Germany and NATO: From “cooptation” to equality

Abstract

This work* is divided into two distinct parts: a historical view of di plomacy and German military strategy during the Weimar and the post 1945 periods; and a lengthy theoretical epilogue entitled "Towards a Supranational Sociology." The sociologist Stanford M. Lyman of Florida Atlantic University wrote the text of his tract on German foreign pol icy?covering the Weimar period, German rearmament, NATO military strategy, and German society and politics in the 1950s?in 1957 as a Mas ter's Thesis at the University of California at Berkeley; the manuscript (later combined with the theoretical "Epilogue" section), was not published until 1995. The list of colleagues and teachers with whom Lyman connects himself in the Preface, including the dissertation adviser Ernst B. Haas, is highly impressive and the reader has no doubt that this 1995 publication forms part of a long and distinguished scholarly record. The Introduction and Epilogue were written in 1988 and are less rele vant to the actual topic advertised in the title of the book, Germany and NATO, than are chapters 1 through 5. Because they have been published in their original form and no recent secondary literature has been consid ered, for today's reader these chapters have the character of a historical source rather than of a current piece of scholarship. This fact does not, however, detract in the slightest from their value in the 1990s, for two rea sons: first, it is interesting to consider the views of Germany and NATO which were in circulation before NATO proved to be such a great success in creating security and lasting peace in Europe; and second, because it is striking how many of the issues which required urgent attention at the be ginning of the Cold War are once again at the forefront of discussion now that the Cold War is over and Eastern Europe is again part of the free world.