Thanks to this French president, NATO is meeting today in Brussels, and no longer in Paris
With both NATO’s headquarters in Evere and command in Casteau (Mons), the most important military decisions against Russia are made in the coming Belgian territory. And that is entirely coincidentally the result of an ego-burst of the French President Charles de Gaulle 60. Because until then NATO was based in France.
And by the way: that’s how the Northern treaty agreement organization ended up in Belgium. Thanks to the French. When NATO was founded on April 4, 1949, France — like eleven other countries, including the US, Great Britain and Belgium — had nevertheless sworn a solemn oath of allegiance to the much-discussed ‘Article 5’, which had already been much discussed in the confirmed days. In that from the NATO charter all (today already 30) members promise to assist each other militarily if one of them could be attacked. Even then, that mainly came from Russia, alias the USSR.
Because France was even more centrally located in NATO’s area of operations, a transfer was therefore made in 1952 from London to Paris. And since they may still be there today, then French president Charles De Gaulle should not have felt undervalued. He believed that France should have something to nod to the British and Americans within NATO, although the French also had many nuclear weapons at their disposal. And so our southern neighbors decided to withdraw militarily from the alliance in 1966 (which would last until 2009) and to remain only ‘political’ members.
Illegal Kotteries
This naturally clashed with the location of the headquarters in Paris, ending with other NATO countries deciding to set up their headquarters in the equally centrally located Brussels from 1967. But that had to go fast. So in just seven months a medley of Belgian, Dutch and German construction firms put together a new complex at the former airport of Haren-Evere. An ’emergency complex’, even because it was planned to move to a real new NATO headquarters on the Heysel plain five years later.
Only — you know how it goes with building plans in Belgium — it would remain a castle in the air in the Heysel and the ‘temporary’ building in Evere would ultimately remain in use for 50 (!) years. With the decades still a lot of prefab containers attached to it, because more new NATO members joined. So a bit of koterij à la belge. And deliberately illegally illegal: according to a deliberate rumor without a building permit and never regularized.
There is also an unusual reason for the location of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) — say NATO’s military battle center — in the Hainaut Casteau near Mons. That too had to submerge from France in 1966, but because the Belgian government did not want such a large military ‘target’ near Brussels, SHAPE was housed in an old army barracks in Casteau. In addition, we have economic growth by using that SHAPE presence.
Thousands of surveillance cameras
While the 700 military SHAPE employees are still in the armies in Casteau today, in 2017 the 4,200 diplomatic NATO employees were finally allowed to leave their houses behind and cross the Leopold III avenue to the new state-of-the-art headquarters. Price: 1.17 billion euros, of which the ticket itself pays around 45 million euros according to the distribution key.
Long before the war predilections, security proved to be paramount, with over a thousand surveillance cameras continuously monitored, a double fence full of sensors, and those windows that are explosion-proof. An underground air raid shelter? That possibility was previously formally denied by NATO. However, a few ‘safe rooms’ cannot be ruled out. It is also possible to communicate via an ultra-secure IT system with all military command centers of the 30 member NATO countries. Hopefully those lines of communication won’t be too red hot over the weeks.