A group of ten eastern European states which added to Europe's diplomatic
kerfuffle surrounding the possible
war on Iraq when they came out in strong support of the American line. Not, as one might think, a circle of
Lithuanian dissidents from the late
Gorbachev era, or a rejected pitch for an
S Club 7 rip-off.
The Vilnius group was formed on
May 19, 2000 by nine countries aspiring to join
NATO and seeking ways to co-operate with each other in implementing the
Membership Action Plan with which they had to comply before they could be admitted. The original Vilniusers
or Vilniites? were
Albania,
Bulgaria,
Estonia,
Latvia,
Lithuania,
Macedonia,
Slovenia,
Slovakia and
Romania: four ex-
Warsaw Pact states, three ex-
Soviet republics, and two former component republics of
Yugoslavia.
In May
2001, the ex-Yugoslav contingent was increased to three when
Croatia, now anxious to make up for lost time in the European integration race after the death of the semi-isolationist president
Franjo Tudjman, signed up to the Vilnius group at a meeting of its prime ministers in
Bratislava.
The Vilnius Ten models itself on the
Višegrád Group, which originally consisted of central Europe's three front-runners to join the
EU and NATO,
Poland,
Hungary, and
Czechoslovakia. Formed in
1991, at a meeting of the three states' presidents in the same castle where the Polish, Hungarian and
Bohemian kings had held a summit of their own in
1335, the Višegrad
troika later expanded to a quartet after Czechoslovakia's
velvet divorce.
Slovakia remains a Višegrad member today, although it dropped some way down the European integration list after the split with Prague and, more seriously, the years of near-dictatorship under nationalist president
Vladimir Mečiar. The Slovaks signed up to Vilnius as well, according themselves the doubtful privilege of getting to host two separate sets of summit meetings.
While the Ten might be thought of as representing eastern Europe's second wave, the distinction has been blurred by the enlargement timetables of the institutions they plan to join. Seven of the Ten were admitted to NATO in November
2002, leaving Albania, Macedonia and Croatia to wait for the next round of
Atlanticist enthusiasm. Or, remembering that the Višegrad Top Three made it into NATO just before the
1999 bombing of
Kosovo, the next time
Washington could do with an all-hands-on-deck favour.
EU enlargement arrangements also divide the Ten. Well-developed Slovenia and Estonia have long been seen as no less ready than the Višegrad group and, in fact, rather more ready than Slovakia. All three,
referenda permitting, will now join in
2004, alongside the other two
Baltic republics, but Bulgaria and Romania have been told they must wait until
2007. Croatia and Macedonia, let alone Albania, are still not official candidates, although the ex-Yugoslavs have both made preliminary agreements.
In public, the EU welcomes its foray into what was once the
Soviet bloc with a flurry of blue flags and yellow stars; in private, the Union's established powers harbour reservations that their own weight in EU decision-making will be diluted after the accessions. French fingernails, especially, are in for some uneasy years, since many of the newcomers appear to gravitate more naturally to
Berlin, making for quite some tension within the so-called
Franco-German axis which has often been the EU's prime motivator. The
second language in Vilnius states, too, is rather more likely to be
William Shakespeare's than
Marcel Proust's.
Gallic unease came to a head in February
2003 after the EU and its hopefuls divided into two camps over the war against
Saddam Hussein. At the behest of the British prime minister, supposed socialist and faithful American ally
Tony Blair, four EU members with centre-right governments (
Italy,
Spain,
Denmark and
Portugal) signed a letter on
January 30 pledging support for Washington's stance, and were joined by Poland, Hungary and the Czechs to make up an alignment known as the
Gang of Eight.
A few days later, the Vilnius Ten came out with their own statement in similar terms. The American defence secretary
Donald Rumsfeld gratefully referred to them as the embodiment of the
New Europe, reviving a term applied to the region by hopeful democrats during
World War I, when much of it was still under
Habsburg rule. The British academic and propagandist
R. W. Seton-Watson had used the name as the title of his weekly journal of central European affairs.
Rumsfeld went on to hit out at the unco-operative
Old Europe of France and Germany, hinting that American forces might be redeployed away from Germany and on to NATO's new frontier and provoking a furious reaction from the French president
Jacques Chirac. At the end of an emergency summit convened in
Brussels on
February 18 to try to co-ordinate a pan-European response to the crisis, Chirac attacked the Ten's behaviour as 'reckless', 'infantile' and 'dangerous', with an implicit warning that it might affect their prospects of joining the EU. The candidate states had already been upset when
Greece, in its capacity as EU president, had excluded them from the summit.
The Vilnius response was equally robust, with the Romanian president
Ion Iliescu describing Chirac's remarks as 'undemocratic'. Iliescu, perhaps, should know better than most; Bucharest's veteran political chameleon had been a second-string Communist leader under
Nicolae Ceausescu. The Slovakian foreign minister,
Edvard Kukan, pointed out that Chirac had not applied similar criticisms to Italy, Spain or Portugal.
Murmurs from some Višegrad chancelleries also suggested that the 2004 candidates had been under previous diplomatic pressure from France and Germany to align themselves with Chirac's line on the war instead of Blair's, and one unnamed Czech official expressed alarm to the UK newspaper
The Guardian that Berlin now envisaged a 'German Europe' rather than, as it had used to do, a 'European Germany'. In parallel with an emerging split in NATO after France vetoed troops being sent to
Turkey's border with Iraq, the argument seemed to confirm
Henry Kissinger's comment that Europe had no
telephone number.
Although the Ten may well hope that America will champion their efforts to join the EU in return for services rendered, their Atlanticism may also have deep historical roots, with a widespread suspicion of French security guarantees after the 1930s experience: it is hoped in central Europe that NATO will provide, if necessary, what the
Little Entente never could.