Garcevic Gives Talk at Emmanuel College on NATO and the Balkans
Ambassador Vesko Garcevic, Professor of the Practice of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, delivered a lecture about NATO, Eastern Europe and the Balkans at the Institute of Eastern Mediterranean Studies at Emmanuel College on November 15, 2018.
Amb. Garcevic delivered a talk entitled “NATO and the Western Balkans: the Center of Great Power Competition,” in which he stressed that Russia-NATO relations have evolved from a partnership at the beginning of the 1990’s, to a rivalry in 2008, to the open hostility which now characterizes contacts between the two.
Moscow sees NATO as an alliance directed specifically against Russia, and therefore strongly opposes NATO’s open-door policy and enlargement in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, according to Amb. Garcevic.
According to Amb. Garcevic, one of Russia’s goals is to weaken the Euro-Atlantic bond in order to make NATO look obsolete and unnecessary with the hope of replacing the organization with a new European architecture where would Russia play a key roles.
“This is not a new idea,” Amb. Garcevic. “It was born in the mid-90s and was reinvigorated with former Russian President Medvedev’s proposal of a new European security architecture.”
During his diplomatic career, Amb. Vesko Garcevic dealt with issues pertinent to European security and NATO for almost 14 years. In 2004, he was posted in Vienna to serve as Ambassador to Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He had been a Montenegro’s Ambassador to NATO from 2010 until 2014 and served as a Montenegro’s National Coordinator for NATO from 2015 until he joined the faculty at the Pardee School.