a. Achievements in the Study

The NATO Enlargement Study does much better in distributing the burdens of adjustment onto the proper shoulders and avoiding a pure one-way street than did those who were calling for a declaration of criteria for automatic admission.

The Study recognizes that the only formal criteria for membership are those laid down in Article X of the North Atlantic Treaty: to be “European”, and for the accession to be in the security interests of the existing Allies and of their democratic values. The Study states additional general standards and expectations for membership, but it leaves space for flexibility and exercise of good NATO judgment in applying these standards to particular countries: “there is no fixed or rigid list of criteria for inviting new members to join the Alliance” (Chapter 5, paragraph 70). It allows that “national participation in standardization is optional,” and in general that compliance with past NATO agreements and publications – of which there are already over 1200 – “should be an evolutionary and controlled process to enhance Alliance operational effectiveness.” (paragraph 77) It recognizes in the final paragraph that “it will need to be decided to what extent preparations for membership by countries can be undertaken before formal accession or whether many of these can be left until after formal accession.” (Chapter 6, paragraph 82)

CEERN strongly endorses these propositions. Indeed, it advanced and defended each of them in the CEERN Report. It is important to understand that these propositions are all directed in opposition or qualification to the views advanced by a highly influential school of thought that called for a definition of rigid new criteria for membership. This was described, misleadingly, as the “fast track” school of NATO enlargement, on the argument that the criteria, once established, could safely be used as a basis for automatic immediate admission of any countries that met them. The criteria were almost always made too strict, sometimes to the point that no country could ever satisfy them.

It is extremely fortunate that the NATO Study has adopted the more flexible and realistic approach.

The rigid criteria school risked drawing rigid new lines in Europe and stifling the exercise of strategic and diplomatic common sense. It also projected all the burdens of adjustment onto the applicant countries, which are already undergoing revolutionary social adjustments and can scarcely bear many additional burdens. An underlying reason for the exaggerated criteria was that it felt the criteria would protect NATO from dilution. The fundamental thought of this school was that the threat to NATO decision-making comes from the danger that new members might not be enough like us. One of its major proponents formulated it thus: 'the entering country must be similar enough to "us" as not to blow up NATO's decision-making ability.'

Such a posture simply ignored the fact that decision-making ability is a function of factors on two levels: the procedures on the level of the organization, and the players on the level of the members. As a result, it failed to notice that the effect of adding new members depends on the procedures on the organization-level, and can be changed by changing the procedures. The procedures on NATO’s side would need streamlining for a greater number of members, even if the new members met all the criteria for being “like us,” since decision-making under the unanimous-consent procedure is inherently more difficult when there are more participants.

For those who sensed that there was a problem here but who did not want to challenge NATO’s rhetoric on “consensus” or acknowledge that any of the burden of adjustment should be borne on NATO’s side, the solution was simple: raise the criteria still higher, project still more burdens of adjustment onto the applicant countries, and hope that this will somehow solve the problem. This is why the “criteria” school projected all of the burden of adjustment eastward.

In reality, an indispensable part of the burden of adjustment must belong to NATO. It must adapt its decision-making so that it can function with more members, some of them in conditions that are bound to be less stable than those of the old members for decades to come, and so that it can function in an atmosphere of more complicated and diverse challenges than those of the cold war era.

Since no amount of adjustment to becoming "like us" on the part of the Easterners can compensate for a failure on the part of the West to make its own adjustments, the consequence of projecting all the burden of adjustment onto the side of the Easterners is to project unrealistically high criteria on them – and even after that, to be left with a lingering suspicion that this kind of mechanical enlargement will weaken NATO anyway. A plethora of unrealistic criteria that have been proposed. Most of the proposed criteria would require expulsion of some of the present members of NATO; and some, such as “irreversibility” of democracy, would, if taken literally, require expulsion of all the members of NATO. Their rigidity would also create chicken-and-egg problems for aspiring members, which actually need membership in the here and now as a factor helping them to stabilize as democracies and meet the criteria. And, despite all the pretensions of being objectively open to everyone including Russia, in reality they would draw a rigid line in the Eastern European sand by making it obvious that NATO would never trust Russia enough to let it in and would never consider the adjustments on its own side that would be needed to make Russian membership do-able.

It often seems comfortable to project the burdens of adjustment onto others, but it is ill-advised. It never solves the real problem. It usually sacrifices major interests (in this case, the vital interest of the West in the success both of NATO and of the fledgling democracies to its east) to the minor interest of avoiding burdens of adjustment.

The process of projection imperiously holds the West guilt-free, adjustment-free, and responsibility-free. It shows an arrogance of power. It is no way to make friends and influence people.

The NATO Enlargement Study has the virtue of rejecting this approach explicitly; and, implicitly, of accepting some burdens of adjustment on NATO’s side at the decision-making core of the problem.

b. Shortcomings

However, it has to be recognized that in some respects the Study falls into a similar trap as the “criteria” school, with similar features and similar consequences. It, too, places some excessive and inappropriate burdens of adjustment on the applicant countries. The underlying reason for this is that it, too, fails to contemplate sufficiently deep adjustments on NATO’s part to enable NATO to handle new members, and it too projects extra burdens of adjustment onto the applicant countries in the hope of making up for this.

Specifically, the Study, as we have seen, goes a step toward reform of internal NATO decision-making, but falls short of the extent of the step that would be needed to render NATO fit for absorbing new members. As such, it must still be – rightly – suspicious that new members would be a burden on decision-making, and it must still try to allay its own suspicions by projecting extra preliminary burdens of adjustment on the Easterners. Its projections are not as extreme as those of the “criteria” school, who do not discuss any direct work on the decision-making procedure at all, but they are still sometimes unrealistic, inappropriate, irrelevant or ill-advised.

By emphasizing that consensus means a commitment to seek agreement and a timely common decision, the Study reformulates the meaning of consensus internally, and as such mandates some degree of internal reform without saying so. Equally important, this makes it possible for the Study to place much of its emphasis on an adjustment on the part of entering countries that really would have some relevance to decision-making: namely, that they should “commit themselves to good faith efforts to build consensus within the Alliance on all issues”. This relevant criterion and adjustment must have enabled the writers of the Study to feel to some extent that they have grappled with the core of the issue of decision-making, and so enabled the Study to avoid ridiculous excesses in projecting other criteria and adjustments onto the applicant countries.

But is it possible that anyone could really believe in their bones that such a vague commitment to seek consensus would suffice to avoid problems in actually reaching a consensus in real life, once a number of additional countries became members? The insufficiency of this solution forces the Study back onto the path of seeking assurances through further adjustments in the applicant countries to become more like us.

The emphasis on consensus decision-making leads the Study to place a special emphasis on one particular aspect of becoming like us, namely, adjusting to and adopting the inherited NATO position on policy positions. This is the only way, after all, to be sure to preserve the supposed consensus on these policies when new members join. While this is not wrong in every case – there are indeed some NATO policies which constitute an acquis communautaire to which it is not only appropriate but necessary to ask new members to adjust – nevertheless there are some instances in which it is utterly inappropriate. For example, it is inappropriate to say that entering countries should all accept a lock-step view on specific controversial NATO policies, such as that “new members will be expected to support the concept of deterrence and the essential role nuclear weapons play in the Alliance's strategy of war prevention” (chapter 4, paragraph 45d).

This amounts to insisting on a one-way street of adaptation to NATO’s inherited strategies; it excludes the possibility of a two-way strategic accommodation. It destroys one of the West’s greatest opportunities at the end of the cold war: the possibility of using NATO enlargement to complete the ending of the cold war’s legacy of military confrontation.

It also creates a chicken-and-egg dilemma that virtually rules out accession for countries with their own strategic forces such as Russia. On the one hand, Russia could join NATO only if there is a two-way strategic accommodation, which the one-way street approach rules out from the accession process. On the other hand, a full two-way accommodation can be achieved only through the process of negotiation and implementation of entry into NATO, since it requires the construction of a common security architecture strong enough not merely to upgrade the common interest but to subsume the basic national nuclear interests and perspectives within it.

The NATO nuclear deterrent umbrella is still in large part directed implicitly against Russia. The idea that new members should support it means that they should support preparations for possible deterrence of Russia. This is something that it would be absurd to ask Russia to join in doing. At most Russia could be asked to look the other way and ignore the NATO nuclear policy for some years, as part of a two-way strategic accommodation in which the opposition-to-Russia character of Western nuclear forces could eventually be put aside through an upgrading of common NATO nuclear structures.

To make actual support for the “consensus” on NATO nuclear policy a precondition of membership is, in practice, to draw a rigid line against Russian membership. Russians would have every right to draw the conclusion that NATO’s promises are hollow when it says that the possibility of membership is open to Russia, too.

The result of the one-way street it to destroy political and diplomatic space. This result flows inherently from the mechanical nature of the NATO enlargement that is under consideration.

Mechanism obviously afflicts the rigid "strict criteria" approach. It also, in lesser degree, afflicts the NATO Study. This is because it, too, shares the assumption that NATO enlargement would proceed independent of any deep transformations in the procedures and strategic outlook of NATO.

Insofar as there is any consideration of the possibility of internal changes in NATO, it is assumed that they would proceed on a track completely independent from the track of dialogues on NATO enlargement. In the real world, it is extremely difficult to mobilize the internal political will within NATO to make any major internal transformation of the alliance. Such a political will would have a practical chance of emerging only if the issue of internal transformation were taken in conjunction with the sexier issue of enlargement of the alliance, which brings to the table a strong persistent political constituency for change. It is fair enough for Russians, as a critic of NATO enlargement to Central-Eastern Europe, to conclude that the hoped-for internal reforms simply will not take place if they are not negotiated and implemented during the enlargement itself.

Any expansion of membership that is not directly linked to major internal changes in NATO qualifies as a mechanical enlargement of NATO and will result in a loss of political space. Even if major changes in NATO are actually occurring simultaneously, the de-linking of them from the NATO enlargement will cause that enlargement to have most of the same negative effects as they would have had if the intra-NATO changes did not exist.

NATO was the adversary alliance to Russian-Soviet power. Mechanical enlargement of it means mechanical renewal of adversary relations with the post-Soviet Russia. This – not, as some would have it, the speed of NATO enlargement – is the source of the loss of political space. Russia would be happy to see a rapid enlargement that included Russia in the first tranche of new members; what it is against is an enlargement that proceeds mechanically step by step eastward, with Russia retained as the implied threat and obviously not seriously intended ever for consideration for membership. Russia has said as much. It has said it time and again. What is baffling is why it is not understood in the West.

Part of the problem is definitional. Most discourse in the West has come to define "NATO enlargement" as mechanical enlargement step by step eastward into Eastern Europe, without correlating it to internal transformations and without serious plans for ever including Russia. Given that "NATO enlargement" is defined mechanically in this way, then the Russian reaction really will become worse in proportion as such "NATO enlargement" is rapid or early. But this becomes true only on the basis of a mechanical definition of the phrase. It is the mechanical approach that is the operational source of the Russian reaction, not the pace.

Parenthentically, the mechanical definition of NATO enlargement is not really an accurate definition. It is not what the Central and East Europeans meant by NATO enlargement when they started calling for it in 1990. Quite the opposite: they explicitly linked it to a fundamental transformation in NATO, to a door seriously open to Russian membership in a proximate future as well, to the creation of a strong CSCE with NATO as its security underpinning, and in general to a breakthrough in common security befitting the scope of the revolutionary changes that were taking place and to the new opportunities that were opening up.

Mechanism eliminates the space for creativity and for upgrading of common interests. This platitude, which is rather obvious, is the point most pertinent for thinking about the “how” of NATO enlargement. The main purpose of diplomacy and international policy is to build political space through the creative use of the mind and of channels for communication and for elaboration of policy. This purpose is not being sufficiently realized in the preparations for NATO enlargement, despite the fact that the very reason for enlargement is to upgrade the common security interest. The temptation of retreating into a mechanical approach has been too strong, as a way of avoiding challenges to the acquis of consensus and of avoiding the extremely difficult labor of thinking together innovatively. A formal group discussion or negotiation will rarely innovate beyond a least common denominator of what the members of the group have already recently prepared themselves to think. This is why it is so important for Westerners to prepare themselves, in advance of the actual negotiations, for thinking about the broader and deeper issues of NATO enlargement.

c. Further Steps

NATO should state explicitly that it views the accession of the Easterners as a two-way adaptation and that it intends to share the burdens of adjustment. In order to implement this, it will need to:

• Describe all major areas in which the schedules for (i) meeting membership standards and (ii) gaining membership may proceed interactively rather than just consecutively. An interactive schedule will be appropriate in most areas where membership would help countries in meeting the standards, including: stabilization of the new democracy, reorientation of the military to a democratic identity, and development of market confidence.

• Affirm that NATO will have to bring in unstable democracies if it is to enlarge in this era. Acknowledge the reality that the new democracies will not be able to guarantee their own democratic stability for decades to come, certainly not in the absence of their actual inclusion meanwhile in NATO. Deal with the consequences of this reality, by providing for reversion to associate member status in cases where a member diverges too far from alliance standards.

• Make deeper adaptations on NATO’s side in the decision-making process (as outlined in section 1 above), so that its decision-making capability really will not be lost by more members in more diverse conditions, and NATO will not be tempted to project extra burdens onto the Easterners in a search for compensation for such a loss.

• Keep open the possibility of two-way strategic rapproachment with Russia and other countries in the course of the negotiation of accession protocols, not just one-way adaptation to existing NATO strategic policies.