Vilnius letter

The Vilnius letter was a declaration of support for the United States' aim of régime change in Iraq by means of an invasion. It was published at the height of the Iraq disarmament crisis of early 2003.

The letter of the eight of 30 January, 2003, that according to many observers torpedoed the European Union's cautious position in the developing crisis, followed Colin Powell's assertion in the UN Security Council of Iraq's continuing development of illicit weapons. It was followed on 6 February by a letter from the Vilnius group comprising Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia, which effectively supported a US military intervention in Iraq. The letter expressed confidence in the evidence presented by Powell and agreed that Iraq had clearly violated UN resolutions. In capitals around the world, the letter could not be interpreted as anything but support of a US military intervention in Iraq.

By expressing support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq — by that point seemingly inevitable — the Vilnius letter was a public rebuke by ten EU candidates of France and Germany's vocal opposition to American and British policy. The signatories were later dubbed "New Europe" by the US Defence Minister Rumsfeld, and were to receive emotional criticism from the French president Chirac. Observers noted that the signatories by the letter indicated that they this time prioritized U.S. interests instead of the European Union's at a time when it was too late to reverse their admittance into the Union.

According to reports in respected national newspapers, the US envoy Bruce P. Jackson was the architect behind both the letter of the eight and the Vilnius letter. He arranged a meeting in the Lithuanian embassy in Washington, where the foreign ministers of all ten countries participated. The text had been proposed in advance, but according to the press reports it was Bruce Jackson who convinced the participants to accept the proposal and to disregard efforts by Bulgaria — then a rotating member of the UN Security Council — to alter the text. Since the early 1990s, Bruce Jackson had been an informal advisor to central European governments, advising them on the road to admission into NATO. He allegedly now convinced the foreign ministers of the Vilnius ten, that their support for the US in this international conflict would give them much better chances in the US Congress when it was to vote on accepting those countries into NATO.

Criticism

The letter was met with public consternation in many countries on the European continent — and surprise and criticism from several governments in the European Union. In retrospect, the letter is sometimes pointed at as a significant warning of the crisis and deadlock that came to signify the European Union the following years, with its inability to move forward the issues of defense cooperation, constitution, "transparency" and democratic legitimacy, or integration of the new member countries; and it has been questioned whether the governments in question in fact acted supportive of Anglo-Saxon interests critical or fearful of a strengthened EU, which these governments with their fresh experience of the Soviet Union's detrimential dominance on national independence might have been sensitive for. Such criticism may hint at the Vilnius letter as a tool for U.S. policies to divide and rule, citing essays from the think tank PNAC. More diplomatic criticism, partly following the same lines, was made by among others the French government, noting that the signing countries' admission to the EU was not jeopardized, but US promises — not least in terms of funding of future military improvements — may have been at stake.

For their part the signing central European governments emphasized the Vilnius letter as a commitment to such traditional European and American values as free trade and democracy — and also their participation in the War against terrorism. The letter referred to the "compelling evidence" presented by US secretary of state Colin Powell to the UN, and added: "Our countries understand the dangers posed by tyranny and the special responsibility of democracies to defend our shared values." Critics argued that, rather than defending shared values, the signatories were undermining the authority of international law and the United Nations.

Some central European newspapers pointed out the foreign policy problem their governments faced wasn’t primarily connected with Iraq but instead concerned the clash between the regional powers of the European continent: France and Germany on one side, and the Atlantic powers, the United States and the United Kingdom, on the other, with Russia as a further complicating factor. Critics argued that by signing the Vilnius letter, they were responsible for aggravating the crisis in the European Union, and putting national security in danger. It has also been criticized that the governments in question by this letter revived a patronage-client relationship, although with another patron, that was felt as severely humiliating during the Cold War when they now officially supported, in precisely the same way as Warshaw Pact members had had to, empty rhetoric whose obvious purpose was to conceal the United States' geo-political motives behind the war.

Defenders of the declaration respond that the EU's defence capabilities will remain limited due to predictable obstruction from countries such as the UK and Denmark and that the Vilnius governments understood that de facto their security interests lay with the US and UK, implying that when Russian revanchism wakens the European Union is doomed unless subordinating to U.S. imperial interests.

Background

14 January 2003: Jack Straw, the United Kingdom's Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, announces that London would not wait for a UN decision to attack Iraq and would act on its own. Meanwhile two other countries, Poland and Republic of Macedonia offer to participate in the conflict with troops.

27 January 2003: Hans Blix presents the UN Security Council with the report that the inspectors had been granted access to every site they needed to inspect, but he says that “It is not enough to open doors.”

28 January 2003: United States President George W. Bush delivers his State of the Union address to the United States Congress, alleging that Saddam Hussein had ties with terrorist organizations, and that Iraq was a serious threat against the security of U.S. citizens as the world’s most dangerous producer of weapons of mass-destruction.

Further information

• Text of the Vilnius letter