Redefining European Security: 4 (Contemporary Issues in European Politics) - Softcover

Hodge, Carl C.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0815327927 ISBN 13: 9780815327929

Publisher: Routledge, 1999

Synopsis

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

About this title

Review:

"All the certainties about Europe learned over the past five decades now must be reexamined in the light of the Cold War. In no other area is this more true than in questions regarding the future of European security. Carl Hodge's Redefining European Security brings together a talented group of experts from both North America and Europe to provide a broad, readable and highly useful assessment of the security challenges facing Europe as well as the national and institutional responses to them. It provides an essential road map to anyone seeking to understand the changing European terrain.."
-Stephen Szabo, Professor of International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University
"In this carefully constructed, wider-ranging review of the area, its institutions, major national actors and issues, Carl Hodge has made a significant contribution to our understanding of the revolution in European affairs that has occurred in the last decade of the twentieth century. It is a marvelous collection with an insightful blend of theory and reality, disparate approaches and points of view and more than a modicum of common sense about the circumstances and expectations of both Europe and the world. It is one of the best chronicles that I have seen on the momentous experiment to reshape the landscape, institutions and contentious issues of the Cold War and the implications of the choices being made."
-Grant T. Hammond, Professor of International Relations, Air War College

Synopsis:

Presents a collection of essays concerned with changing perspectives on peace and political stability in Europe since the end of the Cold War, in both the "hard" security terms of military capacity and readiness, and in the realm of "soft" security concerns of economic stability and democratic reform. European governments, the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are dealing with the fundamental problem of determining the very parameters of Europe, politically, economically and institutionally. This book defines security as the efforts undertaken by national governments and multilateral institutions, beginning with the end of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany, to continue to protect European populations from acts of war and politically-motivated violence in light of the dissolution of the imminent political threat posed to Western Europe by the Soviet Union, 1945-1991.

Together these essays assess the progress made in Europe toward preventing conflict, as well as in ending conflict when it occurs, after the abrupt passing of a situation in which the source and nature of a conflict were highly predictable and the emergence of new circumstances in which potential security threats are multiple, variable and difficult to measure. Contemporary Europe is a mixture of old and new, of arrested and accelerated history. Europe's governments and institutions have been only partly successful in meeting new security challenges, to a high degree because of failing unity and political will. "Yesterday, Europe only just avoided perishing from imperial follies and frenzied ideologies," wrote the late Raymond Aron in 1976, "she could perish tomorrow through historical abdication".

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0815327927
• ISBN 13: 9780815327929
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 392