European Community, Atlantic Community?

European Community, Atlantic Community? For more than forty years the security
alliance of the North Atlantic Treaty symbolised the common interests of
Western Europe and the United States, and provided the context for all
transatlantic political and economic relations. Yet the loss of a common enemy
in the Soviet Union forced a reconsideration of the purpose of Nato and the
mutual interests that still existed between Europe and the United States.
These contributions build on this post-Cold War reframing of transatlantic
relations and offer a multi-faceted study of the values, purposes, milieus and
networks that underlay the Atlantic Community after 1945. For a long time the
notion of “Atlantic Community” was a widely used phrase denoting a taken-for-
granted state of affairs—the organization of the West in front of the Soviet
threat —with very little conceptual clarity behind it. In particular, the
chapters consider what it meant, how the transatlantic intellectual and
policy-making elites sought to convey it to their national publics, which
circles supported it, and what the effects were in social life as a whole.