NATO's Enlargement to the East: An Analysis of Collective Decision-making EAPC-NATO Individual Fellowship Report 1998-2000 Frank Schimmelfennig Dr. Frank Schimmelfennig Institut für Politikwissenschaft Technische Universität Darmstadt Residenzschloss D-64283 Darmstadt Germany Tel.: (49) (7121) 670487 Fax: (49) (7121) 907138 E-Mail:
[email protected] URL: http://www.ifs.tu-darmstadt.de/pg/regorgs/regorgh.htm 2 Acknowledgments I gratefully acknowledge funding for the research presented here by an EAPC-NATO Fellowship for the period 1998-2000. I am highly indebted to my interview partners (see list in the appendix) for sharing their precious time and their insights with me. I further thank Karen Donfried, Chris Donnelly, Gunther Hellmann, Johanna Möhring, and Frank Umbach for helping me to get in contact with the interviewees and Thomas Risse and Klaus Dieter Wolf for supporting my application for the fellowship. 1 1 Introduction At NATO's Madrid summit of July 1997, at which the alliance decided to invite the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland to become members, Czech deputy minister of foreign affairs Vondra approached a group of U.S. senators participating at the summit on behalf of the Senate NATO Observer Group and asked them, "Why did you choose us?" The answer he got was, "We like you, we think you like us, and then you talked it into our heads for so long that we could not do otherwise." (Interview Member of CEEC Delegation to NATO) This little anecdote could serve as an epigraph for the analysis of the collective decision- making process on NATO's Eastern enlargement which is the subject of this report.