The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (179 page)

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), established in 1949, was the culmination of Western responses to a growing perception of threat from the Soviet Union in the years following the end of the Second World War. It followed on from the beginning of American re-engagement in Europe with Marshall Aid and the Truman Doctrine in 1947, from the formation of the Brussels treaty in 1948 among Britain, France, and
Benelux
, and from the joint allied response to the Berlin blockade in 1948–9. NATO originally had twelve members: the United States, Britain, France, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, and Portugal. Greece and Turkey joined in 1952, the Federal Republic of Germany in 1955, and Spain in 1982. In 1966 General de Gaulle withdrew France from the integrated military commands of NATO, though not from membership in the alliance itself. The parties of NATO agree to treat an attack on any one of them as an attack against all, each member being obliged to assist those attacked by taking ‘such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area’. They agree to settle disputes among themselves by peaceful means, to avoid economic conflict, and to work towards economic collaboration with each other. The North Atlantic Council is the basic political directorate of the alliance, and its military command is centred on the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE).
NATO functioned successfully throughout the
Cold War
as the main bastion of Western defence (and of American containment policy and forward defence) against the Soviet Union. Despite nearly continuous internal wrangling over military policy and burden-sharing, the alliance sustained a solid front against Soviet political and military pressure. It survived the crisis of French military disengagement, and managed to contain, though not to solve, the antagonism of Greece and Turkey. As the European allies recovered from the war, burden sharing became a constant problem, with the United States increasingly resentful of the much larger defence burden on its economy compared to European members who had become equally wealthy.
NATO survived two serious crises over nuclear weapons. The first was in the early and mid-1960s, when the credibility of American military guarantees to Europe was weakened by the Soviet Union's development of the capability to mount nuclear strikes against the United States. This crisis was instrumental in the French withdrawal, but led to the policy of flexible response, which combined conventional defence with threats of nuclear escalation. The second was in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and concerned the decision to deploy cruise and Pershing II theatre nuclear weapons in Europe in response to the Soviet Union's deployment of modern SS20 medium-range ballistic missiles. The deployment was successfully carried out despite widespread public opposition, and marked the failure of the last significant Soviet attempt to split the alliance.
NATO's Cold War role can be summarized by the remark that its purpose was to keep the Americans in, the Germans down, and the Russians out. Between 1949 and 1989 it accomplished all three of these objectives successfully. With the ending of the Cold War, NATO has suffered from a crisis of function. The Soviet threat is unlikely to revive in the short and medium term. Germany is unified and cannot be kept down. The
European Union
hovers on the brink of establishing its own defence and security identity, possibly through the Western European Union, an expanded version of the Brussels Treaty left over from 1955. But despite the loss of its original purpose, and the winding down of American force levels in Europe, NATO is still in demand. Given the potential for turbulence in post-Cold War Europe, most Western European states still feel more comfortable having America ‘in’, and most of the successor states to the Soviet empire also favour a continued American presence. NATO has formed a North Atlantic Co-operation Council (NACC) which serves as a consultative mechanism to bring the ex-communist states into the Western forum. The United States is amenable to a reduced presence, and NATO members as a whole are reluctant to abandon the extensive network of military collaboration and integration that they have built up.
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Rules of conduct determined by reflection upon human nature, the natural conditions of human existence, or the requirements of human flourishing. ‘Nature’ has many meanings in the history of ideas, of which five (which overlap) are especially important in this context:

(1) What is necessary for the development to occur or the aspiration to be realized.
(2) What is common to all persons, or what is common to positive legal systems.
(3) What the earliest conditions of human existence were.
(4) What such an existence would be like in the absence of some event or institution, such as private property or government.
(5) What God intended for man, and what is required of man.

The enforceability of natural law is problematic. In so far as it is associated with the will of God, its sanctions may be attributed to another world. In a secular version, in which natural law is depicted as rationally compelling, rights of enforcement may be attributed to all individuals, or the need for enforceability adduced as an explanation of the artifice of government. Natural law has therefore figured as an explanation of positive law and as a critical guide to its proper content. In so far as it specifies a universal standard, it provides a higher law than that of particular legal systems, and an external standard by which they may be judged.
Liberalism
, in particular, has been shaped partly by a tradition of natural
jurisprudence
, in which the writings of
Grotius
,
Pufendorf
, Barbeyrac ,
Locke
, and Adam
Smith
are particularly important. Contemporary political philosophy, characterized as the exploration of the political consequences of the human condition, may reject many of these understandings of the ‘natural’, but can scarcely escape some depiction, however plastic, of the material of political life. See also
perfectionism
.
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Rights which persons possess by nature: that is, without the intervention of agreement, or in the absence of political and legal institutions. Natural rights are therefore attributable to individuals without distinction of time or place. A contrast may be drawn with positive rights: that is, those rights conferred or guaranteed by a particular legal system. Natural rights have been derided as nonsensical (by
Bentham
) on the ground that it is impossible to speak of rights without enforceable duties, and enforceability exists only when a potentially coercive legal system exists. Furthermore there has been no unanimity even amongst those who recognize natural rights as to their content. Natural rights have been seen as gifts of God, as correlative to duties imposed on man by God, and as concomitants of human nature or reason. We might distinguish:

(1) natural rights;
(2) moral rights; and
(3) legal rights.

The third are those recognized by positive law. The first are those asserted to be universal and thus guides to the proper content of any legal system. The second are those which, it is claimed, should be recognized by particular legal systems or which, while not universal, should be recognized under existing conditions. The classification of rights will depend in part on understandings of their purpose and of their consequences.
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Generally, ‘nature’ connotes what comes as an inborn characteristic, while ‘convention’ connotes that which is suggested by custom and practice. The opposition between these two terms was an important feature of ancient Greek political thought. Until challenged by the
sophists
, political thinkers seem to have thought of moral ideas as being natural in the sense that a morally mature person would come to acquire them. The sophist challenge lay in the idea that perhaps moral ideas were human inventions, which were proposed ultimately because they were convenient. A clear statement of this view is presented by Glaucon and Adeimantus in Book 2 of
Plato's
Republic
. People who have both meted out and received injustice ‘began to set down’ their own laws and compacts and to name what the law commands lawful and just…. [J]ustice … is a mean between what is best—doing injustice without paying the penalty—and what is worst—suffering justice without being able to avenge oneself’. Plato's Socrates devotes the rest of the
Republic
to arguments designed to rebut this and to show that ideas of justice are indeed natural.
The Greek word we translate as ‘nature’ is
physis
, from the verb
phyein
. This shows one of the classic perils of translation. English ‘nature’ is derived from Latin
natus
, ‘born’. So if something comes naturally to us, the basic connotation is that it is inborn. But Greek
phyein
has the additional sense ‘make to grow’.
Aristotle
agreed with Plato that moral qualities were natural, not conventional. But he expresses himself in a biological rather than a metaphysical way when he states ‘Man is by nature a political animal’. This carries the connotation that man grows to full moral maturity only by being the citizen of a Greek
polis
(city-state).
The Greek distinction between the natural and conventional has persisted. For instance, those writers who follow the
organic analogy
are siding with Plato and Aristotle in thinking of the political institutions or ideas they praise as ‘natural’. Those who deny the organic analogy and regard institutions and ideas as human artefacts side with the sophists.