West European Unity: Implications for Peace and Security

Abstract

The language we have used for so long about the ‘two halves of Europe’ has misled us about the continent’s balance and shape. The image summoned up is one of two relatively equal parts of the continent, now coming back together; of ‘West’ and ‘East’ rejoining to form a whole which draws upon the constituent elements of both of its previously divided parts. The argument presented here is that ‘Europe’, if defined as an entity which stretches from the Atlantic to the Urals, is — and has been throughout the past millennium — fundamentally unbalanced. Its economic and political core has been in the west, its periphery stretching east across its shifting and ill-defined borders. The devastation of Central Europe in the final years of World War II temporarily altered the tilt, with the two great continental powers of Europe’s eastern and western edge drawn into confrontation across Central Europe. But the recovery of the West European economy, reinforced by the establishment of a relatively integrated political system, has rebuilt a dominant West.