Expanding Alliance: The Impact of the NATO Madrid Summit‪.‬

SEBESTYEN L. v. GORKA is an International Research Fellow at the NATO Defense College. With a decisiveness uncommon in international politics, the Clinton administration publicly committed NATO to expand by "one or more" countries in the year of the alliance's fiftieth anniversary. The political momentum of that commitment so galvanized the machinery of the alliance that by the Madrid Summit of July 1997, Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, after more than five years of lobbying, were finally invited to join the alliance. NATO, now coping with radical internal reforms spearheaded by its latest Secretary General and with its operational christening in the former Yugoslavia, has itself afforded little effort to the question of what happens after Madrid. The advocates of expansion are vindicated, but the eight other states that have applied for full alliance membership were disappointed at Madrid. What does fate hold for them?