MILITARY officers and diplomats from 23 countries met in Malahide, Co Dublin, for a second day yesterday to debate post Cold War Europe.
The conference on Security Issues and Challenges in Europe was presented by the US mission to NATO in collaboration with the US embassy in Dublin.
Instability, participants were told, has replaced the fear of Warsaw Pact aggression as Europe's main enemy. To meet that threat, the US mission to NATO was offering participation in the loosely configured Partnership for Peace and, in a few years, the possibility of full NATO membership.
Although half a dozen Irish political parties had been expected to send observers, only the Young Progressive Democrats attended the conference.
The enlargement of NATO and the EU to include former Eastern Bloc countries, such as Hungary and Poland, appeared inevitable, the conference was told. NATO enlargement is expected to take place in 1999, the 50th anniversary of the founding of the alliance. It is hoped the security framework provided by an enlarged NATO will provide new impetus for economic reconstruction in central Europe.
The waiting list in eastern Europe is essentially the same for both NATO and EU membership, but applications to the Union will take longer, with some candidates failing to qualify and the first new accessions expected around 2003.
The EU must move more slowly than NATO, said Mr James Elles, a British MEP, because its policies and institutions must first be adapted.
"NATO is not trying to reap the spoils of the Cold War," Mr Gunnar Riberholt, Denmark's permanent representative to NATO, told participants. "It is the candidate countries who want to join - because it multilateralises their relations with bigger countries. This is of crucial value. For 1,000 years, we met our big neighbour alone in a dark alley. Now, whenever we meet, it's in a committee room with maps, agendas and witnesses.
With the threat of Soviet US war a thing of the past, NATO is reorienting itself towards crisis management and peacekeeping. IFOR, the interim force in former Yugoslavia, has provided a laboratory for the new NATO. In the Tuzla command, NATO troops are deployed alongside neutral, former Eastern Bloc and Soviet soldiers. Officers say the experience has been successful. "The degree of ad-hoc-cry is disturbing," said Mr Robert Gelbard, a US Assistant Secretary of State involved in peacekeeping in Bosnia. "A number of precedents have been established. A number of lessons should have been learned.".
Ms Elizabeth Rehn, a Finnish MEP and former defence minister, expressed concern that IFOR has not been able to stop human rights abuses. "The situation is really not good," she said. "People are still killing each other. Ethnic cleansing is still going on." Ms Rehn told of two Muslims she recently saw held without charge in a Serb police station in Bosnia. They had broken ribs and internal bleeding.
Russian opposition to the enlargement of NATO was a frequent theme at the conference. "Anyone in Moscow who is seen as acquiescing would be in political trouble," a Western diplomat said.
Russia is demanding that no infrastructure, troops or nuclear weapons be moved nearer to its borders and no countries from the former Soviet Union he allowed to join NATO. This would be "at best problematic, at worst unacceptable", the diplomat said.
One Russian participant asked that the "four letter word" NATO be changed to something that would not evoke Cold War memories.