The Adriatic Europe: Albania, Croatia, and Macedonia

Since the end of World War II, and especially after the death of communism, history has changed forever, and in the right way. For the first time, countries have seen that when conflicts arise—as they do and they will—there is a way to resolve them by reason and negotiation, not by killing. For the first time, countries have seen that there is a way to shelter their people without disappearing into someone else's empire. For the first time, countries have invented a way to secure themselves, not by union, but by an alliance of free nations.

Three new democracies of southeastern Europe—Albania, Croatia, and Macedonia—are witnesses to the ultimate triumph of those principles. These nations have survived a terrible, deadly twentieth century. They have, all three, seen their people conquered and killed, their territories overrun, their human rights exterminated by dictators and despots.

But the human drive for liberty prevails, and they are the proof. These three countries represent free European nations of the twenty-first century and, combined, nearly 10 million Europeans. They all have democratically elected governments, resulting from repeated democratic elections.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the US administration has been the engine for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization enlargement. The first round of enlargement in 1999 admitted three new countries into NATO: Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, all three formerly members of the antagonistic Warsaw Pact.

The first round required making the case for enlargement itself in a world still driven by the East-West divide. The initiative on enlargement came from Washington, and it was from the United States that the campaign for NATO enlargement was waged. But agreement in the United States itself on embracing enlargement as a policy required a convergence of process, politics, and policy that took almost six years. Those in favor of enlargement were successful when the three countries joined NATO in 1999, but, more critically, they looked beyond that first step and deliberately put in place an "open door" policy.

With the inclusion of the first three formerly communist nations, NATO indeed opened its door to all emerging democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. Yet in 1999 no one could imagine how fast and how far eastward NATO's enlargement process would go.

While the 1999 NATO summit in Washington, marking the alliance's fiftieth year, brought in three new members, it did not issue further new invitations, since NATO was concurrently moving toward a new relationship with Russia. But NATO did make it clear that "no invitations" did not mean the end of the enlargement concept. In Washington, NATO committed itself to the open door policy by the creation of the Membership Action Plan (MAP), a procedural framework and process toward invitation.

Nine countries were explicitly named in the Washington summit communiqué as party to the MAP process: Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. At that point, though, it was unclear how a further round of enlargement would take place, when it might take place, and which country or countries would be invited. Unlike the first round, based on a political decision made almost unilaterally by the United States, if there was to be further enlargement it would be based both on political criteria and clear technical measures. The MAP process became paramount for each of the candidate countries to prove its progress and growth. It shifted the criteria, as foreign policy expert James Goldgeier wrote, from the "not whether but when" of the mid-1990s to the "not when but whom" in 1999.¹ Actions became louder than words. That remains the case today.

The MAP process presented a universal set of measures applicable to every aspirant country. In May 2000, the governments of Lithuania and Slovenia sponsored a conference on NATO enlargement in Vilnius, Lithuania, in which the foreign ministers issued a statement of solidarity and made the pledge to work with and help each other until all nine (later ten) participant countries were admitted to NATO. Thus was born the original Vilnius Group (the V-9), which...