— Eastern Europe: the nations running from the Baltic to the Black Sea that were occupied by Soviet troops in World War II and developed their recent national identities from this experience.
— There is, of course, a fourth less significant Europe, the Scandinavian countries.
In the first half of the twentieth century, Atlantic Europe was the imperial heart of the world. Central Europeans were later comers and challengers. Eastern Europeans were the victims. Torn apart by two world wars, Europe faced a fundamental question: What was the status of Germany in the European system? The Germans, frozen out of the imperial system created by Atlantic Europe, sought to overturn that system and assert their dominance. The conclusion of World War II found Germany shattered, divided and occupied, controlled by Soviets in the east, and England, France, and the United States in the west.
During the 1950s, when NATO was created, the European Economic Community was also conceived. The European Union, which emerged from it, is a schizophrenic entity. Its primary purpose is the creation of an integrated European economy, while leaving sovereignty in the hands of individual nations. Simultaneously, it is seen as the preface to a federation of European countries, in which a central European government, with a parliament and professional civil service, would govern a federal Europe where national sovereignty was limited to local matters, and defense and foreign policy rested with the whole.
Unit III. EU at the Crossroads
Europe has not achieved this goal. It has created a free-trade zone and a European currency, which some members of the free-trade zone use and others do not. It has failed to create a political constitution, however, leaving individual nations sovereign — and therefore never has produced a united defense or foreign policy. Defense policy, to the extent it is coordinated, is in the hands of NATO, and not all members of NATO are members of the EU (notably the United States). With the collapse of the Soviet empire, individual countries in Eastern Europe were admitted to the EU and NATO.
In short, post-Cold War Europe is in benign>1 chaos. It is impossible to unravel the extraordinarily complex and ambiguous institutional relationships that have been created. Given the history of Europe, such confusion would normally lead to war. But Europe, excepting the former Yugoslavia, has no energy for war, no appetite for instability, and certainly no desire for conflict. Europe's psychological transformation has been extraordinary. Where, prior to 1945, slaughter and warfare had been regular pastimes for centuries, after 1945 even the conceptual chaos of European institutions could not generate conflict beyond rhetoric.
