Abstract
In previous chapters this book has examined the political factors that have played a key role in maintaining or changing Europe’s bipolar security order. In the next two chapters I will risk making predictions about the future. The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan once said that anyone who truly perceives the present can also see the future, since “all possible futures are contained in the present.”1 Unfortunately, the future of Europe must appear to any observer as inordinately complex, a combination of processes that could produce contradictory outcomes. Nevertheless, some of these processes are developing into a coherent pattern of change, and the time may be ripe for fairly accurate predictions.
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Endnotes
See Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989), p. 276.
For a timely analysis of the problems related to the changes of military doctrines, see Pal Dunay, Military Doctrine: Change in the East?, IEWSS Occasional Paper Series, no. 15 (New York, 1990).
This study does not deal with the problem of the redefinition of security in greater detail. However, that debate has exploded in recent years, particularly in Europe, and the literature is expanding. On the need to redefine security on the basis of ecological arguments, see, for example, James G. Speth, Environment, Economy, Security: The Emerging Agenda (Washington, DC: Center for National Policy, 1985).
Decision-makers throughout the world have rapidly recognized the importance of “ecological thinking.” For a systemic analysis of the impact of the threat of environmental catastrophes on interdependence, see Norman Meyers, “Emergent Aspects of Environment: A Creative Challenge,” The Environmentalist 7, no. 3 (1987), pp. 163–174.
See Michael MccGwire, Military Objectives in Soviet Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1987).
The concept of common security was elaborated by the Palme Commission in 1982, and its report was published in The Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues Staff, Common Security: A Blueprint for Survival (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982).
See Lee Wilkins and Philip Patterson, “Reporting Chernobyl: Cutting the Government Fog to Cover the Nuclear Cloud” (unpublished paper, 1987); also Ilkka Timonen, Suomi ulkomaisessa lehdistossa Tshernobylin yoimalaonnet-tomuuden jalkeen, Tampereen yliopisto, Sarja B 52/1988.
For a historical analysis, see Raymond Garthoff, Detente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1985).
Kenneth Boulding, The Image (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1956).
Henry Kissinger, A World Restored (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1974, orig. 1957), pp. 144–145. I am grateful to Professor Robert Jervis for drawing my attention to Kissinger’s book.
John Mueller, “The Essential Irrelevance of Nuclear Weapons,” International Security 13, no. 2 (Fall 1988), pp. 57–90.
See in particular Kenneth Boulding, Stable Peace (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979).
See Karl Kaiser, “A View from Europe: The U.S. Role in the Next Decade,” International Affairs 65, no. 2 (Spring 1989), pp. 209–223. Kaiser puts great emphasis on the maintenance of nuclear deterrence as a precondition for stable peace in Europe by speaking about “a sufficient capacity for deterrence.”
On the foundation of the European nation-state system, see, for example, William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Forces, and Society Since A.D. WOO (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 125. McNeill argues that as a result of the Treaty of Westphalia, national armies were established that finally became guarantors of order and peace in Europe between the states. Yet political disputes between states were not eliminated by the Treaty of Westphalia and no permanent peace ensued, although a certain degree of order was established.
The author has developed this model of three or four European political entities in his article “Europe’s Security Structure in Disintegration: Power Politics, Stability and Political Change,” Rauhantutkimu 1989, no. 1 (in Finnish). See also Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Yasuhiro Nakasone and Henry A. Kissinger, “East-West Relations,” Foreign Affairs 68, no. 3 (Summer 1989), pp. 1–21, in which a model of three “political entities” is proposed.
About the two paths to peace in conceptual terms, see Charles W. Kegley, Jr. and Eugene R. Wittkopf, World Politics—Trend and Transformation, 3rd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), pp. 423–492.
The philosophy of Jacques Attali is illustrative with respect to the foundation of EBRD. Attali is of the opinion that Western Europe would become one of the two or three power centers of a new world not dominated any more by the two postwar superpowers. He predicts a major decline in particular of the Soviet Union, but also of the United States. In Attali’s vision, a united Germany does not exist as a power center comparable with Western Europe (which would be a France-like Western Europe). See Jacques Attali, Lignes d’Horizon (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1990).
See Victor-Yves Ghebali, “The Institutionalization of the CSCE Process: Towards an Instrument for the ‘Greater Europe’“ (paper presented at meeting of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs (FIIA) and Washington Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on “New Security Arrangements in Europe: Developing the CSCE Framework,” September 27–28, 1990, Helsinki. For a timely analysis that tries to combine the collective security arrangements with the existing security institutions, see Gregory Flynn and David J. Scheffer, “Limited Collective Security,” Foreign Policy 80 (Fall 1990), pp. 77–101.
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© 1991 Institute for East-West Security Studies
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Rusi, A.M. (1991). The Outlook for European Security in the 1990s. In: After the Cold War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21350-4_7
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