| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The Year of Europe initiative, publicly launched by President Richard M. Nixon's Assistant for National Security Affairs, Henry Kissinger, with a speech delivered to an annual Associated Press gathering of prominent publishers, newspaper editors and media executives at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City on 23 April 1973, is primarily remembered as a major policy failure that quickly unravelled amid acrimony and recrimination. 1 Despite its high-sounding aspirations, Kissinger's call for a new sense of purpose and revitalised set of objectives to animate the transatlantic alliance had the contrary effect of provoking European suspicions of American motives, and fears that the forging of a new "Atlantic Charter"-as Kissinger proposed in his speech-would become a device for Washington to reassert its hegemony over its alliance partners, just as there was a growing impetus behind closer moves toward Western European unity, with the European Community (EC) expanding its membership from six to nine at the start of the year, and beginning to search for a collective political voice.
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