Something very peculiar happened in Prague last week: Nato became a European peace movement. At times, it even looked like a peace movement.
Near the end of the grand Nato summit dinner in the gothic Vladislav Hall of Prague Castle, ageing rockers in black leathers, one with shoulder length hair, another in dark glasses, sang Power to the People! John Lennon's song was mixed with Smetana's My Country, Beethoven's Ode to Joy, the American spiritual Oh, Freedom and the Marseillaise, in an outré medley of hymns to freedom commissioned for the occasion by the summit host, Vaclav Havel. I could see exactly what this meant to Havel - the spirit of 68, Czech style, memories of the "velvet underground" in the long years of oppression and of the velvet revolution that catapulted him into the castle in 1989. But what did it do to George W Bush? I suspect rockers in black leathers with shoulder length hair singing Power to the People would just about sum up everything he hated about the 60s. And this was meant to be Nato.
Earlier in the evening, Bush, Blair, Chirac and the rest were entertained to half an hour of avant garde ballet in the gilded and mirrored Spanish Hall. Dancers in 18th-century costume, with powdered wigs, performed an allegory of life and love. Prerecorded scenes projected on to a large screen included one in which male and female dancers in foppish underwear mimed the act of love on an enormous double bed, with Chaplinesque speeding-up of the film. Afterwards, as we jostled down the corridors leading to dinner, I found myself walking next to the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. What did he think of the ballet, I asked. "I didn't understand anything," he twinkled. "I'm from Chicago."
The Americans did seem slightly bemused as they rubbed shoulders with a bulky bearded man who looked like a security guard but turned out to be the president of Croatia, a young guy who must surely be a student but introduced himself as the defence minister of Slovenia, or Latvia, or wherever, and then an exotic Slav beauty - the former foreign minister of Bulgaria. And know what? Half these guys (in the unisex, American usage of that word) are now your Nato allies!
A peculiar, an amazing thing happened in Prague - and almost no one noticed. Most of the Czechs didn't notice, because they had abandoned their capital to Nato. I have never seen Prague so deserted. Czech friends told me this was not only because people expected traffic jams and hostile demonstrations, but because the Czech interior minister had whipped up a panic in the media about a major terrorist attack. Perhaps Osama bin Laden would send another airplane to crash into the congress centre, killing all the leaders of the west at one go: 11/21 as the sequel to 9/11. So Nato, the ultimate guarantor of your security, arrived, and the good soldier Svejk fled. Nor did the outside world notice much, because the international media were mainly interested in what the allies might say about Iraq. But the statement on Iraq was predictably bland. The amazing thing that happened in Prague was that Nato invited seven more countries to join it, including three that used to be part of the Soviet Union. And the Russian president didn't seem to mind, amicably receiving George Bush in St Petersburg the next day. At the time of the velvet revolution that brought Havel to the castle there was a great debate in central Europe: should one construct a pan-European security system or aim to join Nato? Now Nato is the pan-European security system. In a process started by the central Europeans - and especially Havel - but then carried forward most energetically by Americans, both Democrat and Republican, against the bitter opposition of many west Europeans - and especially Britain - Nato was enlarged in 1999 to include Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary. If all goes according to plan, in 2004 they will be joined by Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria.
In the process of Nato enlargement these new democracies are emphatically told to put their militaries under civilian control, respect the human rights of their minorities, improve the rule of law, democratic practice, and so on. So long as Nato and the EU offer a prospect of membership on such conditions, Nato and the EU between them are driving forces in the democratisation of the other half of Europe. The democratisation - and the pacification.
Democracies in Nato still do many stupid things, but one thing they don't do is fight each other. These days (unlike during the cold war) they are also strongly advised not to beat up on their own peoples. Moreover, countries that want to be democracies in Nato have to behave better too. Three would-be members not invited to join Nato this time round are Croatia, Albania and Macedonia. But their leaders were present in the Vladislav Hall, and they issued a statement saying they would work more closely together in order to qualify next time. Marginal diplomatic flim-flam, you may say. But ask yourself this question: where has a war nearly started in Europe in the 21st century? Answer: last year in Macedonia, between Albanians and Slav Macedonians. And who stopped it? Nato, the EU, and local politicians who want their countries to join them. In this deeper sense, and not just because it now has rockers singing Power to the People, Nato has become a European peace movement. An effective movement, that is, to spread peace across the continent.
Of course, critics are now saying that Nato is enlarged but dead, like the bloated corpse of a once-mighty bull. In Prague, its leaders tried to answer that by announcing the formation of a "technologically advanced, flexible, deployable, interoperable and sustainable" Nato response force to be used outside the Nato area in a crisis. I think the adjective-overload is telling us something here. Anyway, it's not even supposed to be fully operational until 2006. Nato thinkers talk of finding a great new transatlantic project: Europe and America working together to democratise the greater Middle East. But even if these schemes come to nothing, Nato will not be dead. It will just be another animal.
"Then the Americans will lose interest," those thinkers say. Well perhaps, so far as making war is concerned. For that, Washington will just call on what are now charmingly referred to as the "boutique skills" of individual allies (Britain for the SAS, Slovakia for mountain troops, etc). But don't tell me that an organisation which, together with the EU, may keep the peace throughout Europe is an irrelevance to the security of the whole free world. After all, it was in Europe that the three world wars of the 20th century started - the first, the second and the cold - each dragging the US back into the old continent. It was in Europe, in the Balkans, that wars started again in the very last years of the last century.
Now, in Havel's castle, a dream becomes seriously imaginable. Imagine, for the first part of the 21st century at least, that Europe is a place where wars don't start. As John Lennon sang: Imagine.