Commentators on both sides of the Atlantic have their own views about who is to blame for the parlous state of NATO. For the pro-war lobby, it is France and Germany's dithering over military action against Iraq that is ripping apart the Western alliance. The French and Germans have caused 'the deepest crisis [in NATO] since the 1960s', claims one report (1).
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According to liberal commentators, the Bush administration's determination to invade Iraq no matter what - unilaterally if necessary - is bringing NATO to its knees. For one writer, President Bush's bellicose war talk has 'split international bodies, and could end up disabling them', causing future conflict between America and Europe (2).
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In truth, NATO's current crisis is part of much bigger divisions between Western powers. The spat between America and France and Germany over what to do about Iraq may be pushing NATO over the edge - but this international body has been dying on its feet since the end of the Cold War 15 years ago.
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The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation was signed in Washington DC in April 1949, bringing together the USA and 10 Western European states (including Britain and France) into a postwar 'military alliance'. The member states' professed aim was to watch out 'for each other's defence' in the face of the perceived threat from the Soviet Union. Members of NATO could call on one another for assistance if they felt their national security was 'at serious risk' (3).
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Six years later, in 1955, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) signed up to NATO too - and the Soviet Union responded by founding the Warsaw Pact. This brought together the USSR with Eastern European states (Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany and Romania) in an alliance against the USA and its allies.
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Between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, the stage was set for the Cold War - the West/East framework of international relations from the end of the Second World War until the late 1980s. This was a period of relative calm between the major Western powers; and now that some of the old Cold War alliances are unravelling, commentators are predicting a move towards 'dangerous and unpredictable conflict'.
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What many seem to overlook is that the Cold War was the exception to the rule in modern history. The absence of major conflict between Western elites during the Cold War years has far from been the norm in the history of capitalism; it was, historically speaking, a mere episode in international relations. Traditionally, relations between capitalist powers have been defined by rivalry, tension and competitiveness. The major powers have consistently clashed over issues of trade, territory, spheres of international influence - leading to two world wars and untold bloodshed.
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The Cold War simply put such tensions on hold. After the Second World War, the USA assumed global domination, effectively putting a temporary stop on the clashes between Western powers that had defined the capitalist era. The Cold War didn't resolve the problem of the balance of power in international relations that had caused the First and Second World Wars, but it did provide a temporary solution. The division of Europe after the Second World War, and America's role as the number one superpower, kept clashes between the major powers in check.
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This is where institutions like NATO came in. The military alliance of NATO - under the guise of warding of the supposed Soviet threat - allowed the USA to assume leadership of Europe. Anti-communism became the cement that bound together the Western powers. Across the West, anti-Soviet ideology was the big idea, tying together potential rival states under the domination of the USA. As the only power capable of standing up to the Soviet threat, the USA took on the role of 'protecting' Western Europe from the 'Evil Empire'. NATO effectively allowed America to extend its global influence in the postwar period, and to dominate much of the world in the Cold War years.
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There were still tensions between Western powers - albeit shortlived and muted ones. France was always more dissenting than other Western powers in its relationship with the USA during the Cold War. In 1966 the French even temporarily left the NATO military alliance, claiming that they wanted an 'independent identity outside of the US/Soviet division' - though they returned four years later in 1970.
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Even Britain, loyal-to-America Britain, sometimes displayed a degree of resentment towards the USA's global position. In 1956, British and French forces invaded Egypt to protect the Suez Canal from being nationalised by the Egyptian government - only to be effectively ordered out by the US government. The Suez crisis caused a temporary rift between America and its NATO allies Britain and France, though this, too, was subsumed beneath the broader stop on tensions institutionalised in the Cold War era.
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In many ways, the Cold War period worked extremely well for the West - transforming the traditional conflict of power and interests between Western elites into a military alliance held together by anti-communism. The end of the Cold War, however, threatened to once more unleash the tensions between Western powers. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought to an end the West/East framework of the previous four decades, and undermined the West's anti-communist ideology. It brought into question the existence of institutions like NATO, and the postwar solution to international conflict that NATO had embodied. After 40 years, the old 'North Atlantic' alliance had lost its raison d'ętre.
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The end of the Cold War was initially celebrated as a victory in the West, as the triumph of Western capitalism over Soviet communism. But the victory speeches soon gave way to a profound sense of uncertainty among Western powers, and concern about the potential for instability. The loss of the 'Evil Empire', the loss of an enemy against which the West could define itself and its mission, led to much hand-wringing in the West. It was one thing for America to pose its global role in negative terms, as standing up to the threat from 'over there' - it was quite another for the USA to put a positive case for its international domination. The collapse of the Soviet Union robbed the USA of its defining purpose in international affairs.
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The NATO alliance suffered a crisis as the Cold War ended. What was the point of a military alliance that no longer had an enemy to ally itself against? What role could there be for a specifically Western force when the Eastern counterparts that it defined itself against had collapsed? Even its name - North Atlantic Treaty Organisation - started to sound odd, at a time when the world was no longer divided along the same geographical and political lines.
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In the early 1990s, some perceptive commentators recognised the impact that the end of the Cold War was having on NATO and the Western alliance. In 1992, former US defence secretary James Schlesinger wrote: 'Ultimately, the realities of the changing political and economic lines of forces [within Europe] will outweigh all the immediate declamations of unswerving loyalty and fidelity to institutions like NATO…. The sharply diminished need for US protection unavoidably implies the shrinkage of US importance to Europe. That will be true no matter how much we flatter ourselves.' (4)
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After the Cold War, there were heated debates in US government and foreign policy circles about the 'rise of new powers' - specifically of a newly united Germany. Under the heading 'The Unipolar Illusion: why new great powers will rise', international expert Christopher Layne wrote in 1993 about Germany coming to the fore on the international stage, and claimed that the 'USA-Japan relationship will become highly competitive and the possibility of hegemonic war will be present' (5).
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Yet for all the concern about new big power conflicts, in fact Western tensions were largely muted in the immediate post-Cold War period. In response to the uncertainty wrought by the end of the Cold War, Western elites reacted conservatively - desperately trying to hold on to the past, to the certainties of yesteryear, and to find new roles for old institutions like NATO. In the confused climate, Western powers were not inclined to rock the boat in international affairs, much less to challenge America's global role.
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So even as the NATO alliance was unravelling in the 1990s, Western powers tried desperately to keep it together. President Bush senior spent the early 1990s making speeches about 'adapting and renewing NATO for the New World Order'. American strategists attempted to forge a new role for NATO in Europe, calling for a US-led rapid deployment force, consisting of European troops. Others called for the NATO states to tackle unrest in the Eastern European states emerging out of the Cold War aftermath.
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Some attempted to forge a post-Cold War role for NATO by talking up new (and unconvincing) enemies. The Soviet Union may no longer be a threat, but what about third world nationalism, asked US officials? In the early 1990s, some pointed to the threat of the 'Islamic Bomb' (the notion that Islamic fundamentalists could get hold of nuclear technology from the collapsing Soviet Union) as another good reason for keeping NATO together. Such enemies were more the creation of Western elites seeking a new role in the world than real threats to world peace.
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Yet despite the subjective desire to keep the North Atlantic alliance intact, objectively there was little to cohere it. Where the Soviet threat of old had some purchase in the West (however much it was blown up by Western elites), the new bogeymen of bloodthirsty third-world nationalists and nuke-hungry Islamicists didn't cut it. The Soviet Union was a real thing, a system against which Western capitalism could advertise itself positively. The succession of rent-an-enemies wheeled out after the Cold War did not galvanise people in the same way.
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Indeed, American statesmen's proposed roles for a 'new NATO' for the 1990s only brought attention to NATO's insignificance in the new era. The more America talked up the creation of a new US-led force for Europe, the more European leaders (especially in France and Germany) floated the possibility of Europe developing its own force, free from American influence. There may have been little desire among Western powers actively to renew the conflicts of old, but diverging interests were nevertheless coming to the fore.
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NATO finally seemed to have found a new purpose in the mid-1990s, when for the first time in its 45-year history it was used to launch attacks. In the name of NATO, US fighter planes bombed Bosnian Serb positions in the former Yugoslavia in 1994, in the dog days of the Bosnian War. Russia may have been opposed to the action against the Serbs, but most European states (Britain, France and Germany) supported America's bombing campaign. But even this did not herald a new united North Atlantic alliance.
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It was telling that NATO first launched attacks, not against its Soviet enemy during the relatively certain Cold War period, but in the uncertain 1990s. However, the US-led NATO action in Bosnia seemed further to exacerbate tensions between America and Europe, rather than making a powerful case for going back to the North Atlantic alliance.
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The American-led NATO bombing of Bosnia continued the post-Cold War trend for Western powers, not to assert their interests individually, but rather under the guise of multilateral institutions. During the Bosnian conflict, America increasingly asserted its interests in the name of NATO, while European powers expressed theirs under the remit of the United Nations.
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But by dressing up its effectively unilateral action against the Serbs as a NATO thing, the USA only made NATO look even less attractive to European powers. By the end of the Bosnian conflict, many European commentators were dissing NATO as little more than a front for 'arrogant America'. In the America v Europe tensions that culminated in disagreements over the future of the former Yugoslavia, the idea of NATO as a new force for the New World Order was further undermined.
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Likewise, NATO's most recent last stand - in the British and American-led bombing campaign against Serb forces during the Kosovo War of 1999 - did not herald anything like a new era of North Atlantic unity. Then US president Bill Clinton and UK prime minister Tony Blair may have scored some points in their Kosovo campaign, by launching attacks to boost their international and domestic reputations. But their self-serving campaign did little for American and European relations.
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Britain and America launched their 1999 war against the Serbs under the remit of NATO because there were divisions within the United Nations. Most Western powers backed the offensive against Serb forces, but Russia's opposition meant that the attacks did not have the backing of the UN Security Council. By using NATO as a means of getting around the UN, the Kosovo action further fuelled the notion that NATO was little more than a cover for America's interests.
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(However, this didn't stop many left-wing and liberal commentators from supporting Clinton and Blair's Kosovo war. Many on the left who now criticise Bush junior and Blair for even thinking about acting against Iraq without UN agreement were vocal supporters of the NATO bombings in Kosovo and Serbia in 1999.)
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Today, still, new roles are being sought for NATO, as America and the Franco/German alliance remain at loggerheads over Iraq. But it is the changes and shifts since the end of the Cold War that exposed the fault lines between American and European interests, and which brought to the fore the differences between the former North Atlantic allies. And the increasingly makeshift attempts to forge (yet another) new role for NATO are highly unlikely to overcome such profound tensions.
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In the noughties, European and American officials have called for NATO to be transformed into a peacekeeping force, and are now even proposing that it should be expanded to include more of the old Eastern European states that were once its sworn enemies. According to one US writer: 'An American looking for a little transatlantic support and sympathy would be well advised to book a ticket to "new Europe": the former communist states of Central and Eastern Europe that have emerged as some of Washington's strongest diplomatic allies.' (6)
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Yet these attempts to magic up a peacekeeping role for a former military alliance, or to balance out the disagreements between NATO's member states by bringing on some of the more US-compliant states in Eastern Europe, will do little to resolve the deeper crisis and uncertainty in international affairs. You cannot have a geographical or organisational solution to what is fundamentally a political problem.
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And such desperate lashing around for a new role - any role - can only further expose the hole at NATO's heart, and the divisions within the West.
Brendan O'Neill is coordinating the spiked-conference Panic attack: Interrogating our obsession with risk, on Friday 9 May 2003, at the Royal Institution in London.
Read on:
spiked-issue: War on Iraq
spiked-issue: War on terror
(1) Spain says NATO's Turkey crisis worst since 1960s, Daniel Trotta and Marta Ruiz-Castillo, Reuters, 12 February 2003
(2) An Empire too far, Christian Science Monitor, 13 February 2003
(3) See the North Atlantic Treaty, on the NATO website
(4) 'Transatlantic partnership: an American view', James Schlesinger, The Brookings Review, Summer 1992
(5) 'The Unipolar Illusion: why new great powers will rise', Christopher Layne, in The Cold War and After: Prospects for Peace, edited by Sean M Lynn-Jones and Steven E Miller, MIT Press, 1997
(6) Continental divide, David R Sands, Washington Times, 9 February 2003
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