Ghosts from the past

French President Jacques Chirac's visit to Moscow heightened the controversy surrounding plans to invite Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to become members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In fact, his claim that he was optimistic about an agreement with Russia sounded like wishful thinking in light of the alacrity and alarm with which Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin warned that "developments in Russia could take an ominous turn". The latter's case is that NATO's eastward thrust would not only weaken President Boris Yeltsin at a time when ill health has already made him vulnerable to intense pressure, but would also be a shot in the arm to communists and nationalists who are spoiling for a fight with the West.

Russia's highly-developed external sensitivities and precarious internal balance cannot be ignored if post-Cold War Europe is to look forward to peaceful reconstruction. If swords are, in fact, to be beaten into ploughshares, the West must also demonstrate that it is no longer a prisoner of those years of barren confrontation. Logically, or at least ideally, NATO should have been wound up when the Warsaw Pact, which provided its military raison d'etre, was liquidated. Instead, NATO is being expanded on a selective basis that cannot but create uneasiness among the countries that are left out. Worse, NATO does not seem prepared to consider positive alternatives.

Inevitably, the question pops up: What is NATO's new purpose? Inevitably, the answer is what it has always been, the containment of Russia. If the reason for expansion -- to underwrite democracy -- was taken at face value, then Russia would be the first candidate for membership in a born-again alliance. If the real reason was to protect neighboring countries that are concerned about Moscow's geopolitical ambitions and military strength, then membership should be offered to the former Soviet republics on Russia's western flank -- Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. As for the argument that it is necessary to extend NATO to fill a security vacuum in Central Europe, the point is that security is already guaranteed by the arms limitations pacts signed between 1097 and 1993, and even more, by the political changes that transformed the old Iron Curtain countries between 1989 and 1991.

The slightest hint of Western aggressiveness will place at risk the network of understandings, assumptions and agreements that underlies this emerging concert of Europe. An activated NATO might squander the future to propitiate the ghosts of the past.

-- The Straits Times, Singapore