North Atlantic Treaty Organization
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Dear Delegates,
I am Zagreb Mukerjee, your director, and it is with great honor that I welcome you to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization of HNMUN 2011. I am a rising sophomore at Harvard College, concentrating in Mathematics. I am a citizen of the United States; I am also a sometime resident of foreign countries like India, Germany, and Texas, and have visited several others, such as France, Switzerland, and Yale. Besides Model United Nations, I also dabble in one or two political organizations and serve as a research assistant at NBER; I waste what little free time I have reading, singing, Romantic art, Baroque and early music, sleeping, and hunting squirrels on Harvard Yard with a Frisbee.
My involvement in Model United Nations dates from high school, as many tend to do. I was president of my school’s club, and would hold small conferences where delegates from my school and local schools could come together and quibble about diplomacy. I engaged myself more seriously in MUN once arriving at college, and was at Harvard’s high school and collegiate conferences. As a result, I have seen at least three NATO committees, and none of them had anything in common. One was a thinly disguised UNICEF talking about child soldiers at the highest level of abstraction, one was a committee in continual crisis because of an invasion of Canada, and one was an utter disaster, I suspect as a result of the director’s mild intoxication. I intend to steer our committee somewhere in-between the first two, and entirely away from the third.
This committee will not be run as would be a conventional committee in the ECOSOC/Regional Bodies. I urge you all to pay attention to the forthcoming study guide, particularly the procedural dimensions. To give a quick summary of the most significant differences, your committee will issue communiqués, which are shorter, action-oriented resolutions, in order to respond to events as well as address long-term questions, and your committee will be run in conjunction with the Shanghai Co-operation Organization. Since the two committees are covering the same questions, and the actions of the committees affect each other directly, your committee and the SCO will be in communication and will often be forced to co-negotiate in order to avert disaster.
Coming to HNMUN, whether the first time or the last, will be a wholly new experience for all of us, staff and delegates alike, and I encourage all of you to explore the opportunities, substantive and otherwise, that it offers you. I promise you that NATO will be part of the novelty that I am sure you eagerly anticipate, and I ask of you only that your minds be open, quick, and well-prepared. The lines of power in this world are shifting, and at HNMUN 2011, you will be offered an unrivalled opportunity to ride the crest of this wave.
Sincerely,
Zagreb Mukerjee
Director, North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Harvard National Model United Nations 2011
Topic Area A: Terrorism and Global Security
As a result of the globalizing world, states today face a new and terrifying landscape of conflict. Non-state actors are soaring to prominence everywhere in the globe, and asymmetric warfare has become an axiom of modern geopolitics. This means that terrorist organizations are integrating themselves into a global network of crime and violence, and the states that confront them cannot let themselves fall behind. NATO, in this committee, will explore the questions prompted by this trend of terrorist integration, specifically how NATO member nations can engage in great cooperation to counter sophisticated terror networks. NATO will also engage with the SCO on such matters as intelligence sharing and joint security operations.
Of course, full cooperation has not yet come about, and there are reasons for this; state security forces are still wary of opening up fully to their once and future rivals and sharing their trade secrets. Diplomats at NATO will have to tread a careful balance between satisfying the security needs of their own states and integrating their own security policies into a synergistically global anti-terrorist initiative.
Topic Area B: Expansion of NATO and the SCO
Whereas the first topic opens up some of the spaces in which NATO and the SCO can find common ground, this second begins to touch on the areas in which they come into conflict. Both NATO and the SCO have manifested a desire for geopolitical expansion. For example, the SCO is conducting negotiations with India and Iran for membership and security partnerships. NATO, too, in recent years, has added many states such as Romania and Lithuania that Russia perceives to be in its ’sphere of influence,’ creating tension between Russia and NATO, and by extension the entirety of the SCO, which has been rumored to conduct strategic exercises simulating Eastern European conflicts. NATO must choose between antagonizing the SCO, abandoning its policy of expansion, or some compromise between the two. This committee will explore the conflicting goals and desires in this expansion, as well as the potential for NATO expansion elsewhere, and will discuss issues that strike to the heart of what NATO means.
