Forum 2000 Holds NATO Roundtable
These days, many conferences and roundtables are being held in Prague alongside the NATO summit in order to highlight different perspectives on NATO. One of the first took place last week and was organised by the Forum 2000 committee, the topic being "The Role and Responsibility of NATO after Enlargement."
When they did stick to the topic, some participants had interesting perspectives on NATO enlargement. Take, for example, John Shattuck, a former American ambassador to the Czech Republic, who believes that NATO could be expanded to include many more members - even Russia. And how many states could he ultimately envisage in the organisation?
"Oh, I don't think it's a question of numbers especially. I think it's a question of the shared values and vision of NATO as a coalition of democracies which has a military role, but also has a very important civilian and peacekeeping and conflict resolution role as I was describing in the discussion here this morning."
To understand the role of NATO in today's world, Chris Donnelly, the special adviser for Central and East European affairs to the secretary general of NATO, stated that it is important to recognise that NATO has, first of all, stopped its members from fighting one another. He believes that NATO has no guarantee of existence, but exists only because its members want it to. I asked Mr Donnelly to respond to critics who contend that NATO justifies its own existence by searching for enemies:
"I would say they simply don't understand the situation. NATO - in my experience of being in the organisation - is not looking for new jobs. NATO is only what the member nations make it. And the problem NATO has is that the member nations have given it an enormous number of jobs, and it is now having to adapt and provide itself with the capability to fulfil those jobs. NATO doesn't need to look for new roles: there are plenty of new roles out there. NATO's job is to adapt so it can answer those problems."
One of the main critics of NATO at the roundtable was Miloslav Ransdorf, the deputy chairperson of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia. For Mr Ransdorf, the development of European identity will be crucial in deciding the future of NATO:
"The survival of NATO depends on the forms of development of European identity. It can be coincidence, it can be divergence, it can be conflict. And these three options, three possibilities, are very important for the further direction of development of NATO as a military alliance."
Aside from this somewhat diplomatic statement, Mr Ransdorf did also articulate his criticisms of NATO:
"NATO cannot function in the future as the Holy Alliance, because this principle of humanitarian intervention adopted in Washington during the summit in 1999 is something like the principle of legitimacy of the Holy Alliance turned upside down. And it leads to double and multiple standards in the question of human rights and in relations to individual states. And I think that it is wrong that we should use other forms of control in relation to individual parts of the world, and soft sources of control and power are more important and hopeful than these hard sources of power, like military power."
One of the examples Mr Ransdorf referred to when arguing against NATO policies was that of Kosovo, and this issue dominated much of the proceedings. Mr Ransdorf claimed that the reasons for bombing Yugoslavia in 1999 were not convincing enough, a stance which was also shared by the roundtable's anarchist, Ondrej Slacalek. Such statements were wholeheartedly rejected by Mr Shattuck and the Czech political scientist Petr Sedivy, who believed that NATO did indeed have a duty to protect the Kosovo Albanians.
"The Role and Responsibility of NATO after Enlargement" was staged by the Forum 2000 committee, which organises the annual Forum 2000 conference in Prague. While critics often note that the Forum 2000 conference itself is no more than a talking shop, events such as this roundtable demonstrate that a collection of lively personalities with differing views is still the right recipe for an entertaining, interesting and useful discussion.
