Signature of the North Atlantic Treaty: 4 April 1949 Map of the world with NATO member countries highlighted
Posted on: 4 April 2019
Today, NATO is 70, its membership at 29. In recent years NATO’s remit and solidarity has been adapted, confirmed, extended and questioned, but for most members it remains the essential bedrock of Western security. The Cold War is long over, but some East-West tensions persist, and NATO plays a key role elsewhere, for example in Afghanistan. Yet when we look round the world in 2019, other regions loom large on the global security landscape: for example, Latin America, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific including China. On NATO’s 70th birthday, it is interesting to note whether and how those regions figured in the context of the negotiations leading up to the signature of the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949. Latin America The NATO Treaty was based partly on the Rio Treaty (Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance), signed on 2 September 1947 by 19 states including the USA.1 The central principle was that an attack on any member would be taken as an attack on all (though a 2/3 majority was required for action to be taken, and each state could decide what to do). Argentina wanted this to apply only to aggression by non-American states, but others, suspicious of the intentions of President Peron, resisted this. The Rio Treaty came into force on 3 February 1948, and two days later Belgian Prime Minister Spaak suggested to Hector McNeil, Foreign Office Minister of State, that a similar pact would be attractive to the US and help draw them into guaranteeing Western European security. They agreed that any agreement would need to provide for more rapid action, unanimously and more precisely defined, but that Rio was a good precedent to follow.2 Africa A number of prospective NATO members, including Britain, still had African colonies while the North Atlantic Treaty was being negotiated. Ernest Bevin thought if Western European countries could mobilise their colonial resources in support of a security pact, overall population and production capacity could counterbalance the Soviet bloc. 3 But US policy was resolutely anti-imperialist and any reference to colonies threatened to jeopardise American support for mutual defence arrangements. Nor did the Americans want to guarantee the security of European territories on the African mainland: after all, they said, they did not plan to include Hawaii. On the other hand, the US was interested in strategic raw materials in Africa, and in establishing American bases in others’ colonial territories. Western European countries
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