Individual Democratic Institutions Research Fellowships 1994-1996

The research reports reproduced here are the responsibility of the individual authors. Their reproduction does not imply any form of official or unofficial endorsement by NATO. The reports are offered in unedited form, as presented by their authors, with a view to make their findings available to a wide audience. The role of international regimes in promoting democratic institutions: the case of NATO and Russia Sergei Medvedev [Back to Index] Chapter I. External Framework 3. Political Context: Is European Security Divisible? Further doubts are added, as one looks into a multi-dimensional, heterogeneous world of post-Cold-War, post-Westphalian (and somewhat post-modernist) European security. The evolution of European security from 1989 until present has shown that theories of liberal internationalism and neorealism worked well only in a clearly defined Cold-War system (in fact, the dichotomy of liberalism and realism matched the plain oppositions of the Cold War: binary dilemmas for a bipolar world), but appeared to be somewhat at odds with the more complicated phenomena of the nineties. At first, though, with the demise of the Warsaw Pact and COMECON, and the headlong reunification of Germany, it seemed that a paradoxical confrontational "unity of opposites" of the Cold War will give way to a true, cooperative unity. In search for an alternative kind of common European politics, the idea of cooperative security was put forward, which was set out in the 1990 CSCE Charter of Paris.(21) In the spirit of the times, other European institutions made their moves, most notably NATO. In 1991, NACC was created, which facilitated the implementation of the CFE Treaty by the USSR successor states. The EC, too, ventured in the East, opening talks with Russia. In these early years after the Cold War, Russia continued to be part of new developments in European security. This was largely due to the fact that it still possessed of two psychological levers in European politics. One was the threat of instability in post-Soviet area. Later in the 1990s, especially after the armed crisis in Moscow in October 1993, the "instability threat" was gradually replaced by the "authoritarianism threat", i.e. the possibility of totalitarian turn in Russian politics. According to the popular argument, resounding liberal internationalism, this could be prevented only if the West created a favorable institutional regime, avoiding to isolate Russia from Europe. Capitalizing on this argument, Moscow was winning considerable concessions. An instructive example was the publicized President Yeltsin's letter to leaders of the West in September 1993, in which he warned them against NATO enlargement, denouncing his statements in Warsaw made three weeks earlier. To a certain extent, the reaction of Moscow to these early NATO's plans influenced the ensuing discussions within the Atlantic Alliance that resulted in adopting the Partnership for Peace program in January 1994. In brief, the first five years after the Cold War were the period of weak hopes and reasonable compromises, overshadowed by the Balkan war and a striking inefficiency of all institutions and peace plans on offer. The idea of cooperative security did not come true, nor did the popular concept of "partnership". In late 1994, on the eve of the Budapest CSCE summit, NATO disclosed its plans to go ahead with enlargement. This decision, along with near-isolation of Russia at the Budapest summit (most of Moscow's proposals on reforming executive bodies of the OSCE were rejected; Russia went alone with blocking the resolutions against Bosnian Serbs), showed that decisionmaking on crucial issues of European security need not necessarily involve Moscow. It also became clear that events in Western and East Central Europe (including the Baltic states) were taking a different turn from those in the former Soviet area. On the one hand, there was a logic of institutional buildup (NATO, EU and WEU), which for the moment did not involve countries of the CIS. On the other hand, nations that were left out were drawn into closer relations with Russia and with each other - i.e. into a different security arrangement. In fact, that meant the end of a single security context which existed in Europe since WW2 - be it the Cold-War "unity of opposites", or the post-Cold War uncertain compromises under the heading of "partnership". In this "post-post-Cold War" period, security policies are much less ideologically charged than during the Cold War (the ideology of systemic confrontation), or during the transitory five years in the wake of the Cold War (an alternative ideology: a liberal utopia in the spirit of the "end of history"). The emerging security environment is too heterogeneous, its challenges too polymorphic and geographically remote from each other to tackle them in a single institutional arrangement.(22) In Western, and recently more and more in East Central Europe, we see an emerging arrangement that can be classified as a security community, involving countries in the North Atlantic area, including those in Western and East Central Europe. The emerging security community is based on contingency planning with respect to developments in the FSU, and particularly in Russia: possible cooperation with a benign Russia, and also possible containment of a malign Russia. The community is based on common perception of security challenges (from the East and from the South), and on a relative consensus about common solutions (NATO enlargement). It is further enhanced by a growing political role of the EU which, having admitted three EFTA countries in 1995, turns to the next echelon of candidates, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Another powerful argument in favor of this model is Central East Europeans' awareness of their European identity which is not always the case with the peoples of the former Soviet Union. As Jalonen points out, what distinguishes the emerging Western European security community from earlier attempts to introduce greater degree of stability into the European society of states, is that order within the community is not primarily attempted to maintain by compelling and deterrence, but by association and exclusion.(23) But this same logic of association and exclusion also provides for the creation of a different security arrangement at the eastern margin of the European security complex: the post-Soviet regional conflict formation. All principal Western institutional endeavors stop at the frontiers of the CIS. The first to legalize such attitude was the WEU, which formed the Forum of Consultation with eight countries of Central and Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Rumania) in June 1992. In May 1994, this group, which became "the nine" after the breakup of Czechoslovakia, was upgraded to Associate Partners of the WEU. The same "group of nine" is the primary target of EU's reinforced political dialogue. In this sense, security policies of the Union, which have large perspectives under Title V of the Maastricht Treaty and will be probably upgraded after the 1996 IGC, are from the very outset confined to "countries with a vocation for membership", as they put it in Brussels. Finally, NATO, too, in its Study on Enlargement, constantly articulates the difference between prospective members and "partner countries which may be unlikely to join the Alliance early or at all".(24) The post-Soviet regional conflict formation is different from the West European security community in many senses. There are no common security threats, nor common threat perceptions, or even security institutions (the CIS security structures, including comatose mechanisms of the 1992 Tashkent Treaty, are hardly operable at all). The consolidating factors are the infrastructure of the Soviet Army which was never completely nationalized by the USSR successor-states, Russian troops and military bases in the "near abroad", networks of corrupt military, channels of illegal arms trade and recruitment of mercenaries, groups of unemployed professional officers which offer their services to all sides in post-Soviet conflicts, etc. In summary, post-Soviet regional conflict formation is defined not by institutions and guarantees under international treaties, but by the power dominance of Russia which can simultaneously guarantee and endanger the security of a neighboring CIS state. A remote analogy is the relation between the United States and Central America, or between France and the states of Sub-Saharan Africa in 1960-s.(25) Looking at both sides of the continent, one has to conclude that security in Europe is not about unification, but about relations between two entities, or rather two types of security arrangement.(26) In other words, post-Cold War European security is clearly divisible, with Euro-Atlantic, West European and East Central European components representing one kind of development, and Russia, and most of the post-Soviet area (with the exclusion of three Baltic states), undergoing a different evolution. Summing up the argument of Chapter I, we have to conclude that the external framework for interaction between Russia and NATO (and in a more general sense, between Russia and the entire external institutional setup) is fairly loose: in the historical sense: historical analogies of the influence of international/institu-tional environment on domestic democratization/marketization in individual countries are not correct, since this influence was exerted under very specific conditions (division of post-WW2 world into victors and the defeated, into East and West, the presence of two strong "enforcer states", the USA and the USSR, etc.) that are not likely to be reproduced; in the theoretical sense, since today's European security cannot be adequately described by traditional guises of liberalism and realism that operate in a homogeneous environment composed of nation-states; instead, we face heterogeneity, heterarchy, diversity, and possibility of parallel coexistence of two (or more) security entities in the practical/political sense: security developments on both sides of the European continent begin to differ more and more, and the interplay between two types of security arrangements need not necessarily take place within a single system or structure.