Nato Reform: Alliance Policy and Co-Operative Security

Abstract

The end of the Cold War brought profound changes to the security landscape in Europe. With the disappearance of ideological confrontation between East and West, the bi-polar character of the post-war security order became anachronistic virtually overnight. Of the institutions devised during that period, the Warsaw Treaty Organisation today seems more an object of scholarly interest rather than the primary security institution it once was for the eastern half of the European continent. Communist political and moral authority throughout the countries of the Warsaw Pact had so eroded by the 1980s that efforts by Soviet President Gorbachev to reform the political power structures through “perestroika” were doomed from the outset.

Dr. John Barrett, Political Affairs Division, NATO