East European Integration and European Politics

The moment may be ripe for a fundamental reassessment of Western, especially American, policy toward political change in Europe. There has developed a dual and symbiotic sense that political and economic changes in Western Europe are on the whole threatening to the security of the member-states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (nato) and that the Soviet Union has successfully quarantined Eastern Europe from the effects of parallel changes. Thus, the idea has grown that in Europe change itself is a single-edged sword, cutting only to the West and not to the East. The corollary of this notion has been that political and economic changes in Europe have become the agents of expanding Soviet influence, and policies resisting change in the West have been seen as a means of containing that influence.

This sense of nato as an embattled encampment, of course, has the ring of past decades and has global as well as European dimensions. The pace of change in the international environment has seemed to accelerate radically since 1973, and, perhaps inevitably, it has provoked responses reminiscent of the Cold War years. The confluence of these two streams of change - European and global - has been perceived to threaten security and to require defensive policy.

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