It used to be said that the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the European Union were in the same city, but on different planets. As George Bush will have noticed this week, the two Brussels-based organisations are just ten minutes apart by motorcade. But they have always had different missions and cultures. NATO is a military alliance, invented during the cold war to deter the Soviet Union; the United States is by far its biggest and most powerful member. The EU grew out of the European Economic Community, a title that encapsulates everything that sets it apart from NATO: it is purely European and its business has always been primarily economic. Even today, the cultures of the two organisations are different. The EU is based in a string of grandiose offices in the centre of Brussels; its operatives are technocrats in suits; and its administrative culture is built along French lines. NATO is based in a compound in suburban Brussels that looks like a cross between an office park and a military base. Like the EU it is full of civil servants and diplomats, but they rub shoulders with a lot of uniformed officers with crew cuts. The atmosphere is brisk, military and American-accented.
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