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Maastricht Treaty, which entailed a commitment to ‘deepening’ the organisation and
transforming it into what would become the European Union (EU). Among other
measures, the treaty would lead to the establishment of a common currency, the Euro,
in January 1999.
This commitment to deepening came, to no small degree, at the expense of ‘widening.’
In part, this was because deepening raised the bar for accession, but it was also
because deepening used up political capital that might otherwise have been spent on
widening. As the historian John Lewis Gaddis would put it in a 1998 article, the EU’s
‘single-minded push to achieve a single currency among its existing members’ meant
that it was ‘left to NATO to reintegrate and stabilise Europe as a whole, which is
roughly the equivalent of using a monkey wrench to repair a computer’ (Gaddis, 1998,
p. 147). A decade later, design flaws with the Euro would also make Europe’s Great
Recession all the worse and threaten to undo the entire European project.
It was not until mid-1993, however, that the question of NATO enlargement began to be
seriously discussed in the West. The issue was raised by Presidents Vaclav Havel of
the Czech Republic and Arpad Goncz of Hungary, who, on a visit to Washington in April
1993, informed US President Bill Clinton that their countries wished to join NATO as
soon as possible. Other Central European governments, notably Warsaw, followed suit.
Their reasoning was clear. As Lennart Meri, the Estonian president, told one of
Clinton’s senior foreign policy advisors, ‘the only way to keep Russian troops from
reoccupying his country when Yeltsin gave way to a more traditional Russian leader
was for Estonia to be in NATO and protected by the American nuclear umbrella’
(Talbott, 2002, p. 94).
Russian President Boris Yeltsin was preoccupied at the time by an intensifying struggle
with oppositionists in the Russian parliament, and initially he seemed to take the
possibility of NATO enlargement in stride. On a trip to Poland in August, he indicated
that he ‘understood’ Warsaw’s desire to join NATO, and he would make similar
statements on trips to Prague and Bratislava. As it turned out, this would be the only
moment when the Kremlin expressed anything but firm opposition to enlargement.
Yeltsin’s position changed after the violent showdown with the opposition on 21
September 1993. Reportedly under pressure from the Russian military, whose support
had been critical to Yeltsin in his victory over his opponents, Yeltsin wrote to several
Western leaders, including Clinton, that his earlier ‘understanding’ of NATO expansion
was conditional on Russia having a central role in the new European security system.
While he had indicated previously that Russia might be willing to join the Alliance at
Ukraine and Russia: People, Politics, Propaganda and Perspectives