‘Greater Europe’ exists. It exists historically and geographically ‘from the Atlantic to the Urals’, in General de Gaulle’s words. And Russia is, essentially, a part of this Greater Europe, indeed of the ‘Very Great Europe’ described by Yves Lacoste, with ‘European Russia’. Territorially speaking, Russia is a vast country which extends from the Baltic to the Pacific and which can be said to swing between the West and Asia. However, its essential systems and most of its economic dynamism are in Europe, and its trade is mainly with its European neighbours. Although for some it can and should be counted both as ‘European’—with Michel Strogoff—and ‘Asian’—with Genghis Khan—this nation spanning Europe and Asia is above all a European state, to be fully involved in European affairs.

The Postwar Period

‘Greater Europe’ therefore exists historically and geographically but was divided in spirit after the Second World War. France, which at the time aimed to protect itself against any new upheavals on the Old Continent caused by Germany, attempted to organize European security by allying itself with Britain. This was the object of the Dunkirk Treaty of 4 March 1947. However, from July 1947 the threat for the future was apparent not so much from the other side of the Rhine as further to the east. The USSR and the ‘people’s democracies’ refused aid from the vast economic recovery programme financed by the United States known as the Marshall Plan, unlike the countries of Western Europe, and declined to join the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), created to administer this aid, and which in 1961 became the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). At the same time, the process of ‘sovietization’ of Eastern Europe was taking place. The Soviet Union, which was reaching its territorial apogee and regaining the security space which it had known in the seventeenth century, wanted to build the glacis which it had lacked when confronting the Third Reich.

The communist coup in Prague on 25 February 1948 aroused the fears of the West European powers. They sought to counter them in the Brussels Treaty of 17 March 1948 (France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg). This treaty was complemented, with the inclusion of Germany and Italy, by the signature of the Paris Accords on 23 October 1954, creating the Western European Union (WEU). The Berlin blockade, beginning on 24 June 1948, was to last 323 days. This event confirmed the division of Europe, symbolized by the Iron Curtain and placing Europe at the heart of the confrontation of two blocs: the West with the North Atlantic Treaty, signed in Washington on 4 April 1949 and NATO; the East with the Warsaw Pact, concluded on 14 May 1955. The result was the Cold War.