Europe and Her Defense

Europeans enter the 1980s experiencing, for the first time since the cold war, a deep sense of concern-and even fear in some quarters-for the preservation of peace on their Continent. The decade began with speeches by European leaders, including President Giscard d'Estaing and Pope John Paul II, stressing the risks of a new world war, and polls conducted in several European countries throughout 1980 echoed similar qualms.

This concern is, of course, fueled by the rapid accumulation of crises over the past 18 months, all of which have had a direct impact on the security of Europe. The sad irony is that although Europe has had to endure this avalanche of events without having any control over them, the basic setting of European security has been drastically changed.

Paradoxically, while new realities call for urgent and drastic actions on the part of all responsible European governments, these same realities seem to enhance the inertia of these governments, so that they appear both unwilling and unable to take such actions. Up to now, most European governments have endured passively what is in effect the restructuring of their entire security framework. They have only been capable of pushing through policies which amount in practice to delaying tactics: the Warsaw and Moscow summits of last spring between the French President, German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev have not succeeded in restoring East-West détente in the absence of détente between the superpowers; and the European Community's "Venice initiative" of June 1980, calling for participation by the Palestine Liberation Organization in the settlement of the Arab-Israeli dispute, has yet to resolve Europe's strategic problems in the Middle East. Moreover, the stagnation of defense programs and expenditures in most European countries (with the exception of France) illustrates a general reluctance to face up to new threats of the 1980s.

The key questions for the Europeans-as well as for the West as a whole-remain to be faced and answered: How can the existing European security system adapt to the new political and strategic realities of the 1980s? What, specifically, can the Europeans themselves do for their own defense? And what would a modified European security arrangement imply for European defense cooperation as well as for the NATO alliance as a whole?

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