ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the revival of the Western European Union (WEU) in the mid-1980s. It focuses on interviews conducted from 1985 through 1989 with WEU functionaries and with West European officials who participated in the WEU revitalization process. The reactivation of the WEU led to the appointment of a dynamic general secretary of the organization. The real genesis of the Platform Document was the speech by France's then-Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, presented to the WEU Assembly in December 1986, where he called for the establishment of a security charter. Cooperation between member states' navies in the Gulf has been a real and unexpected success story for the WEU machinery. The WEU and its officials constantly recognized that the organization must take careful account of the new conditions in European security that were triggered by the implementation of the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty. The attitude of senior politicians in Britain has been somewhat ambivalent toward WEU revitalization.
