Title: From Lisbon to Lisbon: squaring the circle of EU and NATO future roles. Egmont Security Policy Brief No. 16, January 2011
Abstract: [Introduction]. NATO emerged from its 19-20 November
2010 Lisbon Summit with a new Strategic
Concept (SC) that is concise and readable.
That is an achievement in its own right, as
those who in preparing for the Summit
struggled through the previous longwinding
1999 version will appreciate. The
new text does not break a daring new path
for NATO nor does it bridge any age-old
divide, which perhaps explains why
attention from the media and the general
public outlasted the Summit itself by just a
day or two. Even so the Summit can be
deemed successful, for NATO needed a
new and clear mission statement, as the
public, and many governments, were
growing restive about Afghanistan, and
were beginning to doubt whether that
seemingly never-ending war did not put a
mortgage on the Alliance’s reason for
living: the collective defence of its territory.
The new Strategic Concept provides the
answers that were to be expected. Of
course, NATO must be capable of both
Article 5, i.e. territorial defence, and non-
Article 5, i.e. worldwide crisis management
operations. Evidently, the Alliance must
remain committed to nuclear disarmament
while maintaining nuclear deterrence as a
core element of Article 5: “As long as
nuclear weapons exist, NATO will remain
a nuclear Alliance” (SC §17). Naturally, it is
better to have a “strong and constructive
partnership with Russia” (SC §34) than to
steer an antagonistic course — Russia’s
own interpretation of that will become
clear soon enough. The Strategic Concept
offers a neat expression of NATO’s
mission and how it seeks to go about it in
the years to come.
And yet, a forceful Strategic Concept has
not generated a self-confident Alliance, and
not just because at the same time as
strategizing NATO had to down-size as
well. The NATO structure will be cut from
some 13,000 to some 8,000 personnel. The
much more fundamental reason for the
existential unease that marks NATO today
is its loss of centrality. The Strategic
Concept contains a number of ambiguities
as a consequence of trying to reconcile two
ways of dealing with this loss of centrality:
staying relevant by strengthening the core
business, or staying relevant by adding new
business lines
Publication Year: 2011
Publication Date: 2011-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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