In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War period in the 1990s, NATO was highly engaged with the armed forces of a number of states of the former Soviet Union and the Eastern Europe-based Warsaw Pact. The intent of this engagement was to assist their militaries in the process of Western-style transformation as part of their national preparation for interoperability and potential integration with NATO. One of the major supporting components for this NATO process was the development of regionally focused “clearing-houses.”

 

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a clearing-house as “a central agency for the collection, classification, and distribution, especially of information;…. [a] channel for distributing information or assistance.” In the case of NATO, these regional clearinghouses were to serve an integration function for the NATO member states to provide specific support for the transformation of militaries in former Soviet republics and Warsaw Pact countries. The NATO member states would participate in these periodic meetings to identify the required assistance needs on the part of the non-member target states that were not being filled (gaps that existed in the support process), and to determine which member nations would be willing to support efforts to meet those needs through the execution of various programs and individual events.

 

After heads of state and government created the Partnership for Peace (PfP) program in 1994, they developed a number of tools to assist partners, including the perpetuation of the original clearing-house concept. A clearing-house had been in existence at NATO headquarters up to the late 1990s, when NATO realized the difficulty of meeting partner requirements with offers from Allied nations when the partner states participated in the same meeting, sometimes in the same room. Several Allies made a decision to reinvent the clearing-house tool by taking a regional approach after NATO disestablished the clearing-house in Brussels. The first regional clearing-house was established in support of the three Baltic nations: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. This was followed in the first decade of the twenty-first century by regional clearing-houses designated for Southeastern Europe (Balkan countries) and the Caucasus (Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia, later joined by the Republic of Moldova). In addition, one clearing house exists solely to provide support to Ukraine. Over time, these regional clearing-houses have become

critical security cooperation management tools for the Alliance in its effort to support the transformation of the armed forces in partner nations.