‘Post-Iraq’ is not the least of the parameters which the EU and NATO are going to have to take into account in the coming years. But above all, the strategic situation is about to change profoundly with the emergence onto the international scene of new powers. A new transatlantic relationship necessarily means direct dialogue between the EU and the United States. At this stage it is far from perfect.
New Challenges for the West, for Europe
We are currently celebrating a double anniversary: 50 years of the Treaty of Rome and 60 of the Marshall Plan. It is perhaps a good moment to have a look at the durability of two pillars of the Western world as we have known it since 1947, the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.
The Treaty of Rome
We are approaching the 50th anniversary of the signature of the Treaty of Rome on 25 March 1957, which created the European Economic Community, now the European Union. It was the starting point of an enterprise founded upon Franco-German reconciliation that became the fundamental building block of our Continent, a condition for its prosperity and a guardian of its stability.
As we have seen with enlargement to incorporate the former Eastern bloc countries, and are currently seeing in the Balkans, the European perspective is the one factor which might permit political reconciliation and economic viability in those countries where ethnic conflict and appropriation of power by local mafia organisations could otherwise destabilise our immediate environment. This was one of the very reasons why the EU replaced NATO in Bosnia in 2005, and could yet do the same in Kosovo.
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