Report

Deputy Secretary General thank you. I've got two pieces of good news. Number one is that I'm the last rapporteur and the second is I'm going to try very hard to break the speed record set by my three distinguished predecessors.

We on panel four had a very demanding task; we had to talk about two things, not just one.

As the deputy secretary general said we had to talk about improving institutional cooperation and secondly to review the Balkans and apply the lessons learned to elsewhere. I'm very pleased to say that we were incredibly self disciplined under the very good chairmanship of Dimitrij Rupel and I think we covered both of those subjects very comprehensively.

On the international organisation, the general mood was clearly that there's room for improvement, we can seek greater synergy.

Nicholas Whyte, I think, pointed out that one of the weak areas was early warning of crises and advanced information and that greater links with NGOs would be helpful there because NGOs often being on the spot are the best means of early warning.

And everybody agreed, following Dmitrij Rupel's opening remarks, that we need to share information, we need to share expertise, keep each other informed and multiply contacts, both at the strategic level and at the working level.

Second area of general agreement, obviously avoiding duplication of resources. We will all be losers from competitive relationships. And looking at the NATO-EU relationship Under Secretary of State Burns did point out that Berlin Plus has proven to work very well in regulating the NATO-EU relationship and should be adhered to.

The focus was on very much bringing the resources together to handle common tasks. Kosovo, the UNMIK structure, the integration of the organisations there was sighted as a model in moving the standards process forward in Kosovo where each organisation was playing a part, destruction of small arms and ammunition, security sector reform, border management, these have been mentioned already, were referred to as examples of managing common tasks.

The Chairman, Dimitrij Rupel, came up with some interesting rules of the road for how we could manage better the synergy among the institutions. First of all he said there should be a lead organisation that in any situation was best geared to take the overall lead with the other organisations fitting in behind.

It didn't always have to be the same organisation. He gave examples of different crisis where different organisations have been best at taking the lead.

The second thing he said is don't get hung up on theology and later on the Estonian ambassador came in very usefully on this with reference to Darfur and said hey, the people in Darfur don't care which institution is bringing them help or stopping genocide or ethnic cleansing. In fact he used a slightly stronger term than don't care, but I won't repeat that here.

But the fact is that it's about the crisis not the institution, was I think a lesson in reality, which was well heeded by everybody in working group four.

The next rule of the road was that organisations should not be afraid to defer to others. It's not a strategic defeat if sometimes nations take the lead in dealing with crises and not international organisations or if each organisation is not necessarily involved in every crisis. There's certainly enough work to go around to keep everybody occupied, and that we should reduce bureaucracy and the number of meetings where they didn't produce results as well as offer expertise to other areas of the world.

Then in the next stage of the working group's work, we looked a little bit about the current state of the organisations. Pierre Lelouche came across in a sober minded mood, talking about a mid-life crisis of the institutions or a floue artistique and in NATO in particular he worried about the Alliance not having a distinct role in combating terrorism, its inability to have a common line in dealing after the September 11 with Iraq.

He worried too about the United States still being attracted mainly by coalitions of the willing and the Rumsfeldian comment repeated at the (inaudible) in Munich last February, that it's the mission which determines the coalition and what did this mean for the future of NATO.

Nick Burns responded, making it very clear that from a US perspective NATO will be the central transatlantic institution but the US would prefer always to act multilaterally in contrast to acting with just a few of the allies, that NATO would continue to be the best way for Europeans to work with the United States. And he reminded everybody that the US-European partnership after World War II had brought an unprecedented period of success and peace for both sides of the Atlantic, and he doubted strongly that the great majority of Europeans wanted the EU or Europe to be a counterweight to the United States.

Pierre Lelouche then went on to offer some other thoughts which I believe did reach a general consensus. One remark he made which interested me was that we are talking up soft power far too much at the moment. It's of course a n essential ingredient of crisis management but as he pointed out, the danger is that we're never going to have adequate defence budgets if we always put the emphasis on soft power and that NATO of course as it seeks to generate military capabilities would be one of the largest losers.

He also pointed out that the Europeans themselves, particularly with the referenda in France and the Netherlands over the next few days have to decide crucially if they are ready to be a willing partner to the United States, both in building up the European security and defence policy and obviously providing the defence budgets necessary for Europe to have the capabilities that a real partner has to have.

He also suggested that international law was an important part of crisis management and raised the interesting question of whether in Kyrgyzstan violence would have been used- would be used if the Kyrgyz leaders or any other leaders committing disproportionate acts of violence knew that they would be deferred to the International Criminal Court.

This started an interesting discussion, and you won't be surprised to hear this, on the US - European EU relationship and the need for enhanced political consultations in NATO. James Ellis representing the European Parliament I think very usefully pointed out, quoting Henry Kissinger, that Europe has a telephone number but the US still needs to know what Europe is going to say to it across that telephone line.

He pointed out that substance was really the key here, the political will others made this point to work together on issues, and whether that political will was there, whether it would be the US-EU dialogue or the dialogue in NATO would rapidly be identified.

And he also pointed out and I think very sensibly that if the EU-US relationship was working well that would benefit NATO and vice versa. It was not a zero sum game. A good relationship would benefit both organisations.

And finally he pointed out that as the parliamentary dimension, particularly here in Europe with the increased role of the European Parliament becomes ever more important, involving parliamentarians in this exercise as well as diplomats would be a precondition of success.

Then we went on to the Balkans. The Foreign Minister of Croatia, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic reminded everybody that we were at a favourable moment based on past successes, but at the same time Nick Burns also pointed out that the Balkans, despite those successes, are unfinished business. That we began the twentieth century in the Balkans and we finished the twentieth century in the Balkans and that therefore we had to work on the key issues: Bosnia, Serbia-Montenegro and Kosovo.

Bosnia, there was general agreement on the agenda that needs to be achieved to build a truly multi-ethnic state with common institutions, particularly in the police and the military. To persuade the Bosnian Serbs to commit more to that vision of a unitary state alongside the Bosnian Croats and the Bosnian Muslims, to continue, of course, with the ICTY requirements to hand over Mladic and Karadzic.

Serbia-Montenegro, to bring this country into the transatlantic family, to- obviously to manage the functioning federation between Serbia and Montenegro, or what would follow from it, and security sector reform.

In both those cases, there was a discussion on conditionality which I found interesting. I think the consensus was, ladies and gentlemen, the conditionality has worked, and therefore we should stick to it. But at the same time, there were some participants that believed that even conditionality was compatible with smart sanctions or smart visas, or helping the moderates by giving a positive incentive--that’s certainly an area for further discussion.

On Kosovo, general agreement too, as Nick Burns pointed out, that 2005 can be the year of decision which can set Kosovo on a clear path towards a resolution of the status question, the assessment of the standards is important, pressure has to made- maintained for those standards to be advanced even while the review process is taking place as we head towards final status talks. Support(?), this won't surprise you, for the principles of the Contract Group and a sense that yes, on the one hand, there can be no pre-ordained solution for Kosovo in advance of the standards review, but that at the end of the day a decision which goes against the choices of the people there would be difficult to implement.

On the Balkans in general, particularly as we were so fortunate in having the foreign minister of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, the foreign minister of Croatia, and the foreign minister of Albania in the panel room, we looked, of course, also at the membership aspirations of those three countries. A clear sense that the Adriatic Charter had been helpful in that process, and even a discussion as to whether Serbia and Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina should be associated with that process, but also a clear sense that those three countries, while cooperating, had to go at their own individual speeds and be considered on their individual merits.

In general too, a sense for a presentation by Kastriot Islami, the foreign minister of Albania, that regional cooperation had proved its value in terms of refugees, war crimes, economic development, property questions, and should be continued and reinforced. But as Nicholas Whyte pointed out, when he intervened again, that the solution could not be the eternal presence of international governors and international representatives, that the now whole process should be to create accountable local institutions.

Finally, future work. Here, too, major thoughts. One, though, is that NATO needs to do much more thinking on the link between security and development, particularly economic development and reform.

It was pointed out, for example, in Croatia, by one of the questions from the floor, that the lack of economic, comparative, relative lack of economic growth had reduced support for NATO and the European Union, although the foreign minister of Croatia intervened to explain why and relativize that, but that these were linked, and that therefore this had to be much more factored in.

And secondly, the whole experience that NATO has gained in the Balkans in the 1990s, of working with civil society and NGOs, economic agencies and other international organisations, should somehow become a model mutatis mutandis that then could be applied via the partnership to the search for other stabilization solutions in the Black Sea, the Caucasus and elsewhere.

And believe it or not, we managed to do all of that in two hours.

Thank you.