Key Documents - The road to equality (history)

NATO and Multinational forces and personnel policies

This page is based on an abstract from “Multinational military units and homosexual personnel” published in Feb 04 by Geoffrey Bateman and Sameera Dalvi. It has been summarised and reworded as appropriate to proud2serve.net. The original document can be retrieved from the CSSMM website.

Generally speaking, NATO does not set policies of any sort for its member states, but encourages standardization to promote effective military cooperation among members. However, the NATO Standardization Group is the “central Alliance body for remedying existing deficiencies,” working to mitigate the most extreme differences between member countries. This is achieved through NATO standardization agreements, (STANAGS) in the operational, material, and administrative areas.

NATO and its member countries view standardization as a flexible concept that is used when necessary. Standardization among NATO members is voluntary and a “means of achieving the desired end, but is not an end in itself.” Attaining standardization has not been simple, and the more pressing difficulties of synchronizing interoperability have been at the expense of addressing cultural interoperability.

The question of women’s roles in multinational units is an imperfect corollary to the question of homosexual personnel in similar situations, but it does provide a useful analogy that has received slightly more attention in both organizational and academic publications. No STANAGS address the issue of women or homosexual personnel with regard to NATO force composition or management. Within the last decade, however, NATO has started to address issues concerning women in the military, creating the International Office on Women in the NATO Forces in 1997. NATO members continue to allow more military opportunities for women, and women’s presence in multinational operations has increased.

NATO has no policy for managing conflicts between countries that maintain different policies about women’s roles in the military, or homosexuals. and the lack of administrative policy leaves little guidance about how to deal with problems that may arise. Officially, the alliance’s respect for national sovereignty means that member countries must respect all others’ policies on women as well as gay and lesbian personnel. Yet recent discussion at NATO headquarters and with the International Military Staff about creating clear guidelines concerning sexual harassment suggests a need for policies that would apply to all member nations that send personnel to staff NATO headquarters. Such policies would not contradict national personnel policies that stipulate conditions on who can or cannot serve in the military, but would require some countries to work with women in contexts they may not officially condone in their national settings.

Thomas-Durrel Young observes, “[T]here are so many other issues in trying to make multinationality work that something like this [dealing with homosexual personnel] just pales ... nations delegate only operational command or operational control.” To insure that personnel working under the auspices of NATO follow national laws and policies, each nation appoints a national commander who exercises full command. It is through such national contingent commanders that the “nation retains full responsibility for administration, personnel management and discipline, in addition to logistic support.” Hence, NATO’s respect for national sovereignty requires a de facto support for gays and lesbians who serve in integrated NATO missions. As long as NATO member countries allow them to serve, the alliance itself must respect and support their presence.