英文摘要 |
In the Post-Cold War era, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation is faced with changing missions ahead, shifting from the deterrence against the threat posed by the Soviet-led Communist bloc to the assurance of stability in Central and Eastern Europe, a region that was once antagonistic to the alliance. Whether NATO would be able to adapt to the new challenges, a question that would be closely linked with its survival, would be based upon the organisation's relationship with the CEE nations.The issue on whether NATO should extend its membership to the CEE has been a focus of scholarly debates among theorists and practitioners in international relations. The pros and cons of the enlargement of the alliance revolve around rational factors such as Russia's reaction to the enlargement, advantages and weaknesses caused by the CEE's NATO membership,transaction costs of the enlargement, and alternatives, if any, to NATO expansion.The 1990s turned out to be a critical era for the evolution of NATO enlargement. The alliance seemed undecided in its policy towards expansion in the first half of the decade, and not until the mid -1990s had MATO started to declare, unambiguously, its intention to expand the organization. The alliance has since adopted a two-track policy, namely extending its membership to the CEE step-by-step, while mitigating obstacles towards the enlargement posed by Russia by creating partnership with Russia that would not rule out the prospects of a future, though remotely, membership for Moscow.By verifying the literature of the debates centred on NATO enlargement with the actual developments of the policy, thes article attempts to show that the rational factors proposed by the current literature cannot offer satisfactory explanations for the organisation's extension and that irrational factor, instead, can be seen as a useful alternative for sound interpretations. |