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Takes up the relationship between the US and regional multilateral organizations in Europe, in particular, NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization), and the European Union (specifically the common European security and defence policy, or ESDP). It is suggested that US relations with Europe are an indicator of the US commitment to multilateralism more generally, and argued that the US approach to NATO has been driven by a combination of international structural factors (the distribution of capabilities) and the key domestic factor of national character (the liberal identity of the US). These very same factors hold important consequences for NATO because the US is the decisive actor in NATO, which, as a political entity, reflects the multilateralism that has its foundations in US national character, but as a military instrument, reflects the dominant power of the US. The resulting tensions in NATO were finessed more easily during the cold war, in the face of a common enemy, but are more significant in the current unipolar system, which exaggerates both the incentives for the US to act unilaterally and the frustration of European states who are less able to constrain the US yet unwilling to act independently. The author expects NATO to become less rather than more important to the US in the years ahead, and thus to matter less as a multilateral organization. The different sections of the chapter are: Isolationism as Multilateralism's ‘Other’?; Sources of America's Eurocentric Multilateralism; Systemic Change and American Behaviour: The Case of NATO; Consequences for Multilateral Organizations: The EU and the ESDP; and The Bush Administration and the European Allies.

The particular circumstances of the Cold War that swiftly succeeded World War II highlighted the problem of an unpalatable regime in a country with a desirable attribute, in this case, Spain's geostrategic importance. Dean Acheson's assertion that in relation to foreign policy towards Spain, Britain had become the ‘tail of the kite’, was not entirely accurate. Britain held firm convictions on the matter which, backed by strong political feeling in France, Belgium, and Norway, were sufficient to prevent the inclusion of Spain in the Marshall Plan or NATO. Thus, the bilateral agreements between the United States and Spain were largely a reflection of the implacable opposition of those governments towards a regime aptly described by one Spaniard as ‘a country occupied by its own army’. Spain's role in Anglo-American relations in the post-war period illustrates the far wider problems which still lie behind United Nations efforts to deal with pariah regimes and which, more than fifty years on, neither the international community nor its leading powers have been able to resolve.

This chapter presents a theoretical framework for the EU’s active leverage, defined as the EU’s deliberate efforts to promote reform in candidate states moving towards EU membership. Active leverage is animated by the fact that the benefits of membership create incentives for states to satisfy the entry requirements, setting the stage for the effectiveness of conditionality within the EU’s pre-accession process. Three characteristics of this process make it particularly powerful: asymmetric interdependence, enforcement, and meritocracy. This chapter explores the origins of the EU’s pre-accession process, unpacks the requirements of membership, and details all of the different tools that enable the EU to exercise conditionality within the process. It compares the EU’s active leverage to the efforts of NATO, the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to promote democratic standards and economic reform in Eastern Europe's new democracies.

Assesses the success of the two humanitarian interventions in the Balkans – Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo in 1999 – from the perspective of humanitarian organizations. It argues how, ironically, the effectiveness of organizations such as UNHCR can dissuade powerful states from taking the necessary steps to address the root causes of massive human rights violations. Slow and ambiguous action from the international community can raise false expectations on the part of suffering civilians, and embolden those who commit atrocities. The author argues that the political, military, and humanitarian strands of interventions are always closely interwoven, and draws a series of lessons from the Balkans experience: the need for the international community to act early, credibly, and consistently; the importance of preserving the identity of a humanitarian operation; the imperative to end the impunity of those who orchestrate and commit massive violations of human rights; and the importance of engaging the United Nations.

The Introduction presents the dramatically changing evaluations of NATO. Through the years many had predicted the demise of the organization, but NATO had weathered crises after crises. In 1999 it celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, still going very strong. It had indeed survived the end of the cold war and the disappearance of the Soviet Union. The 1990s had been a period of transition, but the emphasis seemed to be on the continuity side. The coming to power of George W. Bush appeared to change everything. The Iraq War brought to a climax tensions that had developed in Atlantic affairs. Yet, soon the crisis subsided. So, was this just another major crisis that had come and gone? The chapter sums up the conclusions of the many prominent contributors to this book.

Most observers agree that during the cold war the Soviet threat was crucial in holding the two sides of the Atlantic together. This chapter argues that terrorism will not hold the NATO members together in the way the Soviet threat did. In fact, as the war on terror unfolds with probably more attacks on Europe than on the United States, “the divide between the two will grow.” Many in Europe felt that the American approach to fighting terrorism, as exemplified by Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, was counterproductive. Divorce between the two sides may not occur, but they are likely to drift further apart. “There is no way of returning to some presumed golden past of allied unity using the vehicle of something so ill-defined as an ‘Islamic threat’ to hold the alliance together.”

Despite acute international tensions, the EU has failed to exert influence, especially in security matters most requiring heroic leadership. The EU has no defence responsibility or capability, and seeks indirect influence through the Common Foreign and Security Policy, the Anglo-French European Security and Defence Policy, and through other policies. The main actors are the Council Secretariat and the Political and Security Committee, but lack of clear institutional lines of authority results in disputes, notably over relations with NATO and policy implementation despite the efforts of the High Representative for foreign policy. Because foreign and security policy are member state responsibilities, the EU is condemned to leaderlessness and concentration on non-military tasks and ambitious schemes are unrealistic. It should reduce institutional overlap to achieve greater coherence in action.

The first chapter sets the scene by placing the analysis within the framework of debates about developments in the transatlantic security community in the post-9/11 world. It explains this book's focus on the EU, NATO, and the OSCE, and discusses the methods and data used in this study. Following an analysis of changes in the field of security since the end of the Cold War — and, as a prelude to the empirical chapters, a brief discussion of the evolving roles of the EU, NATO, and the OSCE — this chapter explains the conceptual framework used in this book. Drawing on analyses of risk-management developed in the disciplines of sociology, criminology, and political science, it argues that contemporary practices aimed at preventing and fighting terrorism can be understood as instantiations of a particular form of management of allegedly exceptional risks to modern liberal order.

Over the past few years, the challenge for NATO has been to transform itself into a highly flexible and complex institution, designed to manage a plurality of complex risks, especially the risk of terrorist attacks. Although NATO remains an institution that is significantly different from the EU, in response to significant changes in the field of security, the alliance has adopted a similar approach to risk-management, combining inclusive and exclusivist security practices. This chapter examines some notable examples of such practices, ranging from efforts to expand the security community via the diffusion of liberal norms in partner states, to attempts to control and exclude terrorists from the allied territory via operations such as Operation Active Endeavour in the Mediterranean. In addition, this chapter analyses NATO's most important current mission — ISAF in Afghanistan — and argues that this, too, reveals a combination of practices of inclusion and exclusion. This chapter also shows that, as in the case of the EU, practices enacted in the name of combating terrorism have contributed to a redefinition of modes of governance in the Euro-Atlantic area, especially by blurring the boundaries between the public–private spheres.

The final chapter explores the ways in which the EU, NATO, and the OSCE have related to each other in their (theoretically joint) effort to prevent and combat international terrorism. Drawing on the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, it argues that important instances of cooperation among NATO, the EU, and the OSCE have been accompanied by a dynamic of competition, as each institution has sought to secure a privileged position in the changing field of security by invoking and seeking to further enhance its symbolic and material capital. This chapter also reflects on the ways in which the activities carried out by the EU, NATO, and the OSCE have further contributed to transformations in the field of security and, more broadly, to changes in norms of governance in the Euro-Atlantic area, for instance by participating in the process of blurring the boundaries between policing/defence activities, public/private spheres, and (re)constituting categories of protector/protected. Through their practices, NATO, the EU, and the OSCE have also complicated questions about the acceptable limits of exceptional treatments of exclusion that target individuals and groups deemed as enemies of the community based on liberal-democratic values.

This chapter begins by bringing together the findings of the previous six chapters to outline the complete conception of legitimacy—the Moderate Instrumentalist Approach. It goes on to use this approach to consider to answer two central questions: (a) ‘Who has the right to intervene?’ and (b) ‘Who has the duty to intervene?’ It first suggests that any agent that has an adequate degree of legitimacy has the right to intervene. Second, it argues that the duty to intervene should fall on the most legitimate intervener. Assigning the duty to intervene raises additional issues, such as that of fairness. The chapter therefore defends the view that the most legitimate agent has the duty to intervene against three leading alternatives and the claims that this is unfair. The third section considers who, out of current agents (the NATO, the states, the UN, the regional organizations, and the private military companies), (a) has an adequate degree of legitimacy, and therefore the right to intervene, and (b) is the most legitimate agent, and therefore has the duty to intervene. It concludes that, although some agents of intervention possess an adequate degree of legitimacy, no current agent is fully legitimate.

Several broad trends provide the context for current refugee policy responses. The debate over national sovereignty and humanitarian intervention, while not new, reached a crescendo over the past decade as refugees and population movements more generally necessarily diminished the exclusive prerogative of state sovereignty relating to border control in the modern world. Europe is a fertile setting for the development of regional capacities that can blend military and civilian responses to humanitarian crises, both within and outside Europe, including at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Yet, the difficulty of protecting and assisting internally displaced persons, continues to raise basic questions about the competence of the international system and the implementation mechanisms for human rights and humanitarian law. International migration provides the broad context for the evolution of refugee policy.

Many expected the role of the US in Europe to shrink after the end of the Cold War and with the end of the Soviet–Communist threat: Western Europe presumably did not need the US in the same way it had during the Cold War; now, a strengthened EU could manage much more on its own. In some ways the American role in Western Europe did decline, but the surprise was how little it changed in the period under discussion (1993–2001): the unification of Germany and Western Europe's participation in the Gulf War under US leadership had set the pattern under Bush; now, under Clinton (who was elected in November 1992), America's lead was to be most clearly seen in the wars in ex‐Yugoslavia (discussed in the first section of the chapter) and in the process of NATO expansion (discussed in the second section). NATO did not collapse when its raison d’être, the Soviet Union, the enemy against which it had been directed, disappeared, and the Warsaw Pact was dissolved; on the contrary, NATO took in new members from among the former Pact members and some of the disputes that had plagued it for decades were now softened, so that France moved closer to NATO again. The third section of the chapter shows that, in return, the Clinton administration was showing a more open attitude than that of Bush to European integration (the EU), in the form of monetary and defence cooperation. The last section of the chapter makes the point that, with so many signs of change in Washington, European governments and publics were renewing their invitations to the US to stay involved in Europe: in Western Europe the invitations were weaker and more ambivalent now than in the early years after the Second World War, but in Central and Eastern Europe, finally free from Soviet control, the invitations were quite similar to those the Western Europeans had extended almost fifty years earlier.

Discusses the transatlantic drift (or split) that has occurred between the US and Western Europe since the election of George W. Bush in December 2000, and the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York on 11 Sept 2001. The further tensions that have arisen since then over the Afghanistan and Iraq wars are discussed, as is the crisis over North Korea and the huge expansion in NATO and in the EU through the entry of Eastern European countries. The author presents speculations on the future of the American–Western European relationship, and forecasts an even further drift apart. This he bases on eight primary reasons, which he discusses in detail. These are: the Cold War is over; unilateralism is growing stronger in the US; the EU is slowly but steadily taking on an ever stronger role; out‐of‐area disputes are becoming increasingly frequent and they have been notoriously difficult to handle for the two sides of the Atlantic; redefinitions of leadership and burdens are always difficult to do; economic disputes are proliferating; even cultural disputes are becoming increasingly numerous; and finally, demographic changes are taking place, particularly on the American side of the Atlantic, that in the long run are likely to challenge the existing relationship.