Abstract
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.
Highlights
It would not be unreasonable to suggest that it was incumbent on those who claimed to have won the Cold War to create the conditions for a viable and enduring peace
There is a vigorous debate over what to call this new era of confrontation following the cold peace, but whether we call it a ‘New Cold War’ or something else is less important than recognising the great failure of our generation to create a sustainable and enduring peace order in Europe
China helped Russia to withstand the sanctions, while the BRICS countries began to create an alternative to western-dominated international institutions
Summary
The countries in between that had formerly been in thrall to Moscow jumped at the chance to become part of the alternative security system, but this only reinforced the competitive bloc politics that had been at the heart of the Cold War. The Atlantic alliance would have endured but in new forms, subordinated to the commitment to build an inclusive and equitable pan-European community as one of the pillars of the new continentalism This is the project for the creation of a transformed historic West, in which Russia would become a founder member with a stake in its perpetuation. The security association with the US would become redundant as Europe takes control of its own destiny This over-arching greater European body represents the ‘integration of integrations’, bringing together what have become the EU and the EEU, creating both a process and the embryonic institutions under whose aegis the continent could unite. The monist Atlantic system expanded through the enlargement of existing structures and ideas, repudiating the transformative vision outlined at the end of the Cold War by Gorbachev and successive Russian leaders It is this monist system which predominates in Western Europe
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