European integration and the atlantic community in the 1980s

Atlantic Community in the1980sThis unique collection of essays lays the groundwork for the study ofthe intersection of European integration and transatlantic relations inthe 1980s.. 11 G

Atlantic Community in the1980s

This unique collection of essays lays the groundwork for the study ofthe intersection of European integration and transatlantic relations inthe 1980s With archives for this period only recently opened, scholarsare beginning to analyze and understand what some have called anapogee of the European project and others have called the second ColdWar How do these moments intersect and relate to one another? Theseessays, by prominent scholars from Europe and the United States,examine this and related questions while challenging conventionalchronologies

Kiran Klaus Patel is Professor of European and Global History atMaastricht University He is the author, among other works, ofSoldiers of Labor: Labor Service in Nazi Germany and New DealAmerica (Cambridge 2005) and coeditor of The United States andGermany During the 20th Century: Competition and Convergence

(Cambridge 2010) and of Europeanization in the Twentieth Century:Historical Approaches (2010)

Kenneth Weisbrode is Assistant Professor of History at BilkentUniversity He is the author of On Ambivalence (2012) and TheAtlantic Century (2009), and coeditor of The Paradox of a GlobalUSA (2007)

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

European integration and the Atlantic community in the 1980s / [edited by]

Kiran Klaus Patel, Kenneth Weisbrode.

pages cm Includes bibliographical references.

isbn 978 -1-107-03156-2 (hardback)

1 Europe – Relations – United States 2 United States – Relations – Europe 3 European federation – History – 20th century 4 European Economic Community countries – History – 20th century 5 United States – Foreign relations – 1981–1989 6 United States – Economic

policy – 1981–1993 7 Europe – Politics and government – 20th century.

8 Europe – Economic conditions – 20th century 9 National security – United States – History – 20th century 10 National security – Europe – History – 20th

century I Patel, Kiran Klaus II Weisbrode, Kenneth.

d1065 u5e974 2013

327 091820109048 –dc23 2013015871

isbn 978 -1-107-03156-2 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of url s for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain,

accurate or appropriate.

List of contributors pagevii

Kiran Klaus Patel and Kenneth Weisbrode

2 The Unnoticed Apogee of Atlanticism? U.S.–Western

N Piers Ludlow

3 More Cohesive, Still Divergent: Western Europe, the

United States, and the Madrid CSCE Follow-Up Meeting 39

Angela Romano

4 The Deal of the Century: The Reagan Administration

Ksenia Demidova

5 Poland’s Solidarity as a Contested Symbol of the Cold War:

Robert Brier

6 The European Community and the Paradoxes

of U.S Economic Diplomacy: The Case of the IT

Arthe Van Laer

7 The European Community and International

Duccio Basosi

v

8 Did Transatlantic Drift Help European Integration?

The Euromissiles Crisis, the Strategic Defense Initiative,

Philipp Gassert

9 A Transatlantic Security Crisis? Transnational Relations

between the West German and the U.S Peace Movements,

Holger Nehring

10 Reviving the Transatlantic Community? The Successor

Generation Concept in U.S Foreign Affairs, 1960s–1980s 201

Giles Scott-Smith

Antonio Varsori

12 A Shift in Mood: The 1992 Initiative and Changing U.S

Mark Gilbert

13 France, the United States, and NATO: Between

Europeanization and Re-Atlanticization, 1990–1991 265

Frédéric Bozo

Kenneth Weisbrode and Kiran Klaus Patel

Duccio Basosi is Assistant Professor of the History of InternationalRelations and History of North America at Ca’ Foscari University.Frédéric Bozo is Professor at the Sorbonne Nouvelle (University of Paris III),where he teaches contemporary history and international relations.Robert Brier is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute inWarsaw.

Ksenia Demidova holds a Ph.D in contemporary history from the EuropeanUniversity Institute in Florence and presently is a full-time MBA participant

at Vlerick Business School

Philipp Gassert is Professor of Transatlantic Cultural History at theUniversity of Augsburg

Mark Gilbert is Resident Professor of History and International Studies atthe Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, Bologna

N Piers Ludlow is a reader in international history at the London School ofEconomics

Holger Nehring is a reader in contemporary European history at theUniversity of Sheffield

Kiran Klaus Patel is Professor of European and Global History atMaastricht University

Angela Romano is affiliated with the International History Department atthe London School of Economics, where she has been Marie Curie Fellowsince 2011

vii

Giles Scott-Smith is Professor of Diplomatic History of AtlanticCooperation at Leiden University.

Arthe Van Laer is a lecturer in the History Department of the University ofLouvain-la-Neuve and in the Faculty of Economics, Social Sciences, andBusiness Administration of the University of Namur as well as a teacher atthe college SC Charleroi

Antonio Varsori is Professor of History of International Relations andhead of the Department of Politics, Law, and International Studies at theUniversity of Padua

Kenneth Weisbrode is Assistant Professor of History at Bilkent University

This book originated from a conference held at the European UniversityInstitute in May 2010 Participants at the conference included GrahamAvery, Stefano Bartolini, Duccio Basosi, Frédéric Bozo, David Buchan,Edwina Campbell, Gabriele D’Ottavio, Ksenia Demidova, Aurélie Gfeller,Mark Gilbert, Friedrich Kratochwil, N Piers Ludlow, Kiran Klaus Patel,Antonio Costa Pinto, Matthias Schulz, Giles Scott-Smith, Angela Romano,Federico Romero, Nuno Severiano Teixeira, Marten van Heuven, KennethWeisbrode, and Christian Wenkel.

The editors are grateful to them and to the EUI’s Robert Schuman Centrefor Advanced Studies, which sponsored the conference; to the Faculty ofArts and Social Sciences of Maastricht University for its support; and tothe anonymous peer reviewers and editors at Cambridge University Pressfor their many helpful suggestions

ix

Introduction Old Barriers, New Openings

Kiran Klaus Patel and Kenneth Weisbrode

The inspiration for this collection is straightforward.“Study problems, notperiods,” Lord Acton advised; yet the 1980s – whether or not these yearsmark a distinct period – pose a significant problem for contemporaryhistorians because of the rapidity of so many momentous changes in theworld The history of these years has only just begun to be examined,and for many scholars, it centers on a return to the high politics of theCold War: the years between 1979 and 1989 saw a heightening of militarytension between the superpowers, with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan

in 1979 and the reinvigoration of conflicts across Latin America andAfrica, reaching its worst point around 1983 This was followed by sodramatic a reduction in hostilities that contemporaries would declare theCold War over by the end of the decade

The effects of this change were particularly dramatic in and for Europe.Indeed, 1989 has entered the canon of international history with datessuch as 1648, 1815, and 1914 as one of Europe’s major turning points.Germany would soon be reunified, the Soviet Union dismantled, andEurope, in U.S president George H W Bush’s popular phrase, couldbecome“whole and free.”1

This narrative, tilted heavily toward the veryend of the decade, has overlooked or underplayed nearly every other eventfrom the onset of détente in the 1970s to the wars of Yugoslav succession.2

To many Europeans, the 1980s tell a different story The year 1989 was

a dramatic moment, to be sure, albeit one that few people predicted to thehour Perhaps more significant in retrospect were the vastly differentreactions to it throughout Europe The Central European experience of

1989was not shared uniformly by all Europeans, or even uniformly withinCentral Europe, least of all within Germany This point, which would seem

to be obvious to any historian writing about any major world event,remains contested within the historiography of this decade.3

The picture is not any clearer at its putative beginning For all that theso-called second Cold War (ca 1979–85) was an important development

in the lives of many people in Europe– at its nadir around 1983 – it did notpredetermine every aspect of the dramatic transformation that followed.For one thing, Europe and European concerns had ceased to be at thecenter of the world– or even, for that matter, of the Cold War – by the

1970s Although the revolutions of 1989 dominated headlines then andsince, they did not alter this reality, nor did they occur independently fromglobalization, which may have had as much to do with bringing about therevolutions in 1989 than any single sequence of political negotiationswithin or over Europe The shape of Europe at the end of the centurywas not prescribed fully by the end of the Cold War, whenever andwherever it began There was more to the story.4

Another important element, of course, was the long-evolving process ofEuropean integration Whether and to what degree the putative end of theCold War in Europe– or, alternatively, its acceleration a few years earlier –breathed new life into that process is open to debate Both its power overnation-states and its territorial reach had grown consistently since the

1950s The 1980s alone saw the European Community welcome Greece,Spain, and Portugal as new member states well before opening its doors tothe nations of the former Communist bloc When this took place formally

in 2004, a reunited Germany was already more than a decade old, with the

the Berlin Wall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); the special issue of the Journal of Contemporary History, “Revisiting 1989: Causes, Course and Consequences,” (August

2009 ); Frédéric Bozo, Marie-Pierre Rey, N Piers Ludlow, and Leopoldo Nuti, eds., Europe and the End of the Cold War (London: Routledge, 2008); Andreas Rödder, Deutschland, einig Vaterland: Die Geschichte der Wiedervereinigung (Munich: Beck, 2009).

former GDR having become part of not only the Federal Republic but alsothe EC in 1990 Another decade earlier, in 1980, the Community signeditsfirst trade agreement with a Comecon member, Romania.5

And in 1986came the Single European Act (SEA), which set into motion the processleading to the Maastricht Treaty six years later and the formal establish-ment of the European Union

This enumeration of events epitomizes a basic fact about the integrationproject: enlargement not only reinforced the Community’s economic anddemographic potential, but also demonstrated the new political role it hadacquired, or aimed to acquire, by the 1980s In all three Mediterraneancountries, EC membership helped stabilize the young democratic systemand was accompanied by a new focus on human rights and democratiza-tion, in and beyond Western Europe.6

What perhaps looked like alate glimmering of Wilsonianism was indeed an expression of a newEuropean idea, reinforced by actors such as the European Parliamentwith its more self-assertive role since the introduction of direct elections

in 1979 Moreover, the SEA and even more the Maastricht Treaty onstrated that the integration was moving incrementally beyond its focus

dem-on the ecdem-onomy and now increasingly included competences infields asdiverse as the environment, energy, home affairs, and culture.7

None of this happened in a vacuum; but neither did the end of the ColdWar To establish how best to connect the multiple narratives of and aboutEurope during these years is the central aim of this volume Specifically, itweaves a transatlantic, Cold War perspective into the standard narrative

of European integration– and vice versa Why did European integrationtake so big a stride forward at the precise moment of greatest hostilitybetween the superpowers? Is it possible to show that one set of tensions led

to progress in mitigating or reversing another? Were the two trajectoriesessentially reinforcing, or independent? And where did the UnitedStates – and, broadly speaking, transatlantic relations – fit in theEuropean story? How does the European integration narrativeflow within

5

David Kennedy and David E Webb, “Integration: Eastern Europe and the European Communities, ” Columbia Journal of Transnational Law 28 (1990), 633–75; Suvi Kansikas, Trade Blocs and the Cold War: The CMEA and the EC Challenge,1969–1976 (unpublished

Ph.D thesis, University of Helsinki, 2012).

6

See Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010).

7

N Piers Ludlow, “European Integration in the 1980s: On the Way to Maastricht?” Journal

of European Integration History, 19 (2013).

the wider framework of an Atlantic Community?8

Was this a case of benignU.S neglect? Or were there important, albeit indirect and perhaps evenunrecognized, steps taken by Americans that facilitated the deepening, andpaved the way for the later widening, of European institutions and gover-nance? What does the relative paucity of European discourse in the UnitedStates during the early and middle 1980s– in contrast with earlier moments

of high global tension, namely the late 1940s, mid-late 1950s, and early

1960s– suggest about the nature of the years leading up to 1989, and thosethat followed? Might the U.S government have devoted more attention inpublic to nonmilitary issues like trade, the environment, and monetarypolicy earlier in the decade? And how did European attitudes toward theUnited States– which also reached new lows in the early part of the decade –affect those priorities? Were transatlantic scars still too raw to reopen fromthe tumultuous 1960s and 1970s, which saw some disputes over marketaccess and energy policy grow nearly as bitter for some people as thoseover life and death in Vietnam? These are just a few of the questions raised

by the chapters in this volume Its overall aim in suggesting answers to them

is to establish and advance an agenda for research on the decade, looselydemarcated

s c o p e , o r i e n t a t i o n , a n d c o v e r a g e

The first task for the study of any historical period is to address itschronology It includes when the decade began, when it ended, how itcompares to earlier periods, and even whether the usual ten-year demarca-tion makes historical sense As already suggested, the 1980s may be more of

a“non-decade” or “long decade” than one would otherwise gather fromthe calendar Recent research on the 1970s, for example, suggests that it washardly the“dark ages” of European integration that most contemporariesand an earlier wave of research thought it to be.9

Yet, according to Matthias

8

For precedents, see Valérie Aubourg, Gérard Bossuat, and Giles Scott-Smith, eds., European Community, Atlantic Community? (Paris: Soleb, 2008); Giles Scott-Smith and Valérie Aubourg, eds., Atlantic, Euratlantic, or Europe-America? (Paris: Soleb, 2011) 9

Robert O Keohane and Stanley Hoffmann, “Institutional Change in Europe in the 1980s,”

in Robert O Keohane and Stanley Hoffmann, eds., The New European Community: Decisionmaking and Institutional Change (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), 1 –39, here 8;

as a contemporary example, see Sicco Mansholt, La Crise (Paris: Stock, 1974); one of the earliest, more positive reassessments of the decade is Joseph H H Weiler, The Constitution

of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 39 –63; for more recent work

by historians, see, e.g., Antonio Varsori and Guia Migani, eds., Europe in the International Arena during the1970s: Entering a Different World (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2011).

Schulz and Thomas Schwartz, the 1970s was the first decade in whichEuropean integration was acknowledged as an impediment to transatlanticrelations: the United States continued to support the former rhetoricallybut did little to encourage or help it in practice, which had not been the caseduring the 1950s and early 1960s.10

Others like Geir Lundestad have goneeven further to characterize U.S support for, and interest in, Europeanintegration between 1977 and 1984 as going“from bad to worse.”11The term“Eurosclerosis,” coined in the 1980s to characterize the decadestarting in the mid-1970s, may suffer a similar divided fate as research movesfurther into the 1980s Instead, some have argued that the Communityexperienced “a sequence of irregular big bangs” during the years from

1973to 1986, while others have disaggregated these years into even smallerunits.12

Obviously, distinct policy fields had different trajectories – forinstance, with the Common Agricultural Policy being a problem child duringmost of the decade, whereas the Common Fishery Policy, the direct elections

of the European Parliament, or thefirst Schengen Agreement on bordercontrols signified new steps and modes of integration Its pace and effectsvaried much from place to place, as they had always done At the formallevel, the 1980s saw considerable movement: on the one hand, three newcountries joined the EC, but on the other, Greenland became thefirst and (sofar) only country ever to leave the Community Such variations mattered,and continue to matter They are also a sharp reminder against any simplisticand teleological narratives of European integration.13

Yet it should still bepossible to stand back and address the most important turning points andcontinuities

Contending periodizations have produced different verdicts of ment and failure For this reason, we propose extending both the

achieve-10

Matthias Schulz and Thomas A Schwartz, “The Superpower and the Union in the Making: U.S.-European Relations, 1969 –1980,” in Matthias Schulz and Thomas A Schwartz, eds., The Strained Alliance: U.S.-European Relations from Nixon to Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 355 –73.

11

Geir Lundestad, The United States and Western Europe since1945: From “Empire” by

Invitation to Transatlantic Drift (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 201 12

See, e.g., Peter Katzenstein, “International Relations Theory and the Analysis of Change,”

in Ernst-Otto Czempiel and James N Rosenau, eds., Global Changes and Theoretical Challenges (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1989), 296; Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 526; Desmond Dinan, Ever Closer Union:

An Introduction to European Integration, 4th edition (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2010) 13

On this problem, also see, e.g., Wolfram Kaiser and Antonio Varsori, eds., European Union History: Themes and Debates (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2010); Mark Gilbert, “Narrating the Process: Questioning the Progressive Story of European Integration, ” Journal of Common Market Studies 46 (2008), 641 –62.

chronological and geographic scope of the decade and its topical eters from the heretofore narrow and separate discussions of security oreconomic integration to national, regional, and global culture and theelaboration of each in the presence of the other That is to say, by address-ing the Atlantic and European dimensions of politics, economics, andsociety together, we may rediscover what many people probably under-stood at the time: the transatlantic narrative had one logic and hierarchy,with geopolitics at the top, while the European integration narrative hadanother that was defined by the language of center and periphery Butneither one could escape the other.

param-The chapters in this volume thus do more than blur the standardchronology They also claim that, when seen in their interrelated totality,the transatlantic and European narratives accomplish something remark-able for one another during these years Transatlantic relations improveddramatically, which helped further (again, indirectly) some real achieve-ments in European integration insofar as Americans neither stood in theway nor gave the impression that hand-holding was needed or wanted

In other words, there was the semblance of a rise in sovereignty– for theAtlantic Alliance, which was no longer held hostage to intramural battlesover codfish, grain, pipelines, or missiles; for the European Community,which was no longer expected to submit to the blessing or approval ofnon-Europeans; and for the members of the soon-to-be-former Sovietbloc, which was no longer so fearful of Soviet power and therefore couldfinally contemplate choosing a different set of European and transatlanticalignments

All this was imagined and executed during a very short period of time

in the mid-1980s, and ironically, soon after contemporaries said things couldnot get any worse for the West For not only did the global basis of trans-atlantic relations continue to shift from a superpower duopoly to a moremultipolar arrangement, but so did subjects like energy, the environment,and human rights continue to reappear in transnational fora.14

Even withinEurope, there was a shift away from bipolarity as European governments(no longer just De Gaulle’s France) took independent positions fromthe United States, for example, over the boycott of the 1980 Moscow

14

E.g., Robert O Keohane and Joseph Nye, Power and Interdependence (Boston: Little Brown,

1977 ); Bruce Mazlish, The New Global History (London: Routledge, 2006); chapters by Niall Ferguson and Charles Maier in Shock of the Global; Franz Knipping and Matthias Schönwald, eds., Aufbruch zum Europa der zweiten Generation Die europäische Einigung1969–1984 (Trier: WVT, 2004); Antonio Varsori, ed., Alle origini del presente.

L ’Europa occidentale nella crisi degli anni Settanta (Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2007).

Olympics; the imposition of an embargo on Soviet grain; the construction

of a Soviet natural gas pipeline to Western Europe; and on the trade andother disputes following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan None ofthese disputes was fatal to the Alliance, as the following chapters address,both separately and cumulatively; in fact, as some scholars have evenargued about earlier challenges to U.S hegemony, they may even havestrengthened it.15

The transformation of relationships in and between Europe and theUnited States must be understood in a global context World merchandisetrade more than tripled between 1973 and 1983– from $578 billion to

$1,835 billion In 1993, it stood at $3,639 billion.16

Between 1978 and

1985, the number of intergovernmental organizations (IOs) jumped from

290to 380, and the number of international NGOs from 2,400 to 4,700.17The number of IOs as well as of NGOs experienced the fastest growth

of any time since 1945 In sum, the world, especially the Atlantic world,was more closely connected than ever, while at the same time, Japan wasperceived as both a political and strategic asset and as a real economicthreat, while several other important economic actors in Asia emerged.The West was a beneficiary of globalization, but also now one of severalcontenders for global preeminence

It is within this context that the so-called second Cold War– the collapseand replacement of superpower détente– occurred alongside the acceler-ation of European integration leading to the SEA Each took place amid

a transformation of global politics and society away from the bipolarorder that had begun to compete, even within Europe, with alternativeconcepts, eventually including the “European common home” laterchampioned by Mikhail Gorbachev This concept– a Soviet rendition ofthe pan-Europeanism from the interwar period, which placed all Europeannations, including Russia and its fellow members of the Soviet bloc, into asingle, regional idea– did not come suddenly into existence, but ratheremerged over time, and with considerable variations across the Soviet bloc,

as Europe’s own position in the world began to supersede East-Westdivisions over the course of the 1970s This context helps explain whythe second Cold War did not look perfectly like a replay of the late 1940s

and early 1950s: while those years put Europe back on the center stage ofworld politics, the most recent literature reveals that the continent’s easternand western parts still managed to decouple themselves to a surprisingextent from this simple formulation.18

A few years later, Gorbachevdepicted Western Europe as his partner in reform, impressed, as he put it,

by the EC as a“new giant developing one with a population of 350 millionpeople, which surpasses us in its level of economic, scientific and techno-logical growth.”19

If the last generation of Soviet rulers – and even more than them theintellectual elites of East-Central Europe– really did regard Europe and

“Europeanness” as a positive orientation because of the perceived promise

of closer relations with the European Community, the perception would,

in effect,flip the Cold War pattern of causation on its head It would meanthat the progress of European integration of the mid-late 1980s, ratherthan being one of several results of the end of the Cold War, was in effectone of its primary stimuli, while at the same time, the role of the EuropeanCommunity in ending the Cold War – if only because of Gorbachev’sviews of it– was more important than most accounts have allowed Asthe chapters by Piers Ludlow, Antonio Varsori, Angela Romano, andPhilipp Gassert demonstrate, borders between conditions, causes, andconsequences blur considerably by the middle of the decade, so muchthat a Panglossian interpretation of the entire period may present a strongtemptation for authors of the grand narrative In assigning subjects andscholars we tried our best to resist it Indeed the various chapters differ

on several points: for example, on the main thrust and import of peace

18

Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse,1970–2000 (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2001), chapters 1 and 2; and Svetlana Savranskaya, Thomas Blanton, and Vladislav Zubok, Masterpieces of History: The Peaceful End of the Cold War in Europe,

1989 (New York: Central European University Press, 2010), 18ff, 492–96, 641–43;

Marie-Pierre Rey, “‘Europe Is Our Common Home’: A Study of Gorbachev’s Diplomatic Concept, ” Cold War History 4 (2004), 33–65; and, by the same author, “Perestroika and Its Effects Revisited: Gorbachev ’s New Thinking and Europe, 1985–89,” in Bozo, Rey, and Nuti, Europe and the End of the Cold War; José M Faraldo, Paulina Gulin´ska-Jurgiel, and Christian Domnitz, eds., Europa im Ostblock Vorstellungen und Diskurse (1945–1991)

(Cologne: Böhlau, 2008); Jacques Levesque, The Enigma of 1989: The USSR and the

Liberation of Eastern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Poul Villaume and Odd Arne Westad, eds., Perforating the Iron Curtain: European Détente, Transatlantic Relations, and the Cold War,1965–1985 (Copenhagen: Museum

Tusculanum Press, 2010).

19

Gorbachev at the Political Consultative Committee Meeting in Warsaw on July 15, 1988, published in Vojtech Mastny and Malcolm Byrne, eds., A Cardboard Castle? An Inside History of the Warsaw Pact,1955–1991 (New York: Central European University Press,

), 608.

movements on either side of the Atlantic vis-à-vis nuclear arms controland disarmament; the causal relationships between economic and polit-ical trends; the degree to which both were mediated by globalization, ormore by internal (i.e., European) factors; the relative influence of second-tier states like Italy or Poland in advancing a wider process of historicalchange; and, ultimately, the structural, or stochastic, character of suchchange in the late twentieth century or, as several chapters suggest, a series

of challenge and response cycles that recall the theories of Arnold Toynbee.The possibility of considering these and related questions is just one of theadvantages of reconstructing the intertwined histories of Europe during thisperiod from the inside out rather than derivatively from the outside in, or thetop down

Within Western Europe there was an effort to extend economic andpolitical integration and to bolster Western military and economic strengthbeyond it This took place, as Angela Romano describes, while the alliessimultaneously advanced their opening to the East by way of the CSCEprocess with follow-on conferences to the 1975 meeting that produced theHelsinki Final Act, their associated Helsinki Watch Groups and relatedactivities that sought to protect and promote human rights Europeanintegration gained traction, we argue, precisely because of the perceivedneed to present an image of strength, not only to“other” Europeans (that

is, in the Soviet bloc) whose rhetoric had come to equate reform in theircountries with the wider coming together of Europe, but also to Americans,who regularly demanded a commitment to the same Helsinki processthroughout Europe, particularly in these countries, as well as to someWestern Europeans who, rightly or wrongly, questioned policies put for-ward by the United States

That did not happen uniformly, to be sure: the chapters by FrédéricBozo and Antonio Varsori, for example, illustrate important distinctionslater on in French and Italian approaches Images of what Europe could,and should, be continued to diverge throughout the long decade However,this preliminary survey of the 1980s suggests that the deepening andwidening of the transatlantic and European processes of integrationwere permeable inasmuch as they played off their mutual strengths, aswell as the specter of mutual dilution This does not necessarily mean thateach was consistently present in the thought and action of most people

on both sides of the Atlantic; the Polish crisis from 1980–81, for example,reveals, in Robert Brier’s chapter, that the language of Western unitydiffered from place to place but rarely took into account the EC per se,whereas Romano demonstrates the indirect effect such differences had

on European cohesion within the framework of the 1980–83 Madridfollow-on meeting of the CSCE In these instances, the need to standtogether for the purpose of gaining Soviet concessions on human rightsfor the most part overrode transatlantic disputes over the best approach totake, which, in turn, allowed the NATO caucus in Europe to encourageunity among EC members in this and similar forums.

On the domestic level, the complexities of each story present an able yet logical pattern of causation from moment to moment, as well

unpredict-as transitively: for example, in noting Brier’s description of the similaritiesbetween Poland and Chile; or in recalling how important the Falkland Islandsconflict was to Thatcher’s political career, and how critical Thatcher sub-sequently was to making Gorbachev acceptable to Western skeptics, leads us

to wonder whether a Chilean dictator or an Argentine junta was indirectlyresponsible for the peaceful end of the Cold War, however tendentious thatmay sound Or in highlighting, as several authors do, that the U.S StrategicDefense Initiative prompted much collective soul-searching in Europe and,apart from whatever effects it may have had on Soviet calculations, evidentlyreinvigorated the drive for integration in Western Europe It may also bepossible, therefore, to draw an admittedly circuitous line of causationbetween the SDI and the SEA This was, as historians like to say, a verypregnant decade When considered cumulatively and in light offluctuatingpolitics in each major country, as the chapters in this volume also describe,the two European narratives become nearly impossible to separate, and infact appear to attract one another as would the force between the two poles

of a magnet

How and when did they come together? There were two phases, withthefirst having begun around 1977, lasting through the end of 1986, andthen another one following from 1987 to 1992 The chapters of this bookfollow along this chronology The first phase featured a reactive, evendefensive, stance on both sides of the Atlantic vis-à-vis national andregional interests amid worsening global tensions, but it was neither newnor clear-cut One recalls that the early 1970s brought the first enlarge-ment of the EC and the reorientation of the United Kingdom, not necessa-rily away from the Atlantic, but toward a more composite position thatsought to harmonize both transatlantic and European interests Thatcompromise survived and, arguably, thrived, as Western governmentsmoved to recover from their mid-decade crisis over monetary and energypolicies with important successes, particularly after 1975: the establish-ment of a post–Bretton Woods system for the coordination of monetarypolicy; the advent of a global human rights agenda within the framework

of détente; the rethinking of relationships between the developed and developed worlds; and the further entry of transnational, global issueslike the environment and energy into the realm of high politics, all during

under-a period when personunder-al relunder-ationships between leunder-aders on either side ofthe Atlantic (e.g., Henry Kissinger–Michel Jobert; Jimmy Carter–HelmutSchmidt) appeared dismal

The Iranian hostage crisis, the declaration of martial law in Poland, theSoviet grain embargo, and the Falklands War brought them even further tothe fore Yet, as Gassert’s and Varsori’s chapters show in detail, NATO’s

1979 dual-track decision and its implementation – resulting in theEuromissile deployments and then their subsequent elimination by treaty

in 1987– offset the difficulties and, to some extent, liberated negotiations

in other areas while at the same time even forcing a reexamination– some

of it collaborative and complementary– among the many groups opposingthe deployments

Meanwhile, by the mid-1980s, Europe– that is to say, the Europeanproject– again became fashionable, even in the United States.20

But it was

a particular Europe, with multiple identities acting in parallel For some inthe United States, as Mark Gilbert’s chapter illustrates, it was a Europethat harkened back to the 1940s and 1950s and ahead to an ideal future–the center of action, the critical ally, the favoredfield of battle in the war ofhuman progress In much of Western Europe, it remained an integratingentity and a glass half empty, whereas in the East it was a bit of both Inall three regions there was, according to Gilbert, a shift in the character oressence of the question that seemed, at least then, to overtake the so-calledstructural constraints of previous decades, notably the one that setAtlanticism and Europeanism against one another as mutually exclusivepolicy orientations or visions Seen in retrospect, that apparent dialectichad mostly to do with the moving contours of Germany and its dual statuswithin postwar Europe, and less with the inherent meaning or value ofeither orientation.21

By about 1986, or, as Bozo’s chapter concludes, tainly by 1992, it was no longer the case that European integration– eitherwithin Western Europe or across the East-West divide– had to happen atthe expense of transatlantic solidarity, or vice versa Three rounds of EC

cer-20

Not least among social scientists who, in the 1980s, returned to European studies with renewed interest in functionalism, “constructivism,” and related topics of the economic and political dimensions of regional integration This interest also coincided with the emphasis of scholars like Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, Power and Interdependence, on questions of institutional governance and interdependence.

21

Cf Schulz in Schulz and Schwartz, The Strained Alliance, 307.

enlargement, for which old alliances such as in the case of Britain (1973)and security concerns in the cases of Spain and Portugal (1981) as well as

of Greece (1986) loomed large, are probably the best evidence for thisnew dynamic and also for the greater heterogeneity that now characterizedthe integration project An Atlantic Europe could coexist with a FederalEurope, even with a Gaullist Europe In other words, multiple Europesbecame fashionable during a time when the awareness and acceptance ofmultiple channels of intergovernmental action grew, thanks not only to suchprocesses within Europe but also to the nascent G-7 and similar arrange-ments throughout the developed world That the effect of such multiplicitiesconverged in the mid-1980s was not entirely accidental; nor was it entirelyplanned.22

The second half of the decade, roughly from 1987 to 1992, saw the

ECfinally make the leap from an intergovernmental body to a small butcredible world actor The United States meanwhile appeared to renew itscommitment to European integration, reversing some earlier setbacks To

be sure, the extent to which the post-1986 period was a conscious reaction

to the period before varied by sector and country, but on balance, thisperiodization best evokes the interrelationship of the transatlantic andEuropean narratives on the one hand and of historical causation in bothdirections– before and after 1986 – on the other.23

t h e l o n g e r v i e w

To begin to understand this story requires a deeper examination of thesources of European Policy during the 1980s: the personalities, economicand social conditions, political realignments, shifting moods and attitudes,and, perhaps above all, the congruence of popular axioms amid the depar-ture of an elite generation and its replacement by another in the widerregional, global, historical, and intellectual contexts For while there weremajor differences in the 1970s over the ends of policy– within the West,

22

Cf Kiran Klaus Patel, “Provincializing the European Communities: Cooperation and Integration in Europe in a Historical Perspective,” Contemporary European History 22 (2013) 23

E.g., see, also with a focus on 1975 to 1985, Philipp Gassert, Tim Geiger, and Hermann Wentker, “Zweiter Kalter Krieg und Friedensbewegung: Einleitende Überlegungen zum historischen Ort des NATO-Doppelbeschlusses von 1979, ” in Philipp Gassert, Tim Geiger, and Hermann Wentker, eds., Zweiter Kalter Krieg und Friedensbewegung: Der NATO-Doppelbeschluss in deutsch-deutscher und internationaler Perspektive (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2011), 13; Geir Lundestad, ed., Just Another Major Crisis? The United States and Europe since2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

between the West and the East, and even between the North and the South–

as noted in the chapter by Antonio Varsori– most of these disappeared bythe later 1980s or were replaced by differences over means.24

Looking ahead, several chapters also compel the question of why somany achievements were followed by so much discord Was the oldAtlantic-European dialectic buried too hastily? Or are cultural differencesjust too endemic? This kind of quasi-biological historicism has provedpopular in the writings of polemicists like Robert Kagan, as it had beforehim with Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber and others.25

It is true that manyAmericans and Europeans remain geopolitically and culturally ambivalent;Donald Rumsfeld was neither thefirst nor the only public figure to toutthe existence of an Old World/New World dichotomy At one level bothAmericans and Europeans appear to recognize the continued interpenetra-tion of one another’s societies, although it must be admitted that this ismuch more palpable now in Europe At another level, there are too manydistinctions to enumerate, and increasingly, again because of globalization,

it is much harder to assert that Americans and Europeans (andtheir interests) are any more alike and aligned than, say, Americans andJapanese, Mexicans, or Australians Of course Europeans themselves con-tinue to discuss their own place in the world with endless determination.Americans increasingly have begun to do the same thing, as the late SamuelHuntington’s final book – Who Are We? – well attests.26

Atlanticism and Europeanism were each born of the apparent desire ofsome Europeans and Americans to have two balls in the air at once: somewanted to stress solidarity yet at the same time to assert difference; otherswanted to recognize a state of interdependence while also championingself-determination Atlanticism and Europeanism have always coexistedand competed with one another, and with their respective paradoxes

Re flections on the Kagan Thesis,” unpublished paper, Atlantic Council of the U.S (2003); Steven Walt, “The Ties that Fray: Why Europe and America Are Drifting Apart,” National Interest 54 (1998/1999), 3 –11; and Ulrich Krotz, “The (Beginning of the) End of the Political Unity of the West? Four Scenarios of North Atlantic Futures, ” RSCAS Working Paper2008/31.

26

Simon & Schuster, 2004.

Who were the principal Atlanticists and who were the Europeanists?This question also is more complex than it appears Too often, historiansmake the mistake of tracing a policy trajectory by way of the statementsand presumed thoughts of the few people at the top But there were otherimportant players In the U.S State and Defense departments, for example,Atlanticists still held sway over policy during the 1980s Almost none wereGaullists to the extent Kissinger, Nixon, and Brzezinski could be painted

as having been Men like Horst Teltschik in the Federal Republic, CharlesPowell in the United Kingdom, Brent Scowcroft in the United States, JacquesAttali in France, Jacques Delors in Brussels, and Anatoly Chernyaev inthe Soviet Union came, by the very end of the decade and in the early

1990s, to establish their own transatlantic policy network, much as theirpredecessors had done a generation before Where they were unable tosmooth the edges of politics, civic groups were needed tofill the gap andbring continuity – as Giles Scott-Smith’s chapter describes – often inresponse to the opposition led by the groups described in Philipp Gassert’sand Holger Nehring’s chapters Therefore, to tell this story, one also mustextend its coverage vertically, so to speak, to include many more protago-nists and antagonists, as well as horizontally, over time

Tracing the ebb andflow of policy networks is just one way to understandthe importance of cross-cutting transnational alliances among bureaucratsand pressure groups and, not insignificantly, economic policy makers andbusiness lobbies, as the chapters by Duccio Basosi, Ksenia Demidova, andArthe Van Laer illustrate Collaborative relationships and rivalries amongthese groups led in most cases to a borrowing and a blurring of policymodels– seen especially in Basosi’s chapter – whereby Europeans fashioned

an unwieldy combination of acquiescence to – and in some places, evenpraise for– Reaganism’s microeconomics with deep criticism of its macro-economics and its effects on Europe Jacques Delors’s trajectory from wit-nessing Mitterrand’s failed experiment of Socialist economic policy between

1981and 1983 to sweeping up the pieces as minister of the economy and

offinance in France and later on putting the European Community on amore neoliberal track is one of the better examples Similar paths werefollowed in many other areas as well, from popular music andfilm to theacademic disciplines The extent to which these convergences mediated andconditioned high politics has only just begun to be understood

Policy history meanwhile has only so much explanatory value.Bureaucracies are known to give priority to some areas that may turnout to be less salient over time; and the interests of bureaucracies maynot match perfectly with the aims they claim to pursue Determining the

fate of policies therefore comes down to much more than the relative inence of its promoters and detractors In this instance, most Atlanticistsand Europeanists would have said that their general goals were consistent:peace, prosperity, and successful integration of Europe,first of the West,then of the East Yet one set of goals and actors did not guarantee fulfillment

prom-by the other Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union, or a powerfulEuropean Union, could have brought about an end to the Cold War, or theunification of Europe, on its own

These rather obvious qualifications take us back to the role of leadersand leadership We may extend the speculation, as several chapters do inthis book, back further to argue that some like Kohl and Mitterranddrew inspiration from the Monnet method and example, not only in itspassion and commitment to European unity but also and perhaps evenmore consistently to transatlantic partnership, alternately strengtheningtheir own European “pillar” and persuading like-minded Americans tosupport it.27

Delors was known to share many of these views, and wasportrayed in the United States, as we learn from Mark Gilbert, as a latter-day Monnet By and large, the United States under Reagan and especiallywith George H W Bush returned during this period to the axiom ofEurope as a unifying project In Europe, this augmented the effort led

by Kohl and Mitterrand to lay a European basis for German unification

by ensuring that a unified Germany would play a constructive role inEuropean institutions Bush and Kohl in turn helped ensure a similar result

in transatlantic institutions Both efforts built upon the earlier work ofGorbachev, Reagan, and Thatcher– who again had been the first majorWestern leader to bestow her endorsement upon the Soviet leader– to endthe Cold War peaceably If the history of this decade suggests anythingabout there having been some kind of broad, strategic dialectic in Europe,

it existed both between the continent’s eastern and western centers ofgravity, and between rival geopolitical visions within each bloc

Atlanticism and European integration came to resemble more symbioticthan contending doctrines This does not necessarily mean their rivalrywas not significant But it was not, and never really was, mutually exclu-sive It would appear impossible for two distinct policy maps to existsimultaneously in the real world; but in this case, and during this decade,especially, there did

27

A central argument of Frédéric Bozo ’s book, Mitterrand, the End of the Cold War, and German Reuni fication trans Susan Emanuel (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009).

e n v o i

The discussion in the chapters that follow centers on the question of vergence, both among various ideas and images of Europe, and betweenthose ideas and events on the ground They do not all agree on causes andeffects, or even on the same chronologies Thus, while their coverage varies–and is meant to be selectively comparative rather than exhaustive – theaim of each chapter is to draw the various strands of the decade’s historytogether while planting the seeds of future scholarship Archives withsources for these years have just begun to open; students are gravitatingtoward them, and the entire decade is finally being treated with somemeasure of objective distance We are still at the beginning – the verybeginning – of a long and rich path of discovery Accordingly, our biashas been in favor of adding– both years and nuance – over subtracting

con-We plot a course for others to follow with the aim, as the selection ofauthors and topics reveals, of extending historical European integrationresearch into a new decade, of broadening the discussion of Europeaninternational history in the 1980s from its heavy focus on the very end– infact, the final year – of the decade, and of enriching Anglo-Americanhistoriography of the Cold War with more perspectives from Europe.28

By integrating the transatlantic dimension of European integration andEurope’s role in the transatlantic relationship as best as sources willcurrently allow, we hope this portion of the international history of thelast years of the twentieth century will not only resemble a Rubik’s cube –invented, incidentally, in 1974 andfirst sold on the market in 1980 – butalso afinely woven fabric of silk and iron

28

Cf Michael Cox, “Another Transatlantic Split? American and European Narratives and the End of the Cold War, ” Cold War History 7 (2007), 121–46.

The Unnoticed Apogee of Atlanticism? U.S –Western European Relations during the Early Reagan Era

N Piers Ludlow

The 1980s did not start well for Western Europe In domestic political terms,the era was one of acute polarization, with Britain, France, and Germany allcharacterized by intense ideological competition.1

This left-wing, right-wingbattle took place, moreover, against a backdrop of an acute economicdownturn In most European economies, the new decade did not bring theend of the problems that had beset the global economy during the 1970s,but instead their prolongation, with growth anemic or absent altogetherand unemployment remaining stubbornly high, if not still rising WesternEurope’s predicament, furthermore, was made worse by the contrastbetween its ongoing economic stagnation and the renewed growth of itsprincipal international competitors, the United States and Japan It may havebeen“morning in America,” but on the other side of the Atlantic, dawnshowed no sign of breaking.2

For a continent that had grown accustomed inthe course of the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s to higher growth rates thanthe Americans, this was frustrating indeed, as was the seemingly inexorablerise of the Japanese economy that had overtaken Germany as the capitalistworld’s second-largest exporter in the course of the previous decade.3

1

Richard Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the Thatcher Era (London: Simon & Schuster, 2009); Serge Berstein, Pierre Milza, and J.L Bianco, eds., Les années Mitterrand: Les années du changement, 1981–84 (Paris: Perrin, 2001);

Andreas Wirsching, Abschied vom Provisorium: Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland1982–1990 (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2006).

The early 1980s are also generally perceived to have been a time ofstagnation as far as European integration was concerned A reasonablystrong Commission presidency under Roy Jenkins was followed from

1981 by a much weaker period of leadership under Gaston Thorn.The Council of Ministers, meanwhile, still seemed leaden in its decision-making and prone to total impasse.4

A greater use of qualified majorityvoting (QMV) was widely canvassed as the solution to this problem, butthere seemed little short-term prospect of this happening Both France andthe new member states, Britain in particular, seemed wedded to a ratherdogmatic (and historically questionable) interpretation of the LuxembourgCompromise, which greatly limited the scope for QMV, and there was

no consensus for actual treaty change.5

The European Council alsostruggled for direction, losing much time over the question of Britain’sbudgetary contribution.6

This row proved highly time consuming andacrimonious, despite the relatively small size of the actual sums involved,and the irrelevance of this dispute to the much broader and morecrucial question of what the EC could contribute to Western Europe’srecovery Overall, the European Community of the early 1980s seemed

to have little chance of providing the answer to the region’s deep economicdifficulties

Transatlantic relations were not much better, according to the tional account, at least.7

tradi-Part of the discord sprang from a record number

of trade disputes between the EC and the Reagan administration, thesubject of Duccio Basosi’s, Ksenia Demidova’s, and Arthe Van Laer’scontributions to this volume At a more fundamental level, however,the difficulties reflected a serious divergence between Washington andmost European capitals in both economic policy and approach to theCold War The economic priorities of Reagan’s America thus differedmarkedly from most European governments’ (Thatcher’s Britain would

be a partial exception) and a similar gap had opened up in readings ofthe Cold War Whereas the American priority in the early 1980s seemed to

Geir Lundestad, Empire by Integration: The United States and European Integration,

1945–1997 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

be to adopt a newly forceful, if not confrontational, stance toward theSoviet Union even at the expense of a serious increase in East-West tension,most Western European states sought instead to maintain important ele-ments of the European détente of the 1970s.8

Reconciling such divergentgoals would not prove to be an easy matter And to make things worse,Reagan’s public image in Europe replete with suggestions that the formeractor was an ignorant and dangerous “cowboy,” intent on taking theworld to the edge of nuclear war, only increased the pressure onEuropean governments, especially those of the center-left, to distancethemselves from Washington

This chapter will not seek dramatically to overturn this picture ofeither European or transatlantic affairs Indeed, the opening section willconfirm the existence of a number of important divergences between theincoming U.S administration and its principal European allies It willalso confirm Reagan’s European image problem Based on the first crop

of archival releases relating to the early 1980s, primarily from theReagan Presidential Library in California, the chapter will, however,seek to add a level of nuance and complexity to this account It will thussuggest that despite the periodic transatlantic disputes that punctuate theperiod, some of the underlying mechanics of the partnership between theUnited States and its principal Western European allies continued towork surprisingly smoothly, both bilaterally and multilaterally Unlikesome early periods of transatlantic discord, in other words, disputes oversubstance did not feed through into rows about how transatlantic dia-logue should be conducted Second, it will argue that the very complexity

of interchange and interaction between the two sides of the Atlantic,involving as it did a huge array of different institutional links, makes itvital for any historian seeking to arrive at a balanced judgment of trans-atlantic ties to look beyond the headline-grabbing personal relationshipsbetween Reagan and his European counterparts And third, it willsuggest that the structures of transatlantic cooperation were actuallyextraordinarily favorable to European influence in Washington duringthis period Therefore, the regular complaints of European leaderswho believed that Reagan’s America paid little heed to their interestsand was indeed growing away from the Old World need to be taken withmore than a pinch of salt

8

For the U.S approach, see Melvyn P Lef fler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union and the Cold War (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007), 339 –65.

w e s t - w e s t t e n s i o n o v e r e a s t - w e s t c o n f l i c t

At the heart of political tensions that characterized transatlantic relationsduring the early Reagan years was a basic divergence in Cold War tactics.This in turn was aggravated by a mismatch in the general political cycles ofseveral of the key Western powers, with the United States and Britain moving

to the right well before West Germany did the same, and France moving in theopposite direction entirely The replacement of the centrist Valéry Giscardd’Estaing – the “most pro-American French leader since World War II”according to Helmut Schmidt, the German chancellor9

– with FrançoisMitterrand, whose Socialist-led coalition government initially also includedseveral Communist ministers, was bound to complicate transatlantic rela-tions.10

The degree of West-West misunderstanding was increased still further

by the very different levels of trade with Eastern Europe carried out by theUnited States and its main European partners Cold War gestures that madepolitical sense in Washington and carried an acceptable level of economic costwere much harder to swallow for Western European countries intent onincreasing their foreign trade outlets, not contracting them

The leaders of Western Europe were not unaware of the rise in West tension during the late 1970s and early 1980s On the contrary, asSchmidt never tired of reminding the Americans, he had been much fasterthan the Carter administration to recognize the threat to European secur-ity constituted by the deployment of a new generation of intermediate-range Soviet nuclear missiles (the famous SS-20s), and had expended ahuge amount of political capital in pushing for an effective Westernresponse.11

East-This had eventually arrived in the form of the December

1979 “double [or dual] track” decision, which committed NATO todeploying a new generation of American intermediate-range missiles inEurope (the cruise and Pershing II missiles) while simultaneously seeking

to remove the SS-20s through disarmament talks with Moscow, therebymaking the cruise and Pershings unnecessary.12

Similarly, all the

9

Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, California (hereafter RRPL), NSC Country Files, Box 14, Folder: FRG (1/20/81–6/30/81) (4), Memcon of Reagan-Schmidt meeting, May 21, 1981.

10

Robert Frank, “‘L’Effet Mitterrand’ à l’étranger: Un ‘état de grace,’ un jeu de mirroir et une politique étrangère de l ’image” in Berstein et al., eds., François Mitterrand, 119–20 11

RRPL, NSC Country Files, Box 14, Folder: FRG (1/20/81 –6/30/81) (4), Memcon of Reagan-Schmidt meeting, May 21, 1981.

12

Leopoldo Nuti, “The Origins of the 1979 Dual Track Decision – A Survey,” in Leopoldo Nuti, ed., The Crisis of Détente in Europe: From Helsinki to Gorbachev,

1975–1985 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 57–71.

European governments recognized that Soviet actions in Afghanistan in

1979and in Poland during the last months of 1981 constituted seriousCold War crises to which the West needed to respond.13

Where differencesarose, however, was in deciding how to respond

In the United States, the whole process of détente had become publiclytarnished, viewed by many as a relaxation in Cold War tension that theSoviet Union had cunningly exploited in order to strengthen itself militarilyand seize new opportunities for expansion in the Third World As apresidential candidate in both 1976 and 1980, Reagan had been partic-ularly critical of détente, leading President Gerald Ford, for instance, toban the use of the word in the course of his unsuccessful campaign forreelection.14

In his veryfirst press conference upon becoming the president

in 1981, Reagan dismissed détente as“a one-way street that the SovietUnion has used to pursue its own aims.”15

Unsurprisingly, therefore,Reagan had no incentive to talk of détente once he began to set the course

of U.S foreign policy On the contrary, many of his most forthrightchampions among the American conservative movement stronglyapplauded his critical rhetoric toward the Soviet Union and praised himfor not going out of his way to talk to his Russian counterparts Summitmeetings, many U.S conservatives feared, were simply opportunities forwily Soviet leaders to play upon the many pressures felt by a democraticWestern leader and to trick the West into unnecessary concessions.16

Itwas therefore no accident that there were no U.S.-Soviet Summits in thecourse of Reagan’s first term In Western Europe, by contrast, there hadbeen much less of a backlash against détente Indeed, the prestige of theOstpolitik process that had normalized the Federal Republic’s relationswith Eastern Europe (and with East Germany in particular), and of thatother apogee of European détente, the Conference on Security andCooperation in Europe (CSCE), remained generally high The disarma-ment talks component of the dual-track decision was also seen as being ofimmense importance.17

European leaders were hence under pressure to go

13

Douglas Selvage, “The Politics of the Lesser Evil: The West, the Polish Crisis, and the CSCE Review Conference in Madrid, 1981–3” in Nuti, The Crisis of Détente in Europe, 41–54 14

Raymond Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon

to Reagan (Washington, DC: Brookings, 1994), 581.

on talking to the Soviets rather than shunning direct dialogue Schmidtthus welcomed Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, to Germany inNovember 1981.18

Giscard d’Estaing visited the Soviet Union in May

1980.19

And Mitterrand traveled to the Soviet Union to meet KonstantinChernenko, the new Soviet leader, in 1984, did so again less than a yearlater to attend Chernenko’s funeral and to have talks with MikhailGorbachev and other Politburo members, and in October 1985 becamethefirst Western leader to be visited by Gorbachev since he had becomeGeneral Secretary.20

Margaret Thatcher also attended Chernenko’sfuneral, having previously met Gorbachev when he traveled to London

in December 1984.21

Such contrasting attitudes toward top-level dialoguewere emblematic of a more general divergence of attitudes toward how tobehave vis-à-vis Moscow Schmidt was representative of a much moregeneralized European attitude when he told the U.S Ambassador inDecember 1981 that“[t]he way to deal with Moscow is not by speechesand interviews These are not read by the Soviets Moscow must bedealt with quietly.”22

Face to face dialogue, not long-distance rhetoricalbroadsides, was the key policy tool in dealing with the Soviet Union.Actual policy divergence was moreover amplified by the very differentpublic debates on either side of the Atlantic Personal relations betweenReagan and his European counterparts were often quite good Schmidt,for instance, was highly commendatory of Reagan’s performance in theaftermath of the Ottawa G-7 Summit in July 1981, letting it be known tothe U.S Embassy in Bonn that “[h]e likes the President as a person,understands what he is trying to do, and is sympathetic to him.”23

Thesame telegram noted that the mood in London about the summit was evenmore euphoric And there is plenty of other evidence of the close personal

208 ; the author would like to thank Marie-Pierre Rey for her help in identifying the dates

of Franco-Soviet Summit meetings.

rapport that quickly developed between Thatcher and the president.24

But

in neither Britain nor Germany did the personal warmth between thenational leader and the U.S president easily translate into more generalpublic sympathy for the new American leader Instead, the image ofReagan as a reckless and somewhat shallow former B-movie actor whoknew little about international affairs and was prepared to take ill-judgedrisks with the security of the world in general and Europe in particular, wasfortified by the sound bites from America’s own much more hard-linedebate about the Cold War that drifted over the Atlantic.25

Gaffes such

as the president’s 1982 comments into what he supposedly thought was aninactive microphone– “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you todaythat I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever We beginbombing in five minutes” – only made matters worse.26

The famousmock-up Gone with the Wind poster produced by the peace movement

of Reagan as Rhett Butler holding Thatcher as Scarlett O’Hara in his armsagainst a backdrop of a mushroom cloud– complete with the tag line, “Shepromised to follow him to the end of the earth He promised to organiseit!” – was perhaps an extreme example of European anxieties.27

However,

as a number of telegrams from the U.S embassies in both London andBonn illustrate, fears that anti-American sentiment was growing acrossWestern Europe were taken very seriously by U.S diplomats A March

1982dispatch from London summarized the problem:“The upshot is that

we no longer enjoy the benefit of the doubt in Britain – or we suspectelsewhere in Europe On the contrary, our every move is scrutinized forevidence that we are using our power irresponsibly.”28

In such circumstances, European leaders found it very hard to lookfavorably upon U.S urgings that their countries adopt hard-line Cold Warstances, especially when to do so would be bothfinancially and politicallyexpensive This was true of the debate about NATO rearmament whereU.S pressure for a generalized arms build-up was a source of discomfort

24

See, for instance, the extracts of Nicholas Henderson’s diary about Thatcher’s visit to Washington in February–March 1981 reproduced on the Thatcher Foundation website: http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/110525 (last accessed on October 1, 2012) 25

RRPL, NSC Country Files, Box 14, Folder FRG (January 9, 1981 to December 31, 1981) (3), Bonn to Washington 24153, December 8, 1981.

for those (such as Schmidt) who were conscious of the high political pricethat was already being paid within the ruling SPD party, in particular, inorder to get the dual-track decision through, and acutely aware of thebudgetary constraints faced by even a comparatively well-performingEuropean economy like that of West Germany The pained (if discreet)reaction of the German government to the U.S announcement that itintended to resume production of neutron bomb warheads underlinedthe ongoing political sensitivity of the whole rearmament debate in WestGermany and Western Europe more generally.29

And European fort was even greater in response to the recurrent U.S pressure to punishthe Soviet Union for episodes such as the declaration of martial law inPoland by means of restrictions in economic interchange across the IronCurtain The most notorious such controversy, over the American attempt

discom-to impede Western European companies from supplying components discom-tothe gas pipeline running from the Soviet Union to Western Europe, is thesubject of Demidova’s chapter in this volume But the pipeline affair wasonly one of a succession of transatlantic rows in which U.S and WesternEuropean priorities collided head on For the Americans the key was toavoid economic transfers that might provide solace to a struggling Sovieteconomy and the interruption of which would also be a highly visible sign

of Western disapproval of Soviet actions For the Europeans, by contrast,not only was trade a sign of healthy East-West relations, but there was also

a disincentive to forsake valuable commercial opportunities at a time whenall of the economies of the region were underperforming.30

The fact thatmost Western European countries had also built up much more intensivecommercial ties with Eastern Europe than had the United States also meantthat Germany, France, or Britain had much more to lose from any recourse

to economic sanctions as a form of Cold War pressure AsTable 1onstrates, all four of the larger Western European powers did significantlymore business with Eastern Europe than did the United States; forfeiting oreven endangering such contacts in the name of Western solidarity washence not an easy step to take at a time of generalized economic gloom

dem-29

RRPL, NSC Country Files, Box 14, Folder FRG (January 7, 1981 to August 31, 1981) (1), Bonn to Washington 15861, August 18, 1981 To understand why the whole neutron bomb question was so sensitive in Germany, see Kristina Spohr Readman, “Germany and the Politics of the Neutron Bomb, 1975 –1979,” Diplomacy and Statecraft, 21, 2 (2010),

All told, therefore, the early Reagan years were an era characterized by adegree of transatlantic discord The standard account is largely confirmed bythefirst wave of archival evidence But what the archives also reveal is thatnotwithstanding the multiple tactical disagreements that arose between theUnited States and its principal European allies in this period, the underlyingmechanisms of the transatlantic relationship continued to run quitesmoothly The second main section of this chapter will thus seek to demon-strate what continued to work despite the aforementioned rows.

a w o r k i n g r e l a t i o n s h i p

A decade earlier, the situation had been very different Disagreements inthe late 1960s and early 1970s between the United States and the mainWestern European powers had helped fuel Europe’s quest to develop amultilateral mechanism for coordinating foreign policy among theEuropean Community member states and colored the initial U.S response

to the launch of European Political Cooperation (EPC).32

Washington hadnot tried to obstruct Europe’s attempt to coordinate its members’ foreignpolicy stances directly However, Henry Kissinger had struggled to concealhis disdain for the inevitable slowness of multilateral foreign policy coor-dination and made clear his annoyance at being obliged to speak toEuropean spokesmen who not only came from small countries (Denmarkheld the EC presidency when thefirst EPC positions on transatlantic affairswere communicated to Washington), but were also not empowered to

t a b l e 1 Trade with the Eastern Bloc31

Exports toComecon

Percentage ofTotal ExportsUnited States 1483 0.59 3844 1.8

negotiate, only inform.33

Kissinger had also been involved in a handed attempt to insist that the United States be consulted at an earlystage of EPC deliberations, and had reacted with anger to the initialEuropean attempts to outline a policy toward the Middle East.34Disagreement about substance – in particular, the belief that mostEuropean governments were too pro-Arab and too committed to multi-lateral détente with the Soviets– had thus blended dangerously with U.S.disapprobation of Europe’s fledgling foreign policy coordination mecha-nisms Kissinger’s famous and tactless Year of Europe speech, in which hedifferentiated between the United States’ global concerns and Europe’spurely regional ones, was only the most public manifestation of a stronglyheld belief that Europe should not seek to involve itself collectively inmatters that were best handled unilaterally by the United States.35

heavy-By the early 1980s, however, the United States seemed to have come toterms with the EC’s attempts to exercise some influence in the field of foreignpolicy and to have established a pattern of practical, day-to-day cooperationwith the EPC structures The change was perhaps most obvious in the case

of Middle Eastern diplomacy – the field in which, a decade earlier, theUnited States had been most outspoken in its criticism of European inter-vention Thus, in the autumn of 1981, the U.S Embassy in London kept inclose touch with the British EC presidency about the discussions underway

in the EPC about the involvement of four European countries in the plannedMultinational Force and Observers (MFO), designed to oversee theEgyptian-Israeli peace accord signed at Camp David.36

Eight years earlier,

by contrast, Kissinger had gone out of his way to ensure that no EuropeanCommunity countries were invited to participate in the UN EmergencyForce established to police the 1973 cease-fire.37

The U.S documents gest, admittedly, that some level of Israeli discomfort remained aboutthe overall European approach to the situation in the Middle East.However, whereas in the early 1970s such Israeli misgivings had onlymagnified the United States’ own unhappiness at the European role, by theearly 1980s, the United States was actively involved in seeking to calm

36

RRPL, NSC Country Files, Box 20, Folder United Kingdom January 9, 1981 to March 31,

1982 (2 of 4), London to Washington 20842, October 27, 1981.

37

Möckli, European Foreign Policy during the Cold War, 202.

Israel’s anxieties and arguing strongly for a European role.38

In similarfashion, Washington welcomed European activism in some of the mostcontentious East-West issues of the era; Alexander Haig, the secretary ofstate, briefed the president before his meeting with Peter Carrington, theBritish foreign secretary:“We strongly support the British-led EC initiative

on Afghanistan.”39

And even regarding Poland, where undoubted ences of approach did emerge between Washington and many of the WesternEuropean countries involved, this divergence did not reflect a U.S failure toengage with the complex machinery of European foreign policy making.Rather, the reverse: in the weeks immediately after the declaration of martiallaw in Poland in December 1981, the U.S government not only lobbied each

differ-of the four largest EC states directly, but also invited all ten EC ambassadors

in Washington to a lunch with the secretary of state designed to stiffen thecollective position of their countries.40

All of this suggests that historians working on transatlantic relations inthe 1980s need to move beyond the usual consensus that the EPC processwas disappointing and largely ineffective Thefirst decade of foreign policycoordination among the Nine and then the Ten (EC member states) did notresult in the revolutionary effects that some of the early rhetoric aboutEuropean emancipation from the United States suggested The belief thatEurope might soon be able to behave in a tightly coordinated fashion on aglobal level, and maintain its unity whether dealing with Cold War enemies

or close allies like the United States, the apogee of which had been reached atCopenhagen at the end of 1973, had not endured.41

Instead, the realizationhad sunk in that regarding transatlantic matters especially, bilateralexchanges with Washington would remain as important, if not more so,than any internal-European coordination.42

But foreign policy coordinationwas not a total failure, either The European member states built up a pattern

38

RRPL, NSC Country Files, Box 20, Folder United Kingdom January 9, 1981 to March 31,

1982 (3 of 4), Haig to Carrington 6631, November 23, 1981.

39

RRPL, NSC Country Files, Box 20, Folder United Kingdom, January 20, 1981 to August

31 , 1981 (3 of 6), Haig memorandum for the President, July 16, 1981.

40

For the démarches to Carrington and Genscher (which refer to similar messages being sent

to Cheysson and Colombo) see RRPL, NSC Country Files, Box 20, Folder United Kingdom January 9, 1981 to March 31, 1982 (3 of 4), Haig to Carrington 668, January

1 , 1982 and Box 14, Folder FRG, January 1, 1982 to September 30, 1982 (2), Haig to Genscher 669, January 1, 1982; for the reference to the lunch for EC ambassadors, Box 14, Folder FRG, January 1, 1982 to September 30, 1982 (2), State Department to Bonn 714, January 2, 1982.

41

Möckli, European Foreign Policy during the Cold War, 240 –47.

42

Ibid., 316 –22.

of low-key, but useful cooperation on many of the key foreign policy issues

of the day – and this manner of working was accepted as part of thediplomatic landscape by most of Europe’s international interlocutors, andthe United States in particular In many instances, admittedly, the EPCprocess resulted only in words of condemnation rather than action.Nevertheless, as examples from the early 1980s ranging from the Polishcrisis to the Falklands War demonstrate, the mechanism could at timesenable the EC toflank strong words with limited economic sanctions andother punitive measures

From a U.S perspective, the emergence of the EPC process did notrequire too sharp a change in its modus operandi toward Europe.Washington had always tried to conduct most of its diplomacy towardWestern Europe through bilateral discussions with the leading Europeanpowers This remained a largely effective tactic under EPC rules becausefrequent U.S exchanges with Europe’s three largest powers (Britain,France, and Germany), plus sometimes the Italians and whichever stateheld the EC’s rotating presidency, would normally suffice to remain fully intouch with whatever was being talked about among the Nine or Ten, and

to enable the United States to exercise quite a strong degree of influenceover the outcome of the multilateral European discussions Furthermore,

at a time like the 1980s when the principal U.S concern about Europe wasnot the danger of overactive European diplomacy– the issue that seems attimes to have worried Kissinger– but rather the prospect of too anemic aresponse by the Europeans to the key foreign policy issues of the day, anymechanism that might help encourage Europe to do more in the foreignpolicyfield was generally welcomed The whole tone of an October 1981message from Haig to Carrington was highly revealing in this respectbecause the U.S secretary of state was quite open about the differencesthat existed between the U.S and European positions vis-à-vis the MiddleEast, but emphasized the U.S desire to see Europe engaged in the process:

“Let me assure you, Peter, in handling this issue we will be very careful inour public and private comments not to characterize EC participation asanything other than support for the treaty of peace We certainly will notcharacterize it as an EC underwriting of the whole Camp David process.Let us agree to disagree about the essential if there is to be a peace process

in any form.” However, the key was that the EC reached a position thatwould enable European member states to participate in the MFO.43

43

RRPL, NSC Country Files, Box 20, Folder United Kingdom, January 9, 1981 to March 31, (3 of 4), Haig to Carrington 285070, October 26, 1981.