Problems of a Western European Union

In: The review of politics, Band 11, Heft 2, S. 131-152

Abstract

In a divided world and one in which there is no peace, a nation's military power fixes the extent to which it can hope to influence its own destiny. Only a few years ago, Europe west of the Stettin-Trieste line encompassed four out of seven Great Powers. Today it is militarily and economically prostrate and sapped by political dissent and moral incertitude. The unexampled accumulation of power across the Atlantic and beyond the Iron Curtain turns this weakness into relative impotence. No wonder that many western Europeans have reacted against this striking change in their fortunes by demanding that their several countries recapture jointly what as individual nations they have irretrievably lost.The problem before us is a formidable one but its elements are simple. Many years ago Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw the day when each of the European nations, caught between the mass of Americans and the mass of Russians, would feel itself tragically weak, indeed powerless.