Enlarged NATO, EU to dominate political agenda

TWO enlargements will dominate the agenda of European politics this year, that of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and that of the European Union. Policy elites in most European countries and in the US are in favour of both, regarding them as complementary. But, as was revealed in several news items this week, there are tensions between the two processes - and also significant dissident voices about the advisability of pursuing NATO enlargement at the expense of stable western relations with Russia.

In Moscow, the NATO Secretary-General, Mr Xavier Solana, held inconclusive talks with the Russian Foreign Minister, Mr Yevgeny Primakov, about NATO's plans for enlargement, which are to be announced at a summit in Madrid this July. In return for enlargement, and at the insistence of the Germans in particular, NATO is offering a comprehensive consultative security pact to the Russians, dealing with, in Mr Solana's words, "every issue that would affect their common interests, whether these relate to crisis management, arms control or non-proliferation".

The Russians are quite unconvinced about enlargement and dissatisfied with the terms so far on offer for the security pact. But they have agreed to continue the discussions with Mr Solana. President Yeltsin, health permitting, is to meet the Dutch Prime Minister in The Hague on February 4th to discuss these matters further as they bear on Russia's relations with the EU. The official Russian position is that it opposes NATO enlargement because it will gratuitously alter the strategic balance in Europe when Russia no longer constitutes a threat to its neighbours.

Other critics say it divides, the new democracies and encourages countries which face no real external threat to divert resources to defence rather than economic transition and welfare.

Influential US columnists, such as William Pfaff, and Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, argue that NATO enlargement is badly ill-advised. Friedman says it is "the most ill-conceived project of the post-Cold War era" (International Herald Tribune, November 28th, 1996); Pfaff, writing in the International Herald Tribune (December 12th, 1996), says that enlargement would create the problems it seeks to prevent by provoking Russian retaliation.

Both these writers echo dissident views in the European and US policy establishments. They wonder whether the US Senate will be prepared to endorse with two-thirds majorities the nuclear guarantees required to underwrite enlargement. Pfaff suggests the policy establishment has ideological as well as organisational interest in NATO expansion. "It sees it as part of a larger expansion of America's world role and post-Cold War responsibilities."

There was no reference to this in President Clinton's inaugural speech on Monday, which had little about international affairs, although he did say "the world is no longer divided into two hostile camps. Instead, now we are building bonds with nations that once were our adversaries".

US relations with Europe were more explicitly addressed by the new Secretary of State, Mrs Madeleine Albright, who was endorsed by the Senate, impressing its Republican majority leaders. She told them that "America must remain a European power ... European stability depends in large measure on continued American management and leadership. And as history attests, European stability is also vital to our national interests."

The proposition is endorsed by other influential theorists of international affairs, including Samuel Huntingdon, who has expanded an influential Foreign Affairs article of 1993 into a book-length study, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon and Schuster, 1997). He argues that "to say that modern civilisation is western civilisation is arrogant, false and dangerous" and that the "Davos culture" of universalising neo-liberalism is a quite inappropriate model of world politics. Future conflicts are likely to occur on the boundaries of cultures and civilisations. To preserve western civilisation it will be necessary to reinforce US relations with Europe.

In order for the US to remain a European power it is necessary to reinvent NATO. The assertion of its leadership can be seen in the plans to enlarge the alliance on the one and, a matter of hard security, and, on the other, in its sponsorship of the soft security Partnership for Peace organisation under NATO's umbrella, which now embraces most of its former adversaries and European neutral states. Foreign policy leadership in Bosnia and the Middle East complete the picture.

European critics of NATO enlargement make the strong point that it would be much better to enlarge the EU than NATO, or at least to orchestrate the two in parallel. But this week, in an embarrassing slip-up, the European Commission published a briefing, document which admits that "the earliest realistic date for the first accessions is likely to be no earlier than 2002". This is taken for granted privately by most EU governments, despite the urgency attending the current Inter-Governmental Conference, which is designed in large part to adjust to a much larger EU.

The gag between these timetables is being filled by the NATO expansion. Mrs Albright said it is designed "to do for Europe's east what NATO did 50 years ago for, Europe's west: to integrate new democracies, defeat old hatreds, provide confidence in economic recovery, and deter conflict".

All but the last of these objectives look much more appropriate to the EU than NATO. But the unwillingness of the richer EU member-states to expand the fiscal means for EU enlargement, and the concentration on achieving monetary union by, 1999, means that they are being taken on by NATO.

As another distinguished US-commentator, Stanley Hoffmann, puts it in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, this "helps preserve American hegemony. By providing Washington with a perfect opportunity to integrate some of these states into NATO, the Western Europeans have missed their chance to let them into the EU first", leading to a demoralisation of "believers in a truly united Europe that would be more than an economic animal, one that could define and pursue a genuine European mission in the world". He believes the most likely way out of this dilemma will be a multi-speed EU; hence the importance of the IGC debate on flexibility, which is only now getting fully into its stride.