ABSTRACT
The NATO engaged in Afghanistan today is not the same NATO that was created in 1949. In March 1999 former Secretary General Javier Solana quite aptly noted: “The old security agenda, over NATO’s first 40 years, was based on a relatively simple strategic imperative: territorial defence. It was a passive, reactive agenda, imposed by the dictates of the Cold War.”1 Solana’s choice of the word “imposed” is interesting, for the Cold War did not impose anything on NATO. Rather the Alliance as a bureaucratic structure internalized the East-West conflict and the concepts of deterrence and balance of power to establish norms and an identity. With the end of the Cold War the thereby established identity and norms of action were called into question. Uncertainty in international affairs triggered a crisis of identity within NATO. Since 1989 the Alliance has attempted to institutionalize a new set of norms and to create a new identity. This is par for the course within bureaucracies; as Barnett and Finnemore note, “organizations that start with one mission routinely acquire others”.2 Thus, as in its early days, NATO today is working to create a new “social reality” – this time a reality that reinforces the Zeitgeist of the risk society. As Solana went on to say, NATO has shed the straightjacket of the Cold War and now seeks to “shape the security agenda, not be driven by it”.3 Consequently the Alliance has evolved from a reactive entity occupied with the concepts of deterrence and the territorial defence of Western Europe into a proactive global risk manager. NATO’s evolution though is not limited simply to the postCold War era. This chapter traces the evolution of the Alliance from a military alliance into a security community and from there into the risk community it has become in the early twenty-first century.
