West European Responses to Change in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

Abstract

[From the Introduction]. The main purpose of this paper is to examine the individual and collective responses of the West Europeans to the events of 1989 and 1990 and to make some judgements about the extent to which they were able to rise to the leadership challenge that they posed. On the one hand these events can be seen to present the West Europeans with a great opportunity to both widen and deepen their integrative experiment in a Europe no longer divided or dominated by the superpower protagonists. This view would see the Cold War as placing definite limits on what was achievable at the collective European level particularly in the foreign and security policy spheres; it would see NATO and the need for the US nuclear umbrella as a restraint on the development of a European security identity and the continuance of the east west divide as an inhibition to the extension of the European Community ( and thus of economic and political integration) to include either the neutral states of Western Europe or the states of eastern Europe. The end of the cold war would thus be seen as resulting in the lifting of a series of restraints on the West Europeans in the pursuit of their collective endeavours.