How the West was One: Representational Politics of NATO

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Abstract
Contemporary discussions about the West having “won' the Cold War are framed within a conventional strategic discourse in which one political-military alliance, NATO, demonstrated its staying power and integrity in the face of its rival alliance, the Warsaw Pact. NATO's strategic practices, long the object of criticism on the part of revisionist historians and critical peace researchers, have apparently been vindicated. This paper draws upon a variety of post-realist approaches to global politics to examine NATO as a set of practices by which the West has constituted itself as a political and cultural identity. By turning our attention from the external, foreign, and defense policies of NATO and its member states to the domestic social and cultural dimensions of Western security politics, we can illuminate a side of security policy overlooked in conventional debates. NATO's success resides in having provided a network of intertextual representations for the articulation of global political space. Traditional security concerns, including the nature of the Soviet/Warsaw Pact “threat,” can thereby be seen not as existing externally out there on their own, but as circulating within a broader set of social practices. In the wake of recent developments within the Warsaw Pact and between the two alliance systems, the critical perspective outlined here enables us to analyze contemporary security issues in ways that transcend prevailing strategic discourse. Theoretically, we can see the outlines of a post-realist approach to security. For Europe, such an approach accords dignity to alternative, post-statist, post-modern security arrangements.

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