ABSTRACT
In the initial phases of Cold War studies, the emphasis of scholars focused on the main players of the international system, namely, the USA, Britain, France, West Germany and the Soviet Union. Gradually the attitudes and perceptions of smaller states also came into the picture, while attention has being paid to the regional aspects of Cold War confrontation in Europe.1 In our days, the expansion of Cold War studies has embraced additional aspects, including research on the two major alliances, NATO and the Warsaw Pact. This raises fresh methodological problems, as scholars enrich their study of ‘traditional’ power centres and national policies with the understanding of alliance processes and the complicated interaction of states on multiple levels, from threat perception and military planning to political consultation and propaganda. Thus, international scholarship stresses that, even from the start, NATO was more than a simple military arrangement: it was a union of sovereign states, based on common values, political and cultural; NATO was a crucial aspect of the institutionalization of the post-war West (Kaplan 1999; Mastny 2002; Wenger, Nuenlist, and Locher 2007).
