Introduction

Abstract

The end of the Cold War, the disintegration of the socialist system and the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin wall and the reunification of Germany engendered a series of innovative concepts reflecting the dominant state of minds among policy experts and practitioners at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. These included the de Gaulle-inspired idea of a “common European home” promoted by Mikhail Gorbachev, the expectations of the “end of history” articulated by Francis Fukuyama, and a number of post-modernist anticipations, from de-bordering to creating “security communities”, at least at a regional level, if not in the “wider Europe” from Lisbon to Vladivostok.