This paper focuses on divergences in Europeans’ attitudes towards NATO with specific reference to perception of contemporary hard and soft security challenges, and the legitimacy of NATO when it comes to military and non-military operations. In international relations concepts of threats and challenges have shown a great variety of actors and issues. In particular, in the post-September 11 period threats that challenge at various levels of analysis have no physical boundaries, armies and states. Moreover, international community lacks a coherent attitude towards how to fight these challenges. The common denominator of the new challenges, however, has been the shared understanding about the necessity of a coordinated response at the international level. For a security alliance as such, a new global ‘leadership’ phenomenon has become a sine qua non. An indispensable pillar of European foreign policy has historically been the transatlantic partnership. Yet, this has become more frequently questioned in the post-September era. September 11 attacks have clearly shown how unprepared and fragile was the modern and industrialized states vis-à-vis the non-conventional threats. The new global security agenda have pointed to the fact that it was inevitable not to engage in multilateral efforts to fight against contemporary security threats. This has brought about the issue of global response at the political and public agenda especially in western liberal democracies. Recent polls suggest that pluralities of Europeans support a more independent approach within the transatlantic partnership in security and diplomatic affairs. At a time when there are several problematic issues concerning NATO such as by whom and how NATO should be authorized, the liabilities of the member states and beyond everything on what grounds should NATO intervene militarily into conflicts when faced with both military and non-military security challenges, citizen support for NATO becomes critically important. This paper analyses the essentiality of NATO as perceived by European public opinion concerning NATO’s capacities to deal with hard and soft security challenges. Associating NATO with source of international legitimacy for military operations, and it is a platform to obtain common decisions. It analyses public opinion on through the empirical study of longitudinal survey data. Using Transatlantic Trends Survey data (2004-2012) through logit regression analysis it maps out public opinion on NATO, focusing on the particular concepts of alliances, threat perception and global leadership within the scope of NATO’s essentiality for future global security order.
