| Description |
Nineteen-ninety-nine was a climactic year for the NATO Alliance, wherein the Alliance's celebration of its 50-year anniversary was tempered by the standoff and subsequent military intervention in Kosovo. Many felt at the time that by acting to solve this crisis, NATO was in fact superceding the confmes of its traditional role, that it was getting involved in a situation that was beyond its purview. NATO's 50th Anniversary celebration thus turned into a strategic referendum, wherein the member nations sought to determine what exactly was the purpose of the NATO Alliance. In attempting to shed light on this question, my paper takes a detailed look at the historical context under which the NATO Alliance was formed in 1949. In doing so, my paper shows that at the moment of its founding, NATO was conceived of as an alliance whose mission was far broader than is now generally supposed. Not merely a political tool designed to confront Communism, NATO was in fact created to defeat a wide array of potential enemies, of which Soviet Communism was but one part. This paper thus argues that, rather than being an organization designed solely to fight the Cold War, NATO was in a certain respect an organization designed to fight the World Wars. Emerging as the phoenix-like byproduct of30 years offighting, NATO was the creation of a war-weary Western world whose leaders were still influenced by the mistakes of Versailles and Munich, rather than by the still distant spectacles of Havana and Hanoi. Specifically, the late 1940's were a time when the world was still dominated by the residual effects of repeated German aggression and thus felt compelled to ensure that such aggression in the future was made impossible. Set against the backdrop of the rapidly emerging Soviet threat, the Western leaders were thus caught between the specter of past and future problems, and ultimately conceived of the NATO Alliance as a means to bridge over the battlefields of the past, while at the same time preparing for the conflicts of the future. This paper presents this theme by first discussing the political quandary faced by the midcentury United States. Unarguably the most important member of the NATO Alliance, the road to globalization was a rocky one for the Americans, with the internal political debates of the 1940's in tum dramatically influencing the form that the NATO Alliance would eventually take. The paper then expands in scope, discussing the history and nature of the East-West! Communist-Capitalist tension, and showing how the relationship between the Great Alliance of World War II could deteriorate so rapidly and so dramatically, thus producing less than five years later an alliance on the scale of NATO. That aura of tension established, this paper then focuses on the particular problem of Germany, showing that even within the context of the rapidly escalating, Moscowfearing paranoia of the West, the problem of Germany nevertheless remained central to the geopolitical deliberations, in effect creating the paradigm by which the Soviet situation would be viewed. Taken in the aggregate, this paper shows that the formation of NATO in 1949 was influenced not only by the ideological foes and military manifestations of the present, but also out of the military ghosts of the past, along with the ideological threats yet unimagined. That NATO won a battle in 1990 is a fact unquestioned. That this victory represented the apotheosis of its ultimate global ambitions and ideological existence, however, is a fact very much in question. This paper sheds light on that question, showing such an interpretation to be constricted and ultimately inconsistent with the historical record. |
