The importance of lobbying for NATO?

The Foreign Affairs Minister of Albania was also present at the emergency meeting of the NATO Foreign Ministers on the crisis in Georgia. Albania is yet to become a fully fledged member of the Alliance, but the invitation to join, given to it at the Bucharest Summit (along with Croatia), in April this year, certainly paved the road towards membership with full rights. It is expected that this will take place soon. At the Cologne Summit in Spring which coincides with NATO’s 50th Jubilee, Albania’s Ambassador to the Alliance will take his seat as an equal alongside the 26 other member countries of the Alliance. In July of the current year, Albania signed the membership protocol in Tirana and now ratification procedures begin at the Parliaments of the 26 member countries. What should be done to expedite this process? It appears that there exists a misunderstanding that originates from the way lobbying has been conducted to sign the SAA with the EU. This is a process which started in June 2006 and has still not ended. The Speaker of the Albanian Assembly together with her Croatian counterpart have sent out a letter to the Speakers of the 26 countries to speed up the ratification process for NATO. The initial replies are positive. Ireland and France confirmed that they will ratify the agreement within this year! The 24 other replies are also expected to be positive. It is better to save time and energy for other fields and not waste them lobbying from capital to capital of the Alliance, because the ratification issue has been included on the agenda of NATO, so the Ambassadors of the respective countries themselves are the ones who remind and encourage their governments to complete this formality. This process will be regarded merely as a formality for as long as Albania conducts itself like an Alliance member. Albania is the first country in the former Communist East which articulated, in 1990 (through the Opposition) its desire to join NATO. Repeated opinion polls and surveys have shown a more than 90 per cent support rating of the population for their country to join NATO. In the year 1994, Albania signed the Partnership for Peace program with NATO,and during all this time, the Armed Forces have undergone a deep-going reform. In 2008, for the first time since 1990, the budget of the Armed Forces took 2 per cent of the GDP, also fulfilling one of the NATO criteria. Albania is present with its elite troops in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and more recently, in Chad. However, conduct as a member state of NATO does not only signify the military dimension. NATO is not a military, but a political organization. Tirana’s homework for the ensuing months is to be very careful not to commit any ‘democratic accidents.”! Concern strongly articulated by an American diplomat in Tirana, no less than one month ago! Ongoing reforms, the strengthening of the independence of institutions, respect for them, the completion of the electoral infrastructure, the battle against organized crime and corruption, the independent judiciary and a free media, are absolutely decisive conditions for the evaluations on Albania’s democratic progress to be positive. Hence, the ‘duties’for Albanian diplomacy and politics lie at home-base. This period of time should not be regarded as merely time to “get across the next river”, but as a period of time during which Albania should be striving to convince the members of the family of the Alliance that it wants to join NATO because it believes in the principles this Alliance promotes; the market economy, an independent judiciary, free media, free and fair elections. We are living in a world that is changing rapidly. The latest events in Georgia, where a country like Russia intervenes with tanks into a neighbouring state, re-dimension and lend a far greater significance to the moment when Albania will become a member of NATO. It would be well worth while to view the period of time left precisely from this angle. Any negligence and misunderstanding could overturn everything from a historical moment to a historical error.