Video-interview

Q: Mr. Donnelly, welcome and thank you for joining us today to talk about your 14 years of service at NATO and your experiences. You were employed at NATO as a Sovietologist 14 years ago. How did you feel when the first Russian officials and officers walked down the corridors of NATO HQ after the end of the Cold War?

Chris Donnelly: Well, it was quite a surreal experience. Not in itself the first official visitor being Mr. Shevardnadze, who was then the Soviet Foreign Minister, but what was interesting was there was a spontaneous move on the part of all the staff, officials, secretaries, cleaners, guards, to fill the hall, and as soon as he walked in, totally unexpected, everyone started to clap and cheer.

And it was a real good example of what people felt about effectively the end of the Cold War. That step of Shevardnadze into the building signalled to them that the tensions of the Cold War were over, we were now going to make friends. And that made perhaps the biggest impact on me.

Secondly, as I was initially responsible for bringing people from the then Soviet Union into the headquarters, military and civilian people. As I brought them in, and I, by that time, had been in NATO for a year and I understood how the organisation worked, but when they came into the headquarters, they were always initially shocked. The first thing you would hear them say under their breath is gosh! I never thought I'd be in the headquarters of the aggressive NATO block. And secondly, they would say, where are all the soldiers? Their idea of NATO headquarters was that this was a big military organisation. And the sight of a lot of fairly innocent looking civilians wondering around was just not the image of NATO they had. They had a real shock. And that, for me, was a shock in itself because I hadn't expected that kind of reaction.

Q: And speaking of the special atmosphere at that time, could you also describe the atmosphere at NATO headquarters at the time of the London Conference when these very important notions of the hand of friendship and of partnership were first introduced?

Chris Donnelly: A lot of this had to do with the personal leadership of Manfred Wörner. And for me, the real telling thing was to see how an individual with real visions and a degree of charisma and a lot of courage could actually shape, not just an organisation, but the whole continent and its attitude.

For example, the whole issue of the relationship with the then Soviet Union and then the countries of Central Europe created a lot of nervousness in people. It's easy with the wisdom of hindsight to say what happened was bound to happen, but that's not true. We have no idea what was going to develop. We had no idea whether there was going to be, not this friction but conflict between the countries of Central Europe and between the Soviet Union. We had no idea whether the Soviet Union was going to survive as an entity, which it did not, from when the Soviet Union disintegrated. We had no idea whether Russia was going to go the same way.

So, throughout this period, everything was uncertain. When I attended the first summit conference, which I sat on in December of 1989 and watched the members of the... the heads of state and government tackle one another on this issue. What is clear... because they were arguing following the collapse of the Berlin Wall about how to manage the gradual reintegration of Germany, they were talking as if they had control over a political situation which, in fact, they had none at all. And this was a process which had been taken in hand by the people, and the politicians in effect just sat back and watched. They were arguing futilely but they didn't know it at the time.

And then, as the process developed, people didn't know what to do. What will happen with a unified Germany? What will happen with NATO? What will happen with the Warsaw Pact? It was clear the Warsaw Pact was going to disintegrate, do we need NATO anymore? And at that same summit, the member nations decided they did need NATO precisely for the reason that, in their eyes, it stopped them fighting one another and that it allowed them a mechanism to solve their own problems internally without that these going into conflict.

But secondly, well, what should we do with Germany? And there was no answer until Manfred Wörner personally stood up and said, Germany will be united and it will be in NATO. And everyone said, yes, of course. But until that moment, there had been no blueprint, no careful plan, no careful consideration. It was a vision, and he said it, and suddenly it became accepted.

And the number of times that that happened in those early years, the number of times that an individual, such as he, produced a visionary idea and inspired people and then led it, is quite amazing. But I often think that history will try and judge these events with too much attention to rational thought, too much attention to discussion. It did happen this way, it had to happen. It could have been totally different. And without that kind of individual spark of genius and charisma, it would have been different.

Q: And speaking of those special moments, that moment when NATO Secretary General Manfred Wörner walked on the Red Square in Moscow, what did you feel then?

Chris Donnelly: My own feelings were that I was very glad to get him there because of the impact this had on him. His first visit to Red Square wasn't... pictures you see of him walking across the Square during the middle of the day on the formal meeting, it was late at night just after he'd arrived, all the formal visits had ended. It was night, there was nothing else to do. He said, right, what should do now? You've got to come to Red Square, you've got to see one of the sights of the world at night, I said. The reward was his reaction because from his point of view, this had been the enemy. He'd been... an air force pilot, he'd been defence minister. Germany split in the Cold War, and here he was, walking on Red Square as the person who had perhaps the most to bring East and West together at that particular point. And it was a very emotional moment.

Q: As Special Advisor of the Secretary General on Central and Eastern Europe, you were aware, of course, of the main challenges these countries would face as they would gain independence in the early '90s. Could you describe the main challenges that these countries faced and how NATO approached them to try and help them with overcoming these challenges?

Chris Donnelly: Well the first thing said, the challenges they faced were far far greater than we thought at the time. We really underestimated how difficult it would be for a country, which had for 50 or so years been shaped by the communist system, to cast off that system.

From a historical point of view, as a historian, I recall to mind the comment during the American Revolution when French officials sent to observe the revolution were reporting back to the French king. And they had been asked, what was this thing called democracy? How do you describe it, what is it? And they found themselves at a loss to describe it. And one of them said, well, it's not so much what it is, it's not so much it's a structure, it's not even so much the law. It's more the habit of heart and mind and that's what we found when we started to work with the countries of Central Europe. It wasn't a question of getting rid of the communist structure, it wasn't a question of getting rid of difficult civil (inaudible)... relationship. It was more a problem of heart and mind, more a problem with changing the mentality of people shaped over a couple of generations. And it gave, for example, in Germany, it gave the Germans almost a terrible shock. So they hadn't appreciated just how different East Germany had developed in that time.

And this remains the most difficult challenge for countries to overcome. We now realise it probably takes two generations to change the habits in heart and minds, not a couple of years as we thought back in 1989.

Q: And quite obviously, these are ongoing challenges both in the... and they will be in the mid-term and in the long-term. But what other pressing issues do you see that these countries have to still overcome?

Chris Donnelly: Speaking from a point of view of security and national security, the overriding one is military reform. These countries are stuck with military systems which in the main do not meet the security challenges of today and tomorrow. They are obsolete.

And although a lot of work has been put in to try and achieve reform, today there truly isn't any former Warsaw Pact or (inaudible) Soviet country which has achieved an adequate degree of military reform, so that it can be satisfied it's got the armed forces, police, security forces that it really needs.

And this is serious because we're at a time today really of a fundamental change in the nature of conflict. And the security threats we face in the future are going to be very different from those in the past. And if we haven't solved this problem, if we haven't ... in... Central European countries, given these countries or helped them achieve efficient security sector forces, army, police and so on, then these countries with their still-not-totally-robust democracy and market economy, they're going to be more vulnerable to these new threats than longer established democracies, and that's worrying.

Q: And during your times at NATO, there must have been good times and less good times, what were some of the most difficult moments that you remember? And at the same time, what were some of the most rewarding ones?

Chris Donnelly: I'll put it rather differently. There's been a lot of dramatic moments which are difficult, bad, or rewarding, depending on your point of view.
Perhaps one of the most dramatic moments was getting Boris Yeltsin and Manfred Wörner together on the telephone during the ministerial meeting immediately after the attempted coup in Moscow.

A melodramatic moment, particularly for someone like myself whose whole professional life has been studying the Soviet Union and Central European countries, was to be sitting in the ministerial meeting, in December 1991, when the then Russian... the then Soviet Ambassador Assenaseyevksy(?) was summoned in the middle of the meeting, out of the meeting, returned half an hour white-faced to say that he asked for the record to be withdrawn because the Soviet Union had just legally ceased to exist. I think that's perhaps the most dramatic moment of all.

Q: Mr. Donnelly, thank you very much.

Chris Donnelly: My pleasure.