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10 Candidate Countries Meet in Estonia on NATO Membership
Foreign ministers of 10 European countries seeking NATO membership Monday expressed confidence that the military alliance would admit all qualified applicants at its 2002 Prague summit.
In a statement issued at the end of a meeting in Tallinn, the top diplomats said that they were convinced NATO would widen "the common zone of security and stability in Europe, regardless of geography and history, and would invite all qualified democracies to join the alliance in 2000."
They were indirectly referring to Russia's strong opposition to NATO's eastward enlargement to encompass the three former Soviet republics on the Baltic Sea.
At the ministerial meeting, they also discussed closer cooperation in their common efforts to join the 19-nation NATO, and decided to hold two summits in Romania and Latvia next year to coordinate the pace of their efforts.
The 10 countries are Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Croatia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Latvia, Romania and Macedonia.
NATO announced in April that leaders of its member states will gather on November 21-22 next year in the Czech capital of Prague. In December 1997, the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary were admitted into the military bloc.
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