1 00:00:02,130 --> 00:00:05,160 Proceed straight away to today's speaker. 2 00:00:05,640 --> 00:00:14,220 One of our visiting fellows, originally from the Centre for Military Studies, University of Copenhagen, 3 00:00:15,570 --> 00:00:21,370 has been here with us since January as a visiting fellow of the Change in Courage of War 4 00:00:21,390 --> 00:00:30,870 Project and is now presenting us the results of six months of hard labour intellectual strife. 5 00:00:32,700 --> 00:00:40,200 Dr. Christian Sylvia Christensen will speak on imagining NATO's past and present futures for the Western alliance. 6 00:00:42,620 --> 00:00:48,110 Well, thank you. Thank you again for the kind introduction and thank you to all of you for coming, 7 00:00:48,940 --> 00:00:54,319 whom I've been really grateful for being a visiting fellow here for the last almost six months, 8 00:00:54,320 --> 00:00:58,570 because it has given me the time to to finalise a manuscript. 9 00:00:58,610 --> 00:01:03,860 And that manuscript is what I'm going to talk from today. 10 00:01:05,270 --> 00:01:13,430 The manuscript is about what nature is, and it's about how to understand the end of the Cold War and perhaps NATO's future. 11 00:01:13,460 --> 00:01:22,010 So I'm really trying to tackle some of the big issues surrounding nature and the question of what nature is. 12 00:01:22,010 --> 00:01:28,430 And the question of nature future has has not been easy questions for academia, at least not for for political science. 13 00:01:30,080 --> 00:01:36,860 In the in the short text advertising, in the lecture, I referred to two ways of of answering what nature is. 14 00:01:37,220 --> 00:01:47,390 Is it, according to the famous but unverified quote by Lord Ismay about keeping the Americans in the Germans down and the Russians out? 15 00:01:47,660 --> 00:01:51,710 Is it in that way about a strategic equilibrium, 16 00:01:52,220 --> 00:01:59,690 the consequence of national interest falling in line by the geopolitical realities materialising themselves after the Second World War? 17 00:01:59,960 --> 00:02:05,900 Or alternatively, is nature the expression of an enduring Western political community, 18 00:02:05,900 --> 00:02:13,070 perhaps even as a security community, where, in the famous words of Deutsche Welle becomes unthinkable? 19 00:02:15,370 --> 00:02:22,150 Both of these are academic conceptions of what nature is, but they are equally political concepts. 20 00:02:22,660 --> 00:02:27,010 Their political imaginations that foresee what nature is and what it can become. 21 00:02:27,820 --> 00:02:33,040 And in the following, I'll try to investigate how nature could be imagined in its past, 22 00:02:33,280 --> 00:02:42,670 and if that can help understand the enigma of the end of the Cold War for nature, and understand how nature does become what it is today. 23 00:02:45,250 --> 00:02:53,050 In 1989, Europe and the world celebrated the end of the Cold War, and so did nature, because this world crumbled. 24 00:02:53,260 --> 00:02:58,419 Nature could celebrate its own 40 anniversary and could congratulate it on itself, 25 00:02:58,420 --> 00:03:04,660 on the role it played in contributing to the end of the Cold War, the victorious into the Great War. 26 00:03:05,860 --> 00:03:07,960 But the end of the Cold War did not mean the end of nature. 27 00:03:08,830 --> 00:03:14,200 It had not played out its role, contrary to both academic expectations and political prophecy. 28 00:03:14,500 --> 00:03:17,680 Nature did not fade away as its adversary collapsed. 29 00:03:18,730 --> 00:03:22,230 Nature did not behave as could be expected of an alliance. 30 00:03:22,240 --> 00:03:27,639 It did not turn into an irrelevant and empty shell in a world that witnessed a new 31 00:03:27,640 --> 00:03:34,030 world order that was radically different from the post World War Two or later did not, 32 00:03:34,180 --> 00:03:37,840 as predicted, turned into a cenotaph of the previous age. 33 00:03:37,930 --> 00:03:48,380 Even in the face of radical change, unpredictably, nature remained both relevant and remained central to both European and American security. 34 00:03:48,970 --> 00:03:57,070 And who could have imagined in 1989 that NATO's today would consist of 28 members, that it would have conducted crisis management in the Balkans? 35 00:03:57,400 --> 00:04:02,110 Who could have imagined that it even would exist to celebrate its 60th anniversary? 36 00:04:03,880 --> 00:04:11,110 Who indeed could have imagined that nature would be encased in long, bloody military operations in places so far away as Afghanistan, 37 00:04:11,260 --> 00:04:17,649 an area so far away from Europe and so much out of area that, in the words of Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, 38 00:04:17,650 --> 00:04:22,240 the previous secretary general, it had never before appeared on the Alliance Horizon. 39 00:04:23,020 --> 00:04:29,290 How to understand these changes and how to understand this conceptual antigravity change of horizon. 40 00:04:32,320 --> 00:04:35,880 How nature came to present in many ways remains an enigma. 41 00:04:35,890 --> 00:04:40,090 It's difficult to understand how it actually managed to do what it has already done. 42 00:04:40,390 --> 00:04:44,260 It is difficult to come to terms with what it is normally. 43 00:04:45,460 --> 00:04:50,050 The question of who, who, who would have imagined? Is it just a phrase? 44 00:04:50,050 --> 00:04:54,100 It's a manner of speaking. But I think I think it can be more than that. 45 00:04:54,100 --> 00:04:57,130 I think it can also be a relevant research question. 46 00:05:00,460 --> 00:05:08,080 How NATO's future could be imagined, I would argue, is actually important to answer how NATO's became what it is today. 47 00:05:10,310 --> 00:05:17,960 And these initial faults lead me to a four point plan for what I'm going to say today. 48 00:05:18,590 --> 00:05:27,720 First, I'll outline a bit more detail in my argument about how we can get to know what nature is, how we can come to terms with what it is. 49 00:05:28,580 --> 00:05:36,650 I will in that relation state why out of area? Why out of area problems is this important and is significant to investigate? 50 00:05:37,160 --> 00:05:44,000 I will state why the West is important and why it is important to look historically at nature. 51 00:05:45,170 --> 00:05:54,110 I'll present the argument that nature's present is made possible by and can be understood by looking at past political imaginations of its own future. 52 00:05:57,030 --> 00:06:01,530 Secondly, I engage the history of NATO's political imaginations. 53 00:06:01,560 --> 00:06:05,940 What are out-of-area problems and why? Look at them. During the Cold War, Natal. 54 00:06:06,270 --> 00:06:10,980 Constantly troubled by events and actions of its members outside of Europe. 55 00:06:12,870 --> 00:06:16,430 France. War in Little China. The Vietnam War. The Yom Kippur War. 56 00:06:16,770 --> 00:06:19,830 The Suez Crisis, as well as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, 57 00:06:20,040 --> 00:06:24,720 are all various points in natural history that question what nature is and what it can become. 58 00:06:25,860 --> 00:06:32,820 And in attempting to manage these always problematic issues outside of Europe and outside the logic of the Cold War, 59 00:06:34,000 --> 00:06:38,820 a political imagination develops in NATO's nature and its future. 60 00:06:39,090 --> 00:06:43,500 Even its its true becoming as being more than an alliance. 61 00:06:44,160 --> 00:06:51,870 It sees nature as the expression of a Western community. And the effect of this discourse is that the end of the Cold War can become a moment of 62 00:06:51,870 --> 00:06:57,450 becoming the end of the Cold War as as not only a threat or fundamental challenge to nature. 63 00:06:57,720 --> 00:07:03,120 It can be seen as a moment of fundamental opportunity to realise nature. 64 00:07:03,420 --> 00:07:09,360 Its true being estimated during the Cold War that nature can now finally become more than an alliance. 65 00:07:10,890 --> 00:07:13,080 That is basically my empirical claim. 66 00:07:13,680 --> 00:07:23,850 And with that, I certainly return to more theoretical questions about how to conceptualise nature and how to view it in relationship to the West. 67 00:07:24,360 --> 00:07:33,720 Which leads me to my one final and fourth point the conclusion What can this history actually tell us, if anything, about the future of nature? 68 00:07:36,840 --> 00:07:45,850 Starting with the argument, one of the great puzzles of the history of nature is how it's managed the end of the Cold War during the Cold War, 69 00:07:45,850 --> 00:07:50,520 and it was about getting as many tanks as possible, as close as possible to Checkpoint Charlie. 70 00:07:50,820 --> 00:07:54,209 It was focussed on Europe during the Cold War. 71 00:07:54,210 --> 00:07:58,110 Anything outside of Europe was besides the point. It was not central. 72 00:07:58,950 --> 00:08:03,690 And today nature was about getting as many troops as possible as far away from Europe as possible. 73 00:08:04,710 --> 00:08:12,480 Nature focuses outside of Europe, the outside of central things and issues, outside of area, out of their approach to nature. 74 00:08:14,760 --> 00:08:20,250 To understand nature, it's necessary to engage in this fundamental change, and not least the question of how it was possible. 75 00:08:20,430 --> 00:08:27,089 How did nature become what it is? That leads to a fundamental assumption that nature is not just what it is. 76 00:08:27,090 --> 00:08:32,820 There's no continuous cause that continuously explains what nature is, that explains that identity. 77 00:08:33,300 --> 00:08:37,230 It's neither just the strategic equilibrium of Western security. 78 00:08:38,160 --> 00:08:42,450 It's neither just a strategic equilibrium or a wisdom security premise. 79 00:08:42,540 --> 00:08:48,210 There's no incentive for nature. On the contrary, it is constantly in the process of becoming. 80 00:08:48,990 --> 00:08:52,260 That means that what motivates must be a historical question. 81 00:08:52,740 --> 00:08:59,190 The question is how it came to stand, how it was possible for nature to become what it is understanding. 82 00:08:59,190 --> 00:09:03,570 Therefore, what nature is today requires that we write a history of the present. 83 00:09:03,810 --> 00:09:09,900 As for for today, for nature, this writing a history of the present must be about the end of the Cold War. 84 00:09:12,240 --> 00:09:17,310 The overall puzzle in the history of nature is how to understand how to action and then to being. 85 00:09:17,370 --> 00:09:26,280 After the end of the Cold War, what's possible? How was it imaginable to go from Checkpoint Charlie to move a killer to go from look up to Benghazi? 86 00:09:27,990 --> 00:09:36,299 Answering that requires that we treat the end of the Cold War precisely not as a fundamental break through that 87 00:09:36,300 --> 00:09:43,110 makes the end of the Cold War and its effects on what later could become inexplicable cannot explain anything. 88 00:09:43,140 --> 00:09:50,010 The end of the Cold War becomes an interregnum, fundamentally separating the past from the present, making the true independent. 89 00:09:51,330 --> 00:09:57,180 It leaves us with an empty concept of change. If, on the other hand, we wish to understand change. 90 00:09:57,240 --> 00:10:04,470 I think we must investigate and naturalise apparent continuity during the Cold War to investigate how NATO's been 91 00:10:04,620 --> 00:10:11,400 after the end of the Cold War is conditioned on Cold War machinations on Cold War change and Cold War discontinuities. 92 00:10:12,390 --> 00:10:22,590 These discontinuities is what I empirically investigate and I try to put some concept in the concept of change with 93 00:10:22,590 --> 00:10:32,070 that can restate the argument shortly to become that nature today is made possible by past imaginations of its future. 94 00:10:32,820 --> 00:10:38,600 Cold War imaginations can be investigated by empirically analysing how nature in relation to all of 95 00:10:38,910 --> 00:10:45,060 problems was represented in an intimate and symbiotic relationship with something called the West. 96 00:10:49,180 --> 00:10:54,340 How is that possible? That's an empirical and historic question, and the history is what I turn to now. 97 00:10:54,610 --> 00:10:58,500 I'll do four things, outline what out of area history is in general, 98 00:10:59,590 --> 00:11:08,050 and I'll show two periods during the Cold War where in relation to out of area history out of the issues nature is is re-imagined imagined a new. 99 00:11:09,370 --> 00:11:14,680 So I'll summarise the changes that these bring to natal these new imaginations make possible. 100 00:11:15,010 --> 00:11:21,850 And finally, I'll show how these imaginations partook in making Natal possible after the end of the Cold War. 101 00:11:23,260 --> 00:11:30,730 First. Out-of-Area in general during the Cold War. 102 00:11:30,740 --> 00:11:39,170 NATO never acted. Never acted out of error, never acted out of Europe because security issues outside of Europe, well, it was problematic. 103 00:11:39,830 --> 00:11:44,600 They removed the focus from the central task of nature of the defence against the Soviet Union. 104 00:11:46,160 --> 00:11:52,280 Other issues should thus be kept off NATO's agenda when the Allies meet and discuss security issues, 105 00:11:52,610 --> 00:11:56,390 because these issues would always create division within nature. 106 00:11:56,480 --> 00:12:02,060 They could, in fact spell the end of nature. That's all the traditional story goes. 107 00:12:02,150 --> 00:12:05,540 Nature continuously state confined to Cold War issues. 108 00:12:05,570 --> 00:12:11,719 Nature works of Elisabeth should keep its eye on the ball in Europe and out of error. 109 00:12:11,720 --> 00:12:15,380 Problems were always problematic as it showed when they did not work. 110 00:12:15,740 --> 00:12:22,370 This showed the limits of responsibility between its members, the limits of alliance, their short and short, what nature was not. 111 00:12:24,110 --> 00:12:29,780 However, the limits is where new life can be imagined. 112 00:12:29,780 --> 00:12:36,290 And there's just more to this story in my mind than than does most of this story. 113 00:12:36,650 --> 00:12:42,730 Then continuity. Because constantly throughout the Cold War, there were plans. 114 00:12:42,920 --> 00:12:49,550 There were proposals that were strategies for trying to make it possible to engage nature outside of Europe. 115 00:12:50,180 --> 00:12:55,700 And I think these plants show that there was a constant pressure for making nature into something it was not. 116 00:12:56,660 --> 00:13:05,120 And looking at these plants, these imaginations of what nature should and could perhaps become so but the continuous continuity of the Cold War, 117 00:13:05,750 --> 00:13:12,680 sort of the source itself, things actually did happen. And depending on the story of out of their issues, it's not the whole story. 118 00:13:16,070 --> 00:13:24,860 And following, I'll show how changes and events in nature during the Cold War made it possible to imagine alternate 119 00:13:24,860 --> 00:13:31,340 futures for nature and how this was done by powerful actors speaking on behalf of the alliance. 120 00:13:33,910 --> 00:13:40,510 On the 5th of March, 1953, Joseph Stalin dies, and with his death, 121 00:13:41,050 --> 00:13:45,490 one of the many changes during the Cold War that destabilises the politics 122 00:13:45,490 --> 00:13:50,050 and the political concepts and agreements on which NATO's existence is based, 123 00:13:50,410 --> 00:14:00,700 on which NATO's on which NATO's Western strategic consensus is based, is Stalin's death and eliminating peaceful coexistence from the Kremlin. 124 00:14:01,660 --> 00:14:08,380 What is the stage? No longer the danger of an immediate Soviet onslaught in Europe, but a permanent state of generalised confrontation? 125 00:14:08,740 --> 00:14:11,560 An uncertain but certainly dangerous future. 126 00:14:12,520 --> 00:14:23,050 As stated by Eisenhower in 1956, three years ago, human freedom was under direct assault, fierce global war of a nuclear holocaust of the future. 127 00:14:23,290 --> 00:14:30,850 Today, three years later, we have reason for cautious hope that a new, a fruitful, a peaceful era for mankind can emerge. 128 00:14:31,330 --> 00:14:35,500 But on the other hand, hope is not a certainty. 129 00:14:36,370 --> 00:14:40,900 And as secretary general of this may remind us, the be a smiles. 130 00:14:41,470 --> 00:14:44,710 But let us remember that he's an animal that can kill you without hope. 131 00:14:44,950 --> 00:14:48,040 So hoping for peace can itself be dangerous. 132 00:14:49,480 --> 00:14:52,570 One must not be misled by the smiling peer at the task. 133 00:14:53,290 --> 00:15:01,180 But the West need to us to conceive and maintain a strategy that will ensure coherence and work, even according to John Foster Dulles. 134 00:15:01,660 --> 00:15:05,870 The threat we face is not one that can be adequately dealt with on an emergency basis. 135 00:15:05,890 --> 00:15:13,090 It is a threat that may long persist. And this long persisting threat is in itself a threat to nature, 136 00:15:13,570 --> 00:15:22,270 because conventional wisdom about alliances tells us that unity dissolves in the face of and in the face of a diffuse threat. 137 00:15:23,440 --> 00:15:30,670 The challenge, then, is to maintain a permanent, coherent and geographically limited alliance in the face of a changing, 138 00:15:31,000 --> 00:15:33,550 diffuse, non-military and perhaps even global threat. 139 00:15:34,870 --> 00:15:44,680 As the immediate and common threat lessens, individual allies will be tempted to follow individual interests, ultimately risking their lives. 140 00:15:46,000 --> 00:15:50,700 And in 56, this prophecy from conventional alliance theory, 141 00:15:50,830 --> 00:15:58,000 conventional wisdom seems to be coming true as the United States evidently stops the French English invasion in Egypt, 142 00:15:58,030 --> 00:16:02,890 actually in the midst of battle, in the face of the lessons of the threat. 143 00:16:03,160 --> 00:16:13,750 Not even the wartime allies can retain unity. The Suez Crisis, the most famous of Out of Iraq crisis, shows the limits of lies. 144 00:16:13,870 --> 00:16:19,630 It shows the limits of Vietnam, as claimed by Secretary General Paul II, this spark. 145 00:16:19,840 --> 00:16:27,310 It has shown that the Atlantic Alliance failed to function. And the crisis, in fact, according to Spark, left the West in disarray. 146 00:16:28,480 --> 00:16:33,730 Inside unity cannot, it seems, be maintained in the face of outside disunity. 147 00:16:35,170 --> 00:16:38,409 But something has to be done. The failures must be commended. 148 00:16:38,410 --> 00:16:48,550 Nature must be reimagined. If it is to have faced this long haul and future crises out of error that could be expected in relation to the Cold War. 149 00:16:48,970 --> 00:16:52,100 The time has come again, according to John Foster, 150 00:16:52,100 --> 00:17:01,570 both to turn nature into the totality of its meaning and the totality of nature's meaning is, in short, that it is not an alliance. 151 00:17:01,810 --> 00:17:04,980 It is both. And an alliance that no one thing, 152 00:17:05,020 --> 00:17:13,090 I guess what is me that the North Atlantic Treaty is merely a temporary alliance which has been forced on us by compulsion of external threat. 153 00:17:13,510 --> 00:17:19,930 It is much more than that. Much, much more. Nature, according to law, is to ensure its modern alliance. 154 00:17:20,500 --> 00:17:30,310 But what is this more than it is the real life manifestation of a political community of the Western political community. 155 00:17:30,760 --> 00:17:38,530 So it is widely argued either is or will be proof that there in world politics exists a community of Western nations. 156 00:17:38,950 --> 00:17:43,779 North Atlantic Treaty holds in according to a lot is made that the North Atlantic 157 00:17:43,780 --> 00:17:48,430 community should develop into a true family of nations thinking together, 158 00:17:48,640 --> 00:17:53,530 acting together, and helping each other over the whole feel of international relations. 159 00:17:54,430 --> 00:18:00,930 So this promise, and not the immediate defence against the Soviet Union is the true meaning of nature. 160 00:18:00,940 --> 00:18:08,140 That is the totality of its meaning, and nature doesn't matter and holds the promise of Western transcendence. 161 00:18:08,770 --> 00:18:14,800 Nature holds the key to a future Western utopia where the problems of the present will be solved. 162 00:18:15,880 --> 00:18:23,620 Otherwise, if this is not to happen, the consequence going according to those may be that the West may destroy itself. 163 00:18:25,180 --> 00:18:30,430 This means that nature is then important, not just because of guards against the Soviet Union in the future. 164 00:18:30,430 --> 00:18:39,860 In the present. Sorry. It is in. Because it's a tool that will visualise a future in which a true family, a true community comes into being. 165 00:18:41,330 --> 00:18:45,110 Nature secures the moment of future wisdom, transcendence. 166 00:18:46,100 --> 00:18:52,970 And when this transcendence happens, nature and the West will not be jeopardised by out-of-area problems. 167 00:18:53,270 --> 00:19:02,180 Because when becoming the genuine expression of this community, nature will be able to act in unison in the whole field of international relations. 168 00:19:04,310 --> 00:19:12,049 So because nature in this political imagination is not an alliance, it is not doomed to face the fate of past alliances. 169 00:19:12,050 --> 00:19:22,100 It, on the contrary, has the power again, according to born of the Spark, to prove the old concept of geographically limited alliance outmoded. 170 00:19:24,320 --> 00:19:34,250 So NATO's future in the 1950s is not to be found in its past because in itself holds the promise to radically break away from the past. 171 00:19:35,510 --> 00:19:43,910 Nature becomes imagined as a new beginning. According to President Eisenhower, it has grown into a powerful security community. 172 00:19:44,150 --> 00:19:49,490 Something new and important has happened. And according to politics, spark. 173 00:19:50,360 --> 00:19:55,460 This community spirit, which is beginning to appear within the Atlantic Alliance, 174 00:19:55,670 --> 00:20:00,320 is probably the most important event which has occurred in our present era. 175 00:20:01,160 --> 00:20:05,960 So this is a promise of nature to be more than an alliance. To be where the West develops. 176 00:20:07,460 --> 00:20:10,580 But this promise is continues the promise of the future. 177 00:20:11,150 --> 00:20:18,530 And that is why nature should be developed and be defended even in the face of a diffuse Soviet threat and serious out-of-area crises, 178 00:20:18,530 --> 00:20:24,380 because nature promises to overcome both the Soviet problems and all of their problems. 179 00:20:25,730 --> 00:20:29,960 This never happens, of course. During the Cold War, all of the problems remain problematic. 180 00:20:30,170 --> 00:20:37,130 But NATO's continuously emerging as that which, when finally developed into its true meaning, will overcome the present. 181 00:20:39,500 --> 00:20:46,370 So in the fifties, Natal could be imagined as that which would bring at a future point in time, 182 00:20:46,520 --> 00:20:49,760 transcendence and radically transform international relations. 183 00:20:52,160 --> 00:21:00,560 It could be more than the lines in the fifties as it casts its own promise of Western deliverance in the long haul. 184 00:21:00,770 --> 00:21:06,590 During the Cold War. But when the Cold War ends, what we need to face is the end of the Cold War. 185 00:21:06,890 --> 00:21:17,150 This is the second, second instance of nature being remade because according to some way, in 1974, 186 00:21:18,050 --> 00:21:25,430 I quote, not only the Cold War, but the entire post-war order came to an end with Nixon's first term. 187 00:21:26,030 --> 00:21:33,140 It was as the 1960s came to an end. In fact, widely believed that the world was witnessing the end of the Cold War. 188 00:21:34,610 --> 00:21:38,630 George Kennan, the godfather of American Cold War diplomacy, in fact, 189 00:21:38,960 --> 00:21:45,590 labelled in an essay in 1972 called After the End of the American Foreign Policy. 190 00:21:45,590 --> 00:21:53,660 After the end of the Cold War, the Cold War was ending. And according to Richard Nixon, the world was entering into an era of negotiation. 191 00:21:54,860 --> 00:22:00,560 So the question is, what is the use of a post-war era alliance when the post-war era is over? 192 00:22:00,650 --> 00:22:04,580 What is the use of a Cold War alliance when the Cold War is over? 193 00:22:07,520 --> 00:22:14,690 As with the science of peaceful coexistence in the fifties, the era of détente fundamentally questions and challenges. 194 00:22:15,080 --> 00:22:18,580 Nature. NATO's challenge by science. 195 00:22:18,620 --> 00:22:26,480 Peace and science of cooperation. And that, again, requires an open up to new imagination of what nature is. 196 00:22:27,620 --> 00:22:32,720 And again, the answer is to imagine that it was more than just the military lines in 67. 197 00:22:33,110 --> 00:22:38,270 Nature commissioned study on its own future. What was later to be known as the Ahmed Report. 198 00:22:39,620 --> 00:22:46,160 And that report imagines a future for nature central, even in the face of threatening peace. 199 00:22:47,060 --> 00:22:54,800 In short, the report argues that, and I quote the report Military security and the policy of détente are not contradictory, but complementary. 200 00:22:55,880 --> 00:22:59,570 So later in this report, it's not a relic of the post-war era. 201 00:23:00,620 --> 00:23:08,270 On the contrary, and I quote again, the ultimate purpose of the alliance is to achieve a just and lasting, peaceful order in Europe. 202 00:23:09,290 --> 00:23:15,440 NATO's facilitates NATO's identity is shifted from being about defence to being about peace. 203 00:23:16,910 --> 00:23:26,660 But the time is thus not the end of nature. On the contrary, it is in nature that the process of peace, that the management of turn will take place. 204 00:23:27,480 --> 00:23:31,400 NATO's not a relic, but central for realising new, a peaceful era. 205 00:23:31,940 --> 00:23:35,360 Nature becomes not a hindrance to Western transcendence into peace. 206 00:23:35,360 --> 00:23:41,690 Nature becomes imagined central in making possible the peaceful time in these new times after the Cold War. 207 00:23:46,800 --> 00:23:50,130 But again, that's before problems look in the outside. 208 00:23:50,580 --> 00:23:59,670 And as the report plainly states, the North Atlantic Treaty area cannot be treated in isolation from the rest of the world crisis. 209 00:23:59,670 --> 00:24:06,990 A conflict arising outside the area may impair its security, and it did indeed impair the security of nature. 210 00:24:07,740 --> 00:24:15,920 The Vietnam War in general, as well as lack of consultation and coordination, the lack of genuine community in relation to the Yom Kippur War. 211 00:24:15,920 --> 00:24:23,160 Long power nature of the units necessary to manage the times in Europe is threatened by issues out of area, 212 00:24:23,490 --> 00:24:28,410 out of area problems threatening the visions of the peaceful future secured by nature. 213 00:24:30,000 --> 00:24:38,160 So the western transcendence making out of their problems unproblematic has not yet arrived in the imagined new times of peace. 214 00:24:38,520 --> 00:24:46,110 During the tent, Nature and the West are still, as argued by Henry Kissinger, 1973, 215 00:24:46,380 --> 00:24:53,400 in need of a fresh act of creation to lay the basis for a new era of creativity in the West. 216 00:24:54,840 --> 00:25:02,159 The act of Western creativity, making the times and peace possible is still imagined as a moment of transcendence that 217 00:25:02,160 --> 00:25:08,280 will bring the West into its true existence and nature into the totality of its meaning. 218 00:25:09,330 --> 00:25:15,090 That will make it possible for the West, embodied in nature, to manage challenges both inside and outside of Europe. 219 00:25:16,200 --> 00:25:21,089 But this still a thing of the future, and the future is still constantly jeopardised. 220 00:25:21,090 --> 00:25:22,770 But issues outside of Europe. 221 00:25:24,630 --> 00:25:31,350 The moment of transcendence that will make nature action outside of Europe possible is constantly awaited during the Cold War. 222 00:25:32,550 --> 00:25:37,020 Sparks Community of Spirit. Community spirit does not materialise. 223 00:25:37,320 --> 00:25:43,890 Nature is not brought into the totality of its meaning, and the realisation of Western utopia is always not there yet. 224 00:25:45,150 --> 00:25:52,110 So taken together, these two spirits show that central change in what nature is actually do take 225 00:25:52,110 --> 00:25:55,890 place in the political imagination of central decision makers during the Cold War. 226 00:25:56,070 --> 00:25:57,720 Nature is imagined differently, 227 00:25:57,990 --> 00:26:06,480 and these differences in imagination support the argument that the end of the Cold War can be understood in nature's past. 228 00:26:07,410 --> 00:26:15,660 So summing up from these two empirical stories, what can you say about nature during the first nature? 229 00:26:15,960 --> 00:26:21,570 It's never just an alliance. It is never just one thing. It is constantly imagined as more than it lines. 230 00:26:21,900 --> 00:26:24,450 Second, nature is about the future. 231 00:26:25,350 --> 00:26:34,290 Nature is about securing a radically different and utopian western future as much as it is about managing the Cold War present. 232 00:26:36,430 --> 00:26:40,390 Which means historically that nature is important without the Cold War. 233 00:26:40,720 --> 00:26:43,990 Nature is not just about defence. It is equally about peace. 234 00:26:44,200 --> 00:26:54,040 And it's about managing a peaceful order in Europe. Even when the Cold War was meant to ending to be ending in the seventies, falsely. 235 00:26:55,410 --> 00:26:56,540 NATO's about the West. 236 00:26:57,700 --> 00:27:07,790 NATO's met and important because it's a real life representation of the West that's a defence and represents the existence of a political community, 237 00:27:07,990 --> 00:27:15,040 a Western political subject. And just finally, the outside is significant. 238 00:27:15,700 --> 00:27:23,200 It is when joined to an action also outside the confines of Europe and outside the conceptual confines of the Cold War, 239 00:27:23,530 --> 00:27:28,690 that it's possible that this Western subject, Western family of nation emerges. 240 00:27:31,110 --> 00:27:41,160 There's a lot of area problems and problems that constantly have to be overcome because overcoming them signifies the moment of transcendence. 241 00:27:43,080 --> 00:27:49,590 Now, this political imagination of nature and nature of future is, of course, only one, only one amongst many. 242 00:27:49,590 --> 00:27:57,150 It can still be imagined as a strategic equilibrium managing the Germans and the Americans and the Russians alike. 243 00:27:57,870 --> 00:28:04,320 But the point is that it makes it possible to make sense of the Cold War and NATO's role in a particular way. 244 00:28:05,160 --> 00:28:09,570 The end of the Cold War had first been imagined before it ended. 245 00:28:10,920 --> 00:28:17,490 Knowledge making sense of it was available. Knowledge that at the same time established a future for Natal. 246 00:28:18,210 --> 00:28:23,880 Natal in a way, thus knew what it had to expect when the Cold War ended. 247 00:28:25,170 --> 00:28:30,570 So what can we know from this story about Natal and the end of the Cold War? 248 00:28:31,680 --> 00:28:41,129 It tells us that the end of the Cold War because these imaginations could be understood not just as a challenge to later the end of the Cold War. 249 00:28:41,130 --> 00:28:43,230 It was also a moment of opportunity. 250 00:28:43,530 --> 00:28:52,140 It's a moment of opportunity for finally bringing Natal into the totality of its meaning as envisioned by those four years earlier. 251 00:28:53,490 --> 00:28:54,809 Natal was not an alliance. 252 00:28:54,810 --> 00:29:04,050 It was a powerful security community expressing the existence of the Western activity in world politics and now liberated from the Cold War, 253 00:29:04,080 --> 00:29:10,380 Natal and the West could arrive at their long awaited, long imagined moment of transcendence. 254 00:29:11,460 --> 00:29:12,780 In that sense, past, 255 00:29:12,960 --> 00:29:22,560 present and future come together in the moment when Natal in unity can manage a peaceful order both inside and outside its traditional area. 256 00:29:22,950 --> 00:29:27,329 It can now, it could be imagined finally go out of their natal, 257 00:29:27,330 --> 00:29:34,680 in fact has to go out of area because that validates the existence of the West and NATO's close relation to it. 258 00:29:35,700 --> 00:29:43,170 Natal has, as the Cold War ends, in the now famous words of the American Senator Richard Lugar, to go out of area, go out of business. 259 00:29:45,090 --> 00:29:51,930 And that, as we know, is what happened Natal. Increasingly after the Cold War has been about breaking its own boundaries. 260 00:29:52,680 --> 00:30:00,150 Its identity lies in being able to manage global security increasingly and being engaged increasingly in Afghanistan. 261 00:30:01,230 --> 00:30:07,170 And in short, this is how the move from Checkpoint Charlie to Musa became possible. 262 00:30:08,040 --> 00:30:12,629 Political imaginations of what nature was related to out-of-area issues of visions 263 00:30:12,630 --> 00:30:16,860 of the West during the Cold War made native possible at the end of the Cold War. 264 00:30:17,670 --> 00:30:24,000 In that sense, Natal was not a blank slate upon which events of the present are constantly able to write themselves. 265 00:30:24,600 --> 00:30:28,080 Continuity may change and the end of the Cold War possible. 266 00:30:30,830 --> 00:30:33,950 This then sort of concludes the empirical part. 267 00:30:35,510 --> 00:30:38,630 Who would have imagined that Natal had a future after the end of the Cold War? 268 00:30:39,290 --> 00:30:47,930 The empirical history show that somebody actually did. Imagine these imaginations partook children producing the actual future Natal has. 269 00:30:48,800 --> 00:30:53,690 So now follows some theoretical points because what does this story tells us 270 00:30:53,690 --> 00:30:59,090 conceptually about Natal and how can we understand its relationship with the West? 271 00:31:03,140 --> 00:31:12,530 On the question of what nature is. It's, of course, a central, empirical and theoretical question, and the answer is that it is never just one thing. 272 00:31:12,530 --> 00:31:16,100 It is never just a Western community and never just an alliance. 273 00:31:16,700 --> 00:31:22,520 And instead of trying to answer what it is, we must analyse how it becomes what it is. 274 00:31:23,810 --> 00:31:29,150 It's not just fun, solid being it itself, its past and its future. 275 00:31:29,420 --> 00:31:38,149 It's constantly stroking into being. That's why I would argue that that identity and identity is a matter of its history being 276 00:31:38,150 --> 00:31:44,870 as a matter of becoming and being is always therefore uncertain and always incomplete. 277 00:31:45,290 --> 00:31:47,540 And it's always in relation to something else. 278 00:31:48,800 --> 00:31:57,790 In short, nature is what it is or becomes what it is by being historically represented in relation to others and in relation to its outsides. 279 00:31:59,960 --> 00:32:08,930 This means that when analysing and asking what nature is, that questions should be kept analytically open as little as possible, should be suppose, 280 00:32:09,170 --> 00:32:20,390 should be presupposed, because otherwise one can risk objectifying nature identity one risk, making it one where in fact, there were no oneness. 281 00:32:23,090 --> 00:32:27,860 How nature could become something is always a consequence of complicated discursive 282 00:32:27,860 --> 00:32:33,320 processes containing various representation of nature in relation to various others. 283 00:32:33,800 --> 00:32:37,130 Nature is not just something in relation to the Soviet author, 284 00:32:37,340 --> 00:32:42,770 it's not just something in relation to its other problems and is not just something in relation to its west. 285 00:32:45,640 --> 00:32:51,220 To his Western product. But still, this sweat change happened. 286 00:32:55,130 --> 00:33:01,820 Okay. The argument that the discourse making nature possible is largely NATO's past discourse on its own future. 287 00:33:02,570 --> 00:33:06,740 This is what makes new political strategy logical. It's what makes them rational. 288 00:33:07,010 --> 00:33:10,160 And this is what makes them expectedly realisable. 289 00:33:10,700 --> 00:33:16,550 And this process take place in the largely public transatlantic deliberations on what nature is and what it can become. 290 00:33:17,240 --> 00:33:21,140 Presidents, prime ministers, secretary generals and ministers of defence, 291 00:33:22,250 --> 00:33:27,320 together with sometimes columnists, commentators, and especially NATO's own communiques. 292 00:33:27,470 --> 00:33:33,530 Imagine what NATO's they speak legitimately on NATO's behalf, and they have the power to view it. 293 00:33:34,550 --> 00:33:39,860 And when they speak about what nature is and can become, they often speak of it in a relationship with the West. 294 00:33:40,400 --> 00:33:45,710 They imagine that nature is or can become constantly more than an alliance. 295 00:33:45,830 --> 00:33:52,760 They expect it to be more than an alliance. That they express a should expressed insistence of the Western community. 296 00:33:53,810 --> 00:33:59,180 And therefore investigating historically how these discourses develop, change and modify it. 297 00:33:59,180 --> 00:34:08,420 Make it possible to tell a story of change, to investigate how nature continuously becomes what it is it's possible to trace changing continuity. 298 00:34:12,470 --> 00:34:20,630 It makes it possible to chain to trace how the historical emergence of the conditions of possibility for the present emerges. 299 00:34:20,990 --> 00:34:28,850 It makes it possible to write the history of the present. Later today is made possible by past imaginations of history, 300 00:34:29,630 --> 00:34:36,590 and these past imaginations can be investigated by analysing empirically how natural in relation to our issues. 301 00:34:36,650 --> 00:34:41,450 To sum up, was represented as in an intimate relationship with something called the West. 302 00:34:42,860 --> 00:34:46,910 So that leads to my fourth and final point, which is my conclusions. 303 00:34:48,620 --> 00:34:54,560 What about nature and what about its future? What can you say about its future? 304 00:34:55,400 --> 00:35:01,940 Well, first of all, by looking at its history, we can certainly state that its future will be uncertain. 305 00:35:02,450 --> 00:35:06,589 The nature future will be difficult, if not impossible to predict. It will change. 306 00:35:06,590 --> 00:35:17,390 But precisely how it will change is impossible to say. NATO's current future, it is commonly stated, depends on its operation in Afghanistan, 307 00:35:18,110 --> 00:35:22,220 on how nature managed to actually go out of air in a very serious way. 308 00:35:23,570 --> 00:35:33,290 It's commonly stated that that nature will make or break in Afghanistan, that its future is on the line if nature cannot succeed in Afghanistan. 309 00:35:33,290 --> 00:35:36,379 And in the words of first US future McCain, 310 00:35:36,380 --> 00:35:44,360 Canadian Minister of Defence of Nature cannot contribute to the building to building security for the larger international community. 311 00:35:44,540 --> 00:35:50,479 Then what is nature for? And in that sense, Afghanistan is important for nature. 312 00:35:50,480 --> 00:35:55,220 It questions nature, identity. It question what nature is for. 313 00:35:55,790 --> 00:35:59,460 Thus, the future nature is indeed to be found in Afghanistan. 314 00:35:59,480 --> 00:36:02,450 But on the other hand, failed in Afghanistan. 315 00:36:02,690 --> 00:36:11,690 My mind will not mean the end of nature because nature has failed before and failures in the past have created a momentum for change, 316 00:36:12,020 --> 00:36:18,170 a momentum for imagination for imagination, what nature is and what it should and could become. 317 00:36:20,420 --> 00:36:32,120 Because nature depends not only on Afghanistan, it depends on its dead on being able to represent itself as a manifestation of a larger community, 318 00:36:33,110 --> 00:36:37,400 a community that is sometimes called the West, sometimes it is called the transatlantic unity. 319 00:36:37,610 --> 00:36:45,380 Sometimes it is called the community of values. Sometimes it's called the security community, a western security community. 320 00:36:46,730 --> 00:36:52,430 Never mind the terms. But the point is that failure in Afghanistan could, 321 00:36:52,700 --> 00:37:01,870 as previous failures have been brought to the fact that this community and the community spirit sparked talked about is not there yet, 322 00:37:01,910 --> 00:37:07,400 that it has not been developed yet, that nature has not yet been brought into the totality of its meaning, 323 00:37:07,880 --> 00:37:11,090 as John Foster Dulles imagined that it would be in the fifties. 324 00:37:12,440 --> 00:37:15,470 Failure in Afghanistan does not spell the end of nature. 325 00:37:15,650 --> 00:37:25,680 Failure in Afghanistan will spell a new beginning because later and some depends on defending and representing it, 326 00:37:25,700 --> 00:37:29,270 reimagining itself as something related to the West. 327 00:37:30,050 --> 00:37:39,650 And as long as the West, whatever that is, exists and is threatened both on its inside and outside, there exists a future for nature. 328 00:37:40,730 --> 00:37:47,090 As long as the West in political discourse can be argued as collapsing, as declining, 329 00:37:47,390 --> 00:37:55,010 as ending, as in austerity, as in its most serious crisis ever, as it has repeatedly been. 330 00:37:55,520 --> 00:38:04,460 There will be a future for nature, constantly trying to defend and develop the West into its still awaited moment of true and final transcendence. 331 00:38:05,780 --> 00:38:14,360 In conclusion, NATO's future is imagined and made certain in continued Western uncertainty. 332 00:38:15,440 --> 00:38:17,840 Thank you very much. I hope you have some questions.