Good Read. Interview with William H. Hill, author of "No Place for Russia – European Security Institutions since 1989"
How did it happen that Europe, which at the end of the Cold War was optimistically hailed as whole, free and at peace, ended up three decades later with relations plagued by mistrust and outright hostility? In his new book No Place for Russia – European Security Institutions since 1989, William Hill argues that it is a situation that nobody wanted, the result of a variety of decisions taken for reasons often understandable in their own right, but together leading to impasse.
Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Columbia University Press, 2018
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(book cover image courtesy of the author)
A professor of history who studied at Leningrad University at the same time as Putin and a long-time US diplomat and OSCE official (twice Head of the Mission to Moldova), Hill traces in over 400 pages the history of the interrelation of the European security institutions NATO, the EU and the OSCE from 1989 to the beginning of the Ukraine conflict in 2014, when, he argues, the post-Cold War era can be said to have come to an end.
In this interview, he talks about his book and reflects on the OSCE, the potential with which it was invested, but which it was prevented from fully unfolding – at least until now.
Can you say something about the choice of title for your book: No Place for Russia?
William Hill: You can read the title No Place for Russia in many different ways, which is why I liked it. You can look at it as an injunction or instruction: that Russia should not be there. Or you can look at it as a comment, or you can look at it as a statement of the result.
The way I look at it is that we tried, but we ended up with a system in Europe with no place for Russia. And I believe that this was not the result we intended and it wasn’t the result that the US, our Western allies or Russia desired. In the 1990s and really until the war in Georgia in 2008, we were basically co-operating, we worked together closely on many things. But we took decisions on various things for various reasons and it ended up that Russia was excluded, isolated, left out of some of the most important institutions in the European security order.
What were some of these decisions?
Hill: The EU, early on, said flatly that Russia cannot be an EU member, because it’s too big and too different, and they decided instead that the EU would build a special relationship with Russia. This worked better when perhaps half of Europe was in the EU and half of it was not. But when the EU was well over 20 nations and Russia was alone, there was an obvious imbalance there.
NATO is more ambiguous because several times Russia – both Yeltsin and Putin at times – talked about Russia becoming a NATO member but for various reasons it did not – it never made an application. And in determining to expand NATO, the Western nations tried also to build a special relationship with Russia. But, at least from a US perspective – I participated in US deliberations and then negotiations with Russia on the first enlargement of NATO –the decision was quite clearly that while we had important interests in the relationship with Russia, we also we had important interests in Central Europe making a successful transition. And we came to the conclusion that we would put Central Europe first. This is one of those decisions: it was understandable; it generally worked pretty well for Central Europe; it worked well for Russia for a time; but it ended up starting NATO on a path with Russia outside.
By 2004/2005 you started to get complaints from the Russians, and these complaints were not that NATO was on their border or that NATO was a danger. What the Russians complained about – in OSCE meetings at the time and in important Russian publications – was that they were left out. One Russian author put it this way: the Western security architecture is like a club. You allow us to come into the club and sit in the room but you won’t let us sit at the bar and buy drinks. We can’t take part in the important decisions.
Particularly you see it in their criticism of the 2008 recognition of Kosovo. Where the West – the EU and the US – basically unilaterally decided we needed to recognize Kosovo to avoid destabilization, the Russians, who had been a party to UNSCR 1244 on the end of the war with Serbia, were just left out. And they objected.
You are saying this was short-sighted?
Hill: In retrospect, it was. It was counterproductive. Those in the West who ended up making that decision looked at the consequences for Kosovo and for Serbia, but did not consider the broader circumstances. They probably justified it by rationalizing that Russia would protest, but get over it. It got harder and harder for the Russians to get over things like this. For Putin, certainly, the NATO intervention in Libya in 2011 was the final straw. NATO took a Security Council resolution which was basically for the protection of the populace in Benghazi and used it for an attack that ended up removing Gadhafi. In public statements following this, and over the years, Putin is basically saying to the West: do you see what you have done? I’m oversimplifying, but in Putin’s view this is what the West always did. The Western point of view was: it was tackling important security problems and trying to find a solution to them - a solution that the Russians were blocking.
On the other hand you had domestic developments in Russia, its retreat from the openness and competitiveness of the first decade after the Cold War. This was a disappointment to a lot of Russians as well as to a lot of Westerners. The second thing – and I think the single greatest problem that Europeans and Americans had with Russia – is the Russian failure to treat the former Soviet republics as fully independent and fully sovereign states. It was not as big an impediment to Russia’s relations with either Europe or the US in the early days because neither was as deeply involved in these countries as they became after the EU and NATO expansions.
It seems like an intractable difference.
Hill: It is hard to find a compromise. You are either independent or you are not. If you have a 19th century droit de regard on your neighbours, they are not fully sovereign, and that is something they complained about. This has been the problem and a direction that the Russians have pretty consistently taken and it is one that brings them into conflict both with their neighbours and with broader Europe and North America, who are trying to establish relationships with them and treat them as free countries. That is at the heart of the conflict in Ukraine now, and it’s at the heart of ongoing separatist issues and negotiations in Georgia and in Moldova.
So you gradually moved from a relationship that was largely co-operative in the 1990s to a relationship that was hostile and competitive if not outright in conflict after 2014, and there is no one thing that caused this. There was never a time that either the West, the US, the EU, important European countries or Russia said: we want this, we want a relationship like this, or a relationship like this is inevitable.
Wouldn’t the OSCE have been the place to resolve these matters?
Hill: Gorbachev had a dream for the CSCE and unfortunately many of the Europeans and many of the Americans simply did not share this dream, so it never became what he and some of the Russians who followed him hoped that it would be.
The CSCE and the Helsinki process was a way for a united Western Europe and North America to try to bring about positive change in the Soviet bloc. Come 1989, we believed that that was effective. We got to the Charter of Paris and the fundamental statement of values and the start of the institutionalization of the CSCE, which became the OSCE, but that’s where our view of how the future would be diverged.
Gorbachev clearly believed that the CSCE would become like a European UN and Russia would be a member of a European Security Council. The Russians proposed that, more than once. I am not sure that many of the Europeans would have liked it very much, because it would have been like the UN, where the General Assembly gets to take decisions but nobody listens to it. I presume if the Russians had gotten what they wanted, that’s how it would have ended up – perhaps it could have been different, but nobody had a vision.
Both the US and the EU always had an ambiguous relationship with the OSCE. The OSCE was a rival to each of them in different ways. With the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, a wider and deeper Europe became the primary interest for those that were either in the EU or aspiring to it. The OSCE’s economic dimension, the “second basket”, which had always been stunted, was considered a direct rival to the EU, so they would never let it grow.
In terms of the US, the rivalry concerned the “security basket”, and there was a real debate in the US – I know because I sat in the office that wrote the papers on it in 1991 and 1992 – about the question of remaining in Europe. Considering the lessons learned from history, the US decided that we needed to stay because Europe’s future was too closely tied to ours. And the vehicle for the US to stay in Europe was NATO. NATO was very effective, an instrument ready to use. It was much more effective than the OSCE.
The OSCE did get involved in the former Yugoslavia when we put field missions on the ground. And in 1992 the participating States gave the OSCE a peacekeeping capability. But the OSCE had no office, no capacities to do this. NATO did.
You were involved in developing the first OSCE field missions?
Hill: As the American director for CSCE, I was the one who wrote the proposal for the first field mission of long duration. The CSCE had agreed on good offices missions, first at the Vienna meeting in 1989 and then in the Moscow Document in 1991. We were looking in Washington at what we could do to help with the wars and keep them from expanding, and it occurred to me that we could send in good offices missions. Except that in the existing CSCE documents they were meant to be short term visits. So I said: “what if we keep sending people, and keep them there all the time?” We brought this to the Helsinki preparatory meeting leading up to the 1992 Helsinki Summit, and I was extremely surprised that the Europeans took it and adopted it right away. They had a mission ready to go to Kosovo almost immediately – it was remarkable. It was an idea whose time had come.
So the OSCE got field missions. But the US was very reluctant to send military forces over which it did not have command. And that is why we went to NATO. But NATO is also a political organization.
So the political questions were debated in NATO rather than in the OSCE?
Hill: In the OSCE, the way it typically worked is that the EU would develop a position in its caucus, and then we would have the NATO caucus meeting, where the US would get a combination of the EU points and the things that we wanted. So NATO would come into the OSCE with a position already formed. It was very difficult for a country like Russia or anyone else who wasn’t in NATO or the EU to have a voice on these important questions.
The Russians started to complain that the US did not bring the most important security questions to the OSCE. And they were right. If we discussed them with the Russians we did it bilaterally or in the NATO-Russia Council. It is a problem that reinforces itself because then the Russians don’t bring the important questions to the OSCE, either. They say it’s meaningless, we’ll just denounce you there, but then we’ll go talk with you bilaterally where we’ll have the real talks. So the OSCE rarely became the forum where you could have a debate.
Do you see potential for the OSCE as a true multilateral forum?
Hill: I spent a good deal of my career with the OSCE and always hoped that it would do important things. And in some respects it has. It has become necessary – unfortunately I think – mainly when relations get very bad, this is when it’s been more important. There is nowhere else where we all meet as equals. And so when you need this, that’s where you have to go.
There is no other organization, for example, that could have fielded the Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine or the Observer Mission at the border between Ukraine and Russia. The only place you could have agreed on these and the only framework in which you can have the talks on a settlement in Donbas is within the framework of the OSCE, where all are members and all are equal.
The sad thing is that rather than the first choice, it has become the lowest common denominator and the institution of last resort.
When I look at it right now, I think the initiatives like the Structured Dialogue show promise of restoring the OSCE to an important contributing role. Where you can have important discussions on issues that are not simply left over because NATO and the EU have either shown lack of interest or have failed to solve them. We’ll see. It’s a welcome initiative.
What’s the way forward?
Hill: Given the deterioration of the post-Cold War structure that we built up from 1986 to 1992 and the effects of what happened from 2014 on, we really need to start working on some sort of rules of the road that are going to guide our relationships for the coming years in whatever we chose eventually to call the era that we’re living in now. It is no longer post-Cold War.
We are going to be less intrusive on some things and we need to concentrate on important issues such as control of nuclear weapons and materials. There are important new technologies that need to be considered, new conventional arms. The whole area of cyber, the Internet, social media – basically we have no rules and we are finding out now that nobody wants the law of the jungle. That is one of the problems where how you solve it is going to have an extremely significant effect on what the coming two or three decades look like.
In the last chapter of my book I do talk about how what was done after the Cold War, the integration of Europe in the EU and NATO, in many respects was a tremendous success – in terms of travel, movement of goods, common practices, the way that people mix.
Unfortunately the one, the big failure was that we ended up with Russia left out and finding that it had no place. And this, given how important Russia is, even before you look at its own considerable self-estimation, is just something that wasn’t tenable.
As we build the next era, even if there are things about Russia that we don’t like, we are going to have to find a way of dealing with this, of including Russia enough that that it feels it has a stake in the system.