From the Atlantic to the Urals: Gorbachev’s Europe and Delors’s Europe

From 1985 to 1991, during six years of hope in Europe and the world over, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, the latest head of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, launched the proposal of a “Common European Home” (CEH), opening it to inhabitants from the Atlantic to the Urals and marking one of the moments of greater proximity in the controversial relationships between Europe and Russia. In the end, however, the proposal was rejected. Historians have looked for the multiple causes of this failure, from the inherent weakness of the proposal to the Americans’ fear of fostering Soviet influence in Western Europe. The question remains: why was Gorbachev’s proposal to establish a model of pan-European cooperation rejected, and what is the historical significance of that failed attempt? The purpose of this work is to help answer these questions by reconstructing the response of the European Commission, chaired by Jacques Delors, to the Soviet Union’s proposal.