| Author (Person) | Bower, Helen | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Publisher | ProQuest Information and Learning | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Series Details | 25.11.02 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Publication Date | 25/11/2002 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Content Type | News, Overview, Topic Guide | In Focus | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) is set to mirror two key developments of the European Union after NATO's 19 member countries agreed to expand the defence alliance and establish a rapid reaction force at the 16th NATO summit in Prague from 21-22 November 2002. NATO leaders have invited seven countries - Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia - to join the alliance with hopes that the new countries could be admitted as soon as 2004, the same year as the planned EU expansion. 2004 has also been set as the deadline by which time a new rapid reaction force should be established, able to be deployed "wherever needed" in the world. Both objectives are widely seen as attempts by the alliance to justify its existence, which has been questioned since the end of the Cold War left NATO the victor but without an enemy. Background Since its establishment in April 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation has been the key provider of security and defence in Europe and the northern Atlantic for over half a century. Set up as relations between the United States and the Soviet Union deteriorated following the beginning of the Berlin blockade in 1948, the organisation is based on the principle of collective security. This means that an armed attack against one or more of the member countries in Europe or North America is considered an attack against them all, and consequently each of them will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area. The break up of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 90s prompted a reappraisal of NATO's role and structure. What was the need for a military defence alliance when there was no longer the nuclear or military threat that there had been? Could the existence of a defence alliance be justified when most nations were seriously cutting their defence budgets? At first, NATO appeared to act as a catalyst for extending security and stability throughout Europe - it began to diversify its tasks so that it began to take on a more co-operational as opposed to military role. It established a process of dialogue and partnership with the states of Central and the Organisation on Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE); and developed a close working relationship with institutions, such as the United Nations and the Western European Union (WEU). Then as the Balkans crisis erupted, NATO found a new role for itself there as the international peacekeeping force. Since 1995 NATO has led a 20,000-strong peacekeeping mission, or Stabilisation Force (SFOR) in Bosnia and Herzegovina that maintains the security environment necessary to enable the country to rebuild after the devastation of years of conflict. As the conflict spread to Kosovo NATO extended its role to there as well, this time actively carrying out a campaign of airstrikes which lasted seventy seven days. The agreement to use NATO force came in March 1999 after peace negotiation talks in Rambouillet and Paris broke down following the Serbian delegation's refusal to sign a peace agreement. Certain sceptics suggested that NATO's involvement in the Kosovo campaign was more to do with the United States seeking to justify the alliance's existence as it approached its 50th birthday rather than because of the help it believed it could offer to the Kosovar Albanians. At the fifteenth summit of NATO in Washington in April 1999, which celebrated fifty successful years of the alliance, NATO members agreed to a number on initiatives aimed at adapting NATO so that it could take on a new role in the changing international environment. This new role would include:
The terrorist attacks in the United States of America on 9 September 2001 and the increasing threat of international terrorism once again raised questions about what role NATO should play in an ever changing international environment. After the event, NATO members invoked Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, the mutual defence clause and offered military supoort to the United States. It seemed that a decade after its traditional role became eroded when the Soviet threat was removed a new task of preventing international terrorism might be presented. Once again, the future role of NATO had been raised and this along with the size of the organisation were to provide the focus for the Prague Summit. Prague Summit: New members, New capabilities Summit meetings of the NATO alliance are relatively rare - there have only been 15 summit meetings in the history of the alliance - and as such their occurrence normally signifies an important development in the evolution of the alliance. In the main countries are represented by their governments at levels suitable to the subject to be discussed and the nature of the decisions to be taken. Alliance decisions are based on consensus among member countries and have the same force regardless of the level at which they are taken which means that, unlike other international organisations, meetings of Heads of State are not necessary for progress to be made. The significance of a summit meeting should not be underestimated therefore and the Prague Summit is no exception. Moreover, the location of the November 2002 Summit in Prague is very symbolic of the changing nature of the alliance. Just over a decade ago, it lay behind the Iron Curtain - a representative of the perceived eastern - and now the inclusion of the Czech Republic's neighbouring countries in the NATO alliance would be one of the issues at the top of the agenda. In fact there were four key items on the agenda: New Threats and Capabilities The threat of international terrorism has been near the top of NATO's agenda since the September 11 attacks in the United States. Following the terrorist atrocity, NATO leaders invoked Article 5 of the Washington Treaty which states that attacks against one are an attack against all member countries. Over the following months, NATO adopted a series of measures aimed at assisting the United States in their "war against terrorism" such as deploying NATO airborne early warning aircraft to the United States and sending an Alliance naval force to the Eastern Mediterranean. At Prague, they hoped to adopt further measures and finalise a strategy aimed at strengthening the Alliance's capabilities for fighting terrorism. In the Prague Summit Declaration the NATO leaders recognised the challenges posed by the new threat of terrorism saying,
In order to ensure that NATO can provide an effective response to any future terrorist attack the NATO members have agreed to enhance a number of their military capabilities. First and foremost, they have agreed to the establishment of a NATO Response Force (NRF) consisting of a technologically advanced, flexible, deployable, interoperable and sustainable force including land, sea, and air elements ready to move quickly to wherever needed, as decided by the Council. The aim is to make the initial capability of this force operational by October 2004 with the full capability available tow years later. NATO leaders also agreed to streamline the alliance's military command arrangements after approving the defence ministers' report. The plan is to develop the transatlantic link, resulting in a significant reduction in headquarters and Combined Air Operations Centres. There will also be two strategic commands, one operational to be headquartered in Belgium, and one functional to be based in the United States. The final details will be worked on by the Council and Defence Planning Committee with a final decision expected in June 2003. Another attempt to improve and develop new military capabilities is the Prague Capabilities Commitment (PCC) which foresees that individual allies will improve their capabilities in the areas of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear defence; intelligence and surveillance; combat effectiveness, including precision guided munitions and suppression of enemy air defences; strategic air and sea lift; and deployable combat support and combat service support units. In order to prepare for an attack against civilians NATO members also agreed their commitment to implementing the Civil Emergency Planning (CEP) Action Plan for the improvement of civil preparedness against possible attacks against the civilian population with chemical, biological or radiological (CBR) agents. Five nuclear, biological and chemical weapons defence initiatives will also be implemented and ways to defend against cyber attacks are also to be explored. Overall the new military capabilities represent significant progress of the alliance. By agreeing to these commitments it would seem that the NATO members have found a way of making the alliance relevant in the 21st Century but the question remains whether the NATO countries will actually honour these commitments? Analysts have already suggested that the threat of terrorism may not be enough to persuade European countries to reorganise their defence spending so that these new capabilities can be achieved. In essence, whilst NATO may have found a way of making a case for its existence in the 21st Century on paper, this has yet to be proved. New members, new relationships Another way in which NATO is seeking to carve a role for itself in the new international environment is by pushing back its borders, embracing countries that formerly belonged to the Warsaw Pact and lay on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain that divided Europe in two symbolising the two enemies of the Cold War and the reason for NATO's existence. Three Eastern European countries - Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic - joined the Alliance in 1999 but another "big bang" enlargement as President Bush calls it is already on the cards. In 1999, NATO set up a Membership Action Plan (MAP) to assist any European country which wished to join the Alliance with political and technical advice and practical assistance. At Prague, an invitation was extended to seven of the ten countries currently participating in the plan to become members of the alliance. They are the three Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as well as Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania. Two other countries who participate in MAP - Albania and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia - have not yet met the criteria (economic, political and military reform) and will have to wait whilst Croatia has just started the process. Accession talks will begin immediately with the seven countries in the hope that the Accession Protocols can be signed by the end of March 2003 and the ratification process completed in time for these countries to join the Alliance by the May 2004 Summit. The belief within NATO is that this latest expansion will encourage the growth of democracy and market economies in the former Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe and by locking them within the alliance all European countries should benefit from greater political relations and more stability on the continent. Moreover, NATO's political weight will be projected further east, up to the Russian border and down to the Black Sea. However what these countries bring in terms of political security, they lack in military power which raises more questions about NATO's capabilities. However, it has been suggested that these issues could be solved by encouraging the new countries to develop specialised forces that would possibly not require as much defence spending. Above all the reasons for expanding the alliance are political not military ones. Looking to the east, NATO's relationship with Russia was also under the spotlight in Prague as it offered a good opportunity to see how relations are progressing. Six months ago the NATO-Russia summit relaunched ties between the alliance and Moscow and the presence of Russian Foreign Minister, Igor Ivanov, at a meeting when an offer of membership was extended to three Baltic Republics indicates that things are going well even if Russia does not publicly support the enlargement and prefers to emphasise the need for progress in military co-operation between Russia and NATO and the common threat that they faced from terrorism. One tense relationship between NATO and a former Eastern country was apparent at the summit meeting when the Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma turned up uninvited. NATO members are concerned that Kuchma may have sold sophisticated radar systems to Iraq and they have not yet received a satisfactory response from the President. A potentially embarrassing situation was cleverly avoided by switching the alphabetical order of countries around the table from English to French so that Blair and Bush were not seated near Kuchma. NATO after Prague The general consensus as the Prague Summit was that it achieved all that it set out to and certainly could become one of the most important summits in the alliance's history. But there remain doubts about whether the organisation, even with new members, new roles and new capabilities, is relevant in a world where the alliance's main threat and the reason why it was set up no longer exists. International terrorism offers a new threat that could justify NATO's continued existence but the alliance must be able to effectively respond and deal with this threat rather than leaving individual Allied countries to act. The real test of Prague's success has surely yet to come. Further information within European Sources Online:
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Helen Bower Background and reporting on the week's main stories in the European Union and the wider Europe. |
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