NATO unlikely to earmark Georgia membership
VALENTINA POP
02.12.2008 @ 10:35 CET
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - NATO foreign ministers meeting in Brussels on Tuesday (2 December) are unlikely to give Georgia a so-called Membership Action Plan (MAP) - formal candidate status for the transatlantic military alliance - a debate with Georgian and NATO officials on Monday revealed.
"I met kids in Georgian villages who were named 'MAP'," Georgian Prime Minister Grigol Mgaloblishvili said, when talking about how politicised the issue has become, at a seminar by the German Marshall Fund, a US think-tank, in Brussels.
Tbilisi: unlikely to receive the so-called Membership Action Plan (MAP), but a closer co-operation with NATO is ongoing (Photo: EUobserver.com)
The MAP is not a "membership guarantee," but a technical assistance phase ahead of potential future accession to the alliance, Jamie Shea, NATO's policy planning director, explained.
Last week, US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice pulled back from asking for a MAP for Georgia and Ukraine, after finding little support for the move among Western European partners amid vehement opposition from Russia.
"We believe that the NATO-Georgia commission and the NATO-Ukraine commission can be the bodies with which we intensify our dialogue and our activities," Ms Rice said, referring to two consultative bodies aimed at helping shape up the two countries' armed forces. "Therefore, there does not need at this point in time to be any discussion of MAP."
Georgia's foreign minister Eka Tkeshelashvili said that getting work done under the NATO-Georgia commission - which was established in the aftermath of the August war - would have the same effect as MAP but without the MAP tag.
NATO's Mr Shea echoed Ms Tkeshelashvili's remarks. "You don't become a NATO member because you have a MAP label, but because you've done fundamental reform and transformation - which can be done under a variety of mechanisms which are on the NATO table," she said, stressing the need to focus on the "end deliverables."
With the Georgian government undergoing a thorough national security strategy review and with NATO prospects far off in the future, the question is if it should keep building expeditionary forces or concentrate on territorial defence, the German Marshall Fund's Ron Asmus asked.
Mr Shea replied that the underlining principle of NATO was the "musketeer" clause - one for all and all for one.
"If every member would now focus on defending its own territories and not on expeditionary forces, NATO would not function anymore," he said, urging the Georgia not to "jump to conclusions" and restructure its military to defend its own territory only.