The debate over ‘global NATO’ has reached a turning point at the intellectual level and must soon be resolved as NATO faces a critical moment in determining its future direction as an alliance. Since the Brussels summit of 1994 that set post-Cold War NATO on a path of enlargement, the debate about the Alliance’s future role in the world has accompanied every significant decision NATO has made. Like nuclear deterrence, NATO works better in practice than it does in theory. NATO’s presence and its activities have a way of ‘muddling through’ ad hoc arrangements that somehow transcend the logical contradictions and anomalies of its position. This is rather how the debate about a ‘global NATO’ has gone; nothing but vexing contradictions on the theory of how NATO should, or could, act globally, but different strands of policy that have left NATO reasserting its core mission in Europe while also engaged in the most challenging out-of-area operation – in Afghanistan – that could possibly have been imagined in 1994.

It would be dangerous, however, to assume that these questions can be allowed to go unanswered for very much longer. At 16 members in 1994, NATO still represented predominantly West European and North American opinion. At 28 members now, NATO is a far more pan-European organization whose range of security interests is inevitably greater than ever. It is an Alliance that is more united by its values and its long-term interests than, as used to be the case, by the politics and the immediate security needs of its members. The Alliance now covers about 900 million people, whose societies account for 45 per cent of global GDP (though only 13 per cent of world population). This alone would suggest that NATO nations have global interests, but also highlights how difficult political consensus must be in a grouping of 28.

In this enlarged form, NATO now confronts the task of defining a new Strategic Concept, 10 years after the last one agreed in Washington in April 1999. That document spoke of NATO being prepared to support operations on behalf of the United Nations, making “full use of partnership” to prevent and defuse crises wherever they might arise. It may have seemed a natural commitment to political stability at the time. But since then NATO has witnessed the 9/11 attacks on the United States and the invocation of Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the rise of a newly assertive leadership in Moscow, the war in Georgia, and the world economic crisis; events all capable of changing fundamentally the security equation for European and transatlantic societies.

OUTLINE

• The dynamic of NATO policies since 1994
• The geopolitical dimension
• The ethical dimension
• The Afghanistan dilemma

Michael Clarke is Professor of Music and member of CeReNeM (Centre for Research in New Music) at the University of Huddersfield (UK).