NATO Information Seminar Sarajevo, 2-3 July 1998

"NATO's Cooperation with Partners" Ulrich Brandenburg Head, Partnership and Cooperation Section Political Affairs Division, NATO HQ This is not the first time I speak about NATO's partnership and cooperation programmes, but it is certainly the first time in a country where NATO has assumed such an exceptional role. The situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina is still far from normal, but the fact that we can today discuss security cooperation beyond this region may be a sign that we are on the way back to normality. One of the earlier speakers mentioned the notion of "cooperative security". This is a new term that emerged after the end of the Cold War, although the roots of our cooperation programmes today go back to the arms control and confidence-building agreements concluded in the 1970's, and to the "Helsinki process" initiated by the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in 1975. NATO itself was founded as an active security organization in 1949, based on Article 51 of the United Nations Charter which allows for individual or collective self-defence. But Article 1 of the Washington Treaty - the founding document of the Alliance - already says that we want to settle international disputes by peaceful means and refrain from threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations. Back in 1949, NATO's founding members agreed to "contribute toward the further development of peaceful and friendly international relations (...) by promoting conditions of stability and well-being". The immediate task was to stop Soviet expansion to defend the freedom of our countries in the West. This role was successfully filled by the Alliance until 1989 when the threat disappeared: until the fall of the Berlin Wall, and subsequently the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union itself, and the retreat of the Soviet troops from Central Europe. Sometimes I am asked why NATO was not dissolved after the end of the Cold War as was the Warsaw Pact. NATO's role in Bosnia today is part of the answer: we still need it. The other part is that NATO and the Warsaw Pact were indeed very different organizations. No nation was ever forced to join the North Atlantic Alliance, and many remain on the "waiting list" today. NATO has always seen itself as a community of values, and our commitment to these values remains unchanged. A few months before the unification of my own country - Germany - as a member state of NATO, the Alliance at its London Summit in 1990 took the historic decision to extend the "Hand of friendship" to its former adversaries in Central and Eastern Europe. The new democracies were invited to establish liaison offices at NATO Headquarters, and since then our colleagues from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Bulgaria, and even Kyrgyzstan have become a familiar sight at Headquarters. As a political framework for its relationship with Central and Eastern Europe the North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC) was founded in 1991. The NACC quickly developed into a venue for regular political and security related consultations and for the development of bilateral relations with these countries. Military from Partner countries began to participate in joint exercises and other activities with the Alliance. Since 1993, we have been working together with all partner countries to develop a common basis of understanding for peacekeeping operations. In short, consultations developed into more and more practical forms of cooperation. This is why in January 1994, the time was right for the creation of a more practical cooperation mechanism, the Partnership for Peace. Its stated goals laid down in the PfP Framework Document are: facilitation of transparency in national defence planning and budgeting processes; ensuring democratic control of defence forces; maintenance of the capability and readiness to contribute, subject to constitutional considerations, to operations under the authority of the UN and/or the responsibility of the OSCE; the development of cooperative military relations with NATO, for the purpose of joint planning, training and exercises, in order to strengthen their ability to undertake missions in the field of peacekeeping, search and rescue, humanitarian operations, and others as may subsequently be agreed; the development, over the longer term, of forces that are better able to operate with those of the members of the North Atlantic Alliance. A state can join the partnership once he is invited by NATO and signs up to the PfP Framework Document. From then on, much depends on how intensively this state wants to develop its relations with the Alliance. Cooperation is organized in the Individual Partnership Programmes (IPPs) agreed between NATO and the PfP Partner State and updated on a yearly basis. My next two slides show the areas of cooperation PfP has on offer today: Air defence-related matters Air space management/ control Consultation, command and control, including communications and information systems Civil emergency planning Crisis management Democratic control of forces and defence structures Defence planning, budgeting and resource management Defence policy and strategy Planning, organization and management of nations defence procurement programmes Planning, organization and management of national defence research and technology Consumer logistics Medical services Military infrastructure Conceptual, planning and cooperational aspects of peacepkeeping Operational, materiel and administrative aspects of standardization Language training Meterological support for NATO/Partner foces Military exercises and related training activities Military education, training and doctrine Military geography NBC defence and protection Partnership for Peace is being used for different purposes. Some partner nations want to learn and seek assistance in a number of technical areas; others have a lot of experience to share, for example in the peacekeeping field. Some nations use the Partnership programme to better prepare for their eventual accession to the Alliance. You will hear more about this aspect from Hungarian Ambassador Simonyi today. One of the best examples for the usefulness of Partnership for Peace is the fact that many partner nations today participate in SFOR here in Bosnia, along with troops from NATO countries. There are good reasons to assume that, should NATO get involved in further peace support operations, it would again be in cooperation with PfP Partner Countries. The next step in our Partnership and Cooperation Programme was taken in 1997, when NACC was transformed into the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC) with Partnership for Peace as an integral part and a clearly identifiable element. The Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council is different from its predecessor in that it provides partner countries with a more active role in decision-making, both on cooperation activities in which they participate and, for example, on peace support operations with their participation. The EAPC combines two major characteristics: it is inclusive; no partner country will ever be excluded from an EAPC activity. And it maintains self-differentiation; this is the principle that any partner can decide for himself the level and areas of cooperation with NATO he wants. How does the EAPC work? It meets both at the Foreign and the Defence Ministers level twice a year. EAPC Ambassadors meet once a month, and once a month or more often we have meetings at Committee level, such as the EAPC Political Committee or the Steering Committee for Partnership for Peace in the EAPC Format. The EAPC is a framework for day-to-day consultations on political and programme issues. It is also, for example, the framework for regular consultations with the non-NATO countries contributing to SFOR. My next two slides show a number of generic areas for consultation and practical cooperation in the EAPC: Political and security-related matters Crisis management Regional matters Arms control issues Nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) proliferation and defence issues International terrorism Defence planning and budgets, and Defence policy and strategy Security impact of economic developments Civil emergency and disaster preparedness (recent creation of Euro-Atlantic Disaster Response Coordination Centre in Brussels) Armaments cooperation under the Conference of National Armaments Directors (CNAD) Nuclear safety Defence-related environmental issues Civil-military Coordination of Air Traffic Management and Control Scientific cooperation Issues related to peace support operations. Some of this may sound very technical to you, but it is the substance of our cooperation programmes. It brings together decision makers and practitioners in the security field from 44 countries, through thousands of specific activities every year - ranging from PfP exercises to training courses and seminars. The map on my next slide shows the countries that have joined EAPC so far. We are 16 Allies and 28 partner countries, 27 of which also participate in Partnership for Peace. The new approach created with the EAPC is reflected in the EAPC Action Plan 1998 - 2000, adopted jointly by Allied and Partner Ministers last December. Although we are far away from Moscow and Kyiv here, let me add a few words about the special relationships that NATO has set up with Russia and Ukraine. Both, of course, would deserve a separate presentation. Russia has been ( and still sometimes is) a difficult partner. As a nuclear state, still with a huge military force and still an important player in international politics, it needs to be dealt with as something special. When Russia joined Partnership for Peace in 1994/1995, we agreed that we would develop a "16+1" relationship beyond PfP. In 1995 Russia took the important decision to participate in the implementation of the military aspect of the Dayton Peace Agreement, together with NATO troops. We were able to build on this positive experience when we started negotiating the NATO-Russia Founding Act which was concluded by Heads of State and Government in May 1997. The slide shows how it works now with regular meetings, work programmes and an increasing routine of cooperation in spite of differing views on, for example, NATO enlargement. People usually acknowledge that Russia is something special. But why Ukraine? This is a country of more than 50 million inhabitants, a huge piece of the former Soviet Union, and a country that in 1994 voluntarily gave up its nuclear weapons. NATO had come to the conclusion early on that it should care about Ukraine, and that the integrity and independence of this country are important to European security. Since the NATO-Ukraine Summit in Madrid in 1997, our relationships are organized under the NATO-Ukraine Charter, with regular meetings and work programmes as in the case of Russia. Some Ukrainians say that eventually they might want to join NATO. Others say this is not on the agenda. It is not in our interest to push them either way, but we will do our best to develop the "distinctive partnership" that we agreed. A word about the context. I am speaking about NATO and our programmes because I am representing this organization. But NATO is not acting in isolation and does not pretend a monopoly for security cooperation in Europe. My last slide shows the spaghetti we usually call "interlocking institutions", with Bosnia and Herzegovina top left. All these institutions contribute to security cooperation in one way or another. There is no contradiction in their conceptual approaches, and I think Bosnia is a good example how they have been forced to coordinate their activities and concentrate on their comparative advantages: NATO with the EAPC and PfP, the European Union, the WEU, the OSCE and even the Council of Europe. What is NATO's comparative advantage, and why do we place such an importance on our cooperation activities? I said in the beginning that NATO have never understood itself only as a collective defence organization. From a NATO point of view cooperative security means projection of security. In very simple terms: it is in our own interest to work with countries that understand us, and understand each other. Armed forces under firm democratic control are an important ingredient of security. If we help them work together on a common foundation, we invest in our own future.