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7 J. Common Mkt. Stud. 1 (1968)

handle is hein.journals/jcmks7 and id is 1 raw text is: THE CHANGING CONTEXT OF EUROPEAN SECURITY By PiERRE HASSNER EVERY period is by definition a time of transition. Some, however, tend to give an illusion of permanence; others an expectation of utopia or of doom. The remarkable feature of the present time is that it is almost impossible not to share the feeling that we are entering into a new period of international and European affairs-and almost as difficult to agree on where we go from here. Our feeling of change is based on our witnessing the decay of the old, rather than on fearing or hoping for the emergence of the new. Somehow our belief in change is belied by a deeper feeling of security. Although the resources, the beliefs and the institutions on which the present European stability is based appear in danger of drying up, we somehow feel that the same stability will continue without a real upheaval, either by rejuvenating or somewhat refreshing the solutions of today, or by reaching back to those of yesterday and the day before yesterday. The only brave new world we can imagine after the end of NATO or of the cold war bears the hardly very youthful face of the disengagement and denuclearization plans of the fifties, of the pro- jected peace treaties of the forties, of the collective security agreements of the twenties, or of the balance of power or the European concert of the nineteenth century. To look beyond the cold war means to look beyond the confrontation of the two alliances and this in turn is increasingly taken to mean a return to the task which was interrupted by the cold war or prevented by NATO-namely, a European settle- ment involving the signing of a German Peace Treaty, the 'acceptance of the results of World War II', and the organizing of collective security. An alternative to NATO and the Warsaw Pact would then mean a return either (i) to the situation immediately following the war (the two great powers stay on, but instead of facing each other they face Germany as occupying or supervising powers) or (2) to the situation preceding it (the two universal powers return to their domestic or extra-European concerns and play only a marginal role in a renewed European balance of power). To those who like their power-politics with collective security or international organization dressing, the formalized (and, thereby, hopefully, stabilized) equivalents of those patterns are (3) a mixture of Potsdam and San Francisco-with the 1

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