1. Ambitious but ambiguous commitments on decision-making

a. Achievements of the Study in this area

The NATO Study addresses and proposes a solution to the central question in NATO enlargement, namely, how to maintain decision-making effectiveness when there are more members. It poses this question in the right terms – “how to ensure that enlargement strengthens the effectiveness of the Alliance” (chapter 4) – not just how to accept fatalistically and try to minimize a loss of effectiveness.

This in itself is a tremendous success, in light of how difficult it is for NATO to address this question. An adequate question has the potential to propel thinking toward an adequate answer; nothing else does. However, the Study does not succeed in finding a solution adequate to answer the question: by itself, its proposed solution would not suffice even to maintain NATO’s present effectiveness after enlargement, much less strengthen NATO’s effectiveness. It will have to be supplemented by major further measures in order to achieve that purpose.

It must be said that the Study, while posing the question in the right terms, proceeds to discuss it in an opaque, not to say obfuscatory, fashion. Here is what it says:

“In enlarging its membership, the Alliance will want to ensure that it maintains its ability to take important decisions quickly on the basis of consensus and that enlargement results in an Alliance fully able to carry out both its core functions and its new missions.... On joining the Alliance, new members must accept the full obligations of the Washington Treaty. This includes participation in the consultation process within the Alliance and the principle of decision-making by consensus, which requires a commitment to build consensus within the Alliance on all issues of concern to it.... A smooth and effective decision-making process in an enlarged Alliance will be key to preserving its effectiveness. Maintenance of the consensus principle will be essential in the political, military and defence areas. All Allies must therefore be willing to work constructively toward this. To this end, it will be important that prospective new members become familiar with the Alliance decision-making process, and the modalities and traditions of consensus and compromise, before joining. The highest priority should be given to a new member's involvement in the appropriate elements of the decision-making processes and military commands.” (Chapter 4, paragraphs 42, 43, 46)

Among the things that will be expected of countries before admitting them as new members is to “commit themselves to good faith efforts to build consensus within the Alliance on all issues, since consensus is the basis of Alliance cohesion and decision-making” (Chapter 5 paragraph 69).

These lines have a peculiar feature: they may constitute a significant advance, but they make the advance under the guise of no change. They accomplish this by consistently misstating the facts about Alliance realities. In point of fact it is not the case that the “obligations of the Washington Treaty” include “the principle of decision-making by consensus”; actually the consensus principle was deliberately not included in the Washington Treaty. Nor is it the case that the Alliance already has an “ability to take important decisions quickly on the basis of consensus” and only needs to maintain this ability during enlargement. Nor that NATO has always made its decisions by consensus.

And so it is simply not the case that new members, in “commit(ting) themselves to good faith efforts to build consensus within the Alliance on all issues,” will just be joining in a commitment long shared by all members and with which they merely need to familiarize themselves by acclimatizing to existing alliance practices. Rather, in taking on such a commitment, new members will be taking on a commitment that is considerably stronger than the one the original allies made.

This change is potentially a very good thing. It implies a major upgrading of the commitment to cooperation in the alliance. It is especially good if it is interpreted to mean that the old allies, in adopting this document, have themselves made this higher commitment to cooperate in reaching a consensus efficiently in favor of effective decisions. But it is important to be clear about it. This is a major new departure within NATO. If it is to be implemented seriously, it entails a fundamental shift in style and emphasis: a shift from the old emphasis on separate rights to an emphasis on common responsibilities and capabilities.

The old emphasis, enshrined in decades of cold war rhetoric, was on the right of any country to veto and the absolute lack of any supranationality in NATO itself, which accordingly was supposed to require the prior concurrence of every member before it could have a common policy. The new emphasis is on the obligation of every member to pursue consensus and arrive punctually at the common policy, for the sake of the higher virtue of solidarity, cohesion, cooperation and common action. These emphases are not only different; they are, when pursued at any length, mutually contradictory. The old obligation of NATO to wait for consensus leads to a national right to veto; the new obligation of member countries to compromise and come to a consensus leads to a denial of the veto and a right, in critical cases, for the mainstream of NATO members to act, using some joint NATO procedures and instruments, in the absence of a consensus.

The virtue of the new commitment, beyond its intended use in assimilating new members without excessive damage to alliance effectiveness, is that it is a major step toward what is needed if NATO is to achieve functionality in its new missions and the new era. This step, if supplemented by the means to implement it reliably, would mean a historic turn toward effective international cooperation and away from the excesses of nationalism that have bedeviled the post-cold war world.

b. Shortcomings

At the same time, there are dangerous gaps in the new commitment. It is unenforceable if left by itself. This problem is compounded by the fact that no means are provided even to encourage implementation of it after a country has joined. Instead, it is coupled with a contradictory reaffirmation of the old-style emphasis on NATO’s absolute requirement of and dependence on consensus in order to reach a decision. The commitment itself is ambiguously treated as if it merely meant assimilation to NATO traditions of good behavior. In reality the traditions already include a degree of "bad" behavior which, if perpetuated in the new era and assimilated by the new members, would mean the incapacitation of the alliance. A deliberate step forward in alliance cohesion and procedures is needed in order to render the new commitments real. This cannot be achieved by pretending that the cohesion and procedures already exist.

Compare this to the courage three leading national security specialists have shown in naming ways to maintain NATO’s decision-making effectiveness:

NATO could establish new memberships with a series of conditions that prevent new members from obstructing consensus among current ones. A ‘consensus-minus-one’ rule could be established to prevent a single aggressor from paralyzing an Alliance response. Well-established procedures for dropping a nation from NATO membership could make clear the dangers of irresponsible behavior. Various weighted voting schemes could be developed to ensure that former adversaries cannot prevent the Alliance’s traditional members from acting.

The point may be clarified by examining the potential methods for maintaining NATO effectiveness that were listed in the CEERN report, Changes Needed for Bringing Eastern Europe and Russia into NATO:

1. “Greater emphasis on the obligation to reach a decision, less on the obligation to reach consensus.

2. “A formal option of voting that is held in the background; continuation of discussion in most cases until consensus is reached, while holding in ultimate reserve the right to call a vote in case of inordinate obstructionism.

3. “Unanimity for setting general framework policies, but weighted majorities for deciding specifics of implementation, follow-up measures, and adaptation of policy in face of external changes and reactions.

4. “Weighted majority to decide on setting NATO policy and using the common NATO instruments; implementation by “coalitions of the willing,” without any obligation on the part of other nations to send their own units into combat.”

In the present “Study on NATO Enlargement,” NATO has moved along the lines of step 1. This is a major step forward, compared to past ideology and practice. At the same time, it is only a half-step. The NATO Study has adopted only the first half of step 1: greater emphasis on the obligation on the side of the individual members to reach a decision. NATO has not yet brought out the necessary accompaniment, namely less emphasis on the obligation on the side of the alliance as a whole to wait for a consensus. It has put all its eggs in this half-basket.

The CEERN Report found that method 1 requires both halves in order to work smoothly. Further, it also requires some use method 2: “If on some issues unanimity is retained as the basic method of decision, greater emphasis will nevertheless be needed on the obligation to reach a decision. This could be reinforced by holding in reserve a formal option of moving to a vote.” Consensus works as a tolerably reliable method of proceeding only when total reliance is not placed on it, i.e. only when it is openly asserted that other ways of proceeding are held in reserve and when these “other ways” are occasionally exercised.

The first half of method 1, taken all by itself, is not adequate. In order to render the first half of method 1 workable and sustainable, it will be necessary for NATO to climb a bit higher up the ladder and adopt also the rest of method 1 plus method 2. This is the bare minimum that is needed to enable NATO to proceed without loss of decision-making effectiveness when it has more members.

Equally importantly: Method 1 alone is also not sufficient for emabling NATO to make the new kinds of decisions needed in the more complex conditions of the new era, at the new pace needed. For this, some use of methods 2, 3 and 4 is needed.

NATO already in fact took a big step toward method 4 back in January 1994. At that time it adopted not only the Partnership for Peace but also a plan for “Combined Joint Task Forces” (CJTFs, a new technical name for a military-administrative structure for coalitions of the willing).

However, there have been many complaints that the implementation of the CJTF concept has been slow and ineffective. This is not surprising, since the CJTF concept aims to establish a structure compatible with coalitions only on the administrative level, not on the more fundamental political level. Until there is an efficient, flexible political procedure, such as method 4 above, for enabling temporary coalitions of the willing to form within NATO and gain authorization to act on behalf of NATO, the plan for CJTFs will not realize its promise and NATO will continue to find its hands tied in the face of the turbulence of the new era.

Likewise, there has been some inching toward method 3, but it remains most unfulfilled because it has remained limited to the administrative level.

It is disappointing that the “Study on NATO Enlargement” has not done anything to revivify either of these two potentially great advances in NATO procedures. It has not even discussed them. It would benefit NATO to fill in this gap in future planning for enlargement.

There has been some sentiment in NATO that issues such as NATO decision-making are for the West to discuss on its own, without any input from the Easterners, and without being linked to plans for admitting new members. This is understandable as an assertion of turf, but it is unwise. The compartmentalization of issues only harms NATO here. The issues are interrelated in practice, and NATO could profit by bringing the Easterners more effectively into the discussion. NATO may have every legal right to cut the Easterners entirely out of the discussion of NATO's internal procedures, but that does not mean that this is the right thing for NATO to do. Even from the standpoint of NATO's purely internal interests, the opposite would be the wiser choice. After all, it is the Easterners who want to join are also the ones who have the greatest desire to make the plans for their membership adequate, so that NATO will not be afraid to let them in. They will be the best participants in this discussion, the ones who will be least attached to maladaptive practices in the past and who will most strongly favor the adaptations NATO itself needs in order to render itself fit to take new members. For this reason, in future studies and plans for enlargement, NATO should consider (a) putting on the table all of the issues of internal NATO reform that are pertinent to the question of NATO's ability to assimilate the potential new members, including CJTFs and decision-making options, and (b) including the potential new members in the process of making the study.

Consensus culture vs. the new era of Openness and Democracy

We have not dealt here with a point which the Study on NATO Enlargement reaffirms without question and makes the basis for its adoption of the first half of method 1 without the second half; namely, the assertion that the reliance on consensus is a virtue and is essential for the cohesion of NATO. This was already dealt with in depth in the CEERN Report. We should only note here, briefly, why this is an unfortunate ideological holdover from the past.

The emphasis on consensus was understandable during the cold war decades, when there was some use in presenting a front of unanimity vis-à-vis the enemy. In those years the enemy was always the same country, was very powerful, and had an influence on significant sympathetic internal political forces within the Western countries. In those circumstances, one of the greatest dangers to the West was a public fracture in the Western coalition which the enemy could have exploited in order to turn people away from the Western alliance toward a more free-floating neutral orientation. This, it was feared, could upset the balance of power more than any dilatoriness on NATO's part. Whether even this was sufficient reason for maintaining rigid procedures of consensus within the alliance may be questioned – even in some of the most heated years of the cold war, in the early 1980s, consensus was put aside by NATO in face of the greater danger that the alliance would be fractured by its inability to reach a decision – but at least it was a real reason with some degree of plausible justification.

Today circumstances are completely different. Potential enemies are much smaller, more numerous, much more fast-moving and capricious, and utterly incapable of equaling the power of the West or reversing the balance of power. The danger is not that the balance of power will be upset by having some of the NATO allies sit out an action against one of these adversaries, but that NATO will be hamstrung by the habit of sitting out any action until it has arrived at a consensus among its members. The problem for NATO today is not to make sure that all of the members will fight in case the Soviet Union invades with main force across the middle of Europe, but to provide for a coalition of its members to fight when the mainstream of NATO support this and urgent action is needed. The danger of dividing the West comes not from the Kremlin enticing a few allies to sit out an action or even dissent publicly from it; rather, the danger of dividing the West comes from a petty dictator or terrorist rendering the West incapable of action by enticing the minority to use the consensus procedure to hamstring the majority. NATO suffered serious public discrediting and loss of cohesion from 1991 to 1994 by its sitting out of the war in former Yugoslavia for want of consensus; today it is being recredited because it is finally acting. It risks, however, being discredited again if it takes upon itself too much of the responsibility for getting America to send troops to Bosnia lock-step with the Europeans and if the peacemaking forces become bogged down in a quagmire. The flexible coalition model is the only realistic way to build solidarity and cohesion in the new era. The lock-step “cohesion” of the past is irrelevant and only a threat to the actual spirit of cohesion in the future.

At the root of this matter, there is a principle to be considered. The lock-step consensus approach may be appropriate to some emergencies, but it is sad to see it idealized as a principle in an alliance of democratic countries. The democratic principle is itself a much more mature method of maintaining solidarity. It does not insist on any lock-step consensus on policy. It is not afraid of public dissent. It accepts the fact that human beings naturally have different ideas and perspectives. It actually encourages them to express their differences publicly and organize in ways that divide the political arena, in order to widen the awareness of the public of its options and enable it to make better choices. Once a decision has been made democratically, there are some joint instruments for implementation, supporters of the decision are also welcomed to volunteer additional help in its implementation, and opponents are expected not to obstruct its implementation. However, opponents are not expected to shut up or support a front of unanimity; quite the contrary, their continued criticism is recognized as a virtue so that the public will always have the option of adjusting or changing its decision in the face of changing evidence. The front-of-unanimity is, strictly speaking, the principle of a gang. It is incompatible with the principles of openness and democracy. It gives rise to the oft-noted scholasticism in NATO pronouncements.

While it is embarrassing that NATO has become stuck in affirmations of an undemocratic principle, this is, we repeat, understandable. The fear of being divided was legitimate during the cold war years. This fear gave rise to a further fear of public criticism or even venting of constructive differences of approach, and to a spirit of defensiveness about everything hitherto agreed to in NATO. The lock-step consensus ideology provided what seemed like a perfect solution to all of these fears, and to other public relations needs as well (such as self-minimalization on the part of NATO when its policies became too controversial). The ideology became so ingrown with fear that it turned self-perpetuating, like a gigantic loop of circular thinking in the collective mind of NATO. Ideological arguments for the virtue of operating by consensus were developed in depth. Warning signs were posted at each point around the loop about the danger to the alliance of any deviation from the ideology of consensus, and for that matter of any deviation from any of the policies that NATO had ever adopted by consensus. It is hard enough for an individual human mind to pull out of such a loop of circular thinking and fear; it is even harder for an institution like NATO.

In many respects it is impressive that NATO has already made so much progress away from its old loops in thinking. At the same time, from the standpoint of the fledgling free peoples to the east of NATO, the slowness of the change is more striking, along with the costs and risks from the delays. These costs have not been small, and they are objective real-world costs, unlike the subjective cost that NATO must endure to change its mental habits. It would be narcissistic to evaluate progress primarily from the standpoint of NATO's internal mental comfort; the only way to move on with life is to evaluate matters from the standpoint of what is needed in the external world. From this standpoint, NATO has both realized tremendous opportunities and has neglected and lost tremendous opportunities. It has come a long way, and it still needs to go long way further in the here-and-now. It has taken major steps in self-reform – the decision in favor of CJTFs, and the partial shift of emphasis in the meaning of consensus – that have brought it up to the edge of a reform at the organizational-procedural core. But it has not crossed that edge and, until it does, its reforms will retain an ambiguous peripheral character and stand at risk of collapsing of their own contradictions.

The “Study on NATO Enlargement” has moved the matter farther than most people expected. In moving forward, it has also raised the contradictions to a higher level. In the next step, NATO will need to move at that higher level.

c. Further Steps

In sum, NATO has moved a step forward on decision-making, by the in-house organizational method of misstating and reinterpreting past commitments and present realities. This is potentially the beginning of a great advance, but it is also potentially a failure which will die of its own inconsistencies unless it is supplemented by these further steps:

• The emphasis on the obligation to compromise and reach agreement (our method 1a) needs to be supplemented by a reduction of emphasis on the obligation of NATO to wait for consensus (method 1b), and by the reaffirmation that the mainstream of the NATO countries reserves in the end the right to act through NATO if necessary without consensus (method 2).

• Likewise, CJTFs need to be supplemented by the method of making framework decisions with more efficient procedures for follow-up decisions (our method 3) and by a system for authorizing CJTFs on a basis of a critical mass short of consensus (method 4).