Transforming NATO in the Cold War
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Transforming NATO in the Cold War

Challenges beyond Deterrence in the 1960s

Andreas Wenger, Christian Nuenlist, Anna Locher, Andreas Wenger, Christian Nuenlist, Anna Locher

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eBook - ePub

Transforming NATO in the Cold War

Challenges beyond Deterrence in the 1960s

Andreas Wenger, Christian Nuenlist, Anna Locher, Andreas Wenger, Christian Nuenlist, Anna Locher

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About This Book

The first comprehensive history of NATO in the 1960s, based on the systematic use of multinational archival evidence.

This newbook is the result of a gathering of leading Cold War historians from both sides of the Atlantic, including Jeremi Suri, Erin Mahan, and Leopoldo Nuti. It shows in great detail how the transformation of NATO since 1991 has opened up new perspectives on the alliance's evolution during the Cold War. Viewed in retrospect, the 1960s were instrumental to the strengthening of NATO's political clout, which proved to be decisive in winning the Cold War – even more so than NATO's defense and deterrence capabilities.

In addition, it shows that NATO increasingly served as a hub for state, institutional, transnational, and individual actors in that decade. Contributions to the book highlight the importance of NATO's ability to generate "soft power", the scope and limits of alliance consultation, the important role of common transatlantic values, and the growing influence of small allies. NATO's survival in the crucial 1960s provides valuable lessons for the current bargaining on the purpose and cohesion of the alliance.

This book will be of much interest to students of international history, Cold War studies and strategic studies.

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Yes, you can access Transforming NATO in the Cold War by Andreas Wenger, Christian Nuenlist, Anna Locher, Andreas Wenger, Christian Nuenlist, Anna Locher in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Histoire & Histoire de l'armée et de la marine. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2006
ISBN
9781134152988

Part I
Introduction

1 New perspectives on NATO history

Andreas Wenger, Christian Nuenlist, and Anna Locher


This book about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the 1960s concentrates on the political dimension of the alliance. Most studies on NATO have centered on the alliance’s deterrence and defense functions, that is, on how changing perceptions of the Soviet threat and the military balance informed NATO’s debate on military strategy and force planning. Far less attention has been paid to how NATO evolved into a forum of political consultation and cooperation and how it reacted to the challenges beyond deterrence that culminated in a debate about the future political order in Europe. NATO’s political roles go back to the foundation of the alliance itself and are rooted in the unsettled nature of the postwar order in Central Europe. The alliance’s role in keeping the Anglo-Saxon powers engaged on the continent and in ensuring West German integration into an emerging Europe is well documented.1 By the mid-1960s, however, the key political challenges had shifted from keeping “the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down” (Lord Ismay) to designing political structures that would allow the multilateralization of détente and accommodate the demands of an economically revived and politically more assertive Europe.
The 1960s are the crucial decade for studying the political dimension of NATO, not least because at the time the future of the alliance seemed uncertain. As NATO’s twentieth anniversary in 1969 approached, one member–France under President Charles de Gaulle–seriously seemed to consider using its right under Article 13 of the North Atlantic Treaty to cease its alliance membership. De Gaulle’s opposition to military integration and central nuclear control is also well documented. At the heart of the Gaullist challenge to NATO, however, was the questioning of NATO’s political legitimacy: was NATO, dominated by the United States, the right political forum for achieving German and European unity, for proceeding with détente with Eastern Europe, and for negotiating a lasting European settlement? De Gaulle was convinced that the Europeans had to assume political leadership outside of NATO’s structures.2 The fact that policy makers in Bonn and other European capitals at times raised the possibility of dissolving NATO and the Warsaw Pact as an alternative model for designing a new European order stirred considerable anxiety in NATO’s corridors.
The founders of the alliance, in the context of the early Cold War, had not conceived NATO in the tradition of a classical defense coalition of sovereign states. NATO was founded as an alliance of like-minded states with a common heritage–shared democratic values and common interests–that combined the defense of values with the defense of territory.3 The North Atlantic Treaty represented a compromise between the European aim of securing US guarantees to deter and defend Western Europe in case of a Soviet military attack, on the one hand, and Washington’s goal of encouraging (Western) Europe’s economic reconstruction and democratization as a means of curbing Soviet political influence in Europe, on the other.4 It was the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 that catalyzed NATO’s militarization. The Korean War shifted the focus from the political to the military field–from Soviet intentions to Soviet capabilities–thus jumpstarting a process of military integration that resulted in the buildup of a centralized command structure and the nuclearization of NATO. The evolution of NATO’s strategic thinking dominated NATO’s cooperative efforts for the remainder of the 1950s.5
Policy makers at that time–like scholars in later periods–paid much less attention to the expansion of NATO’s political functions and consultative procedures than to the development of its military and force planning efforts. While the peaceful coexistence policy of Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev put the issue of how to approach détente onto NATO’s agenda in 1955–56, a series of international crises in Asia and the Middle East, along with a growing perception that the locus of the East–West confrontation was shifting from Europe to the global south, led to conflict among the allies over “out-of-area” issues. As a consequence, the perception took hold within NATO that the changing patterns of East–West as well as West–West conflicts demanded a strengthening of the political dimension of the alliance. The 1956 exercise and report of the “Three Wise Men” represented a first attempt to strengthen NATO as a forum for transatlantic political consultation and cooperation–a development that was met with French opposition once de Gaulle had returned to power in June 1958.6
By the end of its first decade, NATO had entered a phase of transition that led to a widespread perception of crisis and a pronounced public and governmental debate about the future of the alliance. Disagreement over NATO’s political role built up through the Berlin and Cuban missile crises and erupted in January 1963, when de Gaulle announced his veto to Britain’s admission to the Common Market, rejected US Polaris missiles, and signed a treaty of friendship with German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. The malaise of the mid-1960s revolved around such important questions as the management and application of nuclear power, out-of-area issues–including Vietnam–and the perception of a decreasing Soviet threat. Once France had left NATO’s military structures in the spring of 1966, the transformation of NATO into a more political and less hierarchical alliance became possible. The new balance between its military and its political functions, as recorded in the public statement of the landmark 1967 Harmel report, would carry NATO into the post-Cold War world.7
This book distinguishes itself from earlier studies in that it focuses on topics pertaining to NATO’s political dimension and in that it invites an assessment of the alliance’s role in the debate and design of a new political order in Europe. In general, the evidence presented here broadens the scope of existing analyses in at least three ways: first, most of the authors have benefited from the release of new archival material. Since the opening of NATO archives in 1999, a wealth of newly declassified material on NATO has become available in Brussels, as well as in many archives of the member states. Studies on the history of NATO require multinational and multi-archival research, as demonstrated by the exemplary multi-volume project on the history of NATO from 1949 to 1956, launched by the Military History Research Institute (MGFA) in Germany in the 1990s.8 This fresh scholarship on NATO at times challenges earlier readings of the alliance and reveals the valuable contribution of new sources and perspectives to a fuller appreciation of the complex intra-West interactions during the Cold War.
Second, in an attempt to complement research focusing primarily on the NATO policies of key member states, the contributions of this volume explore the multilateral dynamics of NATO’s political deliberations. Analyses of NATO as a multilateral forum for political consultation tend to shift the focus from the East–West conflict to the West–West conflict and from a situation where the superpowers had the initiative to a situation where the small allies seized the opportunity to “wag the dog.” Trans-governmental coalitions emerged that shaped the political agenda, sometimes with a decisive impact on the domestic policy making process of key member states.9 Third, integrating insights gained in other fields of study, such as international relations and social and cultural history, some of the chapters of this book examine the perceptions of transnational actors. Investigations into transatlantic elite networks and anti-nuclear protest movements can enrich our understanding of NATO’s political impact. Arguably, the transformation of NATO was driven as much by domestic political and social changes as by great power policy initiatives.10
The book consists of four main sections. Part II analyses NATO as a pluralistic security community (Karl Deutsch) and discusses the extent to which NATO’s survival beyond the 1960s was the result of a common political culture. Introducing the section, Jeremi Suri argues that a set of shared values, which transcended the actions of US and West European leaders, allowed for the continued prosperity of NATO into the 1970s. According to Suri, the alliance fulfilled two vital political functions during the second half of the Cold War. One the one hand, NATO provided a vehicle for overcoming the unavoidable disunity of the Western states by assuring acceptable West German participation in European politics, by keeping the United States and Britain engaged militarily and politically on the European continent, and by facilitating the emergence of a West European identity. On the other hand, the alliance successfully leveraged the political order among the Western states as the basis for building new bridges to Soviet-dominated Europe, in effect legitimizing the process of East–West normalization. By the late 1960s, Suri concludes, NATO’s commitment to democratization and détente had proved as important as the military functions that had underpinned the initial formation of the alliance.
NATO politicians were in fact concerned about the alliance’s democratic image, which was very much at stake in its handling of the delicate psychological warfare issue. Roused by the Berlin crisis and West German fear of isolation, Bonn proposed at the end of the 1950s the development of an offensive political warfare capability within the NATO structure. West Germany’s proposal, Giles Scott-Smith notes, transcended NATO’s established political role and radically challenged the identity of the alliance. But since London opposed a psychological warfare agency within NATO, and since Washington’s reaction was only lukewarm, Bonn proposed to work through an independent private group. As Scott-Smith demonstrates, the establishment of the private and transnational “Interdoc” network provided the West Germans with an outlet for their concerns about Eastern bloc propaganda, in effect giving them an alternative to an offensive psychological warfare capability within NATO. Within the alliance, psychological warfare remained in the hands of the military for use in times of conflict only. Psychological warfare never made it into a formal NATO body, Scott-Smith concludes, because it clashed with NATO’s democratic values.
Transatlantic elite networks, Thomas W. Gijswijt argues in his contribution, were a key characteristic of the Atlantic political culture. Elite networks like the Bilderberg Group were deeply concerned about the cohesion of the alliance, and with their activities they contributed to Western unity and to a basic consensus on transatlantic cooperation. Gijswijt traces the influence of this private informal network of high-level policy makers on NATO decision making, demonstrating how the Bilderberg Group played a key role in forming the international response to the Franco-German treaty. Supplementing rather than replacing official NATO gatherings and procedures, the Bilderberg conventions, according to Gijswijt, formed part of the overall fabric of the Atlantic alliance. Transatlantic elite networks provided Washington with an effective instrument to legitimize its leadership role while offering the Europeans an opportunity to understand and influence US policy. The participants’ list of the Bilderberg meetings, which included such influential NATO personalities as Washington’s Undersecretary of State George Ball and NATO Secretary-General Dirk Stikker, confirms the important role of the network in shaping ad hoc coalitions that could be used as leverage to influence national policy making.
Part III deals with the two challenges–Gaullism and détente–that resulted in a fundamental disagreement about the legitimacy of NATO’s political role. De Gaulle’s demand that NATO move to a tripartite directorate–which challenged the United States and embarrassed and infuriated the smaller allies–put the issue of the alliance’s political leadership up for discussion. And Khrushchev’s Berlin ultimatum brought conflicting détente policies to the fore, which in fact seemed to prove that incompatible visions of Europe’s future had emerged within the alliance. Within this context, Christian Nuenlist discusses the political debates among NATO ambassadors in Paris and NATO foreign ministers from 1958 to 1963. Political consultations on the Berlin crisis and on the related issue of East–West détente revealed serious intra-bloc tension among Western allies. Nuenlist argues that NATO political consultations dramatically deteriorated in the second half of 1959, both because of de Gaulle’s anti-NATO stance and because of Eisenhower’s policy of bilateral détente with Khrushchev. Reconciling superpower détente and alliance politics became increasingly difficult for the United States as NATO’s hegemonic leader. Comparing Eisenhower’s record of political consultation with NATO on East–West relations with Kennedy’s, Nuenlist concludes that Kennedy was more successful than Eisenhower in managing détente within the NATO forum. In addition, Secretary-General Dirk Stikker’s handling of the NATO Council encouraged substantial multilateral political debates within NATO, whereas the restless efforts of his predecessor Paul-Henri Spaak to improve political cooperation within NATO produced less concrete results.
Erin Mahan narrates the battle between Kennedy and de Gaulle over power politics, international economics, and NATO strategy in the context of the escalating Berlin crisis. Mahan offers a comprehensive account of how the Berlin crisis led to the emergence of incompatible, if nebulous, US and French visions for the future of Europe. The Berlin crisis convinced de Gaulle that France would have to withdraw from military NATO, once the direct threat to the city had passed, and it bolstered his determination to veto Britain’s membership application to the Common Market as a means of minimizing Anglo-Saxon influence in Bonn. In Washington, by contrast, tension over Berlin persuaded Kennedy that a war with the Soviet Union could be avoided only through his grand design of a unified Western Europe, tightly bound economically and militarily to the United States. Mahan blames both leaders for establishing too many linkages between economic policy and security policy–connecting nuclear sharing with British entry into the Common Market–so that the two policy areas became difficult to separate.
The question of how NATO insiders coped with the alliance’s internal crisis between 1963 and 1966 is the topic of Anna Locher’s chapter. The French stance in NATO triggered crisis perception and “crisis talk” at NATO’s routine political meetings, and among NATO and national officials from January 1963 on. This talk anticipated, and prepared the alliance for coping with, the 1966 crisis following France’s withdrawal from NATO’s military command. While de Gaulle used Secretary-General Manlio Brosio as a channel for informing the allies about his next moves, small allies, led by Canada and Belgium, initiated a debate about the future of the alliance that paved the way for the understanding that NATO was necessary beyond 1969 and would continue, even if France were to leave the alliance. NATO’s multilateral discussions were an expression of the general malaise that had beset the alliance since the early 1960s and thus highlighted the need for reform. But at the same time, Locher emphasizes, this West–West bargaining process produced methods of crisis management and a set of ideas that proved instrumental to the successful transformation of NATO towards the end of the decade.
Part IV addresses NATO’s perennial nuclear dilemmas. The focus of the three chapters, however, is neither on the evolution of NATO’s nuclear strategy nor on the history of the Multilateral Force (MLF).11 Rather, the contributions in this volume concentrate on the political aspects of NATO’s nuclear challenge, exploring the role of anti-nuclear protest movements, the delicate balance of political interests in the evolution of the Nuclear Planning Group (NPG), and the interconnection between NATO’s nuclear sharing schemes and the negotiation of the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). Addressing the nuclear issue from the perspective of social history, Holger Nehring locates the fundamental dilemma of the alliance in the diverging perceptions of security within Western societies from 1955 on. For the anti-nuclear weapons protesters, Nehring argues, NATO’s nuclearization would not contribute to a “long peace” (John Lewis Gaddis). Analyzing the discussion of NATO within the protest movements against nuclear weapons in Britain, West Germany and France, Nehring is struck by the degree to which the protest movements framed NATO’s nuclear issues as national problems. While Britain and West Germany both experienced large-scale anti-nuclear protest movements between 1955 and 1963, France had no strong protest movement. This can be explained by de Gaulle’s unilateral nuclear policy, which became the symbol for the stabilization of the French state. While protesters in all countries regarded the NATO crisis as severe, only a vocal minority among them in Britain and France wanted their countries to leave NATO. By 1963, in the wake of the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the antinuclear weapons protest movements began to transform into broader protest movements that cumulated in the violent protests of 1968.
The long petering out of the MLF project and the parallel, initially almost unrecognized rise of the NPG is the subject of Andrew Priest’s chapter. The campaign of the MLF “theologians” in the State Department to bind West Germany more permanently into the alliance through the MLF is well-known. Priest argues that support for the MLF remained only lukewarm in many countries because the question of control–of central importance to national nuclear sovereignty–was never solved and because the MLF was perceived as anti-détente in the domestic political debates of some NATO countries. After the unofficial demise of the project in December 1964, US Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara introduced, in May 1965, the idea of a select committee of NATO defense ministers to discuss nuclear problems and to share expertise in the nuclear field. Gradually, West Germany was won over to the idea, the demands of the smaller allies that the new committee would not be a trilateral affair were accommodated, and the Soviet Union decided not to oppose a “software solution.” The NPG, Priest concludes, represented a significant change in NATO’s political and military structures that facilitated a consensus on flexible response and made progress on the NPT possible.
Connected with the issue of NATO’s nuclear sharing, if much broader in scop...

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