The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is an alliance of 26 countries that are committed to protecting, by political and military means, the freedom, common heritage and civilizations of its members’ liberal democracies. NATO was founded by the North Atlantic Treaty, signed in Washington, DC, USA on 4 April 1949. This document committed NATO’s 12 founder states (marked * below) to defend the NATO territory collectively. Article 5 of the treaty stated that ‘an armed attack against one or more of [NATO’s members] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all’. This meant that Western Europe could draw on the military power of the USA in the event of its countries being attacked.
NATO was founded shortly after the Soviet Union’s (USSR) blockade of the city of Berlin in 1948. The establishment of NATO was the West’s response to the perceived military threat of the USSR at the start of the Cold War. However, alternative assessments have proposed that the likelihood of a Soviet attack was exaggerated, and that NATO’s key objective was in fact a political one: to mobilize popular resistance to communism in Western Europe. During the Cold War NATO developed its military capability to match that of the USSR. Its membership was also expanded to include Greece and Turkey (1952), West Germany (1955) and Spain (1982). Following the end of the Cold War, four states of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Bloc’s military alliance, joined NATO. The German Democratic Republic became part of NATO through unification with the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990 and the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary joined in 1999. Seven other Central and Eastern European Countries became members in 2004.
Since the end of the Cold War NATO has been involved in a number of military conflicts. Significantly, NATO intervened with air strikes against Serb targets in Kosovo in 1999 in order to prevent the massacre of ethnic Albanians. This was the first time that NATO had intervened in a civil conflict, a move that was not sanctioned by international law. NATO felt that its intervention to prevent humanitarian tragedy was morally justified. Following the terrorist attacks in the USA on 11 September 2001, NATO for the first time invoked Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, maintaining that the attack on the USA was an attack on the whole alliance.
