ABSTRACT
Europe and North America are once again in the midst of wide-ranging security debates that can be counted on to generate sound and fury, as well as a few shafts of light. The tendency toward institutional proliferation and simultaneous modification can be traced through the economic, political, and security arrangements of Europe in the immediate postwar period, and needs to be related to the discussions surrounding the architecture of European security since 1989. Quite similar patterns of gradual institutional modification and transitional linkages may be discerned in the security arrangements of Europe, beginning with the 1947 Dunkirk Treaty committing France and Britain to resist the revival of German aggression. Even a cursory examination of those institutions in the immediate postwar period illustrates the extent to which they reflected divergences in approach and expectations as well as in concrete needs. Plural institutionalism was used to alleviate and prevent conflict among allies, thus averting dangerous divisions caused by isolated and frustrated states.
