Contents

XII. Are the Eastern Europeans and Russians fit yet to join NATO? Are they

ready? Do they meet NATO standards? 96

A Mutual Defense Organization, not a Club 96

Commitments, not Criteria (Goodpaster) 97

The Litany of Excessive Criteria 98

1. “Reliable Partners” 98

2. “Democratic Standards” 100

“The Democracy” and the responsibilities of power 102

Defense potential against a renewed Russian threat 103

3. Civilian control 105

4. Stable international relations 106

5. Technical standards 106

What to do with Membership Criteria? 107

XII. Are the East Europeans and Russians fit yet to join NATO? Are they ready? Do they meet NATO standards?

“With respect to the criteria, we are not setting any specific criteria, although, as you know, in Article 10 of the Washington Treaty are set forth the benchmarks for membership.”

– State Department background briefer on the NATO Partnership plan, October 20, 1993

“The Parties may, by unanimous agreement, invite any other European State in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic Area to accede to this Treaty.”

– North Atlantic Treaty (“the Washington Treaty”), Article 10

“Yes, the Easterners are ‘ready’ to join NATO. They meet the official standard.” That is the answer which the quotations above provide, in a rather definitive fashion, to the question posed in the headline of this section. This answer may come as a surprise to those who have been used to the issue being treated in terms of the Easterners not yet being ready. It will be the more disconcerting because of its logical implication: that if NATO expansion has not yet taken place, it must be because the West has not been ready for it.

The criteria for NATO membership were set in 1949. They have now been reaffirmed by the Clinton Administration. Most of the countries of the NACC and CSCE, including Russia, already meet these criteria, pending resolution of certain outstanding strategic issues through the actual membership commitments.

In principle, this settles the matter. The Easterners are eligible in the here and now. All (all!) that remains to be done is to clear away the underbrush of arguments that have obscured this. Unfortunately the underbrush is indeed thick.

A Mutual Defense Organization, not a Club. There has been something a bit snobbish in the talk about “criteria” and “standards.” We have deliberately worded the title of this section in the snobbish vein. One might imagine from it that NATO was a club which handed out membership as a sort of certification that a country met NATO standards of good behavior, “fitness” and “readiness.”

NATO certainly did not operate in such a way in the past. Rather, it negotiated memberships for the practical purpose of strategic alliance. In order to organize a deep military unity, it sought members among countries that had a basic compatibility or “compossibility” of values, interests and strategic orientations. That was the standard. The question was not whether these countries conformed with a full panoply of Western practices, but (a) whether their orientation was toward democracy and toward strategic alliance with the West, and (b) whether their occasional deviations from Western standards were not such as to do much damage to the functioning of a strategic alliance through NATO.

The same practical rules of thumb should apply to the Easterners today. Anything more rigid would be self-defeating on the part of the West.

Far more change has already been carried out in the aspirant Eastern countries than is contemplated for NATO-West in any scenario. Still, there is plenty more to be done in the East. What matters for Westerners is to avoid an excessively demanding, one-way-street attitude. If it is in the mutual interest to be allies – and it is in the mutual interest – then the effort at adjustment to realize this interest should be mutual. The West needs to start conceptualizing the further changes in the East as proceeding on an interactive schedule with membership in NATO, not as prior conditions for membership.

Regrettably, for several years, it has been a practice in some quarters to take all concerns about problems involved in expanding NATO and simply translate them into more “criteria” for the Easterners to meet before they can enter NATO. Instead of thinking up joint solutions to joint problems as they arise, these Westerners have piled up a vast array “criteria” for membership ... and with them, a vast array of adjustments that the Eastern countries would have to complete unilaterally before membership would be considered.

At a time when the Easterners can hardly afford any more shocks of adjustment, this has been unseemly. It has amounted to exporting onto the Easterners all the burdens of the adjustment involved in expanding NATO. It has left them for the meanwhile without the benefit even of NATO’s normal cushioning from shock. And it has spared NATO from facing the adjustments which actually need to be made on its own side in order to make new memberships work, and for which no amount of adjustments on the Eastern side will be an adequate substitute.

Now, when the West has decided to embark seriously on expanding NATO, this process of misconception and projection of adjustments has to be undone. The valid concerns that have been reduced to the form of one-sided “criteria” need to “un-reduced” and brought back to their full-bodied form, so we can find more appropriate ways of dealing with them. The items that have been misfiled as “criteria” have to be refiled correctly as mutual problems of adjustment. Some of the problems will need to be solved by Western action, some by joint East-West action. A number of them will be best solved at the time of or after becoming Members, not in advance of membership. It is only the small fraction of problems that really need to be solved unilaterally by the East and in advance of membership that can be fairly called “criteria.”

Commitments, not Criteria (Goodpaster). We should be asking the Easterners for “commitments,” not “criteria.” This epigram of Gen. Andrew Goodpaster, former SACEUR, captures the nub of the matter. The Easterners are being asked to make commitments when joining the NATO Partnership program, not to meet an excess of criteria in advance. The same, we may add, should apply to joining NATO proper.

The CSCE commitments – democratic government, minority rights, sanctity of borders – are a good example. These commitments have already been made. They might be reaffirmed upon joining NATO. However, their complete prior fulfillment should not be made a criterion for joining NATO, since joining NATO is meanwhile needed to help get them fulfilled reliably; in particular, the security provided by membership in NATO would make it much easier for the Eastern countries to abide consistently by these commitments. By making these commitments a part of a country’s NATO membership commitments, NATO could win considerable authority to arbitrate and enforce the CSCE commitments, and at the same time delimit the extent of its own commitment to the Eastern countries by making this contingent upon the Easterners’ abiding by their CSCE commitments. All this might be done by the simple device of grandfathering the CSCE commitments into the protocols of accession to NATO for the Eastern countries.

The Litany of Excessive Criteria

Following are the main criteria that have recently been suggested as prerequisites for NATO membership ... and the ways in which they can be changed from inappropriate prerequisites into appropriate standards for members.

1. Becoming “reliable partners”

It is precisely by means of integration into NATO that the Eastern countries can become ever more reliable as strategic partners of the West. To ask the Easterners to go farther than they have already and prove themselves “reliable partners” before they can join NATO – and some do ask for this – is to put the cart before the horse.

The ex-Communist countries want to be “reliable partners” of the West. They want to support Western values and Western leadership in the world. They have gone to great lengths with a view to becoming partners of the West. The concrete opportunity for building a reliable partnership with them is the here and now, by interactive effort. To put it off in favor of further gradual growth of reliability on one side is to lose the concrete opportunity.

This is especially important in the case of a great power like Russia, just as it had been decades earlier in the case of Germany. If Germany had been refused membership in the EC and NATO until Germany first became a reliable partner of France – and many Frenchmen wanted to do this and opposed letting Germany into NATO or forming an EC together with Germany – then Germany never would have become a reliable partner of France or of the West. Realists today would be saying that the renewal of Franco-German conflict was inevitable and that the old proposals for joining France and Germany through the EC and NATO were totally unrealistic. This is strikingly similar to what is being said today by those who predict that Russia will inevitably fail as a democracy and revert to a separate imperial and anti-Western geopolitical posture.

The West can if it wishes dump all the effort and cost of adjustment on the Easterners, under the guise of waiting for them to become “reliable partners,” before the West will stir itself to make any major adjustments of its own. It can keep on delaying its own adjustments indefinitely in this manner. But the Eastern societies are not able to bear the burden of adjustment alone. Some of them are cracking. Others are faltering. This may cheer Western pessimists, who may adduce this as vindication of their prophecy that these countries could not be reliable partners. But the pessimists will pay the costs, along with all the rest of us. And the costs are severe. It costs far more to deal with failures on the tail end than to make adjustments on the front end.

Despite the illogic of it, some Westerners have been letting out word to the Easterners that they must become “reliable partners” before joining NATO. The Easterners inevitably sense that this is a way ot taking advantage of their inferiority complex and abusing their desire for union with the West. It is playing its part in engendering the new alienation from the West.

In reality, the shoe is on the other foot. It is not the East that has failed to try hard enough to be a reliable partner of the West; it is the West that has failed to try hard enough to be a reliable partner to the East. This has not escaped the notice of the Easterners.

It is the West that has failed to make good in a serious way on its promises of help to the Easterners if they threw off their oppressors. It is the West that has failed to make good on the promise that the Euro-Atlantic system made at its inception – the promise that it was meant as a basis for all-European unity, not for Europe’s continuing division, once the Easterners became free. This is not a minor failing; it is a major historical betrayal for the Eastern democrats who have staked their all – and have led their countries in staking all – on a Western orientation. It is an attempt at running away from the responsibilities which come unavoidably with power.

The doctrine of waiting for the Easterners to become “reliable partners” has served for an alibi for the West to fail to act as a reliable partner. The waiting has been ahistorical; the failing of the West has been the stuff of real history.

Nevertheless the failing has not been the whole story, and it could yet cease to be the main story. In one sense, time was needed to adjust to a spirit of being reliable partners – but it was needed by the West. Time has past. The Western spirit has become more willing. The Eastern spirit has been damaged by disillusionment, but is still mostly willing. If the West seeks now to concretize the partnership, that fact alone will make this a “right moment,” and a foundation may thereby be laid for gradual growth into general mutual reliability.

2. “Democratic standards”

Which of these following levels of democracy meet the actual, practical standards of NATO for membership? ––

Level 1) Established and stable democracy, meeting all basic standards of human rights and elected government.

Level 2) Fully or predominantly democratic government, but not stabilized; pro-Western and seeking an anchor in the West.

Level 3) Predominantly non-democratic government that is pro-Western and oriented toward a transition to (or restoration of) democracy.

The answer is that all 3 do. European/Eurasian governments on all 3 of these levels are spiritual allies of the West and of democracy. As such they belong in NATO, whether as full Members (levels 1 and 2) or Associate Members (level 3). Only governments that are organized around an anti-Western, anti-democratic ideology are adversaries of the West and belong outside of the Alliance.

In the past, NATO was far from pure about democracy. From the start in 1949, it included a dictatorship in Portugal. For many years it accepted undemocratic regimes in Greece and Turkey. It was right in not being pure. All that NATO needs for its own stability is:

– a strong preponderance of functioning democracies among its members, coupled with

– a dominant orientation, in any less-than-democratic member regimes, toward strategic alignment with the Atlantic democracies, and toward a transition to democracy at home.

Basic standards of orientation toward democracy (level 3) must be met before NATO can let a country join, but membership in NATO can play a decisive part in stabilizing a country’s orientation toward democracy and helping it make it to full democracy (level 1). The question of “democratic standards” needs to be posed in this practical, interactive way, not the exaggerated a priori way in which it has been used since 1989 at the expense of the Easterners.

Many of the Eastern countries have already met a stronger standard of democracy than was used by NATO in the past. They have completed the basic transition to democracy, i.e. have held free and fair elections for the main central authorities. If this were the real standard for NATO membership, then NATO should have already invited them in.

In other Eastern countries, the completion of basic democracy – free and fair elections of parliament and president – is still awaited. The governments are oriented toward a democratic transition, they are headed by people who for the most part are identified as “democrats,” but they are still only part-way democratic. Russia was in such a position after December 1991. It still needed to be anchored to NATO, if only to valid its orientation toward the West and toward democracy. It was self-defeating to insist that it complete its democratic transition before being linked effectively to NATO. Such countries should be at minimum Associate Members, with the protocols specifying a robust procedure for promotion to full Membership when they complete their democracy. In a few cases it would be worth making them full Members, with the protocols specifying a commitment to a schedule for new elections under close CSCE supervision as a condition for continuation of Membership.

Conversely, provision needs to be made for demoting a country from full Member to Associate Member if it lapses from democratic rule. This would have been helpful in the past in dealing with Portugal, Greece and Turkey. It will be even more needed in the future. The creation of a category of “Associate Member” for new entrants would supply the occasion for finally making this provision.

If a Member lapsed in a deeper sense and abandoned its pro-Western, pro-democratic orientation, it would have to be demoted further. Provision needs to be included for demoting such countries to Observers or expelling them altogether.

Fortunately Membership in NATO would make it much less likely for a country to lapse so fundamentally in its orientation. The real danger of such a lapse is from a Russia that is excluded from NATO and left to drift.

To be sure, the determination of a government’s “orientation” is a judgment call. (So is the determination of its “democracy.”) Nevertheless it is a judgment which people are capable of making with enough accuracy to keep the alliance sound. The orientation and intention of a government – pro-democratic or anti-democratic, pro-Western or anti-Western – is, after all, the factor which determines whether that government is at heart an ally or an enemy. A government which switched to an anti-democratic, anti-Western orientation would have to be kicked out. But there is every reason to keep inside the alliance a government which, having lapsed from democracy for temporary or emergency reasons, nevertheless remains pro-Western and is oriented toward resolving the crisis and restoring democracy. The retention of Associate Membership in the alliance would serve as an anchor for the government’s democratic intentions and for its pro-Western orientation. The chance to regain full Membership would meanwhile provide an incentive to proceed to the restoration of democracy.

Demotion should be feasible without a crisis. A vote of the North Atlantic Council should suffice. Restoration of full Membership should take place by a similar vote. To depoliticize the process and reduce the diplomatic fall-out, a NATO Monitoring Agency on Democratic Standards might be established, to issue reports on changes in democratic status and orientation. A formal Agency report of such a change could be followed automatically by a debate and vote on demotion or promotion.

It will be many years before it will be possible to say with confidence that stable democracy has been achieved in any of the ex-Communist countries, even those which are already considered fully democratic and which are widely favored for NATO membership such as the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. Lapses in some countries are inevitable. Fear that this could tear apart NATO has been one of the sources of the fear of letting these countries join NATO. The response, however – to wait until the Eastern countries stabilize – has created a chicken-and-egg problem, since strategic integration is one of the conditions for stabilization. Stabilization is defined by democratization theorists as five free general elections in a row. Stabilization is therefore by definition some years down the road. Meanwhile the “security gap” and “renationalization of defense” have plenty of time to work their destabilizing influences. The only realistic solution is to make the question of membership less rigid on both ends: to proceed with membership in the here and now, and to make provision for demotion from full membership if the future should require it. Such provision could be readily included in the protocols for admission of new Members or Associate Members; there is no reason why it should be presumed difficult.

“The Democracy” and the responsibilities of power

In some Western circles, only countries on our level 1 of democratic standards are called “democracies.” These are the longstanding, stable democracies, which we have gotten used to bracketing as “the democracies.”

In a more ordinary English-language usage, countries on our level 2 – with unstable but primarily democratic governments – are also called “democracies.”

But in a usage that is very important in the ex-Communist East, all the countries on 3 levels – all countries with democratically-oriented regimes – are “Democracies.” Power in the East is in the hands of those who are called “the democrats”: the political leaders who are pro-Western, who want their country to join the West, and who want a democratic system of government and market economy. For the people, what matters is that “the democracy” is in power, not whether their society has stabilized or met all standards for democratic processes. Democracy will be judged by what people think of the reign of “the democracy.” The West will be judged along with “the democracy.” It is vitally important for the West that the experience of “the democracy” be a good experience not a bad one; or at least, that it be a hopeful experience despite all the pain. It is dangerous for the West that the experience thus far has been not just bad but often virtually hopeless, with the pain compounded by despair and injustice. This is a formative period in the psychology of these counties; the impressions made in these years will remain imprinted on their collective minds for decades.

It would do no good for the West to say (as some of its temptors suggest that it say by way of rationalization of its saddest failings): “Don’t blame us, you have to create your own democracy; what you have right now isn’t very good democracy by our standards; and since you’re not up to making a success of our help and if we gave you real leadership it would only make us seem responsible for your fate, therefore we will give only token help.” Actually the main source of the problems of these countries is not their imperfections in meeting democratic standards but the pain of the transition, coupled with the ethnic imbalances and contradictions in the absence of a stabilizing Western ballast. These costs and contradictions are magnified by the lack of sufficient help and leadership from the West to impart hope and confidence through all the difficulties. It sounds like a cruel joke when the West talks as if the Easterners must jump through many more Western hoops and meet many more standards before serious Western help and leadership will be forthcoming. The East has already jumped through many, many hoops – possibly too many hoops – and the West has shifted the goal post too many times.

Nor will “the democrats” in the East be let off the hook for Western shortfallings if, as another school urges, the West takes good diplomatic care not to identify itself too closely with the democrats. The democrats staked their countries’ futures on the belief that democracy could work this time, even though it has never worked in the past in their part of the world, and a large part of their hope was based on the success of the Atlantic system in making democracy work in Germany, Japan and southern Europe for the first time in history. They trusted in the prospect of joining this system. When the West, in the moment of truth, withdraws this hope and offers only impotent diplomatic meetings and driblets of aid, it does not leave the Eastern democrats free of the taint of the West; rather it leaves them holding the bag. How can they answer, when the Slavophiles accuse them of having sold their souls to the West and having torn their own societies to shreds in a hopeless experiment at Westernization?

Where there is power, there is responsibility. Never has this verity been more pertinent. The East, Zbigniew Brzezinski has said, has collapsed with the West in the “receivership.” Whatever may be the case metaphysically, here on earth in 1993 the West’s is the power and the responsibility. America is at the very core of Western power. America is the superpower; there is none other. The arrogance of power of which it must beware includes the arrogance of irresponsibility – the habit of calling on the world to conform to its wishes even while avoiding the labor of struggle and generosity. The world’s sole superpower does not have the luxury of merely failing to act; to neglect to act is also an action. The peoples of the East will hold us responsible, whether we will it or no. In our deeds and our decisions, they will divine the meaning of our ideals. In our actions and our inactions, they will judge us and all for which we stand. This is for them the moment of truth. It is for us the moment of truth before them. There is no escaping the responsibility.

Reserving a potential for joint NATO defense against a renewed Russian threat.

Could a Russia-in-NATO destroy NATO’s capability for organizing a defense of the West in case Russia “went bad” again? Should Russia therefore be kept out of NATO until it proves itself a stable democracy? The answer, briefly, is no.

One might readily think that, if Russia were in NATO, then NATO could not organize a joint defense against Russia. But upon inspection, the problem dissolves. Many solutions are readily available to ensure that, in the event of regression of Russian toward hostility, the joint defense against it would be stronger not weaker for the fact of the extension of NATO.

The farther east NATO is extended, the better it will be able to prepare a collective forward defense. Germany would be far better defended by a hastily-prepared defense in the Baltics, Poland and Ukraine, with an influence inside Russia itself, than by a stolid defense in Central-Western Europe .

This factor alone outweighs any drawbacks for Western defense that might potentially flow from Russian membership. But the feared drawbacks could never materialize in reality, because the West would have plenty of warning of a Russian reversion to an anti-democratic regime, plenty of time to expel such a regime from the alliance or reduce its role, and plenty of time to resume preparations for collective defense against it.

Russia-in-NATO would bring an intertwining of military plans. This means that, ordinarily, there would be no Russian plan for invasion of the West. The West would have adequate sources of information to assure itself of this fact. The West in turn would not need an immediate plan for conventional defense against Russia. What it would need is warning time in case Russia developed a new interest in attacking the West.

This warning time is exactly what Russian membership in NATO and intertwining of military command personnel would give. If Russian leaders started hatching plans for a surprise attack, then it is far more likely that the Russian officers who were involved in NATO would let their Western friends know of the plot and provide advance warning to the West, than that they would participate in it or try to obstruct preparations for Western defense against it.

Additionally, the West would get a long political warning. Before Russia could revert to a hostile military posture, it would have to have completed a sharp political turn against the West. The first stage of this would be a turn away from practicing democracy to a more authoritarian, if still ideologically pro-democratic and pro-Western, regime. This would lead to demotion from full Member to Associate Member of NATO, and thus loss of any possible Russian veto in NATO affairs. A further turn to an anti-Western ideological orientation could come only after a far-reaching, highly visible, protracted internal debate. This would bring a further demotion from Associate Member of NATO to mere Observer or a complete expulsion from the alliance.

The actual military preparations for an invasion of the West would take still more time after this stage was reached. Indeed, a conventional invasion might never become realistic in view of the disintegration of the Soviet army.

The only real danger would be from a Russia whose political leadership had gone insane and ordered a nuclear strike. A minimal Western nuclear deterrent would have to be maintained on a level balancing the residual Russian nuclear force. Meanwhile, if Russia had turned missiles over to a NATO-run MLF, or helped form a joint missile defense system in NATO, this would greatly reduce the danger of a surprise nuclear strike.

But the best defense against the scenario of nuclear madness is to prevent the Russian leaders from going mad, by making them a part of the strategic leadership of the world and avoid backing them into the corner as outsiders. A Russian government that was in NATO would be extremely unlikely to launch nuclear strikes against the West. Russian military officers who were making plans together with their Western counterparts would come to find the whole idea repugnant. An Extended NATO would in no sense add to the danger; it would do much to reduce it.

3. Civilian control of armed forces. In most Eastern countries this is developing apace alongside the renationalization of defense, although the habit of civilian control will by definition take time to form. Civilian control has a greater distance to go in the former USSR and Yugoslavia, due to imperial military positions inherited from the old pseudo-federal structures.

The best schedule for relating civilian control to NATO membership is an interactive schedule. Basic civilian control is the rule-of-thumb advance standard, but in some cases it may be necessary to use a bare minimum standard of an orientation in favor of civilian control. In such cases, the commitment to the goal of full civilian control could be enshrined in the NATO membership agreements, along with a guideline schedule and conditions for promotion and demotion in membership status.

NATO has used an interactive schedule in the past. Greece and Turkey were not expelled in their periods of lack of civilian control, although it would have been good if a procedure had existed for demoting them to a lower status of Associate Member. Spain was encouraged to join NATO on the argument that the NATO experience and supervision would help the Spanish military adapt to the spirit and habit of civilian control.

In the case of the new democracies, it would be counter-productive to wait for a full steadying of civilian control before allowing entry into NATO. Waiting for full and entrenched civilian control would mean waiting also for the full and entrenched “renationalization of defense.” National defense establishments would get used to full independence and develop habits of supreme authority. They would be reluctant thereafter to yield their prerogatives to supranational command structures.

It would be far better for NATO to introduce its supranational level of influence at an earlier moment. The ex-Communist militaries would then be subjected to an element of civilian control on the supranational NATO level, supplementing the growth of civilian control nationally. The process of renationalization of defense would be halted before it went too far.

There used to be two paths to re-establishing civilian control of the ex-Soviet military:

(a) Through breaking it up and placing it under the control of separate Republics first.

(b) Through integration of the common post-Soviet C.I.S. Command into NATO.

The second option would have been complicated and hard to guarantee, since the C.I.S. command was not accepted by all C.I.S. countries, nor was it under clear civilian control – but not nearly as complicated and hard to guarantee as the consequences of the break-up. It would have solved many problems in one fell swoop. It would have provided more elements of civilian control over the military on the C.I.S. level. It would have moderated Ukrainian fear of the C.I.S. military and averted some of the renationalization of defense inside C.I.S.

With the passage of time this option has been lost. The C.I.S. common command has been dissolved; there are only Russian forces posted abroad now. This places the post-Soviet militaries under more definite national control. It also creates many more problems of relations among national militaries and territorial limits on the location of Russian forces – problems which should not be treated as obstacles to negotiating NATO membership, since left to themselves they might fester further, but which might need to be resolved in the protocols of NATO membership.

4. Stable international relations. Peace among the Eastern states. Avoiding an arms race between them. Stable borders. Renunciation of territorial claims. Fair treatment of ethnic minorities. Turning over Ukrainian warheads and delivery systems to Russia (or to the UN or NATO). Military reductions. Stopping arms sales to unstable countries.

It would be a mistake to expect the successor states to solve all of these problems in advance of joining NATO. Rather, membership in NATO would facilitate their solving these problems. What needs to be asked is, How many of these problems really need to be settled prior to joining NATO? In what cases should protocols of entry include a settlement of mutual problems and a NATO guarantee of the settlement? In what other ways could NATO help in solving these problems?

This should be treated as a practical matter, not a theoretical question of meeting standards which in the past NATO never held to. Section VI (above) provides some guidelines for the answers.

5. Technical standards. It is always virtuous to be working on meeting the technical standards for NATO equipment, force structures and training. The NATO countries have been working on this ever since 1949. But one does not know whether to laugh or cry when one hears representatives of the Eastern countries saying, in a plaintive earnest tone of voice: “We are working on meeting NATO technical standards. It’s expensive, but we’re getting there. Soon we will be ready and NATO can let us in.” What will they think if, after having gone to some trouble to jump through this hoop, NATO does not let them in after all but moves the goal post somewhere else?

The reality is that the satisfaction of technical standards is not the main obstacle to NATO membership. It is not even a significant obstacle.

It is not technical standardization that leads naturally to membership. It is membership that leads naturally to work on technical standardization.

The original NATO countries signed the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949 and then set to establishing a common command and meeting common standards under it. That was at a time when technical standardization was an urgent need, in order to prepare a joint defense against a feared invasion. There is no such urgent need today; the urgency today is for political membership. It would make no sense if NATO were more rigid and demanding on the technical level today than in 1949. The Easterners can join NATO and then get to work on technical standards, just as the original NATO members did in 1949. What could be reasonably insisted on in advance is to include in the membership agreements a commitment to work toward common technical standards.

What to do with Membership Criteria?

It has been proposed by several constructive thinkers that NATO lay down its membership criteria, in order to give the Easterners hope that, once they meet the preconditions, actual negotiations for membership will follow. This is wise as long as the West really would follow through with negotiations and membership, and as long as it does not give rein to an attitude of arbitrarily “laying down the law” on criteria. The NATO countries have the full legal right (authority) to lay down any conditions they choose, but it is not right (correct) or in their own interest for them to lay down impractical conditions.

In recent times, NATO circles have talked themselves into a corner on the question of standards for joining NATO. If, in this mood, the NATO countries were to sit around a table and start unilaterally laying out membership conditions for the Easterners, they could end up piling condition upon condition, with little regard for what was actually needed. In order to get a minimal consensus among themselves and bring alone those among them who would rather not let the Easterners join at all, the natural temptation would be to project their differences onto the Easterners by adding more and more conditions and wording them in an unduly rigid manner.

A statement of conditions prepared in such a way could serve to prevent Eastern membership for all time to come. It would be insulting rather than enticing to the East. It would also be damaging to the West’s own interest, which is to anchor the Easterners to the West and integrate them with the West.

To avoid a disastrous outcome, any statement of standards and conditions should be accompanied by an acknowledgement that it is only a framework statement, subject to the actual membership negotiations, and does not preclude practical accommodations or compromises, or even some transitions to compliance after membership is achieved. It should also be accompanied by a declaration of intention to proceed with negotiations for membership with any willing European country, including Russia, that comes within fair range of meeting the conditions.

While a statement of conditions could be prepared and issued unilaterally by NATO, it would be much better prepared through discussions that include the Easterners. This would be much less insulting to the Easterners. It would lead to a much better sense of mutual commitment to making good on the conditions for membership. And it would probably lead to a much more realistic set of conditions – a set that would include some needed adjustments on both sides. NACC or a commission of the “Partner” countries could be the venue for discussing, preparing and publicly issuing this statement of conditions.