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The European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation are two main treaty-based Western organisations for cooperation between member states, both headquartered in Brussels, Belgium. Their natures are different and they operate in different spheres: NATO is a purely intergovernmental organisation functioning as a military alliance whose primary task is to implement article 5 in the North Atlantic Treaty on collective territorial defence. The EU on the other hand is a partly supranational and partly intergovernmental sui generis entity akin to a confederation that entails wider economic and political integration. Unlike NATO, the EU pursues a foreign policy in its own right - based on consensus, and member states have equipped it with tools in the field of defence and crisis management; the Common Security and Defence Policy structure.
The memberships of the EU and NATO are distinct, and some EU member states are traditionally neutral on defence issues. The EU and NATO have respectively 27 and 30 member states, of which 21 are members of both. Another four NATO members are EU applicants — Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Turkey — and another one, the United Kingdom, is a former EU member. Two others — Iceland and Norway — have opted to remain outside of the EU, but do participate in the EU's single market as part of their European Economic Area membership. Two EU member states — Sweden and Finland — have applied to NATO and are being ratified as members, leaving four non-NATO states in the EU: Austria, Ireland, Cyprus and Malta. Several EU and NATO member states were formerly members of the Warsaw Pact.
The EU has its own mutual defence clause in Articles 42 and 222 of the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union , respectively. The CSDP command and control structure is however much smaller than the NATO Command Structure , and the extent to which the CSDP should evolve to form a full defence arm for the EU that is able to implement the EU mutual defence clause in its own right is a point of contention, and the United Kingdom has objected to this. At the UK's insistence in the negotiations leading to the Treaty of Lisbon, Article 42.2 of TEU also specifies that NATO shall be the main forum for the implementation of collective self-defence for EU member states that are also NATO members.
The 2002 Berlin Plus agreement and 2018 Joint Declaration provide for cooperation between the EU and NATO, including that that NCS resources may be used for the conduct of the EU's CSDP missions.