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Multilateralism in Post-Cold War NATO: Functional Form, Identity

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Multilateralism in Post-Cold War NATO: Functional Form, Identity Multilateralism in Post-Cold War NATO: Functional Form, Identity-Driven Cooperation Frank Schimmelfennig Paper for AUEB International Conference on “Assessing Multilateralism in the Security Domain, 3-5 June 2005, Delphi, Greece Frank Schimmelfennig Mannheim Center for European Social Research University of Mannheim 68131 Mannheim, Germany [email protected] +49-621-181-2813, -2845 (fax) 2 Introduction: New Partners, New Tasks According to an oft-quoted aphorism of Lord Ismay, NATO’s first secretary-general, the purpose of the North Atlantic Alliance during the Cold War was “to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down”. In functional-institutionalist parlance, NATO as an international institution served to provide a high level of U.S. and European military resources for the collective deterrence and defense of Western Europe against the Warsaw Pact, while making it hard for the U.S. to defect in case of a Soviet attack and avoiding rivalries among the alliance members from resurfacing and escalating. With the collapse of communism, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, on the one hand, and the progress of European integration, on the other, the original purposes of NATO receded into the background. Instead, in a declaration agreed at NATO’s London summit in July 1990, the alliance offered the Central and Eastern European transition countries to formally put an end to confrontation, to establish permanent diplomatic relations with NATO, and the base the future relationship on the principle of common security. In its Strategic Concept adopted in Rome in November 1991, NATO established a new, cooperative relationship with the countries of Central and Eastern Europe as an integral part of the Alliance strategy. At the same time, NATO began to develop a set of new forums and frameworks to institutionalize this new relationship: NATO partnership. Over time, partnership led to both a deepening of cooperation between NATO and the Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) and an increasing differentiation among them. The Liaison Concept of June 1991 was followed by the establishment of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC) in December of the same year as an inclusive forum for consultation and exchange. In January 3 1994, NATO agreed on the Partnership for Peace (PfP) program, which deepened security cooperation and consultation between NATO and the CEECs, differentiated among the CEECs through Individual Partnership Programs, but was still open to all OSCE countries. In 1997, the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC) was established, which serves as an umbrella organization for both former NACC and PfP activities. Also in 1997, NATO invited the first CEECs (the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland) to join the alliance and, in 1999, established the Membership Action Plan (MAP) for the remaining CEECs interested in becoming full members. Seven of them joined NATO in March 2004. In lockstep with the enlargement decisions, NATO upgraded its institutionalized relationship with Russia and Ukraine in 1997 (NATO-Russia Founding Act; Charter on a Distinctive Partnership between Ukraine and NATO) and 2002 (NATO-Russia Council, NATO-Ukraine Action Plan).1 During the same period, NATO has begun to transform its organizational and force structure and security strategies and policies to respond to the disappearance of the common Soviet threat and the rise of new, more diverse and unpredictable risks and challenges to the security of its members. At its 1994 Brussels summit, NATO endorsed the Combined Joint Task Force (CJTF) Concept calling for “easily deployable, multinational, multiservice military formations tailored to specific kinds of military tasks”.2 In 1996, NATO agreed to build a European Security and Defense Identity (ESDI) within NATO, which would permit and support autonomous military operations led by the European Union (EU). At the Washington summit of 1999, NATO launched the Defense Capabilities Initiative to equip its forces for new tasks of crisis management and intervention. The Prague summit in October 2002 gave new impetus to the transformation of NATO. In June 2003, NATO defense 1 The Mediterranean Dialogue follows a similar approach in relations with Mediterranean nonmember countries but is less institutionalized and will not be further discussed here. 2 See NATO Handbook, available at www.nato.int/docu/handbook/2001/hb1204.htm. 4 ministers agreed on a new and streamlined command structure with a single command (Allied Command Operations) with operational responsibility and another command (Allied Command Transformation) responsible for overseeing the transformation of NATO forces and capabilities. In October 2003, NATO inaugurated a highly flexible, globally deployable and interoperable NATO Response Force based on a pool of troops and military equipment. In sum, the main thrust of transformation to the new NATO has been flexibilization and diversification. Finally, and paradoxically at first sight, it was after the end of the Soviet threat, for which it was established, that has NATO has been involved in actual warfare, invoked the mutual assistance and consultation articles of the North Atlantic Treaty (NAT), and sent member state troops outside the North Atlantic region – each for the first time in its history. In 1995 and 1999 NATO used its airpower to intervene in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo and put an end to ethnic violence in these parts of former Yugoslavia. On September 12, 2001, the North Atlantic Council agreed to regard the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington as an attack on all alliance members according to Article 5 NAT, and in October 2003, NATO assumed the command and coordination of the International Stabilization and Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. At the same time, however, NATO member states were deeply split over the war on and occupation of Iraq in 2003 and any NATO involvement in it. The strongest opponents of the Iraq war (Belgium, France, and Germany) for some time failed to agree to NATO preparations to protect their ally Turkey against a possible Iraqi counterattack and have rejected any substantial NATO role in Iraq to this day. It is the aim of this paper to review the transformation of NATO in the perspective of multilateralism with regard to both institutional form and actual cooperation. Following John Gerard Ruggie, multilateralism is defined as a generic institutional form that “coordinates 5 relations among three or more states on the basis of generalized principles of conduct: that is, principles which specify appropriate conduct for a class of actions, without regard to the particularistic interests of the parties or the strategic exigencies that may exist in any specific occurrence.” These “generalized organizing principles logically entail an indivisibility among the members of a collectivity with respect to the range of behavior in question” and generate “expectations of ‘diffuse reciprocity’”.3 In three ways, I will expand the analysis of multilateralism starting from this definition. First, although Ruggie defined multilateralism as an institutional form, the formal design of international institutions is rather undetermined by his focus on “generalized organizing principles”. More recent approaches to the analysis of institutional design have proposed more fine-grained conceptualizations, which call for a more differentiated analysis of multilateral institutions.4 Second, I will move beyond the analysis of multilateralism as an institutional form to the assessment of multilateralism in actual international cooperation or “practice”. Third, whereas Ruggie’s theoretical analysis of multilateralism focused on the dominant IR theories at the time – realism, (neoliberal) institutionalism, and liberalism – I will add a constructivist or sociological analysis of international institutions. Thus, in the first part of the paper, I will describe, categorize, and assess the elements of institutional design in NATO partnership and the new NATO in comparison to the old, Cold War NATO. Second, I will explain these elements and their variation on the basis of institutionalist theories. In the third part, I will assess the multilateral quality of NATO post- 3 Ruggie, John Gerard, “Multilateralism: The Anatomy of an Institution”, in Ruggie, John Gerard (ed.), Multilateralism Matters. The Theory and Praxis of an Institutional Form, New York: Columbia University Press 1993, p. 11. 4 See Abbott, Kenneth W., Robert O. Keohane, Andrew Moravcsik, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Duncan Snidal, “The Concept of Legalization”, International Organization 54: 3, 2000, 401-19; Acharya, Amitav and Johnston, Alistair Iain, “Comparing Regional Institutions: An Introduction”, Ms. 2004; Koremenos, Barbara; Lipson, Charles and Snidal, Duncan, “The Rational Design of International Institutions”, International Organization 55:4, 2001, 761-99. 6 Cold War cooperation. Above all, I seek to account for the variation in member state cooperation on the core policies and decisions of the past decade: enlargement and the decisions to intervene in Yugoslavia and the Middle East. In terms of research design, the paper tries to capitalize on the insights of “within-case variation” and comparison. The fact that post-Cold War NATO has changed and differentiated its institutional design and has exhibited highly different degrees of member state cooperation allows me to probe systematically into alternative explanations of institutional design and cooperation
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