NATO as a political alliance: continuities and legacies in the enlargement debates of the 1990s

NATO’s ongoing relevance as a political alliance appeared time and again in the debates of the 1990s, as the Western allies struggled to adapt their old institutions to the challenges of a new world, one without the Cold War. This article explores continuities in allied thinking pointing to concerns and considerations that remained no less relevant with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the splintering of the Warsaw Pact, and the unraveling of the Soviet Union. It focuses on the popular notion that NATO represented a political alliance, not merely a military one, showing how Canadian policymakers advocated for NATO enlargement on the basis of the Atlantic alliance’s political credentials. In so doing, this article suggests new avenues to examine and reevaluate the process of NATO enlargement by incorporating the perspectives—and increasingly available archival records—of often neglected members of the alliance.