Jeffrey Herf
ILLUSIONS OF EUROPEAN NEUTRALISM
American liberals would like to believe that Ronald
Reagan is the reason that hundreds of thousands of Western
Europeans have been demonstrating against the deployment of
American missiles in Europe . These critics argue that once the
United States turns away from its current belligerence back to arms
control, a more sober estimate of Soviet power, and a realization of
the futility of economic sanctions, the ties between the U.S . and
Western Europe will become more normal-and amicable. They
have a point. But observers of European politics cannot be so
sanguine that developments in the European-or at least the British
and West German-political and moral climate make such a return
to normalcy likely. Atlanticism has been attacked before and
survived. Whether or not the current crisis is worse than previous
ones, there is little doubt that the rejection of Atlanticism is now
more acceptable in Europe than at any time since the 1950s. The
radical 1960s did not focus on Atlanticism. The action was in the
Third World. Today's controversies focus far more directly on the
East-West conflict. They also raise the issue of what William Phillips
has described as middlebrow politics, an elusive left-liberalism from
which serious thinking about the Soviet Union is largely absent.
Beyond the often arcane technical arguments over numbers and
strategy are disputes about political values and arrangements that
have remained in place in Europe since the end of World War II.
When the first reports of West European protest against
deployment of the missiles came out, liberals in the United States
reacted with some sympathy, assuming that these protests were a
perfectly understandable reaction to the Reagan administration's
careless rhetoric about fighting, limiting, or winning nuclear war.
By now it has become clear that some of the groups in Western
Europe protesting deployment of the missiles are not merely
anti-Reagan or even antinuclear, but oppose most if not
all
of what
Western military experts-not only in the Reagan admini–
stration-say is needed for the defense of Western Europe. Their
leaders have spoken of a "third way" between the superpowers and
