Name: ____________________
NATO & The Warsaw Pact
Contents:
 NATO & The Warsaw Pact Overview Readings
o Excerpts/Additional information: How the West was One: Representational Politics of NATO, 1990 &
The Warsaw Pact Today: And Tomorrow?, 1990
 Blank Map of Europe: Geopolitical Divisions of Europe
 Excerpts from: Ideology and the Cold War
Task:
 Read: Overviews of NATO & The Warsaw Pact AND Excerpts/Additional Information boxes
o Answer the following:
1. To what extent are NATO and the Warsaw Pact causes of the Cold War?
2. To what extent are NATO and the Warsaw Pact results of the Cold War?
3. COMPARE & CONTRAST NATO & the Warsaw Pact
a. Be sure to address origins and purposes of the organizations

Map: NATO members vs. Warsaw Pact members (Non-Aligned = Yugoslavia)

Read: Ideology and the Cold War
o Answer the following:
1. What are Kramer’s key points regarding NATO & the Warsaw Pact?
2. Why was NATO formed?
3. Why was the Warsaw Pact formed?
4. How does Mr. Kramer address ideology of the Cold War?
5. How does Mr. Kramer address historiography of the Cold War?
NATO & The Warsaw Pact
Background: In 1949, the prospect of further Communist expansion prompted the United States and 11 other Western
nations to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Soviet Union and its affiliated Communist nations
in Eastern Europe founded a rival alliance, the Warsaw Pact, in 1955. The alignment of nearly every European nation into
one of the two opposing camps formalized the political division of the European continent that had taken place since
World War II (1939-45). This alignment provided the framework for the military standoff that continued throughout the
Cold War (1945-91).
A Divided Europe: Conflict between the Western nations (including the United States, Great Britain, France and other
countries) and the Communist Eastern bloc (led by the Union of Soviet Socialists Republics or USSR) began almost as
soon as the guns fell silent at the end of World War II (1939-45). The USSR oversaw the installation of pro-Soviet
governments in many of the areas it had taken from the Nazis during the war. In response, the U.S. and its Western allies
sought ways to prevent further expansion of Communist influence on the European continent. In 1947, U.S. leaders
introduced the Marshall Plan, a diplomatic initiative that provided aid to friendly nations to help them rebuild their wardamaged infrastructures and economies.
Events of the following year prompted American leaders to adopt a more militaristic stance toward the Soviets. In
February 1948, a coup sponsored by the Soviet Union overthrew the democratic government of Czechoslovakia and
brought that nation firmly into the Communist camp. Within a few days, U.S. leaders agreed to join discussions aimed at
forming a joint security agreement with their European allies. The process gained new urgency in June of that year, when
the USSR cut off ground access to Berlin, forcing the U.S., Britain and France to airlift supplies to their sectors of the
German city, which had been partitioned between the Western Allies and the Soviets following World War II.
http://www.history.com/topics/formation-of-nato-and-warsaw-pact
NATO: The Western Nations Join Forces:
The discussions between the Western nations concluded on April 4, 1949, when the foreign ministers of 12
countries in North America and Western Europe gathered in Washington, D.C., to sign the North Atlantic Treaty. It was
primarily a security pact, with Article 5 stating that a military attack against any of the signatories would be considered an
attack against them all. When U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson (1893-1971) put his signature on the document, it
reflected an important change in American foreign policy. For the first time since the 1700s, the U.S. had formally tied its
security to that of nations in Europe--the continent that had served as the flash point for both world wars.
The original membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) consisted of Belgium, Britain,
Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and the United States. NATO
formed the backbone of the West's military bulwark against the USSR and its allies for the next 40 years, with its
membership growing larger over the course of the Cold War era. Greece and Turkey were admitted in 1952, the Federal
Republic of Germany (West Germany) in 1955 and Spain in 1982. Unhappy with its role in the organization, France opted
to withdraw from military participation in NATO in 1966 and did not return until 1995.
http://www.history.com/topics/formation-of-nato-and-warsaw-pact
Source: Klein, Bradley S, How the West was One: Representational Politics of NATO, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3, Special
Issue: Speaking the Language of Exile: Dissidence in International Studies (Sep., 1990), pp. 311-325, Wikley-Blackwell, Jstor, date accessed:
November 2012, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2600572
Contemporary discussions about the West having "won' the Cold War are framed within a conventional strategic
discourse in which one political-military alliance, NATO, demonstrated its staying power and integrity in the face of its
rival alliance, the Warsaw Pact. NATO's strategic practices, long the object of criticism on the part of revisionist
historians and critical peace researchers, have apparently been vindicated.
Warsaw Pact: The Communist Alliance:
The formation of the Warsaw Pact was in some ways a response to the creation of NATO, although it did not
occur until six years after the Western alliance came into being. It was more directly inspired by the rearming of West
Germany and its admission into NATO in 1955. In the aftermath of World War I and World War II, Soviet leaders felt
very apprehensive about Germany once again becoming a military power--a concern that was shared by many European
nations on both sides of the Cold War divide.
In the mid-1950s, however, the U.S. and a number of other NATO members began to advocate making West
Germany part of the alliance and allowing it to form an army under tight restrictions. The Soviets warned that such a
provocative action would force them to make new security arrangements in their own sphere of influence, and they were
true to their word. West Germany formally joined NATO on May 5, 1955, and the Warsaw Pact was signed less than two
weeks later, on May 14. Joining the USSR in the alliance were Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German
Democratic Republic (East Germany), Hungary, Poland and Romania. This lineup remained constant until the Cold War
ended with the dismantling of all the Communist governments in Eastern Europe in 1989 and 1990.
Like NATO, the Warsaw Pact focused on the objective of creating a coordinated defense among its member
nations in order to deter an enemy attack. There was also an internal security component to the agreement that proved
useful to the USSR. The alliance provided a mechanism for the Soviets to exercise even tighter control over the other
Communist states in Eastern Europe and deter pact members from seeking greater autonomy. When Soviet leaders found
it necessary to use military force to put down revolts in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968, for example,
they presented the action as being carried out by the Warsaw Pact rather than by the USSR alone.
http://www.history.com/topics/formation-of-nato-and-warsaw-pact
Source: Garthoff, Raymond L, The Warsaw Pact Today: And Tomorrow? The Brookings Review, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Summer, 1990), pp. 34-40, The
Brookings Institution Press, Jstor, date accessed: November 2012, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20080163
During its first 30 years the Warsaw Pact served several purposes, primarily in the interests of the Soviet Union, but in some aspects
also for its other members. In a paradoxical way, the Pact also came to serve certain purposes for the United States and NATO, if only
as an opponent against which the Western alliance could be rallied. While the several objectives and functions of the Pact in those
years can be described in various ways, they fall within three major categories: 1. A device for Soviet hegemonic control of its
political, ideological, military, and economic bloc of Eastern European satellites or allies. 2. A Soviet-controlled military command for
contingent military operations, offensive and defensive. 3. A mechanism for coordinating Soviet and Eastern European policies and
actions in various spheres, including foreign policy, internal ideology, and military policy. All of these roles were seen as mutually
reinforcing and as serving overall objectives such as enhancing security and international influence. Ideological, political, economic,
and military solidarity was taken as a given. There were, in practice, flaws…
Geopolitical Divisions in Europe
Source: Kramer, Mark, Ideology and the Cold War, Review of International Studies, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Oct., 1999), pp. 539-576,
Cambridge University Press, Jstor, date of access: November 2013 http://www.jstor.org/stable/20097622
Was the Cold War a contest of two ideologies? liberal democracy and Marxism Leninism? or was it driven mainly by
considerations of power and material interests? No definitive answer to this question has yet emerged. Indeed, deep
divisions remain among Western analysts about the precise role of ideology in the making of the Cold War.
…
The power vacuum in Europe after World War II eventually induced both super powers to seek European allies against
one another. The disparate geopolitical circumstances that the two countries faced were bound to have some effect on the
types of alliances they sought. In the United States, many officials and legislators initially were reluctant to maintain a
permanent military presence in Europe. They planned instead to help the West European states themselves acquire the
wherewithal to sustain a viable balance against the Soviet Union. Not until after the outbreak of the Korean War in June
1950 did US perceptions of the Soviet threat change enough to generate widespread support for a huge increase in the US
military commitment to Western Europe. By that point, US officials already sensed, from the Berlin crisis of 1948-49, that
the United States would need an extensive network of military bases in Western Europe if it wished to deter or rebuff
Soviet probes on the continent. The increased deployment of US troops and weapons in Europe from late 1950 on was
geared toward that end, and was also intended to reassure the West Europeans of the strength of the US commitment to
their defence. That commitment had been nominally codified in April 1949 primarily at the West Europeans' initiative
with the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), but it was not until the early 1950s, after the
shock of Korea, that the United States began putting up the resources needed to fulfill its military obligations to NATO.
The Soviet Union, as the dominant European power, had less intrinsic need to deploy troops and weapons far outside its
western borders, but until the early 1990s several hundred thousand Soviet soldiers were stationed at high alert in East
Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania (until 1958), and Czechoslovakia (after 1968). One of the main rationales for this
was purely strategic: The Soviet-led alliance in Eastern Europe, which initially was based on an interlocking series of
bilateral defence agreements and was then formally constituted in May 1955 as the Warsaw Treaty Organization (or
Warsaw Pact, for short), started out primarily as a buffer zone for the Soviet Union against (West) Germany, rather than
as a full-fledged military organization. For much the same reason, the Warsaw Pact consistently emphasized rapid
offensive operations that would keep any fighting as far away as possible from Soviet territory. These features of the Pact
can be explained by the geopolitical circumstances that the Soviet Union faced. Almost any government in Moscow
would have been inclined to pursue similar arrangements.
…
Two explanations of the discrepancy between NATO and the Warsaw Pact have been proposed: one based on ideology,
the other on power. The importance of ideology in alliance management has been emphasized by John Gaddis*, among
others. In his latest reassessment of the Cold War, Gaddis claims that NATO was far more flexible and open than the
Warsaw Pact because Americans ‘were, by habit and history, democratic in their politics’. This ingrained democratic
ethos, he writes, prompted ‘the United States [to] permit [the West Europeans] a surprising amount of influence over
[NATO's] structure and strategies’. US officials, Gaddis adds, 'were used to the bargaining and deal-making, the coercion
and conciliation, that routinely takes place within [a democratic] system. They did not automatically regard resistance as
treason'. Gaddis contrasts this with the tyrannical nature of Soviet Communism, which, in his view, guaranteed that
Soviet leaders would use an equally heavy-handed and ideologically driven approach within the Warsaw Pact: 'The
Russians, coming out of an authoritarian tradition, knew of no way to deal with independent thinking other than to
smother it. The slightest signs of autonomy . . . were heresy, to be rooted out with all the thoroughness of the Spanish
Inquisition. The result was surely subservience, but it was never self-organization'.49 The implication of Gaddis's
argument, as he himself notes, is that 'democracy proved superior to autocracy in maintaining coalitions'.50
The competing explanations of why NATO and the Warsaw Pact were so different. This explanation not only
deemphasizes ideology, but leaves it out altogether. Proponents argue that the disparity can be attributed to the simple fact
that Soviet preponderance in the Warsaw Pact was far greater than US preponderance in NATO. The difference in relative
power guaranteed that the United States had to negotiate with its allies on more equal terms than the Soviet Union did
with its allies. Differences in ideology, the argument goes, were irrelevant.
* John Lewis Gaddis is a noted historian of the Cold War and grand strategy who has been hailed as the "Dean of Cold War
Historians" by The New York Times. He is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University. He is
also the official biographer of the seminal 20th-century American statesman George F. Kennan. His biography of Kennan won the
Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2012
Name: ____________________
NATO & The Warsaw Pact
Overviews of NATO & The Warsaw Pact AND Excerpts/Additional Information boxes Questions
1. To what extent are NATO and the Warsaw Pact causes of the Cold War?
2. To what extent are NATO and the Warsaw Pact results of the Cold War?
3. COMPARE & CONTRAST NATO & the Warsaw Pact
o Be sure to address origins and purposes of the organizations
Ideology and the Cold War Questions:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
What are Kramer’s key points regarding NATO & the Warsaw Pact?
Why was NATO formed?
Why was the Warsaw Pact formed?
How does Mr. Kramer address ideology of the Cold War?
How does Mr. Kramer address historiography of the Cold War?