Page 80 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

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1381
nubians

A treaty of mutual assistance between Belgium, France, soil in the 1980s led to many anti-NATO demonstra-
Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and the United King- tions, notably in England.
dom was signed in Brussels on 17 March 1948, with the Many predicted that the fall of the Berlin Wall (9 No-
Canadian prime minister expressing interest in joining vember 1989) and the consequent removal of the Com-
them on 28 April, and Senator Arthur H.Vandenberg of munist menace would lead to the dissolution of NATO,
the United States initiating talks in the Senate that re- which had been negotiated and established against the
sulted in the almost unanimous adoption on 11 June of backdrop of the Berlin blockade and airlift (24 June
a resolution calling for “the association of the United 1948–4 May 1949), but the organization seems to have
States, by constitutional process, with such regional and found a new lease of life, with action in Serbia in 1994
other collective arrangements as are based on continuous and the Middle East in 2004, and the accession in 1999
and effective self-help and mutual aid, and as affect its of the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, followed in
national security.” The road was clear for formal negoti- 2004 by that of the Baltic Republics (Estonia, Latvia,
ations and the drafting of a treaty, which took place in and Lithuania) and Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and
Washington from 6 July 1948 to 18 March 1949, when Slovenia. The former anti-Communist, anti-Soviet
the terms were made public, with the Brussels Treaty sig- alliance may still be said to justify its mission “to restore
natories, Canada, and the United States announcing and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area” in
that they had also asked Denmark, Iceland, Italy, Nor- the face of new threats against the twenty-six sovereign
way, and Portugal to join the proposed alliance and that states that now compose it.
they had accepted. (Spain only joined in 1982, after the
Antoine Capet
death of Francisco Franco.)
These nations constituted the twelve founding mem- See also Cold War; Containment
bers, with Greece and Turkey joining in 1952. The con-
troversial accession of the Federal Republic of Germany
in 1955 led to the creation of the Warsaw Pact—the Further Reading
Soviet Bloc’s version of the Atlantic alliance—and ex- Duignan, P. (2000). NATO: Its past, present, and future. Stanford, CA:
Hoover Institution Press.
treme tension with Communist parties in Western Eur- Heller, F. H., & Gillingham, J. R. (Vol.Eds.). (1992). NATO: The found-
ope, which denounced the rearmament of “revanchist” ing of the Atlantic alliance and the integration of Europe.The Franklin
and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute series on diplomatic and economic his-
(i.e., intent on starting another war avenging the defeat
tory:Vol. 2. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
of 1945) crypto-Fascists, as they saw the West German North Atlantic Treaty Organization, official website. (2004). Retrieved
governing elite. The 1960s saw another period of diffi- April 20, 2004, from http://www.nato.int/
Park, W. (1986). Defending the West: A history of NATO. Boulder, CO:
culty for NATO, over the question of the “American Westview Press.
nuclear umbrella” and who would decide on nuclear war. Schmidt, G. (Ed.). (2001). A history of NATO: The first fifty years. Lon-
don: Palgrave.
Only two other members, the United Kingdom (1952)
and France (1960), had a nuclear retaliation capacity—
though it was in no way comparable to that of the two
superpowers—and each chose a different course, with
the British government opting for total integration of its Nubians
nuclear deterrent (1962) while France, under General de
Gaulle and his successors, decided that continued mem- or over a thousand years, from the fourth century to
bership in NATO did not preclude independent nuclear Fthe fourteenth century CE, the medieval Nubian king-
strikes (1966). After the period of detente in the 1970s, doms and their peoples dominated a wide span of Africa,
the installation of American cruise missiles on European stretching 1,200 kilometers from the plains of the Blue