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Title: Two Tiers or Two Speeds?: The European Security Order and the Enlargement of the European Union and NATO (Europe in Change) by James Sperling ISBN: 0-7190-5402-8 Publisher: Manchester Univ Pr Pub. Date: March, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: useful book
Comment: Two Tiers or Two Speeds? is a useful collection of ten essays edited by James Sperling, professor of political science at the University of Akron, Ohio. Like Building a Bigger Europe by Smith and Timmins (2000), this book also fills a significant gap in the scholarly literature on the dual enlargement processes of the EU and NATO. They agree with Smith and Timmins that both EU and NATO enlargement are necessary to build a viable European security community. While both the EU and NATO have their origins in the cold war, the disappearance of the Soviet threat in the 1990s in no way undermined the cohesion and purpose of these institutions, as John Mearsheimer and other political scientists predicted a decade ago, Sperling notes. He emphasizes that the original purpose of the EU and NATO was to contain Germany and Russia. Even in the late 1990s, according to the author: 1) Russia still had the ability to disrupt the European order both economically and militarily: 2) the absence of ideological enmity between Russia and the United States did not alter the balance of nuclear power substantially, nor did it reduce German power in Central Europe. Therefore, "if nothing else the EU and NATO will retain the residual function of containment into the third millennium" (p. 4).
Like Smith and Timmins, Sperling stresses that the EU is an economic and political entity, whereas NATO is a military machine. He somewhat dourly concludes that "EU enlargement will remain a tortuous process with an uncertain outcome owing to an array of institutional, financial, and political liabilities of the accession states and constraints within the EU (p. x)." In contrast, NATO enlargement has been "a relatively swift and painless process because there have been no compelling reasons not to proceed" (page x). In this way, Sperling takes a more optimistic view than Smith and Timmins of the expansion of NATO and its post-Cold War military achievements.
The book is evenly divided---four essays on NATO and four on the EU. The contributors include: Erik Jones (University of Nottingham), Thomas-Durrell Young (Naval Postgraduate School), Emil J. Kirchner (University of Essex), Gale A. Mattox (U.S. Naval Academy), Daniel Whiteneck (Towson University), Michael Huelshoff (University of New Orleans), Clay Clemens (College of William and Mary), and others.
---Reviewed by Dr. Johanna Granville, Stanford University

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