Primacy Of States' Power In Changing International Structure

Both balance-of-power and balance-of-threat realist theory on alliances attribute the fundamental causes of alignment action among states to the needs of balancing certain common military threat ing-power, and thus predict the loss of cohesion or even the eventual collapse of an alliance as the threat posed by and, then the capability of its adversaries diminish. Accordingly, as a military alliance created by US and the western Europe countries in response to the so-called Soviet-Communism threat after the second world war, the Atlantic Alliance (i.e. US-Europe Alliance), just like the traditional alliance, will also unexceptionally lose its cohesion and eventually collapse as a result of the end of the Cold War, the demise of the Soviet Union and the tremendous transformation of east Europe countries. In fact, that was also the common prediction of many realist scholars after the end of the Cold War.The Atlantic Alliance endured after the end of the Cold War, however. Moreover, the Alliance's institutionalize organization, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), has been presently transformed to be the most important international security institution in Europe. As a consequence, that invited much of criticism of realism explanations for the reasons of alliance's endurance from many western liberalists and constructivists. They criticized realists' argument that states tend to balance against threating power and asserted that realism cannot be used to explain the new developments of alliance politics affairs in Europe after the end of the Cold War. Liberalists argued that security concerns and military considerations hold little sway on the Atlantic Alliance relationship as the realists claimed. Instead, international institutions, high economic interdependence, and the pacifying effects of democracy are the central determinants of state relations among North America and Western Europe countries. The persistence and transformationof NATO, for example, was reckoned to be the necessary outcome under those factors. Even the enlargement of NATO was believed to be the effects of the enlargement of western democratic institution and the free market economic systems. On the other hand, the constructivists emphasized certain non-material factor's decisive effects, such as cultures, norms and identities. They contended that other things being equal, states would prefer to ally with governments whose culture and identity are similar to their own, so that an alliance whose members share similar cultures and identities is likely to be more persistent than an alliance which is created to realize the individual interests of member states, even if the external environment of threat-balancing changes dramatically.Despite of those non-realism criticisms, I will in my thesis put forward a refined realism mode for explaining the persistence and transformation of the Atlantic Alliance under the basis of existing realism alliance theory. The refined explaining mode will focus on the subsequent points: Firstly, it will emphasize the vital effects of the changing international structure, especially America's unipolar hegemonic status, on endurance and transformation of the Atlantic Alliance. Secondly, the pursuit of security and relative power motivates NATO' s member states to endure and reform the Alliance. Thirdly, Western Europe states' recognition of the security function of NATO influences the endurance and transformation of NATO. Lastly, it will emphasize that while the particular international structure provides systemic constraints and fundamentally formulates foreign policies of particular states, the systemic pressures are translated through unit-level intervening variables, and that some unit-level factors largely determine the specific transformation process of the Atlantic Alliance and NATO.Following the paradigm of realism and the analysis approach combining the systematic-level analysis with unit-level analysis, I will in my thesis elaborate several most important aspects of NATO transformation,...