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Nato to take lead

in European defence

BRUSSELS: Nato, written off by some as a Cold War relic a few years ago, intends to set the seal next week on its recent emergence as the central organisation shaping Europe's future defence and security.

NATO foreign ministers meeting in Berlin on Monday will give broad approval to plans for more flexible military cooperation which would allow European nations a far greater role within the U.S.-led alliance.

"The Berlin meeting opens a new era for Nato. This is the start of a much wider reform without which enlargement and new types of missions would not be possible," said a senior alliance source.

The critical issue of how radical an overhaul of the alliance's command structure should be undertaken to create a separate European Security and Defence Identity (ESDI) has been left for another day, Nato sources said.

But they said broad agreement to allow European nations to use NATO's largely U.S.-owned satellites and communications equipment to undertake missions in which the Americans do not wish to take part would be a landmark event from which more reform would flow.

"The agreement on a new concept of more flexible command structures that we are expected to reach in Berlin, is a milestone in the history of Nato," alliance Secretary-General Javier Solana wrote this week in the German daily Die Welt.

"The structural reform...takes us closer to the European security and defence identity that we have been discussing for so long. Nato proves thereby that it supports a stronger European role in security policy in practical matters, too."

Agreement on the concept of the Combined Joint Task Force (CJTF), as it is known in alliance military jargon, would open the way for Nato to handle a new type of post-Cold War mission, such as crisis-management or peacekeeping.

The breakthrough on CJTFs follows months of tortuous negotiations after the alliance, desperate for a solid role since the Cold War ended, agreed to look into the issue in January 1994.

The lessons of the West's failure to prevent war in former Yugoslavia sent the subject to the top of the agenda, but the final push came last December when Paris suddenly said it wanted full participation in all alliance structures.

France left Nato's military structure in 1966 in protest at perceived U.S.-domination, although it remained an alliance member and took part in political debates.

Successive French governments pushed for the creation of a separate European identity under a revamped Western European Union a body that fell dormant during the Cold War and with a far greater European Union input.

President Jacques Chirac, drawing the lessons of former Yugoslavia and pushed by budgetary constraints, said France could play a full role in a future reformed alliance.-Reuter