I.

Introduction

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), also known as Organisation du Traite de l’Atlantique Nord (OTAN), regional defence alliance, formed under Article 9 of the North Atlantic Treaty signed on April 4, 1949. The original signatories were Belgium, the United Kingdom, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United States. Greece and Turkey were admitted to the alliance in 1952, West Germany in 1955, and Spain in 1982. NATO’s original purpose was to enhance the stability, well-being, and freedom of its members by means of a system of collective security. In 1990 the newly unified Germany replaced West Germany as a NATO member. In March 1999 the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland formally joined NATO, marking the first admission of former Communist states of the old Soviet bloc to NATO, and in early 2004 Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia also achieved full membership. How far NATO should further expand into former Soviet-controlled areas remains a controversial question, as is what its long-term relationship to Russia should be. Another debate in NATO in the aftermath of the Cold War concerns to what extent it should convert itself from a purely defensive arrangement for its members’ own territory into both a peacekeeping and anti-terrorism organization prepared to intervene elsewhere, as it did in the former Yugoslavia.