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Rome, 3 December 2002LITHUANIA’S SECURITY POLICY AFTER THE NATO ENLARGEMENT The NATO membership means to us the inclusion of Lithuania into the zone of durable security and stability. It will ultimately embed Lithuania within the democratic community of the West, to which Lithuania undoubtedly belongs from the point of view of its historical, political and cultural background. It will also make irreversible those positive qualitative changes in Lithuania’s international posture and its security environment that took place since the restoration of our independence in 1990.The NATO membership will increase Lithuania’s security by providing a direct “hard security” guarantee. The dramatic increase in the country’s security standard will be achieved at an incomparably lower cost, than if we were to reach that standard without allies, relying solely on our own resources. How will the Lithuanian security policy change upon the country’s entry to both NATO and the EU? The general policy objectives will remain the same - preservation of independence, territorial integrity, its democratic constitutional order and stable international environment; the promotion of democracy, safeguarding of peace and stability, and creation of conditions for economic prosperity. However, the strategic task agenda will change considerably, with its present two principal goals achieved, and NATO and EU membership transferred from the task list into the policy tools arsenal. The contents of our policy will be to a great extent everyday participation in the EU and NATO integration processes, in the development of common policies on the issues that each of them addresses. Our security policy agenda will address whatever the NATO and EU agenda is addressing, be it the international struggle against terrorism, partnership with Russia, or CFSP/ESDP.To sum up the essence of the imminent change in our security policy: We will have to learn how to run indefinite process-driven, rather than definite objective-driven, policy. This may and will require a good deal of adaptation: political, institutional and, not least, psychological. In that everyday process, we will have to develop and put through our individual identity, that we will need to bring in harmony with our Allies’ views. We will no longer have to follow our friends’ advice and guidance on how to qualify for the democratic community of the West. Instead, our task will be much tougher: We will have to make our own, independent input into debating and deciding which way do we have to go. Our security policy will become part of both NATO’s policy and defence planning and the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy. Within NATO, Lithuania will most likely invest its security policy efforts and energies in three main directions:(1) to participate actively in the Alliance’s further evolution and adaptation. This addresses, on the one hand, the new missions that NATO assumes and supports with the development of appropriate capabilities, in order to remain relevant in the changing international security environment, with the new threats, risks and challenges it brings. On the other hand, it will also address the need for the Alliance to remain a strong collective defence organisation that provides “traditional” Article 5 guarantees to its members;(2) to ensure the continuity of the NATO enlargement process to ultimately include all prepared candidates in Central and Eastern Europe. The important task here will be to make sure that such future accessions would strengthen the Alliance, not dilute it;(3) to project stability and Western-type democratic values to partners in such countries and regions of the Euro-Atlantic area, as the Balkans, Ukraine, South Caucasus, Central Asia. Let me comment on each of these directions of our intra-NATO policy.The first one, the evolution and adaptation of the Alliance, is likely to address the following key points: (a) strengthening of the strategic transatlantic security link between Europe and North America that lies at the core of security of each individual European NATO Ally. NATO candidates will strengthen among the European Allies the argument in favour of further American involvement in the European security. At the same time, we will keep explaining to the Americans the considerations and arguments behind the European reading of the topical security policy issues. To do so, we will make use of the means available to us, including the strong Lithuanian community in the United States and the tradition of the US-Lithuanian strategic partnership, based on the 1998 US-Baltic Charter, as well as on the US security support and bilateral/multilateral co-operative programmes. NATO itself will become the major forum and tool for the formation of our mutual agenda with the US. (b) As a member, we will strengthen the allied collective defence capabilities with our forces, assets, territory and with the military units, defence infrastructure and training establishments, and with our participation in NATO defence planning process. Since the early 1990s, we managed to develop national armed forces from scratch into a small, but well-trained, highly motivated and capable force that we are equipping up to NATO standards. In that effort, we have relied on our national resources and on our Western partners’ support, including France. The ongoing Lithuanian defence reform lies at the core of the implementation of our NATO Membership Action Plan. The scope and objectives of the reform have been carefully co-ordinated with the Alliance. The development of the armed forces is oriented on the criteria identified by NATO: mobility, deployability, sustainability, flexibility and interoperability. The reform concept pays particular attention to Lithuania’s potential force contribution to NATO operations. Internally, we will retain the existing solid consensus, across the entire Lithuanian political spectrum, on the key foreign, security and defence policy issues, as embodied in our parliamentary parties’ Defence Policy Agreement. (c) Part of our policy will be continued participation in the Allied operations, as is the case today in Bosnia and Kosovo, accompanied by direct involvement in the political and operational planning. This applies largely also to such operations as Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, to which we have dispatched our special forces. (d) Lithuania may well contribute to the strengthening of the NATO-Russia partnership, because we will make our positive experience of good-neighbourly relations with Russia part of the Alliance’s co-operation strategy. Lithuania has a very good record of mutual relations with Russia, including Kaliningrad region. We welcome the current positive trend in the NATO-Russia partnership and the establishment of the NATO-Russia Council. For this trend to bring the desired results, much political commitment will be required from both NATO and Russia. Lithuania is able and willing to contribute to further constructive development of the NATO-Russia dialogue, on the basis of our own experience in the Baltic Sea region. Already today we project our bilateral policy with Russia as a constituent part of broader NATO-Russia and EU-Russia relationships. Good-neighbourly relations with Russia (and Belarus) will remain to Lithuania an important component of ensuring a safe Euro-Atlantic environment. The specific contents of these relations will largely depend on how consequently Russia will pursue its dialogue and co-operation with NATO, as well as on when the process of political democratisation, market liberalisation and opening-up to the outer world will start in Belarus and how dynamically it will progress. (e) The second direction, continuation of enlargement, will build on the experience of the Vilnius process that we launched two and a half years ago at a conference of the candidate countries’ foreign ministers in the Lithuanian capital. The Vilnius process has proved successful in keeping the enlargement high on NATO’s agenda and in ensuring that co-operation, solidarity, mutual support and transparency prevail over competition in the relations between the candidates. We think the mechanisms of the Vilnius process can find very useful application in transferring the recent entrants’ NATO preparation, accession and integration experience to the future waves’ candidates. This will help ensure that the subsequent rounds of NATO enlargement would strengthen the Alliance and that the prospective new members would contribute to the planning and implementation of allied decisions and would not hamper the effectiveness of NATO’s decision-making. The third direction, stability and value projection, is based on the assumption, that Lithuania and a few other Central European nations have accumulated a decade’s successful experience of political and economic transition to democracy and functioning free-market economy. Transfer of this experience to the interested countries, say, in the Balkans or in the former Soviet Union, may help them quicker and easier overcome those problems that we have already solved in our societies and establish all inherent institutes of a democratic nation. Our experience of democratic transition during the past decade may be of more interest and relevance to them than the centuries-long process in the old democracies, because ours occurred within lifetime of the current generation and we began from approximately the same starting positions as our potential policy-transfer “customers”. In many cases, such policy can be seen as conducive to long-term stabilisation and even conflict-resolution in the target countries and regions. This will safeguard us from all sorts of spillover effects of political, economic and military crises affecting some of them; this will also gain us new friends there with whom to join our efforts in the work towards common objectives of justice, freedom, peace, stability and prosperity. We are already making the first steps in that direction in our relations with Ukraine, South Caucasus, Central Asia. But a reasonable success can only be expected in this work if NATO and the EU do it in a well-concerted effort and support it by their resources.