One in, all in? NATO’s next enlargement 17 pages, pdf  Download Back

One in, all in? NATO’s next enlargement

Publisher: Terry Terriff, Stuart Croft, Elke Krahmann, Mark Webber and Jolyon Norwort

Volume: 17 pages, pdf

Description:

In the wake of the war in Kosovo, and the subsequent downfall of President Milosevic, it was easy to see NATO as the most poweful military organization in the world. A large number of states that are geographically close to the alliance share this assessment and therefore quite naturally seek to benefit from NATO membership. Managing this persistent demand to enlarge, however, has confronted the allience with number of difficult political and strtefic issues. 

At NATO's Madrit summit in 1997, the Czech Republic, Hungari and Poland (the so-called VIsegrad Three) were invited to join, and they formally acceded to the alliance shortly before the 1999 Washington summit. The alliance also noted at Washingotn that it would consier further enlargment at it summit meeting in Prague in November 2002. The NATO secretary-general Lord Robertson, reiterated this claim in June 2001, saying that NATO hopes and expects, based on current and anticipated progress by the aspiring members, to continue the process of enlargment at the forthcoming Prague summit. In other words, the so-called ''zero option'' in off the table. There are currently ten offical applicantes for membership-Albanie, Bugaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia (the so-called Vilnius Nine), plus Croatia- and there i a very real possibility that other states, such as Ukraine, might follow in the not too distant future. The question is not whether NATO will invite more states to become members an the Prague summit, but how many it will invite.