Fearful Symmetry: The Dilemmas of Consultation and Coordination in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization

John W. Holmes

International Organization, 1968, vol. 22, issue 4, 821-840

Abstract: In confronting any question about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the late sixties one is uncomfortably aware of insistent questioning as to how much it all matters. Is NATO a device to meet horizontal challenges when the new challenges are vertical? Is “the West,” whatever that is, defending the Elbe when the struggle is going on in its own streets? These challenges from within are not the subversion directed from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics which NATO subcommittees had always taken into their calculations. Insofar as they are Communist in inspiration at all, they are the consequences of the disruption of the Muscovite International. What makes them serious is that they have their roots in Western society itself. Perhaps the West has been too much preoccupied with interstate relations and the creation of superstates when the essential problems are internal—not isolated national phenomena certainly, but eruptions which ignore boundaries, in some cases intensely nationalistic and at the same time dedicated to removing the barriers between peoples. The new rebels are deeply skeptical of that “way of life” the West has insisted it was defending through NATO and believe nothing could be more irrelevant than a military alliance to defend it.

Date: 1968
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