We are living in a remarkable time, a time which tests our ability to deal with a new and wide range of threats to humanity. These threats bear not only on our security but also on our environment and our civilisation.

These threats impose great demands not only on NATO and its newest members, including my country, the Czech Republic, but on the human race.

Sixty years after the invasion of our country by Hitler's Wehrmacht, and 31 years after armies of the Warsaw Pact crushed the Prague Spring, our security is becoming an integral component of the security of the entire Euro-Atlantic world.

The danger that the Czech people might again fall prey to an aggressor who would attack us, certain that the democratic world would not lift a finger to intervene, is irrevocably receding. Yet, while the direct threat of invasion and occupation has diminished, sinister forces still loom and must be confronted.

The adversary facing NATO today is much more difficult to grasp than before, though its sources are terribly familiar.

Once again, the breeding ground for aggression is ethnic hatred. Teamed with that racial rage are religious and/or ideological fanaticisms.

These pathologies are energised in societies which are bereft, where sheer despair leaves people in positions without hope and faith in their surrounding society or civilisation.

Today, that rage takes the form of regional conflicts and ethnic cleansing, of anonymous terrorist assaults. It feeds off a network of organised crime and the traffic in weapons of mass destruction. It denies the very existence of human culture and freedom, killing people at random.

Once again the bloody extermination of entire human communities is not only taking place but can be witnessed on television.

All these threats have two things in common.

First, they are all directed against humanity.

Second, they always harbour a dangerous explosive potential and can, therefore, grow into large-scale conflicts, threatening to engulf us all. They can and will do so unless timely preventive action is taken.

Despite the ambiguity about NATO membership which registered in opinion polls in my country, the citizens of the Czech Republic are fully aware of these threats, and the obligations which NATO membership imposes as to their part in preventing or combating them.

They know that NATO is not only a guarantee of our security but also a major commitment: just as our allies safeguard our security, we stand guard for the security of others, assuming the same co-responsibility for peace in the world which the Atlantic alliance accepts as a whole.

NATO membership brings with it the right to participate in the deliberations and decisions of the alliance. Our commitment to NATO, thus, does not restrict our freedom but enhances it, making us much better equipped to advance our views on the international scene and the grave threats which confront it.

At the same time, our new status helps us to better understand that freedom is not a gate to egoism but, primarily, an occasion for solidarity and a call for responsible conduct in the face of threats of the type which NATO is now facing in Kosovo.

Indeed, NATO's actions today highlight its changing nature. Because the alliance has decided to open itself up to the new European democracies, it means that it has decided to pull down completely the strange psychological wall which separated the so-called old democracies from the post-communist ones.

This is concrete evidence that the old, imposed division of the world into two gigantic camps is, at long last, being replaced by a new division, far more logical, far more fitting for the present-day world and far more beneficial to humankind.

It is a division into natural regional entities united by shared cultural, historical and political traditions, as well as by a shared history of civilisation; entities which yearn to communicate with one another as friends; to pursue all-around co-operation; and, thus, to help forge a better social order, based on world peace.

The three new members of the alliance belong to the Western sphere of civilisation. The same is true of Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bulgaria and other Balkan states. The bloodshed in Kosovo is a war within that united civilisation; it is not a clash between opposing civilisations.

A natural self-delimitation of one sphere, however, does not mean that it considers itself to be better than other spheres, or that it defines itself in opposition to anyone else. On the contrary, only an entity conscious of its identity can be a good and equal partner for co-operation.

The fact that the Cold War is over, and that NATO ceases to be geographically defined by the agreements reached by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta, brings with it the need for the alliance to truly recognise that it has undergone a substantial transformation.

The nature of the dangers and threats from which the alliance protects us is changing. NATO is no longer confronting one large, clearly delineated strategic opponent. Instead, as in Kosovo, it must confront those hidden forces which can suddenly burst above ground, consuming many people in the fires of rage.

For peace cannot be attained without a readiness to defend it against the forces of evil.