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EUROPEAN SECURITY DILEMMAS - SLOVENIA AND NATO EXPANSION -
18th International politics and strategy conference of Hanns-Seidel Foundation
Speech by the President of the Republic of Slovenia, Milan Kucan
Munich (Germany), 4 November 1997
"Slovenia, understandably, does not see the main benefits of the expected expansion of a modernised NATO Alliance, as part of the system of Euro-Atlantic connections, in the protection of new countries under the umbrella of NATO’s military resources. It sees them rather in the general increase of mutual respect and cooperation and the concurrent reduction of tensions and threats. In an improvement, then, of the position and security of all countries resulting from increased security and stability across the entire Euro-Atlantic area, which is what NATO wants to achieve through expansion, in an operation synergetic with the complementary processes within the broader European security architecture.
Slovenia therefore sees the benefits above all in the increase of mutual trust and the commitment of all countries to mutual cooperation and joint action in the area of stability, security and defence, and in an unambiguous message to all countries not yet included of the peaceful and non-aggressive nature and intentions of this process," said the President at the seminar of CSU of Bavaria, which he attended at the invitation by the president of CSU and the German federal minister of finance dr. Theo Waigl.
At the invitation of Dr Theo Waigel, President of the Christian Social Union and federal finance minister, the President of the Republic of Slovenia, Milan Kucan, attended a seminar of the Bavarian CSU on current issues of international cooperation in Europe and the world yesterday. This two-day (3 and 4 November 1997) seminar was held under the auspices of the Hanns Seidel Foundation and was dedicated to the memory of former Bavarian minister president and prominent German politician Franz Joseph Strauss. The seminar was attended by some 200 personalities from the fields of politics, economics and science in Europe and elsewhere in the world.
On the second day of the seminar President Kucan, together with NATO General-Secretary Dr Javier Solana, spoke about NATO expansion and the importance of this process for global security and stability. Mr Kucan emphasised the historical significance of the NATO expansion process, which is bringing a final close to the Cold War era in Europe and annulling the decisions made at Yalta, which for half a century divided Europe into two mutually exclusive military, political and ideological blocs. Membership of NATO remains a strategic goal for Slovenia, irrespective of the fact that it was not included in the first round of enlargement. In the context of the global changes taking place in today's world, characterised by multipolarity, competition and cooperation between the development centres of human civilisation and their responsibility for world peace, Slovenia sees NATO expansion as an open-ended process which will gradually take on board all those European countries that want to join and which meet the conditions for membership. NATO represents an opportunity not merely to strengthen their security but also to develop cooperation between European and American partners, and for peaceful and democratic development in Europe and its cooperation with the rest of the world. And it also represents a means by which to prevent European provincialism and to develop European globalism, which requires cooperation and connection among all European countries and their preparation for major global competition on world markets.
This is not the first time that President Kucan had taken part in activities sponsored by the Hanns Seidel Foundation. During his one-day stay in Munich he also held talks with Bavarian minister president Dr Edmund Stoiber and certain other prominent participants at the seminar.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Your Excellencies,
Please allow me first of all to thank you for inviting me to this prestigious conference and giving me the opportunity to offer you my views and the views of my country, Slovenia, on such important and fundamental issues as NATO expansion and its expected influence on the security and stability of Europe. I am very pleased to have this opportunity, perhaps especially so in view of the fact that Slovenia, despite expectations to the contrary, was not among the countries invited to join NATO. May I stress straightaway that despite this unfavourable decision NATO remains Slovenia’s fundamental strategic goal.
Though naturally disappointed, we have been realistic in our view of the decision taken in Madrid on 8 July 1997, by which Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary were invited to join NATO. This was truly a historic decision and its importance cannot be stressed enough. By opening its doors to the East, NATO has begun a new chapter of European history. At the symbolic level it ends the Cold War era and at the same time annuls once and for all the decisions made at Yalta. It crosses the line which for half a century divided our continent into two ideological, political and military blocs, which forced nations whose history made them part of Western Christian civilisation into the ‘European East’. Now these nations of Central and Eastern Europe have the opportunity to reject the position forced on them by the interests of the superpowers during the period of bipolar division. After a long period of living under the enforced logic of divisions they now have the opportunity to start making their own decisions about their destiny, their values and their economic and political ties, and about the defence institutions with which they would like to cooperate. Experience, including the tragedy in the Balkans, proves that European values, especially respect and concern for human rights, democracy, the rule of law and a free market economy, must be defended by those who are committed to them. The NATO Alliance, as demonstrated by this decision, is the most suitable means of ensuring the common security of European values. A system of new European security can only be built on democratic values.
I see NATO expansion as a process, since I believe that the Alliance will gradually extend invitations to other European democracies seeking NATO membership, among them, of course, Slovenia. I do not see NATO simply as an opportunity to meet our own security needs but also as an opportunity to cooperate with our European and American partners in the peaceful and democratic development of our continent and of the world as a whole. I do not view NATO expansion outside the context of the real situation in Europe and the world, a situation of which NATO itself is a part. This reality has its roots in the years that followed the Second World War and the grim era of the Iron Curtain.
The consequences are well known. Europe is still confronted by them today and will continue to be confronted by them in the future. That is why it is essential for us to turn our thoughts to a European future. Now, as we approach the new millennium, we have an opportunity for pan-European reconciliation and the building of a free community of European countries based on social stability, competitive cooperation in a common economic area, human rights, security and the other values of the Euro-American democratic heritage.
Let us remember that never before in human history has the world been so inter-dependent and connected as it is today. The end of the second millennium has brought great changes to our lives and unprecedented development, particularly in the economic, technological and information fields. Neither would it do to overlook the extraordinary innovation brought by Christianity, based on the principle of the equality of all men before the highest ideal, before God. For two thousand years this model has inspired individuals and nations, and many social utopias and movements for social justice. Historical reasons, however, have prevented it from becoming universal and uniting the world. Up until the Second World War our world was a compound of various self-sufficient worlds living independent and closed lives in accordance with their own spiritual, cultural and political traditions. This applies even to Europe, which particularly in recent centuries has undergone an explosion of development and, through the discovery of the New World and through technological progress, become the development generator of modern human civilisation. Our world has been a Eurocentric world, with all the concomitant positive and negative effects of a European presence on other continents. Now the age of Eurocentrism has finally passed. The world has become multipolar. The European political, economic, cultural and spiritual supremacy of the second half of this millennium is over. This is a new challenge for Europe, and a new opportunity. Now is the time to give serious consideration to its future.
Multipolarity is the new method of functioning of an inter-dependent human world that encompasses all the continents. It raises the question of whether mankind will see multipolarity as an opportunity for competitive cooperation among several powerful development centres on the basis of cogent principles of civilisation and thus achieve the optimal synergetic effect of this competition, or allow this competition to degenerate into attempts, including violent attempts, by individual centres to gain hegemony, to dominate others, even by military force. To put it another way, does the future lie in the subordinating of some parts of the world merely in order to benefit others more powerful and more developed, or will mankind and the world be driven to strive for common benefits and a friendly common future? In the past the common good, or bonum communae, was defined at the level of an individual country. Likewise the issue of social stability. Today, peace, security, the common good, social stability and the ecological balance of the world are global, trans-national problems.
In a modern world of such dimensions and contrasts the responsibility of Europe, of European countries, the European political elite and all who believe in a common European home as the one productive possibility, can be seen more clearly. Europe is still made up of several Europes, whether as the consequence of old divisions or the intimation of new ones. This is the truth that confronts the recognition that only a Europe of cooperation will be able to compete successfully and cooperate with the other development centres of the world. Europe would not be capable of such reflection if it did not take into account the lessons of the long history of European conflicts. European history is full of disputes between nations and their states, between exclusive ententes and alliances of varying permanence, and between exclusive ideological blocs. They were the ever-present reason for the politics of violence and war. Let us hope that Europe’s statesmen were right in their oft-repeated claim that the long period of conflict and division really did end in Berlin in 1989. This might indeed be true, but only provided Europe as a whole is able to unite and cooperate as Western Europe did in the years following the Second World War, when it responded with cooperation to the long and bloody period of establishing and upsetting the balance of power and fear, a period of destruction, bloodshed and the tears of millions of Europeans and Americans. In a short period after the Second World War, Western Europe was capable of sufficient political wisdom to leave its past behind despite all the difficulties, great and small, that this involved.
It did this because it knew that cooperation was the only alternative capable of preventing a return to the old policy of the balance of power, to the domination of superpowers and similar ‘solutions’ which in the end always degenerated into wars, and before that in many cases into state and ideological totalitarianism. Today the European alternative is establishing itself on a Europe-wide scale. It is time to make a choice: a return to the traditional European system of the balance of power, arms and fear, or a continuation of the path of continental integration through the gradual but by no means discriminatory incorporation into the European Union and NATO of all countries which have made such incorporation their goal.
Today, Central Europe is in the waiting room. Central Europe is the part of the continent always most affected by divisions, including cultural divisions. The state of Slovenia, which I represent, is part of Central Europe. Since the fall of the Iron Curtain the common values characteristic of this special and unique cultural and spiritual community have experienced a revival in Slovenia. These are grounded in a positive tradition of striving after values such as mutual respect, the recognition of difference, tolerance and dialogue, equality, a similar or equal historical destiny, an overlapping of the cultures of these nations, and the desire to create a productive relationship between the concepts of nation state and citizen state. Central Europe no longer wants to be an intermediate political playing field between Western and Eastern Europe. It wants to be fully integrated into European institutions and NATO. To leave any of the countries of Central Europe outside the European Union and NATO would mean to preserve or renew European divisions. Determining Central Europe in whole or in part as a kind of intermediate area would be intolerable not least because of the great hopes and efforts of these countries when they pressed for structural political changes in 1989 and 1990. The nations of Central Europe, sincere in their expectations, implemented changes which enabled them to throw off the shackles of the totalitarian system - both the system which cruelly bound them during the Second World War and the system which was forged afterwards. Patiently, but persistently, these states are introducing political, economic, security and other reforms in order to become completely compatible with the Western European countries with long democratic traditions. The cultural divide, the ideological division which arose as a consequence of fifty years of living within a different ideological and political tradition, is wider than it seemed when the Berlin Wall was torn down.
It remains an important question whether we will have in the future one Europe or two, or even three. The changes which have taken place in the East affect the whole of Europe. Their depth and extent have surprised not just the East but the West as well. They mean that the West needs to treat the countries of Central and Eastern Europe as partners in its efforts for a common future. These countries understand that they are not only responsible for their own development but for the stability of the continent as well. Just as the NATO member states are trying to maintain their own strategic position and are thus seeking responses to further expansion, so the Central and Eastern European countries which have set themselves the goal of joining NATO are seeking concepts of development which accord with this goal.
Both sides must be guided by the awareness that restructuring is a world phenomenon. The most important reason for global restructuring is the disappearance of the frontiers of local markets. Nations must harmonise their own economies with the new world situation. Understanding that restructuring is a world phenomenon inevitably returns us to the initial question of the necessity of compatibility in Eastern and Central Europe, or rather the need to overcome differences in development between the economies in transition and the economies of the more developed countries, and the urgent need to build a uniform security and defence area for the whole of Europe. Only commitment and partnership can build a bridge between countries, a bridge that leads to an expansion of the core of democratic countries with efficient economies and effective democratic security systems. It is up to NATO to accept this challenge and use it for the strategic placing of Europe in a new security strategy designed to ensure world peace. European provincialism is thus opposed by European globalism.
Slovenia, understandably, does not see the main benefits of the expected expansion of a modernised NATO Alliance, as part of the system of Euro-Atlantic connections, in the protection of new countries under the umbrella of NATO’s military resources. It sees them rather in the general increase of mutual respect and cooperation and the concurrent reduction of tensions and threats. In an improvement, then, of the position and security of all countries resulting from increased security and stability across the entire Euro-Atlantic area, which is what NATO wants to achieve through expansion, in an operation synergetic with the complementary processes within the broader European security architecture. Slovenia therefore sees the benefits above all in the increase of mutual trust and the commitment of all countries to mutual cooperation and joint action in the area of stability, security and defence, and in an unambiguous message to all countries not yet included of the peaceful and non-aggressive nature and intentions of this process.
Such a purpose, and an expansion of NATO based on such principles, thus correspond entirely not just with the views but also with the real interests of the Republic of Slovenia. Slovenia lies at the heart of Europe and is also interested in the primary, general, but immediate benefits of this process. It is itself striving to attain these benefits through its foreign and security policy, by nurturing good relations and cooperation with neighbouring countries, through creative cooperation in all global and European multilateral security organisations and processes - it has just been elected a member of the United Nations Security Council for the next two-year period - through bilateral cooperation on defence and military matters with many European countries, through its candidacy for full NATO membership, and through its strenuous activity within the Partnership for Peace.
Naturally Slovenia would also like to obtain as soon as possible the more powerful security guarantees of joint defence which are reserved for full members of the Alliance, but it wishes to be realistic in its expectations. Since achieving independence and international recognition Slovenia has made incorporation into all European and Euro-Atlantic structures, including NATO membership, and other security/political structures, its constant aim. The results of these efforts have been its full participation in the Partnership for Peace, its membership of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council or Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council, its participation in NATO operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cyprus and Albania, its extensive military cooperation with the armies of member states, and the holding of individual dialogue on its candidacy for full NATO membership in the first round.
Slovenia believed, and still believes, that both sides would gain through its inclusion in the NATO Alliance, and that Europe as whole would also gain. NATO’s interest in this appears to us to be clear and undisputed. By including Slovenia, NATO would, without any political, strategic, economic or other difficulties, and at minimal cost, expand and strengthen its area of stability and security in an important part of Central Europe, establish a better strategic connection between present members and potential future members, and ensure itself a favourable starting point for further rounds of expansion, all of which are goals it set itself in its Study on Expansion. By means of an invitation and the accompanying preparations, and even more so through acceptance, it would support and reinforce the system of political democracy and market economy and the level of protection of individual and collective human rights. It would support the democratic control of the armed forces and guarantee the respecting of democratic standards and procedures in the resolving of disputes between member states and disputes with countries that are not members of the Alliance, all of which are the declared intention of expansion. All of this would correspond entirely with the declared interests and goals of the European Union and Europe as a whole. Moreover, Slovenia’s joining NATO would in no way affect the interests of any other country, including the Russian Federation. On the other hand the expansion of the area of increased stability and security onto its territory would be an unquestionable gain for Slovenia. What NATO aims to achieve through expansion is identical to the wishes and development goals of Slovenia and would represent, if Slovenia were accepted into the Alliance, direct political, economic and strategic benefits. Slovenia would also be formally recognised as an area of stability and peace, its territory would be excluded from the possible use of violent means to resolve international disputes, it would be closer, economically and politically, to the integrated open market, with significantly lower regional risk for investments and with an increased movement of labour, goods and capital. The conditions would be far better for acceptance as a full member of the European Union.
I have already stated that the decision not to invite Slovenia to talks for full membership in the first round has been accepted realistically by my country. There currently exists no direct threat to Slovenia’s independence and territorial integrity. The high level of our actual functional ties and cooperation with NATO, and the assurances of imminent acceptance, are a basis for the assessment that the decision of the NATO summit will not have critical consequences for our security.
Nevertheless, our interests and our desire for NATO membership have not changed in the slightest. Slovenia has no other realistic alternative. It will therefore continue to strive for this goal, continue to cooperate closely with NATO and continue to improve its conditions for acceptance. We sincerely hope that we will be successful in our efforts and that we will be invited for full membership in the next round.
Slovenia has values in common with the NATO members and a similar commitment to democracy, human rights, a free market economy and the belief that international life must be regulated by peaceful methods. We accept all the consequences implied by our sovereign decision to apply for membership, including an integrated military system. Europe is no longer threatened by the same giant strategic opponent that faced it during the Cold War. Democracy and peace in Europe are threatened today by new dangers, by national and local quarrels and by conflicts where it is difficult to distinguish between wars, terrorism and organised crime. NATO will have to take these new facts, these new dangers, into account as it transforms itself, and at the same time maintain its combat readiness. This reflection on the future will benefit from the inclusion as soon as possible of the new candidate countries, so that we can search for the best solutions together with our new allies. Slovenia firmly believes that the second and subsequent rounds of NATO expansion will happen as and when NATO itself is ready, and provided it is able to accept the fact that its greatest problem is that it no longer has a clear enemy in an opposing military and political bloc.
Mr President, I believe that I share the opinion of most of the participants at this conference when I say that the questions of a European security system, which includes NATO, cannot be limited to technical, legal and organisational issues, or questions of the greater or lesser suitability of individual candidate countries. At the heart of the matter lies the choosing of those values and thus the modern European spirit which will permeate all of the mechanisms and institutions of European political, economic and security ties in Europe. This can only be done by a community of equal countries, closely identified with a new European identity which will, in the coming millennium, be equal to the challenges of the competing civilisations of the new globalised world. Slovenia would like to take part in the shaping of this new Europe.
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