(*This opinion / analytical article was written by Ivan Dikov for The European Views website.)

The EU as a collective member of NATO would enhance the capabilities of the Alliance, rather than “duplicate” them.

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The European Union should finally become a collective member of NATO to resolve the decades-old “EU – NATO Discrepancy”, a partly technical and partly conceptual issue that has been hampering both entities from realizing their full potential in support of Western and global stability and prosperity.

This is certainly an old idea but it is high time that it got put into practice: it seems to be the only feasible solution to the well-known “EU – NATO Discrepancy”.

The Western leaders’ long-time failure to implement it is one of the many obvious things making the West seem clueless, and tossing disenchanted voters in the open arms of Trumpism, Brexiteerism, Five-Star-League-ism, Orbanism, you name it.

Even though NATO and the EU have often been perceived as a twin brother and sister, at least as far as their Eastern enlargement from the past two decades is concerned, the EU – NATO Discrepancy is well-known and powerfully significant.

It’s the fact that these two pillars of the West and much of the international order don’t overlap precisely in terms of membership, which creates both practical problems and theoretical doubts about both entities.

NATO and the EU are different, with the former being a permanent intergovernmental military alliance, and the latter being a supranational entity focused on in-depth integration, especially economic. But both are indispensable to the security and prosperity, and therefore survival and thriving of the democratic Western world.

That is why the infamous “EU – NATO Discrepancy” ought to be resolved as soon as possible.

As of March 2019, NATO has 29 members (soon to become 30 with the aptly renamed Republic of North Macedonia), and the EU has 28 (potentially to become 27 when, or if, Brexiting Britain does Brexit), and they share 22 members (to become 21 because of the UK)…

Read the rest of this article on The European Views website here

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