NATO as a political alliance: continuities and legacies in the enlargement debates of the 1990s

Abstract

NATO's ongoing relevance as a political alliance appeared time and again in the debates of the 1990s, as the Western allies struggled to adapt their old institutions to the challenges of a new world, one without the Cold War. This article explores continuities in allied thinking pointing to concerns and considerations that remained no less relevant with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the splintering of the Warsaw Pact, and the unraveling of the Soviet Union. It focuses on the popular notion that NATO represented a political alliance, not merely a military one, showing how Canadian policymakers advocated for NATO enlargement on the basis of the Atlantic alliance's political credentials. In so doing, this article suggests new avenues to examine and reevaluate the process of NATO enlargement by incorporating the perspectives-and increasingly available archival records-of often neglected members of the alliance. Keywords Canada • Canadian foreign policy • NATO • NATO enlargementChastened by a near miss with nuclear war, the Western allies mused about the prospects of an improvement in East-West relations in the early 1960s. Teetering on the brink during the Cuban Missile Crisis had-unsurprisingly-made many wary of repeating the experience. NATO's smaller members pressed for a coordinated approach, insisting that the alliance should take on a role in the pursuit of détente between East and West. At the North Atlantic Council throughout the mid-1960s, Belgian, Canadian, Italian, and Norwegian representatives led the charge to carve out an allied role in the détente process Nuenlist 2003, 2004). The Canadians proposed a study of the alliance's past, present, and future in December 1964 (Donaghy 1997, 451; Locher and Nuenlist 2004, 197). Ottawa's overtures went nowhere. But when French president Charles de Gaulle announced his plans to withdraw France from the integrated command structure in 1966, these earlier initiatives

The role of the USA in the Western Europe’s security policy making

“…The study confirmed the assertions of researchers (Ringsmose and Rynning, 2021;Colbourn, 2020) on the need for continued US defence efforts to develop the EU's common defence potential. This could strengthen the current state of European defence and the EU.…”

“…But the European Union lacks the NATO level of operational activity. So, the USA and NATO supplemented by EU security entities remain the key actors in European defence (Virkkunen, 2022;Colbourn, 2020).…”