ABSTRACT
For 40 years, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was the principal answer to almost any question about security in Europe, no matter which side of the Atlantic posed it. The end of the Cold War changed the character of at least some of the questions. It also opened up a set of discussions about new possible answers. Academics, political commentators and others rushed into the fray to promote the idea of reorganizing the institutional architecture of European security. It was a broad debate that raged across the merits and demerits of organizations like the Western European Union (WEU), the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) now renamed the Organization on Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the European Union (EU) and others.
