At their Summit in Strasbourg/Kehl on 3 and 4 April 2009, NATO’s Heads of State and Government tasked the Secretary General to develop a new NATO Strategic Concept. This exercise should be completed by the time of NATO’s next Summit in Lisbon in late 2010. The Summit also tasked the Secretary General to convene and lead a broad based group of qualified experts who will lay the ground for the new Strategic Concept.
The first phase of the process towards the new Strategic Concept is undertaken as an open and inclusive process to get input from member countries, NATO Partners, representatives from other international organisations, think tanks and NGOs, journalists and experts. This process is well underway. The Group of Experts is laying the ground and will provide the Alliance with a report next spring. To help generate ideas, a series of seminars is being organised. The Oslo-seminar is the third seminar of this kind, the two frist were held in Luxembourg and Slovenia in the autumn of 2009.