No Schadenfreude on Nato's Birthday - 30 April 1999

The Germans have a word, "schadenfreude" - pleasure in other people's pain. Surely an unworthy emotion, which may be why we don't admit to it by having a word in English.

Last weekend there were many of us who felt a tinge of it as the delegates from 19 nations came together in Washington for what was intended to be a joyful, a triumphant, anniversary of the founding of the Nato alliance 50 years ago.

So against all expectations and the prevailing sour, sad mood it was not a thumping success but it was a heartening one, in a way that nobody had predicted. We were all overcome, as the 19 allies were, by Kosovo and our evident inability to cripple, even to dent, Milosevic's forces or stop the campaign of ceaseless cruelty that triggered this, the first Nato war.

We expected to see a parade in Washington of rather embarrassed, apologetic nationals. Not so. From the day of their arrival and from the first speech by the secretary general to the last, what was surprising and heartening was the strong sense that the Europeans had of their own unity, their belief in their mission, and far more positively than the Americans that tenaciously held vow to give what they had to win.

I think also the point was made by a few relative oldsters present - I wish there'd been more - that the 1500 delegates there and the millions looking on at the opening ceremony are alive and well and free men and women because Nato was born.

The 50-year general peace has been kept by Nato, and by what Churchill called "the American umbrella" - the early American possession of the bomb.

Perhaps there was nobody there old enough to have been present at the birth 50 years ago. You must forgive me if it stays green and very vivid to me.

It was an April day and April in Washington is the joyfullest month - jetting cascades of cherry blossom against clear blue skies.

On such a day, glimpsed through the high windows of the government's Department of Labour auditorium, there walked briskly to a shining table a tall, dapper character with a bristling moustache. You'd have sworn he was the colonel of the regiment.

He was, in fact, the American Secretary of State, one Dean Acheson. He sat down and signed, for the United States, the treaty which bound, in the beginning, 12 nations to go to each other's aid in case of attack on any of them or clear threat of invasion.

To any student of American history this was an incredible day. It was the first time the United States had ever signed a treaty of alliance with any European state since George Washington, in one seemingly doomed winter of the Revolution, begged the French to come in and save the new-born nation. Which, by the way, they did.

Acheson was to be the point man when the treaty came up for ratification in the Senate. The president cannot make treaties without the consent of the Senate.

But such was the eloquence and tough persuasiveness of Secretary Acheson, before a key committee of the Senate during a month's debate in that summer of 1949, the threatened Republican boycott wilted and died. Eighty-two Senators voted aye to ratify, only 13 said nay.

Back on that April day of the treaty's signing there then stepped forward not another colonel but a small powder blue-suited man who looked like the regimental sergeant major in his best Sunday civvies. One Harry S. Truman - President of the United States.

He it was, never a ringing orator, who nevertheless found a simple, telling, phrase to say what the treaty embodied.

"It is," he said, "an act of neighbourliness by a group of householders who have decided they have so much in common that they had better, for their mutual advantage, set up a formal association."

I find it hard now to convey to you the enormous sense of relief we then felt, and flowed from that April ceremony.

By the spring of 1949 we, the United States and Western Europe, had come through a tumultuous and terrifying time.

The peace, so-called, had descended on devastated Europe in 1945. Within the next three years the Soviet Union had set up a puppet government in Poland, threatened Greece and Turkey with Communist guerrillas, imposed Communist regimes on Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and stopped all food and all transport from the West into the island of Berlin.

The Americans and the British responded with what seemed at the time like the well-meaning crazy device of an airlift, dropping food and goods - blankets, heaters, coal - in from the air. It's one of the marvels of our time that 132 planes made a round trip every day, took in, on an average, 3,500 tonnes a day - all sorts of weather - for a whole year, at the end of which time Stalin gave in.

Well apart from those pressing immediate crises there was always, haunting the back of our minds, the awful knowledge that while Britain had disarmed considerably since 1945 and the United States even more radically, the Russians had just under half a million men-at-arms at the ready.

That was the atmosphere - the sort of world we lived and fretted in - when the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation was born.

Who, somebody asked me a week ago, then was the father of Nato? A tricky question. But after much digging in the parental archives I think I've found the man.

A quiet, unassuming man, not apt to claim the authorship of anything. He had been the Prime Minister of Belgium, and when the US Congress was signing an agreement of help to Greece with money and arms the Belgians suggested: Wouldn't it be a good idea to abandon these piecemeal agreements and subsidies to single nations? Why not, as the United Nations Charter allowed, a regional European alliance for collective self-defence?

The suggestion was taken up and the grim 12-month experience of Russia's Berlin blockade quickened American's conviction that a general transatlantic defence alliance was essential - which led to 4 April 1949.

Now I can identify without fear or favour or shame the Belgian father. He was Paul Henri Spaak - a totally forgotten hero I think you ought to hear more about. The meekest war monger you'd ever want to meet and the mildest socialist who ever became Prime Minister of Belgium or any other country.

When Belgium was invaded in 1940 he made his way to London and became the foreign minister of the Belgian government in exile.

After the war he was back again as prime minister and the most insistent advocate of some sort of Council of Europe. He encouraged 10 nations to join, most of whom were to be the nucleus of the emerging Nato.

Monsieur Spaak became Secretary General of Nato for four years and then, in his mid-60s, he retired from politics.

During the rest of that decade I was on the advisory board of an encyclopaedia with him. Once a year nine of us met with the encyclopaedia staff in very pleasant places for four days and nights, and in the mornings we spouted or meditated about our speciality.

Monsieur Spaak was our expert on international affairs and each year he gave a lucid, quiet, all-embracing survey of some sort of progress and many sorts of trouble around the world - always in a slightly regretful tone, as of a man who'd had too much experience of sudden pain to dare to predict anything.

One year we met in Puerto Rico, which in September can be and was an inferno. We were all in light slacks, sports shirts, except the small, diffident Monsieur Spaak. He was in faded dark grey winter suit, a rumpled white shirt and neck tie, and he stayed that way for all four days. His luggage had never arrived from Europe.

The following year we were in Pebble Beach on California's magnificent Monterey peninsula. Once again Monsieur Spaak appeared and stayed in a faded dark grey suit, rumpled shirt, nondescript tie. He looked, once again, like an impoverished bank clerk. I couldn't believe what he told me. His luggage never arrived.

"What?" I shouted. "Not again?"

As mildly as Mr Toots hearing that Florence Dombey was not going to marry him he said: "It's of no matter thankee, thankee no matter."

The following year the board thought it only fair to meet closer to Monsieur Spaak's home which was on the French Riviera. Indeed we met in an elegant hotel close by his village.

This time we all of us were in our usual summer slacks and sports shirts. Enter Monsieur Spaak, ex-prime minister, ex-Secretary General of Nato, ablaze in an outsized floppy shirt, a riot of flowers and leaping animals and sky blue trousers. A card, an ageing playboy, very nearly a jock. He knew what he was doing and he asked, nervously, if our luggage had arrived.

I wish I could end this comparatively happy talk with a rousing report that the wobbling Congress had stiffened and acted to brace the president beyond his rather cautious rhetoric. Alas, swifter than anyone expected on Wednesday evening, the House voted overwhelmingly to refuse the president's use of ground troops without the approval of Congress.

Then the president's loyal Democrats offered a resolution, which doesn't have the force of law, that would give the president symbolic support in Nato's aerial campaign. The vote, astoundingly, was tied - 213 to 213. The White House comment: "The House voted today No, on going forward, No, on going back, and tied on standing still."

The Republican war hero Senator John McCain then offered his own resolution authorising the president to use "all necessary force". But the Republican Senate Leader, Mr Lott, wouldn't even let it come to the floor.

In retrospect the consensus is there are two heroes of the Nato summit - Prime Minister Blair and Senator John McCain - about whom, however, it had better be said that, at the moment, the number of Americans who want him to be president - he's running - is 6%.

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