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Three Versions of Atlanticism
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The Wide, Wider West The Danish Atlantic Treaty Association has asked Professor Christopher Coker, London School of Economics and Political Science to give his view on the future basis for NATO and the wider Atlantic cooperation, the Western Alliance and the greater Atlantic community. Twenty years ago the fall of the Soviet Union, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the Central and Eastern European countries’ liberation from the Communist regime in Moscow opened the discussion on the purpose and goals for NATO. With the enemy no longer at the gates, what was the use of the political/ military alliance that should stop the Soviet troops at the Fulda Gap? Was there a need for NATO anymore? The answer was first given by Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Repub-
lic, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Croatia, Slovenia, and what was the GDR. Once they had the free choice, all countries chose to seek membership of NATO and later the EU. The people in these countries were in no doubt that their security was better anchored in the West, the Western Alliance. In today`s context of developments in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and in the Arab world the ideas of the West are being challenged. At the same time the number of partners in NATO led actions is growing. Common values or more “real politics” and common interests? Will this work in the future? Professor Coker presents three versions of the Atlantic idea, the values and interests that are rooted in the unique cooperation across the Atlantic. Coker
questions a static view of values and interests unique to the old “ West” and calls for a broadening of the concept of countries that share fundamental interests of communities in the West - such as India. While being firm on its own attitudes and beliefs the West should be able to deal with other dimensions such as China which represents the non-western world and has success in doing so. Please join the discussion of professor Christopher Coker.
Troels Frøling Secretary General Atlantsammenslutningen. The Danish Atlantic Treaty Association
The Danish Atlantic Treaty Association – forum for security policy
Atlantsammenslutningen Ryvangs Allé 1 DK-2100 København Ø Tlf.: (+45) 39 27 19 44 Fax: (+45) 39 27 56 26 E-mail: atlant@atlant.dk www.atlant.dk
Since it was established in 1950, the Danish Atlantic Treaty Association (DATA) has informed the Danish public about Denmark’s foreign, defence and security policies and NATO. DATA is a nationally-based and internationally-oriented NGO that functions as a link between politicians, researchers, students and the interested public as well as a forum for debate on security issues. DATA is a member of the international Atlantic Treaty Association, ATA. For more information, please visit www.atlant.dk and www.ata-sec.org Security Policy INFO is published by The Danish Atlantic Treaty Association. Executive editor: Troels Frøling Editor: Søren Kyster Hvelplund Author: Professor Christopher Coker, London School of Economics and Political Science Lay-out/printing: Kosmos Grafisk ApS +45 66 13 90 75 ISSN: 1903-6396 (Electronic version)
Three versions of Atlanticism: the uncertain future of the western alliance Back in the early 1990s the editor of the conservative journal The National Interest suggested that the political ‘West’ was not a natural construct but a highly artificial one. It had taken a life-threatening, overtly hostile ‘East’ to bring it into existence. It was extremely doubtful that in the absence of such an enemy it could long survive (Harries, 1993). The purpose of this essay is to ask whether his prognosis was correct.
which make possible common practices which in turn, bind people to certain norms of behaviour. Institutionally, these human beings come together with the aim of forming political entities with certain ends in view, including the primary end; security.
We have been here before, many times. All those who have speculated that it has lost its rationale in the post Cold War world have been confounded by its resilience. And this, in turn, has been traced back to the fact that it still remains, in its own imagination, at least, a value rather than interest based coalition. The alliance, writes the well informed NATO watcher Stan Sloan, is a community “with roots in the hearts as in the minds of the partners” (Sloan, 2003: 4). Even Robert Kagan who made the headlines some years ago with his criticism of Europe seems to have changed his mind. NATO, it would seem, does indeed serve a purpose if only because its members “aspirations for humanity are the same” (Kagan, 2003: 50).
In short, a social imaginary involves a common understanding of how the world works that makes possible common practices. It offers people perspective on history; it explains where they stand in space and time, including their relation to other societies. And every social imaginary offers a sense of how things work interwoven with how they ought to, and from this derives a sense of disappointment when things go differently from what we expect.
A Social Imaginary
The western social imaginary that we understand today was a product of the Second World War. It was embodied in the Atlantic Charter which was signed by the United States and Britain and eight
governments in exile in 1941. The only country that did not sign at the time was France which, true to form, delayed doing so until its liberation. But it is also important to add that this social imaginary did not exclude separate national imaginaries. France and Germany have their own founding myths that make possible the Franco-German community which the young Michael Tournier discovered when he taught in Germany in the early 1950s. He and his fellow students, he wrote in his memoirs, found that “belonged to each other at last.” (it is a striking phrase) (Tournier, 1989: 71). Some of those imaginaries are beginning to come under strain. As the Euro crisis deepens, so the European imaginary is becoming more difficult to sell to public opinion, especially in Germany. A widening gap is opening between a transnational elite - ‘Europe’ or Brussels, the Franco-German axis, call it what you will - that still subscribes to the stories it has been telling since the 1950s and a public opinion - call, this too what you will, nationalism, populism, anti-capitalism or just democracy - which is finding some of those stories difficult to believe.
It would be nice to think that – but, as often as not, appearances can be deceptive. The ties that bind in the C21st are not based much on sentiment, or affinity of values, let alone norms. They are much less pervasive than in the past. Relationships are more transient, and more brittle. Hence the former interest in floating coalitions, coalitions of the willing or ‘discretionary alignments’. And although American leaders pay lip service to the connection with Europe, not many Europeans believe their professions of affection.
The Concept of the ‘West’ One way of conceptualising what the ‘West’ actually is in the second decade of the C21st is to take a philosophical construct and apply it to the present situation. The concept is the Canadian academic Charles Taylor’s discussion of social imaginaries. The West can be seen as a collective, political and institutional incarnation of western civilisation at a particular moment in its long history. Taylor employs the term to describe the way people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, and what normative expectations they have of each other (Taylor, 2004: 171). A social imaginary, in other words, involves common stories, narratives and myths
3 “The Republican candidate at the US election in 2008, Sarah Palin, referred to Gordon Wood’s idea of American exceptionalism.” Photo: Dreamtime.
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As the US enters a post-American era so the message of American exceptionalism is becoming less easy on the ear. “We’re an exceptional nation,” declared Sarah Palin at a rally in Nevada in September 2008. “America is an exceptional country’, she further went on to declare. Just in case anyone missed the point she added “you are all exceptional Americans”. But exceptionalism has taken an ugly twist of late. It has become the angry refuge of an America in denial about the real state of the world. Behind the claim lies anger as the country’s relative decline has become more manifest in stagnant or falling incomes, repossessed homes, massive debts burdens. The idea of exceptionalism served the Americans well in the Cold War, as it had in World War 2. It came naturally to mind in 9/11 when the US found itself under direct attack. But the cost of the War on Terror (at $3.2 trillion only marginally less than the cost of World War 2 ($3.6 trillion in today’s dollars) has exhausted the country and left it uncertain of its future.
American exceptionalism American exceptionalism refers to the theory that the United States is qualitatively different from other countries. In this view, America’s exceptionalism stems from its emergence from a revolution, becoming “the first new nation,” and developing a uniquely American ideology, based on liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism and laissez-faire. This observation can be traced to Alexis de Tocqueville, the first writer to describe the United States as “exceptional” in 1831 and 1840. Historian Gordon Wood has argued, “Our beliefs in liberty, equality, constitutionalism, and the well-being of ordinary people came out of the Revolutionary era. So too did our idea that we Americans are a special people with a special destiny to lead the world toward liberty and democracy.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism + Gordon Wood, “Introduction” in Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States (2011) And then there is the concept of the West:. In Afghanistan it is committed to fighting an un-winnable war. It confronts a rising Russia, and an ever-rising China. The great projects in which it once engaged at the end of the Cold War – such as humanitarian intervention, civil society promotion and nation-building - have far less appeal than they once had. Even with its intervention in Libya its ambition is fast fading as we enter what Ian Bremmer calls a ‘G-Zero world’, one in
which no single power, or even coalition of powers has the political will or the resources to turbo-charge a truly internationalist agenda. And within the West the prospects of eventual separation if not divorce are beginning to be raised, with only 40% of Americans in a recent German Marshall Fund poll now identifying Europe as a key strategic interest in the C21st, and of these a depressingly high number of respondents were over 40 (International Herald Tribune, 12 September 2011). In this fast changing world Atlanticism still survives but there is no broad consensus on what people want the western alliance to be, which is particularly problematic for NATO which has tried to be all things to all people. If there is a threat to the alliance, writes Patrick Porter, it lies partly in its messianic restlessness; its persistent desire to intervene everywhere and on every occasion; its ideological fundamentalism; its own self-perception of itself as the guardian of international order; and above all ‘its self-defeating pursuit of relevance’ (Porter, 2011: 13). The chief explanation for this, I hazard the opinion, lies in the fact that three very different social imaginaries are contending for the moral high ground. The liberal ‘West’ is still strongly internationalist and expansionist in that it sees its values as universal. It is explicitly acknowledged that the values are suitable for export (making the world safe for democracy is still a principal theme). The cosmopolitan ‘West’ is largely behavioural. It is more normative than valueaffirming for it is derived from transnational values and translated into specific norms of behaviour. Norms acquire particular importance, writes Peter Katzenstein, when they crystallize through institutionalization. Once institutionalized, norms do not simply express individual preferences, they become part of an objective reality for its members. The problem is that Europe and the US cannot always agree, and therefore work together as one. To quote Katzenstein again, the US too has norms but they impact on identity formation (they are constitutive; the EU’s norms define standards of appropriate behaviour (they are regulatory) (Katzenstein, 1996: 19). And in so far as both inform, enable and bind actors at the same time the existence of two such different normative regimes brings the Western powers into conflict as was the case in Libya, where Germany and Poland were distinctly ‘off-side’ aligning themselves with the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) who could not bring themselves in the UN to vote for the mission or against it, but preferred to doggedly sit on the fence.
The communitarian ‘West’ is a more narrow vision that unabashedly focuses on a primary group to the exclusion of others. The 2010 Strategic Concept more or less embraced this understanding by insisting that NATO should dedicate itself primarily to preserving the security and the peace of the North Atlantic area. Which is why the ‘new’ Europeans such as Poland and Bulgaria saw Libya as an unhelpful distraction from what they consider to be the chief function of NATO: collective security against Russia. One of those countries Estonia came under attack in 2007 when it had to briefly shut down its internet links with the rest of the world. Estonia, claims its Defence Minister, has already fought the first battle of an undeclared and unacknowledged ‘World War 3.’ Georgia (an aspiring NATO member) came under a more conventional attack the following year. So, which of these visions, if any, are credible for a C21st western alliance?
Liberal Internationalism “We had better proclaim ourselves the knights errant of liberty and organise at once a crusade against all despotic governments,” President John Taylor proclaimed in 1852. There was still a place for the use of the sword but only to advance what he called ‘the doctrines of republicanism’. The only legitimate reason for going to war was the improvement of the human lot. War could educate for freedom. There have been many different variations on this theme. ‘Making the world safe for democracy’ remains its most famous expression.
ing a government, or offering ‘people power’. It is liberal because it recognises individual rights and responsibilities; it is constitutional because it recognises the non-negotiable demands of human dignity. The western understanding of democracy is unlikely to take root in most of NATO’s partnership’ counties, and most unlikely of all to take root in post Arab Spring Middle East. As Michael Doyle contends, Kant actively distrusted unfettered, democratic majoritarianism and his argument offers no support for the claim that NATO – as a security alliance – relies upon most: the understanding that all participatory politics is likely to be peaceful. Thucydides associated popular rule with aggression; Machiavelli with imperialism; most recently we have associated it with ethnic cleansing in places like the Balkans (Williams, 2011: 145). The Comic Strip is printed with permission from Cox and Forkum.
It was re-affirmed in George Bush’s Christmas 1991 address at the time the Soviet Union was already imploding in a speech which had all the breathless elation of a baseball coach whose team had won the World Series. “This is a victory for democracy and freedom! It is a victory for the moral force of our values.” The message was clear. American ‘values had triumphed’ and Russian leaders could be instructed in the art of becoming good capitalists, a prospect that became western policy over the next ten years. For the past 20 years, however annual opinion polls have clearly shown that 60% of Russians actually believe that liberal democracy is not for them; that their security requires autocracy to be Russia’s continued default position (Sixsmith, 2011). Yet 1991 was also the year the West persuaded the UN to recognise that states have responsibilities as well as rights, and that states that fail to acknowledge the former raise legitimate international concerns. The UN General Assembly accepted ‘the right to intervene’ in catastrophic situations. Later in 2005 it also endorsed the ‘responsibility to protect’ victims of genocide, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. This was the spirit behind NATO’s intervention in Libya – an example of ‘muscular liberalism’ claimed David Cameron, not – he was quick to point out – a continuation of ‘liberal vigilante-ism’ that had been a feature of the Blair-Bush years. The invasion of Iraq came at the very height of America’s Unipolar moment which is now over and has been for some time. In the event, the rest of the world went along with NATO’s war because Gaddafi had no friends; but they disapproved of it. They are unlikely to abstain again. Even before the Arab Spring the nonwestern world was under-whelmed by the plight of the Burmese following Cy-
clone Nagris in 2008 when the French threatened to airlift aid in defiance of the opposition of the country’s military junta. The West had to back down. It was the first – and possibly last –failure wrote one British commentator of ‘gunboat philanthropy’ (De Waal, 2008:19). The West also found itself disappointed that African countries would not condemn Robert Mugabe’s flagrant breaking of the electoral rules in Zimbabwe. To its surprise it has discovered that even liberal powers like India tend to have illiberal foreign policies. Their liberalism does not translate into liberal internationalism. All of this makes it difficult to imagine expanding the western alliance into what John McCain called a ‘League of Democracies’ (McCain, 2007: 19-35). If the purpose of NATO was no longer territorial defence, wrote two Washington analysts at the time, but bringing together countries with similar values to combat global problems then the alliance no longer needed an exclusive transatlantic identity (Daalder, 2006: 105-112). What is the West, however, if not a community of liberal societies? The chief challenge the West may find in Libya over the next few years is the one it has found in Bosnia and even Kosovo that liberalism and democracy are not always compatible. In the words of Philippe Schmitter: Liberalism either as a conception of political liberty or as a doctrine for economic policy may have coincided with the rise of democracy. But it has never been immutably or unambiguously linked to its practise” (Williams, 2011: 146). Again and again, the West has been disappointed to find electorates in places like Gaza electing distinctly illiberal groups like Hamas. This may be true of Libya, too. Constitutional liberalism is more than just elect-
The West now has to recognise that there are other stories, models and narratives to tell. The very success we have had in the liberal world which from our own vantage point is the most successful, and indeed humane experiment in human living (all its present failings notwithstanding) cannot disguise that our own experience is likely to remain that of a minority of human beings on the planet. Trying to force states to embrace more liberal positions may yet prove selfdefeating. Asking people to show more love and respect for things they neither love nor respect may create a deep sense of resentment.
Cosmopolitanism One of the most common claims heard when the state of the Western Alliance is debated is that it is divided despite sharing the same values. Another is that the division can best be explained by the fact that European and American values differ significantly. Both arguments are wrong. Both the United States and Europe share the same values, but they instrumentalize them in different, even competing, ways. All cultures come into being by translating certain underlying foundational values into norms of social behaviour. Norms count for most, of course, for what we call ‘politics’ is the translation of a value into a norm. If values give different cultures a sense of civilizational identity (what we think of as ‘western’ makes it possible to construct a western alliance) norms differ so much from culture to culture that they make it difficult for any civilisation to have a coherent identity (hence the nonsense of the unlamented former NATO Secretary-General Willie Claes’ attempt to postulate an ‘Islamic’ challenge to the West when cultural divergences between Arabs and Afghans, Iranians and Pakistanis are so striking,
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Whatever explanation we volunteer for this normative gap between the US and Europe it is pretty clear that the United States is not on the road to becoming a cosmopolitan power anytime soon.
Time Square, New York City, an example of modern western cosmopolitanism. Photo: Dreamtime.
even to the uninformed eye). What makes the Western world so remarkable is the striking continuities that still bind Europe and the United States with respect to race, social origin, income, cultural capital and political culture. In recent years the European Union has struck out on its own. As a community it embraces global governance as a way of syndicating its values across the globe. It seeks to bind countries to the EU through associative agreements such as trilateral – EU-China-Africa initiative which first launched in 2008, has tried to promote the idea that anti-corruption, and the rule of law, and the application of International Labour Organisation (ILO) standards when hiring locals are all ‘public goods’ i.e. they are in the interest of all three parties. The Chinese, for their part, still prefer to bribe local officials; to give support, tacit or overt, to African dictators and to apply different labour laws in the bid to win markets. The Europeans, by contrast, have invented a system of overlapping power networks, involving partnership between states, social advocacy groups and pressure groups such as Transparency International, a Berlin-based global anti-corruption organisation which publishes an annual Corruption Perception Index (CPI). These are the building blocks of a cosmopolitan democratic view which is already coming under challenge on different fronts not least because many non-European powers see it as a form of ‘regulatory imperialism.’ And where the cosmopolitan view embraces a network of activist groups and NGOs (75,000 of them) that share universal assumptions, not all of them share liberal ones. One example is the very unholy alliance between the Vatican, African governments, and Muslim NGOs against some of the family planning initiatives launched in the United Nations in recent years.
The point about cosmopolitanism is that it is the definition of a very specific European understanding of power just as the new doctrine of ‘creative intervention’ as opposed to its previous doctrine of non-intervention is distinctly Chinese. Internationalism – the application of universal values based on Wendell Wilkie’s famous 1942 vision of One World is now beginning to break down as the credibility of the European Union continues to be devalued in non-European eyes. If the Americans were the great critics of cosmopolitanism in the last decade, the Asians are its loudest critics today. When it comes to security the European vision is under threat, too. Europe has been involved in a historical project of major proportions: the creation of the world’s first, and perhaps only, civilian power. Whereas the Americans still see war in Clausewitzian terms as a ‘continuation of politics by other means’, the Europeans tend to see it differently, as the promotion of international law. America’s criteria for ‘just wars’ are essentially ethical in nature and their application is not subject to verification by international courts of law; they remain a matter of debate at home. The European preference, writes the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, is for ‘cosmopolitan law enforcement’, not war (Habermas, 2006: 101). In opposition to America’s ‘moralisation’ of war the Europeans prefer its ‘juridification’: war should take the form of policing operations. As a West Point military lawyer, Michael Nelson puts it, the Europeans seem to prefer ‘lawfare’ to warfare. They prefer to pursue traditional strategic objectives by using legal manoeuvres, and when the use of force becomes unavoidable, to severely constrain it with legal norms. What the Americans complain about most is that the Europeans talk the language of ‘ultimate causes’ but practice the art of minimum risk.
None of which is to deny real successes when NATO and the EU work together. P J O’Rourke, provocative as ever, may have lambasted the Kosovo war (1999). “Kosovo certainly taught the world a lesson. Whenever there’s suffering, injustice and oppression, America will show up 6 months late and bomb the country next to where it’s happening.” (O’Rourke, 2004). But the US did show up, and was responsible for 80% of the airstrikes. More impressive, if even more belated, was the success of the Bosnian operation. The country has been demilitarised; one million refugees have been returned; and the main instigators of ethnic cleansing have been rounded up and sent to the International Criminal Court. But the EU shows little enthusiasm for taking its co-operation with NATO any further, which must be a sine qua non if the West is to ever accommodate a cosmopolitan imaginary. EU-NATO cooperation has been poor in Afghanistan. Javier Solana did not visit the country until 2008 (after intense British lobbying). One of the most egregious examples of lack of co-operation was the EU Police Training Mission (EUPOL). The mission was so dysfunctional that NATO had to arrange bilateral security agreements with each of its members. One frustrated Canadian ambassador asked why his country, though not a member of the EU, ended up being the mission’s fifth largest contributor (Williams, 2011: 99). Working relationships can be close; the Eurocorps has been deployed three times under NATO command but cooperation is underpinned by no grand bargain: no striking political vision. Even in the case of military industrial cooperation the progress in cooperation between the Prague Capabilities Commitment and the EU Capabilities Action Plan has been disappointing; most of it has been informational. With the Eurozone in crisis it is difficult to see that the situation is going to change fundamentally; unless it does, I see no prospect of Europe’s cosmopolitan grand concept being sustainable
Communitarianism All these debates are about ‘we’, the West, but the communitarian ‘we’ is a more narrow one, and unashamedly focuses on primary group loyalty to the exclusion of others. It is based on an idea that people derive their values from the community, and their meaning in life from membership of a group. Communitarians share the idea that groups have a fundamental right to organise themselves into com-
munities which by definition are of an exclusive nature. The basic assumption of those who hold this position is that individuals have no being outside or before community; life is inherently social and it is embedded in culture. The most communitarian western state was once Germany. In the run up to the First World War the Germans rejected ‘civilisation’ (the market, liberalism, peace) in favour of ‘Culture’ (a view point memorably defended by the young Thomas Mann in his book Thoughts of an Un-political Man). By the time Mann himself had embraced ‘western’ values especially liberalism the Third Reich was at war with ‘civilisation’ too in what has been described as an attempt by the forces of ‘reactionary modernism’ to escape the future – what was ‘reactionary’ about the Nazi state was that it rejected all forms of universalism but especially the normative order that the US under Roosevelt was intent on establishing. The Germans were eventually incorporated into the Atlantic world in the 1950s. But we tend to forget these days that the Atlantic alliance was meant to become a political community over time. Indeed in 1950 a resolution before the US Congress suggested the President should sponsor a federal convention in the hope of forging a federal union between the Western democracies. In the event, the institutions that might have created an Atlanticist frame of mind simply did not evolve. Twelve years after the signing of the Washington Treaty, the French writer Claude Delmas regretted the fact that the Atlantic Alliance was “but a hint of a political organisation in search of its form” (Coker, 1998: 61). It was largely the creation of political elites. It was a necessity of the hour which attracted little real emotional investment, or commitment, except arguably in Britain. The failure of Eisenhower’s last Secretary of State, Christian Herter, to get across his vision of an Atlantic community was particularly telling. Ironically, there are still Europeans who would like to re-forge such a community; the East Europeans, the West’s new members. The end of communism has meant for most East Europeans a return to a Europe which is no longer seen as a geographical space, but a spatial-temporal dimension from which they have felt excluded for so long. They have consistently rejected the idea of NATO as ‘an out-of-area enforcer’ (the term is Richard Betts’), or as a vehicle for the export of the ‘Open Door’ of market democracy to states outside the Atlantic area. They want it to curb its appetite and to become a more functional defence organisation, a strong shield rather than a destabilising force. But of course, not everyone buys into this story. Edward Lucas the author of The New Cold War shares their fear of Russia but also confesses that he
finds it distinctly ironical that it should be the east Europeans “those ill governed, tetchy and intolerant countries that are now the front line that the West is trying to defend” (Lucas, 2008: 23). But it is the return of Russia that has rekindled the debate. For at this stage of history several new social imaginaries are up for grabs. One is favoured by the Poles; a western collective security community, anchored in the Atlantic, binding the US and Europe in a permanent default position: defence against a resurgent Russia that has set out a new social imaginary of its own. Since announcing his ‘comeback’ Putin has set out his vision of a ‘Eurasian union’ reuniting the former republics of the Soviet Union. He envisages a ‘supranational bloc’ that will constitute ‘one of the poles of the modern world, a project which is entirely in line with his self-conceived historical mission to restore Russian greatness and challenge western hegemony. Putin’s vision involves rolling out an existing customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan to Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan though it is hard to see how much further the project might go: Ukraine might be interested having abandoned its attempt to join NATO, and blown its chance of European integration as a result of corrupt political games at home. Then there is the Polish nightmare (which the French must fear as well if fiscal union is abandoned, and the Euro were to collapse). The Deutscher Weg - a deliberate contrast to the ‘American Way’ still popular in certain circles on the Left might see a rapprochement of Germany and Russia, a new partnership of powers. Germany anchored itself in the West after fighting the liberal powers in two world wars as a strategy of survival; it also joined the European social imaginary for much the same reason: as the former conservative statesman, FranzJosef Strauss once declared, ”anyone who wants to be a German must first become a European’. But the two strategies are not as self-evidently in Germany’s national interest as they once were. If Europe falters there will be other visions of the future that might have greater popular appeal especially in the eyes of the next generation of politicians. There is also of course one other imaginary to consider: a European Security Community (proposed some years ago by President Medvedev, initially as an energy community similar to the Steel and Coal Community that launched western Europe on its tryst with destiny). Russia would return to Europe as an equal member of a new concert of Europe, a new balance of power governed by certain norms of behaviour more narrowly defined – ‘western’ rather than ‘liberal’ or ‘cosmopolitan,’ the norms that under-
pinned the C19th balance of power. It is an imaginary that might also appeal to Turkey. If denied EU entry, it might still remain in the West, if not of it. The question is whether Russia can be folded into a new security system; it is perhaps, significant that it has successfully avoided coming to direct blows with the West in the last twenty years.
Conclusion The vocabulary of Atlanticism which sustained us is no longer useful today, or, at least, it is not as useful as it once was. For our forefathers’ purposes, it was very useful indeed. All I am arguing is that we just happen to have different purposes which are probably better served by a different vocabulary. Instead of dreaming of a renewed ‘League of Democracies’ western countries should be inspired by a different vision of the future. They will still have a supreme interest in cooperating with countries that share part of that vision (India) and negotiating from a position of strength with those like China that never will. Which does not absolve them of responsibility for defending what they believe to be right for themselves. The main challenge for western societies is to defend the positions that must be defended, and to negotiate on the rest. For we can no longer afford to look away from what stares us in the face: the imperium of the West is over, never to return. The direction is gently down for the duration. Countries like China have long measured themselves against the West and have improved greatly as a consequence. Increasingly, as the non-western world gains momentum, the shoe will be on the other foot. For both parties the challenge will be resisting the winner-takesall mentality and learning to bring out the best in each other by bringing out the best in themselves. At least, that is not a bad story to tell ourselves, even if we don’t quite believe it.
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Bibliography Coker, C (1998) Twilight of the West, Boulder: Westview Daalder,I, (2006), ‘Global NATO’, Foreign Affairs, 85:5, September/October De Waal, A, (2008) ‘Against gunboat philanthropy,’ Prospect, May 29, Habermas, J (2006), The Divided West, Cambridge: Polity Harries, Owen, (1993) ‘The collapse of the ‘West’, Foreign Affairs, 72: 5, September/October Kagan, R, (2003) Paradise and Power: American and Europe in the New World Order, New York, Knopf Katzenstein, P, (1996) Cultural Norms and National Security, New York: Columbia University Press Lucas, E (2008) The New Cold War London, Bloomsbury McCain, J (2007) ‘An enduring peace built on freedom’, Foreign Affairs, 86:6 November/December O’Rourke, P, (2004) Peace Kills, New York, Atlantic Porter ,P, 2011, ‘Hooked on Security’, The World Today, November Rorty, R (1999), Philosophy and Social Hope, London: Penguin Sixsmith, M, (2011) Russia: a 1000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East, BBC Books Sloan, S (2003) NATO, the European Community and the Atlantic Community: the transatlantic bargain reconsidered, Lanham, Rowman and Littlefield Taylor, C (2007) A Secular Age, Durham: Duke University Press Tournier, M (1989) The Wind Spirit, London: Collins Williams, M, (2011), The Good War: NATO and the Liberal Conscience in Afghanistan , London, Palgrave
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Three versions of Atlanticism: the uncertain future of the western alliance Author: Professor Christopher Coker
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