Warsaw
In 1932, the year Lithuania’s elder statesman Vytautas Landsbergis was born, Europe was starting to come apart. Several countries, led by Greece, were defaulting on sovereign debts. In the north, a fascist coup nearly succeeded in Finland. To the south, an antisemite named Julius Gombos became prime minister of Hungary. The National Socialist German Workers Party (aka the Nazi party) won 36 percent of the vote in Prussia. As 60 hopeful nations met in Geneva for a world disarmament conference, an Austrian named Adolf Hitler was in the process of obtaining German citizenship.
Landsbergis, much like the late Václav Havel—the Czech playwright turned president after the collapse of communism a quarter-century ago—has led one of those improbable lives Communist rule seemed to spawn. The son of a famous Lithuanian architect, Landsbergis was a professor of music during the Soviet era. Before that, as a young boy he had lived through fascism (his family sheltered a Jewish teenager in the early 1940s). Like Havel, Landsbergis entered politics out of obligation and necessity. He was fiercely anti-Communist and anti-Soviet. And like Havel in Czechoslovakia, Landsbergis became Lithuania’s first head of state after independence from the Soviet Union in 1990.
Today, Landsbergis thinks freedom and peace in this part of Europe are again in jeopardy. He believes in deterrence, pure and simple. At a conference of the Transatlantic Renewal Project in Warsaw, he urges the West to convey to Russian president Vladimir Putin and associates that aggression “will end with them hanged at Red Square.” If you have Landsbergis’s biography, you see no point in beating around the bush. In January 1991, he witnessed the Kremlin backlash against Lithuanian independence, with Soviet forces moving against civilians in the capital, Vilnius, and several other cities. Thirteen Lithuanians were killed and nearly 1,000 injured.
Today, the Baltic nations of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia feel vulnerable. After the events in Ukraine—and still remembering Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia—they fear that Moscow may use energy, espionage, “little green men” (masked unmarked soldiers in green army uniforms), and other means to destabilize their young democracies. Estonia and Latvia have significant ethnic Russian minorities, 25 percent and 28 percent, respectively. In fact, Russians make up roughly half the population of the Latvian capital, Riga. It’s unclear whether NATO has specified what nonconventional forms of aggression would trigger article 5 of the NATO treaty, under which member states regard an attack on one as an attack on all. In 2007, Estonia suffered a massive cyberattack thought to have originated in Russia. The country’s banks and media, government and parliament were thrown into disarray. In this part of Europe, countries not members of NATO are getting jittery as well.
The Swedes are sensitive. Over Easter last year, Russian aircraft simulated a bombing raid on Stockholm. More recently, a submarine thought to be Russian turned up in the waters off the Swedish capital. “The Russians,” one Swedish official tells me, “are deliberately trying to undermine the confidence of our armed forces.” There’s not much confidence in those armed forces to begin with. Since the end of the Cold War, the Swedish Air Force has scaled back by 70 percent, the navy by 80 percent, and the army by 90 percent, from approximately a half million soldiers to 50,000 troops. According to a 2013 poll, 6 percent of Swedes believe their country can defend itself. While Sweden’s center-left government opposes NATO membership, for the first time more Swedes favor, rather than oppose, joining the alliance.
The Finns are pensive, too. In Finland, which shares an 800-mile border with Russia and where incursions by Russian aircraft are now a weekly occurrence, Prime Minister Alexander Stubb said in September, “We should have become a [NATO] member in 1995 when we joined the EU.”
Like Landsbergis and others in the neighborhood, the Finns are marinated in history. Back to 1932: In that year the country signed a nonaggression pact with the USSR, only to see it unilaterally renounced by the Soviets before the decade was out, when Soviet forces shelled one of their own villages and claimed Finland was responsible. “Everything is possible, nothing is to be excluded,” says Landsbergis of the situation today. It was incidentally a Finnish magazine, Suomen Sotilas, that first noticed that those mysterious soldiers in Crimea—the men in green without insignia—happened to be carrying the full suite of weapons and equipment exclusive to Russian special forces.
It’s not hard to understand why parts of Scandinavia and the Baltic countries are anxious. Poland has been a strong supporter of Baltic defense, and very tough on Russian actions in Ukraine as well. The other three Visegrad countries, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Hungary, all have been less resolute on anything having to do with Russia. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban, who gets low marks from human rights groups like Freedom House on media freedom, at first answered the crisis in Ukraine with silence, then an expression of neutrality (“Hungary is not part of the conflict”), and finally a position of carefully constructed ambiguity. Orban likes to fault Moscow and Kiev in equal meas-ure, while expressing concern about Kiev’s treatment of ethnic Hungarians in Ukraine (there are about 156,000 ethnic Hungarians in the country, most holding Ukrainian and Hungarian citizenship).
Further south, the challenge for the alliance looks even more daunting. There’s Russian bluster and intimidation. Last spring, NATO member Bulgaria put its air force on high alert some 30 times during a period of two months in response to a surge in Russian military aircraft flying near its borders along the Black Sea. In May, Russian deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin tweeted about NATO member Romania: “Upon U.S. request, Romania has closed its air space for my plane. Ukraine doesn’t allow me to pass through again. Next time I’ll fly on board Tu-160.” The Tu-160 is Russia’s largest and most advanced strategic bomber. In September, Moscow’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov termed the prospect of NATO membership for additional Balkan countries—Croatia joined the alliance in 2009—a “provocation.”
Moscow has energy as a weapon to bring countries to heel. Like most of the former Soviet bloc, southeastern Europe is heavily dependent on Russia for its natural gas. The region suffered shortages in 2006 and 2009 when Moscow cut off supplies transiting Ukraine. But a good portion of the region’s vulnerability stems from homegrown problems.
After communism’s demise we thought that by enlarging NATO and the EU to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, west European zones of security and prosperity would rather seamlessly extend eastward. By some measures, of course, NATO and EU expansions have both been successes. For anyone who thinks NATO enlargement is the source of current Russian aggression, ask yourself what peace and security would look like across the region if the 12 countries that have joined since 1999 had been left to float in a gray, neutral zone between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the West. And indeed, the prospect of NATO and EU accession required candidate states to prove seriousness in areas including democracy, rule of law, human rights, respect for minorities, and market economics. There was progress.
The trouble is that while institutional change has come relatively quickly to this part of Europe, cultural change—habits, values, and behavior—have been slower to evolve. Put corruption atop the list. It’s a serious problem across post-Communist Europe, but it’s particularly acute in the south. Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia rank 35, 39, and 43, respectively, on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index. Compare that to Macedonia at 64th place on the same scale, Bulgaria and Romania at 69th (tied with Greece), and Montenegro at 76th. In case you were wondering, the starkest contrast is between 26th-ranked Estonia and fellow NATO member Albania, which, at 110, rivals Ecuador and Ethiopia in levels of corruption.
Shallow democratic roots, weak rule of law, and media that are frequently neither independent nor especially responsible are now pervasive throughout southeastern Europe.
As elsewhere on the continent, populism keeps popping up, but with arguably more extremist tendencies. And corruption seeps into everything, making countries “ungovernable or governable by somebody else,” as Bulgarian analyst Ivan Krastev puts it. In fact, NATO’s southern flank—including alliance members Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, and Albania—is in danger of sliding into serious crisis.
What does it mean for NATO, if this part of Europe falls apart? How will it affect the alliance if significant portions of Central and Eastern Europe become absorbed into Russia’s sphere of influence? The latter is exactly what’s already happening with the EU’s “Eastern Partnership” countries of Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova. Does anyone believe that Moscow will be satisfied once this band of territories is fully incorporated? Twenty years ago we spoke of “Europe whole and free” and were convinced that new freedom-loving NATO members from the formerly Communist east would revive and reenergize the alliance as a whole. That work was never completed.
People like Vytautas Landsbergis feel it in their veins: History is back. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is not the Soviet Union. It is not spreading a global ideology, nor does it have the capability to project power around the world as the USSR once did. Putin’s economic fortunes appear to be dwindling, what’s more, and that’s an opportunity for the West. But up until now, Putin has proved a master at playing a weak hand as if it were strong. For the last decade and a half, the West has done mostly the opposite and as a result has squandered many of the gains of the 1990s. We still urgently need three Ds—deterrence, democracy, and (economic) development support for our allies in Central and Eastern Europe—in order to recover the project of building Europe whole and free.
Jeffrey Gedmin is chairman, global politics and security, at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service; codirector of the Transatlantic Renewal Project; and senior director, Blue Star Strategies.
