NATO Enlargement: Senate Advice and Consent

The Congressional Research Service, a department of the Library of Congress, conducts research and analysis for Congress on a broad range of national and international policy issues. Some of the CRS work is carried out specifically for individual members of Congress or their staff and is confidential. However, there is also much CRS compiled material which is considered public but is not formally published on the CRS website.

For that reason a number of other organisations try to keep track of these publications and make them publicly available via their own websites. Currently, ESO uses the following websites to track these reports and allow access to them in ESO:

EveryCRSReport.com
Federation of American Scientists (FAS)

In some cases hyperlinks allows you to access all versions of a report, including the latest. Note that many reports are periodically updated.The Senate is expected to vote on the resolution for NATO enlargement sometime in early to mid-May. The enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1998 to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, and the invitations extended at the NATO summit in November, 2002, to seven additional states have raised questions about whether Senate advice and consent is necessary when new states join NATO.

This report describes the process that has been used in previous enlargements — Greece and Turkey (1952), the Federal Republic of Germany (1955), Spain (1982), and Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic (1998) — and finds that Senate advice and consent has been sought and given in every instance. The report also discusses the reunification of Germany in 1990. For more on NATO applicants, see CRS Report RL30168. This report will be updated as needed.

• Primary Source

Federation of American Scientists (FAS): Congressional Research Service [CRS] Reports https://fas.org/sgp/crs/index.html

EveryCRSReport.com https://www.everycrsreport.com/

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