Residence Palace Brussels 11 July 2005

Welcome remarks by Dr. Stefanie Babst, Head of NATO Countries, Division of Public Diplomacy at the WIIS Conference, Brussels, 11 July 2005 Event 11/07/2005 NATO: New Tasks and Responsibilities All right. It seems like we are all set and I would like to say good morning to you and welcome you all here on behalf of the NATO Public Diplomacy Division. My name is Stefanie Babst and I have the pleasure to co-host together with our partner, Women in International Security Studies, this one-day conference titled NATO: News Tasks and Challenges. It's great to see so many people up and still wide-eyed with obviously a great degree of enthusiasm for transatlantic relations and for NATO and I think you need to have a certain degree of enthusiasm and dedication when one is coming to join a conference which starts at 8 o'clock in the morning. I do apologize for that but I still see that many of you are here so, I figure that we're going to get started. I particularly would like to thank our distinguished speakers, our colleagues and friends who have travelled long hours and far distances, from the United States of America, from various European capitals, from Brussels, from NATO obviously, in one case even from Afghanistan. That's really great to see so many people who have an interest to spend a day with us talking about NATO's current agenda, our current transformation agenda; and without further ado I just would like to make a few very short introductory remarks about this conference. As I said already a minute ago, this conference is first and foremost about transatlantic relations and as we all know transatlantic relations have been a tricky bird to spot. If this is supposed to be an early bird's conference, then I probably can remain with that metaphor of early birds so, yes I think transatlantic relations have been a tricky bird to spot. And we've seen a couple of ups and downs in recent years and months on transatlantic relations. Probably this has been due to language differences as some may suggest but probably also due to the fact that we simply, at least sometimes, tend to think differently when it comes to looking around us, looking at international security challenges. But I would very much hope and am convinced, to put it a bit more positive, that this conference provides a very useful tool in order to not only speak a common language on transatlantic relations but also allows us to have a good look on the new transatlantic projects that we've already started with and that we are going to move ahead with. As we all know Iraq in particular has been a very tricky and difficult test for NATO to pass but I think that NATO has managed to pass this test successfully and has probably emerged as an even stronger tool in order to provide not only a form for transatlantic security cooperation but also for dialogue. And I'm pretty sure that the Secretary General of NATO, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer who will join us in an hour and a half or so, will echo that message of saying that NATO is indeed very much in the midst of developing on a number of political and military common transatlantic projects. I think what NATO makes so unique is in fact two-fold. I think NATO has both the political willingness and the means in order to tackle security challenges through a number of aspects. We've started to come together in terms of fighting international terrorism; we have come together--both Americans and Europeans--to start establishing security partnerships to the countries of the Euro-Atlantic Region but even far beyond if you look, in particular, at NATO's outreach policies towards the Broader or Wider Middle East and the countries of the Mediterranean Dialogue; we've started successfully to modernize our military capabilities; and on top of that we've also pretty much engaged in peacekeeping and where necessary even in peacemaking. These four subjects are basically the basis for our conference program today and I very much hope that it will allow us to have a good look, a fresh look, a critical look if necessary, but a joint transatlantic look on these four key issues. But this conference is not only and exclusively about transatlantic relations and about NATO. It's also, if I may say so and I don't mean this in any way discriminatory, about women--women professionals in international security policy and in foreign affairs. It's a special pleasure for NATO and in particular also for my colleagues and me to have been able to co-host and co-organize this conference with a very reputed and very prominent institution based in Washington but also based in Berlin because WIIS, Women in International Security policy, is really a network of foreign affairs specialists--female foreign affairs specialists--and, so it's very much a pleasure for us, I mean to have been able to host this conference together here with WIIS. If there is some truth in the saying that women, in a more general sense, tend to be very much forward looking when it comes to relationships and tend to be very much caring when it comes to relationships and tend to be very much- to feel responsible when it comes to relationships, I think we have chosen the right project partner here today in order to actually look at and discuss transatlantic relations. I very much hope that we're going to have an interesting day that we can spend together, an inspiring day. A fresh look, again, at transatlantic relations and without further ado I would like to pass on the floor to my colleague Valerie Gilpin who is executive director of Women in International Security Studies who will also say a few words of welcome.