A Question of Relevance

The new buzz word, as I'm sure you've noticed, whenever anybody, liberal or conservative alike, is thinking about international bodies like NATO or the UN is "relevance." For instance, the former:

But the question is whether NATO, after its recent roller coaster history, can survive such a high profile public spat and whether it is going to retain any relevance if and when an Iraqi war begins. (CNN)

The North Atlantic Council (NAC) will reconvene tomorrow at 9.45am amidst debate over whether the on-going crisis has really blown NATO's credibility in American eyes and put the Alliance’s relevance as a military organisation into question. (EU Observer)

Nato governments were understood to be working hard to persuade Jacques Chirac, the French president, to change his position. Furious US and British officials say Paris is the main culprit behind the current 16-3 split, which is threatening to render Nato irrelevant at precisely the moment it has been "re-invented" to meet post cold war challenges. (The Guardian)

To be sure, the present NATO deadlock is an organizational crisis, but not in the way most of these articles appear to be assuming. First, if NATO's relevance is indeed related to the current 16-3 split to send defensive units to the Turkish border, one can only conclude that relevance must is indelibly linked to the tabletable, and thus the interests, of one of its members, the U.S. This is precisely the sort of hegemony, however, that the democratic process governing the organization is supposed to forestall. The fact is, and this has been repeated time and time again, notably by Jacques Chirac, the divisive issue in the debate is one of "timing." As posted a couple of days ago, the Franco-Germanic position, in both the UN and NATO, is one of declaration -- i.e., sussing out where all the players stand, and making them announce it. By putting the onus on the U.S. to either accept or reject the UN resolutions before countenancing their defensive responsibilities, a declaration upon which one cannot help but think the NATO split is predicated, the French not only stake a claim to the importance of their contribution to world affairs, outsized though it may be, they are actually doing the international bodies a long-term service by providing an outlandishly official and public platform for the U.S. to demonstrate whether or not it wants to play along. If U.S. fails to do so, then the question of relevance must indeed be posed, but not, at least from the European perspective, as a question of "relevance" vs. "irrelevance."

Adaptation to a different European landscape, one that is expanding, geographically and economically, will surely do NATO good in the end, even if the NATO of old, which, let's face it, has always been more about symbolic defense and peacekeeping than an offensive menace, must continue its ever so slow senescent fade into the annals of 20th-century history. To grow old, and possibly even to die, though, is not irrelevance; it is merely change, evolution, the nature of all things. In sum, consciously or not, the architects of the present split in NATO provide a stimulus to its potential, emergent viability, not its ruin.. America has always, in spite of itself, paradoxically, always been afraid of such change, regarding the whole process as a menace to rage against, literally as well as figuratively, especially when it is marked by the fade of something that must pass away in order that something else may be.