Between Democracy and Deterrence

Abstract

For almost half a century the European Community/Union had only one border to be concerned about, one source of external political power to contend with across that divide. What Winston Churchill dramatically described as the ’Iron Curtain’ was, at one level, the focus of righteous indignation for the West’s political class. But it also served a useful purpose, by raising an impenetrable barrier, a cordon sanitaire protecting the West from the uncertainties, the potential problems that might spill across from an entirely ’other’ and less developed Europe. A Europe where the stabilising influence of the territorial nation state rooted in a concept of universal rights, common citizenship and political affiliation above ‘mere’ primordial identity had failed to become embedded as a natural corollary of nationbuilding, industrial modernization and démocratisation as these sequential transformations had taken root in the West from the seventeenth century.