Ladies and Gentlemen,

Today is the last of my visit this time to New York and Washington. For four days, along with my two colleagues from Riga and Vilnius, we have been having high level meetings including with President Clinton and Vice President Gore, Secretary Perry, a number of ranking Senate and House members, not to mention journalists and observers of the region. such as yourselves.

You are probably wondering what we talked about at these meetings. Well, I'll tell you: security, security and more security. My job as president of Estonia is to make sure my people can live and prosper in a safe environment, so it makes sense that one of my priorities in talks here in Washington is to discuss how to enhance the security of the Baltic states in what is admittedly a rather tricky international arena.

If the leitmotiv of our talks here has been security, then the symbol of that is NATO. Estonia takes a very pragmatic approach to NATO enlargement. Although we would like someday to become full members of NATO, we know that this will not happen today, or tomorrow or even next week. We also believe that actions speak louder than words, and so instead of beating the NATO membership drum, we concentrate on being increasingly active in the NACC, in Partnership for Peace and a number of other means by which we maintain our relationship with the Alliance, including helping out in LFOR.

Still, I find myself often in the position of having to reiterate what may seem to us to be absolutely clear, but which is evidently unclear to many. I would like, in my brief remarks this morning, to make four points about NATO enlargement.

First, it is often said that NATO cannot enlarge to include the Baltic states because those states are part of an age-old Russian sphere-of influence. My friends, nothing could be further from the truth. I have a strong personal interest in cultural anthropology, and spent years making films about Finno-Ugric peoples in the vast Eurasian continent, having developed that interest when I was deported to Siberia as a child. I can assure you that for 5000 years, Estonians have been living on our corner of the Baltic littoral.

Furthermore, this is the end of the twentieth century. If I am not grossly mistaken, it is anachronistic, if not also politically incorrect, to speak in terms of sphere-of influence, historic territories and such.

My second point is this: it is often said that NATO cannot enlarge to the Baltic states because the Baltic states are indefensible. Here we have another case of fuzzy thinking I ask you, was Berlin defensible during the Cold War? No, it certainly was not. But because the 1Western allies, led by the United States, made a political commitment to preserve Berlin s integrity as the capital of a divided Germany, the money and energy requited to maintain that status was allocated.

I would argue that we need the same kind of leadership and commitment now in the Baltic states as we saw for Berlin during the Cold War. This is because the Baltic states are the Berlin of the l990's- just as Berlin was the place where the passions of East-West relations were played out, so are the Baltic states the tripwire for the security of the continent, and, by association, of the trans-Atlantic community as well.

My third point concerns demographics. It is often said that NATO cannot enlarge to the Baltic states because we have too many Russians living there. Here we again encounter an anachronistic thought. First of all, there is no such creature as the nation-state anymore. We all live in multiethnic societies, Estonia included. During Soviet rule, hundreds of thousands of Russians were brought into Estonia as part of a centrally organized Russification campaign. As Vice-President A1 Gore said last year when he visited Tallinn, Estonia is a model for other states of the successful integration of non-indigenous peoples into society.

Moreover, I would submit to you that this argument is fundamentally racist. Has anyone ever argued that Germany should not have been part of NATO because there are too many Turks living there? What about Pakistanis in Great Britain? The ethnic composition of one or another state should hardly affect that state's responsibility to assure safety for all its inhabitants, regardless of race, colour, creed or what language a child happened to learn at the breakfast table at home.

My fourth and final point concerns semantics. We often speak of NATO's enlarging or expanding, as though the Alliance were some sort of exotic, and, to the Russia leadership, a somewhat contagious ameba. I would point out one does not join NATO, one is asked to become a member. Unlike Groucho Marx, I believe that this is a club I would like to join, even though it has doubts about having my state as a member.

In addition, we forget that NATO cannot get bigger overnight. This is an Alliance of sixteen member states, the parliaments of which must al1 ratify any new permutation of the Washington Treaty. This is why during this last four days we having not only been speaking to government leaders, but have spent considerable time on Capital Hill as well.

It is not only governments that will decide this issue, it is, in the final analysis, the parliaments elected by the people who must decide. Public relations is a tricky business, but it is one that I, as president, must engage in order to make sure that Estonia remains safe for democracy.

Thank you very much.

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