A comment on Michael Cox's ‘Another Transatlantic Split? American and European Narratives and the End of the Cold War’Edwina S. Campbell has been Professor of National Security Studies, Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell AFB, AL 36112, since 2003. She taught at the National Defense University from 1995 to 2001. A former Fulbright Fellow and US Foreign Service Officer, Prof. Campbell is working on a new book, War and American Power.

Edwina S. Campbell has been Professor of National Security Studies, Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell AFB, AL 36112, since 2003. She taught at the National Defense University from 1995 to 2001. A former Fulbright Fellow and US Foreign Service Officer, Prof. Campbell is working on a new book, War and American Power.

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Notes

Edwina S. Campbell has been Professor of National Security Studies, Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell AFB, AL 36112, since 2003. She taught at the National Defense University from 1995 to 2001. A former Fulbright Fellow and US Foreign Service Officer, Prof. Campbell is working on a new book, War and American Power.

 [1] Cox, “Another Transatlantic Split?,” 121–46.

 [2] Ibid., 122.

 [3] Ibid.

 [4] Ibid.

 [5] May, “The Nature of Foreign Policy,” 666–7.

 [6] Bowie, “Die Zusammenarbeit politischer Fuehrungsgruppen,” 49.

 [7] Franklin Delano Roosevelt, asking Congress for a declaration of war on Japan, 8 December 1941.

 [8] Shirer, Midcentury Journey, 260.

 [9] The 1973–74 Watergate crisis, more than Vietnam, turned American reporters into sceptics, if not antagonists, of the US government. An earlier generation of journalists, reared on the New Deal, World War II, and the civil rights movement, had seen the intervention of federal power, both at home and abroad, as the solution to the political, economic, and social problems of the time. They trusted Washington's judgement and accepted its pronouncements at face value. After 1974, that would never be the case again.

[10] See Campbell, Germany's Past, esp. chapter 6, “CSCE and a ‘Common European House’,” 121–52.

[11] As was amply demonstrated by the language he used in 1990–91 to describe Saddam Hussein.

[12] The voting age at the time was 21.

[13] The flaw in Kohl's thinking was the assumption that Germany's neighbors would not welcome political leadership from Bonn. Used to dealing with an older generation of leaders like Francois Mitterrand and Margaret Thatcher, he failed to understand that younger Europeans, born in the 1960s and 1970s, associated the Federal Republic with Willy Brandt, détente, and the opening of the Berlin Wall, not Nazi Germany. Students from all over western Europe had flocked to Berlin in 1989; this younger generation had welcomed German unification, and, in the early 1990s, would have welcomed new European political ideas (which were not forthcoming) from Bonn. Kohl's mantras were ‘a European Germany, not a German Europe’, and ‘partnership in leadership’ with the US, but in fact, both Washington and Brussels needed German ‘leadership in partnership’, a phrase which never seemed to occur to the German government.

[14] See, for a discussion of this, Campbell, ‘Germany's Approach’, 143–62.

[15] Cox, “Another Transatlantic Split?,” 137.

[16] Ibid., 138.

[17] Roosevelt, Fireside Chats, 45–6.