A question that haunted critical minds in the West throughout the Cold War was whether the evolution of two opposing military blocs in Europe meant that the blocs, their ideologies and their strategies, were actually mirror images of one another.

A casual glance at the display in front of the SHAPE Liaison Office in Room 1A711 of the Pentagon in 1996 might have startled an unwary observer. Throughout the year, under the slogan of 'Operation Joint Endeavor – the New NATO', there was a list of non-NATO countries, eighteen including Russia, contributing forces to NATO's operation in Bosnia. The flags of sixteen countries flanked the office, along with colour photographs of Supreme Allied Commanders Europe, past and present. They represented the old NATO. Did then the inclusion of a host of new nations, from former members of the Warsaw Pact to current members of the Arab League, symbolise a NATO ‘enlargement’ without going through the painful process of formal membership? Did their presence signal new functions for the old alliance? Conceivably, both changes were taking place, the latter openly, the former clandestinely.

Thirty years after its adoption in December 1967, the Harmel report can be seen as a turning point in the history of the Alliance. By postulating NATO's compatibility with the changing nature of international relations, the report's conceptual framework provided an answer to the political dimension of the Alliance's mid-1960s crisis – which, fundamentally, was a crisis of legitimacy. From then on, NATO's increasingly active role in East–West relations would complement its original rationale – the defence of its members in the narrow sense – with a new one – the management of European security writ large, thus enhancing, for at least two decades, the Alliance's raison d'être as a whole. With the benefit of hindsight, the long-term significance of the Harmel report is, in fact, indisputable: how could NATO have survived the disappearance of the Soviet threat and the end of East–West conflict had it not been for the post-Cold War expansion of its ‘new tasks’ along the lines of the Harmel report?

This article tries to outline the relevance of NATO for domestic Italian politics by looking both at some of the important foreign policy decisions that the Italian government took in relation to the Alliance, and at the role that NATO may have had as an active player in Italian politics.

With the end of the Cold War, opportunities long foreclosed to Europe came back into view on the horizon. The prospect of Western Europe providing for its own security became a realistic proposition for the first time in fifty years. The French government developed a strategy for replacing US power with a more cohesive European Union security and defence identity which garnered substantial support from other European NATO countries, especially Germany, resulting in an intensive four-year competition over which institution would form the basis of Europe's security and defence capabilities. By the end of 1995, NATO had decisively won this contest, due to rapid reconfiguration of NATO's military structures and the test for both organisations of responding to Yugoslavia's collapse. In the final analysis, it was the military capability of NATO that defeated the French alternative security structure. This article tells the story of that evolution.