How Far Can the EU and NATO Go in Taking in Ukraine and Russia

At a recent Kennan Institute talk, Ira Straus, U.S. Coordinator, Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO, discussed the prospects for integrating Ukraine and Russia into Western political institutions. He argued that NATO and the EU failed to make timely use of the opportunity presented by the collapse of Communist regimes in 1989–1991 to facilitate the integration of the new states, which had all, including Russia, just reversed their global orientation. While the Orange Revolution has recently brought the issue of Ukraine's potential membership in NATO and the EU into the international spotlight, Straus contended that some of the same obstacles that existed in 1991 still exist today. Only core member states can take the initiative to reform these international institutions in order to integrate Ukraine and Russia.

Straus believes that it is dangerous to consider bringing Ukraine into Western institutions without remedial efforts toward Russia as well. He argued that both Russia and Ukraine are moving westward toward integration, but Ukraine is presently moving faster. If Ukraine moves much farther than Russia, however, the schism inside the country will deepen and may create instability because most people in eastern Ukraine wish to retain close ties with Russia. To avoid this, the West would have to bring Russia partway along at the same time, according to Straus.

The states of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, Straus argued, went through a dramatic transformation from 1985 to 1991. Although many of the states, including Russia, are still not liberal democracies, the essential changeover from Communist dictatorships to market-oriented economies and democratically-oriented polities was complete in nearly all of them, outside of Central Asia, by 1992, Straus argued. He contended that Western states needed only small steps to prepare for integrating former Communist states, but have taken few steps to reform NATO, and the relevant steps to reform the EU were undertaken only after the mid-1990s. According to Straus, NATO and the EU could have brought in new member states rapidly after 1991, if they had been re-conceptualized and restructured as primarily political entities, rather than primarily military or economic entities. Accordingly, both organizations needed more efficient decision-making procedures, he argued. The EU has finally done this almost sufficiently with the Amsterdam and Nice treaties and the pending Constitution, but in the case of NATO, members still need to develop procedures that allow for decision-making without de facto veto or crisis, such as an option of weighted vote alongside the traditional method of consensus.

Straus cautioned that even with substantial reform, the ability of NATO and the EU to accept new members is limited. The number of new states that these organizations can accept, he argued, is limited by a series of "necessary imbalances" that any cohesive society has to maintain. An organization of an international integrative character, in order to ensure its own stability, must, he contended, maintain roughly twice as many reliable, socialized, committed, stably democratic, and rich member countries as unreliable, newly joined, skeptical, democratizing, or poor member states or populations, and the ratio must be still higher if decision-making is inefficient. On this basis, the EU—already stretched to the limit from its recent expansion—could not safely add any more large states in this era. However, a reformed NATO could keep this balance while expanding to include all the states in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and has in fact declared all Partnership for Peace countries eligible to apply. Straus emphasized that this broadening of NATO makes sense in terms of Atlanticist thinking since the late 1800s and would not destroy the purpose of NATO. He contended that NATO was not really the institutionalization of the Cold War but the institutionalization of a larger phenomenon: the Atlantic Alliance, which has existed for more than 100 years and has already absorbed its original enemies.