Yet even before the final event of the Rome Summit (a performance¾some might say "significantly"¾of Mozart's "Requiem Mass" at the Vatican), there were signs of strain in the fabric of this bold new tapestry the Allies had attempted to weave. NATO was entering a period in which the pace of change in the European security landscape exceeded the institutional capacity to adapt to it. The first evidence of this came from within the Alliance. At a press conference immediately after the signing ceremony, French President Mitterand seemed to distance his government from elements of the documents just signed. Then, on the day of the first meeting of the NACC in December 1991, another shock (this time external to NATO) was dealt to the vision of Rome: the Soviet Union ceased to exist as a nation. At the conclusion of the meeting the representative of the Soviet Union was forced to make a dramatic announcement that, officially, his country had not participated, because officially there was no longer a Soviet Union.[footnote #9] The initial challenge to NATO was the decision over whether or not to admit all of the successor states of the USSR to NACC membership. Subsequently, as Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Kozyrev has noted, "local conflicts in the CIS have given rise to a host of security problems for Russia and other nations in the Euro-Atlantic area."[footnote #10]
By the time members of the Alliance began to prepare themselves for the next round of meetings (at the level of defense and foreign ministers) in May and June of 1992, it was increasingly evident that the vision of stability and security in a trans-Atlantic community stretching from "Vancouver to Vladivostok" was not being matched by reality. The Rome documents had been intended as a roadmap to help the Alliance advance toward this goal, but there was in fact no NATO capability in place to ensure peace and stability in the face of serious challenges. And serious challenges there were. While one segment of Europe had met in Maastricht at the end of 1991 to adopt a charter seeking to overcome centuries of European nationalism, other segments, freed from the repression of years of Communist domination, had begun renewing ages-old nationalistic and ethnic conflicts with a vengeance. This was particularly true with regard to the violent and bloody conflict taking place in the former Yugoslavia, in close proximity to the borders of several NATO and NACC members. If NATO was to make good on its pledges in Rome, it was becoming increasingly evident that the Alliance would have to be prepared to commit its forces to a type of operation that had heretofore never been considered as an Alliance mission: peacekeeping.