As NATO's leaders gather for a summit in Prague this week to accept seven new members into the Euro-Atlantic treaty body, NATO Secretary-General Lord George Robertson has said it is a time for rejoicing, not demonstrating. Yet mindful that any international meeting can attract peaceful as well as violent protest and even terrorism, some 12,000 Czech uniformed men will be guarding 2,000 delegates and 3,000 journalists, the center of town will be closed to local residents, and U.S. Air Force jets have been granted special permission to sweep the skies during the meeting (see "NATO: Summit to Focus on Expansion, Alliance's Changing Role," rferl.org, 18 November 2002). Despite the high ratio of security forces to civilians, hundreds of foreign antiglobalization activists and self-styled local anarchists are converging on Prague, claiming their protest is largely planned to be peaceful, even as some justify the use of violence against property in opposing states' military actions (see "NATO: Despite Security Checks, Protesters Flow Into Prague," rferl.org, 19 November 2002).

For weeks, anti-NATO protesters have been organizing through websites like international.antinato.cz, exchanging advice on mobile kitchens, first-aid, warm gear, and techniques to foil tear gas, such as wrapping bandanas soaked in vinegar around faces. Travelers facing border hurdles are urged to pretend they are going to a Polish film festival and then travel overland to the Czech Republic. There, security officials say they are already expecting not only anarchists but fascists from Russia and Serbia. A few hundred people picketed earlier this week with anticapitalism and antiwar signs in Prague and other cities without incident. Czech police have arrested five people accused of plotting to cut power during the summit, and deported or cancelled residence permits of several dozen more during a pre-summit security dragnet (see "RFE/RL Newsline," 14 and 18 November 2002).

Seven or 10 years ago, before there was much of an antiglobalization movement, criticism of NATO expansion could be heard more loudly from prominent American Sovietologists and former U.S. Foreign Service officers than from East European anarchists. Only a few East European opposition leaders worried that Russian backlash to NATO's growth, especially with the Baltic states' inclusion, would foreclose democratic possibilities in Belarus and other border states. Both civil society activists and governments used to make much more of a connection between increasingly militarized blocs and relative internal levels of freedom. In the 1980s, socialist labor historian E.P. Thompson, leader of the European Nuclear Disarmament movement, would often comment at rallies that "every time a Pershing missile is deployed in Europe, a jail door slams in Moscow."

Conversely, American diplomats of that era admitted that the exiling of Soviet dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov to Gorky and other gross human rights violations helped them persuade reluctant European allies to deploy missiles on their continent to counter the Soviets' SS20s. With the latest round of expansion, the connection is once again being invoked. When the Czech government turned down authoritarian Belarusian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka's visa application to attend the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council meetings this week, they did not cite military issues such as the allegations of Belarus's sales of arms or the transfer of military expertise to Iraq, instead, they invoked human rights.

Asked in an interview with "(Un)Civil Societies" if newly demarcated Cold War-style blocs might be re-established after NATO expansion and adversely impact democracies in transition, Ambassador Hans-Georg Wieck, a veteran German diplomat, regional expert, and former chief of the expelled OSCE Mission in Minsk, said there were "no longer notions of prevailing regions of interest," but more importantly, "the stability that goes with [NATO] membership is an element of internal stability, in particular of military forces." Wieck acknowledged that in the last year since the terrorist attacks on the U.S., NATO appeared to lose importance, even as Eastern Europe itself was overshadowed by the war on terrorism in Central Asia and the Middle East. "Prague refocuses the trans-Atlantic initiative on the impact NATO has on stability in Europe and beyond its boundaries." Wieck believes that for publics contemplating their attitude toward NATO, the Russian threat is really no longer an issue; the most significant danger for NATO and the Russian Federation is terrorism, which has "highlighted the requirement for solidarity," said Wieck.

Among East European nightmares, said Wieck, are the old KGB-style security forces that must be dissolved, and the fear in the last decade that countries would only change the heads of security departments and not reform them at the core. An important task in NATO expansion was not only to dismantle Soviet-style security structures but to "educate the parliaments to be trustworthy controllers" of security and military forces, said the German diplomat. Regarding the Czechs' visa denial for Lukashenka, Wieck agreed that the Belarusian leader was "undesirable" because he is "not qualified to speak for his country" -- a democracy issue with implications for civilian control over armed forces.

Beyond street demonstrators and "not-in-my-backyard" environmental concerns about nuclear weapons and the high financial or even human cost of reforming armies and dismantling missiles (like the Scuds in Bulgaria, where four workers were killed in an explosion as they attempted destruction of the weapons), most troubling for some reluctant publics in Central and Eastern Europe is the post-11 September emphasis on Article 5 (an attack on one member shall be considered an attack on all) and the implication for these countries of NATO's projection of force outside the region. In part, says a RAND study, this wariness is due to a deficit of local democratic participation and transparency in the process of determining just how small East European nations will play a role in military action taken by the U.S. and the EU (see http://www.rand.org/natsec_area/products/czechnato.html) While a majority of Czechs support NATO membership, many criticized NATO's strikes against Yugoslavia as an aggressive attack by a military alliance on a sovereign state and are ambivalent about a war on Iraq.

The newest likely NATO member with the greatest internal dissent against the alliance is Slovenia, as 39.4 percent of the population polled opposed membership in NATO in September, according to a Politbarometer survey, reported the Slovene Press Agency on 29 October. That figure dropped to 32.5 percent in October, with 49 percent voting in favor out of 1,022 respondents (up from 38.5 in September). (The original poll report for October in Slovenian can be found at http://www.uvi.si/slo/aktualno/javnomnenjske-raziskave/pdf/aktualno.pdf). To the query, "Would Slovenia benefit from joining NATO," 47.4 responded "yes" in October, with 31.6 replying "no," and 21.1 saying they were still undecided. When asked, "How would you vote in the case of a referendum on NATO membership?" the results were 49 percent in favor, 32.5 percent opposed, and 18.6 undecided.

"The September poll shows NATO supporters trailing by 0.9 percent, but in October they're suddenly leading by 15.8 -- a change of 16.7 percentage points in a single month," a Slovenian political commentator, Miso Alkalaj, who opposes Slovenia's inclusion in NATO, commented to "(Un)Civil Societies." Alkalaj noted that no other Politbarometer polls of any type show such a change within a month, and speculated that while no crude manipulations were likely made, under pressure to obtain better numbers, samples may have been shifted from rural to urban or across classes or education levels. An outspoken anti-NATO professor who led the opinion survey is no longer on the project, he said. Government officials attribute the pro-NATO surge to the fact that all presidential candidates stressed membership in the alliance in their campaigns. Some protestors said that a mass-mailing of a brochure titled in Slovenian "Natopis," and sent to every household was a factor, although others said superficial promotion of this type was counterproductive because it was viewed as "propagandistic" and a waste of the taxpayers' money.

There is indeed a drive to gain public appreciation of NATO. "We want to see public support of well over 50 percent," one senior NATO official was quoted as saying by Slovenian writer Nicholas Kralev in "The Washington Times" on 22 October. "As a member, a country incurs serious common-defense responsibilities under Article 5, and the government should have the full backing of its people."

The bare majority obtained in Slovenia does not necessarily spell solid support for policies of the U.S., the dominant force in NATO, says Jean McCollister, an American antiwar activist who lived in Slovenia for many years, in Slovenia's "Delo" newspaper supplement of 31 August-7 September 2002. She notes that "even the most zealous pro-NATO advocates go to enormous lengths to distance themselves from U.S. policies, which they euphemistically term 'independent' (as opposed to unilateralist, imperialist, or barbaric)" -- a reference to controversies like the death penalty or the International Criminal Court.

In Eastern Europe, the U.S. has more compliant partners than in Western Europe, says McCollister. U.S. military officers supervising a training exercise in Kekcskemet, Hungary, earlier this year, for example, enthused about the access and freedom given their troops during a mock assault, and Hungary's granting to NATO of unrestricted use of its air corridors and permitting live-fire exercises. "This kind of access is denied to the Americans at Italian and German bases because of environmental and social restrictions, so the Pentagon has been looking elsewhere," said McCollister.