OPEN DOOR POLICY:KEEP IT OPEN OR SHUT IT?

Abstract

Military Organisations, similar to States, possess and reconfigure their identities depending on the context and period in question. This paper seeks to analyze the legitimacy crisis of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). It focusses on the concept of ontological security and its related components of the environment and socialization, to engage NATO’s minor identity crisis during the cold war and major identity crisis after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Subsequently, it will discuss the intra-rivalry camps in NATO, defined as the Anglo-American camp and the Franco- German camp. It will discuss how NATO reconstructed its identity after the cold war by mastering its environment and socializing new members thus providing it with ontological security. It will elucidate the lack of socialization between both historical intra-rivalry camps, precisely after the cold war, by focussing on the process of enlargement known as Open Door policy and the notion of New Europe and the Ukrainian Crisis. At times, the article will appear approximating a classical Strategic Studies paper ,focussing on the importance of geography to speculate whether NATO will endure without the two most important European countries: France and Germany- socializing NATO’s common vision of expansion.