Globalisation:Atlantic Partnership: Atlanticism and it's Critics

Atlanticism

Atlanticism became the foundation of British foreign and security policy for the duration of the Cold War. The uniqueness of being a trustworthy ally in the circumstance of a hostile international system produced a union of interests across a variety of security and defence issues. Following the tragedy of 9/11, international relations imply a very dissimilar context. Conscious of its principal position in the unipolar order, the “imperial public” has verified that it is not satisfied to act as a status quo power.

In order to recover ground with the United States the EU is suggesting improving transatlantic relations further than the traditional Atlanticism one to one that is more orientated around results and lead by tactical precedence, such as the Atlantic Partnership.

In the 21st century, Atlanticism has undergone important adjustments due to terrorism and the war in Iraq, the main consequence being a new inquiring of the idea itself and a new insight that the security of the particular countries quite possibly need alliance action outwith the North Atlantic terrain. Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, NATO, for the first time invoked Article 5, stating that any attack facilitated on a member country will be seen as an attack on the entire group of members.

Critics

On the 24th of June, 2005, the Streit Council for a Union of Democracies prearranged a panel on Atlanticism in 20th century U.S. Foreign Policy at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations. The panel tackled the question of whether American foreign policy could resolve some popular contrasts, particularly the European soft power versus American hard power choice offered by Robert Kagan, and discovered that the Atlantic integrationist approach had supplied an efficient blend during much of the twentieth century.

Also, the panellists analysed the reason why the Atlanticist postwar strategy of combining an initial grouping of democratic countries succeeded in attracting other countries to democratize and join, opposing to the observation that much of the academic and activist worlds had taken that it would cause other countries to unite against it. They disputed that the Atlanticist approach had united universalism with regionalism in two ways: a “nucleus” tactic of moving from the regional toward the universal by persuading others to join, and a concentric circles approach supporting both inner (Atlantic) and outer (global) levels of international organisation, with the inner circle offering direction and enthusiasm, and the outer circle offering global legal standards and authenticity. The complexity of this approach materialized out of the disturbing experiences of the World War I and II generations. The internationalists of the period became well aware of the insufficiency of every basic form of internationalism and developed a more sophisticated one. After 1947 they were capable of applying, in a biased, Euro-Atlantic structure, both strategies-- concentric circles and open nucleus – raising their notion to the level of the core project of the 20th century American foreign policy.