The PfP Consortium as a Change Management and Integration Tool: Ten Years of Experience

Abstract

The PfP Consortium was born in 1999 at NATO’s Fiftieth Anniversary at the Washington Summit, although the idea of the Consortium was first tested in 1998 at ISF in Zurich. Bulgaria had the privilege of hosting the Second PfP Consortium Annual Conference in Sofia—the first gathering dedicated to the new initiative to define the roadmap for the future “troika council” that had been established to provide continuity between the annual conferences. The objectives defined in Washington were “fostering greater academic and educational opportunities within the defense and security community; encouraging high standards for professional military education; promoting cost-effective education through collaborative distance learning and distributed training; expanding dialogue, understanding, and cooperation through security-related research in EAPC countries; and, exploring complementary relationships with institutions such as the NATO Defense College.” About ten years later it is time to see how these goals were pursued, and to assess to what extent they have been achieved in EAPC area. The Statement of the Principles of the Consortium and the Statement of Operation and Administration were approved at the conference in Sofia. This marked the formal start of the new initiative, which was prepared by a team led by Dr. Kennedy and Dr. Winkler at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in GarmischPartenkirchen, Germany. The following year, in 2000, Dr. Winkler took over the Geneva Centre for Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF), an organization that played a key role in moving the Consortium forward. From the very beginning, the Consortium—having been established in the spirit of PfP—was an effective change management instrument that provided the opportunity for defense academies to work with civilian universities and security studies institutes, many of them NGOs from PfP countries. The development of the Consortium was facilitated by annual conferences, and through its relationships with other forums such as the International Security Forum (ISF), the George Marshall Center Alumni Association, the NATO Defense College Alumni Association, and the Conference of the