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Democracy promotion / Comment

NATO: what to expect from the Bucharest Summit

13/03/2008 By Jos Boonstra

Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO Secretary General / © NATO

Are enlargement and the Partnership for Peace (PfP) programme still effective tools for NATO in spreading democracy? And what can we expect in this sense from the upcoming NATO Summit in Bucharest in April?

Since the break-up of the Warsaw Pact in the early nineties, NATO has expanded to include ten new members, mostly in parallel with EU enlargement.

While current aspiring members – Albania, Croatia and Macedonia – and countries that aspire to engage in the Membership Action Plan (MAP) – Georgia and Ukraine – are reforming their societies and democratising their defence structures, several other PfP members do not take the EU and NATO message of “Western style” democracy for granted anymore.

Since NATO is not in the business of democratic regime change, but works through gradual reform assistance, options to do so effectively need to be reviewed.

In this Comment article Jos Boonstra explores the challenges and opportunities facing both NATO and the countries that hope to join the organisation in the years ahead.

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Keywords

Belarus Bosnia and Herzegovina Croatia Democracy promotion Eastern Europe and Russia Estonia Europe Hungary Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan Lithuania Macedonia Montenegro NATO North America Russia Serbia Slovakia Slovenia Tajikistan Turkmenistan Ukraine Uzbekistan

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Bio author: Jos Boonstra

Jos Boonstra is senior researcher in the democratisation programme of FRIDE. He focusses on EU, NATO and OSCE policies in Eastern Europe and beyond with specific attention to democratisation of security and defence.