Part of this is psychological. After so many years of Communist propaganda, we have a neophyte’s enthusiasm for the forbidden fruit of NATO and EU membership. Another part is security. Countries like Poland, Slovakia and Hungary are the new frontline states, bordering Russia, Belarus and Ukraine–countries whose democracy is uncertain at best and whose geostrategic orientation is undecided. Like Germany through the cold war, we want to be both good NATO allies of the United States and loyal members of the European Union. If you might be able to have your cake and eat it too, why not try?
Two groups are trying to spoil the party for us. The first are European nationalists, mostly living within the periferique of Paris, who seek a united Europe to rival the United States–chiefly to leverage their own waning power. Europe cannot be a superpower with non-European troops on its soil, in their view, and the logical extension is the dissolution of NATO and U.S. military withdrawal from Europe.
The nationalists have found allies in the triumphalist wing of American foreign policy. Europeans are so pathetic, goes this view, that it’s not worth even the courtesy of calling them allies. Quarrelsome, militarily weak, demographically in decline, unsound on Israel and anti-American, Europe should be treated as a refueling stop for U.S. aircraft. NATO might as well be folded, if only to teach Europeans about providing for their own security.
We in Central Europe think this would be a disaster. What Europe and the United States need is not a divorce but a renewal of their vows. A more respectful tone would be a start, but they also require a new sense of mission. Stabilizing the post-Soviet sphere and pushing the greater Middle East in the direction of free-market democracy are new shared interests. Both sides have much to offer. America has the world’s best military but, as Iraq is proving, countries need more than might to change the world. Europe’s strategy of creating concentric circles of association with the world’s biggest economy, the EU, can be an invaluable complement to America’s hammer. Fifteen years ago commentators beat themselves into a lather predicting how Eastern Europe, taken out of the Communist freezer, would explode into an orgy of 1930s-style nationalism. It didn’t happen, largely because the promise of membership in NATO and the EU gave those countries powerful incentives to stay on the straight and narrow. When Europe and America act together, we are invincible.
