Abstract
If finding some issue in which Western Europe has a collective interest opposed to that of the United States is difficult, the question posed by this chapter is awesome. The suggestion is that there are issues in which the interests of countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany are closer to those of France, the Netherlands and West Germany than to the interests of the USSR. Over and above the rational difficulties entailed by this assumption there is a methodological problem. It would be irrelevant for us, as Western analysts, to find ‘objective’ similarities of interest between say, Poland and Euro-NATO unless these interests are perceived by the Poles themselves.
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Notes
See Michael Howard, ‘Men Against Fire: Expectations of War in 1914’, in Steven E. Miller, ed., Military Strategy and the Origins of the First World War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
The ‘anti-coalition strategy’ of the USSR is discussed in Robbin Laird and Susan Clark, eds, The Soviet Union and the Western Alliance (Alexandria, Va.: Institute for Defense Analyses, 1989).
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© 1990 Institute for East-West Security Studies
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Cuthbertson, I.M., Robertson, D. (1990). Is There a Pan-European Special Interest?. In: Enhancing European Security. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20682-7_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20682-7_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-51361-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-20682-7
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