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What is the position under international law where a third party wants to join an alliance, and the existing members willingly agree their membership? I don't know, so I am interested to know if there any legal constraints to this.
Trying to clarify the point, Ukraine don't have a right to join unilaterally, but do they have the right under international law to join by agreement with existing members?
I don't know what rights countries have to join (by agreement) military, political or economic organisations, but I would be surprised if these rights were constrained, subject to the organisations themselves being legal?
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Ukraine don't have a right to join unilaterally, but do they have the right under international law to join by agreement with existing members?
Yes.
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I'm not sure I exactly follow, but I think there's a definitional issue here that's maybe caused some confusion. Not sure though. But here I go anyway: Ukraine, and anyone else, obviously could join NATO. But they don't have a sovereign right to membership by nature of being a sovereign state. It's essentially a club and the club decides who gets in. However, Ukraine obviously has the right to request membership (in fact, they did long ago). And the people of Ukraine have the right to push their government to join.
Even the UN gets to decide who it lets in, and geopolitics has left some states out (Taiwan and Palestine for example). Because there's no sovereign right to be a member of the UN, it turns out.
Brommers
I don't think they're ignoring it. They're taking a pretty firm position: that Ukrainian Nato membership should not be something the West should support as it's (in their estimation) more likely to result in war/further conflict than peace. Whether they're right or wrong is up for debate.
There was an edit after I responded, so I'll add to this:
Yes. They state: "It has also declared that Ukraine has a “sovereign right” to join NATO, when no such right exists to join it or any other military alliance." They're saying membership to and international organisation is not something one has a democratic right to. If every country that wanted to join something only needed to express a democratic desire to do so things like Nato (and the EU) would look very, very, different.