Concerned as they are by the many crises occurring on their very doorstep, the European public, politicians and analysts seem hardly to recognize other conflicts in Europe that have not happened and need not happen. Crisis prevention and peace-building have been sidelined by conflict management and peacekeeping.

Broad security has become a self-explanatory concept in these times of transition which affect every country with the end of the Cold War and the advent of 'cyberworld'. The multi-disciplinary approach to security is nothing new; its globalization is. The combination has radically altered the signposts of human cohabitation. The terms of the social contract between the citizen and the state have been altered, as transnational phenomena multiply.

Pendant la Guerre froide, le facteur nucléaire a structuré et sous-tendu les relations internationales. Il était à la base des stratégies militaires du monde occidental, déterminant toutes les fonctions de défense. Les armes nucléaires étaient considérées à la fois comme des insignes suprêmes du pouvoir politique et comme des instruments militaires indispensables. L'effondrement du Pacte de Varsovie et l'implosion de l'URSS ont radicalement changé le paysage géostratégique et, corollairement, bouleversé la perception du nucléaire. Sans menace massive, l'arme nucléaire a perdu sa fonction militaire immédiate. Face aux nouveaux défis de l'après-guerre froide, elle semble à la fois inappropriée et insuffisante. La perte de signification militaire a entrainé une réduction énorme du poids politique : aujourd'hui, une grande puissance se définit moins par son statut nucléaire que par la performance économique. En même temps, l'effondrement de l'URSS et la guerre du Golfe ont attiré l'attention internationale sur les nouveaux dangers de la prolifération. L'anarchie nucléa...

Since 1814, Sweden's security policy has been anchored to varying degrees of neutrality. Throughout this timeperiod, its interpretation has been flexible and trademarked by an ability to adjust to different external conditions; effectively enabling the country to combine participation in international affairs with an adherence to non-alignment.

The war in Bosnia has witnessed a broad swing in the moods of the "international community" and of European nations particularly. In the wake of the end of the Cold War and of the victory in the Gulf War, expectations run high at the outbreak that collective security would have been able to deal with regional disturbances. Three years later, the "international community" had accumulated many frustrations and the IFOR operation which put an end to the fighting was regarded as a highly specific one which was unlikely to be repeated in other contingencies. This paper argues that both the initial and the final attitudes toward the Bosnian War have been excessive and, somehow, related. The initial optimism rested on uncertain foundations and was very likely to fail. The delusion, in turn, produced a cynical mood in which the initial mistakes were reversed and substituted with a pessimistic assessment of the prospects for long term stability. A more balanced attitude would not have produced such extremes and would have maintained a consensus in the "international community" for a wise and ...

With the end of the Cold War, security has acquired very different components. In Europe, it has broadened to include conflict prevention and crisis management, in an attempt to substitute persuasion for enforcement. It has essentially become a political rather than a military concept whose features are foresight, transparency and accountability, and which combines political and economic as well as military measures.

Changes in the post-Cold War strategic landscape have, among other things, affected WEU countries' Defence Industrial and Technological Base (DITB). The further evolution of WEU, with respect to the recently defined EU reform and that impending in NATO, heightens the importance of solving the problems hampering European armaments cooperation, which directly affects WEU's operational capabilities.

In recent months the Institute has been particularly involved in studying the concerns of countries that are candidates for membership of European security organizations. Seminars organized by the Institute and its participation in conferences have been mainly directed at that very topical aspect of the reform of European security institutions. While closely linked, and complementary, questions of institutional deepening and widening need to be analysed separately.