Search
The Prague Summit
- Home
- Experts
- Past Themes
- Nato Expansion
- The Prague Summit
The Prague Summit: Beginning or End for NATO?
By Sean Kay
To citizens of the seven countries invited to join NATO, the November 2002 Prague summit understandably represents an extraordinary finish to a decade long effort to rid themselves of their domination by external powers. However, citizens of the "old" NATO countries might well be left wondering, what do we get from this? Does NATO really matter to the threats that confront us today? When United States Senators begin to discuss constitutional ratification of NATO's enlargement this should be the foremost question on their minds.
NATO's summit in Prague was historic largely because of its enlargement. Inviting Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria to negotiate membership is an extraordinary sentimental gesture toward the efforts these countries have made to rejoin the West. Whether these countries needed NATO invitations to reify their western identity can be questioned. Ultimately, the Baltic countries, for example, are western in their identity, politics, and strategic orientation. But they no more need NATO membership to confirm this than does Sweden or Ireland. Of course, Sweden and Ireland - each neutral and non-NATO countries - do not have an immediate history of external occupation either. Fear of Russia clearly still drives some of these new members toward NATO - thus immediately putting these new members at strategic odds with the traditional NATO membership which seeks to integrate Russia as much as possible into western institutions.
| Senators will have a choice - ratify a sentimental enlargement of NATO with no questions asked, or attach amendments to the process to ensure that NATO enlargement becomes a means to the larger end of reorganizing for meeting the security challenges of today. |
In terms of their collective defense, NATO membership actually brings very little to these long-suffering new members. While each to varying degrees seeks serious security guarantees, they will not get them from NATO. As with the first round of NATO enlargement, there will be no NATO bases in these countries, no nuclear weapons or nuclear infrastructure and no allied troops in the current security climate. It is a deep strategic irony that the countries that most need security guarantees and investment in Europe are Albania and Macedonia. Indeed, these countries actually have more credible security guarantees because they have US troops in their territory today and yet they do not benefit from NATO membership.
If the new NATO members will get little from NATO, then the question becomes - do they help NATO adjust to a new post-9/11 mission? The answer here is largely no. While Romania and Bulgaria offer strategic gains, they have serious problems with corruption and intelligence sharing. Latvia too has problems with the protection of sensitive intelligence secrets. Indeed, before the Prague summit, the Financial Times reported that the US Department of Defense was lobbying to have Latvia, Bulgaria and Slovenia kept off the invitee list. The remaining Baltic countries, Slovakia and Slovenia have very little to offer NATO in terms of strengthening its capabilities. In Slovenia, not even a majority of the population even supports joining NATO. The problem for NATO is that it never bothered to do a post-9/11 assessment of its NATO enlargement criteria. In the end, NATO enlargement is a symbolic political exercise with no meaningful value to the issue that matters most to Americans today, security against terrorism.
The United States had a serious opportunity to use Prague as a major transformation summit, but in the end it failed to do so by not holding the invitees to serious measures of both established political, economic, and military criteria or demanding new criteria that fit into a more general concept of remolding NATO as a counter-terrorist institution. While enlargement was highly sustainable as breaking down the artificial barriers imposed on Europe by Stalin in the 1940s, and therefore in the end justified, it was a policy that has NATO looking to solve problems that do not currently exist. In effect, NATO enlargement has become a morally sound policy, but a strategic distraction. In a time of war, a failure to look forward and make NATO a relevant tool for counter-terrorism both in terms of membership and its capabilities would be a major historical failure of creative leadership on the part of the United States and its allies.
The major proposal that would transform NATO into an institution that is capable of seriously dealing with the issues of the day is the very cogent concept of building a 21,000 person high-end "niche" force capable of multilateral rapid deployment to areas of crisis. NATO also approved a set of high-end military force objectives called the Prague Capabilities Commitment designed to streamline multilateral force planning away from national territorial defense and toward meeting security challenges with high-end military capabilities. These ideas are among the most creative proposals to be entertained by NATO in its ten years of post-Cold War adaptation. However, Prague may also prove a lost opportunity in this regard as well.
As the NATO Response Force concept was presented to NATO from the US Department of Defense, it largely relegated the European Union's plans to deploy a 60,000-person reaction force to that of after-action peacekeeping. As a distribution of labor, this makes realistic sense; but the basic message to the EU was that it was irrelevant. This approach simply will not be sustainable in modern European politics and the failure by the United States to recognize this dynamic suggests that it is not thinking creatively enough about how to keep NATO operationally useful.
Specifically, the lack of direct linkages to the European Union means that this NATO proposal will not create the kind of enthusiastic European defense investment that it is intended to generate. Moreover, it also shows that more needs to be done to appreciate fully how to use NATO as a means to combat terrorism. Terrorism must be fought with a combined, joint doctrine that involves as many tools and resources as possible. In essence, what NATO needed was to establish a rapid response force that would build headquarters and integrate directly with the European Union and its emerging military and civilian capabilities - especially its tested and growing multinational police capabilities. It would have been relatively simple to present the NATO Reaction Force as a means of building up the EU - but the United States did not seize this opportunity at Prague.
Meanwhile, new NATO and remaining aspiring NATO members are left wondering which force should they contribute to - NATO or the EU? Given that they are now invited to join NATO, their incentives will increasingly be to generate political favor within the European Union. Right now, these new NATO members are very pro-American in their orientation, but when it comes to political and economic stability their interests will lie far deeper in cooperation with the EU and meeting its membership requirements.
Now that the crowds and euphoria of the NATO summit are gone, the core question remains - is NATO relevant? When the details of the Prague summit emerge, and US Senators are reviewing NATO during the enlargement ratification process, it might well be that what is revealed is an alliance that is politically unmanageable, militarily futile, and strategically irrelevant. Such an outcome would almost certainly drive the United States further away from NATO and the European allies closer toward the European Union as an alternative.
NATO has now gone through several rebirths since the end of the Cold War. Each time, NATO has proclaimed itself as busy and as healthy as ever. In 1994, the allies triumphed their Combined Joint Task Forces proposal only to have it whither in the details of NATO political squabbles. In 1999, NATO trumpeted its Defense Capabilities Initiative, only to have it fade away to a meaningless futility. Once more, NATO has made declarations and patted itself on the back for so doing. But in reality, the success of the Prague summit can only be measured by whether or not it succeeds in transforming NATO into an institution that can effectively combat terrorism while dealing with the still incomplete missions of keeping peace in the Balkans and integrating Russia into the West. There is no clear evidence from the Prague summit to suggest that there is reason for optimism in this regard.
The next opportunity to push for a more comprehensive approach to sustaining NATO will come when the U.S. Senate begins the process of ratification of an amended NATO treaty to admit the seven new candidates. The Senate might choose to condition the admittance of the new members on complete adherence with the initial membership criteria set out by NATO, and add new requirements of counter-terrorism commitments and contributions to the NATO Response Force. The Senate might also require the Bush administration to go back to NATO and seek a more comprehensive plan for reforming it into an effective counter-terrorist organization to include direct institutional links on political-military and multinational police cooperation between NATO and the EU. Effectively, Senators will have a choice - ratify a sentimental enlargement of NATO with no questions asked, or attach amendments to the process to ensure that NATO enlargement becomes a means to the larger end of reorganizing the organization for meeting the security challenges of today.
The key test will be whether the United States, its allies and the new members see the Prague summit as the end game or the beginning. If the NATO members collectively seize the momentum of the summit, and apply a far more creative approach to international security than applied to date, then NATO might just make it through this pivotal time. It is far more likely that as an international institution, however, NATO is in for a very bumpy ride in the years ahead. If this period of transition fails, far more radical approaches will be needed. Either the treaty creating NATO will have to be re-written, or a new institution may need to be built if NATO itself cannot meet the challenges of the day.
Sean Kay is a non-resident fellow at The Eisenhower Institute and an associate professor of politics and government at Ohio Wesleyan University. He is the author of NATO and the Future of European Security (Rowman and Littlefield, 1998) and co-editor of NATO after 50 Years (Scholarly Resources, 2001). His current project is a co-edited volume titled: Limiting Institutions: The Challenge of Security Governance in Eurasia (forthcoming from Manchester University Press, 2003).