Kadri Liik,
Senior Policy Fellow,
European Council on Foreign Relations
In the late 1990s, when I was working as a journalist in Moscow, and NATO enlargement was top of the agenda, I was often asked when Estonia actually decided it needed to join NATO. Had Russia been a friendlier neighbour, the reasoning went, maybe Estonia would have been happy to stay outside?
I always replied that the decision was essentially made in 1939. The experience of being squeezed between two totalitarian states, losing statehood and freedom for decades, pushed the Estonian elite from then on to embed itself as strongly as possible with democracies, especially on matters of security. All the rest – and that includes the creation of NATO in 1949 – was in a way a technicality. And there was surely absolutely nothing that the independent Russia of the 1990s, even if democratic and friendly, could have done to change Estonia’s mind.
Russia decided early on that it did not like NATO enlargement. The analysis written in 1993 by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, headed at the time by Yevgeny Primakov – the strategic mind behind many of Russia’s foreign policy decisions – outlined the concerns quite clearly. The expansion of a military organisation was bound to have implications for Russia’s force posture, and that in turn would divert much-needed resources from the social sphere. Also, with all focus on NATO expansion, the creation of a pan-European security system that involves all was bound to become a secondary issue.
That said, among the Russian elite of the 1990s there was some grudging acceptance of the moral case for NATO enlargement. One could catch that sentiment in the Moscow meeting rooms and reception halls of the time. Russian politicians did not like NATO expansion, but deep down, many of them understood why the east Europeans wanted to join; and they realised that it was not quite fitting of Russia to try to resist it.
I think I benefitted from that mood back then. In 1997, when the first round of NATO enlargement and the NATO-Russia act were being negotiated, I often attended the post-meeting press conferences of Primakov and visiting dignitaries: Madeleine Albright, Stroble Talbott, Javier Solana, Klaus Kinkel… By press-conference standards, these were huge events, managed by the Russian foreign ministry’s press office, with the bulk of the major world news organisations present. I was a young journalist from a small Baltic news organisation with highly inconvenient questions – yet I was always given a chance to ask them, often at the expense of more prominent colleagues. I do not exactly know why, but I assume that on some level the Russian diplomats in charge of the proceedings accepted that for the Baltic states the matter of NATO was existential, and they had the right to be present and ask questions.
In the years that followed I have often asked myself if things could have turned out differently. Could this reluctant acceptance of smaller neighbours’ right to make their own choices have grown and become a proper part of Russia’s political psyche? Could NATO membership have become a non-issue, something that was not viewed as existential?
Much of it boils down to Russia’s path of political development. Had Russia become a full-fledged democracy, a lot would have been possible. The post-Cold War OSCE-based European order had a highly normative nature: it was built on the assumption that the countries on the continent shared the same norms and values. It privileged democracies – which meant that the shorter Russia fell of democratic standards, the stronger its feeling became of being a second-order country in the international system that was designed to promote democracy.
This may also have spelled the end of OSCE as a truly efficient pan-European security organisation. Russia’s domestic democratic deficiencies prompted Moscow to shun OSCE as an election watchdog and human rights organisation, and this built-in conflict meant that OSCE never became truly efficient as a hard security tool.
Also, a democratic Russia would likely have been more attractive to its neighbours, including in the former Soviet Union. In the 1990s, their centrifugal drive to move away from Russia was probably inevitable. But later on, Russia could have relied on its genuine attractiveness and soft power in building relations with neighbours, without needing to “force them to friendship” – which of course could only have the opposite effect.
However, one can assign some blame also to the Western side. This is inconvenient to discuss these days, because nothing that the West may have done or not done explains, even less justifies, Russia’s war against Ukraine. But it remains a fact that the wars in Kosovo and Iraq – different in nature as they were – helped to cement the image of NATO as an adversary among the Russian public as well as politicians. Also, after the first successful rounds of enlargement, the West may have started taking Russia’s acquiescence for granted. I often remember what one smart Russian expert told me: the first rounds of enlargements were discussed with Russia. Russia may not have liked it, but it had accepted a deal, and it knew it had accepted it. In 2008, by contrast, on the eve of the (generally ill-prepared) Bucharest summit, Russia was not approached.
In retrospect, these negotiation rounds that I followed as a journalist in 1997, were not for nothing. The idea that enlargement is a question between NATO and a prospective member state was formally true, but in practice, Russia retained a lot of disruptive power in countries like Georgia and Ukraine. It is questionable if one could have bought Russia’s acquiescence once again in 2008, but to fail to understand the sensitivity and seriousness of the question – and to devise any policy to address it – remains a Western failure.
Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia aimed to stop NATO enlargement – and as such, it succeeded. But Russia’s other regional war – the war in Ukraine – was not motivated by NATO. NATO enlargement to include Ukraine was not on the agenda in 2022; and that was clear to everyone concerned. The invasion of Ukraine – likely motivated by the Russian president’s irrational history-related passions (though we’ll only know for sure once the archives open) – brought about another round of NATO enlargement.
Finland and Sweden joined the alliance 19 and 20 years after Estonia. While Russia may not have been able to do anything to change Estonia’s mind about NATO membership, it is quite clear how Russia could have affected the calculations of Finland and Sweden: by not issuing ultimatums and by not invading Ukraine.