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Austria and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have a close relationship. Austria with Ireland, Cyprus and Malta are the only members of the European Union that are not members of NATO. Austria has had formal relations with NATO since 1995, when it joined the Partnership for Peace programme.
In 1955, Austria issued its Declaration of Neutrality, meaning that it would never join a military alliance. The Austrian Armed Forces' main purpose since then has been the protection of Austria's neutrality. Its relationship with NATO is limited to the Partnership for Peace programme. [5]
All members have militaries, except for Iceland, which does not have a typical army (but it does have a coast guard and a small unit of civilian specialists for NATO operations). Three of NATO's members are nuclear weapons states: France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. NATO has 12 original founding member states.
Four non-NATO states are members of the EU: Austria, Cyprus, Ireland, and Malta. Several EU and NATO member states were formerly members of the Warsaw Pact. [3] The EU has its own mutual defence clause in Articles 42(7) and 222 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), respectively.
A NATO member since 1952. Ukraine: 1991–2014 (to Russo-Ukrainian War) In its Declaration of Sovereignty (1990), Ukraine declared it had the "intention of becoming a permanently neutral state that does not participate in military blocs and adheres to three nuclear free principles" (art. 9).
Cyprus is the only EU member state that is neither a NATO member state nor a member of the PfP program. The Parliament of Cyprus voted in February 2011 to apply for membership in the program, but President Demetris Christofias vetoed the decision, arguing that it would hamper his attempts to negotiate an end to the Cyprus dispute and demilitarize the island.
NATO member states agreed to establish four additional battlegroups in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia, [47] and elements of the NATO Response Force were activated for the first time in NATO's history. [52] As of June 2022, NATO had deployed 40,000 troops along its 2,500-kilometre-long (1,550 mi) Eastern flank to deter Russian aggression.
The European Union (EU) is an institution of its own kind consisting of member states being part of an alliance as well as military neutral member states while developing a Common Foreign and Security Policy for the union as a whole. The military neutral member states are Austria, Ireland and Malta. [1]