NATO's Democratic Retrenchment

Hegemony After the Return of History

Henrik B.L. Larsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429999673
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Exploring NATO's post-Cold War determination to support democracy abroad, this book addresses the alliance's adaptation to the new illiberal backlashes in Eastern Europe, the Western Balkans and Afghanistan after the alleged 'return of history'.

The book engages the question of what has driven NATO to pursue democratisation in face of the significant region-specific challenges and what can explain policy expansion or retrenchment over time. Explaining NATO's adaptation from the perspective of power dynamics that push for international change and historical experience that informs grand strategy allows wider inferences not only about democratisation as a foreign policy strategy but also about the nature of the transatlantic alliance and its relations with a mostly illiberal environment. Larsen offers a theoretical conception of NATO as a patchwork of one hegemonic and several great power interests that converge or diverge in the formulation of common policy, as opposed to NATO as a community of universal values.

This volume will appeal to researchers of transatlantic relations, NATO's functional and geographical expansion, hegemony and great power politics, democracy promotion, lessons of the past, (Neoclassical) Realism, alliance theory, and the crisis of the liberal world order.

Part I

Theoretical framework

1 Realism and democratisation

Chapter I is divided into two sections: (i) a description of the rise of political NATO after the end of the Cold War and a review of the existing literature and the identification of a need to fill the missing realist contribution on NATO and democratisation, and (ii) the advancement of a realist explanation of democratisation as a foreign policy strategy in contrast to the dominant liberal or constructivist paradigms on democracy promotion in general and on NATO specifically.

1.1 Theorising NATO’s democracy support

This section shows the rise of democracy in NATO’s approach to security after the end of the Cold War. It makes the case that the existing NATO literature is biased insofar as the soft security aspects – or ‘political’ NATO – are dominated by liberal-constructivist research, whereas realist scholarship primarily has been interested in the hard security aspects – or ‘military’ NATO – while overlooking the importance of the alliance’s political role and the spread of democratic values beyond its borders.

The rise of political NATO

The rise of political NATO follows a growing tension between NATO’s original military purpose (containment and deterrence of the Warsaw Pact) and its political element (forum for wider transatlantic security cooperation). The historical landmarks in NATO’s foundation and reviews are: the North Atlantic Treaty from 1949, NATO’s dual-track policies issued in 1967, the Partnership for Peace (PfP) formulated in 1994; the Open Door policy from 1997, and NATO’s ‘Going Global’ from 2010.

North Atlantic Treaty: The North Atlantic Treaty adopted in 1949 is carefully crafted to build on both interests and values, infusing both geopolitical and liberal values into NATO’s raison d’être (NATO, 1949). Parallel to its core military provisions defined by article 5 (collective defence) and article 4 (security consultations), the North Atlantic Treaty prescribes the strengthening of free institutions among NATO members and the elimination of conflict in their economic policies (article 2), and it ties the commitment to its values and principles as a precondition for accession of new members (article 10). NATO’s geopolitical element in practice had clear predominance during the Cold War. The primacy of the military element became clear in practice when non-democratic states like Portugal (1949), Greece and Turkey (1952) were admitted to the alliance to increase its geostrategic weight against the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. Authoritarian reversals in Greece and in Turkey did not nourish serious debates about ejecting those countries from the alliance. On the other hand, NATO denied Spain membership until a democratic government replaced the authoritarian Franco regime. NATO’s security umbrella combined with U.S. (Marshall) assistance arguably prevented a rise to power of communism in Western Europe, just as a Soviet/Warsaw Pact invasion most certainly would have meant the end of the democratic institutions.

Dual-track policies: The Harmel Report issued in 1967 was a landmark in NATO’s political evolution and brought in the understanding that political détente was not contradictory but complementary to military security. The alliance was to ‘pursue the search for progress towards a more stable relationship in which the underlying political issues can be solved’ (NATO, 1967). By outlining engagement and cooperation as complementary to defence and deterrence, the report provided an intellectual and political framework for NATO policies and the basis for NATO consultations to serve to coordinate Western approaches to the East (Sloan, 2017: 259). Harmel’s twin pillars of deterrence and détente have shaped alliance policy ever since. When NATO in the 1980s agreed to deploy U.S. middle-range missiles in response to the Soviet SS-20 deployment, this followed a parallel strategy of seeking nuclear arms negotiations with the Soviet Union.

The end of bipolarity allowed the alliance to infuse democratic values into the power vacuum that communism left in Central and Eastern Europe. At the NATO summit in London in July 1990, allies instituted a policy of value exportation and strengthening of NATO’s political dimension as an agent of change (NATO, 1990). At the summit in Rome in November 1991 (when the Soviet Union still existed), NATO recognised the historical opportunity of its new role in assisting the newly independent countries throughout Europe in their democratic transition processes (NATO, 1991a). NATO began a third dual-track period by engaging the newly independent Russia diplomatically and preparing its coming enlargement. The value-based underpinning became visible in the way common values and democracy promotion became intrinsically connected first to NATO’s new partnership policies, then to its enlargement policy and later in NATO’s approach to out-of-area operations. The North Atlantic Cooperation Council was founded in December 1991 – from 1997 called the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council – and was the first multilateral consultative forum for dialogue between NATO and the newly independent states.

Partnership for Peace (PfP): PfP was established in 1994 to promote trust and peace with and among the newly independent states. PfP was not meant as a formal precursor to actual membership but for some countries became an actual preparatory instrument. The Brussels Summit declaration from 1994 lists democracy as a ‘direct and material concern’ to NATO and extrapolates democratic development to officially considering enlargement (NATO, 1994a). The PfP Framework in 1994 outlined the overarching democracy projection mechanism of the partnership tool, including a new strong emphasis on democratic control over armed forces (NATO, 1994b). PfP came to include countries as diverse as the neutral European countries (e.g. Switzerland, Austria), highly authoritarian regimes (Belarus, Central Asian republics) and of course the new independent formerly communist countries that transitioned into liberal democracies and which enjoyed membership prospects. NATO in these countries faced similar domestic legacies that required the establishment of democratic control of the military, usually ensuring stronger parliamentary control and reducing the power of the executive (Sherr, 2006: 159; Cottey et al., 2006: 4).

Open Door: The next step in strengthening NATO’s role ensued when U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry in February 1995 presented democratic institutions as one of four principles as a precondition for alliance accession (Perry, 1995). Perry (2012) said that whereas enlargement gave rise to some debate within NATO, democracy as a guiding principle never did. Perry’s principles were an important foundation for the subsequent ‘Study on NATO Enlargement’, which was published in September 1995 and which linked democracy intrinsically to security and future enlargement decisions (NATO, 1995). Adherence to democratic norms showed up as the real hard criterion for membership, as opposed to financial and military contributions, which were defined in more flexible terms (Schimmelfenning, 2003: 248–9). It was not evident in the beginning that NATO would assume a role as ‘top-down’ reconciler and democracy promoter because of the sensible Russia question. However, it turned out that NATO was the only tool that could provide incentives for rapid change in the wake of the communist breakdown: the EU was too slow, while the OSCE was too weak (Asmus, 2002: 12).

In 1997, the Madrid Summit declaration went on to establish NATO’s Open Door policy by declaring that no European democratic country whose admission would fulfil the objectives of the Treaty would be excluded from consideration (NATO, 1997a). NATO at the same summit invited Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary to join the alliance as full members. The 1999 Washington Summit simultaneously introduced NATO’s membership action plan (MAP) as a formal preparatory mechanism. MAP establishes five main chapters that a candidacy state would have to fulfil: 1. political/economic issues, 2. defence/military issues, 3. resource issues, 4. security issues, 5. legal issues (NATO, 1999: 73–9). While chapters 3, 4 and 5 are mostly procedural, chapters 1 and 2 deal with the substantial requirements of a functioning democracy, market economy and armed forces that are interoperable and under democratic control.

Democratic expansion itself had become a new NATO mission when nine new aspiring countries were granted MAP at the Washington Summit (Barany and Rauchhaus, 2011: 295).¹ By 2002, it was clear that NATO would have to slacken its qualification criteria for alliance enlargement, if it wanted to initiate a new second wave of enlargement eastwards as not all the new countries were equally advanced on their reform tracks (Barany, 2002: 129–55; Barany, 2003). Compared to the 1999 enlargement, the 2004 enlargement was hastened through with less concern for the actual progress of domestic reforms, at least partly due to the perceived need for new contributions to NATO for Europe and beyond after 9/11 (Barany, 2004; Moore, 2007: 90). According to NATO Secretary General Javier Solana (2013), who served during both the Madrid and the Washington Summits, the 1999 enlargement was based largely on consensus with Russia, whereas the 2004 enlargement was less cooperative but still accepted by Russia despite the fact that integrating the Baltic States, Bulgaria and Romania would bring NATO military infrastructure closer to its heartland and perceived sphere of interest.

Going global: NATO’s Istanbul Summit in 2004 linked democracy to NATO’s out-of-area missions and established a Partnership Action Plan on Defence Institution Building with the purpose of building democratically accountable institutions. NATO stated its ambition to assist in democratic change in Afghanistan and Kosovo (NATO, 2004) and thus continued its evolution from a military alliance to a political actor with democracy as a critical pillar (McMahon and Baker, 2006: 83). The participation of non-NATO countries in NATO missions raised the question of whether membership should be extended to other countries worldwide sharing the alliance’s democratic values, such as Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Japan. NATO’s response was that it is not a global alliance but a regional alliance with a global reach (Kitchen, 2010: 107).

The Strategic Concept from 2010 brought NATO’s political role to an unprecedented level. It elevates cooperative security, i.e. the waging of political leverage through partnerships and enlargement, as a core task in principle equal to crisis management and collective defence. In terms of operations, it gives guidance for the combined use of military and political tools (NATO, 2010a). The 2010 Strategic Concept, so to speak, re-invented the principles of the Harmel Report in the hope that it would provide a similar long-term basis for NATO’s raison d’être on a global scale (Bailes and Cottey, 2010: 160; Noetzel and Schreer, 2012). If NATO originally was a military alliance with a political underpinning, it had now become a political alliance with a military underpinning.

NATO after 2010 has been described as a so-called ‘version 3.0’, an attempt to renew the alliance by linking it to emerging challenges such as failed states and to globalising in a complex network of partnership agreements (Rynning, 2012: 199–200). By comparison, NATO ‘version 1.0’ was the alliance of the Cold War with a primary focus on deterrence and defence (1949–1991). NATO ‘version 2.0’ sought to consolidate its role as a European security alliance (1991–2010) with a primary focus on enlargement and humanitarian intervention. NATO ‘version 3.0’ represents thus not only a functional but also a geographical expansion, with the alliance seeking to translate its regional consolidation success into global accomplishments.

However, NATO in its version 3.0 also came to suffer from a discrepancy between vision and reality that was greater than ever before. The ‘return of history’, say after 2008, describes a new situation in the post–Cold War period where more immediate security demands came to take priority over the alliance’s long-term wishes for democratic change. Three geographical theatres are relevant to how NATO had to absorb or deal with unprecedented backlashes against its democratic agenda:

• The new Eastern neighbourhood, which emerged after the 2004 enlargement, left the four post-Soviet states in the new frontline between NATO and Russia. NATO by means of its incentive tools for closer association asserted itself as a political actor with influence on domestic politics, culminating in the formal membership promise given to Georgia and Ukraine at the Bucharest Summit in April 2008. The Eastern neighbourhood is obviously characterised by the rise of a rival power, Russia, whose ‘near abroad’ doctrine and military and economic containment effectively relegated both Ukraine and Georgia to strategic partners in a much looser and non-committing framework. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine since the Euromaidan in 2014 confirmed the halt of eastward expansions after the war in Georgia in 2008 but also renewed NATO’s commitment to security sector reform.
• NATO’s presence in the Western Balkans in many ways can be seen in contrast to the development in Eastern Europe with an ongoing enlargement process. Croatia and Albania acceded in 2009 and Montenegro in 2017 after a lengthy preparation process. North Macedonia started accession talks only in 2018 after progress in negotiations over the long-standing dispute with Greece over its official name. Bosnia-Herzegovina is under NATO monitoring and assistance via MAP since 2010 but remains dysfunctional as a coherent state. Serbia as the region’s largest country does not aspire t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Theoretical framework
• Part II Eastern Europe
• Part III Western Balkans
• Part IV Afghanistan
• Part V Conclusions
• References
• Index