The prospect of NATO's enlargement to include the countries of Central and Eastern Europe has become a dominant issue in the evolution of Russian foreign policy. Indeed, the strong Russian reaction to this prospect has created some nervousness in the West, which was reflected in the atmosphere at NATO's Brussels Summit in January. Some observers believe that they have detected the rebirth of imperial trends in Russian policy towards Central and Eastern Europe.
However, the Russian reaction to NATO's possible eastward expansion must be put into perspective to be properly understood and assessed. It is conditioned by a number of factors, including Russia's recent history and the development of its relations with the West following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Mr. Yeltsin had two years in which to lay the foundations of a national consensus on Russian foreign policy. This was by no means an easy task: Russia had to part with the Cold War heritage of the past, establish a qualitatively new relationship with the nations of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), and find a new international role.
This goal has been partly accomplished. Today, Moscow is on better terms than ever with the West. It has managed to avoid major conflicts with the other former republics of the Soviet Union, in spite of some sharp political disagreements, particularly with Ukraine. Finally, Russia has begun to establish a new network of relations with NATO, the European Union and the GATT.
Nevertheless, having rejected confrontation with the West, which had been at the centre of Soviet policy since the inception of the Cold War, Russia has not managed to find a new international role for itself. Today's Russia appears to be but a pale shadow of its powerful and influential predecessor. Despite having inherited a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, Russia has failed to establish itself as a leading player in the UN, instead merely following the lead of the United States, Great Britain and France.
Moscow seems to have also lost the Asiatic dimension of its former policies. Its relationship with China is stable and non-conflictual, but Beijing and Moscow are strategically as far apart as ever. The question of the Kuril Islands continues to block the development of potentially profitable economic and trade contacts with Japan. The once "special relations" with Vietnam and North Korea are gone, leaving Moscow without any leverage or influence over the policies of these countries. And the roots of the new commercial ties with the ASEAN (Association of South-East Asian Nations) countries, as well as South Korea and Taiwan, are shallow indeed.
The ideological and political split with the regime of Cuba's Fidel Castro - a regime that is itself on the verge of collapse - and the defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, have left Moscow with no allies or strongholds in Latin America. Virtually the same thing has happened in Africa. With Mengistu Haile Mariam's overthrow in Ethiopia, and the MPLA in Angola striving to find a common language with the US since Moscow has become unreliable, its once significant presence on the African continent has become little more than a memory.
Finally, by reorienting its Middle East policy from that of one-sided support for radical Arab regimes and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to an even-handed approach towards the Arabs and Israelis, and by turning its back on Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Moscow has lost almost all of its former influence in this strategically critical area, where it traditionally played an active role.
Presumably, with Russia's rejection of Communist ideology and its political system, few of these developments could have been prevented. A Russia pursuing democracy and partnership with the West no longer needed a foreign policy agenda which had made it the West's main adversary.
It is virtually impossible, however, to assess the full extent of the shock to the Russian psyche produced by this geopolitical avalanche. What made this process - which might seem "normal" and "logical" to an outsider - so painful for the average Russian was its extreme abruptness. With Boris Yeltsin in the Kremlin, more than 70 years of geostrategic heritage was suddenly dropped in favour of a partnership with the West. What gave a further dramatic twist to this swing of the pendulum was that the new Russia's wish to quickly join the family of free and prosperous nations proved to be as utopian as the Bolsheviks' dream of overtaking America and relegating capitalism to the dustbin of history. It was simply not possible for Russia to instantly become part of the Western world, or join the Group of Seven. When this became evident, Russians experienced yet another major disappointment.
The feeling of humiliation due to "losing" the Cold War and suddenly being relegated to the status of poor distant cousin of the wealthy US and Western Europe, was further compounded by the loss of lands that had constituted the former Soviet Union and that millions of Russians had considered as their own. These feelings are especially strong when it comes to the Crimea - which was joined to Ukraine in 1954 by Nikita Khrushchev - and the northern territories of Kazakhstan, which are mainly populated by Russians.
The Russian President and his Foreign Minister, Andrei Kozyrev, had referred to the CIS as a smoothly functioning community of politically independent, but economically and militarily closely associated, states, with transparent borders allowing for the free flow of goods and people - a sort of new Common Market. Reality, however, proved to be quite different.
Russia entered almost immediately into a protracted political collision with Ukraine over the fate of the Soviet nuclear legacy, the future of the Black Sea fleet, and Sebastopol - the main military base in Crimea. The attitude adopted by certain Ukrainian leaders during these political disputes was considered by a number of Russians as intentionally offensive. It was compounded by tensions between Moscow and Kiev at the very top; while Moscow constantly tried to stress its leading role in the CIS and Russia's status as successor to the USSR on the world scene, the Ukrainians saw their only means of asserting their new-found identity internationally was at Moscow's expense.
The political rift between Russia and Ukraine poisoned the atmosphere within the CIS, and made it clear that Yeltsin was unable to control or direct this loose community. Friction over nuclear and economic matters complicated Russia's relations with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan as well. What was even more detrimental for Boris Yeltsin's political image was his inability to defend the rights of Russian-speaking minorities in the former Soviet republics.
In fact, the government's neglect of this very delicate and potentially explosive problem was a major blunder. The 25 million Russians living in the near-abroad suddenly felt abandoned by their motherland. Those living in Moldova and the Baltic states felt especially endangered. Yet, until mid-1993, neither the President, nor the Russian Foreign Minister, paid any attention to this problem. It created a huge "black hole" in Russian foreign policy, a vacuum that was just waiting to be filled by Zhirinovsky's slogans.
Furthermore, the ill-defined approach towards the dispute with Japan over the Kuril Islands gave a pretext to the hardliners in the former Russian parliament as well as in the mass media to accuse the government of intending to sell out Russian territories to foreign powers. Once again Yeltsin and Kozyrev miscalculated the freedom of manoeuvre they had vis-a-vis political and public opinion, failing to define the delicate line between abandoning the legacy of the Cold War and neglecting what were widely considered Russian national interests.
This negative reaction has been caused mainly by a virtual failure of Western financial and economic assistance programmes in Russia. While this aid does help the Yeltsin government to survive, at least financially, it hardly pays off politically or as a public relations exercise. This is because, in spite of numerous calls to work out a new Marshall Plan for Russia and the CIS, no such strategy has been clearly defined. Instead, the West has adopted a number of loosely inter-connected decisions without forming a coherent policy. Moreover, their implementation has too often depended on financial and economic conditions which Russia was unable to fulfil.
The main mistake was to oversell this assistance to the Russians. The economic aid programmes worked out by the G-7, first on George Bush's initiative in late 1991 - the $24 billion package - and then in March/April 1993 upon the initiative of Bill Clinton and Fran ois Mitterrand - the $43 billion Tokyo package - were naturally devised to help Russian reforms. But the Russian masses never felt any real increase in their living standards as a result of this aid, for it was clearly insufficient. Some Russians tended to believe that all the fuss about the foreign economic aid campaign was a huge hoax, or at least that the rich West did not care at all about Russia after it became weak and stopped representing a military threat.
Of course, Western leaders needed those campaigns to sell their policies to their own voters. But whatever public relations success it brought to President Clinton in the United States or to President Mitterrand in France, in Russia it produced a sense of disillusionment and loss of faith in foreign assistance.
It was a hard blow to Yeltsin's foreign policy. His whole strategy of partnership with the West - Kozyrev even spoke sometimes of an "alliance", adding to the confusion - was based on a much publicized assumption that the West would actively assist the new democratic Russia and help it to integrate into the world economy. However, this assumption was ideologically and politically biased. It did not take into account either the actual capabilities of the West to assist Russia, or Russia's capacity to make use of this assistance. It failed to foresee the natural conflict between Russia and the Western countries on international markets concerning armaments, uranium, space technologies, etc. It was also based on a false premise - that the West would immediately embrace Russia as an ally or at least a partner as soon as it rejected the Communist system. That premise ignored the natural apprehension of Western countries vis-a-vis a huge nuclear power that had just abandoned Communism and was therefore still in an unstable and potentially dangerous period of transition.
An additional impulse to Russian nationalist feelings was given by what appeared initially as Moscow's unqualified support for the Western line in the Yugoslav conflict and the sanctions against Serbia, considered Russia's historic ally in the Balkans. Andrei Kozyrev has clearly underestimated the domestic repercussions of such a stance, just as he has underrated the growing resentment of his outspoken pro-Americanism. It appeared to many that Moscow indiscriminately followed the United States and the West on a number ofissues, including sanctions against Serbia and Libya and the cryogenic rocket deal with India, hurting Russia's political and commercial interests, without getting much in return.Both the image of Yeltsin's government and that of its Western partners suffered as a result. Disappointment with its romance with the West resulted in the "unrequited love syndrome". The Communists and the nationalists capitalized on this feeling, presenting themselves as the ones who had warned Russians about such an outcome.
First of all, a formal decision to expand NATO eastward in the near future would cast a fatal blow to Yeltsin's policy conducted in the 1992-1993 period which, in spite of some new and tougher rhetoric primarily concerning the near abroad, has not yet undergone any fundamental changes. It would not only lead to the resignation of Andrei Kozyrev, but push a number of conservatives in the state bureaucracy and the military into top positions.
Secondly, under present circumstances, with a fierce debate raging in Russia on its future foreign policy orientation, and a consensus on the issue only beginning to take shape, such a decision would certainly help isolationist and anti-Western feelings, not only in public opinion, but, what is more dangerous, in decision-making state institutions, right up to Yeltsin's own administration.
Thirdly, it would give credence to the arguments of the hardliners that the West wants to use Russia's weaknesses to take over at least politically and militarily, the countries which used to be in the Soviet sphere of influence, in order to bring NATO as close as possible to Russia's borders.
Finally, the admission of Central and Eastern European states into NATO would create a growing pressure for membership from the Baltic states and, eventually, Ukraine. That would be considered in Moscow as a direct threat to Russia's national security, and would be tremendously profitable for Mr. Zhirinovsky and the whole ultra-nationalist trend.
Thus, the Partnership For Peace concept, establishing a programme of cooperation between NATO and Eastern European countries, Russia included, and leaving the issue of admission open until things in Russia become clearer, best suits both the West's and Russia's interests. In fact, this policy is not contrary to the interests of Central Europe either, for, contrary to what is often asserted, there is no chance in the foreseeable future that Russia could try to exercise pressure on those countries, much less act aggressively against them. In any case, Partnership For Peace would avoid provoking a dangerous reaction against NATO in Russia, while still allowing the Alliance to incorporate those countries into NATO virtually overnight, in the event of a resurgence of a real, not mythical, Russian threat.
The NATO Summit's decision has certainly helped Boris Yeltsin to pursue his policy of partnership with the West. During his meeting with President Clinton in Moscow from 12-15 January, President Yeltsin stressed that the concept of partnership is a result of bothAmerican and Russian efforts. Thus Yeltsin can now argue that Russia's positions on critical international issues are being taken into account.
Yet there are a number of dangers looming over this partnership, and both sides should be extremely careful to avoid making serious mistakes. There is a pronounced trend in the Kremlin to defend with more resolve what it considers Russia's vital national interests. There is nothing wrong with this so long as Moscow acts to protect those interests by peaceful, non-military means. At the same time, it is tempted to use tough talk when dealing with the so-called countries of the near-abroad, such as Ukraine and the Baltic states. It is not by chance that even the dovish and pro-Western Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev resorted to such language right after Clinton's visit, which created some concern in the Baltic states, as well as in the West.
"Demonstrations of strength" of this sort, which are useless and detrimental to Russia's real national interests, can only give credence to views in the West that appeasement of Russia will have particularly negative results. For its part, the West should not over-react and necessarily interpret Russia's foreign policy moves as attempts to restore its former empire, or attribute them to hardline influences. It should be understood that Russia is a world power slowly coming back to its senses. It is largely up to the West to ensure that those senses do not take the form of nostalgia for former imperial policies. The Western countries should acknowledge that Russia has its own national interests - political, commercial and geopolitical, and the right to defend them by legitimate methods. A line should be carefully drawn between such a defence and imperialistic policies should Russia revert to them. By taking account of Moscow's legitimate concerns, the West would help Russia to affirm itself as a stable, active and influential member of the international community, sharing with the West the basic values of political democracy, market economy and a non-aggressive foreign policy.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------- NATO - OTAN Tel.: (32)-2-728.4599 INFORMATION / PRESS FAX : (32)-2-728.5248 NATO CENTRALIZED MEDIA SERVICE (32)-2-728.4579 Chris SCHEURWEGHS E-MAIL: Scheurwe@hq.nato.int Leopold III laan Scheurweghs@shape.nato.int 1110 BRUSSEL, Belgium Moderator E-MAIL NATOSCIENCE: haaaj01@blekul11.bitnet of NATODATA & NATOSCI haaaj01@cc1.kuleuven.ac.be --------------------------------------------------------------------------