Atlanticism

Abstract: Acknowledgements Introduction: The lessons of the 1980s Part I. Geopolitics, Post-America: 1. North Atlanticism in decline 2. The Reagan non-revolution, or the limited choices of the US 3. Japan and the future trajectory of the world-system: lessons from history 4. European unity and its implications for the interstate system 5. 1968, revolution in the world-system 6. Marx, Marxism-Leninism, and socialist experiences in the modern world-system 7. The Brandt report 8. Typology of crises in the world-system 9. The capitalist world-economy: middle-run prospects Part II. Geoculture, The Underside Of Geopolitics: 10. National and world identities 11. Culture as the ideological battleground of the modern world-system 12. The national and the universal: can there be such a thing as world culture 13. What can one mean by southern culture 14. The modern world-system as a civilization 15. The renewed concern with civilization(s)? Index.

Abstract: Part 1 Argument and method: introduction states and blocs. Part 2 The cold war: the debate about the origins of the cold war stalinism and East-Central Europe the making of Atlanticism is there an East-West conflict?. Part 3 Detente and new cold war: differing conceptions of detente reform and "normalization" in post-stalinist societies the erosion of Atlanticism why did detente fail?. Part 4 The military confrontation: imagined strategies real resources beyond detente?.

Abstract: The unravelling of the post-Cold War security order in Europe was both cause and consequence of the crisis in Ukraine. The crisis was a symptom of the three-fold failure to achieve the aspirations to create a ‘Europe whole and free’ enunciated by the Charter of Paris in 1990, the drift in the European Union's behaviour from normative to geopolitical concerns, and the failure to institutionalize some form of pan-continental unity. The structural failure to create a framework for normative and geopolitical pluralism on the continent meant that Russia was excluded from the new European order. No mode of reconciliation was found between the Brussels-centred wider Europe and various ideas for greater European continental unification. Russia's relations with the EU became increasingly tense in the context of the Eastern Partnership and the Association Agreement with Ukraine. The EU and the Atlantic alliance moved towards a more hermetic and universal form of Atlanticism. Although there remain profound differences between the EU and its trans-Atlantic partner and tensions between member states, the new Atlanticism threatens to subvert the EU's own normative principles. At the same time, Russia moved from a relatively complaisant approach to Atlanticism towards a more critical neo-revisionism, although it does not challenge the legal or normative intellectual foundations of international order. This raises the question of whether we can speak of the ‘death of Europe’ as a project intended to transcend the logic of conflict on the continent.

Abstract: Relations among the transatlantic allies are in very serious trouble. It has been a long time since a US Secretary of State spoke of the Alliance ‘breaking up,’ as Colin Powell did in early February amid the flap over France, Germany and Belgium’s refusal to allow NATO to take preventive steps to defend Turkey in case of a war against Iraq.1 As close and long an observer of US–European relations as Henry Kissinger has even concluded that differences over Iraq have ‘produced the gravest crisis in the Atlantic Alliance since its creation five decades ago.’2 Is today’s crisis in transatlantic relations different from the many that occurred in the past? Some, like Robert Kagan, argue that the changing structure of US–European relations – and especially the great and growing imbalance of power – make this crisis different. ‘Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus’, Kagan writes pointedly. ‘This state of affairs is not transitory – the product of one American election or one catastrophic event. The reasons for the transatlantic divide are deep, long in development, and likely to endure’.3 Others have a more optimistic view. For all their differences, notes Philip Gordon, ‘basic American and European values and interests have not diverged – and the European democracies are certainly closer allies of the United States than the inhabitants of any other region’. The differences that do exist, Gordon argues, are the result largely of a sharp policy shift in Washington under President George W. Bush. But only ‘if policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic act on the assumption that fundamentally different world-views now make useful cooperation impossible’ is a transatlantic divorce conceivable.4 Rather than conflicting, both contentions are in fact on the mark. There has been a profound change in the structure of US–European relations, though the differentiation of power is only one, and not the most important, factor accounting for this change. One crucial consequence of this transformation is the effective end of Atlanticism – American and European foreign policies no longer centre around the transatlantic alliance