NATO and the European Union (EU) both have the same starting point in the Cold War. Both were constructed to counter the extension of Soviet influence in Europe. Both - it must be admitted - succeeded. Once the Cold War was won logic should have led to the winding up of NATO. Curiously, just when we really don't need NATO many previously critical voices against NATO in the Labour Party have fallen completely silent. It is within living memory that Labour's official policy was for the mutual winding-up of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Well, the Warsaw Pact more folded up than wound up, and there's still NATO - a bit like one of its old foes, Gromyko, always there whoever is in charge.
NATO has transformed itself quite neatly into the capitalist world's policeman and has provided an excellent solution for those who want a body to intervene in conflicts which, unlike the UN, is not subject to veto nor indeed discussion. The countries of eastern Europe are queuing to get in, in the belief - thoroughly mistaken - that membership of NATO will provide a guarantee against future aggression from Russia.
First of all, keeping Russia out of NATO is the surest way of making Russia aggressive. Secondly, can anyone seriously imagine NATO (aka the White House) ordering American boys to intervene to drive the Russian tanks out of Hungary or Poland, especially as neither country has the oil reserves which prompted the west to save "democracy" in Kuwait by driving out the tyrant Saddam Hussein? (Am I alone in wondering what happened to the promises from the Kuwaiti royal family about introducing democracy as a price for intervention?)
The present Polish Government presents a sorry and desperate picture, offering up young Polish men to go and do NATO's bidding in return for a place at the table. The increase in the Polish defence budget to meet the bill for NATO membership will be crippling, for all NATO states' armaments have to be compatible, and soon Warsaw will be full of carpetbaggers selling death, hot on the heels of the carpetbaggers selling feasibility studies on privatisation.
As long as NATO exists there will never be a realistic chance of a truly independent European Force; the Pentagon and its supporters, always as numerous in a Labour Cabinet as a Tory one, will simply not allow one to develop.
EU expansion and NATO expansion go in tandem. The eastern states see membership of both as a sign of acceptance and some will be bought off with one, failing to achieve the other. The EU Commission has held out the prospect of relatively early membership for those countries most successfully detached from the old Soviet Empire - Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Estonia, in addition to Slovenia and Cyprus.
The economies of the applicant states could hardly be more open to the ravages of the market economy than now when their terms of co-operation with the EU are certainly not those of equals. Membership gives them some chance of bargaining. In addition their inclusion will force a fundamental realignment of the finances of the EU and certainly hasten the collapse of the Common Agricultural Policy. Weak as it is, the Social Chapter will be applicable to those low wage economies.
There is absolutely no way that an EU of over twenty member states can be run on the basis of the federalists' plan for a supranational government. Future co-operation will have to be intergovernmental pragmatic planning based on a multi-speed, multi-layered Europe. The Single Currency, which looks less and less likely by 1999, will be impossible after expansion, hence the madcap, going for broke attitude of Helmut Kohl.
This is not to say that I shall purvey the myth of salvation and prosperity through membership of the EU; but I shall not join in any atavistic campaign to persuade those countries and comrades to stay out. The more countries there are inside the EU the more obvious will be the need for a different, more pluralistic Europe.
The present and growing danger remains however, the isolation of Russia. The west's preferred candidate, Yeltsin, offered up his troops in like manner to the Poles, but to no avail. The biggest influence on the Russian economy is the Mafia, apart from the five IMF advisers who fly into Moscow once a month and stay at the Hilton for a week.
The west will yet pay a heavy price for the collapse of the Soviet Union. There was a chance of managed transition under Gorbachev, but the west chose literally to go for broke. Another collapse in Russia at the beginning of the next century could, as happened this century, plunge Europe into turmoil.