PARIS: The Madrid summit of the Atlantic Alliance has spoken: the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary are admitted to the western security club. Other postcommunist applicants have been told to wait their turn. The sense of isolation their current rejection by NATO will bring is worrying, and not only for them.

Today, NATO decisionmaking appears dominated by a fear of Russia’s reaction to enlargement. Negotiations over expansion seemed designed more to buy Russian toleration than to further the interests of those countries directly concerned. The consequences of this process are likely to be most spectacular, at least in the short run, not in the elected few but in the rejected many. Yet they are the ones with the least power to force consideration of their interests.

In the Czech Republic and in Hungary (but not Poland) enthusiasm for accession into NATO is mixed: the public knows that membership entails no magic solution for their problems and that, in the first phase, it will entail as many costs as benefits. But the consequences of rejection for the unsuccessful applicants, while more debatable and complex, are likely to be more spectacular, in political and psychological terms. Russia may consider that they have been consigned to its sphere of influence.

The specter of a new Yalta, indeed, is always quick to rise in former communist countries. Limiting NATO expansion to the favored three creates (at least in some quarters) the impression of a geographical division between central Europe as a part of the West returning to the fold after having been kidnapped, and the Baltic and Balkan regions, seemingly thrown back into the Russian "near abroad" or the anarchic East.

More than with geopolitical or cultural realities, however, such a division would be based on the perceptions and self-perceptions of the rejected, and would be heavily dependent upon their own attitudes and strategies. Today, three main reactions to this emerging state of affairs are emerging.

Slovakia seems ambivalent about admission to NATO. Its government seems to pursue a kind of "preventive sour grapes" strategy (one possible meaning of that country’s planned referendum on NATO being, it appears, to allow the Meciar government to be able to say "You may not want us but we were not interested in NATO in the first place"), while also attempting to compensate for exclusion by cultivating ties with Russia.

Romania is the other extreme. Even the regime of former president Ion Iliescu put all its eggs in the Western basket. Both Romania’s recent treaty with Hungary (in which each country recognized, at long last, their common border), the campaign of the winning coalition led by current president Emil Constantinescu (which ousted Iliescu), and the various economic and diplomatic steps taken ever since Constantinescu and his allies came to power, are geared to Romanian accession to NATO, which is presented as a solution to all the country’s ills.This rejection by NATO, for which possibility the government made no effort to prepare the population, will likely be seen as a national humiliation, a sign that no matter how virtuously they behave Romanians will never be considered as real Europeans

A more prudent strategy is that pursued by Ukraine, which tries to keep good relations with Russia while giving priority to relations with the West. It voices no illusions about its admission to NATO anytime soon. Nevertheless, Ukraine welcomes enlargement and insists upon a strategic relationship with the Western alliance that should be different, and independent, from Russia's relationship with NATO. Ukraine’s delicately tuned policy corresponds to the vulnerability of its position.

All the unsuccessful applicants are in a delicate and dangerous position, one which their luckier neighbors have an interest in improving. Nobody, least of all the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland has an interest in seeing an undemocratic, nationalistic, pro-Russian Slovak thorn emerge in NATO's side. Nobody has an interest in seeing communists and nationalists riding a wave of Romanian resentment to the tune of "We told you so". Above all, nobody can wish for Ukraine to follow in Belorussia's sorry steps or to be torn between nostalgia for the West and dependence upon the East.

The situation is even more paradoxical and worrying for the Baltic states. Their size and culture make them particularly easy to integrate into the West (indeed, Estonia is closer to the Maastricht criteria for joining monetary union than several present EU members). Yet it is over the Baltics that the Russian veto is most categorical and threatening, at least as far as admission to NATO is concerned.

So Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are beginning to realize that, even more than for Romania and almost as much as for Ukraine, membership in NATO is not around the corner. But they have every right to ask that tacit acceptance of a Russian veto should not be extended to the debate about their admission in the European Union, and that, in terms of political and military security, a credible system of Western involvement and guarantees should be put in place as a substitute for official NATO membership.

Although the West cannot undo the constraints of geography and history, it should make every effort to avoid making things worse in the form of a clear-cut distinction between the "ins" and the "outs". Not everybody can enter every Western organization at the same time, but it would help if the presence of Slovenia, Romania, and Estonia -- either in NATO or in the EU or in both -- indicated that no region should see itself as excluded forever. At any rate, everybody, in particular the "happy three", should understand (as the Hungarians seem to dowith Romania), that it is better to leave the door open to future applicants, even if they are troublesome neighbors, rather than create a new wall between Europe’s "Children of light" and its "Children of darkness".