THE MEANING OF MEMBERSHIP
«NATO Membership» is not as straightforward a proposition as it may appear at first blush. Historically, legally and practically, the Alliance came about in two distinct parts. First came the North Atlantic Treaty, signed on 4 April 1949 by the twelve founding members, which entered into force on 24 August of that year. Since then, sixteen additional states have signed and ratified the Treaty. None of the parties to the Treaty has chosen to renounce it since it has been in existence.
The creation of a military organisation was not a treaty commitment, nor had it been planned for ab initio. The move from a legally-binding political association of nations to a broad-spectrum politico-military organisation came about as a result of the sharp rise in international tension caused by the Korean War (June 1950–July 1953). The decision to study the establishment of a centralised command structure was taken in September 1950, followed in December by the designation of General Eisenhower as Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR). The basic military structures for the Alliance in Europe and the political decision-making machinery, with the North Atlantic Council (NAC) at its centre, were in place by mid-1951, and the entity has been known since then as the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.[1]
France chose, from 1966 to 2009, to withdraw from the military part of NATO for the most part, removing all of its forces from the integrated command structure, while remaining a party to the Treaty and represented on the NAC as well as in a number of technical bodies. As a budding nuclear power located in a crucial geographical position, France could retain this policy despite the reluctance of her NATO allies. This is not on offer to putative new members of NATO: membership means both becoming a party to the Treaty and a full participant in the organisation.
- ↑ It may be worth noting that before NATO was set up, the five founding states of the Western European Union (the UK, France and Benelux) had established a command structure, the Western Union Defence Organisation (WUDO), from 1948 to 1951 headed by Field Marshall Montgomery in Fontainebleau, which eventually became NATO’s SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers, Europe).
