NATO and the Warsaw Pact: Intrabloc Conflicts

Introduction

vii The essays in this volume are based on papers originally presented at Kent State University in an April 2004 conference, “NATO and the Warsaw Pact: Intra-bloc Conflicts.” In what seemed like a natural melding of their missions, the Lemnitzer Center for NATO and European Union Studies hosted and cosponsored this gathering with the Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact (subsequently renamed the Parallel History Project on Cooperative Security). The Cold War era has claimed no shortage of publications focusing on issues of interbloc conflict between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Indeed, with the declassification of materials by NATO and member states of both blocs since the early 1990s, scholarshavepresentednewinformation,insights,andinterpretations.Contrastively, intrablocconflicts,whichplaguedbothalliances,havereceivedgenerallyextraneous attention. The fourteen essays in this volume, written by scholars from the United States and Europe, seek to fill this relative gap in the historiography. The volume is divided into two roughly equal sections, one on each alliance, with each introduced by an overview essay about the alliance’s workings and general history. “NATO United, NATO Divided: The Transatlantic Relationship” by Lawrence S. Kaplanprovidesthethematicbackdropforthecoverageof intrablocconflictswithin NATO in the following essays. Differences among member states became evident from NATO’s origins, but the reliance on consensus and common consent in the alliance’s decision-making process somehow prevailed and is evident to the present. Kaplan refers to “the NATO method” for subsuming differences among allies and follows with several case studies embodying conflict and consensus. Even before the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty (NAT) in April 1949, an unequal partnership between a dominant United States and its European allies surfaced and persisted to influence affairs in subsequent decades. It is this underlying theme that Kaplan emphasizes as he analyzes: NATO before the outbreak of war in Korea, the “special relationship” between the United States and the United Kingdom up to the 1956 Suez crisis, the challenges posed by France’s Charles de Gaulle, and the Reagan administration’s strident policies. In doing so, he lists a succession of intrabloc conflicts, concluding that no year during the Cold War passed without some indication of tensions in the relations between the United States and its European partners. Introduction S. Victor Papacosma viii introduction One might have speculated that with the demise of the Warsaw Pact, the “glue” supplied by the Soviet threat, now undone, would have led, along with mutual transatlanticresentments ,tothedismantlingoftheAtlanticalliance.Inhisfinalcasestudy dealing with Iraq, Kaplan maintains that even with the glaring divide in the policy positions of the Bush administration and most of its NATO allies, “the termination of the transatlantic alliance is not inevitable.” He adds that despite a succession of intrabloc conflicts and despite the North Atlantic Treaty’s provision for an alliance member to withdraw, no state has drawn on this option. Concluding, he argues that the great challenge for this long-lived alliance is to prove its ongoing relevance. Although colonial issues hardly served as an impetus in the drafting of the NAT, they did surface after its signing largely because a number of its members were major colonial powers. Mary Ann Heiss in “Colonialism and the Atlantic Alliance: Anglo-American Perspectives at the United Nations, 1945–1963” analyzes the diverging stances of Britain and the United States on matters of non-self-governing territories in the United Nations, which, in turn, influenced NATO affairs. The UN General Assembly’s composition and the Soviet Union’s espousal of anticolonial positions in the UN assured that decolonization became another feature of Cold Warconfrontation.Washingtonfounditselfshiftingfroma customarilyanticolonial position to a less critical one as it viewed the colonies of Western European allies as valuable bulwarks in the global struggle against communism. Concurrently, U.S. policymakers confronted the dilemma of containing the alienation of the growing list of nations supportive of anticolonialism. This two-pronged effort generated many complications and troubled ties between Washington and London at the United Nations. The Eisenhower administration initially professed to shift from its predecessor’s middle-of-the-road position but ultimately maintained, with some exceptions such as during the Suez crisis in 1956, the basic approach of not allowing anticolonialism to facilitate the advance of Communism in the developing world. The Kennedy administration followed and, with some variants, continued in this general direction . Throughout this earlier Cold War period, debates, votes, and resolutions at the UN posed problems for the United States and its colonial power allies. If these latter states weakened because of colonial problems, then their contributions in the Atlantic alliance...