European Security Policy at the End of the Post‐Cold War Era
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12431 |
| Author | Tobias Bunde,Wolfgang Ischinger |
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
European Security Policy at the End of the
Post-Cold War Era
Tobias Bunde and Wolfgang Ischinger
Hertie School of Governance
Future historians may differ, but from today’s viewpoint,
2016 may well represent the end of the post-Cold War era
and the general assumptions that are associated with it.
These include the beliefs that the United States remains a
European power, guaranteeing the territorial integrity of its
European NATO allies, that liberal democracy represents the
political system widely seen as the only legitimate norma-
tive reference point, and that the future of the European
Union will be defined by continued integration into an ‘ever
closer Union’. These assumptions have been shaken to the
core.
First, the election of Donald Trump as US president may
result in a fundamental departure from traditional US for-
eign policy. As Thomas Wright has argued, Trump’s foreign
policy vision is in contrast to common belief quite consis-
tent and shaped by a rather clear ideology that has hardly
changed over the past three decades. According to Wright,
Trump has three key arguments: ‘He is deeply unhappy with
America’s military alliances and feels the United States has
overcommitted across the globe. He sees America as disad-
vantaged by the global economy; and he holds sympathies
for authoritarian strongmen. Trump’s quest is nothing less
than ending the US-led liberal order and freeing America
from its international commitments’(Wright, 2016). In other
words, if this is truly the foreign policy mind set of Donald
Trump, the 45th president of the United States questions
the common thread that has undergirded US foreign policy
and the global system it has forged since 1945. And it
would constitute a fundamental shift of European foreign
policy. While optimists hold onto the hope that his team of
advisors, the bureaucracy that continues to wield power,
and most importantly experienced foreign policy specialists
in Congress will exert influence on Trump’s policy, US allies
around the world need to hedge and prepare for a new era.
Either way, Trump is the extreme voice of a chorus of US
politicians who have warned Europeans that the United
States will not eternally assume the lion’s share of the
transatlantic defence burden. Starting with the Obama
administration, the United States has made clear that it
would no longer seek a leadership role in every European
crisis. Although the US has still shouldered the major part of
the burden that came with NATO’s strategic reorientation
since 2014, the Obama administration was willing to ‘lead
from behind’and leave important crisis diplomacy tasks
relating to the situation in Ukraine to Europe (Bunde, 2016).
It is unclear whether the Europeans can step up to
substitute for the US if Trump is genuinely determined to
reduce the US security commitment. The major European
military powers have not even been capable of executing a
minor military operation such as the intervention in Libya in
2011 without the support of the United States. More
recently, in the diplomatic efforts to end the Syrian civil war,
the Europeans have been almost completely absent
although the conflict has cost several hundreds of thou-
sands of lives and has caused the displacement of millions.
President-elect Trump who announced he would focus
exclusively on the fight against Daesh (IS) shows little con-
cern for humanitarian considerations –nor for the European
Union, which is already overwhelmed by a number of refu-
gees that one day may seem small in perspective.
Second, European integration has apparently reached a
crossroads. The post-Cold War period has witnessed remark-
able integration steps that deepened and widened the Euro-
pean Union. Undoubtedly, this process was never
uncontested –and backlashes to increasing European inte-
gration emerged repeatedly. Referenda in some member
states rejected certain proposals such as the adoption of the
euro or the European Constitution. Yet, the financial and
economic crisis, followed by the ‘euro crisis’, triggered a
new level of widespread disagreement with ‘Brussels’. The
2016 ‘Brexit’referendum in the UK drove home the message
that there is a deep fundamental split within the European
populace. In almost all European member states, a signifi-
cant part of the population sees further integration as a
threat rather than as a solution to challenges that can no
longer be solved on the national level.
Third, liberal democracy is on the defensive today.
Although Francis Fukuyama’s notion of the ‘end of history’
has often been simplified and misunderstood, the general
impression of the 1990s was one of a liberal development
across the globe. It was an era of liberal progress, which
saw the transformation of a large number of countries into
market-based liberal democracies, the adoption of numerous
international treaties protecting human rights and liberal
democracy, or the creation of international courts in order
to prosecute international crimes. Yet, this trend has met
with resistance for quite some time.
On the one hand, liberal democracy is increasingly con-
tested even within the West. As Roberto Stefan Foa and
Yascha Mounk (2016, p. 7) argue based on data from the
World Values Survey, citizens ‘in a number of supposedly
consolidated democracies in North America and Western
Global Policy (2017) 8:Suppl.4 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12431 ©2017 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 8 . Supplement 4 . June 2017 27
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