|
|
|
|
|
|
Resources |
|
|
|
An Uneasy Alliance
| Article
# : |
15145 |
|
|
Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
|
| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1989 |
2,805 Words |
| Author
: |
Christopher Coker
Christopher Coker is a lecturer on international relations at
the London School of Economics. |
Concern about the future of the Atlantic alliance is hardly new. Since the early 1950s, opinions have been predicting its eventual, even imminent, demise. The questions raised at its 10th anniversary, at the end of the 1950s--in retrospect, its first and most successful decade--reveal that hardly a year has passed when its future has not been questioned.
If our fears today, on NATO's 40th anniversary, tend to be expressed more forcefully, it is perhaps because the alliance seems to be nearing a mid-life crisis. Confronted with the prospect of the most presentable Soviet leader the public can recall, an era seems to be passing and another beginning in which the alliance may be left leaderless and adrift in a changing world. As Soviet spokesman Georgy Arbatov commented last year, "to be deprived of an enemy" is, for any alliance, possibly the cruelest fate of all.
To be deprived of political leadership is more serious still. It is particularly serious because the "successor generation" in Europe lacks the sense of purpose and certainty that sustained Europe's leaders even during NATO's worst crises, such as the decision by France to withdraw from its integrated military command in 1966 and the battle that had to be fought to modernize theater nuclear weapons in 1983. As Zbigniew Brzezinski pointed out in an interview some years ago, the older generation of NATO could afford to be so Atlanticist because it was "politically Americanized while culturally non-Americanized." Today's generation "tends to be culturally more Americanized, but politically more de-Americanized than before."
A generation is a difficult entity to describe. What made
... (1998 of 17289 Characters)
Read Full Article
|
|
