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Central Europe Has Joined NATO: The Continuing Search for a More Perfect Habsburg Empire

1999; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 19; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sais.1999.0040

1946-4444

Igor Lukeš,

Post-Soviet Geopolitical Dynamics

Central Europe Has Joined NATO: The Continuing Search for a More Perfect Habsburg Empire Igor Lukes (bio) Central Europe has joined NATO. The expansion of the alliance into Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary will repair a structural flaw in the overall European security system: a weak Central Europe. Increased stability in the area between Germany and Russia will benefit everyone. Previously, the Western powers have “resolved” their security concerns by ignoring the region, as at Locarno in 1925, or by allowing it to fall to a dictator, as at Munich (1938) and Yalta (1945). With the enlargement, NATO has chosen the right solution for itself and for the new members. I support the expansion of NATO for two reasons. First, it has an important security dimension. In 1866, after his victory over the Habsburg empire at Königgrätz in Bohemia, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck remarked that “whoever rules Bohemia, rules Europe.” 1 A review of the events that followed the Austro-Prussian war leaves no reason to doubt the accuracy of his observation. The control of Europe’s center has been contested vigorously on many occasions since it provides an immediate strategic advantage. Hitler’s occupation of Bohemia in 1939 compelled the British and French to stipulate that a German attack on Poland would amount to war. It was from Central Europe that Hitler began his march to the English Channel, the Balkans, Africa, and the outskirts of Moscow. It was in Bohemia that the last German units offered organized resistance to the Allies in May 1945, even after Berlin had fallen. It was the imposition of a Stalinist government in Bohemia (Czechoslovakia in February 1948) that provided the impetus for establishing NATO in April 1949; and [End Page 47] Leonid Brezhnev told Alexander Dubcek in August 1968 that the Soviet Union would not surrender control of Bohemia and Central Europe even if it took a worldwide war. 2 The present tensions between the alliance and Russia—caused not by NATO expansion, but by Washington’s effort to find a solution for the crisis in Kosovo—have made it clear that Central Europe must not be left dangling in the gray zone between East and West. The Kosovo crisis has shown that the enlargement benefits the Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians as much as it does the alliance. A second reason for expansion is its pedagogical component. NATO will help Central Europeans to cleanse themselves of the remains of communism, much as it once helped Italy, West Germany, Spain, and Portugal to exorcise their historical demons. At the same time, the alliance will impress upon Central Europe a modus operandi that will favor the development of indigenous democratic institutions. The Security Dimension “The empire will crumble,” insisted the exiled Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski in the spring of 1983, while Poland was under the heel of the communist military junta. He predicted that if the Soviet-style regimes in Central Europe were deprived of Red Army tanks and KGB supervisors, they would rapidly disintegrate. 3 We have since observed the rebirth of Solidarnosc, the breaching of the Iron Curtain on the Austro-Hungarian border, the “resurrection” of Imre Nagy and Alexander Dubcek, the “burial” of Janos Kadar and Gustav Husak, the march of Vaclav Havel from jail to the Castle, and the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Yet in 1983, Kolakowski’s prediction contradicted the view held sacred by many in the West. Policymakers and influential outsiders tended to believe that the regimes in Central Europe, however they had come to power initially, enjoyed legitimacy in the eyes of their subjects. To express faith in the possibility of a collapse of the Soviet system in Central Europe meant risking condemnation for holding a dangerously simplified, black-and-white view of the world. Kolakowski was right, of course, and after a mere seven years the perceptive analyst Zbigniew Brzezinski, who himself had contributed greatly to the peaceful implosion of communism as President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, could survey the wreckage of the Soviet system. However, while the Red Army was packing up for its historic retreat, Brzezinski was right to worry [End Page 48] whether the region’s destination...