European Union and NATO Expansion: Central and Eastern Europe

European Union and NATO Expansion

Previous Publications

Continuity and Change in the Baltic Sea Region: Comparing Foreign Policies (with D. Galbreath and J. Lamoreaux, 2008)

European Union and NATO Expansion Central and Eastern Europe

Ainius Lašas

European Union and NATO Expansion Copyright © Ainius Lašas, 2010 All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States – a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230 –10001–5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lašas, Ainius. European Union and NATO Expansion / Ainius Lašas. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–230 –10001–5 (alk. paper) 1. Europe–Economic integration–Political aspects. 2. European Union–Europe, Central. 3. European Union–Europe, Eastern. 4. North Atlantic Treaty Organization–Europe, Central. 5. North Atlantic Treaty Organization–Europe, Eastern. I. Title. JN15.L34 2009 341.242'2–dc22 2009034468 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by MPS Limited, A Macmillan Company First edition: April 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

To family, friends, and colleagues

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Contents

List of Tables and Figure

viii

Acknowledgments

ix

List of Abbreviations

xi

1 Introduction: Explaining NATO and EU Enlargement 2 The “Black Trinity” and the Cold War 3 NATO Enlargement 4 EU Enlargement 5 Conclusions and Extensions

1 27 65 103 141

Notes

153

References

185

Index

199

List of Tables and Figure

Tables 1.1 Countries affected by the “black trinity” 1.2 Western countries’ involvement in the “black trinity” 1.3 Competing explanations of Eastern enlargement 3.1 Freedom House ratings, 1996–2002 4.1 Selected economic data, 1997

Figure 1.1 Change in preference order of Western political elites

11 12 17 88 133

22

Acknowledgments

For financial support in conducting field research in Washington D.C. and Europe, I would like to thank the European Union Center of Excellence at the University of Washington and the Individual Ph.D. Program, my home department for the last five years. A special thank you is extended to the members of my dissertation committee: Christine Ingebritsen, James Caporaso, Daniel Chirot, Steve Hanson, Steve Pfaff, and Guntis Smidchens. Also, I am indebted to Arista Cirtautas, who was always ready to help. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Berit Jacobson for editing assistance. For help with translations to English, my appreciation goes to Tru Ambrose, Elsa Raibon, and Eleonora Jonušiene.. Finally, I would like to thank staff at Palgrave Macmillan for their help in transforming the manuscript into a book. This book is a revised and expanded version of the author’s article published in the Journal of European Public Policy: Ainius Lašas, 2008, “Restituting Victims: EU and NATO Enlargements through the Lenses of Collective Guilt,” Journal of European Public Policy 15 (1): 98–116.

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List of Abbreviations

BHE CEE CEECO CEECs CoE CSCE DoD EC EEC ENP EP EU FRG FSU GDP IR MAP NACC NATO NGO NIS OSCE PfP PHARE

TACIS

Bloc of Homeland Expellees and Disenfranchised Central and Eastern Europe Central and Eastern European Coalition Central and Eastern European countries Council of Europe Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe Department of Defense European Community European Economic Community European Neighborhood Policy European Parliament European Union Federal Republic of Germany Former Soviet Union Gross Domestic Product International Relations Membership Action Plan North Atlantic Cooperation Council North Atlantic Treaty Organization Non-Governmental Organization Newly Independent States Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Partnership for Peace Pologne et Hongrie: Aide à la Reconstruction Economique (Program of Community Aid to the Countries of Central and Eastern Europe) Technical Aid to the Commonwealth of Independent States

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Explaining NATO and EU Enlargement

T

he collapse of the Soviet empire in the late 1980s left the Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) not only with the delight of freedom but also with a chilling reality of post-Soviet economic, political, and social chaos. Feeling betrayed, compromised, and abandoned to the mercy of the Soviet tyranny for the past half a century, CEECs demanded full integration into the Euro-Atlantic structures as the only way to get a peaceful revenge on the ghosts of the past and to ensure a prosperous and secure future. This book argues that having contributed to their misery, Western political elites grappled with historical-psychological legacies, specifically collective guilt, over the Munich Agreement, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and the Yalta-Potsdam Conferences. NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and EU (European Union) enlargements became the acts of historical restitution for a specific group of CEECs affected by this “black trinity.”1 The variable of collective guilt—which does not imply any feelings of personal culpability—explains the rationale of the dual enlargement and designates countries that are eligible for expedited membership process. This research project thus addresses two basic questions. First, why did the EU and NATO decide to expand to Eastern Europe? The underlying reasons for expansion are not only important as such, but they also help to understand different stages of the policy development. The latter is at the heart of the second research question: why did EU and NATO enlargements follow particular stages of integration? The stages refer to the gradual nature of the process. NATO expanded eastward in 1999 and 2004. The EU also went through two waves of enlargement—in 2004 and 2007. Moreover, the EU followed a rigid and formal process of accession negotiations, which began with the official invitations for the CEECs. The two opening rounds

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in 1997 and 1999 provide additional points of reference for process-related research question. This book treats both enlargements as similar in rationale but more distinct in process due to structural differences of the organizations. As a higher-tier motivation, the variable of collective guilt explains the reasons for, the geographical scope of, and the overall time span of Eastern enlargements.2 In terms of the process of the accession, this variable provides a dynamic “tactical tunnel” for two lower-tier factors, that is, collective guilt gradually constrains interests and relaxes institutional norms as the pressure to deliver on the promise of enlargement builds up. In order to understand what is going within the constraints of the tunnel, it is necessary to examine the normative differences between the two organizations and take into account specific member state interests. In terms of institutional norms, NATO has a relatively narrow organizational profile, focusing almost exclusively on security issues. After the Cold War, its goals were gradually expanded to include conflict-management and peacekeeping missions, but its institutional norms and rules furnished little guidance beyond military command, control, and capability issues. In contrast, the EU abounds in institutional norms and rules. Its organizational structure and regulative scope dwarf those of NATO.3 Therefore, the book argues that norms and rules shaped the process of EU enlargement more actively than in the case of NATO. Given the “thin” normative layer of the Alliance, member state interests primarily influenced the process within the dynamic constraints of historical-psychological legacies. These contrasting density levels of institutional norms in interaction with member state interests explain some of the differences in the patterns of EU and NATO enlargements. The link between the two main research questions can be conceptualized in terms of strategy and tactics. Whereas the former involves the decision on a long-term policy objective, that is, NATO and EU enlargement to the CEECs, the latter deals with particular ways and means to reach this goal. However, before delving into methodological issues, I first overview current theoretical debates on enlargement and define the key concepts of this work. Grand Debates Currently, two major International Relations (IR) theoretical traditions— normative/constructivist and rational institutionalisms—dominate the debates over the Euro-Atlantic enlargement eastward. The constructivist approaches emphasize the role of institutional norms and/or identity, while

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the rationalist camp puts the explanatory weight on member state interests. These explanations are unsatisfactory because they provide either a too structurally deterministic or a too shallow reading of the enlargement process. The following review serves both as a summary of the theoretical debates and a critique of current approaches. Rationalist Approaches Building their explanatory framework, rationalists usually begin and end with member states’ geopolitical concerns and economic interests.4 In the case of the Alliance, they treat Eastern enlargement as a part of the reinvented NATO mission and new challenges in the post–Cold War environment.5 The process of expansion becomes a part of the larger institutional change where the Alliance is being transformed into a security management organization.6 The latter does not need “to pose credible deterrence threats” but rather to provide efficient information-sharing structures.7 As long as it does, NATO remains a viable institutional arrangement serving the interests of its members. A more “cynical” rationalist perspective interprets the persistence of the Alliance in the context of continuous burden-shifting and benefit-gaining strategies of the member states. Eastern enlargement is just another opportunity that “offers the promise of burdens shifted to others and a continuing flow of construction projects and weapons contracts that, with political skill and luck, will be paid for mostly with other people’s money.”8 The problem with both the efficiency and the benefit-gaining arguments was the fact that the new economically weak, militarily backward, and politically unstable members were bound to increase financial burdens of more prosperous member states and to dilute NATO organizational effectiveness.9 Even the geopolitical gains argument is hardly credible given Russia’s vehement resistance to NATO enlargement. Not surprisingly, realists seem to be at a loss over the causes of NATO expansion eastward. The end-of-NATO scenario, proposed by Kenneth Waltz and John Mearsheimer in the early 1990s, has not yet occurred.10 Unexpectedly, they blame a small group of Clinton advisors—National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, and Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke—who managed to outmaneuver their opponents in the U.S. bureaucracy.11 As Kenneth Waltz, the most prominent realist, puts it: “The error of realist predictions that the end of the Cold War would mean the end of NATO arose not from a failure of realist theory to comprehend international politics, but from an underestimation of America’s folly.”12 Still the origins of the “folly” remain unclear.

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Examining the case of EU Eastern enlargement, rationalists approach it as a fine balancing act among competing interests. Any opposition to enlargement simply stems from the uneven distribution of costs and benefits among the member states. As in previous rounds of EU expansion, the differences between losers and winners are resolved through side payments, concessions, and compromises, which, as predicted by interstate bargaining theory, lead to the convergence of preferences.13 Countering constructivists’ claims of prohibitive costs and uncertain benefits of the EU expansion, liberal intergovernmentalists point out that “the benefits of enlargement must be weighed together with the costs of foregoing it.”14 The argument is somewhat disingenuous because there is an obvious third option— substantially delaying (or pacing out the process of ) enlargement until CEECs implement necessary reforms and turn their economies around. This self-serving move would stop short of alienating Eastern Europe and at the same time tilt the benefit-cost ratio in favor of current member states. Despite rationalist assertions to the contrary, defection of candidates was hardly an issue since none of the CEECs longed to return under Moscow’s dominion. Furthermore, if opening of the EU market as a regional stabilizing factor was the driving force behind enlargement, as argued by Walter Mattli, then why was the European Community so reluctant to remove all trade barriers?15 In regard to the two stages of accession negotiations, liberal intergovernmentalist explanations follow constructivist argument of the differentiating levels of compliance with institutional rules and norms. Vachudova presents it as “the meritocracy principle,” which entails a comprehensive assessment of progress toward meeting accession criteria across countries as well as across time in each candidate country.16 Recently, some realists also entered the EU enlargement debate arguing that security interests of the member states are the key motives for the enlargement. Focusing the process of enlargement, Lars Skålnes insists that the 1993 commitment to enlarge at the Copenhagen Council and the 1999 decision to expand accession talks at the Helsinki Council to ten countries are best understood by taking in account broader European security dilemmas. In 1993, dwindling reforms in Eastern Europe and the ongoing conflict in the former Yugoslavia generated a commitment to enlarge eastward. The 1999 decision came out of the concerns related to the Kosovo crisis. Still Skålnes admits that constructivist arguments—the record of compliance with institutional rules and norms—adequately explain the invitation of the first five candidate countries to the negotiations table in 1998.17 While realists put a finger on potentially important factors, their argument fails to account for different economic and security conditions across Central and Eastern Europe. It is also unclear why the EU was eager

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to stabilize the Baltic States or Poland, but not so much Turkey, Moldova, Georgia, or Ukraine. Constructivist Approaches Many constructivist institutionalists treat the EU and NATO as “norm entrepreneurs”18 spreading their own institutional values: democratic peace, respect for human rights, and regional stability and security.19 The process of enlargement is perceived not only as an ongoing discourse but also as a kind of an academic course on liberal democracy, where parties recognize and accept “their respective roles as teachers and students.”20 As aspiring candidates study and absorb institutional values, they “grow into” a member state. The actual act of expansion is only a formality reflecting the process of convergence that has already occurred. In the case of NATO, this community of shared values does not have to be contained within predetermined geographical boundaries. As long as nonmember states are interested in applying to the “NATO academy,” the Alliance’s boundaries can be stretched “from Vladivostok to Berlin, San Francisco and Tokyo.”21 This Deutschian “security community” expands because of its institutional values and norms.22 The same logic applies to the EU Eastern enlargement project, which, according to O’Brennan, grew out of “an existing set of norms and practices but itself developed in a way which both helped better define existing practice and created a new more concrete normative template for future enlargement rounds.”23 Introducing a more historically nuanced approach, Fierke and Wiener emphasize the interaction between context, speech acts, and institutional change.24 Given the past promises of the West, especially the Final Act of CSCE (Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe) signed in Helsinki on 1 August 1975, the CEECs were able to leverage these speech acts as threats in the post–Cold War context. Concerned about the possible alienation of the CEECs from the core Western values—liberal democracy and free market economy and the loss of face over the unfulfilled promises—the Euro-Atlantic community decided to expand eastward. Thus, the decision to enlarge came out of “the tension between past promises and on-going practice in a context of dramatic change.”25 While underspecified, the particular process-related outcomes seem to be primarily shaped by conflicting institutional interests. For example, in the controversy over the NATO membership of the Baltic States, Fierke and Wiener see the clash of two contradictory promises: promise to expand and promise to partner with Russia.26 However, it is not clear why and how one promise ended up prevailing over another. Interestingly, both Turkey and Ukraine were also among the signatories of

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the Helsinki Accords, but their EU fortunes turned sour, presumably due to some other set of conflicting promises. In contrast to purely constructivist perspectives, Frank Schimmelfennig attempts not only to account for institutional and normative factors but also to capture the rationalist domain of interstate bargaining mechanisms.27 He supplements a constructivist perspective with some of the features of liberal intergovernmentalism. Schimmelfennig argues that a normative perspective can fill in the rationalist gaps by examining the community as a strategic norm-promoting actor. The link between the two perspectives is found in the notion of strategic “rhetorical action,” where state actors, constrained by rhetorical commitments and community norms, are forced to honor their pledges.28 Rhetorical action, “the strategic use of arguments,” is put in contrast to Habermas’ communicative action, which is defined as “non-strategic, appropriate use of arguments” (emphasis in original).29 In explaining the phenomenon of rhetorical entrapment, Schimmelfennig assumes a one-way process, that is, pro-enlargement actors “entrap” opposition on the basis of their previous rhetorical statements and commitments. However, entrapment could have successfully occurred in the opposite direction: the anti-enlargement coalition “entraps” the CEECs by demanding, for example, a long premembership transition period as proof of lasting commitment to Euro-Atlantic democratic ideals. Instead, the EU and NATO enlarged eastward with few “hiccups.” Institutional-norms-based interpretations view both enlargements as open-door projects, where the Euro-Atlantic community should be equally ready to consider, for example, the memberships of Ukraine, Poland, the Southern Caucasus, and the Baltic countries. Given the existing differentiation among these countries, constructivist Helen Sjursen proposes European identity as the key factor that can adequately explain the contrasting EU approaches to the CEECs and Turkey. She interprets the enlargement as a manifestation of “kinship-based duty,” which stems from the perception of common European identity within a limited geographical and cultural space.30 Building on the Habermas’ theory of communicative action, Sjursen insists that norms and identities are an “end in themselves,” defining what is considered a valid and true European. While the CEECs represent “the kidnapped West,” Turkey has always played the role of “other” in the European cultural consciousness.31 Therefore, the CEECs are destined to join the EU, while Turkey seems to be damned by history to remain outside of the community. The main shortcoming of the framework is the black box of “kinship-based duty.” What is it based on? Why do Romania and Bulgaria but not Ukraine fall under the notion of European kinship? Is the latter somehow less “European” than largely Muslim Albania or Bosnia

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and Herzegovina, which are considerably ahead in their pursuit of EU membership? While acknowledging the relevance of the EU’s identity, another influential constructivist, Ulrich Sedelmeier, singles out a specific aspect of the identity. The underlying rationale for enlargement is found in the EU identity vis-à-vis the CEECs, which “prescribes to actively support the transformations in the CEECs and their integration into the EU.”32 Specific Eastern enlargement outcomes are explained through the varying degrees of internalization of identity-driven norms by EU and member states officials. On the one hand, because of the high levels of resonance with the EU’s identity toward the CEECs, policy makers responsible for external relations in the member states and in the European Commission constituted a strong pro-enlargement coalition. On the other hand, shielded from the policy advocates and entrenched into their own policy paradigms, sectoral policy makers in the Commission and member states were less inclined to accommodate Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) preferences.33 Whereas siding with the constructivist school of thought in favor of nonmaterial reasons for both enlargements, this book puts the explanatory weight on historical-psychological legacies, particularly collective guilt, that are exogenous to NATO and EU organizational norms. It builds the argument on Sedelmeier’s insight that the broader aspects of institutional identity are insufficient to trigger a commitment to enlarge.34 One has to consider “the specific role construction of the EU in its relationship with the CEECs.”35 His rather vague and EU-bureaucracy-centered concept of responsibility is replaced with the notion of the collective guilt or responsibility of the EuroAtlantic community over the Munich Agreement, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and the Yalta Agreement. In contrast to Sedelmeier, who argues that responsibility does not imply that the EU was “indeed ‘responsible’ by any objective standard,”36 this book argues that the sense of responsibility was substantive and “real” among Euro-Atlantic political elites. Such countries as Germany not only repeatedly acknowledged and accepted, but were also assigned by others historical responsibility for the unfortunate fate of the CEECs immediately before, during, and following the World War II. Thus, NATO and EU members both perceived CEE demands for membership as “objectively” legitimate and felt a sense of moral-historical obligation to respond positively to such demands. At the core of the enlargement initiatives was a determined group of Western policy entrepreneurs. They formed interest-based coalitions, which developed and pushed through this agenda at various critical junctures. Since guilt is a noninstitutional variable, which constitutes a sufficient, but not a necessary condition for membership, it has to be linked with

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specific organizational structures and political contexts in order to map out the process of both enlargements across time and geographical space. At the end of this chapter, a proposed model brings together these diverse explanatory variables by using what some scholars call the domain of application approach.37 Theoretical Framework This section defines five concepts, which constitute and/or inform the explanatory model of the book: historical-psychological legacies, collective guilt, restitution demands, institutional norms, and member state interests. The first three relate to the question of motivation for Eastern enlargement, while the last two to the processes of both enlargements. Legacies and Collective Guilt Collective guilt stems from “being associated with a group that has perpetrated injustice against another group.”38 Since it “acts as an attitude of self-assessment—but the self here is not one’s self but the collective or group of which one is a part,” collective guilt may or may not lead to a sense of personal culpability.39 This moral responsibility by association is what Karl Jaspers designated as “political guilt”40 and Hannah Arendt as “collective responsibility.”41 In the context of EU and NATO enlargements, the collective acquires not only a national dimension but also an international stratum vis-à-vis the EU as an economic-political community and NATO as a security community. This interpretation in part resonates with Risse-Kappen’s analysis of Western normative communities.42 Alternatively, it can be viewed as an extension of the historical legacies literature elaborated by such prominent scholars as Ken Jowitt, Andrew Janos, and others.43 Instead of following their structuralist line of argument, this work introduces a notion of constructed historical-psychological legacies. These are persistent emotional states shared by a group of political actors, which are intrinsically linked with past events and experiences vis-à-vis other groups of actors. Galvanized by a variety of internal and/or external factors, the states represent a specter of emotions including but not limited to sympathy, guilt, hatred, fear, et cetera. Thus, collective guilt is a subset of historical-psychological legacies. Collective responsibility implies a certain shared understanding of right and wrong. It manifests when an actor or a group of actors acknowledge that their social group violated societal norms or laws and brought about damage to another group. More importantly, not only does guilt indicate a moral violation but it also signals that “steps should be taken to repair

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that relationship.”44 Once acts of reparation and restoration take place, they not only acquire the symbolic significance of “a rite of passage back to union”45 but also provide psychological relief and a sense of closure. Elster offers the most concise and compelling summary of the underlying mechanisms of guilt: The basic action tendency of guilt is to make repairs, to undo the bad one has caused. In addition, there is often a strong urge to confess, preferably to the person one has harmed. Both tendencies are expressions of a more general tendency to restore an equilibrium that has been upset [emphasis added].46

In the case of the CEECs, guilt emerges from connotations and consequences of the “black trinity.” Each of the three pacts symbolizes a form of betrayal, complacency, or even deceit on the part of some Western countries. As representatives of their states, political elites—in contrast to ordinary citizens—tend to have a heightened sense of historical awareness. Feeling responsibility for harm done, they seek to confess the wrongdoing and to remedy the situation through reunification. This responsibility stems not so much from institutional norms but from crucial historical mistakes that left CEECs behind the Iron Curtain for 50 years. While institutional norms provided a favorable environment for an Eastern enlargement agenda, they did not shape the specific geographical scope of NATO and EU enlargement commitments. If one strictly follows this “institutionalist” logic, NATO and the EU—given the open-ended nature of their enlargementrelated institutional norms—should have granted the future possibility of membership to every country in Europe as long as an applicant was willing to work toward meeting accession criteria. Similarly, Fierke and Wiener’s analysis of the promises of the Helsinki Final Act should be applicable to all signatory countries. In social psychology, the analysis of guilt is often coupled with another “moral emotion”—shame. While there is some debate over possible overlapping influences of the two emotions,47 most scholars differentiate between guilt and shame on the basis of contrasting behavioral outcomes. As suggested in the groundbreaking work of Helen Block Lewis, “the experience of shame is directly about the self, which is the focus of evaluation,” while “in guilt the self is not the central object of negative evaluation, but rather the thing done or undone is the focus.”48 Given this contrasting focus, shame leads to a desire to hide and escape, while guilt leads toward approach and reparation.49 Also, many researchers link guilt with empathy.50 This otheroriented emphatic feeling shifts the focus from the defective self to an offending behavior, generating a motivation for reparative action: “The tension, remorse,

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and regret of guilt causes us to stop and rethink—and it offers a way out, pressing us to confess, apologize, and make amends.”51 Why did Western political elites experience collective guilt rather than shame over the “black trinity”? The findings by social psychologists suggest four factors, which underlie the emergence of guilt in this situation: the role of victims, the collective nature of actors, the controllability, and the temporality of the failures. First, “victim” states guided the emerging debate toward concrete reparative actions. After the collapse of the Eastern bloc, CEE political elites not only raised the issue of the Euro-Atlantic responsibility over the past historical events but also tied their grievances to the actual steps of reconciliation. Using their moral authority, East European leaders demanded full reintegration of the CEECs into the Western community as the ultimate proof of the irreversibility of history. In some ways, this behavior parallels parent-child dynamics, where parents’ approach to their child’s inappropriate behavior can induce either guilt or shame.52 Second, the collective nature of the “national self ” made the emergence of shame highly unlikely. Because the definition of “self ” must be applied on a societal level, the only possible shaming argument would focus on the flawed national character as the cause of specific historical events. Obviously, such claims would be unfounded, offensive, and unconvincing.53 Instead, CEE leaders focused their debate on specific events where the West failed to stand up to their principles. This brings me to the third factor: controllable failures seem to generate guilt, while uncontrollable attributes—shame.54 To the extent that the Western leaders could have controlled, shaped, or even prevented the events of the “black trinity,” they should experience guilt. Most historians and political scientists would agree that all parties involved actively shaped and voluntarily signed the Munich Agreement, the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, and the Yalta Agreement. Most scholars also agree that these agreements brought adverse consequences to the affected countries. Because these agreements came about by the volition of the signatories, they should have felt responsible for the effects of these agreements. Finally, to the extent that the failure is the result of a specific temporally bounded situation (rather than some permanent flaw), the feeling of guilt seems to be a likely response. Because the “black trinity” represented historical decisions made 50 years ago by political leaders that only come alive in historical accounts, their failures tell nothing about the characters of current Western political elites. However, because their decisions sealed the fate of the CEECs right up to the 1990s, this frozen history recurred with the meltdown of the Eastern bloc. The players were different, but the situation was immediately and directly linked with the “black trinity.” This was an opportunity to take into account the desires of the CEECs and

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make choices that would redress historical injustices. EU and NATO memberships became the symbols and vehicles of reconciliation and reunion. Despite the suggested importance of historical-psychological legacies, NATO and EU enlargements should not be perceived as historically predetermined events. It took time for the consensus over the proper compensation for historical injustices to be reached. The new CEE political elite insisted on complete integration into the Western structures even before the collapse of the Soviet bloc, but the process was somewhat slower among the Euro-Atlantic community members, which over the years came to accept the inevitability of this forced division of Europe decreed by Yalta.55 Especially, in the case of NATO, the question of “if ” turned into “when and how” only after the dust of Soviet disintegration settled. Building on the collective guilt literature, the growing salience of the consequences of the three black spots in recent European history bolstered the commitment to enlarge.56 Also, the argument based on historical-psychological legacies does not suggest that enlargement is inevitable for all affected countries. Instead it defines a specific group of countries, which, due to past historical events, has a “competitive advantage” over other countries (see Table 1.1). Essentially, these countries have a different set of Table 1.1 Countries affected by the “black trinity” Countries Albania Bosnia-Herzegovina Bulgaria Croatia Czech Republic Estonia Hungary Kosovo Latvia Lithuania Macedonia Moldovaa Montenegro Poland Romania Serbia Slovakia Slovenia

Munich

Molotov-Ribbentrop

X X

X X X X

X

Yalta-Potsdam X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X

a Moldova’s case is unique because it was split from Romania and made into a separate Soviet republic. Thus, from a narrow nationalistic perspective, such historical developments should be interpreted positively.

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rules that apply to them, if they take advantage of these circumstances in their pursuit of westward integration. However, not all countries affected by the “black trinity” joined NATO and the EU. This potential for experiencing collective guilt and acting to remedy the situation may be unused or suppressed by various intervening factors. In the case of many former Yugoslavian countries, the breakout of the Bosnian War in 1992 and other regional tensions later on prevented such countries as Bosnia-Herzegovina or Croatia from joining the process of enlargement. Thus, throughout much of the 1990s, neither the Euro-Atlantic community nor West Balkan politicians spent much time thinking about membership prospects as there were more pressing concerns to deal with. Does the “black trinity” have an additive effect favoring countries impacted by multiple historical events? The book treats these three events as symbols of the Cold War tragedy rather than as exact representations of all recent historical incidents related to a particular country. All of them cast one 50-year-long shadow of history over the region. Therefore, once evoked in the enlargement discourse, these symbols should have grouped rather than disaggregated affected countries. Still this question deserves to be answered on empirical grounds. It is revisited in the conclusion. Although collective guilt is assigned to the West, not all countries bear the same levels of responsibility. Table 1.2 lists countries that were involved in the decision-making process of the three treaties. While the list of direct participants is quite limited, the collective responsibility argument extends beyond these countries. As noted by Branscombe and Doosje, “immoral actions and outcomes caused by other in-group members link the self to the wrongdoing via shared group identity.”57 This spillover effect applies to international organizations that were created in Europe to deal with the aftermath of World War II and included the culprits. While direct responsibility does not transfer to other members, solidarity with peers within an organizational framework provides a sense of common responsibility grounded in the logic of appropriateness as specified by James March and Johan Olsen.58 This dynamic leads to an institutional convergence of preferences, but it does not exclude the possibility that an individual member Table 1.2 Western countries’ involvement in the “black trinity” Level of involvement

Munich

Molotov-Ribbentrop

Yalta-Potsdam

Direct participation

France, UK, Germany, Italy

Germany

United States, UK

Indirect participation

Italy

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state may also retain other motives to support Eastern enlargement. The same dynamic occurs on a national level where political elites exhibit a variety of diverse feelings and historical assessments. The convergence of preferences and development of pro-enlargement coalitions occurs through moral suasion and mobilization of similarly minded decision makers across bureaucratic and political levels. The mechanism that transforms discourse into decisions revolves around the constructivist concept of norm socialization. Once CEE demands converge with the acknowledgment of responsibility by some Western political elites, the norm of victim restitution becomes activated, that is, it creates “impetus for behavior consistent with the belief.”59 Given the uneven internalization of historical-psychological legacies by political elites of various member states, this norm, as typically specified in constructivist literature, both constitutes and regulates behavior.60 On the one hand, it sets an appropriate standard of restitution; on the other, it constrains opposition. When key Western countries acknowledged their historical responsibility and pledged to undo the division of Europe, any opposition to this commitment from other member states was largely delegitimized because, according to their role of in-group members, it was an inappropriate behavior.61 Restitution Demands In current Eastern enlargement literature, CEE demands for EU and NATO memberships are usually interpreted as purely strategic arguments in “a self-serving, competitive, and opportunistic manner.”62 This shallow reading of the CEE motives ignores two key factors: the existence of the pre-independence “return to Europe” discourse and the role of restitution for CEE societies. Since chapter 2 addresses the topic of preindependence discourse, we turn to the issue of restitution. Its roots go much deeper and wider than EU and NATO enlargement. The CEE governments perceived the 1989–1991 events as the restoration of pre–World War II independence. This was not only a symbolic act but often entailed at least a partial reinstatement of interbellum legal and political systems, opening up venues for various forms of restitution. For example, the issue of private property restitution featured prominently in domestic political agenda of most “restored” states in the 1990s. Whether it succeeded or not, its intended goal was social justice, that is, individuals (and in some cases religious and ethnic communities) had to be compensated for their “illegally, or morally unjustifiably,” confiscated property.63 The issue of restitution also came up in social policy vis-à-vis resistance fighters and deportees, and even in citizenship laws. It has been ingrained in the post-Soviet Eastern European legal,

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political, and cultural fabric. Therefore, restitution demands to the West should be interpreted as a part of the broader CEE understanding of their current national narratives and identities. After all, such demands were not limited to the West only. To this day, the Baltic States insist that Russia, as a legitimate heir of the Soviet Union, should take responsibility for the damage caused by the 45-year-long occupation of the region.64 Despite the futility of such attempts and detrimental effects to bilateral political and economic relations, the Baltic republics continue this seemingly “irrational” foreign policy. Like most of the CEECs, they seek to deal with the consequences of the “black trinity” on a number of different levels. The “return to Europe” was only one of many restitution discourses that pervaded CEE domestic and foreign policies. The collapse of the Soviet Union not only reinforced memories of the past and heightened the historical awareness of political actors but also brought the affected party to the discussion table. The voices of East European dissidents, suppressed for decades, came out with a new force in the late 1980s as they moved from the political side street to the main street. For them, the three agreements were not distant historical analogies but tragic geopolitical realities persisting since World War II. Whether their critical assessments about the “black trinity” have been justified in an objective historical sense is largely irrelevant for the purposes of this work. What is relevant is that with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, East Europeans earned the moral right to interpret recent history and put out demands based on these interpretations. The winners, embodied by such larger-than-life figures as Lech Wałe˛sa and Václav Havel, sided with the critical approach to the Euro-Atlantic community vis-à-vis the “black trinity.” This strategy only strengthened and legitimized the positions of a certain group of Western political elites that expressed similar points of view. Thus, it is not surprising that moral responsibility regarding the “black trinity” became a key factor in discussions on NATO and EU enlargement. Interests and Norms The variables of member state interests and institutional norms have been extensively discussed among IR scholars for the past several decades. The book treats them as important secondary factors that influenced the process of enlargement. Each variable is defined within its theoretical paradigm and the distinct domain of application. Institutional norms are conceptualized as both formal and informal operating practices and procedures of a given organization. From the constructivist perspective, the institutional norms regulate and shape actors’ behavior.65

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They are “the boundaries between prescribed behaviors and proscribed behaviors in a particular institutional setting.”66 In the case of the EU and NATO, these operating practices guide and constrain member state representatives and institutional bureaucrats in decision-making situations. At its most powerful, a norm can be internalized by actors achieving “a ‘taken-for-granted’ quality” that transforms compliance with the norm into a routine.67 Member state interests are often external to a specific international institution, that is, they are rooted in a domestic context constituting national policy approaches on an international level.68 In line with the classical microeconomic theory, interests are defined as egoistic utility-maximizing calculations formulated before the start of negotiations.69 Given the participation of multiple players, member states calculate payoffs vis-à-vis other relevant decision makers.70 More lenient rational choice paradigms perceive institutional norms as intervening variables that can inform, guide, or structure the bargaining process.71 Generally though, the emphasis is on an individual actor (or a group of individual actors) rather than on an institutional context.72 The point of conceptual convergence between the two theoretical perspectives is the acknowledgment of the presence of the two variables in an organizational setting.73 This assumption does not contradict foundations of either theory as long as institutional norms and member state interests have distinct roles in their specific domains of application. Along the constructivist line of thinking, institutional norms are conceptualized as an independent variable, but this variable does not constitute member state interests. In the same way, the origins of member state interests cannot be derived from EU and NATO institutional norms. In line with the domain of application approach, neither of these independent variables is an intervening one in relationship to the other in shaping policy preferences of EU and NATO enlargements. This is consistent with the findings of current literature discussed earlier. As secondary factors, interests and norms interact with the primary variable—collective guilt—shaping particular outcomes. The proposed model of interaction is one of the focuses of the methodological section. Methodological Framework Although the gap between the rationalist and constructivist meta-theories is here to stay, this book embraces the challenge of some IR scholars to utilize not only competitive but also additive modes of theory testing.74 For NATO and EU Eastern enlargements, it posits two key questions. First, it wants to understand underlying motives for enlargement, that is, why the

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EU and NATO communities decided to open their membership doors to the CEECs. It is a competitive single-variable testing that evaluates the impact of historical-psychological legacies on Eastern enlargements. The “competitors” are the two most prevalent variables in current literature: institutional norms and member state interests. The second question focuses on the process and patterns of the enlargements: how and when the EU and NATO communities enlarged eastward. The model emphasizes the interaction among the variables. It specifies both the rank ordering of the variables and the expected interaction effects. This competitive preference sequence testing provides more insight into the enlargement as a policymaking process. Conceptually, these two questions are separate because of distinct dynamics: one of them is rather static while the other varies across time. The question of motivation is closely linked with the political decision to enlarge. In the case of the EU, it decided to open its doors to the CEECs during the June 1993 Copenhagen Summit. For NATO, the initial step took place around the time of the January 1994 Summit in Brussels. In both cases, the political decision was made before the respective bureaucracies developed actual enlargement tactics. The second question, or the question of patterns, relates to the political and bureaucratic routines of the international institutions. The paths of Eastern enlargement reflected the process of “the pulling and hauling.”75 The relationship between the two questions was one of strategy and tactics. The variable of collective guilt, a meta-motivation, actively informed the strategy—the overall longterm plan—of expansion. At the tactical level, that is, the actual short-term ways in which the strategy was executed, the collective guilt became more of a framing device providing the “tunnel” within whose constraints lower-tier preferences based on member state interests and institutional norms operated. This meta-constraint varied over time. As enlargement approached the finish line, the “tactical tunnel” began to tighten in the case of member state interests and to relax in the case of institutional norms because of the pressure to meet the actual goal based on historical-psychological legacies. Such meta-structural pressures may be inexorable in a multiple preference model if and when lower-tier preferences (based on structure or agency) start to interfere. However, before specifying anticipated interaction effects, I begin with a simplified single-variable model. Question No. 1: Why to Expand? The question of underlying motivation of Eastern enlargements is inherently challenging because it involves “inner reasoning” by the decision makers.

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Publicly stated preferences may not always coincide with the actual ones because of reputational and/or strategic concerns. However, when a particular rhetoric not only remains consistent in public and in private, but also predefines and aligns with the outcomes, one can make a safe assumption that the stated motivation reflects the actual one. To tease out the motivation behind EU and NATO enlargements, the book utilizes a competitive testing model. Each competing variable reflects its own theoretical realm and distinct expected outcomes. This stylized approach differentiates among the underlying logics of actor behavior. Rather than being motivated by strategic gains or the expansion of a normative community, the legacies-based argument proposed in this book highlights the importance of psychological relief and closure. Thus, enlargement becomes possible not when member states’ benefits outweigh costs or when candidate countries adopt and implement community norms and rules, but when acknowledgment of collective responsibility and restitution demands converge to mend historical damage. Obviously, the inner motivation cannot be measured directly; however, it leads to some important variation in expected outcomes (see Table 1.3). First, collective guilt argument favors full integration of the affected countries in the short and long term. The commitment of the Euro-Atlantic community to expansion should be clear and resolute from the first stages of the process. From the rationalist point of view, association is the most appropriate short-term strategy because it not only allows to obtain more Table 1.3 Competing explanations of Eastern enlargement Variables

Member state interests Strategic gains

Institutional norms

Collective guilt

Expansion of normative/ideological community Adoption of/ compliance with institutional norms

• Psychological relief and satisfaction • Sense of closure • Acknowledgment of guilt • Restitution demands by victims Full integration

Motivation behind enlargement Enlargement triggers

Benefits outweigh costs

Preferred “type” of enlargement Approach to enlargement

Short term: association Long term: integration Country-by-country differentiation

Short term: association Long term: integration Country-by-country differentiation

Enlargement timeline

Varies from country to country

Varies from country to country

Regional differentiation based on the geography of guilt Expedited process of regional integration

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information about the future gains/losses of East European integration but also allows to cherry-pick most economically successful and geostrategically important candidates. If formalized, this set-up would lock in the candidate countries into the cooperative framework and would eliminate any risks of defection, however minute they might be. This framework also aligns with the rationalist insight of the time horizons of the political process.76 Because politicians have short time horizons framed by the electoral cycles, they should not embrace obvious short-term costs of Eastern enlargement for possible long-term gains. Similarly, for constructivists, who argue that the process of EU and NATO accession was largely based on the exclusive (compliance leads to membership) rather than inclusive (membership leads to compliance) strategy, the short-term preference is for association. It provides additional information on the sincerity and ability of candidates to adopt and internalize community norms. A basic game model can illustrate these claims. Three main groups of players—enlargement skeptics, proponents, and uncommitted—faced three basic choices in response to Eastern European demands of membership: to deny membership, to commit to membership, or to offer enhanced cooperation short of membership, thus leaving space for future maneuvering.77 For enlargement skeptics the most advantageous strategy would have been the outright denial of membership prospects. Because in the early 1990s the CEECs were just beginning to reform their institutional structures and faced enormous economic challenges, exacerbated by worldwide recession; the benefits of future enlargements were few and far in between. The 1993 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) economic predictions for the region gave little reason for optimism: “A number of the CEECs should expand in 1994 and all of them should do so in 1995, but growth will remain disappointingly slow.”78 The same outlook applied to the implementation of institutional rules and norms, which involved significant domestic financial and human resources. At the time, the CEE political elites were just starting to take a closer look at EU and NATO institutional structures. For skeptics, the second-best strategy was to set up formal cooperation mechanisms with the CEECs without giving explicit promises of membership. This choice would have provided some maneuvering space to control negative externalities. The least palatable option involved explicit commitments to institutional enlargement. Not surprisingly, enlargement enthusiasts should have faced the exact opposite order of preferences with the latter being their most favored option followed by cooperation mechanisms short of membership and the denial of accession prospects at the bottom of the list. Those on the fence should have preferred the cooperation strategy because it gave more time to evaluate potential

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members while locking them into an institutionalized cooperation system in case their membership becomes advantageous in the future. The second-best option for the undecided would have been equally split between the option of outright denial and commitment. Essentially, they should have been indifferent to either choice. Thus, the collective payoffs favored the cooperation strategy, unless enlargement could be limited to the most economically advanced and strategically important candidates. Before exploring the small enlargement option, this situation already presents a puzzle for rationalchoice-based enlargement theories—why choose the public commitment to enlarge and limit the maneuvering space early on in the game? The answer might be incentives to avoid defection, as suggested by Vachudova.79 But the problem was that the CEECs did not have anywhere to defect. The option of “return to Moscow” was clearly not on their list of preferences. At the same time, Russia presented no actual threat to the region. With their troops out of most CEECs by the end of 1993, the potential for regional tensions significantly subsided. Constructivists face a similar challenge: why designate future members at the very start of the socialization process given the distribution of joint preferences? One possible option is to abandon the compliance argument and focus instead on predefined identities or kinship-based duties.80 Coming back to Table 1.3, the second variation in expected outcomes involves the size of enlargement. If historical-psychological legacies played a fundamental role, member states should approach enlargement from a broader regional perspective that differentiated potential candidate countries on the basis of predefined geographical extent of the collective guilt. Those affected by the “black trinity” should face more favorable accession conditions than others. For both interest- and norm-based approach, the differentiation should vary from country to country. Rationalist principles would posit that each candidate’s accession prospects depend on the costs/benefits ratio for the member states. The most “cost-effective” candidates should be admitted first followed by less “beneficial” ones. The only caveats to this rule are possibilities that the admission en masse is more efficient than countryby-country strategy or that it is extremely difficult to determine the most advanced candidates.81 From the constructivist point of view, the accession depends on the levels of normative buy-in by candidate countries, which is also an individual evaluation approach. Such clearly disaggregated strategy should strengthen the CEE commitment to convergence with the EU institutional norms and rules rather than dilute it, a potential danger in the group-based setting. If one accepts the correlation between economic prosperity and ability to implement institutional reforms and to enhance military effectiveness and capability, then both interest-based and norm-based

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scenarios of enlargement should be quite similar. The cost-benefit calculations of EU and NATO enlargements should roughly follow national GDP per capita growth estimates. According to a well-known work by economist Richard Baldwin published in 1994, under optimistic growth scenarios the average income of the four Visegrad countries should reach 75 percent of EU-12 average income in 20–30 years. Slovenia was the only candidate forecasted to reach the target in 8–11 years.82 This is roughly consistent with other forecasts predicting that in 40 years—1997 being the base year— only five CEECs should reach or exceed the EU-15 mean income levels. A more conservative forecast has only two or three countries approaching EU income averages.83 Most economists tend to assume that lower than 75 percent income levels present a financial burden for member states and structural reform challenges for candidates. Going by these economic forecasts, the most advantageous strategy favors small size enlargement in the long run (20–30 years). The second-best strategies would be a small size enlargement in the medium run (8–11 years) or a medium size (4–6 countries) enlargement in the long run.84 This is generally consistent with the predictions and recommendations of Centre for Economic Policy Research report issued in 1992, which stated that the admission of “substantial numbers of CEECs as full members within the next two decades” is difficult and unlikely.85 The final expectation based on historical-psychological legacies (Table 1.3) touches upon the issue of timing. The variable of collective guilt should compel member states to agree on the expedited time line of integration or even to commit to concrete deadlines before any strategic gains or compliance records become obvious. In the most ideal scenario short of immediate membership for all countries affected by the “black trinity,” the enlargement driven by collective guilt should favor large expansion completed in the shorter end of the medium-run spectrum. In the case of interests and norms, the underlying principles still remain individualistic. When it is in their interests, member states should expedite the accession of a particular candidate country or countries, while leaving others behind. The normative argument judges the timing of enlargement according to candidates’ records of compliance. The most diligent “students” gain membership first leaving freeloaders to repeat the course. With the above discussion of the strategy—overall principles and rules—of the enlargements, four collective-guilt-driven hypotheses form the first set of expectations: 1. Guilt-related discourse. Extensive guilt-related discourse should be present between both candidate and member states. This discourse

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should clearly link the historical events—the Munich Agreement, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and the Yalta-Potsdam Conferences—with enlargement as a mechanism of compensation. 2. The right of CEECs to accede to NATO and the EU. Because of suppressed opposition, member states should not openly question the right of countries affected by the “black trinity” to become full-fledged members of the key Euro-Atlantic organizations in contrast with other potential applicants. On the other hand, the CEECs should not be afraid to openly demand NATO and EU memberships as their historical right. 3. Early commitment to enlarge. If guilt played a role in NATO and EU enlargements, member states should commit themselves to enlargement early in order to demonstrate their willingness to remedy the situation and to avoid the mistakes of the past. The acceptance of historical responsibility, by such key countries as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany in particular, should rapidly elevate enlargement debates from “whether” to “when” and “how.” 4. Regional approach to enlargement. Because the “black trinity” affected over a dozen countries, enlargement should be approached from a broader regional perspective. Also, there must be guilt-based differentiation between outsiders (non-Baltic former Soviet Union, i.e., FSU countries) and insiders –(the CEECs, including former Yugoslavia and Albania). While some of these hypotheses seem to resonate with current enlargement literature, there are important differences that become apparent in the course of the book. The next section discusses the second level of inquiry, which focuses on the particular tactics of Eastern enlargement. So to say, the focus from the forest is brought down to individual trees. Question No. 2: How and When to Expand? As argued earlier, the process and patterns of Eastern enlargement are functions of member state interests and institutional rules within the dynamic constraints of historical-psychological legacies. There are a number of possible ranking orders of the variables or in other words tactical choices. Given the previous hypothesis of the collective guilt as the meta-motivation for enlargement, member state interests and institutional rules become secondary preferences (see Fig. 1.1). The change occurs due to moral suasion from Eastern European political elites and from within Western societies as some politicians embrace and articulate pro-enlargement

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European Union and NATO Expansion Systemic changes

Domestic moral suasion

PHASE I Western Political Elites

1st order preference

Activation of historicalpsychological legacies

Foreign moral suasion

PHASE II Western Political Elites

Member state interests

Collective guilt

Institutional norms

Member state interests

(Collective guilt)

Institutional norms

Deny/refuse to commit

1st order preference 2nd order preferences

Commit to large expansion in medium-term

Figure 1.1 Change in preference order of Western political elites.

arguments based on historical responsibility of their own countries. While the lower-tier factors do not undercut the primary motivation, they impact the pace and tactics of Eastern enlargement by introducing “the snake in the tunnel.” There are three process-related hypotheses as member states take into account their national interests and monitor the alignment of the candidates with institutional norms: 5. The pace of enlargement should be cyclical. Fears of overly speedy expansion should generate pressure to slow down and take into account lower-tier preferences, while any excessive slowdown should put pressure back to align with the dominant pro-enlargement motivation. 6. Institutional rules should introduce some short-term differentiation among candidates. However, if the candidate countries fail to live up to preset standards, rules should be gradually relaxed as the accession process draws near the end. The pressure to meet the actual goal of enlargement amplifies the “tactical tunnel” providing more wiggle room vis-à-vis institutional rules and norms. 7. The protection of national interests should be increasingly constrained to most important and legitimate issues. We should observe the gradual tightening of this “tactical tunnel” as enlargement starts to approach the finish line.

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Based on these three hypotheses, it is clear that initially the policy at the tactical level should be quite cumbersome because of these lower-tier preferences aggregated into the enlargement agenda. As the process evolves, historical-psychological legacies generate “the proof of pudding is the eating” dynamics, that is, pressure builds to deliver on membership promises in order to avoid a perception of another appeasement to the detriment of the CEECs. This leads to the relaxation of institution rules and the attenuation of member state interests. Chapters 3 and 4 deconstruct three main variables and evaluate their effects on enlargement decisions. While in reality the distinction between the three is not clear-cut, this research design makes it possible to better differentiate among the influences of independent variables. Because this framework is a parsimonious (and thus inevitably blunt) tool of analysis, specific institutional norms and member state interests are discussed at each step of the inquiry. Throughout the examination, the chapters suffuse the strategic and tactical levels of analysis and separate them out only when evaluating the hypotheses. The Structure of the Book This book is divided into five chapters including introduction and conclusion. Chapter 2 focuses on the “black trinity” discourse in the West during the Cold War era. It provides continuity and linkages between the actual events and the post-Soviet period. While the collapse of the Soviet bloc awakened the ghosts of the past by its own right, the chapter demonstrates that the discourse on the Munich Agreement, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and the Yalta-Potsdam Conferences was always present among Western political elites. Similarly, the “return to Europe” idea was not an invention of the 1990s. CEE dissidents adhered to it well before the opportunities for NATO and EU memberships emerged. Chapter 3 examines the dynamics of EU enlargement. It looks at decisionmaking patterns starting with the early 1990s and up to the 2007 enlargement, emphasizing the interaction dynamics of CEE and West European political elites. The chapter investigates at what particular points politicians brought up historical-psychological legacies and traces the levels of impact, if any, of these rhetorical actions. Particular attention is paid to the main culprits of the “black trinity” in Western Europe—England, France, and Germany. The discourse of their key political players acts as a barometer of the level of internalization of historical-psychological legacies. The chapter also evaluates the role and impact of member state interests and institutional norms. In the case of the EU, both factors influenced the process of accession.

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Finally, the chapter revisits the proposed hypotheses and assesses their relevance against the findings of the study. Chapter 4 uses the identical framework of analysis for examining NATO enlargement. The main difference is the target countries. Since the United States was the most important member of the Alliance, the attitudes of its political elites are of particular importance. They were also the primary innovators in the NATO engagement eastward, including such initiatives as North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC), Partnership for Peace (Pf P), Membership Action Plan (MAP), and the NATO-Russia Charter. In addition to the United States, Germany was the second most active proponent of the enlargement policy, especially in the persona of German Foreign Minister Volker Rühe. In chapters 3 and 4, the evaluation of hypotheses also follows a comparative pattern. First, it focuses on the nature of discourse. At the initial level of inquiry, the main argument is probed against the null hypothesis, which is that the discourse does not provide a clear linkage between the Eastern enlargements and past historical mistakes. Once the evidence in favor of the collective guilt is confirmed, the evaluation controls for the two additional variables—member state interests and institutional norms. While the normative discourse seems to be as prevalent as the guilt discourse, the timing, the mode of selection of candidate countries, and the eventual outcomes of enlargement are more consistent with the expectations of the collective guilt argument. Second, the chapters examine the effectiveness of the additive model in explaining the “when and how” of both enlargements. Again, both the null-hypothesis and the alternative explanations are tested. The former can be clearly dismissed because the hypotheses derived from the additive model are a significant improvement over the hypothesis of random accession process. The alternative variables present a more formidable challenge to the proposed model. Still I find that the additive approach provides a more nuanced and dynamic explanation of the Eastern enlargement processes. The conclusion revisits the major findings of this work and explores their implications for and links with other political research venues. The study revealed that not all so-called culprits of the “black trinity” equally internalized and acted upon historical-psychological legacies. Only in Germany and the United States the collective guilt clearly constituted and guided the policies of Eastern enlargement. The UK and France showed moderate signs of collective responsibility relegating the influence of historical-psychological legacies to more of a constraining role. While the variable of collective guilt provided further insights into NATO and EU enlargements, it has to be linked with institutional norms

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and member state interests in order to account for both the rationale for and the interim outcomes of enlargements. The mixed methodology offers more acute insights of intra-institutional dynamics. It expands the understanding of preference aggregation in institutional settings. Europeanization literature gradually embraces such modeling techniques as witnessed by the works of Frank Schimmelfennig, Wade Jacoby, and many others.

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CHAPTER 2

The “Black Trinity” and the Cold War

T

he purpose of this chapter is not to adjudicate the actual motives of the participants or to discuss the effects of the Munich, MolotovRibbentrop, and Yalta agreements on Eastern Europe, but rather to demonstrate the ebbs and flows of the “black trinity” discourse throughout the Cold War era. During these 50 years, the agreements became deeply ingrained into the Western political discourse. They were often evoked on anniversaries and other commemorative occasions for their historical and emotional value. Many politicians also utilized them as mental shortcuts. The “black trinity” images were sometimes uprooted from their historical contexts and superimposed on events of the day in order to make sense of an infinitely complex and constantly changing set of variables. While many historians rightfully criticized this reductionist and sometimes revisionist approach, the ubiquity of the discourse throughout the Cold War demonstrates the inherent appeal of heuristics under the conditions of uncertainty.1 Furthermore, many scholars argued that the perceptions and interpretations of these events framed the political perspective toward the Soviet bloc and well beyond its borders.2 This chapter traces the evolution of the “black trinity”–related discourse among Western political elites. It focuses on four countries—France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States—because they were the key players both in the 1930–40s and in the 1990s. Their decisions and indecisions shaped and still continue to shape the fate of CEE. As demonstrated below, the nature and intensity of the discourses varied from country to country, party to party, and politician to politician. Still the general unease about these three agreements filters through the 45 years of discussions on CEE. The last section of the chapter provides a snapshot of dissident rhetoric behind the Iron Curtain. It demonstrates the depth and continuity of the “return to Europe” idea, challenging narratives that see only strategic incentives as the driving force behind East European desire to join the EU

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and NATO. This historical survey does not claim the exclusivity or superiority of the “black trinity” discourse in comparison to other historical references throughout the Cold War. Instead, it simply establishes the ongoing presence and relevance of these agreements in Western political discourse up to the collapse of the Eastern bloc. The Munich Agreement Appeasement seems to be the most frequent word used by Western political elites in connection with the Munich Agreement. The historical interpretation of what happened in Munich on 30 September 1938 is essentially unanimous: key Western countries—Great Britain, France, and Italy—signed off an area of Czechoslovakia known as Sudetenland to Germany, which led to Hitler’s occupation of the whole country. There are three aspects of this event that elevated it into such an iconic status. First, it was an open and cynical breach of the national sovereignty of Czechoslovakia. The government of Milan Hodža was presented with the fait accompli of facing a choice between peaceful capitulation and solitary resistance to the Nazi military machine. Second, some Western politicians naively perceived the Munich Agreement as the guarantee of lasting peace in Europe. After returning home from Munich, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain famously proclaimed: “My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.” The reality could not have turned out more differently. In a year, the world was facing one of the most devastating wars in human history. Finally, the Munich Agreement came to be perceived as the catalyst of World War II. According to many historians and politicians, the West wasted an opportunity to curtail or at least contain German militarism at this critical juncture. Instead, the license to take over Czechoslovakia only fueled Hitler’s delusions of grandeur. These three closely interrelated factors go a long way to explain why this agreement became the symbol of appeasement and betrayal. Furthermore, the images of Munich surfaced in various unrelated contexts for reasons of convenience, cover-up, or genuine concern. However, as the next section reveals, there were also legal aspects of the agreement that continued to be discussed throughout the Cold War. In addition to the symbolic utilization of Munich, the signatories faced the issue of its legal status and consequences. While all signatories came to regard the agreement as an act of aggression against Czechoslovakia, there were substantive variations in diplomatic and legal approaches. Such countries as France and Italy left little space for interpretation. In a letter to Czech Prime Minister Jan Šrámek dated 29 September 1942, General Charles De Gaulle

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declared: “The French National Committee, rejecting the agreements signed in Munich on September 29, 1938, solemnly declare that they consider these agreements null and void as also all acts accomplished in the application or in consequence of these same agreements.”3 Marking the sixth anniversary of the agreement, an almost identical formula was used by the Italian Council of Ministers that reneged it as “null and void […] and with them any other act which, as a consequence of these agreements, may have aimed at harming the independence of the Czechoslovak Republic.”4 While a particular choice of words may seem like a minor detail, for the British, German, and Czechoslovakian governments the phrase “from the very beginning,” otherwise known as ab initio or ex-tunc, was an object of continued negotiations and bilateral perturbations. At stake were not only moralhistorical images of some signatory countries but also the status of German refugees from Sudetenland, issues related to property rights, and broader ramifications of declaring an international treaty as void since its inception. These country-specific aspects were closely correlated with domestic politics, which are discussed in greater detail next. Not Valid, but Relevant Bonn was especially careful in balancing out conflicting domestic and regional interests and expectations. In the context of German-Czechoslovak relations, one set of complications stemmed from the transfer of roughly 2.5 million of the Sudentendeutsch to Germany in 1945–47. This expulsion was and still is often linked with the so-called Beneš decrees—the Czechoslovak president’s ordinances issued during the period of the World War II—several of which dealt with the citizenship status and property rights of ethnic Germans. West-East German relations and border issues with Poland were also tied into this bilateral knot.5 In contrast to the lands east of the Oder river transferred to Poland after World War II, West Germany never questioned the status of the Sudentenland as an integral part of Czechoslovakia. Still, Bonn was reluctant to denounce the Munich Agreement ab initio because of numerous legal ramifications for the expellees and possible restitution demands from the Czechoslovak government.6 Its public denunciations were often footnoted with reminders of the expulsion of the Sudentendeutsch approved by the Potsdam Conference.7 Both were considered comparable crimes that had to be dealt in tandem. The unilateral acknowledgment of the Munich Pact as void since its inception would have broken the link between 1938 and 1945. It was such political lobbies as the Bloc of Homeland Expellees and Disenfranchised (BHE) and the Sudenten German Association that kept

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these issues on the forefront of the political agenda. Some of their leaders publicly argued that the starting position for any border negotiations should include the Sudentenland because the 1938 agreement was still valid.8 They insisted that the agreement was not a dictate but a peaceful resolution of interstate problems at the conference table.9 With 5.9 percent in the 1953–57 Bundestag, the BHE became an important player in the first decades of post–World War II German politics.10 Later, it merged with the German Party, which was a part of the government throughout the 1950s. It was during this period that such conservative politicians as Hans-Christoph Seebohm, Federal Minister of Transportation, repeatedly played up to the sentiments of the German expellees and even claimed that there is no causal link between the Munich Agreement and World War II.11 This rhetoric was seen as problematic not only in Prague but also in Western European capitals. As a part of the bilateral negotiations, De Gaulle urged Adenauer to improve relations with Eastern Europe and to resolve outstanding border issues.12 British Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart also advocated that Germany take a more decisive stance on this “despicable” agreement.13 It was only in 1964 that the German government led by Ludwig Edhard took first cautious steps to normalize relations with Prague. During a visit to the United States, Chancellor Edhard formally acknowledged that the Munich Agreement was “torn apart by Hitler” and dismissed the possibility of any territorial claims against Czechoslovakia.14 Two years later, the Federal government issued the German Peace Note reiterating that the 1938 agreement had “no territorial significance.”15 The formulation was a watereddown version of stronger language promoted by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.16 Still the ministry managed to eventually prevail once Edhard’s successor, Kurt Kiesinger, stated on behalf of the three-party-coalition government that the 1938 agreement was concluded under “the threat of force” and thus “no longer valid.”17 Still Chancellor Kiesinger came shy of embracing the ab initio formula because of potential legal ramifications for Sudeten Germans. The Czechoslovakian government was less than impressed with German attempts at détente. Deputy Foreign Minister Otto Klicka declared that Kiesinger’s conciliatory tone “changed nothing in the obduracy of the content of the declaration.”18 Despite Czechoslovak skepticism, both sides continued informal dialogue, which led to the start of formal bilateral negotiations under Chancellor Willy Brandt. During a prolonged period of ups and downs, the opponents of Brandt’s détente policy were on the offensive, especially after the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968.19 Conservative politicians and expellee lobbies accused the federal government of unilateral surrender to Prague’s demands.20

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Despite this poisoned domestic atmosphere, the persistence of Brandt and his Foreign Minister, Walter Scheel, paid off. Following eight rounds of negotiations, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and Czechoslovakia signed a treaty on mutual relations on 13 December 1973. The Munich Agreement was at the heart of the document. It declared the 1938 pact as void and acknowledged that it “was imposed on the Czechoslovak Republic by the national socialist regime under the threat of force.”21 Although the ab initio formula was not included in the treaty, it can still be regarded as one of the highlights in otherwise somewhat chilly German-Czechoslovak relations during the Cold War years. Brandt’s initiative was a part of a broader German policy of reconciliation pursued during his chancellorship.22 The next wave of bilateral initiatives had to wait until the collapse of the Eastern bloc. Aside from the traditional German-Czechoslovak context of the Munich Agreement, German politicians sometimes encountered more unusual reminders of 1938. One such occasion occurred in May of 1990 when Chancellor Kohl and French President Mitterrand attempted to offer their solution for ongoing confrontation between Moscow and the independent-minded Soviet republic of Lithuania. Following their meeting, the leaders issued a declaration urging the Lithuanian Parliament to suspend “for a while” its declaration of independence and to begin negotiations. At a news conference, they could not escape suggestions of “the spirit of Munich,” which both wrote off as inappropriate.23 The issue might have been triggered by Lithuanian Parliament leader Vytautas Landsbergis, who a few days earlier accused President George H. W. Bush of “another Munich.”24 Such reminders of Munich will later be repeated over and over again in the context of NATO and EU enlargements. Stumer In contrast to Germany, which actively sought reconciliation with Czechoslovakia in the 1960s and 1970s, Great Britain maintained a more passive posture throughout the Cold War. Many Labor and Conservative politicians openly recognized the unfortunate role of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in Munich and criticized his naïve statements following it, but the British government came short of dismissing the agreement ab initio. Similarly to the FRG, the British Foreign Office took the position that the 1939 German invasion of Czechoslovakia rendered the agreement void. In diplomatic circles, the reference was usually made to Winston Churchill’s statement on 30 September 1940 declaring that the agreement was “destroyed by the Germans.”25 This position remained unchanged for

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the next 50 years. Visiting Prague in 1966, Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart called the agreement abhorrent and insisted that it was no longer valid, but did not agree with the ab initio formula.26 A year later, his successor Frederick Mulley provided a similar formulation in the House of Commons: “Her Majesty’s Government regard the Munich Agreement as completely dead and have so regarded it for many years. The fact that it was once made cannot justify any future claims against Czechoslovakia.”27 Such a cautious position had several justifications. A historical adviser to the Foreign Office argued that ab initio formula “would be liable to prejudice British interests in the historical, and more broadly, moral fields.”28 British diplomat Thomas Brimelow provided a more nuanced justification. He insisted that “if we were to accept the view that the Munich Agreement, concluded over 30 years ago, should be declared invalid on grounds of inconsistency with current principles of international law, it might also be claimed that these principles should apply to other, older treaties whose validity we might not wish to have called in question today.”29 While some politicians continued to argue for an outright annulment of the agreement—for example, Patrick Gordon Walker, Foreign Minister-designate of the Labour Party in 196430—the official British position was clearly not as resolute as those of the French and the Italians. The official diplomatic maneuvering was only the tip of the Munichrelated discourse in Great Britain. Like in the FRG, this page of British history was brought to bear on many domestic and foreign policy developments. Tory Beverly Baxter described the situation in 1942 as follows: “There is a persistent cry in certain sections of the country and in the Press that the men of Munich who are in the Government should go. We hear it over and over again.”31 Not surprisingly, it was Labour politicians who usually reminded Conservatives of their past mistakes. For example, during the House of Commons debates on Austria in 1947, Labourite Ayrton Gould made a typical “back to Munich” rhetorical twist: “It was only a little while after the occupation of Austria, that Munich happened. The Labour Party denounced appeasement, as it always has denounced it, but the Government in 1938 carried it out with what most of us think was disastrous results.”32 Whatever the topic, Munich served as a constant warning against perceived appeasement or irresoluteness. During World War II, Conservatives repeatedly cautioned Churchill not to commit to engagements that could not be honored. Tory Edward Grigg questioned the rationale of British foreign policy by evoking recent failures: “Does the House remember—this is a very recent issue—that we guaranteed Czechoslovakia after the Munich surrender? What use was that to Czechoslovakia? We proceeded to guarantee Poland and Rumania. What was the use of that to Poland and Rumania?

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High principles, certainly; but a ‘stumer’ cheque all the same.”33 Prominent Labour politician James Henry Thomas warned his own party not to repeat Munich mistakes in Poland: “The wicked thing to my mind was that we tried to compel the Czech Government to accept a solution which we knew was immoral, and that is the danger I see in this present situation, that His Majesty’s Government should try to urge upon the Polish Government something which they know to be wrong.”34 In the 1940s–60s, the references to 1938 surfaced during almost every major foreign policy development: the Berlin Airlift, Arab-Israeli conflict, rise of Communist China, Korean War, Suez Crisis, Vietnam War, and even Rhodesia’s declaration of independence. However, the most painful and direct reminder of Munich at the time was the Prague Spring of 1968. With the reawakening of Czechoslovakia, British politicians urged the government to take “an opportunity to help the cause of peace and democracy, 30 years after a great wrong was perpetrated by those who surrendered principle to expediency.”35 Help was primarily envisioned in the form of outright repudiation of the Munich Agreement and any potential German-Czechoslovak border revisions arising from it. The supporters argued that British Foreign Secretary Goronwy Roberts should “make clear beyond a shadow of doubt that the British Government [took] basically the same view of the Munich Agreement as [did] the French and Italian signatories.”36 With the news of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August, these demands lost their immediate relevance. Instead, the focus switched to British countermeasures in response to the aggression. While recommendations varied from condemnation to trade sanctions and even limited military actions under the auspices of NATO, all politicians agreed that Great Britain had to react because of its special responsibility vis-à-vis Czechoslovakia. As Labour MP of Czechoslovakian descent Robert Maxwell put it: “For 30 years our people have had a special feeling for the people of Czechoslovakia because of the way in which we left them in the lurch at Munich. This makes it very important that everybody in this country should do what he can to support the Czechs today against this brutal Soviet oppression.”37 It was also not unusual to put the Soviet aggression into a broader historical context, drawing on the lessons of both Munich and Yalta. According to Lord Boothby, the 1968 crisis was in part “an inheritance of Yalta” that due to “the establishment of the so-called spheres of influence led in the end to a far bigger sell-out than Munich ever did.”38 Prominent Conservative MP Duncan Sandys, Churchill’s son-in-law, argued that [i]t would be foolish to ignore the lessons of past miscalculations. Up to the time of Munich, there were many who still held the view that, with patience,

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it would be possible to establish confidence and co-operation between Nazi Germany and the West. At Yalta, despite Churchill’s warnings, Roosevelt believed that Communist Russia could safely be entrusted with the task of restoring freedom to the occupied countries of Eastern Europe. More recently, the Western Governments persuaded themselves that the Soviet Union was becoming more moderate and that this would open the way to a genuine détente. This latest illusion, like the others, has been shattered by events.39

Along with the Soviet aggression in Czechoslovakia, 1968 marked another important development for Great Britain—the stepping down of Charles De Gaulle in France. It opened up the prospect of long-awaited British membership in the European Communities (“EC” hereafter, for both European Community/Communities). Not surprisingly, this possibility generated ample controversy. The accusations of “the biggest sell-out since Munich” again echoed in halls of the British Parliament. Interestingly, pro-European politicians also embraced the Munich analogy, but as an argument against isolationism. According to a member of the shadow cabinet Harold Lever, “It [EC accession treaty] has to do with Munich because we cannot remain isolated from what is happening on the continent. It has to do with Munich, too, in the contrast it makes with the purposes of the people of Europe in wanting us to sign the treaty. They do not want us to sign the treaty in order to plunder or enslave us.”40 Even after the Great Britain joined the EC, references to 1938 found their way to the public square on such issues as the renegotiation of the accession treaty in 1975 and British contributions to the Community budget. The early 1970s also saw a détente in Soviet-Western relations. Moscow was promoting the idea of a European security conference in order to address various outstanding and accumulated issues since World War II. Initially skeptical, Western leaders, including those from Great Britain, gradually warmed up to the idea. However, with the fresh memories of the quelling of the Prague Spring, Conservative Geoffrey Stewart-Smith warned the government that “Helsinki must not be the Munich of our generation.”41 Some right-wing MPs even painted dire visions of “a super-Munich” and “a second and greater Yalta” as reflections of “the state of mind of the Western peoples at present.”42 Right before the summit, Conservative MP Winston Churchill, the grandson of Premier Churchill, argued that “going to this summit meeting and by putting their hands on behalf of the free people of the world to this document the leaders of the Western democracies could be in danger of signing a second Munich Agreement, signing away the rights of millions of people in far-away lands and, above all, duping their

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own people into believing that genuine détente and ‘peace in our time’ had been achieved.”43 Even in retrospect, some Tories scolded the Helsinki accords as “the Munich of the free world.”44 In her memoirs Margaret Thatcher acknowledged that she had difficulties with the overall strategy of détente because “it was difficult to see any difference between appeasement and détente.”45 Although the conflict with Argentina over the Falkland Islands did not escape occasional references to Munich, the next wave of history-laden rhetoric came with Saddam Hussein’s aggression against Kuwait. Like their American colleagues, some British politicians saw clear parallels between 1938 and 1990. For them, history clearly demonstrated that this was not a time for compromise but only for decisive action. According to Conservative Lord Rodney Elton, “Hitler was able to persuade himself that the warnings issued by the free world were without substance and we demonstrated to him, above all at Munich, that we were prepared to compromise. Saddam Hussein should not be under any such illusion … ”46 Furthermore, diplomatic solutions were to give Saddam Hussein a chance to grow in strength as Nazi Germany did before World War II: “It was because we went on and on—through the abandoning of Czechoslovakia, the Munich crisis and so forth—failing to grasp the nettle that we finally allowed Hitler to become so strong that we very nearly lost the war.”47 There were always those who rejected such analogies, but they risked to be equated to “the sort of people who would have appeased Hitler in the 1930s.”48 Even Prime Minister Thatcher seemed “to smell the stench of appeasement in the air— the rather nauseating stench of appeasement.”49 At the time of the Gulf War, the Soviet Union was going through its own internal perturbations. The Baltic States were trying to keep their struggle for independence alive, while the Soviet tanks rolled on the streets of their capitals. The Cold War order was on its last legs. For some, it seemed like history was coming to an end, for others, it was a reawakening of history after the 50-year-long freeze. La Nuit de la France Like their British counterparts, the vast majority of the French political elite in 1938 embraced the Munich Agreement as one that held promise to prevent another war at the expense of Czechoslovakia. Beneath the veneer of cheering crowds welcoming Foreign Minister Daladier, many politicians, in the words of three times premier Leon Blum, were “torn between a cowardly relief and shame.”50 Another prominent politician and a friend of Blum,

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Pierre Mendès France, fully concurred: “Basically, what Leon Blum expressed that day was what everybody felt. Even opponents of Munich like us […] felt seized by a ‘cowardly relief ’ when we saw war move away.”51 Among the few dissenters was Charles De Gaulle, for whom this was the moment when France “ceased to be a great power.” He was angry that “the French, like bird-brains, utter cries of joy, while German troops enter triumphantly into the territory of a state that we helped to build, pledged to secure its borders and that was our ally.”52 Even four years after the fact, De Gaulle’s denunciation of the Munich Pact on behalf of the National Committee was by no means a consensus position, but it eventually became the modus operandi of all French governments. The Czechoslovakia Coup of 1948 brought about this convergence and at the same time expanded the discourse in French domestic politics. Munich became not only about “the interpretation of the past” but also about “the intellectual and ideological struggle of the present,” where “one always risked becoming a Municheer of something.”53 However, until the mid-1960s, the “Munich complex” did little to improve France’s relations with Communist Czechoslovakia that preferred to utilize recent French-Czechoslovak history for propaganda purposes. In the words of French Ambassador Jean-Paul Garnier, Prague used every anniversary of the Munich Agreement to emphasize that “the orientation of Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Union [was] determined by its geographical location and the lessons of history, particularly the most recent history, living in Munich, Czechoslovakia abandoned by its Western allies …”54 The Quai d’Orsay was also well aware that France’s improving relations with Germany were closely monitored by Prague. To the extent that Bonn was reluctant to recognize the nullity of the Munich Pact, the growing Franco-German cooperation was viewed in Prague through the lens of 1938.55 The chill of the early 1950s was dramatically, though shortly, reversed in the mid-1960s. Bilateral visits presented an excellent opportunity to address the historical issues as well. During the 1964 Paris meeting of foreign ministers, Maurice Couve de Murville assured his Czech colleague that the Munich Agreement had no bearing on Czechoslovakian borders. At the same time, Czech minister Václav David expressed his appreciation for De Gaulle’s resolute position on the Munich Agreement during World War II.56 Two years later, during his visit to Czechoslovakia, Maurice Couve de Murville declared that Paris regarded the Munich Agreement as null and void from the very beginning.57 Although this bilateral amicability came to an abrupt end with the quelling of the 1968 Prague Spring, the French statement of denunciation became the gold standard that Prague demanded from every signatory country. Both the UK and West Germany were not ready to follow the French example at the time.

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Domestically, the discussions over 1938 continued both among academics and politicians throughout the Cold War. The verdicts were largely the same—the Munich Agreement was a disaster both for France and for Czechoslovakia. In his memoirs, Prime Minister Michel Debré described Munich as “a crushing diplomatic defeat and the delirium of popular enthusiasm cheering this defeat. […] Freedom was murdered by deceit and honor by cowardice”58 For the fortieth anniversary of Munich, journalist Roger Massip and historian Jean Descola published a volume that included interviews with a number of prominent French politicians. The conversations clearly demonstrated that the French political establishment of the late 1970s still had strong opinions on the topic. Gaullist Jacques Chirac saw Munich as a broad systemic problem, which led the interbellum France “from cowardice to cowardice.”59 Louis De Guiringaud, the head of the Quai d’Orsay at the time, reminisced about his initial reaction in 1938 in the following manner: “My feelings were mixed: relief of respite may have won before a war became inevitable, but also outrage and shame about this abandonment of Czechs and the capitulation to Hitler.”60 Only Maurice Faure of the Radical Party, which was in government in 1938, was more careful in his assessments: “Seen after the event, it is clear that it was almost too late to react in Munich. […] At the time of Munich, the problem is more nuanced, in that the concept of respite in history is not condemnable in itself. A respite is sometimes a good tactic.”61 The “anti-Munichois” rhetoric was visible not only in the context of French-Czechoslovak affairs. This historical parallel was also applied, or rather misapplied, in other situations because it fit well with prevalent and often erroneous beliefs of the domino theory. In the French case, one such example was the 1956 Suez Crisis. After Egyptian Colonel Gamal Nasser decided to nationalize the Suez Canal, Paris (and London) was adamant to see “Hitler on the Nile” removed.62 The ongoing colonial war in Algeria may have been the primary motive for Prime Minister Guy Mollet to join the British in this new venture, but there was also an important historicalpsychological undercurrent.63 Mollet drew comparisons with 1938, where “our fathers learned the lesson that it is worth more to die than to accept the bondage and humiliation.”64 For the socialist premier, who spent World War II in French resistance movement, the parallel seemed obvious: “It was too risky to allow this adventurer, this miniature Hitler, to develop.”65 In response, critics candidly pointed out that “Munich is not on the Nile” and Egypt of 1956 is not Germany of 1938.66 Interestingly, Mollet’s comparisons of Nasser and Hitler were not just public posturing. He articulated the same views in closed-door meetings. After his conversation with Mollet,

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the U.S. ambassador to France sent a telegram to the Department of State recalling the following details: Mollet said that there had been frequent comparisons between Nasser and Hitler and he hesitated to make the comparison because it might seem banal. However, he had to admit that the parallel was extremely close. Nasser’s deal with the Soviets for arms is the parallel to the Hitler Stalin Pact of 1939. While Nasser is head of a country far weaker than Hitler’s Germany, the Soviet Union is now far stronger than in 1939. He then picked up a copy of Nasser’s book “The Philosophy of Revolution” which he had on his desk and said that he felt that all leading officials in the Dept of State should read this book promptly if they had not done so already. He considered it a perfect parallel to “Mein Kampf.”67

Mollet assigned the same historical motivation to British Secretary Anthony Eden: “And make no mistake: this is the key to Eden’s attitude, so inexplicable to many. Without this key, it is impossible to understand my colleague’s decision. He had been courageously anti-Munich and wished to remain loyal to his past.”68 But the emotions over 1938 ran high not only in signatory countries. U.S. politicians kept the lessons of Munich close to their hearts as well; some even say too close. Munich Generation While the United States was not a party to the 1938 agreement, President Roosevelt and U.S. Ambassador to Britain Joseph Kennedy, father of John F. Kennedy, were in favor of granting concessions to Hitler in order to avoid a new war. The failure of this policy has become one of the most vivid and lasting images among the American political establishment. Its framing effect on U.S. foreign policy throughout the Cold War is reflected in numerous examples of political discourse. Already in 1940, President Roosevelt himself condemned “the doctrine of appeasement” as “a major weapon of aggressor nations.”69 He insisted that “there [could] be no appeasement with ruthlessness.”70 His successor, Harry Truman, was just as adamant about the lessons of Munich. According to some scholars, he made a decision to send troops to Korea through the linkage of the invasion by North Koreans with the events in the 1930s.71 Addressing the nation on the eve of the war, President Truman argued that “the free nations [had] learned the fateful lesson of the 1930s. That lesson [was] that aggression must be met firmly. Appeasement [led] only to further aggression and ultimately to war.”72 Secretary of State Dean Acheson shared the same framework of reference in the context of the Korean War.73 At the end of his presidency, Harry Truman seemed to

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comprehend only two ways to deal with the threat of Communism: “To pay the ransom of appeasement or to pay the price of building together sufficient strength—military, economic, political, and moral strength—to keep the peace.”74 This largely dualistic approach to foreign policy was sustained during President Eisenhower’s years in office. Already in his inaugural address, Dwight Eisenhower pledged not to pursue the futile path of appeasement and not to trade honor for security.75 He described his policy of waging peace in the following terms: “If you are going to do that and are not going to be guilty, every time the thing looks dangerous, of a Munich, you have got to stand firmly.”76 For Eisenhower, lessons of 1938 applied not only in Europe but also across the globe.77 Facing the Taiwan Straight Crisis in 1958, he described China as Germany of 1938 trying to impose “a Western Pacific Munich” on the world.78 The rhetorical images changed little with the coming of President Kennedy, whose senior thesis at Harvard was entitled “Appeasement at Munich.” In fact, some scholars argue that it was during Kennedy’s years that this analogy became particularly influential in framing U.S. foreign policy.79 This assertion is questionable because Kennedy clearly moved beyond the dualistic nature of U.S. foreign policy where “appeasement or war, suicide or surrender, humiliation or holocaust, to be either Red or dead” were the only available options.80 Instead he urged not to “mistake honorable negotiation for appeasement.”81 The Republicans criticized such a position from the day Senator Kennedy decided to run for president. Some vehement partisans labeled him as “the apostle of appeasement.”82 This was not the first or the last instance when the 1938 agreement was used as a political football. With the coming of Lyndon Johnson and the escalation of the Vietnam War, the “shame of Munich” was put before the critics as one of the most important historical lessons in the face of Communist assault. Those that “advocated retreat or appeasement by whatever new names they use,” President Johnson suggested, should “reread history, for there on history’s face the blotch of Munich is still visible.”83 At one of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations’ discussions on Vietnam War, Secretary of State Dean Rusk made a telling remark that clearly revealed the depth and breadth of the Munich analogy: “I belong to that generation of young people that was betrayed into World War II with tens of millions of casualties all over the world because the governments of that day, including the Government of the United States, refused to face the problem of organizing a peace in the world.”84 Whether it was or was not a generational marker, this historical event has become an important reference point for many American politicians to come. Its resurrection was especially apparent

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with the Republican presidencies of Ronald Reagan and particularly George W. H. Bush. President Reagan perceived Munich as the principle genesis of World War II. Marking the fiftieth anniversary of the pact, he argued that Munich was “the naive gesture of appeasement that brought us the great nightmare of this century: World War II. The vain boast that we had achieved ‘peace in our time’ was followed five months later by Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia and 6 months after that of Poland.” As for many American politicians before him, the principal lesson of Munich was that weakness invites aggression and war.85 Not surprisingly, this type of rhetoric surfaced on the U.S. political scene during all major post–World War II conflicts—the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and even the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. President George W. H. Bush looked at Saddam Hussein as a personification of Adolf Hitler: “We’re dealing with Hitler revisited, a totalitarianism and a brutality that is naked and unprecedented in modern times. And that must not stand. We cannot talk about compromise when you have that kind of behavior going on this very minute.”86 Even in his private conversations with world leaders, President Bush did not hesitate to link the invasion of Kuwait with 1938. Expressing his concern about the potential outcome of Saudi-Iraqi negotiations to the Prime Minister of Turkey, he argued, “If the solution is that Iraq pulls back and Kuwait pays, that is not a solution but another Munich.”87 According to White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater, “the war experience was alive in him [President Bush] and was a major factor in his mind which he talked about a lot. It made the question of appeasement and evil dictators vivid, thus altering how he saw the [Gulf ] crisis and his approach.”88 While George H. W. Bush was the last Cold War president, he was by no means the last U.S. leader to dwell on the lessons of Munich. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact A year after the Munich Agreement, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a treaty of nonaggression. Its secret protocol stipulated “the boundary of the spheres of influence of Germany and the U.S.S.R.”89 The pact directly affected the fate of six countries: Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania. They were either divided or annexed entirely by the two parties. Since most of the Western countries were neither involved nor aware of the secret protocol at the time of signing, the treaty did not acquire the same broad resonance as the Munich Pact. While the latter was openly and regularly condemned by the Soviet Union and the West, the MolotovRibbentrop Pact was usually avoided by Communist political elites because it indicted the Kremlin as a co-aggressor. The victims forcedly incorporated

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into the Soviet bloc were largely silenced until the late 1980s. Nevertheless, for Central and Eastern European émigrés, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact became another powerful symbol of betrayal and national tragedy linked not just with Germany but also indirectly with other Western countries. For example, it was argued that the interbellum Polish government expected more from Britain and France than just formal declarations of war against Germany after it invaded Polish territory on 1 September 1939. Also, the pact was often interpreted as a precursor to later agreements that essentially acquiesced with the 1939 Soviet spheres of interests. Since the Baltic States were the only ones that lost their statehood as a result of the agreement, it came to symbolize their unfortunate fate in the hands of the totalitarian regimes. The nonrecognition of the Baltic States’ incorporation into the Soviet Union became a flagship of Western foreign policy during the Cold War era.90 It was a perfect propaganda tool despite the fact that earlier Western leaders embraced less virtuous positions behind closed doors.91 Gallant Little Nations The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was always understood as an important historical landmark not only for East European countries but also for British-Soviet relations and even the genesis of World War II. In 1939, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union were negotiating the terms of a defensive alliance against Germany. In exchange for cooperation, the Kremlin demanded a right to take over the Baltic States in the case of direct or indirect aggression.92 Chamberlain’s refusal to sign off the Baltic States allegedly led Stalin to turn to Nazi Germany, which was eager to divide up the region into spheres of influence. On the one hand, this refusal was hailed as an honorable act.93 On the other hand, the failure of the trilateral negotiations was portrayed as a likely cause of World War II vis-à-vis the Nazi-Soviet alliance.94 The issue of the Baltic States often surfaced in connection with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact throughout the Cold War era. Britain, like most Western countries, was aware that the Baltic States “have de facto been absorbed into the Soviet Union but have not recognised this de jure.”95 Its policy of nonrecognition—a result of circumstances and expediency rather than virtue—was primarily based on the illegality of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet agreement. However, the issue rarely came onto the public political stage because the three countries lost their statehood through integration into the Soviet Union. One of the more prominent episodes involved the 1969 Foreign Compensation Bill that dealt with outstanding Soviet-British claims related to pre–World War II individual and business assets in the Baltic States,

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Poland, and other territories then under Soviet control. The British government’s decision to utilize the pre–World War II Baltic gold reserves stored in the Bank of England as compensation to the Soviet Union generated substantial controversy. The critics of the bill led by Conservative Harold Balfour accused the government and its supporters of being “appeasers of Russia” and ignoring “the rape of these gallant little nations.”96 Another Conservative Henry Strauss argued that “not a penny should have been used as a tip to the State that had brutally invaded and destroyed the Baltic States.”97 The bill passed despite the dissent of some Conservatives, including the future Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. For her, the memory of this vote lasted throughout the Cold War as well as the appreciation of “the special legal status” of the Baltic States.98 In the 1950s, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was used as a warning against Western isolation of Germany. According to former Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd, it was a historical proof that “a neutral uncontrolled Germany would be an element of instability in Europe.”99 If Germans continued to be treated as “a nation of untouchables, […] we shall get another Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact,” warned Labourite Stanley Evans.100 The pact also served as an example of unreliability and temporality of alliances. Thus, former Chancellor of the Exchequer Reginald Maulding cautioned against overreliance on China in the 1970s: “It is no doubt convenient that the Chinese are also hostile to Russia. However, I am old enough to remember the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, when their two great dictator countries, which had been snarling at each other, suddenly shook hands and unleashed Hitler across Western Europe.”101 Conservative Alan Glyn agreed that such “a Ribbentrop-Molotov type of agreement” would allow the Soviets to move their troops to Eastern bloc countries and “alter the whole balance of power in the West.”102 Others used the 1939 agreement to make the opposite argument encouraging the Western-Chinese cooperation of convenience and preempting a possibility of similar Soviet adventurism.103 Because the pact had limited direct appeal to British politicians, it was primarily used as a mental shortcut in analyzing foreign affairs. It carried a narrow emotional charge, usually tied with the tragic fate of the Baltic States. Bloodiest Aggression Unlike the Munich Agreement, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact generated little controversy among German political elites. As victims largely silenced by one of the signatories and domestic coalitions of displaced people were fragmented, the topic had limited public exposure. It usually came up in

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the context of German-Soviet relations, especially with the inauguration of Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik. Facing suspicious allies abroad and skeptical conservatives at home, Chancellor Brandt was stuck between a rock and a hard place. While mending fences with Moscow, he was careful not to raise fears of the UK, the United States, and France, where, according to the FRG ambassador to Moscow, German-Soviet cooperation prospects were associated with such “words as ‘Rapallo’ and ‘Hitler-Stalin Pact.’”104 During his first meeting with Chancellor Brandt, French President Georges Pompidou openly expressed fears over the return of the German-Soviet dominance in Europe.105 Thus, it was no surprise that following the 1970 Moscow Treaty, French politicians and media were ringing alarm bells and drawing historical parallels to 1922 and 1939.106 At the same time, the government tried to mollify domestic critics who accused it of ignoring historical lessons and abandoning Adenauer’s policy of strength.107 Christian Social Union leader Franz Josef Strauß viewed Brandt’s efforts to negotiate a peace treaty with the Soviet Union as another failed collusion: “It is eerie that even under the Hitler-Stalin pact both sides argued that they acted to keep the peace.”108 The legal status of the Baltic States was also indirectly tied to the 1970 treaty. Having followed the policy of nonrecognition since the late 1940s, Foreign Minister Walter Scheel assured that the German government had not changed its position on the annexation of the Baltic States.109 While the issue remained rather peripheral in German politics, Spohr Readman argues that Bonn was “influenced in its Baltic policies by the fact that it was never free from the historico-moral burden of the Hitler-Stalin Pact and thus its partial culpability for their loss of independence.”110 Similar historical context was at the heart of German-Polish relations at the time. During his famous 1970 visit to Warsaw, Chancellor Brandt argued that Germany should not forget that “what the Polish nation had to suffer after 1939 was worse than anything else it had had to endure in the course of its history.” He acknowledged that “this injustice [had] not remained without consequences,” an obvious reference to the redrawing of German-Polish borders in 1945.111 German President Gustav Heinemann expressed similar sentiments on the thirtieth anniversary of World War II: “What we, to our great satisfaction, have achieved with our former “arch-enemy” France remains as an uncompleted task with regard to our eastern neighbors and especially Poland. Poland was the first victim of the onslaught of 1939. […] Here too the old war memories must be buried so deeply that no one will be able to disinter them ever again.”112 Parties on both sides of the divide praised the German conciliatory tone, but its persistence after Jaruzelski’s imposition of martial law in December 1981 immediately brought back the old fears. Commenting on the lackluster German reaction to political

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repressions in Poland, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski compared German-Soviet détente with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.113 There were also public voices that urged West Germany to come to terms with its past. The 1965 memorandum on “The Condition of the Exiled Germans and the Relationship of the German People to its Eastern Neighbours” issued by the West German Evangelical Church, a bulwark of German nationalism, argued in favor of reconciliation with Poland and acknowledgment of historical injustices committed by the Nazi regime. One of the prominent supporters of this memorandum, Dietrich Goldschmidt, Director of Max Planck Institute in West Berlin, argued that Germany had to drop its demands over the Oder-Neisse line and face “the shameful history […] of the fourth division of Poland.”114 There were a lot of dissenting voices as well, but the document became an important milestone in initiating broader attitudinal changes in German society toward Eastern Europe. Marking the fortieth anniversary of the beginning of the World War II, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt urged fellow citizens to be aware of the historical responsibility that fell not only on today’s generation but on many generations to come.115 In a somewhat unexpected way, Schmidt interpreted the future prospects of German reunification through the lenses of Polish history: “Historically there have been three divisions of Poland. […] And then again, in 1939, there was a fourth division of what then again had been created as a Polish state between Stalin and Hitler. But nevertheless, the Poles, over a period of 200 years, two centuries, did not give the will, not give up the hope to get together one day in the future.”116 Clearly, like in German-Czechoslovakian bilateral relations, history often took the center stage in German-Polish affairs as well. Crushed In addition to the earlier-referenced concerns over the establishment of Soviet-German and Soviet-Chinese alliances in the 1970s, for French politicians the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had domestic relevance. First, it represented a deep humiliation for the French Communist Party, the largest such organization in Western Europe. In 1938 the Communists stood almost alone against Daladier’s policy of appeasement. Their vindication was short-lived as a year later they embraced the Hitler-Stalin Pact and were reluctant to join the French resistance until the German invasion of the Soviet Union.117 Following World War II, the French Communists spent a lot of effort trying to justify their complicity, generating heated exchanges in the National Assembly.118 Second, the pact represented the

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coming defeat of France: having secured the eastern frontier, Hitler was now free to move westward. De Gaulle’s remark to Andrei Vishinsky, a Soviet representative temporarily in charge of Italian affairs, clearly demonstrates the prevailing frustration: “It was a mistake on our part not to have put into practice with you, before 1939, an open alliance against Hitler. But how wrong you were to reach an understanding with him and allow us to be crushed!”119 The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was also referenced in foreign policy debates. The failed Paris Summit of 1960 was one of such occasions. The meeting was largely derailed by the U-2 spy plane incident at the beginning of the month. For Socialist Georges Bonnet, Khrushchev’s abrasive behavior in Paris smacked of 1939 Soviet diplomacy. After all, Khrushchev himself brought up the topic in a meeting with French diplomats at the Quay D’Orsay trying to convince them that Stalin had no other choice but to collude with Hitler.120 The same year, frustrated with Moscow’s provocative statements about Algeria, General De Gaulle struck back with one of his strongest statements on Eastern Europe: The [Soviet] empire holds under its yoke, and what a yoke, all kinds of people who were once conquered by Czars or more recently by itself. They are a people who hold down, oppressed and disfigured, a great number of nations: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Albania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Prussia and Saxony.121

Although France never recognized the forced incorporation of the Baltic States into the Soviet Union and even refused to surrender Lithuania’s and Latvia’s interwar gold reserves, the statement was quite unusual as it put former and current CEECs on equal footing. At the same time, it should have pleased West German politicians as it indicated at least a short-term shift of French foreign policy from the Soviet Union to West European allies. The images of 1939 always colored German-French relations. Usually they generated support for closer German-French cooperation122 and brought up fears over potential German-Soviet détente.123 Like the British, French politicians were also worried about the dynamics of Soviet-Chinese relations. Henri Froment-Meurice, the head of the Asia Department at the Quai D’Orsay, wrote down in his diary in 1973: “Relations between the USSR and China make me more and more think about those between Stalin and Hitler. It can result in the German-Soviet pact of 1938 or the war.”124 Clearly, the pact had broad applications for French politicians, especially as they approached the two signatories—the Soviet Union and West Germany.

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Infamous As with the Munich Agreement, American politicians were eagerly and openly moralistic in their assessment of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The cynical nuance, often present in European discourse, was largely absent in Washington.125 This heightened sense of puritanical wrath was especially visible during various anniversaries that presented excellent opportunities to keep the Soviet leadership on defense and score points with émigré groups as well as with dissenters in Eastern bloc countries. This approach was encouraged at the highest political levels. A memo prepared by CIA Director Allen Dulles recommended to “utilize anniversaries of past Soviet actions, such as the Hitler-Stalin pact or the Soviet takeover of the various satellite states, to point out past communist duplicity and ultimate Soviet responsibility for the imposition of an alien rule upon unwilling Eastern European peoples.”126 Thus, it is not surprising that the Congressional record, especially the Extension of Remarks section, is bursting with resolutions, speeches, radio addresses, newspaper articles, and statements on every imaginable anniversary. Whether it was the sixty-fourth anniversary of independence of Estonia or the hundred and sixty-fourth anniversary of the Polish constitution, U.S. politicians were eager to put their condemnations of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Soviet occupation on record. All of them competed for the most stirring language. The “criminal,”127 “treacherous,”128 and “sinister”129 German-Russian agreement was blamed for stabbing Poland in the back,130 battering the Baltic States away to Russia,131 and smashing their way across borders to launch World War II.132 The White House also did not shy away from similar statements, especially under presidents Reagan and Bush Sr. With a nudge from Congress, for many years 14 June was celebrated as the Baltic Freedom Day. On that day, a typical presidential statement condemned “the cynical arrangements of the infamous Ribbentrop-Molotov agreement” and pledged to continue the U.S. nonrecognition policy in the future.133 Depending on the timing of these statements, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact also served as a cautionary tale in dealings with the Soviet Union, China, Korea, Vietnam, and even the Persian Gulf countries. This type of discourse was present not only in the public square but also in narrower political and diplomatic circles. For example, like the French, Americans were particularly vigilant about German-Soviet relations. General Eisenhower argued that it was necessary to tie Germany into Western security networks in order to avoid the situation where “the Germans might be disposed to play the Soviet Union off against the West, or in the pattern of the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement Germany might make some sort of alliance

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with the Soviet Union for tactical reasons.”134 Seeing France’s continuous distrust of Germany, U.S. Ambassador to France Charles Bohlen worried about “the possibility of provoking another German-Soviet deal.”135 U.S. diplomats continuously pointed to this historical analogy as proof that the United States should not move its focus off Germany.136 An even bigger concern for Americans was Soviet attempts to extend their influence in Europe and beyond. When the Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov proposed the all-European security pact in 1954, Secretary of State Dulles reacted quite predictably: “As this conception became clear, Secretary Dulles said, he was at once reminded of the meetings between Hitler and Molotov at Berlin during the Nazi-Soviet collaboration. At one of these meetings Hitler and Molotov had discussed dividing up the world much in the fashion of Russia’s present conception. Accordingly, Secretary Dulles was tempted to point out to Molotov that he had learned his lessons well from Hitler.”137 In the 1960s, the United States was concerned about the upturn in Soviet-Chinese relations. Although some experts viewed with skepticism the possibility of Soviet-Chinese military cooperation, Secretary of State Dean Rusk was quick to remind them that the “Stalin-Hitler Pact showed how two hostile totalitarian states could sometimes get together very quickly when it suited them.”138 In the 1980s, the Reagan administration took up the rhetoric of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. When following the 1985 Bonn Summit, Moscow criticized Western powers for their role in starting World War II, to which State Department spokesperson Edward Djerejian had a swift response: “Whatever mistakes French and British leaders committed in the 1930s, they don’t compare with the encouragement of Hitler received from the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. […] France and Britain declared war on Hitler because of invasion of Poland. The Soviet Union joined Hitler in that attack on Poland.”139 As demonstrated by excerpts above, the American political establishment maintained the Molotov-Ribbentrop discourse throughout the Cold War. It might not have been as widely applied as the Munich analogy, but it was powerful in framing political thinking on a number of issues especially in relationship to West Germany and the Soviet Union.

The Yalta Agreement If the interpretation of the Munich Agreement and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact raised few controversies among Western political elites, the Yalta Agreement (initially known as the Crimea Conference) has been an object of heated debate, criticism, and accusations since day one. Criticism grew

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stronger as it became increasingly clear that a number of articles of the agreement were hardly worth the paper they were written on. Just four years after the agreement, U.S. Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius Jr. acknowledged that in the United States there was “widespread acceptance of the idea that at Yalta vital interests of the United States were sacrificed to appeasement of the Soviet Union.”140 Having participated in and having shaped these negotiations, he strongly disagreed with such interpretations, but at the same time admitted that the condemnations stem from “subsequent failures to carry out the agreements reached at Yalta.”141 Each side of the debate tended to portray the other as naïve, disingenuous, and even radical in their views, but in fact these were very diverse and broad coalitions of academics, politicians, and political activists. The criticism of the Yalta Agreement was usually based on two perceived flaws. The first one related to the initial unprincipled positions taken by Western powers. In this context, the brunt of condemnation fell on the shoulders of President Roosevelt, who, to the detriment of Eastern Europe, primarily focused on two goals: Soviet involvement in the war against Japan and the agreement over the structure of the United Nations.142 As the socalled Yalta Papers (published in 1955) revealed, he was largely indifferent to the British concerns over the problem of Poland, leaving the British, Polish, and Soviet officials to sort out the details.143 Also, some U.S. politicians alleged that Roosevelt came to the negotiation table with the status quo attitude ready “to sacrifice all principle.”144 As demonstrated later, this was an interpretation actively promulgated by Republicans, including President Dwight Eisenhower. The 1961 publication of the Teheran Conference proceedings revealed that the fate of such countries as the Baltic States was agreed upon before the Yalta meeting. In Teheran the U.S. President accepted the territorial claims of the Soviet Union in the Baltic region de facto, suggesting that Stalin organize plebiscites in the Baltic States to provide the appearance of willing accession to the Soviet Union.145 In contrast to this more cautious position of the United States (which later opened up opportunities for academic and political debate), Britain had been ready to accept Stalin’s territorial demands in the Baltic region (including Finland) since the beginning of the war. In fact, they repeatedly put pressure on the United States to acquiesce to the new Soviet borders. In his letter to President Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill insisted: The increasing gravity of the war has led me to feel that the principles of the Atlantic Charter ought not to be construed so as to deny the USSR the frontiers she occupied when Germany attacked. […] I hope therefore you

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will be able to give us a free hand to sign the treaty which Stalin desires as soon as possible.146

According to Churchill, he dropped his initial “moral position” and embraced the new one “under the pressure of events.”147 Similarly, Romania was also acknowledged as a legitimate Stalin demand already in December of 1941. In his memoirs, British Secretary Anthony Eden recalls a conversation with Stalin in Moscow, where he acknowledged Soviet domination of the Baltic States, Finland, and Romania.148 Further divisions of spheres of influence came on 9 October 1944 in Moscow. Churchill proposed to Stalin in what he dubbed a “naughty document,” ratios of influence in the Balkan region.149 In addition to Romania, Churchill offered Bulgaria to the Soviets in exchange for Western influence in Greece and equal shares of influence in Yugoslavia and Hungary.150 Given such “deals” early on, the Yalta Conference was only a snapshot in time that registered largely fixed preferences on Eastern Europe (with the partial exception of Poland). Still it became, in Churchill’s words, “the source of anxiety” because of a stark mismatch between its pompous Wilsonian language and the bleak reality on the ground. The second criticism focused on the process of the negotiations. Again, President Roosevelt was perceived as the weakest link among the Western allies. To the dismay and frustration of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, he was not interested in working on joint U.S.-British positions before or during the Yalta Conference.151 Instead, as critics of Roosevelt’s negotiating strategy point out, he was convinced that he could single-handedly win over Stalin through his “Diplomacy by Friendship” approach.152 In his wellknown message to Churchill, President Roosevelt asserted: “I think I can personally handle Stalin better than your Foreign Office or my State Department.”153 Roosevelt’s physically feeble shape at Yalta also contributed to an impression of a weak and ineffective negotiator. According to British Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs Alexander Cadogan, President Roosevelt “really hardly knew what it was all about. And whenever he was called upon to preside over any meeting, he failed to make any attempt to grip it or guide it, and sat generally speechless or, if he made any intervention, it was generally completely irrelevant.”154 Whether such harsh words were correct or not, they supported the general notion of a sellout of Eastern Europe. Another factor that played into criticism of the process was simply the absence of any Eastern European representatives when their fate was being discussed. While at the time the Big Three negotiations might have been the only reasonable and plausible path, historical parallels to the Munich Agreement and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact could not be avoided.

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Already in 1950, historian and journalist William Henry Chamberlin published a book in which the Crimea Conference was designated as “the Munich called Yalta.”155 Having addressed the general critiques of the Crimea Conference, the next section turns to the political discourse in the United States and Western Europe vis-à-vis Yalta. During the Cold War years, this treaty, like the Munich Agreement, became not only an important historical symbol but also a political football kicked around to gain electoral votes and to demonstrate political resolve. Violation of Principles In contrast to consensus formed on the Munich and Molotov-Ribbentrop pacts, U.S. political elites never came to a unified valuation of the Yalta Conference. President Roosevelt’s deal-breaking with Stalin throughout World War II generated some obvious unease, but the verdicts ranged from cautious approval based on military necessities to accusations of appeasement and betrayal of Eastern Europe. During the first two decades of the Cold War, Yalta-Potsdam Agreements were an especially sensitive topic in Washington. This was largely due to two factors: the proximity of the events and the postulated U.S. foreign policy position, which was geared toward liberation of the Soviet satellites. Following the Soviet military repression of the 1956 Hungarian revolt and the 1968 Prague Spring, the “liberation” doctrine was dropped in favor of differentiated incentives for Eastern European states. This policy of selective engagement was followed until 1981. With the coming of President Reagan, U.S. foreign policy toward the Soviet bloc initially switched back to a more confrontational approach. However, the appointment of Mikhail Gorbachev turned the tide back to engagement. Despite these policy shifts, the Yalta Conference, as the symbol of the division of Europe, was constantly present and visible on the U.S. political scene. The analysis below highlights some of this discourse. With the ink barely dry on the Yalta Agreement, a number of critical voices were already lashing out at President Roosevelt. The accusations of moral retreat, backstabbing, betrayal, and appeasement came from politicians, Eastern European émigrés, and the media at large. Some of the harshest and immediate criticisms of Roosevelt’s policy on Eastern Europe originated from the Republican camp. A couple of weeks after the conference, conservative Republicans insisted that the Yalta Agreement was “the most dastardly crime of the ages.”156 They alleged that “Britain and the United States [had] acquiesced fully in the demands of Stalin […] not only in Poland and the Baltic area, but in the south of Europe also.”157 The contrast was

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being drawn between the high moral ground taken by the U.S. government in regard to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Yalta “principles of force and political expediency.”158 The delineation of the Polish eastern borders according to the Curzon Line was mocked as acceptance of the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact.159 This initial trickle of criticism grew into a barrage of accusations by the early 1950s. At their 1952 National Convention, the Republicans adopted a platform stipulating that “the Government of the United States, under Republican leadership, will repudiate all commitments contained in secret understandings such as those of Yalta which aid Communist enslavements.”160 As a Republican nominee, General Eisenhower repeatedly drew on this language. Talking to Polish-Americans at the annual commemoration day of General Pulaski, he pledged to repudiate the Yalta Agreement, “which, through the violation of the principles of the Atlantic Charter and its unilateral violation by the Soviet Government, has resulted in the enslavement of Poland.”161 The criticism of Yalta went beyond the partisan divide. Some Democrats were just as harsh in their criticism of President Roosevelt as were their colleagues across the aisle: “We should never have agreed at any time to turn Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Rumania, and Bulgaria over to Russia. We have no right to put our stamp of approval on turning those countries over to one of the most tyrannical governments that has ever existed.”162 Yalta was readily designated as “the appeasement policy”163 where the United States agreed “to condone Soviet Russian looting and robbery of every country upon which Stalin’s Red legions set their foot.”164 U.S. diplomats also did not shy away from self-criticism. The U.S. ambassador to Czechoslovakia found no surprise in Czech distrust of Washington and their closer relations with Moscow: “In any event, there was no alternative than for the Czechs to sign with the Soviets. Our attitude at Yalta and Potsdam on boundaries and reparations and especially the halting of our army in May 1945, thus permitting Soviet forces to liberate Praha confirmed our stand in the minds of the Czechs.”165 The National Security Council came to similar conclusions assessing Czechoslovak attitudes toward the West: “The tendency to doubt rests on a recollection of the willingness of the Western European powers to sacrifice the Czechoslovak Republic at Munich, and upon the impression that Western wartime policy toward Czechoslovakia was to leave the country in a Soviet sphere of influence, hoping for the best but not preparing for the worst.”166 Secretary of State Dulles asked at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings whether the United States betrayed Poland at Yalta, rejected this blunt language but acknowledged some discomfort: “I do not believe that it is possible to put events like that in terms of striking phrases like betrayals and the like.

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We faced a very difficult situation, and there is certainly room for a large amount of difference of opinion whether we could have done any better than we did or not.”167 Feeling unease over World War II policies, U.S. officials were eager to make clear to weary Eastern European émigrés that there would be no other dealings with the Soviet Union over their heads. In the lead-up to the 1953 Bermuda meeting and the 1954 Berlin Conference, Secretary of State Dulles stated to the House of Representatives: “The captive peoples […] are not forgotten, that we are not reconciled to their fate, and above all, that we are not prepared to seek illusory safety for ourselves by a bargain with their masters which would confirm their captivity.”168 A very similar promise was given in what became known as the Potomac Charter, where President Eisenhower and Prime Minister Churchill pledged: “As regards to formerly sovereign states now in bondage, we will not be party to any arrangements or treaty which would confirm or prolong their unwilling subordination.”169 Such a position was not just an official pomposity but was also held within the bureaucracy. Exploring the possibilities of collective security negotiations with the Soviet Union in the 1950s, diplomats agreed that certain positions are nonnegotiable as a matter of principle. The case of the Baltic States was an often-quoted example: “Since the United States has taken so strong a position on principle for so long in opposition to the illegal incorporation of the Baltic Republics into the Soviet Union, we could not make a concession on this issue without suffering a loss of moral credit that would have widespread consequences in other areas, above all, in the satellites.”170 The perception of relatively clear and resolute U.S. Cold War policy was also shared by Eastern European émigrés. The leading Polish-American newspaper Nowy Swiat ran an article in 1960 arguing that “there [had] not been a day for many years when distinguished American politicians, including many occupying high positions in the Government administration, [had] not condemn[ed] the Yalta-Potsdam madness.”171 Throughout the Cold War years, the Eastern European émigré communities insisted on this interpretation. In a letter to President Kennedy, the Czechoslovak National Council praised his policy of “NO MORE APPEASEMENT” (capitalized in the original) and asserted that “had the West been able some thirteen or fifteen years ago to muster the courage, vigor and decision which we find in your recent proclamation, Czechoslovakia would not be a Communist dominated country today.”172 Marking an anniversary of the First Polish Democratic Constitution, the Polish American Congress issued a statement to the president claiming that the Polish people “were shamefully sold down the river on political bargain tables by internationalist schemers, who preferred to appease Communist criminals for the sake of dubious

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promises of so called peace.”173 Judging from Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s assessment of the Yalta Agreement—“a violation of the Atlantic Charter, an endorsement of slave labor”—such harsh language of the émigré communities was not entirely out of touch with some residents of the White House.174 In the late 1960s, the U.S. slash-and-burn rhetoric gradually eased up as Washington switched its foreign policy emphasis from liberation of captive nations to engagement with the Eastern bloc. The first steps were taken already in the late 1940s, when General Tito openly confronted and severed his ties with the Soviet leadership. This was followed by the rise of pro-Western Gomulka’s government in Poland in the mid-1950s. By the late 1960s, Romania began to assert its own foreign policy, looking for closer economic partnership with the West. It was rewarded with President Nixon’s visit to Bucharest in 1969. At the same time, Eastern European émigrés also began to modify their views as it became apparent that quick geopolitical changes were not in sight. Changes in the leadership of some émigré organizations reflected this new phase. For example, in 1968, the Polish American Council replaced its long-standing president Charles Rozmarek, an adamant advocate of Polish liberation from Communism policy, with the more moderate Aloysius Mazewski. Still, engagement did not mean that there was attitudinal switch on the Yalta Agreement. President Nixon viewed Roosevelt’s foreign policy successes and failures as being in tandem with his health status. By the time of Yalta, according to him, both were going downhill.175 The same skeptical position was held by his successor Gerald Ford, who already as a senator condemned the sins of Yalta.176 However, he is better remembered for a comment made during the 1976 second presidential debate, where he insisted that Eastern Europe was “independent, autonomous, it [had] its own territorial integrity, and the United States [did] not concede that those countries [were] under the domination of the Soviet Union.”177 Jimmy Carter replied with a bit of sarcasm urging his opponent to convince Eastern European émigrés of his interpretation of history. While later Ford reneged on his own comments and tried to present it as a misunderstanding, according to many analysts, this blunder alone might have cost him the elections. For his part, President Carter, who respected President Roosevelt and refrained from any open criticisms of his foreign policies, privately admitted that the United States “gave away too much at Yalta […]. The granting to Stalin of an almost undisputed control over Eastern Europe was a serious historical mistake.”178 In contrast to many Republicans, who openly pointed out the unfortunate role of the United States in Yalta, President Reagan rejected “any interpretation of the Yalta agreement that suggest[ed] American consent for

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the division of Europe into spheres of influence.”179 Instead, he pointed the finger of blame at the Soviet Union that broke its promises. In regard to the United States, Reagan argued that Yalta represented a 40-year pledge to restore the “community of free European nations.” Its importance stemmed from the fact that the division of Europe remained “unfinished business.” Thus, he openly declared his “wish to undo this boundary.”180 A similar position was held by President George H. W. Bush, who also preferred to focus on the Soviet Union as the main villain of the post-Yalta order.181 At the same time, he followed a long-standing Western tradition of emphasizing the artificial division of Europe as the main Cold War legacy that had to be overcome. In May 1989, his A Europe Whole and Free address in Mainz, Germany became one of his most iconic foreign policy speeches, leaving a lasting footprint in U.S. bureaucratic and diplomatic circles. In the 1990s, it was an important reference point for discussions on NATO enlargement to Eastern Europe. Jalta-Linie In Germany, Yalta was usually closely linked with the memory of Potsdam. Both of these conferences came to represent complex and painful geopolitical realities of postwar Germany. First, Bonn faced the loss of large territories east of the Oder-Neisse line and with it the influx of millions of German refugees that came to play an important role in German politics. Second, the division of Germany itself into Western and Eastern parts (including Berlin) was an open wound throughout the Cold War that was a miniature representation of the division of the European continent and of the world at large. The overcoming of this reality was a cornerstone of West Germany’s foreign policy. As stated in Helmut Schmidt’s memoirs: “No German chancellor is politically entitled to retrospectively criticize the Yalta resolution, but German policy must always be based on the political and military situation of the divided Europe and divided Germany that were created in 1945.”182 This intricate balancing act between humility and assertiveness, guilt and resentment, distrust and détente coexisted among German political elites. The first Chancellor of West Germany, Konrad Adenauer, was the preeminent example of these creative tensions grounded in recent past. According to the London Times, the Chancellor was obsessed with the fear of a new Yalta. In his memoirs, Adenauer himself quotes the paragraph and admits that “the paper was not altogether wrong about my fears […] A return to Potsdam harbored great dangers for the Federal Republic and for Europe.”183 During his 14 years in office, Adenauer pursued two main foreign policy goals. On the one hand, he rejected the notion that the 1945

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agreements represented the final settlement of borders. This issue had to be decided in a future Peace Conference that, with the help of Allies, would also bring a reunification of Germany.184 On the other hand, he showed initiative to deal with some outstanding border disputes with France and thus gain Western trust and support on his tough position toward Poland and the Soviet Union. In 1954, Adenauer agreed with the French demand for independence of the German-speaking Saar territory. For some mysterious reason, he interpreted Bundesrat’s approval of the Saar Agreement as “the completion of Yalta” despite the fact that before the vote, critics accused the chancellor of treason, selling out, and promoting another Yalta that did not take into account German interests.185 While the independence of the Saar territory has never materialized, West Germany wanted to make sure that there would be no more decisions made by the Allies behind its back. Responding to the idea of a new peace conference floated at the 1955 Paris meeting, Adenauer insisted that “there [would] not be another Yalta Conference.”186 Similarly, he was deeply frustrated over the American-Soviet negotiations of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and its perceived discriminatory nature vis-à-vis Germany. Adenauer interpreted it as the “second Yalta.”187 Although Adenauer’s tough rhetoric and emphasis on West European cooperation earned him respect among conservative voters, there was little to be shown on the “Eastern front.” It was Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik that embodied a new strategy to overcome the Yalta line through reconciliation. Whether it was his visits to Poland in 1970 or Crimea in 1971, conservatives criticized Brandt for ignoring the lessons of the past.188 The political clashes reflected the larger split in German society between those who resented the Yalta and Potsdam agreements as unfair and those who interpreted them as a burden of the Nazi aggression. Siding with the latter perspective, Social Democrats favored bold actions instead of bold rhetoric to ameliorate the legacy of 1945. Brandt’s successor Helmut Schmidt even criticized U.S. politicians for their excessive public posing: “Neither the majority of the American media nor the administration admitted to themselves the reality that the partition of Central Europe into two spheres of influence […], which had been initiated at Yalta, could not be abolished by television speeches, large gestures, and subsequent small action.”189 All German politicians shared this frustration over the continuing legacy of a supposedly temporary solution in 1945. What started as occupation zones evolved into spheres of interest generating political and military standoff between the two superpowers. Caught in the middle, Germany felt, in the words of the FRG President Richard von Weizsäcker, “the Yalta fatigue.” For him, the 1945 agreement was “the main cause of today’s military threats.”190 The grumble about the Yalta order always generated some

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unease in the Soviet Union. At the 1987 Weizsäcker-Gorbachev meeting, the Soviet leader expressed his frustration over the continuous questioning of the legality of the 1945 agreements: “… [W]e hear it said again and again that the ‘German question’ remains open, that not everything is clear about ‘the Eastern lands,’ and that Yalta and Potsdam are not valid.”191 While Gorbachev may have referred to earlier-quoted Weizsäcker words, these topics were widely discussed not only in diplomatic or political circles but also in the mass media. As expected, anniversaries were especially fruitful occasions to revisit the Yalta Agreement. For example, for the fortieth anniversary, Der Spiegel ran an extensive series of articles about the victims of Yalta (Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria), and about countries that managed to avoid or escape a similar fate (Yugoslavia and Finland). In this context, Germany belonged to both camps as only its Western part managed to avoid the Soviet menace. Blaming the Sick Man of Washington The subject of the Yalta Agreement in regard to Eastern Europe has been a very sensitive issue in the UK for four major reasons. First, the UK formally went to war with Germany because of Hitler’s invasion of Poland. The Anglo-Polish Treaty of Mutual Assistance signed in 1939 pledged mutual military assistance in case of an attack by a third country. Second, since 1940 the Polish Government-in-Exile was based in London. While its recognition was withdrawn by Britain in 1945, the Polish government formally functioned until December 1990, when the newly elected president, Lech Wałe˛sa, came to London to receive the symbols of the Polish state. Third, Polish armed forces loyal to the Government-in-Exile fought under the British command during World War II. And finally, Great Britain was one of the signatories of the Yalta Agreement bearing at least a partial responsibility for its outcomes. Just like in the United States, the British political debates on the Yalta Agreement were harsh and bitter. With the joint declaration of the Big Three presented for approval before the House of Commons in February 1945, some politicians did not hide their disappointment with the results and sought to introduce an amendment critical of government actions. Unionist Guy Lloyd argued against underwriting this shameful agreement, which legitimized “downright annexation of a large portion of Poland’s territory.”192 The fate of the Baltic States, according to Conservative Sir Archibald Southby, was just as hopeless: “Why is it that in the Yalta Report there is not one single word regarding the Baltic Republics? Are they not to be given the unfettered right to choose their own Government?”193

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While the amendment was handily defeated, the case of amendment supporters only strengthened with time. A year later, prominent Labourite Michael Foot was eager to remind Prime Minister Clement Attlee that “human misery with which Europe [was] now afflicted date[d] from the decisions taken at Potsdam, Teheran and Yalta.”194 According to another Labourite Richard Stokes, the linkage between these three agreements was one of betrayal of the British principle: “It was betrayed first at Teheran; then it was mortally wounded at Yalta, and the indecent funeral took place in Potsdam.”195 With the illusion of free and unfettered Polish elections soon quashed, for critics, Yalta became yet another example in a long string of British foreign policy failures: If we yielded to Hitler before the war, we yielded far too much to Russia during the war, both at Teheran and at Yalta. After the war, we yielded too much to Russia at Potsdam and at San Francisco. In this tragic situation, there is just time for us to be saved if we have the will to learn the lessons of the past. The first lesson is that passivity and irresolution must be avoided like the plague.196

Many preferred to change the discourse from “we” to “they” by pointing a finger of blame across the Atlantic. According to Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery, one of the most prominent British military commanders during World War II, it was Roosevelt who because of his feeble condition failed to adequately deal with Russia.197 Commenting on the outcomes of Yalta, former Prime Minister Clement Attlee also argued that under the American pressure the British “had to agree with many things, which we really should not have agreed with.”198 Even the newly declared doctrine of containment of Russia was written off by Conservative Julian Amery as the same old policy “which [had] already permitted the Sovietisation of half of Europe and the whole of China.”199 Again and again, Poland stood as the prime example of the tragic consequences of the Yalta Agreement. Those few who voted against it, like Conservative Colin Thornton-Kemsley, had some harsh words for the rest: “The effect now of the Yalta policy is that Poland, who, to our everlasting shame, has been surrendered into the Soviet clutches, without any kind of consultation and without any means of defence, is now completely subservient to Russia.”200 In fact, the assessment of the Crimea Conference among the British MPs in the early 1950s was so grim that Mr. Thorton-Kemsley believed, “If the Yalta vote were taken again tonight, the whole House would declare itself overwhelmingly against it.”201 While many scholars challenged both the myth of the repeated sell-out of Eastern Europe and the usefulness of lessons based on them, these mental

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shortcuts continued to be applied in the East European context and beyond. In the 1950s, Egypt became one such example. With Americans urging London to abandon its imperial possessions, some British politicians saw this as a replay of Roosevelt’s policy. The American distrust of the British, they argued, already produced Teheran and Yalta.202 The 1956 events in Hungary only added fuel to the fire. The eyewitnesses of 1945 were ringing bells of “a second Yalta.”203 The British government was urged to take more decisive actions against the Communist offensive across the world. A similar spike of history-laden rhetoric came up with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Besides the previously mentioned analogy of Munich, the “Yalta division of Europe” became another relevant historical image.204 The Yalta order was allegedly visible not only in abrasive military actions but in the yet unsolved German-Polish and German-Czechoslovak border issues as well. Instead of playing down these problems, some politicians, like Lord Bethell, urged the government to step up to the plate: “People remember that it was Great Britain who signed the Munich, Yalta and Potsdam Agreements. We are responsible for these frontiers, and we have a special interest in their maintenance or their abandonment.”205 At the same time, there were constant warnings from Conservatives not to be tricked again by the Soviet Union. Ardent anti-Communist Geoffrey Stewart-Smith thought that the détente of the 1970s was just another trap: “I maintain that the British Government were wrong in 1945 to trust the Soviet Union. There was a minority who voted against the Government then. I believe that the British Government will be totally wrong if in 1973 they attempt to endorse the violations of the Yalta conference.”206 These warnings continued up to the signature of the Helsinki Accords in August of 1975. The situation in Rhodesia in 1978 was one of the more unusual instances where the Yalta lessons were evoked. The debate over whether the Rhodesian government should negotiate with Soviet-supported rebels led by Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo brought back memories of 1945, particularly the negotiations over the make-up of the provisional Polish government. Former British diplomat Robert Hankey expressed his disapproval by recollecting his experiences in Eastern Europe: “I do not think those are the sort of people you want to get into a democratic Government. I was at Yalta and I have served in Poland and Hungary, and I have seen what happens when the Communists get into a Government; they eliminate everybody else. You do not want to put the cuckoo in the nest and see everybody else chucked out.”207 For others, Rhodesia was only one instance of a policy that was pursued in South West Africa and the Horn of Africa. According to former Minister of State Julian Amery, Western efforts to

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compromise with the Soviet Union in Africa were a sure sign that “we are heading for […] another Yalta Agreement.”208 With the 1980 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the ghosts of Yalta were unleashed again. The latest instance of Western complacency was contrasted to the latest aggression of the Soviets, who maintained their devious ways “since the Kremlin got the green light at Yalta.”209 A year later, Poland became yet another proof of aggressive Soviet intentions. In addition to many predictable condemnations, former British Secretary of Defense Denis Healey made a statement that touched upon deeper feelings of unease about the British postwar policy vis-à-vis Poland: No one who, like people of my age, has lived through this period can approach the current situation without a certain sense of guilt. I make no apology for using that word. It is true that we declared war when Poland was attacked in 1939, but we were unable, for physical reasons, to lift a finger to help the Poles from being occupied by Germany. The Poles made a major contribution to our own war effort by land, sea and air. Yet, we found it necessary, for reasons of State, to cover over the crime of Katyn for fear of upsetting the Russians. When the Russian armies stood passive on the other side of the river as the Germans pounded Warsaw to pieces and the Poles fought them in the sewers, the British, despite heroic efforts by the Balkan air force, were unable to give significant help. At Yalta, we allowed Russia to take eastern Poland into the Soviet Union and to install a Communist Government under guarantees of free elections which they did not even expect us to believe.210

The Yalta discourse continued throughout the 1980s following the ebbs and flows of Western-Soviet relations. With the Eastern bloc crumbling down, the Yalta era was coming to an end. Looking back at those tumultuous years, former Prime Minister Thatcher said: “In the space of two years, it has become a different world—not the end of history, as some foretold, but the return of history.”211 This statement made in 1992 not only described the immediate past but foreshadowed the next 15 years of the Euro-Atlantic policy vis-à-vis Eastern Europe. Policy of Blocs Among many French politicians, the Yalta Agreement became the symbol of the unjust division of the European continent. The origins of this rhetoric can be traced back to Charles De Gaulle, who was bitter toward the UK and the United States for not consulting with him over the Normandy landing operations and excluding him from the table of negotiations at Yalta and later

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at Potsdam. According to De Gaulle’s biographer Brian Crozier, “Yalta was the intolerable lump that stuck in de Gaulle’s throat. […] The memory of this exclusion never ceased to rankle.”212 Two years after the conference, De Gaulle’s own words were critical, but measured: “I continue to think that the Yalta affair, especially concerning the absence of France, was very grim and, in general, unfortunate.”213 The lingering bitterness is also reflected in De Gaulle’s words to Soviet Ambassador to France Sergei Vinogradov. After the latter extended an invitation to visit Moscow, De Gaulle coldly answered: “You should also invite me to Yalta, Mr. Ambassador.”214 In his memoirs, De Gaulle insisted that Yalta “enabled Stalin’s Russia to annex Central Europe and the Balkans automatically at the time of the collapse of the Third Reich.”215 For him, the ghosts of Yalta were surfacing up in the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty,216 French-Romanian relations,217 Sino-Soviet relations,218 and the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The latter was an especially painful blow as France was trying to court the Soviet Union in bridging the divisions of Europe.219 A statement from the Office of the President regretted the fact that Moscow had not abandoned “the policy of blocs, imposed on Europe by the Yalta agreements, which [was] incompatible with the right of peoples to self-determination.” At the same time, it insisted that France “did not participate in these agreements and did not adopt this policy.”220 This position was repeated again and again by various French officials.221 The rhetoric of Yalta persisted beyond the early days of the Fifth Republic because it constituted the core of foreign and even defense policy. In 1970, Defense Minister Michel Debré argued that the French national security concept stood on three legs: opposition to the policy of blocs, maintenance of stability in Europe through multilateralism, and restraint on external commitments. He explicitly contrasted the first two points to “the spirit of Yalta.”222 In the Gaullist tradition of skepticism toward Anglo-Saxons, the French were initially weary of Nixon-Brezhnev initiatives in the early 1970s. Political circles were buzzing over the possibility of the nouveau Yalta.223 Foreign Minister Maurice Schumann warned that Americans, prone to intellectual laziness, might repeat the mistakes of Yalta.224 The Yalta mentality was not exclusive to Gaullist politicians. Socialist François Mitterrand argued, “We live in a time of Yalta. This reality dictates the hierarchy of our duties and interests.” It was he, who in December of 1981 famously stated: “Anything that will enable us to escape from the consequences of Yalta will be good.”225 According to Polish dissident and historian Bronislaw Gemerek, two months earlier French Prime Minister Pierre Moray disclosed to him and Lech Wałe˛sa that Paris was planning to propose an international conference that would address the decisions made at Yalta.226 The idea lost its

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relevance once General Jaruzelski imposed martial law in Poland. However, it was not long until the events across Eastern Europe caught up with the rhetoric. The Yalta order was coming to an end. Kidnapped Europe East European discourse on EU and NATO enlargements analyzed in later chapters may appear to be perfect examples of strategic attempts to persuade Western colleagues about the necessity of expansion. While such a conclusion has some merit, it overlooks the continuity of the “return to Europe” idea throughout the second half of the twentieth century. East European dissidents were harboring the hopes of overcoming the Yalta order long before any prospects of the breakup of the Eastern bloc became apparent. This factor alone goes a long way in explaining the impact of this rhetoric on Western political elites in the 1990s. It is nearly impossible to accuse Lech Wałe˛sa, Václav Havel, or Árpád Göncz of “cheap rhetoric” given the resoluteness and consistency of their stance and vision throughout previous decades. One of the most iconic examples of the “European” discourse was a distressed telex message from the Hungarian News Agency during the last hours of the 1956 Revolution: “We are going to die for Hungary and for Europe.” A prominent Czechoslovak writer and a participant of the 1968 Prague Spring, Milan Kundera, quoted this telex as a warning to Western political elites. He argued that the events of 1956, 1968, and 1980 were not just “a drama of Eastern Europe, of the Soviet bloc, of communism, it [was] a drama of the West—a West that, kidnapped, displaced, and brainwashed, nevertheless insists on defending its identity.”227 Similar images are found in the writings of influential Polish intellectual and dissident Adam Michnik. Inspired by the Pope’s 1979 visit to Poland, he hoped that “the vision of a wounded and divided Europe, a Europe whose Warsaw and Cracow, Budapest and Prague, Vilna and Lvov [had] been amputated, a vision created by the powers of this world at the Yalta conference as a result of military actions, is today coming into question.”228 Like many of his compatriots, Michnik blamed the Western allies for abandoning Poland in 1945.229 Lech Wałesa also found it no surprise that “the Yalta agreement should have aroused, and should still arouse, a deep bitterness in the Poles.”230 In a French diplomatic manner, the famous “Prague appeal” of 1985 urged efforts to overcome the division of Europe, agreed upon at Yalta, and “build Europe into a community of equal partners.”231 For Baltic dissidents, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was their equivalent of Yalta. On 24 August 1979, 45 Baltic nationals issued an appeal requesting, among other actions, “the governments signatory to the Atlantic Charter, on the

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basis of their moral responsibility, to denounce the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and its consequences.” It also urged the government of West Germany to declare it “null and void from the moment of its signing” and “to assist the Soviet government to nullify the consequences of that pact.”232 It was these and other similar statements that repeatedly challenged the status quo in Eastern Europe. They built the groundwork for the resurgence of revolutionary movements in the late 1980s, which predictably looked to Europe as their final destination. On 15 November 1989, Lech Wałesa delivered his address to the joint session of Congress. Revisiting the 45-year-old history, he argued: In 1945 we were theoretically on the winning side. But theory had little to do with practice. While her allies looked on in tacit agreement, an alien system of government was imposed on Poland. […] The atrocities of the war were followed by the persecution of all those who dared to think and act independently. All those solemn pledges made in Yalta about free elections in Poland were broken … After 1939, this was the second national catastrophe. While other nations celebrated their victory, Poland went into mourning, a bitter mourning, for the Poles felt that the Allies had abandoned them. Many still feel that way.233

Barely a week later, Civic Forum representative Václav Havel struck a more optimistic tone. The November 23 declaration stipulated two fundamental certainties of the future Czechoslovakian state. One of them was “that we want to live in a free, democratic and prosperous Czechoslovakia, which must return to Europe, and that we will never abandon this ideal, no matter what transpires in these next few days.”234 At the time, the “return to Europe” was a rather vague notion, but already three years later it came to represent two main foreign policy goals of most Eastern European countries: membership in the EU and NATO. Undoubtedly, CEE leaders understood and pursued economic, political, and security benefits that came with joining the Euro-Atlantic organizations, but this Drang nach Westen was not born in the Prague Castle or in the Sándor Palace, but in prison cells and cigarette-smoke-filled apartments frequented by dissidents. Conclusion Although this chapter focuses solely on the “black trinity” discourse, it does not seek to establish the exclusivity of these historical parallels during the Cold War. It simply demonstrates four key points. First, Western political elites maintained the memory of the Munich Agreement, the MolotovRibbentrop Pact, and the Yalta-Potsdam Conferences right until the collapse

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of the Soviet bloc. The historical awareness was widespread ranging from mid-tier diplomats to politicians at the highest national levels. Second, the discourse was not just a public posturing for the gain of political points against rivals, but was also repeatedly engaged in private settings. This indicates a deeper intellectual and emotional appeal of the “black trinity” among Western political elites. Third, judging from many examples presented earlier, there was an ongoing and genuine debate about the role of the Euro-Atlantic community in the unfortunate fate of Central and Eastern Europe. No consensus was reached on the assessment of the agreements, however almost everyone agreed that the CEECs got the short end of the stick. Fourth, the CEE dissidents, who became influential politicians in 1990s, envisioned the return to Europe long before any realistic prospects for independence emerged. Furthermore, they almost univocally condemned the “black trinity” and its tragic consequences for their countries and the region as a whole. It is impossible to accuse them of some strategic concerns. Instead they seemed to reflect suppressed national sentiments and resentments. This chapter provides a bridge from the historical events, which took place in 1930–40s to the policy of the EU and NATO enlargement developed in the first half of the 1990s. Once the CEE politicians came to the Euro-Atlantic community with the demands of “return to Europe,” the historical context of such claims was crystal clear for everyone. More importantly, these were not demands based on several distant and infinitely plastic historical analogies—as some examples provided in this chapter might suggest—but instead on specific regional geopolitical and socioeconomic realities, which came into being in the aftermath of the “black trinity.” CEE leaders demanded the elimination of these tragic outcomes through irreversible and full integration of their countries into the Euro-Atlantic community. They knew that they had the moral-historical right to “return” to Europe. At the same time, the key Western powers were fully aware of their historical responsibility to respond positively to such demands. As demonstrated in the next two chapters, this combination of the perceptions of responsibility and entitlement gave birth to the policies of Eastern enlargement.

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CHAPTER 3

NATO Enlargement

T

estifying before the Armed Services Committee in 1997, U.S. Secretary of State Albright presented four reasons for NATO enlargement: to protect against future wars in Europe, to strengthen NATO by adding capable new allies, to defend Europe’s gains in democracy, peace, and integration, and finally, to right the wrongs of the past.1 Without taking them at face value, this chapter evaluates each of these reasons in the context of the proposed theoretical framework. This framework provides a more systematic way not only to analyze NATO enlargement but also to compare it to the EU expansion. The first two reasons—the prevention of new conflicts and the enhancement of institutional capability—are linked with member state interests. Protection of democracy and peace is treated as an extension of the regional stability argument, but with emphasis on norm entrepreneurship and socialization. Finally, the righting of historical wrongs represents a historical-psychological legacy expressed in the variable of collective guilt. Since current NATO enlargement literature either ignores or underestimates the importance of the historical guilt component, this chapter fills in the gap by narrating the development of the policy through this perspective. Alternative explanations are discussed following the main discussion. At the end, the explanatory power of the proposed model is evaluated vis-à-vis the hypotheses presented in chapter 1. Enlargement as Restitution Many historical accounts of NATO enlargement in the 1990s begin with the Euro-Atlantic side of the story.2 While this approach picks up the enlargement issue as it was entering foreign policy discussions of NATO members, the debate over the future security framework of post–Cold War Eastern Europe and Europe at large started much earlier. It is easy to forget that East Europeans initiated the NATO enlargement debate, while member

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states acted in response to their demands. As noted by Goldgeier, the majority of Western politicians did not even consider NATO enlargement before the eventual disintegration of the Soviet Union.3 Commenting on ongoing enlargement debates among member states as late as January 1996, British Defense Secretary Michael Portillo argued along the same lines: “… I don’t see this as a great ambition of NATO to get bigger. What we are responding to is applications from other countries who want to join our organization.”4 Thus, until the demands of Eastern Europeans became concrete and congruent, the enlargement debate was virtually absent. These demands finally got Western attention in 1992, although the initial suggestions predated the collapse of the Soviet Union. The progression from hints to outright demands of membership as the only legitimate option of the “return to Europe” took about a year and a putsch in Moscow. During his visit to Germany in October 1990, Polish Foreign Minister Krzysztof Skubiszewski stated that not only the EEC (European Economic Community) but also NATO should consider East European enlargement.5 At the CSCE Paris Summit in November of 1990, Czechoslovakian President Václav Havel saw a transformed NATO as the primary security guarantor in Europe: Considering the future European security structure, I mentioned the fact that everything seems to point to NATO as its basis of some kind, a pillar which in due course after its radical transformation could be turned in the new European security structure. I mentioned the possibility of some kind of co-operation, or even an association agreement between other European countries and NATO as one of many various steps in this direction.6

Following the summit, NATO Secretary General Manfred Wörner visited Hungary, where both Prime Minister Jozsef Antall and President Árpád Göncz insisted that NATO should take responsibility for the future security of Europe.7 Such statements were by no means open requests for membership yet, but rather urges for closer institutionalized cooperation. Though slight, this was a noticeable departure from proposals made earlier in the year by Czechoslovak Foreign Minister Jirˇí Dienstbier. His vision of a pan-European security structure modeled after the CSCE began to lose its steam as Eastern Europeans followed with great anxiety the conservative turn of Mikhail Gorbachev in November 1990. His speech to the Supreme Soviet, reminiscent of the Cold War era, coupled with cabinet changes and the warnings of approaching dictatorship by Eduard Shevarnadze, raised some serious doubts as to the viability of pan-Europeanism. Gorbachev’s veto on the participation of Baltic representatives at the CSCE Summit only

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strengthened East European concerns. Václav Havel, a strong supporter of the Baltic cause of independence, cancelled a planned meeting with the Soviet leader during the summit.8 At the same time, Hungarian Premier Jozsef Antall issued a statement declaring that it was necessary to dissolve the Warsaw Pact by early 1992. A couple of months later, the tragic January 1991 events in the Baltic republics further confirmed the incompatibility of the Soviet and Eastern European visions of regional security. The last straw was the August Putsch in Moscow, which demonstrated the unpredictability of the Soviet Union and by extension the Russian Federation. It played to the long-held beliefs of many Western and East European politicians that Russia belonged to the “other,” less predictable and darker part of geographical Europe. As stated by Milan Kundera in 1984, nothing could have been “more foreign to Central Europe and its passion for variety than Russia: uniform, standardizing, centralizing, determined to transform every nation of its empire [ … ] into a single Russian people.”9 Only several weeks after the putsch, East Europeans were already openly asking for NATO security guarantees. During his three-day U.S. visit that included a meeting with President Bush, Polish Premier Jan Beliecki repeatedly talked about the extension of “the NATO umbrella over Central and Eastern Europe.” According to him, the option of “full membership in NATO” should have been on the table “because the Pact [was] an important solution to the European security system.”10 On the heels of the Polish visit, Hungarian Prime Minister Jozsef Antall made the same arguments to U.S. politicians. According to him, “NATO should [have declared] that it [took] responsibility for the security of the area from its borders to the borders of the Soviet Union.”11 At the October Summit of Visegrad countries in Crocaw, East European leaders repeated requests for speedy integration into the Euro-Atlantic community and even chastised Western leaders for their indecisiveness. Polish President Lech Wałe˛sa argued that “the West is avoiding responsibility.” His demands were blunt: “We want association and next integration with the EC. We want such links with the NATO that would give us the feeling of security. We do not want to threaten anybody but we will not allow for any grey zone in our region.”12 Seen in the context of the accelerating fragmentation and unpredictability of their former master, these demands were understandable. In the case of Poland, the slow pace of Soviet troop withdrawal heightened its sense of insecurity. Although reactions to these early security demands were rather subdued, it was clear that NATO members were starting to discuss security guarantee options for Eastern Europe. Just prior to the Paris Summit, President Bush stopped for a visit in Prague and affirmed for East Europeans that the

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United States did not want “to see Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary off in some kind of no-man’s land”.13 Following the Moscow coup in August of 1991, NATO Secretary General Manfred Wörner went as far as to declare that the West’s “security [was] inseparably linked to all other states in Europe, particularly eastern Europe.”14 In the Visegrad countries, this statement was perceived as an important breakthrough in member states’ perceptions of regional security needs. With the new geopolitical environment facing the West after the 1989 revolutions, NATO member states had not only to engage Eastern Europe but also to demonstrate their willingness to cooperate with the Soviet Union. The Rome Summit in November of 1991 revealed the NACC as the primary mechanism of consultations and information sharing at the ministerial levels. With the eventual collapse of the Soviet state, the NACC came to include all FSU republics. To avoid any speculations regarding the NACC mission, Manfred Wörner was quick to assure that “this [was] not the end of the way” for Eastern Europe. He went as far as to confirm to Visegrad countries the eventual possibility of enlargement: “Although we are not today considering whether to increase the membership of NATO, this does not mean that we exclude additional membership in the future. We keep this option open.”15 At the time, Wörner was pushing Washington’s limits of comfort. Since taking office in 1989, President Bush approached the Eastern bloc first and foremost vis-à-vis the Kremlin. His priority was not the demolition of the Soviet Union through confrontation but a soft landing for the superpower in distress. This strategy of engagement was largely maintained after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As noted by Robert Hunter, Bush preferred to deal with Russia as the United States dealt with Germany after 1945 rather than after 1918.16 However, President Bush was approaching the end of his first term. With the U.S. economy slumping and Democrats launching scathing criticism at him for spending too much time abroad, there was little space for NATO-Eastern European policy discussions at the White House. Noting the trend and anticipating future challenges for NATO, Republican Senator William Roth and Democrat Joe Lieberman urged the president to initiate negotiations with fellow NATO members on the “re-crafting of the alliance.” They argued in favor of some “minimal security guarantees to the region’s emerging democracies” because “for much of this century, the history of Eastern Europe [had] repeatedly been the scene of invasion, repression, and occupation, from both West and East.”17 Across the ocean, the French-German suggestions of a separate European army corps only confirmed NATO institutional challenges, although the inability of the EU to deal with the Yugoslav conflict was chipping away

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at the newly found European self-confidence. At the same time, the appointment of Volker Rühe as the German Minister of Defense in April 1992 represented a significant shift in Berlin’s attitudes toward NATO enlargement. He became the first top-ranking Western politician to endorse and actively promote the idea of NATO expansion. Although the German Ministry of Defense had started working on the policy of NATO expansion in November of 1992, it appears that the first public “leak” was made during Rühe’s visit to Washington. Speaking at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation on 17 February 1993, he insisted that Eastern Europeans should not be denied the prospects of NATO membership.18 The more widely known version of his enlargement policy speech was presented a month later—on 26 March 1993 at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London. Repeating the arguments made in Washington, Rühe insisted that EU and NATO enlargements should go hand in hand: What applies to the economic dimension applies to policy as well. We must not exclude our neighbors in the East from the Euro-Atlantic security structures. Eastern Europe must not become a conceptual “no man’s land.” […] The Atlantic Alliance must not become a “closed shop.” I cannot see one good reason for denying future members of the European Union membership in NATO.19

Several days later, he assured Hungarians that the membership of the Visegrad countries would soon come up on NATO’s agenda.20 In the next four years, he delivered seven hundred speeches on the topic.21 Like most broad policy proposals, Rühe’s argument was multidimensional. It tapped into strategic aspects of expanding the European zone of stability and security—“a conditio sine qua non for the stability of the entire continent.” At the same time, it touched upon deeper historical-psychological underpinnings of overcoming “many of our Cold War divisions.”22 The importance of the “moral” component especially stands out in the closer analysis of Rühe’s personal beliefs. Frederick Kempe’s book Father/Land is a goldmine of insights on the German Foreign Minister. With Kempe, Rühe discusses the underlying rationale for NATO enlargement in the way that can only indirectly be detected in his public speeches: I had the feeling, and still have, that we owe a lot to Poland. […] We owe them in a negative sense for what we did to them during the war. And we owe them in a positive sense for their courage in the 1970s and the 1980s. Their liberating themselves was really the key to overcoming the division of Europe. We need to understand that there would have been no Leipzig without Gdansk.23

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While the German-Poland rapprochement for Rühe was, in his own words, “the big change,” he saw enlargement in broader historical terms—as a third attempt at reconciliation in Europe: “The first was Versailles, and that went completely wrong and laid the seeds for the next war. The second was after World War II—everything was right in the West but the East was kept out. Now we knew we had the chance to do the right thing for all of Europe …”24 Interestingly, Rühe’s definition of the Eastern half of Europe is implicitly based on the 1938–39 regional map. The restoration of this historical map lost due to the “black trinity” is seen as the reunification of Europe. The geopolitical fault lines would later be similarly drawn in the United States, but the incoming administration under president-elect Bill Clinton was initially focused on Russia. With Strobe Talbott, a close friend of the president and a prima facie Russia expert, playing a strong foreign policy hand, the vision of democratic and pro-Western Russia captured the imagination of the new team early on. With the United States also staying aloof from the raging Yugoslavian crisis, Eastern Europeans felt confused. Jan Urban, the former Civic Forum dissident, was worried that “the U.S. [was] slowly disappearing from European politics.”25 At the same time, Polish Defense Minister Janusz Onyszkiewicz was much more optimistic after his meetings with the incoming Clinton team members. He asserted that “the United States [accepted] the inevitability of Poland’s accession to NATO.”26 Whomever he was talking to, it was clearly not the next Secretary of State Warren Christopher. His presentation of Clinton’s foreign policy priorities before the Senate emphasized cooperation with Russia as the next game in town. The rest of the former Eastern bloc featured largely as an afterthought: “We should also orchestrate similar international action to help Ukraine, the other Commonwealth [of Independent] States, the Baltics, and the nations of Eastern and Central Europe. […] Our Administration will support efforts by the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe to promote human rights, democracy, free elections, and the historic re-integration of the nations of Eastern and Western Europe.”27 While Clinton may not have yet considered the policy of NATO expansion in early 1993, for lower echelons of his team and departmental bureaucrats, the idea was not entirely new. Eastern Europeans were making more concerted efforts to elevate their demands for security. At the same time, Volker Rühe’s proselytizing in Washington and across Europe was noticed as well.28 A somewhat unexpected boost to the idea of NATO Eastern expansion was given during several days of meetings with Eastern Europeans at the end of April. A whole group of dignitaries arrived in Washington for the opening

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of the Holocaust Museum on 23 April. While overloaded with his domestic agenda, President Clinton scheduled one-hour meetings with Polish President Lech Wałe˛sa and Czech President Václav Havel.29 The latter managed to make the biggest impression on Clinton as he argued for NATO expansion. Working in Havel’s favor was not only Clinton’s fond memories of Prague in 1970 but also his personal admiration of the Czech president.30 President Clinton also held shorter discussions with Slovak President Michal Kovácˇ, Hungarian President Árpád Göncz, and Bulgarian President Zheliu Zhelev. All CEE leaders “argued to Bill Clinton that he had the historic opportunity to erase the line drawn through Europe by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.”31 Through the opening speeches and exhibits, history was coming alive with memories not only of the Holocaust but also of the Munich Agreement, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and World War II. Havel’s speech at George Washington University clearly revealed these historical interdependencies. For him the question of how the Holocaust had been allowed to happen was best understood in the context of 1938: It was a failure of democracy, the politics of appeasement, giving way to evil: what in my country we call the spirit of Munich. The inability of Europe and the world to recognize the emerging evil in time and to stop it from growing to such monstrous proportions is merely a consequence of understanding the world as an agglomeration of inconvenience. The issue here is the absence of a wider sense of responsibility for the world. Czechs remember well a statement made by a democratic statesman shortly before he signed the Munich Agreement, the real beginning of all the horrors of the Second World War. He was appalled, he said then, that his country was digging trenches and trying on gas masks ‘because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.’ This is a classic example of how suicidal it is to try to sidestep difficulties.32

This gathering of prominent East Europeans became a perfect storm that created momentum “to turn this pious wish into a policy.”33 According to Clinton’s National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, “the Holocaust Museum meetings made a huge difference mostly because it very much impressed the President that these leaders made this [enlargement] the top of their agenda.” Clinton wanted to make sure that Eastern Europe “looked to the West with confidence rather than to the East with fear.”34 In Ron Asmus’s opinion, Clinton “was open to it [enlargement] in my view because of the moral argument and his desire to help consolidate democracy in the region; and because he understood that NATO had to be recast if it was going to remain relevant in a very different world.”35 The answer to the puzzle about the future direction of NATO would probably

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have been quite different if not for the CEE requests for NATO security guarantees. More importantly, these requests would have been significantly less effective if not for historical-psychological legacies that touched a naked nerve on both sides. Charles Gati, a senior adviser on the Department of State’s Policy Planning Staff during Clinton’s first term, fled his native Hungary for the United States after the failed 1956 revolution. What he encountered throughout the years was a deep sense of American unease about Central and Eastern Europe: There was still a sense of guilt. I felt that as a Hungarian in 1956 when I came here. Often people talked to me, and to this day, about big American words and few American deeds. So I think there was a sense of guilt that we Americans allowed Soviet-imposed slavery on Central and Eastern Europe. And I think to make up for that, Havel’s appeal was very important.36

Despite the initial pressure from Eastern Europeans, the idea of NATO enlargement was met with stiff resistance and skepticism among many U.S. bureaucrats and politicians. Even within the immediate Clinton circle, the supporters were in the minority. This power asymmetry resulted in the Pf P program announced at the NATO defense ministers’ meeting in Travemunde in October of 1993. From the East European perspective, this was an alarming development. It threatened to turn NATO into an OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) type of security forum or to add another institutional layer with downgraded security guarantees. Neither of the options was acceptable for new democracies that wanted to join an effective security structure with its Article 5 intact. Feeling threatened and insecure, Eastern Europeans expressed their frustration by reminding the Euro-Atlantic community of previous empty promises and “betrayals.” In his speech candidly entitled “The Lessons of Appeasement,” at the University of London, Hungarian Foreign Minister Géza Jeszenszky, historian by profession, spoke not only about the appeasement of Hitler but also about Western “appeasement of Stalin” during World War II. His language was straightforward and tough: “It was not our fault that we did not accede to the Washington Treaty in 1949 which established NATO, or to the Treaty of Rome which established the European Community in 1957. […] The people living in the former communist countries suffered very much and today they seek the pledge that they will not be left out in the cold again, abandoned as they were in 1945, 1956, 1968 and 1981.”37 Václav Havel declared that “if the West [refused] Central European states the right to become full-fledged members of the European integration structures, including NATO, it would mean a return to the spirit of Yalta.”38 During his visit to

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the United States, Polish Foreign Minister Andrzej Olechowski warned that “we will say no if we come to the conclusion that this program is likely to become a new Yalta or prevent us from membership in NATO.”39 Former Deputy Defense Minister of Poland Radek Sikorski compared the situation to “the Twenties and Thirties,” when the Western establishment exhibited similar “indifference to the security concerns of Central Europe.”40 These remarks were echoed on the other side of the Atlantic. Republican Senator Richard Lugar acknowledged the legitimacy of “the expressed concerns about Yalta II” and warned against making any deals “over the heads of the Europeans.”41 The U.S. administration faced a peculiar situation in which it depended on the Eastern Europeans to embrace the Pf P as a legitimate cooperation instrument. Without their explicit support, the Pf P was at risk of losing its relevance even before it was formally launched. To shore up enthusiasm before the upcoming NATO Summit in Brussels, Clinton dispatched three of his most prominent Eastern European expats—U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright, State Department Senior Adviser Charles Gati, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Shalikashvili—to pay visits to Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Slovenia, Bulgaria, and Albania. In the words of Albright, they were “living proof to Central Europeans that there were people high in the U.S. government who understood their past problems and future hopes.”42 Madeleine Albright, who famously proclaimed, “My mind-set is Munich,” grew up in the home of prominent Czechoslovak emigrants deeply aware of the historical misfortunes of her homeland.43 When her father spoke about World War II, “he never strayed far from the lessons of Munich: unspeakable tragedies ensue when great countries appease evil, and do not pay attention to what is happening in faraway places.”44 Like the previously mentioned U.S. diplomats during the Cold War, she also understood why many Czechs and Slovaks were disappointed with the West following World War II: “There were also many Czechs and Slovaks who identified with ‘Mother Russia’ as a nation of fellow Slavs. After the war, the [Communist] party gained strength because the Western powers, not Moscow, were held responsible for the betrayal at Munich. The Soviet Union had also been an ally in fighting the Nazis, and General Dwight Eisenhower had agreed to let the Red Army liberate Prague.”45 There is no doubt that, like for most Eastern Europeans, NATO enlargement had a deep historical-psychological significance for her. According to Asmus, who worked closely with Secretary Albright, she “viewed enlargement as a moral imperative. It was an opportunity to erase the lines drawn by the armies of Hitler and Stalin and accepted by the West at Yalta.”46

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Aside from the fuzzy Pf P proposal, regional security sensitivities were also heightened by the open hostilities between Russian President Yeltsin and the defiant State Duma in late 1993. Just two months after the bloodshed, the results of the Russian Duma elections inspired little optimism. Although the proreform party Russia’s Choice emerged the winner with 21.3 percent of seats in the lower chamber of the parliament, the overall voting trends were a wake-up call not only for Eastern Europeans but for the West as well. The Liberal Democratic Party of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, an ultra-nationalistic extremist, came in second with 15.5 percent of seats. Communists managed to get 14.4 percent of parliamentary seats.47 The outlook was grim, as openly antireform parties received 40.4 percent and openly proreform parties only 36.4 percent of the seats. The vision of pro-Western and democratic Russia was gradually giving way to a more skeptical assessment along the Eastern European lines of thinking. In the midst of allegations over the indifference of the West toward new democracies, Bill Clinton paid his first visit to Europe as U.S. president. While in Prague, he uttered his famous phrase that clearly indicated the U.S. resolve to enlarge NATO: “Now the question is no longer whether NATO will take on new members, but when and how we will do so.” Repeating Vice President Gore’s words spoken to East European-Americans, Clinton assured his East European colleagues that “this is not a rerun of Yalta; it is a first-run of democracy.”48 In Brussels, the U.S. president was as emphatic in his historical references: Over the past half century, the transatlantic community only realized half of the promise of World War II’s triumph over fascism. The other half lay captive behind Europe’s walls of division. Now we have the chance to realize the full promise of Europe’s victories with its great disappointment, Normandy without Yalta, the liberation of the low countries without the Berlin Blockade. […] We must not let the Iron Curtain be replaced with a veil of indifference—for history will judge us, as it judged with scorn those who preached isolationism between the World Wars.49

Following the summit, the U.S. Senate also took up the issue of future NATO enlargement in the form of an amendment to the Foreign Relations Authorization Act of 1994. While embracing the Pf P, Amendment 1280 called for the United States to “urge prompt admission to NATO” for countries “which demonstrate both the capability and willingness to support collective defense requirements and established democratic practices.”50 The sponsors of the amendment—Senators Hank Brown (R), Paul Simon (D), and Barbara Mikulski (D)—shared the view that “the United States had failed these countries in the past and had an obligation to assist them in their efforts

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to integrate themselves into the West.”51 Not surprisingly, discussions on the floor often came back to East Europeans as victims of World War II. According to Senator Hank Brown, the irresoluteness of the Western allies, including the United States, was an important part of the problem: It is fair and reasonable to observe that the events, the tragic events, of 1939, where Poland was dismembered both by Hitler and Stalin, where the Polish people were enslaved and murdered and tortured, took place, at least in part, because the aggressors did not feel that anyone would come to the aid of Poland. […] The tragedy was compounded after the war when the United States intervened and asked the leaders of the Polish resistance to surrender to Soviet forces …52

The amendment passed with an overwhelming majority—94 yeas and 3 nays—indicating that there was a broad bipartisan coalition in support of NATO enlargement. Without timetables and other details, the political commitment appeared rather shallow, but it gave the green light to the Clinton administration to further develop the policy. In January 1994 the president appeared to be torn between Strobe Talbott’s strategy of pan-Europeanism and Tony Lake’s moralist streak focused on Eastern Europe. However, just a few months after the Brussels Summit, it was clear that President Clinton was giving into the moral pressure exerted by CEE politicians (and some of his advisers) and committing the United States to NATO Eastern enlargement in a relatively near term. During his July visit to Poland, President Clinton repeatedly emphasized that NATO enlargement not only should, but will happen. In his address to the Polish Parliament, President Clinton sounded almost like an American politician of Polish descent: Poland should never again have its fate decided for it by others. No democracy in this region should ever be consigned to a grey area, or a buffer zone. And no country should have the right to veto, compromise or threaten democratic Poland’s or any other democracy’s integration into Western institutions, including those that ensure security.53

By the fall of 1994, Vice President Al Gore was already speaking about moving beyond the Pf P and starting discussions on CEE demands for membership in the near future.54 Despite some half-hearted American assurances that NATO might be open even to Russia’s membership bid, German Defense Minister Volker Rühe did not share this optimism: “If Russia were to become a member of NATO it would blow NATO apart.”55 President Yeltsin’s response at the CSCE Summit in Budapest was just as

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dramatic: “Europe is in danger of plunging into a cold peace.”56 In the midst of this unfolding drama, the just burgeoning policy initiative for enhancing European stability—Pf P—was being supplanted by a narrower policy version of enhancing CEE stability. While this was a worthwhile goal, it directly challenged the earlier embraced position of no new divisions in Europe. Critics were adamant about this point. Shortly after leaving his position of Director for European Affairs on the National Security Council, Charles Kupchan wrote a piece in the Washington Post harshly criticizing Clinton’s “NATO expansion kick” as “a train wreck in the making” that would lead to “a Europe again divided into hostile halves.”57 Among U.S. think tanks, the RAND Corporation was the leading advocate for rapid NATO enlargement. The 1993 article in Foreign Affairs by three RAND experts—Ronald Asmus, Richard Kugler, and Stephen Larrabee—became a sort of manual for many enlargement supporters. It urged the forging of “a new translantic bargain” that would bring regional stability, overcome old rivalries, and prepare NATO for the challenges of the twenty-first century.58 Less widely known, but equally interesting, is a piece by RAND’s Vice President David Gompert in the Moscow Times. Building a historical-psychological case for enlargement, he wrote: An ugly wound still separates Europe’s new democracies from the safe and wealthy West. That wound was made by Stalin’s army and accepted at Yalta, 50 years ago last month, by Western leaders anxious to avoid World War III. With the Soviet Union gone, responsibility for the old wound has shifted to those who could heal it but hesitate. At heart, this is a moral issue. Since liberating themselves five years ago, the Poles, Hungarians and Czechs have pleaded to join the West, only to be dodged by double talking diplomats. So Germany may be unified, but Europe is not. Yet why should East Germans and for that matter, West Germans, Dutch, Greeks have more right to belong to the West than those who suffered without respite from Nazi and then Soviet oppression? The cruel irony is that West Europeans and North Americans have chosen to hoard the benefits of security and prosperity provided by the very institutions from which East Europeans were excluded during their Soviet captivity.59

As mentioned earlier, Ron Asmus, who joined the State Department in 1997 to work on NATO expansion, also saw Clinton’s decision to embrace enlargement partly in moral terms. Although when it was suggested, he explicitly rejected the idea of personal or even collective guilt, Asmus explained the moral factor as “the sense that we owed this to them since they ended up behind the Iron Curtain for reasons that weren’t of their own making; because these countries had suffered more than enough in their

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respective histories; and because of the critical role they played in bringing down communism (and saving us a hell of a lot of money).”60 Over in Europe, German Defense Minister Volker Rühe rarely shied away from historical references. He argued that the policy of Eastern enlargement was the only viable option: “What is the alternative? To say that we’re a closed club, we don’t accept you? That’s the policy of Stalin, and it will invite lots of trouble.”61 Immediately following the 1994 Brussels Summit, Rühe asserted that some CEE countries should join the alliance by 2000: “I can see good chances of that happening before the end of the decade. […] We must not delay any longer than that.”62 He repeated his pledge throughout the year, singling out the four Visegrad countries to be first in line for membership.63 Although initially reluctant to take sides between Rühe and Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel, who opposed the idea of enlargement, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl finally took his stance during a visit to Poland in July 1995.64 He saw both NATO and EU enlargements in the context of German-Polish reconciliation. In his speech to Polish joint parliamentary session, he acknowledged the painful history between the two countries: “In my government statement on 1 June [1995] in the German Bundestag, I clearly spelled out the German guilt and German responsibility for the crimes of Nazi barbarism. We Germans do not forget that Poland was the first victim of Hitler’s war assault, and we do not forget the suffering of the Polish people.”65 At the time, an article in the Washington Post described NATO enlargement debates in Germany as having “a quasi-theological cast, as if the country [had] been given an opportunity to atone for the calamity imposed on Europe by Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich and compounded by the 1945 Yalta conference.”66 According to Special Adviser to the Secretary General for Central and Eastern Europe Christopher Donnelly, “what drove Germany is the historical guilt.”67 NATO spokesperson Jamie Shea largely agreed: “Germans believed that by promoting the idea of NATO enlargement and Germany willing to extend its security perimeter—this will be an important psychological move in normalizing their relations with countries with whom they had since the Hitler period and even before a very complicated historical relationship.”68 This German activism seems to have swayed even some French officials.69 At the beginning of the year, expressing skepticism about CEECs near-term prospects for NATO membership, French Defense Minister François Léotard was much more optimistic when visiting Warsaw for a trilateral German-French-Polish meeting in July: “There is no reason to wait for a green or red light on anybody’s part.”70 If the United States and Germany were on the same page by mid-1995, the UK showed little enthusiasm about the idea of expansion. For British

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politicians, Germany’s growing profile threatened to subvert the UK’s second-in-command position in the Alliance. Furthermore, enlargement was perceived as “an act of generosity,” where the benefit-cost scale was heavily tilted in favor of Eastern Europe. During the 1990s, Jamie Shea constantly heard his fellow countrymen’s complaints. The basic argument ran as follows: “What is my advantage in extending security guarantees? They benefit and I don’t. So they are the consumer of the security and I am the provider of security.”71 Despite the skepticism, both Conservatives and Labourites valued a privileged partnership with the United States more than the risks that enlargement presented. By mid-1996 there was a general understanding in British government that the first group of candidates would be named at the 1997 Madrid Summit.72 Still it was not until the Labour Government, led by Tony Blair, came into power after May 1997 elections that the British government embraced the policy of enlargement with more enthusiasm. As the key decision point—the Madrid Summit of 1997—drew closer, East Europeans ramped up their rhetoric and diplomatic efforts. Polish, Hungarian, Czech, and Slovak politicians were joined by their colleagues from the Baltic States and Southern Europe. Again, allusions to Yalta and Munich dominated the discourse. Only a few quotes are provided below because it is impossible to cover them all. After meeting U.S. Senator Hank Brown, Polish Senate Speaker Adam Struzik explained the U.S. support for enlargement in the following terms: “Americans feel to some extent morally obliged to actively support Polish aspirations to enter NATO. This stems from their behavior and restraint in 1939 and later in Yalta and Potsdam.”73 In his speech to the Czech Parliament on 12 March 1996, Václav Havel talked about a new Munich Pact: This danger of another Munich Agreement signed in September 1938 by Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and France and Britain giving away part of Czechoslovakia’s territory to Germany is looming over Europe once again. To think about it, about its sources, forms and consequences means to think about democracy as such.74

Estonian Foreign Minister Toomas Henrik Ilves warned, “Madrid must not become the third city of the series that begins with Munich, followed by Yalta.”75 Responding to Yeltsin’s efforts to derail NATO enlargement, Polish Foreign Minister Dariusz Rosati issued a statement that sums up the core of this book’s argument: The undemocratic system of government has been imposed upon Poland (and other countries) by decisions of the Yalta Conference and not by our

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sovereign decisions. The Yalta order also prevented Poland from joining NATO at the time it was set up. It should also be remembered that this act of constraint gained the consent of Western countries. Most countries of Central Europe have a longer democratic tradition than certain countries which are members of NATO and there is absolutely no reason to doubt in the lasting nature of their democratic order. In this sense NATO’s eastward enlargement is an act of historic compensation. It definitely ends Europe’s division into two hostile camps and lays grounds for a new political order in Europe based on cooperation, common values and respect for law.76

Western political elites understood the historical context of these poignant public statements. As U.S. Ambassador to NATO Robert Hunter once remarked: “You ask any Central and Eastern European—what do you need? They say—buddy, if you had our history, you wouldn’t have to ask this question.”77 Some Western diplomats and politicians went even further in embracing the importance of historical-psychological legacies. Speaking on the rationale for enlargement, former British Deputy Foreign Minister and Ambassador to Russia Sir Rodric Braithwaite stated that “the guilt based on the Munich and Yalta deals” was the key factor that bolstered the case of Eastern Europe and the Baltic States.78 During his visit to Hungary, U.S. Department of State Assistant Secretary for European and Canadian Affairs Richard C. Holbrooke acknowledged that “for the peoples of this region, the words Versailles, Trianon, Munich, Yalta, or Potsdam are not just names on the map; they are living legacies of conflicting historical resentments.”79 Former British Ambassador to Hungary and the Soviet Union Bryan Cartledge made his pro-enlargement argument in a similar vein: “At Munich and at Yalta the West incurred a debt of honour to Central Europe which there is now an opportunity to redeem.”80 Even NATO Secretary General Javier Solana was as insistent about the historical nature of this decision as his predecessors: NATO’s enlargement will show that those countries, which at Yalta had their destinies chosen for them, will in the next century be shaping their own destinies as free and independent countries. It is both a moral as well as a self-serving obligation that we have towards the new democracies.81

In the United States, East European émigré groups played a noticeable role in maintaining pressure on the members of both Houses and on the administration. The most visible of them was the Central and Eastern European Coalition (CEECO), which united 18 national membership organizations including the Polish American Congress, the Joint Baltic American

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National Committee, the National Federation of American Hungarians, et cetera. Formed in December 1993 and claiming to represent up to 20 million Americans, it served as a clearinghouse and a lobbying front for NATO expansion to Eastern Europe. Like their compatriot politicians in newly formed democracies, many Americans of East European descent had a heightened sense of World War II–related history. A number of them left their homelands during the war and often felt that the United States did not do enough to fight off the onslaught of Communism. A typical example was Senator Barbara Mikulski’s story of her grandmother, who turned the picture of her favorite president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, face down after Yalta and Potsdam.82 Almost all letters, addresses, and communications of the CEECO illustrate this hypersensitivity inherited from its members— Eastern European émigré organizations. In fact, one of its first operations was the so-called anti–Yalta II campaign launched just before Clinton’s visit to Europe in 1994. An action alert urged members to contact the White House and express opposition to “any Yalta II policy by the U.S. which [ceded] control or influence over any nation to Russia.”83 CEECO letters to President Clinton were unequivocal reminders of the mistakes of the past: “We do not believe that one can find any American with roots in these countries who does not dread the specter of the big powers once again deciding, as at Yalta, the fate of these smaller nations. We all remember the suffering imposed on our kin as a result of Yalta, as well as the high price the United States had to pay through the years of the Cold War.”84 It is difficult to say to what extent these communications influenced decision makers, however, they clearly helped to maintain the visibility of the enlargement issue and reinforced the historical-psychological perspective in approaching it.85 All this rhetoric reached a peak during the Madrid Summit in July 1997. The sense of history was not only in the air but also in the speeches and arguments of the participants. The debates over the number of invitees were especially sensitive. Canadians, Italians, and the French argued for the candidacies of Romania and Slovenia. Danes were adamant about the inclusion of the Baltic States if the discussion seriously moved beyond the three core candidates. It seems that German Chancellor Helmut Kohl managed to resolve the debates by demonstrating the importance not only of southern but also of northern candidates. As noted by Asmus, he claimed that Germany “had a special responsibility to the Baltic States. Germans could never forget that Hitler had betrayed these countries. […] Therefore, NATO also had to send a clear signal that it would be open to them as well at some point in the future.”86 In her memoirs, Albright also confirmed the importance of Kohl in bringing the discussions to a close.87 After the

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summit, Danish Foreign Minister Niels Helveg Petersen assured suspicious Balts that Germany played a “very constructive and active” role in arguing that equal emphasis should be placed on both southern and northern candidates for the next round of enlargement.88 Such German (and Scandinavian) arguments seemed to put the Baltic States on the same footing as other second-wave candidates, despite obvious geopolitical and militarycapability differences among them. Only within the historical context of the World War II tragedies was Estonia or Latvia as legitimate a candidate to rejoin the Euro-Atlantic community as Romania. This particular episode stands out as somewhat unusual because Germany, more than the United States, was very careful not to offend Russian security sensitivities vis-à-vis the Baltic States. Volker Rühe’s August 1995 visit to the three ex-Soviet republics was a perfect illustration of the friction between historical-psychological legacies and the broader European security-based interests of Germany. While acknowledging the right of the Baltic States to join the alliance, Rühe favored the Visegrad countries and suggested to his Baltic colleagues that they should follow more closely in the steps of Scandinavian countries to ensure security through EU membership. For Estonian President Lennart Meri, such suggestions recalled “appeasement.” Meri told German Defense Minister that Bonn had a moral obligation not only to Poland but also to the Baltic States because of the MolotovRibbentrop Pact.89 Rühe’s visit coincided with the fifty-sixth anniversary of the pact, which further sensitized the issue. Responding to Rühe’s comments, German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel assured that the Baltic region will not become a gray zone: “The security architecture in the Baltic area must not result in a burden for the Baltic states.”90 Count Lambsdorff, Chairman of the Free Democratic Party, went even further and acknowledged that Germany had a historical responsibility for the fate of the Baltic States. He rebuked Defense Minister for going too far with his comments. 91 Germany was clearly trying to walk a fine line between reconciliation, reunification, and compromise. It knew that it could not preclude the Baltic States from NATO membership because of historical-psychological legacies, but it sought to engage Russia at the same time. Once the Madrid decision was announced, representatives of all involved parties were eager to voice their assessments. Participating in the special White House briefing from Madrid, members of the Senate’s NATO Observer Group were alike in their assessment of the decision. For Senator William Roth, this move was “a long-waited step in the effort to heal the wound of Yalta that left Europe so tragically divided.”92 Both Senators Gordon Smith and Barbara Mikulski also referred to Yalta’s broken promises.93 East European leaders did not hide their emotions. For those

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who were invited, the words of Polish Prime Minister Wlodziemierz Cimoszewicz summarized the essence of the decision: “Yalta is over.”94 For others, the reaction depended on their initial expectations. Chairman of the Greater Romania Party Vadim Tudor was bitter: “It is the third time this century that the West has abandoned us to the claws of the Russia bear. First in 1939, the second time in Yalta in 1945, and the third time now, in Madrid in 1997.”95 On the other hand, Bulgarians were quite pleased with this initial step. The governmental declaration stated that “the meeting took historic decisions launching the process of NATO enlargement to the east that invalidates the Yalta divisions and carries into effect the idea for a free, prosperous, and indivisible Europe.”96 Baltic politicians also cautiously welcomed the decision, hoping to join the alliance in the near future.97 After the summit, President Clinton attended celebrations in Warsaw and visited Bucharest to assure of the next expansion round. Both visits were laden with historical references. The celebrations in Poland were especially notable in that regard. In her memoirs, Albright describes some peculiar details about thematic underpinnings of the visit: “Working with our Polish hosts, the White House advance team produced an American campaign-style events in Warsaw’s Castle Square. Thirty thousand jubilant ‘mourners’ attended what was advertised as ‘Yalta’s Funeral.’ There were marching bands, red carpets, balloons, and banners.”98 Such arrangements went far beyond the PR value. In fact they were representations of deeper historical-psychological legacies shared by political actors “present at the creation” of enlarged NATO. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Marc Grossman expressed these feelings in very personal terms: I think it is fair to say that in Madeleine Albright, because she was born a European, you had a deeply instinctive desire to set right a great wrong. And I would consider myself also to be in that category because Communism was such a disaster for everybody. If you have a career and a life, you don’t get too many chances to do something big. And you don’t get many chances to say: gosh, for 50 years these people were just enslaved and I have a chance now to help them be free. I believe it was very important moment because it wasn’t just about geopolitics, it wasn’t just about strategy, but it was also about morality. We had a moral duty to help people be free.99

Despite the triumphant undertones of Chopin’s Sonata No. 2 in Warsaw, for the Clinton administration, the next big step was the approval of NATO enlargement by the Republican-led Senate. While this was not an easy or automatic process, momentum had been building in favor of expansion for a while. Already in July 1996, both Houses passed the nonbinding NATO Enlargement Facilitation Act with an overwhelming bipartisan support.100

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Two years later, the administration was looking for the same landslide. Without going into the details of the extensive preparatory work conducted by the NATO Expansion Ratification Office at the Department of State, I would like to focus again on the nature of the discourse.101 Formal hearings on NATO enlargement started at the Senate Committee level even before the 1997 Madrid Summit. Secretary Albright was among the first ones to present her testimony before the Armed Services Committee. According to her, “If we don’t enlarge NATO, we will be validating the dividing line Stalin imposed in 1945 and that two generations of Americans and Europeans fought to overcome.”102 When asked, she acknowledged that NATO enlargement for her was a deeply personal matter: “I came to this country as a result of the fact that Europe was artificially divided. So my whole life has been affected by—by that fact, and I consider it a historic opportunity to be able to move this process forward.”103 A number of prominent former government officials were also brought before Congress committees. Former U.S. Ambassador to the UN Jeane Kirkpatrick argued that already too many years had been wasted “through indifference, procrastination and timidity.” She embraced Václav Havel’s warning about the return of “the spirit of Munich” and urged using the window of opportunity.104 Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski argued in favor of expansion as the key to the “vitality of the American-European connection.” Although for him the “moral crusade, meant to undo the injustice the Central European peoples suffered during the half-century-long Soviet oppression” was of secondary importance, he acknowledged “the moral right” of Central Europeans to security.105 While there are other examples of historical-psychological discourse, the testimony of Peter Rodman, who by the time had served under four Republican presidents, was one of the most comprehensive. He argued that enlargement was just as much a strategic as a moral decision: For us to say no is to say: “Sorry, we don’t want to ‘draw a new line’ in Europe, so we’ll stick to the old line—the 1945 line, the Yalta line—and you’re just on the wrong side of it.” I find that an appalling answer. Similarly, with respect to the Balts, and others formerly absorbed by force not only in the Soviet empire but in the Soviet Union itself, to exclude them a priori from the Atlantic Alliance is to enshrine the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as the guiding principle of American foreign policy. We never did this before; why should we do it now?106

Just looking at these testimonies, it is clear why even enlargement skeptics thought that the Clinton administration was “repeatedly emphasizing the compelling importance of ‘righting the wrongs of Yalta.’”107 In reality, Republicans were just as, if not more, prone to view enlargement in moral

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terms. One of the most powerful Senate Republicans and Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jesse Helms, asserted that enlargement was “the moral challenge of working to right the wrongs perpetrated in the last century at Yalta, when the West abandoned the nations of the Central and Eastern Europe to Stalin and a life of servitude behind the Iron Curtain.”108 In this respect his views came quite close to those of Madeleine Albright. Not surprisingly, both of them teamed up to push NATO enlargement through the Senate. The administration’s emphasis on historical-psychological legacies was also evident in the timing of various enlargement-related events. One of them was the signing of an amendment to the Washington Treaty on 11 February 1998 by President Clinton in the presence of three East European foreign ministers. As Senator Joe Biden recalled several hours later on the Senate floor: “It was pointed out to me by the Vice President [Al Gore], as we were leaving the State Department ceremony, that it was this very day upon which the Yalta Conference ended some 50 years ago. It seems incredible to me that it is happening, but also that it has taken this long for us to rectify a serious historical error.”109 At the signing ceremony of the Washington Declaration on the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of NATO, many leaders invoked history and treated the moment as a time of reconciliation and end to divisions in Europe.110 While this was a moment of celebration (moderated by the ongoing bombing campaign in Kosovo), candidate countries left in the waiting room also worried about maintaining momentum for a second round of NATO expansion. With Clinton’s era coming to an end, fresh concerns surfaced among the candidates. In the words of Chairman of the Lithuanian Parliament Vytautas Landsbergis, “The Russians have lost the Yalta line, but they want to preserve the Ribbentrop line.”111 These warnings got a boost when the Washington Times reported on the alleged deployment of nuclear weapons in the Kaliningrad region.112 Interpreted as Moscow’s response to future plans for NATO expansion to the Baltic States, the stakes appeared higher than ever. However, even before the Bush administration took office, there were clear signals that it would not be deterred from pursuing the broad second round of enlargement. Asked about the possibilities of NATO membership for the Baltic States during Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s confirmation hearing, Secretary of State-designee Colin Powell expressed his steadfast support: “We have to do what’s right for those nations.”113 The outgoing committee Chair Jesse Helms concurred: “We must not repeat the mistakes of the 1940s today by acknowledging a Russian sphere of influence in what Russian leaders ominously call the ‘near abroad.’”114 In response, Russian President Putin was just as assertive in his opposition to enlargement: “We see NATO’s politics of enlargement as a mistake and

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declare that it is totally unacceptable to us.”115 Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov warned that the expansion “would create a fundamentally new situation in Europe which would harm Russia’s interests, and one which would provoke a serious crisis.”116 Despite the escalation of tensions between the United States and Russia, the new administration was firmly determined to invite new candidates to the alliance. Similar to Clinton’s first visit to Europe, President Bush’s first trip to the Old Continent left no doubts about a second enlargement. In his speech at the Warsaw University on 15 June 2001, Bush assured that “as we plan to enlarge NATO, no nation should be used as a pawn in the agendas of others. We will not trade away the fate of free European peoples. No more Munichs. No more Yaltas.”117 It was hard to find open skeptics even among traditionally more reluctant European leaders. Visiting the Baltic States in July 2001, French President Jacques Chirac stated that “France could not but support the candidacy of the three Baltic states.”118 German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, allegedly the most adamant supporter and a close friend of Russian President Putin, also publicly pledged his support for the Baltic NATO membership. Visiting Estonia in June of 2000, he stated that “the NATO summit in Washington decided on continuation of enlargement, and this means it is expecting Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.”119 Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato was in favor of moving on with enlargement as well: “There’s no sense delaying NATO enlargement because of Russian opposition. It is like with an aching tooth, because waiting, the pain can only get worse.”120 Following the Warsaw speech, even the British reluctantly acknowledged the inevitability of the extensive second round of enlargement.121 All of these statements were made before the 9/11 events, which directly challenges a notion among some scholars that the terrorist attacks prompted Washington to turn its half-hearted support for enlargement into an active pursuit to lock in as many “dependable and dedicated allies” as possible.122 In fact, Bush repeated almost verbatim his key “Warsaw phrase” during a visit to Lithuania in November of 2002, demonstrating that the historicalpsychological aspects of enlargement were not lost with the 9/11 events. If anything, the NATO Summit in Prague can be regarded as another culmination of this type of discourse. For host of the summit Václav Havel, the second wave of enlargement signified “that the unnatural division of Europe, [had] come to an end in real terms, and that the last surviving remnant of the Iron Curtain—that strange psychological wall that used to separate the ‘old’ democracies from the post-Communist ones—[was] finally breaking down.”123 Congratulating new members, French President Jacques Chirac reiterated Havel’s words as expressing the true significance

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of the decision: “The enlargement of the Alliance is a new witness to the end of the artificial division of Europe. This enlargement is indeed a historic moment when Europe is finally reunited, where Europe and North America reaffirm the indivisibility of their security.”124 For Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the invitation of the Baltic States was an especially noteworthy aspect of the enlargement. It denoted the final end of the Cold War era: “Today we leave the remains of the Cold War division of Europe behind us.”125 Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski could not agree more: “I wish to express how deeply moved and happy I am that here in Prague, a city of a thousand-year-long history, the place of the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968 and its last meeting eleven years ago, we are making a decision that will finally put an end to the era of Yalta and Potsdam divisions, evil of Ribbentropp-Molotov pact, the cold war and the false balance of fear.”126 The newly accepted members perceived the NATO decision in exactly the same terms. Latvian President Vaira V¯l k¸e-Freiberga, being herself an expatriate, clearly spelled out the psychological and historical significance of the decision: For us in Latvia it comes as a sign of international justice. It will put an end once and for all to the last vestiges of the Second World War, to the last sequels of what started with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1939, to the consequences of the decisions taken in Teheran and Yalta.127

There is no reason to doubt the sincerity and the power of such rhetoric. As expatriates returning to rebuild their countries or as dissidents fighting against the system from within, these East Europeans leaders were living witnesses of the struggles that their countries went through. This was not cheap rhetoric, but in fact a very costly one. All of them had scars to prove that, which was understood and appreciated by the Euro-Atlantic community. Given the historical-psychological context of these demands, Western politicians did not dare to deny the prospects of membership even for the most inconvenient candidates. Institutional Norms Dealing with NATO enlargement may have presented a challenge to realist strands of political science theory, but for others—especially the constructivist school of thought—the puzzle has a rather straightforward answer. Their argument, based on compliance with institutional NATO norms, seems to reflect the actual enlargement events: as candidate countries adopted and implemented NATO norms, they became eligible for full membership.

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The most prominent variant of this constructivist hypothesis was offered by Schimmelfennig, who argued that liberal norms became “activated” through the strategic use of rhetorical action. While this infusion of rationalist “flavor” into the largely constructivist perspective provides a forceful explanation of NATO enlargement, it is valid only if the initial assumption of NATO as a norm-promoting organization holds. Even a casual look at the NATO membership list in the early 1990s raises some serious doubts about this “community of likeminded democracies.”128 Comparing the Freedom House ratings of political rights and civil liberties between candidate and some member countries, it is clear that member states such as Greece and particularly Turkey have a worse record than the majority of candidate countries including the “second rounders” (see Table 3.1). While Schimmelfennig eliminates Turkey as an outlier,129 this approach obscures rather than reveals the true NATO normative core or rather lack thereof. If Turkey is included, the variation in political and social rights among the “likeminded” members is greater than among candidate countries. Since its inception, NATO seems to have had very little to do with the promotion of democratic values and norms; rather, its paramount concern has been security.130 If this were not the case, we would expect that Turkey, even if accepted for other reasons, would have been actively pressed by NATO to improve its dismal human rights record over time. However, any recent improvements came at the insistence of the EU and had very little to do with NATO. The same applies to Greece, which together with Turkey has held NATO membership since 1951. When the Greek colonels staged a coup d’etat in April 1967, the U.S.-led NATO showed few signs of discontentment. In fact, the United States actively supported the regime and sought to suppress any complaints by Danish, Dutch, and Norwegian colleagues within NATO.131 In contrast, the EEC froze Greece’s associate membership, although the strongest and the most persistent criticism came from the Council of Europe (CoE). Portugal constitutes yet another historical case demonstrating different levels of institutional democratic norms in the EEC and NATO. While Portugal under Salazar’s regime was a founding member of NATO, the EEC denied Portugal’s eligibility for membership until the end of its dictatorship era in 1976.132 As demonstrated by these examples, NATO has a very narrow institutional layer, which has little to do with spreading liberal democratic norms. Any comparison of the two organizations has to take into account these substantial differences. When in the mid-1990s U.S. officials proposed the idea of coordinating NATO and EU enlargements, Gunther Burghardt, the European Commission’s Director General for External Relations, drew a clear distinction between the two organizations: “EU expansion involves between 70,000 to 80,000 pages

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Table 3.1

Freedom House ratings, 1996–2002 (Political Rights, Freedom Liberties)133 NATO1997

2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996

NATO 2002

Members

CZ

HU

PL

SLVE

EST

LT

LV

SLVA

BU

RO

TUR

GR

DK

1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2

1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2

1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2

1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2

1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2 2,2

1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2

1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2 3,2 2,2

1,2 1,2 1,2 2,2 2,4 2,4 2,3

1,3 2,2 2,2 2,2 2,2 2,2 2,2

2,2 2,2 2,2 2,2 2,2 2,3 4,3

4,5 4,5 4,5 4,5 4,5 4,5 5,5

1,3 1,3 1,3 1,3 1,3 1,3 1,3

1,1 1,1 1,1 1,1 1,1 1,1 1,1

Note/Source: The table includes Denmark to illustrate the ratings of the majority of NATO members. Karatnycky et al., 2003.

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of legislation whereas NATO involves Article 5.”134 While somewhat caricaturizing the reality, this statement highlights the qualitative difference between these organizations. Thus, NATO’s discourse about democratic liberal values seemed like a post–Cold War invention rather than a constitutive part of the organization. Commenting on the future of NATO in December of 1993, U.S. Secretary of Defense Les Aspin highlighted this newly found spirit of norm “entrepreneurship”: “In the old, Cold War world, NATO was an alliance created in response to an external threat. In the new, post–Cold War world, NATO can be an alliance based on shared values of democracy and the free market.”135 In this case, the word “can” clearly indicates future possibility rather than today’s reality. The Alliance’s belated turn to the promotion of democratic norms looks less credible, less consistent, and less legitimate than the EU’s democratic entrepreneurship. NATO has never claimed to have a concrete list of membership criteria. One of the core enlargement documents, the 1995 Study on NATO Enlargement, stated that “there [was] no fixed or rigid list of criteria for inviting new member states to join the Alliance. Enlargement [would] be decided on a case-by-case basis …”136 Similarly, MAP, designed to guide the “second rounders” toward membership, warned that it could not be “considered as a list of criteria for membership.”137 Given all of the above factors, labeling NATO a liberal norms- and values-based organization seems to hide some fundamental differences between the Alliance and the EU. As noted by former NATO spokesperson Jamie Shea, “The MAP does not have quite the same weight as the avis of the EU Commission, so [NATO] governments can say—alright, good enough […] It’s a bit more of a beauty contest ultimately. It’s a bit more of a political sort of thing. I feel good about this country. It’s not perfect, but it’s going in the right direction.”138 In addition to the institutional assumptions, the constructivist argument based on norm compliance cannot account for the differentiation among the CEE countries in the two-stage enlargement. In this context, the thin layer of institutional norms was more of a secondary constraint excluding “rogue” candidates rather than a dominant motivation.139 The invitation of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary had little to do with their democracy scores since other countries, for example, Lithuania and Estonia, shared comparable scores. Although the Baltic States vigorously lobbied for early NATO membership, extreme Russian sensitivities coupled with the challenges of building armed forces from scratch left the three republics with little hope. The decision to stick with a small group of candidates directly affected not only the Baltic States but also Romania. Since the latter lagged behind the three Baltic republics in economic and political reforms, the fulfillment of French and Italian demands to include

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the two southern European countries—Romania and Slovenia—would have sent a very blunt message to the Baltic States, that is, that they had been sacrificed to Russian interests.140 The United States along with several allies refused to cross this psychological line. In the case of Slovenia, its unsettled border with Croatia and the simmering Yugoslavian crisis might have also contributed to NATO member states’ reservations.141 Bulgaria and Slovakia crossed themselves off the list of the first enlargement round. In Bulgaria, the ruling Socialist party showed no interest in joining NATO.142 Only with the change of government in 1997 did the new Bulgarian political elite start to pursue the NATO enlargement agenda. The autocratic regime of Slovakia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Mecˇiar lost the support of allies before any lists of candidates were formally discussed. By February 1995, U.S. representatives had already sent the first warning signals to Slovakia regarding its deteriorating chances of membership.143 In response to repeated criticisms of his growing authoritarianism, Mecˇiar stunned Washington with wild accusations that the United States was making deals with Russia over the heads of the Slovak people.144 At this point even Slovak President Michal Kovácˇ tried to distance himself from the premier’s comments, acknowledging that “the path to NATO [did] not lead via lies and misleading the public.”145 The referendum on NATO in May of 1997 became the ultimate political disaster for Slovakia. Coupled with internal political struggles between the premier and the president, the referendum with a turnout of less than 10 percent left no immediate membership prospects.146 Bratislava’s dismal record of compliance with and open disdain of Western democratic norms disqualified it from the first round. As in the case of Romania, Slovakia’s admission would have been unjustifiable vis-à-vis the Baltic States as well. The second NATO enlargement is also problematic because Romania and Bulgaria are obvious misfits in the group, lagging behind others in terms of political and economic reforms.147 After all, the EU enlargement of 2004 did not include these countries because of their poor economic and political performance. In comparison to the EU, the allies spent markedly less time and effort monitoring and discussing the actual record of the CEECs’ compliance with Western democratic norms. In fact, NATO accession talks with the first round of candidates took place not before but after they had been formally invited to join the Alliance.148 Thus, norms played a rather negligible role. While the dismissal of some candidates in 1997 can be interpreted as a decision based on normative criteria, the overriding constraints seem more strategic in nature. The next section explores when and how member states’ interests, embedded in the historical context of collective guilt, shaped the tactics of enlargement.

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Member State Interests Unlike the EU, NATO’s agenda setting was dominated by one country—the United States.149 It became the primary innovator both in introducing the interim schemas of cooperation with Eastern Europe—the NACC, the Pf P, and the MAP—and in pushing forward the case for NATO enlargement. Germany played second fiddle taking the spot of the UK, traditionally the most proactive European member of the alliance. In both pace-setting countries, the majority of political elites and bureaucrats were initially quite skeptical about the idea of NATO enlargement. According to Senior Director for European Affairs at the NSC Jenonne Walker, from the whole White House team only President Clinton and his National Security Adviser Tony Lake supported the idea of expansion in early 1994.150 A similar situation had existed in Germany where Defense Minister Volker Rühe was considered by many to be out of line with the position of German Foreign Ministry led by Klaus Kinkel.151 In general, there were relatively few NATO members who expressed enthusiasm about the Alliance’s march eastward. Thus, the policy was largely driven by several key individuals who had to fight against initial indifference and skepticism at home and among allies.152 Given the situation on the ground, the enlargement’s eventual success is all the more surprising and the motivation of its advocates all the more important. There are three key strategically driven variables that might rival or supplement the collective guilt argument. The importance of domestic factors is one possible alternative explanation. Viewed from this perspective, President Clinton supported expansion policy for largely domestic instrumental reasons: he sought to attract the ethnic East European vote during the 1996 presidential elections and thus responded to the pressure exerted by such organizations as the CEECO. Clinton’s so-called NATO speech in Detroit on 22 October might be considered a clear example of playing to potential “pro-enlargement” voters. While there is no doubt that Democrats were eager to win over voters of East European descent, to view this factor as the key to the development of NATO enlargement policy is problematic for a number of reasons. First, the 1996 presidential elections were not a closely contested race, especially in traditional East European strongholds such as New York, Illinois, or Michigan. Clinton was consistently leading Dole by hefty double-digit margins.153 Second, there was no practical difference between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole’s stances on NATO enlargement. Both of them openly supported the process, although Dole tried to outdo his rival by suggesting NATO expansion as early as 1998. He pledged to organize a summit in Prague on “the 60th anniversary of the betrayal of

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Munich” because “there could be no more appropriate year or appropriate place to declare that Central Europe [had] become a permanent part of the Atlantic community.”154 Still, the variation between the candidates was largely in style rather than substance. Third, Clinton embraced the idea of enlargement early in his first presidency, not due to pressure from particular interest groups, but because of the convincing case made by CEE leaders and some of Clinton’s advisers. Fourth, as demonstrated above, the “righting the wrongs of Yalta” discourse was engaged not only in public but also in more narrow circles, even when there was no media to publicize remarks. Fifth, after the 1996 elections there was no slowdown in the advancement of the policy. The administration just as eagerly pursued NATO expansion. Finally, Clinton’s team not only completed the first round of expansion in 1999 but also worked hard to assure less fortunate candidates that NATO’s door remained open. The US-Baltic Charter—a declaration of U.S. commitment for long-term security and support for NATO membership of the Baltic States—is a good example of such efforts that had few repercussions in terms of domestic votes. As Clinton’s National Security Adviser Tony Lake remarked on the Baltic States: “It seemed to me immoral to allow in Warsaw Pact countries, but not the countries of the former Soviet Union when they had not asked to be a part of the Soviet Union.”155 Another line of argumentation might focus on the promotion of regional stability and democracy. With the ongoing troubles in the former Yugoslavia and in some FSU states, the allies decided to engage and prevent any tensions from spreading beyond the current zones of instability. This was primarily a self-serving strategy, especially for Germany, which did not want to remain on the eastern security frontier. While the argument seems relevant and convincing, several puzzles remain unresolved. Germany is one of them. As noted earlier, Chancellor Kohl played an important role in brokering compromise on the size of the first enlargement at the 1997 Madrid Summit. At the same time, Germany deliberately set the trajectory for the next and bigger wave of expansion. If Kohl was primarily concerned about creating a security buffer for his country with minimal damage to GermanRussian relations, then the 3 ⫹ 2 formula supported by the majority of NATO members was the most optimal solution. It satisfied not only German but also French and Italian interests, at the same time deflating any pressure for the next round. Instead, recalling German historical responsibility for the Baltic States, Kohl favored a limited first round and large second round, despite the fact that the latter had no value-added for Germany’s security. It might be that he recalled 1991, when the leaders of the Baltic States came to his office with one sentence: “Mr. Chancellor, we return home to Europe.” Kohl appeared to be moved by “these men [that]

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came from countries that Hitler betrayed to Stalin in the particularly evil Hitler-Stalin pact.”156 Or maybe, it was a month-old public rebuke by Estonian President Lennart Meri, who accused Germany of focusing too much on Moscow and forgetting its obligation to the victims of the 1939 Pact.157 The argument for regional stability is also weakened by the fact that it included some and excluded others. In line with collective guilt–based expectations specified in Table 1.3, it prioritized the stability of the CEECs largely ignoring the NIS (Newly Independent States)—a crucial part of the overall security puzzle. With the push for Eastern NATO enlargement, the full engagement of Russia became unfeasible. Without Russia’s full engagement, it was difficult, if not impossible, to enhance broader regional stability. This was clearly understood by U.S. politicians who coined the Pf P initiative as an inclusive instrument of cooperation to deal with CEE anxieties and to establish institutional linkages with FSU countries. It was a classic example of the “cooperate” option discussed in the theoretical chapter. It did not commit the allies to any particular path forward while engaging everybody in the region. In the words of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Shalikashvili, the Pf P promised to bring “stability and security to all of Europe” without establishing “new divisions in Europe.”158 Opposed to the idea of enlargement, Russian politicians welcomed the initiative with open arms. Upon hearing about it from Secretary Christopher, President Yeltsin called it “a stroke of genius.”159 At the same time, the CEECs perceived the Pf P as an obscure, toothless, and dangerous initiative. They shot it down even before it was announced at the 1994 NATO Summit in Brussels. Interestingly, at this pivotal moment, the White House administration began to drift toward the CEE side. What was behind this gradual but decisive turn? The 1993 Duma elections might have raised some doubts about the future of Russian democracy, but it was hardly a reason to prioritize the CEECs membership over the Pf P. Most U.S. politicians along with Strobe Talbott saw the vote as an opportunity to broaden support for Russian reforms.160 After all, the antireform backlash and the return of excommunists was not unique to Russia but took place across the region including Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, et cetera. Instead, the Duma elections might have triggered historical-psychological legacies already stirred up during the Holocaust Museum opening. This approach was not based on the assessment of current situation on the ground, but rather on the tragic past that was haunting not only CEE but also Western politicians. As Clinton remarked in Warsaw in July of 1994: “There appears to be no immediate or short-term threat to Polish sovereignty, but history and geography caution us not to take this moment for granted.”161 It was

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this line of reasoning that generated the persistent drive for expansion. While soothing CEE anxieties, the strategy had the potential to subvert the Pf P even before the initiative was rolled out. This is not to say that the U.S. administration completely ignored Russia once it took a decisive turn toward NATO enlargement. In fact, Clinton took reasonable efforts to expand the alliance without alienating Russia, or more precisely Boris Yeltsin. Given the sensitivities surrounding the upcoming Russian presidential elections, Clinton promised Yeltsin to keep the enlargement agenda under the rug and not to make any public endorsements of candidate countries until that date: “I’ve made it clear I’ll do nothing to accelerate NATO enlargement. I’m trying to give you now, in this conversation, the reassurance you need for ’95 and ’96.”162 Furthermore, he assured the Russian president that NATO would expand gradually. In line with these promises, the first wave of enlargement was limited to three countries, leaving the rest of the candidates in the waiting room. To sweeten the deal, NATO invited Russia to formalize cooperation by signing the Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation, and Security during the Paris Summit in May of 1997. It gave Yeltsin a chance to claim a partial victory, which was used to consolidate his political base. The NATO-Russia cooperation was further expanded through the establishment of the NATO-Russia Council in 2002. While these arrangements did not provide Moscow with leverage to influence NATO enlargement decisions, they demonstrated the extent of NATO members’ efforts to appease and to engage Russia. These were sensible compromises that aided Yeltsin in the short term but unfortunately did little to reduce growing mistrust and suspicion of the West in Russia. By the time the Bush administration came to power in 2001, all secondround candidates were pursuing NATO membership in earnest. While their records of compliance with Western democratic norms, according to the Freedom House ratings (and EU annual progress reports), still exhibited some differences, President Bush was actively pushing for a broad expansion policy. During his Warsaw visit in June of 2001, he made it clear that the United States was ready to invite new members during the 2002 Prague Summit.163 Thus, the idea that the 9/11 terrorist attacks triggered the second NATO enlargement is inaccurate. The only clear effect of the 9/11 was a diminution in Russia’s open opposition to the expansion of the Alliance. Still, evidence demonstrates that even before the attacks the allies were not fazed by Moscow’s antagonism. If anything, they seemed ready to declare that, in the words of French President Jacques Chirac, the Russian opposition neither stopped the Baltic States from becoming candidates nor would prevent NATO from expanding.164

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The final counterargument to the historical-psychological explanation could be made along the Machiavellian lines of reasoning: exploiting the opportunity rendered by the collapse of the Soviet Union and a temporary weakness of Russia, NATO member states decided to solidify their Cold War victory by bringing in the CEECs to the alliance. While this interpretation does not align well with any of the official rhetoric by the allies, a hardcore realist would not expect less from sophisticated, powerhungry, and inherently deceitful political elites. There are a number of serious challenges facing this interpretation of NATO enlargement. First, it would be quite hard to pinpoint the presence of Machiavellian realism among European allies. At best it could be applied to a limited circle of fervent anti-Communists, the majority of whom were found among American, but not European, politicians. Neither Volker Rühe nor Bill Clinton could be counted in their ranks. Instead, Republican Jesse Helms was probably the most stereotypical representative of this vocal, but not sizable, ideological camp. Second, even if one assumes that the anti-Russian realpolitik primarily drove the U.S. policy of enlargement, the puzzle of European cooperation remains unresolved. Did the United States simply push through the policy of enlargement due to its dominant world power status? It might be tempting to discount the opinion of European allies, but the 2008 Bucharest Summit is a salient reminder that NATO adheres to consensus-based, not military power-based, decision making.165 Third, it is reasonable to expect that the U.S. power-grabbing strategy would originate in or at least be strongly supported by the Department of Defense (DoD). Who else if not military leadership would appreciate the strategic benefits of this policy? Contrary to such expectations, the DoD actively resisted the idea of enlargement from the start. It offered the Pf P as the most optimal alternative to secure U.S. regional interests. Given the many challenges facing the CEECs and the NIS including nuclear weapons safety and nonproliferation issues, most policy makers argued for increased cooperation with Western-friendly Boris Yeltsin rather than for a new confrontation. Former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock thought that enlargement would serve no other purpose than to convince “the Russian political elite that they are not our partner and that their security is not as important to us as the security of the Czechs.”166 The father of U.S. containment policy, George Kennan, famously called NATO expansion “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post–cold war era.”167 Prominent diplomatic historian John Lewis Gaddis saw it as “ill-conceived, ill-timed, and above all ill-suited to the realities of the post–Cold War world.”168 Notable exceptions to this chorus of prominent critics were former National Security Advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger,

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who staunchly supported enlargement, though for somewhat different reasons. Interestingly, Kissinger was not only a strong advocate of the first wave of enlargement169 but also came out in favor of NATO membership for the Baltic States: “Baltic membership in NATO would produce a strong Russian reaction, if only to maintain the Putin government’s domestic standing. On the other hand, it is morally and politically impossible to ignore or postpone the appeals of the Baltic democracies.” According to him, “no group of nations [was] more deserving of protection by the Western democracies than these small countries …”170 However, by 2008 Kissinger argued against the extension of the MAP to the FSU countries, especially Ukraine, in order to deal with other outstanding U.S.-Russian issues.171 The key question then is why Ukraine, in contrast to the Baltic States, happens to be an acceptable bargaining chip with Russia. Not surprisingly, the argument based on historical-psychological legacies helps to answer this question. As demonstrated above, strategic interests played a role in shaping the tactics of NATO enlargement, but they, like institutional norms, acted more as a constraint rather than underlying motivation. Their effect was most visible during the first round of expansion, but largely dissipated with the approach of the second round. This does not seem to be due to the events of 9/11, but rather to the promises and agreements made at the 1997 Madrid Summit. Member states agreed to limit the first round of expansion only to three candidates, but at the same time committed themselves to a much larger second round. This time the Euro-Atlantic community was determined to deliver on its promises to Central and Eastern Europe. Hypotheses Revisited While investigating the influences of three independent variables, this chapter did not explicitly differentiate between the strategic (higher-tier) and tactical (lower-tier) levels of decision making. At this point, the theoretical distinction based on the domain of application approach is revisited, and each proposed hypothesis is evaluated in the context of NATO enlargement. As demonstrated above, the collective guilt discourse (H1) has been repeatedly engaged both by CEE and Western political elites. It surfaced not only during public ceremonies or commemorations but also in more narrow circles of decision makers, indicating its deeper intellectual and emotional appeal. While this type of argumentation was one of several in favor of enlargement, it was the only one that applied exclusively to the CEECs. Furthermore, it originated on both sides of the Iron Curtain well

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before the development of the enlargement idea. Even though some Western politicians used the “black trinity” for partisan purposes during the Cold War years, such framing was rarely utilized during the 1990s. In the United States, both Democrats and Republicans embraced arguments based on historical-psychological legacies. While during the 1996 presidential election campaign, Bob Dole tried to win over CEE votes from Bill Clinton by promising an earlier NATO enlargement date, this never gained much traction or interest. With prominent Democrats of Eastern European descent such as Madeleine Albright or Barbara Mikulski championing the cause of enlargement, there was no partisan split on the issue. In Germany, the momentum toward enlargement was primarily built by Volker Rühe, with broad, though relatively subdued, support from political elites. It was often perceived more as a historical necessity rather than as a key security interest, especially when it came to the second wave of enlargement. The British appeared to be rather skeptical across the political spectrum. They perceived enlargement as a joint U.S.-German project that provided few direct benefits to the UK. Tony Blair agreed to go along because of U.S. determination, and in part because of British responsibility for the establishment of the Cold War order in Europe. As former Ambassador to Russia Rodric Braithwaite puts it, “the image of Chamberlain and his umbrella is still very potent” among British political elites.172 In line with Hypothesis 2, Eastern Europeans did not hesitate to demand integration into the Euro-Atlantic community as their historical right. In fact, they even argued that if the CEECs were free to choose in 1949, they would have joined the Alliance like West European countries did. Presented as a moral-historical right, the issue of NATO enlargement was tough to argue against.173 Thus, most critics never questioned the right of the Eastern Europeans to join per se. Instead they emphasized enlargement’s negative effects on NATO institutional cohesion, Euro-Atlantic–Russian cooperation, and regional stability. On all three points, there were more or less valid arguments on both sides of the aisle. As demonstrated in chapter 1, the most optimal decision might have been an active engagement of all former Eastern bloc countries in the short- to medium-run or a small enlargement in the long run. This was the recipe to avoid new fault lines. German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel presented this argument quite convincingly in 1994: “There is no military threat to central Europe at this point. It can’t be in the interest of the central Europeans if the price of their membership would be a new confrontation in Europe with them on the frontline.”174 But as Senator Richard Lugar noted during his visit in Germany, past not present was guiding NATO enlargement: “Allowing new democracies in the East to seek entry into the Alliance of their choice is hardly an exercise in

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line drawing. It is an exercise in erasing the old artificial lines of Yalta and the Cold War.”175 The evidence for early commitment (H3) was not as decisive as might be expected, but the overall tendency to commit remained strong. Statements by Bill Clinton and George W. Bush during their first visits to Europe demonstrated clear though vague support for future NATO enlargement. In the same way, German politicians did not shy away from providing assurances of future accession. Both Volker Rühe and Helmut Kohl repeatedly declared that some of the CEECs would be full members of the Euro-Atlantic institutions by 2000.176 While the list of likely candidates was not formally presented before the 1997 summit, it was an open secret which countries were at the top of the agenda. Interestingly, the prioritization had little to do with levels of military competence, where, according to an internal NATO report, both Hungary and Czech Republic lagged behind Romania. In fact, the Czechs seem to have assumed that their membership was guaranteed, showing little eagerness to raise military expenditures to the recommended 2 percent of the GDP.177 In addition to the invitation of three countries, the Madrid Declaration assured that “the Alliance [would] continue to welcome new members in a position to further the principles of the Treaty and contribute to security in the Euro-Atlantic area.” It singled out the progress made by Romania, Slovenia, and the Baltic States. As NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana put it: “Everyone must understand that Madrid is the beginning of the process, not the end.”178 Thus, already in 1997, NATO members gave explicit assurances that the second wave of NATO would take place. For the most vulnerable of them, the Baltic States, the United States went even further, signing the U.S.-Baltic Charter and declaring that “the United States of America [welcomed] the aspirations and [supported] the efforts of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to join NATO.”179 As in the case of early commitment, the regional approach hypothesis (H4) seems to correctly account for the overall tendency. While not explicitly specifying the most likely candidates, NATO members focused on the CEECs. This was in part due to the demands of the CEECs themselves, but also due to NATO’s openness toward these countries. For example, the case of Ukraine stands in stark contrast to the Baltic States. During the negotiations of the NATO-Ukraine Charter in 1997, Ukraine sought that the charter would explicitly affirm the Alliance’s openness to future Ukrainian membership.180 Visiting Brussels in March 1997, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Gennady Udovenko stated that “we expect the allies to support Ukraine’s strategic goal to integrate fully into the European and EuroAtlantic security structures, including NATO.”181 However, NATO members declined to include such language. At the signing ceremony of the charter,

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Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma made it clear that “in the course of negotiating this Charter, not all desires of Ukraine [had] been taken into account.” He concluded by urging NATO to “remain open to all countries which would like to join them [Euro-Atlantic institutions] and meet the corresponding criteria.”182 This last sentence is especially noteworthy because technically it represents what NATO always claimed to be its policy. In reality, NATO adhered to a narrower definition of “all countries.” Another confirmation of this differentiation occurred during the 2008 Bucharest Summit and subsequent meeting of NATO foreign ministers in December. Even though the United States supported the extension of the MAP to Georgia and Ukraine, Germany and France successfully blocked this initiative. Given the absence of collective guilt and the presence of mixed member state incentives, the allies were expected to have a difficult time agreeing on the future security cooperation framework for these two countries.183 This turns out to be quite an accurate prediction, but still the question remains as to why the United States supported the extension of MAP to those two countries. At this point, it is difficult to explain the underlying reasons because this might have been used more as a bargaining chip with Russia rather than as a realistic prospect for membership in the Alliance. Furthermore, the Bush administration’s initiative was not only ill-prepared but also did not have steady support among U.S. politicians.184 Moving to tactical expectations, the pace of enlargement was indeed cyclical with secondary issues shaping intermediary outcomes (H5). Concerns over Russia played the most prominent role in terms of both the size and timing of the expansion. At the same time, any slowdown generated a lot of criticism and pressure from Eastern Europeans as they waited for “the proof of the pudding.” Despite the asymmetric relationship between the parties, the Euro-Atlantic community appeared to be sensitive to such criticism and often reacted with assurances of policy continuity. Surprisingly few discussions touched upon the institutional impacts of enlargement. After all, the addition of economically poor and militarily backward countries had quite obvious financial repercussions for the members. The expansion of the Alliance from 16 to 19 and then 26 countries also should have complicated institutional decision making. More members meant more opinions and thus additional challenges for consensus-based agenda. The thin institutional layer of NATO produced few obvious norm-based obstacles for the candidate countries from the very start (H6). The Alliance challenged only the extreme case of Slovakia, which at the time was teetering on the path toward a nationalistic dictatorship. In general, there were no clear or consistent accession criteria for both the first and second waves of enlargement. Because of this, candidate countries sometimes faced

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demands that had only a tangential relationship to democratic governance. For example, the issue of the Holocaust surfaced before the second wave of enlargement as some U.S. politicians responded to the pressure from the Jewish electorate. Candidate countries took up the challenge with vigor revising school curriculums, textbooks, and opening up Holocaust museums.185 They were determined not to give any excuses for the delay or dismissal of their membership. At the same time, there is no evidence that the member states were looking for excuses to deny membership prospects for any candidate country. Due to the institutional thinness of the alliance, it is impossible to adequately evaluate the first “tactical tunnel” hypothesis, but the second one, dealing with member states interests, is relevant (H7). The interaction between the higher-tier and lower-tier motivations within dynamic constraints of the “tactical tunnel” can be observed throughout the process of Eastern enlargement. In the early stages of the policy implementation, geopolitical concerns clearly adjusted the timing and size of the first wave of NATO expansion, but they did not derail the vision of the reunification of Europe based on historical-psychological legacies. The constraining effect of the higher-tier motivation is seen primarily during the 1997 Madrid Summit, where the members agreed to limit the first wave of enlargement to a handful of countries and postpone the invitation of Romania and Slovenia for the second larger round in order to avoid any implied endorsements of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line. As noted, Chancellor Kohl’s remarks on Germany’s special responsibility for the Baltic States might have been the key to building consensus among allies. In the same way, the case of the Baltic States had the potential to become a sensitive issue before the second round of enlargement. From a purely realpolitik point of view, denying membership to the three ex-Soviet republics might have been regarded as a worthwhile sacrifice on the altar of U.S.-Russian cooperation. Given unique challenges in the post-9/11 geopolitical environment and the strategic importance of Russia in dealing with Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran, the delay of Baltic membership would have been a small price to pay. However, from the historical-psychological point of view, such a move was practically unthinkable, as it would have repeated the policies of appeasement of the 1930–40s. This was the psychological line that the majority of NATO members refused to cross despite obvious strategic advantages. Free, Whole, and at Peace One of the most enduring foreign policy visions of President George H. W. Bush was his notion of a Europe free, whole, and at peace. Presented in

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1989 in Germany, it was not only substantive enough to capture the dilemmas facing Europe at a particular moment in history but also broad enough to fit in multiple policy components over time. The incoming Clinton administration initially adopted the concept in its broadest sense, which, as embodied by the Pf P initiative, included both the CEECs and the NIS. However, with the rising demands for NATO enlargement and growing transition challenges for the Russian Federation, the idea was largely truncated to a group of CEECs affected by the “black trinity.” After all, CEE demands for joining a defensive alliance based on its original premises and Russian resistance to its expansion were two incompatible ideas. One of them had to take priority over another and subsequently adjust the boundaries of “a Europe.” If in 1993 Russia was the centerpiece of Clinton’s foreign policy, by mid-1994 the situation began to change. Russia still commanded close attention from the U.S. administration, but it was no longer at the top of the priority list. Enlargement was to take place, no matter the readiness of Russia to cooperate. U.S. Ambassador-at-large for the NIS James Collins told the House International Relations Committee in early 1997: “Progress on the NATO-Russia track [would] not influence or affect progress on the enlargement track.”186 While such a policy was bound to create tensions with the Kremlin, internally it grew more congruent as the positive notion of a Europe whole, free, and at peace merged with the more negative concept of collective responsibility. Seen through the lens of historical-psychological legacies of World War II, this positive vision was the logical inverse of a Europe divided, enslaved, and at war. Thus NATO enlargement became the bridge from one Europe into another, but only in a limited geographical space. Viewing both ideas in tandem, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Marc Grossman saw no contradiction in a two-fold motivation behind enlargement. He roughly estimated that “70 percent of our motivation was trying to meet the standard that the first President Bush set of a Europe whole, free and at peace.” The remaining 30 percent was seen as a chance to undo a great injustice, which was the fact that these countries in Central and Eastern Europe endured 50 years of Communism and have been members of the Warsaw Pact. And then if you jump ahead to the second expansion, in a particular case of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, it was a chance to undo the great wrong of the forcible incorporation of these countries into the Soviet Union.187

In this chapter, both of these percentages merge to represent the positive and negative sides of the historical-psychological legacies that were forged

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by the successes and failures of World War II. NATO enlargement became the means to remedy historical tragedies and make good on unfulfilled promises of “peace in our time.” While strategic concerns have played a visible tactical role in the process, they cannot adequately explain the underlying motivation behind enlargement. Many institutional arrangements short of full NATO membership could have addressed the security concerns of the CEECs, but only the full integration into the Alliance was able to deal with the historical-psychological legacies on both sides.

CHAPTER 4

EU Enlargement

I

n March of 1998, a survey of German political elites revealed that 85 percent of all respondents either tended to support or were strongly in favor of Polish accession to the EU. The sentiment held steady across partisan lines.1 When asked about the rationale for their support, most respondents preferred two answers: German multilateralism (98.2 percent) and German moral-historical debt to Poland (73.5 percent).2 As noted by Matthias Ecker-Ehrhardt, author of the survey, these reasons are closely related, since multilateralism in Germany is always thought in terms of historical lessons of the Nazi period.3 In his work, Ecker-Ehrhardt demonstrates that opinions expressed by political elites are largely congruent with German public discourse on enlargement. This survey serves as an interesting starting point for the discussion of the EU policy on Eastern enlargement. It raises two central arguments advanced in this chapter. First, the observed consensus of German political elites toward Polish EU membership was a much broader phenomenon, that is, most EU members viewed the membership of a particular group of CEECs as a historical imperative. Few were as proactive as Germany, but all of them seemed to share the perception of the inevitability of expansion. Second, there was a strong historical-psychological component in the enlargement strategy. The reunification of divided Europe was not only a rhetorical figure of speech but in fact the primary motivation for the advancement of the policy. Again, few of the members felt the direct sense of moral responsibility for the fate of the CEECs, but all of them clearly understood and appreciated the historical-psychological context of the endeavor. Like with the account of NATO enlargement, this chapter provides an overview of EU enlargement through a historical-psychological perspective. The two waves of the fifth enlargement (2004 and 2007) are treated as a single continuous story. The second part of the chapter considers how other

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variables—member state interests and institutional norms—influenced the process. The final section evaluates seven hypotheses presented in the introductory chapter. Enlargement as Restitution One of the most striking features of EU Eastern enlargement is the early consensus among members regarding its inevitability. In contrast to NATO expansion, which had more pronounced “whether” and “when” phases, the right of the CEECs for EU membership was largely accepted since the late 1980s. Granted, these assurances were rather broad and vague, but they were important public commitments on behalf of the Community. The first EU Ambassador to Hungary, Jean Trestour, made this clear to Hungarians upon his arrival: “When I arrived in Budapest in July of 1990, I started shaking hands of my Hungarian colleagues and saying: welcome to the club.”4 Once contrasted with current EU attitudes toward Ukraine (or for that matter, Turkey), which for the past decade sought in vain for similar promises, it becomes clear that such rhetorical consensus should not be taken for granted.5 At the same time, the process of enlargement was neither smooth nor starry-eyed. It was often bogged down by national interests and institutional requirements. Following the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989, symbolized so vividly by the breach of the Berlin Wall, the newly elected leaders of Visegrad countries made it very clear that one of their most important and immediate foreign policy goals was “the return to Europe.” This was a dual task. On the one hand, the CEECs had to take up internal economic and political reforms. On the other hand, they, as Václav Havel once remarked, had to “arouse those in the West who [had] slept through our awakening.”6 Nothing awakened Western Europeans more than the statements of Eastern Europeans about their membership goals. In July 1990, the newly appointed Hungarian Prime Minister József Antall declared that his country’s “strategic aim [was] to obtain EC membership by 1995.”7 Few months later, Czechoslovak Premier Marián Cˇalfa informed Jacques Delors, the President of the EC Commission, that Prague was interested in opening talks on joining the Community.8 Polish President Lech Wałe˛sa appeared to be just as impatient presenting accession as the immediate foreign policy goal.9 Similar pronouncements were also made by Romania and Bulgaria. In fact, some Romanian politicians went even as far as to reject the whole notion of the “return to Europe” by pointing out that Romania never left it in the first place. Vice President of the Romanian Senate Vasile Mois summarized this feeling in the following way:

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Another aspect is that in Europe, reference to our return is made precisely by those who virtually marginalized us. And I am thinking particularly of the promoters of the Yalta agreements. When the decisions were made at Yalta, no Romanian, not even one, was asked if Romania wanted to stay in Europe or go East. For this reason, to set the question of Romania’s return to Europe is to me a lack of probity.10

West European reactions varied from member state to member state; however, none openly challenged the right of Eastern Europeans to gain full membership. Early in the process, the French were some of the most visible enlargement skeptics, especially President François Mitterrand. Quietly backed by other southern EC members, Mitterrand argued for the long-term prospects of CEE membership, which, according to him, were “decades and decades” away.11 In the meantime, he was promoting the idea of European confederation, a variant of Charles De Gaulle’s vision of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals. Headquartered in Prague, the organization was destined to become a trimmed down version of the CSCE, excluding the United States and Canada. Once these details began to emerge at a July 1991 conference hosted by Václav Havel, Mitterrand was rebuffed both abroad and at home. Initially intrigued, Eastern Europeans rejected the idea as a “futurological” ploy to exclude them from EC membership.12 In an interview given before his visit to Paris, Lech Wałe˛sa expressed his frustration in the following manner: We are knocking on the door of the European Community. The EC gives us lessons on democracy, but declines to accept us. […] And why should we, Poles, strive to win the confidence of the West at all costs? The West betrayed us during the war, imposing Yalta on us. Later it used to lend money to the communists we fought against. We should be the ones who do not have confidence in the West and not the other way around.13

The Germans embraced the idea of the European confederation early on, especially in the context of West-East European relations. Kohl saw it as a reasonable initiative to meet the challenges of the tumultuous regional situation.14 As noted by the Times, such developments seemed to exclude membership prospects for the CEECs in the near term: “Under Helmut Kohl Germany is most unlikely ever to agree to allow Poland, Czechoslovakia or Hungary to join the European Community. This is partly because of the strength of the German anti-immigration lobby, […] but also for more Machiavellian reasons.”15 However, this position began to shift as the French provided more details of the confederation plan and the reactions from Eastern Europeans, the intended cosponsors of the project, grew increasingly

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negative. The gap between German and French approaches to Eastern Europe began to visibly widen in early 1991, but the fundamental differences were present for decades. For Germany, the dream of reunification, pursued for the past 45 years, was always a part of the broader Central and Eastern European context. As noted in chapter 2, this understanding matured in the early 1970s under the chancellorship of Willy Brandt. Reunification was impossible without German renunciation of its past and reconciliation with its immediate neighbors. The November 1989 border treaty with Poland was one such step toward “lasting reconciliation between Germans and Poles.”16 At the signing ceremony, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher repeated a part of his statement made a few months earlier at the UN: Fifty years ago the Polish people were the first victims of Hitler’s Germany when the war broke fences. They should know that it is their right to live within secure borders and that the Germans whether now or in the future will not put any territorial claims upon them. The wheel of history will not be turned back. We want to build a better Europe together with Poland. The inviolability of borders is the basis of peaceful coexistence in Europe.17

The German-Polish treaty was followed up by the German-Czechoslovak friendship agreement. While the parties left out the sensitive question of the nullity of the Munich Agreement, Chancellor Kohl saw the agreement as a step to “bring our reconciliation to a close and at the time to focus on the future.” As in the Polish case, he pledged Germany’s full support for Czechoslovakia’s integration into Europe, which was a part of a bigger strategy to reunite Europe and to “quickly and forever” overcome “the consequences of the earlier division of our continent.”18 It was at this point that the Kohl administration seemed to have accepted the role of active enlargement advocate. As noted by a Die Zeit correspondent, if it were up to Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the European Community would soon reach about 20 members.19 At the time, there was no record of CEECs’ economic transition or compliance with EC norms and regulations. Instead it amounted to two basic notions: historical responsibility/reconciliation and regional stability. The latter may have been addressed by Mitterrand’s confederation proposal, but the initiative stopped well short of dealing with historical-psychological legacies. Not surprisingly, reacting to Mitterrand’s comments on the distant prospects of future enlargement, a top German official assured that “Bonn saw East European entry happening within five to ten years, whether their economies were ready or not.”20 At home, Mitterrand was compared to nineteenthcentury Austrian diplomat Metternich, famous for his imperial ambitions

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and realpolitik mentality.21 Mitterrand’s rival on the right, ex-President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, expressed his unconditional support for EC enlargement.22 Under pressure, Mitterrand began to soften his position acknowledging that his comments might have been a bit blunt. The new official line became that the enlargement is unrealistic “within a few years to come.”23 Even President of the EC Commission Jacques Delors, a known enlargement skeptic, thought that the notion of “decades and decades” was more of a Freudian slip and should not be taken at face value. Delors agreed that the current EU members did not have a “monopoly right to Europe.” Thus, Eastern enlargement was inevitable, but the consensus grew that it should take place within a reasonable term. What is reasonable? For Delors, Havel’s suggestion, which envisioned membership by the end of the decade, was a realistic prospect.24 This was a remarkable progression from two years prior, when the president of the Commission was skeptical even about the membership prospects of the so-called neutral Austria.25 Along with Germany, the UK was another active proponent of Eastern enlargement. As early as August 1990, Margaret Thatcher was urging the Community to “declare unequivocally that it [was] ready to accept all the countries of Eastern Europe as members if they [wanted] to join, and when democracy [had] taken root and their economies [were] capable of sustaining membership.”26 For Thatcher, enlargement was closely tied with the notion of dilution, however, broader British support was more diversified. After all, British politicians have always been acutely aware that institutional deepening usually preceded widening. As Thatcher’s former colleague and later Vice President of EC Commission Sir Leon Brittan conveyed during his August 1990 visit in London, “It is absurd to think that further enlargement of the Community can only occur if we abandon prospects for further integration. […] The history of the last decade points, indeed, in exactly the opposite direction. The accession of Greece, and later of Spain and Portugal, accelerated the integration of the Community.”27 This was clearly understood by later British governments as well. Blair’s Minister for European Affairs Dennis MacShane called the idea of dilution through enlargement “complete and utter rubbish” because the EU history demonstrated that “the more you enlarge Europe, the more you need a stronger center to make it work.”28 Not least among the British motives was the understanding of historical responsibility toward CEE. During Václav Havel’s first visit to the UK in March 1990, Margaret Thatcher acknowledged that each Brit still felt “some sense of shame over that Agreement and we still feel unease that the Western World watched as the Prague Spring of 1968 was crushed by the Soviet tanks.”29 A few months later, she made a similar statement before the

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Czechoslovak Federal Assembly: “We failed you in 1938 when a disastrous policy of appeasement allowed Hitler to extinguish your independence.”30 Two years later, Prime Minister John Major visited Prague and signed a joint declaration, which formally confirmed “the nullity of the Munich Agreement of 1938.”31 While such rhetoric was not always immediately linked with the discourse on enlargement, these speech acts represented a part of the broader notion of reconciliation and reunification of Europe. How do you say “no” to CEE demands for membership after acknowledging your unfortunate role in the events that led to their 45-year-long isolation behind the Iron Curtain? At a strategic level it was nearly impossible, but when it came to tactics, some member states were less willing to compromise than others. The collapse of Mitterrand’s grand design for Eastern Europe may have left some grudges among French political elites, which, coupled with more immediate domestic factors, surfaced during the negotiation of EU-CEE association agreements. In September 1991 France blocked negotiations by refusing to slightly increase, free of tariff, beef import quotas from the Visegrad countries. The move was unexpected given that other members agreed to remove some of their objections and speed up the process following the attempted coup in Moscow. The reaction to the French veto was one of disbelief and dismay. Jacques Delors, a French Socialist himself, warned Mitterrand that it was no good welcoming the independent countries of Eastern Europe “with tears of joy if we do not allow them access to our markets,” while Danish Foreign Minister Uffe Ellemann-Jensen called it “a disgrace.”32 Under pressure from domestic rivals, member states, and Eastern Europeans, Mitterrand tried to calm the atmosphere by shifting the focus from touchy trade issues to newly found political will for enlargement. During his visit to Germany, the French president asserted his country’s commitment not only to association agreements but also to eventual CEE membership. He acknowledged that the CEECs had “the right to become members of the Community” and pledged to see the attainment of the goal “with all its [France’s] strength.”33 After some revisions and compromises, which ironically provided no improvements on the initial offer, France removed the veto three weeks later.34 For Eastern Europeans, frustration was boiling over. As always forceful in his rhetoric, Wałe˛sa repeated his favorite argument line: “They gained in Yalta at our expense, they gained during the Communist rule, they got us in debt giving money to communists, and today they want to make profit as well.”35 The association agreements were finally signed on 17 December 1991, but not without a last minute distraction. The ceremony was delayed for an hour due to Spain’s unsuccessful attempt to insert a protocol on steel exports.36 While the results

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did not meet initial Eastern European expectations, the documents recognized “the fact that the final objective” of the Visegrad countries was “to become a member of the Community and that this association, in the view of the Parties, [would] help to achieve this objective.”37 The commitment to enlargement was still quite vague, but all members began to view it as a political must. According to Horst Krenzler, the European Commission’s Director General of External Economic Relations, this understanding “really became [clear] in 1991–1992. Then it appeared unavoidable, but at that stage we still had the concept of enlargement in stages.”38 The veto had much to do with the dynamics of French domestic politics. Mitterrand tried to demonstrate to French farmers, already extremely sensitized due to falling livestock prices and ongoing talks under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, that the government was willing to take a black eye for their interests in Brussels.39 Similarly, Spanish concerns over steel exports of the CEECs looked like political posturing for domestic consumption.40 Such highly publicized but substantively minor glitches tend to draw the attention of scholars to the detriment of other developments. For example, just a few months before the dispute over several hundred tons of meat, Western countries went out of their way to provide extensive debt relief to Poland. In April 1991, the Paris Club countries decided to cut the Polish debt of almost $30 billion in half, one of the largest amounts of debt relief to date. France slashed almost 60 percent of the debt, which amounted to approximately $3 billion.41 Germany followed up with a 50 percent reduction totaling nearly another $3 billion.42 This was a substantial help to Poland, which did not directly impede on domestic constituents and thus was less politically costly to provide than the minor adjustments in meat import quotas. In the same way, the EC directed substantial aid flows to the CEECs in comparison to other developed countries. By the end of 1991, the Union accounted for three-fourths of all G-24 aid flow to the region.43 Thus, the EU members were more accommodating than it may appear at first glance. After signing association agreements with the Visegrad states, the EC attention turned to Bulgaria and Romania. Although Mayhew argues that the extension of the association status to these southern states was a sign of EC commitment to countries “which set out on the course of reform,” the record of Romanian reforms was dubious at best.44 Following the parliamentary and presidential elections in May 1990, both the legislative and executive branches of the government came under the control of the National Salvation Front led by Ion Iliescu, a Moscow-trained Communist. Some opposition leaders felt cheated by the electoral process, while the newly elected President Iliescu designated the protesters as “extreme rightist forces”

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and, inciting domestic violence, asked for protection by the working-class people.45 Although neither the Commission nor the EC members ever questioned the right of Romania to apply for membership, they were deeply concerned over the ongoing violence and intimidation sanctioned by the authorities. Seeking to leverage its economic muscle, the EU Commission postponed the signing of the bilateral trade agreement. Its representatives also threatened to delay (and later delayed) the extension of the PHARE (Poland and Hungary: Aid for Economic Restructuring) aid program to Romania.46 The British Foreign Office minister in charge of Eastern Europe went as far as to accuse Iliescu of employing Ceaus¸escu-like tactics.47 Because of the political situation in the country, the U.S. ambassador to Romania even refused to attend the official inauguration ceremony of Iliescu.48 Not surprisingly, the negotiations over the EU associate membership were also repeatedly delayed. Despite these temporary setbacks, the European Commission responded to every moderate improvement in the political situation in Romania. The bilateral trade agreement was signed in October of 1990. Bucharest was put on the PHARE aid program in January of 1991. Two years later, the EU and Romania signed an association agreement, which, using the boiler plate formula from earlier agreements, acknowledged that Romania’s “ultimate objective [was] to become a member of the Community.”49 The relatively smooth and fast progression of EURomanian relations is quite surprising given the reluctance of Bucharest to pursue political and economic reforms. In fact, as late as July 1997, the EC Commission’s first Regular Report on Romania argued that the applicant “did not experience a genuine change of government until the November 1996 elections. The political system [had] long been characterized by the persistence of practices inherited from the Communist system …”50 The decision to offer membership prospects to Bulgaria and Romania should not be viewed simply as an attempt to decelerate the pace of Eastern enlargement. In fact, if the EC members truly sought to deny any mediumterm prospects of membership, they might have coined an early equivalent of the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP), which established cooperation with immediate EU neighbors without providing any membership prospects.51 Instead it chose associate members quite carefully, implying that these countries were realistically seen as future EU members. In a sense, selection of Bulgaria and Romania was the first nail in the coffin of a limited enlargement idea. The Baltic States and Slovenia were the last to hop on the EC enlargement train. While the latter came out largely unscathed from the breakup of Yugoslavia and in fact was one of the most prosperous candidates, three ex-Soviet republics faced formidable challenges on socioeconomic, political, and

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security fronts. With economies burdened by the aging Soviet industrial and military complex and by large but inefficient agricultural sectors, the Baltic States looked at the EU as the bridge to a more prosperous and stable future. Lithuanian Foreign Minister Algirdas Saudargas made this clear right at a press conference following the official ceremony of the EC’s diplomatic recognition of the Baltic States: “We want to become associate members of the European Community. It is too soon to talk yet about full membership but this is our tendency.” Estonian Foreign Minister Lennart Meri emphasized the historical context of the events: “Our independence marks the final end of the Second World War.”52 EC members responded in kind. For understandable reasons, Germany was especially eager to admit its historical responsibility and to pledge its long-term support for the Baltic States. German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher joined his Baltic colleagues at the press conference in Brussels. While celebrating this occasion, he also admitted his country’s past failures: “Germany is aware of its historical responsibility toward the Baltic States. Hitler’s Germany, through the Hitler-Stalin pact, contributed to the destruction of the Baltic States, in violation of international law.”53 Genscher added that “if they [the Baltic States] [wished] so, the German government would plead for their association with the EC.”54 Just a couple of days later, Denmark, one of the most active proponents of Baltic independence and later of EuroAtlantic integration, was already pushing for the inclusion of the Baltic States into ongoing association agreement negotiations between the EC and the Visegrad countries. According to Danish Foreign Minister Uffe EllemannJensen, the initiative was rebuffed as premature by Britain, France, Spain, and the EC Commission.55 Interestingly, Ellemann-Jensen saw his steadfast support of the three Baltic republics through a historical prism: “The three small Baltic countries have a particular place in my heart. Probably because I have a feeling that their fate could have been ours, if in April 1945 Field Marshal Montgomery had not rushed in to cut off Marshal Rokossovsky’s army before it moved up in Denmark.”56 This argument is reminiscent of what psychologists call a “survivor syndrome” usually associated with survivors of tragic events such as the Holocaust.57 While some scholars see the Europe agreements as the end of the era of innocence and optimism in EU-CEE relations,58 this book emphasizes an alternate aspect. More than anything, the negotiations unveiled for the CEE political elites a complex and sometimes petty nature of EU institutional decision making. The strategic endorsement of Eastern enlargement is not the same thing as tactical steps toward this goal. The right of future membership was not yet the right of immediate and unobstructed market access. Feeling conflicting pressures of domestic interests and historical-psychological

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legacies, EC members balanced them by further crystallizing political cooperation commitments on the one hand and controlling for negative economic externalities on the other.59 In some ways, this dual strategy shielded the political cooperation process from domestic electorates and advanced it to the point of no return. In addition to the Europe agreements, Community-wide acknowledgment of Eastern enlargement has been reflected in the 1992 Lisbon European Council conclusions, asserting that cooperation with Central and Eastern Europe “will be focused systematically on assisting their efforts to prepare the accession to the Union which they seek.”60 Similar language was present in the Edinburgh European Council conclusions, but it also mentioned two additional documents that became important milestones toward a more formalized engagement. Trying to bring EC-Visegrad cooperation to a new qualitative level, in September of 1992 Visegrad ambassadors in Brussels, following the Commission’s advice, submitted a joint memorandum to the EC, which, among other things, stated that the three countries sought to join the Union by 2000, and urged the Community to lay out clear accession criteria. The deadline for the evaluation of their progress and the decision on the opening of talks was set for 1996.61 It is necessary to emphasize that these were CEE demands, and thus they can be regarded a standard against which the enlargement progress and the sensitivity of the member states could be measured. In response to this memorandum and the Lisbon Council request, the EC Commission released a report in December entitled “Towards a Closer Association with the Countries of Central and Eastern Europe.” For the first time, this document laid out general accession conditions for the CEECs, which later became known as the Copenhagen criteria. In addition, it asked the next European council “to confirm that it [accepted] the goal of eventual membership in the European Union for the countries of Central and Eastern Europe when they [were] able to satisfy the conditions required.”62 In view of these two documents, the Edinburgh Council promised that “the European Council at its meeting in Copenhagen [would] reach decisions on the various components of the Commission’s report in order to prepare the Associate countries for accession to the Union.”63 This was the initial step toward a more defined and structured membership path of the CEECs. Anticipating the potential of the Copenhagen Summit, the CEE leaders worked hard to convey their high expectations of the upcoming meeting. A few days before the summit, Czech Prime Minister Václav Klaus insisted that Copenhagen decisions should be a “partial contribution to overcome the half-a-century lasting division of Europe.”64 Visiting Portugal, Wałe˛sa

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talked to the parliamentarians about the dangers of a new division of Europe, but this time between wealthy and poor Europeans.65 The decisions of the Copenhagen Council clearly took into account CEE requests. The conclusions of the presidency, in direct response to the 1992 Commission report, not only provided the list of candidate countries but also affirmed that the associated countries in Central and Eastern Europe that so desire shall become members of the European Union. Accession [would] take place as soon as an associated country [was] able to assume the obligations of membership by satisfying the economic and political conditions required.66

The absence of any controversy over the language of the document is the best indication of how widely and deeply the understanding of the inevitability of Eastern enlargement was shared by the member states. Pressured by the CEECs, the Copenhagen Council also agreed to make market access concessions by reducing customs duties and increasing import quotas on some industrial products. Still, for the Visegrad countries, the language of political commitment was too vague as they expected concrete dates and deadlines and an exclusive status. Following the Council, Václav Klaus was critical of what he perceived as a second-class treatment: “We believe that we are a part of Europe, and not a part of some Central or other Europe.”67 The Visegrad countries also did not want to be grouped with relatively poor and politically vacillating Romania and Bulgaria as it might have slowed down the process. More substantial obstacles to speedy enlargement stemmed from internal EC challenges, such as the ongoing Northern enlargement, challenges presented by the Danish “no” to the Maastricht Treaty, the completion of the monetary union, and other institutional reforms. With the first Europe Agreements having come into force in February 1994 and the upcoming German presidency of the EU during the second half of the year, the momentum was building for a more structured preaccession dialogue between the EU and the CEECs. The additional stimulus was given by the Commission paper “The Europe Agreements and Beyond: a Strategy to Prepare the Countries of Central and Eastern Europe for Accession,” which invited the Council to expand cooperation in areas that fall under the Community’s prerogative. While Germany was eager to move the process forward, the timing was somewhat awkward due to two main distractions. First, the German presidency immediately followed the rowdy Corfu European Council (June, 1994), where some members clashed over the next president of the EC Commission. Second, parliamentary elections were coming up in Germany, which naturally entailed a lot of highspirited haggling over the future vision of Europe and Germany’s role in it.

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In September, the Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union, the ruling coalition partners, floated a controversial proposal for “multispeed” Europe, which was rejected by Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel. He was disappointed with the “third-class membership” option offered to the CEECs by the proposal. Instead he argued for full and simultaneous integration of the candidates to greatest extent possible.68 Kinkel recalled that Germany had a “historical responsibility” to bring the CEECs to Europe.69 Despite the distractions, Bonn managed to achieve quite a few milestones during its presidency. In October, the EU agreed to grant access to key ministerial meetings to six CEECs—Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania. Unofficially, Slovenia was also a part of the “privileged” group, although first it had to resolve property restitution disputes with Italy. The absence of the Baltic States was attributed to the concerns over the Russian reaction, but Klaus Kinkel insisted that the three ex-Soviet republics would not be decoupled from the group.70 For German political elites, which were more reticent about the idea of speedy Baltic membership in NATO, it was important to demonstrate their commitment on the EU front. The first proof of that came just a few days later, when EC Commissioners, led by Sir Leon Brittan, agreed to ask the Council of Ministers for the extension of Europe Agreements to the Baltic States.71 In response, the Essen Council pledged to “do everything necessary” to conclude association agreements with the Baltic States (and Slovenia) within the next six months.72 Just two days after the Council endorsement, the Commission officially opened talks with the Baltic States. Marking the occasion, Leon Brittan insisted that the EU had a “moral, political, economic and strategic obligation to get the three Baltic States on board.”73 Coupled with association membership in the Western European Union, the formal EU defense arm, early in the year, the EU-Baltic cooperation had been elevated to an equal footing with the rest of the CEE group. For Brittan, who is of Lithuanian Jewish descent, this might have been an important personal moment as well. He describes his rationale for actively supporting Eastern enlargement in the following terms: I took the view that during the whole Communist period we were all very sad and sympathetic about the plight of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe […] But if we were so sympathetic to the plights of these countries, then not to welcome them and to help them become members of the European Union would show that the tears that we shed were crocodile tears and were hypocritical. So I thought that first and foremost we have the moral obligation to have them in; of course, only when they met the criteria.74

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Another important legacy of the Essen Council was the request to the Commission to draft a White Paper on the integration of the CEECs into the internal market. Released in May 1995, the document laid out extensive sector-by-sector approximation tasks. It was at this point that the daunting scope of convergence with EU legal, regulatory, and monitoring systems became more apparent for the candidates. It was also at this point that the Commission clearly stepped into a new level of visibility and importance. With most CEE membership applications submitted by the end of 1995, the pre-accession process was slowly shifting from a more or less political undertaking to an increasingly complex and multidimensional bureaucratic coordination game. Still the political core of the project was always on display. In 1995 some key member states came out with rosy promises of Visegrad membership by year 2000. During his July visit to Poland, which put a special emphasis on historical reconciliation between the two countries, Chancellor Kohl expressed the opinion that he would like to see Poland as a member of the EU by the end of the decade.75 Several months later French President Chirac gave the same pledges during his tour of Central European countries. While these promises were considered unrealistic by most EU bureaucrats, they provided an important reference point that coincided with the CEE expectations articulated in 1992. It seems that at least Chancellor Kohl was prepared to take these pledges one step further. During the December 1995 Madrid Summit, he floated an idea to designate the Visegrad countries (except Slovakia) as the first group of candidates to start negotiations.76 While this verbal suggestion might have been a strategic attempt to prioritize Germany’s immediate neighborhood for enlargement, it was not a fixed or widely shared preference. In fact, by early 1997, Germany along with France considered starting preaccession screening process with all CEECs.77 In the run-up to the Luxembourg Council, this idea was recycled by Denmark, Sweden, and in part Italy.78 The 1997 December European Council in Luxembourg represents one of the most important milestones in Eastern enlargement. Based on the recommendations of the EU Commission, the member states selected five CEECs (plus Cyprus) to start accession negotiations. At the same time, the other five (plus Malta) were granted access to the prenegotiation screening process that evaluated national legislation compliance with the acquis communitaire. In a sense, while formally separated, both groups of candidates started negotiations simultaneously. The main difference was that one group formally opened up negotiation chapters, whereas others began the process of regulatory convergence on a less formal level. Some constructivist scholars, who tend to emphasize the importance of institutional rules and norms as the guiding motivation for enlargement, often neglect this rather peculiar

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arrangement, which may shed some light on the underlying rationale puzzle for Eastern enlargement. In July 1997, the European Commission published its “Agenda 2000” report that laid out not only an extensive “business plan” of accession negotiations, but also provided first candidate country evaluation reports. The Commission handpicked the five most economically advanced candidate countries that met the Copenhagen criteria and thus were eligible to start formal negotiations. The selection of these countries was based on very well-specified criteria that left little space for dispute. More importantly, the Commission drafters were shielded from any political pressure and let the facts speak for themselves. Rutger Wissels, who wrote the economic part of the reports, felt pressure from neither outside nor inside: I have never experienced any pressure to write the economic analysis any differently than I did. It was put under severe scrutiny and I was questioned very insistently by a number of Commissioners’ cabinet [members] in the last phases we were finalizing the reports, but I defended my case and I was not asked to modify a comma anywhere.79

When these evaluations were released, some member states, specifically Denmark, Sweden, and Italy, objected to their apolitical approach. Instead, they argued in favor of the simultaneous opening of negotiations with all candidate countries. According to Danish Foreign Minister Niels Helveg Petersen, the Commission’s approach had a danger of causing “fresh divisions” in Europe. He argued that the member states were “under a historic obligation to ensure Europe grows together.”80 Excluded candidate countries also laid out arguments along the same lines. Romanian Minister for European Integration insisted that under the present economic circumstances his country “could not afford” EU membership. Thus, he urged member states to reject the group-by-group option in favor of the regatta approach: We said we could not agree with a ‘sea-like,’ namely in waves, EU enlargement strategy, which would mean drawing fresh borders and would make us think of a new Yalta, but we need a ‘river-like’ strategy, namely a currently flowing one, representing, as a matter of fact, the essence of the EU enlargement process.81

In this debate about the “essence” of enlargement, Sweden and Denmark proposed a plan, which circumvented Commission’s strict division between the two groups of candidates. The initiative sought to divide the process of accession negotiations into two stages. The first one would begin with “multilateral acquis screening” for all candidate countries followed by the

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opening of bilateral negotiations in the beginning of 1999.82 With the Luxembourg Council rapidly approaching, Jacques Poos, the Foreign Minister of Luxembourg, pledged to find “intermediate ways” to solve the standoff.83 The eventual formula, approved by the Luxembourg meeting, followed along the lines of the Swedish-Danish proposal. While it officially designated the first group of countries to begin negotiations in March 1998, it also opened up the prescreening process to the other six countries. As Friis points out, the emotional appeal of the Swedish-Danish argument superseded the allure of perceived objectivity.84 Upon return from Luxembourg, Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar gave a passionate report in parliament, touting the end of the historical divisions of Europe: “This has been a political agreement of great significance that erases the unjust borders of the European continent drawn by Yalta, and that was the result of the bipolar order with which the postwar period was inaugurated.”85 Bulgarian Prime Minister Ivan Kostov also sounded quite optimistic, declaring that the decision “took Bulgaria out of the Yalta map and put it on the map of Europe.”86 The role of Sweden in this episode (and later during its EU presidency in the first half of 2001) was noteworthy. Following its accession in 1994, Sweden (along with Denmark) became one of the most active advocates of the Baltic States within the EU. While Swedish support for the three ex-Soviet republics had obvious geopolitical and economic dimensions, there were also painful historical-psychological legacies that had haunted Sweden since the early 1940s. First, it was one of the very few Western countries that had officially recognized the Soviet annexation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Like Great Britain, it returned Baltic gold savings to the Soviet Union. In fact, already in May of 1941, Sweden had signed a bilateral agreement with the Soviet Union that resolved mutual liability issues vis-à-vis the Baltic States.87 Second, after the war, Sweden sent back to the Soviet Union some of the Baltic refugees who often encountered a less than friendly welcome home. Thus, it was not surprising that ever since Baltic independence, Stockholm, in the words of the Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs Lars-Ake Nilsson, was seeking to shed its “shame complex.”88 The Swedish government compensated the gold reserves, invited the refugees for a state visit and issued formal apologies, and pledged its unwavering support for the Balts in the future.89 One of the most visible and significant speeches on this topic was made by Prime Minister Carl Bildt on 17 November 1993 at the Foreign Policy Institute. Talking at a later Parliament hearing, he recalled the details of the speech as follows: I thought it was urgent to tackle the national debt by Sweden for the national silence for too long prevailed in the case of the Baltic States and the Baltic

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people’s situation. We must not forget the long period in Swedish foreign policy when we spoke loudly on things far away and were silent on those issues close by. To the Baltic people there are reasons to regret our politics and we partially regret it and even feel ashamed for it.90

Bildt argued that Sweden could not formulate its future foreign policy “while hiding its own past.” Such statements about moral responsibility toward the Baltic States were not unusual among Swedish political elites, but Bildt went even further and implied that Sweden might drop its traditional neutrality position in the case of a threat to Baltic independence.91 This phrase became a point of contention in the run-up to the national elections. Although the negotiations with the “fast track” group started as planned in March of 1998, the progress turned out to be slow and uneven. Presenting annual progress reports in November, External Relations Commissioner Hans Van den Broek singled out Czech Republic and Slovenia as beginning to lag behind the rest of the group. At the same time, he praised Latvia for making sufficient progress to open negotiations by the end of 1999. Lithuania and Slovakia were also close to achieving the same goal.92 Of all CEE candidates, the worst situation appeared to be in Romania, which, according to the annual report, made “very little progress in the creation of a market economy and its capacity to cope with competitive pressure and market forces has worsened.”93 Still Van den Broek assured that the Commission had no intention to leave any countries behind a curtain, including Romania and Bulgaria.94 The first sign of this strategy came about in January 1999. Following the guidelines agreed upon at the Luxembourg Council and confirmed at the Vienna Council, the Commission moved from multilateral to bilateral screening for the “slow track” candidates. It planned to conclude the process before the upcoming December Summit, that is, in about eight-nine months. Given that the first group of countries was scheduled to wrap up their bilateral screening by the end of June, a 15-month-long procedure, the time difference between the two groups was narrowing.95 A gradually gathering political momentum for broad enlargement was clearly visible at the February 1999 congress of the European People’s Party, a right-leaning, pan-European political bloc. It elected Bulgarian Foreign Minister Nadejda Mikhailova as a Vice President of the party and pledged to go forward with enlargement without delay. President of the European Commission Jacques Delors applauded the EPP for “taking the lead in this historic reconciliation, opening the party to its brother parties in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.”96 In early 1999, it was already clear that the Finnish Presidency during the second half of the year

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would seek to formally invite additional members to preaccession negotiations. The consensus was building around three countries—Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovakia. The case for the inclusion of Romania and Bulgaria was somewhat weaker, but not out of question. Any haziness was resolved by the Kosovo War, which started at the end of March. As EU Chief Negotiator Nikolaus van der Pass told Die Welt in May, although the two countries hadn’t met the necessary standards, it would be difficult to exclude just two of them. He also acknowledged that their case had been bolstered further by the Kosovo crisis.97 They cooperated with NATO allies throughout the war and encountered serious economic disruptions because of it. The invitations at the Helsinki Council were partly a sign of the EU’s appreciation of their efforts. As Enlargement Commissioner Guenter Verheugen remarked, “Europe found a new sense of unity in that difficult period of time.”98 Furthermore, he expressed hope that the second wave countries should be able to catch up with the first group.99 For his part, new President of the EU Commission Romano Prodi was already envisioning that “early in the next century it [would] be possible to reunite Europe on terms very different from the divisions and strife of the twentieth century.”100 In Helsinki, EU members also agreed on 2002 as a potential date for the conclusion of negotiations with the most advanced countries.101 Formal negotiations with the “slow track” candidates were opened in April of 2000. Romania and Bulgaria put their target date for accession at January 2007, while the rest of the group aimed for the beginning of 2004. Although some time difference between the groups remained throughout the year, the distance was gradually diminishing. Already in April, Poland became worried that it might not be among the first batch of invitees. EU Commissioner Gunter Verheugen sought to mollify Polish concerns: “Poland is the biggest country in the (enlargement) process and it is in my view desirable that it is among the first to join.”102 A few months later, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer was just as supportive of Poland: “We bear a historical responsibility to open the way to the European Union as quickly as possible for the Poles, who were pushed behind the Iron Curtain for almost fifty years by the evil policies of the Third Reich.”103 In response to the increasing pressure from the second-wave candidates to open up all negotiation chapters, the Santa Maria da Feira Council (June 2000) pledged to achieve this goal in early 2001 and assured that the catch-up was possible.104 Half a year later, the Nice Council reiterated the 2002 date for the conclusion of negotiations with some countries and expressed hope that the new members would have a chance to participate in the 2004 European Parliament (EP) elections. Thus, it was not surprising that the Swedish Presidency during the first half of 2001 sought to set a firm deadline for

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the conclusion of negotiations and the admission of new countries. However, in the runup to the Gothenburg Summit, the cards seemed to be stacked against the wishes of Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson. As one EU diplomat remarked to a news agency, “there’s no chance Sweden [would] be able to get that idea through in Gothenburg.”105 A week before the summit, the Irish “no” on the Nice Treaty only thickened the clouds of doubt about the rationality of setting a firm target date. The variation among candidates in terms of closed chapters was also quite spread out. In early June, Cyprus and Hungary led with 22 closed chapters out of 31, while Poland had only 16 chapters closed, already lagging behind Lithuania and Slovakia from the “slow track” team. For Germany and France, which could not politically imagine the first wave of enlargement without Poland, the situation was further complicated by pressures from domestic electorates who over the years grew increasingly cold toward the idea of enlargement. In the spring of 2001, only about 35 percent of Germans and the French supported EU expansion.106 With these complicating factors in the background, the first day of the Gothenburg Summit produced a stalemate over the Swedish initiative.107 But the next day, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder caved in. “It would not have been right for me to block such an openly stated goal of the Swedish presidency,” he declared after the meeting.108 To the great satisfaction of the CEECs, the Council argued that “the road map should make it possible to complete negotiations by the end of 2002 for those candidate countries that [were] ready. The objective [was] that they should participate in the European Parliament elections of 2004 as members.”109 This was the strongest language to date embraced by all EU members. The fears of some member states that the road map might increase pressure for a “big bang” enlargement and diminish the effectiveness of EU negotiations turned out to be completely justified. With Polish parliamentary elections scheduled for September 2001, Warsaw showed few signs of substantive progress in accession negotiations. Despite the political gridlock and diminishing popular support for membership in Poland, EU members went out of their way to assure Warsaw that it would still be a part of the first group of enlargement. German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer argued that he could not “imagine enlargement with Poland not in the first wave.”110 Austrian Foreign Minister Benita Ferrero-Waldner joined in, asserting that “the EU without Poland would not be complete.”111 Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, whose country held the presidency during the second half of 2001, was urging Poland to pick the pace before the Laeken Council, so that “it could be said there [in Laeken] that Poland [would] enter the EU in the first wave of enlargement.”112 It almost appeared that the EU members wanted Poland to succeed more than Polish

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political elites themselves. As Rutger Wissels, who was responsible for overseeing the Justice and Home Affairs chapter, remarked: “Huge effort made in 2001–2002 was to kick and push, and whip the Poles into what they had to do. This was really quite an extraordinary effort. […] I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it. And the pressure was absolutely huge.”113 Despite negotiation hurdles, the conclusions of the Laeken Council reflected the prevailing political sentiment to extend membership to all ten CEECs. In terms of public discourse, there was a noticeable role reversal between the EU members and the group of most advanced candidates. Seeing mounting Polish challenges and fearing accession delays, the latter began to emphasize the necessity of an “individual and differentiated” approach to negotiations.114 The last year of negotiations with ten CEECs seemed like a cacophony of promises, accusations, assurances, veto threats, and hard-core bargaining. With a clear deadline looming on the horizon, the rush was on to deal with any outstanding issues. Some of them, like the Czech-Austrian dispute over the safety of the Temelin Nuclear Power Plant, related to specific bilateral concerns. Others, like the CAP, touched upon highly sensitive policy areas for the majority of the members. While by the end of October, most of the hurdles had been cleared, Poland (along with some other candidates) used its advantageous political position to demand higher farm subsidies and larger financial aid right through the last minutes of the Copenhagen Summit. The decision was reached in overtime, when the EU offered to make €1.3 billion available for spending earlier than previously scheduled, lowered compulsory payments to the European Investment Bank, allowed new members to increase direct agricultural subsidies, and provided a few other adjustments.115 In addition to inviting ten new members, the Copenhagen Council also confirmed that its objective was “to welcome Bulgaria and Romania as members of the European Union in 2007.”116 While the last minute horse-trading may have left a bitter aftertaste on both sides, the historical significance of the decision was clearly understood and appreciated by the participants. All of them spoke about it along similar lines. The host of the summit, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, argued that at the summit “we decided to heal our continent. We decided to create one Europe. Today we have closed one of the bloodiest and darkest chapters in European history. Today we have opened a new chapter.”117 German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer echoed Rasmussen’s remarks by declaring “the definite end of the Cold War.” Belgian Foreign Minister Louis Michel’s comments seemed to be lifted right from the famous 1984 article by Czech dissident Milan Kundera: “It’s a return of the kidnapped children of the free world.”118 EC Commission President Romano Prodi

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was in agreement: “Accession of 10 new member states will bring an end to the divisions in Europe.”119 Eastern Europeans were just as emphatic. Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller declared: “Our people have finally thrown off the chains of Yalta.”120 Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy argued that his country had “once again returned to the house of Europe.”121 But for Bulgaria and Romania the negotiations were not yet finished. Just as in the earlier round, the EU formally continued negotiations and measured progress on an individual basis, however, there was no doubt that Romania and Bulgaria were destined to accede together. Already, at the Thessaloniki European Council in June of 2003, the members affirmed that “Bulgaria and Romania [were] part of the same inclusive and irreversible enlargement process.”122 Given Romania’s lackluster economic performance, Sofia was frustrated with their assigned teammate. Reacting to the latest annual progress reports, Bulgarian Prime Minister Simeon Saxcoburggotski complained that he “could accept the report as very positive if [Bulgaria] disregard the issue with Romania.”123 The problem was rather obvious as Romania still failed to meet the economic part of the Copenhagen criteria. In a vaguely worded statement, the Commission argued that “Romania [could] be considered as a functioning market economy once the good progress made […] continued decisively.”124 In addition, both countries faced serious challenges in curbing corruption and crime, and ensuring adequate functioning of their judicial systems. However, the political pressure was on to finish negotiations by the end of 2004 and to welcome the candidates in 2007. The deadlines were met, but with derogations. The EU Commission required the candidates to sign onto unprecedented postaccession benchmarks in most problematic areas: corruption, organized crime, and judicial affairs. If the goals were not adequately met, the Commission reserved the right to impose financial penalties. All these measures were taken to “ensure the proper functioning of EU policies and institutions after accession.”125 This was a curious compromise, which reflected the overwhelming political determination to complete the fifth enlargement even though the candidates were still shy of meeting accession criteria. EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn’s remarks made in May 2006 clearly demonstrated the dilemma of squaring the circle: “It is our goal to welcome Bulgaria and Romania in 2007 and it is our duty as the guardian of the (EU) treaties to ensure that once they join they really meet the conditions.”126 Such language was reminiscent of the 1997 Luxembourg compromise, which at the time, according to Tony Blair, assured that the negotiations would “take place at different times for individual countries,” but “no one [was] shut out of this process.”127

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The Eastern enlargement story relayed above reveals that the “oxymoronic” compromises were an inseparable part of the process. Because of that, EU Commission officials usually found themselves navigating the tricky confluence of institutional norms and historical imperatives. The dynamic interaction of these lower-tier and higher-tier preferences illuminates many tactical adjustments throughout the process of enlargement. However, first, I focus on the role EU institutional rules and norms played in the process. Institutional Norms Since its inception in 1957, the EEC has been a project of continuing convergence and interdependence among its member states. “The ever closer union”—the main aspiration of the EEC founding fathers as stated in the Treaty of Rome—became a familiar and hardly controversial cliché by the end of the century. Nowadays, the EU constitutes a complex institutional and legal structure that a number of analysts treat as the rudimentary federal state—“the United States of Europe.” While this claim has its rightful critics, it is undisputable that over the past fifty years the Union has developed an extensive legal and normative core that looks even more impressive when compared to such organizations as NATO. As noted by Jane Sharp, “joining the EU means turning one’s economic structure and legal system upside down.”128 Candidate countries had not only to transpose thousands of pages of EU legislation into a national legal system but also to demonstrate a functioning polity that adhered to democratic values, respect for human rights, and the rule of law. The Copenhagen Summit of 1993 laid all these requirements as follows: Membership requires that the candidate country has achieved stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities, the existence of a functioning market economy as well as the capacity to cope with competitive pressure and market forces within the Union. Membership presupposes the candidate’s ability to take on the obligations of membership including adherence to the aims of political, economic and monetary union.129

The first part of the stipulation constituted the broad political criteria, while the obligations of membership became associated with the 31 negotiating chapters and the acquis communitaire at large—the EU body of law. Because both of these segments were presented as the EU institutional core, a candidate country supposedly had to make substantial progress in all of these areas before accession. Candidates that achieved sufficient

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levels of normative compliance were invited to start formal negotiations on the 31 chapters. Obviously, the Copenhagen criteria did not always offer exact evaluation measures (even when it was further specified under Accession Partnerships); still, the economic, political, and civil rights records of candidate countries were clearly laid out in the annual progress reports. Each country could also check its relative progress in the negotiations and receive information about any derogations or transition periods granted to others. In such areas as corruption and minority rights, where EU legislation was largely absent, the Commission used the CoE conventions as measures of compliance. Most scholars agree that while candidate countries had some leverage, it was largely an asymmetrical process of bargaining, where all candidate countries had to accept the EU rules of the game.130 But did the desire to socialize the CEECs into the EU institutional culture drive the enlargement? Were these norms and rules consistently applied? Following the collapse of the Eastern bloc, the initial stance of EU members to recognize the right of some CEECs (but not others) for future Community membership should be quite puzzling to constructivist institutionalists. In particular, there seemed to be an a priori division between non-Baltic former Soviet republics and the rest of the CEECs. By the end of 1991, the European Commission had created two distinct aid mechanisms—PHARE and TACIS—that turned out to be excellent predictors of current EU members and neighbors.131 At the time, Helmut Kohl made it clear that the Commonwealth of Independent States should be considered a distinct economic space from the EU and that its members should not be offered associate EU membership.132 What were the reasons for this differentiation even before any meaningful records of economic and political reforms were available? Was it because such countries as Ukraine were not interested in forging closer ties with the EU? The evidence seems to suggest otherwise. In December 1991, Ukrainian presidential candidate Leonid Kravchuk argued that, if elected president, he would “insist that Ukraine [became] a member of all European organizations.”133 After he won, Kravchuk repeated his country’s European ambitions during the inaugural meeting of the Ukrainian Supreme Council: Ukraine is a European State. This is the major factor determining the priorities of our foreign policy. It is the countries of Europe with which Ukraine has the closest political, economic and humanitarian ties, so expansion of these ties on a qualitatively new basis [is] our chief priority …134

The same commitment was reiterated during an EU delegation’s visit to Kiev in February of 1992.135 A few months later, Ukrainian Foreign

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Minister Anatoly Zlenko asked the French government for assistance in joining the Community.136 One of the most decisive early pledges for Ukrainian membership came during Zlenko’s visit to Denmark in June of 1993. After a meeting with a Danish counterpart, Zlenko insisted that “Ukraine [hoped] to become, step by step, an associate member and then a full member of the European Community.”137 For his part, Danish Foreign Minister Niels Helveg Petersen downplayed any membership prospects, stating that “the agreement we are currently negotiating with Ukraine does not envisage membership of the community.”138 Ironically, this statement was made at the time when Denmark was preparing to host the celebrated Copenhagen European Council. Whatever is the reason for ignoring Kiev in the early 1990s, norm-based explanations offer little insight, especially if Ukraine is contrasted with its southern neighbor Romania under Iliescu’s semiauthoritarian regime. Despite Romania’s dismal early transition record, the EU never questioned its right to gain membership. In addition to strategic reasons, which will be explored in the next section, the decisive shunning of Ukrainian desires for membership, which is still the policy of the EU, might have something to do with history as well. Commenting on this apparent differentiation, former Vice President of the European Commission Leon Brittan explained West European attitudes toward the Eastern bloc in the following way: I think there were three categories. First of all, the Eastern and Central European countries, which were quasi-independent [during the Cold War]. That was a clear case in a sense that if you believed in enlargement at all, then obviously as and when they met the criteria and ready to join, they should join. The Baltic States was another category because they had been independent and their independence was taken away from them. And they were sort of conquered by the Soviet Union with Nazis’ support. So again there was a lot of feeling. […] Now Ukraine, it was a different story altogether because Ukraine was both a part of the Soviet Union, as opposed to being an independent country, and it wasn’t annexed by the Soviet Union. […] And it was much bigger and harder to digest.139

Clearly, size is a complicating factor here, but it is a secondary one at best. After all, size was not a problem during the fifth enlargement. Why were the 20 million Romanians or 40 million Poles not considered an issue? Judging from the implicit categorization above, the answer seems to point to the West’s own negative historical-psychological legacies surrounding World War II. In addition to the pre-selection of candidate states, the decision making surrounding the 1997 Luxembourg Council also diverges from explanations

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based on compliance with institutional norms. As demonstrated earlier, the EU Commission’s first invitations to six candidate countries were indeed perceived as objective in the context of the Copenhagen criteria. As Jacques Santer, presenting Agenda 2000 to the EP, proudly declared: “I am sure that when you come to read carefully the documents the Commission is presenting today you will have no doubts about the thoroughness and objectiveness of our work.”140 Nobody questioned the Commission conclusions on their merits. Instead, Sweden and Denmark challenged the necessity to legalistically abide by the EU institutional criteria! How could two small EU members directly challenge institutional norms and eventually change the preferences of the majority in favor of the “slow track” group of candidates? As argued by Lykke Friis, it was a successful framing strategy. These countries appealed to the fundamental core of the project that was not about compliance with institutional norms and rules but first and foremost about a historical reunification of Europe. Could Germany exclude, for example, Latvia when its Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel just two months earlier pledged in Riga that “all three states will relatively quickly join the EU, and we will not admit formation of two groups from the Baltic states”?141 As noted by Kinkel, this pledge of support was based on German historicalpsychological legacies: “The time between 1940 and 1991 was a nightmare for the Latvian nation and the Baltic area. There followed Soviet and German occupation, and the worst years of humiliation and oppression. Out of its responsibility that comes from the past, today’s Germany vouches for the future of the three Baltic States.”142 Similar to Luxembourg Summit, the Gothenburg Summit demonstrated that the arguments based on compliance with institutional norms were downgraded in favor of historical-psychological arguments. While the Swedish proposal to set up a road map was considered detrimental to the perceived “objectivity” of the enlargement process, no member state wanted to take the moral burden of blocking such an initiative. Gerhard Schröder’s argument that it was “not right” to block the Swedish proposal can be best understood in the historical-psychological context of the overall process. From the compliance point of view, there was everything “right” about refraining from preset road maps because the negotiations in June of 2001 were only about half way through. But if the process was framed in moralhistorical terms—as “our historic obligation,” to quote president of the EC Commission Romano Prodi, then the conclusions of the Gothenburg Summit appear to be less mysterious.143 It was Chancellor Schröder himself who, before the Nice Summit, declared while visiting Poland: “We should meet our historic obligation and finalize the building of Europe […] We must take account of the wishes of the Polish nation, which wants to return to

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Europe, to which it has always belonged but from which it was separated by the Second World War.”144 It was these historical imperatives that drove member states to commit when, from the strategic and normative point of view, the commitment was not the most optimal or appropriate choice. The treatment of Poland was a classic oxymoron during the accession negotiations phase. The Commission tried to whip Warsaw into shape and issued stern warnings about its reluctance to perform. Somewhat disturbed by the rhetoric coming from Brussels, the Polish officials turned for assurances to key EU member states, which, it transpired, were more than willing to respond. Country representative after country representative issued public promises of the inevitability of Polish accession during the first round of enlargement. This made little sense if social learning was at the core of EU enlargement. To be assured before an exam that you will pass is a bad strategy to encourage learning. So what kind of institutional norms do candidates learn with these mixed signals? Judging from their behavior during the last year of negotiations, the candidates figured out that members shaped accession standards, not the other way around. One could argue that the first instance of commitment by the member states to a particular deadline may have happened due to the unpredictability of the future process. Then we would expect that such mistakes would not be repeated. However, at the 2002 Copenhagen Summit, the member states agreed on a new set of target dates for two “laggards”— Bulgaria and Romania. The negotiations process was again rushed in order to meet the promised deadlines. The casualty of such a strategy was the accession criteria, which had to be lowered to bring the candidates into the Union. In his evaluation of the EU Eastern enlargement, Timo Summa, who oversaw the accession of Bulgaria and Romania at the European Commission, touched upon these problems: Sustaining the maximum motivation to reform until the very end is possible only if the process is not forced to conclude by a pre-fixed date. The cases of Bulgaria and Romania, which had fixed promised accession dates (2007 or 2008), resulted in delivery problems, and basically this was the principal reason why post-accession monitoring (CVM) became necessary. The “packaging” together of eight ex-communist candidates entering in May 2004 obviously helped some countries to get an easier ride in some sectors.145

Such compromises show that institutional norms were an important part of the accession process, but they were not the main driving force behind EU Eastern enlargement. They had some constraining influence, but ultimately other factors seemed to take over and drive the course of action. Even the

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European Commission, which is usually considered the guardian of EU rules and norms, became more flexible and lenient over time. This was especially noticeable during Romano Prodi’s presidency. Clearly, the Commission did not just follow and apply institutional rules but oftentimes engaged in proactive policy making. Also, it had the ability to speed up or slow down the process. Thus, the motivation of key EU bureaucrats is relevant to the study of enlargement. Economic interests do not apply in this case, but a number of other factors could play a role. The historical obligation of enlargement was one of them. For Gunnar Wiegand, the spokesperson for the External Relations Commissioner, this was simply a given: “That’s because I am German perhaps. For me it’s clear. And also for many of the leadership at the time in Germany and many in this house [Commission] were clear about a historical imperative to enlarge.”146 As noted in chapter 2, this perception of responsibility was not a post–Cold War phenomenon. It matured over decades and came to fruition after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Member State Interests In the complex organizational structure of the EU, the Council of Ministers and the European Council have been traditionally considered the primary vehicles for the advancement of member state interests.147 What were these interests in the case of Eastern enlargement? Since the EU is first and foremost a common market project, economic costs and benefits should be the primary litmus test when approaching the possibility of institutional expansion. National security is another consideration. Its importance could be weakened if alternative frameworks—such as NATO-driven security initiatives—step in to fill the vacuum. In fact, throughout the Cold War, the division of labor between the EU as an economic institution and NATO as a security institution worked quite well for Western Europe. The failure of the EU to deal with the Yugoslavian crisis during the first half of the 1990s might have reinforced the logic of differentiation. Also, the parallel process of NATO enlargement should have further abated security concerns within the Union. Still the EU, as a project of economic interdependence to prevent future wars in Europe, always had a soft security gene in its DNA. Therefore, both variables are potentially relevant when examining the validity of the interests-based explanations of Eastern enlargement. The question of economic costs and benefits is central to the rationalist narrative of EU enlargement. Vachudova argues that the 2004 expansion was made on the cheap and thus made perfect economic sense. There are several problems with this analysis. First, the commitment to enlarge was

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made not in 2004 but in the early 1990s, when the anticipated costs of enlargement just for the Visegrad countries ranged from 4 to 37 billion ECU annually.148 At the time, Europe was also coping with substantial economic slowdown, which should have further dampened the enthusiasm of enlargement proponents. Second, even if it were possible to anticipate “cheap” enlargement, there should have been few doubts that the CEE share of the total budget was bound to increase to the detriment of old members in the future EU budget cycles. Discrimination of insiders is much more difficult than of outsiders. Third, there is also an issue of the uneven distribution of costs and benefits among the old member states. In the long term, Spain or France can hardly count on the same cost-benefit ratio in their trade with the CEECs as Germany or Sweden. Fourth, the support for enlargement presented risks for political parties since the majority of the EU electorate became enlargement skeptics over the years.149 And finally, if the costs of the EU enlargement are so small, why is there such reluctance to continue with the enlargement? After all, “cheap” enlargement can be replicated again. Is Germany or France not interested in adding another 100 million consumers? Are they not interested in stabilizing such countries as Ukraine, whose quarrels with Moscow caused serious economic and social disruptions across the EU countries in the winter of 2008? Clearly, the cost of enlargement is not simply a function of EU budget payments to the CEECs in 2007–2013. As discussed in chapter 1, according to rationalist assumptions, the initial strategy regarding CEE should have favored a cooperative framework without any promises of enlargement. From a point of view of a skeptic like France or Spain, the idea of expansion should have been dismissed quickly and forcefully in order to prevent the build-up of any expectations from interested member states or potential candidates. Instead, skeptics seemed to agree with the proponents on the imperatives of Eastern enlargement. At its most extreme, they argued that CEE membership was several decades away. When faced with criticism from Eastern and Western Europeans, the author of this remark, French President Mitterrand, toned down his rhetoric and assured the CEECs that Paris did not oppose their membership in principle. Right-leaning politicians went even further and embraced without significant reservations the prospects of Eastern enlargement. In fact, when Jacques Chirac became president in May of 1995, he joined Kohl in urging rapid accession of the Visegrad countries. This was unusual because France was well aware that, at least in comparison to Germany, it would end up with the short end of the stick. That is why Mitterrand was so keen on the idea of confederation, but he was dependent curiously on Eastern European political elites to buy into it. When Havel dismissed the idea and

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repeated his expectations of full-fledged membership, the French president quietly discarded his proposition. A few months later, Mitterrand signed a bilateral treaty with Czechoslovakia pledging his country’s support for “complete integration” into the Community.150 Similarly, CEE politicians dismissed special status initiatives coming from some influential European Commission members. To some extent, this dynamic is reminiscent of the PfP initiative, analyzed in the previous chapter, where the Euro-Atlantic community appeared to be dependent upon Central and Eastern Europeans to approve the project. Therefore, the notion of asymmetry between members and candidates should include some differentiation between strategic and tactical levels. CEE political elites had substantial leverage, if not outright veto power, when it came to choosing the overall strategy of EU-CEE cooperation. It was not related to their economic or geopolitical importance but to historical-psychological sensitivities on both sides. Realizing that their Eastern cousins had just come out from 45 years of forced confinement and had the moral right to finally choose their own path of development, EU members could not unilaterally impose the mode of cooperation on them. It had to be a consensus decision. As discussed earlier, this stood in contrast to the treatment of such countries as Ukraine. When it came to tactics, or the actual steps of achieving the goal of membership, there were myriad instances of asymmetrical engagement and attempts to leverage the privileged position enjoyed by the member states. This was especially obvious at the beginning of the process because the pressures to deliver on the promises of membership were still relatively weak, leaving the “tactical tunnel” wide open. France’s veto of increased quotas of meat imports from Eastern Europe is an example of domestic interests at play par excellence. Facing the protests by farmers, the French Socialist government took a highly visible stance to appease a key domestic constituency. This was done despite heightened geopolitical awareness due to the recent coup d’état attempt in Moscow. In the same way, Italy blocked Slovenia’s association negotiations until mid-1996 because of the disputes over property restitution and purchase.151 Again, Rome seemed to be unfazed by the ongoing hostilities in the former Yugoslavia. The standoff was resolved only when the new Italian center-left government led by Romano Prodi came to power. In the late 1990s, Austrian politicians repeatedly harassed Czech Republic over its ongoing nuclear power plant project. Although this was largely political posturing, it poisoned the overall atmosphere. Also, it demonstrated that enlargement did not take place in a vacuum. As Prague newspaper Lidove Noviny bluntly remarked following the French veto on meat imports: “If they do what is right for the continent they will lose the next elections.”152 While the choice was not as stark, the domestic

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constraints were real. EU political elites clearly took into account national political sensitivities, which resulted in many tactical adjustments. One of the challenges to both neoliberal institutionalist and constructivist narratives of enlargement recently came from a realist camp that views the policy through the lens of regional geopolitical considerations. The process of expansion becomes a “function of politico-military threat” faced by EU member states.153 According to realist explanations, the development of the enlargement policy in the early 1990s was driven by two events—the August 1991 coup in Moscow and the Yugoslavian conflict. Skålnes argues that the coup prompted conclusion of the Europe agreements with the Visegrad countries and the opening of such negotiations with Romania and Bulgaria. Before considering evidence in support of such propositions, the argument should clarify why Western Europeans cared for Romania and Bulgaria to begin with. If the proximity of threat is the key explanatory variable for enlargement, then Romania should be treated similarly to Ukraine, while Bulgaria should be treated similarly to Turkey. These two eastern Balkan countries were usually considered peripheral to the security of Western Europe. Not accidentally, during the meeting with Stalin in October of 1944, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill suggested his infamous 90-10 formula, which traded the Soviet control of Romania and Bulgaria for the British control of Greece. Furthermore, there was always the alternative of NATO cooperation frameworks and later its expansion plans that could have addressed geopolitical concerns. More substantively, the urge to complete the Europe agreements with the Visegrad countries by the end of October 1991 had already been spelled out in June 1991 European Council conclusions.154 Pressure was building up from Eastern Europeans, who grew increasingly anxious about delays. In the same way, already in July 1991, Bulgarians hoped to start association negotiations with the EU in October or November.155 On 1 October, the EU foreign ministers asked the Commission to explore the possibility of opening negotiations with Sofia, but at the same time recommended delaying a similar initiative with Romania due to ongoing political turmoil in the country.156 It is hard to see how this decision related to the Moscow coup. Furthermore, contrary to Skålnes’ assertions, Romania and Bulgaria were not left out in the cold in 1990–91. In fact, both countries finalized trade and cooperation agreements and were included under the PHARE program. The progress might not have been as rapid as both countries wanted, but it was clearly observable. Therefore, the alleged effect of the coup was momentary at best. Even Skålnes agrees that by December, the EU was back to business as usual.157 If France’s veto in early September is taken into account, then this alleged “shock” lasted barely two weeks.

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This is consistent with Friis’ and Torreblanca’s analyses of negotiations, which found no fundamental changes in EU attitudes following the coup.158 In the same way, the Copenhagen criteria did not suddenly materialize because of the Yugoslavian crisis, but was a gradual process that was driven by growing pressure from Central and Eastern Europeans. The September 1992 joint memo from the Visegrad countries was the most visible sign of their ongoing efforts to force the EU’s hand. The timing had much more to do with opportunities provided by the conclusion of the Maastricht Treaty and the ratification of Europe Agreements by the CEECs than with a year-old war in the Balkans. If the driving force behind the creation of Copenhagen criteria was the spread of the conflict into Bosnia-Herzegovina in early 1992, then the EU response was surprisingly slow. It would be reasonable to expect that the linkage would be already apparent in the July 1992 Lisbon Presidency conclusions, which contained an extensive resolution on the situation in the former Yugoslavia. Furthermore, Italy’s aforementioned blocking of negotiations with Slovenia for a year should have been an anathema in this context. Finally, there is no evidence that following the Dayton Peace Accords signed in December of 1995, the EU became less willing to see through the policy of Eastern enlargement. The argument based on the intensity of external threats has even less to contribute to the 1997 decisions made at the Luxembourg Summit. As argued earlier, the 1997 verdict to start negotiations with five CEECs— Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovenia—could not be explained by the candidates’ compliance record with the political criteria. The dismissal of Lithuania and to some extent Latvia demonstrated that the Commission took into account not only political but also economic criteria. As the basic economic data provided in Table 4.1 indicates, the two Baltic countries were lagging behind the “fast track” countries on a number of economic parameters. Most analysts agreed that Estonia had moved ahead of its southern neighbors in the reform process.159 Thus, it was not entirely surprising that the Commission decided to put Estonia, but not Latvia and Lithuania, into the first wave of candidate countries. However, not only are the three selected indicators important from a compliance point of view, but they also have clear economic repercussions for the member states. Low GDP per capita entails substantial transfers from EU structural funds. A high percentage of agricultural workers can indicate increased competition and reduced subsidies for the farmers of the member states. High unemployment figures may be an indication of high migrant inflows from these countries. Thus, the economic logic of interests and norms largely overlap reinforcing the legitimacy of the Commission’s conclusions. Despite this, the Danish-Swedish initiative against “new divisions” among the

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Table 4.1 Selected economic data, 1997160 Candidates

Slovenia Czech Republic Hungary Poland Slovak Republic Estonia Lithuania Latvia Romania Bulgaria

GDP per capita (constant: the year 2000; expressed in USD) 8,530 5,281 4,056 3,877 3,613 3,555 2,910 2,727 1,711 1,352

Employment in agriculture (% of total employment) 12 6 8 20 9 9 21 22 39 25

Unemployment, total (% of total labor force) 7 5 9 11 12 9 14 15 6 14

Note/Source: World Bank Group, “World Development Indicators,” http://web.worldbank.org/.

candidate countries received an unexpectedly high level of receptiveness from other member states. The Luxembourg compromise partly circumvented the Commission’s recommendations and took the first step toward the big bang enlargement. In accordance with Moravscik’s expectations, the initiative came from member states, but neither Sweden nor Denmark could be considered key power brokers in the Council of Ministers. Just like the Luxembourg compromise, the 1999 opening of negotiations with the “slow track” group also presents a dilemma for arguments based on institutional norms. The Commission included both Bulgaria and Romania, which were clearly behind the rest of the pack. Skålnes argues that the Kosovo crisis influenced EU decision making.161 While this argument has some merit, the process tracing of the Helsinki decisions demonstrates that the first seeds for the convergence of the two candidate groups were already sown two years earlier. The tendency became especially pronounced in January of 1999, when the Commission decided to initiate a “quick and dirty” version of the bilateral screening process with the second group of candidates. In comparison to the first group, the estimated time to complete the screening was cut almost by half. There is no doubt that the Kosovo War, which began at the end of March, provided additional impetus for extending negotiation invitations to Bulgaria and Romania; however, it would be quite a stretch to insist, as Skålnes does, that the 1999 enlargement decision was primarily motivated by the strategic concerns born out of the

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Kosovo campaign. In addition to the evidence of the accelerated negotiations with the second group, at which point the Kosovo campaign was in the preliminary stages of planning, there were clear indications (around the same time) that the Helsinki Council intended to invite at least Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovakia. There is no direct evidence that Bulgaria and Romania had sufficient support for their cause, although, as noted by the EU chief negotiator, their exclusion on purely economic grounds would have been complicated. Finally, if the Kosovo War had produced a “change of heart,” then the NATO Summit held at the end of April would have been the perfect opportunity to reward these two countries with membership invitations and to enhance their regional stability. Instead, they were only mentioned along with the Baltic States as the next candidates in line. Therefore, the Kosovo factor generated a sense of sympathy toward the two countries, which smoothed out the process, but did not cause it in the first place. Lastly, let us revisit the issue of deadlines set by the candidates. Visegrad countries sought to start accession negotiations by the end of 1996 and to become EU members by the end of 2000. Both dates turned out to be too ambitious, but they set important reference points for the process as a whole. Once endorsed by at least some EU politicians, they became useful tools in the game of expectations. The CEECs tried to put on a straight face and continuously played up the approaching “deadlines,” while the Community followed its own pace, still trying to stay in the ballpark of expected time estimates. Despite some delays, the actual accession dates clearly differed from forecasts done by economists, who, as mentioned in chapter 1, envisioned limited enlargement in about 20–30 years. Hypotheses Revisited Discourse based on the “black trinity” (H1) was commonplace among Western and Eastern European political elites. It was addressed to and evoked by not only France, Germany, and the UK but also countries that were not directly involved in shaping post–World War II order. There was a basic level of awareness of the historical imperative to enlarge shared by every EU member, which in turn empowered key individuals—policy entrepreneurs— to push through pro-enlargement agenda. Whether it was Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Lech Wałe˛sa, Helmut Kohl, Václav Havel, Uffe Ellemann-Jensen, Lennart Meri, Carl Bildt, or Romano Prodi, these political leaders managed to leverage their unique positions at various critical junctures throughout the process. Some of the entrepreneurship was strategic in nature, but its core touched upon historical-psychological legacies. While many EU members had conflicting interests, all of them shared the understanding of the historical

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imperative to include Central and Eastern Europe. This perception of what Jacques Santer designated as “historical and moral duty” is quite unique to the fifth enlargement.162 Even the Mediterranean expansion, which bears some resemblance to the latest round due to the relative economic underdevelopment and political transformation of candidate countries, never acquired the same level of consensus or urgency. Such EU members as France refused to commit for at least five years after Spain and Portugal submitted their applications and made their approval contingent upon intra-Community agreements on agriculture and fisheries. If economic concerns were given the same level of prominence in the Eastern enlargement, the accession of the CEECs would have been indeed “decades and decades” away. Instead, as noted by Christophe Leonzi, Deputy Director for Central Europe at Quai d’Orsay, the right of the CEECs to accede to the EU “was beyond national interests. It was never a question.” The only issues were “the method and the progressivity.”163 If West Europeans thought of enlargement as a must, their Eastern colleagues perceived it as a right (H2). Having been subjugated for 45 years to the will of the mighty, they openly demanded membership and chastised the EU for any delays. For example, at the opening of the EP’s discussion on enlargement, former Polish Premier Józef Oleksy argued that membership for Poland was “not a reward but a historical right.”164 It was this kind of approach and rhetoric that put pressure on EU politicians to enlarge. These persistent demands by the frontrunners drove the initial crystallization of the policy.165 Where did the leverage of the CEECs come from? It was definitely not their geopolitical or economic muscle. Without taking into account the presence of historical-psychological legacies, such demands on the one side and sensitivity on the other makes little sense. Thus, the evidence provided in this chapter contradicts rationalist assertions that “East European dissidents and their Western supporters were quickly disabused of the idea that these kind of considerations [based on moral historical grounds] would play an important role in shaping policy after 1989.”166 If that is the case, why did the CEE dissidents-turned-presidents and prominent Western politicians endorse and leverage guilt-based rhetoric throughout the process of Eastern enlargement? The year 1989 represented not the end but rather a new beginning for the “black trinity” discourse. In terms of the early commitment to enlarge (H3), the evidence is slightly mixed. As noted earlier, EU members never questioned the right of the CEECs to become members and publicly assured their unwavering commitment. Thus, the “whether” to enlarge question was eliminated from the very start of the process, but the “when” question persisted for quite a long time. Various politicians spoke about the end of the decade as a realistic or desirable

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date of accession, at least for the frontrunners. Still, Community-wide commitment started to take shape only with the beginning of accession negotiations. It first came from the candidate countries that provided target dates for the end of negotiations. By the end of 2000, most EU members were on board with the 2002 negotiation deadline and the accession date two years later. As for Romania and Bulgaria, they received formal promises of 2007 membership at the Copenhagen Council in December 2002. The early reluctance to commit to a particular target date makes perfect sense if one takes into account the complexity of the enlargement process and the implementation of parallel institutional reforms. In fact, one could argue— and some did that—the EU committed to particular deadlines for the conclusion of negotiations far too early in the process.167 But the collective-guilt-based explanation would predict an earlier commitment, which would crystallize before any reasonable forecasting was possible. French, British, and German promises of membership to the Visegrad countries by the turn of the century made in or before 1995 come closest to this expectation. Obviously, British politicians might have had a somewhat different motivation for such a commitment; however, they also understood that widening was not possible without deepening. Thus, the importance of the dilution hypothesis should not be overestimated. Coming back to the issue of the commitment to target dates, the EU always appeared to be on the fence. Remarks made in early 2000 by President of the EP Nicole Fontaine is typical example of this almost self-contradictory rhetoric: “We do not want to determine a date but our goal is to accept some new members by the next election to the European Parliament in 2004.”168 The expectation of the regional approach to enlargement (H4) has largely been met. Early on in the process, the EU members seemed to have a mental map of the Eastern enlargement, which a priori included some and excluded others. The case of the Baltic States is especially interesting in this regard as they are the only ones from the former Soviet republics to have been “pre-approved” for membership. The clearest manifestation of their “special” status came right around the time of the recognition of their independence at the end of August in 1991. British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd made a very telling interpretation of the Soviet history asserting that [e]veryone is operating on the basis that the three Baltic states, by dint of their history, are a case apart. There are no other republics of the Soviet Union which enjoyed independence between the two world wars, were members of the League of Nations and whose absorption into the Soviet Union was not accepted by a majority of other countries.169

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As it does for the rest of the 12 CEECs, this interpretation fits perfectly with the long-nurtured notions of the Yalta division of Europe. This context also helps to explain why relatively secluded and economically backward Romania and Bulgaria received equally firm promises of EU membership as the Visegrad countries received. The merger of the “fast track” and “slow track” groups is yet another allusion to the presence of a regional mindset. Since the Luxembourg compromise, the Commission and the EU member states were quite receptive to the idea of “catch-up” by the Helsinki group, albeit allegedly only on individual merits. Just as with the pre-accession screening, the initial speed of accession negotiations with Lithuania, Latvia, and Slovakia was several times higher than with the Luxembourg group: what the first six candidates achieved in a year, the catch-up countries completed in a semester.170 The final piece of evidence comes from the treatment of other countries that would like to join the EU. Whether it is Turkey, Ukraine, or Georgia, there seems to be little enthusiasm among old member states to make any commitments. As Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili once candidly remarked, “We are not knocking on the EU’s door because we don’t want to make anyone allergic.”171 Cyclicality has been an obvious part of the enlargement process (H5). Because of multiple institutional players with competing roles and interests, a plethora of rules and norms, and other simultaneous institutional reforms, Eastern enlargement followed a winding path. Any prolonged lulls in the process generated increasing criticism and anxiety of CEE politicians, which in turn led to more dynamic responses from EU member states. Whether it was the development of the Copenhagen criteria or the start or conclusion of accession negotiations, the “pushy” hand of the CEECs was always visible. These spurts were often driven by a few politicians (and in some cases bureaucrats) who took it upon themselves to play the role of policy entrepreneurs. Often their initiatives tapped into historical-psychological legacies shared by West Europeans. Reluctant to challenge the challenger, other members often went along. As expected in H6, the initial differentiation among candidate countries based on the compliance with institutional rules was gradually but quite intentionally replaced with a group-style negotiation. Although it was never acknowledged formally as such, both members and candidates recognized the shift. Pressures to deliver the actual enlargement based on historical responsibility had negative impacts on the implementation of and compliance with EU institutional rules. The “tactical tunnel” began to expand significantly, compromising various accession requirements. Enlargement in 2007 is particularly unusual in this regard because rather than putting off the accession of unprepared candidates for another year or two, the Community

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forced their admission. The reasons for this rush seemed to have little to do with economics or geopolitics, but rather with the psychology of the member states. Facing growing pressure from the enlargement-weary electorates, EU politicians were eager to use the window of opportunity and take this final step of the fifth enlargement. More than anything, it was a psychological closure of the process. In fact, one would expect that after the big 2004 enlargement, the pressure to follow through with two geopolitically peripheral, economically poor, and quite populous countries would significantly drop as most old member states had already achieved their goals. Negotiations could have turned into a prolonged process similar to Turkey’s. Instead, there was a considerable rush to absorb Romania and Bulgaria. I would argue that both of them were still considered a part of the same narrative of the reunification of Europe. Within this context, they were equals of 2004 members, that is, they deserved to “come back to Europe” as much as the other ten members. The growing constraint of national interests (H7) is a more difficult hypothesis to establish. Still, in comparison to the association negotiations during the first half of the 1990s, the member states appeared to be more timid in sticking to their last minute demands. For example, in April of 2002, Austria attempted to revisit property restitution issues with Czech Republic, but was dismissed both by the Commission and the Czechs. Feeling isolated, it backed down without much headway.172 Similarly, the Austrian-Czech controversy over the Temelin Nuclear Power Plant did not reach a satisfactory end from Vienna’s point of view. Still, Austrian Foreign Minister Benita Ferrero-Waldner assured Prague that a veto on enlargement is “out of the question.”173 In addition, Netherlands promised a showdown on the issue of farm subsidies for old and new members. They resisted even the initial 25 percent cap in payments for the CEE farmers. Also, some Dutch politicians argued that Poland, Lithuania, and Slovakia might not be able to meet entry requirements on time. The uncertainty was further increased by the collapse of the Dutch government coalition in October 2002. Still Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende was not ready to put Eastern enlargement on the line. He promised early on not to veto expansion despite disagreements.174 His idea of placing voting restrictions on the “unprepared” candidates did not see the light of day either. Thus, it appears that the moment was perceived as too significant to ruin. As noted earlier, observing such behavior, some CEE politicians tried to leverage the situation to their own advantage. And in fact, they managed to gain a few, though relatively minor, concessions. Finally, both hypotheses H6 and H7 imply a certain urgency to enlarge. The overall pace of Eastern enlargement was slower than the candidates

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wished for, but at the same time it was much faster than initially anticipated by many West Europeans. Aside from Mitterrand’s “decades and decades” comment, many European politicians and bureaucrats, in the words of the Principal Administrator of the EP, were “rather slow to realize the speed with which the enlargement process would advance.”175 Daniel Guggenbühl of the Directorate-General for External Economic Relations saw it the same way: “To be honest my colleagues and I didn’t think that the process would be so fast and that the conclusion of the Europe Agreements would be followed in such a short-term by enlargement via membership.”176 The pressure from the CEECs coupled with the sensitivity of some EU politicians (and bureaucrats) became an important engine of enlargement policy. It is quite easy to explain why the candidates sought to speed up enlargement, but the sensitivity of the member states is quite surprising, unless one takes into account historical-psychological legacies. The collapse of the Eastern bloc redefined the geopolitical map of Europe. Both Western and Eastern political elites perceived this turn of events as an opportunity to reunite the old continent and to heal the wounds of the “black trinity.” On the one hand, the sense of historical entitlement due to the 45 years of suffering under various flavors of Communist regimes spurred the CEECs to demand full reintegration into Europe. On the other hand, the EU member states felt that they had a moral obligation to right historical wrongs. This synthesis of entitlement and responsibility brought about the policy of EU Eastern enlargement. Like in the case of NATO, the EU had many potential policy venues short of complete institutional integration to deal with political and socioeconomic challenges (and opportunities) facing the CEECs, but only the full membership represented the reunification of Europe broken up by the “black trinity.”

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CHAPTER 5

Conclusions and Extensions

O

n the day the EU accession date was officially set, former Polish Foreign Minister Bronislaw Geremek declared that his country’s accession to the EU designated the end of World War II.1 While at a first glance such a statement might look like a classical political hyperbole meant to move the audience, its meaning had deep roots on both sides of the former Iron Curtain. At a 1967 Senate Subcommittee on European Affairs hearing, U.S. Ambassador to Poland John Gronouski described the attitudes of the Communist Poland toward Germany in the following way: “They remember the 1939 pact between Hitler and Stalin. […] They have a genuine fear of Germany. It is not all public relations and propaganda. Every family has lost something in World War II-some five or six million killed out of 30 million. So there is a genuine fear.”2 The word “genuine” is rare among political scientists. Behind the thin veil of presupposed genuineness, we usually manage to find a darker, or at least less idealistic, side of politics. In that regard, day-to-day wrangling over Eastern enlargements might not look like an exception, however, this book argued that the process included a crucial historicalpsychological component often neglected or underemphasized in current scholarly literature. During interviews with participants of these events, a number of them spoke of their feelings of historical responsibility, moral obligation, and even guilt vis-à-vis Eastern Europe that endured the yoke of Communism for 45 years. This sense of genuine unease was by no means professed or accepted by all. Usually, Americans and Germans acknowledged what I refer to as collective guilt. An analysis of enlargement discourse also revealed numerous examples of historical-psychological elements primarily linked with three events: the Munich Pact, the RibbentropMolotov Pact, and the Yalta Agreement. Both applicants and member states engaged and leveraged the “black trinity” at various phases of Eastern enlargements.

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As demonstrated in this work, the linkages of these agreements with current events were not unique to NATO and EU expansions. In fact, they surfaced on many occasions during the Cold War. Western politicians eagerly applied them to military conflicts, other international agreements, and even domestic political disputes. Still, it was often an intellectual exercise somewhat detached from the tragic realities on the other side of the Iron Curtain. This accounts for the apparent plasticity of the historical analogies. However, the collapse of the Soviet bloc brought the “black trinity” to its original context, where it represented 45 years of separation and suffering by Central and Eastern Europeans. In a sense, it was their Holocaust. And now, they were free to express their opinions and render historical judgments. As victims of the “black trinity,” they felt morally entitled to evaluate their own history and make demands based on it. In most cases, they chose to restore the pre–World War II statehood in both symbolic and legal terms. In the same way, the return of history was applied to foreign policy. Forced to disappear from the geopolitical map of Europe for decades, Eastern European political elites were now eager to make a full and irreversible comeback. As symbols of post-1945 West European security and success, the EU and NATO quickly became for them the preferred bridges to European reunification. Faced with these demands and a sense of historical responsibility, the members of the Euro-Atlantic community pledged their support. These were not so much acts of arm-twisting, but rather rhetorical prodding based on the “black trinity.” Both enlargement projects entailed benefit-cost ratios that should have favored very cautious and measured approaches. A number of EU and NATO member states exhibited this hesitation throughout the process, which indicated that Eastern enlargement did not take place in isolation from domestic and other international concerns. In turn, these factors led to some tactical adjustments and digressions that often generated frustration and anxiety among the CEECs. Their main weapon was moral pressure based on shared historical-psychological legacies. Western sensitivity to such rhetoric usually translated into public assurances of future membership and further crystallization of enlargement policy. The psychological underpinnings of these promises only heightened with time. Trying to prove to the CEECs that this was not just another set of empty rhetoric, the Euro-Atlantic community sought to actually “deliver the pudding.” As selection and accession deadlines approached, the political imperatives of membership put pressure to relax institutional rules and to constrain member state interests. Despite some unfinished business, the reunification of Europe was on the way. The two most prominent post–World War II institutions in Western

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Europe finally put to rest the so-called division of Yalta. As NATO Secretary General Javier Solana argued: Both organizations have inspired the larger European project of integration, of cooperation and reconciliation which is healing the unnatural divide of the past between East and West. They are thus both leaders of the drawing together of Europe, its rejuvenation and reconstruction. […] Both enlargements, therefore, are two sides of the same coin.3

It is this understanding that warrants the comparative focus of the book. While normative and structural differences between the two organizations should not be neglected, the overarching political objectives of the reunification and reconciliation of Europe provide the common underlying rationale for both Eastern enlargements. This shared sense of collective responsibility also explains why so-called enlargement skeptics never challenged the right of the CEECs to accede into the Euro-Atlantic community. Furthermore, it explains why other Southern and Eastern European countries (for example, Ukraine or Georgia) that were not directly affected by the “black trinity” have grave difficulties convincing the Euro-Atlantic community of their legitimacy and “worthiness” as potential candidates. Thus, the consensus around the ten CEECs was built not by rhetorical entrapment based on compliance with institutional rules or by intergovernmental bargaining based on side payments to the skeptics but by historical-psychological legacies based on the “black trinity.” This book presents a macro-level analysis of Eastern enlargements in contrast to a microanalysis focusing on daily developments of the policies. There are some negative and positive sides to such an approach. First, it risks overlooking smaller procedural details that could provide important additional information about the nature and rationale of key decisions. To address this concern, some critical junctures of Eastern enlargement were process-traced in a more detailed manner. Second, a macro lens tends to oversimplify the underlying narrative(s). While to some extent this is unavoidable, the analysis could be improved through a more nuanced model specification. The choice of the multiple preference approach serves as a remedy for this shortcoming. On the other hand, the potential downside of “political micro-seismography” is not only the loss of a bigger picture but also the exaggeration of daily minutia. Discussions and exploratory ideas can easily become major disagreements and stalemates. Country position swings evaluated on a weekly basis might look more extreme than measurements taken over a period of a year or two. These methodological considerations ensured a more fine-grained evaluation of Eastern enlargement while sustaining the focus on the shared rationale of the dual policy. Without diminishing or trivializing institutional differences

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between the EU and NATO, the book emphasizes the importance of perceptions that actors share prior to the negotiation over and the development of new institutional policies. Emotional States This book demonstrates that EU and NATO enlargement policies were largely based on historical-psychological legacies over the “black trinity.” It presents a significant amount of evidence to support such a proposition; however, it is difficult if not impossible to find a direct and unequivocal proof of particular inner feelings experienced in connection to a policy. The word “guilt” is already an emotionally loaded term, which people may deny just because it sounds threatening, accusatory, or uncomfortable. Public discourse often sends mixed signals because some politicians do not like to present themselves as weak or backward looking. Chapter 3 mentions the story of a grandmother told by U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski during the Senate hearings on NATO enlargement. Her speech is worth a closer look as it reveals many of the mixed signaling that occurs during political discourse. Below there are two passages that seem to contradict each other. The excluded in-between section is the story of her grandmother: If NATO does not enlarge, the Iron Curtain will remain permanent and the unnatural division of Europe will live on longer than the Soviet empire did. As a Polish American, I and members of my family have been waiting years for this debate to occur. I know that the Polish people did not choose to live behind the Iron Curtain. They were forced there by the Yalta agreement, by Potsdam, and because they and the Baltic States and the other captive nations were sold out by the free world. […] But my support for NATO enlargement is not based on nostalgia, nor is it based on the past; it is based on the future, and it is support as an American. I support NATO enlargement because I believe that it will make America and Europe more stable and more secure. NATO enlargement means a future in which the newly free and democratic countries will take their rightful places as members of Europe. NATO played an important role in securing this freedom. It has been the most successful defense alliance in world history. It is an alliance that helped us win the cold war. It deterred war between the superpowers, and it has helped prevent confrontation between member states.4

There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of this passage; however, the logical contradictions of the argument are inescapable as well. The historicalpsychological factor literally leaps out from the first paragraph and then it is denied later. I would argue that this excerpt in part illustrates the

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“irrationality” of NATO and EU enlargements. Framed by the tragedies of World War II, both policies did not follow a rational choice decisionmaking tree or the path specified by compliance with institutional norms. Instead, these factors grounded in distinct domains of application interacted in complex ways that made the process rather messy, and sometimes unpredictable. As the policies evolved and developed, a sense of historical responsibility (higher-tier motivation) increasingly constrained interests of the member states (lower-tier motivation) and at the same time relaxed institutional norms and rules (lower-tier motivation). These “tactical tunnels” allowed for different levels of policy adjustments and compromises over time. Sometimes their apparently callous nature seemed to contradict the underlying motivation for enlargement, therefore, their parallel coexistence is all the more fascinating. Secretary Albright’s comments made in an interview with journalist Charlie Rose perfectly illustrate this strategic-tactical duality: “I call myself a real idealist or ideal realist. You have to be idealist in order to know where you are going. You have to be realist in order to get there.”5 The explanatory model provided in this work has quite clear scope conditions on both demand and supply sides. Due to their specific historical context, Eastern enlargements, conceptualized as the settlement of historical accounts, applied only to countries that were adversely affected by the Munich Agreement, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and the Yalta Agreement. EuroAtlantic political elites felt no historical obligations toward such countries as Ukraine or Georgia because they were not directly affected by any of these agreements and thus had no legal standing in the process of historical restitution. During the interbellum period, these countries had no durable and independent statehood. Since their status was not affected by the war, they fell outside of the “reunification of Europe” framework. They could not return, but only turn to Europe. While they may eventually join the Euro-Atlantic community, the accession criteria will be set much higher than for the ten CEECs, unless there is an external shock to the system that will generate unprecedented momentum for enlargement policies. Moldova is another curious case that in principle is a part of historical-psychological legacies of the “black trinity.” In the aftermath of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Moldova was split from Romania and made into a separate Soviet republic. From a narrow nationalistic perspective, such a development should be interpreted positively because it represented the start of Moldovan nationhood. Thus, the Moldova’s status as a “victim” of the World War II was intrinsically tied to the reunification with Romania. If Moldovan political elites refused to rejoin their nation, they dropped out of the broader historical restitution narrative. They might still join the Euro-Atlantic

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community at some point, but their chance to hop on “the European express” had passed as it had left from the Bucharest station. Finally, the majority of the former Yugoslavian countries and Albania are still waiting for their opportunity to “come back to Europe.” For some of them, the 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest provided the first step toward this dream by extending membership invitations, for others there still awaits a long and winding path. Does the case of the former Yugoslavia and Albania challenge the argument of collective guilt? No, it only demonstrates that the potential for experiencing collective guilt and for acting to remedy the situation may be unused or suppressed by various intervening factors. If the former Yugoslavia had followed the peaceful breakup pattern of Czechoslovakia, all of the countries would probably have been at the forefront of Eastern enlargements. Unlike Slovenia, which managed to escape the Yugoslav federation early on, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Croatia spent the first half of the 1990s—the critical window for Eastern enlargement—fighting the Bosnian War. Fifteen years later the contrasting results between Slovenia and the rest of the group are obvious: Ljubljana has achieved Euro-Atlantic membership, while its Balkan neighbors are still struggling to fulfill this goal. In the same way, Albania’s progress westward was significantly set back by the 1997 civil unrest, which required 6,000 UN troops led by Italy to restore order.6 All of these countries are facing an uphill battle since their candidacies seem disconnected from the events in the late 1980s. They missed the window of opportunity when the historicalpsychological momentum was at its zenith. At this point, Western Europeans feel like they fulfilled their historical obligations and now are less willing to sacrifice their interests. Nevertheless, in contrast to such countries as Ukraine or Georgia, they all got a promise and a realistic prospect of future membership in the Euro-Atlantic community. As initially expected, the supply side of Eastern enlargement was primarily driven by participant states of the “black trinity.” Still, the feeling of collective responsibility varied by country and over time. France and partly the UK exhibited relatively few signs of historical-psychological legacies. At the same time, the United States and Germany repeatedly engaged the collective guilt discourse and acted accordingly. They were the main drivers behind NATO and EU expansion with some smaller countries—in particular Denmark— blazing the way. Has the Euro-Atlantic community differentiated among candidates according to the perceived level of “victimization”? Did the “black trinity” have an additive effect? The evidence does not support this proposition. If there was any differentiation, it was temporary in nature and primarily based on geopolitical or normative concerns. Instead, Western politicians approached the region from a broader historical perspective implicitly

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designating a pool of potential candidates that deserve expedited membership and excluding others a priori. They acted as “cognitive misers” seeking to provide psychological closure to the tragic history of World War II, which reemerged following the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the formation of new democracies in CEE.7 The analysis also demonstrates the importance of some key politicians and bureaucrats as policy entrepreneurs. Having found themselves at the right time and in the right place, they managed to push forward enlargement agenda far beyond the initially expected limits of institutional consensus. Their ascent to and descent from the political scene impacted the pace and nature of policy development and implementation. Without them, NATO and EU enlargement might still have been only a future prospect. Although this work utilized the variable of collective guilt to analyze NATO and EU enlargements, there are other examples where this factor potentially played an important role in international relations—Kosovo war. German-Israeli relations, and post-1994 Western-Rwandan relations, to name just a few. There are also many domestic political issues that touch upon historical-psychological factors. The decision of the Australian government to officially apologize to the Aborigines for cultural genocide is only one recent example of a sense of collective guilt on the part of political elites.8 Thus, this research project is a part of larger political psychology literature that engages many collective emotional states. Whether it is hate, shame, sympathy, or fear, these emotional dispositions play a role in constraining and constructing political behavior. Without understanding them, it is difficult to fully appreciate and explain the dynamics of international relations. Is collective guilt limited to Western liberal democratic societies? Evidence suggests that the emphasis should be put not on “Western” but on “liberal democratic” systems, which provide public spaces to discuss, criticize, and reevaluate state actions. This creates an opening for victims of injustice or for their surrogates to be heard and certain perceptions to be formed. While state-to-state reconciliation and restitution is a less common phenomenon, there are many examples of truth and reconciliation commissions set up to deal with injustices perpetrated during civil conflicts or during the reign of authoritarian, military, and apartheid-like regimes. With different levels of effectiveness, such bodies were established in Argentina, Chile, Fiji, Guatemala, Sierra Leone, South Korea, South Africa, and many other countries.9 Therefore, Western political elites do not hold any special monopoly or extra sensitivity to their past actions. Usually, this heightened historical awareness comes with regime changes. The collapse of the Eastern bloc constituted such an opening. The CEE political leaders came out with vengeance demanding full and speedy “return to Europe.” Their demands

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fell on a political soil that was already nurtured for years. Thus, it is not surprising that the demand and supply curves for the Euro-Atlantic memberships started to approach intersection. Still the question remains why in some instances the potential of political elites to experience collective guilt does not fully develop even in liberal democratic societies. Is it possible that collective guilt represents just a “noble” rationalization of political utility? The evidence provided in this book leads above and beyond the outer limits of member state interests or their utilities vis-à-vis the CEECs. Historical-psychological legacies formed well before EU and NATO memberships became realistic options. The discourse was not just a public posturing or an attempt to score political points, but also came up in private conversations among key politicians. Also, decisions to enlarge were made at the time when the economic and political prospects of the CEECs were still questionable, while the costs of integration seemed substantial. As noted in chapter 1, economic growth estimates for the CEE region predicted painfully slow rates of convergence with the old member states. Furthermore, by the end of the 1990s, the EU enlargement became increasingly unpopular among Western European electorate. With the majority of voters exhibiting deep skepticism, politicians had little to gain from supporting enlargement. Thus, there was not much to rationalize even if the Euro-Atlantic community sought to. The key to understanding the collective-guilt-based action lies with a group of policy entrepreneurs who took advantage of their position in the political bureaucracy and pushed through enlargement agenda. Reconsidering Legacies Traditionally, the legacies approach in European comparative politics has been focused on the former Eastern bloc countries. It examines the role of historical-structural variables—the levels of interbellum economic development or political and religious traditions—on the outcomes of post-Communist transitions.10 However, this work to some extent reversed the tables and explored the legacies of the Euro-Atlantic community. They were not structural but “soft” constructed memories and perceptions vis-à-vis the CEE. As noted in chapter 2, these understandings, shared by Western political elites, were formed throughout the Cold War. The memory of the “black trinity” was not only kept alive in Western political discourse, but its perceived lessons were often applied and misapplied as mental shortcuts to make sense of international events. With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, these legacies acquired new relevance and application. As symbols of Western

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European successes and Eastern European lost opportunities, NATO and the EU organizations came to be perceived as means of the reunification and reconciliation of Europe and the elimination of “black trinity” consequences. In the context of these historical tragedies, the CEECs felt that they had moral right, and the Euro-Atlantic community moral duty, to provide psychological closure to the painful legacies of World War II. Are constructed perceptions as persistent as the structural ones? Viewed from the perspective of NATO and EU enlargements, they appear to be more transient, especially if both sides find an appropriate mechanism of settlement and closure of historical accounts. Once the accounts are settled, collective guilt should lose some of its psychological byte, although scars of the past inevitably remain in bilateral relations. On the other hand, nationalism and ethnic conflict literature serve as a reminder that historicalpsychological legacies can be easily reconstructed, revived, and transformed to fit new circumstances. However, it seems that a more self-reflective sense of collective responsibility has quite different dynamics from politics of collective fear or hate.11 Decision Making Under Uncertainty Throughout the book, the examination of Eastern enlargement engaged traditional theoretical divides in the discipline of international relations. However, the findings of this work can also contribute to the understanding of political decision making as such, especially under the conditions of uncertainty. Since many diverse concepts fall under this area of research, it is worthwhile to connect them with the concepts utilized in the book. This short analysis demonstrates the potential for cross-pollination in the study of political behavior. In a groundbreaking work on prospect theory, Tversky and Kahneman demonstrated that decision makers use “anchoring,” a heuristic technique, when making choices under uncertainty.12 Using starting value or reference point (“anchor”), they tend to adjust or focus their decisions toward it. Like the notion of legacies, this observation also provides an insightful perspective into decision-making processes of NATO and EU enlargements. It appears that the members utilized historical-emotional anchoring when considering potential candidates and members of the Euro-Atlantic community. Facing extreme uncertainty following the collapse of the Eastern bloc, both institutions approached enlargement as a project of reunification and reconciliation of Europe. The collective responsibility over the “black trinity” acted as an anchor that designated a specific group of the CEECs for relatively speedy process of negotiations and accession. While a “true”

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(or “objective”) reunification of Europe would have to involve all former Communist European states seeking EU and NATO membership, the admission of the ten countries that suffered greatly during and after World War II became a mental-psychological shortcut to provide closure to a painful historical chapter for both the members and the candidates. Path dependence literature designates this phase of uncertainty as a critical juncture.13 This book utilizes this term because it quite accurately described the profound moment in history when the 45-year path of dependence was disrupted and a new path selected, which is by now probably locked in for years to come. The process of selection demonstrated that a historical-psychological effect grounded in a previous juncture influenced decision making at a later period of uncertainty. The tragic lessons of the past guided actors to choose new and more hopeful paths for CEE. In a similar way, constructivist propositions about the importance of normative structures in international relations often stumble upon “an embarrassment of norms.”14 Faced with a multitude of social expectations, which creates uncertainty, actors might rely on historical-emotional cues to select particular norms. In the context of NATO and EU enlargements, the norm of restitution becomes a meta-principle guiding the selection of candidates and the construction of appropriate accession frameworks. Whatever is the theoretically expressed mode of uncertainty, historicalpsychological reflectivity provides one way to bridge the gap of the unknown. The collapse of the Soviet bloc and the end of the Cold War represented exactly such a moment when the past was guiding the present. EU and NATO enlargements came to be perceived as the restart button toward a fresh beginning for the CEECs. The struggles of socioeconomic and political transformation are here to stay for a while, but the regional actors anticipate a brighter future as full-fledged members of the Euro-Atlantic community. Beyond History Francis Fukuyama’s prediction of “the end of history” has become a wellknown cliché among political scientists. Writing about years following the end of the Cold War, he envisioned the coming of “boredom with peace and prosperity.”15 His hypothesis turned out to be off the mark, but could it be a problem of scope conditions? Is it possible that, after the accession to the EU and NATO, Central and Eastern European countries face the new dawn of dull economic growth and political cooperation for years to come? While the wounds of the twentieth century may gradually heal and retrieve to the pages of history textbooks, there is no doubt that the

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region will continue to confront old and new challenges and opportunities. They will come not only from within but also from without. If Central and Eastern Europeans manage to temporarily quell the demons of the past, then their eastern neighborhood will ensure that “boredom” will never come to the region. There is more history looming beyond the history of Eastern enlargements.

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Notes

Chapter 1 1. The “black trinity” is a symbol of the recent CEECs history that subsumes such events as the Soviet aggression in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968. I treat these events as a manifestation of earlier historical choices, which left these countries behind the Iron Curtain. Similarly, for the sake of parsimony and elegance, I treat the Potsdam Conference as a postscriptum under the Yalta Agreement. 2. For more on distinction between second-order and first-order preferences and the aggregation of preferences, see Hirschman 1984, 89–96. 3. Jacoby 2004, 119. 4. Moravcsik and Vachudova 2003, 43. 5. Duffield 1995, 766. 6. Wallander and Keohane 1999, 22. 7. Ibid., 33. 8. Thies 2003, 282. 9. Perlmutter 1998, 234–35. 10. Waltz 1993, 75; Mearsheimer 1990, 5–6. 11. Kupchan 2001, 130. 12. Waltz 2001, 34. 13. Moravcsik and Vachudova 2003, 51. 14. Vachudova 2005, 245. 15. Mattli 1999, 97. 16. Vachudova 2005, 113. 17. Skålnes 2005, 223–24. 18. Ingebritsen 2002. 19. Risse-Kappen 1996; Kugler and Kozintseva 1996, 14–15; Michta 2002, 75–76; Ulrich 2003, 26. 20. Gheciu 2005, 1003. 21. Risse-Kappen 1996, 396. 22. Schimmelfennig 2003a, 4. 23. O’Brennan 2006, 170. 24. Fierke and Wiener 1999, 737. 25. Ibid.

154 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

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Ibid., 736. Schimmelfennig 2003b, 159. Schimmelfennig 2003a, 5. Ibid., 203. Sjursen 2002, 508. Ibid. Sedelmeier 2005, 9. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 30. Jupille, Caporaso, and Checkel 2003, 21–22. Branscombe, Slugoski, and Kappen 2004, 31. Tollefsen 2006, 234. Jaspers 2000, 25. Arendt 1987, 45. Hannah Arendt differentiated between collective guilt and collective responsibility, but the majority of current literature use these terms interchangeably (see French and Wettstein 2006.) Following the convention, I use the terms interchangeably. Risse-Kappen 1996, 396. For an example of a classic historical legacies argument, see Jowitt 1992, 284–305. The legacies approach has also been applied in the analysis of the CEE emulation of NATO and EU institutional practices (Jacoby 2004.) Lickel, Schmader, and Braquissau 2004, 47. Morris 1976, 100. Elster 1999, 153. Harder 1995, 387. Lewis 1971, 30. Tangney and Dearing 2002. See, e.g., Eisenbery 1986; Lindsay-Hartz, de Rivera, and Mascolo 1995; and Tangney 1995. Tangney and Dearing 2002, 180. Ibid., 184. Following current literature in social psychology and social philosophy, I do not make a distinction between behavioral responses of collective and individual guilt (see, e.g., Branscombe and Doosje 2004b; French and Wettstein 2006.) Tracey and Robins 2006, 1350; Lewis 1971, 84; Lindsay-Hartz, de Rivera, and Mascolo 1995, 291. Mayhew 1998b, 5. Branscombe, Slugoski, and Kappen 2004, 17. Branscombe and Doosje 2004a, 5. March and Olsen 1998, 951–52. Risse and Sikkink 1999, 7.

Notes 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77.

78.

79. 80. 81.

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Sjursen 2002, 500. March and Olsen 1998, 951. Schimmelfennig 2003a, 235. Blacksell and Born 2002, 188. See, e.g., Baltic Assembly, “Resolution on the Need to Assess the Damage Inflicted on the Baltic States by the Occupation,” December 19, 2004, http:// www.baltasam.org/?DocID⫽256. Jepperson, Wendt, and Katzenstein 1996, 54. Dubin 1959, 149. Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, 904. Putnam 1988, 442. Hicks 1946. Neumann and Morgenstern 2004 [1944]. Goldstein and Keohane 1993, 12–13. Aspinwall and Schneider 2000, 11. Observing the presence of both variables, some EU scholars attempted to develop a mixed institutional theory—deliberate suprationalism. For more, see Eriksen 2003 and Torreblanca 2005. Jupille, Caporaso, and Checkel 2003. Allison and Zelikow 1999, 255. Olson 1993, 572. Based on analyses by Friis and Murphy 1999, 221; Schimmelfennig 2001, 50; Torreblanca 2001, 202–17, member countries are divided as follows: enthusiasts (Germany, Denmark, and the UK), skeptics (France, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Ireland), and uncommitted (Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, and reluctantly Belgium). By mid-1990s, France and Italy became more enthusiastic about Eastern enlargement following changes in governments. “Central and Eastern European Countries and the Newly Independent States of the Former Soviet Union,” OECD Economic Outlook, no. 54, December 1993, 113, http://find.galegroup.com/itx/start.do?prodID⫽EAIM. Vachudova 2005, 245. Sjursen 2002. Neither caveat seems to carry much weight. In the first case, the EU bureaucracy was well-equipped to oversee small Eastern enlargement, given its experience with Iberian and Northern expansions. The determination of the most economically advanced countries is also quite easy with Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovenia leading the way. Baldwin 1994, 168. Weise et al. 2001, 238. There is also a possibility of more nuanced scenarios where small enlargement in the medium run is followed by another small or medium enlargement in the long run. CEPR 1992, 73–74.

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Chapter 2 1. For a classic text on heuristics, see Tversky and Kahneman 1974. 2. May 1973. Anderson 2008. 3. Research Western European: Munich—the French View, National Archives of the UK. 4. Background: Munich Agreement, National Archives of the UK. 5. Hofhansel 2005, 29–33. 6. Wolffsohn 1986, 24. 7. Die Zeit, “Gegen Einseitigen Reue–Akt,” 7 July⬎ 1967, http://www.zeit. de/1967/27/Gegen-einseitigen-Reue-Akt. 8. Der Spiegel, “Welche Grenzen?” 17 April 1957, 11, http://wissen.spiegel.de/wissen/ dokument/dokument.html?titel⫽Welche⫹Grenzen%3F&id⫽41120979. 9. Der Spiegel, “Letzte Ölung,” 9 September 1968, 102, http://wissen. spiegel.de/wissen/dokument/dokument.html?titel⫽Letzte⫹%C3%96lung& id⫽46477758 10. Major 1997, 268. 11. Der Spiegel, “Letzte Ölung,” 9 September 1968, 102, http://wissen.spiegel.de/ wissen/dokument/dokument.html?titel⫽Letzte⫹%C3%96lung&id⫽46477758. 12. Der Spiegel, Hinter drei Türen. 23 September 1964, 34, http://wissen.spiegel.de/ wissen/dokument/dokument.html?titel⫽Hinter⫹drei⫹Türen&id⫽46175455. 13. Der Spiegel, “Spielt England Noch Eine Rolle In Der Welt?” 1 August 1966, 55, http://wissen.spiegel.de/wissen/dokument/dokument.html?titel ⫽SPIELT⫹ENGLAND⫹NOCH⫹EINE⫹ROLLE⫹IN⫹DER⫹WELT% 3F&id⫽46408335. 14. Bettzuege 1995, 289. 15. Ibid., 296. 16. Der Spiegel, “Auf den Hals,” 8 August 1966, 17, http://wissen.spiegel.de/wissen/ dokument/dokument.html?titel⫽Auf⫹den⫹Hals&id⫽46408194. 17. Bettzuege 1995, 299. 18. Brown 4 February 1967, Open Society Archives. 19. Der Spiegel, “Tüchtige Träumer,” 9 September 1968, 29, http://wissen.spiegel. de/wissen/dokument/dokument.html?titel⫽Tüchtige⫹Träumer&id⫽46477735. 20. Der Spiegel, “Go slow,” 12 April 1971, 25, http://wissen.spiegel.de/wissen/ dokument/dokument.html?titel⫽Go⫹slow&id⫽43334740. 21. United Nations Treaty Collection, “Treaty on Mutual Relations between the Federal Republic of Germany and the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic,” 11 December 1973, http://untreaty.un.org/unts/1_60000/26/15/00050707.pdf. 22. Feldman 1999, 348. 23. Alan Riding, “Evolution in Europe; Lithuania Is Asked by Paris and Bonn to Halt Decisions,” New York Times, 27 April 1990, A1, http://www.nytimes. com/1990/04/27/world/evolution-in-europe-lithuania-is-asked-by-paris-andbonn-to-halt-decisions.html.

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24. Associated Press, “President Copes with Sellout Charges on Lithuania,” 27 April 1990, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 25. Wiggin, Letter to Senor Dr. Antonio Parra Velasco, National Archives of the UK. 26. Der Spiegel, “Spielt England Noch Eine Rolle In Der Welt?” 1 August 1966, 55, http://wissen.spiegel.de/wissen/dokument/dokument.html?titel⫽SPIEL T⫹ENGLAND⫹NOCH⫹EINE⫹ROLLE⫹IN⫹DER⫹WELT%3F& id⫽46408335. 27. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 24 April 1967, vol. 745, col., 207, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. 28. Weston, Munich Agreement: Czechoslovakia, National Archives of the UK. 29. Brimelow, Munich Agreement, National Archives of the UK. 30. Der Spiegel, “3:1 gegen Bonn?” 21 April 1965, 104, http://wissen.spiegel.de/wissen/ dokument/dokument.html?titel⫽3%3A1⫹gegen⫹Bonn%3F&id⫽46272332. 31. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 28 January 1942, vol. 377, col. 774, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. 32. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 4 August 1947, vol. 441, col. 1027, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. 33. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 23 February 1944, vol. 397, col. 859, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. 34. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 15 December 1944, vol. 406, col. 1527, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. 35. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 31 May 1968, vol. 765, col. 2345, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. 36. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 31 May 1968, vol. 765, col. 2349, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. 37. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 26 August 1968, vol. 769, col. 1339, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. 38. Parliamentary Debates, HL, 26 August 1968, vol. 296, col. 587, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. 39. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 26 August 1968, vol. 769, col. 1314, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. 40. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 13 July 1972, vol. 840 col. 1903, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. 41. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 8 December 1972, vol. 847 col. 1808, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. 42. Ibid, col. 1830. 43. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 15 July 1975, vol. 895, col. 1309, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. 44. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 1 April 1976, vol. 908, col. 1685, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. 45. Thatcher 1995, 349. 46. Parliamentary Debates, HL, 13 November 1990, vol. 523, col. 280, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/.

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47. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 19 December 1990, vol. 183, col. 407, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. 48. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 31 October 1990, vol. 178, col. 903, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. 49. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 30 October 1990, vol. 178, col. 883, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. 50. Lacouture 1982, 395. 51. Lacouture 1984, 97. 52. De Gaulle 1980, 476–77. 53. Hartleb 2002, 234. 54. Marès 2002, 213–14. 55. Ibid., 214. 56. Ibid., 215. 57. Research Western European: Munich—the French View, National Archives of the UK. 58. Debré 1984, 99. 59. Massip and Descola 1978, 242. 60. Ibid., 263. 61. Ibid., 258. 62. Time magazine, “The Counterpuncher,” 27 August 1956, http://www.time. com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,864098,00.html. 63. Hörber 2006, 71–72, footnote 108. 64. Bariéty 2002, 252. 65. Lacouture 1973, 175. 66. Gilles Martinet, “Munich n’est pas sur le Nil,” France Observateur, 2 August 1956, 4–5. 67. Glennon and Noring 1990, 75. 68. Lacouture 1973, 175. 69. “Address on Hemisphere Defense, Dayton, Ohio,” 12 October 1940, John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [online], Santa Barbara, CA: University of California (hosted), Gerhard Peters (database), http:// www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid⫽15870. 70. “Fireside Chat,” 29 December 1940, John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [online], Santa Barbara, CA: University of California (hosted), Gerhard Peters (database), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/? pid⫽15917. 71. Donaldson 1996, 17; Sandler 1999, 52. 72. “Radio and Television Address to the American People on the Situation in Korea,” 19 July 1950, John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [online], Santa Barbara, CA: University of California (hosted), Gerhard Peters (database), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid⫽13561. 73. Acheson 1969, 376–78. 74. “Message to the Congress Transmitting Second Report on the Mutual Security Program,” 18 November 1952, John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The

Notes

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76.

77.

78.

79. 80.

81.

82.

83.

84. 85.

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American Presidency Project [online], Santa Barbara, CA: University of California (hosted), Gerhard Peters (database), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ ws/?pid⫽14342. “Inaugural Address,” 20 January 1953, John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [online], Santa Barbara, CA: University of California (hosted), Gerhard Peters (database), http://www.presidency.ucsb. edu/ws/?pid⫽9600. “The President’s News Conference,” 19 January 1956, John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [online], Santa Barbara, CA: University of California (hosted), Gerhard Peters (database), http://www. presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid⫽10549. “Address at the Gettysburg College Convocation: The Importance of Understanding,” 4 April1959, John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [online], Santa Barbara, CA: University of California (hosted), Gerhard Peters (database), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/? pid⫽11698. “Radio and Television Report to the American People Regarding the Situation in the Formosa Straits,” 11 September 1958, John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [online], Santa Barbara, CA: University of California (hosted), Gerhard Peters (database), http://www.presidency.ucsb. edu/ws/?pid⫽11231. Hampton 1996, 67–68. “Address in Seattle at the University of Washington’s tooth Anniversary Program,” 16 November 1961, John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [online], Santa Barbara, CA: University of California (hosted), Gerhard Peters (database), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ ws/?pid⫽8448. “Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union,” 14 January 1963, John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [online], Santa Barbara, CA: University of California (hosted), Gerhard Peters (database), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid⫽9138. “Remarks of Vice President Richard M. Nixon on ‘The Open Question,’ WTMJ-TV, Milwaukee, WI,” 8 October 1960, John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [online], Santa Barbara, CA: University of California (hosted), Gerhard Peters (database), http://www.presidency.ucsb. edu/ws/?pid⫽25337. “Remarks at Miami Beach at a Democratic Party Dinner,” 27 February 1964, John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [online], Santa Barbara, CA: University of California (hosted), Gerhard Peters (database), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid⫽26086. Foreign Relations Committee 1967, 86. “Remarks at a Luncheon With Community Leaders in Chicago, Illinois,” 30 September 1988, John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [online], Santa Barbara, CA: University of California (hosted), Gerhard Peters (database), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid⫽34935.

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86. “Remarks at a Republican Campaign Rally in Manchester, New Hampshire,” 23 October 1990, John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [online]. Santa Barbara, CA: University of California (hosted), Gerhard Peters (database), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/? pid⫽18955. 87. Bush and Scowcroft 1998, 326. 88. Interview with Fitzwater, quoted in Yetiv 2004, 62. 89. Sužiede.lis 1989. 90. On nonrecognition and status of the Baltic States, see Talmon 1998, 103. 91. Medijainen 2008, 28–29. 92. Cienciala 2003, 164–65. 93. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 24 August 1945, vol. 413, col. 1121, http:// hansard.millbanksystems.com/. 94. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 28 February 1945, vol. 408, col. 1434, http:// hansard.millbanksystems.com/. Or Parliamentary Debates, HC, 26 March 1979, vol. 965, col. 83, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/. For more on British-Soviet negotiations in 1939 and a similar line of reasoning, see Shaw 2003, 117–48. 95. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 10 February 1947, vol. 433, col. 5, http:// hansard.millbanksystems.com/. 96. Parliamentary Debates, HL, 4 February 1969, vol. 299, col. 51–53, http:// hansard.millbanksystems.com/. 97. Parliamentary Debates, HL, 4 February 1969, vol. 299, col. 47–48, http:// hansard.millbanksystems.com/. 98. Thatcher 1993, 801. 99. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 20 December 1957, vol. 580, col. 742, http:// hansard.millbanksystems.com/. 100. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 14 July 1954, vol. 530, col. 562, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. 101. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 8 June 1978, vol. 951, col. 414, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. 102. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 14 March 1978, col. 317, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. 103. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 26 March 1979, vol. 965, col. 83, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. 104. Der Spiegel, “Meine Mission in Moskau,” 11 September 1967, 69, http:// wissen.spiegel.de/wissen/dokument/dokument.html?titel⫽Meine⫹Mission⫹ in⫹Moskau&id⫽46462451 105. Von Dannenberg 2008, 244–45. 106. Der Spiegel, “Paris: Sorge über Bonns Ostpolitik,” 27 September 1971, 105, http://wissen.spiegel.de/wissen/dokument/dokument.html?titel⫽Paris%3A⫹S orge⫹über⫹Bonns⫹Ostpolitik&id⫽43078785. 107. Rudolf Augstein, “Die Russen Kommen,” Der Spiegel, 25 August 1969, 16, http://wissen.spiegel.de/wissen/dokument/dokument.html?titel⫽DIE⫹RUSS EN⫹KOMMEN&id⫽45547957.

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108. Der Spiegel, “Zitat,” 15 June 1970, 21, http://wissen.spiegel.de/wissen/ dokument/dokument.html?titel⫽ZITAT.&id⫽44931138. 109. Bundestag 1970, 3931. 110. Readman 2008, 127. 111. “Address Made by the Federal Chancellor from Warsaw on Television,” Ena. lu, 7 December 1970, http://www.ena.lu/. 112. Braun 1972, 225. 113. Associated Press, “Brzezinski Says West Germany Appears to be Giving Soviets ‘Tacit Support,’” 16 January 1982, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 114. Dietrich Goldschmidt, “Der Streit um die Denkschrift,” Die Zeit, 19 November 1965, http://www.zeit.de/1965/47/Der-Streit-um-die-Denkschrift. 115. Die Zeit, “September⫺Gedanken,” 7 September 1979, http://www.zeit. de/1979/37/September-Gedanken. 116. Schmidt and Hanrieder 1982, 225. 117. Pike 1993, 467–69. 118. E.g., see, Débats Parlementaires, “1re Séance du 20 Julliet 1961,” Officiel de La République Française, 1878, http://archives.assemblee-nationale.fr/1/ cri/1960-1961-droit/046.pdf. or Débats Parlementaires, “1re Séance du 1 Juin 1958,” Officiel de La République Française, 2589, http://archives.assembleenationale.fr/0/cri/0-cri-1957-1958.pdf. 119. Crozier 1973, 276. 120. Débats Parlementaires, “1re Séance du 5 Juin 1960,” Officiel de La République Française, 1320, http://archives.assemblee-nationale.fr/1/cri/1959-1960ordinaire2/035.pdf. 121. “Moscow Threats Anger De Gaulle,” special to The New York Times, 23 October 1960, 8. 122. Débats Parlementaires, “2e Séance du 13 Juin 1963,” Journal Officiel de La République Française, 3368. http://archives.assemblee-nationale.fr/2/cri/19621963-ordinaire2/023.pdf. 123. Von Dannenberg 2008, 244–45. Or Débats Parlementaires, “1re Seance du 13 Juin 1963,” Journal Officiel de La République Française, 3341, http:// archives.assemblee-nationale.fr/2/cri/1962-1963-ordinaire2/022.pdf. 124. Geopolitics, “Le Journal d’Asie,” 17 November 1973, http://www.geopolitis. net/HISTOIRE/FROMENT%201973-1975.pdf. 125. E.g., Chancellor Helmut Schmidt criticized U.S. foreign policy for lack of rationalism and excessive moralistic tendencies. See Helmut Schmidt, “Mit den Russen Leben,” Die Zeit, 17 June 1983, http://www.zeit.de/1983/25/ Mit-den-Russen-leben. 126. United States. Dept. of et al. 1990, 77. 127. Representative John D. Dingell, Sr., 18 September 1951, 82nd Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record 97, Pt. 9: 11553, http://heinonline.org/. 128. Representative Roman C. Pucinski, 28 January 1969, 91st Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record 115, pt. 2: 2055, http://heinonline.org/. 129. Representative John Phillips, 15 July 1947, 80th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record 93, pt. 7: 8987. http://heinonline.org/.

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130. Representative Hugh Addonizio, 3 May 1955, 84th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record 101, pt.4: 5515, http://heinonline.org/. 131. Representative Frank Horton, 24 February 1982, 97th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record 128, pt. 2: 2220. http://heinonline.org/. 132. Senator Scott W. Lucas, 1 September 1950, 81st Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record 96, pt. 10: 14050, http://heinonline.org/. 133. “Proclamation 5068—Baltic Freedom Day, 1983,” 13 June 1983, John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [online], Santa Barbara, CA: University of California (hosted), Gerhard Peters (database), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid⫽41470. 134. Slany and Baehler 1986b, 1194. 135. Sampson and LaFantasie 1995, 405. 136. See, e.g., Geyer and Keefer 2008, 3. 137. Slany and Baehler 1986a, 1223. 138. Gerakas, Patterson, and Yee 1997, 161. 139. United Press International, “Soviets Bear Blame for Hitler, U.S. Says,” 9 May 1985, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 140. Stettinius Jr. 1949, ix. 141. Ibid., 6. 142. Edmonds 1986, 199. 143. Dept. of State 1955, 210. 144. Bohlen 1972, 135. 145. Dept. of State 1961, 594–95. 146. Churchill 1950, 327. 147. Ibid. 148. Eden 1965, 335. 149. Ross 1984, Doc. 30. 150. Hungary got revised to 80–20 percent ratio in favor of the Soviet Union. See Siracusa 1979. 151. Clemens 1970, 96–97; Stettinius Jr. 1949, 96. 152. Fenno 1955, 76. 153. Kimball 1984, 421. 154. Szkopiak 1986, 126. 155. Chamberlin 1950, 206. 156. Representative Alvin O’Konski, 21 February 1945, 79th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record 91, pt. 1: 1323, http://heinonline.org/. 157. Lawrence H. Smith, 2 March 1945, 79th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record 91, pt. 2: 1701, http://heinonline.org/. 158. Ibid., 1702. 159. Representative Alvin O’Konski, 27 February 1945, 79th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record 91, pt. 2: 1539, http://heinonline.org/. 160. Press Releases 1955, Decimal Files Relating to Poland, the Baltic States, and Czechoslovakia, 1951–1960, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. 161. Ibid.

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162. Senator Burton K. Wheeler, 27 November 1945, 79th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record 91, Pt. 8: 11025, http://heinonline.org/. 163. Representative Thaddeus Wasielewski, 3 May 1946, 79th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record 92, pt. 4: 4443, http://heinonline.org/. 164. Representative Daniel J. Flood, 24 July 1946, 79th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record 92, pt. 8: 9932, http://heinonline.org/. 165. Dept. of State 1974, 748. 166. Analysis of the Situation with Respect to Possible Detachment of a Major European Soviet Satellite, Operations Coordinating Board, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. 167. Foreign Relations Committee 1955, 458. 168. Quoted in Extension of Remarks of Hon. Fred E. Busbey, 3 February 1954, 83rd Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record 100, pt. 1: 1293, http://heinonline.org/. 169. Memorandum for Ee Files: Records Relating to Polish Affairs, 1952–1963, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. 170. Problems Involving the Satellite and Baltic Areas in Negotiations with the Soviet Union, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. 171. Polish-American Criticism of Department’s Reaction to Vice President’s Statement Concerning Oder-Neisse Line, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. 172. Czechoslovak National Council of America, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. 173. Polish American Congress, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. 174. Robert F. Kennedy, “Mein Bruder und ich,” Der Spiegel, 14 February 1962, 46, http://wissen.spiegel.de/wissen/dokument/dokument.html?titel⫽Mein⫹ Bruder⫹und⫹ich⫹-⫹(siehe⫹Titelbild)&id⫽45138998. 175. Leuchtenburg 1983, 173. 176. Ibid., 174. 177. “Presidential Campaign Debate,” 6 October 1976, John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [online], Santa Barbara, CA: University of California (hosted), Gerhard Peters (database), http://www. presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid⫽6414. 178. Leuchtenburg 1983, 196. 179. “Remarks at a White House Luncheon Marking the 40th Anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising,” 17 August 1984, John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [online], Santa Barbara, CA: University of California (hosted), Gerhard Peters (database), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ ws/?pid⫽40265. 180. “Statement on the 40th Anniversary of the Yalta Conference,” 5 February 1985, John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [online], Santa Barbara, CA: University of California (hosted), Gerhard Peters (database), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid⫽37947. 181. UPI, “Bush Promises Aid for East Bloc States with Independence,” New York Times, September 22, 1983, A9.

164 182. 183. 184. 185.

186. 187. 188.

189. 190.

191. 192. 193. 194. 195. 196. 197.

198.

199. 200. 201. 202. 203. 204.

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Schmidt 1989, 121. Adenauer 1966, 398. Weymar 1957, 281–82. Der Spiegel, “Die Erledigung von Jalta,” 23 March 1955, 9, http://wissen. spiegel.de/wissen/dokument/dokument.html?titel⫽Die⫹Erledigung⫹von⫹ Jalta&id⫽31969556. Der Spiegel, “Moskau spielt mit,” 18 May 1955, 26, http://wissen.spiegel.de/ wissen/dokument/dokument.html?titel⫽Moskau⫹spielt⫹mit&id⫽31970332. Bierling 1999, 124–25. Der Spiegel, “In Jalta das Beste gewollt,” 20 September 1971, 25, http://wissen. spiegel.de/wissen/dokument/dokument.html?titel⫽In⫹Jalta⫹das⫹Beste⫹ gewollt&id⫽43078617. Schmidt 1989, 260. Richard von Weizsäcker, “Roundtable ‘Die Deutsche Frage Neu Gestellt,’” Körber-Stiftung, No. 74, 13 November 1983, http://www.koerber-stiftung. de/. TASS, “Mikhail Gorbachyov Meets with Richard Von Weizsaecker,” 7 July 1987, http://lexis-nexis.com/. Parliamentary Debates, HC, February 28, 1945, vol. 408, col. 1450, http:// hansard.millbanksystems.com/. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 28 February 1945, vol. 408 col. 1433, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 13 March 1946, vol. 420 col. 1096, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 29 July 1946 vol. 426, col. 599, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. Parliamentary Debates, HL, 3 March 1948, vol. 154, col. 348, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. Der Spiegel, “Ich Erschiesse Einen Ami,” 13 May 1959, 34, http://wissen. spiegel.de/wissen/dokument/dokument.html?titel⫽ICH⫹ERSCHIESSE⫹ EINEN⫹AMI&id⫽46162562. Der Spiegel, “Deutsche Generale - Nutzloser Haufen,” 24 May 1961, 76, http:// wissen.spiegel.de/wissen/dokument/dokument.html?titel⫽DEUTSCHE⫹ GENERALE⫹-⫹NUTZLOSER⫹HAUFEN&id⫽43364217. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 28 March 1950, vol. 473 col. 219, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 31 July 1952, vol. 504, col. 1791, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. Ibid., 1790. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 21 July 1953, vol. 518, col. 243, and HC, 2 August 1956, vol. 557, col. 1699, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/. Parliamentary Debates, HL, 11 December 1956, vol. 200, col. 958, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. See, e.g., Parliamentary Debates, HC, 23 July 1968 vol. 769, col. 274, http:// hansard.millbanksystems.com/.

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205. Parliamentary Debates, HL, 5 November 1968, vol. 297, col. 163, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. 206. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 8 December 1972, vol. 847, col. 1801, http:// hansard.millbanksystems.com/. 207. Parliamentary Debates, HL, 9 November 1978, vol. 396, col. 575, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. 208. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 6 February 1978, vol. 943, col. 1056, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. 209. Parliamentary Debates, HL, 6 February 1980, vol. 404, col. 1406, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. 210. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 22 December 1981, vol. 15, col. 937, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. 211. Parliamentary Debates, HL, 2 July 1992, vol. 538, col. 901, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. 212. Crozier 1973, 545. 213. De Gaulle 1984, 159. 214. Der Spiegel, “Der Mohr,” 15 December 1954, 27, http://wissen.spiegel.de/ wissen/dokument/dokument.html titel⫽Der⫹Mohr&id⫽28958041. 215. De Gaulle 1971, 199. 216. Trachtenberg 1999, 391. 217. Déclarations Françaises de Politique Étrangère, “Réponse du Général De Gaulle, Bucarest,” 14 May 1968, http://www.doc.diplomatie.fr/BASIS/epic/ www/doc/SF. 218. Fontaine 1966, 72. 219. British Embassy in France reported a conversation with Jacques Andréani, the head of East European Affairs at the Quai D’Orsay, who acknowledged that “the French were wrong about their assessment of Soviet intentions. The Soviet military intervention had come as a great shock to the French experts …” See James, Czechoslovakia: Soviet Bloc, National Archives of the UK. 220. Déclarations Françaises de Politique Étrangère, “Communiqué De La Présidence De La République Sur L’intervention De L’armée Soviétique En Tchécoslovaquie, Paris,” 21 August 1968, http://www.doc.diplomatie.fr/BASIS/epic/www/doc/SF. 221. Déclarations Françaises de Politique Étrangère, “Déclaration De M. Debré Devant L’assemblée Nationale, Paris,” 2 October 1968, http://www.doc. diplomatie.fr/BASIS/epic/www/doc/SF. 222. Débats Parlementaires, “Seance du Mardi 6 Octobre 1970,” Journal Officiel de La République Française, 4119. http://archives.assemblee-nationale.fr/4/ cri/1970-1971-ordinaire1/002.pdf. 223. See, e.g., Débats Parlementaires, “1re Seance Du Mardi 19 Juin 1973,” Journal Officiel de La République Française, 2264–66, http://archives.assemblee-nationale. fr/5/cri/1972-1973-ordinaire2/046.pdf. or Débats Parlementaires, “Seance Du Vendredi 9 Juin 1972,” Journal Officiel de La République Française, 2393, http:// archives.assemblee-nationale.fr/4/cri/1971-1972-ordinaire2/041.pdf. 224. Déclarations Françaises de Politique Étrangère, “Déclaration de M. Schumann, ministre des Affaires étrangères, à la Commission des Affaires étrangères

166

225. 226.

227. 228. 229. 230. 231. 232.

233. 234.

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de l’Assemblée nationale sur l’évolution des relations américano-soviétiques, Paris” 9 June 1972, http://www.doc.diplomatie.fr/BASIS/epic/www/doc/SF. Quoted in Brzezinski 1984–1985, 294. Bernard Lecomte, “Europe: les cicatrices de Yalta,” L’Express, 2 February 1995, http://www.lexpress.fr/informations/europe-les-cicatrices-de-yalta_602658. html. Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” New York Review of Books, 26 April 1984, 33. Michnik 1985, 166. Ibid., 181. Wałe˛sa 1987, 2. Roussopoulos 1986, 257–59. Remeikis 1980. Interestingly, even the leader of Communist Romania Nicolae Ceaucescu criticized the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact declaring “that it actually played a negative part and facilitated the implementation of Hitlerite Germany’s aggressive plans.” See BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, “National Day Speech by Nicolae Ceausescu,” 24 August 1989, http://lexis-nexis.com/. Wałe˛sa and Rybicki 1992, 234. “The Declaration of Civic Forum Representative Václav Havel on Wenceslas Square,” 23 November 1989, CWIHP Virtual Archive, http://www.wilsoncenter. org/cwihp/documentreaders/eotcw/891123a.pdf.

Chapter 3 1. Senate Armed Services Committee, Administration’s Proposal on NATO Enlargement, 105th Cong., 1 sess., 97-S201-17, 23 April 1997, http://lexisnexis.com/. 2. Rynning 2005, 21–67. Grayson 1999, 33–55. Goldgeier 1999, 17–26. Rubinstein, Shayevich, and Zlotnikov 2000, 77. Notable exception—Asmus 2002, 1–17. 3. Goldgeier 1999, 3–4. 4. FDCH Political Transcripts, “British Defense Minister Discusses Britain’s Role and Overall Perspective in Bosnia,” 23 January 1996, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 5. Polish Press Agency, “Minister Skubiszewski Addresses Symposium in Berlin,” 5 October 1990, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 6. BBC, “Vaclav Havel’s Press Conference On Return From Paris Summit,” 23 November 1990, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 7. BBC, “NATO Secretary-General in Hungary,” November 28, 1990, http:// lexis-nexis.com/. 8. Steve Crawshaw, “The CSCE Summit: Warning of ‘dark clouds’ within the silver lining,” Independent, 21 November 1990, 10, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 9. Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” New York Review of Books, 26 April 1984, 33. 10. PAP News Service, “Bielecki Wants NATO Umbrella to Cover Central and Eastern Europe,” 11 September 1991, http://lexis-nexis.com/.

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11. United Press International, “Hungarian Leader Looking for NATO Shield,” 3 October 1991, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 12. Polish Press Agency, “Wałe˛sa Criticises West for Insufficient Aid,” 6 October 1991, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 13. United Press International, “Bush Makes Historic Visit to Prague,” 17 November 1990, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 14. Financial Times, “The Coup Collapses; NATO Tries to Match Pace of History,” 22 August 1991, 4, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 15. United Press International, “NATO Chief Says Pact Looks to Open Door to East Europe,” 12 March 1992, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 16. Hunter 2001, 174. 17. Senator William Roth, 18 September 1992, 102nd Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record 138, Pt. 18: 25892, http://heinonline.org/. 18. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, “Ruehes bescheidenes Programm,” 18 February 1993, 6. 19. “Shaping Euro-Atlantic Policies—a Grand Strategy for a New Era,” International Institute for Strategic Studies, 23 March 1993, http://www.iiss.org/conferences/ alastair-buchan/alastair-buchan-lecture-transcripts/. 20. MTI Econews, “German Defence Minister on NATO Membership of Visegrad Countries,” 1 April, 1993, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 21. Kempe 1999, 114. 22. “Shaping Euro-Atlantic Policies—a Grand Strategy for a New Era,” International Institute for Strategic Studies, 23 March 1993, http://www.iiss.org/conferences/ alastair-buchan/alastair-buchan-lecture-transcripts/. 23. Kempe 1999, 111–12. 24. Ibid., 113. 25. Associated Press, “Clinton’s Foreign Policy Challenges Start Where Cold War Ended,” 5 November 1992, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 26. PAP News Wire, “Onyszkiewicz: U.S. Accepts Prospect of Poland’s Joining NATO,” 16 January 1993, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 27. U.S. Department of State Dispatch, “Statement at Senate confirmation hearing—Secretary-Designate Christopher,” Vol. 4, No. 4, 25 January 1993, http://dosfan.lib.uic.edu/ERC/briefing/dispatch/1993/html/Dispatchv4no04. html. 28. During his February 1993 visit to Washington, he met with a number of Clinton officials including National Security Adviser Anthony Lake. See Von Karl Feldmeyer, “Ruehes bescheidenes Programm,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 18 February 1993, 6. 29. From more than 20 foreign leaders, only Israeli President Chaim Herzog was also given such a generous time slot. 30. According to Charles Gati, a Senior Adviser on the Department of State’s Policy Planning Staff, Bill Clinton highly admired Václav Havel, while Lech Wałe˛sa, with all due respect, was not exactly his type. Interview by author, tape recording, Washington, D.C., 26 March 2008. 31. Goldgeier 1999, 20.

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32. Havel 1997, 123. This speech was made on the day of the opening of the museum. 33. Jane Perlez, “Expanding Alliance: The Overview; Poland, Hungary and the Czechs Join NATO,” New York Times, 13 March 1999, A1, http://www. nytimes.com/1999/03/13/world/expanding-alliance-the-overview-polandhungary-and-the-czechs-join-nato.html. 34. Anthony Lake, phone message to author, 14 April 2008. 35. Ron Asmus, e-mail message to author, 30 September 2007. 36. Charles Gati, interview by author, tape recording, Washington, D.C., 26 March 2008. 37. Jeszenszky 1994, 8. 38. United Press International, “Warsaw,” 23 December 1993, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 39. Polish News Bulletin, “Olechowski in the US,” 16 December 1993, http:// lexis-nexis.com/. 40. Independent, “A Betrayal that Will Return to Haunt the West,” 26 November 1993, 19, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 41. Federal News Service, “Remarks by Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) to the Atlantic Council’s Board of Directors,” 9 December 1993, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 42. Albright and Woodward 2003, 213. 43. Elaine Sciolino, “Madeleine Albright’s Audition,” New York Times, 22 September 1996, 63, http://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/22/magazine/madeleine-albrightsaudition.html?pagewanted⫽1. 44. Albright and Woodward 2003, 33. 45. Ibid., 15. 46. Asmus 2002, 177. 47. Vera Tolz, “Final Results of Parliamentary Elections,” RFE/RL Daily Report, No. 246, 27 December 1993, http://www.friends-partners.org. 48. Department of State Dispatch Supplement, “The Visegrad States: Crossroads to Change in the Heart of Europe,” Vol. 5, No. 1, 3 January 1994, http://dosfan. lib.uic.edu/ERC/briefing/dispatch/1994/html/Dispatchv5Sup01.html. 49. Federal News Service, “President Clinton Delivers Speech on U.S.-European Policy,” 9 January 1994, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 50. Presiding Officer, 27 January 1994, 103rd Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record 140, pt.1: 401, http://heinonline.org/. 51. Asmus 2002, 82. 52. Senator Hank Brown, 27 January 1994, 103rd Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record 140, pt.1: 403, http://heinonline.org/. 53. Polish News Bulletin, “Remarks by President Clinton to the Sejm,” 8 July 1994, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 54. U.S. Department of State Dispatch, “U.S.-German Relations and the Challenge of a New Europe,” Vol. 5, No. 37, 12 September 1994, http://dosfan.lib.uic. edu/ERC/briefing/dispatch/1994/html/Dispatchv5no37.html. 55. Rick Atkinson, “Allies Seek New Ties to Bind NATO; German and U.S. Defense Ministers Differ on Russian Membership,” Washington Post, 10 September 1994, A16, http://lexis-nexis.com/.

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56. Martin Sieff, “Yeltsin Fears ‘Cold Peace’ in Europe; At Odds with U.S. on NATO, Bosnia,” Washington Times, 6 December 1994, A1, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 57. “It’s a Long Way to Bratislava; The Dangerous Fantasy of NATO Expansion,” Washington Post, 14 May 1995, C01, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 58. Asmus, Kugler, and Larrabee 1993. 59. “NATO’s Moral Burden,” Moscow Times, 17 March 1995, http://lexisnexis.com/. 60. Ron Asmus, e-mail message to author, 1 October 2007 and 3 October 2007. 61. Rick Atkinson and John Pomfret, “East Looks to NATO to Forge Links to West,” Washington Post, 6 July 1995, A01, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 62. Agence France Presse, “East Europe States Must be NATO Members by 2000: German Defense Chief,” 9 January 1994, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 63. PAP News Wire, “Visegrad States to Join Nato by 2000, Says Minister Ruehe,” 13 September 1994, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 64. According to Charles Gati, Chancellor Kohl could not make up his mind early in the process. One day he was for the enlargement, another—against it. Charles Gati, interview by author, tape recording, Washington, D.C., 28 March 2008. 65. “Rede von Bundeskanzler Helmut Kohl im Polnischen Parlament vor Mitgliedern von Sejm und Senat vom 6. Juli 1995,” Polish Embassy in Berlin, http://www. berlin.polemb.net/index.php?document⫽332. 66. Rick Atkinson and John Pomfret, “East Looks to NATO to Forge Links to West,” Washington Post, 6 July 1995, A01, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 67. Christopher Donnelly, interview by author, tape recording, London, 10 June 2008. 68. Jamie Shea, interview by author, tape recording, Brussels, 19 June 2008. 69. Due to the opt-out from the NATO military structures, France played a limited role in enlargement debates. 70. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, “German and French Defence Ministers Optimistic about Polish NATO Membership,” 20 July 1994, http:// lexis-nexis.com/. 71. Jamie Shea, interview by author, tape recording, Brussels, 19 June 2008. 72. See, e.g., Parliamentary Debates, HL, July 12, 1996, vol. 574, col. 590, http:// hansard.millbanksystems.com/. 73. Polish Press Agency, “Senator Brown Claims Poland is of Essential Importance for NATO,” 29 May 1995, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 74. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, “President Says Elections Will be a Test of Democracy,” 13 March 1996, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 75. Deutsche Presse-Agentur, “Estonia Expects Clarification from Germany on EU Enlargement,” 16 February 1997, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 76. Polish News Bulletin, “Rosati on Russian Fears,” 9 January 1997, http://lexisnexis.com/. 77. Conference on NATO Enlargement in the Baltic States. Seattle, 29 November 2001. 78. Baltic News Service, “United States Inclined to Pay More Attention to Russian Views on NATO Expansion,” 25 September 1996, http://lexis-nexis.com/.

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79. Department of State Dispatch, “Europe Must Avoid Being Held Prisoner by Its History,” Vol. 6, No. 26, 26 June 1995, http://dosfan.lib.uic.edu/ERC/ briefing/dispatch/1995/html/Dispatchv6no26.html. 80. Bryan Cartledge, “NATO Enlargement,” Times, 26 February 1997, http://lexisnexis.com/. 81. European, “Larger NATO Will Bring Stability,” 10 April 1997, http://lexisnexis.com/. 82. Mikulski told this story during Senate debates on NATO enlargement. See Senator Barbara Mikulski, 18 March 1998, 105th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record 144, Pt. 3: 4003, http://heinonline.org/. 83. Balt-L Listserv, “Action Alert—‘New Yalta’ Opposition,” 22 December 1993. 84. Ukrainian Weekly, “For the Record: Central and East European Coalition Position on NATO Expansion,” 11 February 1996, 9, http://ukrweekly.com/ archive/pdf3/1996/The_Ukrainian_Weekly_1996-06.pdf. 85. One of the examples of the CEECO unsuccessful lobbying was regarding Bill Clinton’s nomination of Stephen Sestanovich for ambassador-at-large to the Newly Independent States in 1997. The CEECO wrote a letter of protest to Secretary Madeleine Albright and asked to replace the nominee because of his views on NATO enlargement. Secretary Albright replied to the letter maintaining her ground. The Senate also approved his nomination. 86. Asmus 2002, 243. 87. Albright and Woodward 2003, 329. 88. Baltic News Service, “Sweden and Denmark Support Simultaneous Start of EU Entrance Negotiations with All Candidates: Petersen,” 15 July 1997, http:// lexis-nexis.com/. 89. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, “Estland besteht auf NATO-Mitgliedschaft Sorge über Haltung des Westens,” 24 August 1995, 2. 90. Deutsche Presse-Agentur, “German Defense Ministry Denies Row over Baltic NATO Membership,” 24 August 1995, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 91. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, “Das darf Herr Rühe nicht tun,” 24 August 1995, 2, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 92. Federal News Service, “Special White House Briefing from Madrid,” 8 July 1997, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 93. Ibid. 94. Agence France Presse, “NATO Winners Cheer Inclusion, Losers Still Hopeful,” 8 July 1997, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 95. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, “Politicians Disappointed at NATO Summit Outcome,” 11 June 1997, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 96. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, “Government Welcomes Results of NATO Summit,” 12 July 1997, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 97. Polish News Bulletin, “Kwasniewski’s Madrid Meetings,” 10 July 1997, http:// lexis-nexis.com/. 98. Albright and Woodward 2003, 329. 99. Marc Grossman, interview by author, tape recording, Washington, D.C., 27 March 2008.

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100. House of Representatives—353 to 65 votes. Senate—81 to 16 votes. 101. For more details on NERO activities, see Grayson 1999, 109–53; Asmus 2002, 251–88. 102. Senate Armed Services Committee, Administration’s Proposal on NATO Enlargement, 105th Cong., 1 sess., 97-S201-17, 23 April 1997, http://lexisnexis.com/. 103. Ibid. 104. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Debate NATO Enlargement, 105th Cong., 1 sess., 98-S381-6, 9 October 1997, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 105. Ibid. 106. House Committee on National Security, U.S. Policy Regarding NATO Expansion, 105th Cong., 1 sess., 97-H571-39, 17 July 1997, http://lexis-nexis. com/. 107. Senate Committee on the Budget, Public Pension Programs in Europe; NATO Enlargement, European Union Expansion and EMU: Policy Implications and Debate, 105th Cong., 1 sess., 98-S251-1, 28 October 1997, http://lexis-nexis. com/. 108. Helms 2005, 226. 109. Senator Joe Biden, 11 February 1998, 105th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record 144, Pt. 1: 1218, http://heinonline.org/. 110. Federal News Service, “Speeches by President Clinton, NATO Secretary Javier Solana, and Others, at NATO 50th Anniversary Summit Opening and Commemorative Event,” 23 April 1999, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 111. Helle Bering, “Scaling NATO’s Ramparts; Nine Countries Boldly Hope to Join,” Washington Times, 24 May 2000, A21, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 112. Bill Gertz, “Russia Transfers Nuclear Arms to Baltics; Movement of Tactical Weapons Designed to Counter NATO Expansion East,” Washington Times, 3 January 2001, A1, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 113. Steven Mufson, “Powell Vows Activism in Foreign Relations; Nominee Backs Missile Defense Research,” Washington Post, 18 January 2001, A1, http://lexisnexis.com/. 114. Steven Mufson, “Helms Calls for Abolishing AID, Increasing Support for Taiwan,” Washington Post, 12 January 2001, A6, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 115. Baltic News Service, “Putin: NATO’s Eastward Expansion Unacceptable to Russia,” 26 January 2001, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 116. Agence France Presse, “NATO Enlargement in Eastern Europe Would Spark ‘crisis’: Russia,” 30 January 2001, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 117. U.S. Newswire, “Remarks by President Bush to Faculty, Students of Warsaw University,” 15 June 2001, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 118. Agence France Presse, “France Supports Baltic NATO Invitation in 2002: Chirac,” 27 July 2001, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 119. Interfax Russian News, “German Chancellor Supports Admission of Baltic States to NATO,” 6 June 2000, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 120. Baltic News Service, “Estonian PM Gets Confirmation in Rome of EU, NATO Enlargement,” 3 April 2001, http://lexis-nexis.com/.

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121. Parliamentary Debates, HC, 22 June 2001, vol. 370, col. 281–356, http://hansard. millbanksystems.com/. 122. Barany 2004, 70. 123. NATO Prague Summit, “Address by Václav Havel,” 21 November 2002, http:// www.nato.int/docu/speech/2002/s021121w.htm. 124. NATO Prague Summit, “Allocution de Monsieur Jacques Chirac,” 21 November 2002, http://www.nato.int/docu/speech/2002/s021120h.htm. 125. NATO Prague Summit, “Speech by Anders Fogh Rasmussen,” 21 November 2002. http://www.nato.int/docu/speech/2002/s021121l.htm. 126. NATO Prague Summit, “Statement on NATO Enlargement by H. E. Aleksander Kwasniewski,” 21 November 2002, http://www.nato.int/docu/speech/2002/ s021121ai.htm. 127. NATO Prague Summit, “Speech of the President of Latvia Vaira VikeFreiberga,” 21 November 2002, http://www.nato.int/docu/speech/2002/ s021122y.htm. 128. Hampton 1998, 235. 129. Schimmelfennig 2003a, 96, footnote 22. 130. Reiter 2001. 131. Clogg 1986, 185–89. 132. Spain became a member of the EEC and NATO only in 1980s. 133. Karatnycky et al. 2003. 134. Handelsblatt, 4 February 1997, 10, quoted in Van Ham 1999, 229. 135. USIS WF, 6 December 1993, quoted in Solomon 1998, 34. 136. NATO Basic Texts, “Study on Enlargement,” September 1995, http://www. nato.int/docu/basictxt/enl-9502.htm. 137. NATO Press Release, “Membership Action Plan (MAP),” NAC-S(99)66, 24 April 1999, http://www.nato.int/docu/pr/1999/p99-066e.htm. 138. Interview with Jamie Shea, tape recording, Brussels, 19 June 2008. 139. Schimmelfennig admits that the argument based on compliance with liberal norms has difficulties explaining “the differentiation among the CEECs.” See Schimmelfennig 2003a, 97. 140. Plantin 1999, 102. 141. Šabicˇ and Julešicˇ 2003, 96. 142. Tashev 2005, 132. 143. Asmus 2002, 154. 144. CTK National News Wire, “Meciar Quotes Albright as Saying Slovakia Will Not Be in NATO,” 28 March 1997. 145. CTK National News Wire, “Kovac Distances Himself from Meciar’s NATO Statements,” 1 April 1997, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 146. Kukan 1999, 164–65. 147. See, e.g., Barany 2002. 148. Jacoby 2004, 151. 149. Ulrich 2003, 21–22; Rynning 2005, 65.

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150. Goldgeier 1999, 23–24. 151. Agence France Presse, “Europeans Apply Brakes to NATO Expansion Plans,” 10 November 1994, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 152. Charles Gati listed eight individuals who, in his opinion, were the most important in shaping NATO enlargement policy: Bill Clinton, Tony Lake, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, Steve Flanagan, Richard Lugar, Václav Havel, and Volker Rühe. 153. See, e.g., Donald Lambro, “Clinton’s Appeal Invades GOP Turf in Electoral Poll; Dole Struggling to Hold South,” Washington Times, 15 September 1996, A4, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 154. U.S. Department of State, “Text: Dole Address to Philadelphia World Affairs Council,” 25 June 1996, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 155. Anthony Lake, phone message to author, 14 April 2008. 156. “Rede von Helmut Kohl zum Europakongress,” Außenministerium Österreich [Austrian Foreign Ministry], 25 February 2005, http://www.bmeia.gv.at/ aussenministerium/aktuelles/reden-und-interviews/2005/rede-von-helmutkohl-zum-europakongress.html. 157. Olaf Ihlau, “Deutschland als Bremser auf dem Weg nach Europa,” Der Spiegel, 5 May 1997, 143, http://wissen.spiegel.de/wissen/dokument/dokument. html?titel⫽Deutschland⫹als⫹Bremser⫹auf⫹dem⫹Weg⫹nach⫹Europa& id⫽8706957. 158. U.S. Newswire, “Press Briefing by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Shalikashvili,” 5 January 1994, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 159. Christopher 1998, 93. 160. Martin Sieff, “‘Misery Factor’ of Russians Gets Role in U.S. Policy; Talbott Admits Vote Sent Message,” Washington Times, 21 December 1993, A1, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 161. Polish News Bulletin, “Remarks by President Clinton to the Sejm,” 8 July 1994, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 162. Asmus 2002, 116. 163. Agence France Presse, “Bush Says US Ready to Support NATO Enlargement in 2002,” 15 June 2001, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 164. Agence France Presse, “France Supports Baltic NATO Invitation in 2002: Chirac,” 27 July 2001, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 165. For more on NATO Bucharest Summit, see page 165–66. 166. Thomas L. Friedman, “Madeleine’s Folly,” New York Times, 17 February 1998, A19, http://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/17/opinion/foreign-affairs-madeleines-folly.html. 167. George Kennan, “A Fateful Error,” New York Times, 5 February 1997, A23. 168. Gaddis 1998, 145. 169. “At Sea in a New World,” Newsweek, 6 June 1994, 6–8. 170. “What to Do with the New Russia,” Washington Post, 14 August 2001, A15, http://lexis-nexis.com/.

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171. “Unconventional Wisdom about Russia,” New York Times, 1 July 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/opinion/01iht-edkissinger.4.14135943. html. 172. E-mail message to author, 4 December 2008. 173. On occasion, some CEE politicians were quite brash in their comments. During his April 1997 visit to the United States, Head of the Lithuanian Parliament Vytautas Landsbergis, frustrated over NATO membership delays, compared Washington’s open door policy with the Soviet promises of bright communist future. He declared to Albright that Lithuania is a “double victim” of the U.S.-Russian geopolitical games. Following these exchanges, the Department of State decided to cancel a joint Landsbergis-Albright press conference. See Sakalauskaite. 2009, 230. 174. Agence France Presse, “Europeans Apply Brakes to NATO Expansion Plans,” 10 November 1994, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 175. Congressional Press Releases, “Speech in Germany Regarding Future of NATO, U.S. World Leadership,” 3 June 1996, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 176. Their hesitation toward the Baltic States presents a challenge that can only be resolved by taking into account regional security dilemmas. 177. David Fairhall, “Nato’s Chosen Recruits Prove Unfit for Service,” Guardian, July 7, 1997, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 178. Press Association, “Blair to Take Tough Line on Bigger Nato,” July 7, 1997, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 179. Department of State Electronic Archive, “A Charter of Partnership among the United States of America and the Republic of Estonia, Republic of Latvia, and Republic of Lithuania,” 16 January 1998, http://www.state.gov/www/regions/ eur/ch_9801_baltic_charter.html. 180. Jamie Shea, e-mail message to author, 15 January 2009. 181. Agence France Presse, “Ukraine Keen to Join NATO,” 20 March 1997, http:// lexis-nexis.com/. 182. NATO Madrid Summit, “Opening Statement by the President of Ukraine, H.E. Kuchma,” 9 July 1997, http://www.nato.int/docu/speech/1997/s970709i.html. 183. Lasas 2008, 112. 184. This rebuttal of the United States also challenges the temptation of many realist-minded analysts to write off 1999 and 2004 enlargements as whims of the United States that was able to push them through because of its dominant position in the Alliance. Such instances demonstrate that the “might makes it right” narrative should be viewed with caution in this context. 185. Nicholas Kralev, “Tiny Baltic States Have Big Hopes for NATO Membership,” Washington Times, 16 November 2002, A1, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 186. House Committee on International Relations, “U.S. Relations with Russia and the Newly Independent States,” 105th Cong., 1 sess., 97-H461-56, 12 March 1997, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 187. Marc Grossman, interview by author, tape recording, Washington, D.C., 27 March 2008.

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Chapter 4 1. Ecker-Ehrhardt 2002, 228. 2. The two statements in the questionnaire read as follows (see ibid., 239.): Germany should be politically engaged in the world through international cooperation and organizations. The Germans have done a lot of injustice to the Poles in the past; therefore, they should help Poland to join the EU and NATO as a sign of reconciliation. 3. Ibid., 234. 4. Jean Trestour, interview by author, tape recording. Brussels, 18 June 2008. 5. Although Turkey has candidacy status, its membership perspectives are currently of a theoretical nature. Even if it manages to address the issue of Cyprus and to meet other requirements related to the accession negotiations, open opposition to Turkey’s membership from France and Austria leaves little ground for optimism. 6. “Address Given by Václav Havel to the Polish Sejm and Senate,” Ena.lu, 25 January 1990, http://www.ena.lu. 7. Christian Science Monitor, “Push Is on for Wider European Community,” 2 August 1990, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 8. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, “Jacques Delors in Czechoslovakia,” 25 September 1990, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 9. Julie Wolf, “Wałe˛sa Warned Off Rush to EC,” Guardian, 4 April 1991, http:// lexis-nexis.com/. 10. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, “Senate Vice President Mois Reviews Session,” 3 August 1990, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 11. Le Monde, “Dans un entretien à Radio-France internationale Les pays d’Europe centrale n’adhéreront pas à la CEE avant ‘des dizaines d’années’ declare M. Mitterrand,” 14 June 1991, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 12. Qtd. in Favier and Martin-Roland 1999, 176. 13. Polish News Bulletin, “I Am Looking for a Place for Myself: Interview with President Lech Wałe˛sa,” 8 April 1991, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 14. Bozo 2008, 399. 15. Times, “Emperor of All He Surveys,” 1 December 1990, http://lexis-nexis. com/. 16. Bettzuege 1995, 744. 17. Ibid., 746. 18. CTK National News Wire, “German Chancellor Stresses Historical Significance of New Treaty,” 26 February 1992, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 19. Klaus-Peter Schmid, “Frage der Zeit,” Die Zeit, 26 September 1991, http:// www.zeit.de/1991/40/Frage-der-Zeit. 20. Annika Savill, “Few Takers for President Mitterrand’s Party Tricks; Inside File,” Independent, 18 June 1991, 8, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 21. Paul Fabra, “Mitterrand—Metternich Le chef de l’Etat aime-t-il autant l’Europe qu’on pourrait l’espérer?” Le Monde, 3 July 1991, http://lexis-nexis.com/.

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22. Peter Millar, “Europe? We Love It, Just as Long as It’s French,” Sunday Times, 23 June 1991, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 23. “Interview De Mme Elisabeth Guigou Ministre Delegue Aux Affaires Europeennes Au Forum Rmc,” L’Express, 25 August 1991, http://www.doc. diplomatie.fr/BASIS/epic/www/doc/DDD/1000652802.doc. 24. R. Leick and M. Schreiber, “Wir müssen Großmacht werden,” Der Spiegel, 14 October 1991, 20b–24, http://wissen.spiegel.de/wissen/dokument/dokument. html?titel⫽”Wir⫹müssen⫹Großmacht⫹werden”&id⫽13491411. 25. Economist, “European Community; Delors, the History Man,” 21 October 1989, 50, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 26. Stephen Castle, “Thatcher Defies EC over East Bloc Members,” Independent, 12 August 1990, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 27. RAPID, “European Community: Deeper and Wider,” 28 September 1990, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 28. Dennis MacShane, interview by author, tape recording, London, 14 July 2008. 29. “Speech at Dinner for Czech President,” Margaret Thatcher Foundation, 21 March 1990, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument. asp?docid⫽108044. 30. “Speech to Czechoslovak Federal Assembly,” Margaret Thatcher Foundation, 18 September 1990, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument. asp?docid⫽108194. 31. “Joint Declaration of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Island. Prague,” 27 May 1992, electronic copy received from the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 32. Paul L. Montgomery, “French Sink East Europe Trade Deal,” New York Times, 7 September1991, http://www.nytimes.com/1991/09/07/business/french-sinkeast-europe-trade-deal.html. 33. Agence France Presse, “Mitterand Welcomes E. European Membership to EC,” 19 September 1991, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 34. Torreblanca 2001, 226–27. 35. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, “President Wałe˛sa Questioned about His Election Promises; Economic Problems,” 22 October 1991, http://lexis-nexis. com/. 36. Polish News Bulletin, “Agreement with EEC Signed,” 17 December 1991, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 37. CEECs sought to include a bit stronger language stating that the “joint objective of both parties to work toward accession.” Mayhew 1998a, 113. 38. Horst Krenzler, phone interview by author, tape recording, 26 June 2008. 39. Torreblanca 2001, 227. 40. Ibid., 267–68. 41. IPS-Inter Press Service, “France: Pessimism and Criticism Mark Wałe˛sa Visit,” 11 April 1991, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 42. Associated Press, “Germany Forgives Half of Polish Debt,” 19 February 1992, http://lexis-nexis.com/.

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43. Associated Press, “EC Condemns U.S., Japan of Shirking Eastern Europe Responsibility,” 11 November 1991, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 44. Mayhew 1998b, 24. 45. Qtd. in Broadcast Information Service Daily Report, “East Europe,” 18 June 1990, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 46. United Press International, “EC May Cut Aid to Romania Due to Crackdown,” 15 June 1990, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 47. Marc Champion and Steve Crawshaw, “EC Trade Deal with Romania Under Threat; ‘Shocked’ Brussels Puts Pressure on Bucharest as Ministers Try to Explain Away the Miners’ Violence,” Independent, 16 June 1990, 1, http://lexisnexis.com/. 48. United Press International, “Iliescu Sworn in as Romanian President,” 20 June 1990, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 49. EurLex, “Europe Agreement Establishing an Association between the European Economic Communities and Their Member States,” OJ L 357, 31 December 1994. 50. Bulletin of the European Union, “Agenda 2000: For a Stronger and Wider Union,” Supplement 5/97, 15 July 1997, 40. 51. For more on the ENP, see Smith 2005. 52. John Palmer, “French Veto Threatens Move to Give Baltic States EC Links,” Guardian, 7 September 1991, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 53. William Drozdiak, “EC Nations Recognize Independence of Baltic Republics; Ministers Make Arrangements for New Soviet Aid Package,” Washington Post, 27 August 1991, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 54. Inter Press Service, “Baltic States: EC Agree to Recognize ‘Restored Sovereignty,’” 27 August 1991, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 55. Globe and Mail, “EC Recognizes Baltic States Preferential Trade Status Studied for New Independents,” 28 August 1991, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 56. Ellemann-Jensen 2002, 60–61. 57. For more on survivor syndrome, see Niederland 1968. 58. Mayhew 1998b, 23; Torreblanca 2001, 160. 59. Sedelmeier 1994. 60. RAPID, “European Council in Lisbon (26–27 June 1992): Conclusions of the Presidency,” DOC/92/3, 27 June 1992, http://europa.eu/rapid/. 61. PAP News Wire, “Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia Urge EC to Ratify Accord,” September 11, 1992, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 62. European Commission, “Towards a Closer Association with the Countries of Central and Eastern Europe,” SEC(92) 2301 Final, 2 December 1992, 3, http://aei.pitt.edu/1586/01/east_europe_close_assoc_SEC_92_2301.pdf. 63. RAPID, “European Council in Edinburgh—11 and 12 December 1992— Conclusions of the Presidency,” DOC/92/8, 13 December 1992, http://europa. eu/rapid/. 64. CTK National News Wire, “Copenhagen Meeting Should Help Eliminate Split of Europe—Klaus,” 18 June 1993, http://lexis-nexis.com/.

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65. PAP News Wire, “Wałe˛sa Meets Portuguese President, Addresses Parliament,” 12 May 1993, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 66. RAPID, “European Council in Copenhagen—21–22 June 1993—Conclusions of the Presidency,” DOC/93/3, 22 June 1993, http://europa.eu/rapid/. 67. Polish News Bulletin, “Klaus in Poland,” 25 June 1993, http://lexis-nexis. com/. 68. Agence France Presse, “Kinkel Rejects Christian Parties’ View of EU Future,” 2 September 1994, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 69. “Nur Noch Zweite Wahl.” Der Spiegel, 4 July 1994, 16–18, http://wissen. spiegel.de/wissen/dokument/dokument.html?titel⫽NUR⫹NOCH⫹ZWEITE ⫹WAHL&id⫽13682820. 70. Associated Press Worldstream, “EU Sets Strategy for East Ahead of Membership Talks,” 4 October 1994, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 71. Agence France Presse, “EU Commission Recommends Associate Membership for Baltic States,” 26 October 1994, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 72. RAPID, “European Council—9 and 10 December 1994 in Essen Presidency Conclusions,” DOC/94/4, 10 December 1994, http://europa.eu/rapid/. 73. IPS-Inter Press Service, “Europe: Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia on ‘Highway’ to Brussels,” 15 December 1994, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 74. Leon Brittan, interview by author, tape recording, London, 14 July 2008. 75. Deutsche Presse-Agentur, “German Leader Seeks to Mend Fences with Poland,” 5 July 1995, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 76. Friis and Murphy 1999, 222. 77. Friis 1998, 12. 78. European Report, “Agenda 2000 Majority Favours Differentiated Accession Negotiations,” 23 July 1997, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 79. Rutger Wissels, interview by author, tape recording, Brussels, 17 June 2008. 80. Baltic News Service, “Nordic Countries, Italy Push for Simultaneous Start of Talks with All EU Candidates,” 22 July 1997, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 81. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, “‘We Cannot Afford EU Membership’— Minister,” 18 July 1997, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 82. Folketing EU Information Centre, “The Launching of the Enlargement Process,” Sweden-Denmark Non-Paper, 27 November 1997, http://www.eu-oplysningen. dk/upload/application/pdf/b6a39536/19980244.pdf. 83. Barry James, “EU Fails to Reach Agreement on Welcoming New Members,” International Herald Tribune, 27 October 1997, 5, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 84. Friis 1998, 11. 85. Senado de España, “Cortes Generales Diario De Sesiones Del Congreso De Los Diputados Pleno Y Diputacion Permanente,” VI Legislatura, No. 127, 17 December 1997, http://www.senado.es/boletines/PC0127.html. 86. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, “EU Membership Puts Bulgaria on European Map—Premier,” 16 December 1997, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 87. Sveriges Riksdag, For an outline of Swedish-Baltic diplomatic history, see “Motion 1990/91:U503 Frihet för de baltiska folken,” 25 January 1991, http:// www.riksdagen.se/.

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88. Dick Polman, “Leaders Edge Swedes Away from Historical Neutrality ‘Shame Complex’ Lingers From WWII,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 29 June 1994, A1, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 89. “Sweden’s Baltic Bulwark,” Economist, 9 July 1994, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 90. Sveriges Riksdag, “Konstitutionsutskottet: Offentlig utfrågning av statsminister Carl Bildt dels angående statsministerns anförande den 17 November 1993 om Sveriges utrikespolitik,” 26 April 1994, http://www.riksdagen.se/. 91. Associated Press Worldstream, “Government Seeks to End Isolation, Most Swedes Reluctant,” 1 January 1994, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 92. RAPID, “Hans van den Broek Member of the European Commission Presentation on Regular Reports to the European Parliament European Parliament Brussels,” 5 November 1998, http://europa.eu/rapid/. 93. European Commission, “Regular Report from the Commission on Romania’s Progress Towards Accession,” 4 November 1998, 50, http://ec.europa.eu/ enlargement/archives/pdf/key_documents/1998/romania_en.pdf. 94. AFX Europe, “Van Den Broek Concerned Over Czech, Slovene Progress towards EU Membership,” 4 November 1998, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 95. Euro-East, “EU Enlargement—Preparations for ‘Second Wave’ Bilateral Screening,” 26 January 1999, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 96. European Report, “EU Enlargement—Signs That Enlargement Is Increasingly on the Political Agenda,” 13 February 1999, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 97. Baltic News Service, “Talks with All EU Candidates May Begin in December: Die Welt,” 11 May 1999, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 98. Europe, “Verheugen Pledges to Guard Standards on EU Entry,” 13 September 1999, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 99. Baltic News Service, “EU Enlargement Chief Says Second Group of Hopefuls May Catch up with First,” 10 December 1999, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 100. Deutsche Presse-Agentur, “EU Commission Proposes Membership Talks with Six New Nations, Says Turkey Should Be Official Candidate,” 13 October 1999, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 101. RAPID, “Presidency Conclusions: Helsinki European Council—10 and 11 December 1999,” DOC/99/16, 13 December 1999, http://europa.eu/rapid/. 102. Mike Smith, “Commissioner Reassures Poland on EU Entry,” Financial Times, 4 April 2000, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 103. EUObserver.com, “Fischer Apologizes for Nazi Germany,” 19 October 2000, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 104. RAPID, “Presidency Conclusions: Santa Maria da Feira European Council 9 and 20 June 2000,” DOC/00/14, 20 June 2000, http://europa.eu/rapid/. 105. Deutsche Presse-Agentur, “E.U. Nations Baulk at Sweden’s Bid to Set Enlargement Date,” 8 June 2001, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 106. European Commission, “Eurobarometer: Public Opinion in the European Union,” Report #55, October 2001, http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/ archives/eb/eb55/eb55_en.pdf. 107. AFX European Focus, “France, Germany Block Accord on Enlargement Talks Completion Date,” 15 June 2001, http://lexis-nexis.com/.

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108. AFX European Focus, “Swedish Determination Made Schroeder Drop Enlargement Date Veto,” 16 June 2001, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 109. RAPID, “Presidency Conclusions. Göteborg European Council—15 and 16 June 2001,” DOC/01/8, 18 June 2001, http://europa.eu/rapid/. 110. Poland Business Review, “German Foreign Minister Fischer Adds Voice to Growing Chorus …” 12 November 2001, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 111. Poland Business Review, “Austrian Foreign Minister Pledges Strong Support for Poland’s …,” 23 July 2001, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 112. Polish News Bulletin, “Verhofstadt Says EU Enlargement ‘Absolutely Necessary,’” 24 October 2001, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 113. Interview by author, tape recording, Brussels, 17 June 2008. 114. Agence France Presse, “Czech Republic Warns against Delay in EU Enlargement,” 21 November 2001, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 115. Philip Webster and Rory Watson, “‘Europe of Solidarity’ Delivers for Poland,” Times, 14 December 2002, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 116. RAPID, “Copenhagen European Council 12 and 13 December 2002 Presidency Conclusions,” DOC/02/15, 14 December 2002, http://europa.eu/rapid/. 117. Baltic News Service, “Latvian President Says EU Accession Terms Very Favorable for Her Country,” 14 December 2002, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 118. Deutsche Presse-Agentur, “E.U. Seals Historic Expansion Ending Cold War Division,” 13 December 2002, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 119. World News Connection, “Prodi Says EU Expansion Puts ‘End to the Divisions in Europe,’” 13 December 2002, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 120. Deutsche Presse-Agentur, “E.U. Seals Historic Expansion Ending Cold War Division,” 13 December 2002, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 121. Agence France Presse, “Warm Front Blows Over post-Cold War Europe,” 14 December 2002, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 122. RAPID, “Thessaloniki European Council 19 and 20 June 2003 Presidency Conclusions,” DOC/03/3, 23 June 2003, http://europa.eu/rapid/. 123. Associated Press Worldstream, “Bulgaria Complains That It Is Teamed with Romania in EU Membership Race,” 6 November 2003, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 124. European Commission, “Regular Report on Romania’s Progress towards Accession,” 2003, 44, http://ec.europa.eu/enlargement/archives/pdf/key_ documents/2003/rr_ro_final_en.pdf. 125. RAPID, “2755th Council Meeting General Affairs and External Relations,” C/06/264, 17 October 2006, http://europa.eu/rapid/. 126. Agence France Presse, “EU Delays Enlargement Decision until October,” 16 May 2006, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 127. Patrick Smyth, “Summit Most Important Meeting Since War, Says Kohl,” Irish Times, 15 December1997, 14, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 128. Sharp 1999, 31. 129. RAPID, “European Council in Copenhagen—21 and 22 June 1993— Conclusions of the Presidency,” DOC/93/3, 22 June 1993, http://europa.eu/ rapid/.

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130. Grabbe 2006, 144; Cameron 2000, 16. 131. PHARE stands for Poland and Hungary: Aid for Economic Restructuring. The abbreviation was left in place despite the fact that the program was quickly extended beyond these two countries. Technical Aid to the Commonwealth of Independent States (TACIS) was a revised version of the aid program to the Soviet Union. Interestingly, only the Baltic States were “upgraded” from TACIS to PHARE in December 1991. 132. Agence France Presse, “EC Membership Not for ex-Soviet States, Kohl Says,” 3 April 1992, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 133. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, “Kravchuk on Relations with Russia and Europe; Nuclear Weaponry,” 4 December 1991, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 134. Shpakovaty 1993, 14–15. 135. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, “Ukraine Wishes to Develop Relations with EC on Basis of ‘Equal Partnership,’” 27 February 1992, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 136. Russian Press Digest, “Ukraine on New Relations with France,” 17 June 1992, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 137. Agence France Presse, “Ukraine Aims for Full E.C. Membership.” 7 June 1993, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 138. Ibid. 139. Leon Brittan, interview by author, tape recording, London, 14 July 2008. 140. RAPID, “Address by Mr Jacques Santer President of the European Commission Agenda 2000 European Parliament Strasbourg, 16 July 1997,” 16 July 1997, http://europa.eu/rapid/. 141. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, “German Foreign Minister Says EU, NATO ‘Doors Remain Open’ to All Baltic States,” 20 October 1997, http:// lexis-nexis.com/. 142. Financial Times, “Promises of Support, but Tempered by Self-Interest: the German Neighbor,” 11 June 1997, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 143. Von Andreas Middel, “EU-Erweiterung ist unsere historische Pflicht.” Die Welt, 14 June 2001, http://www.welt.de/print-welt/article456895/EU_ Erweiterung_ist_unsere_historische_Pflicht.html. 144. Deutsche Presse-Agentur, “Polish-German Reconciliation Brings New Challenges,” 15 June 2001, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 145. Summa, Timo, “The European Union’s 5th Enlargement—Lessons Learned,” Harvard University Weatherhead Center for International Studies, 2008, 25–26, http://www.wcfia.harvard.edu/fellows/papers/2007-08/paper_Summa.pdf. 146. Gunnar Wiegand, interview by author, tape recording, Brussels, 18 June 2008. 147. Moravcsik 1991, 25. 148. Zawalinska 2001, 171–72. 149. For more on how citizen attitudes about the EU affect vote choice in national elections, see Tillman 2004. 150. Agence France Presse, “Paris Pledges to Support Czechoslovakia’s ‘Complete Integration’ in EC,” 1 October 1991, http://lexis-nexis.com/.

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151. Brinar 1999, 247–48. 152. Associated Press, “Eastern Europeans Upset by Obstacles to European Community Entry,” 10 September 1991, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 153. Skålnes 2005, 214. 154. RAPID, “Conclusions of the Luxembourg European Council (28 and 29 June 1991),” 29 June 1991, http://europa.eu/rapid/. 155. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, “EC Aid to Improve Safety at Bulgaria’s Kozloduy Nuclear Power Station,” 5 August 1991, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 156. United Press International, “EC Offers Baltic States Trade, Cooperation Agreement,” 1 October 1991, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 157. Skålnes 2005, 218. 158. Friis 1997, 241; Torreblanca 2001, 213–15. 159. EBRD 1997, 14. See also Economist, “The Next Revolution,” 22 November 1997, S3, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 160. World Bank Group, “World Development Indicators,” http://web.worldbank. org/. 161. Skålnes 2005, 223–24. 162. RAPID, “Shaping Europe’s Future; International Bertelsmann Forum,” 3 July 1998, http://europa.eu/rapid/. 163. Interview by author, tape recording, Paris, 12 June 2008. 164. PAP News Wire, “EU Starts Enlargement Debate,” 19 November 2002, http:// lexis-nexis.com/. 165. Vachudova 2005, 81. 166. Ibid., 243. 167. Timo Summa, “The Nature of the Enlarged European Union: Change vs. Continuity—Roundtable Discussion,” Conference “The European Union After Enlargement,” Seattle, 1 May 2008. 168. Baltic News Service, “Estonia’s Savi Demands More Say for New EU Members,” 9 April 2000, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 169. Sarah Lambert, “EC Recognises Independence of ‘Exceptional’ Baltic States,” Independent, 28 August 1991, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 170. Sajdik and Schwarzinger 2008, 108. 171. Ahto Lobjakas, “Georgia: Saakashvili Tries to Soothe EU ‘Allergy,’” Radio Free Europe, 27 February 2007, http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1074951. html/. 172. Sajdik and Schwarzinger 2008, 140–42. 173. Deutsche Presse-Agentur, “Austrian Minister Says Temelin No Grounds to Veto Czechs in E.U.,” 26 August 2002, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 174. Deutsche Presse-Agentur, “The Netherlands ‘Will Not Veto EU Enlargement,’” 18 October 2002, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 175. Harris 2000, 29. 176. Daniel Guggenbühl, interview by author, tape recording, Brussels, 18 June 2008.

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Chapter 5 1. BBC Monitoring Europe, “Polish Politicians Comment on EU Accession Date,” 18 November 20 02, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 2. Foreign Relations Committee 1967, 481. 3. M2 Presswire, “NATO,” 11 January 1999, http://lexis-nexis.com/. 4. Senator Barbara Mikulski, 18 March 1998, 105th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record 144, Pt. 3: 4003, http://heinonline.org/. 5. “A conversation with Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State,” Charlie Rose Show, 27 March 2007, http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/8313. 6. For more on Albanian civil unrest, see Biberaj 1999, 311–43. 7. Taylor 1981, 194–96. 8. Even there the process was quite complicated and not every politician embraced this move. 9. For a comparative study on truth and reconciliation commissions, see Chapman and Ball 2001. 10. See, e.g., Janos 2001. 11. Chirot and McCauley 2006, 70. 12. Tversky and Kahneman 1974, 1128–30. 13. For a classic work on path dependence and critical junctures, see Collier and Collier 1991. 14. Kowert and Legro 1996, 483. 15. Fukuyama 1992, 330.

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9/11. See September 11 attacks Acheson, Dean 38 Adenauer, Konrad 30, 43, 54–5 Afghanistan post-9/11 geopolitics and 100 Soviet invasion of 40, 59 Agenda 2000 (EU) 116, 126 Albania “black trinity” and 11 Eastern enlargement and 21, 146 European identity of 6 French discourse on 45 Albright, Madeleine 65, 73, 80, 82–4, 97, 144 Algeria 37, 45 Amato Giuliano 85 Amery, Julian 57 anchoring, psychological heuristic of 149 Anglo-Polish Treaty (1939) 56 Antall, József 67, 104 Arendt, Hannah 8 Argentina 35, 147 Asmus, Ronald 71, 73, 76, 80 Aspin, Les 89 association agreements with CEECs 66–7, 108–11, 114, 130, 138 for non-Baltic FSU 124 as strategy of engagement 17–18 Atlantic Charter (1941) 48, 51, 53, 61 Attlee, Clement 57

August coup. See Moscow coup Australia 147 Austria 32, 107, 120–1, 130, 138 Aznar, José María 117 Baldwin, Richard 20 Balfour, Harold 42 Balkenende, Jan Peter 138 Baltic States EU enlargement and 5–6, 110–11, 114, 117–18, 134, 136 French position/discourse on 45, 85, 94 German position/discourse on 43, 80–1, 85, 92–3, 111, 114, 126 guilt/responsibility discourse by 61–2, on 42–3, 50, 56, 80–8, 92, 100, 111, 117–18, 125–6, 144 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and 35, 40–3, 46, 61–2 NATO enlargement and 78–82, 85–6, 89–90, 92, 98, 100, 125 post-WWII status of 41–3, 46, 48, 52, 144 right to Euro-Atlantic membership and security 81, 83, 94, 96, 136 Russia, relations with 14 secessional policies of 35, 66–7 Swedish legacies over 117–18 UK position/discourse on 41–2, 49, 136

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Baltic States – continued U.S. position/discourse on 46, 48, 51–2, 70, 84, 92, 98 Yalta Agreement and 48–9, 56. See also under individual countries Baxter, Beverly 32 Belgium 120, 121 Beliecki, Jan 67 Beneš decrees 29 Bethell, Nicholas William 58 BHE (Bloc of Homeland Expellees and Disenfranchised) 29–30 Biden, Joe 84 Bildt, Carl 117–18, 134 “black trinity” 1, 9–12, 14, 19–21, 23–4, 27–8, 62–3, 70, 97, 101, 134–5, 139, 141–6, 148–9. See also Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; Munich Agreement; Yalta Conference Blair, Tony 78, 97, 107, 122 Blum, Leon 35–6 Bohlen, Charles 47 Bonnet, Georges 45 Boothby, Robert 33 Bosnia-Herzegovina 6, 11, 12, 132, 146 Bosnian War. See Yugoslavia Braithwaite, Rodric 79, 97 Brandt, Willy 30–1, 43, 55, 106 Branscombe, Nyla R. 12 Brezhnev, Leonid 60 Brimelow, Thomas 32 Brittan, Leon 107, 114, 125 Broek, Hans Van den 118 Brown, Hank 74–5, 78 Brussels NATO Summit (1994) 16, 73–5, 77, 93 Brzezinski, Zbigniew 44, 83, 95 Bucharest NATO Summit (2008) 95, 99 Bulgaria “black trinity” and 11

EU enlargement and 104, 109–10, 114, 117–19, 121–2, 127, 131, 133–4, 137–8 European identity of 6 Freedom House ratings of 88 French discourse on 45 NATO enlargement and 82, 90 UK position on 49 Visegrad views of 113 Yalta Agreement and 51, 56 Burghardt, Gunther 87 Bush, George H. W. 31, 40, 46, 54, 67–8, 100–1 Bush, George W. 84–5, 94, 98–9 Cadogan, Alexander 49 Cˇalfa, Marián 104 Canada 80, 105 Carter, Jimmy 53 Cartledge, Bryan 79 CEECO (Central and Eastern European Coalition) 79–80, 91 CEECs (Central and Eastern European Countries). See under individual countries Chamberlain, Neville 28, 31, 41, 71, 97 Chamberlin, William Henry 50 Chile 147 China 33, 39, 42, 45–6, 57 Chirac, Jacques 37, 85, 94, 115, 129 Christian Democratic Union 114 Christian Social Union 43, 114 Christopher, Warren 70, 93 Churchill, Winston (Prime Minister) 31–2, 34, 48–9, 52, 131 Churchill, Winston (Prime Minister’s grandson) 34 Cimoszewicz, Wlodziemierz 82 Clinton, Bill 3, 70–6, 80, 82–5, 91–5, 97–8, 101 CoE (Council of Europe) 87, 124

Index Cold War 2–3, 5, 12, 23, 27–8, 31, 35, 37–8, 40–2, 47, 50, 52, 54, 62, 65–6, 69, 73, 80, 86, 89, 95, 97–8, 121, 125, 128, 142, 148, 150 collective guilt. See guilt collective responsibility. See guilt Collins, James 101 Commonwealth of Independent States. See NIS communicative action 6 constructivism EU enlargement and 115, 123–8 expected outcomes based on 17–19 historical-psychological legacies and 8, 148–50 literature overview 2, 5–7, 14–15 NATO enlargement and 86–7 Copenhagen criteria 112–13, 116, 122–4, 126, 132, 137 Copenhagen European Council (1993) 4, 16, 112–13, 123, 125 Copenhagen European Council (2002) 121, 127, 136 Corfu European Council (1994) 113 Crimea Conference. See Yalta Conference critical junctures 7, 28, 134, 143, 150 Croatia 11–12, 90, 146 Crozier, Brian 60 CSCE (Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe) 5, 66, 75, 105 Curzon Line 51 Cyprus 115, 120 Czechoslovakia breakup of 146 Communist turn of 51–2, 73 EU and 104–5 French position/discourse on 35–7, 45, 130

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German position/discourse on 29–31, 105–6 Munich Agreement and 28–40, 78 NATO and 66, 68 “return to Europe” discourse in 62 Soviet invasion of (1968) 30, 33–4, 36, 50, 58, 60–1, 107 UK position/discourse on 31–5, 107–8 U.S. position/discourse on 51 Czechoslovak National Council 52 Czech Republic Austria, relations with 121, 130, 138 “black trinity” and 11 democratic credentials of 89, 132 EU enlargement and 114, 118, 132–3, 138 Freedom House ratings of 88 guilt/responsibility discourse by 71, 78, on 73, 76, 108, 144 military competence of 98 NATO enlargement and 98 right to Euro-Atlantic membership and security 72, 76, 95 Daladier, Édouard 35, 44 David, Václav 36 Dayton Peace Accords 132 Debré, Michel 37, 60 De Gaulle, Charles 28, 30, 34, 36, 45, 59–60, 105 De Guiringaud, Louis 37 d’Estaing, Valery Giscard 107 Delors, Jacques 104, 107–8, 118 de Murville, Maurice Couve 36 Denmark EU enlargement and 115–17, 126, 132–3 Freedom House ratings of 88 Greece and 87 NATO enlargement and 80–1 support for CEECs 80–1, 111, 146 Dienstbier, Jirˇí 66

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Djerejian, Edward 47 domain of application approach 8, 14–15, 96, 145 Dole, Robert (Bob) Joseph 91, 97 Donnelly, Christopher 77 Doosje, Bertjan 12 Dulles, Allen Welsh 46 Dulles, John Foster 47, 51–2 Eastern enlargement Albania and 21, 146 constructivist approaches to 5–7 cyclicality of 99 defection of candidates 4, 18–19 macro versus micro level of analysis 143 moral suasion 21–2 motivation behind 16–17 pace of 22 rationalist approaches to 3–5 scope of 11, 21 strategy versus tactics 2, 16, 21–3, 144 See also EU enlargement; NATO enlargement Eastern Europe. See under individual countries EC (European Community). See EU Eden, Anthony 38, 49 Edhard, Ludwig 30 Edinburgh European Council (1992) 112 Egypt 37, 58 Eisenhower, Dwight 39, 46, 48, 51–2, 73 Ellemann-Jensen, Uffe 108, 111, 134 Elton, Rodney 35 England. See UK Essen European Council (1994) 114–15 Estonia “black trinity” and 11 EU enlargement and 132–3 Freedom House ratings of 88–9

legitimacy as a candidate 81 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and 40 NATO enlargement 81, 85, 98, 101 Yalta and 51 See also Baltic States EU differences with NATO 2, 87, 89, 128 normative structure of 123 Portugal and 87 UK membership in 34 EU enlargement Baltic States and 5–6, 110–11, 114, 117–18, 134, 136 Bulgaria and 104, 109–10, 114, 117–19, 121–2, 127, 131, 133–4, 137–8 consensus on 11, 21, 104, 107, 113 constructivist approaches to 5–7 Czech Republic and 114, 118, 132–3, 138 dates for 112–13, 127, 134, 136 economic concerns 135 Estonia and 132–3 Europe agreements 111–14, 131–2, 139 France and 105, 108–9, 111, 115, 120, 129–31, 136 historical imperative of 106, 134 interests, member state, and 4, 128–34 Latvia and 118–19, 126, 132–4, 137 Lithuania and 111, 118–20, 132–4, 137, 137–38 norms, institutional, and 5–7, 115, 123–8 Poland and 5–6, 105, 114–15, 119–21, 127, 132–3, 135, 138, 141 rationalist approaches to 4–5 Romania and 109–10, 121, 136 strategy versus tactics 111–12, 135–6 Europe agreement. See EU enlargement

Index European Commission EU enlargement and 112–13, 114–16, 118, 122–4, 126, 128, 130, 132–3, 137–8 Poland and 119, 127 regular reports of 89, 110, 118, 122, 124 Romania and 110, 118, 122 support for enlargement within 7, 107, 111 European Community. See EU European confederation 105–6, 129–30 European Council. See under each individual council European Neighborhood Policy 110 European Parliament 119–20, 126, 136 European People’s Party 118 Evans, Stanley 42 Falkland Islands 35 Faure, Maurice 37 Ferrero-Waldner, Benita 120, 138 Fierke, Karin M. 5, 9 fifth enlargement. See EU enlargement Fiji 147 Finland EU presidency (1999) 118–19 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and 40 Yalta and 49, 56 Fischer, Joschka 119–21 Fitzwater, Marlin 40 Fontaine, Nicole 136 Foot, Michael 57 Ford, Gerald 53 France Baltic States, discourse/position on 45, 85, 94 “black trinity” and 12, 23, 27, 134 Czechoslovakia, position/discourse on 35–7, 45, 130 debt relief to Poland 109

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EU enlargement and 105, 108–9, 111, 115, 120, 129–31, 136 Germany, relations with 36, 43, 45, 47, 55 guilt/responsibility discourse by 35–7, 60, on 78 Iberian enlargement and 135 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and 41, 43–5, 47 Munich Agreement and 28, 35–8, 78 NATO enlargement and 80, 85–6, 89, 92, 99 perception of historical responsibility 24, 146 Soviet Union and 45, 60 Yalta Agreement and 59–60 France, Pierre Mendès 36 Free Democratic Party 81 Freedom House democracy ratings 87–8 French Communist Party 44 French National Committee 29, 36 FRG (Federal Republic of Germany). See Germany Friis, Lykke 117, 126, 132 Froment-Meurice, Henri 45 FSU (former Soviet Union). See Baltic States; NIS Fukuyama, Francis 150 Gaddis, John Lewis 95 Garnier, Jean-Paul 36 Gati, Charles 72–3 Genscher, Hans-Dietrich 106, 111, 134 Georgia “black trinity” and 143, 145–6 EU reluctance toward 5, 137 NATO and 99 Geremek, Bronislaw 60, 141 Germany (including Third Reich and FRG) anti-immigration lobby of 105

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Germany (including Third Reich and FRG) – continued Baltic States, position/discourse on 43, 80–1, 85, 111, 126 benefits of Eastern enlargements for 92, 129 “black trinity” and 12, 23, 27 China, comparisons to 39, 42, 45 Czechoslovakia, position/discourse on 29–31, 105–6 debt relief to Poland 109 enlargement dates and 98, 136 EU presidency (1994) 113–14 France, relations with 36, 43, 45, 47, 55 guilt/responsibility discourse by 7, 21, 43–4, 69–70, 77, 80–1, 92–3, 100, 106, 111, 114, 119, 126, 134, 146, on 31, 35, 59, 76, 78, 81, 93, 134, 141 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and 40–4, 111 Munich Agreement and 29–30, 36 NATO enlargement and 24, 69, 80, 91–2, 99 Poland, position/discourse on 43–4, 69, 103, 115, 119 Polish attitudes on 141 as proponent of EU enlargement 106, 111, 126 reunification of 44, 54–5, 76, 106 Russia, relations with 81 Soviet Union, relations with 43–7 Yalta Agreement and 54–6 Glyn, Alan 42 Goldgeier, James 66 Goldschmidt, Dietrich 44 Gompert, David 76 Gomulka, Wladyslaw 53 Göncz, Árpád 61, 66, 71 Gorbachev, Mikhail 50, 56, 66 Gore, Al 74, 75, 84 Gothenburg European Council (2001) 120, 126

Gould, Ayrton 32 Great Britain. See UK Greece belonging to West 76 democratic credentials of 87 EU membership of 107 Freedom House ratings of 88 Yalta Agreement and 49, 131 Grigg, Edward 32 Gronouski, John 141 Grossman, Marc 82, 101 Guatemala 147 Guggenbühl, Daniel 139 guilt, collective definition of 8–9 expected outcomes based on 17–21, 96 as explanatory variable 1–2, 7, 15–16, 24, 65, 79, 141, 146, 149 France and 24, 146 Germany and 7, 21, 44, 69, 77, 80, 111, 119, 126, 146 internalization of 24 levels of responsibility 12–13 liberal societies and 147 other examples of 147 shame versus 9–10 UK and 21, 72, 101, 146 U.S. and 21, 72, 78, 101, 146 See also historical-psychological legacies Habermas, Jürgen 6 Hankey, Robert 58 Havel, Václav 14, 61–2, 66–7, 71–2, 78, 83, 85, 104–5, 107, 129, 134 Healey, Denis 59 Heinemann, Gustav 43 Helms, Jesse 84, 95 Helsinki Accords 6, 9, 34–5, 58 Helsinki European Council (1999) 119, 134

Index historical-psychological legacies definition 8 EU enlargement and 106, 111–12, 117–18, 125–6, 134–5, 137, 139, 141–2 explanatory framework and 1–2, 7, 11, 13, 16–17, 21–3, 143–4, 148 Germany and 103 NATO enlargement and 72, 79, 81–2, 84, 93, 96–7, 100–2, 141–2 outcomes based on 19–20, 24, 135, 145–6 structural versus constructed 8, 148–9 Sweden and 117–18 See also guilt Hitler, Adolf 28, 30, 35, 37–8, 40, 42–7, 56–7, 72–3, 75, 77, 80, 93, 106, 108, 111, 141 Hitler-Stalin pact. See MolotovRibbentrop pact Hodža, Milan 28 Holbrooke, Richard 3, 79 Holocaust 71, 100, 111, 142 Holocaust Museum opening (1993) 71, 93 Hungary “black trinity” and 11, 72, 76 democratic credentials of 89 elections in 93 EU enlargement and 104–5, 114, 120, 122, 132–3 Freedom House ratings of 88 French discourse on 45 guilt/responsibility discourse by 72, on 76 NATO enlargement and 66, 68–9, 71, 98 revolution (1956) 50, 58, 61, 72 U.S. position/discourse on 72–3, 79–80 Yalta Agreement and 49, 56, 58

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Hunter, Robert 68, 79 Hurd, Douglas 136 Hussein, Saddam 35, 40 Iberian enlargement. See Mediterranean enlargement Iliescu, Ion 109–10, 125 Ilves, Toomas Henrik 78 interests. See member state interests Iran 100 Iraq 100 Italy “black trinity” and 12 border disputes with Slovenia 114, 130, 132 EU enlargement and 115–16, 130, 132 Munich Agreement and 28–9, 32–3, 78 NATO enlargement and 78, 80, 85, 89, 92 Ivanov, Sergei 85 Jacoby, Wade 25 Janos, Andrew 8 Japan 48 Jaruzelski, Wojciech 43, 61 Jaspers, Karl 8 Jeszenszky, Géza 72 Johnson, Lyndon 39 Joint Baltic American National Committee 79–80 Jowitt, Ken 8 Kahneman, Daniel 149 Kaliningrad region 84 Kempe, Frederick 69 Kennan, George 95 Kennedy, John F. 38–9, 52 Kennedy, Joseph (father of JFK and RFK) 38 Kennedy, Robert, F. 53 Khrushchev, Nikita 45 Kiesinger, Kurt 30

206

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Kinkel, Klaus 77, 81, 91, 97, 114, 126 Kirkpatrick, Jeane 83 Kissinger, Henry 95–6 Klaus, Václav 112–13 Klicka, Otto 30 Kohl, Helmut 31, 77, 80, 92, 98, 100, 105–6, 115, 124, 129, 134 Korean War 33, 38, 40, 46 Kosovo “black trinity” and 11 war in (1999) 4, 84, 119, 133–4, 147 Kostov, Ivan 117 Kovácˇ, Michal 71, 90 Kravchuk, Leonid 124 Kremlin. See Russia; Soviet Union Krenzler, Horst 109 Kuchma, Leonid 99 Kugler, Richard 76 Kundera, Milan 61, 67, 121 Kupchan, Charles 76 Kuwait 35, 40 Kwasniewski, Aleksander 86 Laeken European Council (2001) 120–1 Lake, Anthony (Tony) 3, 71, 75, 91–2 Lambsdorff, Otto Graf 81 Landsbergis, Vytautas 31, 84 Larrabee, Stephen 76 Latvia “black trinity” and 11, 86, 101 German position/discourse on 126 guilt/responsibility discourse by 86, on 126 EU enlargement and 118–19, 126, 132–4, 137 Freedom House ratings of 88 legitimacy as a candidate 81 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and 40, 86, 117 NATO enlargement and 85, 98, 101 Yalta and 51, 86 See also Baltic States

Leonzi, Christophe 135 Léotard, François 77 Lever, Harold 34 Lewis, Helen Block 9 liberal intergovernmentalism. See rationalism Lieberman, Joe 68 Lisbon European Council (1992) 112 Lithuania “black trinity” and 11, 84, 101 democratic credentials of 89 elections in 93 EU enlargement and 111, 118–20, 132–4, 137–8 Freedom House ratings of 88 guilt/responsibility discourse by 31, 84, on 85 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and 40, 117 NATO enlargement and 84–5, 101 Soviet Union and 31 Yalta and 51, 98 See also Baltic States Lloyd, Guy 56 Lloyd, Selwyn 42 Lugar, Richard 73, 97 Luxembourg European Council (1997) 115, 117, 125 Maastricht Treaty 113, 132 MacShane, Dennis 107 Madrid European Council (1995) 115 Madrid NATO Summit (1997) 78, 80, 92, 96, 98, 100 Major, John 108 Malta 115 MAP (Membership Action Plan) 24, 89, 91, 96, 99 March, James 12 Matlock, Jack 95 Mattli, Walter 4 Maulding, Reginald 42 Maxwell, Robert 33

Index Mayhew, Alan 109 Mazewski, Aloysius 53 Mearsheimer, John 3 Mecˇiar, Vladimir 90 Medgyessy, Peter 122 Mediterranean enlargement 107, 135 member state interests definition 15 EU enlargement and 104, 109, 111, 128–34 explanatory framework and 2–4, 8, 16, 22–5, 142, 145, 148 outcomes based on 17–23, 96, 100, 138, 146 NATO enlargement and 65, 81, 90–6, 100 mental shortcuts 27, 42, 58, 148, 150 Meri, Lennart 81, 93, 111, 134 Michel, Louis 121 Michnik, Adam 61 Mikhailova, Nadejda 118 Mikulski, Barbara 74, 80–1, 97, 144 Miller, Leszek 122 Mitterrand, François 31, 60, 105–9, 129–30, 139 Mois, Vasile 104 Moldova “black trinity” and 11, 145 EU enlargement and 5 Mollet, Guy 37–8 Molotov, Vyacheslav 47 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact background, historical 40–1 Baltic States and 35, 40–3, 46, 61–2, 81 discourse on 21, 23, 27, 41–7, 50–1, 81, 83–4, 86, 106, 111 Finland and 40 France and 41, 43–5, 47 Germany and 40–4, 81, 111 historical-psychological legacies over 1, 7, 10–12, 62, 71, 93, 100, 111, 141, 145 Latvia and 40, 86, 117

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207

Lithuania and 40, 117 as mental shortcut 27, 38, 42, 44–6 Romania and 40 UK and 41–2 U.S. and 46–7, 51, 83 Montenegro 11 Montgomery, Bernard 57 Moravscik, Andrew 133 Moray, Pierre 60 Moscow. See Russia; Soviet Union Moscow coup (1991) 67–8, 108, 130–2 Moscow Treaty (1970) 43 Mugabe, Robert 58 Mulley, Frederick 32 Munich Agreement discourse on 21, 23, 29–40, 58, 71, 73, 78, 83, 85, 108 France and 28, 35–8 Germany and 28–31 historical-psychological legacies over 1, 7, 10–12, 51, 62, 71, 79, 141, 145 Italy and 28 legal aspects of 28–9 as mental shortcut 27, 33–5, 37–40, 148 UK and 28, 31–5, 58, 108 U.S. and 38–40, 73, 85, 91–2 NACC (North Atlantic Cooperation Council) 24, 68, 91 Nasser, Gamal 37–8 National Federation of American Hungarians 80 National Salvation Front 109 See also Illiescu NATO differences with EU 2, 87, 89, 128 normative structure of 86–90 Ukraine and 96, 98–9 NATO enlargement Baltic States and 78–82, 85–6, 89–90, 92, 98, 100, 125 Bulgaria and 82, 90

208

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NATO enlargement – continued constructivist approaches to 5, 7, 86–7, 89 Czech Republic and 73, 98 dates for 77, 97–8 early discussions on 65–7, 68–9 Estonia and 81, 85, 98, 101 France and 80, 85, 89, 92, 99 Germany and 24, 69, 80, 91–2, 99 historical-psychological legacies and 1, 7–8, 72, 79, 81–2, 84, 93, 97, 100–2 Hungary and 66, 68–9, 71, 98 interests, member state, and 3, 65, 81, 91–6, 100 Italy and 78, 80, 85, 89, 92 Latvia and 85, 98, 101 Lithuania and 84–5, 101 as moral right 83, 97 motivation behind 3, 5, 7–8, 65, 69, 79, 89, 91, 95–6, 100–2 norms, institutional, and 2, 5, 7, 65, 86–90, 99–100 Poland and 67–8, 70, 75, 77, 79, 82, 89, 144 rationalist approaches to 3, 87 Romania and 80, 82, 89–90, 98, 100 Russia and 3, 5, 75, 84–5, 89–90, 93–6, 99–101 Slovakia and 90, 99 Slovenia and 80, 90, 98, 100 strategy versus tactics 96, 99–100, 102 UK and 77–8, 85, 91, 97 U.S. and 65, 68, 70–6, 78, 80, 82–5, 90–101 Nazi-Soviet Pact. See MolotovRibbentrop Pact Netherlands 76, 87, 138 Nice European Council (2000) 119–20, 126 NIS (Newly Independent States) 93, 95–6, 101, 124

Nilsson, Lars-Ake 117 Nixon, Richard 53, 60 Nkomo, Joshua 58 normative institutionalism. See constructivism norm entrepreneurship. See policy entrepreneurship norms, institutional collective guilt and 7 definition 14–15 EU enlargement and 5–7, 115, 123–8 NATO enlargement and 2, 5, 7, 65, 86–90, 99–100 outcomes based on 9, 17–21, 129 socialization 13 strategic use of 6, 87 uncertainty due to abundance of 150 Norway 87 O’Brennan, John 5 Oder-Neisse line 44, 54 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) 18 Olechowski, Andrzej 73 Oleksy, Józef 135 Olsen, Johan 12 Onyszkiewicz, Janusz 70 OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) 72 Paris club 109 path dependence 150 Persson, Göran 120 Petersen, Niels Helveg 81, 116, 125 PfP (Partnership for Peace) 24, 72–6, 91, 93–5, 101, 130 PHARE 110, 124, 131 Poland “black trinity” and 11 debt relief to 109 democratic credentials of 89 domestic politics in 53, 61, 93

Index EU enlargement and 5–6, 105 114–15, 119–21, 127, 132–3, 135, 138, 141 Freedom House ratings of 88 French discourse on 45 German position/discourse on 29, 43–4, 69–70, 77, 81, 103, 105–6, 115, 119, 126–7, 141 government-in-exile 56 guilt/responsibility discourse by 62, 73, 78–9, 86, 105, 122, on 32–3, 43–4, 47, 50–2, 56–7, 59, 69–70, 75–7, 81, 106, 119, 126–7, 144 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and 40, 42, 44, 46–7 NATO enlargement and 67–8, 70, 75, 77, 79, 82, 89, 144 “return to Europe” discourse in 61 UK position/discourse on 32–3, 41, 48, 50, 56–7, 59 U.S. position/discourse on 48, 50–1, 62, 73–5, 82 Yalta and 50–1, 56–7, 61 policy entrepreneurship 5, 7, 65, 89, 134, 137, 147–8 Polish American Congress 52–3, 79 Pompidou, Georges 43 Poos, Jacques 117 Portillo, Michael 66 Portugal eligibility for membership 87 Mediterranean enlargement and 107, 135 Potomac Charter (1954) 52 Potsdam Conference 1, 29, 50–2, 54–5, 57–8, 60, 79, 80, 86, 144 Powell, Colin 84 Prague. See Czech Republic; Czechoslovakia Prague NATO Summit (2004) 85–6, 94

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209

Prague Spring (1968). See Czechoslovakia Prodi, Romano 119, 121, 126, 128, 130, 134 Prussia 45 Putin, Vladimir 84–5, 96 RAND Corporation 76 Rapallo, Treaty of (1922) 43 Rasmussen, Anders Fogh 86, 121 rational institutionalism. See rationalism rationalism criticism of explanations based on 3–4, 128–9, 135 EU enlargement and 4, 128–34 game model of enlargement preferences 18–19 NATO enlargement and, 3, 91–6 norms in 15 outcomes based on 17, 19–20, 145 rhetorical action and 6, 87 See also interests; member state Readman, Spohr 43 Reagan, Ronald 40, 46–7, 50, 53–4 realism literature overview 3–4 EU enlargement and 131, 133–4 NATO enlargement and 95–6 regular reports, European Commission 110, 116, 118, 122, 124 Rehn, Olli 122 restitution demands for 13–14, 17, 29 norm of 13, 150 “return to Europe” as a goal 104, 142, 147 nature of discourse 14, 23, 27, 61–3, 66, 148 rhetorical action 6, 87, 143 Rhodesia 33, 58 Risse-Kappen, Thomas 8 Roberts, Goronwy 33 Rodman, Peter 83

210

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Index

Romania “black trinity” and 11 Copenhagen criteria compliance 118, 122, 127 domestic politics in 53, 109–10 EU enlargement and 104–5, 109–10, 114, 118–19, 121–2, 125, 131, 133–4, 136–8, 146 European identity of 6, 104–5 Freedom House ratings of 88 French discourse on 45 guilt/responsibility discourse by 82, 105, on 32–3 legitimacy as a candidate 81 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and 40, 145 NATO enlargement and 80, 82, 89–90, 98, 100 postaccession monitoring for 122, 127 UK position/discourse on 32, 49 U.S. position/discourse on 51 Visegrad attitudes on 113 Yalta Agreement and 51, 56, 105 Rome NATO Summit (1991) 68 Roosevelt, Franklin, D. 34, 38, 48–51, 53, 57–8, 80 Rosati, Dariusz 78 Rose, Charlie 145 Roth, William 68, 81 Rühe, Volker 24, 69–70, 75, 77, 81, 91, 95, 97–8 Rumania. See Romania Rusk, Dean 39, 47 Russia Baltic States, relations with 14, 81, 84, 96, 100, 114 domestic politics in 74, 93–4 EU, relations with 129 Germany, relations with 81, 85, 92 NATO enlargement 3, 5, 75, 80, 84–5, 89–90, 93–6, 99–101 as “other” 67 as threat to CEE 19, 80, 82

U.S, relations with 68, 70, 85, 90, 93–6, 100–1 See Soviet Union for references to Russia made during Cold War era Saar Territory (Saarland) 55 Salazar, António de Oliveira 87 Sandys, Duncan 33 Santa Maria da Feira European Council (2000) 119 Santer, Jacques 126, 135 Saudargas, Algirdas 111 Saxcoburggotski, Simeon 122 Saxony 45 Scheel, Walter 31, 43 Schimmelfennig, Frank 6, 25, 87 Schmidt, Helmut 44, 54–5 Schröder, Gerhard 85, 120, 126 Schumann, Maurice 60 Second World War. See WWII Sedelmeier, Ulrich 7 Seebohm, Hans-Christoph 30 September 11 attacks 85, 94, 96, 100 Serbia 11, 146 Shalikashvili, John 73, 93 Shea, Jamie 77–8, 89 Shevarnadze, Eduard 66 Sierra Leone 147 Sikorski, Radek 73 Simon, Paul 74 Sjursen, Helen 6 Skålnes 4, 131, 133 Skubiszewski, Krzysztof 66 Slovakia “black trinity” and 11 EU enlargement and 114–5, 118–20, 133–4, 137–8 Freedom House ratings of 88 NATO enlargement and 78, 90, 99 U.S. position on 90 Slovenia “black trinity” and 11 border disputes with Italy 114, 130, 132

Index EU enlargement and 20, 110, 114, 118, 130, 132–3 former Yugoslavia versus 146 Freedom House ratings of 88 NATO enlargement and 80, 90, 98, 100 Smith, Gordon 81 Solana, Javier 79, 98, 143 South Africa 147 Southby, Archibald 56 Southern Caucasus. See Georgia South Korea 147 Soviet Union CEE and 33–4, 35, 36, 41, 45, 48, 51–2, 58, 60, 67, 73, 76, 83, 101, 125–6, 136 China and 42, 45, 47 conservative turn in (1990) 66–7 disintegration of 11, 14, 23, 66, 68, 76, 95, 128, 147–8, 150 France and 45, 60 Germany and 43–7, 55–6 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and 40–2, 45–6, 62 Moscow coup 66–8, 130–2 NATO enlargement and 66–8 parallels between “black trinity” events and actions by 33–4, 38, 40, 43–7, 55, 58–60 Sweden and 117–18 UK and 41–2, 49, 57, 59, 136 U.S. and 46–8, 50–1, 73 Yalta Agreement and 34, 51, 54, 57, 59–60 Spain EU enlargement and 108–9, 111, 117, 129 Mediterranean enlargement and 107, 135 Šrámek, Jan 28 Stalin, Joseph 41, 44–5, 48–51, 53, 60, 71–3, 75–7, 83–4, 93, 131, 141 Stettinius Jr., Edward R. 48 Stewart, Michael 30, 32

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211

Stewart-Smith, Geoffrey 34, 58 Stokes, Richard 57 Strauß, Franz Josef 43 Strauss, Henry 42 Struzik, Adam 78 Sudetenland 28–30 Suez Crisis (1956) 33, 37 Summa, Timo 127 Sweden, benefits of enlargement for 129 EU enlargement and 115–18, 126, 132–3 EU presidency (2001) 119–20 legacies over Baltic States 117–18 TACIS 124 “tactical tunnel” 2, 16, 22–3, 100, 130, 137, 145 Taiwan Straight Crisis (1958) 39 Talbott, Strobe 3, 70, 75, 93 Teheran Conference 48, 57–8, 86 Temelin Nuclear Power Plant 121, 138 Thatcher, Margaret 35, 42, 59, 107 Thessaloniki European Council (2003) 122 Thomas, James Henry 33 Thornton-Kemsley, Colin 57 Tito, Josip Broz 53 Torreblanca, José Ignacio 132 Trestour, Jean 104 Truman, Harry 38 Tudor, Vadim 82 Turkey democratic credentials of 87 EU treatment of 5–6, 104, 131, 137–8 Freedom House ratings of 88 as “other” 6 Tversky, Amos 149 Udovenko, Gennady 98 UK (United Kingdom) Baltic States, position/discourse on 41–2, 49, 136

212

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Index

UK (United Kingdom) – continued “black trinity” and 12, 23, 24, 27, 107–8, 134 Bulgaria, position on 49 Czechoslovakia, position/discourse on 31–5, 107–8 dilution through enlargement 107 enlargement dates 136 German-Soviet cooperation, concerns over 43 guilt/responsibility discourse by 32–5, 42, 56–9, 79, 107–8, 146, on 61–2, 71, 78, 103 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and 41–2 Munich Agreement and 28, 31–6 NATO enlargement and 77–8, 85, 91, 97 perception of historical responsibility 21, 24, 146 Poland, position/discourse on 32–3, 41, 48, 50, 56–7, 59 Romania, position/discourse on 32, 49 Soviet Union, relations with 41–2, 49, 57, 59, 136 support for EU enlargement 107 Yalta and 33–4, 48–9, 56–9 Ukraine “black trinity” and 143, 145–6 EU treatment of 5–6, 104, 124–5, 129–31, 137 European identity of 6 NATO enlargement and 96, 98–9 pursuit of EU membership 124–5 U.S. and 70, 99 UN (United Nations) 48 uncertainty, decision making under 27, 149–50 Urban, Jan 70 U.S. (United States) Baltic States, position/discourse on 46, 48, 52, 70, 84, 92, 98

“black trinity” and 12, 21, 27, 92 Czechoslovakia, position/discourse on 51 German-Soviet cooperation, concerns over 43, 46–7 guilt/responsibility discourse by 40, 47–8, 50–3, 57, 72–6, 81–5, 97, 101, 141, 144, 146, on 52, 61–2, 72, 78–80 Hungary, position/discourse on 72–3, 79–80 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and 46–7 Munich Agreement and 38–40 NATO enlargement and 65, 68, 70–6, 78, 80, 82–5, 90–101 perception of historical responsibility 21, 24, 146 Poland, position/discourse on 48, 50–1, 62, 73–5, 82 Romania, position/discourse on 51, 73–4 Russia and 68, 70, 93–4, 101 Slovakia, position on 90 Soviet-Chinese cooperation, concerns over 47 Soviet Union, position/discourse on 46–8, 50–1, 73 support for NATO membership of Greece 87 Yalta and 48–54 U.S.-Baltic Charter 92, 98 USSR. See Soviet Union Vachudova, Milada 4, 19, 128 van der Pass, Nikolaus 119 Verheugen, Guenter 119 Verhofstadt, Guy 120 Vienna European Council (1998) 118 Vietnam 46 Vietnam War 33, 39–40 V¯lk¸e-Freiberga, Vaira 86 Vinogradov, Sergei 60

Index

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213

Wałe˛sa, Lech 14, 56, 60–2, 67, 71, 104–5, 108, 134 Walker, Jenonne 91 Walker, Patrick Gordon 32 Waltz, Kenneth 3 Warsaw Pact 67, 101 Washington NATO Summit (1999) 84, 134 Washington Treaty (1949) 72, 84 Weizsäcker, Richard von 55–6 Wiegand, Gunnar 128 Wiener, Antje 5, 9 Wissels, Rutger 116, 121 Wörner, Manfred 66, 68 WWII (World War II) 7, 12, 14, 28, 30, 32, 34–5, 37, 39–41, 46–7, 50, 56, 74, 86, 111, 125, 127, 141, 145, 147, 149

discourse on 21, 23, 33–4, 48–60, 73, 78–9, 82, 84, 86, 105, 108, 117 as division of Europe 11, 54, 61, 77, 79, 81, 83, 86, 98, 137, 143 France and 59–60 Germany and 54–6 historical-psychological legacies over 1, 7, 10, 11–12, 62, 79–80, 141, 144–5 as mental shortcut 27, 58–9 parallels with other agreements 49–50, 61 UK and 33–4, 48–9, 56–9 U.S. and 48–54, 83–5 Yeltsin, Boris 74–5, 78, 93–5 Yugoslavia breakup of 110, 146 conflict in (1991–1995) 4, 12, 68, 70, 90, 92, 128, 130–2, 146 during Cold War era 49, 54 enlargement and former 21, 146 See also under individual countries

Yalta Agreement Baltic States and 48 controversy over 48–9

Zhelev, Zheliu 71 Zhirinovsky, Vladimir 74 Zlenko, Anatoly 125

Visegrad countries 20, 67–9, 77, 81, 104, 108–9, 111–13, 115, 129, 131–2, 134, 136–7 See also Czech Republic; Hungary; Poland; Slovakia Vishinsky, Andrei 45