All change for the new millennium

Date: 23/05/1996

THE end of the Cold War in Eastern Europe is forcing NATO to change its shape, while a civil war in Central Europe has caused the alliance to change its mission.

Bosnia-Herzegovina has altered the organisation, perhaps irrevocably. Since United Nations peacekeeping troops removed their blue helmets and donned khaki ones to become the NATO international peacekeeping force (IFOR) - effectively making the western alliance the UN's armed wing - NATO has taken on roles it never had before.

War in the former Yugoslavia caused it to go 'out of area' for the first time (although NATO meeting rooms were the scene of some Gulf War planning, operations were never carried out in the name of the alliance) and its air strikes represented the first use of force in the alliance's 47-year history.

As peacekeepers, NATO troops tasked with separating warring militias have added civilian tasks: transporting war criminals, patrolling areas and reporting findings to institutions such as the UN and the war crimes tribunal, building bridges, controlling checkpoints and monitoring refugee traffic.

NATO officials refute suggestions that the alliance has become the civilian boss of peace implementation efforts.

Bosnia has helped move the organisation's public image away from that of a military machine, but officials insist that it has, in fact, always been that way.

“This notion of NATO as a military organisation is narrow and dated,” said NATO Assistant Secretary-General Gebhardt von Moltke only last week. “NATO is a political organisation with the military means for its own defence.”

One of his predecessors, Amedeo de Franchis, describes NATO's role as “the political management of security”, explaining that while the combined military capacity of alliance members made the organisation credible during the Cold War, the institution is actually a political grouping. “Military force has always been used and seen by NATO in a political context,” he says.

Alliance members are now being called on to make two real political decisions: whether to erase the old boundaries dividing western from Eastern Europe (and risk angering Moscow in the process), and whether to change NATO's image as a mighty power to that of a multinational peacekeeping unit much like any other.

“NATO has recycled itself very well,” said de Franchis, who was under-secretary-general from 1989 to 1994. “The NATO of 1989 could not have conducted a Yugoslavia operation. It was a sort of Great Wall of China, its forces deployed along a single frontier. The new forces are multi-purpose, more mobile, and the command structures are different.”

The new structures not only allow for tailor-made chains of command for specific manoeuvres or operations, but may also usher in an entirely new product: a European defence structure linked to - but less dependent on - the United States.

Establishing a 'European pillar' in NATO is a key goal of European governments anxious to assert the authority of their own political grouping, the European Union. Efforts to develop the Western European Union (WEU) as the EU's armed branch are progressively being amended to acknowledge the fact that the continent cannot develop a security structure outside NATO.

The European pillar will get a big boost when NATO foreign ministers meet early next month (3-4 June) in Berlin. There, they are expected to approve formally the notion of a Combined Joint Task

Force (CJTF). Washington's answer to Europeans champing at the bit for some independence is that the agreement would allow European governments to use (US-owned) NATO assets without US participation.

The CJTF agreement contains three politically significant clauses: first, that the European defence identity will be “politically visible and operationally efficient” - in other words, real rather than symbolic; second, that it does not imply that the 100,000 American troops stationed in Europe will leave; and third, that the EU is not setting up shop to compete with the US.

While the structure would give Europe some independence, it would maintain the transatlantic marriage. The US would still have a veto over European desires to use the NATO assets and, once approved, would have constant oversight and the right to review operations.

The Union has abandoned the idea of creating a WEU command structure that duplicates that of NATO or competes with it, as much for financial as for political reasons. The notion of a permanent European chain of command within NATO has also been rejected.

But the alliance is now making room for European initiatives which might involve the creation of operation-specific chains of command and even political and military direction from the WEU.

An (American) NATO general would always be informed - as one European diplomat put it, “that's a fact of life” - but missions could look more European.

“The European profile will be more obvious,” said the diplomat.

Hopes of a real European image, and the realisation that there is no longer any point in debating whether the US should be involved in European security, have been two of the key factors behind France's decision to return to NATO after a 30-year separation.

French President Jacques Chirac announced last December that his country would rejoin NATO's council of ministers and military committee. Perhaps he purposely chose to make the announcement during a general strike that was keeping newspapers and opponents occupied - but, in any case, it made relatively few waves.

Nonetheless, Paris was careful to point out that it would still have nothing to do with the alliance's 'integrated' structure, the framework within which NATO members coordinate their defence policies and even their national defence budgets.

With that proviso, Chirac could still argue that he was safeguarding France's military autonomy. When General de Gaulle pulled France out of NATO in 1966, he said “integration” equalled “subordination” and the “automatic” engagement of French troops in NATO operations. Chirac has also kept France out of the alliance's nuclear planning group, keeping its own weapons out of the reach of joint UK-US planning.

While careful not to contradict de Gaulle, Chirac has allowed the French to join fully in NATO's Bosnia operation.

“In Bosnia, they were completely integrated,” says an alliance official.

“Even with partial rapprochement, it looks as though there will be even more coordination.”

Nevertheless, Paris says it is not coming back into NATO, but is instead participating in the overhaul which will transform the alliance into something completely new.

Perhaps the French are right. Martin Butcher of the Centre for European Security and Disarmament, commenting on the fact that Secretary-General Javier Solana was an anti-NATO demonstrator in his youth, says: “I never thought I would share a background with a secretary-general of NATO. We were both members of European disarmament. Perhaps that's a sign of how much NATO has changed.”

Other signs of just how much the alliance has changed include the fact that a Russian general with a staff of ten has an office at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Europe (SHAPE), NATO's military headquarters, and that the organisation even has a page on the Internet.

The alliance is on the verge of even bigger changes. Its contacts with Russia have evolved beyond disarmament meetings to cooperation on peacekeeping operations in Bosnia, and its members are considering the future shape of military structures on the continent.

Russian fears of being left out of a new security order are delaying NATO plans to bring in new Central and Eastern European members, but the alliance says Moscow cannot stop it, just as it could not stop the alliance from bringing in the former East Germany.

Still, NATO may have to make some concessions to Russia. It is already amending the Conventional Forces Europe (CFE) treaty to make it more flexible to suit Moscow's needs to deploy troops in different configurations.

Underlining that it intends no aggression towards Russia, NATO is now considering some sort of security cooperation treaty with Moscow. Pavel Podlesny of the Russian Academy of Sciences suggests that a treaty should establish regular political consultation between the two sides and set out the ways in which Moscow could participate in European security.

Assistant Secretary-General Von Moltke, explaining that “NATO does not want a new Cold War”, says the alliance is working hard “to overcome its negative image in Russia”.

To the suggestion that a name change for the Cold War victor might do the trick, Podlesny shrugs. Perhaps he wonders, as one Swedish diplomat recently put it, “would NATO by any other name smell just as foul?”