Monthly Archives: November 2006

No to Non-Euro NATO Bureau

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For some reason, there is hardly ever any NATO coverage on this blog, despite the fact it’s the other pan-European institution. The Euro-Atlantic alliance is having a summit next month, to be held in Riga. Now, one of the main topics for this gathering is the long-running one of adapting NATO to challenges other than that of defending the North German plain from the Red Army. Role-of-the-week is, of course, fighting terrorism. A wider view might point out that the so-called “emerging security threats” predate the War On Terrorism, and that many of the capabilities required for “fighting terrorism” abroad are equally applicable to regional peacekeeping or even expeditionary warfighting.

Anyway, it’s long been thought in some circles that NATO’s radius of action ought to be increased. During the Cold War, NATO was quite intimately connected with other Western allies outside the North Atlantic, both via the Americans and also other multilateral mechanisms. The overlap between NATO, the EU, and other security communities and economic areas has often, then and now, been seen as a sort of “community of democracies” or (as Raymond Aron put it) “world of order”. On the other hand, E.P. Thompson savaged what he saw as a sick complacency in the face of nuclear dread and capitalist exploitation on the part of the “Natopolitans” in an article entitled Inside the Whale, and today’s rabid right wants to have a “Democratic Union” made up of NATO and EU states, Japan, India and Australia – but not France, naturally. NATO, meanwhile, has expanded in Europe and taken on a mission to Afghanistan, which is well out-of-area in NATOspeak.

The latest proposal was supported by the US and UK, and foresaw regular bilateral meetings between NATO and allied states outside Europe, with a shortlist of Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Japan. In a sense, it would have brought a sort of “secret NATO” or “virtual NATO” into the tent – the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia have separate alliances among themselves and with the US, including the UKUSA, CAZAB and Echelon intelligence cooperation agreements, ANZUK and ANZUS.

So what happened?
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And speaking of Bulgaria

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The Foreign Minister of Bulgaria, Ivailo Kalfin, has just started a blog.

What I find interesting here is the “about” section:

With this weblog I would like to enter a discussion about some of the issues that are on the top of the agenda of Bulgaria’s foreign policy, the developments in the European Union, the major challenges of today’s world. I really appreciate the opportunity to use the democratic web space for such a discussion. I expect various comments. My intention is to write as often as possible. The languages? Your choice using English, French, Spanish, Russian or Bulgarian. Please be generous if you find any typing or grammar mistake, especially if this is not in my mother tongue. Nobody’s perfect…

I find that rather sweet.

Foreign Minister Kalfin is 42 years old; he’s an economist who identifies as a Social Democrat; he has a Masters degree from Loughborough University in Leicestershire.

— Bleg: are there any other European Ministers with blogs? And if so, are any of them remotely worth reading? I would expect any such blogs to be rather bland and feeble, but Europe is a big place. Are there any surprises out there?