Students of the European Community in the early 1990s cannot but be struck by an apparent paradox. On the one hand, pressures towards an increasing centralization of arrangements under the heading of political and monetary union seem to have increased, and are frequently linked in public discussion with the concept of federalism. On the other hand, a number of members, most obviously Spain, Portugal and Greece, even the new Germany, are obviously using the Community to develop a sense of their own identity as separate states, and, although the British have been most prominent in opposing federalism, no member government has shown any inclination in speciic terms to abandon its sovereignty. This paradox is hard to understand and is perhaps too easily dismissed with the retort that the Community is sui generis, or that the supporters of further integration have simply not understood its constitutional implications, as the Bruges Group has argued.

I doubt whether the history of mankind is yet complete enough, if ever it can be so, to furnish grounds for a sure theory on the internal causes which necessarily affect the fortune of a state. I am far from denying the operation of such causes: but they are infinitely uncertain, and much more obscure, and much more difficult to trace, than the foreign causes that tend to raise, to depress, and sometimes to overwhelm a community.

Edmund Burke

Introduction

The Idea of national security is pervasive because it lies at the heart of the condition of statehood and the nature of the international system. But although the idea of national security is universally on the political agenda, it is difficult to find an unambiguous or uncontested usage of the concept.

Working definitions exist, of course:

a nation is secure to the extent which it is not in danger of having to sacrifice core values, if it wishes to avoid war, and is able if challenged, to maintain them by victory in such a war.

[L]ittle research has addressed whether, and in what ways, regimes ‘matter’. Do regimes have Independent influence on state behaviour and, if so, how?

One of the more surprising features of the emerging literature on regimes is the relative absence of sustained discussions of the significance of regimes . . . as determinants of collective outcomes at the international level . . . The ultimate justification for devoting substantial time and energy to the study of regimes must be the proposition that we can account for a good deal of the variance in collective outcomes . . . in terms of the impact of Institutional arrangements. [H]owever, this proposition is relegated to the realm of assumptions rather than brought to the forefront as a focus for analytical and empirical investigations.

If it is possible to measure interest in the European Community by the numbers of scholarly publications about that topic then interest today is probably greater than it has been at any time since the end of the Second World War, particularly among European political scientists. But in the absence of any reliable counts of the numbers of such publications it is my guess that the increase is not much more than marginal. Indeed, those advocating or examining the prospects of a united Europe since the war ended could not have been called shrinking violets. And coincidentally, political scientists, particularly those interested in the problem of international integration have had a special interest in the European Community. It was, after all, when in the form of the European Coal and Steel Community 9 the first major attempt at regional integration which involved not only economic, but ultimately, political commitments. Such a research horn of plenty could not fail to interest the scores of political scientists, especially in the expanding American academic environment in the 1950s, looking for new questions to answer, as well as direct routes to tenure and promotion.

Two issues have dramatized the revived potential for a decisive UN contribution to diplomacy in the 1990s. One is the rise of the environmental agenda as an issue at once, both genuinely global, and politically divisive. Conflict is generated because global warming, acid deposition, ozone depletion and marine pollution create real but also differential costs to the states of the world. The second issue, apparent since 1989, is the renewed opportunities for peacekeeping, and the credibility of economic sanctions created by the end of the Cold War and the onset of the Gulf Crisis. Some environmental threats, such as the potential consequences of rising sea-levels, also impinge on traditional military-territorial concepts of security. The fusion of these issues has given rise to the idea of environmental security which generates both an opportunity and a test for the UN's revival as a focus of multi-lateral diplomacy.