Journal of European Integration History – Revue d'histoire de l'

Dieses Dokument wurde erstellt mit FrameMaker 4.0.4.Notices – Informations – Mitteilungen 133Notices – Informations – MitteilungenCooperation and ConflictWestern Europe and the United States since 1945Transatlantic conflicts and crises have been a recurring theme in the relationship betweenWestern Europe and the United States since 1945. More recent examples of such conflictsare the American criticism of the European Union's “constructive dialogue” with Iran andthe EU's strong opposition to the American trade laws D'Amato and Helms-Burton. Nonetheless,the Atlantic Alliance proves to be surprisingly stable even after the end of the ColdWar and the demise of an acute external threat and it is now fast approaching its enlargementtowards Central and Eastern Europe.The history, present and future, of the transatlantic relationship was the subject of the latestNobel Symposium, organized by the Norwegian Nobel Institute, which took place nearOslo on 9-12 April 1997. In a stimulating paper, inspired by the cultural history approach tointernational relations, Frank Costigliola (Rhode Island) explained the cohesion of theAtlantic Alliance as resulting from political acculturation. According to Costigliola, contactsbetween tourists, soldiers, managers and academics contributed to the formation of an“Atlantic identity” based primarily on the “common democratic heritage” and “a magnifiedsense of difference from the Soviet bloc”. The ritual of regular consultations and commonmanœuvres within the Atlantic Alliance generated “feelings of allegiance” to an extent thatNATO became “a kind of nation”. West European and American leaders, such as Dwight D.Eisenhower, first as Supreme Commander of NATO and then as American President during1953-61, continuously revived and strengthened the existing transatlantic bonds by using aspecific, emotional and masculine language. Costigliola’s cultural explanation of the gluethat has kept Western Europe and the United States together since 1945 seemed to be vindicatedto some extent by the introductory remarks by Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the formerforeign minister of the Federal Republic of Germany during 1974-92. In particular, Genscheremphasized that since its creation in 1949 NATO had always been more than a defencealliance. Instead, it was “a community of states with shared values”.Most conference participants agreed that cultural history and discourse analysis could infuture contribute to a better understanding of the underlying reasons for the continued allegianceto NATO as an imagined community among large sections of the political elites andthe general public in the member states. In fact, Alan Milward (EUI Florence) pointed outthat a similar approach might well prove beneficial in the context of the European Union.Nonetheless, some of Costigliola’s wider conclusions were clearly dependent on a certaindisregard for the intricacies of European history. For example, his claim that the democraticheritage as a key for explaining transatlantic cooperation and cohesion was equally “commonto Portugal and Turkey as well as Britain and France” would seem somewhat undifferentiatedto European historians. It also rather conveniently ignored that Portugal became amember of NATO at the time of the authoritarian Salazar regime and that Turkey and Greeceremained in NATO after the military coups of 1960 and 1967 respectively.In any case, those conference participants influenced by the realist school of internationalrelations doubted very much whether the community rhetoric analyzed by Costigliola everhad any real influence on the national foreign policies of the NATO states. Geir Lundestad(Nobel Institute) argued, for example, that the transatlantic cohesion was mainly due to thespecific political and strategic interests of the West Europeans and the United States in anAmerican engagement in Western Europe, which in his view continue to influence the transatlanticrelationship after the end of the Cold War. According to Lundestad, the main aim of