Bilateral alliances with other countries
A country may also try to increase its security by concluding a
bilateral agreement with another country. An alliance is a formal
relationship or agreement by which countries make an agreement with
regard to ensuring military and other assistance in the case of
threat. Small countries such as Slovenia most often conclude such
agreements with larger countries. In practice, this also implies the
peril of dependence on and subordination to the larger ally.
Nevertheless, this method of ensuring security obviously survives
in today's Europe. With the end of the cold war, antagonism came to
an end between the former great alliances: the Warsaw Pact and the
NATO Alliance. The Warsaw Pact disintegrated, and NATO began to
concentrate on its capacity to function more as an organisation to
influence stability and peace in the Euro-Atlantic area than as a
defensive alliance.
The formation of alliances also presupposes the existence of an
actual or potential enemy. Today such oppositions have not appeared in
the relations between European countries, and the clear identification
of an adversary has been exchanged for less definable threats to
security.
In contrast, there have arisen concepts of ensuring security
through cooperation and through integration into international
institutions. In such circumstances the conclusion of alliances would
represent an anachronism, and perhaps even a danger, because alliances
promote counter-alliances.
In actuality, the end of the cold war in Europe did not lead to the
conclusion of new alliances between countries, but instead to the
decided tendency for the countries of Central and Eastern Europe
towards inclusion in institutions that once belonged to the concept of
Western Europe (the EU and NATO). The creation of these new economic,
political and security links has little in common with traditional
methods of establishing ties in alliances.
The majority of European countries that did not belong to Western
Europe in the past are today striving for membership in the EU and the
NATO Alliance, in the process of which their degrees of progress
vary. The countries that lag farthest behind are those that in the
past had to deal with armed conflicts, and in which the processes of
democratisation and the establishment of stable social structures are
still ongoing. West of the line represented by the western borders of
Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova there is the ongoing formation of
a totality connected by economic, political and security links, where
European institutions will play a significant role. In such a
community, defensive alliances between individual countries will
obviously be meaningless in the future.
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