Garčević Discusses NATO Enlargement and War in Ukraine
On August 24, 2022, Ambassador Vesko Garčević, Professor of the Practice of International Relations at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, participated in a BU Metropolitan College Evergreen program seminar during which he discussed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) expansion and how it may have impacted the war in Ukraine.
Metropolitan College’s Evergreen Program serves nontraditional lifelong learners by giving those ages 58 and older affordable opportunities to join Boston University students in the classroom, where they can audit courses and participate in class discussions.
While discussing the time when the idea of NATO enlargement was launched in the last decade of the 20th century, Garčević pointed out that the relations between Russia and the West were not a zero-sum game as popular narratives today describe it. Moscow had a strong interest to have a say as an equal partner in decision-making on major international issues and therefore cooperated with the West.
With the beginning of the European Union (EU)/NATO enlargement debate, Moscow sought to institutionalize cooperation and develop mechanisms for political consultation, joint decision-making, and joint action with both NATO and the EU. This led to complex arrangements during the late 1990s – ones that allowed the Kremlin and the NATO Alliance to cooperatively manage the first waves of NATO enlargement.
Details of the Evergreen event can be found on BU Metropolitan College’s website.
During his diplomatic career, Ambassador Vesko Garčević 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 Montenegro’s Ambassador to NATO from 2010 until 2014 and served as Montenegro’s National Coordinator for NATO from 2015 until he joined the faculty at the Pardee School. Learn more about Ambassador Garčević on his faculty profile.