The Expansion of NATO

This paper, prepared by Filiz Cekic and Christopher Wrigley,
was completed before the outbreak of the Serbian war. © March 1999

Executive Summary

On 12 March 1999 Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic were admitted as full members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. The other former Soviet satellites of eastern Europe are expected to follow them, and there is a possibility that the Alliance will eventually incorporate former constituents of the Soviet Union itself.

This process concerns CAAT primarily because it is likely to give a new lease of life to the arms export trade, as the new and prospective entrants exchange their antiquated Soviet armament for up-to-date NATO-compatible equipment. Certainly the Western arms companies see the region as ‘a very significant market for the future’; and to some extent at least the expansion is ‘industry-driven’. But other factors are at work as well, and it seems necessary to explore the historical background and to ask why the anti-Soviet alliance survived the disappearance of the Soviet Union and how Europe failed to create a more appropriate structure of security and conflict-resolution.

NATO was originally the strategic complement of the Marshall Plan, locking the US into the defence of European democracy and western Europe into the open market economy which the US found essential to its prosperity. When the Soviet grip on eastern Europe was broken, the opportunity arose to repeat the process. However, since the US is now a deficit country, there cannot be a new Marshall Plan. Eastern Europe is offered membership of NATO but not, at present, of the European Union.

In the first post-Cold War years, alternatives to NATO were canvassed. French and German leaders discussed a European Security Organisation, and hopes were pinned on the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which included Russia but not the US. However, the UK and the US vetoed any innovation that would weaken the US presence, and the OSCE was underfunded and sidelined. The Yugoslav crisis of 1991-95 appeared to show that Europe could not resolve its internal difficulties without US leadership. NATO thus not only survived but was extended to fill the space between Germany and Russia. Some of its leaders now hope that it will provide ‘stability’ in a wider area, covering North Africa and western Asia; and Tony Blair has even spoken of it as ‘the military arm of the new world order’.

Since this is a Western world order, the possibilities of further conflict are obvious. Russia is showing signs of retreating into isolation and hostility, which have led it into rapprochement with China.

Meanwhile, the countries of eastern and central Europe, having escaped the burdens of one military alliance, are invited to assume the burdens of another, to the detriment of their fragile economies. NATO itself professes that it does not want them to rearm to the point of bankruptcy; but the prospect of NATO membership gives a powerful boost to local militarists. Collusion between Western arms companies, the armed forces and the depressed local arms industries is likely to lead to eastern Europe being filled with expensive fleets of state-of-the-art warplanes and much other pointless military hardware. In the UK, Racal Electronics already reports orders flooding in from the region, and British Aerospace is busily promoting sales of its Hawks, Gripens and Typhoons.

Click here for the full briefing