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<text> <title> The Euro-Atlantic Architecture: From West to East </title> <article> <hdr> Foreign Policy Bulletin, July/August 1991 The Euro-Atlantic Architecture: From West to East </hdr> <body> Secretary of State James A. Baker, III Speech to the Aspen Institute, Berlin, June 18, 1991 I am pleased to be back in Berlin. When I visited you in 1989, the Wall had just become a gateway. When I returned in 1990, I took part in the negotiations to end the division of this city, this nation, this continent. And now, in 1991, I have the honor of meeting in the capital of a united Germany. Yet as great as this progress has been, there is something else of lasting vitality we have created here. Berlin is much more than a city to Americans. Berlin is the birthplace of a special kinship between Germans and Americans. It is here that Germans and Americans, once adversaries, stood together. This is the place where we suffered, shared, and strove for freedom. We started the transatlantic community here. And it is from here that we must extend it. When I spoke in Berlin in December 1989, I outlined our ideas about the architecture of a New Europe and a New Atlanticism. We have made notable advances in this architecture for a post-Cold War era. Yet our vision must look beyond. We must begin to extend the transatlantic community to Central and Eastern Europe and to the Soviet Union. These are the still incomplete pieces of our architecture. The revolutions of freedom in Central and Eastern Europe need our ongoing support to become lasting democracies. Perestroika needs our encouragement to move further toward a free society and free markets. Our objective is both a Europe whole and free and a Euro-Atlantic community that extends east from Vancouver to Vladivostok. President Bush spoke in Prague about a "new commonwealth of freedom...rest[ing] on shared principles...that constitute our common values." We are starting to build this larger Euro-Atlantic community here, in the eastern Laender of Germany. America's commitment to the unification of Germany did not end with the ratification of the "Two-Plus-Four" treaty. That's why I wanted to listen to some of the people of the East myself today, to see their home with my own eyes. That's why we have launched a comprehensive program to extend America's hand to all Germans. I have no doubt that before too long this part of Germany will be one of the foremost engines in Europe. On that day, I believe Americans and Germans will be standing on the shop floor together. But we cannot rest with the integration of all of Germany. The Atlantic Community: A Community of Values To me, the transatlantic relationship stands for certain Enlightenment ideals of universal applicability. These values are based upon the concept of individual political rights and economic liberty rooted in European ideas of the 17th and 18th centuries and first planted in the new American nation. While these values were originally associated with Western Europe and the United States, they transcend national borders. Indeed, those ideals stand in sharp contrast to some later 19th century views about the intrinsic qualities of societies and peoples, based upon history and heredity, which could allegedly find their highest expression in the state. Ironically, perhaps, the narrow 19th century European nationalism also gave way to another, and a very different, rationalist and universalist ideology that would also transcend national borders--Marxism. In the Soviet Union, Bolsheviks blended this ideology with a Slavophile movement that was itself a reaction against allegedly alien Western values. Stalin imposed this ideology on half of Europe. Now its failures and destruction are obvious to all. As the shackles of this failed ideology have been lifted or broken--in Central and Eastern Europe, in the Soviet Union itself, and elsewhere in the world--old 19th century nationalisms and animosities have reemerged. These forces cast shadows over the new democracies, particularly those seeking root in multiethnic societies. They expose anxieties about political, economic, and military security. They risk creating new divisions of Europe. We need to offer an inspiration, even a goal, to these peoples rediscovering new values upon which they can build pluralistic, democratic, and free market societies. We need to picture their place in the new architecture. Our architecture needs to fulfill the long-established NATO goal, from the 1967 Harmel Report, of achieving "a just and lasting peaceful order in Europe." To do so, our structures need to promote Euro-Atlantic political and economic values, the ideals of the Enlightenment. They need to establish the components of cooperative security for a Europe whole and free, and we need to demonstrate how integration can cope with new dangers from old enmities. The Devolution and Evolution of the European Nation-State Perhaps the most striking phenomenon across all of Europe today is the combined and simultaneous devolution and evolution of the nation-state. While the nation-state remains by far the most significant political unit, its political role is being increasingly supplemented by both supranational and subnational units. In other words, some of the nation-state's functions are being delegated "upward" and others "downward." In Western Europe, the process of evolution has been striking. Over the past 40 years, West Europeans have transferred more and more functions from the national to the supranational level. The European Community has achieved history's most intense and comprehensive voluntary evolution of governing authority above the national level. The Atlantic alliance, for its part, may have achieved the most fundamental intergovernmental cooperation, for it is to NATO that Europeans as well as North Americans have entrusted not merely their prosperity but their personal and national existence. In Western Europe, evolution has been accompanied by the devolution of power to state and local governments, to regions that sometimes cross national borders, and to the private sector. In Central and Eastern Europe, on the other hand, devolution is certainly the more prominent phenomenon. With the collapse of communism, ethnicity has reemerged as a powerful political force, threatening to erect new divisions between countries and, even more acutely, within multinational states. Yet even in the East, there is a simultaneous process of evolution underway. We are seeing the beginnings of a Europe of regions that may well be overlapping. Cooperation among Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia; the Pentagonale (Austria, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia); and the exploration of ties among northern states that rim the Baltic and of southern states on the Black Sea are examples of early efforts. Similarly, the "Nine-Plus-One" accord within the Soviet Union is a first effort to reestablish the legitimacy of that multinational state on the basis of voluntary association among component parts. Furthermore, the interests of these states in associating themselves with Western institutions like the IMF, the EC, and the OECD is also evidence of this evolutionary tendency. Evolution and devolution are not alternatives, but complementary, and indeed interdependent developments. The building of a Euro-Atlantic community can only be achieved on a democratic basis if there is grassroots involvement in the process. Thus, the architects of a united Europe have adopted the principle of "subsidiarity," something like American federalism--that is, the devolution of responsibility to the lowest level of government capable of performing it effectively. By the same token, the process of devolution in the East will lead to fra