NATO's Neocolonial Discourse and its Resisters: The Case of Montenegro

In March 1999, a very important month in the history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as it marked the start of the first offensive war in its entire existence, the New York Times columnist and foreign affairs expert Thomas L. Friedman wrote an article entitled 'A Manifesto for the Fast World' (Friedman, 1999). He openly confessed that the neoliberal world order which the US political elite was in the process of imposing on the rest of the world (the Pax Americana as it was called by other commentators) could not be constructed without the full force of the US military. In his words, 'the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist - McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell-Douglas, the designer of the F-15' (Van Der Pijl, 2001, 300). This is just one of countless examples both in the corporate media and in US government publications that reveals the intentionally hidden truth about the push to expand NATO into East-Central Europe. These examples expose NATO expansion as the indispensable element of the project to re-colonise the ex-Socialist political space and make it safe not for democracy (as has been claimed), but for the most brutal form of capitalism, which leaves ordinary citizens stripped of the most basic forms of social well-being (health care, job insurance, education, retirement benefits, etc.).