Contents

The Eastern efforts to join NATO and the emerging Western response 31

A positive learning curve in NATO, 1985-1988; a step backward in 1989 32

Legacy of the Bush years: a U.S. goal of the East in NATO 34

The old consultationist ideology and the new needs since 1989 35

“Cognitive dissonance” in the West 36

The Eastern efforts to join NATO and the emerging Western response

After 1989, the new democracies in Eastern Europe wanted to become allies of the West and offered to join NATO. Ironically, this put them “out of sync” with NATO. The revolutions in the East rushed ahead of the quiet, gradualistic habits of the West in recent decades. Only now may East and West be beginning to get back “in sync.”

The learning curve was rapid in the East after 1985. It kept accelerating year by year until the end of 1991. By contrast, NATO’s learning curve had long since slowed down after 1949. For decades, good people in NATO were occupied with maintaining consensus. The virtue of the alliance-managers became attached to a posture of defensiveness against potential sources of disruption. Their work was often noble, but it left large portions of NATO ill-prepared for the torrent of change after 1985.

The East Europeans began specifically asking to join NATO in the first months of 1990. NATO did not answer in 1990, except to say that any such thing would offend the Russians. The issue was roundly ignored in the Western press. More than a year later, toward the end of 1991, NATO set up the “North Atlantic Cooperation Council” (NACC), a forum for meetings with the ex-Communist countries. This was done more in the style of making a concession to the Easterners than of seizing the opportunity the Easterners were offering. Nevertheless it was a greater step than anything the EC has done for the Easterners, thereby confirming that there is much more to be done with the Easterners on the side of joint security institutions at this stage than on the side of joint economic institutions. The Marshall Plan and the formation of NATO preceded the formation of the EC; the Easterners are ready for the equivalent of the first two, not the last.

NACC was only a beginning. It was a step toward the inclusion of the Easterners in NATO, but was also a way of putting them off when they asked for membership in NATO. It made room for progress, but only on a consultative basis. It could not fill in the “security gap” or reverse the process of “renationalization of defense” of which the East Europeans were warning.

In December 1991, in a letter to the first meeting of the NACC, Yeltsin declared that Russia, too, had the goal of joining NATO. A few weeks earlier, Vice President Rutskoi had visited NATO headquarters. Rutskoi asked NATO to move urgently to help keep the disintegration of the Soviet Union and its nuclear forces orderly. He declared that the expansion of NATO was inevitable, with Eastern Europe likely to join first but Russia also interested.

This might seem to have made it impossible to keep putting off the East Europeans in the name of not offending the Russians. But still nothing happened. There was no response to Rutskoi’s appeal, except to expand communications links with Russia. The Rutskois of Russia, having counted on the NATO West to do the normal thing and fill in the security vacuum left by Russia’s withdrawal from empire, began to feel that they had been taken for fools. They grew disillusioned with the West. They began to look for a new Eastern imperial answer to the chaos in their former realm.

Even the dramatic Yeltsin letter to NATO got no response, except for a few remarks that letting in new members would make things too complicated for NATO. This response was, to put it gently, not up to the measure of the historic opportunities and responsibilities at stake.

It is important to realize that the weak response of the West in these years was not a result of sound or substantial reasons, but of the “out of sync” situation of revolution in the East coupled with well-fed stability in the West. This was compounded by patterns in Western NATO thinking that had become ingrained among alliance managers in the cold war era, and by the historical accident that the old alliance-manager mode of thinking was re-elevated to power in the White House in 1989.

From a long historical perspective, one can view the responses of the West since 1989 as an inevitable process of learning, a process which required time but which is now bringing NATO toward convergence with the Central Europeans. If the eventual outcome is positive, this will indeed be a part of the verdict of history. Meanwhile, during the actual course of history, choices have to be made and arguments evaluated as true or false not just smiled at as phases in the historical process. It is worth acknowledging that mistakes were made and were rationalized in official arguments: only in this way can the West learn from its mistakes and put aside the arguments that would lead to their repetition. In the words of Confucius, to make a mistake and to fail to acknowledge it and correct it is to make another mistake. For some time, the old arguments have lain in wait and sniped away at every attempt to do better. With the change in U.S. administrations, Western leadership circles have a chance to put the bad old arguments behind them.

A positive learning curve in NATO, 1985-1988; a step backward in 1989

The cold war had left a legacy of stagnation in many areas, not least in NATO. With stagnation came a hardening of the arteries and near-stasis. By the early 1980s, a debate over secondary aspects of deterrence – mid-range nuclear forces and their placement – was enough to create a crisis in the alliance that many thought was terminal. In NATO, unlike the USSR, there could be no Gorbachev to end the era of stagnation in a dramatic way.

Ever since De Gaulle’s time, NATO had grown accustomed to thinking of any change as a threat to the fragile consensus in the Alliance. In the 1980s, Gorbachev’s changes were often characterized in NATO circles as a plot to “divide and deceive the West.” The reaction to Gorbachev was actually mostly negative for several years!

Fortunately President Reagan liked change and was willing to overreach Atlanticist attitudes in order to develop a constructive relation with the Gorbachev revolution. NATO attitudes lept several notches forward when NATO got a new Secretary General, Manfred Wörner, in 1988. Wörner used as his theme the basic point that the opportunities opened up by Gorbachev were greater than the dangers. This was like a revolutionary challenge to NATO thinking. It carried the day officially; the question was, would it carry the day spiritually? Would the pervasive defensiveness about change be overcome? Would the opportunities be embraced by NATO in the sense of making real use of them through commensurate Western policy moves, as distinct from merely passively approving the Eastern changes?

There was a chance in 1988 that NATO would catch up with the pace of change. This chance was lost for four crucial years when George Bush became President in 1989. The old alliance-management attitudes were elevated to the pinnacles of power.

During the 1988 campaign, Mr. Bush had advocated a more “cautious” and suspicious attitude toward Gorbachev. Once in office, he set back the U.S.-Soviet relation by at least six months from where President Reagan had brought it. His National Security Adviser, General Scowcroft, articulated the outlook of suspicion and “caution” in the old language of the alliance managers. When commonsense politicians like Richard Gephardt and wise scholars like Graham Allison and Jeffrey Sachs started calling for Marshall Plan-style aid to Poland (where Solidarity had come to power) and for a “grand bargain” of massive but conditional aid to Russia, the Administration started dredging up whatever arguments it could find to discredit the idea. In the summer, Secretary Baker began openly disputing the Scowcroft approach, but U.S. policy did not really pick up again until the Berlin Wall came down and Baker was proved right. A positive learning curve resumed in the West at the end of 1989, indeed it accelerated greatly. Yet it was actually farther behind the changes in the East than ever before, because the changes in the East had lept several full quantum levels farther. Scowcroft remained in office; most of the old arguments against change also remained, lying in wait to whittle down any new policies of the Administration. The West did not even come close to filling the space opened up by the revolutions in the East.

Where President Reagan welcomed change and saw the opportunities in it, President Bush approached change with trepidation and saw the dangers in it. Things would have been different if there had been a President Dukakis or a President Dole in those fateful years. Things are already different under President Clinton.

It was a tragedy that the United States was led in the years of revolutionary change by a man who had a problem with “the vision thing.” When confronted over his own passivity in the face of the revolutionary tide, he quoted Yogi Berra and explained that he “did not want to make the wrong mistake.” Mr. Bush might have made an excellent president in the 1970s, during the era of stagnation. But in 1989 and 1990, bold vision and energetic leadership were needed. Great opportunities were opening up. They needed to be seized through major initiatives and determined follow-through, not just welcomed as a gift or left to pass by. The horizon was bright in those years. Opportunity had not yet turned into crisis.

Today considerably more vision and initiative will be needed in order to realize the opportunities that remain and turn back the tide of crisis.

Legacy of the Bush years: an unimplemented U.S. goal of the East in NATO

The great positive legacy of the Bush Administration is its goal on NATO – the goal of transforming the Atlantic alliance and extending it eastward. It put this forward as the goal of U.S. foreign policy. But it left the goal mostly unimplemented, as an unfinished agenda of U.S. foreign policy.

James Baker laid out the overall goal in his two major Berlin speeches: a “new Atlanticism,” extending from Vancouver to Vladivostok, with a transformed NATO linked to CSCE as its core (and indeed as the core of the entire world order), and with a federative conception of the evolution of power downward and upward from the national state. This is still a good statement of “the vision thing.”

In a sense, this vision was officially entrenched: CSCE was institutionalized, and NACC was added onto NATO. The idea of NATO as enforcer arm for the UN and CSCE won acceptance in the UN and CSCE as well as NATO itself. These steps established the Baker vision as the goal of the most important international organizations.

However, these steps left the main body of the vision still unimplemented. Real world conditions deteriorated while waiting for implementation.

In its final days, the Bush Administration reached, in an explicit if unusual way, the conclusion that formal NATO membership should be extended to the ex-Communist lands starting with Central Europe. Secretaries Eagleburger and Cheney both made public statements calling for this in December 1992 and January 1993.

This was the core practical measure that would have given real substance to the overall Baker vision. But the Bush Administration was already packing its bags when it came out with this goal; it was far too late for it to take the sustained initiative needed for carrying it out. The goal was merely placed on the public record, as a key goal for the future. It is at the core of the positive legacy of the old Administration to the new one.

Insofar as the new Administration has taken up and developed the goal of extended NATO membership, this has been an act of continuity in foreign policy in the finest sense of the word. At the same time, it has required persistence in transformative initiative, something that was unknown in the Bush years, and a sort of spiritual “de-Bushification.”

“De-Bushification” is already well underway. If the necessary initiative and leadership are to be built, it will have to proceed in a wise manner, without either partisan vindictiveness on the Democratic side or blind partisan criticism on the Republican side. It will have to concentrate on weeding out the spiritual maladies that left the implementation of the vision lagging so far behind the real world situation in the Bush years: the fear of change, the pessimism, the concentration on old dangers, the negligence of new opportunities until they have deteriorated into crises.

The change in spirit has already taken place at the top and in a general way. Now it is necessary for the change to filter down and overcome some specific ways of thinking and some ingrained patterns of response up and down the government – and up and down NATO as well.

At the same time, it will be necessary to preserve the essential and valid features of NATO throughout the entire course of its transformation. It will be necessary to distinguish the baby from the bathwater – NATO from the cold war, the unity of the West from the exclusion of the East, the partly supranational Integrated Command from the strictly consultationist ideology – rather than confuse them as has been done so often in the past. It was unwise to confuse these factors in the Bush years for the sake perpetuating them all together. It would be even more unwise to keep confusing them now for the sake of throwing them out together. The Alliance commitment, the unity of the West, the Integrated Command: these are what must be preserved through all the permutations and combinations of a transformed NATO. The cold war, the exclusion of the East, the apotheosis of consultation into an ideology that excludes efficient and democratic procedures on the alliance level: these are what must be discarded.

The old consultationist ideology and the new needs since 1989

The underlying source of the obstructionism that has plagued NATO’s development since 1985 has been the ideology which is best described as “consultationism.” NATO had long tried to disguise the supranational aspects of its Integrated Command by writing in all its manuals that the heart and core of NATO was merely the consultation that takes place in the North Atlantic Council and the unanimous consent that sometimes results (not without some help from arm-twisting and “American leadership”). The requirement of unanimous consent for all formal decisions was actually a source of constipation in the alliance. The idealization of this procedure raised the propensity to constipation to a much higher order of magnitude. In the mid-1950s, Karl Deutsch developed this idealization of consultation into a full-fledged ideology for NATO.

Consultationism grew encrusted over the decades. It was never a sound doctrine logically, but during the cold war there were some public relations reasons for it – fear of stepping on nationalist toes in all countries, and after 1958, fear of further alienating France. These reasons virtually disappeared with the end of the cold war, when France was no longer needed for strategic depth and when supranationality became a virtue in face of the fear of “renationalization of defense.” Nevertheless the consultationist ideology lingered.

Consultationism was evident in the idealization of the new channel for East-West consultations, the North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC). This was at times described not only as a compromise or a step forward but as if it were the main thing needed, indeed the best response imaginable. Functionalist arguments were also dragged out to say that NACC allowed for the development of all possible “practical” links just as fast as countries were ready for them. These arguments neglected elementary realities: that mutual defense commitments are essential as a foundation for developing deep practical defense links, and that a seat on the decision-making Council is essential as a foundation for developing truly meaningful consultations.

The founders of NATO had held to more far-reaching hopes for international organization. Their outlook ranged mostly from functionalist to federalist; they could never have founded NATO if they had been mere consultationists. But in the course of the next two decades, the hopes of a better NATO were abandoned in favor of consultationism. NATO circles developed a certain melancholy pride about having put their idealism behind them. They spoke of the early years of NATO as “the institution-building phase of the Atlantic Community” (as if history had left that phase behind forever and the structure of the alliance had already after a few short years reached its final resting point for all time to come!). This made it hard for them to react constructively when a new era of institution-building opened up in the 1980s. They reacted fearfully to the idealistic Eastern plans for CSCE and uncomprehendingly to the idealistic Eastern plans for NATO.

The consultationist ideology left NATO unprepared to recognize the very possibility of streamlining alliance procedures in order to be able to continue making decisions with more members. At one point Secretary-General Wörner went so far as to “rule out” new Eastern memberships as impossible for this very reason. The assertion of impossibility provided a bubble of protection against recognition of the obligation to do it. This in turn prevented initiation of discussion on how it might be done and made to work. The whole bundle of attitudes stands in sharp contrast to the EC, where an established doctrine of institutional growth through functionalism and federalism led people not only to recognize but to seize upon the possibility of improving the internal decision-making structure in order to be able to keep functioning with more members. The capacity to conceive of institutional progress in decision-making went hand-in-hand with the capacity to conceive of a wider membership and to recognize the responsibility for it.

“Cognitive dissonance” in the West

In the Western general public, there was a sort of “cognitive dissonance” about the idea of the East joining NATO. The whole idea sounded self-contradictory, after years of thinking of NATO as something whose purpose was to oppose the Soviet bloc.

The Western Left-Right stand-off added to the “cognitive dissonance.” The realism of the establishment and the idealism of the Left had parted company in the 1960s, and both were the worse for it. Too many in the Center and Right became attached to the Atlantic status quo, and were viscerally suspicious of any far-reaching improvements on NATO as a threat to NATO – and to their self-image as “hard-headed realists.” Too many on the Left became viscerally hostile to NATO as an instrument of the Western side of the cold war, and disliked the idea of NATO being the bed on which the East-West reconciliation would be consummated.

The Eastern democratic leaders of 1989, however, felt no such cognitive dissonance about an extended NATO. They felt right at home with the idealistic spirit of the original Atlanticists – the federalist founders of NATO, the Theodore Achilleses and George Marshalls and Will Claytons and Lester Pearsons. They felt cognitive dissonance about something completely different, namely: why was there such a lack of interest in an expansion of NATO on the part of the leaders of the NATO alliance itself?

It was unnatural that the West did not to want to extend its realm of security and alliance. What, the Easterners wondered, was wrong? Why was the West not making good on its stated and implied promises from the cold war years? Was the West afraid of its own success? Or was the West too contemptuous of the East?

When some NATO circles began to argue that the Easterners did not meet NATO “standards,” the contempt hypothesis seemed verified. A better way to drive the East away from the West could hardly have been found. Fortunately many Easterners realized that this was not the full story, and that the main problem was a sort of “NATO-sclerosis” inherited from the decades of cold war. They continued to push on the NATO door. Gradually they wore down the barriers of cognitive dissonance in the West.

It turned out that it was not the East which needed to be gradually prepared for joining the West by getting used to Western ways, but the West that needed to be prepared for letting in the East by getting used to meeting with Easterners and hearing them ask to join. The obstacle was not the objective unreadiness of the East but the subjective unreadiness of the West. The gradualist argument of some Westerners about Eastern “unpreparedness” was itself a part of the problem that had to be overcome by a process of opening up of Western thinking.

As the Easterners kept raising the issue, the West gradually moved away from rejectionism and started thinking about the issue. But the delay was not without a severe price. The East felt “put off,” and began to develop doubts about the West that it was trying to join. Nationalist ideologues in the East have argued that the West’s lack of a normal, generous ambition since 1989 on the international level was a result of its spiritless bourgeois individualism on the social and political level.

Democracy has not been a good experience for the Easterners. The less the West does to try to make it a good experience, the more the West gets the blame. The reaction is sharpest in Russia, which in trying to join the West gave up the most, and which felt the most spurned. The Russia of 1993 is less ready to join NATO than was the Russia of 1991. It is also less willing than the Russia of 1990-1991 to look favorably on a Central European entry into NATO. The optimal moment for moving forward has been lost, although the actual moment seems only now to be approaching.

The Western policy of holding back has not led to a convergence of perspectives. In the most important cases, it has led to a renewal and sharpening of divergencies – between Russia and Ukraine, Russia and the West, Russia and Central Europe, Slovakia and the Czech lands, Slovakia and Hungary, Serbia and all its neighbors ... It has even led to some divergence of perspectives between the Western powers themselves – Germany vs. France and the EC vs. the U.S. over Yugoslavia and a host of other issues.

Up to 1991, the Eastern countries had all been converging in a pro-Western direction and toward an Atlanticist conception of European security. Western policy, or rather insufficiency of policy, served to re-divide these countries against one another. Instead of building a decent reserve of goodwill, marshalling resources, and harnessing the collaboration of the Easterners in building a new order, the West has merely left the Easterners to compete for inadequate Western aid. The Easterners have begun wondering whether the pro-Western orientation is worth the trouble.

The attachment to the West has come to seem enervating to many of the Easterners. While they have forsworn the pursuit of separate national security conceptions, they have not been permitted to share actively in the Western security structure and conception. Empires have collapsed, civil wars have broken out, a “security gap” has emerged in the East. Through all this, the Eastern democrats have been kept waiting passively by the West. Their passivity seems only to invite further disintegration. Nationalists are demanding a return to a separate Eastern security conception, and for a national will to hold up its own political-moral universe apart from and against the West. The full-fledged anti-Western view is still almost everywhere a minority view, but its hope lies in crisis, of which there is a plentiful supply. The danger from it is rising not diminishing with the passage of time and the delay of Western involvement.

If the West has divided the Easterners against one another, it has done so inadvertently, out of a misconceived caution. It was a case of “divide in order not to conquer.” By failing to pay enough attention to any of the Easterners, they were set to competing against one another for the attentions of the West.

In the West itself, a division between “Russia Firsters” and “Central Europe Firsters” began in the form of arguments over who should get economic aid. Even when figures like Richard Nixon and Zbigniew Brzezinski took a statesmanlike stand and called for greatly increased aid to all of the Easterners, pundits insisted on dividing them by pigeonholing them as “Russia Firsters” and “Eastern Europe Firsters.” With the Western governments ruling out anything more than utterly inadequate sum totals of aid, the Easterners and their friends in the West were left to squabble over the division of the driblets.

The original expectation of the Easterners – that the West would complete the Marshall Plan by carrying through the portion of it that had originally been offered to them, and would do it this time, as in the 1940s, in a way designed to compel the various recipient nations to cooperate economically – faded into the mist. Instead, economies were renationalized as the Russian empire fell apart. Basic trade and supply patterns were totally disrupted when the former administrative borders became genuine sovereign national borders. Separate national “structural adjustment”-type programs did not reunite the Eastern countries; only a joint adjustment plan, like the European Payments Union of the old Marshall Plan and OEEC days, would have sufficed. If such a program had been attempted, it would have provided a golden opportunity for OECD, the successor to the OEEC, to revitalize itself by making itself the locus for aid to the Easterners and for mutual coordination among the Easterners themselves. But the U.S. would have had to take the responsibility of leadership within the OECD. Instead the Bush Administration, borrowing the argument of its partisan opponents that the U.S. was bankrupt and could no longer afford the leadership, chose to pass the buck and invite the EC to become the coordinator of aid to the East. The inadequate, piecemeal programs were the inevitable result. All the burdens of adjustment were placed on the Easterners, and on a nation-by-nation basis. The West showed confidence only in national programs that met IMF standards, often described as “shock therapy.” Even though the West had not intended to favor economic nationalism and in fact had mostly opposed the break-up of the Soviet Union, it became fashionable to blame the results on the West. Russian Prime Minister Chernomyrdin, who himself had been imposed on Yeltsin by a “Parliament” reeling in backlash against the Western-style economic policies of the Yeltsin-Gaidar government, complained on a visit to Ukraine that the Russians and Ukrainians had torn up centuries of links with one another for the sake of links with the West which were proving useless.

On the strategic level the effect of inadequate Western attention has been even more damaging. While the Easterners, as they broke up the Russo-Soviet empire, were all converging on a Euro-Atlanticist conception of the post-cold war security system, meanwhile their old imperial security system collapsed, NATO kept to the sideline, and there was no new security system in sight for them. National sovereignty was restored or in many cases established for the first time. Defense and diplomacy were renationalized. So was thinking on security and on geopolitics. National conflicts began bubbling to the surface in the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia, and simmering just beneath the surface in the Baltics, Ukraine, and Romania. Czechoslovakia came apart, releasing new tensions between Slovakia and Hungary. There was no meaningful common response to these problems; each country was left to respond on its own. Naturally they responded in different ways. The different responses began to create divergent geopolitical orientations and diplomatic identities for the Easterners. A similar problem began to undermine even the cohesion of the West; the EC and NATO were widely described as “discredited” after their failure to respond in a meaningful way to the Balkan wars.

Today, it will take much more effort to bring the Easterners back to a common perspective with one another and with the West than it would have taken to consolidate them in their convergence on an Atlanticist perspective in the years 1990-1991. Nevertheless the effort must be made: waiting longer only means waiting for it to get even harder. Eventually if we wait long enough it may become impossible. Fortunately that has not yet happened, except perhaps in the case of Serbia and a few other small territories.

The drift in Russia’s identity is cause for particular concern. From the unrequited Atlanticist orientation of late 1991, Russia began drifting toward a Eurasianist orientation in 1992. Yeltsin and Kozyrev accommodated the milder portions of the Eurasianist program within the bounds of a continuing overall Westernizing democratic identity. Nevertheless the Parliament pushed on for a harsher and more anti-Western form of Eurasianism. The hardliner Yuri Skokov played a growing role in the Russian security apparatus. The anti-Westerners were still a small minority, but a loud and growing one, and their proto-fascist virulence was a matter for concern.

In 1993 Yeltsin got a second wind. He succeeded in removing Skokov, disbanding the old “Parliament” and setting new elections for December. Ironically, this was widely interpreted in the West as a further shift away from the West and toward a neo-imperial Russia. All of Russia’s interventions in its “near abroad,” which had been taking place for more than a year, were suddenly noticed and charged to the account of Yeltsin and of his coup against the old Parliament. This was a curious mistake of address. Fortunately Clinton instinctively understood that the place for the West was at Yeltsin’s side. After the Parliament was disbanded, Kozyrev renewed his call for a partnership between the West and Russian Democracy, although in more cautious language than he had used in 1991 and early 1992, when he had been severely burned politically for his remarks in face of the absence of any validating response by the West. A new moment of opportunity is opening up. This time it will take more effort on the part of the West to make good on it, but at least this time there is a chance that the effort will be made.

The gradual involvement of NATO with the Easterners, despite its debilitating inadequacy for the Easterners, had one major compensation: it gradually opened up NATO’s own mind. It led to the beginnings of a convergence of Western perspectives on European security toward the living Atlanticist perspective of the Central Europeans. This convergence is what has made it possible to renew for the 1993-1994 period the great opportunity of 1989-1991.