The year is 1941. The Nazi SS Einsatzgruppen are sweeping through the occupied towns and villages of the Baltic states rounding up and either summarily executing or deporting Jews and other "undesirables".

But just a few kilometres away the most powerful international military alliance the world has ever known has massive air and land forces at its disposal. It is painfully slow to react. Then it tries to stop the execution squads with high level bombing alone while refusing to commit ground troops to confront the Einsatzgruppen directly. What would be the judgment of history today on the members of that alliance?

More than 50 years after the Nazi holocaust, the debate continues about what - if anything - the wartime allies should or could have done to stop the liquidation of the Jews.

Most experts argue that given the sheer distance between the allied armies and the occupied Nazi territories at the time there was little that could have been done. But the situation today as Milosevic's relentless ethnic cleansing of Kosovo's majority Albanian population continues - sometimes within earshot of NATO troops in Albania and Macedonia - is very different.

The organised slaughter and expulsion of Albanian Kosovans by the Serb military and special police and their fascist Chetnik paramilitary allies poses a moral and political challenge to opponents as well as supporters of NATO and of Irish membership of Partnership for Peace.

But critics of NATO's military campaign against the Milosevic regime in Yugoslavia and Ireland's membership of NATO's PfP have rarely been pressed about how they would respond to the kind of crises witnessed in Bosnia and now in Kosovo.

Nobody can claim lack of warning about what the Serb extremists intended for Kosovo. Milosevic's right-wing ultra-nationalist allies, such as his deputy, Vojislav Seselj and Zeljko Raznatovic ("Arkan", the leader of the Tiger paramilitary squads) made no secret of their plans to empty Kosovo of its nonSerb majority population. The liquidation of the Kosovans began well before the first NATO bombs were dropped.

Against this background there is something deeply unreal about the Irish debate on both Partnership for Peace and Kosovo. Advocates and opponents of Irish membership of PfP have focused mainly on legalistic issues. There has been little discussion about how to respond to actual security challenges now facing the whole of Europe.

This is less true in other neutral countries. Indeed Austria, Finland, Sweden and Switzerland have all joined Partnership for Peace, alongside former member-states of the Warsaw Pact and the former republics of the Soviet Union.

By signing up to Partnership for Peace, these countries have been required to reaffirm their commitment to the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration on Human Rights.

Do the opponents of PfP object to this? If so why? PfP states are expected to contribute to joint military operations such as peace-keeping missions, search and rescue and humanitarian operations. What objection can there be to this?

In some ways the launch of Partnership for Peace alongside the North Atlantic Co-operation Council (which groups NATO members with Russia and other former Soviet republics and allies) underlines the gradual transformation of NATO itself from a Cold War military alliance into an embryonic collective European security organisation.

This is precisely what the neutrals advocated during the Cold War. Indeed, even now if you visit NATO's military headquarters near Mons in Belgium you will see Russian as well as American and other NATO generals operating together within the NATO peace-keeping mission in Bosnia.

The Kosovo atrocities are a painful reminder that a commitment to collective security and to the observance of human rights (whether in the Balkans or anywhere else) is no soft option. Nor should it be presented as such by supporters of Irish membership of Partnership for Peace. This would be as dishonest as those pro-European politicians in Britain who for years tried (and failed) to convince the British public that being part of the European Union was purely an economic affair involving no commitment to closer political union.

Whatever the outcome of the war in the Balkans one thing is already clear. The United States is no longer ready to take lead responsibility for tackling Europe's domestic security crises. This message had already emerged during the war in Bosnia. Indeed, it was at US insistence that the disastrous decision was taken to exclude Kosovo from the Dayton peace accord.

US opposition to any use of ground troops to halt the genocide against the Kosovan Albanians has led to a disastrous over-reliance on air power. The exclusion of ground troops has encouraged, not discouraged, the Serbian killer squads in Kosovo. But if the Europeans are also unwilling to risk the lives of their soldiers to halt the crimes against humanity in Kosovo, why should anybody pay the slightest attention to their fine words about a new European security order based on democracy and human rights?

Rather than confront realities some opt for weasel words about diplomatic "compromise", brokered, it is suggested, by the Russians (remember Chechnya?) and China (remember Tibet?).

Nobody in their right mind would oppose attempts to broker a principled diplomatic solution to the crisis. But let compromise not become a euphemism for a monstrous betrayal of the Kosovans: a partition of Kosovo, where Milosevic grabs the economically most advanced areas in the north of the province and leaves the surviving Kosovan Albanian majority to be herded into apartheid-style Bantustan settlements in the south.

These are now issues not just for NATO, or for the Partnership for Peace but also for the European Union and all its member-states - Ireland included. In the new millennium the responsibility for tackling Europe's security challenges will increasingly fall to the EU. This was spelled out very clearly at the recent NATO summit in Washington. In all probability the United Nations will invite the EU to take direct administrative responsibility for Kosovo - hopefully for a transitional recovery period after which the Kosovan people will be free to determine their own future.

But where do the Republic's last ditch neutrals and opponents of any Irish involvement in both Partnership for Peace and a new EU role in security and defence really stand? Some persist in fighting yesterday's battles against Cold War imperialisms that have long since crumbled. Will they support a genuinely common European Union foreign, security and defence policy, acting in defence of international law and human rights? Or will they leave it to others to confront the new Einsatzgruppen of the late 1990s?

John Palmer is Director of the Euro- pean Policy Centre in Brussels. He writes in a personal capacity.