EAPC
Conference on
Ten Years of
Partnership and
Cooperation
NATO
Headquarters
26 October 2001
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Partnership,
the Foundation of European Security
Speech
by former Prime Minister of Poland,
Jan Krzysztof Bielecki
Ladies and Gentlemen,
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I would like to begin by recalling an event that took
place over 20 years ago, in September 1981, in a sports
hall in Gdansk, during the First Congress of Solidarity.
It was the congress of a political and national opposition
pretending to be a trades union movement. But it was also
the first organised mass movement since 1956, the year
of the Hungarian Revolution, which opposed communism and
which, even more importantly, and unlike the Hungarian
experience, consciously rejected the use of force. Its
future didn't look bright - the communist authorities
were becoming more aggressive, the Soviet Union was more
and more vociferous in its demands for a crack down on
"counterrevolution". This was the gathering
which first heard - and loudly applauded - the "Message
to the Workers of Eastern Europe". While General
Jaruzelski and his staff were busy putting the final touches
to their martial law, in Gdansk workers and intellectuals
declared solidarity, partnership and cooperation with
their friends from Eastern Europe: "We support those
of you who have decided to follow the difficult path of
a struggle for a free union movement. We believe that
very soon your representatives and ours will be able to
meet." You could hardly find a better example of
total isolation from reality. Even Solidarity's own historian
was to write, over a year later, in a samizdat publication,
that the message was "proof of a messianism completely
divorced from realpolitik".
But he was wrong, even if he was far from alone in his
belief. Less than years eight later, an electrician from
Gdansk Dockyard with the now famous moustache and who
was to become president of free Poland, sat at a round
table, negotiating the conditions for the hand-over of
power by the communists. A modern Springtide of Nations
had begun. In this largely peaceful revolution, the spirit
of the 1981 message played an important role. The question
I would like to ask, as I consider the role of partnership
as the foundation of European security in the decade just
ended, is this: has this spirit managed to survive the
years that followed, years which have seen dramatic political,
social and economic changes, local wars and conflicts,
and a fundamental restructuring of the European security
space?
It is no longer possible, especially today, to consider
this issue simply in the spirit of childish delight and
optimism. In those ten years, we experienced too much
together, both good and bad, for cheap optimism to be
an option. As long as the Balkan wars cast a dark shadow
on European progress and the unification of the continent,
as long as the blood shed in the Caucasus continues to
trouble our conscience and as long as we see no end to
the cold war in Nagorno Karabakh (fortunately no longer
a shooting war), we cannot sit back with pleasure to contemplate
the results of the peaceful defeat of totalitarianism.
Now, the events of 11 September have left a permanent
imprint on our lives. In today's situation, all of us,
NATO members and NATO partners, our entire community is
in various degrees involved in the struggle against the
evil which on 11 September manifested itself in such a
horribly destructive and inhuman way.
Our achievements to date are clear, so our questions must
be about today and tomorrow. When, several years ago,
analysing the first difficult but promising phases of
the transformation processes in Central and Eastern Europe,
Timothy Garton Ash wrote of the paradox of transformation
from the "normal abnormality" which was communism
to the "abnormal normality" which is democracy,
the paradox could be seen as witty shorthand for a process
which by and large was unbelievably positive. After decades
of internal constraint and oppression and the destruction
of the rudiments of civil society and the market economy
in Central and Eastern Europe, after decades of cold war
and division, we were now facing "abnormal normality".
Our reality was "abnormal" in the sense that
it challenged us to make sense of the "normality"
which emerged after 1989. We, members of Central and Eastern
European societies, enthusiastically accepted this challenge.
But remembering the decade just past, and the events of
11 September, there is another question we cannot shirk,
one which may also become another challenge: Could this
"abnormal normality" possibly mean something
less positive? Could it represent a threat which we must
face as quickly and as effectively as possible? Could
the transition from "normal abnormality" to
"normality," rather than "abnormal normality,"
now be threatened? And if so, how can we oppose this threat?
The partnership we had in mind in the first months and
years of free Poland was intended as a policy both for
the good times and the bad. At that time, in 1989 and
1990, the bad times were thought of as the persistence
of forces representing the bad past of divided Europe,
however weakened those forces might have been. This meant
that the partnership could not be a minimalist programme,
calling simply for the coordination of interests. It had
to challenge those interests, and redefine them on a new
basis. It had to maximise values, and to embody courage
and deliberation in practical action.
After we came to power - and although we were still constrained
by the terms of our compromise with the communists - we
had to look around actively in our own region, especially
since the old order persisted in our immediate neighbourhood.
We knew that difficult times would lie ahead if we were
left on our own. In short, both heart and mind pointed
in one direction: the closest possible partnership and
cooperation with those forces in the region which were
close to us politically. The history of this cooperation,
in Prague, Kiev, Vilnius, and even Moscow, is still waiting
to be written. Reason dictated gradualism, proceeding
step-by-step in building international political support
among the Western democracies for the newly begun transformation
processes. It should therefore surprise no one that Prime
Minister Mazowiecki's first address contained no references
to joining NATO, or to building a new kind of Euroatlantic
community. That was to come later. However, this approach
was not an expression of cunning or conspiracy, but part
of the process of learning new conditions and forms of
partnership from elites and politicians both in the East
and the West. When as Prime Minister I spoke in 1991 of
the need to extend the NATO umbrella, we were just taking
our first steps along the new path. You could call it
a special kind of on-the job training.
It seems to me that we found it easier to understand the
dynamics of events in our immediate surroundings. We developed
new forms of partnership, such as the successful Polish-Czechoslovak-Hungarian
cooperation, which led first to a downgrading and then
to the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, a few weeks before
the Yanaev putsch in Moscow. In spite of its mixed fortunes,
the tradition of this cooperation, now under the auspices
of the quadripartite Visegrad Group, has survived to this
day. I have no hesitation in saying that the crowning
achievement of our political support for the independence
of Ukraine was its immediate recognition, by my government,
at the first possible moment.
There is no doubt that our greatest challenge was to build
a partnership with our largest neighbours, Germany and
Russia.
If I might invoke the power of the Almighty at this point,
I should like to say that I consider the new opening in
our policy towards Germany, both before and after its
unification, to have been nothing short of a miracle.
Our partnership with this great neighbour was burdened
with an unhappy history to an extent difficult to imagine.
Not much would have been achieved by an ordinary, "minimalist"
partnership. There had to be an element of inspired madness,
of an effort of will and mobilisation of effort around
values, not only to break through the fears and distrust
among our partners in the political negotiations, but
also through the fears and anxieties in our own society.
We were balancing dangerously on a line separating mistrustful
approval from virtual accusations of national treason.
We were fortunate in finding good partners, who were as
quick to learn as we were ourselves. We also gained the
support of others, not only the USA, France and Great
Britain, but also Gorbachev in the Soviet Union. We won,
and we won together with the Germans and together with
Europe.
I feel I need persuade nobody that Russia represents a
chapter of its own in Polish history. But even in the
case of Russia - complicated and difficult, though in
a way that was different from Germany - we were fortunate
to find sensible, rational politicians:, first Gorbachev,
and then, from the autumn of 1991, Yeltsin. The process
of strengthening our partnership with Russia continues
to this day, and President Putin's practical actions engender
hope and form a firm foundation on which to build a new
partnership.
Every country in Central and Western Europe can write
its own history of building new foundations and forms
of partnership. Such histories would find their mirror
image in the new histories of Western European and North
American countries. It must be said that the collapse
of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the new states
are also a part of this process. The peaceful divorce
of the Czechs and the Slovaks gave rise to the hope that,
like most of the former Soviet Union, other places would
also manage to live peacefully through at-times painful
partings. The savage Balkan wars, associated with the
collapse of Yugoslavia, put an end to these hopes. Nationalism
coupled with religious intolerance and fanaticism showed
us a new type of threat, which at the time was still on
a regional scale. Many cherished the illusion that we
were witnessing simply the death throes of a totalitarian
system. But it was not so - you need only to look at Macedonia,
or the Islamic fundamentalist movements rife through Central
Asia, or indeed the populist right radicalism developing
in many Western, Central and Eastern European countries,
however subdued or unformed it may be today.
It seems that it is only now that we are beginning to
see that what we had thought of as isolated phenomena
and processes are in fact part of a unified whole. We
had approached regional and subregional problems as "individual
cases", whose solution might require some political
effort (and financial expenditure) but did not represent
a challenge to Europe, frequently implicitly understood
to mean Western Europe.
The time is fast approaching when we will need to start
thinking of Europe as a single entity, and also as part
of a wider world, an actor on the global stage. If I am
right, it will mean that the scale of the disagreements
and disputes we have engaged in up to now will come to
be seen as highly regional. But there is no need to be
excessively self-critical. It may be that Central and
Eastern Europe's pre-communist experience, and the experience
of the last century, dominated up to 1945 by fascism and
communism, and after 1945 by ideological, political and
economic clashes between communism and democracy, has
caused this part of the world to have a particularly acute
sense of the concepts of partnership, cooperation, community,
equal treatment and the rule of law. Partnership can be
a concession, or the result of a compromise, or a way
of implementing a contract. But it can also be something
more ambitious - a way of life, a method of functioning
in a world divided according to different criteria. In
this second sense, partnership is a concept close to solidarity
(with a small "s") and community, and is a prescription
and antidote to division.
There can be no doubt that the Polish perception of partnership
and its association with European security must be understood
in the second, deeper (or perhaps even organic) sense.
If we look at our past discussions and disputes from this
point of view - for instance those relating to our membership
first of PfP and then of NATO - it will be easy to see
that they related in equal measure to expanding the NATO
umbrella and achieving political and military stabilisation
of the region within the new Europe, and to cancelling
out one of the main divisions created in the last half-century.
It is important to remember that as far as differences
between material well-being, prosperity and such matters
are concerned, these divisions had their roots much further
in the past.
The dispute over PfP and NATO was not exclusively, or
even primarily, about whether or not we were afraid of
Russia. Without wishing either to exaggerate or to avoid
the subject, I think it can be said that it concerned
not simply the well-being and security of the Poles, Czechs
or Hungarians, but the unity of Europe. And more generally
it concerned being able to step beyond the constraints
of the existing framework, fashioned by the clash between
democracy and totalitarianism. The fact that it was a
friendly dispute with partners from the West did not make
it any less hard-fought. It would take a long time to
describe it, but if I were to summarise its essence in
a few words, I would return to the phrase I used before
- on-the-job training. We learned together, people from
both parts of Europe and from beyond the Atlantic, that
partnership must not be perceived as a technical move
which many would interpret as shelving matters, or as
a rejection. On the contrary, if partnership were to have
any meaning, then it would have to become a process of
formulation of aims, assessment and performance criteria,
and decision-making. But to make this happen, we would
need to operate within the same set of basic values, because
uniting what was once divided by force amounts to more
than maintaining correct or even very good relations between
states. Critics of the expansion of NATO could not or
did not want to understand this fundamental fact. But
we must be fair: they did not display their reluctance
too aggressively.
Partnership understood in this way did not need to exclude
anyone a priori. Except, that is, for dictatorships, of
which there were not too many in the Euroatlantic space
in 1989. Naturally, it did not exclude Russia. On the
contrary, it was one of the ways of achieving a new relationship
with Russia, while for Russia it opened a way to a deserved
place in Europe. When I consider our relationship with
this great nation from the perspective of over two years
of our membership of NATO, I see that our contacts have
not deteriorated, but on the contrary have improved. What
was impossible yesterday, or was a taboo subject, can
today be discussed, or even resolved. Can this be the
result of a miraculous visitation? Far from it. The logic
of partnership, the logic of the European Community and
of the actions of NATO and other European organisations
clearly demonstrates that the last decade was not about
a zero sum game. The expansion of NATO as one element
in creating a broader European community should rather
be perceived as a win-win strategy. Although, truth be
told, its expansion and any future further stages are
in reality only a fragment of a broader process in which
the European Union will come to play an increasingly stronger
and more prominent part which will include a political
and military dimension. There is a place in this process
for strategic cooperation between NATO, the European Union
and Russia.
Various sorts of partnership specialists, including our
ambassadors to NATO, the European Union, OECD and Strasbourg,
tend to complain when they get tired that Europe is coming
to resemble an assemblage of interlocking institutions.
This is not entirely without justification, especially
if we think of the efficiency of their operation and in
particular of their cooperation. But at the same time,
the dense network of interrelationships suggests that
the institutionalisation of partnership is an accomplished
fact, and that spending the taxpayer's money on it is
not regarded as profligacy. In the past decade things
have become qualitatively different.
A decade ago, we in Poland saw partnership as the answer
both to the good times and the bad times. In spite of
the conflicts and local wars I spoke of, the past ten
years have by and large been good years. It was only because
of that that we were able to devote our time not only
to matters of strategic importance but also to trifles
(important in themselves, but nevertheless trifles). We
were not alone in this. The famous banana dispute demonstrated
that even the European Union-USA axis could devote time
and effort to a dispute of which, paraphrasing Keynes,
we could say that "though it costs something, it
may be becoming a luxury which we can afford, if we happen
to want it".
This period was brought to an end by the first plane which
struck the World Trade Centre. We don't yet know how events
will develop in the front line of the military conflict
with the terrorists, or in the wider world, beyond the
limits of the hunt for Bin Laden. But we can say that
it is very probable that we are entering a difficult period,
and that the time of partnership for the bad times has
come.
A moment such as this makes us think again about fundamental
principles and values, about the basics. Especially since
we are required to react to phenomena and processes much
more complicated, both conceptually and politically, than
the simple dichotomy of the cold war, of democracy versus
totalitarianism. To defeat the terrorists, destroy their
logistics and financial infrastructure and cripple their
associates is the operational part of the task. This struggle
is now under way, and should involve no hesitation. The
other part of the task is the struggle for our own souls,
so that we don't allow them to be overcome by the desire
for retaliation and revenge. This is not a question of
governments, or at least not principally of governments.
It is a question of ourselves, of our world view and our
view of other people. The traps are obvious. The protection
and expansion of democratic space is the only answer.
It is also the answer to chauvinist and populist sentiments
in Europe itself. The third part of the task is also not
new, and requires us finally to find a practical answer
to the problem not so much of destitution as of the feeling
of hopelessness among hundreds of millions of people.
Perhaps I could relate a brief story of an act of heroism
from the World Trade Center last month to put the term
"partnership" in a different perspective.
Maybe you heard about the six men who got on a lift in
1 World Trade Center the morning of September 11. Their
express elevator was zooming high into the building when,
a minute later, it suddenly stopped and then began to
plunge. Someone punched an emergency stop button. A few
minutes later smoke began to seep into the cabin. One
of the men tried to open the ceiling hatch. Others pried
apart the car doors, propping them open with the long
wooden handle of a window washer's squeegee that belonged
to one of the six men.
Now, I hesitate to mention the name of this window washer,
because then you might understand why I was so drawn to
this story. It was Jan Demczur. Yes, a Polish man!
Mr Demczur and the other men quickly realised that the
lift had stopped at the 50th floor - where this express
lift did not ordinarily stop. There was no door. To escape,
they would have to make one themselves. Mr Demczur, who
had worked in construction in his early days as a Polish
immigrant, saw that the wall was Sheetrock. He knew it
could be cut with a sharp knife. Of course, no one had
a knife. But they did have Mr Demczur's squeegee, which
had a metal edge. For the next 30 minutes, the men took
turns moving the squeegee back and forth to cut a hole
in the wall. Finally, they emerged, into a bathroom. Some
fire-fighters were astonished to see them. They all raced
down the stairs - and made it onto the street just five
minutes before the building collapsed.
Partnership, in this instance, as it so often does, saved
lives. Thinking back on how brave Mr Demczur's actions
might reflect on the challenges that confront Europe,
it is also obvious that partnership requires of us today
a clear, and sometimes grand vision - of being able to
ask bold questions and give bold answers. It is to do
not only with our country, or our region, but with the
world. It is to do with values which Jesus, Mohammed,
Moses and Buddha would never argue about: people's right
to a dignified life, to freedom and free choice. They
are on our side. But we will have to prove it.
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