President Bush’s plan to build a missile-defense shield in Europe won approval from NATO at yesterday’s Bucharest summit meetings, marking an important victory for the U.S. agenda and for American hopes of getting Moscow to ease its opposition. But the summit balked at U.S. pressure to start an admission process for Ukraine and Georgia as premature and liable to raise tensions with Russia.

The planned ballistic missile-defense system involves 10 interceptor missiles based in Poland and a tracking radar site in the Czech Republic. Poland and the Czech Republic are pleased to announce the completion of negotiations on a missile defense agreement,” says a joint statement by the two countries, issued on the fringes of the NATO summit in Bucharest (3 April).

In endorsing the project, a statement by the 26 nations alliance said that the system “will be linked to other US missile defense facilities in Europe and the US.” In addition according to NATO’s Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the alliance will “develop options for a comprehensive missile defense architecture to extend coverage to all ally territory and population not otherwise covered by the US system.” These areas – including Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania – would not be protected by the missile shield as currently planned. In addition, plans are under discussion about how a NATO-focused network of defenses against short-and-medium-range missiles could be “bolted onto” the planned U.S. shield supposed to operate against long-range attacks.

The U.S. was less successful in its bid to gain NATO admission for the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine. The alliance moved to admit Croatia and Albania, but Germany and France led opposition to Bush’s push to expand the alliance into Georgia and Ukraine with a “membership action plan (MAP),” arguing that such a move would unduly provoke Russia, which has vehemently opposed the idea. Most NATO governments also take the view that both these countries have internal troubles – separatism in Georgia, a deep split about Russia in Ukraine – that could become problematical if they were put officially on track to NATO membership. (more…)

Germans are emigrating at a record pace despite their country’s strengthening economy. In 2006, roughly 155,000 Germans left the country, apparently drawn by economic hopes. It marks a new peak of emigration since the postwar wave in the 1950’s. (The net balance of influx and outflow turned “negative” again in 2005 when departures outnumbered returns and immigrants.)

Germany, like other countries in the European Union, is experiencing the effect of EU encouragement for mobility among member states. Britain, Sweden and the Netherlands, are also seeing record-breaking emigration figures. (Some of their emigrants go to Germany.)

For German officials, the trend increases concerns about a looming shortage of highly-skilled workers: the government is working on measures to attract qualified immigrants to fill this gap. The new pattern also aggravates the problem of an ageing German population and shrinking work force that is liable to poses problems for retirement financing.

When Juergen Schupp, of the German Institute of Economic Research, surveyed 2,000 Germans in the 16-year-old category, he found that about two percent of them were considering leaving the country, many of them within a year. Some of them cited the tax burden, together with obstacles to small-scale entrepreneurship, as reasons for considering emigration from Germany. Of course, this does not mean all of them will actually leave. Simultaneously, German academics are showing more mobility, but many of them leave only temporarily.

In the meantime, even Germans who stay can leave vicariously — by watching reality shows (such as “My New Life” or “My New Job”) about their countrymen emigrating.

A survey by Germany’s Federal Statistics Office listed the top destinations for German emigrants in 2005:

Switzerland: 14,000
United States: 13,000
Austria: 10,000
Poland: 9,000

Via NPR, March 28, 2008; Deutsche Welle July 2006; German Institute for Economic Research.

The man credited with putting muscle into UN peacekeeping, Jean-Marie Guehenno, will leave his position on June 1, according to Le Monde newspaper. Guehenno had been widely credited with the restoring the reputation of U.N. “peace operations” as an effective and relatively agency in helping conflict-torn countries in Africa and elsewhere return to stability after civil wars and other strife.

Under his auspices, UN peacekeeping forces increased in size to become the second-largest military force operating outside their country – behind the size of U.S. expeditionary forces.

Guehenno, appointed eight years ago by then-Secretary General Kofi Annan, played an important role in changing the philosophy of peacekeeping after a period in the 1990s when the UN’s reputation was damaged by fiascos in Bosnia and elsewhere. Guehenno told European Affairs in 2006, in an article entitled Contemporary Peacekeeping Is State-Building, that he had lead the UN toward more “robust peacekeeping” — meaning readiness to use force when necessary to implement a peacekeeping mission.

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France has decided more ground troops to Afghanistan for combat missions against Taliban insurgents in the mountainous battle zone close to the border with Pakistan, according to press reports in Paris.

The French commitment, which includes elite special forces, comes at a critical moment for NATO, which it direly needs reinforcements to ratchet up its campaign against guerilla fighters infiltrating eastern Afghanistan from their sanctuaries in the tribal areas of neighboring Pakistan.

By sending in fresh combat units, expected to number up to 500 men, President Nicolas Sarkozy seems to be acting on his pledge that France wants to work more closely with NATO. With the Bush administration asking European nations for more military help in Afghanistan, a Sarkozy adviser was quoted in Le Monde newspaper saying that “France is the only country that can — if it decides to – make the crucial difference.”

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Former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Robert E. Hunter examines the current state of the NATO mission in Afghanistan. He focuses on the challenges presented by so-called “caveats”– limitations that individual nations place on their NATO forces– and the difficulties that they are causing for NATO commanders on the ground. Hunter’s article deals not only with the alliance’s immediate prospects in Afghanistan, but also with the long-term repercussions that could result from NATO’s first major military defeat.
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