UN reform and NATO transformation: the missing link. Egmont Paper, no. 10, November 2005

Leurdijk, Dick A. (2005) UN reform and NATO transformation: the missing link. Egmont Paper, no. 10, November 2005.

Abstract

From NATO’s perspective, Kofi Annan’s report In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All at first sight seemed hardly relevant.(1) In dealing with regional organizations, it nowhere explicitly mentioned the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This was all the more surprising because Annan thus bypassed NATO’s active involvement in the implementation of a number of post-conflict peace-building settlements, based on UN Security Council resolutions, in areas such as Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. In the weeks after the publication of Annan’s report, NATO’s Secretary- General, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, on several occasions expressed his support for his UN counterpart’s reform package. In a keynote address in Brussels, among others, he argued that ‘NATO will increasingly act in concert with other institutions’, including the UN, pointing at NATO’s cooperation on the ground in the Balkans and Afghanistan.