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Text File | 1994-06-28 | 53KB | 995 lines

<text> <title> The Defense of Europe </title> <article> <hdr> Global Affairs, Spring 1992 The Defense of Europe </hdr> <body> Douglas Seay--investment consultant in Washington, D.C., who writes frequently on foreign affairs. Without warning, Europe's great moment has arrived. By demolishing predatory dictatorships and the military power that was their sole asset, the stunning revolutions in the East have also swept away the barriers that both shielded and confined Western Europe. These democratic revolutions liberated Western Europe as much as they did the East, and history may identify them as signaling the beginning of a Pax Europa. Never have Europe's prospects seemed so positive or its peace so secure. Europe's future, no longer tightly constrained by necessity, rests in the uncertain hands of its somewhat startled leaders. They have it in their collective power, as perhaps never before in the modern era, to assume control of the continent's destiny. What use they will make of this unique opportunity is still uncertain. In the onslaught of change, their awareness of new possibilities has been slow to take shape, and concrete actions have been few. The collapse of the Soviet empire was a victory for the West, and for its ideals and institutions. But the totality of that victory has reverberated back onto the West. The structures of post-World War II Western Europe which arose in response to the threat from the East, and within which the western portion of the continent was reshaped, have been weakened. Stable and familiar institutions such as NATO suddenly are afflicted with uncertainty and loss of purpose. New foundations must be established if the hard-won accomplishments of the last half-century are to be made lasting. Europe's leaders may yet successfully acquit themselves of this responsibility through some combination of enlightened vision and measured practicality. But confidence in their success is still premature. The uncertainty does not stem from a shortage of blueprints for the new Europe: so many have been put forward that the construction site has begun to resemble that of the Tower of Babel. The problem, however, is deeper than simply a lack of consensus on the direction in which to embark. A far greater danger is that there is little recognition in Western Europe that the structures that have shaped its postwar transformation are artificial and fragile. Europe's leaders have demonstrated little awareness that the collapse of the Soviet empire just as surely signifies the demise of Europe's made-in-America political order and its attendant stability, and the end of Western Europe as it has come to be defined for over four decades. In their place, in all likelihood, will be a resurgence of Europe's indigenous political order. It is this underlying order, the system that led to two suicidal wars in this century--rather than any external agent--that now poses the greatest threat to Europe's stability. An older Europe, one almost forgotten by citizens and statesmen alike, is now stirring. Beneath the modern fraternalism of Western Europe lies an historical political order of ceaseless struggle and permanent instability. That order was supplanted by the present cooperative one not so much by the actions of the Europeans themselves as by external forces over which they exercised little control. The military threat from the Soviet Union after World War II, and the resulting American return to the continent, were the key agents in that transformation. The more important was the role of the U.S. Through its wide-ranging policies and by its mere presence, the United States created an artificial environment that provided the setting for the transformation of Western Europe into the democratic, peaceful, prosperous, and generally cooperative reality of the present. The innovations of the post-World War II era, however, have not repealed Europe's underlying reality, but merely suppressed it. The danger is that, as the postwar era fades, the structures that have held those destructive forces in check may lose their efficacy, and that the many plans for the future may be overwhelmed by a return of the past. The first order of business for Europe's leaders, then, should be the reinforcement of Europe's stability. This can only be guaranteed by creating new institutions appropriate to the demands of the new era, the most important being a new European security system. The urgency of such an undertaking at a time when all major threats have seemingly disappeared may not be readily apparent. Not surprisingly, it has attracted only limited official attention. And such interest as does exist has been focused on arguments over which organization is to be responsible for addressing the few inchoate threats outside of Western Europe that sharp-eyed strategists can identify. But the sense of security resulting from the absence of an immediate external threat ignores the source of the true historical danger to the European states: the threat they pose to one another. It is this menace that Europe's leaders should be determined to neutralize. For only when secured against each other will Europe's states be able to enter into the more permanent forms of cooperation now being contemplated and on which Europe's future stability will rest. The European Revolutions The collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself have liberated a continent. Rarely has the demise of an imperial system come so swiftly or so peacefully and more rarely still have the results been as positive. The magnitude of change in the East inevitably has had profound impact in the West as well. The demise of the Soviet empire has suddenly ended the enforced military, political, and economic division of the continent and, with it, the familiar structures and concepts of the last half-century. "Western" Europe, a creation of the post-World War II era, is losing its political and cultural identity, as the frontier dividing free from unfree expands eastward. Europe has been enlarged and enriched as nations engulfed centuries ago reemerge and reclaim their rightful place as European states. Europe now extends farther east than many of Europe's statesmen yet realize, and with consequences they have yet fully to grasp. With its familiar institutions in disarray, Europe is in an unusually fluid state. At the same time, the continent is in a period of profound peace and relaxation, presenting its leaders with a unique opportunity to establish a new order of deliberate design rather than improvised necessity. A thorough rethinking of the range of political, economic, and military structures is necessary, as is devising ways of integrating the eastern portion of the continent fully into the European fold. Lacking any other forum, much of the discussion of Europe's future has centered on further integration of the European Community (EC). As the disintegration in the East gathered speed, it also accelerated the momentum toward further integration in the West. In December, the same month that the Soviet Union bowed out of formal existence, the leaders of the 12-nation European Community met in Maastricht in the Netherlands to map out the next, crucial steps toward pushing Europe beyond its present limited economic integration into a binding economic and political union. Although the meetings of necessity focused on the mundane nuts and bolts of technical issues, for many it appeared that the dream of European unity was on the verge of becoming a reality. Yet, even as the relative merits of alternative futures for the EC and for Europe are being debated, the ability to effect change may be receding. None of the proposals under discussion recognizes that Europe's present tranquillity rests on an artificial basis; most projections as