William Hill No Place for Russia Excerpt

Praise for

No Place for R U S S I A

“Hill is the perfect person to tell the story of how the promise and hope that accompanied the end of the Cold War have been replaced by war and renewed division in Europe three decades later. As a longtime student of Russia and as a former diplomat directly involved in addressing some of Europe’s most intractable security challenges, Hill brings a wealth of experience and insights into this clearly written, compelling, and timely narrative.”

William H. Hill is professor emeritus

D AV I D K R A M E R , former U.S. assistant secretary of state

of national security strategy at the National War College in Washington and a retired foreign service officer who served in various posts in Europe, and for the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

for democracy, human rights, and labor

“The end of the Cold War brought with it the expectation of a new era of peace and prosperity. What went wrong? A lack of trust and a lingering Cold War mentality in some quarters, compounded by misunderstandings, misperceptions, and missed opportunities, led to progressively worsening relations between Russia and the West. With his lucid and objective analysis, a direct witness and a protagonist of key events during the last quarter of a century helps us to understand.”

L A M B E R T O Z A N N I E R , high commissioner on national minorities,

Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe

“This book constitutes a definitive history of the breakdown of post–Cold War hopes and illusions, and it is so well documented that I believe that it will be an invaluable resource for scholars and policymakers. Probably the most comprehensive, thorough, and balanced analysis of the evolution of Euro-Atlantic-Eurasian security institutions from the last years of the Cold War through the present.”

No Place for R U S S I A

J O H N B E Y R L E , former U.S. ambassador to Russia and Bulgaria

European Security Institutions Since 1989

“William H. Hill’s No Place for Russia is the most comprehensive and lucid account I have read of how the post–Cold War Euro-Atlantic security order developed. Hill’s long experience as a diplomat and his scholarly eye offer new insight into the unsuccessful project to integrate Russia into European security structures, explaining how and why the buoyant optimism of the late 1980s gave way to the rancor and resentment that define attitudes between Moscow and the West today. An indispensable work for understanding why the East/West divide has reemerged, and a source of wisdom on how both sides might begin to repair the damage done.”

Hill

P. T E R R E N C E H O P M A N N , Johns Hopkins University

C O V E R D E S I G N : Guerrilla Design

Woodrow Wilson Center Series

ISBN: 978-0-231-70458-8

C O V E R I M A G E : © Alain Jocard / Getty Images

P R I N T E D I N T H E U.S.A.

C O L U M B I A U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S | N E W Y O R K | C U P. C O L U M B I A . E D U

COLUMBIA

No Place for

RUSSIA European Security Institutions Since 1989

W i l l i a m H. H i l l

T

he optimistic vision of a “Europe whole and free” after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 has given way to disillusionment, bitterness, and renewed hostility between Russia and the West. In No Place for Russia, William H. Hill traces the development of the post–Cold War European security order to explain today’s tensions, showing how attempts to integrate Russia into a unified EuroAtlantic security order were gradually overshadowed by the domination of NATO and the EU—at Russia’s expense.

Hill argues that the redivision of Europe has been largely unintended and not the result of any single decision or action. Instead, the current situation is the cumulative result of many decisions—reasonably made at the time—that gradually produced the current security architecture and led to mutual mistrust. Hill analyzes the United States’ decision to remain in Europe after the Cold War, the emergence of Germany as a major power on the continent, and the transformation of Russia into a nation-state, placing major weight on NATO’s evolution from an alliance dedicated primarily to static collective territorial defense into a security organization with global ambitions and capabilities. Closing with Russia’s annexation of Crimea and war in eastern Ukraine, No Place for Russia argues that the post–Cold War security order in Europe has been irrevocably shattered, to be replaced by a new and as-yet-undefined order.

contents

Preface and Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1. From a Europe Divided to a Europe Whole and Free 13 2. Building the New World Order, 1990–1991 39 3. Building the New Institutions: NATO, the EU, and the OSCE 68 4. NATO and the EU Move East: Extending Stability or New Divisions? 102 5. War Over Kosovo: The Parting of the Ways 138 6. New Millennium, New Threats 170 7. Colors of Revolution, Rivalry, and Discord 202 8. Russia Leaves the West: From Kosovo to Georgia 238 9. The Reset: One More Try 273

vi Contents

10. Things Fall Apart—Again! 312 11. Confrontation in Ukraine: War in Europe Again 341 12. The Future of European Security: The Past as Present 383

Notes 397 Index 495

introduction

The political crisis that began in Ukraine in late 2013, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and war between Russia and Ukraine shattered the political and security order that had prevailed in Europe since the end of the Cold War. The post–Cold War era began in 1989–90 with high hopes, expectations, and aspirations that we were witnessing the so-called end of history, with the emergence of a Europe undivided from Vancouver to Vladivostok.1 The lines that had divided Europe for almost half a century were seemingly erased, and leaders of the states of Europe and North America agreed in Paris in November 1990 on democratic principles and humanitarian values that would henceforth guide their conduct.

In summits at London and Rome, the United States and its Allies adopted a policy of integrating Russia and the nations of the former Soviet Bloc into an undivided Euro-Atlantic community, an approach that guided their relations with Moscow well into the next century. Yet twenty-five years after the overwhelming optimism of the end of the Cold War, Europe once again has been divided between East and West. By mid-2014, more and more observers spoke of a “new Cold War,” with a new dividing line running through Europe between Russia and the West, only twenty-five years later and further to the east. A bitter and hostile Russia has seized territory and gone to war with its closest European neighbor, in the process trampling on some of the most important principles of

2 Introduction

the Helsinki Final Act and explicitly calling into question the basic principles and arrangements of the post–Cold War Euro-Atlantic security order.

How did the widely hailed “end of history” in Europe go sour so quickly, darkening the continent once again with division, mutual recriminations, and war? I trace the diplomatic, political, and institutional developments and decisions by the major European and North American actors from 1989 to 2016 with the aim of understanding how the optimistic peace of 1989–90 was transformed into the new Cold War of 2016. The narrative focuses special attention on the United States, Russia, Germany, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the European Union, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) as the most consistently crucial, but not the only, actors in this process. Although many mistaken, foolish, or self-serving actions can be identified during this period, in my view no single act or policy caused or explains Europe’s current divisions and instability after such an optimistic end to the Cold War. The story I tell in these pages is, instead, one of many decisions and actions that seemed to make great sense at the time, and may have even enjoyed considerable success, but that also had second-order or unintended effects that led to the current predicament.

The most important security issue in Europe for most of the second half of the twentieth century was the threat of war posed by the division of Europe and the armed standoff between the Soviet Bloc and the Atlantic Alliance. Acting very much in the tradition of its Imperial Russian predecessor, in 1945 the USSR extended its control to the center of Europe. The West—the United States and its NATO Allies—spent the next forty years resisting further Soviet territorial advances. The Cold War ended in the late 1980s with an apparent victory for both sides. The Soviet Union under Gorbachev freed its Warsaw Pact satellites and agreed to remove its troops from Central Europe. The United States, NATO, and the USSR reached landmark strategic and conventional arms limitation agreements that dramatically reduced the threat of nuclear war that loomed over Europe and the world for half a century. The United States under George H. W. Bush and the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev embarked upon a new cooperative relationship that quickly produced a united front against Iraq’s seizure of Kuwait and dramatic movement toward Arab-Israeli peace. For the first time in decades, global peace and great power cooperation seemed to be real possibilities.

For the quarter-century following the end of the Cold War, the United States and its European Allies pursued an overarching strategy of attempting to integrate Russia (as the major power and successor state to the Soviet Union) into global and Euro-Atlantic institutions and regimes. During the 1990s, when Russia was ruled by President Boris Yeltsin, this approach seemed to hold out the prospect of eventual success. However, under successive administrations

Introduction 3

of Vladimir Putin and his colleague Dmitry Medvedev, Russia has gradually grown more distant from, hostile to, and resentful of the United States and the EU. With the outbreak of war in Ukraine, Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, and Putin’s bitter denunciation at the September 2014 Valdai meeting of the international order fashioned and dominated by the United States, it appears that both the desire for and the intention of integrating Russia into the global order, and in particular the regional European security order, have vanished from both sides.

This book concentrates on Russia’s place and role in European security institutions since the end of the Cold War, as part of a larger process of transforming and building an interlocking structure, or architecture, of institutions, in particular NATO, the European Union, and the OSCE. The basic argument in this volume is that neither Russia, the major European powers, nor the United States have been successful since 1989 in defining a place for Russia in the European or Euro-Atlantic security architecture or in integrating Russia into the major European security institutions. To make this case, I examine the development of NATO, the EU, and the OSCE from 1989 to the present. This volume also focuses on the major political developments, policies, and actions of key actors in the Euro-Atlantic area since 1989, in particular Germany, the Russian Federation, and the United States. The argument running throughout the historical narrative is that only by understanding the purposes, design, and growth of the European security order over the past two and a half decades can we adequately understand not only how but why it failed to integrate Russia.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and the unprecedented cooperation in the United Nations Security Council against Iraq in late summer and autumn of 1990, the Soviet Union ceased to be an enemy of the United States and its Allies. At the same time, individuals, groups, and nascent political parties in the Russian Federation advocating greater openness, economic freedom, and democratization were among the most important forces pushing the process of reform of the USSR. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the leaders of the Russian state that emerged from the wreckage committed themselves explicitly to building a democratic polity and a market economy.

It is understandable that many observers and leaders in the West could have assumed in early 1992 that after more than four decades of a global nuclear standoff, peace and freedom had at last triumphed.

The end of the Cold War drastically reduced the prospect of great power conflict involving all of Europe, but the emergence of a nonimperial, democratic Russia did not solve all of Europe’s security problems. Following the Cold War, most of the conflicts in Europe were regional and local, and—unfortunately— there were plenty of them. Soviet hegemony and the Warsaw Pact held together and kept quiet areas and nations in Central and Eastern Europe that had in fact

4 Introduction

not fared too well in terms of comity and stability during the interwar years following the Versailles Peace.

Fears concerning the security and stability of the former Warsaw Pact states were certainly not without justification, given their history between the two world wars. Poland, the land of the liberum veto, had a brief unsuccessful flirtation with democracy following World War I before lapsing into Marshal Józef Pilsudski’s authoritarian regime. Hungary and Romania also were both unsuccessful with democracy, installing governments that were sympathetic to if not outright fascist by the end of the 1930s. The terms of the Trianon Settlement, giving Transylvania to Romania, also kept Budapest and Bucharest suspicious of and hostile toward one another. Indeed, this hostility began to reemerge as the Warsaw Pact began to fray in the mid-1980s. Czechoslovakia had territorial difficulties with Germany and especially Hungary, as well as its own democratic deficits. When the Warsaw Pact disappeared, there were legitimate fears and questions as to what might keep these and neighboring Central European states from lapsing once against into rivalries and conflicts with one another.

Indeed, history in Europe refused to end after 1989, and conflict soon returned to the old world, first of all in Yugoslavia. The Union of the South Slavs, first the brainchild of Croat Franciscan friars in Bosnia in the mid–nineteenth century, was the most troubled child of Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the Versailles Peace, providing Europe with very little tranquility during most of the century that followed. By the late 1930s, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia had become a de facto Serb-Croat condominium, in which the main lines of the tripartite fascistnationalist-socialist civil conflict during World War II were already evident. The post–World War II Yugoslav Republic was held together as much by the force of will of one man, Josip Broz, as by any commitment of the country’s peoples to South Slavic unity. As reforms in the Soviet Bloc encouraged change in Yugoslavia during the decade after Tito’s death in 1980, they brought not only democratization but also resurgent nationalisms.

Alas, Yugoslavia was not fated to experience a miracle similar to the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union. Beginning with the secession of Slovenia and Croatia in June 1991, Yugoslavia broke apart with extreme violence. The conflict in Slovenia was short, but war in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina lasted for more than three years. Repression, tensions, and instability increased in Kosovo and Macedonia in the south. The conflict produced massive refugee flows into much of Europe and provoked increasing disagreements among European, North American, and world powers on how to respond. Diplomatic and military responses organized under the leadership of the emerging European Union and the United Nations failed to contain or resolve the conflict. Finally, the United States and NATO led a military intervention that ended hostilities, and the United States brokered a diplomatic settlement at Dayton. The Russian

Introduction 5

Federation, which had participated in the unsuccessful UN response to the conflict, joined with the United States in implementing the terms of the Dayton Agreement in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The former Yugoslavia’s troubles (and the tension and instability it caused for Europe) did not end with the Dayton Agreement and peace in Bosnia and Croatia. By late 1998 Serbian president Slobodan Milošević’s bloody response to an ethnic Albanian insurgency in Kosovo sent streams of refugees into Macedonia and Albania and provoked Western intervention. This time, however, the response came solely from NATO, led by the United States, without UN or Russian participation or approval. Despite Russia’s involvement in brokering a cease-fire and initial involvement in the peacekeeping operation in Kosovo, the 1999 NATO war against Serbia-Montenegro also produced confrontation and ultimately lasting disagreement between Russia and the major Western powers. NATO’s bombing of Belgrade in effect ended a decade of partnership first forged by presidents George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev in Malta in December 1989 and foreign ministers Eduard Shevardnadze and James Baker at the UN Security Council from August to November 1990.

Although the new Russian Federation under President Yeltsin emerged with a remarkable lack of violence in late 1991, the Soviet Union did experience conflict in several places around its periphery during the process of dissolution.

Most notably, from 1988 on Armenia and Azerbaijan contested with increasing violence the ethnic Armenian majority Autonomous Province of NagornoKarabakh in Azerbaijan, descending into outright war from 1991 to 1994. As Georgia began to assert its independence from the USSR, ethnic minorities in South Ossetia and Abkhazia sought to escape Georgian rule, producing conflicts that were ended only after Russian intervention in the early 1990s. As the majority in Moldova asserted its Romanian heritage and links at the end of the 1980s, the left bank Transdniestrian region, with a Slavic majority, sought first to proclaim a separate Soviet republic and later an independent state. A brief military conflict between Moldovan and Transdniestrian forces was halted in July 1992 by intervention of a large remnant of the Soviet Army stationed in the republic and taken over by Moscow after the USSR’s demise. Competing factions in the political elites in Tajikistan began a struggle for power as the USSR collapsed, starting a war the ended only after some seven years of Russian and Iranian efforts. In fighting almost as bloody as that in Moldova, the North Caucasus Republic of Ingushetia attempted to recover territories given to neighboring North Ossetia by Stalin almost fifty years earlier. Other potential conflicts, such as Crimean concerns over its status within an independent Ukraine, were resolved eventually without the resort to force.

The other major conflict arising out of the breakup of the Soviet Union was inside the Russian Federation, in the North Caucasus Republic of Chechnya,

6 Introduction

which first declared independence in 1991. By late 1994, President Yeltsin was persuaded to send the Russian army into Chechnya to suppress the push for independence. Contrary to the expectations of senior Russian defense officials, the war demonstrated the rot and weakness within the Russian army. By 1996 Moscow had effectively lost the war and was forced to accept a humiliating peace. A largely unintended and fateful consequence of the First Chechen War was to reduce the authority of the secular nationalist proponents of independence, who had initially led the push to separate from Russia, and to strengthen Islamist advocates and fighters, both in Chechnya and elsewhere in Russia’s North Caucasus republics.

In most of these conflicts on the territory of the former Soviet Union, the major Western powers had neither the desire nor the political will to intervene.

In arguably the most serious, the face-off between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, the United States proposed in early 1992 that the OSCE organize a peace conference, an initiative that eventually became the so-called Minsk Group, which after twenty-four years still seeks to resolve the conflict.

In South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Transdniestria, the United States and its Allies followed events and participated in some multilateral diplomatic interventions, but basically trusted and even supported Russian interventions on the ground to end the fighting and prevent recurrences. These were places—this was, in fact, a region—where Russian forces were already present and had been present for decades. Moscow had an obvious interest in the restoration of peace and stability in these areas, and clearly presumed a right to a leading, perhaps dominant, role. Given Western elation over the success of democratization in Russia and a commitment to Yeltsin as a reformer, the United States and its Allies did little to question or oppose, and at times even offered to support Moscow’s role and actions in these conflicts in what quickly came to be called its “near abroad.”

Despite the horrific violence in the 1994–1996 war, Western leaders similarly largely gave Yeltsin a pass for his actions in Chechnya, the most notorious instance being perhaps US president Bill Clinton’s comparison of the Russian president’s actions to those of Abraham Lincoln against the southern secessionists in the United States.2 At some point between 1999 and 2014, the popular Western image of Russia as a democratic (or democratizing) partner was transformed into one of authoritarian rival, or even enemy. This change was gradual, nonlinear, and marked by reversals and disconnects. In addition, these popular perceptions of Russia were not and are not universally shared. In mid-2017 there are still plenty of experts and informed citizens who see Russia as a normal if somewhat embattled country that is simply pursuing its own legitimate interests, just as in 1999 there were a decent number of observers who called attention to the contradictions and flaws in Yeltsin’s “democratic” Russia. But even if the picture is painted in

Introduction 7

shades of gray rather than stark blacks and whites, relations between Russia and the major Western partners have moved significantly from the cooperative end of the spectrum toward the adversarial. And even though Russia in 2017 remains freer and more open than it was in Soviet times, it is also a fact that the country is more closed and authoritarian now than it was when Vladimir Putin assumed power at the turn of the century.

There are many factors, domestic and external, behind the apparent failure of the democratic experiment begun in Russia as the Cold War was drawing to a close. The process of authoritarian restoration in Russia since 2000 has been accompanied by an apparent growth in nationalism and a sense of historical grievance demonstrated or expressed with steadily increasing frequency against the Western “victors” in the Cold War for allegedly taking advantage of Russia’s weakness to seek either to destroy the country or at least to deny Moscow its rightful place in the European and global state system. Such sentiments have existed in certain circles of Russia’s intellectual and political elites since the collapse of the USSR.3 However, the growth in their extent and appeal and the rise of authoritarianism in Russia appear to relate to one another in chicken and egg fashion. A growing sense of grievance lends credence and support to populist authoritarianism, and would-be authoritarian demagogues encourage nationalist grievances to enhance their own political power.

The general area in which this narrative of a Russia neglected, excluded, denigrated, and weakened by its Western partners finds a major portion of its alleged facts and supporting materials is in the development of European security institutions and the conduct of Euro-Atlantic security affairs since 1989. Europe during the Cold War was divided between two major alliances.

At the end of the Cold War, one of them—the Warsaw Pact—disappeared, but the other did not. The survival of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization after the end of the conflict for which it was founded, and its subsequent enlargement to include most of the countries of Europe except Russia, including most of Russia’s former satellites and some former Soviet republics, is now advanced by many Russians as prima facie evidence of Western, especially the United States’, intent to attain geopolitical advantage and perhaps even hegemonic domination of Europe.

At the same time that a security organization dominated by the United States gradually came to encompass most of Europe’s territory, another Westerninspired and born organization, the European Union, gradually expanded to manage the political, economic, and social affairs of most of the continent, and it also implicitly and explicitly excluded Russia. The process was gradual, as at various times using its own terms the EU concentrated on getting either “deeper” or “wider.” When Brussels explained that Russia was simply too big to be integrated successfully into the growing “united Europe,” Moscow understood it

8 Introduction

to mean too alien, too eastern, too Soviet, too “Russian.” Economic issues, particularly with respect to energy, increasingly became contentious between Moscow and Brussels, especially after the mass 2004 wave of both EU and NATO expansion. Moscow’s suspicions and resentments were further deepened by the EU’s steadily growing and increasingly close coordination and cooperation with NATO. Russia clearly expected that security affairs in the new, undivided post–Cold War Europe would be handled in some new pan-European forum. The obvious candidate was the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE); as the Cold War drew to a close, the CSCE was already the setting for the negotiation and adoption of groundbreaking agreements such as onsite inspection in confidence- and security-building measures, the Open Skies Treaty, and the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe. Beginning with the November 1990 Charter of Paris, the CSCE participating states began a process of building security and human rights institutions, culminating in the transformation in 1994 of the CSCE into the OSCE, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a formal pan-European regional organization as envisioned under Chapter VIII of the UN Charter.

However, the OSCE never worked as the Russians hoped it would, and as statements by figures such as US Secretary of State James Baker suggested in 1991 that it might, hailing the emerging organization as the harbinger of a Europe whole and free, from Vancouver to Vladivostok.4 Like the UN Security Council, the OSCE worked on the basis of consensus, and when there were disagreements among major powers, the organization was unable to act. The United States and its Allies gradually found it easier to take important security, political, and economic issues to institutions with which they were familiar and comfortable, such as NATO and the EU. Both of these institutions also worked on the basis of a consensus, but given a more restricted and likeminded membership, the absence of objection was easier to obtain. For this and other reasons discussed in the course of this narrative, the OSCE never attained the potential attributed to it by most of its participating states in the early 1990s.

The overriding features in the development of the European security landscape in the two and a half decades since 1989 have been the rapid development and then equally rapid atrophy of the once ambitious OSCE; the growth in size, reach, and power of NATO and the EU; and the effective exclusion of Russia from deliberation on important European security issues by the fact of its exclusion from membership in the latter two institutions. To be sure, both NATO and the EU developed liaison mechanisms with Russia, but—in the words of NATO—these were designed to give Moscow “a voice, not a veto.”

A weakened Kremlin may initially have been willing to accept this “half a loaf,” but a resurgent, wealthier, more powerful, more confident Russia was not.

Introduction 9

Russia’s relations with NATO, the EU, and the United States and its Allies, especially since 2000, have been increasingly dominated by Moscow’s efforts to be accorded greater, more meaningful participation in deciding European political and security affairs and growing complaints at the refusal of its interlocutors to do so.

Since 2000 Russia, under Vladimir Putin, has made several attempts at reaching an understanding and building better, more cooperative relationships with NATO, the EU, and the United States. Putin went out of his way to offer support and assistance first to the United States and then to NATO in the effort to fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Putin offered minimal objections to the second, “big bang” enlargement of NATO and maintained a relatively constructive approach to broad military and political cooperation in the new NATO-Russia Council. Western support for the “color revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, and Western indifference to Russian objections to Kosovo’s march toward independence from Serbia, soured Putin’s relations with his Western partners. Russia’s 2008 war with Georgia brought a real break in these relations, especially with the United States, but the Obama administration’s “reset” policy brought yet another warming. Meanwhile, Russia never flagged in its cooperation with the NATO war effort in Afghanistan and on some key nuclear nonproliferation issues, such as Iran’s nuclear program.

Nonetheless, strains rapidly reappeared in Moscow’s relations with the United States, NATO, and the EU. Russia’s Western partners shunted aside a 2008 proposal from Dmitry Medvedev for a new, comprehensive treaty on the European security architecture following the Russia-Georgia war.

Moscow’s attempts at building a special relationship with Germany and Chancellor Angela Merkel bore little fruit. Meanwhile, Medvedev’s agreement not to oppose a Western-sponsored UN resolution to protect civilian populations in Libya led to NATO intervention and regime change, prompting visible anger from Putin. Vocal Western support for antigovernment and anti-Putin demonstrators in Russia in 2011–12 appeared to be the final straw in convincing Putin that the United States, NATO, and the EU would never accept a truly equal partnership with Russia and were in the end after regime change, including his removal.

Russia has not been simply a blameless victim of Western ambition or deception in this roller coaster ride leading to the current crisis in relations between Russia and the West. From the very beginning of the post–Cold War era, Russian foreign and security policy in Europe contained a considerable element of the classic geopolitical approach to its neighboring states and regions as a Russian sphere of influence. As early as 1991, some of Russia’s central European neighbors speculated about closer association with the North Atlantic Alliance as a hedge against renewed Russian expansionism. Several of the former

10 Introduction

Soviet states that gained their independence with the collapse of the USSR in December 1991 complained repeatedly of difficulties in getting Yeltsin’s Russia (to say nothing of Putin) to treat them as fully independent. Indeed, the Russian term blizhnoe zarubezhe (near abroad) reflects a view that the former Soviet states are somehow different from other sovereign states. Russia’s claim to a special status or droit de regard with respect to its former satellites and Soviet republics has been a constant and growing hindrance to its integration into European institutions during the two and a half decades since 1989.

This volume looks at the process through which this all happened, the path along which the states of Europe and North America moved from the ideal of a Europe undivided from Vancouver to Vladivostok to the stark divisions of the summer of 2014 between Europe and North America on one side and Russia on the other. My argument is that this result was neither inevitable nor intended.

In fact, many of the important decisions on European security issues and institutions during the past twenty-five years were made by some or all of the actors for specific reasons that made very good sense at the time, and indeed may still make sense. Sometimes the results that led in the direction of today’s divisions were the product of a conscious choice between important alternatives. At other times, the consequences of decisions were unforeseen and unintended. And at times, many states and institutions were simply carried along their existing courses by inertia, or followed the path of least resistance. I do not seek either to indict Russia for abandoning democratic ideals or to accuse the United States and its Allies of ignoring vital, legitimate Russian interests (although many in each party may sincerely believe the other has done so).

My aim in this narrative is instead to examine and analyze how the states of Europe and North America got to where they are today, when they began with a wholly different intention and ambition, in the hope of understanding both how the tensions and animosities in the current situation might be alleviated and how the major actors might avoid similar mistakes in the future. Although I trace the development of NATO, the EU, and the OSCE from the late 1980s to the present— their structures, membership, and capabilities, and their relationships and interactions with one another—this book is not meant to be a comprehensive or definitive study or history of any one of them. I have defined as my primary task to set out the major security issues in the Euro-Atlantic area following the end of the Cold War; how the major states of this area chose, individually and collectively, to address these issues; and how the issues, the institutional structures, and the perceptions, intentions, and policies of these states have developed and changed over time.

I define the Euro-Atlantic area as that covered by the membership, or territory, of the OSCE’s participating states. Some might prefer to restrict the term to the territory of NATO member states. Although I acknowledge such

Introduction 11

a preference, to avoid finding and using another term in this book, I include Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union in the Euro-Atlantic area.

This narrative also deals with the domestic affairs and foreign policies of a number of important individual states—especially Russia, the United States, and Germany. But again, it is not meant to be an exhaustive political, diplomatic, or security history of any one of these states or of Europe as a whole. In each of these three major powers, as within all the states of Europe, important political, social, economic, demographic, and other domestic factors shaped their internal development and the policies they adopted in dealing with the outside world. I attempt only to identify and discuss the importance and influence of these key factors and those states that were important for the development of the Euro-Atlantic security order; this is not an exhaustive study of the respective post–Cold War histories of these states. By recounting the history of the major issues in European security since 1989, I hope to explain how a period that began with the optimistic, peaceful end of half a century of division ended in war and renewed division and mutual recriminations.