| Summary/Abstract |
With the end of the Cold War, it seemed that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had successfully achieved its purpose, above all containing the USSR, and could enter the trash can of history. Instead, the organization spent the next quarter century looking for a role for itself. It faced an existential crisis of purpose. In the mid-1990s Christopher Coker warned of the "twilight of the West," having in mind not Western civilization as such, whose decline had long ago been anticipated by Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, but the Atlantic community as the political and cultural foundation of NATO. Coker meticulously described how the idea of an "Atlantic community" had to be constructed in the post-war years, and did not enjoy the automatic allegiance of its members, in particular in Europe. It was ultimately the Soviet threat that kept the alliance together, although it was challenged by alternative projects, above all the Gaullist vision of an independent Europe responsible for its own security that at its most expensive included the Soviet Union and at its most exclusive was able to manage its affairs without the United States. By the end of the Cold War, moreover, the countries making up the alliance were undergoing major demographic changes that turned them into multicultural societies, with diverse orientations that weakened the traditional focus on Atlantic security. On this basis,
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