Preserving the New Peace

Michael Mandelbaum

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 1995

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Summary:  Expanding NATO east is unwise. It will not promote democracy or capitalism, and it is premature to assume Russian belligerence.

Michael Mandelbaum is Christian A. Herter Professor of American Foreign Policy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and Director of the Project on East-West Relations at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Proponents of extending NATO membership to the Visegrad countries -- Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia -- can be divided into two camps. Those in the first camp assert that the purpose is solely to promote democracy and free markets in central Europe and has nothing to do with the military power and political aspirations of any other country. For the second group, NATO expansion has everything to do with the threat from Russia.

On their point of disagreement, the second group has the stronger argument. NATO expansion is about Russia. But on the policy they commonly advocate, both are unpersuasive. NATO expansion, under present circumstances and as currently envisioned, is at best premature, at worst counterproductive, and in any case largely irrelevant to the problems confronting the countries situated between Germany and Russia.

If NATO is to be a vehicle for the promotion of democracy in the post-Cold War world, and, judging from Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke's recent article ("America, a European Power," Foreign Affairs, March/April 1995), this is the position of the Clinton administration, there is no reason that all the formerly communist countries of Eurasia should not join. Certainly, if the promotion of democracy is nato's new mission, then the expansion under consideration does not reach far enough to the east. For the countries under active consideration are precisely those best placed to make a successful transition to democracy and free markets without NATO membership. It is in Russia and Ukraine that the development of Western political and economic systems will be most difficult, where failure would be most costly for Europe, and where, therefore, success would have the greatest benefit.

In fact, however, NATO is not an effective instrument for promoting either free markets or democracy. In the second half of the 1940s, when the fate of democracy and free markets in Western Europe was the preeminent international issue, the principal response -- and an extremely successful one -- was the Marshall Plan. The plan provided capital, market access, and incentives for economic cooperation, all of which central Europe currently needs. The logical source for all three is not NATO; it is the European Union, membership in which is a matter of the highest priority for each of the Visegrad countries.

ANXIETY ABOUT RUSSIA

NATO is not only not the most effective instrument for promoting democracy, it is not in essence an organization for doing so. Rather, it is a military alliance, an association of some sovereign states directed against others. The "other" in this case is Russia.

Anxiety about Russia makes NATO membership attractive to central Europeans. In the words of Bronislaw Geremek, a prominent democratic politician in Poland speaking in the September 6, 1993, Washington Post, "At the moment Russia is weak. But we know that this is a transitional period. The Soviet empire could be succeeded by the Russian empire. In some years, Russia will become a superpower again, and the memory of this period of weakness will have ...

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