From patronage to pragmatism: Central Europe and the United States.
World Policy Journal › Vol. 13 Nbr. 1, March 1996
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Summary
Central Europeans are divided into two camps regarding expectations on how the US and other Western countries will treat them after the downfall of the Warsaw Pact in 1990. The pessimists fear that they will altogether be abandoned in view of the first priority being given to Russia. The optimists are hoping that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union will welcome them. Their membership in these organizations would be advantageous to all.
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Extract
From patronage to pragmatism: Central Europe and the United States.
Since the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in 1990, central Europeans have vacillated between optimism and pessimism in their view of the region's future relationship with the West. Thus, it is not surprising to find that opinion today is divided not over the goal of integrating into Western institutions, which virtually everyone shares, but between the pessimists, on the one side, who fear another Western abandonment and the optimists, on the other, who believe the United States and western Europe are morally and thus unalterably committed to taking the central European countries into NATO and the European Union.
Both the optimists and the pessimists can, of course, marshall plenty of evidence to support their respective positions. The pessimists, for example, can point to the growing mood of isolationism in the American Congress and the Clinton administration's many flip-flops on NATO enlargement. They can also point to the fact that central Europe does not figure into any major policy discussion in the United States in this election year. To the extent that it does, more often than not it is in the context of exit strategies - ways in which the United States can close out its support, or at least its direct assistance, to the region. The Czech Republic and Estonia are already slated to "graduate" in 1997. Others will not be far behind. Thus, with some justification, the pessimists fear that as the United States gradually scales back its paternalistic, aid-based role in central and ...See the full content of this document
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