NATO and Post-Cold War Burden-Sharing
| Published date | 01 June 2009 |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200906400203 |
| Author | Benjamin Zyla |
| Date | 01 June 2009 |
| Subject Matter | NATO at 60 |
Benjamin Zyla
NATO and post-Cold
War burden-sharing
Canada “the laggard?”
| International Journal | Spring 2009 | 337 |
NATO was taken by surprise by the events surrounding the fall of the Berlin
wall in 1989. No official anticipated the speed with which the peaceful
turmoil in central and eastern Europe took place. At the same time, while
NATO discussed how to respond to those events, a major ethnic conflict
exploded in the Balkans. Initial attempts were undertaken by the
international community to contain the violence, first by the United Nations
and later by NATO. In 1992, the UN security council authorized the
deployment of a UN peacekeeping force, the so-called protection force
(UNPROFOR). This was a 38,599-strong multinational force under chapter
VI of the UN charter. The force was mandated to ensure the demilitarization
of the three protected areas in Croatia as well as to provide safety for all
persons in those zones. While NATO as an international organization was
Benjamin Zyla is a visiting professor in the school of political studies at the University of
Ottawa. This article was written while he was a visiting scholar at the European Forum,
Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University. The research was
partially supported by a grant from the Department of National Defence and the Centre for
International Relations, Queen’s University. He would also like to acknowledge the research
assistance of Siobhan Gibney.
| Benjamin Zyla |
| 338 | Spring 2009 | International Journal |
not part of UNPROFOR directly, most of its constituent states were and made
troops and equipment available. The top three were France, 4493; the United
Kingdom, 3405; and Canada, 2091. When UNPROFOR was unsuccessful in
containing the violence in 1994, NATO took over that responsibility and
assembled a considerable force to enforce peace in the Balkans.1This
mandate was in NATO’s interest as the Balkan peninsula was in close
proximity to NATO territory and thus posed a spillover threat. It also spoke
to the new role of the alliance as a crisis manager in international security
affairs post-1989. This is a role that NATO gave itself at the Rome summit
in 1991.
While NATO’s peacekeeping and peace-enforcement operations in
Bosnia, Croatia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and Kosovo are
well documented in the literature, the question of how the internal burden
of NATO activities was shared post-1990 has not attracted much
scholarship.2This is a significant oversight for at least three reasons: first, the
issue of NATO burden-sharing in the post-Cold War era remains
controversial as larger member-states such as the US and the UK downsized
their armed forces by up to 40 percent (see table 1 below) and put pressure
on smaller states to increase their commitments to collective defence.
Second, after 1989, geopolitical changes in the international security
environment called into question the
raison d’être
of NATO as a defence
alliance. These forces of transformation also affected the perception of
international threats, the meaning of security and power, and the role and
functions of armed services.3Historically, the amount of military equipment,
the size of the armed forces, and the level of defence spending in relation to
a country’s GDP have been used as the prima ry indicators for mea suring
allied contr ibutions to collective defence in the Cold War. However, these
1 Tariq Ali,
Masters of the Universe? Nato’s Balkan Crusade
(London and New York:
Verso, 2000); Andrew Hammond,
The Balkans and the West: Constructing the
European Other, 1945-2003
(Aldershot, UK & B urlington, VT: Ashga te, 2004); and
Diane Johnstone,
Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions
(London:
Pluto Press, 2002).
2 For a more detailed discussion, see, for example, Charles A. Cooper and Benjamin
Zycher,
Perceptions of NATO Burden-Sharing
(Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1989), Peter
Kent Forster and Stephen J. Cimbala,
The US , NATO and Military Burd en-Sharing
(London & New York: Frank Cass, 2005), and James R. Golden,
NATO Burden-Sharing:
Risks and Opportunities
(New York: Praeger, 1983).
3 See, for example, Charles C. Moskos, John Allen Williams, and David R. Segal,
The
Postmodern Military: Armed Forces after the Cold War
(New York: Oxford University
Press, 2000).
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