Understanding global security - Peter Hough

MILITARY THREATS TO SECURITY FROM STATES
keep America in, Germany down and Russia out’ (Schweller 2001: 182). Despite
momentous changes in the international environment some of that logic still persists.
The 1999 expansion extended NATO’s reach into Russia’s traditional sphere of
influence and, in the eyes of those countries, guaranteed that they would be free from
the shadow of the ‘bear’.
The even more complete westward integration of East Germany, through
German reunification, brought fear to the British and French governments over the
effect on their power in Western Europe. A bilateral meeting between the heads of
the British and French governments, Thatcher and Mitterand, was held in 1989, prior
to reunification, after which the former commented; ‘we both had the will to check
the German juggernaut’ (Benjamin 2000). It is often forgotten that it was the fear of
Germany rather than the USSR that sowed the seeds of NATO. France, the UK,
Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg in 1948 founded the ‘Brussels Pact’,
which was a defence community centred on a ‘trigger clause’ in which each state
guaranteed to support the others in the event of an armed attack. The prospect of a
revival in German nationalism that prompted this agreement, however, was overtaken
by events as the more apparent threat posed by former ally the USSR became the
focus for a similar, but much larger and more powerful, defence community. West
Germany was soon brought into the NATO fold, contained not through deterrence
but through the friendly restraint of new allies.
Franco-British fears in 1989 were political and economic rather than military
but most certainly present, and prompted distinct foreign policy approaches. The
French response was to reactivate their enthusiasm for deeper European Community
integration to ‘tie down Gulliver’, re-adopting their pro-federalist line of the 1950s
formulated for much the same reasons. This included reviving the idea of European
defence cooperation for the first time since that era when their initiative had been
scuppered by British indifference and the rise of NATO. For the UK, and other
‘Atlanticists’ like Denmark, the response to German reunification was to take strides
to ensure that, with the receding of the Russian threat the other two components
of Lord Ismay’s maxim were not forgotten. The British, aware that the USA could
conceivably revert to pre-Cold War form and keep out of European military affairs
unless absolutely necessary, redoubled their commitment to the ‘special relationship’,
unconvinced that the newly revamped European Union offered a credible alternative
source of military security. Significant voices in the USA advocated a return to
isolationism but, mindful of the recent historical consequences of distortions in the
European balance of power, the desire to project their influence rather than hold it
back for emergencies held sway.
Well, is it?
The Cold War ‘hangover’ offers a vindication of the post-revisionist view that the
conflict was, in essence, just another balance of power struggle. The balance has
tilted but elements of the struggle remain. Clark, in 2001, argued that the Cold War
had not yet been fully resolved because the process of peacemaking (as opposed to
an event such as the Malta Summit or Paris Treaty) had not been completed (Clark
2001: 6–11). The lack of a systematic attempt to mould a genuinely New World Order
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