Britain and the origins and future of the European defence and security mechanism Article Accepted Version Heuser, B. (2017) Britain and the origins and future of the European defence and security mechanism.Lessons learnt from history can be wrong or irrelevant, but one lesson that to a student of international relations seems both right and relevant seems to have been forgotten: that Britain's security depends on a peaceful Europe, that Europe's stability is enhanced by a firm British commitment to the defence of democratic states in Europe, and that the fine skills of British officials have been essential in overcoming many a crisis not only in transatlantic relations, but also in intra-European relations. Yet, today this carefully crafted defence mechanism of Europe, engineered above all by Britain, is crumbling.This mechanism and the rules to guide its employment took decades to construct, and Britain was one of the leading powers in initiating, amending and then fine-tuning it. In key periods, this was achieved along with France; in others mainly alongside the US and West Germany. It was a mechanism that allowed for dynamism, elasticity and perpetual adjustments to ever new events, which had to be accommodated without undermining the foundations of the entire structure.The British leaders and officials involved drew on centuries of failed experiments with alternative structures, all of which were eventually unable to keep the British Isles out of the two world wars, resulting in unprecedented numbers of casualties, damage and suffering. The mechanism, designed as much as cobbled together in ad hoc salvage operations by British politicians and defence planners, was at once robust and flexible, allowing it to weather a series of crises. But it relied and relies crucially on Britain as the central lynchpin keeping the construct together. The British withdrawal from the EU risks removing this central lynchpin, upon which the entire construct may come apart.
The Channel Bridged by AirpowerCenturies of trial and error form the background to the construction of the current European defence mechanism. England and later Britain, along with most other European entities, had long embraced balance of power strategies. But while the rules of the balance-of-power game stopped any one power from dominating Europe, time and again, war was the main instrument available to beat rivalling expansionist powers.