Professor Jürgen Schwarz, w ith his comprehensive description o f those CSCE institutions that have been established, has spared me the task o f presenting any kind o f detailed rundown o f the CSCE process itself and its accomplishments thus far. It permits me to deal moMtequarely with the subject o f general U.S. policy toward CSCE w ithin the la rg ^rc o n te x t o f the emerging “ security architecture-”
pertaining to Europe.
It needs to be stressed, first o f all, that the subject is not easily monitored in the United States. I f you were to scan all the editions of the New York Times over the past four months, fo r example, you might perhaps find three or four articles dealing with CSCE. More generally, anyone in the United States who wants to follow the subject o f security evolution and dialogue in Europe is forced more or less to rely on the European press. To a large extent o f course, this paucity o f coverage in the U.S.
reflects the circumstantial distraction o f dramatic developments in the M iddle East.
One hopes, in any event, that this is the case - and that we are not witnessing a new phase o f reciprocal “ introversion” in the U.S.-European relationship.
The General U.S. Policy Position on C SC E
A ll that notwithstanding, there is a U.S. policy — or call it more modestly a “ policy attitude” — toward CSCE. In broad terms that official atitude can be described as positive, but also somewhat guarded and qualified. In those respects, there are significant accents o f difference in the language with which the subject tends to be addressed by Secretary o f State James Baker and, for example, German Foreign M inister Hans-Dietrich Genscher.
First, CSCE is seen positively from the U.S. policy vantage point as a means to bring the newly emancipated states o f Central and Eastern Europe into the Western commonwealth, as part o f a more general process o f encouraging the forces o f democratization and market economy in that region.
Second, and relatedly, CSCE is seen as an instrumentality for dampening destabi- lization and conflict in the eastern part o f the continent. S till, it is fair to state that the emphasis in the U.S. policy view is on “ dampening” rather than a structural solution to those problems o f destabilization and conflict. I w ill return to this point again below.
T h ird , the CSCE process is seen as a means o f making the Soviet Union feel reassured o f not being excluded from Europe. I have phrased this last sentence carefully, and I believe accurately in describing the general U.S. policy perspective.
It differs from the common European form ulation, expressed with particular fre- quency in Bonn, o f the need to “ draw the Soviet Union into Europe.” It would be impossible, in the space o f this presentation, to give full justice to the broader, and highly flu id , subject o f current U.S. policy perspectives with respect to the proper
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course to be followed vis-a-vis the Gorbachev regime and developments in the Soviet U nion. Clearly there is no unitary view in Washington: the continuing debate is most markedly m irrored in the contrasting tones o f pessimism and moderate optimism regarding the likely success o f the Gorbachev reforms that shines for example, through statements by Defense Secretary Cheney on the one hand and Secretary Baker’s pronouncements on the other. Still, the compromise in Washing- ton is a wait-and-see attitude, as exemplified in President Bush’s own consistently cautious stance w ith respect to the question of assistance to Moscow. Certainly there is no disposition as yet to open the doors o f Westgip institutions wide to the Soviet U nion, be it the International Monetary Fund or tr ? W orld Bank, let alone Western security structures. In the meantime, from the Washington vantage point, the CSCE process offers the appropriate foium for allowing the Soviet Union to feel part o f the security evolution in Europe, but without being in a position to inject itself directly into the transatlantic relationship that continue to be the exclusive preserve of N A T O .
Qualifiers in the U.S. Stance
Those are essentially the three positive expectations, or better hopes, invested by the United States into the CSCE process. There are also some commensurate qualifiers and caveats attached to that process, which emerge consistently in U.S. policy state- ments. Thus, for example. Secretary Baker, addressing the CSCE conference in Copenhagen in June 1990, emphasized that the United States, in considering propo- sals fo r future CSCE development, w ill be guided by three principles:
“ One, proposals should reinforce fundamental democratic and market values.”
Free translation: CSCE has to be a purveyor o f Western values toward the east, rather than a blender o f ideological convergence in Europe (as tends to be advo- cated in European Socialist circles).
“ Two, suggestions for new institutions should complement rather than duplicate roles assigned to existing institutions and fora.” Translation: The CSCE process should not impinge upon, let alone replace, the security functions o f N ATO .
“ Three, proposals should result in a stronger transatlantic process o f dialogue and consultation regarding Europe’s future.” Translation: The U nited States should not be shunted to the sidelines o f the process.
The accents were equally clear in a speech by Under Secretary o f Defense Paul W olfowitz in Prague in A p ril: “ The United States foresees the New European security architecture as an interlocking o f relationships based on such institutions as N A T O , CSCE and the European Community. While N A T O is vital for European security, the CSCE as a complementary organization shares the role o f improving and maintaining stability, and also helps to define goals fo r all o f Europe."
The U.S. policy position thus can be summarized as follows: The North Atlantic Alliance remains the enduring cornerstone o f any security framework in Europe.
The other structural efforts at work in Europe should be regarded as ancillary to the N A T O framework, especially in the curent transitional phase from confrontation in Europe to new and broader security definitions. That applies not only to CSCE, but
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also to more recent discussion in Europe about endowing the European Community with growing security functions. This basic U.S. position was exemplified in the sharp demarche with which the Bush Administration responded in March to an apparent initiative emanating from the Western European U nion (W E U ) to offer the framework o f that organization as as a sort o f “ interim ” security instrument fo r the European Community pending the creation of a European defense community or even a “ European Treaty Organization” (ETO ).
But what about the longer run? Could an (extended) N A T O provide an enduring security for Europe as whole? No categorical answer to this question emerges from U.S pronouncements. Still, the hope clearly is there, as w ill be indicated below.
CSCE and the Shadows o f History
There is first the alternative question: Can the CSCE process aspire to building a viable, overarching security framework for Europe?
Henry Kissinger, then Secretary o f State, was asked in 1973 in an interview by James Reston of the New York Times whether he felt basically optim istic about the general course of global developments at the time. Kissinger responded that, as a policymaker, he was quite “ upbeat,” because statesmen must cling to optimism. As an historian, however, he tended toward pessimism.
Now, knowledge of history need not make us into confirmed pessimists. S till, a sober view o f the past should at least teach us hum ility in our approach to an embracive project such as an “ all-European security structure.”
An historian contemplating the emerging scene in Europe cannot help but be struck by the sound of echoes from an earlier, “ transitional” interlude in the evolu- tion of the continent - namely, the period of the 1920s and 1930s. Those “ echoes”
resonate particularly from Central and Eastern Europe — in the strivings by the newly emancipated states in that regions to reassert their long-suppressed identities.
Indeed, in important aspects of their political lives, those states are emerging from a “ deep freeze” o f half a century marked by German conquest followed by the Soviet-communist yoke. With some exceptions - notably Czechoslovakia and perhaps Hungary - those states, in large part the arbitrary creations o f the Treaty o f Versailles, cannot point to a tradition o f parliamentary democracy. Some fifty years o f essentially “ arrested political development” are at best d ifficu lt to redress. The task of building viable political systems in those liberated states faces more than
“ simply" the formation and education o f new leadership elites: it entails in effect the laying o f new systemic foundations. In the meantime, moreoever, the thawing o f the former “ deep freeze” is releasing as well a welter o f other forces - those o f ethno- nationalist virulence, including some that earned the fascist label in the 1920s and
1930s.
Yesterday Professor Vardys spoke o f the leavening force o f integrative economics as pointing to the promise o f an interdependent continent in which national borders and traditional rivalries would lose their relevance. He was in effect holding up the European Community as an expanded model for the continent as a whole. That may in fact offer the only solution - in the long run. In the short run, however, we
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confront a strange paradox in the “ correlation o f forces” internal to Europe’s evolu- tion.
Europe today presents a picture of the interplay o f two sweeping forces. The force o f integrative macro-economics generated by the European Com m unity is pushing in a west-to-east direction - or, better put, acting as a magnet fo r the impoverished economies o f Central and East European states endeavoring to establish the rudi- ments o f functioning market systems. A t the same tim e, the newly released force of ethno-nationalist reassertion can be said to be moving in essentially an east-to-west direction. Again in the short run, those two forces are not colliding head-on. In fact, there is a measure o f mutual reinforcement between them: by lowering formal national boundaries, the force o f economics is providing greater leeway for eth- nocentric challenges to the existing state system. A nd those reassertions, and rival- ries, are further inflamed by the revolution o f rising economic expectations.
Emerging, in short, are not only reminders o f the tragic scene o f the 1920s and 1930s, but a scenario that is rendered even more volatile by long-pent-up passions fueled by economic disparities. And behind it looms the additional specter o f mas- sive human transmigrations.
Under the best o f expectations, could an “ all-European security structure,” as currently envisaged in the CSCE process, be established - let alone, be established in time — to cope with this upfolding scenario? That question is underlined, again, by history. We may recall that in 1925 a comparable scheme captured the imagina- tion, and hopes, o f Europe. This was the Locarno Pact - or “ Locarno system” - which embraced most of Europe, both west and east, in a web o f mutual and collective security ties and obligations. The “ spirit o f Locarno” lasted, tenuously, for a bare decade before it was shattered entirely by H itle r’s m ilitarization o f the Rhine- land.
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A n Alternative to N A T O ?
History thus hangs heavily over the emerging European scene. It accentuates one determining factor above all others in the evolution o f the past forty-some years:
namely, the stabilizing weight o f American power, presence and influence on the continent. That weight achieved more than simply balancing power, the security of the West European democracies and the eventual trium ph o f their values on a continental scale. Absent the anchorage o f extended American power in the heart o f Europe — and particularly the U.S.-German relationship - arguably there would be no European Community today.
The key question bearing upon Europe’s future thus becomes one not of the comparative intellectual persuasiveness o f this or that “ architectural model,” but rather o f the abiding place and role o f the United States in Europe. Deputy Secret- ary o f State Lawrence Eagleburger has phrased the proposition in eloquent terms:
The 20th Century is the story o f an ongoing civil war in Europe, one that has produced two monumental bloodlettings brought to a satisfactory end - in part — by American m ilitary intervention, and that probably would have produced another had it not been for the stationing o f American forces on the continent under the N A T O aegis. The lesson is
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simple: The U.S. presence is the best insurance against the rivalries inherent to E urope’s nation-state system - rivalries which have the potential o f going m ilitary as long as that nation-state system has not been subsumed once and fo r all into a unitary structure.
Central to this form ulation is the proposition that there can be no plausible lodging for the continued American presence in Europe other than N A TO . As far as specifi- cally CSCE is concerned, the U.S. policy position described earlier holds the im plicit (and justified) assumption that any “ all-European security structure” would almost by definition have the consequence o f consigning the United States to the role o f an best peripheral player on the European political-m ilitary stage. And this is linked with the (equally justified) assumption that the American polity would not for long support such a peripheral or purely “ symbolic” role.
Also im plicit in such American formulations is a longer-range question touched upon earlier: it concerns the prospect o f a “ greater N A T O ” entually expanding to embrace most if not all o f Europe - or call it the prospect o f N A TO gradually
“ transcending itself” from an alliance into an international framework. This notion has been given direct sustenance o f late by distinct overtures for eventual N A T O membership from Prague, Budapest and Warsaw. But that is a much larger subject that goes beyond the purview o f this presentation.
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