Abstract
The signing of the North Atlantic Treaty on 4 April 1949 was the culmination of negotiations that stretched back more than a year to the Anglo–American–Canadian talks at the Pentagon in March 1948, and of a wider process of polarisation in Europe that had been in progress for somewhat longer. In fact, the concept of an Atlantic security system had been raised in Anglo–American circles as early as November 1940, and gathered force as wartime plans for the post-war system were drawn up during 1943–5.1 The Treaty formalised this polarisation in emphatic terms: it explicitly compelled its signatories to consult each other whenever the territorial or political integrity of one of their number was threatened, to regard an actual attack on a member as an attack on all of them and to collectively develop their joint capacity to resist such an attack.
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Notes
John Baylis, The Diplomacy of Pragmatism: Britain and the Formation of NATO 1942–9 (London: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 8–9, 17.
Martin Hollis and Steve Smith, Explaining and Understanding International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), p. 87.
Ian Clark, The Hierarchy of States: Reform and Resistance in the International Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 13.
My own view on the nature of the European security system is in Mark Smith, ‘NATO Enlargement and European Security’, in Adrian Hyde-Price and Lisbeth Aggestam (eds), Security and Identity in Europe: Exploring the New Agenda (London: Macmillan, 2000).
Anton DePorte, Europe Between the Superpowers: The Enduring Balance, 2nd edn (London: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 1–4.
Clark, p. 146; Robert Endicott Osgood, NATO: The Entangling Alliance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 10–11.
See Alfred Grosser, The Western Alliance: European-American Relations Since 1945 (London: Macmillan, 1980).
The concept of ‘overlay’ is discussed in Barry Buzan et al., The European Security Order Recant: Scenarios for the Post-Cold War Era (London: Pinter, 1990), pp. 15–16. On the relationship between the break-up of European order and the Cold War, see pp. 32–40; also DePorte, pp. 58–91; Clark, pp. 168–76.
William Wallace, The Transformation of Western Europe (London: Pinter 1990), p. 35
John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War 1941–7 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972).
See Clark, p. 110; Karl D. Bracher, The Age of Ideologies: A History of Political Thought in the Twentieth Century (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 189.
Walter LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War 1945–92, 7th edn (New York: McGraw Hill, 1993), p. 13.
The West European states had been sufficiently concerned about the emergence of a Marxist-Leninist Soviet to intervene directly in the aftermath of the First World War, and the presence of Bolshevism remained a key security fear among Western states throughout the interwar years. See D. F. Fleming, The Cold War and its Origins 1917–1960, 1 (New York: Doubleday, 1961), pp. 15–28, 38–9.
See Michael W. Hunt, Ideology and US Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 152.
See Cable 14 March 1946, FO 371/56763; John Baylis, The Diplomacy of Pragmatism: Britain and the Formation of NATO 1942–49 (London: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 41–2.
Dan Reiter makes a useful distinction between direct and systemic threats. Direct threats occur when ‘the threatening state is making a specific demand of a state with the implicit or explicit promise of military action if the demand is not met’; a systemic threat pertains in ‘a situation in which a local power appears to be posing a general threat to the nations of the region, such that it seems to have broad ambitions for greater political power and/or territory’. Dan Reiter, Crucible of Beliefs: Learning, Alliances and World Wars (New York: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 49–50.
On the relationships between alliances and threats, see Stephen Walt, The Origins of Alliances (New York: Cornell University Press, 1987).
Timothy Ireland, Creating the Entangling Alliance: The Origins of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (London: Aldwych Press, 1981), p. 221;
see also John R. Gillingham, ‘Introduction’, in John R. Gillingham and Francis Heller (eds), NATO: The Founding of the Atlantic Alliance and the Integration of Europe (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992), p. 1.
Saki Dockrill, Britain’s Policy for West German Rearmament 1950–1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 3; see also Lawrence Kaplan, ‘The Cold War and European Revisionism’, Diplomatic History, 11(2), pp. 147–56.
Baylis, p. 65; Sir Nicholas Henderson, The Birth of NATO (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982), p. 1.
The development of Bevin’s early ideas on Western Union are examined in Sean Greenwood, ‘Ernest Bevin, France and Western Union: August 1945–February 1946’, European History Quarterly, 14(3), pp. 319–38. See also John Kent and John Young, ‘The “Western Union” Concept and British Defence Planning’, in Robert Aldrich (ed.), British Intelligence, Strategy and the Cold War 1945–1950 (London: Routledge, 1991).
See John Young, Britain, France and the Unity of Europe 1945–51 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1984), for the case that the Dunkirk Treaty’s roots are to be found in the period 1944–7, when security hopes rested on the Grand Alliance, and fears centred largely on Germany. For the argument that the Treaty was actually a precursor of the anti-Soviet treaties which came after it, see John Baylis, ‘Britain and the Dunkirk Treaty: The Origins of NATO’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 5, pp. 236–47; Sean Greenwood, ‘Return to Dunkirk: The Origins of the Anglo–French Dunkirk Treaty of March 1947’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 6, pp. 49–65.
See Baylis, The Diplomacy of Pragmatism, pp. 71–2; Wolfgang Krieger, ‘Foundation and History of the Treaty of Brussels’, in Norbert Wiggershaus and Roland G. Foerster (eds), The Western Security Community: Common Problems and Conflicting National Interests During the Foundation Phase of the North Atlantic Alliance (Oxford: Berg, 1993), p. 232; Jan Van Der Harst, ‘From Neutrality to Alignment: Dutch Defense Policy 1945–51’, in Gillingham and Heller, pp. 32–3. See Oral History: John D. Hickerson, HSTL.
Cees Wiebes and Bert Zeeman, ‘The Origins of Western Defense: Belgian and Dutch Perspectives 1940–1949’, in Ehnio Di Nolfo (ed.), The Atlantic Pact Forty Years Later: A Historical Reappraisal (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1991), pp. 141–62;
Jacques Frémeaux and André Martel, ‘French Defence Policy 1947–1949’, in Olav Riste (ed.), Western Security: The Formative Years: European and Atlantic Defence 1947–1953 (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1985), pp. 92–106.
Elisabeth Barker, The British Between the Superpowers 1945–50 (London: Macmillan, 1983);
Charles S. Maier, ‘Alliance and Autonomy: European Identity and US Foreign Policy Objectives in the Truman Years’, in Michael J. Lacey (ed.), The Truman Presidency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 273–98.
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© 2000 Mark Smith
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Smith, M. (2000). The North Atlantic Treaty in Context. In: NATO Enlargement during the Cold War. Cold War History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333985359_2
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