Conclusion: The Purpose of European Power

Abstract

In 1928 the world’s great powers, including Britain, France, Germany, Japan and the US, signed a treaty where they agreed to outlaw war. The Kellogg-Briand pact, named after the American and French ministers behind the initiative was intended to deliver perpetual peace. It did not. Instead it has been standing as the high-water mark of the Idealist movement of the interwar years. There are apparent similarities to post-Cold War intellectual climate—the ceaseless summiteering, the disarmament efforts, the many treaties without enforcement mechanisms and the romantic ideas of the benign influence of mass public opinion on international politics and the most obvious one, the widely held belief that great-power conflict is a thing of the past—all echo a similar sense of opportunity to change the way international relations operate. When sorting through the remains of the period the EU security policy represents a particular challenge: will the plant that was sown under much milder conditions survive in the changed climate under multipolarity?