The Failure Of The Twentieth Century European Perpetual Peace Project: The Social Construction Of The West Via Opposition To Russia

This paper critiques the de facto equation of Europeanization with submission to U.S. hegemony. It traces the choices that allowed the EU to be equated as one of side of the same coin with NATO. France’s 2009 rejoining the NATO command structure encouraged this perception. It comports with the claim that US liberal hegemony made the European integration process feasible. It highlights the consequences for conflict resolution of the Europeanization process being equated with attitudinal orientation towards accepting U.S. hegemony. Ukraine is a case study of this process on the level of indirect conflict between Moscow and Washington each seeking to contain each other. European integration’s focus on developing vested economic and bureaucratic interests has tied it to U.S. hegemony. It facilitated the institutionalization of anti-Moscow influence tendencies in European integration. The paper adopts a process tracing methodological approach with a focus on the Cold War and the prevailing views that have emerged around it. The institutionalization of Euro-Atlantic integration includes the internalization of the assumption that the USSR, and later Russia, were imperialist aggressors. The US-led Euro-Atlantic community successfully, and relatively peacefully, contained it. Moscow’s prevailing view does not share this problematic analysis regarding post-1945 Soviet foreign policy motivation.