HISTORY AND ORIGINS OF THE ORGANIZATION

After the II World War, Europe, who historically had always been the most powerful area of the world, was devastated; it had been the scenario of the two biggest wars in history, as well as plenty of ideological tension. Europe lost its power to give it to the new upcoming emergent international order characterized by two great powers: the United States of America and the Soviet Union (one representing Capitalism, and the other one Communism).

It is often said that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was founded in response to the threat posed by the Soviet Union. This is only partially true. In fact, the Alliance’s creation was part of a broader effort to serve three purposes: deterring Soviet expansionism, forbidding the revival of nationalist militarism in Europe through a strong North American presence on the continent, and encouraging European political integration. 

Fortunately, by then the United States had turned its back on its traditional policy of diplomatic isolationism. Aid provided through the US-funded Marshall Plan (also known as the European Recovery Program) and other means fostered a degree of economic stabilization. European states still needed confidence in their security, however, before they would begin talking and trading with each other. Military cooperation, and the security it would bring, would have to develop in parallel with economic and political progress. 

With this in mind, several Western European democracies came together to implement various projects for greater military cooperation and collective defence, including the creation of the Western Union in 1948, later to become the Western European Union in 1954. In the end, it was determined that only a truly transatlantic security agreement could deter Soviet aggression while simultaneously preventing the revival of European militarism and laying the groundwork for political integration.

While the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty had created Allies, it had not created a military structure that could effectively coordinate their actions. This changed when growing worries about Soviet intentions culminated in the Soviet detonation of an atomic bomb in 1949 and in the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. The effect upon the Alliance was dramatic. NATO soon gained a consolidated command structure with a military Headquarters based in the Parisian suburb of Rocquencourt, near Versailles. 

The disintegration between the East and West block incremented when the Marshall Plan discriminated the West block, which initially was also included in the plan, but was later excluded because of the Kremlin. The reason of that was that they thought benefitting the Communist countries was like diminishing relevance to its zone of influence. This way, even though the economic aid was not limited to the countries that were part of the NATO, it appeared as the financial complement of a military engagement. 

As a reaction to this, the Soviet Union (not with the same efficacy upon the economic plan) pretended to create a stronger cohesion with the “popular democracies” with the Warsaw Pact and the COMECON (the equivalencies, respectively, to the NATO and the upcoming European Common Trade). 

Officially, the Atlantic Pact was signed the 4th April, 1949, and the countries that took part in it were Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Great Britain, the Nederlands, Canada, the USA, Denmark, Iceland, Italy, Norway and Portugal, who would soon be followed by the German Federal Republic, Greece and Turkey. 

To this organization and connection with Eastern Europe we have the Soviet Union’s respond with the Communist countries. Until Stalin’s death (1953) there was not any problem because the Eastern countries were very united to the Soviet Union, economically and militarly, with the only jurisdictional bases of their ideological orientation. From this union, after Stalin’s death this need to create an organization that made official this alliances appeared; and it was used Stalin’s icon to enforce this pact. 

And it was this year that the Warsaw Pact was signed, and it was a treaty of mutual defense thtat united all military forces under the same command assumed by a soviet marshal. The original members were the USSR, Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, the German Federal Republic, Romania, Czechoslovakia.