Nato's Democratic Retrenchment: Hegemony After the Return of History by Henrik Larsen

Author:Henrik Larsen [Larsen, Henrik]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Intergovernmental Organizations, General
ISBN: 9780429999680
Google: Ns6gDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 44325784
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

8.2 Conclusion

The analysis proceeded along the three-levelled neoclassical realist sequencing explaining NATO’s democracy support in the Western Balkans (y) resulting from the constraints and impetuses of Russia’s regional leverages (x) as mediated by the predominant understandings of Europe’s unification (z). The parliamentary ratifications of the accession of Albania, Croatia and Montenegro revealed useful information about the details of the national cost/benefit concerns at play, while confidential/leaked sources proved useful in tracing the negotiations among allies otherwise not available to the public.

The collapse of regional order in the 1990s was a vivid demonstration of the importance of U.S. determination to enforce peace, followed by NATO peacekeeping to establish a new order and maintain it by means of security policy integration. NATO’s advance was explained as a point of departure from the ‘temptation’ to support democratic improvement (Croatia, Albania) within the constraints of Russia’s successful conflict perpetuation (Belgrade-Kosovo, Sarajevo-Srpska) but unfettered by its attempts to promote energy dependency and in fact reinforced by its undeclared, subversive acts against domestic-political processes to strengthen anti-NATO segments (North Macedonia, Montenegro). Power constraint is best described not as a static power vacuum but as a dynamic concept that stimulates policy expansion or retrenchment. In contrast to Georgia and Ukraine, Russia stands out as a contributing, but not a root, cause. Conflict perpetuation successfully impeded Euro-Atlantic integration, whereas subversion had the opposite effect and compelled NATO to ‘close the gap’. Crude power shifts can explain ‘empty’ balancing behaviour within a given spatial constraint but fall short of explaining the tactical disagreements about values-based security integration.

Clear historical analogies drive both the United States and Germany to take a strong interest in the inclusion of the West Balkan countries, but the difference in lessons explains why the former saw NATO as a democratic umbrella for ethnic reconciliation and statebuilding, whereas the latter preferred an approach of restraint with NATO as a ‘first-wave’ democratiser. Vague analogies applied for France, the United Kingdom and partly Poland, which caused preferences, respectively, for a stable periphery of the concentric Europe, instinctive balancing with continued U.S. involvement, and asserting NATO’s Open Door.

NATO did not face significant trade-offs between democratisation objectives as a long-term endeavour (with uncertainty about outcome, time delay and free/easy riding as described in chapter 1) and security concerns to be dealt with in the short term. This leaves a great deal of autonomy to geopolitical lessons in the establishment of national priorities, even for states where the lessons were vague. Lessons were a reinforcing factor for the United States, the United Kingdom and Poland, which tended to look at problematic nationalistic legacies as something to be overcome and from which Russia should be marginalised. Lessons were a constraining factor for Germany and France, which were more cautious, implicitly seeking a balance of interest with Russia and biased toward the EU as the core integration project.

The inclusion of geopolitical lessons at the unit level gives insight into hegemony’s motivational aspects: the United States, driven by its domestic considerations in favour of the

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