Poland, Estonia: Tale of 2 NATO Hopefuls

When the United States and its West European allies begin to redraw the security map of Europe this July in Madrid, they will erase the lines with which the U.S., Britain and the Soviet Union carved up the continent at Yalta more than half a century ago.

But because the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is likely to invite only a select few former Communist countries to join now and leave others for later, critics say Europe’s old dividing lines are merely being replaced by new ones, equally unjust.

Of the 12 nations that want to join, Poland is among those expected to be chosen. Tiny Estonia is representative of those that will probably be told to wait for another time.

Poles are elated at the likelihood of being included among the first new members of such a powerful Western alliance. But, having been consigned to Soviet domination at Yalta, they can understand what Estonians feel at the prospect of being left behind again.

“We can use our own historical example to tell that this is a very sad story, that there are some countries . . . prevented from joining an alliance which is fundamental to their security,” said Polish Foreign Minister Dariusz Rosati.

The likely piecemeal expansion of the world’s mightiest military pact would create new classes of winners and losers at the core of Europe, where national rivalries have provoked centuries of bloodletting.

Although vastly different in military power--Poland’s army of more than 200,000 is among the largest in Central and Eastern Europe, while Estonia’s barely tops 4,000--the two nations share the common aspiration of living under the United States’ security umbrella.

The stories of these neighboring countries, which are apparently about to be dealt divergent destinies, reflect the high stakes of NATO expansion.

Poland’s Connection With the Founding Fathers

Fresh from a visit to the United States, Polish intellectual Bronislaw Geremek drew confidently on his pipe in his book-lined office at Parliament as he stressed the importance to Poland of joining NATO.

“For us, freedom was something so much connected with the Founding Fathers of America . . . [that] the logic of the dream--if a dream can be logical--is to be together with the United States,” said Geremek, a key figure in the Solidarity movement in the 1980s and now chairman of Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee. “It’s very good news that Americans understand this issue.”

These are, indeed, heady times for Poland. Eight years after Solidarity eased the Communists from power, the nation’s economy is growing briskly, its currency, the zloty, is no longer the laughingstock of the region, and its security has never looked stronger.

For the first time in its 1,000-year history, none of Poland’s many immediate neighbors--it has seven now--is an enemy. Historians such as Geremek can only marvel at the turnaround in the country’s ties with Germany, a perennial adversary but now suddenly a genuine friend that has done more than any other country to draw Poland into Europe.

“I’m astonished,” Geremek said. “Even the emotional dimension of the relationship has changed.”

Now Poles are apparently about to win the grand prize: NATO’s Article 5 security guarantees, which would commit the United States, Canada and the richest European nations to defend Poland’s soil in case of trouble.

While Polish leaders are quick to stress to outsiders the importance of NATO as a community of shared values and aspirations, it takes little digging to understand that for the majority of Poles, the real payoff of membership is the shield against a potentially resurgent Russia.

Poland and the three tiny Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia may end up on different sides of an enlarged NATO’s new frontier, but their residents carry in their gut a shared belief that imperial intentions come to Russians with their mothers’ milk.

“We know the value of good relations” with Russia, said Polish Deputy Defense Minister Andrzej Karkoszka. “But we also know what happens when we’re not strong enough to stand up to them.”

Estonians’ Frustrated Hopes for Protection

From his 10th-floor office complex in the Estonian capital, Tallinn, Foreign Minister Toomas Ilves can survey the monuments of his nation’s many foreign invaders: the 13th century fortress built by the conquering Danes, the pencil-thin Gothic church steeples reminiscent of nearly four centuries of Swedish and German rule, the large Russian Orthodox church representing Estonia’s huge eastern neighbor and recent occupier.

Ilves, like almost everyone in Estonia, had hoped for a new guarantee from the West that the independence of his country would never be compromised again. He had hoped to bring Estonia into NATO.

Estonians are proud of their democracy and the economic sacrifices they made in their campaign to join the Atlantic alliance. Theirs was the first former Soviet republic to ditch the ruble. They implemented a flat income tax, balanced the national budget and slashed import tariffs to virtually zero.

Despite this, Estonia is unlikely to be among the countries invited into the alliance at the July summit.

The reason is an open secret: Russia doesn’t want it.

As he mulled that reality, Ilves could barely contain his bitterness. The selection of new members, Ilves said, “is clearly not based on our economic performance, because we’re doing better than some of the top candidates. And it’s not based on liberal democracy, because we’re on a par or better here too. What is it based on? Geopolitics.”

“We’ve become a post hoc, throwaway line: ‘Oh, there’s the Baltic states that we have to worry about too.’ ”

Lennart Meri, Estonia’s avuncular president, uses more diplomatic language to say the same thing. He worries that NATO has developed “a tendency to abandon [its] democratic principles . . . and expand only to areas where there are no problems or questions of stability.”

“I sometimes worry that things are going on behind our backs,” Meri said at his residence outside the capital. “The last time that happened, Estonia lost a quarter of its population.”

Polish Community in U.S. Helps Mold Policy

The inability of Estonia and its Baltic neighbors to win more than token consideration in NATO expansion talks reflects several troubling dimensions of the enlargement process. The likely separate fates of Poland and its Baltic neighbors are due, at least in part, to special considerations in the U.S. and Russia.

The existence of the United States’ large and influential Polish community made Poland’s membership a key reason to enlarge the alliance in the first place.

Conversely, as part of the price for even considering a bigger NATO, Russia has insisted that former Soviet republics--namely, the Baltic states and Ukraine--be left out.

Many Estonians fear that implicit concessions to Moscow will condemn them to a geopolitical limbo--diminished security for countries still outside the alliance.

Consequently, Estonians and other likely first-round losers want an unequivocal statement from the Madrid summit identifying them as future alliance members.

The declaration is seen as vital for Estonians, who are quick to remind visitors how, in January 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson inadvertently omitted South Korea from a list of Asian countries that the United States was prepared to defend against Communist aggression. The Korean War began five months later.

“We’ll need a signal that we’re not in the Russian sphere of influence,” said Mart Laar, a former prime minister.

Poles and other aspiring members say they support the idea of naming the Baltic states as future members. But U.S. and NATO officials view such a specific commitment as unlikely.

Rosati, Poland’s foreign minister, believes he knows why: “The problem is that American public opinion is not yet ready to extend security guarantees to these countries.”

As Karkoszka, Poland’s deputy defense minister, put it: “Politics are always a little bit dirty.”

Costly Preparations for Joining Alliance

For Poland, the challenge is to get ready to join the club--physically, mentally and financially.

Among the strongest and most outward-looking of the former Warsaw Pact members, Poland had the largest army--except for the Soviets’--and was the only Warsaw Pact member to contribute to U.N. peacekeeping missions.

Today, Polish soldiers or military observers are stationed in 11 countries around the world, including the NATO-led stabilization force in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

But like its former Communist allied forces, the Polish military took a beating after the collapse of the Soviet empire. Per capita military spending plunged by two-thirds between 1985 and 1995 as Poland diverted resources to overhauling the economy. At the same time, the armed forces were halved, to 220,000, and aging tanks, aircraft and weaponry--mostly dependent on parts from Russia--fell into disrepair.

Joining the world’s most modern military alliance would cost Poland money--lots of it. But Polish officials insist that much of the spending would occur anyway. “Modernization is a necessity whether we are in or out of NATO,” Karkoszka said.

Defense planners predict that Poland will be able to bear the huge burden only because of its booming economy and the region’s unprecedented political calm. A planned $250-million-a-year increase in military spending for modernization and NATO integration can be financed through economic growth, officials insist.

But the costs of adjusting to NATO membership are not easy to calculate, and they have become a point of contention in both the U.S. Congress and the Polish Parliament. Though Polish defense officials say NATO membership is a bargain, less than a quarter of Poles who responded to one recent survey said membership should be achieved at any cost.

“There are still a lot of problems to face, and it will be impossible to solve them in a positive way if there are no financial resources,” said Maj. Gen. Leon Komornicki, until recently a member of the Polish general staff.

Komornicki also defends Poland’s much-debated mental readiness to come up to the alliance’s standards. When the United States encouraged Poland to purge its general staff of officials considered resistant to NATO’s standard of civilian control over armed forces, he supported it as “a normal procedure that happens in every democratic country.”

Days later, Komornicki himself became one of five top military leaders stripped of their places on the general staff.

Estonia Looks for Help in Other Quarters

For Estonians, finding alternative security arrangements outside NATO in a fast-changing Europe is complicated by geography, a large Russian minority and a stubborn border dispute with Russia. Although the border question seems to have been resolved, Estonians believe Moscow has delayed signing a formal agreement precisely to make Estonia less attractive to NATO.

Without alliance security guarantees, the country’s fallback strategy rests on two objectives: quick entry into the European Union and closer military cooperation with its larger, non-NATO Nordic neighbors, Finland and Sweden.

The United States is also working on a “Baltic Action Plan” to assist Estonia and neighbors Latvia and Lithuania with measures to build confidence in their economic and political systems.

Estonia’s leadership has placed most of its chips on early entry to the 15-country European Union, which is committed to launching its own enlargement process soon. Ten of the EU’s members are bound in a separate defense pact, known as the Western European Union--and are members of NATO as well--so Estonians view EU membership as more than an economic opportunity.

But the EU’s eastern enlargement is, if anything, more complex than NATO’s and is certain to move more slowly.

EU expansion is resisted by members such as Portugal and Spain, which fear that the generous subsidies they receive from the rich EU nations would be diverted to the poorer Central and Eastern European entrants. Other EU members fear the import of cheap farm products from new members.

Estonia’s Nordic strategy also has problems. With a regular army of barely 4,000 and a total armed strength of about 15,000, Estonia wields only modest military power, and officials say they have begun working more closely with Sweden and Finland. Balts, including Estonians, serve in a Nordic brigade in the NATO-led Bosnia peace force.

But security specialists believe too much military cooperation in the region could raise tensions with Moscow and possibly scare off the Scandinavian partners.

Apparently consigned to a life outside NATO, at least through the end of the century and probably much longer, Estonians say they take some comfort from the belief that individual Americans will recognize what has happened to the Baltic states and why.

“In America, people will be resentful about what they will see as a cynical game of geopolitics,” Ilves said. “That’s one of the nice things about Americans. There is a moral streak, a moral conscience.”

Marshall reported from Warsaw and Tallinn and Murphy from Warsaw. Times staff writer Carol J. Williams in Riga, Latvia, and special correspondent Michael Tarm in Tallinn contributed to this report.