They joined NATO bcs they were told, that if they want to join EU and get the economy benefits they first need to be part of the military pact, its simple as that.
Says you. And the Russian Federation joined the Partnership for Peace also because they too were told?
NATO
The first post-Cold War expansion of NATO came with
German reunification on 3 October 1990. To secure Soviet approval of a united Germany remaining in NATO, it was agreed that foreign troops and nuclear weapons would not be stationed in the east.
There are diverging views on whether negotiators gave commitments regarding further NATO expansion east.
- Jack Matlock, American ambassador to the Soviet Union during its final years, said that the West gave a "clear commitment" not to expand, and declassified documents indicate that Soviet negotiators were given the impression that NATO membership was off the table for countries such as Czechoslovakia, Hungary, or Poland.
- Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the West German foreign minister at that time, said in a conversation with Eduard Shevardnadze that "[f]or us, however, one thing is certain: NATO will not expand to the east."
- In 1996, Gorbachev wrote in his Memoirs, that "during the negotiations on the unification of Germany they gave assurances that NATO would not extend its zone of operation to the east," and repeated this view in an interview in 2008.
- According to Robert Zoellick, a State Department official involved in the Two Plus Four negotiating process, this appears to be a misperception, and no formal commitment regarding enlargement was made
Between 1994 and 1997, wider forums for regional cooperation between NATO and its neighbors were set up, like the
Partnership for Peace, the
Mediterranean Dialogue initiative and the
Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council. In 1998, the
NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council was established. On 8 July 1997, three former communist countries, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland, were invited to join NATO, which each did in 1999. Membership went on expanding with the accession of seven more Central and Eastern European countries to NATO: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania. They were first invited to start talks of membership during the 2002 Prague summit, and joined NATO on 29 March 2004, shortly before the 2004 Istanbul summit.
EU
In 1990, after the fall of the Eastern Bloc, the former East Germany became part of the Community as part of a reunified Germany. With further EU enlargement planned to include the former communist states of Central and Eastern Europe, as well as Cyprus and Malta, the
Copenhagen criteria for candidate members to join the EU were agreed upon in June 1993. The criteria require that a state has the institutions to preserve democratic governance and human rights, has a functioning market economy, and accepts the obligations and intent of the EU. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_criteria
The European Union was formally established when the Maastricht Treaty came into force on 1 November 1993. The treaty also gave the name European Community to the EEC, even if it was referred as such before the treaty.
In 1995, Austria, Finland, and Sweden joined the EU. In 2004, the EU saw its biggest enlargement to date when Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia joined the Union.