Is NATO equipped, morally and politically, to play this role? The mission of the new kind is so radically different from the traditional NATO agenda that it cannot be entrusted to the NATO alone. Like many other international institutions inherited from the Cold War, NATO is trying to find a way to adapt itself to the new political environment in Europe, in the first place. It will be able to do so only if its own potentials and those of the United Nations are combined together, and seen by the world as such. In other words, NATO should maintain its military-backed peacemaking/peacekeeping power, but should embrace the UN development and humanitarian agenda, as well as the Council of Europe democracy and human rights principles. It would be ideal if NATO could be redesigned into an enforcement agency for the UN, and if the UN could serve as a political corrective of NATO military involvement. This debate should be opened-up as soon as possible in order to prevent the United Nations degenerating into a toothless dinosaur, and NATO to compromise itself as a military protection force in its own right.
Notes
1. Foreign Affairs 74, No.1, 1995.
2. EJIL, Vol.11, No.1.
3. EJIL, Vol.10, Nos.1 and 4.
Dr. Zoran Pajic
Associate Fellow
International Security Programme
Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA)
London
