Connections: the Quarterly Journal, Vol. 13, No. 2, Spring 2014

CONDITIONALITY AND COMPLIANCE: THE SHAKY DIMENSIONS OF NATO INFLUENCE (THE GEORGIAN CASE) Shalva Dzebisashvili The QUARTERLY JOURNAL The QUARTERLY The QUARTERLY JOURNAL The QUARTERLY Connections Connections Solving the Syrian Knot: Dynamics within the UN Security Council and Challenges to its Effectiveness Esmira Jafarova The Waning Grand Strategy of Democratization: Why a Pivot to the Asia-Paciﬁ c Places the United States at Greater Risk of Terrorist Attack David Tier Defense Policy and Reforms in Bulgaria since the End of the Cold War: A Critical Analysis Georgi Tzvetkov Spring Partnership for Peace Consortium of Defense Academies and Security Studies Institutes The PfP Consortium Editorial Board Sean S. Costigan Executive Editor Jean Callaghan Managing Editor Aida Alymbaeva Institute for Analysis and Initiatives Development, Bishkek Ernst Felberbauer National Defence Academy, Vienna Peter Foot United Kingdom Piotr Gawliczek National Defence University, Warsaw Hans-Joachim Giessmann Berghof Foundation, Berlin Graeme Herd Plymouth University, United Kingdom Elena Kovalova National Defense University, Washington, D.C. David Mussington Insitute for Defense Analyses, Washington, D.C. Chris Pallaris Director and Principal Consultant of i-intelligence, Zurich Tamara Pataraia Caucasian Institute for Peace, Democracy and Development John Reppert United States Philippe Sommaire France Todor Tagarev Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia The PfP Consortium Publication Manager Enrico Müller Partnership for Peace Consortium Operations Staff The articles appearing in all Connections publications do not necessarily represent the views of the authors’ institutions, their governments, or the PfP Consortium itself. The Consortium’s family of publications is available at no cost at http://www.connections-qj.org. If you would like to order printed copies for your library, or if you have questions regarding the Consortium’s publications, please contact the PfPC Operations Staff at [email protected]. Dr. Raphael Perl Sean S. Costigan Executive Director Chair, Editorial Board CONNECTIONS The Quarterly Journal Volume XIII, Number 2 Spring 2014 Conditionality and Compliance: The Shaky Dimensions of NATO Influence (The Georgian Case) .................................................................................................. 1 Shalva Dzebisashvili Solving the Syrian Knot: Dynamics within the UN Security Council and Challenges to its Effectiveness ................................................................................. 25 Esmira Jafarova The Waning Grand Strategy of Democratization: Why a Pivot to the Asia-Pacific Places the United States at Greater Risk of Terrorist Attack.................................... 51 David Tier Defense Policy and Reforms in Bulgaria since the End of the Cold War: A Critical Analysis ................................................................................................... 65 Georgi Tzvetkov The Future of the Sinai Peninsula............................................................................. 79 Ruben Tuitel The Models of Sovereignty in the South Caucasus .................................................. 93 Gayane Novikova Afghanistan 2001–2014: The Enduring Literature? ............................................... 105 Peter Foot i Conditionality and Compliance: The Shaky Dimensions of NATO Influence (The Georgian Case) Shalva Dzebisashvili * Introduction: The Puzzle It is no secret that NATO exerts global influence, and is an organization without which the international security architecture would be difficult to imagine. Its capacity to exert influence ranges from the very material dimension of military power to the elusive and intangible effects of functional professionalization. Its unifying power was recognized long before the fall of the Berlin Wall, motivating Karl Deutsch to assign to it the qual- ity of the “Community” in the North Atlantic area.1 The paradigm of the Cold War heav- ily influenced the way scholarship evaluated the Alliance. Despite numerous and valu- able attempts, the majority of academic contributions to the study of NATO remained policy-driven. The discussion was subsumed by broader regional security studies and international relations scholarship that repeatedly brought up the question of the Alli- ance’s organizational purpose and durability, leaving other significant questions unex- amined.2 This article will attempt to address the existing scholarly deficit by focusing on a particular aspect of NATO analysis: the Alliance’s capacity to influence aspirant countries’ policy making (formulation and implementation) in the defense area and, by doing that, to ensure compliance with commonly agreed norms and standards. The case of Georgia would serve here as the best example of a country that eagerly stated its willingness to join NATO (as early as the Prague Summit in 2002) and since then has firmly followed the chosen path towards full membership.3 The time span (nine years) to review is sufficient to disregard the risk of early or premature statements that would be symptomatic of early stages of cooperation. The intensity and density of the relationship between NATO and the Georgian Ministry of Defense led to the creation of a complex set of issue areas in which the processes of integration have unfolded, and the national/domestic constituencies have been exposed to various modes of external insti- * Shalva Dzebisashvili received an EU Commission doctoral fellowship (GEM) in September 2012 and currently is a Ph.D. researcher at the Institute for European Studies (IEE-ULB). He is member of the Civil Council on Defense and Security (CCDS), a non-governmental organization founded in Georgia. In 2008–09 he successfully completed an M.A. course in Strategic Security Studies at the NDU (Washington D.C.) and consequently took over the position of Senior Civilian Representative of Georgian MOD (Defense Advisor) to the Georgian Mission to NATO. 1 Karl W. Deutsch, et al., “Political Community and the North Atlantic Area,” in The European Union: Readings on the Theory and Practice of European Integration, ed. Brent F. Nelsen and Alexander Stubb, 3rd ed. (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1957). 2 Mark Webber and Adrian Hyde-Price, “Theorizing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization,” in Joint Sessions of Workshops (Lisbon, 2009), 1. 3 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia, n.d.; available at http://mfa.gov.ge/index.php?lang_ id=GEO&sec_id=453. 1 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL tutional influence. The question of national compliance is inherently related to the concept of conditionality, due to the core principle of agreement between two actors, where one gets rewarded by another if certain conditions (i.e., commitments) are fulfilled.4 Thus, by highlighting particular aspects of defense cooperation between the Alliance and Georgia, we hope not only to provide more insight into the ability of the Alliance to ap- ply various mechanisms of compliance, but also to examine the limitations of those mechanisms, as well as the domestic factors and political incentives that either sup- ported the national decision to comply or in fact impeded any decisions, leading to domestic political cleavages and to a heightening of international (NATO) concerns. The essay is designed in such a way as to provide first a brief overview of the literature on NATO and its inherent deficits from the standpoint of influence on aspirant countries’ decisions. Second, we will operationalize the concept of NATO conditionality in order to devise our line of argument and the hypothesis, to delineate the core objectives that an aspirant country such as Georgia must reach in the area of defense, and to demonstrate the practical utility of existing institutional mechanisms in reaching those objectives. Next we will try to validate the achievements of the Georgian Ministry of Defense (henceforth Geo MOD) by looking at various data sources, often not directly related to defense. Obviously, the high sensitivity of security-relevant issues meant that most of the relevant data reside in classified records, significantly reducing the amount of publicly accessible information. Nevertheless, the pool of sources containing dis- closed official documents, legal acts, media interviews, official statements, news, etc. provide a solid foundation for launching our analytical investigation. Last, we will care- fully sort out the effects of conditionality (positive compliance, and negative non-compliance) caused by NATO from those caused by domestic factors (incentives and calcu- lations) in order to establish a high degree of causal relationship between external influ- ences (conditionality) and domestic effects (compliance). Conceptual Deficits of the NATO-related Literature Scholarship on NATO has been largely structured by the classical divide between the realist and constructivist stands. Various theoretical approaches have been adopted to test the validity of NATO-related claims, from both mainstream perspectives.5 The key element of the realist approach, which is the struggle for power and dominance as the rationale for state survival, was seriously challenged after the collapse of the major communist foe. Realist authors regarded government action as a rational choice in the strategic environment of international politics.6 Thus they questioned the durability and 4 Jeffrey T. Checkel, “Compliance and Conditionality,” ARENA Working Papers No. 18 (2000); available at www.sv.uio.no/arena/english/research/publications/arena-publications/

Load more