Europe's futures, Europe's choices: models of Western Europe in the 1970s

This is a moment of slack water in the tide of European affairs, of uncertainty and of frustration. The clarity that the Cold War imposed upon relations between the countries of the developed world, in particular the sense of solidarity within each of the two main alliances, has become blurred; the assumption of a natural community of interest between the nations of the Atlantic world has been weakened, and so has an equivalent sense of identity between Eastern. Europe and the Soviet Union; the belief that economic association within Western Europe would lead naturally to political association has been called in question; and many tradi tional sources of division between the Euro pean powers, nationalism and diminishing confidence in governments, which were muted through much of the postwar era, have begun to reassert themselves.
The purpose of this study is threefold: first, to examine different structures of a future Western Europe, in order to see what their effects would be, especially on the Atlantic Alliance and on East-West relations; second, to assess the possibilities each of them offers for the solution of Europe's own problems; and third, to bring out the choices which will confront policy-makers in the coming years.