Introduction

Abstract

On 24 March 1999, NATO went to war for the first time. Created in Washington DC in April 1949, NATO was originally designed as a military alliance whose primary purpose was to defend Western Europe against the communist threat in the East. Article 5 of its founding treaty effectively declared that an attack on one member was an attack on all. However, its first war was not a war against the Soviet Union or one of its allies, in fact it occurred almost a decade after the collapse of communism. Nor was it a war of collective self-defence. No NATO members were attacked or even threatened. Instead, NATO’s first war was a ‘humanitarian war’.¹ It was a war ostensibly aimed at preventing a humanitarian catastrophe in the southern Balkans, a catastrophe caused by a decade of Serbian oppression in Kosovo. Once NATO failed to prevent that catastrophe it chose instead to reverse its consequences and was undoubtedly successful in doing so.