Speech

Ambassador Káčer,
Madame State Secretary,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

Let me start by saying how privileged I am by the very high honour that the Slovak Government bestowed upon me just moments ago. I would like to go on by thanking the Slovak Atlantic Commission and you personally, Ambassador Káčer, for this opportunity to complement my official meetings in Bratislava today with a public meeting.  I want to thank you, Ladies and Gentlemen, for attending.  And of course, I also want to congratulate you all on the Slovak Republic’s very successful first five years in NATO.

I will step down as NATO Secretary General at the end of this month after five and a half years in office.  And looking back over that period, I take particular satisfaction from the continuing enlargement of NATO’s membership.  At the beginning of 2004, as one of my first official acts as NATO Secretary General, I had the privilege to communicate to seven Governments – including the Government of Slovakia – a formal invitation to accede to the North Atlantic Treaty.  And at NATO’s 60th Anniversary Summit last April, I was very pleased to be able to welcome two further countries – Albania and Croatia – raising the Alliance’s membership to 28 free, democratic and sovereign nations.

For the Slovak Republic and all the other countries that have joined the Alliance since the end of the Cold War, membership in NATO marked a return to the Europe from which they were once forcefully separated.  NATO membership has given you a seat at the table where key decisions are made to shape the strategic environment.  It has given you Allies with whom to share the common burden of security.  And of course, it has given you the ultimate security guarantee of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Washington Treaty.

As a member of NATO these past five years, your country has continued to work hard for a free, undivided and peaceful Europe.  Slovakia has shown a strong commitment to the defining principles and values of the Alliance – democracy, freedom, solidarity.  Slovakia has helped to shape the political consensus which lies at the very heart of NATO.  And Slovakia has also shown a strong awareness of the need to adapt NATO to a 21st century security environment that is marked by a host of complex risks and threats; terrorism, regional instability, the spread of nuclear weapons, piracy – to name but a few.  One way in which Slovakia has shown that awareness is by making valuable contributions to NATO’s missions and operations – including our vital engagement in Afghanistan, NTMI in Iraq, KFOR in Kosovo – and I wish to use this opportunity to thank the Slovak authorities for that support.

I have, for several years, stressed the importance for the NATO Allies not only to engage in frank debate about the complex new security environment, but also to better define NATO’s role in that environment in the form of a new Strategic Concept.  I was pleased that, at our 60th Anniversary Summit in April, the Alliance’s Heads of State and Government agreed on the elaboration of a new Strategic Concept for NATO.  And we were able to formally launch that process with a major conference in Brussels last week involving many representatives of the security community, including from the Slovak Republic. 

Of course, our existing Strategic Concept of 1999 still contains much of enduring value and we do not need to entirely re-invent the wheel.  The stress on Article 5 collective defence as the bedrock of the Alliance; the importance of our partnerships; the need for equitable burden sharing and solidarity are all part of NATO’s acquis and the source of its enduring vitality.  But if principles are eternal, the way that they are implemented has to reflect the evolution of the security environment.  And that evolution – as I just noted – has been significant.

Our current Strategic Concept does not do justice to recent challenges such as energy security or cyber attacks; nor the likely increasing impact of climate change on security in the future.  There is a whole new agenda of human security as well, enshrined in the Responsibility To Protect.  Counter-insurgency has returned to centre stage.  And we have seen the growing importance of institutional cooperation as the key to success.  Of course, these are issues that will force themselves on to our agenda whether we write a new Strategic Concept or not; but the Strategic Concept exercise can certainly help us to learn the lessons from our experience thus far and to be better able to prioritise in the future.

I sincerely believe that NATO cannot thrive as an organisation which is trying to take care of too many individual threats at the same time -- becoming a Jack of all trades, but master of none.  And that means the time has come in my view to distinguish between perceptions of risk and the hard reality.  Obviously an organisation like NATO has to focus on threats that are the most urgent and which concern Allies as a whole.  And we need to be clear where NATO is equipped to play a major role and where we will be mainly in a supporting role.  Otherwise we may find it difficult to set priorities and fall into the trap of the old Irish joke: if you don’t know where you are going, all roads will lead you there.

Finally, I see a clear need to make the general public, in all our countries, better aware of what NATO is for these days.  People understand what NATO does but they don’t understand how this relates to its fundamental purpose or even their immediate security interests.  I am convinced that a new, up-to-date Strategic Concept will make it much easier to explain to our publics why they still need NATO and what it offers that other organisations or security frameworks do not.  And in so doing, a new Concept will help us to elicit the public support that is essential to NATO’s continued success.

As I said, I will be leaving NATO soon, and my successor Anders Fogh Rasmussen will have the exciting challenge to lead the work on a new Strategic Concept to its conclusion.  But drawing on my personal experience over the past five and a half years, I do of course have a view on what I believe should be priorities in this exercise, and I would like to share that view with you.

First and foremost, I hope the new Strategic Concept will lay to rest the notion that there is any distinction between security at home and security abroad.  Globalisation has removed the protection that borders or geographical isolation from crisis areas used to provide.  Today the challenge is not just to defend our territory but also our populations; and they, unlike our territory, move around.  At the same time, the new Strategic Concept should also reassure all Allies that NATO takes its Article 5 collective defence commitment seriously; not just on paper but through planning and exercises as well as having the necessary capabilities to call on in crisis situations.  NATO cannot function in the long run with two types of membership: those who feel secure and are willing to modernise their forces for expeditionary operations -- and those who feel less secure and are less willing.

Which in fact leads me to a second priority for the new Strategic Concept, which is to state clearly that we need forces  that can operate across the full spectrum of military operations, from crisis management and peacekeeping to war fighting.  A new Concept must not only make this requirement abundantly clear, but it must also map out how it is to be achieved.  And this will entail measures such as reforming our defence planning process and the way in which NATO-led operations and capabilities are financed.

Third, the new Strategic Concept must incorporate the notion of a “Comprehensive Approach”.  Security in Afghanistan, but also elsewhere, demands a coordinated application of economic, political and military measures that go far beyond NATO’s capabilities.  A new Strategic Concept has to recognise this, but it also has to lay out the contribution that NATO is able to make to such a comprehensive approach.  UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and I signed a joint UN-NATO Declaration last September that I believe is a major step in the right direction.  But there are also other international organisations with which NATO needs to develop closer, more effective cooperation, in particular the European Union.  As a matter of fact, I do not believe that the comprehensive approach can work unless we do a much better job of combining the complementary assets of NATO and the EU. 

A fourth concern has to do with partnerships.  One of the things that I am most satisfied with during my watch has been the continued growth of NATO’s partnerships, particularly outside Europe, in North Africa, the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region.  Partners are no longer outside the NATO community, but inside; making indispensable contributions not only to partnership activities but also to NATO’s core business, such as military operations in Afghanistan, Kosovo or the Mediterranean.  At the same time, the value of our Partners to us must not be linked only to how many troops they contribute to ISAF or KFOR.  Partners have an intrinsic value in their own right and we need to be much more imaginative in cooperating on other challenges: energy security, proliferation, cyber defence, terrorism, piracy – to name but the most obvious.  Here, as well, the new Strategic Concept can really help to move partnerships forward.

A fifth priority for the new Strategic Concept is to define a way ahead for the NATO-Russia relationship.  After a low point in our relations following the crisis in the Caucasus last summer, we held a NATO-Russia Council at Foreign Ministers level in Corfu late last month to restart NATO-Russia cooperation, especially in operations in the Mediterranean and Afghanistan and in the military-to-military area.  All to the good; but we need, in my view, not merely to restart the relationship, but to actually relaunch it.  We need to get beyond the on-again, off-again character of our relations.  We must define NATO’s essential interests and objectives with respect to Russia, and unify our thinking in order to maximise our impact.  And although I do not believe it will be easy, it will be a vitally important priority for the new Strategic Concept.

Finally, the consolidation of Europe.  The task of further enlarging NATO while simultaneously maintaining good relations with Russia would appear to have been seriously challenged by the crisis in the Caucasus last summer.  Yet both tasks remain vital.  The aspiration to join NATO is an expression of the right of sovereign nations to choose their own alliances and allegiances, rather than have them chosen for them.  NATO enlargement is also one of the most important instruments in consolidating Europe as a whole, free and democratic continent.  I therefore expect a new Strategic Concept to signal clearly that the process of NATO enlargement will continue, while also making it clear that Russia’s legitimate security concerns will not be ignored or overlooked.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Your country, Slovakia, has completed its journey into the Europe that I just mentioned -- and it has done so with great confidence and great success.  We are very glad to have Slovakia on board as a member of NATO.  In five short years, Slovakia has proved to be a real asset to our Alliance, both politically and militarily.  And I have no doubt that, together with NATO’s other 27 member nations, it will remain a shining beacon for other countries to follow.

Thank you.