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.

Great care was taken to ensure that countries not included in the initial round of enlargement would not be destabilized. The West did not want to repeat the mistake that U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson made in 1950, when he appeared to sketch a new Western security perimeter and thereby invited the conclusion that countries on the other side of the line were of no interest to the West. Therefore, NATO and EU policy sought to blur the lines between members, potential future members, and partners. In practice, this meant finding new ways to embrace and deepen cooperation with countries that did not seek membership or were not yet realistic candidates for it. NATO explicitly left open the possibility of further expansion down the road. The EU was more circumspect, but it, too, expanded its outreach to countries on Europe's periphery whose future stability and orientation it wanted to shape.

The West's desire to mitigate any negative fallout was perhaps most visible in its handling of Russia. In different yet reinforcing ways, the Americans and the Europeans signaled their strategic desire to pull Russia toward the West in the hope that Moscow would eventually evolve into a partner and perhaps even a de facto ally. NATO and EU enlargement were accompanied by an unparalleled effort to engage Moscow and work for Russia's own democratic transformation, while still taking what were seen as its legitimate interests into account. This strategy was not a new effort to contain Russia but an attempt to integrate it -- albeit in a looser form and on a different timeline than that of its smaller western neighbors. And it was not merely rhetoric. NATO rethought its military strategy and force posture in order to underscore that it had no offensive intentions. Moreover, it offered to expand political and military cooperation and plan for future joint military operations with Russia. The EU set out its own far-reaching plans to deepen cooperation. The West took such steps despite uncertainty over where Russia was headed and despite the fear that Moscow would take advantage of these openings to paralyze Western institutions rather than cooperate with them.

Looking back, Western policy achieved two of its goals -- anchoring much of central and eastern Europe and preventing instability in those countries remaining outside NATO and the EU -- and was partially successful in dealing with Russia. These successes were not inevitable, and their importance should not be underestimated. Had NATO and the EU not acted, Europe today would be a messier, less stable, and more inward-looking place. And Washington would have even fewer allies in dealing with crises beyond Europe, such as Afghanistan and Iraq.

Today, it is only too easy to forget that a decade ago there were concerns that enlargement would create new and sharper divisions between those countries joining NATO and the EU and those remaining on the outside. It has done the opposite. The success of NATO and EU enlargement, and the inclusion of countries such as the Baltic states, set a positive precedent for other former Soviet republics. Following the Rose and Orange Revolutions, democratic leaders in Georgia and Ukraine became more serious about seeking to tie their countries to the West. After all, if the Baltic states could do it, why should they not dare to do the same?

The results in Russia were mixed, however. On the one hand, the train wreck that was so frequently predicted by enlargement critics never happened. New arrangements for cooperation with NATO and the EU were set up, and a breakdown of relations with Moscow was avoided. But the West's broader hopes of establishing deeper relations with a more democratic Russia never materialized. Instead of becoming more democratic and cooperative, Moscow has become more authoritarian and adversarial. Hopes that the West and Russia could find common strategic ground after 9/11 have largely gone unfulfilled, and the two are even further apart now on issues such as Afghanistan, Iran, and Kosovo. The Orange and Rose Revolutions were interpreted in Moscow not as democratic breakthroughs but as threatening developments that needed to be challenged and reversed.

Who or what is responsible for these trends is, of course, an issue of considerable dispute. Was it a lack of U.S. and European imagination and will that allowed Russia to drift in this anti-Western direction? Or was it the result of internal Russian dynamics over which the West had little, if any, influence? Did NATO and EU enlargement push Russia in the wrong direction, or was the West fortunate to act when it did given what has followed? Enlargement has created more democratic stability on Russia's western border than at any time since Napoleon. Yet today, the Kremlin's spin doctors are creating a new stab-in-the-back legend of how the West betrayed Moscow during the 1990s. The gap in historical narratives mirrors the increasingly tense relationship between the West and Russia.

ALL QUIET ON THE EASTERN FRONT?

In light of these new circumstances in Russia, enlargement needs to be rethought from the ground up, starting with its strategic rationale. After the accession of a band of countries from the Baltic states in the north to Bulgaria and Romania in the south, many in the West assumed that the enlargement project was almost complete, with the western Balkans constituting the last piece of unfinished business. They were surprised to suddenly find new countries from Eurasia, and specifically the wider Black Sea region, starting to knock on the doors of NATO and the EU -- and unsure how to respond.

In dealing with these new candidate countries, the West must stick to the values and diplomatic principles it laid down in the 1990s, including the notion that countries are free to choose their alliances. But that alone is unlikely to be enough, because although these countries clearly consider themselves European, many Europeans do not feel the same historical or moral commitment to them or see a compelling strategic need to integrate them. Thus, in addition to moral and political arguments, the United States and Europe need to articulate a strong strategic rationale for anchoring them to the West.