SACEUR in military terms, will ultimately only be deployable at the rate of the slowest of the political authorisation processes of the countries involved. Indeed, this has been the case for previous forces assigned to SACEUR, such as the Cold War-era Allied Mobile Force (AMF): when SACEUR attempted to move its air component on his own initiative to protect Turkey during the 1991 Gulf War, countries whose aircraft and aircrew were part of the AMF withheld authorisation (Belgium and Germany).[1]
If Article 5 is based on the principle of ‘all for one, one for all’, the same does not hold true for non-Article 5 combat operations: Greece did not participate in the Kosovo air campaign; fully half of NATO’s (and the EU’s) members, including major countries such as Germany and Poland, did not support the Libya campaign in 2011 and only nine out of 28 actually participated in the operations, in which a number of non-NATO countries (Sweden, United Arab Emirates, Qatar…) were also present.
In other words, NATO decision-making allows for substantial flexibility, as a somewhat paradoxical result of the rule of consensus. Since substantive decisions are not taken by a straight for-or-against vote (as is the case in the EU), those who don’t want to participate in a given non-Article 5 initiative simply opt out, without preventing others from moving forward. There are necessarily limits to this flexibility, but as the Libyan case indicates, they are very broad indeed.
2. Full membership options
For the purpose of this assessment, we have discarded the “Gaullist option” (membership with Article 5 but placed outside of NATO’s military force structure and defence planning machinery), for the reasons indicated above: it is not on offer. Any membership will be full membership.
However, this does not mean that there is only one way of being a full member with only one set of possible effects. Similarly, the effects of membership will vary as a function of the choices of other partners: a more or
- ↑ An extreme case occurred at the end of the Kosovo campaign, a non-Article 5 contingency, in June 1999. British General Sir Michael Jackson, as commander of NATO’s Rapid Reaction Corps, refused to obey an order given by American General Wesley Clark acting as SACEUR, to prevent the reinforcement of the Russian force at Pristina air base. General Jackson reminded his superior that such a political decision had to be approved by his government; he allegedly added that “I’m not going to start the third world war for your sake”. Mike Jackson’s career did not suffer as a result; Wes Clark lost his job as SACEUR earlier than he expected.
