Thomas Daschle: “today the Senate Republican Leader and I are pleased to reestablish the bipartisan Senate NATO Observer Group, or SNOG.…”

“today the Senate Republican Leader and I are pleased to reestablish the bipartisan Senate NATO Observer Group, or SNOG. We originally established the SNOG in April 1997 to advise the full Senate on the historic first round of enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO. It served as an important line of communication between the Senate and NATO and the Senate and candidate countries in the months prior to the July 1997 NATO summit in Madrid at which Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary were admitted to the alliance. The SNOG and the information it generated was central to the Senate's ratification of the protocols of accession in April 1998. The Senate debate in 1998 foreshadowed further enlargement of NATO, and in June 2001, the North Atlantic Council determined that NATO would admit at least one candidate country at the November 2002 summit in Prague. In reestablishing the SNOG, we are asking this bipartisan group of our colleagues to closely monitor the enlargement process and to keep the rest of the Senate fully informed as we move to another historic decision at Prague.”