Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Giacomello, Giampiero

Titel

THE ALLIANCE THAT HAS COME OF AGE

Ist Teil von

• Peace research, 1995-11, Vol.27 (4), p.57-62

Ort / Verlag

Brandon, Man: The Canadian Journal of Peace Studies

Erscheinungsjahr

1995

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Role certainty is undoubtedly reassuring. This is true for any field of human activity. It also applies to one of the most successful alliances in history: the Atlantic (or Western) Alliance. The Atlantic Alliance is more than a simple alternative name for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). NATO has been a very useful instrument for the Alliance and, operatively, NATO has taken care of the defense of Western countries. Nonetheless, the Alliance itself has developed into a more complex framework for a mutual understanding between the North Americans and the Western Europeans--a Western "arena," where it is possible to settle peacefully any confrontation. The structural reorganization is modernizing NATO for a world that no longer needs a highly mechanized defense of Western Europe, but one that does need well-organized international institutions, which are able to operate effectively in dangerous situations. Above all, the whole world needs international bodies that know how to handle soldiers and weapons. The obvious answer would be NATO. Other institutions, such as the U.N. or the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), may give their political blessing, but the nitty-gritty job must be left to those that are able to carry it out. The example of Somalia is worth exploring further. If indifference and separativeness betweenthe Americans and the French at the outset of the mission was almost obvious, given the long story of competition between the U.S. and French military, the antagonism between the Americans and the Italians during the crisis of the Summer of 1993 was astounding. After the Sigonella episode in 1985, when the plane with the "Achille Lauro" hijackers landed on the NATO base in Sicily, the crises over Somalia represented the highest point in the political-diplomatic confrontation between Italy and the United States since World War II. At certain points, misunderstanding was so widespread that it almost seemed that the two countries had belonged to opposite blocs in the past.