Crisis of Transatlantic Relations: NATO and the Future European Security and Defense Identity 39 pages, pdf  Download Back

Crisis of Transatlantic Relations: NATO and the Future European Security and Defense Identity 

Publisher: Mamedov Muschwig

Volume: 39 pages, pdf

Description:

The 20th Century has been one of the bloodiest in history, because we have failed again and again to prevent conflicts. The Munich Convention of 1938 was presumably one of the most humiliating examples of this incapacity. In recent times, probably the civil war in Former Yugoslavia has been a further illustration of the failure of a diplomacy of deterrence. Further bloodshed was prevented only by a fast intervention of NATO.

It is fair to say that the 20th Century began on the day that Gavrilo Princip murdered the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo and thereby triggered the beginning of the First World War. It is one of the great ironies of history that at the end of the same century in the same city the same nationalistic passions unleashed and caused the death of thousands of Bosnians who had been suffering already for a long time.

However, there has also been a spectacular example of successful conflict prevention: the Cold War. Due to the equilibrium of terror, due to the reliability and credibility of NATO deterrence and due to the existence of nuclear weapons, East and West threateningly faced each other only for half a century. The Superpowers terminated their confrontation after the collapse of communism and the desegregation of the Soviet Union-without the use of a single bullet.

One decade after the Wall's fall, the overall concept of the Cold War, the bipolarity of East and West, has not yet vanished from the transatlantic relations between Europe and the U.S. On one hand the past continues to have an effect on NATO's extension to the East, in particular with regard to the new members' motives for joining NATO.

On the other hand, the past is but a memory as Russia is a member of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council. Being the most important institutional transatlantic pillar, NATO finds itself in an ambivalent situation: On the one hand it allies itself with the former satellites of the former Soviet Union, on the other hand it yields to Russia's vehement courting by gradually integrating Russia into the structure of the North Atlantic Alliance.