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New NATO, New Century: David Haglund, ed. |
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Description: Ten years ago, many NATO watchers were far from certain that the alliance would continue to matter much to a Europe that was obviously shaking off the rigidities and animosities of the Cold War. Today, very few express doubt about whether NATO still has a job to do. Today the question is no longer, is there a role for the alliance? Instead, it is, can the allies continue to function as the world's most effective security grouping, in light of then nature of operations expected to be undertaken by the "new" NATO? Question marks hang over three major policy areas, all of which have taken greater poignancy as a result of the war with Serbia in 1999. The first concerns the decades' old aspiration for a more autonomous European "pillar" of defence, in the past few years referred to in North America as the European Security and Defence Identity (ESDI), and in Europe as the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). The second involves the qualitative expansion of the alliance, which has since 1990 been "transforming" itself from an organization whose job was said to be exclusively collective defence, into an entity that spends a great deal of energy pursuing a security objective leagues removed from the earlier task of protecting member states from direct invasion of their territory. And the third relates to the quantitative expansion of the alliance, from a grouping of sixteen states at the Cold War's end to one now comprising nineteen members and pledged to keep the "door open" to even more. David G. Haglund is a Professor of Political Studies at Queens University, and has previously served as the Director of Queen's Centre for International Relations and head of the Department of Political Studies. His research focuses on transatlantic security issues, and Canadian and American foreign and security policy.
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