The Parallel History Project on Cooperative Security (PHP) is an open source website reference compilation, research project, and analysis nexus[ clarification needed ] sparked by the progressive increase in the declassification of NATO and Soviet bloc documents related to Cold War activities, as viewed by both sides. Currently, research into Soviet bloc archives has expanded the project's scope to the Global Cold War, with views specifically on the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia.
According to the site:
[PHP] seeks to collect, analyze, and interpret these premier sources for the study of contemporary international history. By relating them to current security issues, the PHP enhances their understanding by highlighting how they differ from the recent past. It explores how the different alliance experiences have influenced the attitudes and behavior of the present members of the enlarged NATO and the Partnership for Peace (PfP).
The Parallel History Project is based at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland and is run in partnership with the International Relations and Security Network (ISN) and the Center for Security Studies (CSS). Vojtech Mastny has been the project's coordinator.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance of 31 member states – 29 European and two North American. Established in the aftermath of World War II, the organization implemented the North Atlantic Treaty, signed in Washington, D.C., on 4 April 1949. NATO is a collective security system: its independent member states agree to defend each other against attacks by third parties. During the Cold War, NATO operated as a check on the threat posed by the Soviet Union. The alliance remained in place after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact and has been involved in military operations in the Balkans, the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. The organization's motto is animus in consulendo liber.
The Warsaw Pact (WP), formally the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance (TFCMA), was a collective defense treaty signed in Warsaw, Poland, between the Soviet Union and seven other Eastern Bloc socialist republics of Central and Eastern Europe in May 1955, during the Cold War. The term "Warsaw Pact" commonly refers to both the treaty itself and its resultant defensive alliance, the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO). The Warsaw Pact was the military and economic complement to the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), the regional economic organization for the Eastern Bloc states of Central and Eastern Europe.
The Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC) is a post–Cold War, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) institution. The EAPC is a multilateral forum created to improve relations between NATO and non-NATO countries in Europe and Central Asia. States meet to cooperate and discuss political and security issues. It was formed on 29 May 1997 at a Ministers’ meeting held in Sintra, Portugal, as the successor to the North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC), which was created in 1991.
The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc, that started in 1947 after the end of World War II and lasted to 1991.
The Partnership for Peace is a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) program aimed at creating trust and cooperation between the member states of NATO and other states mostly in Europe, including post-Soviet states; 19 states are members. The program contains 6 areas of cooperation, which aims to build relationships with partners through military-to-military cooperation on training, exercises, disaster planning and response, science and environmental issues, professionalization, policy planning, and relations with civilian government. During policy negotiations in the 1990s, a primary controversy regarding PfP was its ability to be interpreted as a program that is a stepping stone for joining NATO with full Article 5 guarantees.
Atlanticism, also known as Transatlanticism, is the ideology which advocates a close alliance between nations in Northern America and in Europe on political, economic, and defense issues. The purpose is to maintain or increase the security and prosperity of the participating countries and protect liberal democracy and the progressive values of an open society that unite them under multiculturalism. The term derives from the North Atlantic Ocean, which is bordered by North America and Europe.
Operation Gladio was the codename for clandestine "stay-behind" operations of armed resistance that were organized by the Western Union (WU), and subsequently by NATO and by the CIA, in collaboration with several European intelligence agencies during the Cold War. Although Gladio specifically refers to the Italian branch of the NATO stay-behind organizations, Operation Gladio is used as an informal name for all of them. Stay-behind operations were prepared in many NATO member countries, and in some neutral countries.
Andrei Vladimirovich Kozyrev is a Russian politician who served as the former and the first Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation under President Boris Yeltsin, in office for the Russian SFSR from October 1990 and, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, from 1992 until January 1996 for Russia. In his position, he was credited with developing Russia's foreign policy immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, although many in Russia have criticized him for being weak and not assertive enough in defending Russian interests in the face of NATO in places such as Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Ba'athist Iraq.
Able Archer 83 was the annual NATO Able Archer exercise conducted in November 1983. The purpose for the command post exercise, like previous years, was to simulate a period of conflict escalation, culminating in the US military attaining a simulated DEFCON 1 coordinated nuclear attack. The five-day exercise, which involved NATO commands throughout Western Europe, was coordinated from the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) headquarters in Casteau, Belgium.
The Geneva Summit of 1955 was a Cold War-era meeting in Geneva, Switzerland. Held on July 18, 1955, it was a meeting of "The Big Four": President Dwight D. Eisenhower of the United States, Prime Minister Anthony Eden of Britain, Premier Nikolai A. Bulganin of the Soviet Union, and Prime Minister Edgar Faure of France. They were accompanied by the foreign ministers of the four powers : John Foster Dulles, Harold Macmillan, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Antoine Pinay. Also in attendance was Nikita Khrushchev, de facto leader of the Soviet Union.
The State Partnership Program (SPP) is a joint program of the United States Department of Defense (DoD) and the individual states, territories, and District of Columbia. The program and the concept originated in 1993 as a simplified form of the previously established (1992) Joint Contact Team Program (JCTP). The JCTP aimed at assisting former Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union Republics, now independent, to form democracies and defense forces of their own. It featured long-term presence of extensive and expensive teams of advisory specialists. The SPP shortened the advisory presence to a United States National Guard unit of a designated state, called a partner, which would conduct joint exercises with the host. It is cheaper, has a lesser American presence, and can comprise contacts with civilian agencies. Today both programs are funded.
NATO is a military alliance of thirty-one European and North American countries that constitutes a system of collective defense. The process of joining the alliance is governed by Article 10 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which allows for the invitation of "other European States" only and by subsequent agreements. Countries wishing to join must meet certain requirements and complete a multi-step process involving political dialog and military integration. The accession process is overseen by the North Atlantic Council, NATO's governing body. NATO was formed in 1949 with twelve founding members and has added new members nine times. The first additions were Greece and Turkey in 1952. In May 1955, West Germany joined NATO, which was one of the conditions agreed to as part of the end of the country's occupation by France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, prompting the Soviet Union to form its own collective security alliance later that month. Following the end of the Franco regime, newly democratic Spain chose to join NATO in 1982.
Relations between the NATO military alliance and the Russian Federation were established in 1991 within the framework of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council. In 1994, Russia joined the Partnership for Peace program, and on 27 May 1997, the NATO–Russia Founding Act (NRFA) was signed at the 1997 Paris NATO Summit in France, enabling the creation of the NATO–Russia Permanent Joint Council (NRPJC). Through the early part of 2010s NATO and Russia signed several additional agreements on cooperation. The NRPJC was replaced in 2002 by the NATO–Russia Council (NRC), which was established in an effort to partner on security issues and joint projects together.
The Polish crisis of 1980–1981, associated with the emergence of the Solidarity mass movement in the Polish People's Republic, challenged the rule of the Polish United Workers' Party and Poland's alignment with the Soviet Union. For the first time however, the Kremlin abstained from military intervention, unlike on previous occasions such as the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and thus left the Polish leadership under General Wojciech Jaruzelski to impose martial law to deal with the opposition on their own.
Vojtech Mastny is an American historian of Czech descent, professor of political science and international relations, specializing in the history of the Cold War. He has been considered one of the leading American authorities on Soviet affairs. Mastny received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and has been professor of history and international relations at Columbia, University of Illinois, Boston University and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, as well as professor of strategy at U.S. Naval War College, Fulbright professor at the University of Bonn, senior research scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and senior fellow at the National Security Archive. He is the coordinator of the Parallel History Project. In 1996-1998 he was the first researcher awarded Manfred Wörner Fellowship by NATO. Mastny's books include Continental Europe under Nazi Rule, which won him the Clarke F. Ansley award in 1971, Russia's Road to the Cold War (1979), The Helsinki Process and the Reintegration of Europe (1992) and The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years, which won the American Historical Association's 1997 George L. Beer Prize.
Ola Tunander is a research professor emeritus at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. He worked as a researcher at PRIO in the period 1987-2016. He is the son of Museum Director Ingemar Tunander and his first wife Gunvor. Tunander is married to the Chinese scholar Yao Xiaoling. He has written and edited 12 books and a number of articles on security politics, naval strategy, submarine operations, geopolitics, dual state, psychological operations (PSYOP) and Cold War history.
The post–Cold War era is a period of history that follows the end of the Cold War, which represents history after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. This period saw many former Soviet republics become sovereign nations, as well as the introduction of market economies in eastern Europe. This period also marked the United States becoming the world's sole superpower.
The Partnership for Peace Consortium is a network of over 800 defense academies and security studies institutes across 60 countries. Founded in 1998 during the NATO Summit, the PfPC was chartered to promote defense institution building and foster regional stability through multinational education and research, which the PfPC accomplishes via a network of educators and researchers. It is based at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch, Germany. According to the PfPC Annual Report of 2012, in 2012 eight hundred defense academies and security studies institutes in 59 countries worked with the PfPC in 69 defense education/defense institution building and policy-relevant events. The Consortium publishes an academic quarterly journal CONNECTIONS in English and Russian. The journal is run by an international Editorial Board of experts and is distributed to over 1,000 institutions in 54 countries.
The Center for Security Studies (CSS) is a center at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, which focuses on Swiss and international security.
Finland–Yugoslavia relations were historical foreign relations between Finland and now split-up Kingdom of Yugoslavia or Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Both countries gained their independence during or in the immediate aftermath of the World War I and the collapse of Austria-Hungary (Yugoslavia) or Russian Empire (Finland). Two parties established formal bilateral relations in 1928. Two countries developed their relations after the end of the World War II and 1948 Tito–Stalin split. At the time neither one of them was a part of either Eastern or Western Bloc in the Cold War divided Europe. Both countries perceived development of relations among non-bloc neutral European states as a way to avoid isolation and preserve certain level of independence without alienating major powers. Belgrade however perceived that in deeply divided Europe there was shrinking maneuvering space for neutral countries and followed the development of what will be called process of Finlandization with great concern. It therefore turned its focus on new allies among former colonies and mandate territories outside of Europe where it developed its policy of equidistant active neutrality via its activities in the newly founded Non-Aligned Movement.