NATO: The Bananazation of Europe

NATO has been the U.S.'s premier military alliance since the 1940s. It was to defend Europe against a supposed threat from the Soviet Union. But now, a quarter century after the demise of the U.S.S.R., NATO continues and has expanded its operations far beyond the north Atlantic region from which it drew its name. Meanwhile, within Europe itself NATO has contributed to what Dr. Joan Roelofs calls the "bananazation of Europe."

A professor of Political Science, Dr. Roelofs will examine NATO as a political institution and some of the reasons why Western European social democracies were willing to join and to remain in this alliance – an alliance that has kept them under U.S. tutelage. Are these supposedly social democratic countries really democracies, or are they banana republics?  Is NATO trying to become a world government? These are among the questions, rarely addressed by scholars and journalists, that Dr. Roelofs will address.