NATO Accession

JAN 01 1999 · 12:00

Václav Havel, the dissident playwright who became the president signing the Czech Republic into NATO on 12 March 1999, ten years after the keys on Wenceslas Square. Place: Truman Library, Independence, Missouri · Černín Palace, Prague Figures: Jan Kavan, Czech foreign minister · Madeleine Albright, US secretary of state (born Marie Jana Korbelová, Prague 1937) · Václav Havel, president The ceremony is held at Harry Truman's presidential library, a deliberate choice. Truman signed the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949; in 1948 he had been told, by the same Jan Masaryk who would die from a Černín Palace window weeks later, that Prague was being absorbed into the Soviet sphere. Half a century afterward, Madeleine Albright, born in Prague in 1937 and twice a refugee from it, accepts the instruments of accession from three foreign ministers. Jan Kavan signs for the Czech Republic. He had spent the years of normalization in exile in Britain, smuggling samizdat back through the Iron Curtain. Hungary and Poland sign alongside. It is the first eastward enlargement of NATO, and the formal closure of the security architecture left in pieces in 1989.