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56 nato after sixty years 56 NATO’s Post–Cold War Operations in Europe Mark Webber As NATO entered its seventh decade it appeared a very different body from that which existed twenty or even ten years previously. The sixtieth anniversary summit declaration with its references to Afghanistan as the “key priority” of the alliance , to a readiness to act at “strategic distance” and to the desirability of working with “partners across the globe,” painted a picture of activity and purpose that appeared far removed from the equivalent statements issued at Washington in 1999 and Brussels in 1989.1 That this twenty-year process of reorientation has culminated in NATO fighting a war in Afghanistan would certainly have come as a surprise to the summiteers of 1989 and 1999. But although NATO’s major challenges have changed, their underlying meaning has in one important respect remained unaltered. Throughout the past two decades NATO has been wracked by an existential search for purpose. That this process has occurred and then been shaped by situations of emergency means it has, in turn, fed a seemingly endless debate on NATO’s relevance and NATO’s future. “What is NATO for?” is a question that will not go away.2 Yet for all this uncertainty, NATO remains. If the past twenty years have shown anything, it is the ability of the alliance to endure in trying circumstances. A state of “crisis as normality” has, in fact, come to characterize alliance development.3 Afghanistan may be the most recent illustration of this dynamic, but taking the post–Cold War period as a whole, it has been most in evidence through NATO’s involvement in the Balkans. Here the alliance has navigated a succession of crises and accompanying tests of its credibility. In each case, it has emerged a damaged but changed organization. Further, in each case it has made a significant, if imperfect , contribution to stabilization and peace. These themes are considered in some detail with illustrations drawn from Bosnia , Kosovo, and Macedonia. The first two of these have been the site of prolonged involvement and here attention is given first to how emerging crises impacted on NATO. This is followed by an assessment of how NATO responded, the principal point being that its intervention was neither the catastrophe waiting to happen nato’s post–cold war operations in europe 57 as some had predicted nor the success trumpeted by NATO; it was rather a case of “good enough is good enough”—suboptimal but nonetheless decisive. Having committed itself in this manner, NATO was then required to follow through, and so, some consideration is given to peacekeeping operations. As we shall see, operations in Bosnia and Kosovo were pathbreaking in size and scope but also problematic in various ways. Having looked at NATO’s two major Balkan commitments , the Macedonian example is then given shorter treatment. The watchword in this case—“good enough is good enough”—is, however, similarly appropriate. Understanding NATO’s Post–Cold War Operations During the Cold War, NATO’s operational character was determined by its core mission of territorial defense. For some forty years, the operational and geographic scope of the alliance was limited to Article 5 tasks (named after the collective defense clause of the North Atlantic Treaty) and so NATO played no role of any consequence out-of-area. As the Cold War wound down, NATO was faced with a profound shift in its strategic environment, one that required fashioning a “strategy without an adversary.”4 The strategic concept adopted in 1991 followed by two separate decisions of the North Atlantic Council in 1992 offered an early and authoritative set of statements on what this would entail—namely a focus on crisis management and conflict prevention to protect peace in Europe and to support the efforts of the United Nations (UN) and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). In this connection, for the rest of the decade the evolution of NATO strategy and doctrine would be directly related to its operations in the Balkans. For reasons of clarity, this chapter follows NATO usage in how operations are defined. The new strategic concept adopted in 1999, in effect, divided these into two categories: Article 5 collective defense operations and non–Article 5 crisis response operation (or NA5CROs).5 The latter category is the focus of this chapter . Such missions do not constitute the totality of NATO’s operational activity in Europe. Operation Active Endeavour, NATO’s maritime...

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