If either the security community in the North Atlantic or the Atlantic political community in the realm of security were to cease to exist, the peaceful end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union is when many would have expected to see it.1 That NATO continued to survive after the Cold War was a shock to some, and certainly not a foregone conclusion. Structural realist as well as liberal theories failed to predict the end of the Cold War (Gaddis 1993) and many theorists began to look away from the international relations mainstream for new models to explain a new world. Policymakers, too, were left grasping for a new vocabulary and new concepts to help them make policy and manage national and collective security in the post-Cold War era. The institutions that defined the Euro-Atlantic security relationship, from the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) to the European Community (EC) and the Western European Union (WEU) to NATO, sought new tasks and new missions and began to socialize new members. The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the rapid unification of the two Germanies a year later symbolically marked the period of the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Persian Gulf War in 1991 seemed to herald a new era for successful co-operation through the United Nations Security Council. The European states took major steps forward in European integration, from the Single European Act (1987) creating the common market to the Treaty on European Union signed at Maastricht in 1992. Integration had solved Western Europe’s security problems, and Europeans hoped that integration and co-operative security would do the same thing in the East, allowing for the creation of a Europe “whole and free.” Since détente, the allies had consistently presented their political community as something worthy of preservation for its own sake, rather than simply as a means to defence against the Soviet Union. At the end of the Cold War, this conviction was not in doubt, though the institutions and mandate for their co-operation were certainly in question. The real, material and political changes accompanying the end of the Cold War were profound and should not be underestimated. But a changed environment was not the only factor influencing allied responses to the structural change in the international system. Visions about where they should go as a community were called into question and had to be redeveloped. These were influenced by

previous events and conceptions of community. Moreover, by defining anew what threatened the community – by securitizing threats in a changed security environment – the allies shaped the environment they faced by interpreting it in particular ways. Examining arguments about security in the post-Cold War world is therefore essential to gaining an understanding of why the community was able not just to survive, but thrive. The wars in Yugoslavia added another side to this discourse of integration, co-operation, and supranationalism. Ethnic conflict, in Yugoslavia but also in Rwanda, Somalia and other places, dominated the transatlantic security agenda for much of the 1990s, at least until NATO’s war on Kosovo in 1999. Among these wars, the late intervention in Bosnia was the most contentious among NATO Allies, and the most crucial for its role in shaping the Atlantic community. The Yugoslav wars were particularly contentious for the NATO Allies because they could not agree on which institution should be responsible for mediating the dissolution of Yugoslavia and intervening as it turned violent. It was only during the Bosnian war, when NATO’s credibility and NATO soldiers were threatened, that the allies were able to resolve their differences and intervene forcefully enough to end the fighting. The allies were forced to act in part because their options were constrained by arguments they had made at the end of the Cold War about the responsibilities they had to Eastern Europe. Not to act would have dealt a serious blow to the integrity of the Atlantic identity. Acting, however, also shaped Atlanticism by beginning to shift NATO’s mandate for joint responsibility beyond mutual defence missions. As the Atlantic allies have dealt with the changing security environment of the post-war world, their debates over out-of-area relations have changed as well. The Vietnam war was not the last time the allies clashed over incidents beyond mutual defence. During the Yom Kippur war in 1973, the allies publicly disagreed on their reaction to Egypt’s and Syria’s invasion of the Golan Heights and the Sinai. To be sure, neither side was pleased, but the Europeans tended to see the invasion as the inevitable consequence of Israel’s refusal to retreat to its pre-1967 borders, as dictated by the UN Resolution which ended the Six-Day war. In part because of their dependence on Arab oil, they were eager to remain neutral in the conflict (Pryce 1986). The Americans, by contrast, saw the conflict through the lens of the Cold War, fearing that an Arab victory would constitute a Soviet victory (Hughes 2008). The Americans supported their Israeli allies by providing them with arms, and by moving aircraft carriers to the Mediterranean. Their NATO Allies opposed them, often publicly by refusing to allow NATO bases to be used as transit points. When American NATO Ambassador Donald Rumsfeld asked the North Atlantic Council to impose sanctions against the Soviets to protest against their support of the Arab states, it refused, arguing that the Middle East fell beyond NATO’s area of competency (Hughes 2008: 25; Stuart 1993). Relations degenerated further when the Americans increased the nuclear alert to DEFCON3 without having consulted with the Allies – a move which implicated the Allies because some of the weapons were on European soil (Hughes 2008). The episode marred American National Security Advisor Henry

Kissinger’s “Year of Europe” initiative, though the Allies did sign a lukewarm “Declaration of Atlantic Relations” in Ottawa in 1974, reaffirming their commitment to one another. Other instances where the allies debated their common and divergent interests in the world beyond the Atlantic include the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, and the involvement of NATO states in the Third World, to mention only the most serious.2 By the time the early-1980s freeze of the “second Cold War” was beginning to thaw, NATO had developed a sophisticated ad-hocery for dealing with out-ofarea issues. Security issues outside of the NATO area were frequently discussed in NATO committees, both officially (in regional experts’ groups, the Atlantic Policy Advisory Group and the Political Committee) as well as informally. Coalitions of the willing were sometimes formed when small groups of states wished to take collective action outside of mutual defence, and other states compensated by increasing their responsibilities in the NATO area. For instance, when Britain responded militarily to the Argentinian occupation of the Falklands in 1982, the rest of the allies chose not to object to the fact that the United Kingdom was using its forces for something other than the defence of Europe (Kaplan 2004: 91). The paramount norm of the Cold War remained in force: out-of-area issues were to be kept secondary, and were not to disrupt the primary task of the Alliance, which was mutual defence. The end of the Cold War marked a significant break in out-of-area policies as it did in all aspects of world politics. NATO’s principal raison-d’être, the Soviet threat, disintegrated almost overnight, and the community had to work out why it remained together as a community in a world that bore little resemblance to the one that existed when the institutions of the Atlantic community were formed. Mutual defence against the Soviet threat was replaced by caution and fear of the resurgence of authoritarianism in the Soviet Union, and of nuclear accident. The rapidly evolving changes of the late 1980s and early 1990s transformed the transatlantic security environment. The Alliance and the European Communities had to deal immediately with the prospect of new members, beginning with the newly unified Germany, and the presence of new, fragile democracies in Central and Eastern Europe. NATO had to determine whether it would, should, or could continue to exist. The process of making the case for the continuing importance of the Atlantic community required the allies to redefine the community in a number of ways. The United States remained the alliance leader and guarantor of security, but the question of how long and in what form North American troops would stay in Europe was again open. The allies had to decide to what extent their institutions would open, and to which new democracies. The allies had always argued during the Cold War that these states were historically a part of Europe. More importantly, they had to figure out what the basis for their renewed co-operation would be. Part of this was determining which threats they faced. Securitizing Europe’s new security environment, that is, making arguments about what issues constituted security threats, would have a significant impact on the shape of the community and its institutions in the post-Cold War period. The question of what

constituted NATO’s jurisdiction, defined both territorially and in terms of its responsibility, became relevant during this process of threat definition. Threats that were less obvious during the Cold War, or were defined as secondary to the main task of defence against the Soviets, came to be seen as appropriate problems for the Alliance. These new threats were not always territorially defined. The Atlantic community had been discussing co-operation on global threats since the 1970s and the creation of the Committee on the Challenges of Modern Society, and interdependence had been a buzzword in the community since the oil crisis. But these threats had always been defined as secondary. They were up for discussion, but subordinate to the larger issues of the second Cold War such as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iran-Iraq war, the Soviet deployment of shorter-range SS-20 missiles (the so-called “Euromissile” debate), and arms control. As the Soviet threat receded, the allies began to argue that they had to co-operate in order to respond to such issues as environmental destruction, international terrorism, drug trafficking and organized crime, and economic security (Bush 1989; Rifkind 1996: 130; Stoltenberg 1990; Thatcher 1997). As Genscher put it, the challenge of the post-Cold War world was co-operating on security with each other (in miteinander) rather than against each other (in gegeneinander). This would change the Alliance (Genscher 1990). These arguments demonstrate that threats are socially constructed and not based on capability. These things had all existed during the Cold War, but were not at the top of the security agenda. This set of concerns never disappeared, though the allies found little agreement on how to prioritize these non-military threats, much less how to address them. In any case, as Yugoslavia began to disintegrate, globalized risks were soon overtaken by a discourse about the dangers of nationalism and ethnic politics which threatened the values of the community. The allies re-affirmed and strengthened that pillar of the community as a way of providing continuity through a period of uncertainty.