In addition to this introduction and the final notes, this article is divided into three main
parts. In the first, the aspects behind the creation and maintenance of the NATO
community and the questions of adapting to the international strategic context are
identified. In the second, the central theme of the document that is the basis for this
analysis is addressed, which is the reinforcement of the political role of the organization,
focusing on the internal dimension of this ambition. In order to present lines of
reinforcement of the internal cohesion mechanisms, in the last part two essential
measures are discussed: the rapprochement of NATO with Turkey and the reinforcement
of cooperation, in different areas, with the EU.
1. A community of (in) security
It is important to identify the aspects that help to understand NATO, its establishment
and its evolution in the international context, in particular after the fall of the Berlin Wall
and the collapse of the Soviet Union. At theoretical level, it is important to retain the
aspects identified by Karl Deutsch, in 1957, regarding the creation of the so-called
security communities. The author helps us to realize that integration in this community
intended to make war unlikely among its members (Deutsch, 1957: 5), developing a
sense of cooperative and collective security. The work of Adler and Barnett (1998: 55-
57), published 40 years later, also gives important indications regarding security
communities. Reinforcing the principles identified by Deutsch, the two authors emphasize
that the creation of this type of community has as its main pillar the identification and
common recognition of a threat with an external origin. In addition to the intention of
creating a security community, the establishment of NATO intended to answer questions
of a geopolitical nature, the principles of which can be found in the theory proposed by
Mackinder (1919, 1943. He argued that only a union of the maritime (Atlantic) powers
may contain the (natural) expansion of the continental power (Soviet Union). Also the
speech by the first NATO Secretary- General, Lord Hastings Lionel Ismay, gives us
elements that reinforce this geopolitical sense of NATO. He stated that the main objective
of NATO is “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down” (NATO,
n.d.). In fact, a large part of NATO's efforts, from its inception until the end of the Cold
War (1991), sought to fulfil this purpose.
The relationship with the Russians during this period was always tense, sometimes
dramatic, not only in the Euro-Atlantic area, in particular on the borders between Soviet
space and Western Europe, but also in the peripheral regions where European powers
and the US sought to maintain their influence. At this time, the world was divided into
two large blocs, in addition to the existence of non-aligned countries. On the one hand,
the Western bloc, with democracy and the market economy as a reference, and NATO as
a collective defence organization. On the other hand, there was the alliance of the USSR
with the countries that had come under its control after the WW II, characterized by
sharing a single-party regime and a centrally planned economy, with the Warsaw Pact as
its military structure.
They were completely opposite in philosophical, political, economic and military terms.
The threat of catastrophic nuclear war led, in the 1950s, to the establishment, at the
20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, of “peaceful coexistence”,
with the decision to attack “capitalist regimes” outside the European area by supporting