On 4 April 1949, twelve Western countries – the USA, Canada, France, Great Britain (then with Malta), Italy, Belgium, Denmark (with Greenland), the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Luxembourg and Iceland – founded the “North Atlantic Treaty Organization” (NATO) as a Western military alliance. The founding of NATO was an expression of the beginning of the “Cold War”, the growing tensions between the former allies USA, France and Great Britain on the one hand and the USSR on the other. The experience of the devastating consequences of the war was still present in Europe, but on the other side of the Atlantic, geopolitical relationships were already beginning to be reorganized.
The end of the Allied unity of the Potsdam Conference became visible in the preparations for the establishment of a separate West German state from 1948 onwards. The founding of NATO was therefore not only a military but also a political decision. In 1952, the then NATO Secretary General Lord Hastings summarized the intention in the following sentence: “The only purpose was to keep the United States in, to keep the Russians out and to keep Germany down …”. NATO headquarters were first located in London, later in Paris, then in Brussels. Allied NATO commands were formed with the involvement of the national armies, for example in Turkey (Izmir), the USA (Norfolk, Virginia), Malta and France (Fontainebleau). The “strategic concept” was “pre-defense”, or clearer: a possible war with the East should be fought in Europe again. For this reason, the FRG also became a member of NATO on 9 May 1955, although remilitarization of FRG had not yet been decided at that time.
In response to this frontline position, the eastern European states united under the leadership of the Soviet Union in the “Warsaw Treaty Organization”.
Until the early 1990s, the political and military reality was shaped by this bloc confrontation between NATO and the Warsaw Treaty. Despite the policy of political détente, the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the SALT I Treaty between the USA and the Soviet Union, tensions intensified. The NATO “rearmament decision”, the planned stationing of medium-range nuclear missiles in the Federal Republic of Germany, at the end of the 1970s also led to an upswing in the peace movement in several European countries. FIR and its member associations were an active part of this mass social movement. Although the nuclear missiles were stationed, the social pressure against NATO policy was visible.
The end of the socialist community of states and the dissolution of the “Warsaw Treaty Organization” in 1991 led to an apparent reorientation. The “Charter of Paris” described a new geopolitical order after the end of the Cold War. Future cooperation between the former opponents of the bloc was to be regulated on the basis of the CSCE agreement. During the two-plus-four negotiations on the reunification of Germany, the then Soviet Union was promised that there would be no eastward expansion of NATO – a political promise that NATO no longer believed it had to keep a few years later. In 1997, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary were offered membership. A few days before NATO’s first war of aggression in Europe against Yugoslavia in March 1999, they became part of the military alliance. Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia followed in 2004. Albania and Croatia joined in 2009, Montenegro in 2017 and North Macedonia in 2020 once the name issue had been resolved. 2024 followed the former neutral states Sweden and Finland. This is not the end of eastward enlargement. The invitations to Georgia and Ukraine made it clear that the thrust of Lord Hastings from 1952 still applies today.
NATO is currently a de facto warring party in the war between the Russian Federation and Ukraine. This is not only about the massive supply of weapons, but also about the training of Ukrainian soldiers and the deployment of NATO personnel and NATO infrastructure (surveillance, control technology, etc.) to provide military support to Ukraine. French President Macron even brought the deployment of NATO troops in Ukraine into play. In doing so, he and the NATO strategy are showing, as they did when NATO was founded, that a possible military confrontation with Russia should take place on European territory. Moreover, this is subject to the real threat of the use of nuclear weapons.
On the occasion of the anniversary of the founding of NATO, FIR therefore reiterates its basic position that the dissolution of the military blocs in Europe and the creation of a new – non-military – European security architecture is existential. This cannot be achieved through militarization of the European Union and confrontation, but only through diplomacy and negotiations.
However, this is precisely what NATO does not stand for!
