(CHICAGO) - NATO must take a more active role in maintaining global stability, Polish President Lech Kaczynski said in a speech here Tuesday.
NATO should "gain in significance by taking more action on the global and regional level," the Polish leader told the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
"There is no other organization which is more efficient, which would have a harder security structure," he said through a translator.
While the United States has a dominant voice within the alliance, it does not mean NATO is "unilaterally governed by the United States," he said.
"My continent, my community should make greater efforts" to rebalance NATO's power structure, buy building up its own militaries, he said.
Kaczynski said he supports the expansion of NATO to include Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and Azerbaijan, but opposes an expansion to Pacific countries which "would change the nature of NATO completely."
He sees NATO membership as a first step toward eventual accession of those countries into the European Union.
"They should be brought into these organizations because NATO is a unique importer of stability and is fairly effective in this respect," Kaczynski said.
"I'm quite sure that were Greece and Turkey not NATO members then within the last decades there would have been armed conflict between them at least once or twice."
Incorporating Azerbaijan into NATO would also improve the strategic situation of the alliance because it borders with Iran, he said.
And while the expansion of the EU would reduce the amount of support funds available to Poland, the long-term benefits of expansion are significant, he said.
"The EU is an effective exporter ... of democracy and economic development," said Kaczynski, whose government recently refused to allow Europe's top election watchdog to monitor next month's parliamentary polls in Poland.
"In the European Union there is no country which would have any real possibility of putting a question mark over democracy within itself," he said, despite varying "internal systems and versions of democracy."
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