Europe and the long formation of Atlantic Order: interaction, competition and cooperation from 1450 to the present day

There is growing attention in European Studies on the significance of geopolitical dynamics and shifts in global order for the present and future of European integration. The rising tensions between the US and China, the ‘decentring’ of globalisation and emergence of new flashpoints of conflict are widely recognised as shaping and reconfiguring European politics in key ways. Most accounts to date have explored the question of the interaction between changes in global order and European integration in the contemporary conjuncture. In this paper, we develop a long-term historical perspective on changes in global order and European politics, tracing the deeper patterns of interaction, competition and cooperation which make up what we term the Atlantic order. We trace the lineages of this Atlantic order, from its origins and development in 1450 to the present day. We advance a stylised periodisation of the formation of Atlantic order encompassing four phases of development first, an early modern period of ‘new world’ discovery, where novel forms of social organisation were pioneered in the form of settler colonialism which fed back into the ‘old world’ on the European continent (1450 - 1750); second, a phase of capitalist modernisation and industrialisation, where the European and US economies become increasingly entangled along a distinct Atlantic axis of finance, investment, production and trade, (1750 - 1914); third, a phase of Atlantic transition, which saw the exhaustion of European state power, inter-imperial conflict and the ascendancy of the US as the leading Atlantic power (1914 - 1945); fourth, the rise of a postwar Atlantic framework, where a liberal international order was underpinned via US hegemony with Europe as its junior partner (1945 - 2008). In reaching back to this deeper history of Atlantic order, we argue, European studies can gain a new understanding of the distinctive transformations and longer term continuities which make up the present global conjuncture, and thereby illuminate the challenges facing European integration as the ‘Atlantic order’ faces new structural pressures.