Abstract
This book is about the systemic and political processes involved in undoing the division of Europe. Europe was divided as the result of a failure to settle the outstanding political problems of World War II. For decades the division provided a relatively stable, although not necessarily just, security order for Europe. Although most Europeans—in particular the Germans—have been uncomfortable with the division, the superpowers have by and large been satisfied with the status quo.1
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Endnotes
Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979), P. 190. States tend to be more motivated to protect the values they already have than to gain new ones: “The result is that protecting the status quo usually is easier than changing it; negative victories are more likely than positive ones.” Quoted from Robert Jervis, “Implications of the Nuclear Revolutions,” (unpublished paper, December 23, 1988).
The origins of the Cold War—and the division of Europe—are highly debated issues in the field of international politics in the postwar era. See Louis J. Halle, The Cold War as History (New York: Harper & Row, 1967); Arthur J. Schlesinger, “Origins of the Cold War,” Foreign Affairs 46 (October 1967);
Walter Lafeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 5th ed. (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1985);
Wilfried Loth, The Division of the World: 1941–1955 (London: Routledge, 1988).
For a Soviet view, see Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), pp. 192–193.
See Wolfgang Heisenberg, Strategic Stability and Nuclear Deterrence in East-West Relations, Institute for East-West Security Studies Occasional Paper Series, no. 10 (New York, 1989).
See Robert D. Blackwill, “Conceptual Problems of Conventional Arms Control,” International Security 12, no. 4 (Spring 1988), pp. 28–47.
There are several well-documented descriptions of the February 1945 meeting of Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Yalta. For a traditional scholarly interpretation, see Diane Shaver Clemens, Yalta (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).
For a recent analysis of the Yalta legacy from the East European point of view, see Ferenc Feher, “Eastern Europe’s Long Revolution Against Yalta,” Eastern European Politics and Societies 2, no. 1 (Winter 1988), pp. 1–34.
Lincoln Gordon et al., Eroding Empire: Western Relations with Eastern Europe (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1987), p. 13.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Game Plan (Boston: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986) p. 197. In general terms, security means the relative absence of threat. In international relations, security can be identified as the relative absence of the threat of armed conflict, i.e., war. Security rests primarily on both political and military stability. Political stability means that there is no incentive for armed conflict on the political level, either because no major tensions exist that would require a military solution, or because the peaceful solution of conflicts has become a regular and accepted pattern of international relations. Military stability means that no state could hope to gain reasonable results by employing military force. In the Cold War era, political stability was lacking but military stability, based upon the ability to deter aggression, prevented the outbreak of war. European security will be served if both political and military stability are high. One could say that if political stability decreases, military stability should remain high. Nevertheless the key factor in European security today is the direction of political change.
See K. J. Holsti, “Change in the International System: Interdependence, Integration, and Fragmentation,” in Change in the International System, ed. Ole R. Holsti, Randolph M, Silverson and Alexander M. George (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984).
This study approaches the process of dismantling of the Cold War structure also in “organic terms.” This conceptualization draws on both the ecological perspective on international relations and on the perspective on the stable world order configured by, instance, Reinhold Niebuhr and George F. Kennan. See Reinhold Niebuhr, Nations and Empires (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), pp. 256–266. See also Alpo Rusi, “Assessing International Politics from an Organic Perspective,” Ulkopolitükka, 1990, no. 1, pp. 40–46. The concept will be further elaborated in this book.
In addition, see, for instance, Harold and Margaret Sprout, Toward a Politics of the Planet Earth (New York: Van Norstrand Reinhold, 1971), pp. 27, 30;
Dennis Pirages, “The Ecological Perspective on International Relations,” in The Global Agenda, 2nd edition, ed. Charles W. Kegley, Jr., and Eugene R. Wittkopf (New York: Random House, 1988), pp. 339–344.
See also Kenneth W. Thompson, Winston Churchill’s World View (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), p. 305.
In regard to the concept of an organic state, see Zbigniew Brzezinski, In Quest of National Security (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1988), pp. 139, 194–196.
For details see Anders Stephanson, Kennan and The Art of Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 117. Kennan is a strong proponent of thinking about international relations in organic terms.
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© 1991 Institute for East-West Security Studies
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Rusi, A.M. (1991). Introduction. In: After the Cold War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21350-4_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21350-4_1
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