NATO invites seven former Eastern Bloc nations to join in landmark expansion

NATO leaders in Prague for the two-day NATO summit have made a historic decision to invite seven former Eastern Bloc nations to join the alliance in a landmark expansion. The new members - Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia - will be admitted to the alliance in 2004. NATO Secretary General George Robertson called the invitation a "crucially important decision". The Czech President Vaclav Havel has welcomed the historic move:

"The alliance's decision to open itself once again to the new European democracies signifies that the unnatural division of Europe has come to an end in real terms and that the last surviving remnant of the Iron Curtain, that strange psychological wall that used to separate the old democracies from the post-communist ones, is finally breaking down."