scholarly journals Sad delusions: The decline and rise of Greater Europe

2021 ◽  
pp. 187936652199975
Author(s):  
Richard Sakwa
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Order ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Mikhail Gorbachev ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Fundamental Tension ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
West European

The end of the Cold War was accompanied by the idea that the fall of the Berlin Wall represented the beginning of the unification of Europe. Mikhail Gorbachev talked in terms of a “Common European Home,” an idea that continues in the guise of the project for a “Greater Europe.” However, right from the start, the transformative idea of Greater Europe was countered by the notion of “Europe whole and free,” whose fundamental dynamic was the enlargement of the existing West European order to encompass the rest of the continent. This was a program for the enlargement of the Atlantic system. After some prevarication, the enlargement agenda proved unacceptable to Moscow, and while it continues to argue in favor of transformation its main efforts are now devoted to creating some sort of “greater Eurasia.” There remains a fundamental tension between Atlanticist and pan-continental version of the post-–Cold War international order in the region. This tension gave rise to conflict and war: in 2008 (the Russo-Georgian War) and again from 2014 (Ukraine), and to what some call the Second Cold War. The continent is once again divided. However, pan-continentalism is far from dead, and although Greater Eurasian ideas have thrived, some sort of Greater European continentalism remains on the agenda. Is this, though, no more than a “sad delusion” or a genuine possibility?

Diplomacy and War

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Weiner ◽  
Paul Sharp
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International System ◽  
The United States ◽  
International Order ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Military Diplomacy ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Invasion Of Iraq

Scholars acknowledge that there is a close connection between diplomacy and war, but they disagree with regard to the character of this connection—what it is and what it ought to be. In general, diplomacy and war are assumed to be antagonistic and polar opposites. In contrast, the present diplomatic system is founded on the view that state interests may be pursued, international order maintained, and changes effected in it by both diplomacy and war as two faces of a single statecraft. To understand the relationships between diplomacy and war, we must look at the development of the contemporary state system and the evolution of warfare and diplomacy within it. In this context, one important claim is that the foundations of international organizations in general, and the League of Nations in particular, rest on a critique of modern (or “old”) diplomacy. For much of the Cold War, the intellectual currents favored the idea of avoiding nuclear war to gain advantage. In the post-Cold War era, the relationship between diplomacy and war remained essentially the same, with concepts such as “humanitarian intervention” and “military diplomacy” capturing the idea of a new international order. The shocks to the international system caused by events between the terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 have intensified the paradoxes of the relationship between diplomacy and war.

The United States at the End of the Cold War, 1989–1993

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Graham Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mikhail Gorbachev ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
The Persian Gulf ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Military Campaign

The Cold War may have ended on the evening of November 9, 1989, when East German border guards opened up checkpoints and allowed their fellow citizens to stream into West Berlin; it certainly was over by January 28, 1992, when U.S. president George H. W. Bush delivered his annual State of the Union Address one month after President Mikhail Gorbachev had announced his resignation and the end of the Soviet Union. After the Berlin Wall came down, Bush and Gorbachev spoke of the Cold War in the past tense in person and on the telephone. The reunification of Germany and U.S. military campaign in the Persian Gulf confirmed that reality. In January 1991, polls indicated that, for the first time, a majority of Americans believed that the Cold War was over. However, the poll results obscured the substantial foreign and domestic crises, challenges, and opportunities created by the end of the Cold War that occupied President Bush and his national-security team between November 1989 and Bush’s defeat in the 1992 presidential inauguration and the inauguration of William Jefferson Clinton as America’s first post–Cold War president in January 1993.

Guardian of Pax Transatlantica

2021 ◽  
pp. 42-67
Author(s):  
Jussi M. Hanhimäki
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Russian Federation ◽  
Building Block ◽  
Iraq War ◽  
Basic Building Block ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Russian Federation ◽  
Security Actor ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter focuses on NATO, the institutional core of Pax Transatlantica. Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has enlarged its membership and ventured beyond its immediate neighborhood. Its significance as a security actor has been enhanced, not least because of the actions of the Russian Federation in Georgia, Ukraine, and Syria. By 2020, NATO was bigger and more engaged than ever before, with military capacities that dwarfed those of any of its real or potential adversaries. Yet, the success story was hampered by widespread pessimism about NATO’s future on both sides of the Atlantic. In fact, the post–Cold War era had seen numerous inter-alliance crises: the Iraq War of 2003 being the most obvious example. Nevertheless, three decades after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, NATO retained its function as the basic building block of Pax Transatlantica.

scholarly journals Back to the Wall: Myths and Mistakes that Once Again Divide Europe

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Sakwa
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Mikhail Gorbachev ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Power Shift ◽  
Peace And Security ◽  
Transformative Politics ◽  
Atlantic Community ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
The Cold War

Europe is once again subject to an epidemic of wall and barrier building. The war in Ukraine is accompanied by the fortification of its border with Russia, while the Baltic republics are creating the foundations for what is an embryonic new ‘iron curtain’ dividing the Atlantic community from Eurasia. Elsewhere fences are being built to halt the flow of refugees and migrants. These new barriers symbolize the failure to build a Europe ‘whole and free’ in the post-Cold War era, and the failure of the era of globalization to create the conditions for security and development in Europe’s neighborhood. The spate of ‘walling’ reflects not the strength of national sovereignty but its weakness, and not the power of the Atlantic community to spread prosperity, peace and security but the opposite. The era of globalization is accompanied by deepening disjuncture and contradictions, and European leaders have no coherent response. The roots of the crisis lie in the patterns established at the close of the original Cold War in the late perestroika years, with a power shift rather than the transcending politics espoused by Mikhail Gorbachev. The Malta summit of 1989 only partially repudiated the politics of Yalta. The asymmetrical end of the Cold War and the 25 years’ crisis represented by the subsequent cold peace contained within itself the violence and the new divisions that now predominate. The myths and mistakes of the cold peace era need to be challenged and a new transformative politics envisaged.

Aspiring for Vicarious Identity Through Engagement in War

2021 ◽  
pp. 151-182
Author(s):  
Christopher S. Browning ◽  
Pertti Joenniemi ◽  
Brent J. Steele
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
International Order ◽  
Ontological Security ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Military Engagement ◽  
The Cold War

The chapter explores Denmark’s post–Cold War reorientation in foreign policy, where a previous emphasis on laying low and a reluctance to engage in military actions has been replaced by a willingness to support activist military engagement. The transformation has entailed a fundamental reappraisal of the Cold War past, where a once comfortable and ontological-security-affirming narrative has been recast as a betrayal of Denmark’s true being and its responsibilities for upholding a norms-based international order. The chapter argues that such self-shaming is designed to elicit anxiety and ontological insecurities that can only be salved through activist engagement. However, lacking sufficient resources itself, Denmark’s redemption is possible only by establishing a vicarious bond with the United States and partaking in American wars. In Denmark’s case, vicarious identification has therefore been central to driving change and reconstituting selfhood anew, rather than reaffirming extant identities as might be expected.

The Cold War root of post-Cold War tension: duality of détente in the 1970s and neo-Cold War in the 1980s

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James W. Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
Mikhail Gorbachev ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Arsenal ◽  
Military Readiness ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Cold War

During the late Cold War there was a serious effort by leaders in both capitals to defuse the tension and conflict that characterized their relationship during the 1950s and 60s. Commitments by both sides to the details of soft power approaches such as negotiating arms agreements such as SALT and the Helsinki Accords eased the climate of hostility somewhat, while the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev, with his emphasis on perestroika and other aspects of reform, resulted in considerable retraction of the Soviet military both in size and from various points of involvement such as Afghanistan. However, there was usually either continuing underlying neo-Cold War tension between the two or vacillation between steps forward and backward. The initial Soviet move into Afghanistan combined with emergence of Marxist forces in locations such as Nicaragua kept American leaders in a state of military readiness. Provocative moves such as the build-up of the American nuclear arsenal under President Reagan in the 1980s were combatitive in tone with regard to Soviet leaders. Thus, positive and negative features combined in an uneasy mix at the end of the Cold War.

The End of the Cold War

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Guyatt
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
International Order ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Warsaw Pact ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter discusses the history of the end of the Cold War. It describes different versions of what signified the end of the Cold War, which include the demolition of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev's declaration that the Soviet Union would no longer use its military to subdue the satellite states of the Warsaw Pact in 1988, and the reunification of Germany in October 1990. The chapter also considers the consequences of the end of the Cold War, which include a renewed search for international order and cooperation.

The Rise and Decline of the Post-Cold War International Order

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
International Order ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Public Health Emergencies ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Cold War

This books surveys the evolution of the international order in the quarter century since the end of the Cold War through the prism of developments in key regional and functional parts of this “liberal international order 2.0” (LIO 2.0) and the roles played by two key ordering powers, the United States and the People’s Republic of China. Among the partial orders analyzed in the individual chapters are the regions of Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia and the international regimes dealing with international trade, climate change, nuclear weapons, cyberspace, and international public health emergencies, such as SARS and Zika. To assess developments in these various segments of the LIO 2.0, and to relate them to developments in the two other crucial levels of political order, order within nation-states and at the global level, the volume develops a comprehensive, integrated framework of analysis that allows systematic comparison of developments across boundaries between segments and different levels of the international order. Using this framework, the book presents a holistic assessment of the trajectory of the international order over the last decades, the rise, decline, and demise of the LIO 2.0, and causes of the dangerous erosion of international order over the last decade.

Winds of History or the Acts of Men? The Unification of Germany

1993 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Deighton
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
European Continent ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Security Issues ◽  
German Question ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
Western Values ◽  
The Cold War

For the first two years after the Berlin Wall came down and, as Jacques Delors put it, while the speed of history accelerated, most scholars confined themselves to journalism. Some books that did appear were rapidly overtaken by the heady pace of history, and the books under review here do not entirely escape being dated by the relentless progress of events on the European continent. Indeed, it can hardly be said that the dust has settled on German unification and the seismic events that we call the end of the Cold War. Both in the East (predictably) and in the West, unscrambling the elaborate territorial, strategic and ideological Cold War structures is bringing a re-examination of the nation state and its democratic practices; international governmental organisations; ‘Western’ values; and security issues. At one level, debate has been raging among some historians between two unsatisfactory notions: the ‘end of history’, and ‘real’ history being on the move again. At another level the German question has been returning unsteadily into focus, as historians start to pick at issues of national identity, nationalism and the nation-state. Other analysts have been trying to fit the European structures and assumptions we inherit from the Cold War years into a post-Cold War security and economic architecture. The close relationship between these strands of European history is obvious.

scholarly journals One Europe or None

2018 ◽  
pp. 35-48
Author(s):  
Richard Sakwa
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Mikhail Gorbachev ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Threat Perceptions ◽  
The Cold War

The European post-Cold War order assumed monist forms. Instead of the geopolitical and ideological diversity sought by Mikhail Gorbachev as he brought the Cold War to an end in the late 1980s, a type of monist cold peace was imposed in which Atlantic security institutions and ideas were consolidated. The monism was both institutional and ideational, and the two reinforced each other in a hermetic order that sought to insulate itself from critique and transformation. Russia was excluded as anything but subaltern. The post-Cold War European peace order was thus built on weak foundations, provoking a cycle of mimetic rivalry. In Russia the fateful dialectic of external challenge and domestic stultification once again operated, heightening the Kremlin’s threat perceptions. Russia’s relations with the European Union (EU) and Washington veered between the cooperative and the confrontational, until settling into a conflictual mode in 2014, as it is argued in the article.

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