This volume is the result of a joint effort on the part of European and American scholars to describe and analyze the nature and the role of the European Community on the threshold of the 1990s. The 1980s stood witness to a significant change in West Europe from "Eurosclerosis" to close European cooperation in the fields of security, foreign policy and trade. This newly won "assertiveness" on the part of the West Europeans will be put to a test in the next decade, as, in addition to the progressing West European integration process, a new dynamic is likely to preoccupy the 1990s – the ongoing reform process in East Europe.

Since the Euro crisis began, Germany has emerged as Europe's dominant power. During the last three years, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been compared with Bismarck and even Hitler in the European media. And yet few can deny that Germany today is very different from the stereotype of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history. After nearly seventy years of struggling with the Nazi past, Germans think that they more than anyone have learned its lessons. Above all, what the new Germany thinks it stands for is peace. Germany is unique in this combination of economic assertiveness and military abstinence. So what does it mean to have a 'German Europe' in the twenty-first century? In The Paradox of German Power Hans Kundnani explains how Germany got to where it is now and where it might go in future. He explores German national identity and foreign policy through a series of tensions in German thinking and action: between continuity and change, between 'normality' and 'abnormality', between economics and politics, and between Europe and the world.

Traces the history of the Marshall Plan and the efforts to reconstruct western Europe as a bulwark against communist authoritarianism during a two-year period that saw the collapse of postwar U.S.-Soviet relations and the beginning of the Cold War.

How established powers can facilitate the peaceful rise of new great powers is a perennial question of international relations and has gained increased salience with the emergence of China as an economic and military rival of the United States. Highlighting the social dynamics of power transitions, The Struggle for Recognition in International Relations offers a powerful new framework through which to understand important historical cases of power transition and more recently the rise of China and how the United States can facilitate its peaceful rise.