To join NATO, prospective members typically must follow a MAP, or membership action plan. The MAP has been NATO’s standard bureaucratic procedure to convert applicants into members for over two decades. After Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined NATO in 1999, this plan was created to streamline the process. The idea was based on the feeling that the initial set of candidates had been promised membership before the military and political reforms outlined in the alliance’s own 1995 “Study on NATO Enlargement” had been finished.
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