Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Foreign Affairs
Issue 33 - Evidence
OTTAWA, Wednesday, April 14, 1999
The Standing Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs met this day at 4:15 p.m. to examine the ramifications to Canada of the changed mandate of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Canada's role in NATO since the demise of the Warsaw Pact, the end of the Cold War and the recent addition to membership in NATO of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic; and of peacekeeping, with particular reference to Canada's ability to participate in it under the auspices of any international body of which Canada is a member.
Senator John B. Stewart (Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chairman: Honourable senators, I call the meeting to order. This afternoon, we begin our work on a recent reference from the Senate with regard to Canada's role in NATO and Canada's participation in peacekeeping operations.
To introduce us to the topic, we have as a witness Dr. David Long. Dr. Long is a professor at Carleton University. He teaches international theory, the history of political thought, European politics and gender and international relations. He has published articles in the Review of International Studies, Millennium: Journal of International Study, Journal of European Integration and International Journal.
He is the author of Towards a New Liberal Internationalism: The International Theory of J.A. Hobson.
I have a list of the many learned articles that he has produced. However, given the hour of the day, I shall not read it. The list is available to any senator who wishes to have a copy.
We have asked Dr. Long to provide us with an overture to our work on our present reference. We realize that since this is the beginning, we may not have a full understanding of all the terminology. However, we have to start somewhere. I am told that Dr. Long will be most helpful to us.
I ask Dr. Long to proceed.
Professor David Long, School of International Affairs, Carleton University: Thank you for inviting me, Mr. Chairman. It is an honour to come to speak to you today.
I was asked to provide an overview of NATO. I must admit that I am somewhat nervous about speaking about NATO here. My first reaction was to wonder what a 30-something university professor could tell senators about what some people would argue is an out-of-date institution that is looking for a role, and also what an overview of such a long-standing feature of Canadian foreign and defence policy means. NATO is 50 years old this year, as I am sure you know.
I decided to give a broad look at how the alliance has changed over the last 10 years. I will highlight a number of themes that are key to understanding where NATO is today.
I wish to state a caveat before I begin. I am not the person to ask about troop levels or military operational matters. I will not speak too much about Kosovo, but I will not be able to avoid the topic altogether.
Over the last 10 years, NATO has transformed itself from being simply a collective defence organization of the Western democracies and an institutional identification of the west's posture of nuclear and conventional deterrence. It has changed into a European security organization with a wide range of functions, responsibilities and activities.
The changes in NATO are a product of its response to changes in European and international security heralded by the Cold War. However, the changes have not been altogether uncontroversial in terms of the internal politics of NATO. That is to say, should it stay as a straightforward collective defence organization, or should it become an organization for pan-European security, or can it do both? Should it enlarge to admit new members or should it only diversify and deepen its relations with non-NATO countries, or should it do both?
Other controversial elements relate to the external politics of NATO's place in the so-called European security architecture. Is NATO the right organization to take on wider security issues and the broader security agenda therein?
Answers to any of these questions are hard to provide because the changes are still in progress and the "new NATO", as it is being called, has yet to be tested. With its role in implementing the Dayton Accords, with enlargement to the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, and particularly with the crisis in Kosovo, it is only now that the new NATO is genuinely being tested.
NATO business during the Cold War focused on deterring a Soviet attack and preparing for defence in the event of an attack, as was outlined under Article V of the Washington Treaty establishing the alliance. As it turned out, NATO was never called to perform its collective defence function. An attack never took place. It sat and waited.
A critical analysis could even go further. It is unclear, it might be suggested, whether NATO itself deterred a Soviet attack at all. When you deter something, it does not happen. If it does not happen, then you cannot know if it was not going to happen anyway, if you see what I mean.
Another reason why you cannot be sure whether NATO was the effective organization in deterrence is that it is pretty clear that the nuclear stand-off between the Soviet Union and the U.S. was the key issue.
It might even be claimed, and I have heard this said in some European fora, that Cold War NATO is rather akin to the Soviet-era Economic Central Planning Agency, GOSPLAN. It may sound like an odd comparison, but the suggestion is that it is a very nice idea in theory but that it did not do anything in practice.
Yet, at the end of the Cold War, there was a celebration because of the transitions, but also because NATO has been viewed, and is still viewed by many, as a highly successful military alliance. It won the Cold War.
Having won, however, in the immediate post-Cold War era in the early 1990s, there was a good deal of questioning of the continued relevance of NATO, although arguably more among academics and pundits than policy-makers. With the disappearance of the Soviet threat, for some, NATO appeared redundant. Many proposed instead the augmentation of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe as a pan-European security organization. Others trumpeted the prospects for a rejuvenated European security and defence identity that would rival NATO within Europe in a transformed Western European Union.
Still others considered that the changed nature and security in Europe meant that international organizations not traditionally concerned with security, such as the European Union and the Council of Europe, would be more appropriate venues for dealing with the new dimensions of security in Europe, inter alia, domestic economic and political transition, migration and refugee flows, ethnic and cultural conflicts, transnational crime, et cetera.
Still others suggested the need for interlocking institutions with a division of labour and relationships of authorization and implementation among them, with the UN and OSCE at the top legitimizing and authorizing, and with NATO and other organizations implementing decisions.
There were certainly changes in the European security architecture, including the Paris Charter of the CSCE declaring the end of the Cold War and various other developments, such as the Petersburg tasks by the Western European Union and the European Union's Maastricht Treaty formulating a common foreign and security policy. For its part, NATO modified its strategic concept, the key way it defines what it is supposed to be doing, to reflect the new, less immediately threatening European environment. It innovated new institutions and arrangements, such as the North Atlantic Cooperation Council and the Partnership for Peace.
However, I would argue that only NATO has emerged from the conflict in the Balkans with its reputation reasonably intact up to this point, and this has restored NATO's place at the centre of European security. The Europeans and their institutions underestimated the difficulties they might encounter in Croatia and Bosnia and thoroughly botched their attempts at settlement. Similarly, the UN was left with egg on its face as the Bosnian Serbs ran rings around UNPROFOR peacekeepers and other monitors. With its role in the embargo on Yugoslavia and Operation Deny Flight over Bosnia, and then the airstrikes against Bosnian Serb targets and, subsequently, its role in the implementation of the military aspects of the Dayton Accords, NATO restored its reputation as the only credible security organization for Europe.
Another reason for the continued salience of NATO is that while the objective view from the west is that there is little direct immediate threat from the east, the subjective interpretations of former Warsaw Pact countries are otherwise. This has led to a continuous and vehement request for accession to NATO on the part of Central and Eastern European countries. This has been crowned recently by the accession of Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland.
How has NATO adapted to its new roles? After all, as a collective defence organization, it was not well suited to the changed security environment of Europe where there are fewer clear enemies, the threats are real but diffuse, such as nuclear proliferation and migration, and where cooperation was needed more than deterrence. NATO rose to this challenge by redefining itself and, in particular, giving itself new roles while maintaining its core function of preserving the security of its members. In so doing, I would argue that it is Article 4 of the Washington Treaty dealing with consultations about security concerns that is emphasized, rather than Article 5, which is the collective defence provision.
There is a change in the way Article 4 is read, in that it has been disassociated from its Cold War association as a trigger for Article 5 measures, namely, that consultations then were to be about collective defence. Subsequently, Article 4 now rests on its own.
Such changes are not merely aggrandizement on the part of NATO. Rather, NATO's coherence and its status as an operational international organization for the hard end of security is vitally important given that in European and global terms this is something in extremely short supply.
I will now talk about the character of the new NATO. Because the threats to European security are currently multifarious and diffuse, NATO's adaptation has taken a number of different forms. There has been a reorganization of the military structure away from that required for an immediate attack in Central Europe towards more flexibility. There is the Rapid Reaction Corps (a small, rapidly deployable force in Albania at present). The new Command Structure is being simplified and has been made more flexible. There are also the Combined Joint Task Forces, which are multinational, multiservice formations intended both to improve NATO operational response to crises and to also allow for the development of the European Security and Defence Identity within NATO. I will return to that. These formations reflect the fact that the Europeans are developing their own security identity, but within NATO.
NATO's new roles emerged from the rethinking of its strategic concept in Rome, in 1991, in terms of providing the basis for a secure European environment. This new role would serve as the transatlantic forum for discussions on security issues and issues of common concern, to deter and defend against aggression and to preserve the strategic balance in Europe.
In the new security environment, then, NATO pursues the security goals of its members through political as well as military means and specifically through dialogue and cooperation as well as crisis management, conflict prevention and peacekeeping.
Dialogue and cooperation have been manifested in NATO's extended forum, the North Atlantic Cooperation Council, formed in 1991, and since 1997 has been called the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council.
The Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council is a forum for political and security-related matters such as defence planning, civil-military affairs and so on. This organization was initially a grouping of NATO members and some members from the former Warsaw Pact. It is now a pan-European organization that includes pretty much all of the European countries with the exception of Yugoslavia, Ireland, and some smaller states such as Andorra and the Holy See.
The EAPC is the forum for political and security-related discussion. It meets on a regular basis. The EAPC will be meeting at the summit in Washington later this month.
This dialogue and cooperation was augmented by the Partnership for Peace (PfP) initiative in 1994, which entailed concrete military to military cooperation between NATO and partners in the context of a series of PfP partnerships for peace agreements. While each PfP agreement can differ given the varied interests and capabilities of partners, among other things PfP has allowed the improved coordination of NATO and PfP in peacekeeping. For example, while a partner such as Romania is not a member of NATO, it, along with others, has been allowed to engage in joint exercises and in peacekeeping.
PfP also created security consultation akin to Article 4 of the Washington Treaty for Partners. The issue of the differences between NATO membership obligations and obligations to partners in terms of consultations is interesting. Maybe we can talk about that later.
Finally, dialogue and cooperation are capped by the accession of new members into the alliance from among the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. Along with the decision to admit Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic at the Madrid Summit in 1997, NATO signed a founding act with Russia sustaining a Permanent Joint Council primarily in order to assuage the Russians about NATO enlargement and to calm fears of a Russian backlash.
In addition, a NATO-Ukrainian Commission has been established. The difficulties of enlargement have lessened somewhat now that the first entrants have been accepted. This was a very controversial issue. However, now that there are actually three countries coming in, these tensions have been arguably reduced.
However, the basic problems or the questions are still there. There are still the costs, financial and otherwise, to the alliance of expansion; the costs to the new members of joining the alliance in terms of raising their military and operational standards to those of NATO; the dilution of NATO collective defence commitments -- and I am throwing this out as a suggestion of what might happen as the alliance expands -- and the creation of new divisions in Europe, now that Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic are in and other countries are out. Finally, NATO continues to be an aggravation to relations with Russia.
Cooperation and security are also hopefully enhanced by the development of a European Security Defence Identity within NATO. Agreed on in 1994, within NATO, this entails the concept of separable but not separate forces and it will rest particularly on the Combined Joint Task Force that I discussed earlier. These could be potentially used for Western European Union operations or, in other words, the European states engaging in peacekeeping or crisis management without U.S. involvement.
Having said that, consent has been rather difficult to get and is intended to be one of the subjects raised at the upcoming summit. However, it is an important move forward in the relationship insofar as it supersedes calls from certain European quarters for a European Security Defence Identity outside NATO.
However, as I said, implementation has been difficult. There are a whole series of questions about how to implement separable but not separate forces and how certain NATO countries would engage in peacekeeping while others did not, how you use what assets from NATO and so on. For Canada, one of the interesting things about the CGTFs being used for the WEU is that if the Europeans decide to do something, they leave us out unless we have a mechanism for being in because we are not part of the WEU.
In addition, in Canada we have a serious concern about "blocism" within NATO. As you build the European pillar, maybe you are reinforcing the notion of a NATO of two blocs, European and North American.
In 1992, NATO agreed to do peacekeeping. This is where I will turn from cooperation and dialogue per se to peacekeeping and crisis management. In 1992, NATO agreed to do peacekeeping if requested to do so by the UN or OSCE.
In that context, NATO secured the no-fly zone over Bosnia, enforced the embargo of Yugoslavia and conducted air strikes in support of the safe havens in Bosnia.
NATO and a number of partner forces have participated in IFOR and SFOR. By my calculations, there are four countries that are neither NATO nor Partnership for Peace countries that are in IFOR. Egypt, Malaysia and Morocco are examples, but the large majority of countries are NATO or Partnership for Peace countries.
Therefore, they have been very much involved in the Dayton Accords. NATO forces in Bosnia helped to maintain the fragile peace as it was implemented and NATO implemented the military aspects of the Dayton Agreements, such as the destruction of militia weaponry, while OSCE and other organizations monitored elections and refugee repatriation.
However, NATO became more involved in the civilian aspects of Dayton as it became clear that some level of force would probably be necessary to ensure that the parties comply with their obligations. This has been limited so far to refugees returning home or what to do about war criminals and the War Crimes Tribunal. It is difficult to balance its peacekeeping responsibilities with going after war criminals or forcibly removing those who are a threat to refugees returning home.
Finally, NATO has recently engaged in coercive crisis management by attempting to use threat and force alongside diplomacy in order to move combatants toward a desired settlement or as a way of preventing the escalation of a conflict such that the stronger side wins. This has moved from squeezing the former Yugoslavia with an embargo and then air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs until the situation on the ground in Bosnia brought the leaders of Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia together. And more recently, of course, we have seen first the threat and then the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia over Kosovo.
This is a general overview. I now wish to ask a few questions that came to my mind as I spoke about the general sense of what NATO had been doing in the last 10 years. I will raise a series of questions and then I will end my presentation.
How will Combined Joint Task Forces work, especially in relation to the development of this Western European Union ability to work on their own and the possibility of non-NATO missions using non-NATO assets? How will that pan out? How can the transatlantic link be maintained in the context of a new emphasis on European security and defence identity? How, where and when will there be further enlargement -- specifically with respect to Slovenia and Romania, the main contenders left out last time? How will NATO's relations with other international institutions concerned with European security develop? On the one hand, in Kosovo, NATO entered into actions without either UN or less relevant OSCE mandate. On the other hand, the dual key approach of the Bosnia operation was exceedingly frustrating, namely, where NATO had to wait for UN notice to conduct air strikes because of UN problems with chain of command and UN political prowess -- things about which we all know.
Is it possible to use NATO military means to achieve a political goal? If so, how and under what conditions? What are the constraints, in addition to that, of a low casualty approach? You know what I mean by that. We will not lose anyone is one side of it. The other side is that they will not lose many people, apart from the bad guys who are doing nasty things. In other words, they will not lose civilians.
Why has there been mandate transition and mission creep? This may be one of the key questions for the committee. What are the consequences of the expansion of NATO activities? In times of humanitarian crisis or profound threats to European security, NATO cannot simply stand by -- partly for moral reasons but more immediately for tactical reasons. If NATO is of no use in a conflict such as Kosovo, it might be argued of what use is it anyway? Arguing that NATO must act because it can is an intriguing inversion of the dictum that "ought" implies "can." I was always told that you cannot be taught morally to do something if you cannot do it. In this case, the argument is that NATO can do something; therefore, it should do it. That is an interesting twist on the original dictum. On the other hand, there seems to be a slippery slope from two apparently perfectly reasonable statements. These statements are, first, that European peace and security are indivisible; and, second, that NATO security is affected by conflict and humanitarian crises on its border. This seems to have moved NATO from supporting peacekeeping under UN auspices to engaging in war on its own behalf in the name of the international community. It has moved it from guaranteeing European security to becoming mired in the Balkan conflicts. This is partly a product of NATO's understanding of collective security. This is an understanding of the term that is markedly different from the classical internally oriented view of "collective security" problematically embodied in organizations such as the UN. NATO's view of collective security appears to be the assertion that insecurity in Europe threatens NATO's security and that NATO's security and, thus, NATO, is responsible for security in all of Europe.
Another question is whether NATO must win, and why? This has been asserted in the context of the present crisis, but there is a broader issue. Partly, it is an issue of NATO's credibility and reputation, although "must win" has more of a Cold War ring about it than anything. Let us be clear: The argument NATO must not lose is not integrally connected to the fate of any ethnic minority in Yugoslavia. It is related, rather, to the credibility of the only perceived successful hard security organization in Europe and also to the credibility of the U.S. the U.K., and so on, who have given rather windy rhetoric against the Yugoslavian regime.
A further question is: In what way does NATO's orientation need to be modified, specifically with regard to the strategic concept? One possibility is increased NATO attention to global concerns -- that is, transforming it from a European security organization to one in service of global security that is responding to humanitarian crises and developing a coherent approach to international terrorism, counter-proliferation, and so on. The advantage is the possibility of addressing tragedies, including humanitarian crises, other than those in Europe, for example, in Algeria, in Sudan or in other places. The disadvantages are obvious. They include the dilution of the focus of NATO still further from collective defence and from the vital interest of its members and, more importantly, the implicit imperialism of NATO, again taking care of others' security in its own terms.
Finally, what is the relationship between the concept of human security -- terminology that we have heard a lot about lately -- to our NATO operations and activities? NATO policy on land mines was not in accordance with the goals of the Ottawa process.
You might raise a number of other questions, but these are what came to my mind.
In conclusion, is NATO an institution that is responsible for global security or is it a militaristic Cold War relic looking for enemies? My remarks have indicated that it is neither of these extremes but that it performs a number of different roles in the post-Cold War European security environment. It has reinvented itself and engages in a considerable amount of cooperative security activities while its core collective defence functions remain salient. It is in the military coercive end of the spectrum of its instruments that NATO's strength lies, literally and metaphorically speaking.
Mediation, negotiation and cooperative activity can and are conducted in other fora, but the combination of force and diplomacy make NATO a unique international actor. This not only allows it to conduct a bombing campaign against Serbia in pursuit of a political goal of negotiations for peace in Kosovo but also increases its credibility in military to military cooperation, a significant part of cooperative security in Europe generally and, in particular, partnership in peace.
More abstractly, NATO represents the military face of the common interests of the Western Liberal democracies. This is an important characteristic but it is also a limitation. While NATO was a product of the Cold War, the nature and shape of the alliance was conditioned by more than simply the need for a continual and formalized alliance in the face of the continuing Soviet threat. In some respects, NATO's origins lie in the ideas and the essay Perpetual Peace by Immanuel Kant. This is so because the idea of some sort of organization of democracies has influenced a race of peace theorists and politicians in this century, especially in face of the challenges from Communist and fascist dictatorships earlier this century.
The bigger picture is the common interest -- and, not only in defence and security of Western liberal democracies -- including bias towards openness, democracy, rule of law, just treatment of minorities, and so on. The limitation, however, is that because NATO is, in a basic sense, an ideological union, it cannot assume that its policies and actions will necessarily find agreement beyond NATO borders. Further, there is a temptation to be profound on what I would describe as "the discourse of the good guys and bad guys", which is a bad B-movie rendition of the liberal democratic biases. This should be resisted for fear of chilling international cooperation more generally.
A different problem with peacekeeping is one that NATO faces these days in the Balkans, and that is the likelihood of being there for a long time. The argument runs that we cannot get involved, for we will be there forever.
NATO could be locked into such a contest. However, this is hardly a problem unique to NATO, as we all know if we consider the case of Cyprus. Furthermore, when one compares the present estimates on the number of troops needed for peacekeeping or other missions in Kosovo, it is worth remembering the number of troops stationed in Europe during the Cold War in circumstances, which, while stable, were potentially catastrophic.
The main difference between the Cold War and the present scenarios is our estimation of the worth or utility of our involvement. Cynically, how many body bags is intervention worth in this era of media?
The transatlantic link established by NATO is central to Canada. It has been and will continue to be for the foreseeable future a central element of our institutionalized relationship with many of the industrialized countries of Europe. Furthermore, Canada has a strong interest in the cooperative activities of the new NATO and also in the security of Europe.
Canada also has an interest in a strong NATO that will oppose international aggression. By the same token, despite or perhaps because of its changes, NATO is a military alliance working less for collective defence, and more for adventures abroad, however worthy they might seem. NATO remains an institution dominated by the U.S.
The Chairman: Is there any other province in Yugoslavia with a large population that has ethnic ties to a NATO country? Do we have NATO members who might find themselves in a position comparable to that in which Yugoslavia now finds itself?
Mr. Long: At first I thought you were asking whether Serbia has a minority population that is represented by a NATO country. I was going to say that a part of Serbia has a Hungarian minority, so a NATO country has a minority in the northern part of Serbia. That has been very quiet so far, but could potentially become unpleasant.
On the other hand, if you are talking about minorities, it just so happens that we have admitted a country that borders on Serbia and has an ethnic minority right there. As you can see, it is quite a serious issue in that sense. As I said, most of this cooperative security stuff has been done under operations. At what point would that kick in if there was a problem in which Hungary was involved? I do not know. Hypothetically, I doubt that Article 5 would be invoked. It certainly is a serious problem.
Senator Stollery: It would affect Hungary as a new member under political independence or security. It would be a clear threat to Hungary.
Senator Andreychuk: You have glossed over Canada's need to be in NATO today. You seem to say that Canada has an interest in belonging to NATO. During the Cold War, a threat to Europe was a threat to Canada. How do you translate that into the same need for Canada and Canada's interests? How do you justify our continuing mandate, given the opportunities we have had to witness what happened in Bosnia and how that has been used in Kosovo? Also, obviously the United States has always played a prime role in NATO, but other nations, including Canada, had carved out a pretty unique role for themselves in that organization. This role seems to have been diluted since 1991, particularly with the new command structures. It seems to me that we have become even more diminished in terms of our influence within NATO. Is that assessment correct?
Mr. Long: My perception parallels yours. We are less influential than we used to be. If you ever raise that issue with Europeans or Americans, they will say that Canadians have closed a base and have been talking about cutting back on expenditures and so on. Perhaps Canada has not given the right signals about NATO and its participation in it.
Canada's interests have changed along with today's threats, problems and issues. During the Cold War period, we had the possibility of a dramatic event we wanted to avoid at all costs. We had to be there one way or another. That concentrates the mind. On the other hand, right now, we have a series of very real problems that are of interest to Canada. We should take this opportunity to encourage and reinforce democratic transition in Central and Eastern Europe. This is not to say that NATO should be the exclusive preoccupation of Canadian foreign policy, but NATO performs a very useful function. The Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council is a warm and cozy environment, but not terrible interesting. At one level you sit around and have discussions about military and political affairs, which is fine. On the other hand, the Partnership for Peace has been very real in terms of defence and military cooperation, as well as in their impact on civil military affairs in each of these countries.
There is also the question of the relationship between civilians and military in your defence ministries. Those are very real issues. I think that it would be very valuable for Canada to contribute to that, and it would reflect our national interest.
Having that said, it is not potential and dramatic, but it is real if it is diffuse.
Senator Andreychuk: You indicated that there was one school of thought that said you need OSCE or United Nations involvement before you trigger NATO or other mechanisms into a conflict in Europe. Then there was the other school of thought. What do you think, knowing that it may be preferable to have the world community backing you through the United Nations or even the broad OSCE? Do you see, in the structures of the present NATO and the WEU, et cetera, the need to go to the UN first or is there a legitimacy within the NATO structures to act on its own, beyond consultation perhaps being the only proviso?
Mr. Long: I do not agree that you can give yourself the mandate to do something, simply to provide security. The question is whether you can bomb people for human rights. We can argue about that, but the thing that worries me is paternalism. That says that we know what is right. We do not actually have a structure in which you can be engaged or in which all the countries that matter can be engaged. In the NATO Council, we think that we should do this, we should take coercive action.
What is the distinction between an aggressive war and collective security as defined by NATO? It seems to me that it is, I hate to say it, in the eye of the beholder. Certainly on the Serbian side, it is. Even from an analytical point of view, NATO says that this is ultimately a security concern for us. I would prefer some sort of legitimizing structure. I am not sure whether it needs to be the UN.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: That is the topic I wanted to mention. If it is not the UN, then who is it?
Mr. Long: It would have to be the OSCE or some other mechanism. We are talking ideally in that my perception is that the OSCE has been sidelined in this. Canada certainly wanted to go to the UN for a variety of reasons. In any case, the OSCE was not in the ball game, which was a shame. Part of the point of a regional organization like OSCE is precisely to anticipate these sorts of crises and to say we need to do something about this and to indicate what it is we need to do. Why the mechanisms did not work, I cannot tell you, but it would be an interesting question.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: I am sure we will approach it as time goes on.
I am still vague as to how NATO was authorized to change its objectives. You did say that, in 1992, "NATO agreed," et cetera. What did that mean, "NATO agreed"?
Mr. Long: In the North Atlantic Council, NATO said that it would, if asked, provide peacekeeping forces for the OSCE. There are two questions. There is the broader question about strategic concept and the activities that flow from it, that is, how you self-define what it is you are doing to provide security for your members. Ultimately, that task has not changed. NATO is about the security of its members, first and foremost, and all the activities that arguably subsequently flow from that. Nevertheless, it has gone beyond that to providing security for others. However, in terms of a mandate to do that, it seems to me that the procedure has been that, until very recently, NATO will not do it on its own behalf, that it will follow one of the other legitimizing, more inclusive organizations, such as the OSCE or the UN.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: Is this NATO's own decision, a known interpretation of its authority?
Mr. Long: Do you mean with regard to any particular conflict?
Senator Lynch-Staunton: I mean with regard to the current one.
Mr. Long: With regard to Kosovo, yes.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: Was that a military and political decision taken within the NATO structure itself?
Mr. Long: The council decided, yes.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: You cannot answer whether there were consultations with the 19 members.
Mr. Long: It would have been a decision of the 19 members, as I understand it, at least. There would have been consensus on it.
Senator Grafstein: What assets do we have deployed in NATO today? What assets do we have at present deployed on a permanent basis in NATO, aside from our support for the ability of NATO to call on additional forces. At this moment, when we say NATO, what do we mean, in terms of physical deployment of personnel or assets?
Mr. Long: I do not have the answer. In terms of Europe, we have very little. We do not have permanently stationed forces in Europe at all. We contribute to the international staff, both military and civilian. We contribute to the international staff in Brussels and on the civilian side of it. There is our permanent representative and so on.
Senator Grafstein: Do we have a permanent air arm physically located in Europe?
Mr. Long: No. One thing that was said of us was that we should have done so because it would have cost us less to fly the CF-18s over there. It costs so much to fly them over there, we might as well have left them there.
Senator Grafstein: Is it fair to say that, given normal times, we had permanently in Europe really strategic staff and support staff in the command and subordinate structures to deal with strategic issues in some fashion?
Mr. Long: Yes.
Senator Grafstein: Have you examined the resolutions of the United Nations and the resolutions of the OSCE to see how, if at all, they adhere to the charter and the mandate of NATO?
The Chairman: Can you answer that briefly?
Mr. Long: I do not think I can. We are talking about different situations. Certainly bodies can be authorized by the OSCE and the UN to act. They can act under certain aspects of the charter. NATO was initially established under Article 51, the right of individual and collective self-defence. There are other aspects, in terms of the resolutions, but, again, I am not an expert on that so I would not venture into it.
Senator Prud'homme: I think we have not assessed sufficiently the expansion of NATO, and on this point I would be in agreement with Senator Grafstein when he talks about having a real debate on that subject.
I am one of those who is not yet convinced we should have done it, and I am not convinced we should do it more in the future. History is on our side. We started at 12 members, and then in 1952 we added Turkey and Greece. Perhaps we helped them to not be at each other's throats. Then in 1955 we added Spain, and in 1982 we added Germany. We added another three, and there are nine who are dreaming and who are pressuring us politically: three in the Baltic, three in the Balkans, and three ex-Warsaw Pact countries.
Our Speaker just arrived from Georgia, and Georgia is the most unstable place. Will we see six separate, strongly armed groups within Georgia, some who are dreaming about Turkey in the south, some who have the support of China in the north, some in North Ossetia versus South Ossetia? They all look alike. If you put all that on television, you will have the same show.
What is NATO to become? What is NATO to be? It was very clearly said, and it has not changed, if my memory serves, that NATO dedicates itself to the collective defence of its member states. I was in Kosovo, and I reported in Ottawa. No one listened because real rednecks wanted to make an independent country and not stay within Yugoslavia. Now, NATO may be in the process of creating a new, independent country, after having said that these people belong to Yugoslavia.
I personally am not happy with what is about to become of NATO, the NATO that was the great, pure NATO collective defence against the big Soviet Union. There are so many changes taking place. That is why I am so interested in this committee.
Mr. Long: I cannot give you a good answer, but I can at least attempt one.
One of the paradoxes is that NATO enlargement arguably secures the already secure. The process is such that only those that are ready and are resolving their disputes will ever get in. Nevertheless, it precisely addresses the areas where there are at least sets of problems. On the other hand, how is security to be provided or how are these countries to gain security? Say you are talking about Albania or talking about Kosovo, Yugoslavia, whatever. It seems to me that membership is not necessarily the answer, in any event.
My opinion has always been that we should bring about a wide range of different organizations, relationships and networks. We should get Partnership for Peace on the military side and EU cooperation agreements on the other into the various organizations for trade, globally, in order to bring them into the wider international community. NATO membership per se does not do anything other than possibly make things more complex. If NATO had not changed, enlarged, or changed its mandate, I think that we would all be sitting here wondering what exactly it was doing, because as I have said, it secures the already secure. That is certainly true of Central Europe.
Senator Roche: I will only ask one question of our witness. It concerns the implications of the present situation on Canadian foreign policy. It is clear that Kosovo has shown dramatically the counterpointing of the United Nations and NATO, particularly now that NATO has assumed this political role in addition to its military function.
Which is going to predominate in determining action for global security? Where is Canada going to rest its primary allegiance? For some time, Canada has fudged the contradictions between the UN and NATO, particularly in the field of nuclear weapons. Is it possible that Kosovo has brought us to a moment in Canadian foreign policy where we can no longer fudge which one will get our primary allegiance, the United Nations or NATO? What do you think will be the implications of the present situation?
Mr. Long: That is a very interesting question. Ultimately, I think Canada's allegiance is to NATO right now, because the UN is not going to work. However, Canada would have preferred the UN.
That leaves us with the question as to why the UN does not work in terms of the Security Council, and there you have the structure of the Security Council and the institutionalization of the veto and great power position. On that, I have what is probably an unpopular and out-of-date position. I actually think that vetoes for Russia and China are not such a bad idea. They precisely stop cavalier action by the United States. It does mean that sometimes we do not do things.
I would not try to reform that forum. If you are going to try to work on ethnic conflict and conflict prevention, I would start reforming the United Nations in a more general way and start talking about other institutions other than high military security in the Security Council.
I would say, in short, that NATO has been chosen this time because the UN is not working. The question is, can the UN ever work in this sort of context? I think reform needs to be pursued, but I am not sure that the current way of looking at UN reform will work. I think we need to be more imaginative on UN reform. That is easy to say.
The Chairman: I think we get to that as a predictability question.
Senator Meighen: This question is purely for my own information. To what extent was there an attempt under the NATO umbrella between its members to enter into, for want of a better expression, what I might call defence production sharing arrangements or other economic goodies, to be shared around, and to what extent, if any, did Canada benefit from it?
Mr. Long: There are several fellows in the University of Manitoba who know a lot more about this than I. My understanding is that there is not a great deal, and you would expect it most from Europe in terms of getting its act together. In fact, I think that issue is one that is supposed to be part of the upcoming summit.
It is not that resources are not being devoted to defence production; it is that they are being devoted to various national champions, which are not doing very much in terms of effective production. It has been suggested that European security and defence identity should be a more coherent European position.
Having said that, that possibly flies in the face of the U.S., which of course is the big player in all of this. However, I would add that I am not an expert on defence production issues.
The Chairman: Senators, we have gone over our time. I think we are in full agreement that this has been a very helpful exploratory venture. I am sure that some of the questions that were raised this afternoon will come back again and again. It may well be that we will need to have the present witness back again, perhaps again and again. Thank you very much. We appreciate your contribution.
The committee continued in camera.