Outreach Strategies in the Wake of NATO and EU Enlargement: Refocusing on the Partnership for Peace

Abstract

As a dedicated non-member country, you can trust Switzerland to be strongly committed to upholding the status of those states that will be left out of future rounds of NATO and EU enlargement. However, this natural tendency of the Swiss should not be taken as a sign of blind instinct or unsophisticated conservatism. We may not be candidates for membership in NATO for valid historical reasons, and we may be regrettably slow on our path towards full integration in the EU. But we do nevertheless have a perspective on the evolution of our continent, on global security, and on the principles and references that we think should guide meaningful progress towards enhanced stability and prosperity. It is in this sense, and because of a set of reasoned convictions, that we favor patterns of openness, outreach, and cooperation between the numerous bodies we belong to, as well as the few to which we remain outsiders. Hence our interest in post-enlargement outreach strategies. Such strategies, we believe, are significant, both at the political and at the technical level. In choosing which aspects to concentrate on, we will limit the present study to the rationale for continued openness and outreach. Considering that none of the EU’s recent mishaps or setbacks have had the effect of modifying its core objectives or its attractiveness to non-members, we will first look at the recent evolution experienced by NATO before making a case for geographic as well as thematic outreach strategies. The Prague Summit, which took place less than a year ago, was widely seen as a success for NATO. The final phase of the second round of enlargement since the fall of the Berlin Wall was formally launched barely eight years after the newly invented Partnership for Peace first attracted former Soviet republics or satellites to NATO (along with some other partners). Russia—apparently satisfied with the enhanced NATO-Russia Council—barely objected to NATO’s eastward expansion. Major decisions were made to transform the command structures of the Alliance. Europeans agreed to fill some of the gaps that separate them from the Americans at the technological level. The full launch of the NATO Response Force was, and still is, scheduled for 2006. NATO seemed to be back on track for playing a relevant role in the future. But soon thereafter, the picture changed quite dramatically. Only a few months later, in the spring of 2003, most of the major international organizations appeared to be in bad shape. The UN, after failing to provide an international mandate for the Anglo-American decision to invade Iraq, was simply ignored. The marginalization of the UN continued after the war was formally over, and it required the tragic death of Sergio Vieira de Mello and twenty other UN staff to jump-start a new debate about giving the UN a more significant role in Iraq. The EU, for its part, was deeply divided on the