Atlantic celebration - Congress of Prague meeting addresses the political climate of Central Europe

National Review, June 3, 1996 by Peter W. Rodman

THE Congress of Prague convened on May 10 in Hradcany Castle, the city's spectacular sixteenth-century citadel, in the ornate gallery of Emperor Rudolf II. The buzzing of conversation was interrupted by the blaring of a trumpet fanfare, as in walked Czech President Vaclav Havel leading a procession of dignitaries including Margaret Thatcher, Karel Schwarzenberg of the Bohemia Foundation, former U.S. Ambassador Edward Streator, and NR editor John O'Sullivan. Havel, the playwright and political prisoner turned statesman, marched with the diffident air of a man who still pinched himself every morning at the wonder of where he had ended up (though he did not appear so diffident, or so surprised, as John O'Sullivan).

Both Havel, in his eloquent keynote speech, and Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus the next day sounded a warning to the gathering. There are external dangers facing the Western democracies, Klaus said, but they are less dangerous than our own deficiencies. Among these he listed isolationist and protectionist tendencies in both Western Europe and America, a nostalgia for statist solutions to social problems, and a hesitation about consolidating Central Europe's place in the Western family.

The Congress of Prague was convened under the banner of the New Atlantic Initiative, led by a group of eminent individuals from the United States, Western Europe, and Central Europe determined to avoid these perils. In broad terms the mission of the Initiative was to reaffirm the moral unity of the Atlantic Community in the new context of democracy's triumph in the Cold War and its spread into Central and Eastern Europe. The honorary patrons of the Initiative and the Congress were Lady Thatcher, Helmut Schmidt, Henry Kissinger, George P. Shultz, former Polish deputy premier Leszek Balcerowicz, and Havel. Its international advisory board included such political figures as Speaker Newt Gingrich and his predecessor Tom Foley, former AFL - CIO president Lane Kirkland, Gen. Colin Powell, Jack Kemp, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Polish prime minister Hanna Suchocka, former Dutch prime minister Ruud Lubbers, former Italian foreign minister Antonio Martino, former Delaware governor Pete du Pont, as well as intellectual figures such as former Yale dean Donald Kagan, film director Milos Forman, Jean-Francois Revel, Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter, Christoph Bertram, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and Samuel Huntington.

While the Initiative was conceived by conservatives, the roster above shows the effort that was made to make the endeavor bipartisan. The Prague meeting was attended and addressed by Lady Thatcher, but British delegates included a close political advisor to Tony Blair. Lane Kirkland made a powerful speech endorsing NATO membership for the Central Europeans, as well as a transatlantic free-trade area; former congressman Dave McCurdy and respected diplomat Max Kampelman were also featured speakers.

But the strong conservative participation had its special significance: In the era of Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and other phenomena on the fringe, the display of the continued strength of conservative internationalism and commitment to the West's democratic partnerships was not a small matter.

The themes of the discussion ranged from the broad to the specific. There was a reminder that the moral unity of the West had antedated the Cold War and went deeper than any contest with the Soviet Union; therefore it should not be expected (or allowed) to fragment just because the Soviet threat was gone. This was a feature of both Thatcher's and Klaus's remarks. In the cultural realm, there was a concern at intellectual trends in the West (deconstructionism, multiculturalism) whose thrust was to denigrate the moral and political heritage of Western civilization.

The nervousness of the Central Europeans at the excruciatingly slow pace of admitting them into NATO and the European Union was, of course, another theme. One of the main purposes of the Congress was to demonstrate solidarity with them -- to display the commitment of many in America and Western Europe to welcoming them back into the Western fold. (See my ''Prague Spring,'' NR, May 6.) The conference was in itself the occasion for intensive networking with young leaders and intellectuals from Central Europe, of a kind that has been a commonplace in the Atlantic context for five decades. The hope, beyond that, was to give political impetus to the decisions of Western governments on both NATO and EU membership.

The pleas of the Central Europeans were powerful: Havel, in his keynote address, warned again, as he has been warning for some time, of the dangers of procrastination and of appeasement. Time was working against the democratic forces in Central Europe, he said, and it was urgent for the West to make firm commitments to embracing and bolstering them. Mrs. Suchocka, too, pointed to the danger of leaving a security vacuum in Central Europe; NATO membership, she argued, was needed as a clear signal to those in Moscow who yearned for the imperial past.