Enlargement to the East” “

At its summit in Prague on 21 and 22 November, NATO is to propose a new enlargement of its organization to seven of the ten countries that have long been participating in the action plan for membership. The new members are likely to be: Romania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovenia and Slovakia. The Atlantic Alliance will thus grow from 19 to 26 countries. “With a little luck, the NATO that will emerge from the Prague summit will be a completely different organization from that with which we have been hitherto familiar”, comments The Economist of 22 November. To analyze the role and the challenges of the renewed Atlantic Alliance, we interviewed Eamon Rascoe , English historian and ‘politologist’, expert in questions relating to the “geopolitics” of central and eastern Europe. How do you assess this further enlargement of NATO? “It should be recalled that only three years ago NATO opened its doors to Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, the most important states of the former Communist bloc. The new member countries, therefore, will do no more than confirm and integrate a process already pursued with conviction and not – as some people wrongly affirm – for political convenience. Enlarged NATO membership is a very important fact for the process of the wider and general reunification of Europe that has been taking place since the end of the war. Indeed we could ideally qualify the new wave of NATO membership as the ‘second phase of the Marshall Plan’, also because membership of the Atlantic Alliance has always been considered by the countries of the former Warsaw Pact as a kind of voucher for entry into the EU”. Will NATO’s aims and objectives essentially change as a result? “NATO is and will remain above all a reciprocal alliance for the defence of its members in the event of an external armed attack. Having said that, it’s equally clear that the ‘original enemy’ – i.e. the Warsaw Pact – no longer exists. A series of other threats exists, beginning with international terrorism, which NATO must address by contributing, in agreement with member states, to ‘protect’ their citizens. But to act as a deterrent against terrorism, NATO needs to be credible, especially from the viewpoint of military capability. The Prague Summit is aimed among other things at modernizing and increasing the operational efficiency of the military apparatus of its European members, in many cases obsolete and incompatible with the new technological parameters that present-day threats demand. For example, Lord Robertson recently confessed that of the 2800 European combat aircraft, only ten percent are able to fly twenty-four hours a day. By contrast the USA has 1400 fighter planes operational at any moment and able to fly in any atmospheric conditions”. Will the enlarged NATO, in partnership with the enlarged EU, be able effectively to combat the many problems that afflict the countries of eastern Europe? “NATO is not only a military presence. The new European and international geopolitical scenarios make the role of the Atlantic Alliance fundamental in many other sectors. For example, cooperation and investments within NATO also means aid to development for many areas in decline or historically impoverished regions of the countries of eastern Europe. Moreover, being a credible deterrent against terrorism within so huge a geographic area guarantees economic and political stability, progress and social protection: in the last analysis, NATO works for peace, which is the objective of every activity of the Alliance. As regards the phenomenon of illegal immigration, for example, one of the tasks that NATO is called to perform is that of stepping up cooperation between police and military forces to crack down on criminal organizations and curb the flow of clandestine immigrants”.