Security Policy Reorientation in Peripheral Europe

A Comparative-Perspectivist Approach

Kjell Engelbrekt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351763226
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This title was first published in 2002. This rich comparative analysis looks at security policy reorientation in four European states located at the periphery of the European continent. During the post-Cold War period, Greece, Bulgaria, Sweden and Finland conducted a security policy that was heavily influenced by their close proximity to the iron curtain. Probing this transition during a decisive phase of the post-Cold War reconstitution of the wider European security order, the author analyzes national security policy making from the standpoints of three international relations traditions - realism, institutionalism and political anthropology. This engaging work is invaluable for students, scholars and policy analysts working in the field of international relations and European politics.

1.The European Security Order and its Periphery

In the energized and entertaining, though perhaps not always fruitful and constructive, disarray which makes up international relations scholarship of today, at least two assertions about recent historical circumstances appear undisputed. First, a Cold War was indeed played out in the second half of the 20th Century. Second, it had tremendously important implications for world politics generally and the European order in particular.⁸

As could be perhaps expected, the consensus ends here. If one speaks to students of diplomatic or world history, the additional information that resulted from the opening up of previously unavailable archives and the access to new interviewees, particularly in the former USSR and Eastern Europe, has indeed helped create a clearer and richer picture of Cold War history.⁹ Also, the absence of intense ideological conflict has paved the way for less contradictory accounts of the era.¹⁰ In some respects, even the formerly sharp distinctions between traditionalist, revisionist and post-revisionist writings on the Cold War have become blurred.¹¹ Nevertheless, when entering more limited discussions about the reasons behind the emergence and endurance of the Cold War, the agreement breaks apart. The same goes for the question of why East-West confrontation ceased peacefully.

Too often, perhaps, international relations scholars have been interested in exploring the end of the Cold War as a means of rejecting or providing vindication for one or several of the well-established theoretical explanations of the East-West conflict. However, if agreement in the academic community is the measure of success, it has been to little avail. At least two ambitious attempts at examining the theoretical implications of the breakdown of the postwar global security arrangements concluded with a formidable blow to the notion of cumulative knowledge in the field, acknowledging the divergence of responses between various authors.¹² The same seems to go for more modest efforts at identifying the major cause or trigger that made post-1945 security arrangements crumble. For instance, the view that U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative decisively ‘broke the back’ of the Soviet economy, held in wide circles of the U.S. foreign and defense policy establishment, has been challenged by scholars who argue that the key impetus came from within the Soviet regime itself. Moreover, many of the latter assert, the collapse was triggered by economic rather than security-related motives.¹³

Yet is there not some common denominator in this prolonged and profoundly influential period? What do most of us mean by subscribing to the notion of a Cold War as the overarching issue, or pivot, of international relations in the 1945-1990 period?¹⁴

I would suggest that a consensus nevertheless exists on the proto-theoretical level of images, narratives and metaphors. This is the universe of fundamental and constitutive ideas and analogies, seldom comprehensively discussed in social theory and even more rarely brought to our attention by scholars of international relations.¹⁵ Depending on the appeal of the particular imagery or narrative employed, metaphors and other forms of proto-theory can arguably be just as compelling as an elaborate theory, not least because they cannot be contested in the same analytical fashion as the latter. Instead, metaphors operate at least partly on the level of intuition, which can make it self-defeating to try to pin down ‘the meaning’ of a proto-theoretical concept.

It is presumably also of limited value to ask questions about the ontological status of metaphors or other proto-theories.¹⁶ The point has indeed been made that all knowledge is “fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”¹⁷ Advocates of various versions of scientific realism—who posit that there is a world ‘out there’—may perceive metaphorical concepts related to the Cold War as reflecting either patterns of deliberation lying deeper in the nature of man, in the internal workings of states or in the system as such.¹⁸ But it would be equally possible to justify them in the critical social constructivist vein as conscious attempts to influence thinking and behavior, more or less successfully concealing the interests of various actors.¹⁹ Or, why not, one might from another non-foundationalist viewpoint, for instance that of contemporary discourse analysis, accept a number of widespread metaphors as elements of a Cold War grand narrative.²⁰ Irrespective of one’s view of ontology, that is, certain metaphorical concepts appear so durable and crucial to the whole notion of a Cold War that they deserve special attention.²¹

It would seem that two metaphorical concepts were consistently used to depict the Cold War at the global and regional levels and remain in use today as widely accepted and appropriate labels of that historical era. In most accounts of what characterized international relations at the global level, the concept of bipolarity occupies a central place. Understood as metaphor, ‘bipolarity’ is not qualitatively different from other attempts at describing certain patterns of behavior in international relations by transposing the language and reasoning of natural science. Just as the ‘balance of power’ notion evokes an image of a natural order of things, regulated by balances of weights, and ‘vacuum’ suggests an empty area inevitably attracting penetration and domination by an outside power, the concept of ‘polarity’ was initially derived from an analogy of magnetic fields. The idea behind the metaphor is to depict a tendency among smaller units in the international system to rally around the larger ones, especially in times characterized by frequent or intense conflict, not unlike iron filings around a magnet. A variant of this image, ‘bipolarity’ describes the specific situation of international politics in which two major powers (magnets) jointly occupy the preeminent position.

Despite the image of ‘bipolarity’ being used repeatedly as a characterization of the Cold War era, an acclaimed contemporary historian like John Lewis Gaddis finds it appropriate to let it yet again become the backdrop to his perhaps most ambitious analysis of the 1945-1989 period in international relations. In We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History from 1997 Gaddis applies the metaphor eloquently, but entirely along traditional lines:

By 1947, it was clear that cooperation to build a new order among the nations that had vanquished the old one was not going to be possible. There followed the most remarkable polarization of politics in modem history. It was as if a gigantic magnet had somehow come into existence, compelling most states, often even movements and individuals within states, to align themselves along fields of force thrown out either from Washington or Moscow. Remaining uncommitted, in a postwar international system that seemed so compulsively to require commitment, would be no easy matter. The United States and the Soviet Union were now as close as any great powers have ever been to controlling—as Tocqueville had foreseen Americans and Russians someday would—“the destinies of half the world.”²²

Whereas clearly useful as analogy, critical theorists, poststructuralists and postmodernists have rightly pointed out that many realist writers have a tendency to ‘reify’ the proto-theoretical formulations and images, to lend them an ontological status of their own. In the writings of the profoundly influential international relations theorist Hans Morgenthau, for instance, neither ‘polarity’ nor ‘balance of power’ can easily be reduced to metaphor alone.²³

But even Morgenthau’s spiritual successor Kenneth Waltz, who is critical of Morgenthau on this particular point, does not seem invulnerable to the objection of ‘reification.’²⁴ In Waltz’s ambitiously conceived Theory of International Politics it is anarchy and hierarchy which represent the two ordering principles shaping international interaction into different patterns of polarity. This occurs, so Waltz, through the processes of competition and, to a lesser extent, by way of socialization. Competition means that states—or any other political unit which controls the means of violence in society—are not necessarily engaged in a struggle to maximize their power over others, but that they will always have to take responsibility for their own survival and territorial integrity. Those who ignore or neglect this role, he explains, “will fail to prosper, will lay themselves open to dangers, will suffer.”²⁵

Socialization, ar the same time, may in Waltz’s terms induce states to conform to the prevailing practices in the international system.²⁶ However, if the patterns of polarity resulting from the theoretically assumed competitive behavior coincide with the prevailing practices of the international system associated with the process of socialization, it appears justified to ask whether they are not identical and if there is not an element of circular reasoning here, as well. The international system, not the balance of power, is what is being reified in Theory of International Politics. The fact that Waltz makes strong assumptions about the international system while refraining to do the same regarding the state does not make him ‘more scientific’ than Morgenthau.

This is not at all to say that Waltzian terminology may not correspond to recurring patterns of behavior in the international system or that it operates poorly as a metaphor. Even though Waltz’s structural realism and other theories based on the observation of recurrent patterns of competitive behavior imply a strong element of internal dynamics prompting frequent disruptions, the notion of ‘bipolarity’ can also help to account fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• INTRODUCTION
• 1. THE EUROPEAN SECURITY ORDER AND ITS PERIPHERY
• 2. CONCEPTUALIZATIONS O F SECURITY
• 3. THE LOGIC O F ANARCHY
• 4. SOCIALIZING PERIPHERAL EUROPE
• 5. CIRCULI VIRTUOSI ET VITIOSI?
• 6. CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS
• A EUROPEAN CORE? A NON-PERSPECTIVIST EPILOGUE
• Appendix: List of Interviewees
• Bibliography