Defense policies of East-Central European countries after 1989

Creating stability in a time of uncertainty

James W. Peterson, Jacek Lubecki

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781526110428
• eBook ISBN: 9781526110459
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The 2014 Ukrainian-Crimean crisis has raised serious questions in the West about Russian motivations and future policy directions. Now more than ever, it is imperative to explore the defensive perceptions, reactions, and preparations of neighbouring countries, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. Is there a convergence of their approaches along similar paths, or do their different cultures and historical experiences prefigure a divergence of their defense policies? While Slovakia, Hungary and Czech Republic all seem to have little concern about Russia's policies in Ukraine, the Polish response has been uniquely strong and militarized. This book will explore reasons for the different responses to the crisis.

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Theoretical framework: liberalism, realism, and constructivism

Divergences and convergences after 1989

In the first years after the seismic events of 1989, there was a widely shared belief that the V4 collective adoption of liberal internationalist ideology would translate into congruent foreign and defense policies in each country. This would arise through the implementation of a democracy, and assumptions of “democratic peace” theory which suggested the dissolution of the Soviet Union would make the world a safer place because emerging democracies are disinclined to fight one another. The relatively quick replacement of the WTO with NATO confirmed these strong hopes. Nations strove to join both NATO and the EU, willingly implementing domestic democratic practices in order to pass the various checkpoints set up by these international organizations. As the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia all constructed liberal polities domestically, and adjusted their foreign and defense policies to liberal internationalist frameworks, there is no question a policy convergence occurred among the V4 post-1989 which persists to this day.

However, not until the Ukrainian Crisis exploded in 2014 were V4 countries exposed to a security threat, the geographical proximity of which highlighted their truly divergent foreign and defense policies, which had been manifest practically in these countries since before communism. Though all V4 countries continue to operate within a liberal internationalist framework, Poland in particular has differentiated itself with a more proactive military presence than any of the other V4 countries.

Poland has consistently spent a significantly greater amount of its budget on military buildup and operations than the other V4 countries since the fall of communism. In fact, since joining NATO, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic have distinguished themselves by a growing neglect of their militaries in budgetary allocations. Conversely, Poland’s dimensionally greater concern with the continual threat posed by Russia has been visible since the 1990s. However, it is thrown into relief especially today, in the wake of the Ukrainian Crisis. Poland’s accelerated military buildup since 2014 – as contrary to the other V4 leaders’ lukewarm reactions and even expressed sympathy towards Putin – reveals a profound divergence that should be examined.

To understand the post-communist foreign and defense policies of the Visegrád Group, their Communist and pre-communist political histories must be analyzed. Though Poland’s current foreign and defense policies provide the most distinct point of contrast within the V4, it is essential to understand the nuanced historical legacies and geopolitical circumstances of each of the four East-Central European countries in order to contextualize Poland’s status. Why is Poland an outlier? And why are the other V4 countries so unconcerned about their defense against a once-more looming Russian threat?

Liberalism, realism, and constructivism

In order to answer these highly relevant questions, a theoretical framework must be established for analyses of these countries, past and present. It comes as little surprise that liberalism, and its derivative liberal internationalism, is the group of international relations theories which most compellingly explain defense policy convergence in post-1989 East-Central Europe. Liberalism is a second-level-of-analysis international relations framework which views the type of domestic political system a country implements as the decisive factor in understanding that country’s foreign and defense policy choices. Specifically, the long-standing practice and ideology of liberal democracy are seen as decisively modifying foreign policy behavior. Famously, as expressed in the “liberal peace theory,” liberal democracies do not go to war against each other. Liberal democracies also tend to create international institutions that project and protect liberal democratic principles such as rule of law. Liberal democracies tend to cooperate in a sphere of international interaction in a pattern called liberal internationalism (Doyle 1986).

The establishment and consolidation of liberal democracies in the V4, their desire to join NATO and the EU, and their behavior as loyal members of these two powerful institutions is best explained by liberalism. The successful political development of East-Central European countries as liberal democracies since 1991, and their resulting convergent foreign and defense policies, will, therefore, be approached here through a liberal theortical framework. However, this framework will only serve to understand V4 foreign and defense policy convergence. Another theory must be utilized to understand the simultaneous V4 divergence and Polish exceptionalism that can be observed most notably since the 2014 Ukrainian Crisis.

To understand foreign and defense policy divergence in the V4, two theoretical frameworks present themselves. First, realism. Realist theories assume that states pursue power (classical realism) or survival (neo-realism), and, under conditions of security dilemma, they inevitably threaten and wage war. Accordingly, realist scholars expected post-Cold War Europe to revert to multi-polar conditions characterized by wars and threats of war. For example, John Mearsheimer predicted a conflict between Hungary and Romania over the Hungarian minority in northern Transylvania (Mearsheimer 1990). Though this did not occur, realists can still explain the persistence of relative peace in Europe with the presence of US hegemony. Realists argue an unstable and insecure world would naturally follow a withdrawal of US security commitment to Europe – a prospect which both the Obama and Trump presidencies brought closer to the fore.

A form of “soft” realism based on a notion that states balance against any concentration of power also applies to some realities of post-communist Europe. It can be used to explain why all peripheral European countries (“the New Europe”) aligned with the US in the run-up to the Iraq Crisis of 2003 (balancing against the Franco-German tandem) and why all Visegrád countries today are likewise pushing against the EU core states, showing a predilection towards Atlanticism (Michta 2006). Similarly, CSDP can be interpreted as a form of softbalancing against the US, or a security guarantee in expectation of US withdrawal from NATO/Europe (Merlingen 2012). The fact that diplomatic rather than military relations are the foundation for this “soft” realist conceptualization of V4 policy, though, makes this framework less important for the book, which discusses military defense policies.

Still, realism remains a seemingly compelling framework for explaining “Polish exceptionalism” in terms of Poland’s perception of a Russian threat. Poland’s geographical proximity to Russia, specifically the Kaliningrad oblast’, as well as Poland’s size as compared to the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia, seems to confirm realism’s relevance to the discussion of V4 divergence. As a medium-sized power, Poland has both greater security interests and a greater ability to react to perceived threats than the other, smaller, V4 countries, which do not border Russia directly.

The tendency of small states to be “policy takers” and simply adjust to given power realities is a well-known concept in realist international relations theory. However, the concept of the “small state” is also inherently problematic as a descriptor of an objective rather than a subjective reality (Hey 2003, 3–4). Israel, which is smaller in terms of territory and population than Slovakia, Hungary, or the Czech Republic, is certainly not perceived as, nor does it act as, a “small state.” Likewise, interwar Hungary, smaller in population and virtually identical in boundaries to today’s Hungary, pursued policies of aggressive territorial revisionism against its neighbors, which could not be more different from the country’s liberal internationalist policies pursued today. In this case, virtually identical structural circumstances did not result in the same outcomes. Clearly, countries’ strategic interests are not a simple reflection of their structural circumstances, such as geography and size, but are results of structural circumstances as processed by particular perceptual lenses.

Perceptual realities point out us in the direction of constructivist frameworks and concepts such as “strategic culture” and “role theory” as more compelling explanations of the patterns of defense policy behavior that we see among the V4 countries. Indeed, constructivist frameworks, which focus on countries’ self-perception based on the lessons of the past (“strategic cultures”)¹ or the constructed and assumed roles the countries play in international organizations (“role theory”)² offer indispensable theoretical lenses to examine V4 divergence, as well as clarify the convergence, of post-communist defense policies in Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic (Gray 1999, Aggestam 2004).

The “strategic cultures” framework asks us to examine a nation’s history and culture in order to understand its defense policies. Through this lens, we are compelled to set aside an objective understanding of a country’s place in a geopolitical order for a moment, and instead examine how the recent and remote perceptions a nation has of itself have formed a strategic culture within the country in question. When we take the time to understand elite and popular perceptions of defense and foreign relations within each respective V4 country, the domestic values of the people of Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic and their subsequent conceptualization of future threats, the findings are quite surprising. The common perception that the communist past has had a lasting legacy of extreme uniformity among the V4 is debunked and replaced with the conclusion that communism was a surprisingly powerful period in provoking diverging strategic defense cultures, particularly in Poland, whose military buildup contrasts decisively against the relative demilitarization of Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic since 1999.

Role theory coupled to strategic cultures, in turn, is indispensable for examining the still notable V4 convergence that occurred during the periods prior to and immediately after joining NATO, encompassed roughly by the period 1999–2011. The successful applications of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary to be admitted to NATO in the first (1999) tranche of Eastern European applicants was clearly predicated on their ability to project themselves as useful potential alliance members to Western perceptions – security creators, not just security takers. As we will see, military spending in these countries spiked briefly during alliance accession, then declined precipitously among all of them except Poland. After joining NATO, all V4 countries played the role of “loyal members” of the alliance, with an emphasis on participation in the alliance’s multilateral missions in the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. Similarly, all of the V4 countries embraced and played the role of “loyal members” of the CSDP framework. The countries’ Atlanticist orientation, in turn, compelled all V4 countries to play the role of loyal ally to the US in Iraq.

However, this “loyalty game” was played consistently with dramatically different levels of commitment: the difference between Polish brigade-size (over 2,000 troops), combat-oriented, long-lasting deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq, as compared to typically company size (150–300 troops), typically non-combat, brief and reluctant deployments by Hungary, Czech Republic, and Slovakia, cannot simply be explained by Poland’s greater size and capability, as the Polish commitment was not just quantitatively but qualitatively, greater. The “loyal ally” role was thus played by all, but the embodiment of that role was manifest quite differently. Differences in respective strategic cultures, and different perceptions of the Russian threat were decisive in explaining the most recent variance observable in the V4. The countries of the region that truly fear Russia have given money and lives to display their commitment to multilateral missions in the hopes that, if necessary, their Western allies would show the same alliance loyalty.

The discussion of concepts provided by constructivist fameworks brings us to a broader reflection on the future of the region. Unlike structuralist frameworks, such as realism (with its unrelenting pessimism) or liberalism (with its optimistic determinism, at least when coupled to a naïve understanding of Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis),³ constructivism is non-deterministic and envisions a wide spectrum of “worlds that we make” (Onuf 1989). According to this framework there is nothing inevitable about the persistence of a liberal internationalist world that was joined and co-constructed by the countries of East-Central Europe after 1989. At the same time, and with all of the detected divergencies, if we discover that the core commitment to liberal frameworks in foreign and defense policies is by and large unchallenged, even in the case of the ideologically self-proclaimed “illiberal democracy” constructed by Orbán in Hungary, there might be reasons to expect that structures that support liberal order in East-Central Europe have a staying power that goes beyond vagaries of electoral politics and theatrics projected by loud nationalist populist leaders who seem to not really offer alternatives to liberalism in foreign policy The investigation concludes by conjecturing how much the rise of nationalist populism will change the pre-existing realities of East-Central European defense policies.

Notes

1  Gray gives us a working definition of strategic culture: “the persisting (though not eternal) socially transmitted idea, attitudes, traditions and habits of mind, and preferred methods of operation that are more or less specific to a particular geographically based security community that has had a necessarily unique historical experience […]. Furthemore, strategic culture can change over time, as new experience is absorbed, coded and culturally translated. Culture, however changes slowly” (Gray 1999, 51–2).

2  Aggestam states that “a role reflects norms and ideas about the purpose and orientation of a the state as an entity and as an actor in the international system” (Aggestam 2004, 8).

3  Fukuyama’s 1989 “The End of History” article published in the National Interest was never properly understood and remains misunderstood, even by its own author. A notion of a long-term normative triumph of liberalism does not predict its unchallenged existence, or deny a possibility of illiberal challengers that might appear to prevail. For the text of the celebrated essay, see www.wesjones.com/eoh.htm, accessed July 31, 2017.

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Empires and peripheries: security and defense realities of East-Central Europe

Pre-history: East-Central Europe prior to the nineteenth century and the emergence of modern empires – Poland’s partitions

By around 1000 AD, the medieval entities of Bohemia/Moravia, Poland, and Hungary (but not Slovakia) emerged from the chaos of the early Middle Ages as Western (Latin) Christian states. For all three, their ethnic centers happened to correspond roughly to where the respective countries are situated today, but their nature and actual political boundaries varied widely, with volatile fates of their ruling strata. As the Middle Ages progressed, all three of them found themselves defined by the geopolitical space between the mostly Germanic Holy Roman Empire to the West, and Christian Orthodox or, later, Muslim entities to the East and Southeast. By 1500 the two most important of these Eastern entities became the Tsardom of Muscovy and the Ottoman Empire. Lovers of geopolitics and of “civilizational” logic can point out that the countries in question are today still defined by being situated between transnational entities in the West (NATO and the EU), and countries of mostly Orthodox (Russia and Ukraine, Romania, Serbia) or Muslim (Turkey) cultural heritage to the East.

The differences between the political developments of the East-Central European entities in question are as important as their sim...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations and acronyms
• Introduction and overview
• 1 Theoretical framework: liberalism, realism, and constructivism
• 2 Empires and peripheries: security and defense realities of East-Central Europe
• 3 Communism and late communism: from forced convergence to divergence
• 4 The Czech Republic: a reluctant ally
• 5 Hungary: imperial legacies and post-imperial realities
• 6 Poland: return to the West?
• 7 Slovakia: politics from the periphery
• 8 Recapitulation: from convergence to divergence and back?
• References
• Index