Nato at 60

In the fall of 2006, Ivo Daalder and James Goldgeier published article in Foreign Affairs in which they set out the case for NATO to expand its membership on a global level. The authors advance the argument that NATO should expand to include other countries that share values and core interests, including Australia, Brazil, Japan, India, New Zealand, South Africa, and South Korea. The case for expanding membership is one that builds on the idea that, since 9/11, NATO has evolved into a global alliance. No longer concerned solely with European security, NATO is now alliance with increasingly global reach, evidence of which can be seen in its operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Darfur and its role in providing humanitarian assistance in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina in the US and the Pakistani earthquake. While NATO has certainly shifted away from its focus on European and towards a global agenda, the extent to which NATO is becoming a truly global alliance remains less clear. Although NATO has expanded since the end of the Cold War into central and eastern Europe, the alliance remains one centred on the Euro-Atlantic area. However, for Daalder and Goldgeier, there is a compelling argument that as NATO adopts a more global agenda, so it must also open its doors to countries outside the Euro-Atlantic zone: NATO's next move must be to open its membership to any state in the world that is willing and able to contribute to the fulfilment of new responsibilities. Only a truly global alliance can address the global challenges of the day.1 At present, NATO has a series of global partnerships with countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea. In 2004, Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer justified such partnerships on the basis that [s]ince NATO is having its operations over a strategic distance, long distance, it means that there is also the need for a dialogue with other interested nations. However, where Daalder and Goldgeier call on NATO to embrace the concept of a truly global alliance, de Hoop Scheffer has struck a more cautious note, stating that NATO should remain an Alliance with global partners, rather than becoming a fully-fledged global alliance, with a global membership.2There is little doubt that partnerships with countries like Australia add greatly to its ability to conduct a broad range of missions on a global scale; however, they also raise important and challenging questions for the alliance as it reaches its 60th anniversary in 2009. The question of NATO evolving into a global alliance strikes at the very heart of existential questions about role and identity. Is NATO a transatlantic alliance bound together by uniquely transatlantic values and ideals? Does it remain a military alliance committed to the collective defence of member- states' territory in a particular geographical region? Or is it a collective organization committed to combating global threats? For Daalder and Goldgeier, [i]f the point of the alliance is no longer territorial defense but bringing together countries with similar values and interests to combat global problems, then NATO no longer needs to have exclusively transatlantic character.3 In other words, NATO must be understood as a democratic community that brings together likeminded nations on the basis of their shared values, and not just their shared transatlantic history. The notion of NATO as a security community, based on shared values, interests, and understandings that bind its member-states together, has long been central to understanding of evolution, and, in particular, its persistence beyond the end of the Cold War.4 However, NATO has typically been understood as Atlantic community, as Karl Deutsch defined the alliance in the late 1950s, one whose members' shared values and interests drew heavily on the Cold War context in which they were formed

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