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Mahesh

06/04/24 06:30 AM IST

NATO at 75

In News
  • At an event marking 75 years of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) recently, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said “NATO is bigger, stronger, and more united than ever.”
Historical background
  • NATO is a Western security alliance founded on April 4, 1949, with 12 founding members – Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom and the United States.
  • They signed the Washington Treaty, which gets its power from Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, “which reaffirms the inherent right of independent states to individual or collective defence.”
  • At the very heart of the alliance is the concept of “collective security” – an attack on any of the members is seen as an attack on all of them and demands collective action.
  • This was deemed necessary in 1949 amid the Cold War rivalry between the then USSR and the US, over ideological and economic superiority.
  • Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, on collective security, was added “to counter the risk that the Soviet Union would seek to extend its control of Eastern Europe to other parts of the continent.”
  • The USSR also aimed to shore up allies and in 1955, the Warsaw Pact was constituted as an alliance of socialist countries.
NATO membership
  • Apart from the original 12, members include Greece and Turkey (1952); West Germany (1955; later as Germany); Spain (1982); the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland (1999); Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia (2004); Albania and Croatia (2009); Montenegro (2017); North Macedonia (2020); Finland (2023); and Sweden (2024).
NATO significance
  • NATO still serves to secure its members against a number of actual or potential dangers emanating from outside their territory,” meaning even beyond Russia.
  • Today, China has emerged as a power which NATO countries often compete with not just in economic terms, but also in the form of various ideological and strategic differences.
  • NATO’s capacity for institutional adaptation”, and how it has played a role in “containing and controlling militarised conflicts in Central and Eastern Europe” by “actively promoting stability within the former Soviet bloc.
  • NATO pessimists overlooked the valuable intra-alliance functions that the alliance has always performed and that remain relevant after the cold war. Most importantly, NATO has helped stabilize Western Europe, whose states had often been bitter rivals in the past.
Source- Indian Express

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