Preparing West Europe for the 1990s

The revolutionary changes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union have modified the traditional systemic antagonism between East and West and are about to dismantle the postwar political architecture of Europe. As West Europeans developed new strategies of their own to deal with domestic as well as international questions in the 1980s, they experienced increasing self-confidence. While the superpowers reached a new peak in the arms race and global confrontation, West Europe remained in a relatively gloomy and pessimistic stage, incapable of shaping either its domestic fabric or its political environment. The policies designed to keep West Europe on a competitive level of economic performance with the United States and Japan. Some of the incentives for the change in direction from a stagnant to a dynamic West Europe in the mid-1980s were a direct response to specific policy initiatives of the Reagan administration.