NATO IN TRANSITION
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Volume: 5 pages, pdf
Description:
True security has seldom been a natural state of affairs, but rather has nearly always been the product of anticipating events and devising solutions to new problems. This is therefore a good time for launching a serious review. We all benefit from a wide and rigorous debate about the nature of the new security environment, and there is a great interest in the rest of Europe in what Turkish intellectuals and politicians are thinking. I believe that we still have a lot of thinking to do before we come to terms with the profound changes we have seen in the past decade. The end of the Cold War meant that the main security problem that we faced together in the Alliance also ended. We no longer have to confront the monolithic threat that the Soviet Union represented to the Alliance. Yet only the naive and those ignorant of history could believe that the end of the Cold War also meant that security and stability would no longer have to be worked for. As we see in the Balkans, in the Caucasus and elsewhere, there are many problems -ethnic, social, economic- which the Cold War suppressed and masked. For decades the rigidity of Communism denied the opportunity for Europe's eastern half to develop in a way which would have eroded and softened ancient sources of tension and ethnic dividing lines. Instead, the arbitrary way internal problems were dealt with, without consultation or democracy, meant that in many cases there is now a greater sense of grievance and injustice than we would have imagined.