NATO's Security Discourse after the Cold War

Andreas Behnke

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136269202
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politique et relations internationales
• Categoría: Politique

This book analyses the way in which the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) defines the West after the end of the Cold War and the demise of its constitutive 'Other', the Soviet Union.

The book offers a theoretical critique of liberal approaches to security, and focuses on NATO's construction of four geo-cultural spaces that are the sites of particular dangers or threats, which cause these spaces to be defined as the 'enemy' of the West. While this forges a collective Western identity, effectively achieved in the 1990s, the book also includes an analysis of NATO's involvement in the War on Terror – an involvement in which the Alliance fails to define a coherent West, thereby undermining the very source of its long-standing political cohesion. Contributing to theoretical development within Critical Security Studies, Behnke draws on a variety of approaches to provide an analytical framework that examines the political as well as philosophical problems associated with NATO's performance of security and identity, concluding that in the modern era of globalized, non-territorialized threats and dangers, NATO's traditional spatial understanding of security is no longer effective given the new dynamics of Western security.

NATO's Security Discourse after the Cold War will be of great interest to students and researchers of International Relations, Critical Security Studies and International Organizations.

1 From space to spatialization

To study the re-presentation of the West in NATO’s security discourse after the end of the Cold War raises a set of theoretical issues that warrant some further discussion beyond the general meta-theoretical commitments outlined in the previous chapter. There is, firstly, the issue of ‘substantialist vs. relational thinking’ (Emirbayer 1997). What constitutes the fundamental unit of this inquiry? Can we assume the West as a political space to have a defining, essential substance? Or do we have to consider it the product of relational or diacritical processes? Secondly, what ontological status can we give such an ambiguous term as the West? Can an ‘alliance’ as NATO be considered to occupy and define its boundaries? After all, even critical studies of international politics usually focus on the (nation-)state as the relevant entity. The purpose of this investigation therefore requires an argument for the ontological equivalence of alliance and state and their respective definitions of political identities. Finally, the concept of ‘culture’ needs to be re-defined in line with the first two points. Usually referring to distinctive features of a ‘substantial’ social unit or collective, culture needs to be brought in line with the relational approach advocated here. I shall address these three points in turn.

From substance to relational process

As Patrick Jackson and Daniel Nexon observe, ‘The majority of IR theories are substantialist – they presume that entities precede interaction, or that entities are already entities before they enter into social relations with other entities’ (Jackson and Nexon 1999: 293). The paradigmatic statements supporting this assertion are manifold. There is for instance Hedley Bull’s argument that the ‘starting point of international relations is the existence of states, or independent political communities, each of which possess a government and asserts sovereignty in relation to a particular segment of the human population’ (Bull 1977: 8). In a similar substantialist vein, Kenneth Waltz describes the state as an ontologically primary entity, with concepts such as ‘system’, ‘structure’ or ‘order’ derived from its interaction with other states. ‘Structures emerge from the coexistence of states. [ … ] International-political systems, like economic markets, are individualist in origin, spontaneously generated and unintended. In both systems, structures are formed by the coaction of their units’ (Waltz 1986: 85). States are introduced as given data into the realm of world politics, their spatial character perhaps acknowledged, yet in any case de-problematized and extricated from the play of politics and power. For the demarcation of space, the drawing and stabilizing of its boundaries, is accomplished on the conceptual and ontological level through the notion of ‘sovereignty’. States enter politics as pre-constituted entities, the boundaries of which are determined before they engage in politics. Sovereignty is what guarantees the order within these boundaries, and it guarantees that order will remain confined to the inside of pre-established states. Each state is thus an autonomous political unit, and it will remain so as long as anarchy endures, since the latter’s imperative is to ‘take care of yourself’, that is, to maintain and safeguard sovereignty.

As Jackson and Nexon point out, even (modernist) Social Constructivism is ultimately embedded in substantialist thinking. For all its interest in the processes through which states establish their mutually recognized social identities, at the core of this approach lies a commitment to their pre-social, ‘corporate’ identity (Wendt 1999: 193–245). While the relations between states are contingent upon a ‘distribution of ideas’ rather than ‘distribution of capabilities’ (Wendt 1999: 309), states themselves are assumed to escape the processes of social construction. Their ‘corporate identity’ is established by attributing ‘anthropomorphic qualities like desires, beliefs, and intentionality’ to them, and by identifying a set of timeless properties that define the ‘essential state’ as a self-organizing entity that can embody these qualities (Wendt 1999: 193–245). Surrounded by layers of ‘social identities’ that are constituted by the social structures in which states find themselves, their ‘body’ remains nonetheless the given ontological starting point. From this perspective, the added value of Social Constructivism, when compared to Realism, is slim indeed.¹ More precisely, Social Constructivism does not make any significant advance away from substantialist towards relational thinking, a move that Jackson and Nexon correctly identify as necessary for a more coherent analysis of social constructions and – pertinent for the purpose of this book – transformations of political entities. For substantialist thinking can never properly explain in what way an entity, agent, or space with a distinguishing substance can be transformed. ‘Substantialism requires that substances have invariant characteristics which are unaffected by changes in variable attributes’ (Jackson and Nexon 1999: 297). Thus, substantialist responses to the observation that entities themselves do change, and not just their secondary attributes, either have to deny this against historical evidence, or succumb to logically contradicting the very idea of an invariant substance as the defining element of an entity.

Applied to the West, a substantialist version would reproduce these problems on a different level. Samuel Huntington’s description of the West is illustrative here. ‘The West was the West long before it was modern. The central characteristics of the West, those which distinguish it from other civilizations, antedate the modernization of the West’ (Huntington 1996: 69). These ‘central characteristics’ which define the substance and hence the trans-historical continuity of the West are ‘The Classical Legacy’, ‘Catholicism and Protestantism’, ‘separation of spiritual and temporal authority’, ‘social pluralism’, ‘representative bodies’, and ‘individualism’.² In typical substantialist fashion, the identity of the West is established by defining its pre-social and apolitical ‘core’. Only in this fashion can a striking statement about the immunity of this civilization to the political, social, and epistemic discontinuities of modernity be asserted. In the same vein, the end of the Cold War cannot affect these core characteristics.

The difficulty to escape substantialism even in a critique of the traditional narratives about the West is demonstrated in David Gress’s work. Rejecting the finalism of the Grand Narrative on the West ‘as a coherent entity emerging triumphantly through history in a series of stages, each contributing an essential element to the whole’ (Gress 1998: 39), the author still refers to yet another substantialist definition of the West’s identity as ‘the synthesis of classical, Christian, and Germanic culture’, which defines ‘the true origin of Western identity’ (Gress 1998: 1).³ In both Gress’s and Huntington’s approaches it becomes impossible to consider the role that ‘the Other’ plays in the constitution of the West’s identity. Both essence and synthesis produce a West that can only be affected accidentally by events and actors external to it. It is indicative that Gress discusses the crises within the West as results of internal debates between its proponents and its critics. Hence the crisis after the end of the Cold War was due to the lack of ‘a strong and confident reassertion of the main line of Western identity, the line that led from heroic freedom, through holy war, discovery, and conquest to democracy and capitalism’ (Gress 1998: 468). In this view, crises are produced through internal misperceptions about the proper identity of West, and can ultimately be rectified. The debates within the West, this argument implies, can always be adjudicated and ultimately settled, as an essential definition of Western identity is always available. Yet such a perspective underestimates the relational and process-related character of identity and thus of political entities. From such a process-relational perspective, entities such as states are produced through particular, historically contingent relations with other and like units, with the relational processes taking ontological priority over the entities. As David Campbell has argued, referring to a slightly different vocabulary, ‘[w]hether we are talking of “the body” or “the state” or of particular bodies and states, the identity of each is performatively constituted’ (Campbell 1998a: 9). The identity of political entities is achieved, ‘not [through] a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition’ (Butler 1990: 145). In the absence of any pre-given, natural, or other substance, relational and performative processes are the only mode in which an identity can be produced. A constant becoming creates the appearance of a permanent being. As Jackson and Nexon (1999: 304–307) point out, the relations established and performed in these ‘stylized repetition of acts’ (Butler 1990: 141) can be conceptualized in a number of ways. For the purpose of this book, the constitutive relationship involved the creation of all political space is based on the relation between friend and enemy.

Friend and enemy

In order to render the concept of political space amenable to the terms of a relational approach, it is necessary to move from its core to its periphery. That is to say, instead of defining spaces in terms of their core elements, their alleged essential features or substance, we need to turn our attention to the process of demarcation, of boundary-drawing, through which such spaces are carved out of the contingency of time and space. To accomplish this move, we have to expand the disciplinary boundary of International Relations and Security Studies into what has so far been the realm of political theory: the constitution of political order.

To choose the work of Carl Schmitt is appropriate for this purpose for a number of reasons.⁴ Firstly, it allows a recovery of a concept of the Political, which includes, rather than presupposes, the production of political space. Secondly, it can be argued that Schmitt’s work bridges the field of geopolitics and security studies, in that his concern with the nomatic order of global politics is intertwined with a consideration of the productive nature of patterns of enmity and amity. For Schmitt, the former is the outcome of the designation of the latter. And finally, in doing so, we can explicitly link the politics of space to the politics of identity. Engaging Schmitt for our purpose thus allows us to recognize that the post-Cold War era entangled us in what could be called a ‘constitutive moment’ in global politics. With the Cold War’s conceptual and political boundaries rendered ineffective, this irruption of contingency has to be contained by a set of new confinements. It is a moment that requires the definition, establishment and guarding of new boundaries. What is asked for, in other words, is the definition of new insides and outsides or, in Carl Schmitt’s words, the redefinition of the distinction between friend and enemy. To the extent that this spatialization is the condition of possibility for modern politics, such boundary-drawings are constitutive or ontogenetic acts. As such they are presupposed and constantly reproduced in the routine political practices within and between the delineated spaces.

It is important to emphasize that for Schmitt, the Political resides within this boundary drawing, in making the distinction between friend and enemy. Unlike traditional notions of the Political in International Relations, Schmitt’s conceptualization does not refer to enmity as a mode of conduct between units in a ‘state of war’. ‘The core of the political is not enmity but rather the distinction of friend and enemy, which presupposes both friend and enemy’ (Schmitt 1995: 93). The key to the concept is thus not enmity as such, but the drawing of the distinction itself (Ulmen 1987: 189). It establishes the relevant community for which a particular social, economic and legal order is to be institutionalized. As such, the Political can be distinguished from other forms of human practices, which are guided by their own, independent oppositions.⁵ Moreover, since any institutionalized order presupposes such a differentiation, it follows that ‘the concept of the State presupposes the concept of the political’ (Schmitt 1991a: 20). The Political is thus an inherently agonistic phenomenon, constantly involving explicit or implicit decisions about the line between ‘us’ and ‘them’, inside and outside. ‘To view the state as the settled and orderly administration of territory, concerned with the organization of its affairs according to law, is to see only the stabilized results of conflict’ (Hirst 1987: 17).

A number of objections might be raised against Schmitt’s definition of the Political. One might easily reject it as too aggressive and bellicose, or for reducing politics to a conflict to the death between political entities. In this ‘realist’ reading of Schmitt, we might surmise that states are caught up in an anarchical ‘state of war’, in which the absence of any kind of order pits states against each other in eternal antagonism. One might then point out that peaceful relationships between states are a reality, and that the peaceful nature of these relationships has been institutionalized within, for example, the European Union. This argument would point out that in some parts of the world the logic of enmity has been transcended, and while states still incorporate different identities, this difference can no longer be described in terms of hostility or conflict.⁶ This criticism makes both too much and too little out of Schmitt’s definition of the Political. It makes too much out of it, since the friend–enemy distinction is not supposed to describe the empirical reality of states’ relations. War between states appears as only the ultimate possibility in a broad spectrum of political choices and strategies. It defines a Grenzbedingung, a borderline condition against which international politics has to be conducted, but it does not determine the forms and modes of politics as such.

At the same time, the criticism in fact makes too little of Schmitt’s distinction. Since it operates on the ontological rather than empirical level, it cannot be reduced to an enumeration of political relationships between states. Such relationships already presuppose that the distinction between friend and enemy has been made and stabilized. Peaceful relations and negotiations between states consequently rest on a prior agreement about the distinction – and on an assumption that this distinction itself remains non-negotiable. Against the ‘realist’ reading, it is important to emphasize that in order to be a constitutive act, the distinguishing between friend and enemy constitutes an agonistic rather than antagonistic relationship. This distinction is crucial indeed. For Schmitt, the identification of the enemy, and thereby of another political entity, involves the recognition of equality between these entities. The other is not a foe, an adversary that has to be conquered, converted, or annihilated. As an enemy, the other is recognized as an equal, and while war is always a possibility between enemies, this war is always ‘circumscribed’ (eingehegt), regulated, and part of an overall order. As such, the relationship should be considered agonistic, ‘in which each opposes the other (and the other’s presumptive beliefs) while respecting the adversary at another level’ as an equal (Connolly 1991: 178). This formalization of enmity is exactly aimed against the antagonistic relationship of foes with its tendency to total, terminal conflict.⁷ In order to be political, in order to constitute the ‘units of the international system’, the distinction between friend and enemy must establish order rather than chaos.

One might then suggest a re-formulation of the ‘friend-enemy’ distinction into a more neutral ‘identity/difference’ semantic structure, arguing that the individuation and constitution of political spaces can be accomplished by less bellicose mediations. Yet this in turn would underestimate the debt owed by national and trans-national identities to discourses of enmity, danger, and threat. The reason for this is not that we cannot imagine difference in any other way than threatening. Neighbours, colleagues and co-workers might very well define each other as different, yet without any reference to threat and danger. What is absent from the social spaces and localities they inhabit, however, is what defines and constitutes political space in the international system: sovereignty. In order to understand the role of authority and power in the negotiation of identity and difference in the international system, we need to recall that the drawing of the boundaries between inside and outside, and thus the establishment of a political space can never be referred to any anterior feature of nature or history. It is ultimately a contingent, indeed arbitrary act, never born out of necessity. As the work of Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm and others have demonstrated, the claim that a nation, or a particular identity of a people can serve as the legitimate reference for the ‘nation-state’ and its institutional practices is unwarranted. It would assume that the reality of a nation would precede a Schmittean decision and deny the role of power in the designation of identity and the demarcation of space. Yet in the absence of any

natural or intrinsic identity, power is always inscribed in the relation an exclusive identity bears to the differences it constitutes. If there is always a discrepancy between the identities a society makes available and that in human being which exceeds, resists, or denies those possibilities, then the claim to a true identity is perpetually plagued by the shadow of the other it constitutes.

(Connolly 1991: 66; emphasis in the original)

If identities are always the product of ultimately arbitrary decisions, they can be contested, denied, and rejected. Alternative modes of identities, alternative framing of spaces can be offered, denying the truth claim of any one authorized version. Yet to the sovereign gaze, this contest of identities is unacceptable. For only if the identity authorized from a sovereign position remains undisputed can it remain sovereign. Any ‘attempt to pluralize and politicize identities militates against achievement of the highest good’ (Connolly 1991: 66). In order for the sovereign position to ‘secure itself as intrinsically good, coherent, complete or rational and in order to protect itself from the other that would unravel its self-certainty and capacity for collective mobilization if it established its legitimacy’, the very mode of being different is a threat, an enemy to sovereignty (Connolly 1991: 65–66). In a system in which universalist claims meet in a pluralist setting, in which absolute claims are decided by the relativity of power, difference is driven into enmity. For a state to compromise on its identity would mean its death. To contest a political identity is thus a declaration of war – Yugoslavia in the 1990s being only the most prominent case in point during the immediate post-Cold War era. The appropriateness of the ‘friend/enemy’ formulation therefore becomes more easily demonstrated in times in which traditional identities are failing, opening up spaces of contestation, of definition and counter-definition. In these times, when identities have to be secured rather than routinely reproduced, when security policies are about the constitution of boundaries and not the protection of existing ones, the warrant for new or old sovereign positions is usually demanded and issued in terms of threats and enemies.

To introduce Schmitt’s vocabulary here is thus not only defendable by the fact that this investigation deals with a security political institution. Firstly, the particular paradoxical nature of the modern state system with its plurality of universal claims over-determines the negotiation of identity/difference in terms of friend/enemy. This, I submit, is most clearly revealed in times of crisis, in which political spaces have once again to be demarcated and authorized through reference to ‘external’ threats and dangers. Secondly, Schmitt’s conceptualization of the Political as the distinction between friend and enemy highlights the very limits of politics within the modern states system. Politics within his work is ‘the refinement of war; it is war’s...