NATO and Post-Cold War Burden-Sharing

Abstract

NATO was taken by surprise by the events surrounding the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. No official anticipated the speed with which the peaceful turmoil in central and eastern Europe took place. At the same time, while NATO discussed how to respond to those events, a major ethnic conflict exploded in the Balkans. Initial attempts were undertaken by the international community to contain the violence, first by the United Nations and later by NATO. In 1992, the UN security council authorized the deployment of a UN peacekeeping force, the so-called protection force (UNPROFOR). This was a 38,5 9 9 -strong multinational force under chapter VI of the UN charter. The force was mandated to ensure the demilitarization of the three protected areas in Croatia as well as to provide safety for all persons in those zones. While NATO as an international organization was not part of UNPROFOR directly, most of its constituent states were and made troops and equipment available. The top three were France, 4493; the United Kingdom, 3405; and Canada, 2091. When UNPROFOR was unsuccessful in containing the violence in 1994, NATO took over that responsibility and assembled a considerable force to enforce peace in the Balkans.1 This mandate was in NATO's interest as the Balkan peninsula was in close proximity to NATO territory and thus posed a spillover threat. It also spoke to the new role of the alliance as a crisis manager in international security affairs post-1989. This is a role that NATO gave itself at the Rome summit in 1991.While NATO's peacekeeping and peace-enforcement operations in Bosnia, Croatia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and Kosovo are well documented in the literature, the question of how the internal burden of NATO activities was shared post-1990 has not attracted much scholarship.2 This is a significant oversight for at least three reasons: first, the issue of NATO burden-sharing in the post-Cold War era remains controversial as larger member-states such as the US and the UK downsized their armed forces by up to 40 percent (see table 1 below) and put pressure on smaller states to increase their commitments to collective defence. Second, after 1989, geopolitical changes in the international security environment called into question the raison d'etre of NATO as a defence alliance. These forces of transformation also affected the perception of international threats, the meaning of security and power, and the role and functions of armed services.3 Historically, the amount of military equipment, the size of the armed forces, and the level of defence spending in relation to a country's GDP have been used as the primary indicators for measuring allied contributions to collective defence in the Cold War. However, these determinants, one might contend, have become outdated in the post-Cold War era. In addition, using these old indicators and applying them in a postCold War security environment may not adequately reflect the level of burden- sharing of the alliance's smaller member- states. Canada is one of those countries and has been criticized for not doing enough for the alliance. And finally, an analysis of the share of burdens and commitments to the alliance in the 1990s by each member-state can be seen as vital to full comprehension of the extent of NATO's current role in and pledges to Afghanistan. In other words, an examination of the 1990s gives one a better understanding of member- states' commitments to the current mission in Afghanistan.Against this backdrop, this article asks the following questions: what was the distribution of the Atlantic burden between 1989 and 2001?4 More specifically, what was the level of burden that Canada - as a medium-sized NATO country - shouldered in NATO in the 1990s?In the Canadian foreign policy literature, it has been suggested that in the 1990s Canada became the slacker of transatlantica, especially after the government decided to close its two forward-operating bases in Germany in 1994. …