Europe

March 2004
Idealism and Power: The New EU Security Strategy
by Jean-Yves Haine
"The Iraqi crisis has forced the EU to acknowledge that, divided, the union is powerless. The EU's enlargement by 10 new members this May is also forcing it to acknowledge that a union of 450 million people cannot shut itself off from the rest of the world."

March 2004
The Lessons of Bosnia and Kosovo for Iraq
by John R. Lampe
"The experience in Bosnia and Kosovo provides encouragement. . . . The largest postintervention lesson they offer is that the United States and its international partners can work effectively together once they are on the ground together."

March 2004
The Tough Trials Ahead for the EU's Eastern Expansion
by David R. Cameron
"As considerable as the challenges of enlargement for the EU are, they pale in comparison to the challenges of accession facing the new members. . . . Taken together, they will make it exceptionally difficult for most if not all of the governments of the new member states to govern effectively and maintain public support."

March 2004
New Europe Meets the Euro
by Barry Eichengreen
"Adopting the euro will have costs for the so-called accession economies, but so would shunning the euro. In fact, there are compelling reasons to think that adopting the euro will be less costly than the other monetary options available to the countries of 'new' Europe."

March 2004
Beyond Old and New Europe
by Joshua B. Spero
"What today stands as a shining moment for Poland in NATO and Iraq may ultimately harm its far more vital role as a bridge between an increasingly independent Germany and an uncertain Russia. America's global-led war on terrorism might, paradoxically, unravel the key stabilizing country between west and east . . . ."

March 2004
In the Mirror of Europe: The Perils of American Nationalism
by Anatol Lieven
"One way of looking at the United States today is as a European state that has avoided the catastrophes nationalism brought upon Europe in the twentieth century, and whose nationalism therefore retains some of the power, intensity, bellicosity, and self-absorption that European nationalisms have had kicked out of them by history."

March 2003
Putting NATO Back Together Again
by Sean Kay
"NATO's new enlargement will further complicate the workings of an alliance that is already politically unmanageable, militarily dysfunctional, and strategically irrelevant."

March 2003
Climate Change Blues: Why the United States and Europe Just Can't Get Along
by Joshua W. Busby
"Although the dispute about climate change is overshadowed by the strain in European-American relations concerning war with Iraq, it may have been a factor in the growing level of distrust between the United States and Europe. Indeed, the dispute over global warming may mask a larger concern."

March 2003
Bringing Turkey into Europe
by Mujeeb R. Khan and M. Hakan Yavuz
"While the goal of earning EU membership has been central to the recent push to implement significant political and legal reforms in Turkey, it still remains to be seen whether Turkey's Muslim heritage, large population, and economic underdevelopment will remain immovable obstacles to full membership. It is now clear that this is a decision that can no longer be indefinitely postponed by Brussels or Ankara."

March 2003
The Islamist Challenge in Kosova
by Isa Blumi
"Even as Western societies worry about the 'rise of Islamic fundamentalism,' the international community's ill-conceived policies for Kosova's rural Muslim population may prove to be directly responsible for the production of Europe's own Taliban."

March 2003
Europe Enlarged, America Detached?
by Simon Serfaty
"September 11 should be a catalyst for a renewal of the West as a community of action that is shaped by interests that are common even when they are not always equally shared. What the West needs, and must seek in and beyond the EU and NATO-the two central institutions that comprise it-is more, not less, integration."

December 2002
Same War, Different Views: Germany, Japan, and the War on Terrorism
by Peter J. Katzenstein
"The tendency of the Bush administration to frame terrorism as a threat posed equally by evil states and nonstate groups is . . . distinctive. It is easy to lose sight of how atypical, even among liberal democracies, are the American view of international life in Manichaean terms and the American emphasis on the military dimension of society. Germany's and Japan's very different approaches to counterterrorism are useful reminders of American exceptionalism."

September 2002
Waiting for China's Lech Walesa
by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom
"Has the Chinese body politic finally been infected by what Beijing officials have sometimes dubbed the 'Polish disease' . . . ? Could China's 2002 turn out to be like Poland's 1981, a turning-point year when cleansing fevers (to invert the medical metaphor) began to take effect?"

November 2001
Macedonia: Melting Pot or Meltdown?
by Duncan Perry
"Today the fate of this new country [remains unclear], but history has shown that the Macedonians are tenacious and will go down fighting--as will the Albanians, if it comes to that. But does it need to?"

November 2001
Kosova: From the Brink--and Back Again
by Isa Blumi
"It should be stressed (rather than ignored) that the conflicts in Kosova have much more to do with colonial exploitation, power politics, and economic greed than primordial hatreds manipulated by indicted war criminals."

November 2001
Croatia's Second Transition and the International Community
by Marina Ottaway and Gideon Maltz
"The international community should rethink the applicability in the short run of some of the high principles that guide its demands, and accept instead the basic lesson of democracy: democratic governments succeed and indeed only survive when they strike a compromise between what they should do ideally and what their constituencies demand."

November 2001
A Dream Become Nightmare? Turkey's Entry into the European Union
by Ersel Aydinli and Dov Waxman
"As long as Turkey's desire for EU membership represented an abstract ideal . . . , Turkey's military and civilian elite could avoid acknowledging the potential political costs of membership in the eu. And as long as the Europeans kept Turkey at arm's length, that elite's willingness to implement the domestic reforms necessary for EU membership was never put to the test."

November 2001
Europe's Eastern Enlargement: Who Benefits?
by John Hall and Wolfgang Quaisser
"The historical experience of the East European countries is to dance to the tunes played by regional powers to their west and to their east. Is this just one more round, with Brussels choreographing the show now, rather than Vienna, Berlin, or Moscow?"

November 2001
An Interview with Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga
by Sean Patrick Murphy
As the european union begins to expand eastward, nato has announced that it will decide next year whether to expand into the former Soviet republics of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Earlier this year, Current History consulting editor Sean Patrick Murphy interviewed visiting Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga in Washington, D.C. about Latvia's possible entry into nato and the implications for Latvia's relationship with Russia. An edited transcript of the interview follows.

March 2001
Building a "Normal, Boring" Country: Kostunica's Yugoslavia
by Eric D. Gordy
The fall of the Milosevic regime has much meaning in itself, and a strong desire to imagine a better future can be sensed everywhere. But nothing is assured unless the new government is able to make this desire concrete.