Segurança e Defesa

Social Democratic parties in NATO countries: A return to consensus?, por Bruce George e Mark Stenhouse

With scarcely enough time to recuperate from the trauma of the INF years, NATO strives, by the end of the decade of 1980, to fashion a new consensus on the role of America’s nuclear guarantee for Europe on the future of nuclear weapons on European soil and on balance of conventional forces, whose urgency becomes even more noticeable after Gorbachev’s Nuclear Initiative pressuring the West for the reconquering of a moral high ground. In the present study, it is hoped that, through the analysis of some of the disagreements that characterised the early 1980s, the temptation to complacency towards Gorbachev may be deconstructed. The purpose of the present study is, thus, to review the way western Europe’s major socialist parties within NATO have approached defence in the post-war world.