The political and cultural underpinnings of Atlanticism's crisis in the 1960s

Abstract

The term “Atlantic Community” was introduced in the early twentieth century by the American journalists Walter Lippmann and Clarence Streit.1 It referred to a union of people and cultures, not solely of states.2 The defi nition was an ecumenical one, combining a democratic concept of society with an alliance of the nations of Europe and North America. Atlanticists, as they came to be called, portrayed the Atlantic Community as the core area of “the West.” This was consistent with the world-historical — also called the civilizational — concept, which joined North America (usually without Mexico) and Europe into a single entity: no longer merely the Old and the New World, but instead a united Western civilization.