NATO was not unique in this regard. Indeed, all of the organizations that were supposed to form the basis for "a new European security architecture in which NATO, the CSCE, the European Community, the WEU and the Council of Europe complement each other," as called for in Rome, were attempting to make it up as they went along. This was not surprising, since they all reflected the national policies of their members, and their members are to a large extent the same group of nations. Even the UN was not immune, as its members and bureaucracy struggled to adjust to a new post-Cold War environment in which, for the first time, a central goal of UN peacekeeping efforts was not merely keeping a regional conflict from becoming a venue for superpower confrontation. This combination of factors directly contributed to tensions in developing smooth coordination between NATO (whose involvement in the past would have certainly heightened the risk of superpower confrontation) and the UN peacekeeping efforts in the former Yugoslavia.
The gap between NATO and the UN on peacekeeping in the former Yugoslavia was vividly illustrated by the initial Alliance efforts to respond to the first UN requests for assistance. The original UN request was for planning estimates to support the provision of humanitarian assistance to Sarajevo. Once NATO resolved its internal debate over whether or not a formal request from CSCE was required to initiate planning, the NATO Military Authorities were tasked with developing preliminary options to satisfy the UN request. Based on NATO's military assessment that a benign environment could not be guaranteed, they prepared initial force estimates to satisfy, literally, the UN requirement to "insure" the delivery of aid to Sarajevo, in a potentially hostile environment, using up to 100,000 troops. UN peacekeeping officials were aghast: since their planning assumptions had always been for a permissive environment, they were looking for a plan that involved closer to 2000-4000 troops.15 Later, when the mission expanded to include areas outside of Sarajevo, the UN asked for assistance in providing an adequate headquarters. NATO was prepared to offer the mobile core of its Northern Army Group (NORTHAG) headquarters, with approximately 750 personnel and their communications equipment, for the task of coordinating UN operations that would involve isolated units spread throughout Bosnia. UN officials and several nations working within the UN feared such a large NATO contribution would be out of proportion to the UN effort, so a small cadre of under 50 NATO personnel was requested to establish the headquarters. From a military standpoint, the result was a serious degradation in the ability of the UNPROFOR-BH Commander to coordinate the actions of his forces.[footnote #16] It was not until after the December 1992 NAC Ministerial decision permitting NATO to respond directly to the UN on peacekeeping matters that a direct liaison was established between the two organizations, permitting advance coordination on such issues. NATO and the UN have since agreed that the Alliance should routinely send liaison personnel to UN headquarters in New York and to UN field operations when warranted by NATO engagement in UN peacekeeping planning and operations.
NATO's early efforts to define its role in peace support operations encountered problems with organizations other than the UN. As the various institutional players in what the Rome Declaration described as the "new security architecture in Europe" all sought to define their roles in the post-Cold War security environment, it was inevitable that some friction would occur. Perhaps nowhere was this more evident than in the approach of NATO and the WEU to Adriatic operations in support of the UN embargo on the former Yugoslavia. While official NATO and WEU statements have made every effort to put a good face on what is publicly described as the "cooperative" effort between NATO and WEU in this operation, the reality was, until the eventual merger of operations after nearly a full year, exactly the sort of competition and wasteful duplication of effort about which the United States has always been concerned.[footnote #17] In this case, the wound was, at least in part, self-inflicted. Washington pressed at first for Europe to take the lead in responding to the crisis in the former Yugoslavia, and therefore resisted initial efforts to involve NATO in the Adriatic. It was only after the WEU had determined to act, using naval assets that were also committed to the newly created NATO Standing Naval Force, Mediterranean (STANAVFORMED), that the U.S. articulated its case for the Adriatic to be a NATO operation.
By this time, however, it was politically impossible for the WEU not to become involved, since the issue had become a test of Europe's ability to respond collectively in the spirit of Maastricht. The result was an artificial division of the Adriatic into two zones, with NATO and WEU swapping from one to the other at periodic intervals. Even the current, more successful, joint NATO/WEU operation (with unity of military command maintained through the NATO chain, but responding to joint political decisions of the NATO and WEU Councils) is somewhat artificial, as the views of all the individual WEU member states could just as effectively be articulated through NATO council sessions.