| 摘要 | As I follow the debate over whether NATO should be enlarged, I have the strong sense that the arguments are often purely mechanical, somehow missing the real meaning of the alliance. The process of expansion must be accompanied by something much deeper: a refined definition of the purpose, mission and identity of NATO.
The alliance should urgently remind itself that it is first and foremost an instrument of democracy intended to defend mutually held and created political and spiritual values. It must see itself not as a pact of nations against a more or less obvious enemy, but as a guarantor of Euro-American civilization and thus as a pillar of global security.
Yet the arguments of many participants in the debate over NATO — especially those who are opposed to admitting new members — froze up somewhere in the days of the cold war, at the time of the bipolar world. The subtle, instinctive transfer of the old way of thinking into the present is perhaps even more dangerous than the endurance of the clearly anachronistic idea of two powerful systems at war.
For decades, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact were NATO’s opponents. But the threat was not dangerous because it was Russian. It was dangerous because it was Communist and totalitarian. Still, it would be preposterous to believe that after the fall of Communism and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, over which I presided in Prague, there were no longer threats to Euro-Atlantic values of freedom and democracy.
The danger is not coming from the present Government in Moscow. The real threats today are those such as local conflicts fueled by aggressive nationalism, terrorism and the potential misuse of nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction. As the case of Bosnia has shown, NATO — with American leadership — is the only consolidated force capable of effectively confronting such threats while offering other countries, including Russia, an opportunity to cooperate in defusing them.
But I believe that certain ways of thinking, which involve clinging to the stereotypical image of a NATO-Russia dichotomy, keep us from being able to stand up to such threats. Some people simply want to continue fighting the cold war and consider the Russians their chief enemy; they see the threat of Russia as the reason to enlarge NATO. Others, citing the end of cold war, in effect think along the same lines when they say, “Let’s not enlarge NATO because it might irritate the Russians,” or “Let’s not enlarge NATO because Russia is not a threat anymore.”
All of them have something in common: Their thinking is deeply rooted in the bipolar world of the past, and they grossly underestimate the variety of dangers that exist for democracy, peace and freedom in the Euro-Atlantic region and elsewhere in the world.
If this way of thinking prevails, it will turn the alliance into a hopelessly antiquated club of cold war veterans. Moreover, if NATO itself fails to live up to the new purpose I am describing, it will encourage some countries — perhaps even including some inside the alliance — to return to the kind of unfortunate situation that existed before NATO, when the most powerful nations divided Europe into spheres of influence and negotiated the regimes that would rule.
History has proved that such dealings with sovereign states, as if they were commodities subject to trade, lead to conflicts, as was painfully experienced by Czechoslovakia under the Munich Agreement of 1938. For that reason, it will not work to have NATO’s enlargement decided by some kind of summit meeting of superpowers — selected NATO member states and Russia. This approach also contradicts NATO’s fundamental principle of full equality among members.
This principle has enabled members within the alliance to eliminate centuries-old conflicts, developing and cultivating common values in cooperation, thus producing greater stability.
The opportunity to make decisions about common defense should not be denied a priori to countries that have embraced and advanced Euro-American political and cultural values. Some of the candidates for NATO membership have undergone pain for the sake of these values and have proved willing to protect them, as in the Persian Gulf war and Bosnia. A security vacuum in Central Europe exists today and could arouse unnecessary temptation among nationalists and those we suspect of nostalgia for power blocs and regional dominance.
As I have said many times, if the West does not stabilize the East, the East will destabilize the West. If principles of democracy win in the East, the peace and stability of all Europe will be insured. And not only to Europe. So NATO expansion should be perceived as a continuous process, in which the nations of Central and Eastern Europe mature toward the meaning, values and goals of the enlarged and revived alliance.
Seven years ago, when I spoke before Congress, I said that if the Americans wanted to help the Central Europeans, they should first of all help the Soviet Union. In principle, this remains true today, though the Soviet Union no longer exists. Many of NATO’s tasks could and should be undertaken with Russia as a partner. But such a partnership with Russia must not seek to restrict the sovereign rights of Central European countries or Russia’s neighbors to decide on membership in security organizations. Nor must it restrict the alliance’s decisions to act.
An enlarged NATO should consider Russia not an enemy, but a partner. A new democratic Russia and a revived NATO can actively and quite naturally pursue constructive cooperation in solving concrete problems. After all, they face common threats. Both Russia and NATO, for example, have an interest in preventing the potential misuse of nuclear weapons. And there is always the possibility of new, not yet fully recognized tectonic cracks in the security map of the world.
But Russia is nonetheless a Eurasian superpower, so influential that it is hard to imagine it could become an intrinsic part of NATO without flooding the alliance with the busy agenda of Russian interests.
Perhaps we have not yet progressed enough in redefining the mission and identity of NATO. I believe that expanding the alliance will be a step forward. Not only will it require serious consideration of the purpose and meaning of the alliance, there will be more of us to take part in this reappraisal. |
