G010882) In defense of NATO IT WAS IN response to the Prague Appeal, which expressed a clearly pro-Western point of view, that the following article was written. Its author, who uses the pseudonym of "Politikus," rejects the idea that there are two military blocs in Europe, dominated respectively by two superpowers, and directs criticism against the Soviet Union alone. The text has been taken from the fall 1985 issue of the journal Gegenstimmen published in Vienna. It has been shortened. POLITIKUS
PEACE MOVEMENT today or tomorrow a government is democratically elected in any Western European country whose program calls for withdrawal from NATO, the Americans will again politely pull out. So, where are there two blocs?
According to the thinking of the author of the Prague Appeal, a precondition for seeking an acceptable solution is recognition of the present state of affairs as the point of departure for a more profound change. I would like to know what the Estonians, Lithuanians and Latvians think of that point of view. Their countries, which never threatened anybody, were occupied treacherously in the summer of 1940 by the Soviet Union. It confiscated power in these countries and brought them under subjection.
After 1945, the Soviet Union was able to hold onto its territorial gains because it had won World War II. No European with genuine democratic feeling can get around this fact. Would it not be better if we went back to the old principle of self-determination of nations?
Already as I write these lines, I know that people are going to respond by saying that I am not enough of a realist, that such proclamations are indeed admirable and true but that they lead nowhere. This would, of course, be so if the document in question were designed to provide the bases for a practical political course. But the Prague Appeal is not such a document and cannot be. It is a declaration of principle, and therefore if it is to have a real value it has to start from the real conditions and not take account of tactical possibilities. Any equating of NATO with the Warsaw Pact, as is implied in the phrase "overcoming the division into blocs," confliets with my experience and cannot satisfy any thinking person who lived through 1968 in Czechoslovakia. I am also thinking of those to whom the Prague Appeal was addressed. I have studied the history of diplomacy for a long time, and I am deeply distrustful of all peace conferences, as well as of disarmament negotiations. They have never solved anything, and the history of the world would probably have proceeded on this course unperturbed without them. Look at how much negotiating there was in the 1930s. But people kept rearming. Hitler built concentration camps, and Stalin slaughtered the kulaks as if they were nothing. - I am still more distrustful of the peace movement in West Europe today. The French president Mitterand was right who he said, "In the East there are missiles, and in the West, the fight for peace."
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Of course, Europe is not a continent of peace, although it has lived for 40 years already in a state that the Prague Appeal calls *a world without war." However, learned to my astonishment that this situation arose when the "the military operational zones defined by the Yalta Accords degenerated into politico-military blocs."
I have never heard such a singular interpretation of the emergence of the Cold War. It is as if some unknown, nameless force "changed" something that was originally intended to be quite different. Is it not absolutely clear that the Cold War was a process that from the outset was conducted in pursuance of perfectly clear strategic interests?
Nowhere in the Prague Appeal does it explicitly say so, but it is not hard to divine the conception of the authors, who see the roots of all evils in the existence of the two bloes, and see their task as "overcoming the division into blocs."
I have lived for some decades on this continent, and I can say with all responsibility, that in Europe there is only one real military bloc forme polic that pursues a great-power policy. It is the one that was formed after 1945 by the Soviet Union to defend
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International Viewpoint 24 March 1986 its strategic interests and has been maintained since, often through the use of brutal methods. Yes, for 40 years Europe has been in a situation of no war. But it is often forgotten that the only real military operations in Europe since 1945 have been carried out by the Soviet Union.
It was the Soviet Union that suppressed the Hungarian insur rection in 1956 and 12 years later intervened in Czechoslovakia. In both cases, this was absolutely clear aggression and has to be defined as such by any expert in international law. In both instances, the intervention was prompted by the fear that the bloc in question could break up.
And on the other side? In 1949, after the Berlin blockade and the February coup in Czechoslovakia [by which the Communist Party took power in 1948] - when it was clearly seen what course Soviet policy was taking - the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed in an effort to erect a barrier against this expansionism. It was an association of free and independent states with elected parliaments and governments, under which human rights were respected.
There were, of course, exceptions. Greece in the years 1967-1974 and Portugal up till 1974 were not democratic states, and the present regime in Turkey is far removed from real democracy. But are not the first two cases precisely evidence that in the framework of NATO there is a road away from authoritarian systems to democracy, while in the Warsaw Pact we are still waiting in vain to see anything like that?
When France decided in 1966 to withdraw from the military structure of NATO, the Americans only asked a few months waiting period and departed discreetly for Belgium. If
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