Relics of Cold War: Europe’s Challenge, Ukraine’s Experience

Summary:

This policy paper was supported by the Bonn International Center for Conversion (BICC), whose Director has co-signed the preface. It is the forerunner for a planned research project in 2004, leading to a book-length publication, in which BICC will be SIPRI's principal partner.

In 2004 Europe will consign the cold war to history in the most emphatic way possible, with the enlargement on a grand scale of both the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Contrary to many expectations, this massive expansion of institutions founded on the Western side of the former Iron Curtain is not taking place at the price of new divisions with, or the alienation of, Russia. The Russian Federation's own relations with the EU and NATO are being enhanced, and both institutions are developing 'new neighbour' strategies designed to share a least some of the benefits of integration with non-members along their new eastern frontiers. Other states born from the break-up of the Soviet Union, such as Ukraine, have been offered a more benign environment to explore their own European vocation than anyone could have predicted at the time when the cold war approached its end, just 15 years earlier.

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