The Vital Partnership: Power and Order

The Vital Partnership is a political, historical, and intellectual assessment of the evolution of transatlantic relations. This partnership, warns Simon Serfaty, is clearly at a crossroads, and even at risk. The problem, he argues, is neither personal nor bilateral or even circumstantial―not even over George W. Bush, France, or Iraq. Instead, the crisis is structural, the result of four interconnected facts. One is the preponderance of American power, which the end of the Cold war left without any immediate competitor. Another fact is the integration of Europe as a European Union whose non-military capabilities and institutional influence now enable it to resist the sway of that power. A third fact is the impact of globalization, meaning the inability for any country, including the most powerful among them, to remain indifferent to developments elsewhere. And the fourth fact is the emergence of a new form of war-like terror, unveiled most dramatically on September 11, 2001. Under such conditions, concludes Serfaty, the defining transatlantic issue is not over power and weakness, but over power and order. And Serfaty calls on the Bush administration to complete the postwar strategy pursued by President Truman during his own second term in office, when the institutional order organized around American power identified the like-minded states of Europe as its allies of choice for the management of the new security normalcy that threatened to engulf the West during the Cold War.

Politics & Social Sciences

Serfaty emeritus Old Dominion University, Simon

Sociology

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

In this comprehensive collection of essays, Simon Serfaty addresses the question of Europe's future and the new challenges to overcoming the ghosts of Europe's past. "Memories of Europe's Future" highlights the axes of discontent at home and arcs of crises abroad that may threaten European integration; examines the policies and institutions that have transformed modern Europe; and makes a powerful argument for the importance of Europe to the United States on the basis of compatible ideas and converging national interests. Now that the post-Cold War years are over, the critical question is whether the future will bring a resurrection of the worst features of a bygone era or a celebration of the best legacies of a more recent past. The future Europe, argues Serfaty, does not require a new vision of transatlantic relations. What will be needed on both sides of the Atlantic is the will to complete the bold policies that were launched during the postwar years half a century ago.

Memories of Europe's Future: Farewell to Yesteryear (Significant Issues Series)

History

Europe

Center for Strategic & International Studies

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Books by Serfaty emeritus Old Dominion University, Simon