To achieve these various purposes, NATO embarked on a series of interlocking efforts during the 1990s that were intended to provide some aspect of an overall concept of security. A series of initiatives resulted in NATO accepting new members with the possibility of still further additions in the future, crafted the Partnership for Peace and created the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council; entered into a Founding Act with Russia and a Charter with Ukraine; revised its command arrangements; and, simultaneously, became increasingly aware that developing a new relationship with the Western European Union was clearly in its best interests (Hunter, 2003).
In this regard, Dannreuther (2004) maintains that the EU's engagement with its immediate periphery represents a highly important, and potentially the most important, post-Cold War geopolitical challenge for its foreign and security policy; the nature of these obstacles can be considered to have three major dimensions, as follows:
There has been the challenge of the enlargement of the European Union, to take on new members and to define the new borders of the Union. To some degree, this has been a joint project loosely coordinated with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) which culminated in the NATO summit in Prague and the EU summit in Copenhagen in late 2002 broadly welcoming the same group of candidates from East-Central Europe.
The impact of the EU's ambition to provide a political union to complement its economic union; the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) represent the most visible aspects of this political ambition.
The security challenges emanating from Europe's periphery and the demands for an effective crisis management capability (Dannreuther, 2004, pp. 2-3).
Recent Trends and Events.
In recent years, the United States, Canada, their European allies, and other countries belonging to the European Union (EU) have continued their long-standing debate concerning the appropriate relationship between the NATO in its historical context as well as a European defense "pillar" of the Western alliance (Hunter, 2002). According to a former ambassador to NATO, this debate has always had several components that continue to influence the various powers involved, including the following issues:
Paramount has been the characteristics and pace of the development of European integration, chiefly enshrined in the European Union;
The management of security within the West -- until 1991 focusing on the Soviet Union and now oriented more broadly;
The sharing of common transatlantic defense burdens among the various countries of Western Europe and North America; and,
The distribution of political influence, both within the two key institutions -- NATO and the EU -- and in general between the United States and its partner (Hunter, 2002, p. 1)
In 1993, yet another series of debates over these and other timely issues took place, with two important developments:
Widespread recognition that NATO still retained a purpose following the end of the Cold War; and,
European Union's embarking on a new round of institutional creativity (Hunter, 2002).
In reality, it would seem natural that the same processes that were taking place within NATO and the EU would have some degree of influence on each other, particularly considering that both of these organizations involved the essence of some fundamental questions. These questions included:
The nature of security in 21st-century Europe;
The long-term relationships among European and transatlantic politics, economics, society, and military affairs;
The role to be played by the United States in European security -- both writ large (the corpus of relations) and small (military engagement); and,
The precise purposes to be developed in the new era for the two great institutions, entailing both the respective bounds that separate them and the processes and practices that can and do link them together (Hunter, 2002, p. 3).
The defense minister from France argued that, "The prime objective of the common European security and defence policy is to strengthen our military capabilities so that Europeans can make a greater contribution to the security of their continent, within the Alliance framework, or within the EU" (quoted in Hunter, 2002 at p. 35).
Current and Future Trends.
According to Gartner and his colleagues, "For much of the Cold War and before, security was primarily defined in military terms and concerned primarily with the national security of the territorial state. In the absence of a...
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