Theorising NATO

New perspectives on the Atlantic alliance

Mark Webber, Adrian Hyde-Price

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317329749
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Scholarship on NATO is often preoccupied with key episodes in the development of the organisation and so, for the most part, has remained inattentive to theory.

This book addresses that gap in the literature. It provides a comprehensive analysis of NATO through a range of theoretical perspectives that includes realism, liberalism and constructivism, and lesser-known approaches centred on learning, public goods, securitisation and risk. Focusing on NATO's post-Cold War development, it considers the conceptualisation, purpose and future of the Alliance.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of international organisation, international relations, security and European Politics.

1 Introduction Is NATO a theory-free zone?

Mark Webber

DOI: 10.4324/9781315658001-1

In September 2014, the twenty-eight members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) gathered in Newport, Wales, for a summit meeting of heads of state and government. The timing of the event was portentous. Held six months after Russia’s annexation of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea and amidst dire warnings of a Russian manoeuvre against NATO’s Baltic members, many saw the Alliance as at a turning point, facing its gravest crisis since the end of the Cold War (Bergeron 2014; Burns 2014; Rumer 2014). The Wales summit was thus championed as the most important coming together of NATO leaders in years, if not decades (Rasmussen 2014). If NATO did not respond to Russian assertiveness, then, so it was argued, its credibility and purpose would be severely compromised (Niblett 2014; Wolfson 2014). But Russia was not the only challenge. Equally worrying was the catastrophic situation in Syria and Iraq; having already baulked at intervening in the civil conflicts in these two countries, NATO faced fresh calls for action in response to the rise of the violent Islamist movement, ISIS (Kamp 2014). And if this were not enough, Afghanistan, too, was a continuing source of concern. There, NATO’s largest-ever operation stood on a knife edge; the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) was due to wind up operations in December 2014, but the follow-on force (Operation Resolute Support) still lacked a proper mandate from the Afghan government as the Wales summit approached, thus calling into question the chances of long-term stability in the country (Gordon 2014).

The gravity of these converging crises is not to be doubted; indeed, the Wales summit declaration itself was informed by an appreciation that the Alliance stood at an important watershed. The longest in NATO’s history, the declaration ranged widely: from the relationship with the European Union (EU) to support for African peace and security; from energy security to climate change; and from political dialogue with the United Nations (UN) to support for a ‘comprehensive approach’ to conflict management and cooperative security (NATO 2014). The headline commitments, however, were a series of practical measures, including rises in defence spending, the creation of a new Very High-Readiness Joint Task Force and a NATO Readiness Action Plan, none of which would have found itself on the summit agenda if not for the Ukraine crisis.

But whatever the air of impending disaster, NATO had found itself in a similar position many times before. Certainly since the end of the Cold War, pitching the business of a summit as a make-or-break event has become part of the normal life cycle of the Alliance. Recourse to the rhetoric of danger and resolve reflects, in part, the politics and purpose of high-level summitry. But it is also indicative of NATO’s unsettled character. The Alliance since the end of the 1980s has been a body in a constant state of flux, unable to enjoy the luxury of managing routine. It has experienced a near doubling of its membership (from sixteen states to twenty-eight), undertaken some forty separate operations (the largest of which, in Afghanistan, has seen NATO forces engaged in combat for a period twice as long as World War II) and absorbed into its terms of reference (as authoritatively expressed in three separate Strategic Concepts in 1991, 1999 and 2010) a set of security concerns extending from terrorism to piracy to cyber attacks. Such far-ranging changes have tested not just NATO’s operational character but also its political unity. Over the Balkans, Afghanistan and, most damagingly, Iraq in 2003, NATO has experienced an exhausting internal struggle aimed at preserving a common front. The visibility and difficulty of that effort has given rise to a view of the Alliance as ineffectual, divided and perched constantly on the verge of collapse (for discussion see Cottey 2004 and Menon 2007: 53–99).

This ‘NATO in crisis’ narrative is one that has, however, come in for some telling criticism – as being exaggerated, imprecise and neglectful of the Alliance’s staying power (Thies 2009). Yet the broader point – of a NATO somehow disoriented by its environment, engaged in a constant search for purpose and thus the object of ongoing anxiety for policy makers – is not far off the mark. It is this turbulence which renders NATO a source of fascination for observers and the subject of questions which sometimes brook no obvious answer. If NATO has changed so much, then how do we pinpoint its essential character? Further, if NATO’s operational and strategic vision has shifted beyond the narrow horizons of the Cold War, how do we explain the organisation’s ranking of priorities and the occasions on which it has decided to act? And when NATO has acted, in whose interest has this been done: all allies, some allies or some overarching NATO aggregate? And looming over all of these questions is perhaps the most important – why does NATO persist at all?

Analysing NATO

It is questions such as these which frame the current volume (more on this later), but addressing them gives rise to another: Why yet another book on NATO? Isn’t the interested reader already well served by an extensive and healthily expanding literature on the subject? That question could well be answered in the affirmative, but a deficiency in NATO scholarship remains nonetheless – namely, its inattention to theory; it is this gap we wish to address. That such a gap exists can be illustrated by a brief survey. Considering works published in the period since the end of the Cold War, much of the NATO-relevant literature can be placed under one of four headings.¹

The first focuses on key episodes of NATO’s recent history – a history that has undoubtedly been dramatic. The Alliance was a key actor at the Cold War’s end and has been central to the reshaping of European (and, to some degree, international) order thereafter. A good deal of attention has thus been paid to moments of crisis and historical turning points. Take, for instance, treatments of NATO’s predicament in the wake of the Cold War. The uncertainty that confronted the Allies at this juncture was unique – not since its creation in 1949 had existential questions of NATO’s purpose and likelihood of survival been presented in such stark form. Much of the consequent analysis was practical in its concerns, focussing on how the Alliance ought to repurpose itself: by reaching out to the former communist East, reorganising its conventional and nuclear force posture, embracing out-of-area missions and facilitating a greater European role in defence (Corterier 1990; Lunn 1992; Sloan 1989). In parallel, a rich vein of work focused on debates within NATO, how distinct national positions emerged over the Alliance’s future and, as an important corollary to this, how the position of the US as NATO’s leading power was viewed (de Wijk 1997; Goldstein 1994; Levine 1992). Given the significance of the issues at hand, much of this work had a reflective quality. NATO, for some, was doomed to wither away, given the disappearance of its long-time Soviet adversary (De Santis 1991). Others, by contrast, saw it as the best guarantee against possible future dangers (a resurgent Russia or war in Eastern Europe), the most reliable expression of transatlantic interests and a body superior to others (for instance, the Western European Union [WEU] and the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe [CSCE]) in its ability to adapt to multiple and new security tasks (Duffield 1994–1995; Glaser 1993; McInnes 1995).

Debates on NATO’s future were sustained by the re-emergence of conflict in Europe. Throughout much of the 1990s, the crucible of change for NATO was in the Balkans. In both Bosnia and Kosovo, decisive NATO interventions (Operation Deliberate Force in 1995 and Operation Allied Force in 1999, respectively)² were preceded by intimations of crisis in the Alliance as well as charges of ineptitude and indecisiveness (Webber 2012). The outcome in each case – a NATO aerial intervention paving the way for local political settlements and long-term NATO peacekeeping missions – had consequences for both Balkan stability and NATO’s own evolution. On the latter, scholarly analysis has focused on a number of themes: NATO capabilities (Lambeth 2001; Schulte 1997), the combination of force and diplomacy in achieving mission outcomes (Daalder and O’Hanlon 2000; Henriksen 2007; Kaufman 2002: 91–136), intra-Alliance debates on the strategy of force (Allin 2002; Martin and Brawley 2000) and how mission outcomes went on to shape NATO’s operational, doctrinal and political development (Allin 2002: 92–100; Kaufman 2002: 209–232; Latawski and Smith 2003: 39–65; Sperling and Webber, 2009: 498–500).

NATO’s forays in the Balkans were premised on an assumption that the organisation’s core purposes were related to the provision of European security (Kay 1998: 59–87). That assumption was overturned by the al Qaeda attacks of 9/11 on the US mainland. In response, for the first (and still only) time in its history, the Alliance invoked the collective defence provisions of Article Five of the North Atlantic Treaty and so NATO followed the US into the long campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan. That campaign was bookmarked by two notable and related episodes elsewhere, both of which were illustrative of debates on NATO’s extra-European role. The first occurred in 2003 over the merits of the US-led intervention in Iraq – a mission firmly opposed by France and Germany and one which became the subject of NATO’s most bitter dispute of the entire post–Cold War period (Gordon and Shapiro 2004; Pond 2004).The second, Operation Unified Protector against the Qaddafi regime in Libya in 2011, was seen to mark something of a departure, given the willingness of NATO’s European allies to undertake a significant proportion of flight missions (Hallams and Schreer 2012). Although regarded by many as operational successfully (albeit within narrow parameters), NATO’s intervention in Libya was not viewed as indicative of a new focus on North Africa and the Middle East (Barry 2011; Englelbert, Mohlin and Wagnsson 2014). The circumstances which had given rise to the operation were largely fortuitous, and as NATO’s reluctance to become involved in Syria in subsequent years would demonstrate, the Alliance lacked the political will to involve itself in any mission to which the United States was not prepared to commit.

As for Afghanistan itself, this has seen NATO’s largest, longest and costliest mission to d...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction Is NATO a theory-free zone?
• 2 Theorising NATO
• 3 NATO and the European security system A neo-realist analysis
• 4 Neo-classical realism and alliance politics
• 5 NATO and institutional theories of international relations
• 6 NATO and liberal International Relations theory
• 7 Understanding NATO through constructivist theorising
• 8 Securitisation theory and the evolution of NATO
• 9 NATO and the risk society Modes of alliance representation since 1991
• 10 NATO A public goods provider
• 11 Learning the hard way NATO's civil–military cooperation1
• Index