The Spread of Security Communities: Communities of Practice, Self-Restraint, and NATO's Post—Cold War Transformation
| Date | 01 June 2008 |
| Author | Emanuel Adler |
| Published date | 01 June 2008 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066108089241 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
The Spread of Security Communities:
Communities of Practice, Self-Restraint, and
NATO’s Post–Cold War Transformation
EMANUEL ADLER
University of Toronto, Canada
This article invokes a combination of analytical and normative arguments
that highlight the leading role of practices in explaining the expansion of
security communities. The analytical argument is that collective mean-
ings, on which peaceful change is based, cognitively evolve — i.e. they
are established in individuals’ expectations and dispositions and they are
institutionalized in practice — because of communities of practice. By that
we mean like-minded groups of practitioners who are bound, both infor-
mally and contextually, by a shared interest in learning and applying a
common practice. The normative argument is that security communities
rest in part on the sharing of rational and moral expectations and dispo-
sitions of self-restraint. This thesis is illustrated by the example of the suc-
cessful expansion of security-community identities from a core of North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) states to Central and Eastern
European countries during the 1990s, which was facilitated by a
‘cooperative-security’ community of practice that, emerging from the
Helsinki Process, endowed NATO with the practices necessary for the
spread of self-restraint.
KEY WORDS ♦communities of practice ♦cooperative security
♦NATO ♦security communities ♦self-restraint
Introduction
Barry Buzan (2004: 222–7) recently suggested a ‘vanguard theor y of the
evolution and decay of social structures’, according to which institutions
spread from the inside out; from local or sub-system beginnings they may
ultimately acquire global forms. This, for example, is how international soci-
ety evolved from a core of European states. Vanguard explanations build on
European Journal of International Relations Copyright © 2008
SAGE Publications and ECPR-European Consortium for Political Research, Vol. 14(2): 195–230
[DOI: 10.1177/1354066108089241]
European Journal of International Relations 14(2)
196
theories of institutional expansion, in particular, coercion theories
(DiMaggio and Powell, 1991). Other theories of institutional expansion rely
on ‘rhetorical action’ (Schimmelfennig, 2003, 2005); social influence
(Johnston, 2001); and normative diffusion involving imitation (Acharya,
2004), socialization, and persuasion (DiMaggio and Powell, 1991; Risse, 2000;
Checkel, 2005) by international organizations (Gheciu, 2005a, 2005b) or
transnational networks (Keck and Sikkink, 1998). While these theories are
not mutually exclusive and while the different mechanisms are important at
particular stages, they may not be sufficient because they do not make
practices a central focus or let them carry the major causal and constitutive
weight in the explanation.
The theory of cognitive evolution of communities of practice presented in
this article, however, argues that the vanguards or ‘carriers’ of social struc-
tures across functional and geographical boundaries are not necessarily states
or societal networks, but ‘communities of practice’ (Wenger, 1998a) — like-
minded groups of practitioners who are informally as well as contextually
bound by a shared interest in learning and applying a common practice
(Snyder, 1997; Wenger, 1998a; Lave and Wenger, 1991). Explaining the
spread of institutions, therefore, requires placing practices in the driver’s
seat. Practices (Schatzki, Knorr Cetina, and von Savigny, 2001; Neumann,
2002), the background knowledge1that constitutes them, and the environ-
ment in which they are performed actually make possible political actors’
socialization and persuasion and ultimately their rational calculation.
The adoption of a new practice can be not only self-transforming but also
constitutive of the ability to change social structure. This is because the dif-
fusion of a practice entails not only the numerical or geographical enlarge-
ment of the group of agents who engage in it, but also the new agents’
participation in a community of practice where learning takes place and
meanings and identities are negotiated and transformed. In and by means of
practice, these communities empower linguistic and perceptual expectations,
dispositions, and identities that survive preferentially. By facilitating both the
innovation and stabilization of practices, communities structure conscious-
ness and intention, constitute agency, and encourage the evolution or spread
of social structure. The spread of social structure is also facilitated by the
acquisition of new material and organizational capabilities, i.e. ‘mobilization’
in Bruno Latour’s (1999) sense — creating alliances, competing for and
mobilizing resources and allegiances, and devising interpretations that align
interests with negotiated identities – and by the reification of the background
knowledge on which practice is based (Wenger, 1998a).
Identifying an analytical mechanism, such as the vanguard community of
practice, however, is insufficient to explain the evolution of normative
phenomena like peaceful change. We also need an argument that links the
Adler: The Spread of Security Communities
197
analytical mechanism to the substance of the social structure we are trying to
explain.2I thus synthesize this analytical mechanism with a normative theor-
etical argument by showing that one type of communities of practice, secur-
ity communities (Deutsch et al., 1957; Adler and Barnett, 1998), spread by
the co-evolution of background knowledge and subjectivities of self-
restraint. The combined effect of communities of practice and the institu-
tionalization of self-restraint accounts both for the social construction of
rationality, in the sense that cooperative-security practices related to self-
restraint help constitute dependable expectations of peaceful change, and for
normative evolution, in the sense that self-restraint brings about security
through cooperation.
To illustrate this thesis, I show that the successful expansion of a security
community from a core of Western states to Central and Eastern European coun-
tries (CEEC) during the 1990s, and the mainly unsuccessful later attempts to
change the ‘Broader Middle East’, were facilitated by a ‘cooperative-security’
community of practice, which, growing from the Helsinki Process, endowed
European institutions, in particular the European Union (EU) and the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), with the practices necessary for the
spread of social structure. Because I cannot describe the complex social con-
struction processes involved in the institutionalization of cooperative security
and the full life-cycle of the eastward and southward expansion of the Euro-
Atlantic security community in a single article, I will illustrate only one link in
the chain: NATO’s partial transformation into a cooperative-security institu-
tion in the 1990s and its subsequent efforts to expand the security community
further. This is why my illustration will focus primarily on how practices are
adopted by institutions and how they spread, rather than on their effects on
particular states (which is the focus of the literature on socialization and per-
suasion). With this article I mainly introduce my practice-based theoretical
framework of the spread of security communities. I provide a partial empirical
illustration; more actual empirical work is needed.
Although recent studies have looked at NATO’s enlargement in the
1990s from various perspectives — organizational survival (McCalla, 1996),
institutional functional adaptation (Wallander, 2000), rhetorical
action/cost–benefit analysis (Schimmelfennig, 2003, 2005), and norm sua-
sion (Gheciu, 2005a, 2005b) — they are hard-pressed to explain the spread
of security-community social structures. While survival and adaptation
played a role in NATO’s transformation, the nature of the survival and adap-
tation strategies were to a great extent dictated by the practices that NATO
adopted at the end of the Cold War. Moreover, while one can argue that
NATO’s potential new members acted instrumentally — initially pursuing
NATO membership because of a concern of a future Russian threat (but see
Epstein, 2005: 94) — it was their adherence to a security-community
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