CHAPTER III
Perspectives on NATO, Russia
and
Future European Security
Western Institutions Extending Eastward: the context of Russian involvement with NATO
Dr. Daniel Hamilton
Department of State Policy Planning Staff
I would like to put the question of the NATORussia relationship in a broader context of change over the past few years.
It is important not to reduce the question of European security to the question of NATO and not to reduce the question of NATO's future to that of NATO enlargement, but to put both in a broader context of change in Europe that has been occurring since before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The driving forces of change affecting Europe are the forces that tore down that wall, forces that were driven by people on the streets in Central Europe, Eastern Europe and, in fact, parts of the former Soviet Union and now Russia.
The people at that time had one message: "We want to join; we want to return to Europe." What they meant was that the dividing line set by where the Red Army happened to be in the summer of 1945 was not a line for all of history; in fact, it had no basis in justice, history or culture, and that to perpetuate it was to create more injustices and perhaps create more instabilities throughout Europe. This idea is what the United States stood for during the 50 years of the Cold War, the fact that the Iron Curtain had no basis in history or in justice.
When the Curtain finally came down, because of the efforts of those people upon whose backs it rested, we had a great opportunity, one we still have today, to build a Europe free of dividing lines, a Europe that is based on shared principles, principles that for the first time in European history all European nations espouse whether practiced to the fullest in reality is another question, but at least espouse principles of democracy, freemarket economies and economic reforms, and basic human rights. These are the principles for which this country stands and under which we now have an opportunity to build a united Europe. We have never been able to build this type of united Europe before, and doing so is the basis for much of our policy.
On the other hand, we see that the euphoria that came with the end of the wall was a bit misplaced because Europe still faces many security challenges. I have already outlined the good news. The more sobering news is the fact that more Europeans have died violently since the wall fell down than in the four decades previous; and that despite the fact that we faced a massive threat during the Cold War, we face greater incidence of violence today, incidents of spillover from countries into other countries, lingering tensions, ethnic, territorial and so on, a whole range of issues that are still part of Europe's reality.
We can use the forces of integration to defeat and defuse these forces of disintegration by building on institutions that brought unprecedented peace and prosperity to half of Europe for half a century. And we can fulfill a legacy that was set forth half a century ago this year, the important legacy of Secretary of State George Marshall, who had a vision for all of Europe that did not end at a particular line. We can build on that vision today; we can fulfill the legacy that he prepared.
We can do so by building on the institutions that began in his time. There are several of them, including NATO. The core institution for the United States is NATO. It is a military alliance. It provides a security for the entire transatlantic area. It also provides a vehicle for the United States to engage in Europe with its allies and manage its relations with them, and a forum for discussions to advance the broader interests that we have.
That is one structure of security. There are others. The European Union is a major force in Europe today. We are not a member of it, but it provides a tremendous part of the security equation in a Europe today where security is not just measured in military terms but also in terms of whether societies are democratic, whether they are progressing with their reforms, and whether there is respect for basic human rights. We welcome both the adaptation internally of the European Union and also its enlargement, questions about which it will face this year as well.
On the initiative of the United States, we are also engaged for the last few years in upgrading the former CSCE (Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe), which is now the OSCE ("O" for Organization). The OSCE occupies another dimension of security in Europe, which while it is complementary, does not substitute for the others. It is essential in terms of bringing countries together which might not necessarily agree on common standards of behavior and trying to build a common framework for understanding based on common principles.
The OSCE is facing an unprecedented task in Bosnia right now. In fact, Bosnia, for many years a symbol of the tragedy of the West's inability to deal with Europe's new challenges, can be seen today as a symbol of how we can construct this new European security arrangement. For the first time in European history, we have a transatlantic coalition of forces dedicated to a common cause and using the different institutions to do the things they do best.
The OSCE is working on elections and on internal democracy. The EU is working both on the political and economic aspects of peace in Bosnia. And NATO has provided the backdrop and foundation for these efforts. NATO is not acting alone, but with partner countries. American and Russian soldiers are in the mud together in Bosnia, patrolling together, working together at common peace. Baltic units are involved. The Hungarian government has hosted NATO forces on its territory as part of the Bosnian operation. These are things that all would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
This is a major transformation in the way we think about security, and in the way we must deal with Europe's future security challenges. In that context, all of Europe's institutions are adapting internally, and all of them are enlarging. NATO is part of that, but it is not the only part. There are many interesting specifics, but it is important to put them in this broader context.
A key element of this process is integrating the new democracies to the East, Russia included, into the broader framework. The reform efforts in Russia are the work of a generation or more. We can do what we can to help, but in the end it is Russia's choice how it defines its future, and in the end Russia must define its relationship with the rest of Europe and the transatlantic community. We have offered a partnership with Russia as part of a new Atlantic community; we want to integrate Russia as much as possible into all of these structures. We are proceeding on various tracks and have proceeded in other organizations besides NATO to do so.
The last element is the NATORussia partnership. We have offered Russia membership in the Partnership of Peace, and they have accepted and joined. We have gone beyond that, offering a framework agreement beyond the Partnership. This was offered two years ago. We are now focused more on the notion of a charter that would define the partnership, and also would create mechanisms that would fill it out and give it some tangible reality. That is the basic piece of the puzzle we are in the middle of right now, at the same time that the enlargement process goes forward.
So let me stop there, having provided a framework, and let my colleague pick up.
Russia-NATO Relations and NATO Enlargement to Central Europe
Daniel Fried
National Security Council
This week, on the eve of Prime Minister Chernomyrdin's visit to Washington, we see at work two different currents, a positive current from NATO's direction toward Russia, and a negative current from Russia toward NATO. Let me deal with the negative current first because the case against NATO enlargement is essentially a case centered around Russia.
We are seeing a push this week by Russia against NATO enlargement. It is a push which suggests that any enlargement of the Atlantic alliance will result in a new Cold War, an arms race, an escalation of tensions, and all sorts of other dire unspecified consequences. Those of us with either a historical perspective or longer memories may recall the Khrushchev meeting with Kennedy in Vienna in 1961 or, more recently, the Soviet Union's public and diplomatic push during the Eurorockets debate.
In response to this, I would first recommend that people read Andrei Kozyrev's oped piece in a recent edition of Newsweek in which Kozyrev notes that Russian opposition to NATO enlargement is primarily an element in and function of Russian domestic politics. He says that it is "an inevitable backlash against democratization led by old guard that grew up NATO as the common enemy." Kozyrev urges the West in general, and Secretary Albright in particular, to resist.
As a purely rhetorical point, I note that I am puzzled when I see so many colleagues and friends accepting the assumption and intellectual framework offered by Russian nationalists, which posits that European security must be a zerosum game.
The purpose of NATO enlargement is integration. The case for NATO enlargement is, as Marty Peretz of The New Republic wrote this week, the case for NATO itself. NATO's three purposes were, as an early British secretary general of NATO put it, to "keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down." The point was that NATO's purpose was far more than simply preventing Stalin's armies from marching west. Its purpose was to integrate the reemergent, fragile, nervous and impoverished democracies of Western Europe in the late 1940s into a common security space and to do so under American leadership as a benign, disinterested, and therefore universally trusted extraEuropean power.
That is the case essentially for NATO enlargement today. The Central Europeans, who consider themselves early plausible candidates for NATO membership, put their case in terms of joining or rejoining the West. By contrast, Russia asserts that Western institutions must be closed to Europe's democracies and argues in essence that Central Europe must be a buffer zone.
I see no reason to accept a definition of European security that is a zerosum game. If we reject the negative current coming from Moscow toward NATO, it also behooves us to discuss the positive current from NATO toward Russia. By all means, we must respect Russia's legitimate concerns and keep the door to the Western community open to a democratic Russia. That is, in fact, precisely what NATO has decided to do.
The vehicles for doing so involve a NATORussia partnership codified and formalized through a charter; adaptation of the CFE Treaty so that Central Europe is no longer faced with even the possibility of destabilizing conventional forces; through progress from START II to START III; and unilateral declarations by NATO, such as the very helpful recent declaration that it has no intention, no need, and no reason to station nuclear forces on the territory of new NATO members. This was a declaration promptly welcomed by the Central Europeans, who themselves have no particular interest in accepting nuclear weapons or in posing a military threat to Russia.
I regret that we still hear language from the Russian media suggesting that NATO enlargement will pose a nuclear threat to Russia. By all means, let us address Russia's legitimate concerns, but let us not circumscribe the future of democracies which suffered disproportionately during the Cold War and whose democratic efforts brought the Cold War to an end.
The Clinton administration regards both the enlargement of the democratic family to all of Europe's democracies and the embrace of a democratic Russia as mutually consistent objectives not easy objectives. It will take considerable work to convince the Russian political class that NATO enlargement is, in fact, in Russia's interest. It was NATO enlargement, in fact, which removed the threat Germany had posed to Russia in the first half of this century.
It is finally a fact that NATO and Russia are engaged in a genuine partnership in Bosnia. NATO, through IFOR, is behaving in many ways as if it has already brought in new members. There is a NATO base -- the dreaded NATO military infrastructure -- in Hungary today. There are Polish and Czech combat troops serving as if they were NATO troops in Bosnia today. Not only does Russia not feel threatened, but Russia is a valuable and constructive partner in Bosnia. If this possible in Bosnia, then clearly the sort of partnership we have in mind ought to be possible elsewhere.
The key over the next six months will be steadiness, consistency and openness openness to Russia by all means, but not at the cost of our other interests.
Stampede or Tortoise Pace? The long march of Central Europe into NATO
Honorable Gyorgy Banlaki
Ambassador of Hungary to the United States
Since Dr. Hamilton has kindly referred to the hosting of the IFOR logistics base in southwestern Hungary, let me start with a formula with which I usually close my presentations, and that is that Hungary has not entered NATO, but NATO has entered Hungary.
I think that conventional wisdom is going to prevail, and I would forecast that this scenario will be realized in July at the NATO summit: A number of Central European countries will be invited to join; then there will be talks, the accession negotiations; then the treaties reached, and then the ratification process. And all this would end, if all goes well, by April 4th, 1999. We are looking forward to this process with a degree of cautious optimism.
One of the major American newspapers has called this process a stampede, which I must say, no matter what our view is, seems a little silly. Because even by the most optimistic projection, it will have been a full decade from the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall that NATO enlargement eventually takes place. So we can argue what is fast, what is slow, but a full decade is hardly a stampede.
Since the framework of this conference is not primarily the subject of Hungarian aspirations and the Hungarian angle, but rather NATO and Russia, I would make the general point that in my judgment there is a great propensity in the West, and particularly in the United States, to vastly overestimate the influence on Russian internal developments of what the West does or doesn't do.
Of course, as we have heard earlier, there is an understandable policy from the side of Russia that likes to play on this and wants to make it seem that this is justified. But all this leads to an approach that is obsolete, that is not able to break out from the old prefallofthe-BerlinWall, Cold Wartype of thinking, still thinking in terms of the zerosum game. Somehow there is this tendency to pretend that the fundamentals have not changed.
The real stampede refers to processes in Central and Eastern Europe. The magnitude and the significance of the changes that have taken place in these countries cannot be overestimated. And changes have taken place not only in Central Europe; NATO itself is in a process of renewal and restructuring, and a new internal adaptation process is going on. It is natural that it is changing, because the nature of the threat has changed.
I will speak in a few moments about the changes in Russia.
The primary driving force that motivates Hungary and the other Central European countries is fundamentally a thirst, a hunger for a sense of belonging, of wanting to join or, rather, rejoin Europe with which today we share common values, common interests, and common goals. We also say that we are not going to be only consumers of security, but we are going to contribute to security. And here I am referring not only to the IFOR base, but also well before that it was a little bit less well publicized AWACS aircraft had been up in Hungarian airspace long before IFOR came to being.
It is very important to emphasize that in saying that Hungary does have strategic value, this in no way means that we have strategic value for designs aimed against Russia. In fact, it is my conviction that the new security threats and instability threats that will have to be faced by NATO are not going to come from the east. It is much more likely to come from the south. This is why a country like Hungary has strategic value.
In 1997 and beyond, NATO can do for Central and Eastern Europe what it had done for Western Europe in the second half of the 1940s. I would define this contribution primarily as an expansion of a zone of stability, and that is in the interest of everyone.
In conclusion, let me say a few words about Russia. First of all, that in our view, NATO enlargement has to be seen as one of the primary elements -- probably determining, but not the only element -- of a broader European security architecture.
Everyone should wish Russia well, and we all share a fundamental interest in seeing Russia become and develop farther into a stable, democratic, prospering country. But I would emphasize that this progress is going to be determined within Russia. It is going to be, of course, influenced, but not fundamentally determined, by what outsiders do.
In Russia and around Russia, fundamental changes have taken place, and this must be remembered by all. The nature of the relationship to the outside world with the evaporation of the ideological dimension has changed. Russia no longer wishes that the proletariat of the world unite. Russia no longer desires that its partners as societies and economies should collapse as soon as possible and change course. Those are fundamentally important developments that prove that it is no longer a zerosum game.
Privatization, although we give little credit for it, has gone a long way in Russia. At the same time, we should not underestimate the psychological difficulty of coming to terms with and facing all the changes and the loss of prestige that is perceived by everyone as a result of the fact that the ideology and the raison d'etre of the state that had been associated with the Soviet Union for over 70 years apparently simply collapsed. This is something that at the personal level is very difficult to face when generations have grown up in it.
The other side of the change is also profound. We marveled that NATO is present in Hungary, but don't we marvel that Russian military officers are present in Brussels? Don't we marvel that Russian soldiers in a unified command serve together with American and other NATO troops in Bosnia? Don't we marvel that NATO is offering a cooperation scheme across a very wide range of issues, a charter to Russia? I think these are also fundamentally important and brand new elements that should go a long way in reassuring those who feel inside or outside Russia that the enlargement process is a danger.
NATO's role in taming nationalism in the new Europe
Jan Nowak
Chairman, Polish-American Congress,
1979-1996
NATO has proven to be the most effective instrument to contain nationalism as a source of conflict, both from without and from within the alliance. I spent 25 years in Munich, Germany. When I arrived in 1951, all Germans, from Kurt Schumacher on the left to Konrad Adenauer on the right, were united in their commitment to regain the eastern territories lost after World War II. It was integration of Germany into defensive and economic structures of the West which made Germany a peaceful nation which is no longer seen as a threat by anybody.
Without the attractiveness and conditionality of NATO and the European Union, democracy would not have taken such deep roots in German soil. There would have been no historic reconciliation with France, and no reconciliation with the Poles and Czechs in the East. The full acceptance by a reunited Germany of the postwar border with Poland brought to an end a centuries' old feud between both nations. Germany abandoned its "drang nach Osten" drive to the east. And the Poles lost their fear of Germans.
The conditionality and attractiveness of NATO are also the most effective instruments to contain nationalism, extinguish the sources of conflict and consolidate democracy in Central and Eastern Europe. Just the prospect of admission to NATO has already had a beneficial impact. No longer do any of these nations raise territorial claims against each other. The conditionality of NATO prompted the restoration of ethnic minority rights. The most telling example: the relationship between Hungary and Romania. In the case of Poland, NATO conditionality helped to overcome the resistance of the military to the civilian authorities.
All of these countries have tremendous stakes in the economic recovery of a democratic Russia. There is an acrosstheboard support for the concept that Russia should be part of the new security architecture and for a charter of strategic cooperation between an enlarged NATO and Russia, provided only that this new system is comprehensive and does not divide the region between Germany and Russia into protected and unprotected states. The humiliation or isolation of Russia is not in the interest of its neighbors.
In my native Poland there is no ethnic hostility to the Russian people. More than two million Russians come to Poland every year to make business with their Polish friends. Poles are not afraid of the Russian people. Poles are afraid of the attitudes of the political elite in Russia. It is the attitude of that elite which is responsible for the fact that Russia is still the only great power which is not fully reconciled with the loss of its empire. It appears that it takes much less time to change an economic and political system than to change habits of thinking and acting shaped by 75 years of brainwashing.
Eduard Shevardnadze, interviewed on ABC Nightline, described his former colleagues in the Kremlin as people whose imperial thinking and approach are still there.
Russia does not, in my view, oppose the enlargement of NATO because it considers this purely defensive alliance a threat to its security. I do not believe that any Russian with any sense of reality can seriously believe that Western democracies will one day invade Russian territory. Moscow opposes not only the enlargement of NATO, but the very existence of a defensive military alliance, because it considers it quite rightly as a threat to its ambitions to regain sometime in the future its empire and to restore some kind of control over former satellites. Surely these dreams relate to some maybe distant future. They do not pose any imminent threat. But, unfortunately, they shape the Russian policy of today.
The admission of former satellites into the alliance would make such longterm ambitions unrealistic. In this way, NATO enlargement could prompt Russia to reconciliation with the present borders of its influence, and as in the case of Germany, it could open a new chapter of friendly cooperation between Russia and her neighbors, who would no longer think of Moscow as a threat. It would also allow Russia to concentrate its resources on internal recovery and improving the present desperately low quality of life of its population.
Present Moscow policy is guided much more by prestige and nostalgia than by the interests of the Russian people. Was it in the interests of Russia to spend billions of dollars on a war with Chechnya or to spend $6 billion annually on research to modernize bacteriological, nuclear and chemical weapons at a time when the government has no money to pay salaries? Is it in the interests of the Russian people that its government should continue intensive intelligence warfare against the United States and spend $200 million on costly installations in Cuba which intercept electronic communications in the United States? Does it make any sense to delay the ratification of SALT II and to spend billions of dollars on the preservation of weapons which are no longer needed?
Lack of proper understanding of the true Russian motives in opposing NATO has led to a policy of delay and concessions. In the hope of allaying Russian security concerns, Russia was offered economic assistance, Partnership for Peace, participation in the Bosnia peace process. NATO recently made another unilateral offer that no NATO troops and no nuclear weapons are to be deployed on the territory of new members. Last year NATO accepted the unilateral Russian decision not to comply with the conventional forces treaty and to increase the number of armored combat vehicles on the border with Latvia to 500. Latvia has 15 such weapons. A similar concentration of forces took place on the southern flank.
None of these offers reduced the influence of nationalistic elements in Moscow. The opposite is true. The policy of delay and concession led to the escalation of demands and threats, including even a threat of war. There is nothing new in this pattern of behavior to those of us who remember the fierce Soviet opposition and threats against the building of NATO in 1949, admission of Greece and Turkey in '52, Germany in '54, Spain in '82, and finally opposition to the stationing of Pershings in West Germany.
There is, however, one important difference. Debate on these issues within NATO never took more than one year. Soviet attempts to intimidate NATO were abandoned immediately, as soon as they were faced with the accomplished fact. This time United States announced its intention to enlarge the alliance in 1993, but postponed the decision. In this way, a protracted conflict was created which is escalating and will escalate even more in the next six months, in the next two years.
The United States and NATO missed an opportunity in the fall of 1993. If the final and irrevocable decision had been taken at that time, subject to conditions which would have to be implemented by new members within, perhaps, two or three years, we would probably have faced today a different Russia. Instead, a policy of delay and concession create a perception in Moscow that the process can be successfully derailed. Such hopes would certainly ring true by the recent avalanche of U.S. press comments attacking NATO enlargement.
Unless Moscow becomes convinced that it has no chance to prevent NATO enlargement, we shall face an intense revival of the Cold War over the next three years. It may take the form of the intimidation of the Western public and governments. NATO may be confronted with efforts to split the alliance and to isolate the United States. We may see attempts to generate conflict between such NATO memberstates as Turkey and Greece. Support for terrorist states such as Iraq, Iran or Libya and the export of sophisticated weapons may be used to destabilize areas of vital interest to the United States such as the Persian Gulf.
In the next six months, and perhaps the next two years, every issue will be used to pressure the allies to abandon NATO enlargement. There is only one way of preventing it: to convince Russia that it is facing an accomplished fact before ratification of the enlargement in 1999.
Admission of Russia to NATO was placed on the agenda of this conference. This ultimate concession will no doubt fully satisfy Moscow. The extension of NATO to the borders of China and giving Russia a right to veto every NATO decision will certainly deprive the alliance of any relevance.
Acceptance of Russia into the alliance is not possible as long as both sides use different terms of reference. To NATO, security means mutual respect for sovereignty, mutual arms reductions, cooperation, and above all, confidencebuilding measures. To Russia, security means a control of the near abroad, buffer zones, and expanded spheres of interest.
Let me finish on a personal note. For 25 years I worked for Radio Free Europe. Through this instrument, American people were calling captive nations to remain faithful to their Western European heritage, to throw down the Iron Curtain and to join the family of democratic nations. Now, when they have done it, should we tell them the doors are closed?
Regionalization of security and Russia's place in Europe
Phillip Petersen
Director of Russian studies,
Potomac Foundation
Any informed discussion of the nature of future NATORussian relations must give consideration to three fundamental issues. First, it is necessary to understand who killed the Soviet Union in order to comprehend who now threatens Russia. Second, the security implications of the global phenomenon of regionalization must be appreciated. Lastly, only a nonzerosum approach to NATORussian relations offers the possibility of integrating Russia into the modern world.
Turning to the first question very briefly, understanding the facts is a prerequisite to identifying the culpable factor, which is crucial to overcoming the contemporary crisis over the expansion of NATO and the construction of an alternative security model for Europe. Conventional wisdom in Washington about the empire ruled from Moscow is as uninformed as Moscow itself is about the forces at play in the abrupt collapse of the Soviet empire and the real threat to Russia itself.
Washington is acting as though what passes for political debate in Moscow somehow reflects reality. And Moscow plays to the socalled wounded psychology of the Russian nation. With advocates like these, Moscow as the third Rome is rapidly slipping along the path of its predecessors.
Just as the Soviet Union was no union, the Russian Federation is no federation. The preSoviet Russia was an empire, and the postSoviet Russia is in transition from empire. Despite the bellicose rhetoric heard in Moscow, Russia is in transition from an empire to some new form of state structure. Today almost all the peoples of Russia wish to remain within the structure of a genuinely federal, or at least confederal, Russian state.
However, it has become increasingly obvious to most of the regional elites that Moscow elites are not working to facilitate the country's integration into European political culture and the global economy, but to continue traditional imperial patterns of economic exploitation. As these regional elites have come to understand that they must save themselves, they have rapidly found their respective regions too small and too economically weak, and have, therefore, bound themselves together into regional groupings.
It is within these greater regional associations that real change in economic relations is occurring, which brings me to the second question or issue: Does regionalization contribute to security? The evolution of greater regional associations in the Russian Federation offers the opportunity for the creation of eight to ten laender that might form the basis of a real federal Russia constructed from below. A stable Russian state can only be constructed from the regions on the basis of perceived interest, not imposed from Moscow on the basis of the threat of violence. Furthermore, a strong Russia can only be constructed on the basis of environmental restoration and economic modernization.
While any state with nuclear weapons can be dangerous, it is no longer enough for the peoples living outside of Moscow to be part of a state which is feared. Now that they are aware of how poorly they live, they desire to live like normal peoples everywhere else in the developed world. They will not be forced to fight imperial wars abroad and are prepared to resist Moscow if it continues to block local development by its predatory economic policies.
Moscow alone will decide whether Russia survives. But to save Russia, it must understand its real options. First of all, there is no turning back. The only alternative to a slow process of reintegration into the mainstream of human development, is greater disorder and the ultimate disintegration of the Russian state. The Soviet empire was not destroyed; it collapsed for its own militarized weight. It is not possible to restore Russia as a great power militarily because power in the 21st century will not be determined by any of the measures that Moscow has experience with.
Greatness can come to Russia only through the growth of a civil society among her peoples and the healing of her despoiled territory. Appeals to Russian nationalism among the imperialists of Moscow and the media only threatens the dreams of the many peoples of the Russian Federation who hope that the state will evolve into a Westernstyle state, usually referred to by the peoples of the federation as a "civilized state," with the comfortable prosperity that many citizens are now aware exists in the world's modern countries.
If regionalization holds out the possibility of survival and prosperity and greatness for Russia, then how do we construct a new European system? I'm going to give you a very short version of the answer to that. The first is the West should not offer Russia a special agreement with NATO, nor should Moscow accept any such agreement. Membership in NATO must not be closed to any nation. NATO must remain open to any state that meets the requirements established at the time of its application. For Moscow to desire a special relationship outside NATO is to continue to make Russia an exception which is unhealthy for the evolution of Russia toward the goal of its peoples, which is what its peoples refer to as a "normal state."
Since this goal is consistent with the security policy objectives of the Western democracies, the members of NATO should refuse to make Russia an exception by offering Moscow any path other than an open door to the process of membership.