Vom Zusammenwachsen des Bundnisses: Die Funktionsweise der NATO in ausgewahlten Krisenfallen 1951-1956 (review)

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), America's first overtly "entangling alliance" since the eighteenth century, was established in April 1949 to contain the Soviet Union and prevent the new Germany then under construction from once more becoming a threat to its neighbors. At the end of the 1980s, when dramatic changes in Europe suggested that NATO might outlive the Soviet Union and provide safe anchorage even for a reunited Germany, the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (Germany's main research institute for military history) undertook a multivolume study of the formative years of the alliance, hoping to discover the reasons for its apparent success. The institute took that task upon itself even though Germany had not been a NATO member during most of those years and even though the alliance at that point had little military substance. Its only real muscle lay in bombers stationed near Omaha, Nebraska. Few European troops were fully committed, and military activity consisted almost entirely of contingency planning. NATO's first actual military operation, the pacification of Bosnia-Hercegovina, came fully four decades after the organization's founding.

The author of this book, Winfried Heinemann, is a historian who has worked at the institute and edited its journal Militärgeschichte. He has also served as a lieutenant-colonel in the German army and has seen service in Mons at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE). He discusses all of this in a volume that traces the political and, to some degree, administrative history of NATO from the establishment of the North Atlantic Council and the appointment of the first secretary-general in 1949 to the formation of the Committee of Three. He has examined diplomatic archives in France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Canada, and the United States, consulted the relevant secondary literature, mostly in English and German, and produced an informative book that describes what he sees as the largely successful integration, over time and with varying degrees of success, of the security policies of the member-states. Without bemoaning what have been called the Venus de Milo characteristics of the alliance (all SHAPE and no arms) or seriously examining the nature of the military buildup actually undertaken after the Korean War, he shows how dangerous and uncertain the world was in the early 1950s, particularly for the smaller members of the alliance, how precarious peace and order seemed to be, and how NATO came to provide both opportunity and incentive for collective security arrangements that might offer a solution.

The crises to which the title of the book alludes are selected from areas of controversy that highlight the differences among NATO members. The future of Cyprus was basically an issue on which three of them had divergent and seemingly irreconcilable interests. The question of the admission of Ireland and Spain or of Yugoslavia, and Portugal's attempt to involve NATO in the defense of Macao and Goa, highlighted divisions about the alliance's purpose. Iceland's admission of Communists to its government, combined with its expressed desire to withdraw from membership, threatened both the unity and the efficacy of the alliance. Only the Suez Crisis was of a magnitude that might conceivably have triggered war, but it, too, is considered here primarily for its effect on NATO. Heinemann, of course, might have included many other crises. The one surrounding the admission of the Federal Republic of Germany is particularly conspicuous by its absence.

Given the focus of the book, Heinemann reaches a series of persuasive but predictable conclusions. He attributes NATO's success and longevity largely to the fact that, from the beginning, the "founding fathers"—such as Lester Pearson, the first secretary-general; Lord Ismay; and representatives from the smaller states, such as Belgium's Paul-Henri Spaak—insisted on the importance of Articles 2 and 4 of the North Atlantic Treaty, thereby moving the alliance as much as possible into...