This book provides a systematic approach which explores the domestic, regional, and systemic factors shaping Germany's role in NATO. Initially intended as stock taking of West Germany's interest and role in NATO over a forty-year period, this book has been transformed by events into a retrospective of what NATO has meant for West Germany and its partners between 1949 and 1989, and what NATO may mean in the future for a unified Germany, for a Europe spanning the Atlantic to the Urals, and for the USA.

The intention of the participants was to deal with NATO's historical record and its significance for the present and future. For this purpose the early chapters concentrate on such issues as the relations of the larger and smaller nations with NATO and with the United States over the forty-year span. The latter half of the book centers on the continuing issues of the alliance, including relations with the Third World and with the European Community, as well as with such central concerns of the organization as conventional versus nuclear defense, the place of detente in NATO's history, and the record of arms control negotiations with the Warsaw Pact.