By Bree Bang-Jensen | Disclaimer
I’d like to briefly interrupt the SWF blogging to discuss another project OIR is launching: a commemorative edition for NATO’s 60th anniversary. I come to the NATO team with a keen interest in regional organizations and curiosity about the ways in which they constrain and enhance the economic, political, and military policy scope available to member states.
In our examination of NATO, we want to move beyond the Cold War dynamics that shaped its development but ask why NATO membership has continued and increased in an era where Germany is a flourishing pillar of the European economy, Russia is not the foremost global threat, and American global action has been a source of tension between American leaders and their European counterparts. It is clear that NATO has moved a long way from the simplistic IR student’s mnemonic of “to keep the Russians out, the Germans down, and the Americans in.” To paraphrase OIR Scholar-Editor Andrew Hammond, “NATO did almost nothing for fifty years while the threat it was created to combat existed, then when that threat was no longer present, NATO suddenly became active.
The first time I traveled abroad was to Paris in March of 1999. Streets and alleyways were covered in slightly faded graffiti urging NATO to get out of the Balkans. Given that this tension existed even when NATO executed military actions in Europe, how have leaders been able to justify the expanding scope of NATO activity to their constituents? We hope to examine the tensions that exist within the alliance, inside member states, and between member and non-member states as NATO engages with its periphery. This will include examination of geographic peripheries (the Balkans, Eastern Europe, Northern Africa, Russia) as well as capacity peripheries (environmental cooperation, reconstruction in Afghanistan) and political peripheries (France, Turkey, the transatlantic alliance). We hope that by examining the successes and failures on the periphery, we can better understand the variables that have allowed NATO to continue to exist– and project the fate of the organization over another sixty years.
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