ABSTRACT

Almost thirty years ago, the author wrote an essay about Western Europe which began by calling it prosperous and disunited. It is ironic that the crisis of the European Community (EC, now called the European Union (EU)) appears to have begun immediately after the signing of the Maastricht Treaty on EU, which seemed to promise a major leap forwards. Western Europe suffers, paradoxically, both from the legacy of the postwar habit of dependence on American leadership in geopolitical affairs and from the decline of an American predominance which had assuredly been a factor of division (between Gaullists and Atlanticists) but also a goad toward a European entity capable of talking back to the United States. And it remains torn by disjunctions it cannot overcome: between politics, which is still national, and economics, national no longer; between economics, which is becoming common, and diplomacy and defense, where the Union still falters; between a settled West and an unsettled East.