O

ver the past 62 years, a military alliance of democratic states called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has demonstrated institutional change by expanding into 28 member states since its establishment in Washington DC on April 4, 1949.

NATO has transformed from a collective defense organization into a collective security organization. The transformation indicates a big leap from just defending member states from external threats to handling various types of domestic and non-military security threats.

Countries from the ex-Soviet Union are now members of NATO. Today, 21 member states of the European Union (EU) are also members of NATO. Twenty years ago, we would never have expected this could happen.

However, many scholars have argued that the enlargement and shifting of direction of the alliance have been misplaced.

Additionally, many argue that this alliance imposes an imbalance of burden-sharing on the US, which appears to always lead in some NATO initiatives.

NATO member states perceive different security threats, and consequently may disagree about the means and approaches by which it goes about achieving security.

For instance, “splits” in the alliance emerged after 9/11 when the US preferred to use preemptive action with its war on terrorism, while European member states throughout the EU proposed to use incentive programs to prevent the roots of terrorism from growing.

The evolution of NATO can be explained by the argument that if an actor wants to survive on the international stage, it needs to equip itself with adequate security assurance.

With the growing security threats these days, NATO can be a reliable security forum for the North American and European member states.

The relationship between the North American and European member states of NATO can be seen as a “marriage,” thus there should be a balance of burden and benefit while obtaining relative gains from the alliance.

As stated in the Article 5 of the NATO treaty, a threat to a member is a threat to all. In this “marriage,” a threat to the husband or the wife could be perceived not only as a threat to each partner but also to their marriage.

Unfortunately, the US and other member states which are aligned under this “marriage” by the name of NATO do not live under one roof. This is not a marriage between two persons rather engagement of the US with a number of partners.

They rarely meet and only if there is a high level of disagreement among them. Last week, member states met in Brussels to discuss
a more NATO technical role in the command structure for the operation in Libya, following US President Obama’s decision to hand over command the leadership of operation to NATO.

Additionally, the meeting was aimed to settle out Turkey’s and Germany’s deliberations that the western coalition would resort to regime change in Libya.

What is significant about this “powerful marriage” under the name of NATO to Southeast Asia? Will this alliance complicate or contribute to Southeast Asia’s security?

The most evident lesson drawn from the evolution of the alliance is that NATO’s development would somewhat contribute to the security of the region.

However, such an evolution has no direct implications. Southeast Asia has its own dependent security cooperation, but this is not also to suggest that any security cooperation in the region could perform as the best security guarantor.

One of the aims of the alliance’s establishment as Brzezinski (2009), a former US national security adviser, suggests is that NATO can be “the hub of a globe-spanning web of various regional cooperative-security undertakings.”

Therefore, ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) may be one of the actors that can link to this hub.

However, with bureaucratic institutional problems developing as the group gets larger, it appears that Brzezinski expectation is too good to be true — at least for now, unless regional and international security organizations and NATO are more willing to cooperate.

They took the first step when a NATO official met for talks with senior political and military leaders from Asia-Pacific which gathered in Jakarta for Jakarta International Defense Dialogue on March 23-25.

Since we do not intend to build military alliances in the region, it is still important to observe this evolution of NATO, if not call it a development of a collective defense organization.

Different approaches must be taken when dealing with military alliances compared to bilateral military relations.

In two respects, analyzing NATO will affect our understanding of the changing perception of security among the members of the alliance and how the member states use different means and approaches to respond to threats.

More disagreement emerged as the memberships are enlarged. It is also interesting to see how some new member states enjoy their status as “the free-rider members”, which rely for their security on the alliance, and particularly upon the US.

So, how far would NATO go? This “marriage” could go further under the condition that it can still maintain its identity as a collective defense or collective security organization of democratic member states. One of the keys is to seek balance between US and the members of the alliance.

Therefore, it is a good step for NATO to share responsibilities in protecting civilians through enforcing the no-fly zone over Libya under the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 which was adopted on March 17, 2011.

The writer is a lecturer at School of International Relations, Paramadina University, Jakarta. She is also a Fulbright-DIKTI doctoral degree student at the School of Political Science, Northern Illinois University.