NATO’s Future: Regeneration, Stable Condition, or Terminal Decline?
11:00 a.m., Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2008
Webster Hall Auditorium
Admission: free

The status of NATO was placed into question after the unification of Germany, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and the demise of the Soviet Union. NATO was transformed, virtually overnight, from a compulsory alliance driven by the exigencies of the bipolar distribution of power sharpened by ideological enmity into a voluntary alliance lacking a specific or immediate military opponent. Many claimed that NATO, as an artifact of the Cold War, would enter into a stage of terminal decline. The deep and acrimonious split in the Atlantic Alliance over the correct course to meet the putative threat posed by Iraq seemed to support those anticipating NATO’s inevitable decline. Those advancing the terminal decline hypothesis adhere primarily to the neorealist school of international relations, while those suggesting that NATO is, at a minimum, in stable condition or undergoing a process of institutional and substantive regeneration are drawn from the neoliberal institutionalist and social constructivist schools. The supply and demand for NATO enlargement provide a fertile testing ground for the central hypotheses produced by each theory. Somewhat surprisingly, neorealism and social constructivism support the contention that NATO is either in stable condition or a process of terminal decline, respectively, while neoliberal institutionalism as expected views NATO as undergoing a process of regeneration.

James Sperling is a professor of political science at the University of Akron and an internationally recognized expert on German foreign policy. He received his M.A. from the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and his Ph.D. from the University of California-Santa Barbara. He also received graduate training at Edinburgh University (Scotland), the Graduate Institute of International Studies (Geneva), and as a Fulbright-Hays Scholar at the University of Kiel (Germany). Dr. Sperling is the coauthor of EU Security Governance (2007) and Recasting the European Order (1997). He has also edited or co-edited over 10 books, including Global Security Governance (2007) and Germany at Fifty-Five: Berlin ist nicht Bonn? (2004).