The End of the Cold War and US-EU-Relations. ZEI Discussion Paper: 2003, C122

Camp, Glen D. (2003) The End of the Cold War and US-EU-Relations. ZEI Discussion Paper: 2003, C122. [Discussion Paper]

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Abstract

[Introduction]. We begin with a version of our preferred theoretical approach of Political Culture applying it to U.S. foreign policy formulation on the one hand, and the nascent European Union Common Defense and Security Policy (CDSP) as well as its most recent "Rapid Reaction Force" (RRF) developments on the other. We also suggest that the modern nation-state is one form of ethnocentrism, which arises from a primordial human urge to live together as social animals in Aristotle’s terminology. We suggest that the nation-state is only one of many theoretically possible forms of ethnocentrism, as "weak" or "failed" states and empires also exist. We see the modern “nation” as the creation of the modern state and not vice versa. We are therefore of the "modernist" school which differs from the primordialist and perennialist schools of thought in that modern nations as forms of social cohesion are by no means a matter of historical necessity. Some form of social cohesion larger than the family is in our view a matter of historical necessity, but the nation-state is the form which actually dominates. Thus even though nations are "natural" in the sense of fulfilling the historical human need for some form of social cohesion transcending the family, they are not "inevitable" in our view. Again, this issue lies beyond the specific purview of our paper. But a brief review of the work of theorists of nation formation and in the case of the European Union, supranational entity formation, is fundamental to understanding our paper.

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