Documents found
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2763.More information
With the end of the cold war, Europe, whilst avoiding the major threat of a global conflagration, has entered a period of uncertainty and instability, resulting from new risks which have appeared and from conflicts which have developed to the east of the continent. The institutions which were created in the context of the cold war, and which helped to manage it, are now forced to redefine their objectives and strategies, since they were not suited to deal with a profoundly different situation. This study evaluates the manner in which these new security challenges have been addressed through adaptation of the various institutions active in the field of security. The study shows that these various adaptations have been incapable of bringing effective answers to the new security problems which have appeared on the continent. Finally, based on this analysis, the study tries to identify the potential and limits of each of these institutions in the search for a European security System.
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2764.
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2766.
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2768.More information
There has been a tendency lately in the United States to talk about the breakdown of the domestic consensus on the purpose of American nuclear strategy. The Reagan administration policies have been largely responsible for the growing felt need by many to question the doctrine and plans underlining that strategy. Why did the erosion of the strategic consensus take place ? One explanation examined in this paper is that the U.S. government has appeared in its nuclear strategy to emphasize more and more counterforce and limited nuclear war plans as its nuclear weapons policy, and therefore has become increasingly receptive to the idea that atomic bombs can be treated like conventional weapons and thought in ways characteristic of the pronuclear world. The central purpose of this article is to analyze how those two phenomenons - the attractiveness of counterforce and the erosion of the strategic consensus - are related to one another. The evolution of the doctrine of counterforce is assessed through a survey of the literature from 1974 to 1984, and particularly from 1980 with the coming to power of the Reagan administration.
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2769.More information
Anachronism is one of the most common distorsions of history by which we circumscribe the past with our own mental universe. That is what the modem West has done and continues to do as regards Islam - a society almost without distinction of time or space. Thus today the encounter between Western Christendom and Islam is commonly seen as essentially negative, having been reduced to the military - religious conflict of the Crusades during the ll,h and 13,h centuries. Of course, it was at that period of time that took shape a Catholic view of Islam as a religion obnoxiously stereotyped, a view which would spread across Europe and which, much later, would give rise to a truly different form of racism, still around to day. Such an overall despising attitude tends to cover up the positive aspects of what had been the encounter between Islam and Christianity. Y et, those were many and they have been invaluable in the development of the Western thought and sciences. Far from being only a region of conflict, at that time the Mediterranean was also a zone of cultural symbiosis to which the modem West owes much. Europe would do well to remember this today that its supremacy is already part of a past which is definitely over.