NATO
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is an international organization for defence collaboration established in 1949, in support of the North Atlantic Treaty signed in Washington, D.C on April 4, 1949. Its other official name is the french language equivalent, l'Organisation du Traité de l'Atlantique Nord, or OTAN.
The core provision of the treaty is Article V, which states:
- The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
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2 History 3 Secretaries General of NATO 4 External links |
From the foundation in 1949 or with the year of accession.
Member States
France is still a member of NATO but retired from the military command in 1966. Iceland, the sole member of NATO which does not have its own military force, joined on the condition that they would not be forced to participate in warfare.
On March 17, 1948 Benelux, France, and the United Kingdom signed the Treaty of Brussels which is a precursor to the NATO Agreement.
The Soviet Union and its satellite states formed the Warsaw Pact in the 1950s in order to counterbalance NATO. Both organisations were opposing sides in the Cold War. After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, the Warsaw Pact disintegrated.
NATO saw its first military engagement in the Kosovo War, where it waged an 11-week bombing campaign against Serbia and Montenegro starting on March 24 and ending on June 11, 1999.
Three former communist countries, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland, joined NATO in 1999 after being invited on July 8, 1997. At the Prague (Czech Republic) summit of November 21-22, 2002 seven countries have been invited to start talks in order to join the Alliance: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania. The invited countries are expected to join NATO in 2004. Albania and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia will probably be told they have not met the economic, political and military reform criteria and will have to wait. Croatia applied only in 2002 and has just started the process.
Charles de Gaulle's decision to remove France from NATO's military command in 1966 to pursue its own nuclear defence program precipitated the relocation of the NATO Headquarters from Paris, France to Brussels, Belgium by October 16, 1967. While the political headquarters is located in Brussels the military headquarters, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), are located just south of Brussles, in the town of Mons.
September 13, 2001, NATO invoked, for the first time in its history, an article in its charter that states that any attack on a member state is considered an attack against the entire alliance. This came in response to the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack.
On February 10, 2003 NATO faced a serious crisis because of France and Belgium breaking the procedure of silent approval concerning the timing of protective measures for Turkey in case of a possible war with Iraq. Germany did not use its right to break the procedure but said it supported the veto.
On April 16, 2003, NATO agreed to take command in August of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. The decision came at the request of Germany and the Netherlands, the two nations leading ISAF at the time of the agreement. It was approved unanimously by all 19 NATO ambassadors. This marked first time in NATO's history that it took charge of a mission outside the north Atlantic area. Canada had originally been slated to take over ISAF in August.
History
Secretaries General of NATO
See also: Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council, OSCE, WEU, UN
