios are explored in a secret illustrative profiles paper produced recently by the Western European Union and seen by The Irish Times. It deals with evacuations of EU citizens from strife-torn countries, humanitarian interventions in natural disasters, even small-scale assistance to the civil powers of Third World countries.

But the Kosovo and Bosnia-scale scenarios have not yet been elaborated and are likely to expose far more ambiguities and potentially controversial challenges.

And they are precisely the sort of questions that on Monday at a meeting with EU colleagues in Portugal, the Minister for Defence, Mr Smith, insisted fellow ministers should address before they get to the question of how many troops each state would pledge to the rapid reaction force. Other ministers are keen to see a "troop generation conference" this year.

Meanwhile, within the institutions, the new military/political structures are being put into place. On Wednesday, we had the first meeting of the new Interim Political and Security committee staffed by senior diplomats - it will give political direction to the EU's crisis management operations and planning.

Detailed military advice will come to it from the new Interim Military Committee, made up of senior officers from the member states - it meets for the first time next week - and from a permanent advisory military staff attached to the Secretary General of the Council of Ministers, Javier Solana.

Meanwhile, External Affairs Commissioner Chris Patten is also developing the idea of a non-military rapid response force for crisis situations.

Mr Solana also has a new policy analysis and early warning unit of 15 which acts as an extended cabinet for him. And he now heads the increasingly bypassed Western European Union, whose assets and military planning personnel are gradually being asset-stripped by the EU. Within a year the EU could have a military staff of about 150.

Both the new committees are interim, while the lawyers work out whether their permanent constitution requires treaty changes. That issue is one of considerable concern to Irish diplomats desperately trying to avoid triggering a referendum in Ireland - which would happen if EU treaty changes were deemed necessary. Irish diplomats and the legal services of the Council of Ministers argue that as the new structures simply give effect to the provisions of the Amsterdam Treaty, no constitutionally significant treaty changes will arise.

But that indomitable scourge of EU militarisation, Green MEP Patricia McKenna, pledges she will be taking legal advice on the issue and demanding a referendum on what she insists are developments that go well beyond what the people voted for on Amsterdam.

No one, she says, was given a chance to vote on the idea of a 60,000-strong EU rapid reaction force.