The Need for an Atlantic Community

Abstract

If one glances at any book on the Atlantic Alliance written in the late 1950s prognostications strikingly similar to those volunteered by today’s pundits and politicians will be found. Klaus Knorr was only one among many to ask in 1958 whether the Alliance could survive a profound crisis of confidence, whether it could still defend Europe against possible aggression and aggressive threats.¹ The questions raised at the end of the 1950s, in retrospect NATO’s first and most successful decade, reveal that today’s crisis of confidence is not without precedent. Crises within the Alliance have been part of its history. Indeed, hardly a year has passed in which its future has not been questioned. If anything, those who write about the Alliance in the 1980s for the most part try to argue that NATO is not foredoomed to failure; that the Soviet Union can still be contained.²