Finding a new role for the Alliance

Date: 21/11/02

In the second of our analyses on the future of an enlarged NATO, Marc Houben argues that institutional reform may be essential if the Alliance is to meet the challenges of the 21st century

LAST Spring, United States Ambassador Nicholas Burns characterised the challenges facing NATO as those of 'new capabilities, new members and new relations'.

NATO enlargement and the adoption of new roles and missions may affect the internal functioning of the Alliance, therefore institutional reform may be an essential part of the transformation of NATO.

I believe that the following issues will affect the chances of successfully transforming the Alliance.

Terrorism and weapons of mass destruction
Weapons of mass destruction in the hands of determined groups and individuals can be used to inflict grave, even irrevocable, damage on entire societies. This threat presents governments with a basic dilemma: if it is known that an actor has acquired these weapons and has expressed his intention to use these weapons, inaction may not be responsible.

The Western world has only just begun to understand the implications of this imperative and NATO will have to acknowledge this dilemma sooner rather than later.

Aside from the challenge of delivering effective military action, this threat poses a whole new set of questions.

In order to be effective, NATO needs to be decisive, but in order to sustain its credibility, the legitimacy of the action must be established.

Decisiveness may therefore need to be accompanied by transparency of the decision, with an emphasis on the burden of proof and post-accountability.

If transparency and accountability become new centres of gravity in the decision-making process, it will require procedures and mechanisms hitherto unknown in NATO's institutional arrangements.

Diverging interests and threat perceptions may make it desirable for certain member states to be able to act in some cases 'ahead of consensus' while preserving the consensus-building principle. The idea of consensus as an agreement that can be located in time and space must be questioned. To conceive of consensus as a 'growth' model may be a more useful concept.

Diverging interests and perceptions of threat will prohibit all-or-nothing involvement, but allow for partial involvement at different times.

Needless to say, the all-or-nothing involvement must be reserved for 'Article V' (the mutual defence clause in NATO's charter which states that an attack on one member is an attack on all) operations.

Changing national interests
In his article The West is Breaking Up, Francis Fukuyama asserts that 'armed forces were an expression of sovereignty; now they have become the moral expression of the will and norms of the international community'.

In a world where 'interest' as a defining notion for action is becoming increasingly vague and difficult to identify, a 'new' NATO will be the guardian of the joint, but redefined, national interest of its members. Territorial integrity, political sovereignty and national security are complemented by notions of quality of life, environmental conditions, consumer protection and human security.

The implications of this metamorphosis of the national interest go beyond the 'new capabilities, new members and new relations' mantra and require NATO to be smart about leadership - employing teamwork, complementarity and solidarity beyond the nation state.

Changing executive-legislative relations
One of the key tasks of NATO is international crisis management. The decision to participate in an international crisis management operation is a national decision of huge political weight and social sensitivity.

NATO is an intergovernmental organisation (in which every member has an equal vote and a veto and decisions are made on the basis of consensus), and its crisis management operations are in a political and practical sense, inter-governmental affairs. NATO's decisiveness, therefore, depends on the decisiveness of the national governments - and NATO's consensus is based on the level of consensus within national political systems.

And right there things start to change.

During the 1990s we witnessed a remarkable phenomenon: western European nations shared a widespread approval of the value of participating in peacekeeping operations.

The mechanism at work is easily explained: the Left's support was motivated by humanitarian instincts and general approval of the operations; the Right did so for the same reasons but had some additional considerations of realpolitik. Different political parties signed up to the same course of action based on different arguments.

In the next generation of crisis management operations, however, the humanitarian agenda is less prominent, thereby making such operations less appealing to the Left.

Only the German Greens seem to have made an ideological U-turn and 'accepted' - albeit with heavy conditions - the use of force, for example in the operations in Afghanistan.

Evidence from member states shows that the national political consensus of the 1990s on the value of international crisis management is thinning and, in some cases, has disappeared.

Thus the ability of a government to arrive at a majority position quickly has been dramatically reduced and the type of contribution it can make has been radically circumscribed.

In most cases this means a preference for humanitarian or general support rather than the more risky contribution to a combat effort.

In all member states, except Germany, the executive has formal power to decide whether or not to participate.

In practice, most governments will seek the support of Parliament prior to taking up a formal position.

If possible, many governments will try to get the opposition behind the position too.

In Germany and in the Netherlands, we are witnessing an emerging phenomenon we could call 'co-responsibility', whereby the executive and legislative pool or align (but not share) their responsibilities in order to arrive at the best possible position.

This increased interest may also have a financial motive: participation is expensive and in some cases hurts the transformation process of the armed forces by delaying it or not completing it.

Another motive may be the (perceived) poor policy coordination.

Crisis management is a comprehensive affair requiring the coordinated use of civil and military instruments. Not many governments have made the necessary transition and created mechanisms to coordinate the use of so fundamentally different policy instruments.

Parliaments, when they oversee government action, are confronted with this gap in coordination.

The success of civil society activism
Civil society initiatives are increasingly politically effective and influential.

It would be prudent for NATO to take these initiatives seriously.

These grass roots initiatives could - if one is smart about strategy - be brought in to complement official efforts.

This may require new modes of shaping effective action without resorting to a supranational mode of leadership and new mechanisms for policy coordination.

'Combined' and 'joint' operations may be perceived as inter-military or inter-service challenges. A future challenge may be in finding a 'combined' and 'joint' mode of working with actors from civil society.

The four phenomena reviewed here all point in one direction: NATO may be forced to shift focus in order to facilitate national decision-making without interfering in it.

NATO must make it possible for national governments to go the extra mile. This requires a deep and sincere understanding of the national concerns and constraints prohibiting a government from making a quick or substantial contribution to a collective effort.

One example is risk-perception which, at the national level, is extremely important and usually comes in two forms; the risks to the deployed soldiers and the risks of political entrapment in an operation.

All member states are, in principle, willing to participate, but their participation - and ultimately the type of contribution they can make - is determined by the way these constraints are accommodated.

These efforts should not undercut the work of national governments but rather facilitate the national process of identifying and articulating the interests, stakes, roles and responsibilities that countries see for themselves in the world and enable governments to express their national will, values and norms.

• Marc Houben is a research fellow with the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) in Brussels.

He is writing a book on the dynamics of multilateral security cooperation in international crisis management operations, which will be published in 2003. He is also the rapporteur of the CEPS/IISS European Security Forum.

Major feature analysing the future of an enlarged NATO. Author argues that institutional reform may be essential if the Alliance is to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

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