The Congress of Prague, to be held May 10-12 under the sponsorship of the American Enterprise Institute and several European institutions, is a major international effort aimed at revitalizing political, economic, security, and cultural ties across the Atlantic and across Europe. This essay describes the apprehensions that have inspired the calling of the Congress of Prague and what the gathering hopes to achieve.

The young diplomat George F. Kennan was assigned to the U.S. Legation in Prague in 1938-1939 and watched the Czech people reel from the shocks of Munich. "Nothing was left in the popular mind but bitterness, bewilderment, and skepticism," he wrote to a friend in December 1938. Even the people's faith in liberal democracy was shattered by the West's abandonment.

Little did Czechs imagine how long their nightmare would last. Their country was to be liberated from one totalitarian dictatorship only to be enslaved by another--to endure a Communist coup d'etat in 1948, reinforced by a new Soviet military invasion in 1968.

No wonder, then, that the specter of Western abandonment haunts the Czech political mind. President V clav Havel, in an address to Parliament on March 12, warned that "The danger of another Munich is looming over Europe again." As he later explained in an interview with The Economist, he was lamenting the "excessive caution" shown by the West in its fumbling response to the Yugoslav crisis and, most of all, in its endless procrastination about admitting the new Central European democracies into the North Atlantic Alliance and the European Union. NATO membership, in particular, Havel saw as "a signal that the West truly wants us and sees us as part of the Western sphere of civilization." But that signal has not yet been given.

Havel's unease is justified--and it demonstrates why time is running out for NATO enlargement. Opponents of enlargement are in the habit of arguing that the present situation in Central Europe is fine--there's no Russian threat at the moment--so why take the risks of expanding NATO? The answer is not simply that historical memory teaches that ambiguity about the status of Central Europe is, in the long run, very unhealthy for the peace of Europe. More concrete and more immediate is the conclusion that the Central Europeans are drawing from the West's hesitation: They see Russia turning ominously in a nationalist direction, and they see the West seemingly paralyzed by its desire not to "provoke" the Russians.

When Generalissimo Franco died in November 1975, one of the arguments often heard for bringing Spain rapidly into NATO was to bolster Spain's democratic institutions and reinforce its solidarity with the West. Six years later, in December 1981, Spain's admission into the Alliance was proclaimed (ratifications took another six months). Today, nearly seven years have already passed since the revolution of 1989, and no invitation has been issued to Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, or any other country to join the Alliance. The NATO foreign ministers last December put off any decisions for at least another year. As for the EU, its summit in Madrid last December refused to set a date for even beginning talks with the Central Europeans on membership. The failure of both the EU and NATO to embrace them by this late date is surely one of the factors contributing to the demoralization and discrediting of the pro-Western forces in these societies, and thus the resuscitation of the neo-Communists.

But more is in store. If the West continues to hesitate, the Central Europeans will not sit still forever; they will eventually conclude that the West is simply unwilling to make a commitment to protect them and that they have no option but to make the best of that situation. They will begin to declare publicly that they really don't need NATO membership all that much (as Bulgaria has already done). They will drift back into the Russian orbit--in the guise of "neutrality," which is the Russian preference. The result will be the Finlandization of Central Europe and the partial reversal of the outcome of 1989. That will be a strategic and moral disaster.

A New Atlantic Initiative

There is, fortunately, a distinguished group of people determined to avoid this outcome. A conference will take place in Prague over the weekend of May 10-12 bringing together statesmen and intellectuals from the United States, Western Europe, and Central Europe, of many political stripes, united on the proposition that Central Europe must be reintegrated as soon as possible into the Western family. The enterprise is called the New Atlantic Initiative, and the roster of its patrons is a distinguished one: Havel himself, Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Helmut Schmidt, and Leszek Balcerowicz (former deputy premier of Poland).

Its International Advisory Board includes other eminent Americans such as Colin Powell, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Mitch McConnell, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Richard Burt, Robert Zoellick, William Kristol, Tom Foley, Lane Kirkland, Donald Kagan, and Adrian Karatnycky, and Europeans such as Jean-Franç Revel, Lord Chalfont, Lord Weidenfeld, Joachim Fest, Hanna Suchocka (former premier of Poland), Geza Jeszenszky (former foreign minister of Hungary), Alain Madelin (former finance minister of France), and Antonio Martino (former foreign minister of Italy).

There is no more appropriate setting for such an event than Prague. Central Europe once held a place of honor in the family of European civilization, before it was artificially and cruelly cut off by the totalitarians from 1938 onward. Prague is where Charles IV built the first university in Central Europe. Mozart was more at home in Prague than in Vienna--indeed, geographically, Prague is to the west of Vienna; it is much closer to Dublin than it is to Moscow.

The congress in Prague this May is modeled after an event that took place in The Hague in May 1948, which launched the United Europe movement. Several hundred delegates from 23 countries gathered there, led by elder statesmen and cultural leaders such as Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Leon Blum, Paul Reynaud, Prince Bernhard, Salvador de Madariaga, and Ignazio Silone, to promote the cause of Western European integration. The 1996 Congress of Prague will be addressed by both President Havel and Czech Prime Minister Vá Klaus, by Thatcher and Balcerowicz, and by Ruud Lubbers, former premier of the Netherlands. There will be working groups and final reports on political and security matters, and on economics and culture.

In the realm of politics and security, a consensus undoubtedly exists among the Prague participants that the Central European democracies should be brought rapidly into NATO and the EU. This will not be unanimous: there will be eminent participants--like Owen Harries, editor of The National Interest--who are uneasy about NATO enlargement. But unanimity will certainly exist on the proposition that the Central Europeans need to be brought immediately into the elaborate networking that has been going on for fifty years among Americans and Western Europeans. A true Atlantic Community has been born since the Second World War; interchange between diplomats, businessmen, academics, journalists, and artistic and literary figures across the Atlantic has become a commonplace of our daily life. It is time to welcome the Central Europeans back to their rightful place in this conversation.

In the cultural dimension, there is much we can learn from each other. Central Europe, reveling in the joys of freedom, can learn some lessons from Western Europeans and Americans about the excesses to which Western culture has been all too subject, the better to avoid them. The Western Europeans and Americans can only find inspiration from the courage of those to the East who clung to Western ideals of freedom through much hardship, even while many in the West came to take them for granted (or turned cynically or frivolously against them).

As the name New Atlantic Initiative implies, the event in Prague will celebrate not only the reintegration of the European family but the consolidation of the bonds across the Atlantic. In the economic area, we may ultimately see a link-up between Europe and the Western Hemisphere as a whole: the idea of a "Transatlantic Free Trade Area" (TAFTA) will be a key item on the Prague agenda. The aim is not simply to ease the chronic trade disputes that have so eroded Allied unity, but to provide an economic structure that can underpin the Alliance and consolidate the West in new ways in a new era. The Atlantic Community is today the natural community of the Western democracies. It is not a supranational entity infringing anyone's sovereignty, but a free associa-tion based on a common civilization.

The West's defeat of Soviet Communism has paradoxically left some confusion in Europe and America about what mission is left for our foreign policy. Consolidating the democratic world is surely part of the answer--beginning with the ties across the Atlantic that proved the salvation of European civilization in this century's great struggle against the totalitarians.

America's Interest in a Stable Europe

Some in America and Western Europe may ask, What is our stake in these other countries? In the 1930s, some in Britain and France asked, Why die for Danzig? Today, Danzig is Gdansk, the shipyard town in Poland where Solidarity was born. The problem is, twice before in this century, the Western democracies realized after the fact that the instability of Central Europe undermined the security of all of Europe. Should the Central Europeans lose their faith in the Western democracies and drift back into the Russian orbit, it will only dramatize the restoration of Russian power in the eastern half of the Continent; it will show that once again the European balance of power is up for grabs. The Versailles Conference of 1919 established this belt of small, vulnerable states out of the wreckage of old empires, and since then their fate has been a determinant of all Europe's fate. It is not a matter of choice but a structural reality of European stability. And European stability is a vital American interest.

NATO enlargement is therefore a matter of crisis prevention with respect to Central Europe, just as NATO's creation was a matter of crisis prevention with respect to Western Europe. It is to foreclose Russian irredentism and make irreversible the new status quo that resulted from 1989. It is simple prudence; the failure to do it would be the more reckless course. And it is not just a favor we do for the Central Europeans, however much they may deserve such a favor. That, at least, is the sentiment of most of the organizers of the Prague Congress.

The young diplomat George Kennan, in personal notes on the Munich crisis written in Prague in October 1938, paid tribute to the "strength, courage, and perseverance" of the Czech people, who "have never been permanently suppressed and have never failed in the end to win their just place in the surging, changing movement of political life." We have an opportunity, finally, to justify that confidence.

Peter W. Rodman is a senior editor of National Review and director of national-security programs at the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom.