The Membership Question and Neo-Enlargement, 1948–9

Abstract

George Kennan, a prominent member of the State Department team that negotiated the North Atlantic Treaty (and a long-standing critic of NATO), has remarked that one of the most difficult parts of treaty negotiations is not who to include but who to exclude: who is to be left out, and on what grounds?1 Kennan reasoned, with consistency but with little success, that a North Atlantic Treaty should be strictly geographical in membership and thus composed only of states ‘whose shores were washed by the waters of the North Atlantic’. This would have the advantages of (a) being clearly a defensive pact and therefore not likely to provoke the Soviet Union into a sort of competition for allies; and (b) possessing solidly delineated membership criteria and therefore not subject to grey areas (it would not, for example, include Italy, Greece or Turkey). Kennan argued that: A particularly unfortunate effect of going beyond the North Atlantic area would be that we would thereby raise for every country in Europe the question: to belong or not to belong… If individual countries rejected membership or were refused membership, the Russians could make political capital out of this, either way.2