NATO Secretaries-General the Legacies of Joseph Luns and Jaap De Hoop Scheffer
NATO Secretaries-General The Legacies of Joseph Luns and Jaap de Hoop Scheffer Ryan C. Hendrickson With the end of Jaap de Hoop Scheffer’s term as NATO’s Secretary-General, the time is ripe for an initial assessment of his service as NATO’s chief diplomat. NATO’s secretary-general, an office that did not even exist until three years after the Alliance’s creation, has generated little academic scrutiny. In part, this dearth of research is understandable given the few official powers held by the Alliance’s political leader. The secretary-general is charged with promoting consensus among the Allies – a rather broad responsibility that provides few organisational tools to achieve this end. In addition, the secretary-general must oversee and manage Alliance summits and ministerial meetings, and chair meetings of the North Atlantic Council, but has no voting authority. Given this limited institutional authority, coupled with the political influence of the Alliance’s ‘great powers’ and the organisational authority wielded by NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), most histories of NATO provide little assessment of the secretary-general.1 Three individuals from the Netherlands: Dirk Stikker, Joseph Luns, and de Hoop Scheffer, have served as NATO’s chief political leader, yet each has left his own, quite different, legacy. De Hoop Scheffer’s record, at least at this first early juncture, is very different from those of his Cold War predecessors, and especially from that of his Dutch predecessor, Joseph Luns, who was NATO’s longest serving secretary-general. This essay provides a short comparison of the legacies of Luns and de Hoop Scheffer.
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