ABSTRACT
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) was formed to engage in a political and military competition in Europe with the Soviet-led Eastern bloc. The form NATO's opening to the east next took was the establishment of the North Atlantic Co-operation Council (NACC) at the Rome Summit in November 1991. The Combined Joint Task Force concept, heralded at the 1994 Brussels summit alongside the Partnership for Peace initiative, is a significant feature of NATO's shift towards a collective security mission. NATO consultation and co-operation with its NACC partners would focus on issues, "such as defence planning, democratic concepts of civilian-military relations, civil/military coordination of air traffic management, and the conversion of defence production to civilian purposes". As a bureaucratic structure, NACC occupied a rather ambiguous ground somewhere between incorporation within NATO structures and complete separation from them. NATO has been by far the leading institutional architect in "designing" Europe's post-Cold War architecture, and this "new" NATO has been its major creation.
