Europe's Eastern Promise

Rethinking NATO and EU Enlargement

Ronald D. Asmus

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2008

Summary:  After the Cold War, NATO and the EU opened their doors to central and eastern Europe, making the continent safer and freer than ever before. Today, NATO and the EU must articulate a new rationale for enlarging still further, once again extending democracy and prosperity to the East, this time in the face of a more powerful and defiant Russia.

RONALD D. ASMUS is Executive Director of the Transatlantic Center at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, in Brussels. From 1997 to 2000, he served as U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs.

In the early 1990s, after the Iron Curtain lifted, Western leaders seized a historic opportunity to open the doors of NATO and the European Union (EU) to postcommunist central and eastern Europe. By consolidating democracy and ensuring stability from the Baltics to the Black Sea, they redrew the map of Europe. As a result, the continent today is more peaceful, democratic, and free.

This accomplishment was the result of a common U.S.-European grand strategy that was controversial and fiercely debated at the time. The goal was to build a post-Cold War Europe "whole, free, and at peace"; to renew the transatlantic alliance; and to reposition the United States and Europe to address new global challenges. But as successful as the strategy of enlargement has been, the world has changed dramatically since it was forged. The United States and Europe face new risks and opportunities on Europe's periphery and need to recast their strategic thinking accordingly for a new era.

Current policy toward Europe's periphery is increasingly out of date, for three reasons. First, the West has changed. The 9/11 attacks pulled U.S. attention and resources away from Europe and toward the Middle East. The reservoir of transatlantic goodwill and political capital accumulated during the 1990s has evaporated in the sands of Iraq. In Europe, enlargement fatigue has set in thanks to stumbling institutional reforms and the mounting expense of integrating new EU members. It was widely assumed that the western Balkan states (Albania and the former Yugoslav republics) would all eventually join the EU and NATO, but even that can no longer be taken for granted. Turkey's chances of gaining EU membership are fading. Indeed, the window of opportunity to expand the democratic world that opened with the end of the Cold War is now at risk of closing.

Second, the East has changed. The challenge of the 1990s was to consolidate democracy in central and eastern Europe along a north-south axis from the Baltics to the Black Sea. Today's even more difficult challenge is to stabilize the countries of Eurasia, the region where Europe and Asia meet, along a new axis extending eastward from the Balkans across the Black Sea region to the southern Caucasus and including Turkey, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Sandwiched between an unstable Middle East to the south and a hostile Russia to the north, these countries are the new flank of the Euro-Atlantic community. Old policies may still work in the Balkans, but countries such as Georgia and Ukraine -- let alone Moldova and Belarus, if and when the latter opens up to the outside world -- are weaker, poorer, and more politically problematic than the central and eastern European countries NATO and the EU sought to integrate earlier. Their claim to be part of Europe is more tenuous, and the perceived Western imperative to help is less obvious. The policy tools developed for central and eastern Europe a decade ago are, accordingly, no longer as effective.

Finally, Russia has changed. In the 1990s, it was a weak, quasi-democratic state that wanted to become part of the West. Now, a more powerful, nationalist, and less democratic Russia is challenging the West. Moscow sees itself as an independent Eurasian power, offering its own authoritarian capitalist model of development as an alternative to democratic liberalism. It practices a form of mercantilist geopolitical hardball that many in Europe thought was gone for good. Nowhere is this more clear than in its policies toward Europe's periphery, where it is seeking to halt or roll back democratic breakthroughs in places such as Georgia and Ukraine. Moscow's willingness to use its energy resources as a political weapon has made European countries reluctant to confront Russia over its antidemocratic behavior. Until the EU can liberalize its energy markets and diversify its supplies, Moscow will have the upper hand.

In this new strategic environment, Western policy toward the nations on Europe's periphery cannot remain on cruise control as if nothing has changed. NATO and the EU need to articulate a new strategic rationale for expanding the democratic West and devise a new approach to dealing with Russia. There is another opportunity today to advance Western values and security and redraw the map of Europe and Eurasia once more. But new ideas will be necessary to seize it -- and to reinvent the transatlantic alliance in the process.

OUT WITH THE OLD

The grand strategy of democratic enlargement that lay behind the opening up of NATO and the EU early in the 1990s grew out of the twin imperatives of reuniting Europe following communism's collapse and reinventing the transatlantic alliance for the post-Cold War era. The goal was to consolidate democracy across the eastern half of the continent by anchoring central and eastern European countries to the West. It reflected the vision of a peaceful Europe expanding its foreign policy horizons and sharing global leadership and responsibility with the United States. At the time, Washington concluded that the EU alone was too weak to lead the enlargement process. Thus NATO took the lead in bringing central and eastern Europe into the fold. NATO's membership could more easily be expanded, and extending NATO's security umbrella to countries in those regions was critical to the consolidation of democracy. NATO also contributed to reform by raising its requirements for new members, a "tough love" policy designed to reinforce positive transformation.

As NATO played a key role in taking the security issue off the table and opening its doors to the East, the EU assumed most of the burden of transforming postcommunist societies into liberal democratic ones. EU enlargement policy was an asymmetric negotiation. Candidate countries simply had to accede to the EU's existing acquis communautaire -- the full range of its laws, regulations, and institutions. The newcomers had little say in anything but the timeline under which the EU's requirements would be implemented. Nevertheless, it was this transformation that fundamentally tied these countries to the West and thus created enduring security on the continent.