THE SHANGHAI COOPERATION ORGANISATION’S MOMENTUM TOWARDS A MATURE SECURITY ALLIANCE

Security organisations can differ in their scope of activities and in deepness of<br />their mutual cooperation. For instance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation<br />(NATO) nowadays pays homage to the broad concept of security: security not only<br />encompassing military but also political, economic, social and environmental<br />factors.1 Among other things, this comprehensive approach to security includes<br />aspects such as free and fair elections; well-organised administrative, lawenforcement<br />and judicial organs at national, regional and local level; employment;<br />housing; education and health services. If all of these dimensions of security are<br />provided in the areas where NATO operates, such as Bosnia, Kosovo and<br />Afghanistan, then a stable and secure situation has been reached. However, in 1949<br />NATO started as an organisation with an exclusive military objective, namely to<br />deter an eventual attack by the Soviet Union and its satellites against European<br />(NATO) countries. Especially during its operations in the former Yugoslavia in the<br />1990s, the Western alliance realised that its concept of security should include other<br />aspects than military, in order to achieve a stable international security environment.<br />As to the intensity of cooperation among its member-states, NATO started with the<br />most essential elements of political and military cooperation only. It took NATO<br />many years to establish its current integrated political-military structure and<br />activities, such as frequent political deliberations, joint forces and allied operations<br />far beyond its territorial borders.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

A person counts once a day per paper. We keep no cookie and no address: a reader is a hash that changes every day. Any month under five reads shows no number.