Identity crisis haunts Nato on summit eve

By CATHERINE FIELD in Paris

Historic Nato summits have a habit of being less an occasion for triumph and celebration than a trigger for an identity crisis and fresh squabbles between the United States and its continental European allies.

The Atlantic alliance's 40th-anniversary summit, in 1989, was marked by a bitter row - forgotten within a few months when the Soviet Bloc fell apart - over deploying new short-range US nuclear weapons in Germany.

A decade later, the 50th anniversary summit was darkened by the Balkans crisis, which reminded Europe of its impotence to tackle a war on its doorstep without American military muscle.

The jinx feeling hovers over this week's summit in Prague, which has been summoned to admit seven new members to the 19-nation alliance, but whose mood will be troubled by Iraq and the hardening suspicion in Washington that the alliance has become an irrelevance.

The gathering in Prague on Friday and Saturday should in theory be the chance for European members to chorus their support for President George W. Bush's plans for a strike on Iraq, but, with the exception of Britain, their disquiet is so deep, especially in Germany, that the summit will stick to simply reaffirming diplomatic support.

"There should be an expression of allied unity at the Prague summit," a senior Nato official told journalists in Brussels last week. "[But] I wouldn't want to lead you to believe that next week there will be efforts to put together a military coalition, because we are on a diplomatic track."

The meeting's main tasks are to give the green light to admitting seven former Communist states - Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia - and to reshape Nato's role.

Nato Secretary-General George Robertson has dubbed it the "transformation summit".

Admitting these states - six of whom were former adversaries in the Warsaw Pact - will be a huge challenge, given that their armed forces are poorly equipped and underfunded.



But a bigger problem touches on identity: what should Nato's role be? The alliance has been grappling to answer this one since the Soviet threat evaporated.

The problem became urgent after September 11 last year.

The European component of Nato, with its static armies, low defence spending and parochial thinking, seems clearly out of step with a world where a mobile, smart and long-range response is needed to tackle the new peril of global terrorism.

"Nato is in urgent need of revitalisation. Its credibility is at stake," Klaus Naumann, a German general who headed the alliance's military committee between 1996 and 1999, warned a few months ago.

For hardliners in the Bush Administration, Nato is on the verge of becoming an irrelevance other than as a source of political support.

Their argument is that with the exception of Britain and to a lesser degree France, the Europeans' defence spending is too low and many of their Governments have no guts for a fight.

Their armed forces lack fighters, bombers, refuelling aircraft, air transport, smart bombs and missiles, and special forces - the tools of the nimble, hands-off wars of the future.

The worst humiliation was that after September 11, the allies unanimously pledged their military support to the United States, but it was so mismatched that almost none was needed for the Afghan war, with the notable exception of Britain's SAS.

The Prague summit will see the US throw down the gauntlet to the Europeans.

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has proposed setting up a rapid reaction force of 21,000 combat troops who could be deployed anywhere in the world within days.

Another proposed initiative is to give Nato a tough anti-terrorism role, under which the alliance would be able to send troops to weak countries that need help to wipe out terrorist groups operating on their territory.

Such questions cause big headaches for the Europeans, who are still digesting the ramifications of Nato's intervention in the Balkans, which shifted the alliance away from its exclusively defensive posture.

Many Europeans are queasy about campaigns away from home, particularly if the aims are unclear or determined by the US vision.

How the proposed Nato forces would operate is another big question.

The Europeans are still at odds over a four-year-old scheme to set up a 60,000-troop European force, to be operational in mid-2003, for intervention in the Balkans or other hotspots close to home.

That goal has been clouded by bickering between Britain and France, Europe's two main military powers.

French President Jacques Chirac is said to want the force to be autonomous and be the kernel of a future defence arm for the European Union. How it would dovetail with the rapid reaction force is still unclear.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a close Bush ally, wants the unit to have close links with Nato, easing American fears that Europe wants to uncouple itself from the organisation that has been its shield for more than half a century.