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Churchill and NATO Enlargement to the East

English Pages, 18. 9. 1997

Fifty one years ago, one year after the war, at the moment of growing tensions between free societies and the dangerous Soviet communist imperium, this city and this university prepared a perfect opportunity for an unforgettable speech which was given by one of the most prophetic European politicians of that time, by Sir Winston Churchill. As we know now, he used this opportunity for expressing several important ideas which influenced the shape of the world, and especially of Europe, for the whole remaining part of this century.

Now, at the end of the century and looking into the next one, we are at another decisive post-war moment, even if the war in the last fifty years was more or less „only“ a cold one. Nevertheless, after the end of communism the world has changed and we need new visions and - as a consequence of them - new bold initiatives. I stress visions and ideas because it has been proved many times that ideas have consequences. We need another Winston Churchill and another Zürich speech. My today’s modest remarks are definitely without any ambition in this respect. I will try to make just a few comments using my very specific perspective - being prime minister of a post-communist country located in the heart of Europe - for adding something to the ongoing debate.

I would like, first, to present some arguments in favour of the continuation of NATO existence, second, to advocate the enlargement of NATO to the East and finally, to express my deep conviction that this development will help to stabilize Europe and will enhance its coherence and integrity - on condition, of course, that Europe itself will not make wrong moves in other fields.

1. To be able to do it, we have to put the meaning and role of NATO into broader historical and geopolitical perspective. To believe that the collapse of communism and its probable definitive end is a final victory, the „end of history“, as some suggest, would be very costly. I see around us new dangers, new blind alleys, new threats, new conflicts, new attempts to create „brave new worlds“ based on wrong ambitions and false assumptions as in any moment in the past. I hope that we all are aware of those new dangers and that we all know as well that in the globalized world of today geographical distance does not have that much importance. There is no doubt that we need international cooperation and - as Winston Churchill stressed so strongly - that we need transatlantic cooperation, that we need an American presence in Europe. We need it in many fields, but in both the spiritual and security fields more than in any other ones.

The idea of transatlantic cooperation between Europe and North America was born at the end of World War II. The tragic experience of our fathers and grandfathers with fascist dictatorships, with communism and with the devastating world war as well as their resolution not to go through the same development again led to many post-war activities and to the formation of several important international organizations, including NATO. The Czechs (and Slovaks) were among the founding fathers of U.N., IMF, World Bank and GATT but the iron curtain did not allow us to be present at the birth of NATO. And we regretted it deeply and we paid for it costly.

The transatlantic cooperation was - for the past decades - kept together by an imminent communist threat and many of us, consciously or subconsciously, accepted the notion that NATO is an anticommunist block, nothing else. With the end of communism the visible and tangible enemy disappeared and some of us seemed to be at a loss what to fight for. I do not have such a problem.

For me (and I am convinced that not only for me), the transatlantic community was never connected solely with one past enemy. It had deeper roots and a stronger basis. If we look at the Churchill’s speech today, we can see that he stressed Christian faith, Christian ethics, that he stressed culture, arts, philosophy and science. For me and for him, the transatlantic community was and is based on ideas, not on enemies. It is connected with the European and American tradition of freedom, democracy and market economy. This tradition is based on our common cultural and civilization heritage which - I suppose - we are obliged to keep alive for future generations on both sides of the Atlantic ocean. John O’Sullivan, editor of National Review and founder of New Atlantic Initiative, put it recently in a similar way: „The alliance is the military expression of Western civilization - in fact the only institution that encompasses all the West“. I strongly believe that exactly for that reason we all need NATO now, and we will need it in the future as well.

2. What about the enlargement of NATO? There is no doubt that the three invited countries, and, undoubtedly, some other European countries, belong to the same community of nations. I know that the invitation issued for three Central European countries to join NATO, and announced at the recent Madrid summit, created new questions, if not tensions. Both inside and outside NATO, both among non-invited countries and among the opponents of enlargement. It is not my aspiration to discuss the criteria used for the selection of the three chosen countries because I am supposed to be biased in this respect. Nevertheless, I would like to say that I would always accept that the decision of one or another prestigious Zürich tennis club to offer me a membership is, and should be, its own decision, not mine. However, taking into account the degree of systemic transformation and the rapid progress in establishing free society, based on a pluralistic parliamentary democracy and on a market economy, achieved in the three invited countries, I would dare to argue that the choice was rational and „just“.
It is evident that the enlargement of NATO has non-zero costs for all participants and that there must not be any free riding. I can assure you that we are aware of it and are prepared to bear the necessary costs. I believe that the NATO members are ready to cover their part of the costs of enlargement as well, but it seems to me that this is something which must be explicitly stated. The ratification process will give us a very important information in this respect.

3. Speaking about Europe, we have to discuss the question how NATO enlargement is connected with the current European institutional restructuring, with the strong European unionistic ambitions which are characteristic for the nineties. I believe, and now I quote from the Churchill’s speech: „... hundreds of millions of people want to be happy and free, prosperous and safe“. We all want such Europe and we consider the European integration to be one of the instruments how to achieve these goals.

The distinction between instruments and goals is for me always - and in the rather fuzzy debate about Europe even more - absolutely crucial. It is frustrating to see so often this difference to be blurred. European integration (and its potential variants) should not become a goal itself or a substitute for other goals. I am, however, afraid that this is the way how it has been approached in many European debates in the last decade.

It seems to me quite obvious that the form of European integration should depend on the goals themselves, on their ranking, on the relative weights given to them as well as on the existing trade-offs among them.
Is there an additivity, or perhaps an incompatibility, or a trade-off between freedom and peace, between peace and prosperity or between freedom and prosperity? The answer is not self-evident. I have the feeling that the current European unification ambitions (including the European Monetary Union) stem from the assumption that some of the goals are superior to some other goals. To put it clearly, the insufficiently structured and specified goal called peace (or security or safety or the reduction of the risk of another intra-European war among individual nation states) has for some of us such a special position that it almost blocks any serious debate about other goals or about existing trade-offs. It has been sometimes even used as a „dummy“ for some hidden goals which is - I am convinced - something we have to avoid.

I guess Winston Churchill would put it in a similar way. He would, probably, address the issues straight on. He would look back and remind us of the World War II experience with the hope that we can learn something. His phrase in his Zürich speech: „Is it the only lesson of history that mankind is unteachable?“ is in this respect very explicit. He would try to define priorities and the sequencing or ordering of existing goals.

For me, and in this respect, I am undoubtedly biased by my personal experience with the life in a communist regime, absolute priority should be placed upon freedom, I mean upon the specific relationship between an individual and the state. My oversensitivity in seeing or sensing various open or hidden forms of the suppression of freedom is notorious. It tells me that we should do our best to stop the continuously repeating tendencies towards excessive regulation of human activities, towards unproductive government intervention at the micro-level, towards various forms of quasi-generous paternalism, of dangerous elitism, of ambitious social engineering. We have to be on guard and that is the main reason why the extremely fruitful transatlantic cooperation should continue and why the role of NATO in Europe and for Europe will be in the future as important as in the past.

This is the core of my message which I wanted to share with you today. To repeat, I believe that NATO is here to stay, that NATO enlargement will reinforce NATO itself, and that the stability in Europe will be strengthened as well. The future, therefore, has a good chance.

Václav Klaus, Speech given at the Churchill Symposium 1997, Zürich, Switzerland, 18 September 1997.