The Globalization of NATO

Intervention, Security and Identity

Veronica M. Kitchen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781138831896
• eBook ISBN: 9781136955679
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book examines NATO's transition from a Cold War mutual defence organization into a global alliance, and puts the recent crisis over the Afghanistan mission in the context of long-standing debates over out-of-area interventions.

Originally, NATO bound the western allies together for the purposes of mutual defence as defined by Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which declared that an attack on the territory of one ally was to be considered an attack on them all. However, Article 4 of the Treaty invites the allies to consult with each other on a less formal basis whenever their 'territorial integrity, political independence, or security' was threatened, without the automatic commitment to a shared response. During the Cold War, the allies consulted both formally and informally on issues beyond mutual defence in debates that were, more often than not, extremely contentious. After the Cold War, these out-of-area missions became the primary focus of NATO's military missions. The allies had to debate the scope of co-operation for every mission they considered undertaking collectively. This book argues that NATO's identity has changed from a Cold War mutual defence organization to a global alliance in the course of debates over how to respond to the changing circumstances of its security environment.

This book will be of much interest to students of security studies, international organisations, contemporary history and IR in general.

1
Identity, security and political talk

Talk and debate are key to explaining change in the Atlantic community over time as well as its maintenance in the face of discord.¹ Not only does communication help to resolve conflict, talk and argument create community in the first place. The Atlantic community, created and maintained through talk and argument, has changed over time, but never so much that its members could not see a fundamental continuity with the community of values they began to construct after the Second World War. However, the members of NATO have frequently had to confront major changes in their strategic environment, such as at the end of the Cold War, and disagreements between its members on questions of common policy. As NATO members have negotiated the extent of their common action beyond mutual defence, they have simultaneously written and rewritten the tenets of their common identity by redefining their common norms and the responsibilities they have to one another.

During the Cold War, Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty governed the responsibilities allies had to one another in case of an armed attack on their territory, presumably from the Soviet Union. An attack on the territory of one member state would always be considered an attack on all member states. The only thing to discuss was the scope of each member state’s contribution to mutual defence. But the military missions beyond mutual defence which are at the heart of this book are somewhat different. They are not governed by an article in a treaty demanding automatic action, but rather by Article 4’s invitation to consult, and sometimes just on the vague sense that the NATO allies should be working together. They do not draw on the unarticulated habits of the community, but rather on the actions NATO members have taken together in the past and their tradition of showing solidarity by acting together in the world. This legacy has become an important part of the Atlantic identity, but it is not mandated by the North Atlantic Treaty. Each time the Atlantic allies wish to act together in the world, they must decide what to do, who will participate, how much each ally will contribute, and whether the formal structures of NATO should be employed. In debating these missions the Allies are debating the responsibility they owe to each other and to others as members of the Atlantic community. The study of political discourse in these debates provides an excellent way of studying the conceptual boundaries of the Atlantic identity over time.

The importance of political talk

The Atlantic political community in the realm of security is constructed in various ways. It is defined by tangible institutions, such as NATO, and intangible ones, such as “the West,” as well as by bilateral visits and summits. Presidents, prime ministers and Chancellors visit each other and form personal relationships. Bureaucrats work together across the Atlantic on common projects and help form the glue which holds the transatlantic relationship together even through times of crisis (Richardson 1996). Diplomats exchange classified notes and politicians make promises in private meetings which only see the light of day when they are unearthed by historians decades later. Journalists, pundits, bloggers and citizens strive to hold their governments to account in the public sphere. Students and soldiers participate in exchanges, and travellers and migrants generate a constant to-and-fro. Ultimately, however, it is elite policymakers who have the power to make decisions and take action in the realm of security policy, and so this book focuses on those actors. Deliberation and negotiation about the creation of common policy in the transatlantic relationship often goes on in secret or behind the scenes. Actions, however, are nearly always public and in a democratic community the reasons why these actions should be undertaken must be given publicly. The members of the Atlantic community are democracies, and democratic leaders must justify their chosen policies publicly in legislatures and the media. Because the Atlantic community is so well connected through the media, travel, business, and family contacts, policy elites effectively make those arguments before the citizens of allied countries as well. Both the content of their arguments—the reasons they give for why their country or the Alliance should or should not undertake a particular policy—as well as the form of their arguments—the rhetorical techniques they use in the course of giving reasons—make up the public face of the community.

Actors in part create the social world they live in by the way they talk about it, and communities are publicly, collectively and socially constructed. Personal opinions and observations become social facts which define the community through communicative exchange and contestation (Bially Mattern 2005a: 597). Together, states create their community by defining what is true about it, and what forms its identity. They strengthen it by embedding these agreed-upon social facts in practices, norms, routines and institutions. As security elites in the member states of these institutions make decisions, react to events and meet each other to discuss events of international importance, they also create webs of meaning which hold the community together. Policymakers have continually stood up in public and spoken of an Atlantic community and an Atlantic community identity as if one exists, even when relations have been poor. The reification of a community beyond the institutions is a constant part of the transatlantic relationship, and it is the study of how allies make arguments about the form and content of this community that helps to explain change in the Atlantic relationship over time. The Atlantic community’s identity is one that is formed and changed through public argument.

Identities are always formed in opposition to some other identity, whether another actor, an historical identity or some other imagined alternative. Thus the construction of an identity is always about the construction of boundaries. This is not the same thing as saying identity is all about antagonistic relationships. Bahar Rumelili notes that while an identity requires being able to imagine an alternative identity, it does not necessarily require a behavioural relationship of opposition. The dimensions on which identity is constructed need not always be set up as dichotomies of good and bad; there must simply be some degree of difference (Rumelili 2004). Actors construct these boundaries through their debate about what is appropriate behaviour for members of their community. According to Jackson, this relationship is causal: policymakers are able to implement only those policies they have managed to justify (legitimate) in a manner acceptable to their populace. Jackson argues that “the configuration of the boundaries of acceptable action, produced and reproduced in the course of ongoing political struggle over policy outcomes, are central to the explanation of these outcomes” (Jackson 2006:55). An international community is produced by the delineation of its boundaries with respect to space, time and responsibility. Atlanticism is produced, reproduced and changed through argument and action about which countries are members of common institutions and which are not, about which actors are enemies and which are friends, about what common institutions should do or become, and what the members of the community owe to each other as allies.

Discourses are social structures created through talk and argument.² Discourse creates boundaries and constraints—though not immoveable ones—by defining a limited set of acceptable arguments and actions at any given moment in time. It frames problems in particular ways, and makes possible certain kinds of arguments about policy while ruling others out as impossible. A speaker makes plausible sounding arguments by drawing on the finite set of rhetorical resources defined by the discourse (Jackson 2006). For instance, in most countries, a policy maker can plausibly argue that the invasion of another country is justified because of the imminent threat of attack, but not because a higher power told him it was the right course of action. The Atlantic identity is a discourse, since it helps define what pass as true, plausible or legitimate arguments for a particular group of people. Actors mobilize these rhetorical resources into arguments which connect the nature of their community to policy arguments about the kinds of actions they should take. These arguments broadly take the form “because we are this way, we should adopt this policy.” By making arguments about their preferred course of action with respect to the interventions outside the Atlantic area, the Allies come to consensus about action or they make decisions about how to behave in the absence of consensus. It is also through this process of argument that they change their identity and their community. Discourse and identity explain behaviour because they form the constraints that legitimate certain actions over others, and they define appropriate behaviour or norms for members of the community. In an established community like NATO, the answers to questions about who we are and what we do together are constrained by who we have been and what we have done together in the past. This does not mean that policymakers can make arguments only within the narrow boundaries of what has been said before. By making new arguments which connect to old ones, policymakers stretch the boundaries of acceptable argument and change the content of the common identity.

Arguing about security

The Copenhagen School’s theory of securitization links talk and security in an explicit way. Securitization is a discursive process by which an actor in a particular political community designates something to be an existential threat to the survival of a particular referent object to be secured, and calls for extraordinary measures to be taken to address it (Buzan et al. 1998). Securitization theory argues that security is a performative speech act, like a promise. That is, by successfully convincing an audience that something is a security threat, it becomes one. This is a good example of how an observation becomes a social fact. Whether the issue objectively constitutes an existential threat is beside the point; what matters is whether the securitizing actor has the authority and social capital to successfully convince its audience of a threat. The threats the allies discuss as they debate the missions beyond mutual defence are not usually existential ones, and that is part of what makes them interesting for the study of the Atlantic community’s evolving identity. However, securitization theory helps us to understand debates about Atlantic security in three ways.

First, securitization theory confirms that the appropriate object of study for the process of threat identification is the talk of security elites (Buzan et al. 1998: 33; Hansen 2006:85). Security elites have the authority to successfully convince an audience something is an existential threat, and to take the extraordinary measures necessary to address it. An NGO or the media may be able to convince an audience that something is a security threat, but cannot follow through with a policy action. Within the Atlantic community, heads of government, foreign and defence ministers and other foreign policy elites usually have both social and formal authority to enact security policy by virtue of their positions.

Second, debates about Atlantic missions beyond mutual defence sometimes do get structured in terms of existential threats. At stake is the survival of the Atlantic community or the effectiveness of NATO, its primary institution, although not the underlying habits of the no-war community. During arguments about intervention in Vietnam, American officials argued that if the European and Canadian powers did not come to American assistance, the Alliance would lose all credibility. Likewise during the NATO missions in Bosnia and Afghanistan, it was argued that failure of the missions meant failure of the institution. Securing the political community underpinning NATO was a good in itself, not just an end to securing the territory and interests of the allies.

Third, and related to the second, securitization theory also gives us a way to measure the survival of an identity and a community. To a community, survival means the survival of an identity; a community cannot be said to have survived if its members no longer recognize themselves as part of a community (Waever 1996:109). For instance, the post-war security community in Europe cannot be said to be the same as the balance of power system that existed in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. The dramatic changes at the end of the Cold War, however, changed the way the transatlantic states thought about security and themselves, but they maintained (and expanded) the no-war community while at the same time preserving the reflexive political community in the realm of security. We would recognize the end of the Atlantic community if actors ceased to invoke it as an important part of their political talk; that is, if they ceased to construct and reconstruct NATO, its associated norms and routines as part of national and international collective identities. If political elites ceased to argue that the survival of NATO was important, or if they began to bypass NATO altogether as a mechanism for common action, these would be far more reliable indicators of trouble in the Atlantic community than either prognostications of the destruction of the community (which suggest that destruction is to be avoided) or the formal dissolution of the Alliance, which for reasons of bureaucratic inertia is unlikely to occur.³

For a policymaker to successfully argue to an audience that something is a security threat, the argument must reach the intended audience. Thus when studying political talk, I focus only on sources which were publicly available at the time of the debate in question: usually radio and television addresses, speeches in legislatures, press conferences and scheduled speeches which address a public audience.⁴ Inevitably, this leads to a conundrum: most of the time, most people are not that interested in foreign policy. If they follow foreign policy debates at all, they are more likely to do it through the news media than by listening to or reading political speeches themselves. Political talk itself, rather than media reports of political talk, is still the appropriate subject for study for three reasons. First, as stated above, policymakers are ultimately the ones with the authority to translate talk into political action. Second, political elites get at least as many opportunities as journalists do to set the frame within which debate happens. They pick the metaphors, analogies and political strategies they use to argue their case. Even when a journalist or NGO successfully sets the frame in a foreign policy debate, it is only policymakers who can translate the choices implied by that frame into policy action. Third, media reports miss much of the nuance of full political speeches. Media may report what was said or the implications of a policy announcement, but will rarely report how it was said, the flow of arguments, or the particular words used. In a study of discourse and identity, these details are fundamentally important. Debates about the connection between identity and policy are more likely to be forcefully argued in policy speeches than they are in the sterile language of a press release (Hansen 2006:85). Occasionally, political texts maintain an emotional intensity even as exclusively written (rather than transcribed) documents. Policymakers write articles designed to engage readers in political debate. Strategy documents, to take another example, typically set out clearly the kinds of roles a state hopes to fill in its foreign policy, which states it sees as its natural allies, and why. These obviously provide as much insight into identity as the spoken word.

Debating the responsibilities of allies

Policy elites make these arguments about the connection between policy and identity at both the abstract and concrete levels. Policymakers are sometimes working to develop documents to provide strategic guidance, like NATO’s Strategic Concept or Summit Communiqués. Sometimes they discuss the content of their identity in stock speeches at state dinners. More often, however, security elites in the Atlantic community are preoccupied by the task of determining the appropriate collective response to pressing security problems and formulating the best arguments to convince their allies and their publics to see things their way. Many of these arguments are about the kinds of responsibilities allies owe to one another or to third parties. They are often arguments about burden sharing, credibility, and the kinds of activities appropriate for the NATO alliance.

Debates about the scope and responsibilities of the NATO Alliance and the Atlantic community beyond mutual defence are therefore at once debates about what it means to be Atlantic and debates about the solutions to particular problems. Members of the political community in the realm of security must work out at a practical level the responsibilities of allies and the expectations they have of each other. Atlanticism influences debates about policies, because they reflect the responsibilities and expectations allies hold, which must always correspond with prevailing notions of what it means to be Atlantic. For instance, during the Cold War, part of what it meant to be Atlantic was to be anti-communist, but precisely what this meant for the expected behaviour of the Atlantic states had to be worked out in arguments and discussions. On the other hand, these debates about particular policies are the stuff from which webs of meaning are woven, and therefore create the discourses which make up Atlanticism.

Atlanticism—or any common identity—does not imply a particular policy course or set of behaviours; indeed, it is precisely because it does not that we have disputes within a community. If the common identity were determinant of behaviour, we would expect concord rather than the divisive debates about policy we actually see (Jackson 2006:60). Allies work out the rules and norms for being a good ally as they make concrete arguments about particular security problems. These debates about the implications of the Atlantic identity function at two levels: allies debate their responsibilities as members of the community explicitly and directly, but they also debate common policies about particular problems. These two levels obviously influence each other as allies try to come to consensus about common policy, or work out rules or mechanisms for how to disagree. Debates about common policies become debates about the norms of the community.

In NATO, the rules outlined in the North Atlantic Treaty define some standards of behaviour such as the fact that an attack on one state is to be considered an attack on all states. But social norms, established over time through talk, argument and repeated action, also order the behaviour of member states. Scholars of NATO’s out-of-area interventions tend to argue that NATO survived the crises it faced over interventions beyond mutual defence because they were secondary to mutual defence (Liland 1999, 2001; Sherwood 1985). This is only true in so far as the North Atlantic Treaty defined an alliance for mutual defence, and thus anything else was by definition secondary. However, if we accept the fact that the North Atlantic Treaty defined more than an alliance, norms had to be socially constructed in the talk and practice of allies:

The interests of allies are not self evident, and the interpretation of the treaty norm depended on how the allies thought about security, the boundaries of the alli...

Table of contents

• Routledge global security studies
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Identity, security and political talk
• 2 The Suez crisis
• 3 The Cold War community and the Vietnam war
• 4 Changing notions of security and the intervention in Bosnia
• 5 September 11 and the dispute over Iraq
• 6 The post 9/11 alliance and changing notions of mutual defence in Afghanistan
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index