EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
1. The national veto policy of the EU and NATO, commendable for the protection of national interests in most cases, is being abused and used by member states to bully aspiring members in relation to organisational expansion.
2. These petty disputes jeopardise the true interests of these international organisations.
3. These disputes are only likely to worsen as EU and NATO expansion continues.
4. The national veto should be abolished in this partciular area of policy and expansion allowed if a majority of member states are in agreement. This will force opponents to justify why democracy, liberty and security should not be encouraged, rather than vice versa.
At the NATO summit this week in Bucharest, it appears likely that Greece will veto an invitation to Macedonia to join the alliance, because it objects to Macedonia’s name. Earlier this month, Croatia was forced to postpone implementation of its Protected Ecological Fishery Zone in the Adriatic in order to avoid an Italian and Slovene veto on its EU membership. In 2004, Cyprus, having just secured EU membership, rejected the Annan Plan for Cypriot reunification, in the belief that, as an EU member, it could use its veto to squeeze a better deal out of Turkey. In each case, the national veto has been used or viewed as a weapon with which existing members of NATO or the EU can bully aspiring members with which they are engaged in a dispute.
Such behaviour makes a mockery out of Western values. In each case, the interests of the Euro-Atlantic community are being jeopardised for the sake of petty interests. Macedonia’s accession to NATO is crucial for stability in South East Europe at a time when Russia is challenging us in the region, and Greece has no legitimate right to force a sovereign nation to change its name. Croatia’s fishing zone was an ecologically necessary measure to protect its dwindling fishing stock from over-fishing by Italy’s voracious fishing fleet, and no different from the kind of zones that Italy and Slovenia have themselves imposed, but commercial greed and double standards apparently trump environmental protection. There is no more strategically important nation in the wider European neighbourhood than Turkey, but its membership of the EU may be contingent on the whims of a future Cypriot president. Instead of NATO and the EU acting as solvents for petty national disputes, such disputes are superimposing themselves on the whole, jeopardising the interests of all.
As NATO and the EU expand, the number of such disputes in which its members are engaged will increase, while the new members, as less mature democracies, are more likely than older members to pursue nationalist vendettas and import them into the EU. For example, Ukraine and Moldova have not always seen eye-to-eye over the Moldovan breakaway territory of Transnistria; as things stand, if one of them were to join the EU or NATO, it might be tempted to use its veto on the other’s membership to extract concessions, making an overall solution to this long-running conflict more difficult. An expanding Euro-Atlantic community, far from facilitating European stability and cohesion, may actually exacerbate and prolong inter-state conflicts all over the continent.
This is not a situation that can be allowed to continue if the Euro-Atlantic community is to function effectively in the twenty-first century. Rather than being reduced to their lowest common denominators, both NATO and the EU need to become more cohesive and flexible. As things stand, the danger is that they will become increasingly less so.
It is time to abolish the national veto on new members in both organisations. Aspiring members should be allowed to join if a sufficient majority of existing states agree. Several existing members, including France and Germany, have serious reservations about Turkish membership of the EU, and while we may not share these reservations, the feelings of our allies have to be taken into account. Consequently, the size of the required positive majority for acceptance of any new member could be made sufficiently high to reassure France and Germany that something as controversial as Turkish EU membership could not happen so long as a significant bloc of existing members is opposed.
Such a system would have the advantage that, if an existing member objects to an aspiring one, it would have to win the battle for opinion among its fellow members if it wanted to keep the aspirant out. This in turn would increase the role of public opinion in resolving disputes between European nations, democratising the process and bringing pressure to bear on whomever is being unreasonable. Selfish nationalist shibboleths, such as Greece’s bizarre fixation with changing Macedonia’s name, are less likely to endure in such a climate.
Europe has multiple serious security concerns: from Islamist terrorism, Serbian-nationalist revanchism over Kosovo and an aggressive Russia trying to muscle its way into the Balkans, to the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan where our troops are deployed. Our position in the world economy is evolving under the impact of the rising economies of nations such as China and India. Recent years have witnessed an unprecedented wave of anti-American and anti-Western sentiment, encouraged by demagogues such as Ahmadinejad, Chavez and Putin. Global environmental damage is reaching crisis levels. These are all serious issues; the reason why a strong, unified EU and a NATO with global reach are more important than ever – far too important to be jeopardised by those of our more selfish allies that are obsessed with unserious issues: trying to get a neighbour to change its name, or trying to steal its fish.