bout de papier, Vol. 15, No. 3 (1998) — Fall 1998 // Automne 1998, pp. 4–5
The word “expansion”, when applied to geo-political situations, connotes an element of calculated planning and irredentism which is wholly lacking in the current enlarged membership issue facing the NATO member states. In fact, in the intense planning for peace within the Alliance that began in 1967 and was only briefly interrupted in 1968 by the Czech crisis, there was at no stage any thought given to absorbing any members of the Warsaw Pact within the NATO membership.
The NATO study, which eventually emerged in 1968 as the Harmel Report (named for the then-Belgian Foreign Minister Pierre Harmel and President of the North Atlantic Council) covered every conceivable ingredient of a successful prescription for peaceful relations with the Soviet Bloc: the settlement of the status of Berlin; resolution of the borders of Czechoslovakia, Germany and Poland: creation of nuclear Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) and conventional Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR) arms control and reduction agreements; and development of political “outreach” institutions such as the Conference on Security and Co-Operation in Europe (CSCE) which later became the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). It may surprise many readers that the blueprint for ending the Cold War was the product of intensive study within NATO, wrongly perceived by many as being primarily a military organization. The Harmel Report has provided the major Western road map for peace in Europe and has proven to be remarkably prescient in bringing to fruition plans devised thirty years ago.
It is simply not true that the decision to recommend the admission of Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary to membership in the Alliance is the result of American or any other Western “plot” to move NATO to the borders of Russia; and in reality it will not do so, as there is no intention to station outside forces in any of the three new candidates for membership. The enlargement of NATO, very simply put, is no more than a positive response to insistent pleas from the three states (and indeed from others in Central and Eastern Europe) not to be condemned once again to fall within the Russian orbit; and an uneasy conscience has doubtless played an unacknowledged role in shaping Western reaction.
Consider for a moment the rather shameful Western record vis-à-vis these states. Despite some treaty obligations, no help was forthcoming when they were overrun by Germany at the outset of World War II. Even more deplorable was the 1943 Yalta Agreement between the USA, Britain and the Soviet Union to divide post-war Europe into “spheres of influence”, thereby condemning all the states of Central and Eastern Europe to half a century of virtual bondage within the Soviet Empire. Later, no concrete help was forthcoming when indigenous democratic movements attempted to overthrow the puppet regimes in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and in Poland in 1971. All three of them passed from six years of cruel Nazi occupation to 50 years of Soviet political and military oppression. Is it any wonder that following the collapse of the Soviet Union, these Warsaw Pact captive states have insistently demanded to be placed under the NATO umbrella precisely to prevent a repetition of the harsh fate they have known for much of this century?
Unconsciously, those who today judge political issues solely in terms of US-Russian relations are continuing to reflect a Cold War mentality and, in so doing, a disregard for the interests of peripheral states. Of course due regard has to be paid to the interests and sensitivity of still – powerful states such as Russia, but that is precisely why institutions such as the NATO- Russian Partnership for Peace and the G8 have been created; not to confront and provoke Russia but to embrace her within a new global framework for world peace.
Those who believe that this goal can be achieved by dissolving NATO are disregarding the lessons of recent history. It was the absence of collective security arrangements among like-minded nations between the 1930s and 1940s, and the development of collective security in the form of NATO and the North Atlantic Alliance in 1949 that made it possible to preserve peace through a very difficult post-war period of Soviet Union hostility which generated such tense incidents as the 1949 Berlin blockade, the 1962 Cuba missile crisis and the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, brutally suppressing the “Dubcek Spring”
Europe is still in a disturbed state as witness recent events in Bosnia. There, NATO forces managed in a matter of weeks to bring about a cease-fire which had eluded Europeans and the UN for the four preceding years. In so doing, NATO was fulfilling its principal mandate to promote peace and prosperity amongst its member states; not just to contain Soviet ambitions in Europe and elsewhere. Indeed, NATO was created equally to prevent old rivalries between major West European states (Germany, France and Britain) from ever again engulfing the whole world in war, as they had repeatedly done in the past, and to prevent chronic internecine Balkan strife from endangering European peace.
Today, NATO provides a disciplined, unified force of democratic member nations accustomed to working together politically and militarily to supplement the efforts of the United Nations so as to bring about and maintain international peace. This is a task which no institution comprising over 160 nations, led by a Security Council dominated by five Permanent Members who more often than not are at odds with each other, can easily discharge. Canada rightly supports the peace-making role of NATO, in the knowledge that the United Nations’ ability to keep the peace presupposes that there is a “peace” to keep. That is the unique function which NATO performs today under the political auspices of the UN. To suggest that Canada and the US should get out of NATO and out of Europe would be a disservice to peace and to the gradual movement towards an ordered world. It would also leave Canada alone in a very unequal bilateral relationship with the most powerful country on earth. We would be bereft of the support we derive from and the influence we wield through the 16-nation North Atlantic Council, which remains the central political and security consultative body for the Western world.
The transatlantic link between Western Europe and North America remains the best guarantee of international peace and security.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 15, No. 3 (1998) — Fall 1998 // Automne 1998, pp. 4–5. Read the rest of this issue →
