Perhaps we could quickly go around the room . . .

[people introduce themselves]

I'm going to speak for 35 to 40 minutes, so we have plenty of time for discussion afterwards. First I want to clarify what I think we want to accomplish in this session. I think it's important to understand, what I think is probably self-evident, that there is little for you to learn or emulate from American foreign policy. And so the purpose of the workshop is not to suggest how you might emulate the broad principles of American foreign policy, which by necessity are quite different from what the concerns and interests of the Central European nations must be. I think it's fairly obvious that the United States is a global power with global interests, a nuclear weapons state, separated by two broad oceans, and doesn't face other great powers in its neighborhood, but can deal with them from a distance. And in this respect you probably have much more to learn from countries like Sweden, Austria, Finland, the Netherlands, perhaps Canada to some degree, since it borders a great power, the United States, though a fairly benign great power.

Similarly, I don't think there is much to be learned by understanding how you might emulate the foreign policy making process in the United States, because I think it has its own unique history. And again, there are quite stark differences between the United States, its democratic foreign policy process, and the democratic processes that are emerging or have emerged in Central European countries. For one thing, the United States is a huge diverse country. It has quite diverse interests within its own borders, between those who are concerned about Asian trade on the west coast and the old Atlantacists on the Northeast, people on our Southern border who are principally concerned with the growing integration of Mexico and the United States. On the other hand, most of you come from relatively homogeneous populations, even though ethnic conflicts are a major part of your history and region. Also, I think there are therefore less diverse economic and political interests as it relates to foreign policy in your countries.

Secondly, the American system is a presidential system, and most of you have predominantly parliamentary systems, which I think produce a different style; if you look at Germany, for example, it produces a different kind of policy process.

Third in this respect, the United States, even though it is a great global power, and even though globalization is a watchword of the American political process these days, the United States is fairly invulnerable to international forces and international politics. Meaning even though there's a point now where the world is slowly helping remake the United States to some extent, with immigration and trade policy, still the United States remains one of the most invulnerable nations on this planet, in comparison with yourselves, who are very exposed to what goes on in other European countries, and into the East in Russia and Ukraine.

So if we're not here to learn how to emulate American foreign policy, I do think we're here to realistically understand how to approach an understanding of American foreign policy and how to understand what matters to us in the United States with respect to the future of Eastern and Central Europe, and therefore also how to not only understand what's going on in the United States as it relates to policies and issues, whether it's on the European Union, Russia, the Balkans, or as it relates to the international trade and investment order, but also how you can best influence American foreign policy to protect your own interests and to establish enduring relationships that last beyond America's flash-in-the-pan commitments, which I think is one of the real weaknesses of American foreign policy.

Let me begin by introducing some broad notions of American foreign policy, deal with some of the catch notions which you've probably all come across in your study of the United States, but which I think may not be fully adequate in helping you understand the American foreign policy tradition and process and the evolution of American foreign policy, particularly during this period of time. It's often heard that the U.S. struggles between isolationism and internationalism, between withdrawal from the world and a very activist approach. It's also often posed that the United States has to choose between a moralist tradition that emphasizes values and human rights, and a more realist tradition that's concerned about hardcore interests and geopolitics. And often you'll hear, as you do in the current debate, particularly over the concern with the popularity of Pat Buchanan, about the risk of isolationism in American foreign policy today.

Well again, I believe this sort of oversimplifies what has gone on historically, and I think it's important to understand that there's a richer tradition of American involvement in the world that sort of defies these two categories. And I would break it up by saying that there's three sort of cultural traditions that the United States draws from and that you see manifested in its foreign policy. One is called the Hamiltonian tradition, which is named after Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, who represented sort of the big monied interests of the United States, the central banks, the sort of high politics of finance and geopolitics. This is the American equivalent of realism; it represented the tradition of the Anglo-American elite, the house of Morgan--Morgan was one of the largest Anglo-American banks, it had enormous influence on the early development of the United States; it was later represented by Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt. It's very much in the American great power tradition, that's concerned about the expansion of trade, but also building political alliances that underpin that trade.

But that's not the only tradition, or even the dominant one. There's also a very strong what I call Jeffersonian tradition in American foreign policy, and here's perhaps where people draw the relationship to the moralistic streaks of American foreign policy, the concerns about human rights, about international law, the Wilsonian tradition, Wilson is often to some degree associated with [the Jeffersonian tradition], named after Thomas Jefferson, who though he wanted to avoid entangling alliances, was very much concerned that American values inform the larger international order. Now I think the Jeffersonian tradition is best represented by the American missionary spirit. There's a rich history, even during the period when the United States was considered the most "isolationist," you had American missionaries on all the continents, very prominent in China in the 19th century, but also in Africa and Latin America,the tradition of going and spreading the American way of life and also the American religion. Today's equivalents of this missionary spirit are the human rights groups and the sort of transnational civil society that is predominantly, there's a lot of Anglo-French involvement in the NGO's, human rights and humanitarian organizations, but you'll notice that many of them are American. And I think this was perhaps well illustrated in the first days after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of democracy in Central Europe, you had a lot of twenty-something Americans as well as a lot of foundations, both individuals and institutions poured into the region to spread the American ethos of democracy and market economy.

The third tradition may be less noble, and I think this is where Pat Buchanan draws much of his resonance, and that is what I call the Jacksonian tradition, named after Andrew Jackson, who was president of the United States in the early 19th century. It's a populist, anti-internationalist, slightly paranoid, inward-looking, somewhat xenophobic, anti-immigrant tradition in the United States that has deep roots. It's often also aligned against the great banks. William Jennings Bryan, in the late 19th century, who ran for president in 1896 on the platform of doing away with the gold standard, which was a conspiracy by the Anglo-American banks to bankrupt American farmers and small businessmen, is part of that tradition. In a strange way, Jessie Jackson borrows some of those attributes, though he also borrows heavily from the Jeffersonian tradition. There was an element of paranoia in this American Jacksonian tradition that is also familiar to people from the Central European region, and I think was reinforced by a lot of refugees from the Second World War who brought a lot of anxieties about having lived in the shadow of German Nazism and Soviet Stalinism and reinforced that tradition, surprisingly.

Now, just as it is oversimplified to talk about isolationism versus internationalism in American foreign policy, it is also oversimplified to talk about interests versus values. I think this distinction doesn't often hold up in terms of thinking about American foreign policy. And I think the way you reconcile that is to understand that the United States is a great power in the sense that it has an interest in shaping a world order that it considers conducive to both its interest and its values. It to some extent recreates the world in its own image, although not consistently. But it also is concerned about shaping an order that fits its longer term traditional interest. Stanley Hoffman, in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, put it this way: The United States is a great power that has an interest in world order that goes beyond strict national security concerns, in that its definition of order is largely shaped by its values. The Economist recently said that the sense of understanding American foreign policy is understanding that the United States wants to live in a congenial world. But of course everyone does. But unlike other powers, the United States has both to some degree the economic and moral and political power to believe in its arrogance and hubris, to have shaped, to some degree, large parts of the world order that emerged after the Second World War.

Now, how do these traditions and this concern about order, creating an order where American interests and values--are there some common, more concrete ideas that we see manifested in American foreign policy over the years? I would argue that there are really four basic notions that are relatively constant, in spite of these conflicting political-cultural traditions in American foreign policy, there are a number of cornerstones or constants in American policy. The first is freedom of the seas, which was important from the very beginning of the revolutionary war, and to the early 19th century; the United States went to war and engaged in military intervention on a number of occasions to enforce the freedom of the seas. In other words, the United States has considered the rights of its citizens and its goods and ships to travel freely in international waters to be a very vital national interest. And so, if you remember, in the 1980s the United States had several faceoffs with Muammar Quaddafi, who was claiming an expanded notion of Libya's territorial waters. It wasn't just that the United States, that Quaddafi was an easy target for the US to look grand and powerful against, but there was a very basic principle that Libya and Quaddafi were potentially violating, and it's also why the American foreign policy establishment is so concerned now with some of China's actions in East Asia, because it threatens one of the basic principles of American foreign policy.

The second is what I call "Open Door," meaning that it hasn't been enough for American goods and ships to pass freely and unimpeded in international waters, but the US has had a consistent pattern of finding markets in foreign ports. In the nineteenth century, at a point where the US was considered isolationist, it sent warships to both China and Japan to open those countries up to American goods. And in this respect it has tried to more recently, even at the same time the US itself was rather protectionist, it has always consistently tried to open other countries' doors to American products and ideas. And this is why it's tended to champion an international system not based on bilateral deals, although it has pursued them from time to time, but on the basis of this sort of open international trading system based on the principle of the most favored nation clause. In other words, they've tried to bring legal principle to bear on international trade, that makes everyone an open door for American goods and products. That's why even a Richard Gephardt, who's considered more of a protectionist in the context of the American Congress, in the end what he's talking about is using pressure to open other countries' markets. He's not proposing that trade be based on closed relations. And the US, if you remember, systematically sought after the Second World War to end the Anglo-French special preferences, relationships that they had with their former colonial empires; the United States attempted to break up old colonial empires based on other trade relations than those, on universal principles of openness.

The third constant in American foreign policy, but one in which there is a great deal of American hypocrisy at certain times, is what you might call an open society, which George Soros has adopted as his principle slogan. Essentially the United States, drawing from its Jeffersonian tradition, has been a crusader state, meaning it has pressed its notion of republican principles--not always democratic principles, but republican principles--in international relations. And it'd done so not always consistently, I would admit, in the sense that it's done it in a sometimes hypocritical and self-serving sense; during the Cold War the United States tolerated and had relations with a number of authoritarian countries that were tolerated as allies, as indeed the Gulf States still are. But it still, at the same time, preached the principles of freedom and democracy and open societies as its basic underlying premise that democratic governance . . . Now you hear it articulated by Anthony Lake, who talked about the cornerstone of American foreign policy, the guiding principle of American foreign policy in the post-Cold War world was democratic enlargement--namely, the principle concern of the US had to be to enlarge the number of democratic countries, because democratic countries didn't go to war with each other. Democratic countries were more conducive not only to American interests but to American values.

A fourth principle is that the United States has had, fairly consistently, a global orientation. To be sure, there have been times when the US has been more European-oriented, sometimes, as in the early twentieth century, when it's been more Pacific and hemispheric-oriented, but nonetheless, as many people argue today, the United States has a major geoeconomic advantage in the world, because it sits at the axis of three major trading regions--the transatlantic region, the transpacific, the Asian, and the effort to commit the Asian and Pacific countries to free trade, and the American, the hemispheric trade, first with NAFTA, but then the talk about a hemispheric free trade zone. So the United States has these very broad global concerns; except for the Soviet Union during the Cold War and Britain at the height of its empire, no other nation in the history of the world has had a truly global orientation in terms of how it's defined its interests.

Now these constants have tended to make the United States a military trading nation, carrying on to some degree the traditions of Great Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It's been concerned about a balance of power in Europe, which has meant that the United States has had a consistent orientation of not letting the continent become dominated by one single power, that's the classical definition of American foreign policy in Europe. But again, where the interest of the United States being not realist or value oriented gets expressed is that it can't support just a balance of power notion in Europe. Instead, it has the NATO alliance, it talks about the family of democratic countries. So again, it mixes interests and values as it approaches Europe. In our own hemisphere, we've been guided by what has been known as the Monroe Doctrine, which has really been to keep European powers out of this hemisphere, to make it an exclusive American lake. But again, the US from time to time, and quite unsuccessfully unfortunately, has tried to temper that great Hamiltonian calculation, that great power calculation, with a sense of values. In the sixties it was the Alliance for Progress that President John Kennedy initiated, which unfortunately was a major failure because it was combined with a sort of xenophobic anti-Communism that in the end supported militarist authoritarian regimes. In Asia it's also had a concern with balance of power, but the policy has been decidedly marked by an open door strategy--keeping China and Japan open to the world. Again, the interest in building an order that is conducive to American interests. And it has also consistently been the force behind the establishment of universal norms, the universal declaration of human rights, even though here again the United States suffers a serious inconsistency, having been the champions, Eleanor Roosevelt having been one of the champions of the universal declaration of human rights, and the US being behind the drafting of the international covenant. Then its Jacksonian traditions take hold, unable to get those conventions ratified internally in the United States because it's an imposition of foreign bodies or international law on the United States, which can't be subject to any foreign interference.

Now let me talk for a few minutes about the foreign policy process, again in fairly broad terms. Again I think, classically, one picks up from the debate, or often if you follow the literature, but often it's been presented as fairly dichotomous, as a struggle between Congress and the President over who sets foreign policy and who has the leadership role. And perhaps the best statement of this, a recent illustration, was when former Secretary of State James Baker was asked to testify in late 94--early 95 actually, after the recent election of the Republican Congress. During long periods of the Nixon Administration and the Reagan Administration, the Republicans were always concerned with the Congress eroding Presidential authority for carrying out foreign policy. And the freshman class of the Republican Congress were eagerly believing they could come in and put restraints on Clinton in foreign policy; the Contract for America has a number of provisions that relate to the United Nations and the conduct of American foreign policy. And Baker pleaded with his Republican cohorts not to interfere in the presidential authority, which has been carefully guarded in a more Hamiltonian--again you have this struggle between the Hamiltonian tradition, which is more executive-oriented, and a Jeffersonian tradition that is often reflected in Congress. Now in fact, the American foreign policy process involves a lot more actors, and is a much more dynamic process. And let me just mention as an illustration the major players I think one has to look at to understand how these traditions of American foreign policy get interpreted in any one particular case, because within the broad constants I mentioned there is great variation, and there's also the many flip-flops that President Clinton has become quite famous for. And to understand these mid-level deviations and little flip-flops, you have to look more closely at what actors are bringing weight to bear on the process at any particular time.

First are the professional bureaucrats in the State Department, in the Department of Defense, in the Commerce Department, in the Treasury Department, on the National Security Council and the Congressional committees. Now the reason why the United States at times can have inconsistent foreign policies, or seemingly four or five different twists on any one particular issue, is that often these departments are competing with each other. One of the most interesting twists in recent years is how the Defense Department has become the most reluctant warriors, while the State Department and the National Security Council have become the home of the interventionists. Colin Powell, when he was Joint Chiefs of Staff and then Secretary of Defense, provided every conceivable reason for the United States not to go to war in the Persian Gulf, but it was driven not only by the White House but by the State Department and the NSC. So there's a battle within the professional bureaucracy. You can't talk--you know, everyone talks about the administrations's position on a certain issue. Often there is no one position, because different parts of the bureaucracy, different parts of the administration, have different positions. Even within the military, you have the Navy taking one position and the Army and the Air Force taking another position. That was often a problem on nuclear--you know, the Army wanted much more far reaching nuclear disarmament negotiations with the Soviets during the seventies and eighties, but the Navy and Air Force were always worried about putting their weapons on the table as well. So you had to have negotiations within the American government before you could have negotiations with the Soviet Union, and this is part of a democracy.

You also have a political class of experts that circle right around the professional bureaucrats. These are the people at the Council on Foreign Relations and the pundits at the New York Times who play the inside-outside game--you know, they whisper into the ears of the Secretary of State, but at the same time they try to build a larger expert and even popular consensus for a particular policy that they want to pursue. Leslie Gelb, the President of the Council on Foreign Relations, is probably the quintessential, he himself having been in government for a number of years and now outside.

Third are the commercial interests and lobbyists of major American corporations that are very influential particularly on trade and alliance policy. I should mention in the same breath, you have the activist groups, the human rights and environmental groups; often you find these two groups at loggerheads on certain issues. The story of the China policy over the last year is a question of the arguments of the human rights groups that trade ought to be conditioned on human rights, labor and environmental concerns, and the commercial interests, the more commercial in terms of export and investment concern, that have argued that China is just too big a market to risk trying to condition trade.

The third and fourth is this clash between the commercial and the sort of civil society groups that are cause-oriented groups.

Other cause-oriented groups are the ethnic groups; in fact, the role of the Jewish lobby is rather famous in terms of its effectiveness in terms of influencing US foreign policy as it relates to the Middle East and Israel. The Greeks try to make a similar claim, although I think with less of a credible basis, that they too are an effective lobby. The Central Europeans, the large number of people of Polish descent, are a very influential force in American politics. Also, increasingly you see this now with respect to some Hispanic groups, particularly Mexicans--in Los Angeles they're becoming a political force--the Chinese to a certain degree, the Cubans--I actually should have put the Cubans above the Israeli lobby as probably the most effective in terms of determining American foreign policy. And the black and African American community was very effective in terms of South African policy. So people talk about the development of ethnic enclaves in American foreign policy, that certain groups "own" pieces of American foreign policy in some respects, because there's not a willingness to buck.

Now an unacknowledged group is what I call allies and enemies. The most influential group in American foreign policy in the seventies and eighties were our European allies. If we didn't do this or that, European allies would begin to gravitate toward the Soviet Union and lose their faith in the United States. So this mythical American ally was standing huge in the American debate, and to some degree it's been replaced with minor allies, including the Central Europeans in some discussions. But the enemies loom large, too; Saddam Hussein takes on a place in life larger than his actual ability to influence things; so does Fidel Castro. We become fixated with demons--again, I think it's part of the Jacksonian tradition, to try to find an identifiable enemy. And often these get in the way, they're very influential in the debate. It's hard to argue US-Cuban relations without dealing with the demon of Fidel; he looms over your shoulder in trying to argue the case. Khomeini has played this role for the United States. Various Soviet premiers have done so as well. Arafat has done so. The interesting case is that the United States does have this ability, I think partly because we can let go of history, we have a tendency to divide and bridge; we demonize the Palestinians and cut them off from civilized discourse, but when the time comes, we have the capability of embracing them, when it comes to America's own interest. You know, Al Gore shaking hands with Arafat, when you think that Al Gore ran to the right of the Likud Party in 1988 in the presidential campaign, for him to be shaking hands with Yassir Arafat was perhaps unthinkable in other political cultures to some degree. But it's also true, I think, in some ways, only the US that had demonized Milosevic, with obviously some very good reason, nonetheless when it came to making a Dayton Agreement could bridge and force others to bridge or create a bridge.

Now, I wanted to conclude by talking a little about my views of how the US foreign policy tradition and the evolution of American foreign policy intersects with Central Europe and the evolution of various foreign policies by various Central European countries. And I would recommend here the paper by Katharine Cornell, who I think has done a very interesting job and reflects a lot of my own views on this subject, although I think we come to different conclusions, with respect to one very key element of the Central European-US relationship, and that relates to NATO enlargement--Katharine's a strong supporter of NATO enlargement, I'm opposed to it, which we can talk about, which I know will be of great interest to you.

Now, I think the Central Europeans . . . (tape turns over) . . . the American political system and influencing American foreign policy in the post-Cold War world. But my argument would be that in the end this will be somewhat short-sighted, and they're actually advocating and pursuing policies that are clearly not in their interests, but may not be in American interests as well. What I mean by this is that Central Europe has succeeded where other countries have failed, in the sense of actually leading the debate on American foreign policy on Central Europe and NATO enlargement, in the sense that the US did have an interest in NATO enlargement from the institutional point of view of wanting to keep NATO a viable institution, because it was the institution by which the United States dominated and secured its political position in Europe. But essentially the United States, the bulk of opinion in the US, was very reserved and opposed to NATO enlargement, for reasons I don't think I have to go into. But the Central European countries were very effective in a number of senses in changing the agenda and actually establishing the agenda for United States on this issue, not only playing on American guilt and Western guilt about previous abandonment of the region, but also by appealing to the best of American values, in the sense of enlarging, how can you be for democratic enlargement and refuse to take these countries into your most exclusive club? They were very effective in making that argument and understanding that the United States was so committed to NATO as an instrument of American power and an instrument of American order building. They were also very successful in using the political leverage they had internally, not only in terms of building on historic fears of Russia, but also in terms of mobilizing--going back to our foreign policy process--respected pundits, but also people of Central European descent in this community, which became an active political force on this issue. So you saw, in a period of a year or two, the United States being forced to reverse its position--of course it's still reversing itself constantly on these issues--but successfully reversing itself. And in some ways, therefore, having whether by skill or by instinct achieved what others so want to do, which is to influence the making of American foreign policy, I must be reserved, I suppose, in offering criticisms. But I think where the main problem has been, and which I think Katharine does very well, is talking about a relationship that in the end has to be based on an understanding of mutual long-term interests. Now one of the forces in American foreign policy that I didn't mention is popular sentiment, which can range from moral outrage to the feeling that the US is overburdened within a period of a week or two. Such that you have at one point CNN photos of people starving in Somalia creating a groundswell of support for America intervening in Somalia, and a few months later sights of American servicemen being dragged through the streets in Mogadishu causing the same popular outrage, but this time for getting the hell out of the place that none of them care about in any deep sense.

So while I think Central Europe in general, there's a lot of variations within that, has been very successful in putting forward a commitment of the US on certain issues, particularly NATO enlargement, what it has been less successful in doing is laying a lasting foundation for the recognition of America's and Central Europe's mutual interest that will outlast any sort of outrage that one group or another is able to influence the system. It hasn't been able to appeal and establish a basis for a lasting long-term relation and partnership. And here I'd like to lay out my own prejudice: I've argued that the lynchpin of the United States grand strategy ought to be a Transatlantic Rim strategy, not a Pacific Rim strategy--meaning that we ought to see the countries from Finland north through the Baltics, Poland, Ukraine, parts of Russia, Hungary, to the Balkans, to Israel and Jordan and Palestine in the South as a transatlantic rim that represents the greatest potential for growth and democracy. Granted there's been a lot of problems, as we've seen. But this is where the United States should give its emphasis in terms of lynching its international strategy. And therefore Central Europe figures in a major way in terms of my own foreign policy priorities. But I've come to what people would call some radically different conclusions about certain particular questions, whether it's NATO enlargement or other issues of the Central European and US relationship.

Let me lay out for you what I believe are the issues that underpin a longer-term Central European--American partnership and relationship. I think the first is with regard to, Central Europe is critical, in my view, to determining the future of a European Union that the United States can live with. And the United States and Central and Eastern Europe have some very common interest in dealing with a slow-growing European Union that's in institutional crisis at the time. It has an interest in a more open, faster growing European Union that represents a larger market for their goods; it has a common interest in the reform of the European Union's common agriculture products, not only because they keep both our agricultural goods out of European markets, but also they disadvantage our farmers globally because of the subsidization of European agriculture. The United States and Central-Eastern Europe have a common interest in seeing a fair distribution of the regional funds of the European Union away from existing EU members to the Central and Eastern European States, because that's where the greatest growth and development potential is in the future; and they have a common interest in investment rules that allow American firms investing in Central Europe to be accorded the same treatment in the European Union as European Union firms, because Central Europe wants to draw in American direct foreign investment, but it's less advantageous for the United States to do so in Central and Eastern Europe if they can't export into the European Union under the same conditions that European firms can, and at this point there's some confusion of whether the US firms are disadvantaged. So to put it in somewhat pejorative terms, Central Europe is a potential Trojan Horse for the United States to encourage the European Union to become a wider, broader, more open Europe, which is in America's interest. And that's in Central Europe's interest as well.

Second, I think there's a common interest, and here's where I think there's sort of disagreement as it relates to the NATO enlargement, I think there's a common interest between the United States and Central and Eastern Europe to be a bridge between the West and the East--by the East I mean the Ukraine, Russia, the former Soviet Union. I think there's a common interest that Central Europe be a bridge, and not a front-line state in a new East-West conflict, which is what I think develops out of NATO enlargement. And the reasons are several fold. One, I don't think it's either in United States or Central European interests to have to devote a huge amount of resources to military modernization over the next decade. The clear priority has to be in economic and social development and environmental cleanup. A commitment to NATO enlargement and a new East-West conflict would commit both the Central European nations and the US, even if it's done on the cheap, to expanded military spending over the next decade.

Second, Central Europe and the US both have an interest in Central and East Europe being a bridge to the East because the Eastern markets are critical for their economic development. If any lesson needs to be drawn from the last three years, it is that Central Europe cannot depend on European Union markets alone for their future economic development and growth. Even if the US and Central Europe develop a joint strategy to make the European Union and the Germans and the French less protectionist and more open to both trade and investment, what is clear is that you're going to have to have stable growing markets in the East for the countries of Central and Eastern Europe to reach their full economic--if they're going to rely on trade and not aid, then their comparative advantage lies in exploiting the markets to the East. In fact, in my recent study of Hungarian firms, I was able--Hungary has enjoyed a major turnaround, as you probably know, in its export performance over the last eighteen months, and a major improvement in its current account. A large amount of that, and the companies that are doing extremely well, are companies that have recovered markets in the Ukraine and Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union, and that's going to have to be the future.

So my point is you want to be a bridge, you don't want to be a frontline state, when you have a very poor region to the East that can't buy your goods, and that is producing refugees and crime, although obviously that's not entirely under your control. That also means that you want to remain a bridge so that assistance continues--you have a vested interest in expanded assistance to Ukraine and Russia, and points to the East, because that will, to the extent possible, help encourage both stability, but also the development, stabilization of markets and growth of the market. So the US and Central Europe--now, the European Union's interests are not so clear in this respect. Germany might be quite happy for you to be a frontline state, absorbing all the instability from the East. Because their orientation is different, living within a rich European Union.

Now the third area where I think the US and Central Europe have an interest to play, and here I think the United States had been more at fault than Central Europe, and that is that Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, other countries of that region have the potential, some of them individually, but others collectively, to become what I call middle-range powers, to become what Canada, Australia, Sweden were in the 1970s and 80s, and to some degree Austria and Finland. That is, they can be, in part, the heart and conscience of the international order, in a low key way, contributing to the building of international instruments, which avoids great power divides, avoids major ethnic polarization. I think that the role that Hungary has played in its chairmanship of the OECE, still a very ineffective body, but nevertheless, that did assert itself in having some role in the settling of the South Ossetia conflict, it had some role in getting Russia to agree at least to international observers of the Chechen conflict, in spite of the failure in settling that problem; the role that it's played in Nagorno-Karabach, is exactly the type of partners the US needs in terms of building more subtle and effective instruments of conflict management and economic development in the future. And the countries of East and Central Europe could become major players and enhance their power and prestige. I think in addition, even assuming that things go well for NATO membership and EU enlargement, I think the interest of the Central European countries is to expand its power and prestige and build up other international bodies where they will have more influence than they will have being second or third tier powers within NATO and the European Union.

Elzbieta Matynia: Thank you very much, I'm sure there will be many comments and questions.

Q: I have one comment and one question. Thank you for your very comprehensive view on Central European and American relations. But I don't agree with your idea of bridges. When a war is going on, the first thing that is destroyed is the bridges. Speaking form Central Europe, we don't want to be something like a bridge between West and East, because we were part of the Western political system and we would like to share the same political ideas as the Western European union have. So I think that we in Central Europe need America's not only economic but also military presence, because of the unstable Russian condition and also German influence in Central Europe. And my question is, I would like to ask you about, it's clear that various traditions from American foreign policy, Hamilton and Jefferson and Jackson and so on, are mixed between Democrats and Republicans. But could we distinguish a clear American modern liberal position and an American classic conservative position among these positions?

SS: Not really, in the sense that . . . American conservatives in the true conservative sense have perhaps been more likely to have been Hamiltonians, and American liberals may have been more likely to have been Jeffersonians, but you'll find a mix of both in both positions. American conservatives are much less likely to be Jeffersonians than American liberals, but you'll find a large representation of Hamiltonian thinking in the American liberal establishment; in fact, if Franklin Roosevelt is a sort of more modern day founder of American liberalism, then he was very much in the Hamiltonian tradition.

And I might just add that one of the interesting things that's going on now--there are three theories about what's going on politically in the United States. One is realignment, where you see some people leaving one party to join another party, so that the Republican becomes the grand party. The other is dealignment, in the sense that you see both parties in the process of breaking down because their coalitions don't make any sense--how can you have social conservatives with blue-blooded bankers in the same party as the Republican Party? How can you have Wall Street investment bankers with labor unions in the Democratic Party together? And so part of the dealignment question is which party is going to represent the underdog in the future predominantly. Traditionally over the last twenty-thirty years, the democratic party has represented the underdog. Buchanan is now changing, is making a bid--first Reagan with the disaffected democratic blue-collar voters, he appealed to them on sort of social conservative, on Cold War grounds. But now Buchanan's making a larger pitch for making the Republican Party the source of the underdog and animus against the establishment.

There's a third theory that what we're involved in is total deconstruction; meaning that the whole political process is in meltdown and that it's being replaced by this new media information era where parties just don't function or have any meaning anymore.

Q: I understand that America's only declared about four wars in its entire history, yet it's been engaged in several military activities throughout, and it seems then that foreign policy making seems to be the least democratic of government practices. I wonder if you couldn't speak to that. And also, because of this poor ratio, does that explain politicians' inability to communicate the implicit connection between foreign policy and domestic issues, particularly during election times?

SS: I think there's been a traditional democratic deficit in American foreign policy. One of our senior fellows is writing a book on this problem of lack of democratic accountability in American foreign policy, in particular national security policy. There's a lot of Cold War imperatives for secrecy and for lack of democratic participation. I think the executive has done a sort of, has subtly rewritten the constitution by making a distinction about declaration of war and use of force, which then the Congress has tried to reclaim with the War Powers Act. But now I think the democratic deficit goes larger, because in those periods the United States, while it may have subjected the United States to conflict of the seas and various places, and possibly might have led to a nuclear showdown at some point, nevertheless the United States was largely unaffected by a lot of foreign policy decisions. But now, when you negotiate trade with China, you are immediately putting large sectors of the American working population, as well as American businesses, either giving them an advantage or creating dislocations and risk. And really there is no mechanism for full participation in many of these decisions, which has increased the democratic deficit. Also when you have other countries influencing what happens domestically in the US you can only rely on--the human rights groups are obviously out there, but still, if the state is the principle instrument of power, which I think it still is in many cases, if you can't get the state to stop China from using child labor and subsidizing goods by using child and prison labor and poor wages, then you have no control over your economic [vesting?]. So I think you point out a major problem. One argument why democracies everywhere face a legitimacy crisis is that they can't deliver on the things that truly matter to people, in terms of jobs and economic security and other things; they can't even deliver on stopping immigrants, but they still talk about that. But that's why they talk about all these social issues, because they know they can't do anything about what really affects people's everyday lives.

Q: During the campaign, they is always talk about "what's your vision for America?" But foreign policy never comes up, yet it seems to be an incredibly important influence. . .

Elzbieta: But some presidents have won on foreign policy, no?

Q: But only because of things they did during their administrations, not because of promises they made during the campaign, I think.

SS: Some of us hoped that Clinton would use his bully pulpit to educate the American public about the new realities of this era, but he quickly ran away from that task, got side-tracked from that task. He's been very fortunate in the turn of political events, but he could be in major trouble if it weren't for the Republicans' own problems, because he hasn't been able to explain fully to them the nature of this momentous economic transition and global transition we're in and what he can and can't do to make a difference, and that does relate to the global trade and investment order and a lot of things that are going on in Europe, in Japan, in Russia, in Mexico etc.

Q: I also have a comment and a question. I don't share totally the position of my friend on the question of bridges, but of course these bridges could be useful and effective only in a case of security as members of NATO and the European Union. . . . And it's true that in Central Europe there is a large accumulation of cultural and social capital in case of Eastern behavior, and it could be useful. And my question is, from your point of view, the growing economic and political power of present China will or could press Russia to come closer to the European Union in the next one or two decades. And in that political situation, could the Russian establishment discover the advantages of closer relations with European Union and the changed position of Central European countries?

SS: I think that's a very insightful question. I just wanted to say one thing on the bridge issue: I didn't mean to imply--by being a bridge, you're still a central part of the West; you can only be a bridge if you're part of the West; if you haven't become part of the West, then America's common interest in having you be a bridge doesn't exist. Meaning you become part of the West by the success of your economic and political systems and development, not by which clubs you belong to. Austria and Finland are no less central to the West because they're not in NATO, and I think that would be true of countries in Central Europe, even more so, because Poland and Hungary in particular will be much more important to the United States than Austria will be, because Austria will be a little dominion of Germany, and not a particularly helpful one, given the nature of its policies towards the Balkans. And therefore, to the extent that Poland and Hungary can make themselves more useful, the more important they become to the United States; that's what mutual interests unfortunately are about. Western credentials are created by how many American businesses are on the ground in Warsaw and other parts of Poland and how many Polish scholars and writers are coming to New York and how many American scholars and writers are going to various points in Poland. Now the question about Russia's future relations I think is critical as it relates to China, because ideally in America's grander interest, the struggle seems to be managing a somewhat declining, potentially chronically weak and chaotic Russia, while at the same time managing the rise of an assertive Asia, and that has led some to believe that the US should play "the Russia card," meaning that the United States, that Western relations with Russia are critical to dealing with China. At the same time, internally, there's a growing feeling of rejection by the West in Russia because of being left out of discussions of NATO enlargement; there's a sense of inevitability, if there's a foreign policy choice, it's China, in spite of all the problems they have with China. The conflicts between China and Russia are far more potentially severe than they are between Russia, Central Europe and the European Union. What I fear, and one of the reasons why I don't favor NATO enlargement under current conditions, is I think you have certain institution--setting, order--setting events; NATO enlargement without Russian-European-American dialogue about why that is happening, that Russia really understands, and I'm not sure, given its political position on this, it can at this stage, would be an order-defining event, which means it would lock into place a certain expectation of conflict with Central Europe and the West, and expectation of finding cooperation, whether they are able to or not, and I think it's a major question, with China. So a NATO enlargement at this stage, under current conditions, would be an order-creating event that would begin to foreclose the possibility for closer European-Russian relations. And that's one of the reasons why I oppose it. It's not the principle reason I oppose it; I oppose it principally on economic and security grounds, because I think it poses enormous security and economic problems for Central Europe, it's virtually suicidal, both in terms of your political and economic interests, but I'm also concerned about it on larger geoeconomic and strategic grounds, it's not in the West's interests.

Elzbieta: Could you comment a bit about American policy vis-a-vis some Soviet Union successor states, mainly the large entities in Central Asia; and is there any effort in American foreign policy right now, let's say in the political class you mentioned, because I guess that would be the place where it could formulate itself, in creating some joint platform, or some kind of a networking or communication with other countries and representatives of the political class, on the issues of international social policies, which was never a traditional subject, but because of the globalization of markets suddenly we are very concerned that we are losing markets to the third-world countries that are producing cheaper because they are using child labor or because they are not giving their people pensions, and so on. And obviously as hypocritical as that concern might look, at the same time it is actually a concern of establishing some international standards. Now if you are not going to let people join the elitist clubs, and I'm not thinking now of NATO, it's extremely difficult to spread these standards because this is where you can actually put some conditions . . .

SS: One of my proposals is actually for a larger transatlantic economics base that is built on social democratic principles, that has an underpinning of social policies. Central Europe has an overriding interest, even though they'll be beneficiaries of certain outward German and European investment to lower wage investment sides, nonetheless Central Europe has a vested interest in creating social policies in the trade and investment arena, because it wants to--in this sense it shares the same position as South Africa, in the sense that its socio-economic future requires a certain commitment to some egalitarian notions that don't entirely undermine the social wage and the social contract, and it can't compete on low wages, nor should it, given its talent and its proximity. But it will be disadvantaged in dealing with cheap Asian importers--the Chinas, the Burmas, the Malaysias--who have even lower wages and disregard environmental and other social wage and social policies. And so the future success of Central Europe in being liberal and social democracies in both the Anglo-American and the European sense depends on two things: the European Union and the US providing a better growth environment, but also I think social policies that enable them to avoid what I regard as the unfair competition of the low social wage countries of Asia and to some degree some other countries. I think that the dilemma that Central Europe faces is, there's now all this talk in the European Union about how it has neglected Asia, it needs to open up, but in fact one of the big problems has been the Asian penetration of the lower end of the industrial product base in Europe over the last five years. And that's in direct competition with the potential industrial base with Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. I would favor Social Democratic, pan-European, transatlantic that discriminated against social policies built on low wages and environmental . . .

Now on your question on the successor states, I think that most important, obviously, from the Central European position, is the Ukraine. Let me give you the optimistic scenario for NATO enlargement, which is that NATO enlargement is seen as an opportunity for the Soviet Union to recreate the former Soviet Union and create its own security organization that includes all the former Soviet Union states, including Ukraine, and that you get a relatively benign Russia at the center, as opposed to a more aggressive one that uses carrots as well as sticks to create a new security order. And these two new blocks emerge, these new political-economic blocks emerge, an enlarged NATO in the west and center and a new CIS to the east. And the CIS does a fairly good job at maintaining order and stability to prevent the overflow of instability from the Ukraine, Central Asia and the Caucuses into Central Europe. So that Russia helps create a buffer zone, and that therefore the two blocks remain political and economic principally in nature and don't develop a military rationale; meaning you don't have Russian missiles that are placed in Belarus and Ukraine aimed at Poland, at Warsaw and Budapest. That's the optimistic scenario.

EM: Optimistic, but realistic?

SS: Well, I think the danger is twofold: one, I don't know that you can get a benign Russian CIS that will be effective in dealing with the instability and chaos inside Russia, in terms of Dagistan and Chechnya, but also in Ukraine, because I think once Ukraine becomes part of that region, the incentive for Western assistance and investment diminishes dramatically, because it becomes part of another orbit; and once NATO enlarges, Russia becomes much more protective of Ukraine as a buffer zone and therefore much more assertive about its interests.

You could see an optimistic scenario where there's a Ukraine-Russian order that's worked out, but I think it's more likely that Ukraine, being even further behind Russia in reforms, deteriorates, so you don't have an economic partner to the East; rather you have a cesspool of instability and chaos, which is bad enough, but then if you have Russia rearming, you have the additional set of military equations to deal with. I think it's critical that--if I were Central Europe, I would get the West to subsidize the building of stability and markets for you in the East; meaning I would yell as loudly as you could for massive aid to Ukraine, quietly accept--assuming you get a reasonable outcome to the elections, which Zyuganov would be a reasonable outcome--quietly accepting continued American assistance to Russia; because you don't want to bear the costs of having to be the frontline states against instability and military conflict in the East. You want the West to subsidize building stability and order and markets for you in the East as well as in the West, and that can only happen if the West remains committed to Ukraine and Russia, and under the NATO enlargement scenario, I worry that you lose that commitment.

Elzbieta: Thank you. Although I do say that Ukraine, especially after the recent visit of Kuchma here, is not very likely to join in this optimistic version . . .

SS: But that will even only make the pessimistic scenario more likely, because that means Russia will have to begin using its economic, political, and potentially its military sticks to encourage Ukraine in that direction, which only heightens tension. According to the agreement, Russia has continued to agree to subsidize Ukraine and its energy needs. If you get NATO enlargement, the first thing that goes, is Russia is back on Ukraine's case and saying, you come closer to us or we cut that subsidy.

Q: They tried to threaten Ukraine with not exporting natural gas, they thought, in hopes that Ukraine would pay back some of their debts. They found they couldn't do that, they couldn't store natural gas, they had to continue to export because it's almost impossible to store natural gas. So Russia can't hold anything over their head.

SS: Well, they can take other political and military [] to change the terms of that natural gas export . . . [unclear]

Q: [unclear --on Russian weakness] . . . inside Russia there's not enough power . . .

SS: It has no power vis-a-vis Central and Eastern Europe, and it's very militarily ineffective vis-a-vis dealing with Chechen rebels, but it has quite a few--Ukraine is still dependent on the Russian market and Russian resources, partly because Ukraine dilly-dallied around for two or three years on political and economic reforms.

Elzbieta: Thank you very much.