The future of NATO: between territorial defense and out-of-area operations

This diploma thesis embraces the development of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) emphasizing the Alliance's capability to adequately adapt and react to the rapidly growing number of security challenges in our globalized world. Using the historical turning points and the experiences gained during the various conflicts the dissertation's focus is on the future of NATO in the "era of unpeace" where it is required to "defend against known unknowns" (Jankowski and Stepniewski (ed.) 2021). The first chapter of the thesis consists of an overview of the four main stages of the Alliance's development. The first phase (1949-1990) is the Cold War period, when the member states' emphasis was to build a strong collective defence strategy but at the same time, they established a liberal democratic system and accepted common values from the institutional point of view. The new members have adopted these governance standards and institutions, proved the effective assertion of the liberal institutionalism doctrine but never gave up military realism. The second stage (1990-2001) was represented by emerging new security challenges due to the fact that the bipolar world order had came to an end and the Alliance reacted to this by spreading the "security umbrella" with crisis management policies and..