Recently declassified Soviet files have revealed that in 1952 Joseph Stalin offered the US a deal: he would reunite Germany by abandoning East Germany provided this united Germany refused to join NATO. Washington rejected this overture, although it has always been held that the US did everything it could to reunite Germany until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
The released documents came as a surprise to many experts. After the death of Joseph Stalin, Lavrenti Beria called on the Western countries to reunite Germany as a neutral state. James Warburg believes that such a possibility existed but they still opted to include West Germany in NATO, and its acceded to membership in 1955.
The case of Germany has important implications for ‘divided’ Georgia. Choosing to join NATO will put off the resolution of Georgia’s territorial disputes for decades. It is very unlikely that the US is more concerned about Georgia’s territorial integrity that it was about Germany’s. There are no signs of that. Moreover, as in the case of Germany Georgia’s territorial integrity is considered less important than its NATO membership.
In 1955 the Socialist countries (led of course by the USSR) set up the Warsaw Pact. NATO always rejected the proposals to sign non-agression pacts with it or dissolve both alliances. We talk about NATO a lot in Georgia but the discussion has rarely come down to specifics. Almost no one talks about what exactly Georgia can expect from NATO membership. What advantages does it give us? Or should we join NATO just for Russia’s ‘sake’, to take revenge on it? Joining NATO does not only affect to the territorial integrity of Georgia, which is certainly of vital importance, but all aspects of the Georgian state.
Let us address the military aspect first. The outlook here does not seem attractive. In an interview in 2007 former Defence Minister Davit Tevzadze noted: NATO has an armed forces quota and a plan for how to use all the troops of its member states. Bulgaria, Romania and the Czech Republic have been disarmed since joining the alliance. Once they were told what their function was in NATO these countries had to dramatically cut their armed forces. If the situation changes tomorrow these countries will become vulnerable due to their lack of domestic forces. If we join NATO we will become the first target for Russian attack. Even if we become a member nobody will be able to help us with their troops in practice. The only means of assistance NATO has is Turkey, which is capable of making a rapid reaction, but rapid reaction means that Georgia will turn into a theatre of war. A grim outlook, indeed.
The Georgian public demonstrate stunningly little knowledge of NATO. The common opinion is merely that what was bad under Soviet ideology became automatically good after the demise of the USSR. Had NATO really been an alliance against the Soviet threat it would have died after the Warsaw bloc dissolved. But quite the contrary is happening: NATO is expanding into former Socialist countries and some of the former Soviet republics.
In his 2004 book The Choice: Global Dominance or Global Leadership Zbigniew Brzezinski draws interesting parallels: “NATO acquired a new role in the 90s of the twentieth century when it established stability in the violent and turbulent Balkans. At the start of the next decade it became clear that we cannot avoid a kind of stability pact for the Caucasus – something similar to the stability pact of South Eastern Europe.”
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