Introduction

The experience of European integration provides a challenge to classical realism. The newly partnered states of Western Europe constructed a community narrative of ‘no more war’ embodied by the creation of a security community embodied in economic integration of Original Six of the Treaty of Rome – with its original six members – France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, and West European military integration within NATO (Kupchan, 2010). With these steps, Western Europe turned its back on the fratricide that led to three Franco-German conflicts in less than 70 years, which resulted in two world wars (Stern, 2007).

The twentieth-century international system had Europe as its reference point: first, as the subject of empires in decline; and, subsequently, after World War II, as the object of superpower competition with a divided Germany at the front line (DePorte, 1979). During the Cold War, the debate was dominated by Waltz’s focus in the international relations literature on bipolarity, namely, the ideological and material competition between the United States and the former Soviet Union. Structural realism, also called neorealism, placed the emphasis squarely on the international system, the so-called third image (Waltz, 1959). In hindsight, the waning years of the last century may be perceived as a bridge decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 and the destruction of the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001 (Chollet and Goldgeier, 2008). That period from 11/9 to 9/11 bore witness to the rise of the internet as the driver of the latest phase in the history of globalisation, namely, the information and communications technology revolution. This latest turning point in world history featured a frequently disorienting experience of contrasts between old-world hierarchies and new social networks (Ferguson, 2019).

The early twenty-first century has experienced a series of three inflexion points. The first came right at the end of the bridge decade with the attacks on the United States in 2001. Less than a decade later, the world experienced the financial crisis of 2007–8, which left many Western countries in a state of future shock (Aliber and Kindleberger, 2015).