US/EC relations: towards a global partnership : a new assessment on burdensharing

With regard to the future of European-American relations and therefore for its political and administrative frameworks the following changes and evolutions in the political landscape of the '90s are of a specific importance. [...] the regular direct presidential meetings between the US-President (on one side) and the President of the European Council and of the Commission (on the other side) was not copied from another set of EC contacts but took up earlier forms of contacts with the US. [...] The present pattern of that cooperation and its regular consultative mechanisms is overwhelmed by the implications for Europe and the United States of the second successful Russian Revolution which has brought the collapse of communism, one of the half dozen or so surpassing events of global consequence this century. [...] The list is not a long one and includes this first approximation: World War I and the end of the Hapsburg, Hohenzollern and Ottoman Empires; the 1917 Russian Revolution; the rise of fascism and World War II; the invention and use of nuclear weapons; the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe; the Western reaction to that occupation (Marshall Plan, NATO, democratic transformation of West Germany and J. [...] But there also many other issues to be confronted: the safety of Soviet civil nuclear reactors which are both numerous and dangerous; the fate of soviet conventional armed forces in the event of large scale conflict between republics; the influence of these various futures on the 2 J politics, economies and defense establishments of the struggling democracies of Eastern Europe; the amount of econo.