The Big Push to join NATO's Partnership for Peace is now on. A campaign has been launched with military precision, combining a pro-PfP media blitz with a pincer movement from the top brass in both the Army and the Department of Foreign Affairs. And cracks in Fianna Fail's defences are beginning to show: it seems set to reverse its 1997 election manifesto stance, opposing Irish participation "in NATO-led organisations such as the Partnership for Peace", and join the PDs, Fine Gael and Dick Spring in supporting PfP membership. The Minister for Foreign Affairs did not refer to Fianna Fail's electoral pledge in his Irish Times article last Saturday, but he did state that things had changed, particularly in the past year, with the PfP. The only things that have changed are that Fianna Fail is now in Government and the PfP has become "enhanced", i.e. even more closely tied to NATO.
The arguments put forward for joining PfP range from the need to ensure Ireland's future peacekeeping role to the fact that PfP contains over 40 countries, including neutrals and Russia, and that Ireland must be part of this new European "security architecture".
But NATO is to be found in every room of this new security "architecture". And that is the objection. The foundation of European and international security should be based on the universality of the United Nations, not on a narrow Cold War military bloc, bolstered by nuclear weapons. The PfP has been hailed by NATO as playing "an important role" in NATO's enlargement and President Clinton proclaimed that the PfP was "a path to full NATO membership for some and a strong lasting link to the Alliance for all". David Andrews says the Republic won't join NATO, for "there can be no question of Ireland joining a military alliance based on nuclear weapons". Why then are we considering a "strong lasting link" to NATO? The Minister's own New Agenda disarmament initiative this year is countered by NATO doctrine, which continues to support nuclear weapons and a first-use nuclear policy.
PfP is Partnership with NATO:
1) The PfP involves an agreement negotiated directly with NATO. It operates under the authority of the North Atlantic Council, NATO's supreme body chaired by the NATO Secretary General. Irish officers will serve in both NATO headquarters and the Partnership Co-ordination Cell in Belgium.
2) The PfP can go beyond peacekeeping and humanitarian missions. In 1997 PfP was "enhanced" to include more "robust" peace enforcement/crisis management tasks, "making the difference between being a partner and being an ally razor thin" (US ambassador to NATO). The Government can choose which aspects of the PfP it wishes to adopt but for how long can we confine our involvement? And how easily could we dissociate ourselves from broader PfP actions which NATO is contemplating? The head of the US armed forces, Gen Shalikashvili, wants PfP to be able to act in Africa and the Middle East.
3) Irish troops would participate in joint exercises with NATO forces, under the direction of NATO, and possibly on Irish territory. And the line separating NATO military exercises from those of the PfP can be easily blurred. For instance, Exercise Strong Resolve (March 1998), jointly planned and executed by NATO's Supreme Allied Commands, was divided into Crisis South and Crisis North. Crisis South was a NATO-led PfP peacekeeping/evacuation operation , while Crisis North - involving only NATO - was a common defence response to an outside attack: a co-ordination of WWIII on the one hand, and peacekeeping on the other.
4) Irish military equipment would have to conform to NATO standards, at Irish taxpayers' expense. Liaising with NATO defence committees, we would acquire Standardisation Agreements, identifying common NATO procedures, systems and equipment standards. The PfP and the NATO enlargement it assists have provided a billion-dollar bonanza for arms contractors.
5) The PfP will undermine neutrality. Technically, we will remain neutral because the PfP is not a mutual defence pact. But Ireland's objection to NATO and support for neutrality has always been broader than objection to mutual defence commitments: it has involved revulsion at nuclear weapons and the arms industry and support for the developing world (often victims of militarism and the arms industry) and the United Nations.
Several PfP neutrals are actively considering NATO membership (Austria is mentioned as being in the next wave of NATO members) and Finland and Sweden already co-operate on defence, including weapons production and procurement and coastal surveillance. NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe has referred to the "neutrals" in the PfP as "former neutrals" (NATO Review, 3/95). None of them sought electoral support for membership.
Finally, arguments that our well-established peacekeeping abilities will be hampered or our UN missions curtailed if we don't join the PfP do not ring true. There are over 140 countries in this world not in the PfP: are they too to be excluded from future UN peacekeeping? There are currently 17 UN peacekeeping missions. Only one - Sfor in Bosnia/Herzegovina - is under NATO command. And Ireland and other countries are involved in Sfor without being PfP members. Not joining the PfP is not an act of isolationism. It is a stand on behalf of reasserting the UN's primary role in peacekeeping and in international security, a role which is being steadily usurped by NATO.
In March 1996, Bertie Ahern stated in the Dail that any attempt to join the PfP without a referendum would be a "serious breach of faith and fundamentally undemocratic . . . it will be seen by other countries as a gratuitous signal that Ireland is moving away from its neutrality and towards gradual incorporation into NATO and WEU".
In the Dail last week, the Taoiseach repeated that we would not join the PfP without a referendum.
Carol Fox is a researcher with the Peace & Neutrality Alliance