Thank you very much.

I would like to thank CSIS and Ambassador Japaridze for organizing this meeting. In many ways meetings like this may be one of the most important aspects of the reality of GUUAM.

Here we are talking about GUUAM as a form of integration that marks the final stage of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. For too many people, the Soviet Union or its surrogate the former Soviet Union remains on the mental map of many people in these countries and in Washington as well. One aspect of that is the tendency to refer to the post-Soviet countries as "new independent states." Two years ago, Azerbaijani President Heidar Aliev asked me how long his country would have to be independent before it ceased to be regarded as new. There is no good answer to such a question: we should never have employed to the term to begin with.

My topic this morning is the attitude of Russians in general and Moscow in particular toward GUUAM. All too often, people discuss GUUAM and other regions in terms of whether Russians feel that it is "anti-Russian" or not, an unfortunate tendency that allows Russians to set the agenda. That is because for many Russians, any criticism of anything Moscow does is not an ordinary political action but a deeply anti-Russian one. We should not fall into the trap of allowing the discussion about the combined actions of five countries to fall into this particular trap.

There is no one Russian perspective on GUUAM. Indeed, it is now better to say Moscow "are" rather than Moscow "is." There are many Moscows. Some Russians there view the GUUAM as a positive development, as part of the natural devolution of empire and something that will help to create a zone of stability around Russia and in which Russia can develop in a positive direction. But far more Russians, especially in the government and the journalistic and academic communities are inclined to see GUUAM as a matter of concern or even as a threat. There are three major reasons for that view.

First, many in Moscow view GUUAM first with four members and then with five as a threat to Russian domination of the Commonwealth of Independent States. If GUUAM gains another member or two, it will be in a position to vote down Russian proposals within the CIS, and if Moscow overrides these votes, the real nature of the CIS will stand revealed for all to see. That could threaten Moscow's ability to dominate its neighbors and also its success in convincing the West that the CIS has some viability as something other than a cover for Russian domination of the region.

This issue dominated initial Russian reactions to the formation of GUUAM, but it appears to be less relevant now. Of greater concern at present from a Russian perspective is the fact that by joining together in GUUAM, the five member states are acting like countries rather than new independent states or former Soviet republics. Countries that want to be treated like countries have to act like countries, and those who don't want them to get that treatment are thus worried whenever they succeed in doing so. GUUAM has provided a place for its members to act like countries in a key international arena, to negotiate, to share information, and to share approaches rather than being played off one against the other. That kind of cooperation alone can be very significant for these states.

In addition, there is yet another intra-CIS concern, one suggested by Moscow commentators like Sergei Karaganov and others. They have suggested that if GUUAM states are able to cooperate with one another, they may be in a better position to counter Russia's attempts to subordinate them by subversion the way Moscow did in the 1920s in the three Baltic member states of the little entent. That strategy was brilliantly described in Paul Blackstock's "The Strategy of Subversion," a book that underscores the temptation of formerly strong countries to conduct a foreign policy on the cheap, a policy intended not to retake what has been lost but rather to keep outsiders from coming in by promoting instability within the target countries.

I completely agree with Professor Brzezinski that we are not going to see the revival of a Soviet Union or even a Russian Empire despite the law passed by the Duma last week allowing Russia to incorporate other countries or at least parts of them. I would note, however, that Yevgeny Primakov may have complained about the law and its consequences, but he did vote for it. Like the little entente in the 1920s, GUUAM is in a position to expose the actions of Moscow in a way that will make it more difficult for the strategy of subversion to work. That is because the complaints of three are more powerful than those of only one, especially in terms of the domestic audience of these coutnries.

At the same time, and as part of this strategy, some in Moscow may hope to use GUUAM in a positive way as part of the east-west transit corridor President Vladimir Putin has advocated. Indeed, it has dawned on some in the Russian capital that cooperating with GUUAM may ultimately be wiser than competing against it.

A second major concern and perhaps a more worrisome one to many Russians is the possibility that GUUAM might expand to include countries that were never part of the Soviet Union or even of the Soviet bloc. That risk from Moscow's point of view has become more a subject of discussion as a result of the formation of the Shanghai Six grouping. Many Moscow analysts have suggested that Beijing may try to use this organization to promote what they have called "a Chinese CIS" in Central Asia and thus be able to pry these countries away from Moscow. Consequently, there is concern that if GUUAM should acquire an "outside" member such as Turkey, that could have the same impact along Russia's southern border that Beijing is thought to want in Central Asia.

Russia's third concern is the greatest but it is typically expressed in the most diffuse way and that in turn has reduced attention to its importance. Western attention to this region has, as Fred Starr pointed out, declined dramatically over the last decade. From the point of view of Moscow, that is not a bad thing. It leaves the Russian government in a position to act out of the glaring light of public attention. But GUUAM and meetings like this carry with them the possibility that this organization may attract greater Western attention once again and thus help complete the transformation of mental maps still surviving from Soviet times.

At present, I suspect that most of you would quickly discover that if you looked for a map that would include all GUUAM states, they would be at the bottom of a map showing Russia in a dominant position. But if our mental maps change, our physical maps will change as well, and with GUUAM countries in the center, the role of Turkey, Iran and other countries becomes more important.

The GUUAM organization thus invites us to move beyond thinking about the CIS, to move beyond thinking about the "new independent states," to begin thinking about these countries as countries. Many Russians are concerned about that possibility. But meetings like this one and the actions of the five governments involved in GUUAM suggest that such a possibility is ever more likely. Thank you.