INTRODUCTION

On July 18, 1955, the first NATO Parliamentarians' Conference convened at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, France, with some 200 parliamentarians attending from the 15 NATO countries. In the words of one of the founders and now past President of the North Atlantic Assembly, Geoffrey de Freitas, the meeting in Paris "was only the final step in the long campaign of a few parliamentarians to get their governments interested in a forum for discussing problems of the Atlantic community."

The Parliamentarians' Conference was established during the institution-building period of Atlantic and European affairs. Some of the founders hoped that the Conference would become in effect the consultative assembly for the Atlantic Alliance. Others took a more limited view of the possibilities for the organization, seeing it as a forum for the exchange of views among legislators and as a means for disseminating information about NATO.

The latter view of the institution has dominated its development. The organization has gone through a number of changes, including a name-change to the North Atlantic Assembly in 1966, and moves of the Assembly headquarters from the initial site in London to Paris and then from Paris to Brussels (when NATO headquarters was forced to leave France following de Gaulle's withdrawal from NATO's integrated military structure). But the organization remains today essentially what it was when it began in 1955: a forum for discussions among parliamentarians from the signator countries of the North Atlantic Treaty about matters affecting the Atlantic Community nations.

In pursuit of an Atlantic parliamentary dialogue, the Assembly meets in plenary session once a year. The committees of the Assembly, where most of the business is conducted, number six and meet at least twice a year. A Standing Committee is responsible for the general direction of Assembly activities. It is in the Standing Committee that the most important decisions regarding Assembly affairs are prepared. In addition to this locus of power, there are five committees which are specifically responsible for the substantive work of the Assembly. They are the Political Committee; the Military Committee; the Economic Committee; the Scientific and Technical Committee; and the Education, Cultural Affairs and Information Committee. In addition, the Assembly in recent years has appointed a number of subcommittees which, in fact, have done some of the more interesting substantive work of the Assembly.2

1 Cameron, Fraser. The North Atlantic Assembly 1964-1974. Introduction by Geoffrey de Freitas, Member of Parliament. The British Atlantic Committee. London (1974) p. 51.

The Subcommittee on Defense Cooperation is credited by many observers as facilitating a more effective transatlantic dialog on issues of armaments cooperation. They point out that the meetings that this group has held with the Senate and House Armed Services Committees illustrate how the Assembly can be an effective vehicle for creating greater understanding between American and European legislators on issues of crucial importance to the Alliance.

The Assembly is supported by a relatively small secretariat in Brussels with a Secretary General, one professional officer responsible for each substantive committee, a few other administrative officers, some "stagieres" or interns and a support staff. The annual budget of the Assembly has increased gradually over the years and for financial year 1978 totaled 36,066,000 Belgian Francs, or approximately $1,110,000. This budget is financed by member contributions and a small contribution from the NATO budget (which of course, also comes from the treasuries of member countries). The United States pays 24.20 percent of the member contributions-a sum of approximately $262,000 for 1978.3

See appendix B for a display of the distribution of shares among the members and the amounts for each

in 1978.

THE ROLE OF THE ASSEMBLY

Throughout its history, the Assembly has sought to define a role for itself both in relation to other parliamentary assemblies and in terms of its standing with regard to NATO and to national governments. In 1979, that search has still not come to a conclusion.

1. THE ASSEMBLY AND OTHER INTERPARLIAMENTARY GROUPS

During the institution-building of the 1950's, a number of organizations were created with the intention of serving the common interests of the European nations or the Atlantic community. To some extent, these institutions were created to deal with a specific problem or set of problems, and it was not possible at the time to foresee areas of duplication or to predict how various institutions would grow-or wither-over time. This was just as true of interparliamentary bodies as it was of intergovernmental bodies.

Following the establishment of the Assembly, much consideration was given to various ways of "rationalizing" intra-European and Atlantic parliamentary forums. The most important of the organizations scrutinized for rationalization were the European Parliament (the parliamentary body which is part of the European Community structure); the Assembly of the Western European Union (established in 1954 after attempts to form a European Defense Community failed); the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe (established in 1949, unrelated to the European Community or NATO, including neutrals as well as NATO members, and aimed at promoting European cooperation in a broad range of economic and social questions); and, of course, the NATO Parliamentarians' Conference (now, the North Atlantic Assembly).

Even in the mid-1960's, however, it was clear that there were major political and technical obstacles to eliminating overlap and consolidating these various efforts, for example, into one "European" assembly and one "Atlantic" assembly. As one author observed in a book pub

lished in 1966:

It is apparent from even a cursory survey of the political factors that major obstacles will confront any early renewal of efforts to establish a consultative Atlantic Assembly or to rationalize in other ways the existing interparliamentary arrangements.1

1 Hovey, J. Allan Jr. The Superparliaments, Interparliamentary Consultation and Atlantic Cooperation. Praeger (New York) 1966, p. 182.

There continues in 1979 to be a certain amount of apparent duplication of effort and overlap among the various interparliamentary bodies. The conclusion of this report, however, is that this overlap is not concern for undue alarm. The fact that it has not been possible to create fewer bodies to consolidate the activities of current organizations merely reflects the fact that there is not sufficient political unity either within the Atlantic community or within Western Europe to allow such consolidation. While this fact may be regretable, it is not a situation that can be changed by rationalization of parliamentary assemblies.

In addition, most overlap that exists is in contacts among West European parliamentarians, and not in the Atlantic framework. Most Europeans acknowledge that the Assembly of the Western European Union seems the most superfluous of these bodies. But there is support for keeping this body alive because it provides a forum for a "European" discussion of security issues. If the European Community's mandate ever were expanded to include security issues, then most Europeans would readily agree that the security issues now handled by the WEU Assembly could be transferred to the European Parliament. But that day has not yet come. The Council of Europe remains unique because it includes European countries which are not members of the European Community or NATO. In addition, it has carved out a reputation for itself as democracy's "ombudsman" in Western Europe.

The North Atlantic Assembly, for all its defects, plays a unique role. The Assembly is the only body that regularly brings together members of the United States Congress and members of the Canadian and European parliaments for the express purpose of discussing the Atlantic Alliance. In recent years, some members of the U.S. Congress have sponsored an exchange of visits with members of the European Parliament. As valuable as this exchange may be, it does not serve as an alternative to the North Atlantic Assembly simply because the European Parliament has no mandate to discuss defense issues. If and when the European Parliament obtains such competence it would make sense to examine Atlantic parliamentary contacts with an eye toward rationalization. But until such time, this report concludes that U.S. congressional participation both in the North Atlantic Assembly and in contacts with members of the European Parliament can make constructive contributions to American interests and United StatesEuropean relations.

2. THE SEARCH FOR A FORMAL ROLE IN NATO

The role of the Assembly has also been examined in terms of its internal operations and its relationships to NATO and to national governments. Throughout most of the Assembly's history, the Assembly's leadership has sought to create a more formal link between the Assembly and NATO. As was mentioned earlier, some of the Assembly founders desired from the outset that the Assembly become NATO's consultative assembly. In other words, they hoped that the organization could become a formal part of the NATO structure, with responsibility for scrutinizing NATO programs, offering advice, and presumably exercising at least some minimal powers.

Some major technical and political obstacles confronted this goal. The North Atlantic Treaty made no provision for a parliamentary role in NATO. Amending the treaty to create a consultative assembly would have been a laborious procedure, and there was little inclination on the part of NATO governments to undertake such a process. Various attempts were made in the early 1960's to win support for adding a protocol to the North Atlantic Treaty or drawing up a new international agreement to give the parliamentarians' group a formal standing in the alliance. But any of these routes would have required the unanimous consent of the NATO governments, and the French in particular were opposed to the idea and few allied governments showed much enthusiasm.

In the late 1960's, the Assembly concentrated on trying to convince the North Atlantic Council and the NATO Secretary General to take fuller account of the actions and desires of the Assembly. A certain degree of success was registered in 1968 when the Council first commented on the Assembly's resolutions and recommendations from the previous year. These steps, however, were far from the institutionalized role the Assembly had sought.

The Assembly's attempt to win a formal role in the NATO structure continued into the 1970's. When the Assembly convened in Ottawa in September 1971, a proposal by Senator Jacob Javits was adopted to appoint a committee of nine prominent parliamentarians to conduct a thorough study of the Alliance, including an assessment of the role of the Assembly. As part of this effort, an advisor to the Canadian delegation, Peter Dobell, was asked to report on the Assembly's future role. Dobell recommended that the Assembly "change its public image of being NATO-oriented so as to be able to attract parliamentarians interested in the broader range of other trans-Atlantic issues. In order to do this he advocated that the Assembly renounce its long-sought goal of having a consultative status with NATO." 2

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The Assembly rejected Dobell's approach in the belief that "the loss of this close association .. could only lessen the authority of the Assembly's conclusions." The Assembly went on, as a conclusion of its study, to recommend that the goal of greater institutionalization be pursued further while attempting to improve the internal operations and external impact of the Assembly.

In the course of interviews conducted with European parliamentarians in February and March of 1978, there emerged almost no support for continuing this long-term search for a formal role for the Assembly in the NATO structure. Even some of the members who had been most deeply involved in past efforts to achieve this status for the Assembly seemed to have given up on this apparently futile task.

It now appears that further attempts to win an institutionalized role in NATO are not a promising use of the time and energy of the Assembly. At the same time, the fact that the Assembly is the only interparliamentary body that deals in detail with Atlantic security issues argues strongly for keeping the focus of the Assembly's work on the broad range of political, military, economic, and social factors that affect the security of the members. And, the Assembly should continue to nurture close and harmonious relations with the NATO structure, including the NATO Secretary General and his staff.

2 Goodman, Elliot. The Fate of the Atlantic Community. Praeger (New York) 1975, p. 561. • Ibid.