Security

Abstract

Security is in this chapter defined as covering democracy and the protection of human rights including those of minorities, as well as inter-state behaviour and the use of the military to keep the peace. In contemporary Europe this set of issues is a seamless web. Democracy may be seen as the best of all instruments of defence against violence and war. The quality of democracy and sharing of related political values is also vital to the process of integration. Tensions involving national minorities and related frontier questions is the single most extensive threat to peace in the post-communist Europe.

I could not stop NATO’s expansion, nor could I bang my shoe on the table like Khrushchev.

President Yeltsin to Jiang Zemin on returning from his Helsinki summit with President Clinton, April 1997.

If NATO is the answer, what was the question?

European Professor of International Strategic Studies, September 1997.