PRAGUE, Czech Republic, Nov. 24 (UPI) -- Amid the fizzing champagne and celebrations of their invitation to join the alliance at this week's NATO summit, the seven new members from Central and Eastern Europe are haunted by the nagging fear that they might be becoming children adopted into an almost broken home.
The first sound they heard of the parents crashing the crockery came earlier this year with the row between Europe and the United States over the International Criminal Court. All the members of the European Union signed up for this dramatic spread of the power of international law and retribution. The United States refused, fearing politically motivated charges of war crimes against its own troops and officials.
In self-protection, the United States began collecting protective bilateral agreements with individual countries, and Romania, determined to become one of this week's new NATO members, hastened to sign. (Partly in reward, President George W. Bush chose Romania as one of the main stops on his post-summit Eastern Europe tour.) But Romania is equally determined to join the EU, and the EU made it clear that signing up for the ICC was the equivalent of a loyalty oath.
That row was patched over. Another is brewing. NATO this week agreed to take "effective action" to force Iraq to comply with the United Nations resolutions, but after French resistance stopped short of pledging military action. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder repeated his refusal to take part in a war at the NATO summit this week.
The Vilnius Group of Eastern European countries, by contrast, issued their own statement saying they were "unconditionally" ready to back a U.S.-led military action if the weapons inspections fail. This was an action the Americans had confidently expected, long convinced that the new NATO members with experience of life under Communist oppression would be far more pro-American and far less squeamish about the use of force to defend freedom than the comfortable Western Europeans.
"The new democracies of Europe should redeem the balance of the old in restoring the relationship with the United States," said Timothy Garton-Ash, a British historian of the fall of Communism and occasional adviser to prime minister Tony Blair. "One Eastern European president told me that if he ever had to make a choice between the EU and the United States, he would pick the Americans."
For most of the past decade, it was blithely assumed that joining both the EU and NATO was a double winner for the new democracies, their path to a combined nirvana of EU prosperity and NATO security. But as the tensions over trade and Iraq and global warming and the ICC sharpen the relationship between the U.S. and Europe, there is growing fear that the Eastern Europeans could be facing the strategic equivalent of Sophie's choice.
"It is unfair to us to put us in a position where we have to choose between Europe and America," complains Slovakia's foreign minister Eduard Kukan.
"We should refuse that choice," adds Michael Zantovsky, chairman of the Czech Senate's foreign affairs committee, and a former Ambassador to the U.S. "We must refuse it. We are European to the core, but we know from history that Europe left to its own devices usually leads to arguments between the larger European powers -- and to violence that tends to get visited on us. We need the Americans in Europe, so I hope the choice between thrust upon us will not become intolerable."
One major European country lives constantly with the diplomatic schizophrenia that the EU-U.S. choice imposes. Britain, described during this week's NATO summit as "our closest friend" by President Bush, was initially kept out of Europe in the 1960s by the veto of French President Charles De Gaulle. The recent publication of France's diplomatic documents for the period cites De Gaulle telling the then British prime minister Harold Macmillan "the idea of choosing between Europe and America is not yet ripe in your mind." (See "Why the General said No", International Affairs, October 2002.)
Britain only joined Europe after De Gaulle lost power and has been a member of the EU since 1973. But it has never been fully accepted by France or Germany as a committed European because of London's insistence on maintaining the "special relationship" with Washington. But Britain, as the EU's second largest economy and most powerful military power, has the weight to survive this tension. The small powers of Central and Eastern Europe command far fewer resources -- at least individually.
That is why the statement of the Vilnius Group of 10 of them to back America over Iraq is so important. It suggests that the new NATO members are prepared to band together as a diplomatic unit to refuse the dreadful choice they see looming ahead. In reality, that means banding together to support America within Europe, a stand that could sharpen Washington's tensions with France and Germany even further.
