The political debate and decisions taken in 1994 regarding the security of Europe constituted a new stage in the process initiated at the turn of the decade by the collapse of the bipolar system and the breakup of multinational totalitarian states in Europe.

The decisions made in 1994 were an attempt to respond to a number of new challenges: how the existing security institutions in Europe might contribute to ending, limiting and preventing future outbreaks of bloody conflicts such as those that have engulfed areas of the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union; how the USA will accommodate its role and active involvement in European security to the new realities; how to stave off the isolation of Russia and its embracing of a hegemonic  and neo-imperialist policy, and pave the way to integrating the Russian Federation into the changing security structures of the European political order; how to overcome the invisible but tangible division of Europe; where to draw the eastern borders of Europe; and how to expand NATO and the European Union (EU).

However, the real issue is neither one of formal legal interpretations of treaty provisions nor of purely institutional arrangements. Specific interests of individual great powers are, as a rule, concealed behind the façade of formal arguments or complex debates on the institutional transformation of the existing security systems. The bipolar system not only caused the subordination of the interests of the Central and East European (CEE) states to Soviet policy but also blurred the differences in the security policies of Western states. When this system disappeared, national security interests reasserted themselves, even overriding international community or alliance interests. The declared policy of expanding and deepening European integration is accompanied by centrifugal tendencies and the growth of nationalism in the East, a remarkable differentiation and competition among the partners of the EU, and a weakening of links between Western Europe and the USA and of the US military's political presence in Europe.

The Western states face the dilemma of how to expand NATO and the EU eastward without creating new divisions in Europe. In 1994 a serious effort was made to harmonize security policy within the framework of NATO and NACC, the PFP, the EU/WEU and the CSCE. The priority in shaping an efficient multilateral security system is inclusion of the reforming CEE states in the mutually reinforcing Western security institutions.

* Documents on European security including an extract from the Budapest Document 1994 are appended to chapter 8.