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When Charles de Gaulle declared that “it is because we are no longer a great power that we need a grand policy,” he neatly summarized France’s predicament on the world scene. In this compact and engaging history, author Frédéric Bozo deftly recounts France’s efforts to reconcile its proud history and global ambitions with a realistic appraisal of its capabilities, from the aftermath of World War II to the present. He provides insightful analysis of the nation’s triumphs and setbacks through the years of decolonization, Cold War maneuvering, and European unification, as well as the more contemporary challenges posed by an increasingly multipolar and interconnected world.
This book explores the role of France in the events leading up to the end of the Cold War and German unification. --from publisher description.
This book seeks to reassess the role of Europe in the end of the Cold War and the process of German unification. Much of the existing literature on the end of the Cold War has focused primarily on the role of the superpowers and on that of the US in particular. This edited volume seeks to re-direct the focus towards the role of European actors and the importance of European processes, most notably that of integration. Written by leading experts in the field, and making use of newly available source material, the book explores "Europe" in all its various dimensions, bringing to the forefront of historical research previously neglected actors and processes. These include key European nations, endemic evolutions in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, European integration, and the pan-European process. The volume serves therefore to rediscover the transformation of 1989-90 as a European event, deeply influenced by European actors, and of great significance for the subsequent evolution of the continent.
In March 2003, the United States and Great Britain invaded Iraq to put an end to the regime of Saddam Hussein. The war was launched without a United Nations mandate and was based on the erroneous claim that Iraq had retained weapons of mass destruction. France, under President Jacques Chirac and Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, spectacularly opposed the United States and British invasion, leading a global coalition against the war that also included Germany and Russia. The diplomatic crisis leading up to the war shook both French and American perceptions of each other and revealed cracks in the transatlantic relationship that had been building since the end of the Cold War. Based on e...
This timely book explores the often stormy French-U.S. relationship and the evolution of the Atlantic Alliance under the presidency of Charles de Gaulle (1958D1969). The first work on this subject to draw on previously inaccessible material from U.S. and French archives, the study offers a comprehensive analysis of Gaullist policies toward NATO and the United States during the 1960s, a period that reached its apogee with de GaulleOs dramatic decision in 1966 to withdraw from NATOOs integrated military arm. This launched the French policy of autonomy within NATO, which has since been adapted without having been abandoned. De GaulleOs policy often has been caricatured by admirers and detractor...
In this brilliant work, Hoffmann considers point-by-point the events and actions that have led America down the path of imperialism, becoming a power at once arrogant, victorious, and unilateral. Tracing the significance of 9/11 in the short term and over the long course of American history.
Exploring the visions of the end of the Cold War that have been put forth since its inception until its actual ending, this volume brings to the fore the reflections, programmes, and strategies that were intended to call into question the bipolar system and replace it with alternative approaches or concepts. These visions were associated not only with prominent individuals, organized groups and civil societies, but were also connected to specific historical processes or events. They ranged from actual, thoroughly conceived programmes, to more blurred, utopian aspirations -- or simply the belief that the Cold War had already, in effect, come to an end. Such visions reveal much about the contexts in which they were developed and shed light on crucial moments and phases of the Cold War.
In the late 1970s, new generations of nuclear delivery systems were proposed for deployment across Eastern and Western Europe. The ensuing controversy grew to become a key phase in the late Cold War. This book explores the origins, unfolding, and consequences of that crisis. Contributors from international relations, political science, sociology, and history draw on extensive research in a number of countries, often employing declassified documents from the West and from the newly opened state and party archives of many Soviet bloc countries. They cover especially Soviet-Warsaw Pact relations, U.S.-NATO relations, and the role of public opinion worldwide in relation to the crisis.
Examines how German reunification and the end of the Quadripartite Agreement in 1990 impacted the AngloAmerican special relationshipLuca Ratti offers new insights into the role of the Anglo-American aspecial relationship in German reunification, and examines the impact that Germanys reunification had on Anglo-American and transatlantic relations. Germanys unification in October 1990 was one of the most momentous events in modern European history and world politics since the end of World War II. German unity ended the Cold War in Europe, accelerated the collapse of communist regimes across Eastern Europe, and the disintegration of the USSR in 1991. It also triggered NATOs transformation at th...
This volume examines the origins and early years of the Cold War in the first comprehensive historical reexamination of the period. A team of leading scholars shows how the conflict evolved from the geopolitical, ideological, economic and sociopolitical environments of the two world wars and interwar period.