ABSTRACT
Following the end of the Cold War, NATO remade itself during the 1990s to deal with radically transformed conditions of security on the European continent. The Soviet external empire had collapsed and all of its European ‘colonial’ possessions had gained both their independence and relief from communism. The Soviet Union itself collapsed, in history’s most radical peaceful transformation of state fortunes. Meanwhile, Germany was reunited, Yugoslavia was sundered into warring mini-states, and, in sum, the Cold War came to an end, ‘not with a bang but a whimper’,1 and with it the 75-year-old European civil war moved toward a close.
