EU-NATO fates entwined, paths divergent?

By Douglas Hamilton

BRUSSELS (Reuters): Strategic imperatives are pulling the West further eastwards towards Asia, stretching thin the aspirations of today's European Union (EU) for deeper political integration.

A far wider union in the future would advance the cause of continental security, but it would inevitably be a far shallower Europe than many EU members now seek, some analysts say.

With its latest enlargement decision at Helsinki summit, the EU is now set to expand from 15 countries to 27 by 2004 if all 12 candidates prove ready, and later to take in Turkey if its disputes with Greece are settled.

The 19 NATO allies plus their 26 Partnership for Peace (PfP) associates already number 45, reaching "from San Francisco out to the borders of China", as NATO Secretary General Lord George Robertson put it proudly at a ministerial gathering recently.

The end of the Cold War created the need to quickly embrace liberated communist states in a blanket of Western democracy, market capitalism and collective security.

The question of how far east the embrace should reach was set aside in the general anxiety to "open the doors" of NATO and the EU to avert a new, destabilizing division of Europe along the old fault line.

Both organizations have proved irresistibly attractive.

But while PfP's "Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council" is a loosely connected half-way house that may or may not lead to eventual NATO membership -- for Rumania, Georgia or even Uzbekistan -- the criteria for joining the EU are concrete, and all 13 applicants are intent on meeting them.

The defining moment at the Helsinki summit was the offer of EU membership candidate status to Turkey -- accepted after a rather theatrical "last-ditch" mission to Ankara by the EU's high- profile foreign affairs supremo, Javier Solana.

U.S. President Bill Clinton, who used his influence to persuade the reluctant EU to take the step, telephoned Turkish Premier Bulent Ecevit to congratulate him on a "victory" for a loyal ally and valued bulwark on NATO's southeastern flank.

An ebullient Ecevit flew to the summit in triumph to proclaim Turkey's European birthright, extol it as a bridge between Christianity and Islam and, with obvious satisfaction, bury the dictum that "East and West shall never meet".

But he flipped a few EU wigs by predicting that "inevitably, the frontiers of Europe will expand east, to the Caucasus, to Azerbaijan and finally to central Asia and the rest of Asia".

It was a flight of oratory, but it concentrated minds.

Asked if Ukraine and ultimately Russia would be on the EU candidates' list, European Commission President Romano Prodi said he had no idea where the frontiers of Europe should lie. He urged "a great debate" on the question.

The European Union was a true political union, not simply a free trade zone, Prodi said, and this was too great an issue for current governments to decide on in conclave.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the Luxembourg premier accused by Turkey two years ago of slamming the door to an EU "Christian club" that stopped at the borders of Greece, said he had long urged such a debate, but in vain.

Now some analysts believe the chance to limit the EU, if it ever truly existed in the post-Soviet era, has gone.

"At Helsinki, the long-standing debate between 'broadening' and 'deepening' the Union was decisively tilted," wrote columnist Flora Lewis. "The 15 have decided to go ahead and take them in sooner rather than later, even if it's at the cost of the integrated European dream."

Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic became members of NATO in March of this year and are in the first rank of EU candidates along with Slovenia, Estonia and Cyprus that are expected to join by 2004, or thereabouts.

Slovakia, Malta, Lithuania and Latvia will not trail far behind and that will increase pressure to bring Bulgaria and Rumania into the fold as well.

Without radical reform of its cumbersome decision-making processes and institutions, such a bloated EU could be paralyzed, collapsing back to square one -- a single market, albeit with the single euro currency to harden its core.

Some EU members warn that reform must be worked out rapidly by an inter-governmental conference due to begin next year, and in a way that would allow more advanced members to proceed with deeper integration rather than at the speed of the slowest.

"Without this possibility, the project of an ambitious political Union not limited to the economy will be frozen for 20 or 30 years by enlargement, and maybe buried forever," wrote German Christian Democrat leaders Karl Lamers and Wolfgang Schauble in Le Monde.

British historian Norman Stone, however, presents a far more optimistic vision of enlargement, using Turkey as a prime example of how the magnet of membership will hasten the westernization of the mainly Islamic country and solve age-old Aegean disputes.

"Europe has done the right thing," says Stone, calling the Helsinki summit "a hopeful moment in history, when the geographic, cultural, religious and political divides between Europe and Asia may finally begin to be erased".

In similar vein, Turkey's Ecevit, speaking at Helsinki, took pleasure in rebutting the "Clash of Civilizations" thesis of U.S. analyst Samuel Huntington, who argues that a new world order will take shape along civilization's faultlines.

Undeterred, Huntington pressed his case in a New York Times article recently, describing the war in Chechnya as a 200-year- old conflict and "one of many along the borders of the great Islamic bloc stretching from Morocco to Indonesia".

"The age of multi-civilisational empires is over," he wrote, without saying, at least in this brief article, where Slav Orthodox Christian states such as Russia and Ukraine will find their place when a line is drawn between Europe and Asia.