Video interview

Q: Mr. Lambert, thank you very much for joining us today to talk about NATO's financing.

A first and very blunt question. How much does NATO cost?

Lambert: It depends on what you include in the perimiter of NATO.

First of all, you have the International Secretariat. For 2004 the budget of the International Secretariat totalizes about 170 million euros. But there is more than the International Secretariat. You have the military budget which totalizes about 810 million euro, but you have more than this. You also have an infrastructure budget which is based on totally different principles, and you also have some agencies. Agencies to which some nations do take part and some nations do not.

So globally, I can say that if you totalize all the budgets of NATO you have about 0.5 percent of the military budgets of all the member states.

How are these budgets financed? It's very particular. For each of those budgets you have a cost share. The cost share is different for each budget and each nation has a percentage to finance in those budgets. And so we, the Financial Control, when we send the call for funds to the nations we request from each nation a different percentage based on the cost shares of these budgets. We request from the nation to pay a percentage of the total budget.

I would like to say that how are those cost shares estimated. It's based on the global national income, but not only. It is also based on a political factor. And all these factors, the global national income and political factor are decided by the nations, not by the International Secretariat.

Q: And speaking exactly about this sharing of costs, now of course new countries have joined NATO and there are more countries to share the burden of NATO financing. Does this mean that NATO, the existing NATO member countries are now paying proportionately less for NATO?

Lambert: Yes, but it is marginal. The new member states, the seven new member states, bring 2.67 percent of the global budget of NATO. And as I see that the global budget did not increase by 2.67 percent this means that the 19, let's say, old members of NATO will pay a little bit less than what they did pay in the past. But it's marginal.

Q: And some international organizations, not to mention any names, but some international organizations have had trouble getting the actual money from their member countries when the time came. Has NATO ever had a problem with this?

Lambert: As far as I know I can answer that we do not have a problem and we have never had such problems in the past, and I hope we will never have such a problem in the future.

Nations pay, they pay regularly. We are flexible. When we launch a call for funds we do not request nations to pay immediately. But generally they pay quite quickly.

Q: You mentioned that apart from the civilian budget and the military budget there's a third special budget that you said functions on slightly different principles, the budget for the military infrastructure needed by the NATO member countries. Could you tell us a bit more about how this budget works?

Lambert: Yes, it is a little bit complicated. I'll try to explain it as simply as possible.
There is an infrastructure budget. This budget is decided by an Infrastructure Committee and, for instance, there is a target for each nation. Each nation has a target to finance a certain amount of infrastructure for this year; an amount which is different nation by nation, of course.

And if a nation decides, or proposes a project to be financed by the Infrastructure Committee, if the Infrastructure Committee agrees then the nation pays the bills for this project and at the end of the year, when we see that one nation, for instance, has made some expenses above its target and another nation is below its own target, then there is a compensation. From one nation to another nation. But we do not here in NATO, in the International Secretariat, we do not deal with the credits. This is a pure compensation between nations.

Q: And of course, NATO is a crisis management organization and you can't always predict crises. When NATO takes on new operations, as is the case for Afghanistan now, who pays for the extra costs?

Lambert: In a nutshell I would say the member states, the nations pay. As you said a crisis, you cannot predict a crisis. So what happens? If there is a new operation, a new action to be undertaken what will we do? We will go and request a supplemental budget, of course. And this supplemental budget will be paid by the nation. We have no other way.

Q: We have a lot of meetings here at NATO Headquarters; Heads of State and Government meet, Defence Ministers meet, Foreign Ministers meet, but we never see Finance Ministers meeting. Why don't they meet? And if they did, would this help NATO?

Lambert: I have been told that in the past, very long ago, there were some meetings of Finance Ministers. This doesn't happen anymore. I don't know exactly why. But all I can say is the fact that NATO is an organization that works. It works quite well without meetings of Finance Ministers, so I'm not the one who can say it is useful or not. This is not my responsibility to say that. But I say that it works without meetings of Finance Ministers.

Q: Mr. Lambert, thank you very much.

Lambert: Thank you.