PERCEPTIONS JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

Year 1999, Volume: 4 Issue: 1, 0 - 0, 01.03.1999

Gülnur Aybet

Abstract

From its inception in 1949 until the early 1990s, NATO functioned as a classic collective defence organisation, by definition and practice. The collective defence measures of NATO were legally embodied in article five of the Washington Treaty, whereas the implementation of the deterrence value of that collective threat was made effective largely by NATO’s nuclear defence posture, the cornerstone of which was the concept of extended deterrence. Thus, this arrangement of NATO successfully provided for the defence of its members against a potential attack from the then Soviet Union. However, apart from the nuclear defence posture, which was the essence of deterrence, NATO members throughout this time also accumulated valuable expertise in security and defence co-operation through numerous exercises and day to day military co-operation within an integrated military structure. This is not to say that during the Cold War NATO had no political role to play either. The Harmel Report of 1967 saw the establishment of a twin track approach: collective defence against and dialogue with the adversary. After the end of the Cold War, when the adversary became the former adversary, NATO added the function of co-operation alongside those of collective defence and dialogue. In fact, the various forums of co-operation with its former adversaries have indeed become one of NATO’s strongest hallmarks in the post-Cold War era. However, this is not to say that NATO has developed as a purely political organisation since 1990 either. Its once essential defence, nuclear deterrence, may no longer be NATO’s foremost military planning issue, so NATO’s integrated military structure in the post-Cold War era has found a new role for itself, not entirely within the spectrum of collective defence but also including that of collective security. As NATO turns fifty, almost a decade after the end of the Cold War, it has developed politically and militarily through new missions, which essentially are embedded in the Washington Treaty, but which NATO did not perform during the Cold War.