The Hill News

As the barricades go up in Chicago to separate activists from Heads of State arriving for the NATO Summit one thing is abundantly clear: NATO needs to become closer to its more than 1 billion citizen stakeholders. NATO is not only the sum of its intergovernmental political and military parts, but also of the 900 million citizens living in its 28 member states - and the more than 532 million additional citizens in states with partnership or contact agreements with the alliance. These citizens, rather than military forces, police and other means of law enforcement, are at the heart of alliance security.
 
To deepen and extend this shared values-base requires an updated, more open, transparent and accountable alliance, appropriate to 21st century expectations. Decision-making within NATO remains largely the exclusive preserve of the executive branch of government and an array of inter-governmental bureaucracies. It is the only major intergovernmental body not to h! ave an information disclosure policyâ€"even the much maligned World Bank has one of thoseâ€"while mechanisms for congressional and parliamentary oversight within NATO are inadequate. For NATO’s new Strategic Concept agreed at the previous Lisbon Summit, only the German parliament scheduled a prior committee hearing and no formal parliamentary debate or vote on the Concept took place in any member state.

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