Millennium Journal of International Studies 2000 Williams 357 87

From Alliance to Security Community:
NATO, Russia, and the Power of Identity

Michael C. Williams and Iver B. Neumann
The evolution of NATO constitutes one of the most important developments in

post-Cold War international security. Despite predictions of fragmentation from
within or supercession from above, the Alliance has emerged as aperhaps the
dominant institution in contemporary security relations. While debates in the late
1980s often revolved around whether NATO would, could, or should survive, they
now centre around the implications of its centrality, and its current and (possible)
future enlargement. While disputes remain concerning the wisdom of NATOs
policies, the place of the Alliance at the centre of contemporary relations seems
beyond dispute.1
NATOs continued centrality and post-Cold War development have also become
important issues in International Relations (IR) theory. As a number of authors
have pointedly remarked, predictions concerning the Alliances dissolution
frequently followed directly from the premises of neorealist theory,2 and the
evolution of NATO in a quite different direction has become an important theme in
a broader constructivist challenge to neorealism in the analysis of international
For their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, we would like to thank Barry Buzan,
Alexandra Gheciu, Lene Hansen, and Ole Waever. Michael Williams would also like to thank the
Copenhagen Research Project on European Integration, and the University of Copenhagen, for their
support of research contributing to this article.
1. Due to space limitations, we do not deal with the other institutions central to the evolution of
European security, particularly the EU, the WEU, and the OSCE. However, we hope that our analysis
may contribute to an understanding of the complementary and competitive evolution of these
institutions with that of NATO.
2. Robert B. McCalla, NATOs Persistence after the Cold War, International Organization 50, no. 3
(1996): 445-75. The most prominent of these neorealist claims was, of course, John Mearsheimer,
Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War, International Security 14, no. 4 (1990):
5-56; see also Waltzs pessimistic view on NATOs future quoted in Thomas Risse-Kappen, Identity in
a Democratic Security Community: The Case of NATO, in The Culture of National Security, ed. Peter
J. Katzenstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 363. More generally, see Glenn H.
Snyder, Alliances, Balance, and Stability, International Organization 45, no. 1 (1991): 121-42;
Stephen Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), esp. 17-26; Peter
J. Katzenstein, Introduction, in The Culture of National Security; John Duffield, Explaining the Long
Peace in Europe: The Contributions of Regional Security Regimes, Review of International Studies 20,
no. 3 (1994): 369-88; and Gunther Hellman and Reinhard Wolf, Neorealism, Neoliberal
Institutionalism, and the Future of NATO, Security Studies 3, no. 1 (1993): 3-43.
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2000. ISSN 0305-8298. Vol. 29, No. 2, pp. 357-387
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security.3 Indeed, while prominent neorealists have claimed that international
institutions hold out only a false promise as a foundation for new security
structures,4 social constructivists have argued that the persistence5 of NATO
demonstrates the need for a fuller understanding of institutions, and that such an
understanding provides a basis for concluding that international security
communities possess considerably more promise as a means of structuring
security relations than neorealism has traditionally allowed.6
From a social constructivist perspective, NATO did not fragment as neorealists
had predicted because the shared democratic norms and identities of the members
meant that they did not perceive each other as threats with the end of the Cold War.
From this viewpoint, NATOs continuation is seen as demonstrating the Alliances
enduring and institutionalised patterns of co-operation, the existence of common
regulative and constitutive norms and values within the organisation, and the
continuing impact of the shared democratic identities upon which the Alliance is
based.7 In Thomas Risses words, the Western Alliance represents an
institutionalization of the transatlantic security community based on common
values and a collective identity of liberal democracies.8
But NATO, of course, has not simply persisted; it has embarked upon the even
more complex, and certainly more contested, process of enlargement. For
constructivists such as Risse, the enlargement process is conceived as an extension
of the pacific federation of Atlantic democracies represented by the democratic
security community that NATO is. The end of the Cold War, he argues,
not only does not terminate the Western community of values, it extends that
community of values, it extends that community into Eastern Europe and,
3. As only a few examples, see John Mearsheimer, The False Promise of International Institutions,
International Security 19, no. 4 (1994/5): 5-49, and A Realist Reply, International Security 20, no. 1
(1995): 82-93; Alexander Wendt, Constructing International Politics, International Security 20, no. 1
(1995): 71-81; and Katzenstein, Introduction.
4. Most directly see Mearsheimer, The False Promise.
5. See McCalla, NATOs Persistence.
6. On security communities, see Emmanuel Adler, Imagined (Security) Communities: Cognitive
Regions in International Relations, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 26, no. 2 (1996): 24977; Emmanuel Adler and Michael Barnett, Governing Anarchy: A Research Agenda for the Study of
Security Communities, Ethics and International Affairs 10, no. 1 (1996): 63-98 and Emmanuel Adler,
and Michael Barnett, eds., Security Communities (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998).
7. See particularly Risse-Kappen, Identity in a Democratic Security Community. Also relevant are
McCalla, NATOs Persistence; Patrick Morgan, Multilateralism and Security: Prospects in Europe,
in Multilateralism Matters, ed. John G. Ruggie (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); and
Steve Weber, Shaping the Postwar Balance of Power: Multilateralism in NATO, in Multilateralism
Matters.
8. Risse-Kappen, Identity in a Democratic Security Community, 395. See also Colin H. Kahl,
Constructing a Separate Peace: Constructivism, Collective Liberal Identity, and Democratic Peace,
Security Studies 8, no. 2/3 (1998/99): 94-144.
358

potentially, into even the successor states of the Soviet Union, creating a
pacific federation from Vladivastock to Berlin, San Francisco, and Tokyo.9
Enlargement, it seems, is in this view a natural and innately progressive outgrowth
of NATOs essential identity as a democratic security community.
There are, however, two obvious difficulties with viewing enlargement as a
straightforward extension of the Western democratic security community. First, it
ignores the fact that while official policy may appear to mirror a consensus,
enlargement has been subject to severe and continuing criticism from within
countries traditionally forming the Alliance. The policy of enlargement often met
strong resistance within the policy-making community, and it continues to be
subject to strong criticism. Michael Mandelbaum, for example, considers it a sure
means of losing the peace, while John Lewis Gaddis has observed that among
historians there is a near universal consensus that NATO enlargement is a mistake,
a position expressed by George Kennans much-quoted claim that it represents a
policy error of historic importance.10
Secondly, the claim that enlargement represents a consensual extension of the
democratic peace runs into an even more intractable problem: the fact that the most
democratic circles in Russia have opposed NATO enlargement exactly on the
grounds that it threatens the development of democracy in Russia. Indeed, the
Russian consensus against NATO enlargement is overwhelming. To give only a
few examples: in February 1996 Russian Deputy Defence Minister Andrey
Kokoshin attended an annual conference on security sponsored by the German
Ministry of Defence where he argued that we have pulled back to the East, while
NATO is turning in this direction and is pushing us further and further eastward.11
Similarly, in their first meeting, Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov reportedly
told Polish Foreign Minister Geremek that: You have to understand we are not
glad about the enlargement of NATO. But we know it will happen. Just dont ask
us to be happy about it.12 Perhaps even more interestingly, at the World Economic
9. Risse-Kappen, Identity in a Democratic Security Community, 396. See also Frank
Schimmelfennig, NATO Enlargement: A Constructivist Explanation, Security Studies 8, no. 2/3
(1998/99): 198-234.
10. Michael Mandlebaum Preserving the New Peace: The Case Against NATO Expansion, Foreign
Affairs 74, no. 3 (1995): 9-23; John Lewis Gaddis, History, Grand Strategy and NATO Enlargement,
Survival 40, no. 1 (1998): 145-51; George Kennan, A Fateful Error, New York Times, 5 February
1997, A23. The literature for and against enlargement is voluminous, and we will make no attempt to
survey it here, for recent expressions, see Michael McGwire, NATO Expansion: A Policy Error of
Historic Importance, Review of International Studies 24, no. 1 (1998): 23-42, and Christopher L. Ball,
Nattering NATO Negativism?: Reasons Why Expansion May Be a Good Thing, Review of
International Studies 24, no. 1 (1998): 43-67. For a tracing of the bureaucratic politics of the
enlargement decision, see James M. Goldgeiger, NATO Expansion: The Anatomy of a Decision,
Washington Quarterly 21, no. 1 (1998): 85-102, and the discussion in Gaddis, History.
11. Quoted in Allen C. Lynch, Russia and NATO: Expansion and Coexistence?, The International
Spectator 32, no. 1 (1997): 82.
12. See Jane Perlez, Warsaw Journal: Trying to Make the Twain of East and West Meet, New York
Times, 17 April 1998, A4.
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Forum in Davos, in February 1997, Anatoly Chubays, the man who is by anyones
reckoning the most vocal force behind Russias economic transition, declared
that when it came to the question of NATO enlargement, for the first time in the
last five years, I personally am adopting the same position as Messrs. Zhirinovsky
and Zyuganov.13 Such statements hardly seem to vindicate a view of the
enlargement process as the consensual extension of a democratic security
community. And in light of such views, it seems unlikely that one can explain the
enlargement process as a straightforward evolution of the consensual and
progressive security community embodied by NATO. Nor can such a position
explain adequately why despite this considerable opposition and continuing
misgivings, Russia in the end largely acquiesced to NATOs enlargement.
In order to explain NATO-Russian relations more fully, we argue that social
constructivism must incorporate into its analyses a focus on the multiple sources
and structures of social power.14 Our analysis proceeds in three parts. The first
section elucidates briefly a theoretical position which stresses the role of narrative
structures and relational processes in the construction of identities and suggests
that these factors can be linked to a theory of action via what new institutionalists
have called a logic of appropriateness.15 We then link this position to a
consideration of the form and exercise of symbolic power, a view that stresses the
power which legitimate conceptions of identity have on what is understood as
appropriate action by the actors concerned.16 Explanations of the NATO-Russia
relations surrounding the enlargement process, we argue, need to be seen in the
context of the relationship between their mutual identity reconstructions in the
wake of the Cold War, the institutional dynamics and narrative resources involved,
and the power relations they embody and express.
13. Quoted in Przemyslaw Grudzinski and Peter van Ham, Integrating Russia in Europe: Mission
Impossible?, TKI Working Papers on European Integration and Regime Formation, no. 14 (Estbjerg:
South Jutland University Press, 1997), 27. In a comment on the party programmes presented on the eve
of the Duma elections, Vadim Borisov stated that: It is to be noted that a nationwide consensus
concerning the NATO eastward enlargement has evolved among various parties and movements. Both
Russian and Western diplomats should certainly consider this fact as a given, in Foreign Policy and
the Election Campaign, International Affairs (Moscow) 42, no. 11 (1995): 27.
14. For an argument that power needs to be central to constructivist analysis of security communities,
see Adler, Imagined (Security) Communities, 260-63. For a criticism that learning approaches
toward transformations in Russia have failed to do so, see Robert G. Hermann, Identity, Norms, and
National Security: The Soviet Foreign Policy Revolution and the End of the Cold War, in The Culture
of National Security, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 285, and
for a discussion in the context of transnational relations, Steven Krasner, Power Politics, Institutions,
and Transnational Relations, in Bringing Transnational Relations Back In, ed. Thomas Risse-Kappen
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). More broadly, see Stefano Guzzini, Structural Power:
The Limits of Neorealist Analysis, International Organization 47, no. 3 (1993): 443-78.
15. James G. March and Johan Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions (New York: Free Press, 1989), 23-44.
16. On symbolic power, see especially Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino
Raymond and Mathew Adamson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). For a recent
explication of Bourdieus ideas see David Swartz, Culture and Power: The Sociology of Piere Bourdieu
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
360

In the second section, we examine the emergence of a narrative construction of
NATOs identity that provided a basis for the enlargement of the Alliance while at
the same time countering objections that this process would inevitably involve the
redrawing of dividing lines in Europe or provoke a threatening Russian reaction.
The core of this process lay in the institutional mechanisms through which the
Alliance was able to mobilise its long-standing identity as the expression and
military guarantor of Western civilisation, as an organisation whose essential
identity and cohesion was based upon common cultural and civilisational
particularly democraticbonds, not primarily upon a shared military threat posed
by the Soviet Union. This reconstructed identity provided a logic of continuity and
action for the Alliance which not only offset claims that it had lost its meaning
with the end of the demise of the Soviet Union, but also provided it with a
motivating and legitimating vision of a new role: the consolidation of a Western
civilisation which had been illegitimately torn asunder by the Cold War. Rather
than standing apart from a concern with threats and power, this discourse emerges
in the context of a threat, and constitutes in itself a specific form of symbolic
power.
In the third section, we turn to an analysis of how this narrative reconstruction of
NATOs identity played a powerful role in the debates taking place simultaneously
within Russia regarding its own post-Cold War identity. These debates were
fundamentally concerned with the question of whether or not Russia was a part of
Western civilisation, and Russian reactions to NATO enlargement need to be seen
in their context and in terms of the powerful influence which NATOs identity
claims played in structuring politically viable Russian policy responses. Our claim
is that, as a consequence of NATOs reconstruction, the Russian leadership was
forced to choose from only two roles for their countrys foreign policy. Russia
could either be an apprentice striving to join Western civilisation, thus entailing an
acceptance of NATO enlargement as inevitable and positive; or, alternatively,
Russia could be a counter-civilisational force, entailing opposition to NATO
enlargement. The latter, we argue, was and remains the identity advocated by the
communist-nationalist opposition, and so it was not a possible role to adopt for the
Russian leadership, which sought to promote a transition to liberal democracy.17
While the Russian leadership tried to retreat to an old rolethat of a strategic
nation-state trying to maximise its national interest in keeping its former allies
from becoming allied to NATOthis role was denied to it by NATOs new selfidentification as a democratic security community. The oft-noted vacillations in
Russian NATO policy in the first half of the 1990s, which have been so often
17. Though we do not pursue it here, this analysis also has affinities to treatments of alliance relations
as two-level games. See, for example, Michael Barnett and Jack Levy, Domestic Structures of
Alliances and Alignments: The Case of Egypt, 1962-73, International Organization 45, no. 3 (1991):
369-95, and Michael Barnett, Institutions, Roles and Disorder: The Case of the Arab States System,
International Studies Quarterly 37, no. 3 (1993): 271-96.
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remarked upon both by Western and Russian commentators,18 are explained by
NATOs power to specify the roles which Russia could legitimately adopt and the
unease of the Russian leadership in coming to terms with conducting a policy
predicated on these constraints.
Identity, Narrative, and the Logic of Appropriate Action
One of the central claims of constructivist and institutionalist analysis is that
identity and action are inextricably related.19 Rather than being fixed or
intrinsically given, identities are seen as variable and as constituted through
relational social processes. Perceptions of the situation in which actors find
themselves and the courses of action which they view as reasonable to pursue are
constructed in the context of their identities. While constructivist analyses vary
considerably beyond these basic premises, a fruitful approach to the construction of
identity is one which stresses the role of narrative structures within the process. 20
As Erik Ringmar has put it, narrative conceptions focus on the ways in which
identities are constructed, maintained, and transformed through the telling of
constitutive stories.21 These narratives provide a context of meaning within which
an actors identity, the situation within which they are located, and the actions
deemed reasonable or appropriate to both, are knitted together within a coherent (if
multi-variant and open-ended) whole. In Ringmars words:
To create a presence for ourselves in time, first of all, is to locate ourselves in
the context of a past and a future...We can be someone today since we were
someone yesterday and since we will be someone tomorrow. But the story not
only creates a present: it also makes sense of it by inserting it into the plot
which is our individual and collective lives. Our present has meaning since it
18. As The Economist put it when examining Russian reactions to NATOs enlargement plans as late
as February 1997: Anyone who claims to understand Russias line on NATO expansion cannot be in
possession of all the factsas Winston Churchill once said of another matter, see NATOs Russian
Salad: Take your Pick, The Economist, 8 February 1997, 30.
19. In a massive and growing literature see, as examples, March and Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions;
Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell, eds., The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Richard Scott, J. Meyer, and associates, Institutional
Environments and Organizations (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994). For explorations in IR see Martha
Finnemore, Norms, Culture and World Politics: Insights from Sociologys Institutionalism,
International Organization 50, no. 2 (1996): 325-48; Peter J. Katzenstein, Alexander Wendt, and
Ronald Jepperson, Norms, Identity, and Culture in National Security, in The Culture of National
Security.
20. Iver B. Neumann, Uses of the Other: The East in European Identity Formation (Minneapolis:
Minnesota University Press, 1999), 207-28. See also Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes, Beyond Belief:
Ideas and Symbolic Technologies in the Study of International Relations, European Journal of
International Relations 3, no. 2 (1997): 193-237; and Richard Price and Christian Reus-Smit,
Dangerous Liasons?: Critical International Theory and Constructivism, European Journal of
International Relations 4, no. 3 (1998): 259-94.
21. Erik Ringmar, Identity, Interest and Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 76.
362

relates to a beginning, to an end, and to the different sections or scenes into
which the plot is divided.22
Narratives of identity are by no means merely private constructions. On the
contrary, they are social and relational in at least two important senses. First, the
narrative resources available to a given actor are neither infinite nor unstructured;
they are historically and socially constructed and confined. Second, the social and
historical delimitations on narrative construction are further reinforced by the fact
that the successful embodiment of a given identity depends also on the recognition
by others of the narrative itself and of their acquiescence to its adoption by the
particular actor involved. Put differently, it is not enough merely to claim an
identity: for that identity to have a degree of internal stability (not being subject
constantly to challenge) and for it to have a degree of social effectiveness (enabling
the actor to act socially in accordance with the identity), the identity itself must be
acknowledged as legitimate by others, and the adoption of the identity by a
particular actor must be recognised by other actors.23
This focus on the narrative construction of identity can be linked to a theory of
action via the concept of roles and what institutional theorists have termed a logic
of appropriateness. As James March and Johan Olsen put it, a logic of
appropriateness holds that behaviour involves:
fulfilling the obligations of a role in a situation, and so of trying to determine
the imperatives of holding a position. Action stems from a conception of
necessity, rather than preference. Within a logic of appropriateness, a sane
person is one who is in touch with identity in the sense of maintaining
consistency between behavior and a conception of self in a social role.
Ambiguity or conflict in rules is typically resolved not by shifting to a logic of
consequentiality and rational calculation, but by trying to clarify the rules,
make distinctions, determine what the situation is and what definition fits.24
The logic of appropriateness can again be seen as a two-sided process and
structure. On the one hand, it focuses on the ways in which the self-perceived
identity of the actors is central to their understanding of what is appropriate action
in a given situation. On the other, the logic of appropriateness is intrinsically social
and relational: what counts as appropriate action is determined in the context of a
social structure within which the actor is located and on the judgement of others. A
particular kind of action is viewed as appropriate for a given kind of actor in a
specific situation. To be recognised as a certain kind of actor is to adhere to the
22. Ibid., 76-77.
23. See Alexander Wendt, Collective Identity Formation and the International State, American
Political Science Review 88, no. 2 (1996): 384-98.
24. March and Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions, 160-61; see also James G. March and Johan P. Olsen,
The Institutional Dynamics of International Political Orders, International Organization 52, no. 4
(1999): 943-69; Martin Hollis and Steve Smith, Explaining and Understanding International Relations
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 143-95.
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recognised behaviour deemed appropriate to the situation, and thus to be a
legitimate actor within it. Undertaking specific actions in that situation is equally a
sign of being a particular kind of actor. Analysed in this broadly social context,
legitimate identities are inextricably bound to roles, and to structures of power. The
linking of a certain kind of identity to a specific set of roles and its analogous
forms of action is a fundamental structure of social power. The capacity to claim
such identities, and to grant or deny them to others, is a source of social power.
The ongoing process of identity-construction and recognition is, as Ringmar
notes, particularly apparent during periods of fundamental change. When
circumstances are shifting dramatically, when new identities are being formed and
old ones seeking or being pressured to transform, then the identification of
beginnings, ends, sections, and scenes is likely to be a task of paramount
importance, and the structures and dynamics involved in these processes are often
thrown into high relief.25 The process of change opens to question the prevailing
identities of the actors, thus also opening to question the policies they should
pursue in the emerging situation. Equally important, a period of transformation
involves a struggle over the forms of identity and action which will be regarded as
legitimate within the emerging order. In such a situation, the directions taken by
actors will be a reflection of struggles exemplifying the narrative resources
available to them for the (re)construction of their identities and of their abilities to
have those identities recognised by others.
Different actors with different identities possess unequal capacities to engage in
these struggles and to influence the structures of social knowledge through which
practices are articulated. A central element in this process is the way in which
organisations provide a locus for the accreditation of authoritative identities and for
the articulation of claims. In security studies, this idea has most recently been
articulated in the idea of security as a speech act. The basic idea is that, just as a
certain social practice may become contested and thus politicised, a political
issue may, by dint of a speech act, be made into a question of security policy, i.e.
securitized.26 As Ole Wver notes, however, this process involves more than a
set of narrative or discursive structures; it is also intimately bound up with
institutions: security, as he argues, is articulated only from a specific place, by
an institutional voice.27 In the case at hand, NATO is the key site in the
rearticulation of security and the securitization of culture.
Narrating NATO: Security and Civilisation
The end of the Cold War presented the members of NATO with threats and
challenges to their security which seemed to render obsolete many of the
traditional structures and strategies of the Alliance and, in the eyes of many, to
25. Ringmar, Identity, 77.
26. See Ole Wver, Securitization and Desecuritization, in On Security, ed. Ronald D. Lipschutz
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
27. Ibid., 225. See also Adler, Imagined (Security) Communities, 260-63.
364

render obsolete the Alliance itself. Yet in contrast to these predictions of imminent
discord, inexorable decline, and potential dissolution, NATOs actual practices
throughout the waning days of the Cold War and its immediate aftermath exhibited
almost precisely the opposite of what the prophets of decline had predicted. Rather
than fragmenting, the Alliance exhibited a cohesion and public commitment to
continued co-operation that matched anything found during the supposedly
unifying conflicts of the Cold War, and which certainly stands in marked contrast
to the discord so characteristic of Alliance relations during the so-called second
Cold War.
How do we explain this cohesion? To begin with, the loss of the Soviet threat
the other so often analysed in assessments of NATOs identity and cohesiondid
not mean that the Alliance was left without a threat.28 On the contrary, what was so
unsettling to NATO in the immediate post-Cold War period was not only the oftdeclared uncertainty of the future or the indeterminacy of emerging NATO-Soviet
relations (though each of these figures prominently), but rather the worry that the
future would be marked by something that the NATO member states knew all too
well: the return of their past conflicts.29 As Wver put it,
Europes other, the enemy image, is today to no very large extent Islamic
fundamentalism, the Russians or anything similarrather Europes Other is
Europes own past which should not be allowed to become its future.30
Seeing the role of NATO in terms of its institutional and symbolic power
provides a series of insights into the persistence of the Alliance as a means of
meeting this threat. NATO occupied a powerful symbolic position as a site where
security could be authoritatively spoken and collectively ascribed to by its
members. The organisation was not simply a convenient venue providing an
established and effective set of organisational routines and capabilities: its status
was an integral aspect in the rearticulation of the relationship of its members,
28. For a variety of views on this issue, see Charles Nathanson, The Social Construction of the Soviet
Threat: A Study in the Politics of Representation, Alternatives 13, no. 4 (1988): 443-84; Simon Dalby,
Creating the Second Cold War (London: Pinter, 1990); Bradley Klein, How the West Was One: The
Representational Politics of NATO, International Studies Quarterly 34, no. 2 (1990): 311-25; Owen
Harries, The Collapse of the West, Foreign Affairs 72, no. 4 (1993): 41-53; Costas Constantinou,
NATOs Caps: European Security and the Future of the North Atlantic Alliance, Alternatives 20, no. 2
(1995): 147-64; David Mutimer, Making Enemies: NATO Enlargement and the Russian Other
(paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the British International Studies Association, 19-22
December 1996); and Neumann, Uses of the Other.
29. The most emphatic prediction that this would be the case was, of course, Mearsheimers, Back to
the Future. For an analysis that a process of renationalisation was taking place, see Jan Willem
Honig, The Renationalization of Western European Defense, Security Studies 2, no. 1 (1992): 12238.
30. Ole Wver, European Security Identities, Journal of Common Market Studies 34, no. 1 (1996):
122; see also Robert J. Art, Why Western Europe Needs the United States and NATO, Political
Science Quarterly 111, no. 1 (1996): 1-40. For an overview of the situation in the early 1990s, see A.
Menon, A. Forster and William Wallace, A Common European Defence?, Survival 34, no. 3 (1992):
98-118.
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allowing them quite literally to speak security to themselves and to each other.31
The Alliance acted as a symbolic marker, a rhetorical touchstone through which
the threat of fragmentation and the return of the past might be countered, and
securing NATO from this threatmaintaining the organisation because its
existence was a value in itselfbecame one of the central goals and political
challenges of the Alliance.
This was readily affirmed by the participants themselves. The Brussels
Declaration of March 1988, for example, begins with the heading A Time for
Reaffirmation, and indeed the first sections of the declaration are concerned not
with the new strategic situation, but with reaffirmations of NATO solidarity.
Having come together to re-emphasise our unity, the Allies declare that the
foundations of NATO remain unchanged. Our Alliance, they state, is a voluntary
association of free and democratic equals, united by common interests and values.
It is unprecedented in its scope and success. Our security is indivisible.32 Such
interpretations can themselves, of course, be seen as contributing to the very
process they describe, and they are intended as such. As the past NATO SecretaryGeneral Manfred Wrner noted in discussing the Brussels Declaration:
The Declarations by the Heads of State and Government were not just proforma displays of unity, but powerful reaffirmations of our basic principles as
the basis for moving forward with the Alliances agenda.33
And as he explicitly argued elsewhere with regard to the centrality of the Atlantic
relationship:
Without a North American commitment, European nations would lack the
element of reassurance that has allowed them to integrate and overcome
historical animosities. In the works of one commentator, the United States
remains Europes pacifier. Europeans would be tempted to renationalize
their defence policies and return to the fragile military pacts of the past.34
31. Michael C. Williams, The Institutions of Security: Toward a Theory of Security Organizations,
Cooperation and Conflict 32, no. 3 (1997): 287-307.
32. NATO, Declaration of the Heads of State and Government Participating in the Meeting of the
North Atlantic Council in Brussels. Brussels, 2-3 March 1988, 1-4. See also, for instance, NATO,
Final Communiqu, Turnberry, United Kingdom, 7-8 June 1990, 20. This reaffirmation of permanent
principles pervades the conclusion of the Communiqu. Similarly, 1991s New Strategic Concept
noted significantly that NATO ensures that no single Ally is forced to rely upon its own national efforts
alone in dealing with basic security challenges. See NATO, The Alliances Strategic Concept. Rome,
7-8 November, 1991, 17.
33. Manfred Wrner, NATO in the Post-INF Era: More Opportunities than Risks, NATO Review 36,
no. 4 (1988): 2.
34. Manfred Wrner, NATO Transformed: The Significance of the Rome Summit, NATO Review 39,
no. 6 (1991): 7-8; see also Lene Hansen, NATOs New Discourse, in European Security 2000, ed.
Birthe Hansen (Copenhagen: Copenhagen Political Studies Press, 1995), 125.
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NATOs insistent pledges of continuity and commitment act, in the words of Paul
DiMaggio and Walter Powell, as
cognitive guidance systems, rules of procedure that actors employ flexibly and
reflexively to assure themselves and those around them that their behaviour is
reasonable. Far from being internalized in the personality system, the content
of norms is externalized in accounts.35
Without the solidarity of the Soviet threat to allow disagreements while largely
guaranteeing fundamental unity in response to that threat, unity in itself became a
practical goal of NATOs members, compelling them to ever-greater statements of
commitment and solidarity. To work outside NATO was to risk breaking the unity
that it embodied, and to risk bringing about the dissolution it symbolically
opposed. The end of the Cold War did not yield greater freedom and flexibility in
security relations for NATOs members. On the contrary, it bound them ever more
tightly within it, and with every success in keeping the Alliance together; those
social pressures became more powerful, the bonds more secure, and the place of
NATO increasingly central in the emerging security order.
But if NATO was to play a central role in allowing its members to avoid falling
back into the conflictual military policies which many portrayed as their fate, and
was to continue to be among the principle architects of the emerging security
order, then traditional military conceptions of security and strategies of balance of
power were directly counter to what was required. Indeed, it was the logic of these
traditional conceptions which was drawn upon by those who held NATOs
collapse to be imminent. Here, a second set of factors accounting for NATOs
persistence lies in its possession of a set of narrative resources through which
change could be transformed into continuity (and continuity presented as change),
an argument which called for the Alliances continuation and centrality rather than
its marginalisation. This transformation involved a rearticulation of the identity and
history of the Alliance. Increasingly, NATO became portrayed not as a
conventional alliance defined by the existence of the Soviet threat and the Cold
War, but as an organisation whose essential identity and history is correctly
understood as one of cultural, or even civilisational commonality centred around
the shared democratic foundations of its members. Since these narratives are
crucial in explaining the unfolding of NATO-Russian relations, the following two
sections trace them in slightly greater detail.
Identity and Security: NATO as a Civilisational Structure
Claims about the cultural and political nature of the Alliance and the Cold War
have always been part of NATOs narrative. In the founding treaty, the signatories
had declared themselves determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage
and civilization of their peoples, founded upon principles of democracy, individual
35. DiMaggio and Powell, The New Institutionalism, 21.
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liberty and the rule of law.36 Historically, however, they have usually been
subordinated to a more narrowly strategic vision which identified security
overwhelmingly with questions of the balance of military capabilities, exemplified,
for example, in the 1967 Harmel report. In the post-Cold War period, these
narratives achieved a new prominence. Indeed, beginning in about 1990, NATO
documents begin to downgrade the focus on the military nature of security and on
the solidarity of the Alliance in the face of an external Soviet threat. Instead,
NATO is increasingly represented as a cultural or civilisational entity whose basic
identity and history should be understood less in terms of Cold War military
balancing and more as the result of a deep, enduring, and profound cultural
commonality.37
Perhaps the clearest expression of this shift can be found in the narrative which
emerges concerning NATOs own history in relation to the Soviet Union. In
Wrners 1991 assessment of the future of The Atlantic Alliance in a New Era,
for instance, the role of the Soviet Union is drastically downplayed:
The Treaty of Washington of 1949 nowhere mentions the Soviet Union but
stresses instead the need for a permanent community of Western democracies
to make each other stronger through cooperation, and to work for more
peaceful international relations. The Alliance has played a major role in
reconciling former adversaries, such as France and Germany, in counteracting
neo-isolationism within the world greatest power and in promoting new
standards of consultation and cooperation among its members. All these
elements would still have been fundamental to security and prosperity in
Europe even in the absence of the post-war Soviet threat.38
The London Declaration of July 1990 expressed a similar movement. In the new
context, the Allies declared:
We need to keep standing together, to extend the long peace we have enjoyed
these past four decades. Yet our Alliance must be even more an agent of
change. It can build the structures of a more united continent, supporting
security and stability with the strength of our shared faith in democracy, the
36. NATO, North Atlantic Treaty (Brussels, 1949), preamble. Or, as stated by the British Foreign
Secretary, Ernest Bevin, in 1948, the Soviet challenge could only be met by: organizing and
consolidating the ethical and spiritual forces of Western civilization. This could only be done by
creating some form of union in Western Europe...backed by the Americans and the Dominions. Cited
in Bruce George and John Borawski, Sympathy for the Devil: European Security in a Revolutionary
Age, European Security 2, no. 4 (1993): 475.
37. See, for example, Manfred Wrner, NATO in the Post-INF Era, NATO Review 37, no. 3 (1989):
21, and A Time of Accelerating Change, NATO Review 37, no. 6 (1989): 2. As McCalla notes, this
concern was also driven by the desire of NATO to undermine the efforts of the OSCE and WEU efforts
in this area and so combat the challenge which these institutions posed to NATOs own position. See
McCalla, NATOs Persistence, 459.
38. Manfred Wrner, The Atlantic Alliance in a New Era, NATO Review 39, no. 1 (1991): 5; see also
Hansen, NATOs New Discourse, 119-22.
368

rights of the individual, and the peaceful resolution of disputes. We reaffirm
that security and stability do not lie solely in the military dimension, and we
intend to enhance the political component of our Alliance as provided for by
Article 2 of our Treaty.39
And the theme was also strongly echoed by German Defence Minister Volker
Rhe who argued in a widely-noted article that:
The Alliance remains the strongest link between Europe and North America.
Europe and North Americas political and strategic positions are based on
shared values and common interests. It is this, and not the presence of an
existential threat, that is the hub of the Alliance.40
Through this redescriptive logic, NATO was not rendered obsolete by the
passing of the Cold War, the Soviet Union, and the Warsaw Pact; rather, NATO
was now able to return to itself, and to move purposefully into the new situation by
building upon its real historic foundations. The symbolic resources of the Alliance
were mobilised to recast NATO in terms beyond those conventionally attributed to
balance of power (or threat) visions of alliance politics and to present itself as
neither outdated nor in need of radical change. The Cold War, so often seen as
NATOs defining rationale and forging struggle, could now be presented as an
unfortunate historical deviation, an anomalous period during which NATOs true
nature and identity was overwhelmed by a regrettable military necessity, the
passing of which allowed NATO to return to its true historic role.
Redefining Security as Culture
The question of what security was (or, alternatively, who or what now constituted
threats) was at the core of NATOs post-Cold War dilemmas. Different answers
to the question generated different visions of the future of the Alliance, and when
viewed through traditional strategic lenses none looked promising for that future.
The rearticulation of the identity of the Alliance, however, was integrally linked to
a concomitant shift in its vision of the nature and conditions of security. Security,
too, came to be re-envisioned in cultural terms. Positively, security is identified
with the cultural and civilisational principles now held to be the foundation of
NATO itself. Negatively, threats are seen as emerging from the absence of such
conditions. The challenge that NATO faces is increasingly portrayed not as a
particular state or group of states whose adversarial position is dictated by the
geopolitical logic of the balance of power. On the contrary, it is the absence of
specific, democratic cultural and political institutions that comes to define the
39. NATO, London Declaration on a Transformed Alliance. London, 5-6 July 1991, 2; see also
Wrner, NATO in the Post-INF Era.
40. Volker Rhe, Shaping Euro-Atlantic Policies: A Grand Strategy for a New Era, Survival 35, no. 2
(1993): 130.
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perception of security, and NATO comes increasingly to argue that the greatest
contemporary challenge is instability.
The shift from a traditional conception of security focusing on military power
and the balance of capabilities to a focus on issues of societal (in)stability and
political-cultural structures is one of the most striking transformations in NATOs
pronouncements on security in the 1990s. In 1991s New Strategic Concept, for
example, the problem of security is portrayed in the following terms:
Risks to Allied security are less likely to result from calculated aggression
against the territory of the Allies, but rather from the adverse consequences of
instabilities that may arise from the serious economic, social, and political
difficulties, including ethnic rivalries and territorial disputes, which are faced
by many countries in central and eastern Europe. The tensions which may
result, as long as they remain limited, should not directly threaten the security
and territorial integrity of members of the Alliance. They could, however, lead
to crises inimical to European stability and even to armed conflicts, which
could involve outside powers or spill over into NATO countries, having direct
effect on the security of the Alliance.41
Equally tellingly, the solutions to these potential security threats are increasingly
portrayed in internal terms, that is, in terms of the problems of social and cultural
dynamics. For example, in late 1990 the North Atlantic Council argued that:
Having worked to overcome past divisions, our countries must now direct
their efforts to avoiding grave economic disparities becoming the new dividing
lines on the continent. All countries have the right to exist in security. In the
midst of change, tendencies towards greater insularity must be resisted. We
seek to spread the values of freedom and democracy that are at the heart of our
tranatlantic partnership so that past labels of East and West no longer have
political meaning.42
The problem of security becomes defined largely as the emergence of specific
cultural or civilisational structures. No longer is the prevailing understanding of the
Alliance one in which states gather together to meet a military threat. Now, their
ability to do so, to form an alliance which has overcome their past antagonisms and
survived the vicissitudes of the Cold War, is ascribed to the kind of states they are
and the kind of alliance that NATO is. Common defence remains a central theme,
but it is systematically sublimated to declarations about the fundamental link
between culture and security. Defining security in cultural terms not only
reinforces the revised claims about the identity of the Alliance and the reasons for
its past success and future continuation. It also provides a basis for a new epistemic
41. NATO, The Alliances Strategic Concept, 10.
42. See the second paragraph of the Final Communiqu of NATOs ministerial meeting in Brussels,
17-18 December 1990 [http://www.nato.int/docu/comm/49-95/c901218a.htm] (17 August 2000).
370

consensus about security: how it is to be achieved, what the threats are likely to be,
and what should be done about them. In other words, it provides an epistemic
orientation that is both linked to, and supportive of, the newly-stressed cultural
identity of the Alliance.
NATOs Cultural Strategy: From Inside to Outside
A central criticism of NATOs continuation in the post-Cold War world was that as
a military alliance it seemed bound to traditional military concepts and capabilities
of limited use in influencing the emergent situation in Central and Eastern Europe.
Certainly the Alliance was not about to invade those areas; nor did it seem
particularly well-suited to foster the kinds of social transformations necessary in
dealing with the kinds of instabilities it had identified as the primary emerging
challenges to European security. Moreover, the military identity of NATO was
constantly referred to as a factor limiting the Alliances potential to act positively
in the new situation due to worries about threatening Russia.
With a transformation in its own identity and its portrayal of conditions of
security, however, NATO not only transcended many of these limits, it also
positioned itself as a uniquely powerful actor within these new contexts. As the
military expression of a cultural or civilisational structure that exemplifies security
in itself, it became possible to portray NATO as transcending the limits
traditionally ascribed to alliances. A narrative emerged in which there was no
essential difference between those who are in the Alliance and those who are not:
no adversaries are necessary, all states are potential members, and no states are
necessarily adversaries. The key mark of geopolitical delineation became the social
and political structures, as well as the cultural attributes, of the states concerned.
Security and culture became increasingly linked to the question of democracy, a
theme which was itself becoming a powerful cultural narrative, whether in the
form of grand speculations concerning the end of history or in declarations
concerning the growth of democratic peace.
Since the Alliance was no longer an essentially military response to a
geopolitical threat, but conceived as the military and material expression of a
value-based civilisational structure, its external relations were not portrayed in
oppositional military-territorial terms. This allowed a rhetorical de-territorialisation
of security and redefined NATO as a highly integrated cultural community. New
members were, therefore, not understood simply as new allies in the traditional
sense, but as societies which naturally belonged to NATO by dint of their political
structure and cultural values. Enlargement was proposed as the extension of this
community, welcoming those who share its pacific values and institutions. It was
not to be directed against anyone, nor did it endeavour to exclude anyone. As
President Bill Clinton declared:
NATOs success has involved promoting security interests, advancing values,
supporting democracy and economic opportunity. We have literally created a
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community of shared values and shared interests, as well as an alliance for the
common defence. Now, the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe
and the former Soviet Union want to be a part of enlarging the circle of
common purpose, and in so doing, increasing our own security.43
Through this narrative, NATO declares itself the integral security dimension of
Western civilisation at large, and constructs a relationship to those who stand
outside it that is importantly different from a balance of power logic. Crucially, this
counters concerns that dividing lines are not to be redrawn in Europe through the
continued unifying existence of the Alliance. NATOs persistence and expansion
thus becomes part of the solution to the threat of fragmentation rather than the
cause of it. In the words of the Study on Enlargement, NATOs enlargement must
be understood as only one important element of a broad European security
architecture that transcends and renders obsolete the idea of dividing lines in
Europe.44
Democratic or Imperialist: Framing Russia
We have sought to demonstrate how NATOs new narrative had the power to
represent it as a qualitatively new security community. We will now attempt to
outline how it also had the power to define the roles which Russia could adopt in
its evolving security relations with NATO, and how it was able drastically to
narrow the field of politically viable options available to Russian policy-makers. In
a powerful political move, Russian responses to enlargement are constructed as
symbolic of Russias identity. They are a test of whether its political trajectory is
progressive: moving toward the West, democracy, and perhaps membership in the
pacific federation, or whether Russia is regressing toward its imperialist past.
Opposition to enlargement within the traditional categories of military security and
national interest are rendered largely illegitimate by this move. If Russia is part of
democratic civilisation, then it has no good reason to oppose enlargement.
Analogously, Russian opposition to enlargement becomes synonymous with a
falling back from the path of reform, democracy, and a market economy.
To Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, the Wests partnership with Russia is
premature not only because it is overly optimistic about the direction of political
developments in Russia, but because it overlooks the continuing
43. William J. Clinton, Remarks by the President at the Harry S. Truman Library Institute Legacy of
Leadership
Dinner,
25
October
1995
[http://www.pub.whitehouse.gov/urires/I2R?urn:pdi://oma.eop.gov.us/1995/10/26/1.text.1] (16 August 2000). See also the off-the-record
account of the influence of Franklin Roosevelts post-war vision on Clintons aspirations in Martin
Walker, Clinton Cleaves to Roosevelts Dream, Guardian Weekly, 23 March 1997, 5.
44. NATO, Study on Enlargement (Brussels, 1994), 9.
372

centrality in Russian politics of an old issue, one that evokes the greatest
passion from the majority of politicians as well as citizens, namely, What is
Russia? Is Russia primarily a nation-state or is it a multinational empire?45
To Brzezinski, the choices dictated by the answer to this question are clear: The
bottom line here is a simple but compelling axiom: Russia can be either an empire
or a democracy, but it cannot be both.46
While Brzezinski phrases this argument largely in terms of its consequences for
the development of democracy in Russia, it is clearly linked to Russian foreign
policy. And within this logic, if Russia is to be considered a democracy, it is then
illegitimate for it to intervene in almost any way in the affairs of its neighbours.
Efforts by Moscow within the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) to
rebuild some of the links that used to bind the old Soviet Union together, whether
these be in monetary, economic, military, or even parliamentary realms, are
portrayed as representing a proto-imperial trend in Russian policy.47 In this view,
any attempt by Russia to influence neighbouring states can be portrayed as protoimperial and undemocratic. Addressing the issue of NATO expansion directly,
Brzezinski writes:
That the expansion of the zone of democratic Europes security would bring
the West closer to Russia is no cause for apology. An eventually democratic
Russia should wish to link itself with a stable and secure Europe. Only then
will modernity and prosperity become Russias reality. On this issue,
propitiating Russian imperialists is not the way to help Russian democrats.
The right course is to insist firmly that the gradual expansion of NATO
eastward is not a matter of drawing a new lineas President Clinton
wrongly put it in January 1994but of avoiding a security vacuum between
Russia and NATO that can only tempt those in Russia who are more than
ready to opt for empire over democracy.48
Despite Brzezinskis oft-declared realist credentials, the idea that Russia as a
state, has interests which it inevitably will (and has the right to) pursue, is rejected
as an expression of an illegitimate imperialist resurgence. A truly democratic
Russia, he asserts, will not oppose NATO expansion, only a proto-imperialist one
would. Lest it be thought that this framing of the issue represented a marginal
perspective, consider the argument of Steven Flanagan, a member of the Policy
Planning staff and the US State Department involved in the enlargement process.
In his view:
45. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Premature Partnership, Foreign Affairs 73, no. 2 (1994): 72
46.Ibid.
47. Ibid., 73.
48. Ibid., 82.
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Any European states outside the Alliance would not be excluded by a
geostrategic gambit; rather states would exclude themselves from the new
collective security pact by their failure to realize or uphold the expanded
Alliance principles.49
And lest it be thought that such ideas reflect only the rhetoric of specific US policy
circles, consider the fact that as early as the 28 October 1992, President Boris
Yeltsin had upbraided the Foreign Ministry for having become too attached to
precisely this rhetoric: I see in our current efforts to formulate foreign policy, he
argued,
the influence of an anti-imperialist syndrome. We shy away from defending
our own interests, apprehending that such actions would be criticized as
imperialistic. But the only ideology the Foreign Ministry should follow is the
defence of Russias interests and Russias security.50
Still, articulating a vision of Russian national interest as the basis of its security
policy was precisely the option which NATOs new narrative had effectively
curtailed. The primary roles available to Russia were two. If it wanted a
constructive relationship with NATO, it would have to become an apprentice
candidate for inclusion within the Western security community: a state which must
be educated and socialised into the new order of which it may ultimately become a
part. Conversely, if it chose an oppositional stance, it would risk being cast as
continuing in the counter-civilisational neo-imperial role scripted for it by
Brzezinski and others. The power at work in this framing is central to the evolution
of relations between NATO and Russia. To understand the constraining power of
this framing on Russian politics more fully, however, it is necessary to examine
how it was interwoven with the debates simultaneously taking place within Russia
concerning its identity and relationship to the West.
Russian Dilemmas
In order to get a grasp on how Russian policy toward NATO evolved, it helps to
recall the trajectory out of which that policy emerged.51 In Soviet discourse, NATO
49. Cited in James M. Goldgeiger, NATO Expansion: The Anatomy of a Decision, Washington
Quarterly 21, no. 1 (1998): 89. Consider also Holstis words: The essential ideait has not been
contestedis that the East will now become like the West. If it doesand this will be a very longterm and uncertain projectwe may see develop a vast zone of peace, modelled on that of Western
Europe. See Kal J. Holsti, The Post-Cold War Settlement in Comparative Perspective, in Discord
and Collaboration in a New Europe: Essays in Honor of Arnold Wolfers, eds. Douglas T. Stuart and
Stephen F. Szabo (Washington, DC: Johns Hopkins University, 1994), 40-41. See also John Ikenberry,
The Myth of Post-Cold War Chaos, Foreign Affairs 75, no. 3 (1996): 79-91.
50. Boris Yeltsin, Statement, International Affairs (Moscow) 39, no. 11 (1992): inside cover.
51. Further analyses of the relationship between the West and Soviet domestic transformations can be
found in Matthew Evangelista, Transnational Relations, Domestic Structures, and Security Policy in
the USSR and Russia, in Bringing Transnational Relations Back In, ed. Thomas Risse-Kappen
374

was universally termed aggressivnyi blok, the aggressive bloc. NATO was
formerly seen as an attempt by capitalist states to live down their intrinsic
economic conflicts by fashioning an organisation around the part of their relations
which were to do with questions of war, and directing it toward the Soviet Union.
Thus, Soviet analysis of NATO was a civilisational analysis, with NATO being
seen as the unified (if historically doomed) expression of capitalist civilisation.
This understanding even had a specific linguistic expressionatlanticheskie
soyuznikiwhich was usually rendered into English as Atlanticists, but which
translates literally as Atlantic Unionists.
In the shift emanating from Mikhail Gorbachevs new thinking, this linkage of
the West with an inevitably hostile capitalist bloc was replaced by the vision of the
Common European Home. Atlantic Unionists was replaced by Europeans as the
central concept in Soviet analyses of the West. Whereas the relationship to the
former had been wholly oppositional, the point for Gorbachev and his supporters
was that the West as a unified bloc could be divorced from Europe. The new
political thinking accordingly framed the question of domestic reform as a
question of Russias return to Europe or, indeed, a return to civilisation. Europe
was represented as a civilisational entity to which Tsarist Russia had once
belonged, and to which the new Russia should once more return.52 This delineation
was centrally intertwined with issues of internal economic and political reform. To
say Europe in Gorbachevian discourse was also to say political and economic
reform, and the state even declared 1987 to be the year of Europe, giving new
emphasis to the need for wide-ranging European state-based co-operation.
The shift in the civilisational aspect of Soviet understandings, and its role in an
attempt to rearticulate Soviet identity in relation to the culture of the West, can be
found throughout this period. In his book Perestroika, for example, Gorbachev
pursued this logic at length: A tremendous potential for a policy of peace and
neighborliness is inherent in the European cultural heritage, he wrote, and
[g]enerally, in Europe the new, salutary outlook knows much more fertile soil than
in any other region where the two social systems come into contact.53 Although
the idea of two social systems (capitalism and socialism) was still present in his
vision, the stress was on Europe as a cultural whole, a point that Gorbachev made
forcefully, arguing that:
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Hermann, Identity, Norms, and National Security;
Iver B. Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe: A Study in Identity and International Relations
(London: Routledge, 1996); and Jeffrey T. Checkel, Ideas and International Political Change:
Soviet/Russian Behavior and the End of the Cold War (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1997).
52. In the words of one commentator, if prior to 1985 the overarching object of Soviet foreign policy
had been to strengthen the positions of socialism at the expense of the West, by 1989 a new goalto
secure Soviet admission to the elaborate collection of institutions that constituted the Western economic
and political systemhad arisen to take its place. See Coit Blaker, Hostage to Revolution: Gorbachev
and Soviet Security Policy, 1985-1991 (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1993), 188.
53. Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World, 2d ed. (London:
Fontana, 1988), 198.
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Some in the West are trying to exclude the Soviet Union from Europe. Now
and then, as if inadvertently, they equate Europe with Western Europe.
Such ploys, however, cannot change the geographic and historical realities.
Russias trade, cultural, and political links with other European nations and
states have deep roots in history. We are Europeans. Old Russia was united
with Europe by Christianity...The history of Russia is an organic part of the
great European history.54
Indeed, Boris Pankin, who served as Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union from the
1991 August coup until the state fell apart, wrote in his memoirs that the countrys
foreign policy at this time reflected an obsession...with the idea of becoming a
civilized state.55
During the Gorbachev years and into 1992, NATO relations were framed largely
in this context: as related to the general commonality between Russia and the West,
but as separable from the Russian-European relationship. The EU was represented
as a vital actor in the process of improving the Soviet Unions, and then Russias,
relations with what was referred to in different contexts as Europe and the
West, and also fostering the domestic political and economic transformation of the
Soviet Union and its former allies. Once the Warsaw Pact was dissolved and
Gorbachevs press spokesman proclaimed the Sinatra doctrine, by dint of which
any former Warsaw country could do it their way, Russias foreign policy makers
seem to have expected NATO somehow to atrophy, and a new comprehensive
security structure to emerge. This idea, too, had a long lineage. At the very
beginning of his reform process, for instance, Gorbachev had argued that
the process of dtente should be revived. This does not mean, however, a
simple return to what was achieved in the 1970s. It is necessary to strive for
something much greater. From our point of view, dtente is not an end goal of
politics. It is needed, but only as a transitional stage from a world cluttered
with arms to a reliable and comprehensive system of international security.56
This was the essence of the internationalist or liberal internationalist position
in foreign policy. The peak of this cycle of liberal democracy as the guiding light
of Russian domestic politics, and when its foreign and security policy more or less
54. Ibid., 190.

55. Boris Pankin, The Last Hundred Days of the Soviet Union (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996), 104; see
also Andrei V. Kozyrev, A Transformed Russia in a New World, Izvestia, 2 January 1992, 3. Broader
analyses of this position include Checkel, Ideas and International Political Change, 103-4; Renee
DeNevers, Russias Strategic Renovation: Russian Security Strategies and Foreign Policy in the Postimperial Era, Adelphi Paper 289 (London: International Institute of Strategic Studies, 1994), 23-27;
Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe, 180-83; and Hermann, Identity, Norms, and National
Security, 310.
56. See the discussion in Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe.
376

followed suit was the first quarter of 1992.57 By late 1992, and throughout 1993,
however, this position was in constant retreat for three main reasons. First, the
policy of a return to Europe was dependent on Europes recognition of Russias
role as a rightful and central European actor. As it happened, Europe refused
Russia such recognition. European states saw Russia as a decreasing security
concern, but they did not view it as a member of the European community.
Second, it soon became apparent that rather than disappearing or being replaced by
a European security institution, NATO was actually consolidating and extending
its role in European security. The development of the North Atlantic Cooperation
Council (NACC), the increasing calls of many former Warsaw Pact members for
admission to the Alliance, and the increasing delineation of security within
civilisational terms tied to NATO rendered this aspect of Russian policy
increasingly problematic. Finally, the social and economic dislocation generated by
Russian political and economic reform conspired to render the idea of a return to
Europe increasingly subject to challenge at the domestic political level.
In the context of this tumult, the premises of Russian foreign and security policy
were open to fundamental debate and, as Renee De Nevers has put it:
With no agreement on Russias national identity or its corresponding interests,
vital or otherwise, the debate over foreign and security policy became a deeper
one over the nature of the state itself.58
Against this background, Russian debates over relations with NATO can be seen as
developing along three trajectories whose overlapping and competing agendas
were at the core of the dilemmas and determinations of Russian policy. At the heart
of each of these positions are different visions of Russias identity, its relationship
to NATO, and the identity of the West which the Alliance had come to symbolise.
Communist-Nationalist: The Counter-Civilisational Claim
The view that Russia is faced with a stark choice between two roles has been made
by a number of Russians, including the Communist Partys principal thinker on
foreign policy and the Vice Chairman of the Duma Committee on International
Affairs, Aleksey Podberezkin. Indeed, Podberezkins very point of departure is that
a stark choice of foreign policy directions is being foisted upon Russia:
The first holds that Russias national security points out a separate path for the
country...Another approach is oriented towards bringing Western values to
57. Sergei Medvedev, Landscape After the Battle: Rethinking Democracy in Russia, International
Spectator 32, no. 1 (1997): 75-76.
58. DeNevers, Russias Strategic Renovation, 23. DeNevers account of the trajectories of Russian
debate is in many ways analogous to our own, and provides useful detail that we cannot cover in this
context.
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Russia and towards her joining the family of civilized nations at any price,
because, as official policy tells us, there are no alternatives to this joining.59
This view involves a rejection of the Western civilisational mantle claimed by
NATO, and a concomitant rejection of enlargement in all its aspects. Expansion is
viewed as a hostile move which should be met by cultural consolidation on the part
of Russia, including, for many, a consolidation of what they see as the Russian
cultural area, which may include Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and even the entire CIS.
This is an answer in kind: what is seen as a civilisationist challenge is met by a
civilisationist answer, drawing upon the civilisational quality of traditional Soviet
opposition to the West.
This shift also challenged prevailing directions of domestic reform within
Russia. The previously dominant presentation of this questionwhere Soviet
models for political and economic life were deemed obsolete, Europe was seen as a
civilisational centre to which one should return, and political and economic reform
were represented as the way to do thiswas challenged from two main
directions.60 The first was a revived movement centred on previous communist
structures: upholding the restoration of old models, not the introductions of new
ones. The second emerged from a nationalist position: focusing on a policy which
would maintain Russias strength and uniqueness in the face of encroaching
globalisation, and provide for a renewal of social stability and solidarity. Despite
their differences, these competing parties found common cause and a mutual point
of opposition: Europe, a symbol that united the legacy of both pre-1917 Russian
nationalism and Bolshevik antipathy to old capitalist Europe.
Also central to these developments was the emergence of mass politics in
Russia.61 Political programs that presented the Soviet era as a total failure, as
seventy years of barren history to be rejected wholesale in favour of the previous
opponenta Western model which now often showed little respect for the
experiences of the Soviet era, and even for the new Russia itselfwas bound to
generate resistance. In foreign policy terms, these positions avail themselves of
elements which historically have been part of Russian nationalist and communist
discourse. Indeed, the entire operation of reorganising the Russian Communist
Party on a nationalist-communist platform may be viewed in this light; Genadiy
Zyuganov, for instance, argues that [t]he empire is the form which both
historically and geopolitically has been closest to the development of Russia, and
that Soviet culture represented an important manifestation of this development.62
Russia is here cast as a bulwark against a Western civilisation, whose essence is
59. Aleksey Podberezkin, Geostrategicheskoe Polozhenie i Bezopasmost Rossii, Svobodnaya mysl,
no. 7 (1996): 86.
60. See De Nevers, Russias Strategic Renovation, 11-12, and Rodric Braithwaite, Russian Realities
and Western Policy, Survival 36, no. 3 (1994): 11-27.
61. However well ensconced the new elites in Russia are, and however peripheral elections or even
Duma politics are to Russian politics at large, it is a political fact in contemporary Russia that politics
are also mass politics.
62. Gennadiy Zyuganov, Rossiyarodina moya (Moscow: Informpechat, 1996), 223.
378

extreme individualism, warlike atheism, religious indifference, mass mentality
and mass culture, contempt of traditions and subscription to the principle of
quantity before quality.63 This position has also been clearly articulated by
Aleksey Podberezkin, who has argued that
NATOs intense insistence on...gobbling up new strategic territory and
showing its muscle outside the borders of an unstable state with an economy
which is in tatters will, I think, not have a deterring effect on the people of that
state...[On the contrary, the] idea of once again being a besieged fortress will
knit the Russian people closer together than the many agreements and
insurances by the West about peace and freedom.64
More specifically, with a powerful reference to a founding moment in Russian
history at the beginning of the seventeenth century when the state was so weak
from internal squabbling that foreigners could invade it at their leisure, he claimed
that the US was falling on Russia in its new time of troubles:
the Partnership for Peace does not afford the participants any security
guarantees, but offers a very useful cover under which Americans may
organise their short-term military presence on the territory of the previous
members of the Warsaw Pact as well as...fuelling the anti-Russian atmosphere
in these parts.65
Russia should answer by minimalizing the participation of its armed forces in
peace keeping operations and rather concentrate on its own internal military
reform.66
This, of course, was exactly the anti-Western, neo-imperialist path of
development that many in the West kept pointing to as one of the two main options
for Russias future, and with which any opposition to NATO could be linked. The
attempt by the communist-nationalist group to consolidate its political position
through overt opposition to NATO enlargement, and the agreement of many in the
West to this ultimately dualistic view of Russian alternatives, provided a focal
point around which other discussions of Russian policy were continually forced to
revolve.
Westernisation: Support for NATO
A second option was to continue to make the Gorbachevian argument that Russias
natural home was in Europe. But this had now to take place in conditions which
meant the acceptance of the equation of NATO with Europe, a situation fraught
63. Ibid., 149.
64. Podberezkin, Geostrategicheskoe Polozhenie, 64. The metaphor of the besieged fortress was
popular during Stalinism.
65. Ibid., 64.
66. Ibid., 69.
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Millennium
with ambiguities and difficulties. For example, Foreign Minister Kozyrevs
message to the first meeting of the NACC stated that:
We seriously approach the issue of our relationship with NATO and we would
like to develop, through all means available, our dialogue and contacts with
this organization, not only at the political but also military level. Today we do
not raise the problem of Russias accession to NATO but we are ready to look
into this as a long-term political goal.67
And at a Conference on Foreign Policy and Diplomacy in February 1992, he
argued that Russia wanted to proceed from cautious partnership to friendly and
eventually allied relations with the civilised world, including NATO, the UN, and
other structures.68
But as noted earlier, by late 1992 this foreign policy orientation was located in a
domestic and international political context which was unfavourable. Given the
absence of European recognition of Russia as a natural part of its civilisation, and
exacerbated by the change in NATOs self-representation from a merely security
organisation to a communitarian expression of a unified Western civilisation, it
became ever more difficult to represent Russia as being a part of Europe, and yet to
argue for a security structure outside of NATO, or to oppose the Alliances
enlargement.69 If Russia were to be a European country, then it had to accept the
expansion of NATO. Russia could only oppose enlargement at the cost of seeming
unEuropean, that is uncivilised or proto-imperialist, and thus playing into the
hands of those (especially in Central and East European countries) who said NATO
should expand with or without Russian agreement, since either one or the other
proved that the process was needed. Russia either had to give in to the policy
agenda of the civilisational argument and agree to expansion, or try to oppose
expansion only at the cost of being cast as an untrustworthy and illegitimate state
outside of the new European security community.
The lack of a strong domestic constituency for the internationalist position, and
the lack of tangible benefits from co-operation with the West, allowed the
opponents of the internationalist position to wield it as a powerful lever in
domestic political contestation. As this tension was exploited by the opposition, its
proponents were forced gradually to abandon the liberal-internationalist position.
Kozyrev, who previously embodied this policy, came under consistent political
attack, and like most others moved increasingly toward a national interest
position.70 As summed up by Allen Lynch:
67. Kozyrev, A Transformed Russia, International Affairs (Moscow) 39, no. 4 (1992): 86.
68. Ibid.
69. See De Nevers, Russias Strategic Renovation, 23-25, and Medvedev, Landscape After the
Battle, 78.
70. For an account of the attacks on Kozyrev, see Sergei Karaganov, Russia: Towards Enlightened
Post-Imperialism, in Europe in Global Change: Strategies and Options for Europe, eds. Werner
Weidenfeld and Josef Janning (Guttersloh: Bertelsman Foundation Publishers, 1993).
380

the communist-nationalist political opposition to Yeltsins government at
home quickly realized that the prospect of NATOs extension eastward could
be exploited so as to undermine the governments nationalist credintials. In
response, Yeltsin just as rapidly moved to close the rhetorical gap with the
communists, so that there is no longer a serious difference between
government and opposition on the issue.71
The Westernising view is now very rarely to be found, but is still voiced, for
example, by the Duma grouping Atlantic Dialogue, formed in April 1997 and led
by Konstantin Borovoy. Borovoy argues that the present Eurasian policy of forging
a multipolar world to challenge US unipolarity by co-operating with China,
forming a union with Byelorus, and giving priority to co-operation within the CIS
is a kneejerk reaction to nationalist pressure which may even lead to alliances with
countries such as Iran, Iraq, and Libya. According to Borovoy, the major threat to
Russian security is not NATO expansion, but Russias own reluctance to become
assimilated and the accompanying insistence on isolating itself.72 The only choice
within this approach is to view NATO expansion as a fact which must not waylay
the new rapport with Europe and the possibility that Russia may one day assimilate
itself to Europe.
The Russian National Interest
A third option was to return to concepts of Russian national interest as a means of
solving the problem of foreign policy in the absence of an accepted vision of
Russian identity. As noted previously, in 1992 President Yeltsin had criticised the
Foreign Ministry for being too tightly bound by the desire to avoid Russian policy
being seen as imperialist and had called for a focus on the national interest as an
antidote. And indeed Russias new foreign policy concept, published at the end of
January 1993, reflected the ascendance of this view. It argued that NATOs
military goals remained basically unchanged, called for increased military presence
in the Baltic states and other areas of the former Soviet Union, and for
interventions in Bosnia and other parts of the former Yugoslavia. Commenting on
this document, the then Chairman of the Supreme Soviet Committee on
International Affairs, Yevgeniy Ambartsumov, responded that:
The important thing is that there is real evidence of a departurein theory at
leastfrom idealistic declarations in favour of a great measure of Realpolitik.
71. Lynch, Russia and NATO, 85.

72. Konstantin Borovoy, Budushchee Rossiyskogo Dialoga c NATO. Ot Imperskikh Ambitsiy k
Novoy Strategii Partnerstva, Nezavisimaya gazeta, 28 May 1997, 5. A founding declaration signed by
38 Duma members, Deklaratsiya ob Obrazovanii Vnefraktsionnoy Deputatskoy Gruppoy Za
atlanticheskiy dialog is available at [http://www.cityline.ru/politika/fs/zat01.htm.] (29 June 2000).
381
Millennium
I was glad to hear that politics should not be partisan, and hence ideologized,
but should reflect national interests; the interests of the state.73
A similar shift to the language of national interest can be seen in direct Russian
declarations on relations with NATO. As noted above, by 1994 Kozyrevs position
had shifted. While continuing to hold that Russia would continue to proceed from
its principled position, that its national and state interests in the world arena
should be pursued through cooperation and not through confrontation, and that
Russia and the West could work together because they were bound together by
basic democratic ideals, he also declared that:
It should, however, be clear that a genuine partnership is an equal partnership.
Our relations should be deprived of even the slightest hint of
paternalism...Partnership does not mean playing at give-away. It means, on the
contrary, close cooperation based on respect for the interests of both sides.74
In addition to a hardened attitude toward NATO enlargement, the primary
initiative resulting from this stance involved a reinvigorated attempt to foreground
the CSCE/OSCE dimension in Russias European policy, a focus which had been
central since the Gorbachev era. In the same 1994 NATO Review article, for
example, Kozyrev stressed the importance of understanding that The CSCE has
won the Cold War. It expresses adequately the main idea of the development of our
continent in the post-confrontation era.75 NATO, he argued, was just one of the
institutions of European security, and the NATO-Russia partnership should lead
not to a juxtaposition of NATO to other institutions.76 This was not only an
attempt to offset the emerging institutional dominance of NATO. It also reflected a
desire to emphasise the only European security organisation in which Russia was a
full member, andimportantlythe only one set up in order to facilitate the
participation of Moscow as a great power.
But this policy option also ran into dilemmas. First, to return to the language of
national interest with its connotations of great power politics and the delineation of
spheres of interest was to adopt a strategy counter to the vision that had become
symbolically and discursively dominant in Europe as a whole, and which
rhetorically at leastunited NATO and the applicant countries of Central and
Eastern Europe. To argue the national interest in such terms was inevitably to
become open to the charge that Russia was reverting to its imperial past and that it
represented a still dangerously unreconstructed state within an otherwise changed
Europe. The dilemma confronting this national interest-based policy has perhaps
73. Yevgeniy Ambartsumov, What Foreign Policy Should Russia Pursue, International Affairs
(Moscow) 39, no. 2 (1993): 9. See also De Nevers, Russias Strategic Renovation, 30-35, and
Medvedev, Landscape After the Battle, 78-79.
74. Kozyrev, A Transformed Russia, 3.
75. Ibid., 4.
76. Ibid.
382

been most cogently captured by one of the central Russian foreign policy
intellectuals, Yuriy Davydov, who upbraids the foreign policy leadership for
having overplayed its hand and spells out the further implications of the
predicament:
It is possible that the announcements made by the Russian President and
senior Foreign Ministry officials that the further expansion of NATO must not
spread to the post-Soviet area may be (and probably will be) seen by the US
and its allies as yet another attempt by Moscow to lay down a veto against the
sovereign right of independent states.77
Secondly, to attempt to reassert the logic of Great Power politics within the
context of the CSCE/OSCE was to pursue the policy in a forum which NATOs
continuation and expansion had increasingly shorn of its overtly military
dimension, and which had increasingly developed its own vision in a direction
opposed to the concepts of power politics. And after NATO had redefined itself as
being not an alliance standing in contradiction to the OSCE, but an institution
fundamentally analogous to it, then Russian appeals to the OSCE as an alternative
to NATO, or as a forum in which traditional Great Power arguments could be
articulated, were bound to be doubly unsuccessful.78
This situation left those in Russia who did not want to give succour to the
opponents of reform through opposition to NATO enlargement one real option:
that was to accept it but on the best national interest terms possible, and within
terms defined by the democratic community argument. The other optionseither a
nationalist-communist opposition which would severely damage relations with the
West, or an untenable form of Great Power logic within the context of the OSCE
were simply not plausible paths of policy for those currently in power in Russia.
The remaining option was to fashion some kind of relationship with NATO
initially by insisting on a central role in the Partnership for Peace. Russia certainly
insisted, when the Partnership for Peace was introduced, that it would not let itself
be treated as a country on a par with other non-members of NATO, but needed an
arrangement that was qualitatively different from those offered to the other
countries involved. This strategy has been partially successful, inasmuch as there
now exists a NATO-Russian charter, a NATO-Russian Joint Political Council, and
an elaborate co-operation mechanism. But even this cannot be said to have been an
unmitigated success because, significantly, there also exists a Ukrainian-NATO
charter and set of arrangements.79 Equally, although Russian sensitivities
concerning enlargement beyond the Visegrad countries have clearly been taken
into account, the broader cultural logic of NATO enlargement principles remains.
77. Juryi Davydov, Rossiya i NATO: Posle Bala, SshA, no. 1 (1998): 11.
78. On the OSCE process, see Adler, Imagined (Security) Communities, 268-77. Consider also the
explicit rejection of spheres of influence in the NATO-Ukraine special agreement; see Tor Bukkvoll,
Ukraine and NATO: The Politics of Soft Cooperation, Security Dialogue 28, no. 3 (1997): 363-74.
79. Bukkvoll, Ukraine and NATO.
383
Millennium
Despite its best efforts, the limited slate of options available to Russia, and the
domestic political struggles with which NATO enlargement was involved, made
enlargementat least in its first phasea grudgingly accepted part of Russian
foreign policy, despite continuing opposition across much of the political spectrum.
This understanding of the relationship between Russias domestic politics and
the ways in which its foreign policy options were framed by NATO, also help
explain the vacillating and apparently paradoxical stance that Russia has taken
toward the enlargement process. As Lynch has nicely put it, the ambivalence at the
heart of Russian domestic politics and policy concerning enlargement generates the
paradoxical situation in which NATO
is thus to be both opposed and appeased: it must be stated time and again that
expansion of the Alliance is unacceptable while taking every precaution that
the political and diplomatic fallout from expansionwhich is generally seen
as inevitabledoes not undermine Russias necessary diplomatic, economic,
and even strategic cooperation with the Western world. The heart of the matter
is that NATO expansion is literally non-negotiable for Moscow, which is not
to say that Moscow will not accept NATO expansion when it comes.80
Conclusion
In his well-known critique of the false promise of international institutions as a
means of restructuring security relations, John Mearsheimer acknowledges that
constructivist or critical theories provide a fundamental challenge to
neorealism.81 He claims, however, that this challenge is weakened by two
debilitating flaws in the causal logic of these alternative analyses. First, he
contrasts the materialist understanding of power characteristic of neorealism to a
discursive conception of power, and implies that constructivist theory represents a
contemporary form of idealism which believes rather naively that human beings
are free to change their world by a collective act of will.82 Secondly, Mearsheimer
argues that even if one accepts the claims concerning the constructed nature of
political reality, one is still left with the question of why specific discourses prevail
over others and how this is accomplished.83
These are important challenges, and they point to questions of power that have
often been incompletely addressed in constructivist assessments of security
institutions. Extant constructivist studies of NATO evolution after the Cold War
80. Lynch, Russia and NATO, 83.
81. The question of the relationship between constructivist and Critical theories is also an issue of
some debate, but we cannot enter into it here. For some reflections see Wendt, Constructing
International Politics; Price and Reus-Smit, Dangerous Liasons?; and David Campbells Epilogue
in Writing Security, 2d ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
82. Citing approvingly Markus Fischers claim that this is the case is Mearsheimer, The False
Promise, 40.
83. Mearsheimer, The False Promise, 41-42 and A Realist Reply, 91-92.
384

seem to be cases in point. In this analysis we have sought to show some of the
directions through which these challenges may be met by examining the
relationship between identities, institutions, and the structures of symbolic power.
A focus on the identity (re)constructions of NATO and Russia at the end of the
Cold War, the narrative structures and institutional contexts within which these
developments took place, and the ways in which these factors shaped the policies
viewed as appropriate, provides a series of insights into how institutions matter in
international security relations and the forms of power involved. It also provides
substantial insights into the development of NATO-Russia relations surrounding
the enlargement process.
The narrative or discursive structures involved in these processes did not emerge
instrumentally as a predetermined plan, nor were they simply the ideological
rationalisations of some more basic interests or power relations. They emerged as
practical responses to emerging situations, responses which drew upon the
resources available in the different political contexts, and the relationship between
these resources. But neither were these practical responses divorced from questions
of threat and power. By re-evaluating itself, NATO was able to reverse the terms of
traditional Realpolitik, to secure itself from a threat of fragmentation, and to
exercise a form of power in the new strategic situation that went far beyond what it
could have achieved within the narrow logics of military power and national
interest.
Simply to reassert that, in the end, the process of NATO enlargement and
NATO-Russia relations are still really about straightforward material or military
power relations is to miss the point. In addition to mustering its material resources,
NATO was able to produce and draw on a set of new power resources, namely the
power to construct a security community and the power to present Russia with
legitimate roles on which it would have to draw, should it want to build a positive
relationship with NATO. In the upshot, NATO was able consistently to play out
the role of a democratic security community, whereas Russia was left to vacillate
between a policy of accommodating NATO enlargement on the one hand and
adopting a seemingly anachronistic and ineffective national interest-based policy
on the other. As Vladimir Frolov writes:
Russian NATO policy is being met with incomprehension both by the blocs
member states and by our East European neighbours who have chosen to enter
into it. Russias goals are not clear: now it is partnership and even a special
relationship; now all declarations about partnership only serve to cover up
Moscows more traditional task of a gradual shattering of NATO resulting in
a weaker role for the US in European politics...However, if NATO is a partner,
then how is it possible to resist a partner? And if NATO is a partner, does not
385
Millennium
that mean that the Alliance is not a threat to Russia, and then it does not matter
within which borders that harmless partner exists?84
Western policy was able to play on the ambivalences in the Russian position to
achieve accommodation to enlargement at a much lower cost than what could have
been achieved by the use of material military power or traditional political coercion
alone. Conversely, extant constructivist accounts of NATO which stress its
essential nature as a democratic security community must consider the new kinds
of power made possible by that very identity. This in no way means that material
power is unimportant, indeed it is doubtful that NATO could have played the role
it has without its capacity for military strength and its reputation as such. But
NATOs power cannot be reduced to this. Indeed the power of the Alliance in the
post-Cold War period derives in considerable part from the ability to maintain its
military dimension while at the same time combining that dimension with a
powerful cultural and political narrative that overcame the challenges faced by a
purely military representation of the Alliance.
Given that NATO enlargement has lost none of its momentum, and given that
Russian frustrations with its present predicament may increase as the number of its
former allies which join the democratic security continues to rise, this perspective
has significant implications for the future of the relationship between NATO and
Russia. If Russian acquiescence emanated in part from the way it has been framed
by NATOs new narrative, and not from its own straightforward acceptance of
NATO policy, then there is no guarantee that NATO enlargement will actually
deliver on the promise of a more and more inclusive democratic security
community within which Russia will one day be included. On the contrary, NATO
enlargement may continue to be perceived by Russian democrats as a threat to the
prospects of an enhanced Russian democracy. Amongst the many commentators
who have made this case, the readings which draw on Russian deep-seated fears of
being overtaken by Western economic and political models, and its historical
experience of military and political intervention are particularly illustrative.
Consider, for example, Anatol Lievens warning that:
By symbolically pushing Russia back to the status of Muscovy, as Russia was
known before the reign of Peter the Great, NATO expansion could also deal a
blow of historical importance to the whole effort, intermittent since the time of
Peter, to reform Russia in a Western direction.85
Similarly, Anatoliy Utkin and Mikhail Vorontsov worry that
84. Vladimir Frolov, Rasslablennoe sderzhivanie kak realistichnaya paradigma otnosheniy Rossii i
NATO, SshA, no. 5 (1995): 61-62; also Davydov, Rossiya i NATO, 4-6.
85. Anatol Lieven, A New Iron Curtain, Atlantic Monthly 277, no. 1 (1996): 22.
386

If the West does not stop to listen to Russian concerns about how its former
allies are being added to NATO, then they will chase former pro-Western
[Russian] forces into the arms of the Eurasian counterweight,
by which they mean forces which oppose the spread of democracy to Russia on
civilisational grounds.86
These reactions carry serious implications for democratic peace theory, and for
those who have tended to equate the enlargement of NATO with the uncomplicated
spread of a democratic security community. These appraisals have been somewhat
wanting in a theoretical sense, inasmuch as they have not addressed the multiple
forms of power which are involved in the restructuring of European security.
Politically, they also invite underestimation of the extent to which the successful
enlargement of NATO has been bound up with specific political circumstances and
power relations that are possibly in the process of transformation. A fuller analysis
of the multiple forms of power underlying NATO-Russian relations may allow
both a fuller theoretical understanding of the evolution of the democratic security
community, and may also invite a reconsideration of the wisdom of continuing the
policy of enlargement without a full evaluation of the uncertainties involved.
Michael C. Williams is Lecturer in the Department of International Politics at the
University of Wales, Aberystwyth and Iver B. Neumann is Researcher at
Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, Oslo
86. Anatoliy Utkin and Mikhail Vorontsov, Novye Parametrymirovogo Protivostoyaniya, SshA, no. 8
(1997): 30.
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From Alliance to Security Community:

NATO, Russia, and the Power of Identity

The evolution of NATO constitutes one of the most important developments in

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NATO, Russia, and the Power of Identity

NATO, Russia, and the Power of Identity

NATO, Russia, and the Power of Identity

NATO, Russia, and the Power of Identity

NATO, Russia, and the Power of Identity

NATO, Russia, and the Power of Identity

NATO, Russia, and the Power of Identity

NATO, Russia, and the Power of Identity

NATO, Russia, and the Power of Identity

54. Ibid., 190.

NATO, Russia, and the Power of Identity

NATO, Russia, and the Power of Identity

NATO, Russia, and the Power of Identity

71. Lynch, Russia and NATO, 85.

NATO, Russia, and the Power of Identity

NATO, Russia, and the Power of Identity

NATO, Russia, and the Power of Identity

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