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6 books match the query 'NATO'
Bidding for the 1968 Olympic Games
International Sport's Cold War Battle with NATOHeather L. Dichter
University of Massachusetts Press, 2021
Winner of the 2022 Lord Aberdare Literary Prize from the British Society of Sports History
During the Cold War, political tensions associated with the division of Germany came to influence the world of competitive sport. In the 1950s, West Germany and its NATO allies refused to recognize the communist East German state and barred its national teams from sporting competitions. The construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 further exacerbated these pressures, with East German teams denied travel to several world championships. These tensions would only intensify in the run-up to the 1968 Olympics.
In Bidding for the 1968 Olympic Games, Heather L. Dichter considers how NATO and its member states used sport as a diplomatic arena during the height of the Cold War, and how international sport responded to political interference. Drawing on archival materials from NATO, foreign ministries, domestic and international sport functionaries, and newspapers, Dichter examines controversies surrounding the 1968 Summer and Winter Olympic Games, particularly the bidding process between countries to host the events. As she demonstrates, during the Cold War sport and politics became so intertwined that they had the power to fundamentally transform each other.
During the Cold War, political tensions associated with the division of Germany came to influence the world of competitive sport. In the 1950s, West Germany and its NATO allies refused to recognize the communist East German state and barred its national teams from sporting competitions. The construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 further exacerbated these pressures, with East German teams denied travel to several world championships. These tensions would only intensify in the run-up to the 1968 Olympics.
In Bidding for the 1968 Olympic Games, Heather L. Dichter considers how NATO and its member states used sport as a diplomatic arena during the height of the Cold War, and how international sport responded to political interference. Drawing on archival materials from NATO, foreign ministries, domestic and international sport functionaries, and newspapers, Dichter examines controversies surrounding the 1968 Summer and Winter Olympic Games, particularly the bidding process between countries to host the events. As she demonstrates, during the Cold War sport and politics became so intertwined that they had the power to fundamentally transform each other.
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Fools' Crusade
Yugoslavia, NATO and Western DelusionsDiana Johnstone
Pluto Press, 2002
In the endless series of United States military interventions, the 'humanitarian' bombing of Yugoslavia played a key role in gaining support of the centre left for war as an instrument of policy.
Thanks to massive deception and self-deception by media and politicians, even the anti-globalisation movement failed to grasp the implications of the aggressive military globalisation pursued by the United States, from Iraq to Afghanistan and beyond.
In this study, Diana Johnstone identifies the common geopolitical interests running through all these past, present and future military interventions. She argues persuasively that outside intervention creates rather than solves problems and cannot be justified.
Johnstone shows that the 'War in Kosovo' was in reality the model for future destruction of countries seen as potential threats to the hegemony of the 'International Community', led by the United States.
Thanks to massive deception and self-deception by media and politicians, even the anti-globalisation movement failed to grasp the implications of the aggressive military globalisation pursued by the United States, from Iraq to Afghanistan and beyond.
In this study, Diana Johnstone identifies the common geopolitical interests running through all these past, present and future military interventions. She argues persuasively that outside intervention creates rather than solves problems and cannot be justified.
Johnstone shows that the 'War in Kosovo' was in reality the model for future destruction of countries seen as potential threats to the hegemony of the 'International Community', led by the United States.
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Integration and Disintegration in NATO
Processes of Alliance Cohesion and Prospects for Atlantic CommunityFrancis A. Beer
The Ohio State University Press, 1969
A foundational analysis that remains essential as NATO faces new existential threats.
Francis A. Beer’s classic study of NATO, first published in 1969 at the critical time of French withdrawal, focuses on processes of Atlantic alliance cohesion and implications for cross-Atlantic relationships. At the present time, as NATO faces existential threats in the form of fresh attacks and skepticism, Beer’s foundational analysis remains essential. He surveys five key areas of alliance activity: political consultation, military forces, armaments, infrastructure, and science. Across each, he identifies a recurring pattern: nationalism, self-interest, and state-level dominance repeatedly constrain and often work against collective action, even in areas where technical logic might otherwise unify coalition members.
Significant support for cooperation, Beer argues, can emerge during periods of international crisis, when member states are pressed to set aside individual concerns for common security. International crises are challenging but need not be destructive. To the contrary, crises provide opportunities for creative institutional leadership. As the book shows, a well-articulated ideology, connected to variable coalitions in different issue areas, can bring members together to maintain and build collective political-military institutions.
Francis A. Beer’s classic study of NATO, first published in 1969 at the critical time of French withdrawal, focuses on processes of Atlantic alliance cohesion and implications for cross-Atlantic relationships. At the present time, as NATO faces existential threats in the form of fresh attacks and skepticism, Beer’s foundational analysis remains essential. He surveys five key areas of alliance activity: political consultation, military forces, armaments, infrastructure, and science. Across each, he identifies a recurring pattern: nationalism, self-interest, and state-level dominance repeatedly constrain and often work against collective action, even in areas where technical logic might otherwise unify coalition members.
Significant support for cooperation, Beer argues, can emerge during periods of international crisis, when member states are pressed to set aside individual concerns for common security. International crises are challenging but need not be destructive. To the contrary, crises provide opportunities for creative institutional leadership. As the book shows, a well-articulated ideology, connected to variable coalitions in different issue areas, can bring members together to maintain and build collective political-military institutions.
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NATO and Germany
A Study in the Sociology of Supranational RelationsStanford Lyman
University of Arkansas Press, 1995
Focusing on the Cold War years, thismonograph examines the processes, problems, and policies through which the Federal Republic of Germany was formed and admitted into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The author compares the situation of Weimar Germany during its short-lived postwar decade with that of the Federal Republic by applying geopolitical concepts and theory, illustrating Germany’s territorial uniqueness and how that special aspect of its place on the European continent in?uenced the nation’s diplomacy in both eras.
During the late 1940s and the 1950s, the problem presented by Germany to the other NATO allies was how to secure and maintain the Federal Republic’s allegiance to the anticommunist alliance without eliminating the country’s desire to be reunited with its Soviet-dominated eastern section. How both NATO and Germany managed to maintain themselves in a state of dynamic equilibrium throughout the era of the Cold War illustrates the concept of international organization called “cooptation,” which Lyman helped to de?ne and expand.
The epilogue explores the larger issues that the case study illuminates: global space, national territorialization, collective identity, and ethnocentrism. Considering the current con?ict in the Balkans as it relates to the new Germany and the role of NATO, this far-reaching book is especially relevant with its suggestions for a basic supranational sociology.
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NATO and the UN
A Peculiar RelationshipLawrence S. Kaplan
University of Missouri Press, 2010
When the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed just four years after the United Nations, it provided its members with a measure of security in the face of the Soviet Union’s veto power in the senior organization’s Security Council, as well as a means of coping with Communist expansion. Ever since then, the two institutions have been competitors in maintaining peace in the postwar world. Occasionally they have cooperated; more often they have not.
In NATO and the UN, Lawrence Kaplan, one of the leading experts on NATO, examines the intimate and often contentious relations between the two and describes how this relationship has changed over the course of two generations. Kaplan documents the many interactions between them throughout their interconnected history, focusing on the major flashpoints where either NATO clashed with UN leadership, the United States and the Soviet Union confronted each other directly, or fissures within the Atlantic alliance were dramatized in UN sessions. He draws on the organizations’ records as well as unpublished files from the National Archives and its counterparts in Britain, France, and Germany to provide the best account yet of working relations between the two organizations. By examining their complex connection with regard to such conflicts as the Balkan wars, Kaplan enhances our understanding of both institutions.
Crisis management has been a source of conflict between the two in the past but has also served as an incentive for collaboration, and Kaplan shows how this peculiar but persistent relationship has functioned. Although the Cold War years are gone, the UN remains the setting where NATO problems have played out, as they have in Iraq during recent decades. And it is to NATO that the UN has turned for military power to face crises in the Balkans, Middle East, and South Asia.
Kaplan stresses the importance of both organizations in the twenty-first century, recognizing their potential to advance global peace and security while showing how their tangled history explains the obstacles that stand in the way. His work offers significant findings that will especially impact our understanding of NATO while filling a sizable gap in our understanding of post-World War II diplomacy.
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The Future of NATO
Regional Defense and Global SecurityAndrew A. Michta and Paal Sigurd Hilde, editors
University of Michigan Press, 2014
The conclusion of International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) operations in Afghanistan in 2014 closes an important chapter in the history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In this volume, European and US experts examine a range of perennial issues facing the Alliance, including relations with Russia, NATO’s institutional organization and command structure, and the role of the United States in the Alliance, in order to show how these issues shape today’s most pressing debate—the debate over the balance between NATO’s engagement in security operations globally and traditional defense within the North-Atlantic region. The volume’s contributors propose that NATO can indeed find a viable balance between competing, but not inherently incompatible, strategic visions.
A theoretically informed, empirical account and analysis of NATO’s recent evolution, this volume will appeal to both security scholars and practitioners from the policy community.
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