At NATO Annual Conference Brussels 14 April 2005

How can we generate parliamentary support for NATO's transformation? Introductory remarks by Constanze Stelzenmüller, Die Zeit Transforming NATO – A Political and Military Challenge Secretary General, Admirals and Generals all, Ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for inviting me to be the chairwoman on the session on how to generate parliamentary support for NATO's transformation. Now, I am always for the advancement of women. But with apologies to all the Secretary Generals, Ambassadors and Generals and Admirals here, I think the present panel and its chairwoman has by far the most difficult job of the day, and not because it's the after lunch session, although that does not make things easier, but rather because I would argue to you that military transformation is the easy bit. I realize that it takes some effort to sort of elaborate the project, but once you've done that, the nice thing about being a commander is that you get to tell people what to do and it actually happens. This is something that always fascinates journalists, and parliamentarians exactly, and I think is also more or less true for defence ministers and more or less true for NATO Secretary Generals. But of course politics don't work that way. Party leaders are lucky if they can generate support from their own side. And as we've recently seen in the German Regionals- elections, that can go badly too. And of course the other reason that this is a particularly difficult session is that the question on how to generate parliamentary support is a loaded question. It implies that the raison d'être of NATO, that this support is necessary, because the raison d'être, perhaps for some of us, and some countries members of the Alliance, is no longer a given. And that, I would argue, is true, at least in the perception of many members of the public and perhaps also of the political elite. We all know, time was, when expertise in security and defence issues, which basically was identical to having expertise in NATO issues, and power went together in parliaments. NATO and the Transatlantic Alliance were at the heart of our external security arrangements. And now, and ironically at a time when all NATO states have sent more soldiers to remoter missions than the earlier generation could ever have conceived of as possible, interest and expertise in NATO in the general public, in our parties and in our parliaments seems to have abruptly declined, and not because it has been replaced by a burning interest or faith in the SDP(?). I think there are many potential causes for this which we might want to discuss here: public introversion in the face of economic decline; decline in the quality and quantity of the strategic community, perhaps on both sides of the Atlantic, more so in Europe I think; a decline in the culture of Transatlanticism; and a decline perhaps even in the commitment of Allies to each other and the Alliance as a whole. I've been asked to be provocative. You see I'm trying to do so. I thought for anybody around at NATO during the diplomatic conflict before the Iraq War, the most disturbing aspect of this was that both sides had a fair case to make and did so in a way that was practically guaranteed to alienate the other side, to prevent the consensus, in many times. I think that now most of us would probably agree that we are past the lowest point. There is visibly a renewed willingness to go to work together. There is, thankfully, an admission of shared threats between America and Europe and there is a dispassionate recognition that whatever NATO's or the Alliance's flaws and shortcomings, this is better than going it alone, and it would also be a bad idea for the Europeans to try and go it alone. But it seems to me that NATO as an Alliance, and the Alliance behind it, is still a fragile one. And I think one of the best examples of that was a speech at a conference which shall go unnamed, where it was suggested tasking a high-level panel between the US and Europe to examine transatlantic issues and institutions, which I think on the whole was not meant badly but was spectacularly ill conceived and carried out, and disastrous in its effect. I think I can think of no better example of the fragility of the general mood still. Now, there have been a number of suggestions made today on how to deal with this, from common funding, whittling down national caveats, sharing intelligence, reducing national logistic dependence, Defence Minister of Denmark's suggestion for integrating political coordination in civil-military coordination, and of course preventive diplomatic and military action, all of which are eminently sensible suggestions, but they are worthless if there is no basic trust between the Allies. And I think nowhere was this more evident today than in the ambiguousness of the discussion about the potential uses in practice of the NRF and in the ambiguousness of the discussion of the future division of labour, or the relationship, whether cooperation or competition, between NATO and the EU. I think that gives us a fair number of issues to discuss among the four of us. I would be interested to see whether the gentlemen to my left and my right agree with my somewhat pessimistic assessment of the situation, which again, as I said, was supposed to be provocative. I think we also need to discuss what parliaments can do today to remedy this, and what can possibly NATO contribute to help shape the debate. I think the modus operandi for this session, to use a military term--you see that this is infectious for journalists--will be to give the word and to Mr. Klose, Mr. Banás and then to you, sir, and then to open the floor for discussion. To begin with, Mr. Klose, he's I think well known to all of you as a German parliamentarian with long-standing experience in transatlantic issues and NATO. He spent a high school year in Clinton, Iowa, like many Germans of his generation, and in fact many Germans now. Not all of them are in Iowa, and not all of them in Clinton, Iowa, but this is something that is very common, a very common experience that binds together many of us who are interested in transatlantic affairs. And he is now the Deputy Chairman of the Foreign Policy Committee in Bundestag. Mr. Klose, I give you the floor.