European Peace Movements and the Future of the Western Alliance

Walter Laqueur

09/2017 · Routledge

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This extraordinary compendium concerns the future of the Western alliance and the development of the peace movements in Europe and in the United States. The peace movement is an old phenomenon given new life by NATO decisions concerning nuclear deployment in Europe and the Soviet responses along the same lines. After a long postwar marriage, Europeans and Americans alike are reexamining the premises of the Western alliance.The contributors provide a variety of scenarios, extending from the maintenance of the status quo to the complete dismantling of the Western alliance, or at least of its NATO component. In a context of rapid change and new challenges to the democratic bloc, the editors and authors argue for higher levels of economic integration and caution that competition might spill over into political collapse.The work deals with thorny security issues in a frank and policy-oriented way. While each contributor expresses a unique standpoint, a surprising consensus emerges: The need for democratic nations to move toward a higher policy ground in order to preserve the fundamental alliance that led to the postwar consensus to begin with. Some contributors feel this is still possible, others that the time has passed, and that national rather than regional interests will once more prevail.The work contains an extraordinary array of talent from both the American and European perspectives. Among the major contributors and their themes are Henry Kissinger on "A Plan to Reshape NATO"; William G. Hyland on "The European Peace Movement and NATO"; Irving Kristol on "What's Wrong with NATO?"; Theodore Draper on "The Western Misalliance"; Niels Haagerup on "The Nordic Peace Movements"; Martin Ceadel on "The British Nuclear Disarmers"; and Jeffrey Herf on "The SPD and the Peace Movement in West Germany." This is a well-integrated text, with no random essays.

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Walter Louis Laqueur was born in Breslau, Germany on May 26, 1921. At the age of 17, he fled just a few days before Kristallnacht and found his way to Palestine, where he was known as Ze'ev. He worked briefly on a kibbutz before moving to Jerusalem, where he spent a year enrolled in the Hebrew University and covered the Middle East as a journalist. In 1955, he moved to London, where he was a founder and editor of The Journal of Contemporary History and a founder of Survey, a foreign affairs journal. From 1965 to 1994 he was director of the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide, a leading archive in London. He became a scholar of the Holocaust, the collapse of the Soviet Union, European decline, the Middle East conflict, and global terrorism. He wrote numerous books including A History of Zionism, A History of Terrorism, The Terrible Secret, Putinism: Russia and Its Future with the West, and The Future of Terrorism: ISIS, Al Qaeda, and the Alt-Right written with Christopher Wall. His memoirs included Thursday's Child Has Far to Go; Worlds Ago; Best of Times, Worst of Times; and Reflections of a Veteran Pessimist. He was also the editor of The Holocaust Encyclopedia. He died on September 30, 2018 at the age of 97.