Nato S Security Discourse After The Cold War

This book provides a critical investigation into the discursive processes through which the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) reproduced a geopolitical order after the end of the Cold War and the demise of its constitutive enemy, the Soviet Union.

This book offers an original and distinct analysis of NATO's post-Cold War evolution. Unlike so much of the available literature, it is not focused on what in the author's opinion NATO should be doing now that the Cold War is over. Rather, the author offers a comprehensive analysis and overview of the extent to which NATO can undertake new roles, tasks and missions in light of the extent to which it has retained significance and vitality as an international institution. The book's originality also lies in the way in which the author discusses NATO's adaptation within a framework provided by international relations theory, and in particular concepts which stress the role and importance of transnational political processes and international regimes. So far these have been little used in the analysis of military security relations and institutions. The book will be of interest to those researching and teaching international relations, European politics and security studies, as well as all those seeking a better understanding of the post-Cold War survival and development of a key international security institution.

This collection is the first book-length study of NATO's bureaucracy and decision-making after the Cold War and its analytical framework of 'internationalization' draws largely on neo-institutionalist insights.

This book examines episodes in NATO’s history from the founding of the North Atlantic Alliance in 1949 to its transition to the post-Cold War order in the 1990s, with an eye to better understanding its present and its future. NATO’s history, now running over seventy years, can no longer be framed in Cold War terms alone. Nor can the organization be understood fully as a post-Cold War institution. Today’s NATO is a product of both these eras. This edited volume offers a reconsideration of NATO’s place in history, looking both at how the alliance coped with the Cold War and how it managed its difficult transition to the post-Cold War international order. Contributors recount how NATO coped with its many political and operational challenges, which on occasion threatened – but never managed to – derail the alliance. The book opens new vistas for explaining how NATO thrived and survived for decades and ponders whether it will survive for many more. The book will be of great value to scholars, students and policymakers interested in Politics, International Studies, Global Affairs and Public Policy. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Strategic Studies.

This book analyses the expansion of The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) into the post-Soviet space after the end of the Cold War. Based on an extensive analysis of the literature and government documents, including doctrines, statements and speeches by the most influential decision-makers and other actors, it sheds new light on the geopolitical and geostrategic context of the expansion of the military alliance, and assesses its impact on international security relations in Europe. The first chapter introduces readers to the neo-realist approach and develops the methodological basis of the book. The following chapters provide a historical overview of the causes and consequences of two waves of eastward NATO enlargement. Special attention is paid to the annexation of the Crimea and to Russian hybrid-asymmetric warfare. Finally, thirty years after the end of the Cold War, the book notes a disturbing return to militarization in international security relations. To counter this process, the author calls for a reduction of current international tensions and a new policy of détente.

How do once bitter enemies move beyond entrenched rivalry at the diplomatic level? In one of the first attempts to apply practice theory to the study of International Relations, Vincent Pouliot builds on Pierre Bourdieu's sociology to devise a theory of practice of security communities and applies it to post-Cold War security relations between NATO and Russia. Based on dozens of interviews and a thorough analysis of recent history, Pouliot demonstrates that diplomacy has become a normal, though not a self-evident, practice between the two former enemies. He argues that this limited pacification is due to the intense symbolic power struggles that have plagued the relationship ever since NATO began its process of enlargement at the geographical and functional levels. So long as Russia and NATO do not cast each other in the roles that they actually play together, security community development is bound to remain limited.

NATO's decision to open itself to new members and new missions is one of the most contentious and least understood issues of the post-Cold War world. This book, an unusual and intriguing blend of memoirs and scholarship, takes us back to the decade when those momentous decisions were made. Former senior officials from the United States, Russia, Western and Eastern Europe who were directly involved in the decisions of that time describe their considerations, concerns, and pressures. They are joined by scholars who have been able to draw on newly declassified archival sources to revisit NATO's evolving role in the 1990s.