Ebook: Perceptions of NATO and the New Strategic Concept

The main goal of the Advanced Research Workshop (ARW) on ‘Perceptions of NATO: A Balance 60 Years After’, that took place in Lisbon, on May 17 and 18, 2010, was to provide an assessment of how NATO and its mission are perceived today in the world. The topic seemed particularly relevant when the organization had just completed 60 years of existence and was in a process of redefining its Strategic Concept. What is NATO’s mission today? How is the organization seen and perceived both in member countries and in partner countries? What do the younger generations, those who were born after the end of the Cold War, think about NATO and its role for the future? What is their awareness and knowledge of NATO? How does NATO take care of its own image around the world? These were indeed some of the major questions we wanted to address during the ARW.

The chapters on this book intend to provide answers to, or at least hypotheses for these questions. Authors such as James Goldgeier, Sten Rynning, Volodymyr Dubovyk, Carlos Gaspar, Guillaume de Rougé and Bram Boxhoorn, provide us with a general overview of NATO and its role in the 21st century, assessing the challenges the organization is facing in the near future, namely the approval of its new strategic concept. Andrey Makarychev, Nika Chitadze and Polina Sokolova give us a fundamental insight to the way NATO has been perceived in the so-called partner countries: Russia and Georgia. The texts by Giuseppe Belardetti and Samuel de Paiva Pires focus on the youth or the ‘successor generation’, seeking to assess how the younger generations of member and partner countries see the role of the Atlantic Alliance in the present and in the future. Finally, Carlos Branco centres his analysis on the importance of communications in NATO’s current campaign in Afghanistan.

The co-directors of the ARW wish to thank all participants in the workshop as well as all institutions involved. The Portuguese Institute of International Relations (IPRI–Instituto Português de Relações Internacionais) and Odessa Mechnikov National University were two organizations that originally submitted the application for the NATO Science for Peace Programme, and we wish to thank Dr Carlos Gaspar, director of IPRI for his support and encouragement. Three other institutions joined us in this common effort: the Portuguese Atlantic Commission and the Young Atlantic Treaty Association were represented in the ARW’s scientific committee by Dr Bernardino Gomes and Giuseppe Belardetti; the Centre for Contemporary Portuguese History (CEHCP-Centro de Estudos de História Contemporânea Portuguesa), at ISCTE-Lisbon University Institute, was our host and provided excellent facilities for the workshop’s many sessions. We also would like to thank the NATO Science for Peace Programme for funding the event and to its director, Professor Carvalho Rodrigues, for his excellent opening lecture titled ‘Data or Belief Systems’, which set the tone for the remaining sessions. The work of the staff and graduate students of IPRI and CEHCP, namely Ana Virtuoso, Cecília Vaz, Daniel Marcos, João Albuquerque, Mónica Fonseca and Thiago Carvalho, was essential for things to run smoothly during the days of the ARW. Finally, the editors would like to express their gratitude to Stewart Lloyd-Jones of CPHRC Editorial Services for proofreading and typesetting this book.

If the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) did not exist today, the United States would not seek to create it. In 1949, it made sense in the face of a potential Soviet invasion to forge a bond in the North Atlantic area among the United States, Canada, and the west European states. Today, if the United States were starting from scratch in a world of transnational threats, the debate would be over whether to follow liberal and neoconservative calls for an alliance of democracies without regard to geography or to develop a great power concert envisioned by the realists to uphold the current order.

NATO’s struggle to cohere and leave clear imprints on entrenched modern conflicts suggests that the Alliance is bereft of a strategic purpose. Yet mainstream international relations theory struggles to offer a convincing explanation for NATO’s durability – it turned 60 in 2009 – and its ability to run the ISAF operation in Afghanistan. There is probably no single convincing explanation for NATO’s durability. Understanding the positions in the NATO debate – their theoretical as well as normative foundations – becomes all the more important. To promote this type of understanding I resort to geography. I outline three geopolitical views as a heuristic device to dissect the NATO debate: Continental Geopolitics, Globalization, and Eurasian Geopolitics. I then engage NATO’s strategic direction since 1991 and the International Relations literature making sense of it. The result is not a turn-key research agenda but an overview of the stakes in the debate and a resource for making strong arguments.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is undergoing an important transformation. This is a well-known and mostly acknowledged fact, but everything else in there is out for questioning. What should the pace of this transformation be? Who is to lead in the process and to carry the bulk of operational and financial burden? How much of the consensus between the members on the overall mission of the Alliance there might be? What should the “newer” NATO’s priorities and modus operandi be? What is to happen to the NATO’s “sacred cows” such as an imperative of collective defense and others? Who should be invited into the Alliance, if any and where is that final frontier could be? What could be done so that the Alliance would have public on its side, both internationally and within the member-states? Should NATO continue along the road of becoming a global player and run those out or the traditional area operations, or should it rather retreat to its more familiar and better tested “backyard”? Finally, what sort of relations the Alliance should be building with its neighbors and major partners? This, certainly, is not an ultimate and comprehensive list of those strategic questions that one faces in looking at NATO’s today and, even more importantly so, its tomorrow. However, it does illustrate the intensity of the debate on the future role of the Euro-Atlantic Alliance.

The debate on NATO’s Strategic Concept may prove to be an opportunity to discuss the nature of the Atlantic Alliance as the international pole of stability, its enduring responsibility for the collective defence of the Western allies and its role as a regional alliance with global responsibilities. The new Strategic Concept should take into account NATO’s new missions as an “expeditionary alliance” and the need to develop new partnerships, namely with democratic powers.

This paper tries to show that the United States (US) and the European Union (EU) have growing interests in the evolution of the alliance towards a more informal transatlantic ‘hub’, but also that such an evolution definitely requires the emergence of the EU as a strategic actor. To conclude, this paper proposes four scenarios about the future of the alliance.

This article discusses three important aspects of NATO’s new Strategic Concept in a broader historical context of the transatlantic relationship. The three aspects discussed are the future role and meaning of article 5, the issue of burden-sharing and finally NATO enlargement. On article 5 the article argues that the discussion among the Allies on article 5 reflect the fundamental differences of opinion among them on NATO’s future role and tasks in the world. It will be hard to reach consensus among the Allies on this issue. On the second issue, burden-sharing it is stated that this issue has a history of its own, reflecting the inequality of the two major parts of the Alliance, the US and the European Allies respectively. Burden-sharing has always been uneven given the US political and military weight. There is hardly any reason to assume that this will change in our lifetime. On enlargement, the main argument is that the end of this process has almost been reached. Further enlargement with countries such as Georgia and Ukraine seem incompatible with a NATO policy aimed at a strategic partnership with the Russian Federation. The article ends with some remarks on the dangerous aspects of a new multi- or non-polar world system for European security.

Here we analyse the main aspects of cooperation between Georgia and NATO, which includes the history of NATO-Georgia relations, the main steps to be taken for Georgia to satisfy NATO standards and the importance of becoming a plenipotentiary member of the alliance to Georgia. We also deal with the main reasons for the August 2008 war between Russia and Georgia, in which one of the basic reasons was Georgia’s intention to join European and Euro-Atlantic Structures. Important attention is also paid to the Alliance’s geopolitical and geostrategic interests in the south Caucasus, with special attention focused on the importance of the region’s geopolitical, geo-economic and geostrategic location, and the role of the south Caucasus and the Caspian Sea region for the Euro-Atlantic region energy security.

The paper seeks to examine the Russia-NATO relationship within the theoretical framework of the English school with a variety of models of international societies at its core. Three of them are given particular attention— multipolarity, procedural integration and normative plurality. It is argued that each type of international society presupposes a peculiar Russian security stance in general and policy toward NATO in particular. Therefore, the key problem is not Russia’s ‘great design’, but rather the inherent inconsistency of Russia’s foreign policy. As seen from this vantage point, Russia is a country lacking a single and coherent policy toward NATO; in its stead different and sometimes mutually contradictory policy lines compete with each other as alternative conceptualisations of the structure of international relations.

The article tackles the problem of Russia-NATO relations at this moment of unpredictability with the emergence of new security threats and the ongoing crisis of identity within both parties involved. On the one hand, such circumstances impose additional complexity on the process of mutual adjustment. On the other hand, however, it could turn out to be the optimal time for rapprochement. Positively evaluating recent initiatives from both sides, this contribution analyses the persisting mutual doubts, misperceptions and policies that prevent the dialogue from moving forward. The author cites a few suggestions about how to develop NATO-Russian cooperation, with a strong emphasis on confidence-building measures both at the high political/military level and at the level of public diplomacy from the angle of engaging the future generation in a constructive Russia-NATO dialogue.

This article aims at providing readers with some reflections on the evolution of Atlanticism - which is to say the relations between the Euro-Atlantic successor generation and NATO, based on the experience gained at the Youth Atlantic Treaty Association (YATA). The article also will focus on the successor generation’s views on NATO and its Strategic Concept. In the third part, how to better engage the successor generation in the NATO debate will be addressed. NATO’s core mission has not changed in 60 years. It is still charged with safeguarding the freedom, common heritage and civilization of our people, while remaining true to the principle of democracy, individual liberty and rule of law as new threats and challenges emerge. Ambition is a crucial element for the future of trans-Atlantic relations and for the new Strategic Concept. YATA strives to play an important role in this regard, by fostering debate over transatlantic relations for world security and stability. Indeed, we believe the message NATO needs to bring forward is a one of peace and transparency, and it is in our interest as citizens of today - and hopefully as the decisions-makers of tomorrow - to ensure the message is heard clearly not only in our countries, but also in those of our partners.

Considering the perceptions and misperceptions of Portuguese youngsters on NATO, our objective is to assess the essential causes and consequences of such premises. As national branch of the Youth Atlantic Treaty Association, the Portuguese Atlantic Youth Association is responsible for promoting Atlanticism among the Portuguese youth. In this paper, we will describe the association’s origin, its evolution and work. Based on that, we will analyse the general perceptions and misperceptions that constitute the object of our presentation. Taking this analysis into consideration, our intention is to conclude by providing recommendations regarding the way public debate on NATO and Atlanticism should be directed in order to provide a clearer understanding of these issues among the successor generation.

This paper aims at addressing the subject of communications in military operations, focused in a very specific kind of operations - counterinsurgency - and in a specific place, i.e. Afghanistan. The author argues that Strategic Communications is a tool not designed to address the afghan population and the insurgents. He underlines the utmost importance of using Traditional Communications. He highlights the importance of social networks of interaction such as churches, tribes, groups of families, common languages, drug cartels and so forth and the crucial need to identify and understand the complicity, sophistication, interconnections and powers of these various intermingled networks to design a communications strategy. The author still argues that to increase the audience, it’s fundamental to look at means to spread messages through traditional message deliveries using for that afghan soldiers and police dully trained and mentored and with a strategy in place.”