Into the New Millennium: Legacies and Change

Abstract

This chapter connects the arguments and findings on the historically rooted underpinnings of French and German foreign and security policy of the Cold War period and the years immediately following it with some of the main developments in these areas that have unfolded since the second half of the 1990s. As the preceding chapters have shown, the major elements of French and German historically rooted domestic construction remained fairly stable from the late 1950s to the mid-1990s, and during that period have exerted significant influence in the main areas of French and German foreign policy, security, and defense.