Going non-nuclear in the nuclear alliance: the Danish experience in NATO

Danish nuclear policy is at a crossroads. Looking back, Denmark's relationship to nuclear technology has been a difficult balancing act for successive governments, trying to soothe an anti-nuclear domestic sentiment on one side and the membership of a nuclear military alliance on the other. This history produced an enduring double approach to nuclear policy by Copenhagen throughout the cold war. Looking ahead, this history is of particular relevance as Denmark and Greenland are considering lifting their twenty-five-year ban on mining radioactive elements and allowing the production of Greenland's uranium. With Greenland's large reserves potentially catapulting this otherwise non-nuclear and non-mining kingdom into one of the world's top suppliers of uranium, the policy debate has to include a look back at Denmark's relationship to nuclear technology, for both peaceful and military purposes.     

How NATO remembers: explaining institutional memory in NATO crisis management

This article introduces an argument for how institutional memory of crisis management operations develops in North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Scholars of European security and of international organisations have examined organisational learning, but have yet to explain its precondition: institutional memory. In a context of increasing turnover due to defence budget cuts, it remains unclear how shared knowledge of strategic errors is acquired. This article finds that the NATO secretariat facilitates practitioners’ use of informal processes for contributing to institutional memory in response to the constraints of existing formal learning processes. These formal processes, including a lessons learned centre and a lessons learned database, inadvertently disincentivise practitioners from contributing such knowledge as using them can incur reputational costs. Drawing on NATO documentation and interviews with 27 NATO elite practitioners, the paper provides evidence that practitioners instead share knowledge through three informal processes: interpersonal communications, private documentation and crisis simulations.     

20世纪中叶以来印度对华政策中涉藏行为分析

“西藏问题”在中印关系中一直是印度国家安全战略中的重要组成部分，是印度政府对华政策的重要内容，在一定程度上可以说是印度政府用以制华的一张牌。随着中印关系的发展，“西藏问题”在中印关系中的地位发生了变化。本文通过就印度对华政策中涉藏行为的回顾、对其西藏政策出台背景的分析以及对中印关系中“西藏问题”前景的预测，揭示中印关系中“西藏问题”的实质，指出“和平发展”不仅是中印两国国家利益所需，也有助于“西藏问题”的解决、有利于境内外藏族人民。     

The United States and its Atlantic partners: the evolution of American grand strategy

The Cold War's end posed immediate challenges to the Atlantic alliance, but a variety of factors, many of them temporary, conspired to mask this shift for more than a decade. In the longer term, the absence of a common foe has allowed previously suppressed tensions within the Atlantic community to play a more prominent role than in the past. Interests, and especially security interests, within the Alliance are less convergent now than during the Cold War. The challenge for the Allies in the future will be to cooperate absent the discipline once imposed by their respective international situations.     

NATO: The View from the East

Abstract

Relations between Russia, Ukraine and Belarus and NATO have placed more emphasis on cooperation than confrontation since the Cold War, and Ukraine has begun to move towards membership. At the popular level, on the evidence of national surveys in 2004 and 2005, NATO continues to be perceived as a significant threat, but in Russia and Ukraine it comes behind the United States (in Belarus the numbers are similar). There are few socioeconomic predictors of support for NATO membership that are significant across all three countries, but there are wide differences by region, and by attitudinal variables such as support for a market economy and for EU membership. The relationship between popular attitudes and foreign policy is normally a distant one; but in Ukraine NATO membership will require public support in a referendum, and in all three cases public attitudes on foreign policy issues can influence foreign policy in other ways, including the composition of parliamentary committees. In newly independent states whose international allegiances are still evolving, the associations between public opinion and foreign and security policy may often be closer than in the established democracies.     

NATO Special Operations: Promise and Problem

NATO special operations forces (SOF) are at a crossroads as the NATO role in Afghanistan winds down. After more than a decade of development, NATO SOF have greatly increased their ability to operate together in the field and in headquarters. If the alliance continues to emphasize SOF development, these forces can play a major role in future NATO campaigns, particularly outside Europe. Moreover, SOF can be maintained effectively in times of austerity. Yet intelligence sharing, particularly in real time, is currently one of the major limitations on NATO SOF, creating divisions between United States and United Kingdom on one hand and much of the rest of NATO on the other. In order to make truly effective use of SOF the alliance needs to make fundamental changes to its decades old system for sharing intelligence.     

How Many Europes? Fragmentation in the European Space since the Great Recession

ABSTRACT

Since the Great Recession started in the late 2000s, the European Union (EU) has experienced an acute crisis that has triggered internal divisions among EU members. Three factors can help shed light on this tendency towards political fragmentation: economics and finance, culture, and territory. Each of these reveals a specific ‘geography’, in terms of policies and narratives, of the current malaise regarding the EU project and the limits of the Union in addressing issues important for the domestic debates of its members. Such discontent, as well as anti-EU sentiment, fuels strong political reactions including populism and anti-elitism that could further fragment the EU in the future.     

Saving NATO: Renunciation of the Article 5 Guarantee

The purpose of this article is to offer a radical proposal: NATO should unleash its potential as the world's premier cooperative and collective security organization by stepping down from being a European collective defense alliance. In other words, I argue that without renouncing territorial security guarantees in Europe, NATO will sacrifice its effectiveness in the new security environment.