NATO, liberal internationalism, and the politics of imagining the Western security community*
| Author | Alexandra Gheciu |
| Published date | 01 March 2019 |
| Date | 01 March 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0020702019834645 |
| Subject Matter | Scholarly Essays |
Scholarly Essay
International Journal
2019, Vol. 74(1) 32–46
NATO, liberal
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internationalism, and
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DOI: 10.1177/0020702019834645
the politics of imagining
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the Western security
community*
Alexandra Gheciu
Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of
Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Abstract
International Relations scholars often assume that NATO represents the institutional
expression of a pre-existing, liberal-democratic Western security community. However,
far from simply representing a pre-given community, NATO has always been involved in
power-filled processes of constructing ‘‘the West.’’ At the heart of those processes lie
practices of collective (re)imagining of the Western world, as well as the representation
of internal tensions as feuds within a community united by liberal values. Today, the task
of managing internal differences has become particularly complicated due to the rise of
radical conservative political forces in several allied states. This has translated into an
unprecedented clash between liberal and illiberal interpretations of the Western com-
munity. This paper also shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, middle powers
have played important roles both in the construction of the liberal Western security
community, and, more recently, in articulating an alternative—radical conserva-
tive—vision of the West.
Keywords
NATO, security community, liberal internationalism, middle powers, illiberal ideas,
conservatism, the West
*Contribution to the Special Issue
‘Middle Power Liberal Internationalism in an Illiberal World’
International Journal
Guest Editors: Rita Abrahamsen, Louise Riis Andersen and Ole Jacob Sending
Corresponding author:
Alexandra Gheciu, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa, FSS 6037,
120 University Private, Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 6N5, Canada.
Email: agheciu@uottawa.ca
Gheciu
33
In recent years, there has been renewed interest among International Relations (IR)
scholars in the ability of the Western security community to protect itself from a
variety of threats and challenges. In this context, longstanding debates concerning
the role played by the organization that is widely regarded as the institutional
expression of that community—NATO—have recently taken on new dimensions.
Scholars and policymakers often disagree in their interpretations of the relative
strength of NATO, but many agree that the alliance needs to play a central role in
protecting the West from a mix of conventional and non-conventional dangers,
ranging from an increasingly assertive Russia to transnational terrorism. One of
the key assumptions underpinning many analyses is that NATO constitutes the
institutional expression of a pre-existing Western security community united
around liberal-democratic norms and values. However, a close reading of the alli-
ance’s history shows that, far from simply representing a pre-given community,
NATO has always been involved in constructing ‘‘the West.’’ At the heart of that
process of social construction lie practices of collective (re)imagining of the
Western world in specific ways, as well as the representation—and management
of—internal tensions as feuds within a community united by shared liberal values.
Today, the task of managing internal differences has been rendered particularly
difficult by the rise of radical conservative political forces in several allied states.
This has translated into a clash between liberal and illiberal interpretations of the
Western security community, which has the potential to seriously complicate inter-
allied relations in the foreseeable future. As this paper shows, contrary to conven-
tional wisdom, middle powers have always played important roles in the constitution
of the Western security community. More recently, they have also played significant
roles in contesting liberal interpretations of the security community, and articulating
an alternative, radical conservative vision of the West. Recent developments in allied
countries such as Turkey and Poland are a potent reminder that not all middle
powers are alike; on the contrary, based on their socially constructed, historically
specific definitions of identity, they can perform a diversity of international roles—in
support of, or, conversely, as obstacles to liberal internationalism.
The narrative of Western unity and the politics of collective
forgetting during the Cold War
One of the most influential narratives of international security put forward by
liberal IR scholars and practitioners centres on the Euro-Atlantic security commu-
nity, consisting of a group of countries united around a set of key liberal norms and
institutions that generate ‘‘dependable expectations’’ of peaceful resolution of con-
flicts that might arise among them.1 From that perspective, NATO is an institution
1.
See in particular Karl Deutsch et al., Political Community and the North Atlantic Area: International
Organization in the Light of Historical Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), and
Thomas Risse-Kappen, ‘‘Collective identity in a democratic community: The case of NATO,’’ in
Peter Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security (New York: Columbia University Press,
1996), 357–399.
34
International Journal 74(1)
that was created in the context of the Cold War to protect the pre-existing security
community from the threats posed by the West’s dangerous other: the communist
bloc. Yet, as a series of constructivist scholars have persuasively argued, there is
nothing natural about the Western security community.2 In Emanuel Adler’s
words, ‘‘security communities are socially constructed and rest on shared practical
knowledge of the peaceful resolution of conflicts.’’3 Furthermore, the absence of
violence should not lead us to conclude that the construction of security commu-
nities in general and the Western community in particular were power-free pro-
cesses. On the contrary, as Adler and Barnett explain, central to the establishment
of a security community is the dialectic between power—primarily symbolic
power—and knowledge.4 Thus, in the physically non-violent context of security
communities, power is primarily ‘‘the authority to determine the shared meanings
that embody the identities, interests and practices of states, as well as the conditions
that confer, defer or deny access to goods and benefits.’’5 Applying this logic to the
specific case of NATO, we can see the alliance not as the institutional expression of
a pre-given community, but, rather, as an organization that has been deeply
involved in power-filled practices of construction and reproduction of that
community.6
Historical evidence indicates that the founders of NATO—policymaking elites
from the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, France, and the Benelux
states—did not take the Western security community for granted. Instead, they
engaged in a systematic set of practices aimed at constructing a sense of community
around a shared set of liberal-democratic norms in the Euro-Atlantic area, and
placed the newly created North Atlantic Treaty Organization at the heart of those
practices. In the intergovernmental debates leading up to the establishment of
NATO, the threat of military confrontation with the Soviet Union was regarded
as less worrisome than the danger of communist subversion within the weakened
societies of Western European states.7 In that context, as Louis St. Laurent—then
Canadian Secretary of State for External Affairs—argued, the best way to prevent
a third world war was by confronting ‘‘the forces of communist expansion with an
2.
Emmanuel Adler, ‘‘Imagined (security) communities: Cognitive regions in international relations,’’
Millennium: Journal of International Studies 26, no. 2 (1997): 249–277; Emmanuel Adler and
Michael Barnett, Security Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Vincent
Pouliot, ‘‘The alive and well transatlantic security community: A theoretical reply to Michael Cox,’’
European Journal of International Relations 12, no. 1 (2006): 119–127.
3.
Adler, ‘‘Imagined (security) communities,’’ 257.
4.
Adler and Barnett, Security Communities.
5.
Adler, ‘‘Imagined (security) communities,’’ 261.
6.
Emmanuel Adler, ‘‘The spread of security communities: Communities of practice, self-restraint, and
NATO’s post–Cold War transformation,’’ European Journal of International Relations 14, no. 2
(1998): 195–230; Bradly Klein, ‘‘How the West was one: Representational politics of NATO,’’
International Studies Quarterly 34, no. 3 (1990): 311–325; Michael Williams and Iver Neumann,
‘‘From alliance to security community: NATO, Russia, and the power of identity,’’ Millennium:
Journal of International Studies 29, no. 2 (2000): 357–387.
7.
Alexandra Gheciu, NATO in the ‘‘New Europe’’: The Politics of International Socialization after the
Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005a).
Gheciu
35
overwhelming preponderance of moral, economic and military force on the side of
freedom.’’8
At the level of top Western political elites, the fear of communism inspired a
collective (re)definition of political identity in the Euro-Atlantic area. The ‘‘spectre
of Communism’’ provided the defining other against which decision-makers on
both sides of the Atlantic were able to subordinate their differences to a collective
definition of a Western community. That community was seen as based on the
common...
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