Proceed straight away to today's speaker.
One of our visiting fellows, originally from the Centre for Military Studies, University of Copenhagen,
has been here with us since January as a visiting fellow of the Change in Courage of War
Project and is now presenting us the results of six months of hard labour intellectual strife.
Dr. Christian Sylvia Christensen will speak on imagining NATO's past and present futures for the Western alliance.
Well, thank you. Thank you again for the kind introduction and thank you to all of you for coming,
whom I've been really grateful for being a visiting fellow here for the last almost six months,
because it has given me the time to to finalise a manuscript.
And that manuscript is what I'm going to talk from today.
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.
So I'm really trying to tackle some of the big issues surrounding nature and the question of what nature is.
And the question of nature future has has not been easy questions for academia, at least not for for political science.
In the in the short text advertising, in the lecture, I referred to two ways of of answering what nature is.
Is it, according to the famous but unverified quote by Lord Ismay about keeping the Americans in the Germans down and the Russians out?
Is it in that way about a strategic equilibrium,
the consequence of national interest falling in line by the geopolitical realities materialising themselves after the Second World War?
Or alternatively, is nature the expression of an enduring Western political community,
perhaps even as a security community, where, in the famous words of Deutsche Welle becomes unthinkable?
Both of these are academic conceptions of what nature is, but they are equally political concepts.
Their political imaginations that foresee what nature is and what it can become.
And in the following, I'll try to investigate how nature could be imagined in its past,
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.
In 1989, Europe and the world celebrated the end of the Cold War, and so did nature, because this world crumbled.
Nature could celebrate its own 40 anniversary and could congratulate it on itself,
on the role it played in contributing to the end of the Cold War, the victorious into the Great War.
But the end of the Cold War did not mean the end of nature.
It had not played out its role, contrary to both academic expectations and political prophecy.
Nature did not fade away as its adversary collapsed.
Nature did not behave as could be expected of an alliance.
It did not turn into an irrelevant and empty shell in a world that witnessed a new
world order that was radically different from the post World War Two or later did not,
as predicted, turned into a cenotaph of the previous age.
Even in the face of radical change, unpredictably, nature remained both relevant and remained central to both European and American security.
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?
Who could have imagined that it even would exist to celebrate its 60th anniversary?
Who indeed could have imagined that nature would be encased in long, bloody military operations in places so far away as Afghanistan,
an area so far away from Europe and so much out of area that, in the words of Jaap de Hoop Scheffer,
the previous secretary general, it had never before appeared on the Alliance Horizon.
How to understand these changes and how to understand this conceptual antigravity change of horizon.
How nature came to present in many ways remains an enigma.
It's difficult to understand how it actually managed to do what it has already done.
It is difficult to come to terms with what it is normally.
The question of who, who, who would have imagined? Is it just a phrase?
It's a manner of speaking. But I think I think it can be more than that.
I think it can also be a relevant research question.
How NATO's future could be imagined, I would argue, is actually important to answer how NATO's became what it is today.
And these initial faults lead me to a four point plan for what I'm going to say today.
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.
I will in that relation state why out of area? Why out of area problems is this important and is significant to investigate?
I will state why the West is important and why it is important to look historically at nature.
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.
Secondly, I engage the history of NATO's political imaginations.
What are out-of-area problems and why? Look at them. During the Cold War, Natal.
Constantly troubled by events and actions of its members outside of Europe.
France. War in Little China. The Vietnam War. The Yom Kippur War.
The Suez Crisis, as well as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan,
are all various points in natural history that question what nature is and what it can become.
And in attempting to manage these always problematic issues outside of Europe and outside the logic of the Cold War,
a political imagination develops in NATO's nature and its future.
Even its its true becoming as being more than an alliance.
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
becoming the end of the Cold War as as not only a threat or fundamental challenge to nature.
It can be seen as a moment of fundamental opportunity to realise nature.
Its true being estimated during the Cold War that nature can now finally become more than an alliance.
That is basically my empirical claim.
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.
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?
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,
and it was about getting as many tanks as possible, as close as possible to Checkpoint Charlie.
It was focussed on Europe during the Cold War.
Anything outside of Europe was besides the point. It was not central.
And today nature was about getting as many troops as possible as far away from Europe as possible.
Nature focuses outside of Europe, the outside of central things and issues, outside of area, out of their approach to nature.
To understand nature, it's necessary to engage in this fundamental change, and not least the question of how it was possible.
How did nature become what it is? That leads to a fundamental assumption that nature is not just what it is.
There's no continuous cause that continuously explains what nature is, that explains that identity.
It's neither just the strategic equilibrium of Western security.
It's neither just a strategic equilibrium or a wisdom security premise.
There's no incentive for nature. On the contrary, it is constantly in the process of becoming.
That means that what motivates must be a historical question.
The question is how it came to stand, how it was possible for nature to become what it is understanding.
Therefore, what nature is today requires that we write a history of the present.
As for for today, for nature, this writing a history of the present must be about the end of the Cold War.
The overall puzzle in the history of nature is how to understand how to action and then to being.
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?
Answering that requires that we treat the end of the Cold War precisely not as a fundamental break through that
makes the end of the Cold War and its effects on what later could become inexplicable cannot explain anything.
The end of the Cold War becomes an interregnum, fundamentally separating the past from the present, making the true independent.
It leaves us with an empty concept of change. If, on the other hand, we wish to understand change.
I think we must investigate and naturalise apparent continuity during the Cold War to investigate how NATO's been
after the end of the Cold War is conditioned on Cold War machinations on Cold War change and Cold War discontinuities.
These discontinuities is what I empirically investigate and I try to put some concept in the concept of change with
that can restate the argument shortly to become that nature today is made possible by past imaginations of its future.
Cold War imaginations can be investigated by empirically analysing how nature in relation to all of
problems was represented in an intimate and symbiotic relationship with something called the West.
How is that possible? That's an empirical and historic question, and the history is what I turn to now.
I'll do four things, outline what out of area history is in general,
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.
So I'll summarise the changes that these bring to natal these new imaginations make possible.
And finally, I'll show how these imaginations partook in making Natal possible after the end of the Cold War.
First. Out-of-Area in general during the Cold War.
NATO never acted. Never acted out of error, never acted out of Europe because security issues outside of Europe, well, it was problematic.
They removed the focus from the central task of nature of the defence against the Soviet Union.
Other issues should thus be kept off NATO's agenda when the Allies meet and discuss security issues,
because these issues would always create division within nature.
They could, in fact spell the end of nature. That's all the traditional story goes.
Nature continuously state confined to Cold War issues.
Nature works of Elisabeth should keep its eye on the ball in Europe and out of error.
Problems were always problematic as it showed when they did not work.
This showed the limits of responsibility between its members, the limits of alliance, their short and short, what nature was not.
However, the limits is where new life can be imagined.
And there's just more to this story in my mind than than does most of this story.
Then continuity. Because constantly throughout the Cold War, there were plans.
There were proposals that were strategies for trying to make it possible to engage nature outside of Europe.
And I think these plants show that there was a constant pressure for making nature into something it was not.
And looking at these plants, these imaginations of what nature should and could perhaps become so but the continuous continuity of the Cold War,
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.
And following, I'll show how changes and events in nature during the Cold War made it possible to imagine alternate
futures for nature and how this was done by powerful actors speaking on behalf of the alliance.
On the 5th of March, 1953, Joseph Stalin dies, and with his death,
one of the many changes during the Cold War that destabilises the politics
and the political concepts and agreements on which NATO's existence is based,
on which NATO's on which NATO's Western strategic consensus is based, is Stalin's death and eliminating peaceful coexistence from the Kremlin.
What is the stage? No longer the danger of an immediate Soviet onslaught in Europe, but a permanent state of generalised confrontation?
An uncertain but certainly dangerous future.
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.
Today, three years later, we have reason for cautious hope that a new, a fruitful, a peaceful era for mankind can emerge.
But on the other hand, hope is not a certainty.
And as secretary general of this may remind us, the be a smiles.
But let us remember that he's an animal that can kill you without hope.
So hoping for peace can itself be dangerous.
One must not be misled by the smiling peer at the task.
But the West need to us to conceive and maintain a strategy that will ensure coherence and work, even according to John Foster Dulles.
The threat we face is not one that can be adequately dealt with on an emergency basis.
It is a threat that may long persist. And this long persisting threat is in itself a threat to nature,
because conventional wisdom about alliances tells us that unity dissolves in the face of and in the face of a diffuse threat.
The challenge, then, is to maintain a permanent, coherent and geographically limited alliance in the face of a changing,
diffuse, non-military and perhaps even global threat.
As the immediate and common threat lessens, individual allies will be tempted to follow individual interests, ultimately risking their lives.
And in 56, this prophecy from conventional alliance theory,
conventional wisdom seems to be coming true as the United States evidently stops the French English invasion in Egypt,
actually in the midst of battle, in the face of the lessons of the threat.
Not even the wartime allies can retain unity. The Suez Crisis, the most famous of Out of Iraq crisis, shows the limits of lies.
It shows the limits of Vietnam, as claimed by Secretary General Paul II, this spark.
It has shown that the Atlantic Alliance failed to function. And the crisis, in fact, according to Spark, left the West in disarray.
Inside unity cannot, it seems, be maintained in the face of outside disunity.
But something has to be done. The failures must be commended.
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.
The time has come again, according to John Foster,
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.
It is both. And an alliance that no one thing,
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.
It is much more than that. Much, much more. Nature, according to law, is to ensure its modern alliance.
But what is this more than it is the real life manifestation of a political community of the Western political community.
So it is widely argued either is or will be proof that there in world politics exists a community of Western nations.
North Atlantic Treaty holds in according to a lot is made that the North Atlantic
community should develop into a true family of nations thinking together,
acting together, and helping each other over the whole feel of international relations.
So this promise, and not the immediate defence against the Soviet Union is the true meaning of nature.
That is the totality of its meaning, and nature doesn't matter and holds the promise of Western transcendence.
Nature holds the key to a future Western utopia where the problems of the present will be solved.
Otherwise, if this is not to happen, the consequence going according to those may be that the West may destroy itself.
This means that nature is then important, not just because of guards against the Soviet Union in the future.
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.
Nature secures the moment of future wisdom, transcendence.
And when this transcendence happens, nature and the West will not be jeopardised by out-of-area problems.
Because when becoming the genuine expression of this community, nature will be able to act in unison in the whole field of international relations.
So because nature in this political imagination is not an alliance, it is not doomed to face the fate of past alliances.
It, on the contrary, has the power again, according to born of the Spark, to prove the old concept of geographically limited alliance outmoded.
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.
Nature becomes imagined as a new beginning. According to President Eisenhower, it has grown into a powerful security community.
Something new and important has happened. And according to politics, spark.
This community spirit, which is beginning to appear within the Atlantic Alliance,
is probably the most important event which has occurred in our present era.
So this is a promise of nature to be more than an alliance. To be where the West develops.
But this promise is continues the promise of the future.
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,
because nature promises to overcome both the Soviet problems and all of their problems.
This never happens, of course. During the Cold War, all of the problems remain problematic.
But NATO's continuously emerging as that which, when finally developed into its true meaning, will overcome the present.
So in the fifties, Natal could be imagined as that which would bring at a future point in time,
transcendence and radically transform international relations.
It could be more than the lines in the fifties as it casts its own promise of Western deliverance in the long haul.
During the Cold War. But when the Cold War ends, what we need to face is the end of the Cold War.
This is the second, second instance of nature being remade because according to some way, in 1974,
I quote, not only the Cold War, but the entire post-war order came to an end with Nixon's first term.
It was as the 1960s came to an end. In fact, widely believed that the world was witnessing the end of the Cold War.
George Kennan, the godfather of American Cold War diplomacy, in fact,
labelled in an essay in 1972 called After the End of the American Foreign Policy.
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.
So the question is, what is the use of a post-war era alliance when the post-war era is over?
What is the use of a Cold War alliance when the Cold War is over?
As with the science of peaceful coexistence in the fifties, the era of détente fundamentally questions and challenges.
Nature. NATO's challenge by science.
Peace and science of cooperation. And that, again, requires an open up to new imagination of what nature is.
And again, the answer is to imagine that it was more than just the military lines in 67.
Nature commissioned study on its own future. What was later to be known as the Ahmed Report.
And that report imagines a future for nature central, even in the face of threatening peace.
In short, the report argues that, and I quote the report Military security and the policy of détente are not contradictory, but complementary.
So later in this report, it's not a relic of the post-war era.
On the contrary, and I quote again, the ultimate purpose of the alliance is to achieve a just and lasting, peaceful order in Europe.
NATO's facilitates NATO's identity is shifted from being about defence to being about peace.
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.
NATO's not a relic, but central for realising new, a peaceful era.
Nature becomes not a hindrance to Western transcendence into peace.
Nature becomes imagined central in making possible the peaceful time in these new times after the Cold War.
But again, that's before problems look in the outside.
And as the report plainly states, the North Atlantic Treaty area cannot be treated in isolation from the rest of the world crisis.
A conflict arising outside the area may impair its security, and it did indeed impair the security of nature.
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.
Long power nature of the units necessary to manage the times in Europe is threatened by issues out of area,
out of area problems threatening the visions of the peaceful future secured by nature.
So the western transcendence making out of their problems unproblematic has not yet arrived in the imagined new times of peace.
During the tent, Nature and the West are still, as argued by Henry Kissinger, 1973,
in need of a fresh act of creation to lay the basis for a new era of creativity in the West.
The act of Western creativity, making the times and peace possible is still imagined as a moment of transcendence that
will bring the West into its true existence and nature into the totality of its meaning.
That will make it possible for the West, embodied in nature, to manage challenges both inside and outside of Europe.
But this still a thing of the future, and the future is still constantly jeopardised.
But issues outside of Europe.
The moment of transcendence that will make nature action outside of Europe possible is constantly awaited during the Cold War.
Sparks Community of Spirit. Community spirit does not materialise.
Nature is not brought into the totality of its meaning, and the realisation of Western utopia is always not there yet.
So taken together, these two spirits show that central change in what nature is actually do take
place in the political imagination of central decision makers during the Cold War.
Nature is imagined differently,
and these differences in imagination support the argument that the end of the Cold War can be understood in nature's past.
So summing up from these two empirical stories, what can you say about nature during the first nature?
It's never just an alliance. It is never just one thing. It is constantly imagined as more than it lines.
Second, nature is about the future.
Nature is about securing a radically different and utopian western future as much as it is about managing the Cold War present.
Which means historically that nature is important without the Cold War.
Nature is not just about defence. It is equally about peace.
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.
NATO's about the West.
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,
a Western political subject. And just finally, the outside is significant.
It is when joined to an action also outside the confines of Europe and outside the conceptual confines of the Cold War,
that it's possible that this Western subject, Western family of nation emerges.
There's a lot of area problems and problems that constantly have to be overcome because overcoming them signifies the moment of transcendence.
Now, this political imagination of nature and nature of future is, of course, only one, only one amongst many.
It can still be imagined as a strategic equilibrium managing the Germans and the Americans and the Russians alike.
But the point is that it makes it possible to make sense of the Cold War and NATO's role in a particular way.
The end of the Cold War had first been imagined before it ended.
Knowledge making sense of it was available. Knowledge that at the same time established a future for Natal.
Natal in a way, thus knew what it had to expect when the Cold War ended.
So what can we know from this story about Natal and the end of the Cold War?
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.
It was also a moment of opportunity.
It's a moment of opportunity for finally bringing Natal into the totality of its meaning as envisioned by those four years earlier.
Natal was not an alliance.
It was a powerful security community expressing the existence of the Western activity in world politics and now liberated from the Cold War,
Natal and the West could arrive at their long awaited, long imagined moment of transcendence.
In that sense, past,
present and future come together in the moment when Natal in unity can manage a peaceful order both inside and outside its traditional area.
It can now, it could be imagined finally go out of their natal,
in fact has to go out of area because that validates the existence of the West and NATO's close relation to it.
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.
And that, as we know, is what happened Natal. Increasingly after the Cold War has been about breaking its own boundaries.
Its identity lies in being able to manage global security increasingly and being engaged increasingly in Afghanistan.
And in short, this is how the move from Checkpoint Charlie to Musa became possible.
Political imaginations of what nature was related to out-of-area issues of visions
of the West during the Cold War made native possible at the end of the Cold War.
In that sense, Natal was not a blank slate upon which events of the present are constantly able to write themselves.
Continuity may change and the end of the Cold War possible.
This then sort of concludes the empirical part.
Who would have imagined that Natal had a future after the end of the Cold War?
The empirical history show that somebody actually did. Imagine these imaginations partook children producing the actual future Natal has.
So now follows some theoretical points because what does this story tells us
conceptually about Natal and how can we understand its relationship with the West?
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.
It is never just a Western community and never just an alliance.
And instead of trying to answer what it is, we must analyse how it becomes what it is.
It's not just fun, solid being it itself, its past and its future.
It's constantly stroking into being. That's why I would argue that that identity and identity is a matter of its history being
as a matter of becoming and being is always therefore uncertain and always incomplete.
And it's always in relation to something else.
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.
This means that when analysing and asking what nature is, that questions should be kept analytically open as little as possible, should be suppose,
should be presupposed, because otherwise one can risk objectifying nature identity one risk, making it one where in fact, there were no oneness.
How nature could become something is always a consequence of complicated discursive
processes containing various representation of nature in relation to various others.
Nature is not just something in relation to the Soviet author,
it's not just something in relation to its other problems and is not just something in relation to its west.
To his Western product. But still, this sweat change happened.
Okay. The argument that the discourse making nature possible is largely NATO's past discourse on its own future.
This is what makes new political strategy logical. It's what makes them rational.
And this is what makes them expectedly realisable.
And this process take place in the largely public transatlantic deliberations on what nature is and what it can become.
Presidents, prime ministers, secretary generals and ministers of defence,
together with sometimes columnists, commentators, and especially NATO's own communiques.
Imagine what NATO's they speak legitimately on NATO's behalf, and they have the power to view it.
And when they speak about what nature is and can become, they often speak of it in a relationship with the West.
They imagine that nature is or can become constantly more than an alliance.
They expect it to be more than an alliance. That they express a should expressed insistence of the Western community.
And therefore investigating historically how these discourses develop, change and modify it.
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.
It makes it possible to chain to trace how the historical emergence of the conditions of possibility for the present emerges.
It makes it possible to write the history of the present. Later today is made possible by past imaginations of history,
and these past imaginations can be investigated by analysing empirically how natural in relation to our issues.
To sum up, was represented as in an intimate relationship with something called the West.
So that leads to my fourth and final point, which is my conclusions.
What about nature and what about its future? What can you say about its future?
Well, first of all, by looking at its history, we can certainly state that its future will be uncertain.
The nature future will be difficult, if not impossible to predict. It will change.
But precisely how it will change is impossible to say. NATO's current future, it is commonly stated, depends on its operation in Afghanistan,
on how nature managed to actually go out of air in a very serious way.
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.
And in the words of first US future McCain,
Canadian Minister of Defence of Nature cannot contribute to the building to building security for the larger international community.
Then what is nature for? And in that sense, Afghanistan is important for nature.
It questions nature, identity. It question what nature is for.
Thus, the future nature is indeed to be found in Afghanistan.
But on the other hand, failed in Afghanistan.
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,
a momentum for imagination for imagination, what nature is and what it should and could become.
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,
a community that is sometimes called the West, sometimes it is called the transatlantic unity.
Sometimes it is called the community of values. Sometimes it's called the security community, a western security community.
Never mind the terms. But the point is that failure in Afghanistan could,
as previous failures have been brought to the fact that this community and the community spirit sparked talked about is not there yet,
that it has not been developed yet, that nature has not yet been brought into the totality of its meaning,
as John Foster Dulles imagined that it would be in the fifties.
Failure in Afghanistan does not spell the end of nature.
Failure in Afghanistan will spell a new beginning because later and some depends on defending and representing it,
reimagining itself as something related to the West.
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.
As long as the West in political discourse can be argued as collapsing, as declining,
as ending, as in austerity, as in its most serious crisis ever, as it has repeatedly been.
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.
In conclusion, NATO's future is imagined and made certain in continued Western uncertainty.
Thank you very much. I hope you have some questions.