INSS

NATO FROM BERLIN TO BOSNIA
S. Nelson Drew

. . . AND THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN

NATO itself was certainly not prepared for the pace of change that followed the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. In the fall of 1989, as the Berlin Wall was coming down, a survey of over 30 NATO and SHAPE staff officers could find only 2 who were willing to consider adopting a new NATO strategy to replace MC 14-3's twin pillars of "forward defense and flexible response" within the next decade in response to the changes underway in Europe. "After all," it was explained, "MC 14-3 took seven years -- and the withdrawal of France from NATO's integrated military structures -- to gain Alliance approval even when there was consensus about the nature of the threat." It would be "too difficult" to attempt to craft a new strategy -- NATO would just have to make do with the old.[footnote #4]

Yet little over half a year later, the NATO heads of state held a momentous meeting in London; there, noting that "the walls that once confined people and ideas are collapsing," they directed the Alliance to undertake a "fundamental" revision of NATO's strategy and to "build new partnerships with all the nations of Europe" by reaching out to NATO's former adversaries in the East and extending to them "the hand of friendship."[footnote #5] To further that end, the NATO heads of state invited the members of the Warsaw Pact to establish regular diplomatic liaison with NATO. At its next summit meeting, in Rome in November of 1991, NATO created the North Atlantic Cooperation Council and adopted its new Strategic Concept.

The speed with which NATO moved to craft and adopt its new strategic concept was astonishing to anyone who had studied the pace of change within the Alliance for the previous 40 years. From the meeting of Heads of State and Government in London in July of 1990, when the Allies agreed "on the need to transform the Alliance to reflect the new more promising era in Europe," to the adoption of the Alliance's Strategic Concept and the Rome Declaration on Peace and Cooperation took only 16 months.[footnote #6] The transformation of the Alliance signaled by those two documents was remarkable. The basis for NATO strategy since 1967 was contained in MC 14-3, a classified Military Committee document agreed to without French participation, and based on the perception that Allies faced the immediate threat of an overwhelming Warsaw Pact attack. MC 14-3 was replaced by an unclassified new "Strategic Concept" agreed to by all 16 Allies in which the word "threat" was no longer used to describe challenges to Allies' security. At the same time, the Rome Declaration on Peace and Cooperation set out a new "institutional relationship of consultation and cooperation on political and security issues" in the North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC) between NATO and the newly independent Baltic states and all the former members of the Warsaw Pact.[footnote #7] With the adoption of these two documents, NATO committed itself to "realise in full [a] broad approach to stability and security encompassing political, economic, social and environmental aspects," and, within this context and in conjunction with other regional and international organizations (including an emerging European Security and Defense Identity) comprising a new "security architecture" for Europe, to "protect peace and to prevent war or any kind of coercion" throughout the trans-Atlantic community.[footnote #8]

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