Transforming NATO: New Allies, Missions, and Capabilities

Transforming NATO

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Transforming NATO

New Allies, Missions, and Capabilities

Ivan Dinev Ivanov

L E X I N G T O N B O O K S

A division ofR O W M A N & L I T T L E F I E L D P U B L I S H E R S , I N C .

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

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Published by Lexington BooksA wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706www.lexingtonbooks.com

Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom

Copyright © 2011 by Lexington Books

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataIvanov, Ivan Dinev. Transforming NATO : new allies, missions, and capabilities / Ivan Dinev Ivanov. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-7391-3714-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-3716-1 (ebk.) 1. North Atlantic Treaty Organization. 2. Security, International. 3. International relations. I. Title. JZ5930.I83 2011 355’.031091821—dc22 2011009706

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of AmericanNational Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

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v

List of Figures and Tables vii

Abbreviations ix

Preface xi

Introduction xiii

1 Management and Sustainability of Clubs: Conceptual Foundations of NATO Politics 1

2 Explaining NATO’s Transformation: The Concept of Complementarities 45

3 Expanding the Mission: NATO’s Out-of-the-Area Involvement 77

4 Advancing NATO’s New Capabilities 115

5 Adding New Allies: Three Rounds of Post-Cold War NATO Expansion 155

6 Managing Twenty-First-Century Operations: NATO’s Involvement in Afghanistan 201

Contents

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vi Contents

Conclusions 231

Appendix: Assessing the Effect of Complementarities 247

Acknowledgments 249

Bibliography 251

Index 271

About the Author 281

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vii

FIGURES

Figure 1.1. Relationship between Defense Expenditures and Na-tional Income (average 1994–2004) 27

Figure 1.2. Relationship between Defense Expenditures and Na-tional Income (2004) 28

Figure 1.3. Relationship between Share of Income Allocated to Defense and Per Capita Income (average 1994–2004) 30

Figure 1.4. Relationship between Share of Income Allocated to Defense and Per Capita Income (2004) 31

Figure 2.1. The Model of Complementarities 60Figure 6.1. Actual Troop Contribution to the International Secu-

rity Assistance Force (ISAF) and Operation Eduring Freedom in Afghanistan (2002–2009) 207

Figure 6.2. Allied Casualties in Afghanistan (2002–2009) 208Figure 6.3. Troop Contribution to the International Security As-

sistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan as a Percentage of All Troops (2002–2009) 213

TABLES

Table I.1. The Three Aspects of NATO’s Transformation, 1990–2010 xxii

Table 1.1. Major Theories of Alliance Politics 14Table 1.2. Types of International Goods (Barry Hughes, 1993) 16

List of Figures and Tables

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viii List of Figures and Tables

Table 1.3. Types of Clubs and Their Relevance to Alliance Poli-tics 23

Table 1.4. Hypotheses Tested 35Table 2.1. Population, GDP, Defense Spending, and Size of

Armed Forces for the New NATO Members (2004) 66Table 4.1. Features of Crisis Response Missions and Capabilities 127Table 5.1. Timetables for the Completion of Reforms for the

Seven Invitees (2002–2003) 167Table 5.2. The Process of NATO Expansion by Year 175Table 6.1. The Advancement of International Security Assis-

tance Force in Afghanistan by Years (2002–2009) 206

APPENDIX

Table A.1. Influence on Per Capita Deployment of Troops Abroad for Fifteen Old NATO Members (1993–2004) 247

Table A.2. Influence on Per Capita Deployment of Troops Abroad for New NATO Members (1993–2004) 248

Table A.3. Influence on Per Capita Deployment of Troops Abroad for Austria, Finland, Ireland, and Sweden (1993–2004) 248

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ix

AC Adriatic CharterACT Allied Command TransformationACUS The Atlantic Council of the United StatesBALTBAT Baltic Battalion;CBRN Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear threats/

battalionCEE Central and Eastern EuropeCFSP Common Foreign and Security PolicyCI Complex InterdependenceCJTFs Combined Joint Task ForcesCPI Counter Proliferation InitiativeDCI Defense Capabilities InitiativeDGP NATO’s Senior Defense Group on ProliferationDPC NATO’s Defense Planning CommitteeDPT Democratic Peace TheoryEAPC Euro-Atlantic Partnership CouncilEGF European Gendarmerie ForceERRF European Rapid Reaction ForceESDP European Security and Defense PolicyEU European UnionEUBGs European Battle GroupsHR for CFSP High Representative for the Common Foreign and Secu-

rity PolicyICTY International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugosla-

viaIFOR Implementation Force for Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abbreviations

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x Abbreviations

IPCB International Police Coordination Board in AfghanistanISAF International Stabilization and Assistance ForceISR Intelligence, Surveillance, and ReconnaissanceKLA Kosovo Liberation ArmyMAP Membership Action PlanMNB RC South Multinational Brigade-Regional Command SouthMND Multinational DivisionNAC North Atlantic CounselNPT Nuclear non-proliferation treatyNRF NATO Response ForceNTM-A NATO Training Mission in AfghanistanNTM-I NATO Training Mission in IraqOEF Operation Enduring FreedomOOTW Operations other than warOSCE Organization for Security and Cooperation in EuropePARP PfP Planning and Review ProcessPCC Prague Capabilities CommitmentPfP Partnership for PeacePRT Provincial Reconstruction TeamSACEUR Supreme Allied Commander—EuropeSEE Southeastern EuropeSEE BRIG Southeast European BrigadeSGP NATO’s Senior Political-Military Group on ProliferationSSTR Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction Mis-

sions/ OperationsTA diplomacy/relations

transatlantic diplomacy/relations

TF Task ForceUNPROFOR United Nations Protection ForceWEU Western European UnionWMD Weapons of Mass DestructionUNSC United Nations Security CouncilVG Vilnius Group

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xi

This is a study of the three major aspects of the North Atlantic Treaty Orga-nization’s transformation—the incorporation of new allies, the implementa-tion of the new missions, and the expansion of allied capabilities. In the past twenty years NATO has become a sui generis Alliance much different from its 1949 design to deter the Soviet threat during the Cold War. NATO’s role in international security expanded tremendously: with almost two and a half dozen members, the alliance successfully incorporated some of its former adversaries; it also introduced and expanded new partnerships with a number of nations across the globe. Today, more than a decade after its military cam-paign against the regime of Slobodan Milosevic in the former Yugoslavia, NATO is once again involved in use of force against the forces loyal to Colo-nel Muammar Qaddafi in the civil war in Libya. The new Operation Unified Protector enforces United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 from March 17, 20011 and involves a broad range of activities aimed at protect-ing civilians and civilian-populated areas under threat of attack by the forces loyal to the regime in Tripoli. At the same time, the Alliance continues to conduct a number of peacekeeping, stabilization and reconstruction missions in the Balkans, Afghanistan, the Mediterranean, and North Africa; its military experts provide crucial training of Iraqi and Afghan security force. The suc-cessful completion of these new out-of-the-area operations required the in-troduction of rapid response force, multinational battalions, and civil-military teams for stabilization and reconstruction. Yet, NATO’s cohesiveness and unity was at stake on multiple occasions when the allies were unable to agree on common strategy or lacked capabilities to deal with the increasing chal-lenges of certain operations. Drawing upon well-established frameworks of alliance theory, this study explores NATO’s missions in Bosnia, Kosovo, and

Preface

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xii Preface

Afghanistan. It carefully examines the advancement of new allied capabili-ties to support these missions such as joint task forces, rapid response force, various multinational battalions (e.g. the one for chemical, nuclear, biological and radiological defense), and force enablers. It also surveys critically the in-corporation of the new members through programs like Partnership for Peace, the Membership Action Plan, and various fora for multinational diplomacy and lobbying.

By introducing the concept of complementarities, the book re-evaluates the relevancy of club goods theory in the context of NATO politics. The argu-ment holds that if NATO members successfully combine military resources, their interaction may enhance the capabilities of each ally and the alliance as a whole. Creating such an interactive synergy enables economies of scale to exist that promote efficiency for various alliance activities. It also provides a valuable blueprint on how NATO’s open door policy for new members is related not only to the presence of democratic institutions at home and settle-ment of disputes with neighboring states, but also has direct implications for these nations’ overall ability to transform and adapt their armed forces in order to meet the operational requirements of the new non-Article Five missions.

This book had its origins in my 2008 doctoral dissertation, sections of which appeared in the Journal of Transatlantic Studies and in conference papers presented at annual meetings of the International Studies Association, the Midwest Political Science Association, the European Consortium for Po-litical Research, as well as symposia talks given at the Taft Center and More-head State University. The study was supported by a fellowship from Charles Phelps Taft Research Center and a number of research and conference grants from the University of Cincinnati and Muskingum University. I would like to express my special thanks to Richard Harknett, Dinshaw Mistry, Andy Wolff, Joel Wolfe, Atanas Gotchev, Ryan Hendrickson, Georgi Genov, Dinko Din-kov, Dieter Dettke, Emily Goldman, Regina Karp, Steve Mockabee, Jim Masterson, Gale Mattox, Carrie Jo Coaplen-Anderson, and many friends, colleagues and students at Cincinnati, UNWE, Muskingum, and Georgetown College, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and assistance that greatly enhanced this study. This book also owes intellec-tual debts to a select group of scholars and experts on NATO and transatlantic relations whose writings on NATO politics made my own research easier and more systematic and are extensively cited in the following pages. Finally, I thank Lenore Lautigar, Joseph Parry, Mirna Araklian, Jana Wilson, and Lex-ington Books/Rowman and Littlefield Publishers for their assistance with the publication of this study.

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xiii

In November 2010 twenty-eight heads of state and government met in Lis-bon, Portugal and adopted NATO’s 2010 Strategic Concept for the Defense and Security. The new document reaffirmed that the alliance continued to play a central role in defending its members, which also included commit-ments to “deploy robust military forces where and when required,” and to promote “common security around the globe.”1 Eighteen months earlier, President Obama praised NATO’s unparalleled commitments to freedom, peace, security, and shared values at the Summit in Strasbourg and Kehl, highlighting that these represent a strong down payment on the future and “a substantial step forward in renewing our alliance to meet the challenges of our time.”2 Similarly, President Bush recognized in 2008 that an alliance which never fired a shot in the Cold War today has become a central player in international security “leading the fight on a key battleground of the first war in the twenty-first century.”3

NATO’s metamorphosis was not that obvious in the early 1990s and few scholars and practitioners of international relations could picture the alliance participating in key battlegrounds around the globe. For example, Kenneth Waltz, a leading neo-realist scholar of international relations, predicted that NATO would gradually fade away after the Soviet Union collapsed as new powerful nations emerged on the world stage. Waltz wrote in 1993: “NATO’s days are not numbered, but its years are. . . . Once the new Germany finds its feet, it will no more want to be constrained by the United States acting through NATO than by any other state.”4

Contrary to Waltz’s prediction, NATO today is larger than ever in terms of membership; it has undertaken a number of missions around the globe, and is trained and prepared to conduct a variety of operations. From 1999 to 2009

Introduction

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xiv Introduction

NATO expanded its membership from sixteen to twenty-eight, incorporat-ing most of its former adversaries in Eastern Europe.5 Since the mid-1990s NATO has been involved in numerous out-of-area operations, such as in the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia and Kosovo), in the Mediterranean, and currently in Afghanistan and Iraq. To handle the responsibilities associated with its new missions, NATO needed new multinational capabilities. These capa-bilities included Joint Task Forces, rapid reaction force, and various hybrid forces designed to accomplish a number of military and civilian tasks rang-ing from non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) to peace enforcement and post-conflict reconstruction. In addition, the allies agreed to enhance their interoperability as a part of NATO’s efforts to operate effec-tively as a single entity. President Obama recognized that “these are the new missions that NATO must take on in the 21st century and these are the new capabilities that we need to succeed.”6

What accounts for NATO’s post-Cold War transformation? How has NATO been able to integrate the new allies, missions, and capabilities? Are processes of expansion and transformation interrelated? More importantly, what measures has the alliance taken to prepare its new allies for member-ship, to enhance its missions overseas, and to develop new allied capabili-ties; and how successful have these measures been? Finally, what internal and external forces influence the patterns of NATO’s transformation? These questions are examined in this book. The latter surveys NATO’s management after the end of the Cold War, thus addressing multiple aspects of interna-tional security and alliance politics.

THE ARGUMENT

This book makes the case that the incorporation of new allies, the imple-mentation of new missions, and the development of new allied capabilities between the early 1990s and late 2000s cannot be studied as separate pro-cesses. Instead, the evidence suggests that these three clearly identifiable aspects of NATO’s transformation are interconnected; they correspond to the goals of the organization embedded in Article Two of the North Atlantic Treaty, namely, “to contribute toward the further development of peaceful and friendly international relations by strengthening their free institutions, by bringing about a better understanding of the principles upon which these institutions are founded, and by promoting conditions of stability and well-being.”7 NATO’s undertaking of new missions in support of international se-curity after the end of the Cold War aimed at peacekeeping, conflict manage-ment, and stabilization resulted in it needing new capabilities, which became

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Introduction xv

one of the essential components of its transformation. Similarly, NATO’s eastward expansion in the late 1990s and 2000s, largely driven by the United States, was intended to extend security, political stability, democratic institu-tions, and market economies in New England. Nonetheless, the integration of the new members had broader implications—in order to join the Alliance, the applicants had to transform their armed forces and improve their limited mili-tary capabilities to enhance interoperability and develop niche capabilities.

Transforming NATO offers an explanation that rests on two foundational pillars: the club goods framework and the concept of complementarities. By focusing on the expansion of new missions and capabilities, the book shows that the latter two aspects are integral to NATO’s overall transforma-tion and tie in closely with the admission of new members, as explained by the club goods theory. Club goods theory, which builds upon the economic theories of alliances, provides a loose, yet manageable analytical framework. The theory assumes that alliances function similar to clubs, providing their members with public goods like collective defense. Clubs have several in-trinsic characteristics: voluntarism (i.e., states can choose whether they want to join), sharing a certain type of common good, cost-benefit analysis, and exclusion mechanisms. Members, therefore, choose to join certain clubs be-cause, as rational actors, they anticipate certain benefits from membership. Unlike homogeneous clubs comprising relatively similar members in terms of structure and income level, NATO operates similar to heterogeneous clubs because its allies vary in terms of their size, wealth, defense expenditure, and overall capabilities. Based on their similarities, the allies can be grouped into several comparable and relatively homogeneous groups (or sub-clubs). This approach helps explain how the different groups or sub-clubs are involved in various forms of intergovernmental bargaining. Such bargaining rests on three core assumptions: (a) negotiations take place within a noncoercive system of unanimous voting; (b) transaction costs of bargaining and, there-fore, generating information and ideas, are lower compared to the benefits of interstate cooperation; and (c) distribution of benefits reflects the relative bargaining power of the participating nations.8 Successful bargaining be-tween alliance members in most of the cases leads to an optimal outcome. As a result, allies agree to manage their resources in ways that advance specific allied capabilities needed for overseas operations. If optimality is measured in terms of outcome and overall impact on the alliance, this may not always be completely accurate. Nonetheless, sizable and diverse institutions like NATO entail some inherent virtues—not only do they provide geographic advantages, and access to current and potential military resources, but also they serve as a tool to legitimize multilateral action. Thus, the accommoda-tion of members’ diverging identities in order to avoid possible unilateral

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xvi Introduction

action or formation of coalitions outside of NATO by default tends to in-crease optimality in terms of international legitimacy.

The concept of complementarities represents the study’s second theoretical pillar. Two goods are considered to be complementary if “the presence (or efficiency) of one increases the returns from (or efficiency) of the other.”9 Complements include those items normally consumed along with the product in question. If the demand for one of these items increases, then the demand for its complementary product increases as well. As a result, the demand for a good varies inversely with the price of its complements.10 Further, multi-good monopoly theory holds that if two goods are complementary, then lowering the price of one good stimulates demand for the other.11 This study uses the concept of complementarities to explain how NATO allies work out a compromise on decision-making and implementation levels concerned with the distribution of resources and sharing of allied capabilities. The military resources include, but are not limited to, military personnel, various types of army, navy, and air force equipment, and defense spending. The allied capa-bilities are represented by various forms of international military cooperation such as Combined Joint Task Forces (CJTFs), NATO rapid reaction forces (NATO Response Force or NRF), and various multinational teams dealing with non-proliferation, stability, and reconstruction that combine military and civilian efforts.

The idea of complementarities holds that if NATO members successfully combine military resources, their interaction may enhance the capabilities of each ally and the Alliance as a whole. Creating such an interactive synergy enables economies of scale to exist that promote efficiency for various alli-ance activities. This efficiency ultimately reduces the cost of the collective defense thereby provided to the allies. Thus, the concept of complementari-ties establishes a direct causal relationship between the military resources of NATO allies and their specific capabilities. The concept helps us understand not only why new states join alliances, but also how these states undergo transformation, adapt their military structures to the new security environ-ment, and share the cost and burden of nascent commitments.

The rationalist approach holds that bargaining is optimal when allies com-mit to managing their military resources efficiently and to the exclusive de-velopment of the capabilities that are needed for overseas operations. Hence, a causal link between resources and capabilities exists that is tested through a survey of the evolution of NATO’s missions. The laundry list of NATO’s new capabilities is determined by the needs of these new operations. This book makes the case that the advancement of allied capabilities is related to the horizontal and vertical evolution of the new alliance missions. The vertical evolution can be attributed to the need for new types of missions

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Introduction xvii

that expand beyond simple peacekeeping, and also include crisis response and stability operations. This trend of vertical evolution is illustrated with advancement from the Combined Joint Task Force’s doctrine to the NATO Response Force and various multinational teams. Alternatively, the horizon-tal evolution indicates how the same mission evolves over time based on a new strategic environment that leads to the development of additional and enhanced capabilities. Examples include NATO’s peacekeeping and non-proliferation missions. Peace enforcement is more complex as it subsumes peacekeeping responsibilities. Similarly, the multinational teams used in various stability operations started as multinational non-proliferation efforts and gradually incorporated Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear (CBRN) defense and post-conflict regional reconstruction. The underlying logic is that every country specializes where it has comparative advantages. The evidence from these cases shows that the optimization of resources is not linear. The member states often commit themselves to unrealistic targets, which they are later forced to review and revise in order to meet the needs of the missions and the capacity of the states to deliver.

The second pillar of the theoretical argument is the concept of complemen-tarities. It rests on the rationalist approach and argues that there is a direct causal link between NATO membership and the advancement of member-specific capabilities. The relevancy of the concept is illustrated through sev-eral cases of regional cooperation among smaller nations such as the Baltic Battalion (BALTBAT), the Southeast European Brigade (SEE BRIG), and the multinational teams for Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear (CBRN) defense. The optimization of resources is hardly achievable without the presence of major players like the United States and their commitments. By putting pressure on allied governments to overcome resistance at home and conduct unpopular military reforms, Washington sometimes acts as an “agent of transformation” that facilitates intergovernmental negotiations and persuades the allies to adapt themselves to alliance needs.

THE STUDY OF NATO’S TRANSFORMATION

Most existing scholarship on NATO has focused on the puzzle of NATO ex-pansion, on the question of whether NATO should add new members, and on the ability of the Alliance to adapt itself to the new security challenges of the post-Cold War world. This study differs from existing scholarship because it focuses on the connection between the NATO’s increased membership and the advancement of its new missions and capabilities, thus illustrating that these three dimensions of NATO’s post-Cold War transformation are

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xviii Introduction

closely related. Such an argument makes several contributions to the debates on NATO politics.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is not only the largest military alliance in modern peacetime history, but also one of the most extensively researched topics in alliance politics. NATO politics is the subject of exten-sion scholarship and policy about its functioning and management. Some North American scholars complained that during the Cold War certain Euro-pean allies received free rides, emphasizing that each ally should contribute resources for collective defense proportionally to its size, while other scholars refuted these concerns, contending that members should be evaluated based on their strategic value.12

These debates continued in the 1990s in regard to the incorporation of new members and the future of the Alliance, thus reflecting a broader theoretical divergence in International Relations scholarship. Neo-realists focused on the aggregation of power in the management of a post-Cold War NATO and made the case that the alliance faced no real threat to balance against, which is why it was regarded an obsolete structure that was not worth to maintain or expand after 1990.13 Other approaches advocated NATO’s re-activation in international security. Neoliberal and constructivist scholars argued that structural theories pay too much attention to the distribution of power across the international system, while at the same time undervaluing other essential variables like the importance of international institutions, or the creation of security communities that modify the outcomes of alliance politics and international affairs.14 Democratic peace theorists, for example, attributed NATO’s sustainability to its particular feature of being an alliance of demo-cratic nations, where “liberal states do exercise peaceful restraints and a sepa-rate peace exists among them.”15 As a result, an alliance of democracies has hidden strengths that would enable it to endure despite “internal wrangling and recrimination.” These strengths would, in turn, take the form of “strong self-healing tendencies not found in alliances with one or no democracies.”16 By the same token, neoliberal theorists have argued that NATO is an integral cog of the post-Cold War order established by the United States resting on the open and pluralistic way in which U.S. foreign policy is conducted, and the “web of multilateral institutions that allow others to participate in decisions and act as a sort of world constitution to limit the capriciousness of Ameri-can power.”17 Therefore, after 1990 NATO has embarked on a new mission of creating Europe whole and free by underpinning considerable faith in the pacifying effect of “shared democratic institutions and values.”18 Finally, constructivists study NATO’s management in the context of establishing “so-cial groups with a process of political communication, some machinery for enforcement, and some popular habits of compliance.” These groups, more

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Introduction xix

commonly referred to as security communities, refute the relevance of power politics and establish a novel framework of international interaction in which “the members of that community will not fight each other physically, but will settle their disputes in some other way.”19 As a result, scholars of democratic peace and security communities have made the case that NATO has always been “something more than the sum of its members and its capabilities.” In addition to pacifying Europe after World War II, NATO also formed the core of a larger project that involved the preservation of the post-war order by creating a value-based community.20

The preservation of this value-based community was critical for the new European security order and the manifestation of these intentions became in-creasingly relevant after the adoption of the Rome and Brussels declarations of 1990 and 1994, thus opening a scholarly debate on the future of NATO. This time the main discussion was about NATO’s new roles, more specifi-cally whether it had been moving from an alliance that provides exclusively collective defense to its members, into an institution of collective security with broader global responsibilities.21 A growing number of scholars lately argue that NATO’s expanded membership and its new non-Article Five mis-sions have transcended the limits of collective defense and have reshaped the Alliance into a very different security institution from its original design in 1949.22 The tendency to view NATO as an institution of collective security was reconfirmed at the Washington and Prague Summits in 1999 and 2002, respectively, when the allies decided to invite new countries into member-ship, and also agreed to build rapidly deployable multinational structures able to respond quickly and efficiently to various international crises, such as those in the former Yugoslavia, Africa, and the Middle East.23 Despite con-cerns about whether NATO would be able to meet its new responsibilities in international security, an argument has been made that “only a truly global alliance can address the global challenges of the day.”24

Has NATO indeed become a truly global alliance? Certainly today its domain of activities reaches well beyond Europe—the alliance has institu-tionalized partnerships with almost two dozen countries from three continents and is considering close relations with many other nations all over the globe. What accounts for this expansion of NATO’s responsibilities and missions? Club goods theory and the concept of complementarities take a rationalist approach toward alliances and explore the conditions under which the indi-vidual members make commitments and honor their responsibilities in terms of allied missions and capabilities. The framework of analysis proposed in the book does not challenge the logic that NATO has become a security commu-nity fostering democratic peace and stability in Europe. Instead, it chooses to focus on explanations that offer a different angle to NATO’s current role in

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xx Introduction

international security—namely, how the alliance reaches out to its members to cope with the gap in much needed capabilities for the new non-Article Five missions.

First, the proposed theory concurs with the explanation that, in large and diverse alliances, it is quite natural for bigger allies to bear a disproportion-ately higher share of collective burden, which does not necessarily reduce their value and benefits that they provide to the rest to the alliance. There-fore, the logic of heterogeneous clubs justifies the expansion process only if new members are willing to participate actively in NATO’s missions and are ready to improve their capabilities.

Second, moving out of the geographic area defined by Article Six of the North Atlantic Treaty does not automatically imply that NATO has become a truly global alliance. Under the 2010 Strategic Concept NATO emphasizes the importance of partnerships with relevant countries and international or-ganizations as a key instrument in advancing cooperative security around the globe. Nonetheless, NATO still remains a regional alliance: its membership is limited to a distinct geographic area stretching on “the territory of or on the Islands under the jurisdiction of any of the Parties in the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer.”25 Most of the decisions, including about the number and scope of the new missions, partnerships, and capabilities, are made by its members. It is quite natural that partnerships between the alli-ance and organizations with global outreach will expand in the future, but the North Atlantic Council cannot substitute the legitimacy of the UN Security Council.

Third, NATO’s geographic limitation inadvertently affects the range of available resources and capabilities. Even though the new partnerships con-stitute an integral aspect of NATO’s post-Cold War identity, they are far from establishing global commitments and responsibilities. The Alliance can be a valuable partner to the United Nations, but has no capacity and legitimacy to replace the universality of the United Nations in dealing with issues of world peace and security. NATO has made huge progress in its out-of-the-area involvement, but it has a long way to go before taking on any global responsibilities. On decision-making level, the developments of the missions in Kosovo and, most importantly, in Afghanistan, indicate lack of consensus on this matter. Similarly, on implementation level the alliance faces short-age of capabilities to deal with the new operational needs on the ground. The presentation of this argument is organized around the three aspects of NATO’s transformation: admission of new members, the introduction of new missions, and the development of new capabilities. The major events accom-panying these aspects are summarized in Table I.1.

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Introduction xxi

Finally, this book grapples exclusively with NATO’s functioning and man-agement after 1990, and excludes other aspects of alliance politics dealing with its origin, formation, sustainability, or decline. While the expansion process has been carefully surveyed, the book does not aim to explore the individual motivations of the new NATO members. The question of this research and its implications specify the scope of analysis to formal alliances, thus excluding other similar forms of international security cooperation, such as alignments and political coalitions. Although some implications are directly linked to the larger debate about the role and functioning of international institutions, the book is targeted primarily toward expanding the existing theoretical literature on NATO and does not aspire to render important contributions to the broader debate on the role and significance of international institutions.

ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK

The book is organized into seven sections. Chapter 1 introduces the logic of club goods theory, its relevancy to contemporary NATO politics, and the method of this inquiry. Chapter 2 presents the concept of complementarities in the context of intergovernmental bargaining theory and discusses the link between the use of available resources and the advancement of allied capa-bilities for NATO members.

Chapters 3 though 5 review the different aspects of NATO’s transforma-tion. Chapter 3 surveys the initiation and advancement of the new missions after the end of the Cold War, and explores the extent to which these out-of-the-area missions contribute to the development of new capabilities. Special attention is paid to operations in Bosnia, Kosovo, the Former Yugoslav, Republic of Macedonia, and the NATO Training Mission in Iraq. Chapter 4 examines the advancement of NATO’s new capabilities and concludes that the advancement of these capabilities may be vertical and horizontal depend-ing on the demands of the new missions. A parallel comparison between NATO and European Union capabilities in support of the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) is also offered. Chapter 5 deals with the most vis-ible part of NATO’s transformation—the incorporation of twelve new allies in the past decade. The chapter also surveys how NATO helped its new allies improve their capabilities relative to other EU nations like Austria, Finland, Ireland, and Sweden, which are not NATO members. Chapter 6 analyzes the advancement of NATO’s new capabilities in the context of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. It highlights the strengths of allied cooperation, the progress made on the military and civilian sides,

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Tabl

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ions

for

Yea

rD

ocum

ent

NA

TO E

xpan

sion

NA

TO’s

mis

sion

sN

ATO

’s c

apab

ilitie

s

1990

–19

91Lo

ndon

Sum

mit

Dec

lara

tion;

Rom

e Su

mm

it D

ecla

ratio

n

The

Nor

th A

tlant

ic C

oope

ratio

n C

ounc

il es

tabl

ishe

dN

ATO

’s fi

rst p

ost-

Col

d W

ar

Stra

tegi

c C

once

pt p

ublis

hed

in

1991

1994

Bru

ssel

s Su

mm

it D

ecla

ratio

nEu

ro-A

tlant

ic P

artn

ersh

ip C

ounc

il es

tabl

ishe

dPa

rtne

rshi

p fo

r Pe

ace

(PfP

) in

itiat

ed

Peac

ekee

ping

Mis

sion

sC

risi

s M

anag

emen

t Mis

sion

sN

on-p

rolif

erat

ion

Mis

sion

s in

trod

uced

Com

bine

d Jo

int T

ask

Forc

es (C

JTFs

) in

trod

uced

Euro

pean

Sec

urity

and

Def

ense

Id

entit

y (E

SDI)

ackn

owle

dged

1994

NA

TO’s

Res

pons

e to

Pro

lifer

atio

n of

W

eapo

ns o

f Mas

s D

estr

uctio

n

Non

-pro

lifer

atio

n ef

fort

s in

trod

uced

Non

-pro

lifer

atio

n ca

pabi

litie

s in

trod

uced

1997

Mad

rid

Sum

mit

Dec

lara

tion

The

Vis

egra

d co

untr

ies

invi

ted

to

beco

me

NA

TO m

embe

rsN

ATO

-Rus

sia

Cou

ncil

Cha

rter

on

a D

istin

ctiv

e Pa

rtne

rshi

p w

/ Ukr

aine

1999

Was

hing

ton

Sum

mit

Dec

lara

tion

Cze

ch R

epub

lic, H

unga

ry, a

nd

Pola

nd jo

ined

NA

TOM

embe

rshi

p A

ctio

n Pl

an

intr

oduc

ed

Ope

ratio

n A

llied

For

ceK

FOR

in K

osov

oN

ATO

’s 1

999

Stra

tegi

c C

once

pt

appr

oved

Book 1.indb xxiiBook 1.indb xxii 7/27/11 11:45 AM7/27/11 11:45 AM

2002

Prag

ue S

umm

it D

ecla

ratio

nSe

ven

coun

trie

s fr

om C

entr

al

and

East

ern

Euro

pe in

vite

d to

jo

in N

ATO

Alli

ed C

omm

and

Tran

sfor

mat

ion

and

Alli

ed C

omm

and

Ope

ratio

ns in

trod

uced

ISA

F in

Afg

hani

stan

und

er N

ATO

co

mm

and

Prag

ue C

apab

ilitie

s C

omm

itmen

tN

ATO

Res

pons

e Fo

rce

Mul

tinat

iona

l Tea

ms

(e.g

., C

BR

N

team

s)B

erlin

Plu

s A

gree

men

t with

the

EU

(200

3)20

04Is

tanb

ul S

umm

it D

ecla

ratio

nB

ulga

ria,

Est

onia

, Lat

via,

Li

thua

nia,

Rom

ania

, Slo

vaki

a,

and

Slov

enia

join

ed N

ATO

NA

TO T

rain

ing

Mis

sion

in Ir

aq

appr

oved

Ista

nbul

Coo

pera

tion

Initi

ativ

e w

ith th

e M

iddl

e Ea

st

intr

oduc

ed

NA

TO R

espo

nse

Forc

e be

cam

e fu

lly o

pera

tiona

l

2006

R

iga

Sum

mit

Dec

lara

tion

Serb

ia a

nd B

osni

a jo

ined

PfP

Inte

nsifi

ed D

ialo

g w

ith G

eorg

iaN

ATO

Glo

bal P

artn

ersh

ips

conf

irm

ed

NA

TO in

volv

ed in

rec

ord

num

ber

of s

ix m

issi

ons

Net

wor

k En

able

d C

apab

ility

Alli

ance

Gro

und

Surv

eilla

nce

Prog

ram

intr

oduc

edEm

phas

is o

n in

tero

pera

bilit

y20

08B

ucha

rest

Sum

mit

Dec

lara

tion

Thre

e B

alka

n co

untr

ies

invi

ted

to

beco

me

NA

TO m

embe

rs (F

YR

of

Mac

edon

ia’s

invi

tatio

n pu

t on

hold

)

ISA

F M

issi

on d

ecla

red

top

prio

rity

WM

D p

rote

ctio

n of

pop

ulat

ions

, te

rrito

ries

, inf

rast

ruct

ure

NA

TO’s

str

ateg

ic c

omm

unic

atio

ns

capa

bilit

y; N

ATO

Ope

ratio

ns

Cen

ter

Alli

ance

Gro

und

Surv

eilla

nce

intr

oduc

ed

2009

Stra

sbou

rg/ K

ehl

Sum

mit

Dec

lara

tion

Alb

ania

and

Cro

atia

bec

ame

NA

TO m

embe

rsD

iscu

ssio

n on

NA

TO’s

201

0 St

rate

gic

Con

cept

und

er w

ay20

10Li

sbon

Sum

mit

Dec

lara

tion

NA

TO’s

201

0 St

rate

gic

Con

cept

“A

ctiv

e En

gage

men

t, M

oder

n D

efen

se”

adop

ted

Focu

s on

non

-pro

lifer

atio

n,

part

ners

hips

, ref

orm

, and

tr

ansf

orm

atio

n

Book 1.indb xxiiiBook 1.indb xxiii 7/27/11 11:45 AM7/27/11 11:45 AM

xxiv Introduction

and the shortcomings and constraints that the allies have experienced during the mission’s first eight years of operation. Finally, the concluding chapter validates the argument developed throughout the study and summarizes the main lessons about NATO’s admission of new allies, the introduction of its new missions, and the advancement of new allied capabilities.

NOTES

1. “Active Engagement, Modern Defense,” Strategic Concept for the Defense and Security of the Members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization adopted by Heads of State and Government in Lisbon, Portugal, November 19, 2010.

2. David Morgan, “Obama Praises NATO for Afghan Support,” CBS News, April 4, 2009.

3. “President Bush Visits Bucharest, Romania, Discusses NATO,” The While House Factsheet, April 2, 2008.

4. Kenneth Waltz, “The Emerging Structure of International Politics,” Interna-tional Security 18, no. 2 (1993), 76.

5. NATO’s eastward expansion took place in three rounds. In 1999 the three Visegrad countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland) joined NATO, while in 2004 seven other Central and East European countries became members—Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Finally, Albania and Croatia were admitted to NATO at the Bucharest Summit in April 2008.

6. Morgan, “Obama Praises,” CBS News, April 4, 2009. 7. See the North Atlantic Treaty, signed in Washington, D.C., April, 4 1949.

http://www.nato.int/docu/basictxt/treaty.htm, accessed on 05/18/2008. 8. Andrew Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe (Ithaca, Cornell University Press,

NY: 1998), 60–61. 9. Peter Hall and David Soskice, “An Introduction to Varieties of Capitalism,”

in Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, eds. Hall and Soskice (Oxford University Press, 2001), 17.

10. Arop K. Mahanty, Intermediate Macroeconomics (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 93–94.

11. David M. Kreps, Course in Microeconomic Theory (Princeton University Press, 1990), 305.

12. For details about this debate see Mancur Olson and Richard Zeckhauser, An Economic Theory of Alliances, Rand Corporation (1966); Galvin Kennedy, Burden-Sharing in NATO (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1979); Casper Weinberger, “A Report to the U.S. Congress on Allied Contributions to the Common Defense,” (1984); James Golden, The Dynamics of Change in NATO (New York: Praeger, 1983); Charles Cooper and Benjamin Zycher, Perceptions of NATO Burden-Sharing (RAND Publication Series, 1986), and Peter Forster and Stephen Cimbala, The US, NATO, and Military Burden-Sharing (New York: Frank Cass, 2005).

13. See Michael Mandelbaum, “Preserving the New Peace: The Case against NATO Expansion,” Foreign Affairs 74 (September 1995), 9.

Book 1.indb xxivBook 1.indb xxiv 7/27/11 11:45 AM7/27/11 11:45 AM

Introduction xxv

14. Neoliberal institutionalism argues that international institutions can provide information, reduce transaction costs . . . and facilitate the operation of reciprocity.” In this framework, NATO is analyzed as a regional security regime establishing stable norms and rules that lead to “stability in levels of conventional forces within the re-gime that cannot be explained by structural theories.” See Lisa Martin, “The Promise of Institutionalist Theory,” International Security 20, no. 1 (1995).

15. Michael Doyle, “Liberalism and World Politics,” American Political Science Review 80, no. 4 (1986), 1156.

16. Wallace Thies, Why NATO Endures (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 294.

17. Joseph Nye, The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Superpower Can’t Go It Alone (Oxford University Press, 2002), 17.

18. Rebecca Moore, NATO’s New Mission: Projecting Stability in a Post-Cold War World (Praeger, 2007), 2.

19. Karl Deutsch et al., “Political Community in the North Atlantic Area,” in Brent Nelsen and Alexander Stubb, Readings on the Theory and Practice of the European Integration (Boulder, London, 1994), 118.

20. Gülnur Aybet and Rebecca Moore, “Introduction: Missions in Search of a Vision,” in Gülnur Aybet and Rebecca Moore (eds.), NATO in Search of a Vision (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2010), 2.

21. For detail see Zoltan Barany, The Future of NATO Expansion (Cambridge University Press, 2003); Stanley Sloan, NATO, the European Union and the Atlantic Community: The Transatlantic Bargain Reconsidered (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003); Rob De Wijk, NATO on the Brink of the New Millen-nium: The Battle for Consensus (Brassey’s Atlantic Commentaries, 1997) and Ted Galen Carpenter and Barbara Conry, NATO Enlargement: Illusions and Reality (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 1998).

22. Emmanuel Adler and Michael Barnett, Security Communities (Cambridge University Press, 1998), and David Yost, NATO Transformed: The Alliance’s New Roles in International Security, (Washington, United States Institute of Peace Press, 1998).

23. For details see Jeffrey A. Larsen, “NATO Counterproliferation Policy: A Case Study In Alliance Politics,” Occasional Paper 17 (Air Force Academy Institute for National Security Studies, 1997); Eric Herring (ed.), Preventing the Use of Weapons of Mass Destruction (London: Frank Cass, 2000); Thomas Szayna, NATO Enlarge-ment, 2000-2015: Determinants and Implications for Defense Planning and Shaping (Rand Publication Series, 2001), and Geoffrey Williams and Barkley Jones, NATO and the Transatlantic Alliance in the XXI Century (The Institute for Economic and Political Studies, 2001).

24. Ivo Daalder and James Goldgeier, “Global NATO,” Foreign Affairs (Septem-ber/October 2006).

25. Article Six of the North Atlantic Treaty, signed in Washington, District of Columbia, April 4, 1949. www.nato.int/docu/basictxt/treaty.htm, accessed on Sep-tember 20, 2009.

Book 1.indb xxvBook 1.indb xxv 7/27/11 11:45 AM7/27/11 11:45 AM

Book 1.indb xxviBook 1.indb xxvi 7/27/11 11:45 AM7/27/11 11:45 AM

1

1Management and Sustainability of Clubs

Conceptual Foundations of NATO Politics

The past two decades confirmed that NATO remains the most significant military alliance of contemporary world politics, an organization that not only admitted a dozen new members in its political and military structures, but has also made major political and military adjustments from its original 1949 design. While abundant literature explores certain aspects of NATO’s trans-formation, international relations (IR) as a discipline lacks a comprehensive, universally accepted theoretical framework explaining NATO’s management and functioning in the post-Cold War world. The first two sections of this chapter define the important concept of alliances and highlight the distinction between research that deals with the origins of alliances and research that studies their functioning and management. Because alliances represent a spe-cific form of advanced intergovernmental cooperation, special attention will be paid to the literature on intergovernmental bargaining and political integra-tion. The following sections reevaluate the logic of collective goods theory and examine the relevance of club goods for studying contemporary NATO politics. Lastly, the final section discusses the mixed method employed in this study and some of its constraints.

ALLIANCE FORMATION

There is a general agreement among IR theorists that “it is impossible to speak of international relations without referring to alliances.1 Alliance is a “formal association of states for the use (or nonuse) of military forces, in specified circumstances, against states outside their own membership.”2 This

Book 1.indb 1Book 1.indb 1 7/27/11 11:45 AM7/27/11 11:45 AM

2 Chapter 1

definition highlights several important features. First, it refers to an associa-tion with a military or security purpose that involves at least several separate state units and requires a formal agreement between the participants. Second, alliances differ from alignments, which are based solely on common interests and informal commitments. Third, they are formed in reaction to or against other states outside their membership. Sometimes alliances are defined as both “formal and informal arrangement for security cooperation between two or more sovereign states.”3 Both definitions highlight several distinctive features of these associations: alliances deal with sovereign states as units of analysis; they address the issues of international security, and thus exclude any other form of international interaction. Alliances, therefore, are relatively narrowly and explicitly defined forms of cooperation among nations.

By and large, current research on alliances focuses either on their forma-tion or their functioning and management. Realists identify three core vari-ables that shape alliance formation: power, threat, and interests. From the per-spective of power politics alliances are seen as “a necessary function of the balance of power operating within a multiple-state system.” Whether or not a nation should pursue a policy of alliances is “not a matter of principle but of expediency.”4 States can choose between two distinctive policies of align-ment—they can either align with a certain power, and therefore bandwagon, or balance against it. The choice of political actors to “balance each other or climb on the bandwagon depends on the system’s structure.”5 Thus, balanc-ing and bandwagoning are two contrasting types of foreign policy behavior which are induced by the concern of the states to maintain their positions in the system.

Other scholars attribute the choice of great powers and weaker states align-ing to the potential threats that these states face. This theory argues that “the forces that bring states together and drive them apart will affect the security of individual states by determining both how large a threat they face and how much help they can expect.”6 States can either balance a threatening power or bandwagon with the most threatening state. In the balance-of-threat theory balancing is defined as alignment against the source of threat while bandwagoning is alignment with the source of insecurity. The former policy is far more common than that latter. Additionally, states may also choose to ally with stronger states if other states with offensive military capabili-ties are likely to provoke other nations to form defensive coalitions. When choosing between the policy of balancing and bandwagoning, states are also constrained by their size and power—weaker states are more likely to band-wagon, rather than balance because they can do little to affect the outcome. Alternatively, “strong states can turn the losing coalition into a winning one because their capabilities may play a key difference in the outcome of a con-


Management and Sustainability of Clubs 3

flict.”7 When no allies are at hand, states may choose to ally with the most threatening state in order to survive.

The balance-of-interest theory challenges the postulate that balancing and bandwagoning are opposite behaviors motivated by the same goal to achieve greater security. According to Randy Schweller, however, states have very different reasons to balance or bandwagon. While the aim of balancing is self-preservation and, therefore, is driven by the desire to avoid losses, band-wagoning is usually driven by the opportunity for gain.8 Thus, alliances are approached as a response both to threats and opportunities.

Aside from systemic features, such as power, threat, and interests, the formation of alliances may be linked to various domestic variables. Stephen David makes the case that states form alliances not only to respond to threats emanating from other powers, but also to deal with internal, state-related or regime-related threats.9 Richard Harknett and Jeffrey VanDenBerg found out that countries experiencing competing allegiances, lack of legitimacy, and control of the state apparatus, form alliances as “a reaction not to the pres-ence of an external threat, nor by domestic political compromise, but by the presence of both external and internal security challenges that reinforce each other.”10 Therefore, the behavior of states is often determined by the presence of internal or interrelated threats. Such a behavior makes the explanation of alignments more complex and difficult. For example, in order to balance against an immediate internal threat, a state aligns with an external power that poses a long-term security challenge. Conventional alliance theory will inter-pret this as bandwagoning while in fact it is balancing against an impending domestic threat. Kegley and Raymond expand this framework and suggest that alliances can also bestow additional “private” benefits. These include the increase of the military capabilities of certain states, as well as political opportunities for the state’s leader to consolidate support at home by gaining political recognition, economic support, or legitimizing ideology.11

Democratic peace theory (DPT) offers an alternative explanation. This approach focuses on democratic governance and studies how it affects the choice of allies. For Michael Doyle “even though liberal states have become involved in numerous wars with non-liberal states, constitutionally secure liberal states have yet to engage in war with one another.”12 It is not that such a war is impossible, but rather that “preliminary evidence does ap-pear to indicate that there exists a significant predisposition against warfare between liberal states.”13 Therefore, variables measuring the level of demo-cratic governance such as constitutional law, republican representation, and the separation of powers determine whether states will enter into an alliance relationship with other states that share similar characteristics. Thus, any step toward armed conflict among those liberal and democratic countries would


4 Chapter 1

be much slower and cumbersome because “liberal states do exercise peaceful restraints and a separate peace exists among them. And this peace provides a solid foundation for the United States’ crucial alliances with the liberal powers.”14 Therefore, after 1990 NATO has embarked on a new “mission of Europe whole and free” reflecting an “evolving concept of security under-pinned by a considerable faith in the pacifying effect of shared democratic institutions and values.”15

ALLIANCE MANAGEMENT

International alliances are intergovernmental bodies of international coopera-tion, which involve a great deal of bargaining as means to exercise leverage over different partners. Andrew Moravcsik indicates that three key variables influence the outcome of intergovernmental bargaining in the untext of EU politics—interest, power, and credibility of commitments. He argues that the outcomes of such interstate bargaining are generally Pareto-efficient, but their distributive outcomes vary greatly.16 In other words, no other bargaining outcome exists which can improve the well-being of one negotiating country without harming another one. When an alternative allocation exists, so that it is possible to improve at least one person’s well being without harming anyone else, then the Pareto optimality requires that the actors choose the alternative. This analysis of intergovernmental bargaining based on the rel-evance of interests, power, and credibility of commitments, rests on several core assumptions of rationality: First, rational action involves some sort of utility maximization, i.e., a situation in which an individual is confronted with an array of options and he or she picks up the one that best serves their objectives.17 Second, an individual’s available options are rank-ordered, i.e., they may consider the two available options unequal or equal. If these op-tions are unequal he or she prefers one to the other and if they are equal, it means that the individual is indifferent.18 Third, the preference orderings of the rational actors are transitive. Fourth, each individual maximizes the expected value of their payoffs measured on some sort of utility scale.19 As a result, the maximizing actions of the individuals produce certain collective outcomes. Moravcsik found that, in the context of European integration, cer-tain bargains may favor Germany, while in other situations they may favor France or Britain.

Alliance bargaining includes a large set of issues such as contributions to military preparedness, burden-sharing, common military action, or joint strategy in case of war. In the past allied bargaining was less salient, more sporadic, and with “widely differing intensity.”20 The introduction of NATO



and the Warsaw Pact on the world stage following World War II increased the frequency of bargaining among allies, helped shape the image of adver-sary, and determined the need for a strategy to evaluate adversary’s inten-tions and capabilities. For example, the existence of diverging assessments of deterrence in the case of NATO accounted for differences among allies over strategy resulting in the negotiation of a vague and broad wording of the Strategic Concept of Flexible Response. Therefore, the Flexible Re-sponse made it possible to project several strategies based on the variation of threat perception among member states.21 As a result, alliance theorists have suggested contending rationalist explanations of alliance bargaining. Some scholars view it as a part of a broader decision-making process in which in-dividual members forward their interests and use the alliance’s assets, rules, norms, and procedures to maximize membership benefits.22 Others explain alliance management with the power that individual states exercise in order to influence the outcome of the bargaining process. Yet others focus on the importance of the credibility of commitment to secure the cohesion and over-all sustainability of alliance structures.

Interests

Alliances may be established for various reasons—to maximize power, to balance against or bandwagon with the threat, to address the interests of the individual members, or to form a pacific community of nations. Once estab-lished, however, they require serious efforts on the part of the members to coordinate their individual interests. Thus, alliances may sometimes serve as mechanisms to reduce costs “by spreading them among several partners” and providing benefits that cannot otherwise be obtained unilaterally.23 Alliances can also provide a “medium for exerting leverage over partners,” where great powers may gain increased influence over other countries’ foreign policy decisions. Such influence may flow from the alliance leader to the smaller partners, as well as from the smaller to bigger allies.

States participate in tacit or explicit bargaining over common and competi-tive interests. Their primary common interest is to preserve the alliance and keep the benefits of membership flowing, whereas their primary competitive interest is to manage allied influence in order to minimize costs and risks.24 Earlier studies have established a causal link between the interest of the in-dividual allies and the size of the alliances that they form. In his 1962 study on political collations, William Riker ascertained that in social situations similar to n-person, zero-sum games with side-payments, the participants have interest to “create coalitions just as large as they believe will ensure winning and no larger.” International alliances are one variation of such


6 Chapter 1

minimum winning coalitions and can be maintained as long as they have suf-ficient number of allies to ensure the existence of these coalitions.25 Mancur Olson and Richard Zeckhauser extended this logic to explain why the United States carried a larger share in the overall burden within NATO during the Cold War. They discovered that a tendency toward disproportionality exists in sharing the burden between large and small nations, whereby the larger nations bear disproportionately bigger shares of the costs associated with the common defense relative to the small ones. That was the case of NATO after World War II when, as a result of the implicit division of labor between the United States and its European allies, the United States shouldered greater military burdens and exercised “correspondingly greater influence in alliance decision-making, including the articulation of NATO military strategy.”26 In order to prevent such disproportionality, alliances establish institutional agreements that enhance coordination and also introduce arrangements for sharing various costs on a percentage or any other basis.27

Scholars of neoliberal institutionalism build on this logic and redefine the notion of state interest by highlighting the joint benefits of international institutions to improve cooperation. Therefore, in this framework, alliances are seen as institutions constructed by governments to “provide information, reduce transaction costs, make commitments more credible, establish focal points for coordination, and in general facilitate the operation of reciproc-ity.”28 Institutionalists challenge the logic that states’ concerns for relative gains prevail, and support that the importance of institutions is “conditional on factors, such as the number of major actors in the system and whether military advantages favor offense or defense.” They approach NATO as a regional security regime that establishes stable norms and rules which lead to stability in conventional military forces.29 These scholars argue that the varia-tion in NATO’s institutional adaptation is explained by “variation in relative costs,” and “by whether the rules, norms, and procedures of a given institu-tion enable states to overcome obstacles to cooperation (such as provisions for sanctioning or bargaining).”30 Therefore, international structures like the United Nations or an enlarged NATO, serve as instruments to improve coop-eration and manage effectively security threats.

Power

Realism and neoliberalism are the two main positivist traditions focusing on the relevance of power in the context of alliance politics. While classi-cal realists focus on power as a state-related characteristic, neo-realists and neoliberals share a common assumption that power is a systemic variable. Currently, international relations literature distinguishes between defensive



and offensive realist assumptions.31 When applied to the study of alliances these distinctive sets of assumptions shape varying expectations about state behavior. Defensive realists posit that states may engage in various unilateral efforts or military cooperation, including alliances, in order to balance the power of threatening states. Once the threat ceases to exist, sustaining this cooperation becomes much more difficult. Defensive realists believe that NATO was created to balance against the Soviet threat and that when the latter ceased to exist, they expected the demise of the Alliance because the presence of American forces would become an irritant to the European states, whose security was not threatened. In 1993, Kenneth Waltz boldly predicted that “NATO’s days are not numbered, but its years are. Some hope that NATO will serve as an instrument for constraining a new Germany. But once the new Germany finds its feet, it will no more want to be constrained by the United States acting through NATO than by any other state.”32 For defensive realism NATO can only sustain itself as a structure of international security and be managed successfully if a threat exists that “can provide sufficient glue to hold the alliance together.”33

Offensive realists highlight the distinction between great powers and the other actors in an anarchical international system. Great powers are deter-mined “largely on the basis of their relative military capability,” such as sufficient military assets to fight successfully against the most powerful state in the world. Power is the key variable that drives state behavior, including al-liance management. Power is composed of two components—latent and mili-tary power. The former is based on the size of the population and the level of its wealth, while the latter is embedded in the army, air, and naval forces that directly support it. Essentially, the theoretical argument of offensive realism rests on two separate pillars. The first one is built on the assumption about the ever present potential for offensive power coupled with uncertainty, where as the international system forces great powers to maximize their relative power because that is the optimal way to maximize their security. The second pil-lar rests on the logic of ocean stopping power because large bodies of water sharply curtail the power projection capabilities of armies and thus shift the balance of land power in important ways. Hence, land power is the central ingredient of military power, because armies are “the principal instrument for conquering and controlling territory.”34

Even though other realist scholars criticize the logical consistency of the argument about the stopping powers of water, they accept the key assump-tion that NATO is an asset to maximizing power.35 For offensive realism the United States would not be willing to give up power and could play on the uncertainty of the Soviet Union’s collapse in order to encourage new allies to join the alliance. Furthermore, Washington continues to dominate NATO


8 Chapter 1

decision making, much the way it did during the Cold War, “making it diffi-cult for many of those states (especially Germany) to cause trouble with Rus-sia.”36 Thus, realism approaches post-Cold War NATO as a tool for managing power relations between the allies who differ from each other primarily due to the variation of their capabilities.

Even though the majority of realist scholarship on NATO converges on the view that the United States has unmatched power capabilities, realism remains divided on United States’ ability to sustain the current distribution of power.37 The unipolar optimists argue that American hegemony is beneficial for the United States and for the international system as a whole. As a result, this imbalance can be sustained under certain conditions without necessarily resulting in intensive balancing against the emerging hegemon.38 T.V. Paul, James Wirtz, and Michel Fortmann suggest a revision of the traditional real-ist logic beyond the balancing and bandwagoning explanations. They argue that soft balancing exists under “near-unipolarity” that involves a “mixture of cooperative and balancing behavior.”39 In this strategic environment the functioning and management of alliances like NATO can be attributed to the multi-faceted relations in a near-unipolar world. Alternatively, unipolar pes-simists share skepticism about the sustainability of the U.S.-dominated unipo-larity and believe that at best it will only last for another decade or two. The U.S. hegemony will trigger a counter hegemonic backlash against the United States and the costs of preserving America’s preponderance will outweigh the benefits. Terrorism, “soft,” and “semi-hard” balancing are only several instances of such balancing behavior.40 Although realism has dominated IR theory for quite some time, it fails to present a comprehensive theory of alli-ance management. Scholars like Waltz, Mearsheimer, Layne, and Wohlforth disagree on whether the current distribution of power would be sustained and, therefore, they offer little insight on the process of adding new allies, mis-sions, and capabilities into NATO.

The neoliberal tradition suggests a very different interpretation of power and alliance management. In general, neoliberal approaches assume that, in a world of anarchy, cooperation is possible if states have significant common interests. Unlike realism, however, the rational behavior of the states is not determined by their sheer survival but by the utility maximization of interna-tional interaction. States have consistent, ordered preferences; they calculate “costs and benefits of alternative courses of action in order to maximize their utility in view of those preferences.”41 Neoliberal theories reject rela-tive power as a key variable driving international interaction and argue that states focus on absolute gains that flow from international cooperation. They accept the possibility of sustained imbalance and attribute successful alliance



management to the effect of international institutions, the uniqueness of the American political system, or the pervasiveness of democracy after the end of the Cold War.

Celeste Wallander, Robert Keohane, and Joseph Nye view international alliances not as a mere aggregation of military capabilities, but as security co-alitions differing in their purposes and “degree of their institutionalization.”42 These institutions are more “portable” than the rules and practices of single purpose alliances focused solely on threat. The seamless web of multilateral institutions of which NATO is also a part allows “others to participate in decisions and act as a sort of world constitution to limit the capriciousness of American power,” thus providing for transparency, consultation, and in-centives for cooperative strategies among members.43 Therefore, the North Atlantic Alliance is becoming an institution whose military functions will decline as threats diminish and “it should gradually expand to encompass all democratic European states that are committed to peaceful, friendly relations based on territorial status quo.”44

Institutional assets and adaptation present one neoliberal explanation for the sustainability of the current distribution of power. Joseph Nye and G. John Ikenberry attribute successful alliance management in the post-Cold War world to the hegemonic distribution of power, which combines the uniqueness of the democratic political system with America’s exceptional-ism. They explain the stability of the Pax Britanica and Pax Americana with various domestic arrangements and the exercise of “soft power” in the inter-national system that ensures reliable peace and security.45 Thus, the stability and expansiveness of the post-Cold War world is based on the United States’ unmatched economic and military power today” coupled with its unique ca-pability to engage in “strategic restraint, reassuring partners and facilitating cooperation.”46

To sum up, neoliberal theories offer multiple explanations about NATO’s management in the post-Cold War world. Some attribute NATO’s persis-tence to its assets as an institution of international security, while others highlight the significance of democracy and the uniqueness of American hegemony in managing NATO politics and steering its transformation after the end of the Cold War. However, the problem with these explanations is that they underestimate the fact that alliances are formal associations with military or security purposes. Thus, neoliberal approaches provide abundant explanations as to why NATO stays in business and continues to expand, yet they fail to explain how the alliance manages its new out-of-the-area missions, deals with the new members, and promotes the develop-ment of new allied capabilities.


10 Chapter 1

Credibility of Commitment

Glenn Snyder defines commitments as “arrangements of value that disposes one to act in a certain way.”47 Commitments emanate from two possible sources: the promise (verbal or written) in an alliance contract and the in-terests in aiding an ally that exist apart from the promise itself. Interests determine the behavior of the parties in a specific issue about which they are bargaining. Albeit constituting a moral and in some cases also a legal obliga-tion, the contact itself is insufficient to build a strong alliance commitment unless additional political values are attached to it, such as prestige and a reputation for honoring agreements. Furthermore, the degree of commitment, which includes the pledge’s explicitness, determines the precision of casus foederis. The more explicit and precise the commitment, the higher the cost in non-fulfillment and, therefore, the greater the credibility of commitment. In the case of NATO, the credibility of commitment is formally embedded in Article Five of the North Atlantic Treaty, which explicitly states that an armed attack on one or more of the allies in Europe or North America “shall be considered an attack against them all.”48 The precision of casus foederis ensures that if such an armed attack occurs, each ally will “assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”49 NATO’s powerful and explicit commitment is unique in world history and no other political and military alignment has ever had the same magnitude of commitment. That is why the Alliance has been able to attract a dozen new members since its inception in 1949.

The commitment is also linked to each state’s underlying interest in defending its partners. If a state has strategic or intrinsic interests, such as preventing allied resources from coming into the hands of a potential oppo-nent, it is more likely that it will honor its pledge or reciprocate its partner’s expectation. As previously mentioned, the commitment is determined by the power of the allies. Glenn Snyder correctly notes that “a strong state will have a clear interest not only in the existence and independence of a weak partner, but also in acting to protect the partner, since the partner cannot defend it-self.”50 Alternatively, if the ally is strong enough to defend itself, the weaker state may have no stakes in acting to preserve its stronger partner even though it may be interested in preserving the alliance. Thus, the precision of commit-ment is constrained by the two other variables that shape intergovernmental bargaining—interests and power.

The credibility of commitment also has direct implications for the level of allied dependence measured in terms of net benefits that each state receives from an alliance, compared to the benefits available from other alternative



sources. Allies seek the optimal level of commitment that will not only guarantee their security but also preserve the alliance and maximize the net benefits from it. For this purpose the alliance members are careful not to take excessive responsibilities for others’ security and, hence, they face two op-posing fears: the fear of abandonment and the fear of entrapment. Entrapment describes a situation of a state being dragged by its allied commitments into a conflict over an issue (or issues) about which the state is not concerned. The fear of abandonment becomes pervasive when the worry arises that a state has alternative partners and may choose one of them over its present allies. Two components of this fear exist—the probability calculus that this partner will actually act and the cost associated with any such decision. Contempo-rary alliances such as NATO have been able to establish various formal and informal mechanisms for consultation and exchange of information aimed at undermining this fear by increasing transparency and ultimately minimizing the risk of defecting. Another form of abandonment—the failure to fulfill al-liance commitments or to renege when the casus foederis arises—has been an issue at NATO in regard to the operation in Afghanistan because some allies are more involved than others in actual combat operations against the Taliban insurgency. By the same token, an example of the fear of entrapment can be viewed in France’s decision to withdraw voluntarily from NATO military structures in 1966. French political leadership, however, realized that this fear was unwarranted and therefore Paris returned to the military command in April 2009.

The explanations based on interests, power, and credibility of commit-ments embrace a rationalist approach which is not universally accepted among political scientists because it fails to explain how integrative processes influence the course of international relations and alliance politics. Alterna-tively, scholars like Ernst Haas, Karl Deutsch, Emanuel Adler, and Michael Barnett suggest alternative explanations regarding the effect of politis inte-gration and security communities alliance transformation.

POLITICAL INTEGRATION AND ALLIANCE POLITICS

Scholars of political integration noticed in the 1950s a novel pattern of political behavior in which powers and duties were being “handed over to regional and other authorities for the better performance of certain communal needs.”51 This process of political integration advanced in spite of old consti-tutional division among nations. A self-propelling tendency occurred during which new authority gradually emerged “above” the territorial states. This process known as functional integration is driven by organized economic


12 Chapter 1

interests and occurs in several separate steps. It requires a wider coordination that starts with technical and functional integration within the same group and gradually spills over to coordination of several groups of functional agencies of different nations; and, finally leads to a fusion between these functional agencies and other international planning agencies. As a result, a single body or multiple advisory supra-national organs emerge that “have some overall political authority” above the interests of the individual states.52

Yet, there is a distinction between economic and security integration. Initial decisions to integrate economically are made by interest groups that organize and develop their own norms and procedures. These groups exercise pres-sure on states’ governments “to manage economic interdependence to their advantage by centralizing policies and institutions.”53 The entire process leads to functional and political spillovers, whereby the pressure for integration in certain sectors propels pressure for further integration in others. The same can-not be observed about political integration because military and defense issues “have not displayed a close affinity to integration unless the issue involves a related question of saving and allocating resources for welfare measures.”54

The effects of political integration are explained through the idea of secu-rity communities. These communities are “social groups with a process of political communication, some machinery for enforcement, and some popular habits of compliance.” They possess a capacity to act as a political unit and have “the ability of a unit to control its own behavior and to redirect its own attention.” By merging security and community, new types of interactions emerge where “the members of that community will not fight each other physically, but will settle their disputes in some other way.”55 The degree of integration highlights a key distinction: The amalgamated communities pres-ent a formal merger of two or more previously independent units into a single larger unit such as in the cases of the United States and Switzerland. Alterna-tively, pluralistic security communities retain the legal independence of sepa-rate governments as autonomous units where “two separate governmental units form a security community without being merged.” Karl Deutsch rec-ognizes that the “pluralistic security communities turned out to be somewhat easier to attain [and] preserve than their amalgamated counterparts.”56

The security communities framework can be applied in the context of NATO politics. The alliance presents an example of such “pluralistic commu-nities of shared values,” where members “perceive each other as peaceful and . . . are likely to overcome obstacles against international cooperation and to form international institutions such as alliances.”57 Several core conditions exist that facilitate the advancement of these communities: (1) compatibility of major values relevant to political decision-making; (2) capacity of the participating political units to respond to each other’s needs, messages, and



actions quickly, adequately, and without resorting to violence; and (3) mutual predictability of the behavior required for the members of the community in order for it to function. In addition to such background (or core) conditions, the formation of these communities requires the length of time over which the pattern of integration persists and contributes to their consolidation. Security communities have two important implications for understanding alliance management. First, their formation affects the behavior of interest groups, po-litical parties, and governments acting in an intergovernmental setting, which seek coalitions at a supranational level based on common ideology. Second, the conceptualization of security communities is important in explaining how political integration affects alliance management through constructing novel types of relations among the different actors of international politics. Third, the formation of pluralistic communities takes some time after alli-ance structures are established and several different conditions need to be present. These include: precipitating conditions; conditions that facilitate the integrative transactions, organizations, and social learning; and the presence of mutual trust and collective identity.58 This approach is certainly valuable in explaining change in international politics made through political integration among allies, thus sharpening the debate with realist and neoliberal theories. At the same time, the framework does not render much explanatory power as to how the allies manage their military and political resources in the new integrative communities. Addressing these questions necessitates a careful look at the existing empiricist research. Alternatively, the collective goods model suggests a parsimonious and yet accurate approach, one that has been somewhat overlooked by scholars of international alliance. The distinctive features of the different rationalist theories dealing with the functioning and management of alliances are summarized in table 1.1 below.

THE COLLECTIVE GOODS THEORY

Mancur Olson, a pioneer of collective goods research, argues that each group, whether large or small, “works for some collective benefit that by its very nature will benefit all of the members of the group in question.”59 Although all members have a common interest in obtaining this collective benefit, they have no common interest in paying the cost of providing the good. Because military alliances are, first and foremost, defensive by nature, their core purpose is to deter potential aggressors. Therefore, alliances are created to provide their members with collective defense, which is a pure public good.

Generally, the literature on international cooperation distinguishes between two major characteristics of international goods provided as a result of inter-


Tabl

e 1.

1.

Maj

or T

heor

ies

of A

llian

ce P

olit

ics

Theo

ries

of a

llian

ce fo

rmat

ion

Theo

ryIn

depe

nden

t or

Cau

sal V

aria

ble(

s)Th

eore

tical

Mod

el o

r Ex

plan

atio

nR

elev

ance

for

Alli

ance

Pol

itics

Bal

ance

of P

ower

Pow

er in

the

inte

rnat

iona

l sys

tem

Stat

es fo

rm a

llian

ces

to b

alan

ce

agai

nst p

repo

nder

ance

Syst

emic

exp

lana

tion

cong

ruen

t with

th

e lo

gic

of d

efen

sive

rea

lism

Bal

ance

of T

hrea

tIn

tern

atio

nal T

hrea

t Per

cept

ion

Stat

es te

nd to

ally

aga

inst

thei

r m

ost t

hrea

teni

ng c

ount

erpa

rts

Bal

anci

ng a

nd b

andw

agon

ing

are

oppo

site

type

s of

beh

avio

r—

stro

nger

sta

tes

choo

se to

bal

ance

ag

ains

t thr

eats

, wea

ker

stat

es te

nd

to b

andw

agon

with

the

sour

ce o

f th

reat

Bal

ance

of I

nter

ests

Stat

e po

wer

to a

chie

ve g

reat

er

secu

rity

Alli

ance

s ar

e re

spon

ses

to th

reat

s an

d op

port

uniti

es—

stat

es

bala

nce

to e

nsur

e se

lf-pr

eser

vatio

n an

d ba

ndw

agon

to

take

the

oppo

rtun

ity to

gai

n

Alli

ance

pol

itics

affe

cts

stat

es a

t uni

t le

vel a

nd s

yste

mic

leve

l; ba

lanc

ing

and

band

wag

onin

g ar

e no

t op

posi

te ty

pes

of b

ehav

ior

Om

ni-b

alan

cing

and

Om

ni-

alig

nmen

tIn

tern

atio

nal t

hrea

ts; I

nter

nal

(sta

te-

or r

egim

e-re

late

d)

thre

ats

Stat

es fo

rm a

llian

ces

as a

rea

ctio

n to

the

pres

ence

of b

oth

exte

rnal

an

d in

tern

al s

ecur

ity c

halle

nges

th

at r

einf

orce

eac

h ot

her

Stat

es a

lly w

ith a

n ex

tern

al p

ower

th

at p

osse

sses

a lo

ng-t

erm

sec

urity

ch

alle

nge

in o

rder

to b

alan

ce

agai

nst a

n im

med

iate

inte

rnal

th

reat

Dem

ocra

tic P

eace

Reg

ime

type

dem

ocra

cy v

s. n

on-

dem

ocra

cyD

emoc

raci

es te

nd to

ally

with

ot

her

dem

ocra

cies

aga

inst

non

-de

moc

ratic

sta

tes

Alli

ance

s lik

e N

ATO

hav

e a

paci

fyin

g ef

fect

of s

hare

d de

moc

ratic

inst

itutio

ns a

nd v

alue

s;

they

con

trib

ute

for

a la

stin

g pe

ace


Theo

ries

of a

llian

ce m

anag

emen

tIn

terg

over

nmen

tal B

arga

inin

gPo

wer

, int

eres

ts, a

nd c

redi

bilit

y of

co

mm

itmen

tTh

e ou

tcom

es o

f int

erst

ate

barg

aini

ng a

re g

ener

ally

Par

eto-

effic

ient

; i.e

., th

ere

is n

o ot

her

situ

atio

n w

hen

all a

llies

are

be

tter

off w

ithou

t mak

ing

the

othe

r al

lies

wor

se o

ff

Cer

tain

bar

gain

s m

ay b

enef

it so

me

allie

s; o

ther

s m

ay b

enef

it ot

her

allie

s. O

vera

ll, a

llian

ce m

embe

rs

are

ratio

nal u

tility

-max

imiz

ers

Min

imum

Win

ning

Coa

litio

nTh

e po

wer

of t

he in

divi

dual

na

tions

; siz

e of

coa

litio

ns a

nd

allia

nces

In n

-per

son,

zer

o-su

m g

ames

, pa

rtic

ipan

ts c

reat

e co

aliti

ons

that

are

just

as

larg

e to

ens

ure

win

ning

and

no

larg

er

Inte

rnat

iona

l alli

ance

s ar

e m

aint

aine

d on

ly a

s lo

ng a

s th

ey

have

suf

ficie

nt n

umbe

r of

alli

es to

en

sure

thei

r ex

iste

nce

Neo

liber

al In

stitu

tiona

lism

Alli

ance

s as

inte

rnat

iona

l in

stitu

tions

(bot

h in

depe

nden

t an

d de

pend

ent v

aria

bles

)

Inst

itutio

ns p

rovi

de in

form

atio

n,

redu

ce tr

ansa

ctio

n co

sts,

en

hanc

e cr

edib

ility

of

com

mitm

ents

and

faci

litat

e re

cipr

ocity

Alli

ance

s lik

e N

ATO

ser

ve a

s re

gion

al s

ecur

ity r

egim

es th

at

esta

blis

h st

able

nor

ms

and

rule

s.

They

are

flex

ible

and

ada

ptab

le

stru

ctur

es e

nabl

ing

stat

es to

ov

erco

me

the

obst

acle

s of

co

oper

atio

nC

olle

ctiv

e G

oods

The

ory

The

size

of t

he a

llies

(in

term

s of

G

DP)

is li

nked

to it

s co

ntri

butio

n to

com

mon

de

fens

e

Alli

ance

s pr

ovid

e pu

re p

ublic

(or

colle

ctiv

e) g

oods

in th

e fo

rm o

f co

llect

ive

defe

nse.

As

a re

sult,

th

ere

is d

ispr

opor

tiona

lity

in

shar

ing

the

burd

en a

mon

g di

ffere

nt a

llies

Smal

ler

natio

ns te

nd to

con

trib

ute

sign

ifica

ntly

less

than

thei

r la

rger

co

unte

rpar

ts; a

llian

ces

esta

blis

h va

riou

s in

stitu

tiona

l arr

ange

men

ts

to r

emed

y th

is d

ispr

opor

tiona

lity

Clu

b G

oods

The

ory

Size

of t

he a

llies

, alli

ed r

esou

rces

(e

sp. d

efen

se s

pend

ing)

; co

untr

y-sp

ecifi

c as

sets

Alli

ance

s op

erat

e si

mila

r to

cl

ubs—

they

pro

vide

exc

luda

ble

good

s th

at h

ave

both

pub

lic

(col

lect

ive)

and

pri

vate

feat

ures

Ther

e ar

e ho

mog

eneo

us a

nd

hete

roge

neou

s cl

ubs;

mos

t of

the

allia

nces

are

het

erog

eneo

us,

i.e.,

the

size

of t

he c

lub

and

the

iden

tity

of it

s m

embe

rs d

eter

min

es

the

outc

ome

of in

tra-

club

ba

rgai

ning

Secu

rity

Com

mun

ities

Pow

er is

tran

sfer

red;

new

au

thor

ity g

radu

ally

em

erge

s ab

ove

terr

itori

al s

tate

s

Pow

ers

and

dutie

s ar

e ha

nded

ov

er to

reg

iona

l and

oth

er

supr

anat

iona

l aut

hori

ties

for

the

perf

orm

ance

of c

erta

in

com

mun

al n

eeds

Plur

alis

tic s

ecur

ity c

omm

uniti

es

are

form

ed; a

s a

resu

lt of

po

litic

al in

tegr

atio

n ne

w ty

pes

of r

elat

ions

hips

occ

ur a

mon

g di

ffere

nt a

llies


16 Chapter 1

action among nations: nonrivalry and nonexcludability. Goods are nonrival when their units can be consumed by someone “without detracting, in the slightest from the consumption opportunities still available to others from the same unit.”60 Examples of such goods are sunsets, unobstructed views, or pollution-control devices. Those goods whose benefits can be withheld by the owner or provider at a certain cost for others display excludable benefits. Alternatively, benefits that are available to all once the good is provided are termed nonexcludable. Usually most goods are excludable, such as territory, oil, clothes, food, etc. Additionally, private goods exhibit both rivalry and excludability, such as territory or natural resources, whereas public goods ex-hibit neither rivalry nor excludability, such as access to radio waves, oxygen, or public parks.61 Furthermore, a third category of goods with mixed char-acteristics exists. Depending on whether goods are excludable and whether they exhibit rivalry, these are called coordination goods and common prop-erty resources.62 These fall between the two extremes of purely private and purely public goods, providing partially rival or partially excludable benefits as shown in table 1.2.63

Scholars of international relations use collective security as an example of a purely public good, whereby the international community has at its avail-ability a “self-enforcing international mechanism or body that automatically reacts by rejecting and immediately renouncing an aggression in the interna-tional system.” The collective security concept, championed by Inis Claude, signifies an “all-inclusive,” inner oriented system “involved in the safeguard-ing of all against aggressive assault.”64 Such a system regulates international behavior by creating institutionalized confidence among participants.65 Charles and Clifford Kupchan argue that the establishment of a collective security system in Europe led by NATO would provide a collective good and allow Russians to define themselves as members of a European community of nations, rather than as outsiders.66 In essence, a collective security system is a “pact against war,” signed by all states in the international community, and collective security mechanisms are directed toward “no predetermined or clearly defined enemy, nor can [a collective security system] operate on the basis of a predetermined coalition.”67 In fact, the history of the League

Table 1.2. Types of International Goods (Barry Hughes, 1993)

Rivalry Nonrivalry

Excludability Private goods Impure public goods: coordination goods

Nonexcludability Impure public goods: common property resources

Public goods



of Nations offers examples from the inter-war period during which the ideas of collective security were implemented to help regulate various territorial disputes such as the plebiscite in Upper Silesia in 1921, the border dispute between Greece and Bulgaria in 1925, and the 1935 referendum in Saarland. Therefore, ideas associated with collective security assume that security is a public good, provided not only to the members of a certain region, alliance, or international organization but also to all states in the international system.

Collective goods theory also accepts the microeconomic classification of the goods according to their elasticity of expenditure into four categories—inferior, inelastic, elastic, and superior. The expenditure for superior goods increases by as much or more than the income of the consumers. Inferior goods exist when the expenditure on the good decreases or is unchanged as income increases, i.e., income elasticity of expenditure (E) � 0. A good is inelastic when the expenditure on the good increases but by a smaller percent-age than the income; therefore, 0 < E < 1. Alternatively, when the expenditure on the good increases by a percentage that is as great as or greater than the percentage by which income increases but by a smaller absolute amount, then the good is elastic. For elastic goods, the elasticity is in the range between 0 and S0/Y0 (0�E<S0/Y0), where S0 is the expenditure of the good when income is Y0.68

The collective goods model assumes that this microeconomic classifica-tion of international goods applies to alliances. As a result, several distinct observations about their management could be inferred. First, the approach is consistent with inter-governmental bargaining. This logic assumes that the decision to allocate resources to military alliances or any other international body is determined by the national interest of each country. Second, in the case of NATO, the model found a positive and statistically significant rela-tionship between the size of the members in terms of gross national product and the percentage of their GNP that they allocate for defense.69 As a result, smaller states tend to rely on bigger states for their defense, while bigger states always pay a disproportionately larger share. In other words, the size of the members determines their behavior in the specific alliance setting. Third, the theory identifies one particular situation in which there will be no tendency toward disproportionality, which exists when defense is regarded as a superior good. This situation holds true when any increase in the national income is used to buy only this good or when none of the increase in income that the nation receives in the form of defense is spent on goods other than defense. Peaks of all-out war or exceptional insecurity create a situation in which security is regarded as a superior good and, in this case, alliances will not have any tendency toward disproportional burden-sharing. The U.S.-British alliance during World War II is an example of such a situation: as the


18 Chapter 1

United States mobilized, Britain proportionately maintained, if not increased, its military capability from 1941 to 1944, and therefore proportionally shared the burden. Finally, to avoid disproportionate burden sharing, larger states initiate different institutional agreements that regulate the contribution of the individual members and convince their smaller partners to accept them. These agreements vary from the coordination of allied efforts to the sharing of certain costs on a percentage basis. In the absence of any institutional ar-rangements, the tendency toward disproportional burden sharing is actually stronger than it would be otherwise.70

Nonetheless, these observations do not imply that irreconcilable differ-ences among the allies and fairly considerable divergence of purpose among them would automatically destroy the alliance. While in some cases limited disagreements among members may have a negative impact on alliance poli-tics, in other cases the differences among the allies may actually increase the effectiveness of the alliance. Operation Allied Force in Yugoslavia in 1999 provided an example of differences that occurred among the contributing NATO countries regarding the approach to air war, the sharing of sensitive information, and the introduction of ground forces. These differences consid-erably strained the Alliance and highlighted key differences in the perspec-tives of the United States and its European allies. Nevertheless, the awareness that alliance unity was at stake in Kosovo helped motivate members to work together because NATO’s credibility was at stake. After the operation’s com-pletion the Alliance identified several major areas that required efforts for enhanced cooperation, such as improved command structures, new defense capabilities initiative, an improved consultation process, and a more flexible system for operational decisions.71

Collective goods theory offers several explanations about the dispropor-tionality of burden sharing among small and big allies. First, alliances are not burden-free for small states. Often when the great powers act, the small states have fewer available options to choose from. Therefore, they are more likely to cooperate, especially in areas that these nations may not have previously considered. Second, the presence of small and big states in an alliance may present economies of scale. Organizations in general strive for a larger mem-bership because they provide certain benefits that increase proportionately as membership increases. In other words, the admission of new allies expands the range of the collective good because ceteris paribus the new members reduce the marginal costs for defense. The production of special types of weapon systems is a good example which illustrates how the expansion of alliances generates economies of scale and enhances interoperability if the al-lies purchase the same type of military equipment. Nonetheless, if a potential new entrant has disproportionately high security needs, it creates a dilemma



of entrapment wherein all other allies have to bear tremendous costs for its defense, as would have been the case of Georgia during the 2008 war with Russia had this nation been a NATO member at that time.

Third, alliances are involved in situations that contain, at least in the near term, a strong element of irreversibility, i.e., once states join an alli-ance leaving or abounding on alliance becomes much more difficult. This does not mean that the states cannot renege on their commitments—in fact history shows that most of the pre-World War II alliances have eventually dissolved—instead, it implies that, at least in the short run, the allies find it considerably more difficult to walk away from such commitments and this situation occasionally creates a sense of entrapment. An example of such a tendency can be found in the dynamic of U.S. defense spending during the Cold War. Albeit it was not always on a continuous upward trajectory, dur-ing the Cold War Washington usually spent on average about 4 percent of its GDP on defense. Despite some fluctuations that can be attributed to various domestic factors, the United States could not afford to fall below this critical threshold due to the Soviet threat. The U.S. also possessed very few tools available to convince its European allies that they needed to contribute more to the allied efforts.72 Fourth, alliances can offset the effect of the free rider problem or “the exploitation of the big by the small” because they provide not only collective, but also purely national, non-collective benefits to the nations that maintain them. Nonetheless, the main conceptual problem of the collec-tive goods model is that it does not draw any analytical distinction between collective defense and collective security and, therefore, undervalues the private or impure public features provided by alliances such as NATO. The club goods theory offers an important corollary to this model.

THE CLUB GOODS MODEL

Richard Cornes and Todd Sandler championed the club goods theory as an alternative approach to studying international goods. They define clubs as voluntary groups “deriving mutual benefit from sharing one or more of the following: production costs, the members “characteristics or a good char-acterized by excludable benefits.”73 Clubs possess several important char-acteristics: “excludability” (i.e., clubs discriminate between members and non-members), voluntarism, and sharing a certain type of good. Therefore, members choose to join certain clubs because, as rational actors, they antici-pate certain benefits from membership. Thus, the utility jointly derived from membership and the consumption of other goods for each of the members must exceed the utility associated with non-membership status. For example,


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in the case of NATO the members expect that the benefits of membership outweigh the costs associated with it.

Clubs incorporate the idea of sharing. They may share the use of im-pure public goods or the enjoyment of the desirable attributes of members. Whether this is a golf club membership, access to the clubhouse, or collective defense, club members inevitably need to share some sort of club facilities or goods. Therefore, the idea of sharing resources and access to goods results in competition over the access to these goods. Because, in most occasions, these resources are limited, the competition results in rivalry for club benefits, causing detraction from the quality of the services previously received. A classic example of such rivalry among nations includes the control of terri-tory, especially if it has valuable natural resources such as fishing whales in the open seas. Usually club members share partially rival public goods that are also excludable such as recreational facilities, tennis clubs, swimming pools, and highways. International security is a good example of an exclud-able good characterized with rivalry, whereby “the overriding goal of each state is to maximize its share of world power, which means gaining power at the expense of other states.”74 Alliances, on the other hand, illustrate a spe-cific form of rivalry where states compete over maximizing the benefits from collective defense, but also engage minimally in burden sharing to avoid any unnecessary costs. Therefore, by definition, alliances provide impure public goods or goods with mixed characteristics such as collective defense.

The club goods framework holds that a direct relationship exists between the size of the membership and the ratio between costs and benefits. As member-ship expands, both costs and benefits arise which leads to crowding. Costs in-volve increased congestion due to a higher number of members, while benefits result from cost reductions due to economies of scale that lower the expenses associated with the club good. By adding a cost offset to the benefits derived from expanding the club size, crowding ultimately leads to finite memberships. In other words, every club has a certain capacity before it becomes congested. Congestion exists when costs surpass benefits. In the case of NATO, the issue of congestion was raised on several occasions since 1997 when the Alliance invited new members with limited military capabilities to join when the Cold War ended.75 The logic of the congestion argument has been challenged by a number of scholars from international institutions who make the case that the persistence of security organizations like NATO is determined by the ability of their specific and general assets, i.e., norms, rules, and procedures to match “the kinds of security problems faced by its members.”76

The clubs also have important exclusionary mechanisms whereby users’ utilization rates can be monitored and non-members or non-payers can be barred. Without such mechanisms incentives for members to join and pay



dues would not exist. The operation of these mechanisms, however, must be at a reasonable cost, i.e., the costs should be lower than the benefits gained from allocating the shared goods. Also, the club goods framework distin-guishes between two different types of costs and benefits: those related to the individual members and those associated with the club as a whole. When ana-lyzing the clubs, it is necessary to distinguish between members with certain user privileges and non-members. In the case of NATO, after the Alliance launched its Partnership for Peace program (PfP) in 1994, most of the East European countries as well as the former Soviet Union joined the program but did not enjoy the privilege of collective defense under Article Five nor did they enjoy participation in any substantial decision-making. By the same token, the members of the club need to determine clearly the amount of the shared good. In the case of NATO, the territorial outreach of the collective defense is limited to within the “territory of any of the Parties in Europe or North America” as defined in Article Six of the North Atlantic Treaty.77 Thus, while NATO remains committed to further developing existing and opening new individual relationships with nations outside of the North Atlantic Area that currently cooperate with the Alliance under the global partnerships ini-tiative such as Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, their prospects of joining the organization are very bleak.78 While most of these nations have clearly expressed that they “are not really interested in becoming members,” they have, on numerous instances, indicated willingness to work with the alliance on its out-of-the-area missions and new allied capabilities, which are some-times referred to as the “collective security business.”79 Therefore, under the current provisions of the North Atlantic Treaty the Global Partners Initiative incorporates participants with minimal prospects for actual membership rather than a sub-club of potential entrants.

Homogeneous Clubs

The club goods theory distinguishes between two types of clubs based on their membership structure—homogeneous and heterogeneous. Homoge-neous clubs include members whose tastes and endowments are identical. If either tastes or endowments differ, then the club is called heterogeneous or mixed. In the economic and business world the majority of clubs are la-beled homogeneous. In international politics, homogeneity can usually be determined from a specific criterion, such as military power or economic wealth. Examples of relatively similar or homogeneous nations in terms of their wealth include the group of the most advanced industrial nations for-merly known as G-7. In the realm of international security other examples of relatively homogeneous clubs include the Austro-German Alliance of 1879


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and the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1891–1894. In both cases these states possessed great power status as well as relatively similar shares of European military resources in terms of population, defense appropriations, or defense personnel.80

The optimal membership size of these clubs is defined as the “core.” The core implies that no individual or set of individuals can improve their situ-ation by forming a different partition.81 When the optimum club size is less than the actual members, i.e., when the club has more members than it needs to function effectively, strong incentives exist for club members outside of the core to switch to other undersized clubs. Therefore, there is a natural tendency for clubs to equalize their size toward the most optimal number of members. As a result, a multi-club world provides safeguards against dis-crimination because members that feel discriminated against have the option to switch between clubs.82 Modern alliances include a much larger group of states. Thus, homogeneity becomes an aberrant condition rather than a rule for these international bodies, especially because alliances aggregate the varying capabilities of the states that create them. For this reason, an analysis of contemporary alliance politics needs to take into account variations in the size and individual characteristics of the states.

Heterogeneous Clubs

In the case of homogeneous clubs, an evaluation of each member’s own pay-offs is easier because club members are very similar and their contribution to the club equals everyone else’s. Studying heterogeneous clubs is, none-theless, “considerably more elusive” because of variation among individual members.83 No uniform approach surfaces in the literature that suggests a method to evaluate whether one member contributes more or less than the others. Some theorists suggest partitioning the heterogeneous population into similar relatively homogeneous groups of members before the average net benefits of each member within the group and of the different groups are evaluated. The criteria to determine homogeneity vary and may include the allocation of resources for defense, the size of the allies, their positions on the level and scope of cooperation within the club, and whether these allies pos-sess distinct military capabilities (e.g., airlift, rapid reaction and deployment, etc). Hence, the total net benefits to the heterogeneous clubs do not depend simply on the number of members but rather on the number and identity of the members (Table 1.3). Thus, the heterogeneous club model presents a flexible and yet adequate framework for studying NATO politics, whereby the alliance comprises several relatively homogeneous sub-clubs. The model allows theorists to draw comparisons within the various groups of relatively



similar members, and between the different larger groups (or sub-clubs) of allies.

The analysis of club goods dynamic implies that if a club has a monopoly over a certain good, that monopoly automatically leads to sub-optimality. A single-club world may also be optimal if low elasticity exists for demand of the good provided by the club for its members. From this perspective, NATO may be viewed as an optimal heterogeneous club only if the collective de-fense that it provides is regarded by some or all its members as an inferior or inelastic good, i.e., such a good that expenditure on it decreases or remains unchanged as income increases or at least the expenditure on the good in-creases by a smaller percentage than the income. Nonetheless, it is possible to have a situation in which there is only one club that establishes a monopoly over a certain good and, yet, it is optimal. It is known in the literature as a noncompetitive provision and implies that the mere presence of a single club does not necessarily lead to a monopoly. In part, the monopoly effect can be reduced by other sub-clubs that provide a near substitute of the specific good.

The club goods theory, therefore, departs from the traditional condition for competitiveness in economic literature and argues that monopoly or oli-gopoly does not necessarily imply large club inefficiencies. Member-owned clubs are examples of club management that may limit the amount of rent that the monopoly or oligopoly can capture. Hence, understanding an optimal

Table 1.3. Types of Clubs and Their Relevance to Alliance Politics

Type of Club Membership ExampleRelevance for Alliance Politics

Homogeneous clubs

Members with identical tastes and endowment

Golf Clubs; G-7; the Austro-German Alliance (1879); the Franco-Russian Alliance (1891-94)

1. The benefits depend on the number of the members.

2. Multi-club world provides safeguards against discrimination.

Heterogeneous clubs

Members with different tastes and endowment

NATO; the Axis powers; the Western allies during World War II

1. The benefits depend on the number and identity of the members (club’s core).

2. Sub-clubs provide near substitute and reduce the monopoly effect.


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monopolistic or oligopolistic club like NATO requires a theoretical model that somehow corresponds to a member-owned and -operated club solution. Although in international security it is difficult to assume that any state is able to establish a monopoly over a certain club, the disparities in the capabilities between the United States and the rest of the NATO allies create a dynamic that may, under certain conditions, be analogous to a member-owned mo-nopoly or oligopoly by the state that has an unmatched resource base and capabilities.

The heterogeneous clubs present a framework of analysis for alliance man-agement in the presence of a non-competitive condition. This condition deter-mines a special role of the United States in dealing with issues of transatlantic diplomacy and efforts to coordinate the outcome of intra-club bargaining on various issues. For example, the active involvement of the U.S. in ISAF has, on multiple occasions, influenced inter-allied bargaining and has resulted in enhancing the operation’s effectiveness.

The Team and the Club Concepts

The club dynamic bears a resemblance to another similar concept in the literature on transatlantic security and diplomacy—that of the teams. The un-derlying assumption in the team is that different players exist each possessing distinct roles and skills.84 Therefore, the team’s ability to function is based on specialization and interdependence, both of which rest on a combination of a common value set and a common goal. Specialization is the organizing principle of a team. The underlying logic is that players specialize to various degrees depending on the overall capability of the team.85 Interdependence, on the other hand, is the team’s modus operandi. Interdependence creates difficulty for community members to act independently. Alternatively, a lack of interdependence allows for unilateral actions when common action is not optimal. The teams have a sense of inherent equilibrium in which the interlocking specialization between the United States and European countries automatically leads to “team entrapment” that appears attractive on both sides of the Atlantic.

The team concept, however, does not take into account several distinctive features of heterogeneous clubs. Despite the distinction between “superstars” and ordinary members of the team, a distinction that highlights the gap in individual members’ capabilities, the concept fails to account for diverg-ing identities and patterns of intergovernmental bargaining among different members of the club. For example, the team assumes that the roles of the individual players are determined in advance and are not contested or chal-lenged by any of team members. In reality intergovernmental bargaining often requires individual partners to adjust positions, which is a long and



burdensome process. The initiation of the 2004 NATO Training Mission in Iraq and the negotiations surrounding NATO’s contingency planning for the 2003 war in Iraq constitute two examples that illustrate the complexity of transatlantic dialogue. Therefore, the idea of the team reflects a desirable out-come of harmonious transatlantic cooperation rather than the actual process of accommodating differences among different allies.

The club goods model and the team concept share, nonetheless, a common understating about partnership being the organizing principle of cooperation. The idea of specialization embedded in the team and the club concepts as-sumes that specialization utilizes more efficiently their scarce resources in the area of security. Additionally, team logic rests on the comparative advantage theory’s argument that resources allocated to security can be used more cost-efficiently if countries form a team and specialize. Specialization is attractive even for countries with the same or lower levels of efficiency in production of all goods.

Although the clubs and the teams share similar assumptions, the hetero-geneous clubs present a broader framework. For example, the criteria for homogeneity within the club varies and may include the size of the allies, the allocation of resources for defense (e.g., defense spending), the scope and size of military capabilities of the individual members (e.g., airlift, rapid reaction and deployment, etc), or their positions on the level and scope of cooperation within the club. The club suggests that the alliance outcome may or may not result in specialization, which depends on specific circumstances. The key focus, nonetheless, is on the relationship between the management of allied resources and the development of specific capabilities. Specialization is only one aspect of this relationship. Lastly, the problem with the team is that it undervalues the effect of bargaining among different European coun-tries. The team vision, nonetheless, provide a valuable analysis about how to manage relations within smaller, relatively homogeneous units. Teams are also particularly useful in understanding the development of niche capabili-ties, such as multinational teams and force enablers, both of which will be discussed later in the book.

NATO’s Heterogeneity

Earlier studies implicitly identify some features of the heterogeneous club dynamic with regard to NATO politics such as the distinction between pub-lic goods and private benefits that the Alliance provides for its members, or the gap between national objectives and the objectives of the Alliance as a whole. James Golden indicates that “there is no unity of objectives between national defense contributions and alliance defense contributions.”86 He


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suggests that, in the absence of a compelling mechanism to convince the member states to place the common interest above the private interest, NATO leaders must search for bilateral political, economic, and security agreements among member nations. Golden’s study on NATO during the Cold War showed a causal link between the size of the allies, their wealth in terms of gross national income, and their spending on defense. This means that during most of its existence, NATO has been functioning as a heterogeneous club where the members’ resources for common defense vary significantly. The presence of different sub-clubs of allies with similar features based on their history, geography, and size has always been a distinctive feature of NATO politics, and different allies have contributed disproportionately more or less to the common defense.

Scholars on NATO admit that creating a measure and comparing national defense contributions have always been a major challenge. Consider, for example, the case of Iceland. The country has no defense forces nor defense budget but its key geographic position constitutes a critical element in alli-ance defense. Additionally, inflation and exchange rate fluctuations tend to overestimate or underestimate any nation’s resources.87 Currently this issue is less of a concern given the fact that as of January 1, 2011, twelve NATO allies have introduced a single European currency—the Euro—and seven others are expected to do the same within the next four to six years. As a part of this process, the new NATO allies and EU members have stabilized their currencies’ exchange rates.88 Although today fewer constraints exist in evaluating the national contributions of NATO members in terms of actual defense expenditure measured in national currencies or in terms of the share of gross national product, there is still no uniform approach in place about how to operationalize defense contributions. The size of member states is certainly important in determining their overall contribution. Alternatively, the elimination of the size factor allows studying the contribution to collec-tive defense per capita, thus illustrating other aspects of the dynamic within NATO sub-clubs, and between them.

While previous research has explored the relationship between defense spending and national wealth in the context of the Cold War, testing the model for the expanded NATO has both theoretical and methodological im-plications.89 It provides an opportunity to compare the outcomes of the club dynamic in an enlarged NATO. Also, the model allows for exploration of the intra-club dynamic and the relations between, and among, various allies and sub-clubs. In Golden’s model, the base year is 1980 primarily because of data availability and reliability, while in this study, the base year is 2004 because that year marks the largest expansion in NATO’s history with seven new members. It is important to compare the correlation between defense



expenditure and national income in 2004 with the average values for the period between 1994 and 2004. The decade between 1994 and 2004 was probably the period of biggest change in NATO’s history that fundamentally transformed NATO politics: it began with the historical Brussels declaration adopted in 1994, followed by the initiation of the PfP program the same year, the new operations in Bosnia and Kosovo (1994–1999), the introduction of the Membership Action Plan (MAP), and ended with NATO’s involvement in Afghanistan and the big bang expansion in 2004.90 This dynamic is shown in Figures 1.1 and 1.3 where the defense expense and GDP indicators for each of the NATO countries have been averaged for the period between 1994 and 2004.

The relationship between defense expenditures and national income for 2004, as well as for the entire period between 1994 and 2004, shows sev-eral important tendencies. First, the correlations for 2004 and those for the period between 1994 and 2004 do not differ substantially. The data for 2004 highlight the overall tendency for the whole decade. Second, similar to 1980, the United States remains the highest defense spender in 2004 followed by Greece, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. These four countries clearly sur-pass the rest of NATO in terms of defense spending. Third, although the U.S. case is excluded from Figures 1.1 and 1.2 for technical reasons, the data show

Figure 1.1 Relationship between Defense Expenditures and National Income (average 1994–2004)


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that the gap in defense spending between the U.S. and the rest of the allies has almost tripled since 1980. In the last decade alone this gap has soared about 20–30 percent because of the increased U.S. spending on the war on terror.

The per capita data for 1980 indicate that, aside from the United States, four major groups of allies could be identified. The first group includes al-lies with substantial military resources: the United Kingdom, France, and the Federal Republic of Germany. The second group comprises the poorer countries in Southern Europe with below average per capita incomes: Italy, Greece, Portugal, and Turkey. The last group includes several relatively small but rich states in the north: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Norway.91 The relationship between defense spending and per capita income for 2004 points to the fact that the picture has not changed substantially for the old NATO members as shown in Figure 1.4: three relatively poor but high defense spenders existed in the south—Turkey, Greece, and Portugal. The other two groups of allies remained relatively unchanged. France, the United Kingdom, and Italy belonged to the group

Figure 1.2. Relationship between Defense Expenditures and Na-tional Income (2004)



of major allies with significant military resources and strength. Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Luxemburg, and Spain formed another group of relatively rich countries with low defense spending. The only major difference from the 1980s in this respect is that in 2004 Germany dropped from the group of allies who maintained higher defense spending and moved to the group of small and wealthy West European nations who maintain low levels of spending. Alternatively, with a defense spending of about 2 percent Italy and Norway switched to the sub-club of big NATO allies with major resources and above average defense spending.

Aside from sheer size and defense spending, when it comes to the for-mation of sub-clubs, the identity of individual allies along the Atlanticist-Europeanist continuum also must be considered. France, Belgium, and Lux-embourg are the staunchest Europeanists and they often seek cooperation with the moderate Europeanists in the south (Spain, Portugal, and Greece), while Germany, Italy, and, to a certain degree, Norway are among the mod-erate Atlanticists. Alternatively, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and the Netherlands are strong Atlanticists seeking close cooperation with the United States and Canada across a large number of issues dealing with transatlantic security.

One major difference from NATO’s dynamic in 1980, however, is the emergence of an entirely new group—that of the new allies from Central and Eastern Europe. They have two very similar characteristics: First, their national income is fairly low, comparable only to that of Greece and Turkey. Second, their defense spending (as a percentage of their gross national prod-uct) is slightly below or around the average of the Alliance. Certainly varia-tions exist within the group—some of the members’ populations constitute only as few as 1.3–2 million people (Estonia, Slovenia, and Latvia), while others like Romania and Poland have a population of about 22 and 38 mil-lion respectively. Hungary and the Czech Republic are closest to the median size of the new allies at ten million.92 At the same time, the structure of the armed forces and the pace of military reforms indicate a major degree of uniformity among those countries which is also captured in the relationship between income allocated to defense and national income per capita. Albeit, with certain variations, most of the new allies from Central and Eastern Eu-rope have a strong Atlanticist identity that can be explained by their history, national strategic interests, as well as their “recent real-world experience.”93 Thus, based on these criteria, the new countries from Central and Eastern Europe emerged as one of the most coherent groups among all member-states (Figures 1.3 and 1.4).94

Lastly, a noticeable trend among a number of European allies illustrated in Figures 1.3 and 1.4 is to be found in their reduction of defense spending. For


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example, while in 2004 eleven of NATO’s twenty-six members met the of-ficial goal of spending 2 percent of their GDP on defense, in 2006 only seven allies (two of which are from Eastern Europe) met this goal.95 Thus, NATO as a whole recorded one of the lowest levels of defense spending of the indi-vidual members leading to immense frustration within the United States at the unwillingness of European allies to contribute to collective defense.

This survey of the relationship between national wealth and defense spend-ing confirmed that the club goods theory is a useful framework through which to study NATO politics. The Alliance has always been a heterogeneous club that brings together diverse members. Based on the size of its members and the amount of resources that they are willing to allocate for common defense, at least several relatively homogeneous sub-clubs have always existed. The latest rounds of expansion in 1999, 2004, and 2009 introduced a whole new sub-club of members from Central and Eastern Europe who share relatively similar characteristics. The variation of nations’ size and defense spending barely accounts for NATO’s heterogeneity. The differences of their national positions require a great deal of compromises and accommodation before an actual decision is being made. Is such a decision optimal and what are the

Figure 1.3. Relationship between Share of Income Allocated to Defense and Per Capita Income (average 1994–2004)



criteria for optimality? Does optimality entail solely ensuring or sustaining Alliance cohesion or does it also include effective implementation of desired goals?

The optimality of the decision-making can be evaluated from two different perspectives—as a process of making a collective decision or an outcome resulting from this decision. As discussed earlier, NATO’s decision-making process outlined in Article Five of the North Atlantic Treaty requires con-sensus among all allies. If the positions of individual members diverge and a compromise is not possible, the Alliance cannot act and an arrangement can only be reached outside of the club. Such a scenario, however, excludes access to key NATO assets; it would not be endorsed by the Alliance and would, therefore, hamper significantly the legitimacy of possible use of force. Despite the argument that fewer participants have a higher chance to reach a compromise, decisions negotiated within smaller groups of nations lack widespread recognition in the international community. As a result, coalition-based decision-making within issue-oriented sub-clubs, produces goods

Figure 1.4. Relationship between Share of Income Allocated to Defense and Per Capita Income (2004)


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whose value is lower compared to consensus-based decision-making that involves all club members. Most of NATO’s post-Cold War decisions to in-tervene in conflicts were preceded by an authorization of the United Nations Security Council in order to ensure legitimacy of international action and inclusive participation of all members; the use of force against Yugoslavia in 1999 being a notable exception in this respect. Heterogeneous institutions like NATO have some inherent virtues—not only do they provide geographic advantages, and access to current and potential military resources, but also they serve as a tool to legitimize multilateral action. Therefore, NATO needed to accommodate the diverging identities of its members to avoid pos-sible unilateral action or formation of coalitions outside of NATO that would be, by default, sub-optimal.

Oftentimes when a decision is put forward at the North Atlantic Council (NAC), the members have contrasting strategic preferences. Additionally, allies may have different perceptions of threat and may choose not to share the burden of costs and risks equally. Their dependency on allies and alliance structures may also vary—those who are more dependent on others “feel greater compulsion to defer to the wishes of their benefactors.”96 Therefore, when a proposal is put on NAC’s table, the allies can either approve it as it is; modify the proposal if one or several allies disagree or when an individual member disagrees but does not want to resort to its veto power; or abstain and then refuse to participate in the collective effort. Even though the lat-ter scenario may influence adversely the size of allied contributions, it is often preferred to a possible use of veto. In theory, optimal decision-making entails not only consensus building but also efficient management of allied resources and enhanced capabilities to conduct successfully out-of-the-area operations. Nonetheless, the process does not follow strictly this rule as illus-trated in the case of NAC’s decision in 1997 to put on hold Slovenia’s bid for membership. Slovenia was considered a strong and well-prepared candidate whose application was received well in Europe and in the U.S. Senate, but the Clinton administration decided that an invitation of three candidates that excluded Slovenia would be easier to accept internationally and at home.97 Despite some notable exceptions, for the most part consensual decision-making increases the likelihood to engage all members and hence improves organizational efficiency.

An assertion that reaching a consensus which takes into account national differences creates the best outcome may be problematic especially if op-timality is measured in terms of outcome and overall impact of the deci-sion for the alliance. Consider for example NATO’s decision in the case of Kosovo in 1999. During the NAC deliberations it was important to find a mutually acceptable decision and sustain cohesion during the entire campaign against Yugoslavia. However, such lowest common denominator policy was



criticized because it unveiled multiple operational constraints that curbed NATO’s overall effectiveness. The alliance was able to successfully com-plete its mission primarily because Serbia was a fairly small albeit obstinate adversary. In more difficult instances, however, a lowest common denomina-tor policy is not always effective.

NATO’s involvement in Afghanistan is a poignant example in this respect. Soon after ISAF’s inception in 2002, the alliance began to experience con-stant problems securing sufficient troop commitment from its members. Vari-ous operational problems after 2005 made multinational cooperation more difficult. With the exception of six contributing nations, most of the troops in Afghanistan operated under certain national caveats that imposed various constraints regarding military activities in which allied troops were allowed to participate while carrying out their missions.98 When NATO agreed to take over the mission in Afghanistan, with the exception of the United States, most of the allies were not equipped with capabilities to participate in coun-ter-terrorism operations. Additionally, many participating nations imposed various caveats on their troop involvement to ensure themselves against a backdrop of domestic and international criticism. These decisions restricted significantly the scope of their involvement in combat operations as well as the capacity of their troops to respond adequately. Different groups of con-tributing nations emerged due to NATO’s heterogeneity: allies such as the United Kingdom, Denmark, Canada, and the Netherlands joined the United States in provinces with high-intensity conflicts, while others like Germany, France, and many of the new allies chose to stay in areas with low-intensity of combat operations where the death toll is much lower. Therefore, the United States stepped in and unilaterally provided much needed combat troops and capabilities. Some scholars saw this “crippling Americanization” of the con-flict in Afghanistan as an indication that NATO has become an organization with marginal and “largely supportive” role in which some allies preferred to coordinate counter-terrorism efforts “through bilateral activities or loose coalitions.”99 Although a separate study is devoted to this case in chapter 6, it is necessary to note that the lack of consensus and further commitment of the allies naturally reflects the alliance’s limited capabilities to meet the specific operational demands of the mission. Nonetheless, there is a major constraint from an academic standpoint to evaluate alternative explanations in the cases of Kosovo and Afghanistan in which a different format of international in-volvement, such as a unilateral action or a broad coalition, might have been more efficient. A study of a would-be unilateral or coalition-based action is simply not feasible methodologically.


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RESEARCH METHOD

Despite the abundance of literature that grapples with different aspects of NATO politics, the scholarship lacks a comprehensive study that integrates all different aspects of its transformation in a comprehensive explanatory framework. This book attempts to fill in the existing theoretical vacuum and offer a holistic approach to studying NATO’s transformation in terms of new allies, missions, and capabilities. By focusing on the link between available resources and the development of new capabilities aimed at supporting new allied missions, this study answers the question of how NATO functions in the post-Cold War era and how allied power is being managed in the course of its transformation.

The selection of methods and research procedure is constrained by the fact that NATO constitutes a sui generis political and military alliance. With its sixty years of existence, it has proven to be one of the most sustainable, long-lasting alliances with very clear and unprecedented commitments embedded in Article Five of the North Atlantic Treaty. Not only did NATO incorpo-rate a dozen new members after the Cold War, but it also undertook major tasks beyond its traditional collective defense responsibilities in places like Bosnia, Kosovo, the Mediterranean, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Therefore, the single case study may be the most appropriate method for several reasons. First, this particular case contributes to identifying common patterns of alliance politics and suggests broader generalizations often referred to as “building block studies” that pose tough tests for existing theories of alli-ance management.100 Developing a model that studies the management of military resources and allied capabilities poses such a tough case because it studies key ingredients of power politics in a new contextual environ-ment in which NATO undergoes major transformation. Second, alternative methods, such as the comparative method, seem hardly applicable because they require at least two or more instances of alliance transformation that resemble each other in every respect but one.101 Instead, the study employs variable-oriented within-case analyses that seek causal relationship(s) of a specific variable by comparing how it performs in different instances within a particular case. These comparisons compensate for the limits of statistical and comparative case studies and are critical to the “viability of the small-n analysis.” Third, the study employs “process-tracing” which identifies a causal path between two types of relationships: (a) the effect that the avail-able resources (independent variables) have on the advancement of allied capabilities (the dependent variable); and (b) how the demand for new mis-sions influences the outcome of these capabilities.



Hypotheses

The interconnectedness of the three patterns of NATO’s transformation—the new allies, missions, and capabilities will be explored through three separate hypotheses. The underlying logic is that after the end of the Cold War the Alliance has been able to transform itself by efficiently using the available resources of its member states in order to boost much needed allied capabili-ties. The three hypotheses are summarized in table 1.4.

The first hypothesis studies the evidence for a relationship between military resources and specific allied capabilities. It is tested through a multi-method approach—quantitative study and a survey of NATO’s capabilities that are needed for peacekeeping, crisis prevention and response, and stability and reconstruction missions. The hypothesis is tested against three groups of nations: old members, new members, and four non-NATO European Union members (Austria, Finland, Ireland, and Sweden).

The second hypothesis explores to what extent and how the demand for new missions stimulates the advancement of new allied capabilities. This hy-pothesis is important because, if confirmed, it presents evidence for a causal relationship between the demand for new missions and the development of new capabilities. The hypothesis will be tested primarily through a qualitative

Table 1.4. Hypotheses Tested

Hypothesis Statement/ Proposition

Nations or Cases against which the hypothesis is tested

Hypothesis One There is a relationship between the available military resources and specific allied capabilities.

The old NATO members (Iceland excluded)The new NATO membersFour non-NATO members of

the European UnionHypothesis Two The demand for new out-of-the-

area missions contributes to the development of specific allied capabilities.

Peacekeeping MissionsCrisis Management MissionsNon-proliferation Missions

and Stabilization Operations

International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan

Hypothesis Three NATO membership stimulates the advancement of allied capabilities.

The old NATO alliesThe new NATO alliesFour non-NATO members of

the European Union


36 Chapter 1

survey of NATO’s three core missions in post-Cold War international secu-rity—peacekeeping, crisis prevention, and reconstruction—and how they are related to the initiation and development of specific capabilities (e.g., com-bined joint task forces, rapid reaction forces, and multi-national battalions for chemical, nuclear, biological, and radiological defense).

The third hypothesis is related the first one and studies to what extent the process of expansion is related to the advancement of NATO’s new capabili-ties. The study surveys whether the prospect for membership has stimulated a more efficient use of available resources as well as development of new capabilities for countries that have recently joined NATO as opposed to non-members who are interested in joining NATO, as well as non-members who do not plan to join the Alliance in the near future. This hypothesis is tested primarily through a survey of patterns in the process of NATO expansion from the mid-1990s to early 2000s.

Data Collection

As indicated earlier, the research combines quantitative and qualitative data to survey the transformation patterns of NATO members in the 1990s and 2000s. The goal of the mixed-method approach is to test the validity of the argument from two different methodological perspectives and ultimately de-velop a theoretical explanation that rests on the logic of heterogeneous clubs and the concept of complementarities.

The quantitative component of the study identifies indicators that best represent the theoretical concepts intended to measure military power, peace-keeping, crisis prevention and response, and the capacity to stabilize the area of conflict. The quantitative method is also valuable toward identifying and operationalizing new variables and hypotheses, such as the relationship be-tween military resources and allied capabilities. Most of the quantitative data have been collected from two main sources: the Military Balance (MB) Year-book and Stockholm Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Database. Occasion-ally, due to the rotation of troops or the shift of missions, the MB database tends to underestimate or overestimate the actual values of the data through recording both the new and old troops or recording none. In order to avoid data spuriousness, the MB and the SIPRI data have been compared and, in cases of discrepancy between the two databases, the data have been checked against other alternative sources, such as national governments’ statistics, to confirm actual values.

The case study approach yields several advantages compared to the large-n approach of the quantitative methods—it provides conceptual validity, explores causal mechanisms, and derives new hypotheses. It is much more



feasible within a single case to use a variety of methods in order to test the consistency of a larger number of alternative explanations. For example, the qualitative part of the study includes a survey of primary sources (official NATO and national documents, press releases, and leaders’ statements) and interviews with decision-makers. The interview component of the data collection provided a trade-off among theoretical parsimony, explanatory richness, a manageable number of cases, as well as generation of valuable original data. The semi-structured format of the interviews with open-ended questions gave freedom to probe and formulate follow-up questions. The interviewees were determined based on two criteria: First, they represent the national elites of NATO members, i.e., people in decision-making or leadership roles; and second, the respondents are experts about the topic at hand. Two types of elites meet these criteria: (a) government representatives, such as national delegations and permanent representations in Brussels, or the foreign and defense ministries of these countries; and (b) representatives from non-governmental organizations and think tanks, such as the Brookings Institution, the Wilson Center, and the George C. Marshall Associations in Eastern Europe. The sample included over a dozen representatives of the po-litical elites in the United States, Western Europe, and Eastern Europe. These interviews were conducted in 2006 in Brussels, Belgium; Sofia, Bulgaria; and Washington, D.C. The interviewees varied from scholars and researchers on U.S. foreign policy and transatlantic relations to high-ranking policy makers in the United States, diplomats from the national delegations at the NATO Headquarters, and think-tank representatives.

There is little doubt that the focus on NATO’s post-Cold War transforma-tion poses numerous methodological challenges. The single-case mixed-methods approach may not be the only way to examine the patterns of NATO’s post-Cold War transformation, but it may be the most appropriate. Alternatively, a comparative study of several similar historical or contempo-rary cases would expand the theoretical findings. The problem of the com-parative approach is that it is very hard to find historical or contemporary analogy to NATO’s scope, durability, and levels of commitment that could render basis for such a comparison.

NOTES

1. George Liska, Nations in Alliance (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), 3.2. Glenn Snyder, Alliance Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 4.3. Stephen Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,

1987), 12.


38 Chapter 1

4. Hans Morgenthau, Politics among Nations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948) [Fifth Edition, 1973], 181.

5. Kenneth Waltz, Theories of International Politics (Addison-Wesley, 1979), 125.

6. Walt, The Origins, 1. 7. Walt, The Origins, 29–30. 8. Randall Schweller, “Bandwagoning for Profit: Bringing the Revisionist State

Back In,” International Security 19, no. 1 (Summer 1994), 74. 9. Stephen David, “Explaining Third World Alignment,” World Politics 43, no.

2 (January 1991), 233–57; and Choosing Sides: Alignment and Realignment in the Third World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).

10. Richard Harknett and Jeffrey VanDenBerg, “Alignment Theory and Interre-lated Threats,” Security Studies 6, no. 3 (Spring 1997), 113–14.

11. Charles Kegley and Gregory Raymond, A Multipolar Peace? Great-Power Politics in the Twenty-First Century (New York: St. Martin Press, 1994), 95.

12. Michael Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs” in International Politics and Contemporary Issues, ed. Robert Art and Robert Jervis (Longman, 2003), 97.

13. Doyle, “Kant,” 97.14. Michael Doyle, “Liberalism and World Politics,” American Political Science

Review 80, no. 4 (December 1986), 1156.15. Rebecca Moore, NATO’s New Mission: Projecting Stability in a Post-Cold

War World (Praeger, 2007), 2.16. Andrew Moravcsik, The Choice of Europe: Social Purpose and State Power

from Messina to Maastricht (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 4.17. See Kenneth Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (Yale University

Press, 1951); also Donald Green and Ian Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice: A Critique of Applications in Political Science (Yale University Press, 1994).

18. Green and Shapiro, Pathologies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 14.

19. See Duncan Luce and Howard Raffa, Games and Decisions (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1957), 50, quoted by Green and Shapiro, Pathologies, 15.

20. Snyder, Alliance Politics,177.21. Ivo Daalder, The Nature and Practice of Flexible Response: NATO Strategy

and Theatre Nuclear Forces since 1967 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 23–38.

22. Rationalist research on international alliances includes Glenn Snyder, Alli-ances; William Riker, The Theory of Political Coalitions (Yale University Press, 1962); Mancur Olson and Richard Zeckhauser, An Economic Theory of Alliances (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 1966); Celeste Wallander, “Institutional As-sets and Adaptability: NATO After the Cold War,” International Organization 54, no. 4 (October 2000); Celeste Wallander and Robert Keohane, “Risk, Threat and Se-curity Institutions” in Power and Governance in a Partially Globalized World (New York: Routledge: Taylor and Francis Group, 2002), 97.

23. Kegley and Raymond, A Multipolar, 95.



24. Snyder, Alliances, 165.25. Riker, The Theory of Political Coalitions, 40.26. Jane Stromseth, The Origins of Flexible Response: NATO’s Debate over Strat-

egy in the 1960s (London: Macmillan Press, 1988), 6.27. Olson and Zeckhauser, An Economic Theory, v–vi.28. Lisa Martin, “The Promise of Institutionalist Theory,” International Security

20, no. 1 (Summer 1995), 42.29. Martin, “The Promise,” 44–49.30. Wallander, “Institutional Assets,” 705.31. For further details on the distinction between defensive and offensive realists

see Christopher Layne, The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present (Cornell University Press, 2006); and John J. Mearsheimer, The Trag-edy of the Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).

32. Kenneth Waltz, “The Emerging Structure of International Politics,” Interna-tional Security 18, no. 2 (Fall 1993), 75–76.

33. John S. Duffield, “Transatlantic Relations after the Cold War: Theory, Evi-dence, and the Future,” International Studies Perspectives 2, no. 1 (April 2001), 97.

34. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy, 43.35. Christopher Layne argues that Mearsheimer’s argument is based on two sepa-

rate theories because the stopping power of water is essentially a defensive realist concept. For further detail see Layne, The Peace, 19–20; also “The Debate Continues: American Hegemony in Theoretical and Historical Perspective: Christopher Layne’s The Peace of Illusions,” 47th International Studies Association Annual Convention, San Diego, California, March 22–25, 2006.

36. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy, 382.37. William Wohlforth, “The Stability of a Unipolar World,” International Secu-

rity 24, no. 2 (Summer 1999); G. John Ikenberry, America Unrivaled: The Future of the Balance of Power (Cornell University Press, 2002) and G. John Ikenberry, Lib-eral Order and Imperial Ambition: American Power and International Order (Polity Press, 2005).

38. T.V. Paul, James Wirtz, and Michael Fortmann, eds., “Balance of Power at the Turn of the New Century” in Balance of Power: Theory and Practice in the 21st Century, ed. T.V. Paul, James Wirtz and Michael Fortmann (Stanford University Press 2004), 366.

39. Paul, Wirtz, and Fortmann, “Balance of Power,” 365.40. Layne, The Peace, 143.41. Robert Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World

Political Economy (Princeton University Press, 1984; reprinted in 2005), 27.42. Wallander and Keohane, “Risk, Threat,” 97.43. Ikenberry, America Unraveled, 17.44. Wallander and Keohane, “Risk, Threat,” 108, and Joseph Nye, The Paradox

of American Power: Why the World’s Superpower Can’t Go It Alone (Oxford Uni-versity Press, 2002), 17.

45. Keohane, After Hegemony, 27–31.


40 Chapter 1

46. G. John Ikenberry, “Liberal Hegemony and the Future of American Postwar Order” in International Order and the Future of World Politics, ed. T. V. Paul and John Hall (University of Cambridge Press, 1999), 125.

47. Snyder, Alliances, 169.48. The North Atlantic Treaty, Washington D.C., 4 April 1949, http://www.nato.

int/docu/basictxt/treaty.htm, (accessed May 20, 2009)49. The North Atlantic Treaty, 1949.50. Snyder, Alliances, 170.51. David Mitrany, “A Working Peace System,” in The European Union: Read-

ings on the Theory and Practice of the European Integration, ed. Brent Nelsen and Alexander Stubb (Lynne Riener Publishers, Second Edition, 1998), 99.

52. David Mitrany, “A Working Peace,” 109.53. Andrew Moravcsik, “The European Constitutional Compromise and the Neo-

functionalist Legacy,” Journal of European Public Policy 12, no. 2 (April 2005), 351.54. Ernst Haas, “International Integration: the European and the Universal Pro-

cess” in International Political Communities: an Anthology (1) Anchor Book, New York, 1966, 103.

55. Karl Deutsch, et al, “Political Community and the North Atlantic Area” in Readings on the Theory and Practice of the European Integration, ed. Brent Nelsen and Alexander Stubb (Boulder, London 1998), 118.

56. Karl Deutsch et al, Political Community and the North Atlantic Area: interna-tional organization in the light of historical experience (Princeton University Press, 1957), 29.

57. Thomas Risse-Kappen, “Collective Identity in a Democratic Community: The Case of NATO,” in The Culture of National Security, ed. Peter Katzenstein (New York, Columbia University Press, 1996), 372.

58. Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett, Security Communities (Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1998), 17.

59. Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1965 [1977 edition]), 21.

60. Richard Cornes and Todd Sandler, The Theory of Externalities, Public Goods and Club Goods (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 6.

61. Barry Hughes “The EC and the Evolution of Complex Governance” in The Future of Integration in Europe (Armonk, N.Y: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), 49–52.

62. Barry Hughes calls the goods that exhibit excludability and non-rivalry coordination goods, while those goods that exhibit rivalry and non-excludability are referred to as common property resources, see Barry Hughes, “The EC and the Evolution,” 49.

63. See Cornes and Sandler, The Theory of Externalities, as well as Todd Sandler and Keith Hartley, The Political Economy of NATO (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

64. Inis L Claude, Jr., Power and International Relations (New York: Random House 1962), 114.

65. Charles Kupchan and Clifford Kupchan, “The Promise of Collective Secu-rity,” International Security 20, no. 1 (Summer 1995), 59.



66. Marina Finkelstein and Lawrence Finkelstein, Collective Security (San Francisco, 1966) and David Yost, NATO Transformed: The Alliance’s New Roles in International Security (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1998), 5–9.

67. Geoffrey Williams and Barkley Jones, NATO and the Transatlantic Alliance in the XXI Century (Cambridge: The Institute of Economic and Political Studies, 2001), 88.

68. Olson and Zeckhauser, An Economic Theory, 11.69. For details about collective goods model see Olson and Zeckhauser, An Eco-

nomic Theory, v.70. Olson and Zeckhauser, An Economic Theory, vi.71. John Peters, Steward Johnson, Nora Bensahel, Tim Liston, and Tracy Wil-

liams, European Contributions to Operation Allied Force: Implications for Transat-lantic Cooperation (RAND Corporation, 2001), 90–93.

72. Miroslav Nincic and Thomas Cusack explain the variation in U.S. defense spending during the Cold War with the perceived utility of such spending in stabiliz-ing aggregate demand, the perceived economic effects arising out of such spending, and the pressure of various institutional constituency-related factors. For details see Miroslav Nincic and Thomas Cusack, “The Political Economy of US Military Spend-ing,” Journal of Peace Research 16, no. 2 (1979), 101–15.

73. Cornes and Sandler, The Theory of Externalities, 159. 74. John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy (New York: WW Norton, 2001), 2.75. Concerns about the utility of NATO expansion and skepticism about the in-

corporation of new members were first expressed by political scientists and policy makers in the mid-1990s. For further details see Michael Mandelbaum, “Preserving the New Peace,” Foreign Affairs (May/June 1995); Ted Galen Carpenter and Barbara Conry, NATO Enlargement: Illusions and Reality (Washington D.C.: Cato Institute, 1998); and Zoltan Barany, The Future of NATO Expansion (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

76. Wallander, “Institutional Assets,” 706.77. The North Atlantic Treaty, Washington, D.C., April 4, 1949, http://www.nato

.int/docu/basictxt/treaty.htm, (accessed August 9, 2007).78. Bucharest Summit Declaration, issued by the Heads of State and Government

participating in the meeting of the North Atlantic Council in Bucharest on April 3, 2008, http://www.nato.int/docu/pr/2008/p08-049e.html, (accessed March 16, 2009).

79. Transcripts from the Atlantic Council Meeting with General James Jones, former Supreme Allied Commander Europe, “Reflections on NATO” (The Atlantic Council, Washington, D.C., Thursday, December 21, 2006), 6.

80. Despite some variation in terms of population, energy consumption, or defense personnel, the composite resource indexes of the individual allies were very similar. For details see Snyder, Alliances, 82–83; and Paul M. Kennedy, “The First World War and the International Power System,” International Security 9, no. 1 (Summer 1984), 7–41.

81. Cornes and Sandler, The Theory of Externalities, 199.82. Waltz, Theories, 93.


42 Chapter 1

83. Cornes and Sandler, The Theory of Externalities, 201–2.84. Richard Harknett, “A World Challenged: Globalization, Sovereignty, and the

Material Capability to Harm,” Fulbright Public Lecture (March 19, 2002, Diplomatic Academy, Vienna, Austria).

85. Borek Lizec, Transatlantic Team Vision Founded on Interlocking Security Specialization: An Attractive Alternative to the Transatlantic Partnership (Doctoral Dissertation, the Economic University of Prague, Czech Republic, 2005), 77.

86. James Golden, The Dynamics of Change in NATO (New York: Praeger, 1983), 77.

87. Comparing the inflation rates during the 1990s is not as challenging for the old NATO allies as it is for the new NATO members. Although the economies in the old allies (with exception of Turkey) have shown a steady growth and low infla-tion, that has not been the case in Central and Eastern Europe, where the economies experienced high levels of inflation and substantial exchange rate fluctuations in the early and mid-1990s. As a result, there are significant fluctuations in the total defense expenditure, the national product, and even the share of the national product spent on defense. Also, the inflation effect is strengthened by the major economic and financial crises that some of the Eastern European countries experienced during their transition in the 1990s such as Poland, the Czech Republic, and Bulgaria.

88. The convergence criteria (also known as the Maastricht criteria) determine the conditions under which the European Union member states can adopt the Euro. The countries in the Euro-zone need to meet four criteria: (a) the inflation rate should not exceed 1.5 percent of the three best-performing member states of the EU; (b) the government deficit must not exceed 3 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) at the end of the preceding fiscal year and the ratio of gross government debt to GDP must not exceed 60 percent at the end of the preceding fiscal year; (c) the member states should not have devaluated their currency for two consecutive years; and (d) the long-term interest rate must not exceed 2 percent of the three best-performing member states in the Euro zone.

89. James Golden developed a matrix to evaluate national contributions in the context of alliance objectives and this study employs his methodology; see Golden, The Dynamics, 25–51.

90. See Declaration of the Heads of State and Government participating in the meeting of the North Atlantic Council (“The Brussels Summit Declaration”), Brus-sels, January 11, 1994, http://www.nato.int/docu/basictxt/b940111a.htm, accesssed on August 14, 2007.

91. Golden, The Dynamics, 44–45.92. On the population size of the new NATO allies see The Europa World Year

Book (London: Taylor and Francis Group, 34 through 45, 1993–2004).93. Ronald D. Asmus and Alex Vondra, “The Origins of Atlanticism in Central

and Eastern Europe,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 18, no. 2 (July 2005), 204.

94. Slovenia is the only country with a noticeably high national income (about the same as Portugal) but still lower than NATO’s average. In the mid-2000s most



of the countries from Central and Eastern Europe spent below or around 2 percent on defense, Bulgaria and Romania being the only exceptions with about 2.4 percent.

95. These seven members were Bulgaria, France, Greece, Poland, Turkey, the U.K., and the U.S. Source: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute data-base. www.sipri.org/, (accessed March 16, 2009).

96. John Duffield, Power Rules: The Evolution of NATO’s Conventional Force Posture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 19.

97. Ryan Hendrickson and Thomas Erthridge, “Slovenia and NATO Member-ship: Testing the Criticisms of NATO Expansion,” Baltic Defense Review 12, no. 2, (2004), 115.

98. David P. Auerswald and Stephen M. Saideman, “Caveats Emptor: Multilat-eralism at War in Afghanistan,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Inter-national Studies Association in New York (February 15–18, 2009).

99. Renée De Nevers, “NATO’s International Security Role in the Terrorist Era,” International Security 31, no. 4, (Spring 2007), 35.

100. Alexander George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Develop-ment in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 183.

101. George and Bennett admit that such a control is very difficult to achieve and list various alternative methods such as Mill’s “method of agreement” and “method of difference”; Ragin’s Qualitative Comparative Analysis; and King, Keohane, and Verba’s “assumption of unit homogeneity.” For details on these approaches see George and Bennett, Case Studies, 153–71.



45

The club goods theory, introduced in the previous chapter, originates in col-lective goods literature and is an important tool in explaining how alliances like NATO function in contemporary international relations. It suggests that these structures have features similar to clubs. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization exemplifies a specific alliance management dynamic due to its heterogeneous nature of incorporating diverse groups of nations. The admis-sion of twelve new members between 1999 and 2009 strengthened NATO’s overall heterogeneity and made the group of new members larger and more cohesive, which ultimately facilitated the formation of various new align-ments and coalitions within this club and outside of it.

What accounts for the survival of alliances in a changing strategic envi-ronment? How do individual states further their interests in the new strategic circumstances? The logic of intergovernmental and intra-alliance bargaining identifies several distinctive features: (a) negotiations among allies take place within a non-coercive system of unanimous voting; (b) the costs of providing collective defense generally remain low compared with the benefits associ-ated with it; and (c) the distribution of benefits reflects the relative bargaining power of the organization’s members.1 This chapter focuses on the cost-benefit analysis of allied bargaining that originates in economic literature and explores how individual members manage their resources to advance specific capabilities needed for NATO’s out-of-the-area missions. The concept of complementarities introduced in the study expands the logic of club goods and discusses important features of alliance behavior not addressed by the intra-alliance bargaining approach.

The chapter is organized around several core sections. The first section surveys the evolution of warfare and its implications for NATO’s overall

2Explaining NATO’s Transformation

The Concept of Complementarities


46 Chapter 2

military and political transformation. The second one introduces the theo-retical foundations of complementarities in the context of the broader debate about national contributions and the distribution of allied burden. This con-cept explains how the individual allies adjusted their resources in order to develop new capabilities for overseas missions. Finally, the validity of the model is tested against three groups of countries—the old NATO allies, the new NATO allies, and four European nations that belong to the EU, but that are not NATO members—Austria, Finland, Ireland, and Sweden.

MILITARY TRANSFORMATION AND ALLIANCE EFFECTIVENESS

The pattern of NATO’s transformation cannot be isolated from the general trends in the transformation of modern armed forces. Military transforma-tion is particularly important in international security because it deals with a distinct and somewhat unique culture that operates in the context of general governmental culture. Military structures consist large bureaucracies with routine, repetitive, orderly action where the different units have their own customs, ceremonies, and even uniforms and in which navies, air forces, land forces, and marines create and sustain their own distinct organizational rou-tines.2 These organizations are not likely to be open to innovation or external change by nature, which is why they can easily survive decades without en-countering an “ultimate test” of their performance. As a result, they become particularly resistant to externally introduced reorganization.

Nonetheless, change within military organizations occurs more frequently than one might expect. In fact, the literature on military transformation identi-fies several stages in the advancement of modern military. The first one can be associated with the French and the Prussian militaries. These fought wars by “fielding a mass national army organized into corps and divisions and trained in a flexible tactical system.”3 Warfare of this era was determined by the need to maintain coordinated order on a battlefield of mass armies, and this need led to marching columns of men linking up and shooting one another with rifles and cannons in a regimented manner. The second stage in the advancement of modern warfare occurred around the time of World War I when the French military introduced the dictum that the artillery is the first to conquer and is followed by the army, which occupies afterward. The beginning of the third stage was associated with the German military campaigns during World War II known as blitzkrieg or “lightning war.” The Germans introduced new operations that combined maneuverability across the breadth and length of the battlefield with a speed that progressively re-placed firepower. This new strategy included the use of tanks with innovative


Explaining NATO’s Transformation 47

operations and ultimately played a decisive role in the May–June 1940 defeat of France and the Low Countries.4 Thus, the second stage focused on attri-tion, whereas the third reflected the destruction of the enemy’s strategic rear, i.e., their industrial capacity and supply network. However, these stages did not always occur progressively right after the previous one. Overlapping oc-curred frequently—these are situations when certain components of previous stages can be observed during later periods of warfare or vice versa. Thomas Barnett noticed an interesting trend during Operation Desert Storm in 1991—the coalition partners chose to bomb their adversary for four consecutive days before the land intervention—a pattern very similar to the military warfare during World War II.

The U.S. military labeled the latest stage of transformation, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as a “Revolution in Military Af-fairs” (RMA). RMA reflects “an emerging consensus on what constitutes a modern military: small highly skilled, rapidly deployable forces using ad-vanced information technologies that are more flexible and putatively much more lethal.”5 Five distinctive characteristics define this latest stage of trans-formation: (1) doctrinal flexibility; (2) strategic mobility; (3) tailorability and modularity; (4) joint and international connectivity; and (4) versatility to function in a war and operations other than war (OOTW).6 In other words, as Gen. George Casey summarized, the twenty-first-century modern army needs to be a “versatile mix of tailorable organizations” organized “on a rotational cycle that provide[s] ready forces for operations across the spectrum of con-flict” and that can hedge against various unexpected contingencies.7

The modern army needs to be prepared for fourth-generation orthogonal warfare that involves a vast array of operations including guerilla or insur-gency-based warfare.8 This kind of warfare seeks to defeat the enemy politi-cally, rather than militarily, and not only on one battlefield, but over years and even decades of what is generally referred to in the literature as “low in-tensity conflict.”9 Thus, the latest stage in military transformation reflects the demand for specific capabilities to deal with asymmetrical warfare and the conduct of military operations other than war such as the conflicts in Rwanda, Somalia, former Yugoslavia, and, most importantly, in the aftermath of Sep-tember 11, 2001. Asymmetrical warfare reflects “a conflict between two foes of vastly different capabilities. It became pervasive after the end of the Cold War when the Red Army was dissolved in the early 1990s. The new smaller opponents knew that the U.S. military was basically unbeatable in a straight-up fight and that is why they sought to exploit its weaknesses and negate its strengths by being ‘clever’ and ‘dirty’ in combat.”10 Thus, the RMA has led to the emergence of two types of forces: (a) forces who successfully wage


48 Chapter 2

war; and (b) a “blended” force, known as “System Administrators” or “Sys-Admin,” that implements post-war peace. Among other tasks, the so-called system administrators are optimized to deal with a broad set of operations—stabilization, support and reconstruction operations, military operations other than war, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, low intensity conflict, and counterinsurgency operations.

Thomas Barnett correctly identifies the evolving nature of military conflict and argues that contemporary military operations seek to defeat the enemy politically, rather than militarily. The major problem in this analysis derives from the definition of defeat within the classical Westphalian understanding of military conflict—defined as occurring between two or more states in which the defeat has to be recognized by the legitimate government or politi-cal leadership of the state as a unit of analysis. What about defeat in the cases where no state or legitimate government exists, such as so-called rogue or failed states?11 These concerns raise the broader question of how to deal with anonymous actors or players that cannot be identified with a specific state, its territory and population, and with a government that is in effective control of both.12 The anonymous sources of threats and the phenomenon of grow-ing non-state actors pose a novel puzzle for contemporary militaries—while they restrict the scope and size of traditional military involvement, these new sources do not alter the understanding of security from a military to a purely political dimension. Ultimately, those efforts involved in the support, stabi-lization, and reconstruction broadly described as military operations other than war (OOTW) require the involvement of organizations that have certain military resources available. The reaction to these types of threats relies again on individual states’ traditional armed forces, not on some sort of para- or post-military mechanisms emanating from various non-state entities or su-pranational bodies. In other words, contemporary states are required to react to different, evolving sources of threats relying on traditional mechanisms to exercise power that states normally have available, e.g., intelligence gather-ing, armed forces, police, etc. Again, the humanitarian interventions and the subsequent stabilization missions in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and the war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq were conducted by the same military, not by some extraordinary soft-power, diplomatic, or non-state institutions.

The post-Cold War cases of military intervention demonstrate that states continue to rely on allies and multinational coalitions in the same way as they did during the nineteenth-century European multi-polar concert or dur-ing the costly global conflicts of the twentieth century. Furthermore, to deal with these contemporary international security issues, states’ militaries need to work together under various formal and informal arrangements includ-ing alliances. The growing participation of international alliances in various



missions is confirmed by the fact that NATO became more frequently and intensively involved in military operations in the 1990s and early 2000s than during the entire Cold War period. In 1995 NATO used its airpower to intervene in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in 1999 it did the same in the Serbian province of Kosovo to put an end to ethnic violence in these parts of former Yugoslavia. On September 12, 2001, a day after the terrorist attacks in the United States, the North Atlantic Council approached these attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. as an attack on all members and invoked Article Five. In October 2003, NATO took over the command and coordina-tion of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan.13 Therefore, military transformation has a direct impact on the management of international alliances—the new military organizations need to adjust to the new operational requirements and improve effectiveness while also combat-ing insurgency, failed states, and a variety of non-state networks.

Military effectiveness is generally defined as “a process by which the armed forces convert resources into fighting power.” The resources in question include: “human and natural resources, money, technical prow-ess, industrial base, government structure, social characteristics, political capital, the intellectual qualities of military leaders, and morale.”14 While a thorough analysis of military effectiveness requires the analysis of various factors such as organizational attitudes, behaviors, and relationships, it also implies the notion of efficiency. Similarly, scholars of military history and international security agree that some relationship seems to exist between military effectiveness and victory. Nonetheless, such a relationship is not al-ways positive—there are political strategic, operational, and tactical aspects which determine precisely where and in what ways organizations have or have not been effective. The efficient use of military resources is only one such aspect that contributed to a successful completion of a set of military activities defined as victory. In the specific dynamic of international alli-ances, efficiency implies that the available resources are used to develop various capabilities that are needed by the alliance to ensure a successful completion of its missions.

EXPLAINING ALLIANCE TRANSFORMATION

In the 2000s NATO became bigger, more heterogeneous, and more involved than ever in out-of-the-area operations. But has the alliance been able to re-tain its effectiveness as an institution of international security? International relations literature attributes NATO’s recent transformation either to the structure of the international system, or to various institutionalist, organiza-


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tional, or bureaucratic factors. Most structural explanations about alliance transformation are linked to realism, but not all realist explanations are struc-tural in their nature. As discussed in the previous chapter, neo-realists attri-bute NATO’s transformation to specific features of the international system but they vary in their interpretation of transformational patterns. Pessimists share skepticism about NATO’s ability to transform itself and adapt to the demand for new missions and also argue that NATO is a product of the Cold War that was created to balance against the Soviet threat and, when the lat-ter disappeared, the Alliance became obsolete. They expect that the current distribution of power is short-lived because the U.S. hegemony will trigger a counter hegemonic backlash. Evidence of such a balancing dynamic exists in the growing terrorist and insurgency activities that target the United States.15

Institutionalism attributes NATO’s capacity to transform itself to the spe-cific dynamic of international institutions: facing the dilemma of going out of business, NATO chose to go out of area and undertook a long path of adjust-ment to the new security reality. During the Cold War the Alliance invested in certain general assets such as the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) and the North Atlantic Council. These were key organizational ingre-dients developed over many years that facilitated transparency, integration, and negotiation among its members. These assets started paying off after the Cold War because they “could be mobilized to deal with new security missions.”16 Thus, NATO’s institutional adaptation can be explained by the minimization of relative costs (such as the cost of information), and by the ability to utilize existing norms and procedures to deal with new problems rather than create new norms and procedures. The allies overcome obstacles of cooperation by modifying the Alliance to address the new issues and develop new ties to “other actors, state and non-state, in pursuit of regime goals.”17

Organizational perspective builds on the logic of institutionalism and fo-cuses on the inner settings of various organizations, thus arguing that “the internal life of an organization tends to become but never achieves a closed system.”18 Certain needs are generated by the organization itself, which com-mand the attention and energies of its participants. The organization’s core problems arise from the need for continuity of policy and leadership. The lat-ter create an intricate system of formal and informal relationships and activi-ties that have primarily an internal relevance. Graham Allison expands this logic and highlights the importance of organizational routines that produce information, alternatives, and action. These routines matter in the same way as do the bureaucratic politics and individual government leaders who make major governmental choices. Therefore, organizational action is determined primarily by the various routines established in these organizations prior to that instance known as “standard operating procedures and programs.” The



model accepts that the “explanation of government action starts from the base line noting incremental deviations.”19 Organizations learn gradually over time, while change occurs only in response to major disasters, thus allow-ing these organizations to remain influenced by the existent organizational capabilities and procedures. Therefore, the NATO officials are expected to reaffirm the value of the Alliance to its members in hopes of assuring continued access to resources. They generally resist efforts to downsize the organization, unless they feel that organization’s future is at stake in which case they would favor the modification of existent or generation of new roles and missions to retain support from the current and possibly new members.20

The organizational perspective can be illustrated by the interaction of NATO’s parallel political and military structures headed by the North Atlan-tic Council and the Military Committee respectively. The activities of these structures are coordinated by about five hundred standing committees. While most of the structures operate on an intergovernmental basis, some bodies, such as the Secretariat or the Allied Commands, are alliance-specific and do not require the consent of individual members. The organizational perspec-tive, therefore, provides explanations on two different levels: on one hand, bargaining among individual allies is driven by the existing organizational routines of the twenty-eight members; on the other hand, the organizational routines also shape the outcome of the alliance-specific structures such as the Allied Commands or the Secretariat. In both cases, however, these perspec-tives provide a better explanation of why the alliance might face major resis-tance on the part of its structures or members to embark on a transformational path that might challenge the different organizational routines pertaining to these structures or members. It offers, however, little explanation regarding why NATO would undergo such a profound transformation through adding new members, undertaking out-of-the-area missions, and developing new capabilities.

The bureaucratic politics model suggests another alternative to the ratio-nalist models. It assumes that leaders who sit at the top of organizations do not constitute a monolithic group. Rather each one is “a player in a central competitive game.” This game reflects bargaining “along regularized circuits among players positioned hierarchically within the government.”21 Thus, the position of each player is determined by parochial priorities and perceptions, which affect a variety of goals and interests of the players, including national security, organizational interests, domestic politics, and personal interests. The bureaucratic model faces major challenges in determining the influence of bureaucratic players in cases in which presidential (or any other top gov-ernment leader’s) preferences significantly constrain the leeway of bureau-crats. Thus, bureaucratic politics can explain decisions of lower importance,


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but fails to capture the top-tier decision-making requiring central coordina-tion. Therefore, other alternative explanations need special consideration such as the concept of complementarities explained below.

THE COMPLEMENTARITIES APPROACH

The Origins of the Concept

The notion of complementarities originates in economic literature stating that two goods are considered to be complementary if “the presence (or ef-ficiency) of one increases the returns from (or efficiency) of the other.”22 Complements include those items that are normally consumed along with the product in question. If the demand for the product rises, then the demand for the complementary good rises, too. Thus, if we assume that people consume non-alcoholic beverages (such as Coke, Pepsi, etc.) with pizza, then when the price of pizza falls, the demand for nonalcoholic beverages increases. As a result, the demand for a good varies inversely with the price of the comple-ments.23 Additionally, from the multi-good monopoly theory we know that if two goods are complementary then lowering the price of one good stimulates the demand for the other.24 Furthermore, the relationship between two goods such as pizza and non-alcoholic beverages also depends on the elasticity of these goods, which is also known in the literatures as sensitivity of demand to income or income-elasticity of demand.25

Political scientists apply complementarities to institutions of the political economy in order to reinforce the differences between liberal and coordinated market economies. However, complementarities may also exist among the operations of a firm; an example of which can be understood in marketing arrangements that offer customized products and also may yield higher re-turns when coupled with the use of flexible machine tools on the shop floor. Therefore, under certain conditions, the logic of economic theory can be ap-plied to security studies.

Firms are the core units of analysis in economics, while states make up the major analytical units in international politics. Firms and companies essen-tially concern themselves with different issues—while a company’s primary goal is to increase productivity and therefore maximize profits, states are concerned about their survival, the preservation of sovereignty, and further-ance of national power. The rational actor model, which applies equally to firms and states, assumes that the efficient reallocation of resources by the principal players leads to some sort of utility maximization. An example of such efficient allocation of available resources relates to geographic location and strategic airlift. Consider the operation in Afghanistan—if NATO has ac-



cess to allied or partner infrastructure, such as ports, airports, etc. in countries close to the area of operation, proximity will significantly reduce the cost of airlift (and therefore, the overall cost of the operation) and will also enhance the alliance’s overall capabilities to provide security and ensure the mis-sion’s success. The concept of complementarities implies that the alliances occasionally operate similar to markets in terms of enhanced efficiency and utility maximization.

In the case of NATO, the concept modifies the logic of inter-allied bar-gaining. In the specific context of the Cold War the main focus of NATO’s bargaining process was on the adversary’s intentions in terms of abstract goals, as well as “costs and risks involved in pursuing those goals.”26 The ne-gotiation of NATO’s flexible response posture illustrates the extent to which the allies varied in their perception of the Soviet and the Warsaw Pact threat. As a result, they could only agree on a declaratory strategy that “papers over the divergent interests in the alliance” and is “contingent upon the force pos-ture designed to implement it.”27 The logic of complementarities reassesses these observations in the context of a new bargaining dynamic in the absence of the Soviet threat. The evidence from the 1990s and 2000s indicate that NATO has introduced various mechanisms to ensure that allies participate in the collective efforts to combat new threats such as terrorism, ethnic vio-lence, failed states, and non-state actors. The notion of complementarities discusses the mechanisms through which this heterogeneous club distributes responsibilities for the missions set up to address these new threats, encour-ages the development of new capabilities, distributes the burden among old and new members, and, in general, provides collective defense to its mem-bers whose perceptions of new threats may vary significantly. By providing an explanation of how allies manage resources within the club in a way that is consistent with the club’s strategy, what holds the alliance together and what keeps it an efficient component of international security, the concept offers a novel insight into how alliances function as clubs. Simultaneously, complementarities fill in an analytical gap by offering a new perspective into issues of cost sharing and burden sharing, which are not thoroughly ad-dressed in the literature.

The analytical framework assumes that the increase of military resources reduces the cost of collective defense and, therefore, enhances the capabilities of each state and the alliance as a whole. Conventional logic suggests that the relationship between military resources and allied capabilities to contribute to peacekeeping efforts overseas should be positive, i.e., that the increase of resources directly affects the capabilities that allies develop. However, a care-ful analysis indicates multiple outcomes. For example, some of the former communist countries who joined NATO in 1999, 2004, and 2009, used an


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outdated and inefficient system of resource management and, for the most part, were forced to reduce or re-allocate portions of their defense resources in order to make more efficient use of them. Nonetheless, the direction and scope of the relationship between military resources and capabilities for peacekeeping operations varies on a case-by-case basis.

Complementarities presents a suitable framework of analysis because it takes a balanced and pragmatic approach in explaining post-Cold War allied bargaining. It departs from the Cold War approach of accommodating struc-tural inequalities of vulnerability and capabilities by negotiating a broad and vague framework. Instead, this approach entails specific commitments de-signed to offset the effect of varying threat perceptions among different allies and provide a more equitable and adequate division of burdens and benefits. Furthermore, the proposed concept of complementarities fills in an analytical gap left by other alternative explanations developed in the literature. Consider, for example, the argument that NATO expands because the United States de-sires stronger East European democracies, thereby exporting the uniqueness of the American political system in the North Atlantic Area and thus establishing a viable security community.28 This argument does not clarify how the new members become fully integrated into the military and political structures of the alliance nor the patterns by which they transition from security consumers into viable security providers. Along the same line, institutionalists explain NATO’s persistence with its cost—it is less expensive to maintain an alliance that has been in business since 1949 than to create new institutions of inter-national security to deal with the war on terror. Therefore, the allies agreed to transform NATO after the Cold War in order to keep it in business as well as use it as a tool to fight terrorism.29 While this book’s approach embraces the adaptability perspective, it offers a different interpretation of its nature: First, unlike institutionalism, the logic of complementarities accepts the importance of military power measured in terms of resources and allied capabilities. Second, the concept departs from the institutionalist assumption that once created, international institutions are resilient and very adaptive to the new environment. Instead, the approach that is presented in this chapter highlights the importance of intergovernmental bargaining in improving the capabilities of the allies and furthering NATO’s overall transformation.

Finally, the organizational perspective provides valuable feedback about how organizations function similar to organisms that need continuity in policy and leadership, but does not take into account how external pressure from the political and military structures in Brussels or the other allies can influence governments’ decisions to draft and implement transformation plans, adapt their militaries to the new security environment, and share the cost and burden of alliance commitments. Despite the fact that the liberal-



democratic, institutionalist, and organizational perspectives are not irrelevant in the analysis of NATO politics, when considering operations in Kosovo, Iraq, the Mediterranean, and, mainly, in Afghanistan, the management of military capabilities remains highly salient.

Defining Resources and Capabilities

The model assesses allied involvement in various out-of-the-area operations. Two alternative approaches exist regarding the operationalization of such involvement: (a) measuring each member’s contributions relative to the other allies; and (b) comparing the level of allied contributions in terms of coef-ficients adjusted to the size of each country’s population and, thus, estimat-ing the resource base per population unit. Given the multi-layered dynamic of alliances, each of these approaches has its strengths and weaknesses. The operationalization and measurement of allied resources and capabilities has always aroused debate among scholars of transatlantic relations. For example, comparing per capita allied contributions to common defense is not necessar-ily the most accurate approach because such a comparison would mean that each member contributes to and benefits from this club exactly at a propor-tion relative to its population size. This has never been the case in the history of any alliance, including NATO, due to the diverging views of the members on how best to achieve the purposes upon which common agreement is reached.30 Some scholars highlight the importance of “fair shares” and equal-ity in the financial sacrifice made for collective defense and argue that all allies should spend proportionately on their defense to the U.S. contributions. If the Europeans are not willing to do so, the United States should adjust accordingly and reduce their share in Europe’s defense.31 A more pragmatic perspective elicits the role of effective military contributions and maintaining alliance unity—differences of opinion among the allies encourage specializa-tion (including joint procurement) which, in turn, addresses the provision of military inputs, and not merely the equalization of costs. The Atlanticist ap-proach is more consistent with heterogeneous clubs logic; it explores the vari-ability in the qualitative difference of each country’s defense spending rather than setting and monitoring actual numerical expenditure goals. Therefore, the resources and capabilities in this study will be measured as indicators divided by the size of the population of each of the alliance members toward an appropriate assessment of the variation in the available resources of each member relative to its size and role in the bargaining process.

In addition to defense spending, the complementarities approach war-rants other factors, such as geography and specialization. For example, the country’s strategic position may add a specific value, thus enhancing the


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Alliance’s overall efficiency. Geography also accounts for specialization in the case of land-locked countries like the Czech Republic, Hungary, Luxem-bourg, and Slovakia, who do not have the resource base to develop a navy and are therefore required to utilize their resources toward specialization in other types of capabilities. As discussed in the previous chapter, club goods entail two forms of heterogeneity: Members vary based on the difference of their per capita resources and capabilities; they also vary based on the size of their countries relative to the other allies measured in terms of population, territory, etc. Consider, for example, the cases of Hungary and Greece: they are relatively homogeneous in terms of their size, each of which has a popula-tion of about 10–11 million people. In terms of defense spending and overall military power, however, they differ dramatically. Greece has better equipped armed forces and spends more on defense in terms of actual allocations and as a percentage of their national product. Alternatively, if we compare the cases of Poland and Slovakia, each differs in size—Poland with its 36 mil-lion people is about seven times bigger than Slovakia. However, in terms of defense spending, the structure of armed forces, and patterns of military transformation, Poland and Slovakia can be compared meaningfully.

In the 1970s and 1980s, debates about NATO’s burden sharing focused primarily on defense expenditures and could be considered misleading due to the complex and variable relationships among expenditures, costs, defense in-puts, and the value of defense spending. Charles Cooper and Benjamin Zycher argue that a disparity between the burden’s comparisons measured in terms of spending and military resources exists due to the fact that the European shares of collective burden rise significantly when shifting the analysis from spend-ing to resource contribution.32 Instead, they suggest that conclusions would be quite different if alliance contributions were measured in terms of resources as opposed to pure military spending. The U.S. contribution, although seem-ingly higher in terms of spending, is not greatly disproportionate relative to European contributions when measured in resource terms. By the same token, when looking at real output measures, the European allies contribute very substantially to the provision of final military services in Europe. In addition to financial support, the military resources include quantity and quality of manpower, a sufficient military-industrial base, and control over the conver-sion of military resources into actual capabilities.33

In order to draw a much needed distinction among the different categories of allied resources, this study classifies the available military resources into three categories: (a) land, navy, and air force equipment; (b) military person-nel, including army, navy, air force officers, and conscripts, but excludes reserves and paramilitary; and (c) actual spending on defense in U.S. dollars. Military equipment is measured by three separate variables—one for each



of the three categories of armed forces.34 Several different ways of quantify-ing defense spending could be identified—as a percentage of GDP, in terms of actual spending, and as a difference in spending from the previous year. Although none of these approaches warrants sufficient parsimony and preci-sion, the defense spending per capita measured in purchasing power parities is a relatively precise indicator used in this model to measure the ongoing dynamic for each of the allies. Similarly, each ally’s wealth is operationalized in terms of GDP per capita (U.S. dollars in PPP).

The model of complementarities explores the conversion of the avail-able military resources into actual allied capabilities. The definition and operationalization of capabilities varies substantially. During the Cold War the understanding of capabilities was circumscribed to the deployment of military equipment. The patterns of the post-Cold War transformation imply a very different approach to capabilities. Despite the lack of a universally agreed definition, the evaluation of capabilities implies an estimation of allied willingness and an ability to adapt to a new strategic environment including members’ actions to respond to alliance’s goals and missions. When mem-bers barely agree on common objectives, such as in the case of the Baghdad Pact, alliances are doomed to fall apart.35 In other cases, when allies agree on common objectives, these international structures could sustain themselves over extended periods of time such as were the cases of NATO and the War-saw Pact during the Cold War. NATO’s strategy of deterrence prior to 1990 was quite similar to the strategy of Warsaw Pact. The collapse of the eastern bloc placed NATO in a new strategic environment, where not the deterrence, but rather, the contribution of its members to peacekeeping, crisis preven-tion, and post-conflict stabilization became NATO’s raison d’être. The 1994 Brussels Summit Declaration recognized that in pursuit of its common trans-atlantic security requirements, NATO would increasingly be “called upon to undertake missions in addition to the traditional and fundamental task of collective defense of its members.”36 The Alliance set itself the goal of adapt-ing its political and military structures to reflect the full spectrum of its new roles, such as the development of Combined Joint Task Forces (CJTFs) and intensified efforts against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery. Force mobility and allied interoperability were essential contributions to NATO defense burdens.37

On a theoretical level, international security literature does not agree on a definition of capabilities that is generalizable and directly applicable to alliance theory. Recent NATO studies emphasize the importance of “the ap-propriate capabilities to meet its missions” and demonstrate timely military response “to threats to any member’s territory.”38 These definitions imply that the notion of capabilities represents a framework that studies the exercise of


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military power approached in a specific strategic environment. The notion of capabilities includes several different tiers of activities: (a) a decision-making process in a specific organizational setting (i.e., formal associations such as alliances or clubs); and; (b) clearly defined missions designed to conduct peacekeeping, prevent crises, and enhance overall stability; and (c) the devel-opment of a certain set of military capabilities based on mutual agreements to support these missions. Furthermore, these alliance activities are aimed at changing and adjusting the existent capabilities as well as building new ones. The logic of military transformation indicates that the advancement of new capabilities is not a one-shot activity, but rather a continuous and cumulative process involving various stages of negotiations and implementation. Despite some shortcomings, this approach provides insightful analysis of the willing-ness of these states to commit troops for new missions, implement needed reforms, and share the burden these missions.

The Model

As discussed earlier, current literature focuses only on specific aspects of NATO’s transformation, such as the debate over the admission of new allies, or challenges to the advancement of new capabilities. In the mid- and late 1990s, most NATO studies chose to focus on the costs of the post-Cold War expansion as well as the commitments associated with it, concluding that “the enlargement process is certain to be expensive.”39 A sense of prevailing skep-ticism existed about the new allies’ preparedness to undertake major security commitments concluding that the Alliance “could discover by extending its realm eastward it had accepted security obligations that its members could not or would not honor, much as France and Britain when faced in 1938 with possibly having to honor their pledges to Czechoslovakia.”40 Thomas Szayna conducted a comprehensive study on the conditions for the enlargement in which he identified several key determinants for the admission of new al-lies: the applicant countries needed to resolve the disputes with neighboring countries; they committed to a peaceful settlement of international disputes and promised to contribute militarily to the new allied missions. These con-tributions include participation in conflict prevention and crisis management throughout Europe (including beyond the North Atlantic Treaty area).41 The new NATO members were evaluated according to political, strategic, and military criteria to determine where the candidates “stand in relation to the established conditions for membership.”42 The assessment also explored the extent to which these nations were willing to take steps to achieve interoper-



ability with other alliance members in order to determine the strategic ratio-nale for issuing invitations to join NATO.

Thus, previous studies on NATO emphasized the importance of key re-source variables such as defense expenditures, military personnel, analysis of the structure of the three types of armed forces (army, navy, and air force), and strategic location. Although primarily policy-oriented, Szayna’s model establishes an implicit casual link between military resources and the capa-bilities needed for allied missions in the context of assessing the prospec-tive candidacy for NATO membership. The model presented in this study expands the number of observed nations and explores causal links between available resources and new allied capabilities. The sample includes three groups of nations—the old NATO members, the new NATO members, and four non-NATO West European nations (Austria, Finland, Ireland, and Swe-den). The timeline begins in 1993 when NATO’s new programs and partner-ships were launched, and ends in 2004 which marked the completion of the biggest round of NATO expansion.

Although the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the later bombings in London and Madrid did not change the alliance’s goals, these tragic events once again highlighted the growing demand for “balanced and effective capabilities” that “NATO can better carry out the full range of its missions and respond collectively to those challenges, including the threat posed by terrorism and by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery.”43 Therefore, the concept of complementarities implies that the management of new post-Cold War missions requires an optimiza-tion and more efficient use of available resources in order to advance new capabilities that will enable the alliance to respond quickly and effectively to various international security challenges. This model explores two separate explanations: (a) whether the development of new capabilities is driven by the demand for new missions; and (b) the extent to which the advancement of these new capabilities is shaped by the efficient relocation, transformation, and expansion of the resource base. Such a relationship between resources and capabilities has direct implications for all three dimensions of NATO’s transformation.

In order to join NATO, the applicants had to incur certain entry costs as-sociated with the development of allied interoperability, including acquisition of transponders that identify tanks as friendly, training new commanders and troops in English and French, or the capacity to commit troops to out-of-the-area missions in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and in the Mediterranean. Furthermore, the new out-of-the-area missions needed the development of


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new capabilities—when NATO embarked on its first overseas missions in former Yugoslavia in the early and mid-1990s, the alliance became primarily involved in stationary peacekeeping, which led to the initiation of the so-called Combined Joint Task Forces. The growing demand for more advanced forms of allied involvement in crisis prevention and response missions led to the initiation of the Prague Capabilities Commitment (PCC), which was aimed at improving the response to international crises, non-proliferation, and interoperability among allies. As a part of the PCC package, members agreed to create the NATO Response Force (NRF). These new forces were intended to reach further, faster, and stay in the field longer while also undertaking the most demanding operations. The ISAF mission in Afghanistan confirms that the need for even more advanced capabilities that serve hybrid missions beyond rapid deployment and incorporate several lines of operation ranging from security and stability to governance, reconstruction, and development.44 For this purpose NATO needed different force multipliers such as Intelli-gence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) platforms and helicopters, as well as an Alliance Ground Surveillance System consisting of defense against WMDs and theater missile defense.45 The detailed model of complementari-ties is summarized in Figure 2.1 below.

Figure 2.1. The Model of Complementarities



NATO’s new capabilities represent efforts to enhance coordination and increase its forces’ deployability and usability. The aim is to ensure that the Alliance can fulfill its present and future operational commitments as well as fight the new threats of terrorism, insurgency, and the spread of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). As shown in the chart, the interoperability is a key ingredient that affects the advancement of new allied capabilities needed for peacekeeping, crisis prevention and response, and stability operations. The logic of complementarities implies that the evolution of allied capabilities may be vertical or horizontal. The vertical evolution can be explained with the need for new types of missions that expand beyond simple peacekeeping and include crisis prevention and response. This trend is illustrated in the context of the progress from Combined Joint Task Forces to NATO’s Rapid Reaction Force. Alternatively, horizontal evolution indicates that, in the new strategic environment, the same mission changes over time. The improve-ment of current and the acquisition of new capabilities is intended to meet the evolving requirements of the same mission. Such are the cases of the multinational battalions for Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear (CBRN) defense, as well different force enablers, which are designed to deal with stabilization and reconstruction efforts.

The model presented in this chapter measures allied capabilities in terms of number of troops abroad under NATO or UN command, including troops involved in operations in Afghanistan and Iraq after 2001. Thus, the depen-dent variable captures several different tiers of indicators. First, the number of troops that participate in peacekeeping operations reflects an actual capac-ity to send a certain number of trained troops for overseas missions. Second, it also reflects the willingness of political elites in each of the countries to contribute to alliance efforts. The model assumes that the allies contribute up to their actual capacity and even if they would like to participate with a higher number of troops, they are not able to do so due to their limited mili-tary resources. For example, Canada, Norway, or Denmark may be willing to contribute more to NATO or UN-led peacekeeping missions but, due to budget constraints, they obviously cannot surpass their resource base cap. Alternatively, other countries like Germany or Spain may be reluctant to send troops although they have the capacity to do so. The model is intended to capture a general trend not a country-specific variation and does not aim at explaining the foreign policy positions of the individual members. Its im-plications for specific capabilities (e.g., CJTFs, NRF, multinational teams, and Force Enablers) will be discussed separately in the chapters that follow.

The quantitative model contains some inherent weaknesses: it does not take into consideration country-specific assets, such as geography. Consider the case of Iceland. Due to its specific geographic location, this ally does


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not maintain armed forces, and therefore, contributes minimally toward core Alliance capabilities or the improvement of interoperability. However, the country contributes to NATOs collective defense with its important geo-graphic position in the Atlantic Ocean. Due to its specificity, Iceland is an exceptional case and will be excluded from the model. Similar to previous studies, the complementarities model is essentially static; i.e., it assumes that the relationship between resources and capabilities is linear and does not ac-count for variation in the scope and direction of the observed relationship.

The quantitative aspect of the study identifies three groups of countries—the fifteen old members; the new allies that joined in 1999 and 2004, and the four non-allied Western European nations (Austria, Finland, Ireland, and Sweden). In spite of a list of differences among old allies, a number of com-monalities exist in the way that these countries distribute resources and de-velop capabilities within the alliance. Most importantly, they have established habits of bargaining during the course of their membership that distinguishes them from the group of new allies. Even though this group is not perfectly homogeneous, further fragmentation into four or even five additional sub-groups is not justifiable because of inherent methodological constraints.46

The data have been collected for each of the members and then applicant countries from 1993 to 2004.47 This extended period allows the exploration of the transformational patterns during the entire decade. In all three models, the resources are measured through six variables: (1) military personnel; (2) army equipment; (3) navy equipment; (4) air force equipment; (5) defense spending per capita in U.S. dollars; and (6) GDP per capita measured in purchasing power parities. Defense spending and GDP per capita can be measured either in absolute values of a major currency (say U.S. dollars or the Euro) or in terms of purchasing power parities. The research indicates that both approaches lead to the same results and that the difference is not statistically significant. Nonetheless, the purchasing power parities indicator is slightly more precise because it captures the differences in the cost of labor and military equipment among the different NATO members.

The dependent variable in the model discussed in this chapter measures the contribution to various international and allied efforts overseas, which include but are not limited to peacekeeping operations. It has been operation-alized in terms of forces abroad (including UN, other peacekeeping forces, and forces participating in Iraq). It is common practice to lag values of the independent variables by one year to ensure that resources do not affect allied capabilities. In this way, the accumulation of the resource base in a certain year affects the size of peacekeeping efforts the following year. Although in reality it has effect over a longer period of time, the model assumes that twelve months is sufficient time to capture this tendency. In order to ensure



that the data in the model are comparable, countries’ sizes have been elimi-nated by dividing indicators by the population size of each country for each respective year. Thus, all the data reflect per capita indicators. Similarly, the time lag between independent and dependent variables has been applied to all three datasets.48 Lastly, the model does not take into account inflation, the variation of the exchange rates, and the value and depreciation of the various types of military equipment over time.

The model presented in this chapter explores two hypotheses. First, it stud-ies whether a relationship exists between military resources and specific al-lied capabilities as far as NATO is concerned. This hypothesis is tested sepa-rately through an OLS regression model for the three groups of nations (see Appendix)—the old NATO allies, the new allies, and the four EU non-NATO countries (Austria, Finland, Ireland, and Sweden). It seeks evidence for the link between available military resources and specific allied capabilities. The second hypothesis studies whether NATO membership makes a difference in developing allied capabilities. By comparing results from the three groups of nations (the old allies, the new allies, and the non-NATO European Union countries), the second hypothesis investigates whether and to what extent the relationship between resources and capabilities studied in the first hypothesis can be observed within and outside of the alliance framework. If the hy-pothesized relationship is not confirmed in the case of non-NATO European nations, this will indicate that the link between military resources and allied capabilities is alliance specific and does not apply to regional nonmembers.

ASSESSING THE EFFECT OF COMPLEMENTARITIES

Despite the variations among old NATO allies, important similarities exist among them, which is why they are approached as a coherent group. They are either founding members or have joined the Alliance during the Cold War pe-riod and, over time, have been able to achieve higher interoperability with the other allies. Furthermore, they share similar political and economic systems. With the exception of Turkey, all other old NATO allies belong to the wealthy western democracies. Lastly, with the exception of Albania, Croatia, Iceland, Norway, and Turkey, the remaining European allies are also members of the European Union.

Data

The regression analysis for the three sets of countries includes six indepen-dent variables and one dependent variable. The independent variables are:


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military personnel, army, navy, air force, defense spending per capita, and GDP per capita. Both defense spending and GDP per capita are measured in terms of purchasing power parities. The dependent variable is forces abroad. All variables are constructed based on yearly data collected for the three groups of nations discussed earlier.

The independent variables measure the military resources of each mem-ber state. The personnel variable is composed as an aggregate coefficient of ground, navy, and air forces measured by a thousand people.49 The data on Military Personnel, Army, Navy, and Air Force have been collected from the Military Balance Yearbook issued by the London-based International In-stitute for Strategic Studies.50 The population data have been collected from the Europa World Year Book and compared with Military Balance in cases of data fluctuation.51 The operationalization of army and navy equipment raises major methodological concerns. For the purpose of this study, these are composite variables that aggregate several indicators.52 Thus, the regres-sion analyzes the overall distribution of military resources across the North Atlantic Area and their relation to specific capabilities in terms of troops that each nation is willing to commit for allied operations abroad.

The data on military expenditure have been collected from the database of the Stockholm Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).53 Similar to Military Person-nel, Army, Navy, and Air Force equipment, Military Expenditure constitutes a coefficient that measures defense expenses in millions of U.S. dollars for each country divided by the population size. The variable indicates actual military expenses per capita in U.S. dollars and provides an easily identifiable measure of the resources absorbed by military activities. Military expenditure is an input measure and is not “directly related to the output of military activi-ties, such as military capability.”54

The dependent variable in the quantitative model presented in this chapter is operationalized in terms of forces abroad. It is an aggregate indicator of all military personnel sent abroad for various operations serving as observers, peacekeepers, and contributors to international coalitions. These are primar-ily contributions to peacekeeping operations under NATO and UN auspices, but also other forces that have participated in the international coalition in Iraq as well as ISAF and OEF in Afghanistan. The data have been collected from the Military Balance Yearbook.55 Despite the variation in the number of troops due to the alternation of different contingents’ tours of duty, the data show convergence in the contributions of the old and new NATO members. The contributions of the old allies tends to assemble around one hundred troops per million people. Alternatively, the data for the new NATO allies indicate that in the late 1990s they increased their contributions on average to



around sixty to ninety troops per million people. The same trend is, nonethe-less, hardly observable in the cases of Austria, Finland, Ireland, and Sweden, as Finland remains the top contributor followed by Ireland, while Sweden and Austria have almost the same per capita contributions to international peacekeeping—slightly over one hundred troops per million.

The analysis accounts for several important assumptions that need to be checked. First, all independent variables are continuous, i.e., these are scale variables and have positive values that vary from zero to infinity. Second, lin-earity exists between the dependent variable and the independent variables.56 Third, the assumptions about the parameters are realistic.57 Furthermore, sev-eral separate assumptions are valid about the residuals. First, the independent variables should not be related, i.e., the number of troops abroad is indepen-dent from the Military Personnel, Army, Navy, and Air Force equipment, and defense expenditure. Second, the independent variables have to be normally distributed. Finally, there must also be homoscedascity.58 The three models indicate that albeit not severely, the last assumption is violated because the scatterplot is not normally distributed along the fit line.59 Finally, the descrip-tive statistic indicates that the six independent variables explain 63.1 percent of the variance in the number of troops for the group of old NATO allies, 25.5 percent of the variance in the number of troops abroad for the group of new members, and 36.4 percent of the variance in the number of troops abroad for non-NATO European nations.

The Model of the Old Allies

The model indicated that for the first hypothesis tested in this study, namely that a relationship exists between military resources and allied capabilities of old NATO members, five out of six variables were significant. GDP per capita is the only variable that is not significant in the model of the fifteen old members.60 The variable “defense spending per capita” indicated lower levels of significance (.05), which means that alliance structures such as NATO have stimulated a positive relationship between resource base in terms of defense spending and peacekeeping efforts of individual allies. In other words, the more military resources the old fifteen NATO allies allocate for defense, the more successful they are in advancing their allied capabilities. Alternatively, the variable “wealth” operationalized as GDP per capita is not significant, which means that how rich or poor the allies are is not important, because their contribution toward alliance capabilities does not depend on their national wealth (see the Appendix, Table A.1). For example, some less wealthy countries like Portugal, Greece, or Turkey have, in fact, been able


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to participate more actively in peacekeeping than other wealthier allies. This finding also implies that the argument against inviting poorer nations to join the Alliance because of their expected marginal contribution to allied capa-bilities is inconsistent. To confirm the validity of this claim, one needs to test the relationship between military resources and specific allied capabilities in the context of new NATO members.

The Model of the New Allies

The second model compares the ten allies that joined NATO in 1999 and 2004. It explores whether the observed relationship between resources and capabilities studied in the first hypothesis extends to other groups of nations, such as the new allies. This group of countries also meets the basic criteria for homogeneity—they all share common past and similar features due to the na-ture of their political and economic transition after 1989. Table 2.1 illustrates that these are relatively small states whose population varies from 1.3 to 38 million people; they also possess limited resources with regard to population, GDP, defense spending, and size of armed forces.

The commonality between the new allies is further strengthened by the nature of their transformation throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. By early 1997 the Central and East European countries had already expressed their desire to join NATO. Also, in 1997, the Alliance enhanced the cooperation

Table 2.1. Population, GDP, Defense Spending and Size of Armed Forces for the New NATO Members (2004)

CountryPopulation (millions)

GDP per capita in US Dollars (purchasing

power parities)

Defense Spending

(million US Dollars)

Defense Spending (%

of GDP)

Size of Armed forces

(thousands)

Bulgaria 7.45 9,000 516 1.9 42.5Czech Republic

10.24 18,000 1,741 1.8 43.3

Estonia 1.33 16,400 181 1.9 5Hungary 10.00 15,900 1,485 1.8 31.5Latvia 2.29 12,800 205 1.7 4.9Lithuania 3.59 13,700 1,042 1.6 13.5Poland 38.63 12,700 4,149 2.0 133.3Romania 22.33 8,300 1,399 2.4 87.2Slovakia 5.43 15,700 585 1.9 18Slovenia 2.01 20,900 465 1.5 7.1

Sources: The Military Balance (2004-05) and CIA Factbook, www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/.



level with partner countries by moving beyond the achievements of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council that was established in 1991, creating the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC). EAPC proposed a new cooperative relationship with all the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, including the then ten prospective members from Central and Eastern Europe. Third, the process of NATO expansion was initiated at the Madrid Summit of 1997 with invitations to the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. In April 1999 the Membership Action Plan (MAP) for all other prospective members was launched. It was designed to assist these countries in their preparations by providing advice, assistance, and practical support regarding all aspects of membership. NATO also established a Planning and Review Process (PARP) under PfP and MAP, and developed Individual Membership Action Plans for the applicant countries in order to have them prepare for full membership. The successful implementation of military reforms by these nations signifies that new NATO members have, at least partially, been able to optimize their militaries and improve capabilities to deploy troops for operations overseas. Therefore, complementarities imply that expanding NATO leads to a more efficient allocation resources by the new members and, with the gradual convergence of their economies, they would be able to contribute more ad-equately to the alliance’s strategic goals.

Similar to the old NATO members, the model with the new allies indicates, albeit moderately, that military personnel and army variables are statistically significant (.05) as shown in table A.2 (see the Appendix). The navy variable, in this case, also shows high values of standard error that can similarly be at-tributed to the individual countries’ characteristics.61 The wealth of the states does not affect the resource base, since GDP per capita does not constitute any statistical significance. However, two major differences exist between the models discussed above. Unlike the first model, defense spending and navy variables are statistically insignificant in the second model. Two alternative explanations could account for these differences. First, although homoge-neous from the outside, this group actually includes two sets of nations with different history of military transformation. The first one consists of the six Eastern European countries that were once members of the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO)—Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia.62 These nations inherited from the Cold War heavy military structures and their transformation included primarily reduction and more effective re-allocation of the existent resources. The second set includes Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovenia, which had no experience with in-dependent statehood prior to 1990. Therefore, their military transformation consisted mostly of institution-building, thus leading to two different types of


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relationships between military resources and allied capabilities for these two sets of new members. As a result, the former WTO countries had to reduce their actual military equipment which led to inverse relationship between their army equipment and the size of their forces abroad, as well as military personnel and forces abroad.

Second, it is necessary to bear in mind that the period between 1993 and 2004 actually captures an extended time line. The data focuses on a period that begins long before these nations intensified their military transformation and even before they were given a clear timeline for upcoming member-ship. Therefore, the data do not completely capture the relationship between resources and capabilities for the new allies as intensive reforms of their armed forces were initiated only after their governments expressed desire to join NATO and, more importantly, after Brussels introduced MAP in the late 1990s. The study on the expansion will present further evidence in support of this argument.

The Model of Four Non-NATO European Nations

Finally, the third model explores the relationship between military resources and the deployment of overseas troops in the case of Austria, Finland, Ireland, and Sweden. It tests the relevance of the third hypothesis, namely whether NATO membership stimulates the advancement of capabilities to deploy troops abroad, particularly in the cases of the four European Union states that do not belong to the North Atlantic Alliance. If such a relationship ex-ists, then the optimization of the available resources and the advancement of allied capabilities cannot be explained with NATO membership, but rather with other processes (such as the European integration). Alternatively, a hy-pothesis that rejects the relevance of complementarities for these non-aligned countries would confirm that the linkage between resources and allied capa-bilities is relevant only within the specific NATO setting and applies solely to current and prospective members. The model presented below does not set itself the goal to assess the contribution that these four European coun-tries have made to international peacekeeping efforts—nations like Austria, Finland, and Sweden are among main contributors in this respect. The goal is to test whether or not the deployment of troops for peacekeeping missions overseas by non-NATO nations relates to the optimization of their military resources. Despite the small number of cases observed (only forty-three), the model clearly indicates that such a relationship does not exist and that none of the variables included is significant. Thus, the test shows that no conclusive evidence exists in support of the relationship between resources and capa-



bilities in the North Atlantic Area outside of the NATO framework (see the Appendix, Table A.3). These findings confirmed the original expectations for the third hypothesis, namely that NATO membership stimulates the optimiza-tion of available military resources in contemporary international security.

In conclusion, the results of the study presented in this chapter confirm that a relationship exists between military resources and the deployment of overseas troops in support of peacekeeping efforts. This relationship can be observed in the cases of the old and, to a certain degree, the new NATO mem-bers, but not in the cases of the non-NATO European nations. These observa-tions have several important implications for alliance theory. First, ipso facto, the model shows that NATO membership makes a difference in optimization of available resources and the advancement of allied capabilities. Despite the fact that different members contribute differently, NATO has put tremendous efforts in standardizing procedures and systems aimed at a more efficient use of resources, improving allied interoperability and ultimately enhancing needed capabilities for new out-of-the-area operations.

Second, the findings illustrate a tendency that has been overlooked by the intra-alliance bargaining approach—even though in alliance structures mem-bers do not share the burden of costs and risks equally, they tend to participate in common efforts despite the fact that their national interests induce them to do otherwise. In the 1990s and 2000s NATO troops were deployed in nu-merous locations away from the territory of its member-states—the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Mediterranean, and the Horn of Africa.63 These opera-tions vary tremendously—some are part of global efforts against terrorism, others involve nation-building, and yet others combine efforts to protect the local population, territory, and international waterways against terrorist or pi-rate attacks.64 In order to curb the effect of disproportionality in burden shar-ing, NATO allies and applicants have introduced various mechanisms that are conducive to a more equitable burden sharing such as the optimization of national resources, participation in multinational teams, and specialization in certain niche capabilities. These observations are illustrated throughout the book by surveying the advancement of various capabilities Combined Joint Task Forces, the NATO Response Force, and multinational teams and en-ablers. They are consistent with the logic of complementarities and constitute an important corollary to the literature on intra-alliance bargaining.

Third, the proposed concept of complementarities has also relevancy for NATO’s overall survivability. Domestic pressures in various members to cut contributions and commitments to the Alliance have been on the rise, especially after the global economic crisis and subsequent recession in the late 2000s. The increasing heterogeneity following the admission of twelve


70 Chapter 2

new allies additionally increased these centrifugal tendencies. NATO has been able to formulate new missions, set up goals and targets to develop new capabilities, and incorporate twelve new allies from Eastern Europe as a part of its adaptation to the new needs of international security after September 11, 2001. The success of these processes requires that the Alliance remain effective when its members are able to efficiently use their resources in order to boost their much needed operational capabilities. This observation has also an important policy implication—the logic of the complementarities implies that NATO should keep its doors open to new members insofar as the appli-cants indicate sufficient capacity and willingness to reorganize and transform their armed forces in order to effectively support its various out-of-the area operations. The analysis highlights the importance of the ability of the states in question to bring additional allied capabilities at low cost and, most impor-tantly, to enhance NATO’s overall capabilities as a club.

NOTES

1. For details about the core assumptions of intergovernmental bargaining theory see Andrew Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1998), 60–62.

2. Donna Winslow and Jeffrey Schwerzel, “(Un-) Changing Military Culture,” in Building Sustainable and Effective Military Capabilities, ed. K. Spohr Readman (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2004).

3. Geoffrey Herrera and Thomas Mahnken, “Military Diffusion in Nineteenth-Century Europe: The Napoleonic and Prussian Military Systems” in The Diffusion of Military Technology and Ideas, ed. Emily Goldman (Stanford University Press, 2003), 206.

4. Herrera and Mahnken, “Military Diffusion,” 244.5. Chris Demchak, “Creating the Enemy: Global Diffusion of the Information

Technology-Based Military Model” in The Diffusion of Military Technology and Ideas, ed. Emily Goldman (Stanford University Press, 2003), 307.

6. Thomas Barnett, Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2005), 307.

7. General George Casey, “Complex Operations and Counterinsurgency,” speech delivered at the Atlantic Council of the United States (ACUS), May 28, 2009, www.acus.org/, (accessed June 3, 2009).

8. Barnett, Blueprint, 19.9. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff defines low intensity conflict as “political-

military confrontation between contending states or groups below conventional war and above the routine, peaceful competition among states.” It usually involves a conflict that ranges from “subversion to the use of the armed forces” and is often localized but “contains regional and global security implications.” It is waged by a



combination of means that involve political, economic, informational, and military instruments.

10. Barnett, Blueprint, xv.11. The terms “rogue” states and “failed” states are discussed in various

U.S. national security documents. The 1999 National Security Strategy poists that failed states “are unable to provide basic governance, safety and security . . . potentially generating internal conflict mass migration, famine . . . ” For further reference see “A National Security Strategy for a New Century,” The White House, December 1999. clinton4.nara.gov/media/pdf/nssr-1299.pdf, (accessed April 28, 2007). The 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States discusses rogue states which “brutalize their own people” and, “display no regard for international law,” sponsor terrorism, and reject basic human values. For further references see “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” September 2002. www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.pdf, (accessed April 28, 2007).

12. The essence of the modern international system is the territorially defined, mutually exclusive, and fixed nation-state. The territoriality of contemporary states is understood primarily as defensibility (broadly defined) against hostile outside forces. John Herz, E. Gulick, and Hans Morgenthau attribute the sustainability of the states to their internal and external stability, as relations with other states, as well as “potential ability to protect a specific population.” W. H. McNeill noticed that the “linkage be-tween military advancements and state consolidation” has been at the heart of modern states’ survival. For details see Richard Harknett, “The Soft Shell of Territoriality in the Nuclear Era,” in Globalisation: Theory and Practice, ed. Eleonore Kaufman and Gillian Youngs (2nd ed., London: Continuum, 2003), 295; and “Nuclear Weapons and Territorial Integrity in the Post-Cold War World,” in New Studies in Post-Cold War Security, ed. Ken Dark (United Kingdom: Dartmouth, 1996), 34–35.

13. Frank Schimmelfennig, “Multilateralism in Post-Cold War NATO: Functional Form, Identity-Driven Cooperation” (paper presented at AUEB International Confer-ence on Assessing Multilateralism in the Security Domain, June 3–5, 2005, Delphi, Greece). www.ekem.gr/pdf/Schimmelfennig.pdf, (accessed April 29, 2007).

14. Allan R. Millett, Wiliamson Murray and Kenneth Watman, “The Effectiveness of Military Organization,” International Security 11, no. 1 (Summer 1986), 37–38.

15. Christopher Layne, The Peace of Illusions, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 206), 144.

16. Caleste Wallander, “Institutional Assets and Adaptability: NATO After the Cold War,” International Organization 54, no. 4 (2000), 705.

17. Robert McCalla, “NATO’s Persistence after the Cold War,” International Organization 50, no. 3 (1996), 464.

18. Philip Selznik, TVA and Grass Roots: A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organization (Harper Torchbooks, 1966), 10.

19. Graham Allison, The Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Cri-sis (Little Brown and Company, 1971), 68.

20. McCalla, “NATO’s Persistence,” 485.21. Allison, The Essence, 144.


72 Chapter 2

22. Peter Hall and David Soskice, Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foun-dations of Comparative Advantage (Oxford University Press, 2001), 17.

23. Arop K. Mahanty, Intermediate Macroeconomics (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 93–94.

24. David M. Kreps, A Course in Microeconomic Theory (Princeton University Press, 1990), 305.

25. In economics, the income elasticity of demand studies the responsiveness of the quantity demanded for a good to the change in the income of the people de-manding the good. It is measured as the percentage change in demand that occurs in response to a percentage change in income. People will consume various goods depending on their income and the elasticity of the various goods. For example, if their income increases, the demand for inferior goods will decrease because people will consume more luxury (or superior) goods.

26. Ivo Daalder, The Nature and Practice of Flexible Response: NATO Strategy and Theatre Nuclear Forces since 1967 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 26.

27. Jane Stromseth, The Origins of Flexible Response: NATO’s Debate over Strat-egy in the 1960s (London: Macmillan Press, 1988), 224–25.

28. Here I refer mostly to Ikenberry’s study on U.S. hegemony and Doyle’s hy-pothesis on democratic peace. In this study I do not challenge the relevancy of these arguments. Instead, my concern is that they simply do not address important features of intra-alliance bargaining.

29. Here I mainly refer to Celeste Wallander’s article “Institutional Assets and Adaptability.”

30. Charles Cooper and Benjamin Zycher, Perceptions of NATO Burden-Sharing (Rand Publication Series, 1986), 13.

31. Cooper and Zycher call it a “fundamentalist approach.” See Cooper and Zy-cher, Perceptions, 7.

32. Cooper and Zycher, Perceptions, 11–12.33. Allan Millett, Williamson Murray, and Kenneth Watman, “Effectiveness of

Military Organizations,” International Security 11, no. 1 (Summer 1986), 39.34. The army equipment is quantified as the average value of the MBTs, AIFVs,

APCs, and artillery. The navy variable includes principal surface combatants, frig-ates, submarines, patrol and coastal equipment, and mine countermeasures and war-fare. Finally, the air forces variable is measured in terms of combatant aircraft.

35. Stephen Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 58.

36. “Declaration of the Heads of State and Government participating in the meet-ing of the North Atlantic Council” (“The Brussels Summit Declaration”), Brussels, January 11, 1994, www.nato.int/docu/basictxt/b940111a.htm, (accessed August 14, 2006).

37. Todd Sandler and Keith Hartley, The Political Economy of NATO (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 67.

38. Daniel Hamilton et al., Alliance Reborn: An Atlantic Compact for the 21st Century (The Washington NATO Project, the Atlantic Council of the United States, February 2009), 46.



39. Ted Galen Carpenter and Barbara Conry, NATO Enlargement: Illusions and Reality (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 1998), 1.

40. Steven Rearden, “NATO’s Strategy: Past, Present, and Future,” 71–92 in NATO in the Post-Cold War Era: Does It Have a Future? ed. S. Victor Papacosma and Mary Ann Heiss (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995).

41. Thomas Szayna, NATO Enlargement, 2000–2015: Determinants and Implica-tions for Defense Planning and Shaping, (RAND Publication, 2001), 74–75.

42. Szayna, NATO Enlargement, 135–36.43. “Prague Summit Declaration,” issued by the Heads of State and Government

participating in the meeting of the North Atlantic Council in Prague, November 21, 2002 www.nato.int/docu/pr/2002/p02-127e.htm, (accessed August 14, 2006).

44. Gen John Craddock, “The Future of NATO, Afghanistan Operations,” speech delivered at the Atlantic Council of the United States, May 11, 2009, Washington, D.C.

45. Daniel Hamilton et al., Alliance Reborn: An Atlantic Compact for the 21st Century (The Washington NATO Project, February 2009), ix.

46. James Golden, The Dynamics of Change in NATO (New York: Pareger, 1983), 77.

47. The sample does not include Albania and Croatia, which did not become NATO members until April 2009.

48. The independent variables measuring military resources were lagged one year before the dependent variable (i.e. troops abroad), which means that the data on troops abroad include 1994 through 2005 while the data on the independent variables include 1993 though 2004.

49. In the case of the United States the manpower also includes the Marine Corps. The army equipment variable is a coefficient that averages three land power indicators—battle tanks, AIFV and APC, and artillery. By the same token, the navy equipment is operationalized as a coefficient of five indicators—Principal Surface Combatants (PSC) including frigates, submarines, patrol and coastal vessels, mine countermeasures and warfare vessels, and other miscellaneous vessels, including amphibious, but excluding craft vessels. Each of these indicators has been divided by the population size (in millions) for the respective year of each country in the data-set. Finally, the navy equipment coefficient consists of five indicators with the same weight (.20). The air power coefficient is based on a single indicator—the combatant aircraft, divided by the population size of each nation included in the study (in mil-lions of people).

50. See The Military Balance (London: International Institute for Strategic Stud-ies), 1992/93 through 2004/05.

51. See The Europa World Year Book (London: Taylor and Francis Group), Vol. 34 through 45 (1993–2004). In cases of large discrepancies between the two sources (e.g., over 100,000 people), the data included in the dataset have been adjusted to the general trend during the observed period between 1993 and 2003. Such was case of Turkey’s population for 2001, 2002, and 2003.

52. In reality, the importance of battle tanks, AIFV and APC, or artillery may not always be the same, where certain types of equipment may be more important than


74 Chapter 2

others. Nonetheless, no sufficient literature exists arguing certain indicators measur-ing military resources are more important than others and should be given a higher weight. Thus, the model assumes that army and navy equipment are compound variables whose indicators of military resources have the same weight in the overall coefficient.

53. For further details see the SIPRI Database, first.sipri.org/indexphp?page=step3&compact=true#24. (accessed June 28, 2006).

54. For further details see the detailed description on SIPRI’s military expendi-tures data, first.sipri.org/index.php?page=step2, (accessed June 28, 2006).

55. Occasionally, due to troop rotation or shift of the missions, the Military Bal-ance (MB) database tends to underestimate or overestimate the actual forces abroad by recoding the new and the old troops or not recording any. In order to avoid data spuriousness, the data from the SIPRI database have been compared with the data from the Military Balance and where major discrepancies between the different sources were found, the indicators have been adjusted or national sources were used to confirm the actual number of forces. Such were the cases of Bulgaria and Roma-nia’s contributions to the operation in Iraq in 2003 and 2004.

56. The correlation matrix indicates that some of the variables in the three groups of countries do not meet the linearity assumptions because the correlation is not significant. In the case of the old fifteen NATO nations, the Military Personnel and Army Equipment variables are not significant.

57. Due to its nature, Navy Equipment necessitates a higher number of military personnel to maintain compared to the personnel needed to operate Army and the Air Force equipment. As a result, in order to increase military presence overseas with one soldier, there should be an increase of 30 thousand dollars in defense expenditures for the new allies and about 40 thousand dollars for the old allies. This estimation also seems quite realistic, especially given the fact that the new allies have slightly lower costs to maintain troops abroad due to the lower wages there. It seems that in the case of the four non-NATO nations, this relationship is not significant. The unstandardized coefficient (-.26) is not an indicator of any particular dynamics because the analysis did not find any evidence in support of a possible relationship between military re-sources and troops overseas.

58. The assumption for homoscedascity is assessed by looking at the scatterplots of the standardized predicted value and standardized residuals.

59. In this case scholars of statistical analysis recommend that violations of homogeneity can be corrected by transformation of the dependent variable scores. Nonetheless, the biggest problem with this approach is the interpretation of the scores. Alternatively, untransformed variables may be used with more stringent levels of sig-nificance. For details see Barbara Tabachnick and Linda S. Fidell, Using Multivariate Statistics (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2001), 82.

60. The army equipment indicates the highest level of significance (.001), while air force and military personnel record a moderate level of significance (.05). The navy variable is also significant at .05 but it also has a high standard error (7.47). This can be explained by the specificity of navy power, which includes fewer, mostly large units of equipment such as frigates, submarines, patrol and costal vessels, and am-



phibious vessels. If only several of these pieces of navy equipment are being repaired, replaced, or decommissioned during the observed period, significant data fluctuations are likely to appear that skew the trend of the model. Furthermore, due to their geo-graphic constraints, some allies such as Luxembourg do not have a navy at all.

61. Due to their specific geography, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, and Slovakia do not have any navy resources at all. Therefore, this model is based only on the observations from six nations and cannot render sound scholarly conclusions.

62. Although the Czech Republic and Slovakia are new states that emerged with the split of Czechoslovakia in 1993, they not only shared common statehood for about seventy-five years but also agreed to divide peacefully the resources of Czechoslo-vakia, including the military ones, in a ratio that corresponded to the contribution of each of the two nations (usually in a ratio of two to one). This information was also confirmed by representatives from the Czech and Slovak missions at NATO Head-quarters during the interviews conducted in January 2006.

63. Operation Active Endeavour in the Mediterranean was launched as an immedi-ate response to the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001. The operation is a part of the alliance’s strategy to combat terrorism by helping to detect and deter terrorist activity in the Mediterranean, http://www.nato.int/issues/active_endeavour/index.html, (accessed May 15, 2008).

64. See NATO and the Fight against Terrorism, www.nato.int/issues/terrorism/index.html, (accessed September 14, 2006).



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This study on NATO’s transformation rests on two theoretical pillars—club goods theory and the concept of complementarities. Club goods theory elucidates a key aspect of alliance politics—bargaining among the various sub-clubs of NATO members. In chapter 2 the model presented evidence for a causal link between allied resources and members’ capacity to send troops overseas in support of peacekeeping operations. It also introduced the con-cept of complementarities arguing that the old and, to a certain degree, new NATO members tend to manage their personnel, military equipment, and defense spending in a way that can improve the allied capabilities needed for NATO’s out-of-the-area operations.

NATO’s transformation, nonetheless, extends beyond mere optimization of allied resources and the advancement of allied capabilities for overseas missions. This chapter surveys the initiation and advancement of NATO’s new missions after the Cold War and explores their role in the overall process of transformation. Two patterns in the development of new missions could be identified—vertical and horizontal evolution. The vertical evolution depicts a process in which the mission evolves from simple peacekeeping to more ad-vanced crisis response, or from crisis response to stability and reconstruction missions. Horizontal evolution accounts for progress over time within each of the three types of missions—peacekeeping, crisis management, and stability operations. Even though the type of mission remains the same, NATO had to expand its scope in order to meet the new operational needs.

The survey of the evolution of NATO’s new missions is organized around theory-oriented process tracing that explains how the demand for quick and timely response to international crises caused by the external environment

3Expanding the Mission

NATO’s Out-of-the-Area Involvement


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shapes the introduction of new missions as well as the expansion of the exist-ing ones. For the most part, their initiation and implementation is a result of the increased need for peacekeeping, crisis response, and reconstruction of war-torn regions in the Balkans, the Middle East, and other parts of the world. Had the ethnic and religious conflicts in the 1990s and the acts of terror in the 2000s not occurred, it is fairly safe to state that NATO probably would not have been requested to send troops in these areas. The Operation Active Endeavour may be the only exception from this rule as it was set up as a dem-onstration of NATO’s resolve and solidarity to implement Article Five of the North Atlantic Treaty in the campaign against terrorism following September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Therefore, Active Endeavour is mostly a supply-driven operation aimed at signaling that the alliance has operational capabilities to address the threats of terrorism in the Mediterranean and other parts of the world. Nonetheless, the vast majority of NATO’s post-Cold War missions were demand driven. This was the case in the Balkans (IFOR, SFOR, KFOR, Amber Fox, and Essential Harvest) where NATO became involved to stop the ethnic violence, restore peace, and stabilize the new states in the area. The introduction and development of ISAF, NTM-Iraq, and NTM-Afghanistan followed a similar pattern after 2001.

Albeit clearly defined in the organization’s strategic documents, these NATO-led missions underwent a multi-stage evolution and adaptation throughout its period of operation which usually included an increase in the number of troops and new activities and areas of responsibility. Sometimes, this process resembles a spillover effect as a result of which the mission gradually expands to more complicated areas of operation. This observation seems consistent with the neofunctionalist logic, namely that a new mission is expected to start with a smaller scale involvement before it gradually incorpo-rates new participants and activities. Alternatively, the intergovernmental ap-proach expects that the depth and breadth of the new missions is determined by ability of allies to reach an agreement in the process of intra-alliance bargaining. If consensus is impossible, NATO cannot move forward with the new mission despite the growing needs for more troops on the ground. Therefore, the expansion of the mission is solely determined by the ability of the allies to reach a deal at the negotiating table.

The concept of complementarities offers a different explanation—even though states are primarily concerned about their national interests resulting in different bargains that they may favor in different situations, they also tend to adjust their national positions to meet, at least partially, the needs of the new Alliance missions. This was the case in 2004 when France and Germany took the responsibility to train Iraqi police even though they had previously opposed the war in Iraq in 2003. They could choose to veto the new mission


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or simply opt out. Instead, they preferred to cooperate despite the numerous restrictions of their involvement (e.g., the training had to be outside of Iraq or independently of the NATO mission). More importantly, after the 2002 Prague Summit NATO recognized that because most of its allies have limited military capabilities, they needed to commit themselves to a more pragmatic approach to enhance interoperability and to develop niche capabilities. As a result, they felt compelled to specialize in specific areas thus sharing more equitably the burden of allied cooperation and contributing adequately to the increasing operational needs of the evolving missions.

As a result, the demand for new missions leads to advancement of new capabilities. These capabilities, on the other hand, are tied to the respective mission and follow a similar evolutionary pattern that involves extensive bargaining among allies at various levels. Contrary to neofunctionalist logic, the expansion of peacekeeping does not automatically spill over into crisis response (and similarly crisis response does not automatically spill over into stability and reconstruction). The endorsement of a new initiative is usually preceded by extensive bargaining among member states’ governments at var-ious levels prior to the upcoming NATO Summit. This trend is illustrated by the negotiations on the initiation and implementation of cornerstone NATO missions in Bosnia, Kosovo, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and the Training Mission in Iraq (NTM-I). Finally, on a decision-making level, the evolution of NATO’s missions rests on key players who act as agents stimulating the expansion of existing missions and the initiation of new ones.

NATO’S NEW MISSIONS AND U.S. FOREIGN POLICY

During the early years of the Cold War NATO’s mission was fairly straight-forward: it was seen, in the words of Dean Acheson, as “the vehicle for American stabilizer role in Western Europe,” i.e., the management and functioning of the alliance was “not merely a military structure to prepare collective defense against military aggression, but also a “political organiza-tion to preserve the peace of Europe.”1 Similarly, Christopher Layne argues that during this period the preservation of the political stability and security in Western Europe was regarded as of the utmost importance to U.S. national security. In this context NATO served as an important tool of U.S. Grand Strategy “to subordinate an integrated Western Europe to U.S. hegemony.”2 The United States could not afford to have the Atlantic alliance weakened because it was a key component in ensuring Washington’s predominance in Euro-Atlantic affairs.


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The collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989 did not fundamentally alter the level of U.S. involvement in Europe. NATO is still in business and U.S. troops are still in Europe. While their numbers in Germany are being re-duced, American troops are being stationed on a short-term basis in Eastern Europe. U.S. government signed agreements with countries like Bulgaria and Romania to use some of their military facilities to station several thousand troops.3 However, the operation of these units is quite different—there will be brigades of as many as 2,500 troops to rotate for “up to six months of training at a time, including training with host-nation troops.”4

Contrary to some expectations the end of the Cold War did not terminate NATO’s existence, as the alliance did not become an irrelevant security institution. The U.S. involvement was once again instrumental in retool-ing NATO for its new role in international security. Under Washington’s leadership NATO admitted three former Soviet satellites in 1999: Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. On March 29, 2004, seven other East European nations—Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slova-kia, and Slovenia—assumed the rights and obligations of full membership. Finally, five years later yet another round of expansion was completed with Albania and Croatia’s admission into the alliance. Layne sees these processes as an attempt by the United States to prevent power vacuums and instabil-ity by providing “reassurance,” and promoting the spread of democracy into Eastern Europe. All these decisions reflect the same U.S. Grand Strategy reaf-firmed by the first two post-Cold War U.S. administrations. The George H. W. Bush administration wanted to preserve America’s hegemony in Europe and to keep NATO as an instrument through which Washington exercised its continental preeminence. In the same way, the Clinton administration was resolved to preserve NATO and assure that the United States remained a “European power” also by reinventing the alliance and vesting it with new roles and missions that would provide a convincing rationale for keeping it in business.5

The evidence presented in this study confirms that U.S. involvement was instrumental in admitting new allies, defining the new missions, introducing new capabilities, and, in general, in the overall retooling of the alliance. As a result, institutions like NATO need key players to influence the decision-making process toward expanding the existing missions and undertaking new ones, mediating negotiations among the allies and facilitating their imple-mentations. Thus, NATO’s transformational dimension reflects a long-lasting cumulative decision-making process that requires a mutually agreed strategy (or strategic concept), a clearly definable mission, and a strong commitment by the United States to enforce their implementation. In order to ensure the success of the new missions, NATO needed to modify the existing capabili-



ties and acquire new ones. This logic will be illustrated with evidence from the operations in Bosnia in the mid- and late-1990s. The initiation and de-velopment of crisis prevention and response will be discussed in the context of NATO’s involvement in Kosovo and in Macedonia. Finally, NATO’s Training Mission in Iraq will be presented in the context of stability op-erations. Due to the complexity of NATO’s involvement in Afghanistan, the management of the International Security Assistance Force will be discussed separately.

PEACEKEEPING MISSIONS

An Agenda for Peace, a cornerstone report of the UN Secretary General, defines peacekeeping as “the deployment of a United Nations presence in the field, hitherto with the consent of all the parties concerned, normally involv-ing [United Nations] military and/or police personnel and frequently civil-ians as well.”6 The report also draws a distinction between peacekeeping and peacemaking. Peacekeeping is a measure to deploy military and/or civilian presence to achieve conflict prevention as a political goal, but also “an action to bring hostile parties to agreement.”7 Therefore, it is a form through which to achieve a desired outcome that includes initiatives such as judicial settle-ment, mediation, and other forms of negotiation.Peacekeeping was originally designed for truce supervision and monitoring of the behavior of standing armies, but, over time, it became more frequently associated with internal and much less with international conflicts.8 In order to organize an effective response to these conflicts, peacekeeping efforts needed to be managed in clearly definable missions.

The conceptualization of peacekeeping missions includes several core characteristics: These are missions carried out by armed forces performing the function of a de facto international police; the operations are essentially consensual, i.e., based on agreement between authorities where the operation is being conducted; and, finally, they are meant to serve as a provisional mea-sure to stop the fighting and prevent it from recurring.9 Peacekeeping’s scope and effectiveness are determined by military power, as well as other “soft” variables. The latter include peacekeepers’ initiative and creativity, their training and skills, and the ability to update their beliefs about the most effec-tive strategy in a changing environment.10 The peacekeeping missions evolve in terms of mandate, capabilities, and range of operations. When introduced by the United Nations, the missions incorporated several basic principles—they were deployed in a buffer zone after the consent of the parties involved where the troops had limited tasks. Gradually, the concept evolved to what


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is now known in the literature as “a second generation of peacekeeping.” The new peacemaking and peace-building missions were also charged with the implementation of peace agreements. Thus, the demand for more effec-tive peace-making led to the introduction of a third generation peacekeeping which combined military and civilian activities.11 Therefore, the three genera-tions of peacekeeping reflect an evolutionary trend where the peacekeepers’ roles increasingly extended in terms of their mandate, due to the specific demand of new missions. The recourse to peacekeeping in over thirty UN missions launched from 1993 to 2004 confirms the growing demand for more complex operations after the Cold War.

The evolution of peacekeeping indicates that allied response is not only based on a commitment to send more troops overseas, but also should include additional improvements that can meet the growing global demand for such missions. The advancement from a first to third generation of peacekeeping illustrates the need to, over time, expand the mandate, range, and capabilities of missions. As a result of this horizontal evolution, new types of opera-tions include a more comprehensive and flexible mandate and also require a broader range of capabilities. Thomas Barnett illustrates this tendency in his work where he distinguishes between two types of power—“hard power” represented by the military that wages wars and SystAdmins or “soft power” forces that are primarily concerned with “operations other than war.” Such operations require a new mandate that would include a broad range of tasks dealing with various forms of post-conflict rehabilitation. When Barnett dis-cussed with his Norwegian counterparts the increased operational needs of the new missions, they immediately noted that the Norwegian military could very well fit in the seam between war and peace exercising SystAdmin or “soft power” functions.12 While Americans fielded the world’s hard power after the Cold War due to their unmatched capabilities, unless the United States can integrate the contributions of smaller militaries like Norway into a larger peacekeeping effort, the international community will “be left with two types of forces neither of which can secure the victory on its own: a Le-viathan force that can run up the ‘score’ in the first half, and a colonial style mopping-up force that can salvage an exit strategy once the peace is lost to never-ending insurgencies.”13 Barnett’s distinction between a Leviathan force and SysAdmins implies some distinctive features of club goods: In heteroge-neous alliances the different members have different capabilities such as the case of the U.S. and Norwegian militaries. Nonetheless, the Leviathan and SysAdmin forces complement each other in a more advanced peacekeeping environment as both types of capabilities are equally necessary. In this way, small and powerful allies do not simply combine their armies or allocate ad-



ditional funding and other resources, but rather use their comparative advan-tages to increase their participation in various alliance missions.

Therefore, the difference between the U.S. and Norwegian approach to peacekeeping illustrates only one aspect of complementarities. This concept holds that the combined effect of Leviathan and SystAdmins forces ensures growing benefits from the management of this club. The United States, for example, may choose to allocate additional resources for certain capabilities such as strategic airlift and counter-insurgency operations where other allies hold very limited potential. The U.S. may also request that the Norwegians and other smaller allies manage the “soft power” aspects of peacekeeping. Although these advantages are present, the smaller allies need to be proac-tive, seek their niches within the mission, and convince the rest of the allies that this form of involvement guarantees highest efficiency of the mission. Similarly, advanced coordination on decision-making level is necessary to ensure the optimization of allied involvement in these missions. NATO’s involvement in Bosnia between 1994 and 2004 pinpoints to these features of post-Cold War peacekeeping.

NATO’s Peacekeeping in Bosnia

NATO’s involvement in Bosnia following the civil war there confirmed the horizontal evolution of peacekeeping and increasing needs for new “hard” and “soft” power capabilities in the mid- and late 1990s. After the initial failure of the diplomatic efforts to halt hostilities and implement a cease-fire, the United Nations passed a resolution in April 1993 declaring Srebrenica and several other enclaves controlled by the Bosnian Muslims and surrounded by Serbian forces “safe areas.” The UN Security Council agreed to send peacekeepers called United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) and asked NATO to insure the delivery of this aid to Sarajevo, thus providing the military muscle of peacekeeping. This first non-Article Five peacekeeping mission was also defining for the alliance as it had to work closely with other international organizations—the United Nations and the Western European Union. A direct liaison was established between NATO and the UN, per-mitting advanced coordination between both organizations on a number of issues.14 Two separate zones were created in which NATO and the Western European Union shared responsibilities. This arrangement guaranteed that Europeans would become involved, too. Even though the operation included about 40,000 soldiers from almost forty nations, UNPROFOR’s main prob-lem was its limited mandate. The troops seemed impotent to protect the predominantly Muslim population in the safe areas from Serb atrocities, for which they were heavily criticized in the West.15


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The Bosnian Serbs, in compliance regarding “save areas,” the 1994 bomb-ing of the Sarajevo marketplace, and the massacre in Srebrenica in the sum-mer of 1995, all done by the Bosnian Serbian paramilitaries, led to NATO’s Operation Deliberate Force. Officially launched on August 30, 1995, this operation was NATO’s first ever direct military involvement. The alliance conducted a large-scale bombing: within two weeks NATO pilots flew 3,400 sorties targeting the Bosnian Serbs’ communication network. The bombing involved attacks on 338 individual targets that forced the Bosnian Serbs into submission.16 Despite fierce resistance during the air campaign, the Bosnian Serbs lost most of the territory won in previous battles and became more will-ing to negotiate a peace agreement. Thus, the use of force in Bosnia paved the way to the Dayton Peace Accords and Paris Agreements in November–December 1995. The success of this military campaign can be attributed to the smooth cooperation between NATO and UN authorities, as well as the close partnership with the former adversaries in the East. Although Russia did not openly accept NATO’s exclusive role as a peacekeeper close to its borders, Moscow appreciated its effectiveness as a vehicle to support and enforce UN-sanctioned peacekeeping operations.17 Per Bosnian Serb insistence, Russia also committed itself to sending peacekeepers in the UNPROFOR mission.

NATO’s biggest challenge after Dayton was providing a military presence that would ensure the implementation of the peace accords. The alliance was the backbone for the formation of the multinational peacekeeping force (IFOR). IFOR’s primary tasks were to ensure compliance with the cease-fire and troop withdrawal to the respective territories, to collect heavy weapons and demobilize paramilitary entities, and, finally, to control air space over Bosnia and Herzegovina. IFOR was, in essence, a peacekeeping mission deployed with a one-year mandate and limited peace support functions. Soon after its inception, however, the Force became involved in additional activities beyond simple peacekeeping such as road and bridge repair, gas restoration, water and electric connections, and telecommunications. The international peacekeepers also helped the OSCE prepare Bosnia’s first post-war elections and started rebuilding schools and hospitals.18

As the situation on the ground remained potentially unstable, when IFOR’s one-year term was completed, the international community agreed that a new Stabilization Force (SFOR) would be introduced. SFOR basically held a very similar peacekeeping mandate as IFOR—its primary focus was the establishment of a safe and secure environment that facilitates civil and po-litical reconstruction. In addition to deterring the resumption of hostilities, NATO peacekeepers held responsibilities to supervise de-mining operations, arrest individuals indicted for war crimes, assist with the return of displaced refugees, and even implement defense reform in Bosnia.19 In 2003 alone, for



example, SFOR disposed of more than 11,000 weapons and 45,000 grenades left from the Bosnian war, conducted demining operations, and set up train-ing facilities to help authorities remove all mines left from the Civil War. The NATO-led mission also partnered with the EU Bosnian Police Mission, which was established to help local police develop law enforcement that meets international standards.20 SFOR was also instrumental in assisting the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in providing security and logistical support, conducting investigative work for the crimes against humanity committed during the war, and bringing more than three dozen war crimes suspects in front of the tribunal. In this way, the troops had to accomplish a large set of tasks that expanded beyond the tradi-tional definition of peacekeeping.

SFOR remained active in Bosnia for about eight years—until 2004 when NATO leaders decided that the security situation had improved substantially, and that the mission should be officially concluded. The same year the Euro-pean Union deployed a smaller follow-up mission know as Operation Althea. NATO, however, continued to provide planning, logistic, and command sup-port for the EU mission within the framework of the “Berlin Plus” Agreement concluded between NATO and the EU to regulate the overall framework for cooperation. For the most part, the new mission comprised the same EU na-tions which participated in SFOR, but was smaller in size—only about 2,500 troops in the theater. The mission provided assistance to the local authorities with policing in efforts to crack down on organized criminal networks and detain fugitives indicted by ICTY for war crimes during the Bosnian war.21

The successful completion of IFOR and SFOR provides substantial empiri-cal evidence for how complex multinational and multifunctional operations are being managed over time. A study conducted in 2004 by the George Mar-shall European Center for Security Studies discovered several noticeable ten-dencies related to IFOR/SFOR participating nations. First, the more NATO became involved in Bosnia, the higher the demand for new and specific capa-bilities. Although the conscripts generally managed their peacekeeping tasks very well, it has become apparent that “these operations have vindicated the general move to smaller, more flexible and professional forces able to oper-ate with other countries.”22 The experience in Bosnia confirmed that modern peacekeeping requires rapid reaction capabilities, which would eventually lead to phasing out conscription and effectively ending mass armed forces in Europe. The survey also showed that soldiers, who were trained to participate in high-intensity war-fighting, can adjust easier to peacekeeping with appro-priate training.

Second, the participating nations did not need to develop a vast array of peacekeeping capabilities in order to contribute effectively to IFOR/SFOR.


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Instead, they could choose to specialize in a certain aspect of the mission for which they have comparative advantages. For example, unlike their French and British counterparts, the German peacekeepers were unable to commit themselves to expeditionary operations for historic reasons. Instead, they could be much more effective in support of complex multinational peace support efforts. The implementation of such a division of labor poses more difficulties than one would expect. On one hand, the alliance needed to facili-tate a division of responsibilities ideally ensuring that powerful and smaller contributing nations could work more effectively together, specifically that smaller powers would not feel excluded or seen as tangential contributors. On the other hand, various political and military constraints made an appropriate division of labor between the U.S., and its allies and friends increasingly dif-ficult. For some nations the perspective to become a NATO member served as a robust incentive to participate actively in IFOR/SFOR and persuade their western counterparts that they are reliable partners. Post-communist societies like Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Romania recognized that the future of their integration within the Euro-Atlantic structures depended, to a considerable degree, on their ability to participate in peacekeeping efforts sponsored by these institutions.

Third, the multinational character of the mission, which included members and non-members, raised the question of improved coordination and interop-erability among different national contributions. For example, in their first opportunity to work alongside NATO in IFOR and SFOR, the Czechs expe-rienced some problems between battalion and brigade commands. Also, the early stages of the mission in Bosnia indicated a serious gap between NATO and non-NATO members in terms of rules of procedure, information-sharing, and fundamental equipment. Language training surfaced as another important factor. While the use of English was helpful in improving coordination be-tween the American, Canadian, and British contingents, others like France, Spain, Italy, and Portugal and the partners from Central and Eastern Europe saw the use of English as their disadvantage.23

Finally, the United States played an instrumental role: Washington secured the most powerful military presence in the region, which, after the Dayton Accords, reached approximately 30,000 troops. The U.S military occupied key mission command positions such as military commander, commander of SFOR, commanding positions in intelligence operations, public information, and special operations and support. While some countries found this influ-ence difficult to accept, the American involvement facilitated considerably the mission’s implementation. Simultaneously, the United States learned from the peacekeeping experience in Bosnia that the management of multina-tional forces may often be a challenging and cumbersome process. In order to



improve some inherent weaknesses of peacekeeping, the international com-munity needed a new type of mission to respond in a timely fashion to rapidly exacerbating international crises.

CRISIS PREVENTION AND RESPONSE MISSIONS

The crisis prevention and response missions resemble peacekeeping and that makes it, at times, difficult to draw a clear-cut distinction between these two types of missions. The advancement of IFOR/SFOR depicts an evolution-ary pattern from traditional to more complex forms of peacekeeping that occurred as a result of mission’s horizontal advancement. Alternatively, vertical evolution occurs when a new type of mission is introduced to deal with the challenges to international security. Crisis prevention and response missions illustrate this tendency. The literature on international security does not offer a universal definition of crisis prevention or conflict resolution, nor does it agree on what constitutes a successful accomplishment of either of these two.24 Nonetheless, several key components describe these missions: First, they are designed to intervene in order to change the outcome of the conflict. International forces usually attempt to control events during crisis in order to prevent systematic violence from occurring. They are involved in a series of actions to “limit or control the level and scope of violence in a given conflict, while striving to accomplish a set of objectives at national, dyadic or international levels.”25 Second, crisis response entails a sense of urgency among top-tier decision-makers who must manage carefully the combination of coercion and accommodation vis-à-vis other states in order to maximize gains and minimize losses.26 Third, compared to peacekeeping, these mis-sions establish a more stable settlement which is a step toward “eliminating the roots of conflict between the parties.”27

Several key factors determine the specificity of crisis prevention and re-sponse missions—urgency, time compression, uncertainty, and adequacy. The existence of a crisis creates a sense of urgency and shortage of time to address it.28 Time compression is especially relevant to understanding leader-ship at the operational level where decisions on matters of life and death must sometimes “be made within a few hours, minutes or even a split second.”29 Therefore, unlike peacekeeping, which come after the crisis has already started, crisis prevention and response assumes that diplomacy can help prevent this crisis from escalating.30 Such diplomatic efforts are conducted with a sense of uncertainty emanating from the consequences of an existent or perceived threat.31


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The response, management, and prevention of crises affect directly the functioning of post-Cold War alliances like NATO—the successful ac-complishment of a mission strengthens these alliances, while their inability to adequately respond may damage significantly the future capacity of the allies work together. Thus, a timely and effective response is a key compo-nent for the success of these missions. Georges Abi-Saab correctly observes that NATO’s crisis response in the 1990s and after 9/11 differs from earlier peacekeeping because it becomes part of a larger strategy that reverses the “complacent tendency” of peacekeeping.32 Efficiency is much more impor-tant for crisis response and the chances for mission failure are much higher in comparison to peacekeeping because a protracted response may have a devastating effect on the conflict. Crisis response, therefore, requires a more comprehensive approach that also includes advanced planning and fast deci-sion making as were the cases of Kosovo in 1999 and the contingency plan-ning for the Second Gulf War in 2003.

NATO’s Crisis Prevention and Response in Kosovo

The Dayton Peace Accords ended the war in Bosnia, but the status of Kosovo, another troubled province in the former Yugoslavia, was yet to be decided. The province, populated predominantly by ethnic Albanians, received au-tonomy within Serbia in 1974. In an effort to consolidate power during his presidency, Slobodan Milosevic stripped Kosovo of its autonomy in 1989, introduced direct control from Belgrade, removed ethnic Albanians from all public offices, and shut down all Albanian-controlled schools and universi-ties. In response to the growing Serbian domination in the province, the Albanians boycotted the central government and established parallel state structures championed by Ibrahim Rugova, the leader of the Democratic League of Kosovo (DLK). For the most part, the Albanian resistance, led by DLK, maintained non-violence until late 1990s, when various Albanian para-military organizations, such as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), orga-nized numerous attacks on Serbian-dominated institutions and police forces in the troubled province. Because Kosovo was only an autonomous province, but never a republic, the question of its status was much more complicated; it occupied a “distinctly secondary place” in the view of the U.S. and other Western powers’ considerations toward the region.33

The violence in Kosovo started to escalate in 1998. In March the Serb security forces killed eighty-five people, many of whom were civilians, in an attempt to curtail KLA’s influence in the province. This massacre intensified efforts to seek international involvement and mediation. The Contact Group for the former Yugoslavia, represented by the U.S., U.K., France, Russia, and



the EU, endorsed a basic framework for settlement of the conflict which was proposed by the U.S. Ambassador to Macedonia, Christopher Hill. This plan, known as the Hill process, did not address Kosovo’s final status but provided for wide autonomy for the Kosovar Albanians as well as several different lev-els of governance there. In addition, the United Nations unanimously passed Resolution 1199, which called for the secession of all activities conducted by Serbian security forces and established an OSCE-led Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM). Under NATO’s threat to use force, President Milosevic ac-cepted a cease-fire and agreed to a peaceful solution of the conflict. Toward the end of 1998 it seemed that a peaceful settlement was very likely.

Despite high expectations for a peaceful settlement, a very different sce-nario unveiled itself only several months later. On January 15, 1999, the KVM mission reported that forty to forty-five civilian Albanians were killed by Serb security forces near Racak in Kosovo. The official authorities in Belgrade argued that these were KLA insurgents. The Racak massacre created a crisis to which NATO needed to respond urgently. Two of the top generals, Wes-ley Clark and Klaus Naumann, were dispatched immediately to Belgrade to reaffirm the alliance’s commitment to military resolve should Belgrade turn down the offer to negotiate. It seemed that NATO’s coercive diplomacy did not resonate well in Belgrade. In part, Milosevic’s skepticism about the use of force was driven by several factors. First, there was major disagreement between the proponents and the opponents of coercive diplomacy in Wash-ington. The White House and the Pentagon preferred an approach that would support OSCE verification mission and reinvigorate the Hill process. Second, a number of key European allies were not very supportive of the use of force as well. In France, certain political circles expressed skepticism about the U.S. influence in these predominantly European affairs. Additionally, the center-left coalition in Germany included several pacifists who rejected coercion as a means to enforce peace. Finally, the ultimatum lacked sufficient credibility due to shortage of military forces available to NATO in the vicinity that could ideally increase NATO’s threat. Only a small French-led force lacking fire-power and mobility was present inside Macedonia to protect the KVM.34

The sense of urgency was reconfirmed when new incidents similar to Racak occurred in Rogovo. The Contact Group conducted a series of con-sultations and decided to send an ultimatum that Serbia should adhere to the principles established by the Hill process. The ultimatum had a preemptive function in case Belgrade turned down a political settlement; it was accepted by everybody in the Contact Group, including Russia, and endorsed by the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Anan. Multilateral talks between the Serbs and the Kosovar Albanians began on February 6, 1999, at the Chateau Rambouil-let near Paris. The Contact Group for the former Yugoslavia proposed an


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Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government which provided for an autonomous Kosovo with limited self-rule. It had to be accepted by Serbs as well as Albanians and would be enforced by NATO peacekeeping forces. This agreement was often seen as “the last chance for peace.”35 The nego-tiations ended inconclusively—while the Kosovar Albanians accepted the agreement, the Serbian delegation agreed on a two-week moratorium. Despite the threat for use of force, the Yugoslav government refused to sign the agree-ment after the negotiations resumed in Paris. Instead, Belgrade used various procedural tricks to amend the text’s content. The Albanian delegation, on their part, signed the text proposed by the Contact Group. Thus, the failure of the negotiations at Rambouillet paved the way to NATO’s Operation Allied Force (OAF).

By March 1999 NATO’s response to the crisis in Kosovo moved from coercive diplomacy to limited war marking, a new stage in its out-of-the-area involvement. In June 1998, the alliance had initially planned for air and ground military combat operations. On January 30, 1999, the North Atlantic Council formally empowered NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana to au-thorize the use of force against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). Thirteen allies agreed to participate in the military campaign, while the rest like Greece supported the operation but decided to not become involved. The allies did not seek a UN Security Council resolution to approve the use of force because they understood that Russia and China would veto such a proposal. Instead, they argued that UN Resolutions 1199 and 1203 offered sufficient mandate for the use of force against FRY.36

Although NATO leaders endorsed the use of force, they were unable to agree on major aspects of the operations such as the aims of the use of force, the type of military force (land or air), and the selection and approval of targets. They used different rationales to justify the war depending on their target audience. For example, when the British Prime Minister discussed the aims of the operation in the House of Commons, he stressed that it was designed to “avert a humanitarian catastrophe” by ending violent Serbian oppression and ethnic cleansing in the province. At the EU summit only one day later Tony Blair asserted that the task of the mission was to “damage Serb forces sufficiently to prevent Mr. Milosevic from continuing to perpetuate his vile oppression against Kosovar Albanian civilians.”37 Senior NATO officials such as General Mike Short argued that NATO’s air strikes could succeed only if the campaign were to be directed against the Serbian political elite. The air strikes indicated that instead of averting a humanitarian catastrophe, OAF actually helped Serbian security forces to conduct a large-scale ethnic cleansing campaign that was already under way in Kosovo. This campaign, known as Operation Horseshoe, drove 800,000 Kosovar Albanians out of



their homeland, of which approximately 400,000 were sent to Albania and another 200,000 to Macedonia. Approximately half a million people were believed to be internally displaced within Kosovo. The exact death toll of Serbia’s campaign in Kosovo is not known, but an estimated 2,100 bodies have been found.38 Furthermore, Serbia’s campaign in Kosovo threatened to destabilize the entire region, especially neighboring Albania and Macedonia, but Bulgaria and Greece as well. As a result, by the beginning of the cam-paign’s second week, officials in the Clinton administration acknowledged that the operation in Kosovo failed to meet one of its key declared goals—to halt violence against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.39

Major disagreement also emerged among allies about the operation’s tactics—whether it should combine the use of air strikes and ground forces. At the end of the day, it was decided to use night raids against the so-called enabling targets in an attempt to create a “more permissive operating envi-ronment” for subsequent attacks against other classes of targets. At the same time an agreement was reached that land forces might be used at later phases of the campaign.40 The general expectation was that OAF would constitute a very short air campaign, ideally spanning approximately two weeks, which is why NATO began the operation with only 350 planes available, less than the 410 planes stationed in the region in October 1998. These constituted only 10 percent of the coalition aircraft that participated in Operation Desert Storm in Iraq in 1991. Because of the expectation that the campaign would not face major difficulties, the allies did not feel they needed to establish an agreement that would regulate the selection and approval of campaign tar-gets. At the beginning of the campaign only the British prime minister and the U.S. president made decisions about the bombing of civilian targets, but the French president insisted that he become directly involved. As a result, the three leaders agreed to set up guidelines for direct input in the target selection process. Later, the process was extended to also include high-ranking Ger-man and Italian officials. This political process of selecting, approving, and acquisition of new targets became very slow, which hampered significantly the efficiency of the campaign. Oftentimes no new targets were approved and NATO military command was frequently forced to return to older targets that had been endorsed earlier.41

The campaign itself lasted seventy-eight days during which the allied air-craft flew more than 38,000 sorties. Close to a thousand lives were claimed, approximately half of which included civilians. NATO attacked key military, dual-use, and even civilian targets that were used by the ruling elite in Bel-grade (such as the national radio and television sites, and the Socialist Party’s headquarters). Even though the operation encountered bad weather condi-tions and a surprisingly resilient opponent, it pinpointed to several distinctive


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problems with NATO’s crisis response that seriously affected its cohesive-ness. NATO leadership believed that the success of the Kosovo mission de-pended to a considerable degree on whether they could put enough pressure on Milosevic to end the crack down in the turbulent province. At the same time, when negotiating a final settlement with the Kosovar Albanians, NATO used an approach similar to Bosnia in 1995. The U.S. and NATO leaders automatically assumed that this approach would work for Kosovo as well. But the Western leaders underestimated the political significance of Kosovo for the Serbs and its critical role for the survival of the Serbian leadership.42

NATO’s strategy was fairly simple—it entailed pressuring Milosevic to limit the level and scope of violence in Kosovo, while at the same time discouraging Albanians to push their maximalist claims for independence. Scholars of crisis management, however, argue that this approach was not the most efficient. When NATO tried to accommodate the Russians in the Contact Group, Milosevic saw this tendency as a signal that the alliance was willing to compromise regarding the use of force, which discouraged him from changing course toward negotiations. Ivo Daalder argues that an agree-ment with Belgrade to send ground forces to Kosovo to protect Albanians and demilitarize KLA would have been more efficient and successful toward halting the violence than the sheer threat for use of force.43 Although such an agreement would not have eliminated the roots of conflict, it would have been a key step toward neutralizing the destructive consequences of Opera-tion Horseshoe in Kosovo.

The sense of urgency and time compression at the beginning of 1999 was coupled with the need to forge consensus about Kosovo not only among the nineteen allies, but also with Russia. Oftentimes the Contact Group was forced to balance between the U.S. and British positions which favored a more confrontational policy, the Europeans who favored a policy of accom-modation and compromise with Milosevic, and the Russians who opposed any sanctions or the threat for use of force on Belgrade. Due to the lack of consensus, the Group was barely able to send a clear message; the U.S. and EU also bypassed the UN Security Council to avoid a certain Russian (and Chinese) veto.

Once the air campaign started NATO persistently faced challenges to maintain consensus, thus affecting the efficiency of the response efforts. Con-sider, for example, the policy of target selection. Most of the attack planning during the campaign was conducted not based on desired effects, but based on “simply parceling out sorties and munitions allocations by target category.”44 Individual targets were approved without much consideration about how the selected target would contribute to advancing the campaign’s objectives. A smooth mechanism for target development and review was not developed



until late April 1999, when the Pentagon, SHAPE, and the U.S. and NATO European commands were connected through a secure digitalized network. In the meantime, some allies used the right to veto targets. For example, when General Clark proposed the attack of military bunkers and vital targets related to Serbia’s leadership, such as Milosevic’s villa, the plan was vetoed by the Dutch because the latter was known to contain a Rembrandt painting. On another occasion, after the infamous bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, the French and the Dutch accused the U.S. of using its national chain of command rather than the NATO military structures to authorize particular strikes. The U.S. responded by claiming that the allied reluctance to strike swiftly would prolong the campaign unnecessarily and would pose serious threats to an information security breach. On an implementation level, Operation Allied Force revealed a widening gap between U.S. capabilities and other NATO air forces. Despite efforts to improve standardization, OAF confirmed that troops of different allies faced significant interoperability problems. Even the U.S. air force experienced difficulty inflicting damage on the enemy’s fielded forces when the latter were dispersed or concealed in rugged terrain.45

Despite numerous constraints, by June 1999 OAF was able to accomplish its core objectives—(1) to secure that Serbia agreed to withdraw all forces from Kosovo; (2) to accept international military presence in the province; and (3) to allow for the unconditional return of the refugees. Thus, the campaign effectively ended ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. NATO was able to reaffirm its ability to maintain unity and complete the mission with minimal casualties. In part, the mission’s success can also be attributed to the media-tion skills of the three envoys in the Contact Group—Strobe Talbott (United States), Martii Ahtisaari (the European Union), and Victor Chernomyrdin (Russia). They reconciled their differences and crafted an agreement which tentatively arranged the withdrawal of Serbian forces, the UN and NATO presence in the province, and the participation of Russian peacekeepers in the Kosovo Force (KFOR). This Military Technical Agreement between NATO and Yugoslavia was signed on June 9, 1999.

Following the June 9th Agreement between NATO and Yugoslavia, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1244, which authorized and regulated the deployment of the international, civil, and military presence in Kosovo. It also set forth specific guidelines and responsibilities for KFOR. These included enforcement of cease-fire and withdrawal of Yugoslav secu-rity and paramilitary forces from the province. In addition, the Kosovar Al-banian’s paramilitary forces were required to demilitarize and decommission arms. KFOR was subsequently charged with the responsibility of assisting with the safe return of the war refugees, and ensuring public safety and order,


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including the removal of mines. As a part of the transitional administra-tion, the NATO-led force conducted border monitoring, police training, and institution-building.46

Several notable differences between KFOR and IFOR/SFOR confirm that NATO’s involvement evolved from peacekeeping in Bosnia to crisis response in Kosovo. First, under UNSC Resolution 1244, KFOR was given a significantly broader mandate. In addition to security, the NATO-led forces were charged with maintaining law and order in Kosovo. NATO troops in Bosnia, on the other hand, had much more limited responsibilities confined to strictly military tasks, which caused tensions between military and the civil-ian efforts.47 Second, unlike the Dayton Peace Accords, no permanent politi-cal settlement existed in Kosovo. Although the province formally declared independence on February 17, 2008, it remains unrecognized by a large part of the international community, including Russia, China, and many Euro-pean Union nations (e.g., Spain, Greece, Romania, and Slovakia). Belgrade argues that the declaration of independence was a breach of international law and refuses to recognize the break-away republic. Even though Kosovo is a de facto independent state, its formal status, including admission into the United Nations, is far from being settled. Third, because of the lack of political settlement, the establishment of law and order in Kosovo was much more challenging than in Bosnia, where most of the legal system, political institutions, and police forces were already in place. Therefore, KFOR also bore the responsibility of institution-building. In 2008, in order to strengthen Kosovo’s institutions, the European Union established a technical mission to monitor, mentor, and advise the Kosovar administration while retaining a number of limited executive powers. The goal was to assist and support the local authorities in Pristina with the rule of law, specifically the establishment of modern and efficient police, judiciary, and customs administrations.48

At its inception in 1999, KFOR was challenged by a KLA-managed ethnic cleansing campaign that drove between 100,000 and 200,000 ethnic Serbs out of the province.49 Gradually, the tendencies for ethnic violence and desire for revenge decelerated. Even though KFOR remained in Kosovo for over a decade, the NATO defense ministers agreed that the situation on the ground had improved significantly and that the alliance would gradually reduce the size of the mission to the so-called deterrent presence. The pace of troop level reductions remains to be decided by the North Atlantic Council.50

In comparison to IFOR/SFOR, the advancement of KFOR exemplifies vertical evolution from peacekeeping to crisis prevention and response mis-sions. These new missions combine multiple military and civilian functions. They also require a high level of political and technical coordination among the participants and are conducted with a sense of urgency due to time



compression. As these missions become more sophisticated, they offer op-portunities for specialization among different contributing nations. Yet, the evidence from NATO’s involvement in Kosovo indicates that the success of a crisis response operation depends to a considerable degree on the ability of the participants to reach a compromise, adjust their original positions, and accommodate differences within the heterogeneous club as well as between the club and its key strategic partners. Consider for example the Talbott-Ahti-saari-Chernomyrdin talks in May and June 1999 that concluded the interim agreement between NATO and Milosevic. These negotiations confirmed that an accommodation between Russia, the U.S., and the EU can be reached under certain conditions are met. First, the inclusion of the Finnish President Martii Ahtisaari was a part and parcel of the mission’s success. Ahtisaari is associated with a neutral nation which held the EU presidency, and would thus represent the interests of the Union as a whole. Ahtisaari realized that, in order to persuade Milosevic, the three envoys would need to agree on a com-mon language. The Contact Group troika met four times until they compro-mised on the key areas of disagreement. The contentious topics included the withdrawal of all or some Serbian security forces, the mandate of the KFOR, and the status of the Russian peacekeepers in Kosovo. NATO and the EU convinced Russia to accept and insist on full withdrawal of all Serbian forces from Kosovo. The United States accepted that, although the KFOR would be under NATO command, it would be endorsed and authorized by the United Nations. Finally, although the Russians were not allocated a special sector in Kosovo, their peacekeepers would be located in several different sectors working hand in hand with their NATO counterparts.51 Because no major gap existed in the Europeans’ and American positions that Russia could exploit to its advantage, the agreement was mostly made on NATO’s terms.52 On June 3, 1999, Milosevic and the Serbian parliament accepted the agreement’s principles. Other situations exist, when allies are not able to accommodate their differences and in these cases the success of a crisis response may be in jeopardy. Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) in 2003 was an acute example in this respect.

NATO’s Crisis Prevention Preceding the War in Iraq (2003)

Three years after Operation Allied Force, NATO’s possible use of force was once again up for discussion. In 2002, the Bush administration suspected that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq and that these might fall into the hands of terrorists. The threat of WMDs cre-ated a sense of urgency and time compression for U.S. decision-makers. As a result, the Bush administration rallied support at the UN Security Council


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(UNSC) to pass Resolution 1441, whose tone balanced between coercion and accommodation, offering the regime in Baghdad “a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations.”53 In essence, the resolution set up an enhanced inspection regime with the aim of bringing to full and verified completion the disarmament process. The Council reached an apparent unity around the U.S. proposal and called for a mutually agreeable arrangement supported also by Russia, China, and Syria. A major problem was the resolu-tion’s implementation as the UNSC members failed to agree on a mechanism to determine whether Saddam’s actions constituted compliance or not. The divergence over Iraq became clear soon after the regime in Baghdad submit-ted its weapons declaration which contained mostly old and incomplete data. The U.S. interpreted the response as incompliance, while other allies, most notably France and Germany, viewed the cooperation of the Iraqi regime as sufficient. The French experts agreed that the Iraqi document was incomplete, but they made the case that the international community needed to move for-ward with further inspections that would shed light on unresolved issues.54 In-stead of searching for a compromise, as was the case with the drafting of the Kosovo Interim Agreement, the divergence of the U.S. and French positions served as a basis around which two opposing camps emerged within NATO.

While the French opposition was not unexpected, Germany’s decision to join Paris in close cooperation against the use of force in Iraq was new be-cause the Germans have always emphasized the value of transatlantic coop-eration and that they would not like to be put in a position to make a special choice between Paris and Washington. Aligning on the other end, the leaders of Britain, Italy, and Spain produced a letter that expressed solidarity with the United States in its efforts “to rid the world of the danger posed by Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.”55 This letter was later signed by the leaders of several other EU and NATO members and even though it did not contain a particularly controversial message, its timing and context created a major impact in Europe.56

The lack of consensus in 2003 significantly hampered NATO’s diplomatic efforts to produce a successful and timely response. The United States in-sisted on a strategy that would force the Europeans to participate militarily in the event of a possible Persian Gulf War. At least four options came under consideration. They included: assistance to Turkey in the context of an Iraqi threat to Turkish territory; technical support; actual military involvement in the combat; and the alliance’s post-war participation in Iraq. The U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, formally proposed that NATO should provide surveillance planes, antimissile batteries, and make available its na-val forces in the Mediterranean to protect U.S. ships heading to the Persian Gulf. Also, the substitution of U.S. peacekeepers participating in NATO



operations had been slated to be redeployed elsewhere. What seemed to be routine contingency planning resulted in major opposition from the leaders of France, Germany, Belgium, and Luxembourg who feared that such planning would imply automatic support for an Iraqi intervention. Despite European opposition, the Bush administration continued to press the Alliance to defend Turkey even though Turkey had not asked for NATO assistance. The United States invoked Article Five from the North Atlantic Treaty (1949) which al-lows for consultation when an ally’s security is at risk. Washington viewed this as an opportunity to line up NATO support for an eventual conflict. The U.S. diplomats who wanted to see the Alliance play a greater role decided to seize this opportunity to “push” the organization to become more active. Instead, the responses that came from Paris, Berlin, and Brussels signaled that such planning was “unnecessary and unnecessarily provocative against representatives of other allies.”57 The American reaction to this position was furious. The U.S. ambassador to NATO Nicholas Burns said that it created “a crisis of credibility for the alliance,” while the U.S. State Secretary Colin Powell stressed that the German and French policy was “inexcusable.”58

The growing divergence between the proponents and opponents of Wash-ington’s policy on Iraq made it practically impossible to reach a compromise in the North Atlantic Council (NAC). As a result, the United States chose to bypass the French opposition by moving the decision-making to the NATO Defense Planning Committee (DPC), from which France withdrew volun-tarily in 1966. Such a move was expected to weaken the German and Belgian opposition and to ensure that reaching a consensus would be far easier. Fol-lowing this decision, a proposal was put forward at the DPC to plan Turkey’s defense. This scenario was also facilitated by a NAC decision in 2000 which stipulated that if the Council was not able to reach a compromise in the event of a crisis, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) would have the authority to defend NATO. The Supreme Allied Commander, General James Jones, and the NATO Secretary, General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, had previously agreed to implement this decision if necessary. The rationale behind the proposal was that a DPC decision backed up by an agreement between the Secretary General and SACEUR should replace the NAC’s lack of consensus.

While Paris continued to insist that a decision to protect Turkey was an im-plicit acceptance of casus belli, the French held no political clout in the DPC. Germany, on the other hand, began to search for an exit from the crisis as it felt it could not afford to further jeopardize its relations with Washington. The German diplomats referred to the Atlantic clause and indicated to their French counterparts that Berlin was “prepared to accede to the scaled-back proposal at the Defense and Planning Committee.”59 Belgium remained the


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only holdout for twenty-four hours but finally all the participating nations agreed to support this planning proposal and come to Turkey’s defense in the event that Iraq retaliated during the war, as is required in Article Five of the North Atlantic Treaty.60

The case of the Second Gulf War in 2003 shows that a seemingly simple deliberation about an issue of contingency planning can transform hetero-geneous clubs into arenas of unnecessary bickering. This bickering inadver-tently exacerbates the divide between allies. The 2003 negotiations within NATO illustrate the constraints that these clubs face in their efforts to craft an efficient response. The allies failed to agree on an apparent issue of collec-tive defense—to defend an ally under their treaty obligations. Also, attempts to bypass the appropriate deliberating bodies and adopt a decision that is not endorsed by a certain group of allies, such as the use of military, rather than political, structures for a decision which is primarily political did not enhance the legitimacy of this decision. The case confirms that NATO needs to reach across various sub-clubs and embark on cumbersome intergovernmental bargaining that accommodates the varying positions of participating states to produce crisis response.

Finally, the absence of an adjustment to NATO’s consensus rule provides an opportunity for some allies to veto the authorization of allied action. Such a setting stimulates the formation of coalitions outside the alliance’s institu-tional setup. The contingency planning for Turkey’s defense in 2003 exhib-ited how eroding consensus among NATO members weakened its capacity to act as an institution of collective defense. The missions in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan after 9/11 confirmed that modern NATO needed to prepare for lengthier operations that would also include stabilization and reconstruc-tion functions.

STABILITY AND RECONSTRUCTION MISSIONS

NATO’s experience in Kosovo showed that the new non-Article Five mis-sions tend to have a longer duration, while at the same time combining multi-ple tasks that require more advanced capabilities. These missions, sometimes referred to as Stabilization, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction (SSTR) Operations or simply stability operations, operate between war and peace. As conflict ends, the comprehensive success of the mission depends on estab-lishing public security, essential services, and basic governance.61 Although such responsibilities do not fall within the traditional domain of peacekeep-ing, military forces are the first to become involved in troubled areas before civilian sources are deployed. Even when civilians take control, they need to



work hand in hand with the military on the ground in order to stabilize the region and lay the foundation of good governance and a secure society. The experience in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq confirmed that SSTR operations usually take much longer to succeed than peacekeeping or crisis response because they incorporate multiple complex tasks and are difficult to sustain both politically as well as operationally.

Stability and reconstruction operations incorporate a range of foundational elements that include establishment and maintenance of a secure environ-ment, deliverance of humanitarian assistance, development of critical infra-structure, and support for good governance and economic development.62 Un-like earlier peace enforcement operations, which emphasized the importance of externally facilitated state-building, these new stabilization missions can only be accomplished internally.63 Naturally, the stabilization process is much more time consuming and cumbersome. A stable environment is defined as “one in which the population is free from major threats to their safety and where national and international actors rebuild political, economic and other key governance institutions.”64

Three main security tasks are needed before reconstruction or nation-building begins—the aversion of a humanitarian crisis, the establishment and support of a legitimate government, and the presence of domestic security forces to support this government.65 The completion of these tasks, in es-sence, concludes the post-conflict operations. Although safety, growth, secu-rity, and liberty may not be completely achieved, the nation’s fate is largely in the hands of its leadership. Furthermore, once these main security tasks are accomplished, several other critical components are needed for successful re-construction after major combat. These include a certain level of international military and police presence (usually 1,000 soldiers per 100,000 inhabitants) and the introduction of domestic police and security forces. Finally, security assistance requires at least five years during which the international military presence provides assistance to train, equip, and mentor police and security forces, as well as rebuild infrastructures because the establishment of jus-tice systems can be extremely difficult and time consuming, especially for societies that have little formal rule of law established prior to the introduc-tion of the reconstruction mission.66 The peacekeeping record indicates that while longer missions do not necessarily guarantee success, early withdrawal implies mission failure. In part, this can be attributed to the fact that nation-building creates ties of enduring and lengthy affection and dependency.67

The multinational stability operations combine civilian and military efforts over extended periods. The underlying assumption is that a direct relation-ship exists between economic empowerment and security. Experience with previous similar efforts in Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Haiti, and Afghanistan


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indicates that higher amounts of financial support for the mission account for a higher level of economic growth and an improved level of security mea-sured in terms of functioning democratic institutions.68 Therefore, a success-ful strategy entails the establishment of a “rudimentary network of domestic institutions” and, once these institutions are in place, democratization and marketization are managed in a series of incremental and deliberate steps.69

Scholars agree that stability operations hold several distinctive features: First, they are growing in numbers. Second, these operations need to be planned for an extended period of time (at least five years). Third, the in-ternational engagement ends only after the achievement of a self-sustaining peace. Therefore, stability operations reflect new, multi-faceted types of mis-sions, which expand the understanding of peacekeeping and crisis response. Similar to crisis prevention and response, these missions override earlier low-level forms of international involvement such as peacekeeping or crisis response. In other words, a mission may start as a simple peacekeeping or more advanced crisis response and gradually over time evolve into a stability operation if the parties agree to upgrade the level of operational involvement. This vertical evolution is determined by the fact that local institutions require reinforcement, as civil society needs time to mature, and that processes of po-litical moderation, social reconciliation, and egalitarian distribution of wealth need more time to be nurtured.70 Usually these missions undergo several stages of implementation. The initial activities resemble very much a crisis management operation during which international presence moderates politi-cal conflict and defeats extremists. The next stage reflects a process of soci-etal transformation during which legitimate and stable institutions are put in place to guarantee the rule of law. Finally, sustainable and irreversible peace is guaranteed through the advancement of indigenous and legitimate local political and economic institutions.71 The ISAF mission in Afghanistan rep-resents the largest stability operation in NATO’s history whose implications are discussed separately in chapter 6. Several earlier NATO-led missions also illustrate how the Alliance became responsible for conducting stability opera-tions: NATO’s non-proliferation initiative in the mid-1990s, the stabilization of Macedonia following the Ohrid Agreement of 2001, and the introduction of NATO’s Training Mission in Iraq following Operation Iraqi Freedom.

NATO’s Non-Proliferation Stabilization Efforts

NATO’s first stabilization efforts in the 1990s dealt with the issues of non-proliferation. The growing threat from the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) demanded swift action and the alliance took the lead of international



response to the WMD threats. These originated primarily from failing state institutions or lack of effective domestic governance in the cases of possible proliferators. The introduction of a non-proliferation mission necessitated a combination of diplomatic and military measures that provided a consider-able degree of flexibility. Therefore, NATO’s leadership marked an early stage in dealing with complex stability operations that helps track down the horizontal evolution of these missions.

The issue of proliferation was first discussed at the 1991 Rome Summit. The summit’s final declaration and subsequent documents reaffirmed the concerns that NATO members and partners felt regarding the growing prolif-eration of WMDs. The alliance introduced a series of initiatives designed to “build confidence and underpin international security.”72 These initiatives in-cluded a global, comprehensive, and “effectively verifiable” ban on chemical weapons, pending arrangements on the NPT’s unlimited extension, and the settlement of the problem with Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine’s nuclear arsenals.73 NATO was willing to address non-proliferation, but did not put forth a clear strategy of how to approach it.

Growing threats from the proliferation of WMDs presented an opportunity for the United States to act as an agent that could foster consensus among different groups of allies. Soon after the Rome Declaration was signed, Washington took a lead in the international arena by launching the Defense Counter Proliferation Initiative (CPI). In December 1993, Secretary of De-fense, Les Aspin introduced the initiative to his NATO colleagues. CPI in-cluded five elements aimed at developing “new military capabilities to deal with this threat.”74 Washington’s decision-makers realized that, to ensure the initiative’s success, a new mission had to be initiated. It was headed by the U.S. president who announced new policies that paid special attention to advanced technological equipment with capabilities to localize and destroy WMDs. CPI highlighted the importance of a new “military planning process for dealing with adversaries who have WMD.”75 In order to succeed, such a mission needed to be furnished with improved counter-proliferation intel-ligence capabilities. Finally, as the initiative called for increased collective efforts against the proliferation of WMDs, it paid special attention to interna-tional cooperation among NATO allies. CPI was certainly an important step in several aspects—not only did it identify new sources of threats, but it also outlined a novel comprehensive strategy to deal with them. Defense Secretary Aspin emphasized that “with this initiative, [the Department of Defense] is making the essential change demanded by this increased threat. We are add-ing the task of protection to the task of prevention. The essence of the CPI was the combination of new capabilities to deal with this threat and a strat-egy to have the allies involved in this process.”76 It became an important test


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whether NATO as a whole can formulate and implement a new mission that combines political and military means, and a serious test of U.S. leadership and their ability to work with allies to bolster new capabilities.

Similar to contingency planning prior to the 2003 Iraq war and the subse-quent NATO training mission, the success of these non-proliferation efforts required bringing core allies such as France, Britain, and Germany on board. Even though Italy, Greece, and Spain felt relatively hostile toward the initia-tive, while Turkey held disputes with several potential proliferant states in the Middle East, CPI’s success depended on the endorsement of these nations. The United States also realized that no alliance policy would work without the participation of the UK, France, and Germany. The United Kingdom and France were quite supportive of the U.S. approach. The British have tradi-tionally favored a comprehensive approach to WMDs that combines politi-cal and military means and is similar to the U.S.-initiated CPI. The British Doctrine held that no major source of threat existed on the United Kingdom’s territory but British forces deployed overseas continued to face threats from WMDs. London saw CPI as a response to the regional causes of the prolif-eration of WMDs, and as a tool to provide the operational military means to deter and defend against these threats. Unlike Britain, France historically led the opposition to U.S. initiatives within NATO. In a 1994 French White Paper on defense, Paris indicated its support for CPI because WMDs were seen as one of the major challenges for French defense and for international security as a whole. The French felt particularly concerned regarding two issues: (a) missile-delivered WMDs from North Africa or the Mediterranean; and (b) the widespread deployment of French troops overseas, which raised the stakes for French forces in strategic areas outside Europe.77

Germany, on the other hand, felt much more skeptical about the proposed U.S. initiative than did Britain and France. Domestically, Berlin was divided between the non-intervention policy and the need to assume greater interna-tional security responsibilities. The non-intervention policy was incorporated in the post-World War II constitution (Grundgesetz) of the Federal Republic and it stipulated that German military forces could not be deployed outside its borders. This constitutional provision conflicted with the country’s growing influence after its 1990 reunification and NATO’s need for German support in peacekeeping, crisis response, and stabilization efforts, especially in train-ing police and security forces where Germany holds comparative advantages. The Federal Republic understood these responsibilities and did not want to remain isolated from non-proliferation efforts. In its 1994 White Paper the German government made its position clear—this time the country was pre-pared to assume new international responsibility, labeling non-proliferation a “priority task of security policy in the years ahead.”78 Berlin’s new position



on non-proliferation has several explanations. First, the German public and political elite saw proliferation as a peripheral problem of limited importance, particularly when compared to other major issues such as the alliance’s ex-pansion. Second, the Germans felt very sensitive to incorporating the military dimension into traditional non-proliferation policy, claiming that counter-proliferation should not replace diplomatic efforts for non-proliferation. Fi-nally, Germany felt the need to object to the DCI while key non-proliferation agreements, such as NPT and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, were “standing at crossroads.”79

The making of CPI indicated that the division among the allies on this issue did not align along lines of Europeanists versus Atlanticists. The counter-proliferation initiative presented the United States with an oppor-tunity to combine political and military approaches in managing NATO’s heterogeneity. While France and Britain seemed supportive of the U.S., others, such as Germany, believed that this approach stood in contrast with traditional non-proliferation tools of diplomacy and arms control. As a result, NATO was unable to agree on the original U.S. proposal and could only reach a compromise on the defensive aspects of non-proliferation. The new risk assessment of WMDs was once again discussed at the subsequent Brussels summit held in January 1994. The participants agreed that they would work in other international fora to develop “an overall policy frame-work to consider how to reinforce ongoing prevention efforts and how to reduce the proliferation threat and protect against it.”80 Two groups were created to come up with a compromise—a Senior Political-Military Group on Proliferation (SGP) and a Senior Defense Group on Proliferation (DGP). The SGP examined measures to enforce existent arms control and non-proliferation agreements. The DGP, on the other hand, discussed adapting NATO forces to new volatile conditions after 1990. Both convened in a joint committee that created a common document known as the “Political Framework of the Alliance to the Problem of Proliferation of the Weapons of Mass Destruction.” The Framework was officially endorsed at the June 1994 NATO meeting in Istanbul and expressed strong support for nuclear, biological, and chemical non-proliferation as well as the unlimited exten-sion of the NPT treaty based on the concern that “there are developments in the evolving security environment that give rise to the possibility of in-creased WMD proliferation.”81 It outlined a three-fold objective that rested on the review of alliance efforts regarding the prevention of WMDs; finding means to decrease the risks of proliferation; and maintaining security in the face of ongoing WMDs. The document’s core underlined that the Alliance policy should be aimed at “supporting, reinforcing and complementing, not at duplicating or substituting” already existent agreements.82


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The process of advancing a new non-proliferation mission within NATO illustrates how a compromise can be reached across diverging nations within a heterogeneous club. The original design of the U.S.-launched Counter-Pro-liferation Initiative was not acceptable for all other allies and, therefore, was not incorporated into the Alliance policy in its original format. Ultimately, the negotiated agreement amended the CPI in three major directions: the Frame-work suggested a more comprehensive approach; it rejected duplication and promoted efficiency among the allies. Thus, the slow and cumbersome path of compromise resulting from inter-governmental bargaining led to a mutu-ally agreed decision that modified the CPI proposal. However, if not for the U.S. initiative to stimulate a discussion, the Framework would not have been negotiated.

The Istanbul Framework illustrated a successful outcome of decision-making at the intergovernmental level that aimed at redefining an existent alliance mission. By adding political and defense dimensions, it reoriented NATO’s original approach of non-proliferation toward new risk assessment. The emphasis rested on the political, rather than, military aspects. Such an outcome can be attributed in part to the German position expressed in the “Ten Point Initiative,” a Bundestag document on non-proliferation from December 1993. The incorporation of the German perspective, nonetheless, strengthened the legitimacy of NATO’s efforts in this direction. The negoti-ated framework served as a basis for several subsequent core documents on non-proliferation—the 1995 “Response to Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction,” the 1999 and 2010 Strategic Concepts of the Alliance, and the 2002 Prague Capabilities Commitment. The practical application of NATO’s non-proliferation efforts is illustrated with a series of missions conducted by the Alliance in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia in the early 2000s aimed at laying the foundation of good governance in this country.

NATO’s Involvement in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia

Macedonia, one of the newly independent nations of former Yugoslavia, ex-perienced serious domestic difficulties in maintaining the precarious political balance between the ruling Slavic majority and the large Albanian minority. The growing ethnic tension led to skirmishes between ethnic Albanians’ paramilitary forces and the government security forces in the first half of 2001. The rebels advocated for better integration of the Albanian minority into different levels of government as well as the introduction of Albanian as a second official language in the country. The government in Skopje sought international mediation and asked NATO forces to step in and prevent further



escalation of the conflict. A Framework Agreement between the Macedonian government and the representatives of the Albanian minority was concluded in August 2001 with the mediation of the United States and the European Union. Under this agreement, the Albanian guerrillas agreed to voluntarily surrender their weapons to NATO, while the Macedonian-dominated parlia-ment agreed to adopt a series of reforms granting ethnic Albanians a package of political rights, as well as extended local and state powers.83

Although to a much smaller degree than in Bosnia and Kosovo, the case of Macedonia shows the erosion of effective governance due to the lack of stable domestic institutions and essential services. Immediately after the agreement was signed, NATO stepped in and sent a series of missions to sta-bilize the country and lay the foundations of a secure and liberal multi-ethnic society. The first operation had a limited scope of responsibility—it collected arms and ammunition from the Albanian rebels. Conducted under the code name Essential Harvest, it was a short-term mission planned for thirty days and initiated jointly by the Macedonian government and Albanian Rebels from the so-called National Liberation Army (NLA), a paramilitary structure similar to the KLA in Kosovo. Arms collection, in itself, proved insufficient to ensure stability and the Macedonian authorities felt necessary to request an extension of NATO’s presence in the country. The Alliance responded positively: Essential Harvest was followed by another NATO mission, Am-ber Fox, intended to protect the international monitors sent to the country to oversee the implementation of the Ohrid Agreement. The mission was authorized in September 2001 and was deployed under German leadership with duration of three months. It consisted of about seven hundred troops that joined the three hundred troops already stationed in the country. Upon the completion of Amber Fox, the North Atlantic Council reviewed the security situation and decided to maintain a smaller “follow-on international military presence in the country” to minimize risks for further destabilization. Thus, NATO remained a part of the peace enforcement in Macedonia between 2001 and 2003. The purpose of the new operation Allied Harmony was twofold: (a) to provide support for the international monitors; and (b) to assist and advise the government in taking control of security throughout the country.84 Similar to SFOR in Bosnia, Allied Harmony was once again handed to the European Union in March 2003. The new EU-led Operation, Concordia, represented a larger commitment made by the Europeans to facilitate this young nation’s integration in the European and Euro-Atlantic institutions as a part of the Stabilization and Association Process of the Western Balkans.

NATO’s involvement in this small country of the Former Yugoslavia indi-cated not only the versatility of tasks required by the international stabilization force, but also the duration of these missions. The approach used in Macedonia


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included several short-termed missions with very specific and narrowly de-fined tasks. It was believed that this approach would meet best the specific needs for stabilization because NATO was not prepared to accomplish a wide variety of civil and military tasks (such as arms decommissioning, protection of international monitors, assistance to the local government and institution-building) in a single mission. The North Atlantic Council recognized the capabilities gap and decided at the Prague Summit in 2002 to establish a re-sponse force capable of addressing these needs. Two years later, in the spirit of the Prague Summit decisions, NAC responded positively to the request of the new government in Baghdad and decided to introduce another small-scale stabilization mission to train Iraqi military and police personnel. The successful negotiations made it possible for the allies to set aside their differ-ences and extend crucial support toward strengthening Iraq’s fragile security institutions following the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

NATO’s Training Mission in Iraq (NTM-I)

In 2004, the Iraqi interim government approached NATO with a request to help train Iraqi military personnel. The NATO Heads of State reviewed the request at the Istanbul Summit and issued a separate Statement on Iraq to which the alliance responded positively, encouraging members to contribute to training Iraqi security forces.85 The North Atlantic Council confirmed the decision, and in September endorsed the establishment of a NATO-supported Training, Education, and Doctrine Center in Iraq. By the end of December most of the planning had been completed, and NATO foreign ministers au-thorized SACEUR to complete the new mission’s activation. The original format included up to three hundred personnel deployed in Iraq, comprising mostly mid- and senior-level trainers and support staff.

Even though Belgium, France, Germany, and Luxembourg had major dis-agreements with the United States in 2003 on the war in Iraq, one year later they expressed no objections against training Iraqi forces. Germany agreed to participate in this training mission but made it clear that its involvement would be outside of Iraq, in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and in Oberam-mergau, Germany. The Federal Republic also committed itself to financially support the mission, and provided airlift support for Iraqi personnel. France, on the other hand, offered to train 1,500 Iraqi military police in Qatar, but clearly expressed their desire to do it outside of the training mission. Simi-larly, Belgium and Luxembourg chose not to participate in NTM-I, but they agreed to provide expertise assistance and defray some of the costs associated with the training. Belgium also sent military driving instructors in support of the German-led training in the UAE.86 Thus, NATO conveyed an important



message—despite their disagreement on the use of force in Operation Iraqi Freedom, its members can easily reach consensus if the mission has para-mount importance for long-term stability in the Middle East. Despite varia-tions in the form, format, and location of the training mission, the allies set aside their differences and indentified alternative forms of participation con-sistent with their national interests. The French government decided to sup-port the mission because it considered the stabilization of Iraq a top priority of its foreign policy. Paris argued that a united, well-trained and adequately equipped Iraqi National Army would potentially increase overall stability in the region.87 Senior French diplomats emphasized that France’s “constructive opposition” to the 2003 invasion of Iraq was not an obstacle to extend support and assistance for Iraqi police and security forces that would maintain order and support the now legitimate government in Baghdad.

The case of NTM-I illustrates two features of negotiating multi-national sta-bility operations. First, successful bargaining is possible only when members’ different identities are taken into account. If France, Belgium, and Luxem-bourg were not given flexibility in the form of their participation, it is likely that they would not have participated in this collective effort. Second, the outcome of such inter-allied bargaining shows that heterogeneous clubs like NATO can attenuate the differences that result from their diverging identities.

One would expect that allies would find it increasingly difficult to agree on complicated operations involving multiple tasks and forms of participa-tion, but in the negotiations surrounding NTM-I they realized the importance of benefits that these new missions provide to international security. Ac-commodating differences in the members’ positions, therefore, constitutes a condition sine qua non: those who found the mission inconsistent with their national interests should be able to opt out. Similarly, those who decided to participate should be offered alternative forms of involvement, whereby decision-makers would introduce clear mechanisms that ideally offset the negative externalities of political rhetoric. Consider the case of the French participation in training Iraqi officers, which was instrumental due to the ca-pabilities and experience that the French military and intelligence have for this type of mission. Prior to 2003, the military cooperation between France and the United States in the fight against terrorism had been particularly benefi-cial. On several instances, U.S. counter-terrorism experts admitted that, until 2003, the French and British intelligence agencies “provided the best quality counter-terrorism material” to the United States from which “Washington could have taken early action.”88 When, at the peak of the 2003 crisis, bilat-eral relations deteriorated, French diplomats and military experts were pres-sured by their government to sharpen the tone of political rhetoric, thus jeop-ardizing Paris’s traditionally good relations with its allies and its reputation


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in NATO’s intergovernmental bodies.89 Specifically, tension between the United States and France put at risk excellent military cooperation between the two countries. Alternatively, when Washington and Paris agreed on the utility of training a modern Iraqi National Army, the format of French par-ticipation was simply a formality. Lastly, the ability to reach a compromise across different sub-clubs enhances the legitimacy of the allied efforts and attracts new participants. When Germany, France, Belgium, and Luxembourg agreed to support the NTM-I efforts, other non-NATO countries like Ukraine also came on board.

Finally, the history of NATO Training Mission in Iraq confirms that, in general, stability operations require an extended period of time. Even though their format varies—they may include either a single longer mission or several short-term missions—these missions begin with limited coopera-tion which gradually expands to other areas of responsibility. The training of Iraqi officers began in August 2004 with slightly more than fifty trainers. Following the Istanbul Summit, the Alliance committed itself to deploy three hundred additional troops and support staff who focused on training and men-toring senior Iraqi security personnel. In September 2004 the NAC set up a NATO-supported Training, Education, and Doctrine Center in Iraq. In order to improve the mission’s efficiency, detailed rules for expanded assistance, engagement, and force protection were developed.90 The Riga Summit in 2006 recognized the importance of each country’s comparative advantages in military and police training and encouraged the allies to explore different niches within the NTM-I mandate.

NATO leadership recognized that the training mission needed an extended period of time to accomplish its goals. In 2008 NATO extended NTM-I for several years as a part of a long-term structured framework for cooperation between NATO and Iraq. NTM-I set up a Tactical Doctrine Center that men-tors senior military and has also been active in providing assistance for the Iraqi National Defense University and the four Military Academies which are located in Ar Rustamiyah, Qualachulon, Zakho, and Tallil.91 In Decem-ber 2008, the mission expanded to other areas including navy and air force leadership training, border security, defense institution building, and small arms and light weapons accountability, thus becoming a foundational tool for institution-building in Iraq.

In conclusion, the growing demand for military involvement in conflicts in the Balkans and the Middle East led to the initiation of a variety of peacekeeping, crisis response, and stabilization operations. The negotiation and implementation of these new missions was not always an easy process. This chapter surveyed several NATO-led missions in the 1990s and 2000s that illustrated the the tendencies for their horizontal and vertical evolution



of these missions. The horizontal evolution showed how new tasks and re-sponsibilities were added to already existent missions, such as the evolution from the first to third generation of peacekeeping or the advancement from non-proliferation to a more complex military training and economic recon-struction as a part of stability operations. Indeed, the cases of Kosovo (1999) and Iraq (2003) illustrate two different outcomes: intergovernmental negotia-tions made action possible in 1999 but revealed gaps in NATO’s capacity to deliver. Alternatively, in 2003 the members had major difficulties to endorse a contingency of plan of Turkey’s defense not because they did not want to fulfill their treaty obligations, but because they disagreed on the principle of casus belli.

The vertical evolution of NATO’s out-of-the-area involvement led to new types of missions. These were charged with new, more versatile and com-plicated responsibilities requiring improved capabilities. This pattern was illustrated with the introduction of crisis response and stability operations. The negotiation of the Istanbul Framework based on the U.S. counter-pro-liferation proposal was an example of bargaining that led to the convergence of allied positions on a new conceptual framework for NATO’s non-prolif-eration mission. NATO’s involvements in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia after 2001 and in Iraq after 2004 represent two distinctive cases of stability operations. These new missions are not simply attempts to keep NATO in business after the end of the Cold War; instead they illustrate the growing demand for new operations as a result of the surge of ethnic violence and the need for consensus among allies on a common strategy to deal with it. FYR of Macedonia, for example, served as a testing ground for NATO’s new small-scale missions aimed at restoring order and rebuilding damaged political institutions. The training mission in Iraq was an important test for the alliance’s cohesion one year after the transatlantic rift between the United States and some of its European allies on the war in Iraq in 2003 that had also an important operational and political significance. Despite notable differences, the mission to train a modern Iraqi National Army and Police motivated NATO members to provide support through alternative forms of participation. The missions in the Former Yugoslavia and Iraq dealt only with specific aspects of stabilization. Finally, NATO’s new missions cannot be separated from the development of new capabilities. The need for modern multinational capabilities to provide the foundation and logistical support for the new operations was recognized in the early 1990s when the allies began discussions for the introduction of multinational teams and development of rapid reaction capabilities. However, it was not until 2002 that all NATO members committed to actively explore their comparative advantages and effectively contribute to NATO’s out-of-the-area operations.


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NOTES

1. The diplomatic historians Leffer and Gregory Mitrovich discuss the offensive nature of the U.S. strategy toward the Soviet Union; see Christopher Layne, The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present (Cornell Uni-versity Press, 2006), 105.

2. Layne, The Peace, 96–97. 3. Vince Crawley, “U.S. Negotiating Use of Shared Military Bases in Romania,

Bulgaria: Ambassador says all democratic nations have interest in security of Black Sea,” International Information Programs (Washington File Staff Writer), November 9, 2005, usinfo.state.gov/eur/Archive/2005/Nov/04-490927.html, (accessed February 29, 2007).

4. Charlie Coon, “U.S., Bulgaria, Romania to kick off agreement with Immediate Response 2006 Exercise will get under way July 17 in southern Bulgaria,” Stars and Stripes, European edition, July 5, 2006, http://www.estripes.com/, (accessed April 29, 2007).

5. Ronald Asmus in Opening NATO’s Door refers to Albright’s speech, where she indicates that “if we get it right NATO will last for another fifty years” and that “if an institution such as NATO did not exist today, we would want to create one.” Also see Madeleine Albright quoted by Layne, The Peace, 109.

6. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace: Report of the Secretary-General A/47/277-S/24111, June 17, 1992, www.un.org/Docs/SG/agpeace.html, (accessed December 22, 2006).

7. Michael Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis, Making War and Building Peace: United Nations Peace Operations (Priceton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 10.

8. Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda, 49. 9. Georges Abi-Saab, “United Nations Peacekeeping Old and New: An Overview

of the Issues,” in ed. Daniel Warner (New Dimensions of Peacekeeping, Kluwer Aca-demic Publishers), 1995, 1.

10. Doyle and Sambanis, Making War, 61.11. Rachel Utley (ed.), Major Powers and Peacekeeping: Perspectives, Priorities

and Challenges of Military Intervention (VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), 3.12. Thomas Barnett, Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating (New York:

G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2005, 17.13. Barnett, Blueprint, 11.14. S. Nelson Drew, “NATO from Berlin to Bosnia,” McNair Working Paper (No.

35, January 1995).15. Metta Spencer, “What Happened in Yugoslavia” in The Lessons from Yugosla-

via, ed. Metta Spencer (JAI Elsevier Science, 2000), 23.16. Steven Burk and Paul Shoup, The War in Bosnia and Herzegovina (New York:

M.E. Sharpe, 1999), 353–55.17. S. Nelson Drew, “NATO from Berlin to Bosnia.”18. Peter Duignan, NATO: Its Past, Present and Future (Hoover Institution Press,

Stanford University, 2000), 89.



19. See “Peace support operations in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” NATO Handbook (Brussels, 2007).

20. “Peace support operations in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” NATO Handbook.21. See “EU military operation in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” EUFOR Althea.

www.euforbih.org/ (accessed August 5, 2009).22. Bernard Boene, Jean Callaghan, and Christopher Dandeker, “Warriors in

Peacekeeping: An Overview of Themes and Issues,” in Warriors in Peacekeeping: Points of Tension in Complex Cultural Encounters, eds. Callaghan and Schoenbom, (George Marshall European Center of Security Studies, Transaction Publishers, 2004), 406.

23. Boene, Callaghan, and Dandeker, Warriors, 420–21.24. For further information see Glenn Snyder and Paul Diesing, eds., Conflict

Among Nations: Bargaining, Decision Making, and System Structure in International Crises, (Princeton University Press, 1977); Stern and Druckman, eds., International Conflict Resolution after the Cold War (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2000), quoted by Winkenfeld et al, Mediating International Crises (New York: Tay-lor and Francis, 2005), 8–9.

25. Zeev Maoz, “Conflict Management and Conflict Resolution: A Conceptual and Methodological Introduction,” in Zeev Maoz et al. Multiple Paths to Knowledge in International Relations. (Lexington Books, 2004), 13.

26. Snyder and Diesing, Conflict.27. Kolb and Babbitt, “Mediation practice on the Home Front” in Vasquez and

Johnson et al., Beyond Confrontation, Learning Conflict Resolution in the Post-Cold War Era (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1995), 80; also quoted by Winkenfeld, Mediating, 9.

28. Arjen Boin et al., The Politics of Crisis Management (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3.

29. Wickenfled, Mediating, 9.30. Daniel Hamilton et al., Alliance Reborn: An Atlantic Compact for the 21st

Century (The Washington NATO Project, February 2009), 25.31. Arjen Boin et al., The Politics, 3.32. Georges Abi-Saab, “United Nations Peacekeeping Old and New: An Overview

of the Issues,” in New Dimensions of Peacekeeping, ed. Daniel Werner (Kluwer Aca-demic Publishers, 1995), 7.

33. Ivo Daalder and Michael O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000), 9.

34. Alex Bellamy, Kosovo and the International Society (Palgrave McMillan, 2002), 114.

35. Bellamy, Kosovo, 142.36. Although the legality of NATO’s involvement in Kosovo is not a subject of

this research, it is worth mentioning many international lawyers argued that the use of force is illegal unless formally sanctioned by the UN Security Council. Yet, other scholars argued that because of the mission’s character being a humanitarian inter-vention aimed at preventing the exacerbation of an international crisis, the lack of consensus in the Security Council does not automatically imply illegality of the use


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of force. See Bruno Simma, “NATO, the UN and the Use of Force: Legal Aspects,” and Antonio Cassese “Ex iniuria ius oritur: Are we moving towards international legitimation of forcible humanitarian countermeasures in the world community?” European Journal of International Law 10, no. 1 (April 1999); also Thomas Franck, Recourse to Force: State Action Against Armed Attacks (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

37. Bellamy, Kosovo, 157.38. It is believed that the actual toll among ethnic Albanians varies between five

and ten thousand people; see Daalder and O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly, 110.39. Benjemin Lambeth, NATO’s Air War for Kosovo: A Strategic and Operational

Assessment (Project Air Force, RAND, 2001), 26.40. Lambeth, NATO’s Air War, 19.41. Bellamy, Kosovo, 161.42. Lambeth, NATO’s Air War, xx.43. Daalder and O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly, 26–27.44. Lambeth, NATO’s Air War, xix.45. Bruce Nardulli, Walter Perry, Bruce Pirnie, John Gordon IV, and John Mc-

Ginn, Disjointed War: Military Operations in Kosovo (RAND Corporation, Arroyo Center, 2002), 47–48.

46. Peter Duignan, NATO: Its Past, Present and Future (Hoover Press, Stanford University, 2000), 99.

47. Nardulli et al., Disjointed War, 109–10.48. EULEX Kosovo: European Union Rule of Law Mission, EULEX Official

Webpage. www.eulex-kosovo.eu/?id=2, (accessed August 18, 2008).49. Duignan, NATO, 101. 50. See “NATO’s role in Kosovo” and “NATO Defense Ministers announce

gradual reduction of troops in Kosovo,” NATO Official Webpage, http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/news_55445.htm, accessed on August 6,2009.

51. Nardulli et al, Disjointed War, 103.52. Daalder and O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly, 171.53. “United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441,” adopted unanimously by

the Security Council at its 4644th meeting, on 8 November 2002, http://www.state.gov/p/nea/rls/15016.htm, accessed on August 18, 2008.

54. Philip Gordon and Jeremy Shapiro, Allies at War: America, Europe and the Crisis over Iraq (New York: Brookings Institution, McGraw-Hill, 2003), 114.

55. Gordon and Shapiro, Allies, 129.56. These were the leaders of Poland, Hungary, Denmark, Portugal, and the Czech

Republic who in this letter stressed the importance of shared values that constitute the “real bond” between the United States and Europe.

57. The February 10, 2003 meeting of NATO ambassadors in Brussels led to angry exchanges and even shouting not normally heard at the NAC meetings. This rhetoric was an indication that the crisis had reached its peak. For details see Gordon and Shapiro, Allies, 138.

58. Gordon and Shapiro, Allies, 138.59. Gordon and Shapiro, Allies, 140.



60. Jolyon Howorth, “The Euro-Atlantic Security Dilemma: France, Britain and the ESDP,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 3, no. 1 (2005), 39–54.

61. Hamilton et al., Alliance Reborn, 25.62. See “Military Operations: Actions Needed to Improve DOD’s Stability Opera-

tions Approach and Enhance Interagency Planning,” Report to the Ranking Member (Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the U.S. House of Representa-tives, May 2007), 8.

63. Dewey Browder, “Conclusion,” in “Stability Operations,” 253.64. Seth Jones, Jeremy Wilson, Andrew Rathmell, and K. Jack Riley, Establishing

Law and Order after Conflict (RAND Corporation: infrastructure, safety and environ-ment, 2005), 2.

65. James Calafano, “Learning from the Past and Leaning Forward: Principles for Action in Undertaking Complex Activities” in Stability Operations and State-Building: Continuities and Contingencies, ed. Greg Kaufmann (The Strategic Studies Institute, October 2008), 175.

66. Jones et al., Establishing Law, xiii.67. James Dobbins et al., “Executive Summary” in America’s Role in Nation-

Building: From Germany to Iraq (RAND Corporation, 2003), xxv.68. Dobbins at al., America’s Role, xix–xxii. 69. Roland Paris, At War’s End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict (Cambridge

University Press, 2004), 7.70. Michael Dziedzic and Len Hawley, “Introduction,” in The Quest for Viable

Peace: International Intervention and the Strategies for Conflict Transformation, ed. Jock Covey, Michael Dziedzic, and Len Hawley (Washington, DC: United States Institute for Peace Press, 2005), 14.

71. See Post-Conflict Reconstruction: Task Framework (U.S. Army and Center for Strategic and International Studies, May 2002), 4–5.

72. “Declaration on Peace and Cooperation,” issued by the Heads of State and Government participating in the meeting of the North Atlantic Council (“The Rome Declaration”), http://www.nato.int/docu/basictxt/b911108b.htm, (accessed March 6, 2007).

73. “Final Communiqués of the Ministerial Meetings of the North Atlantic Coun-cil,” Brussels, March 10 and 23, 1992 and Athens, Greece, June 10, 1993.

74. Henning Riecke, “NATO’s Non-proliferation and Deterrence Policies: Mixed Signals and the Norms of WMD Non-Use” in Preventing the Use of Weapons of Mass Destruction, ed. Eric Herring (Frank Cass Publishers), 36; and Angus McColl, Is Counter-Proliferation Compatible with Non-Proliferation: Rethinking the Defense Counterproliferation Initiative (MA Thesis, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterrey, California, 1995), 2–3.

75. See “Remarks by Honorable Les Aspin, Secretary of Defense,” December 1994, 198–99.

76. Chris Williams, “DOD’s Counter-proliferation Initiative: A Critical Assess-ment,” in Fighting Proliferation: New Concerns for the Nineties, ed. Henry Sokolski (Washington, DC: The Nonproliferation Policy Education Center), www.fas.org/irp/threat/fp/index.html, (accessed March 3, 2007).


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77. Jeffrey A. Larsen, “NATO Counterproliferation Policy: A Case Study in Al-liance Politics” Occasional Paper #17 (Air Force Academy Institute for National Security Studies, November 1997),www.fas.org/irp/threat/ocp17.htm, (accessed March 11, 2007).

78. Larsen, NATO.79. Riecke, “NATO’s Non-proliferation,” 38.80. See Declaration of the Heads of State and Government participating in the

meeting of the North Atlantic Council (“The Brussels Summit Declaration”), Brus-sels, January 11, 1994, www.nato.int/docu/basictxt/b940111a.htm, (accessed August 14, 2006).

81. “Alliance Policy Framework in the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass De-struction” in NATO Handbook (Brussels, 2007), www.nato.int/docu/comm/49-95/c940609a.htm, (accessed March 11, 2007).

82. Riecke, “NATO’s Non-proliferation,” 37.83. “Macedonia: Filling the Security Vacuum,” ICG Balkans Briefing, Skopje/

Brussels, September 8, 2001.84. “The Alliance’s Operational Role in Peacekeeping,” NATO Handbook; Chap-

ter 5 (Brussels, 2001), www.nato.int/docu/handbook/2001/pdf/handbook.pdf, (ac-cessed December 27, 2004).

85. Statement on Iraq, issued by the Heads of State and Government participating in the meeting of the North Atlantic Council in Istanbul, June 28, 2004, www.nato.int/docu/pr/2004/p04-098e.htm, (accessed January 6, 2009).

86. Jeremy Sharp and Christopher Blanchard, “Post-War Iraq: A Table and Chro-nology of Foreign Contributions” CRS Report for Congress, March 18, 2005, fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/44124.pdf, (accessed August 15, 2008).

87. Author’s personal interviews with a French representative to NATO, January 2006.

88. Author’s personal interviews with Sam Wells, Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, D.C., September 2006.

89. Author’s personal interviews with a French representative to NATO, January 2006.

90. See “NATO’s assistance to Iraq,” NATO Handbook, www.nato.int/, (accessed August 17, 2009).

91. See “NATO Training Mission in Iraq NTM-I,” NATO Handbook, 2009, www.afsouth.nato.int/, (accessed September 17, 2009).


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On November 21, 2002, the nineteen Heads of State and Government of NATO members approved a comprehensive package of measures to strengthen the alliance’s ability to meet the challenges to the security of its forces, populations, and territory. NATO leaders committed that these deci-sions would provide for “balanced and effective capabilities” so that the alliance “can better carry out the full range of its missions and respond collec-tively to those challenges.”1 These decisions, known as the Prague Capabili-ties Commitment (PCC), officially endorsed NATO’s intentions to develop advanced multinational capabilities to meet the growing needs of its non-Article Five missions. As discussed in chapter 3, NATO’s out-of-the-area missions underwent horizontal and vertical evolution in the 1990s and 2000s. As a result, new tasks and responsibilities were added to already existent mis-sions; an example of which is the emergence of second and third generations of peacekeeping. Similarly, more sophisticated and complex missions such as crisis response and stability operations were introduced. Being a multilateral consensus-based alliance, NATO had to consolidate the diverging interests of its members and synergize their efforts to develop new capabilities.

This chapter’s presentation is organized around four core arguments. First, the acquisition of new capabilities is discussed in the context of resource op-timization. In general, NATO members tend to avoid or reduce unnecessary costs and unaffordable expenses. Instead, they redirect their resource base toward specific, much needed capabilities. Different nations focus on areas in which they have comparative advantages—for example, smaller states tend to combine resources with other smaller or bigger allies to form multinational teams.

4Advancing NATO’s New Capabilities


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Second, new capabilities’ advancement is a result of increasing demand for peacekeeping, crisis response, and stability operations all over the world. Therefore a direct link exists between the introduction of new missions and the advancement of specific alliance capabilities to support these missions. The implementation of the Combined Joint Task Force, for example, resulted from the 1990s evolution in peacekeeping in which peacekeepers worked closer together and dealt with complicated tasks. By the same token, the NATO Response Force was initiated and introduced in order to improve the alliance’s rapid reaction capabilities. Similarly, PCC called for the develop-ment of niche capabilities, such as the multinational teams or battalions for chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) defense, which could be used in specific missions dealing with a large spectrum of stability opera-tions including non-proliferation.

Third, not surprisingly, the advancement of NATO’s new capabilities also follows an evolutionary pattern because the new capabilities are tied to respective missions. For example, the evolution from peacekeeping to crisis response corresponds to the progress from simple multinational task forces to more advanced Response Force that is equipped with rapid reaction capabilities. Finally, the evolution of NATO’s new capabilities does not oc-cur automatically. Instead, it requires extensive bargaining and coordination among allies. The advancement of a certain type of capability (e.g., multi-national task forces) does not automatically generate a spillover into other types (e.g., NRF or multinational niche teams). Instead, when a new initia-tive is launched, the governments of the member states are usually involved in comprehensive negotiations at various levels prior to the NATO Summit scheduled to take place. Additionally, even if nations commit to meet certain targets within a narrow timeline, they often face resistance at home by their militaries and oftentimes fail to meet the originally planned targets. This situation explains why, at the subsequent summits, the allies once again need to revise their progress and renegotiate more realistic targets, while also in-corporating various mechanisms to monitor the progress and implementation of the new targets. This observation is tested against the Southeast European Brigade and the Baltic Battalion. These two cases of multinational coopera-tion also exemplify efforts to improve the interoperability among current and potential members. Although interoperability does not represent a particular allied capability, it is a key ingredient that affects the success of any peace-keeping, crisis response, or reconstruction mission. That is why sharing mili-tary resources between NATO and the European Union constitutes an impor-tant aspect of the new capabilities doctrine simply because as of December 2010 twenty-one nations shared dual membership and have responsibilities in both organizations.


Advancing NATO’s New Capabilities 117

PEACEKEEPING CAPABILITIES: COMBINED JOINT TASK FORCES (CJTFs)

The new generations of peacekeeping operations potentially able to address intra-state conflicts after the Cold War pointed to the necessity for new types of capabilities. New peacekeepers were generally granted a broader mandate and were expected to act as international police. Their responsibilities were extended to include implementation of peace agreements, peacemaking, and peace building. To meet these expectations, multinational forces were expected to work effectively together to address “hard” and “soft” aspects of peacekeeping. Thus, the interoperability among NATO allies became a para-mount component of NATO’s new role in international security. In an effort to optimize resources and enhance its capabilities, the Alliance introduced the notion of Combined Joint Task Forces (CJTFs). It was intended to give NATO’s forces improved mobility and flexibility, and to better suit them to deal with third generation peacekeeping operations.

What is a Combined Joint Task Force? Essentially, it is a military organiza-tion or grouping organized for the purposes of carrying out a specific mission or task. It is furnished with certain military resources, such as manpower and equipment, and involves two or more military services (army, navy, air force, etc.) accomplished by at least two or more nations.2 Therefore, CJTF is “a multinational, multi-service deployable task force generated and tailored primarily, but not exclusively, for military operations” outside of alliance territory, including but not limited to humanitarian relief and peacekeeping.3

Historically, the first CJTFs came into being with the first Gulf War in 1991, but their conceptualization within NATO was launched in late 1993. NATO’s formal endorsement occurred at the Brussels Summit in January 1994 when the concept of CJTFs was introduced as a means “to facilitate contingency operations, including operations with participating nations outside the Alliance.”4 These multinational task forces serve several pur-poses. First, CJTFs were planned in response to various activities outside of NATO’s traditional territorial domain. They required a concentration of mul-tilateral efforts in third generation peacekeeping for which the organization’s assets should be made available on a case-by-case basis. Second, NATO’s assets would be available not only to the allies, but also to other participat-ing nations that contribute to the operation. Third, these assets could also be made available for operations led by other international organizations, such as the Western European Union (WEU), the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and even the United Nations. The idea was to support European efforts to create “separable but not separate” collective defense capabilities, known as the European Security and Defense Identity


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(ESDI).5 Fourth, the concept provided a flexible and efficient framework to generate rapidly deployable forces with appropriate command and control ar-rangements. Therefore, these new chains of command and control supposedly streamlined the new common procedures and regime of exercises. Ultimately, the CJTFs constituted an unprecedented initiative because it permanently in-stitutionalized the multinational task force concept that had previously been a temporary command-and-control arrangement applied to ad hoc coalitions. The goal was to create a unique, hybrid capability combining the best at-tributes of both coalitions and alliance forces holding the ability to respond rapidly. Necessary infrastructure was provided and preestablished rules and standardized procedures were introduced to facilitate their activities. CJTFs also sought efficiency and relied exclusively on existent resources. Instead of introducing new forces to serve these multinational efforts, CJTFs gained synergy through so-called dual-hatting, i.e., personnel was selected within existent organizations by modifying the procedures in place and introduc-ing new employment and operational concepts. In conclusion, these forces constituted a novel type of multinational peacekeeping capabilities within NATO designed to respond to the growing demand for a new generation of non-Article Five missions.

CJTFs implementation was not an easy task: interoperability was a major issue because the equipment routinely used by non-NATO troop-contributing nations usually differs from that of those employed by NATO troops and, in many cases, is incompatible. Furthermore, a parent headquarters was nec-essary to provide complete equipment suites to certain participants just to ensure a minimal degree of compatibility. Even when issues with interoper-ability were solved, other political problems arose. As an intergovernmental institution, NATO faced difficulties in coordinating the individual positions of its allies and partner countries. Each of them held different understandings of what type of multinational task forces would meet best their individual national interests. There was no guarantee that national support would ar-rive at the task force headquarters as promised. In other words, the rule that all politics is local translated into every NATO language as each sovereign nation has the right of first refusal to requests associated with the formation and implementation of CJTFs.6 Another serious initial problem arose with the “nucleus” staff of these forces. When allied forces conducted the first exercise of a CJTF operation in November 1997, its headquarters filled only a quarter of the four hundred necessary staff officers. Some members ex-pressed reservations about the small nucleus staff, and argued that the parent headquarters should provide approximately 70 percent of the staff. But if a high percentage of nucleus personnel were directed toward the parent head-quarters, this would create a problem with residual capabilities because most



of their officers would be serving as nucleus personnel and other CJTF areas would be understaffed.

Several distinct stages marked the CTJFs introduction and implementation. Three “parent” headquarters were established during the first stage following the inauguration of these forces. In the meantime, ethnic violence in the for-mer Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Somalia, and other places in the world peaked. Im-mediate action was necessary, but neither NATO nor any other international organization held the capability to provide rapidly deployable forces that could stop hostilities. Therefore, CJTFs were sent to provide multinational support; their first test was in December 1995 when NATO began Operation Joint Endeavor in Bosnia. The new force replaced the United Nations Pro-tection Force (UNPROFOR) and included allied and non-allied forces under integrated command.7

One of the special task forces set up as a part of Operation Joint Endeavor was named Eagle. It is an example of a multinational CJTF formed in 1995. TF Eagle began its operation in December within IFOR following the NATO-im-posed cease-fire earlier the same year. Even though it was deployed in the area of U.S.-led Multinational Division North, the force was truly multinational—it included Fifth U.S. Corps, Nordic-Polish, Turkish, and Russian Brigades from a total of twelve NATO and non-NATO nations.8 Its first task—the historic bridging of the Sava River—was completed on December 31, 1995. Other tasks included the enforcement of the Bosnian cease-fire, the marking and supervision of the boundaries and zones of separation between the former war-ring factions, as well as the monitoring of combatants’ withdrawal to their bar-racks, and the relocation of heavy weaponry to designated storage sites. Thus, Task Force Eagle effectively responded to the needs of the third generation of peacekeeping operations, performing versatile peace-enforcement functions. Per OSCE’s request, TF Eagle also helped administer Bosnia’s first democratic national elections. Despite the fact that the United States maintained the largest presence in Bosnia, one third of the 60,000 IFOR troops, most of the CJTFs were truly multinational. When IFOR’s mandate expired in 1996, the mission was replaced by the Stabilization Force or SFOR.9 Despite the change of guard in the command structures, the multinational task forces established with IFOR remained in place and became the backbone of peacekeeping in Bosnia. The need for multinational presence in the area became palpable in November 1996 when demonstrations in two Bosnian villages led to an altercation between the former warring factions, threatening the province’s fragile peace. Soldiers from Task Force Aegis, led by the U.S. First Infantry Division, intervened swiftly and brought the situation under control.10

In 1996, the Berlin and Brussels NATO meetings of foreign and defense ministers endorsed the overall political-military framework for the CJTF


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concept. Since many of NATO’s European members were also European Union nations, these meetings took initial steps in regulating the use of mul-tinational task forces by NATO and other partner institutions, such as the EU. It was decided that the emerging European Security and Defense Identity should be built within NATO, which constituted an essential part of the alli-ance’s internal adaptation. In part, the underlying logic was to apply CJTFs toward strengthening the joint European defense efforts based on “sound military principles supported by appropriate military planning.”11 Ultimately, the emergence of coherent and effective military forces would enable orga-nizations like the EU or the WEU to operate these forces under the political control and strategic direction of different international security institutions.

Two underlying tendencies surrounded the introduction of CJTFs in the late 1990s: Internationally, the rapidly deteriorating security in certain parts of the world demanded new capabilities for swift action. This tendency was coupled with an ever increasing gap of existing capabilities between the United States and its allies. Even though the U.S. held unmatched capabilities to respond to these types of operations, the legitimacy of these efforts neces-sitated coordinated multinational efforts. Dealing alone with the growing need for peacekeeping efforts in the post-Cold War world would be economi-cally inefficient for the United States. In this strategic environment, CJTFs encouraged the European allies to work together in multinational forces and manage their resources more efficiently. The successful implementation of these forces was also an opportunity to encourage other nations to conduct military reforms, promote institutional adaptation, and, in general, reduce the costs of peacekeeping.

The second phase of CJTFs’ implementation focused on NATO’s capa-bilities to deploy small- and large-scale, land- and sea-based Task Force Headquarters as well as nominate additional “parent” headquarters.12 The CJTF concept was put at test on a number of occasions. For example, part-ner countries participated as observers in the Exercise Strong Resolve in March 1998 and were integrated throughout the structure of these forces. Based on these trials, and other relevant staff analyses, the alliance began full implementation of the task forces. This process included the acquisition of necessary headquarters support and command, control, and communica-tions equipment.13 A gap of three years between the first and second stage of CJTF implementation displays the organizational constraints that NATO decision-makers encountered from the member states’ militaries when trying to implement the new force.

Nonetheless, the utility of these combined task forces during their second stage of implementation became particularly noticeable after 2001 in the context of the operation in Afghanistan. Combined Joint Task Force-76 and



Task Force Aegis are examples of such allied interaction. Combined Joint Task Force-76 (CJTF-76) was a U.S.-led subordinate formation of the Com-bined Forces Command in Afghanistan with headquarters in Kabul. CJTF-76 reported to U.S. Central Command. Even though the task force command was deactivated by the end of 2006, the force itself remained active and continued to serve as a headquarters for ISAF Regional Command East. CJTF-76 was designed to conduct a full spectrum of operations throughout its operations area to defeat the extremist movements supporting the adversary and set con-ditions for “long-term stability in Afghanistan.”14 Even though Task Force Eagle in Bosnia was designed primarily for peacekeeping operations, other aspects, such as peacemaking and peace enforcement, were added separately as NATO had already anticipated that the new task forces in Afghanistan needed to be prepared for a full spectrum of operations. Examples of U.S.-led task forces include TF Bayonet, TF Spartan, TF Furry, and TF Currahee. Some of these task forces completed their missions, while others remained active under different command.

Task Force Aegis constituted multinational force led by Canada in South-eastern Afghanistan. Other contributing nations included the United King-dom, the Netherlands, Estonia, and the United States. Aegis was responsible for provincial reconstruction in the troubled areas of Kandahar, Lashkar Gah, Qalat, and Tarin Kowt. This group was also known as the Multinational Bri-gade—Regional Command South (MNB RC South). Under allied agreement the rotational command of the force was taken over by the Dutch at the end of 2006. Task Force Aegis participated in the surge after 2006 and also took a share of the rising death toll in the troubled areas of Afghanistan as four Canadian soldiers from this task force were killed in April 2006 in a roadside bomb explosion in Shah Wali Kot district of the Kandahar province, fifty miles north of Kandahar.15

The introduction and implementation of the multinational task forces con-firm several interesting patterns in the advancement of NATO’s new capa-bilities. First, CJTFs are driven by the demand for more sophisticated, third generation peacekeeping. Second, despite the gap in capabilities between the U.S. and the rest of the allies, these forces remain multinational in their char-acter. They contribute toward allied specialization and a more efficient use of military resources. This finding aligns Thomas Burnett’s argument that small allies may also be instrumental for the success of international peacekeeping missions. From the perspective of heterogeneous clubs, these nations form important cogs in the overall club mechanism because “hard” power may be instrumental when it comes to winning wars, but the participation of small countries becomes particularly important when it comes to winning and enforcing and winning peace. Third, the history of multinational task forces


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indicates that the introduction of new peacekeeping capabilities is related to the overall progress of the respective mission but does not necessarily follow exactly the same trend. Conflicting national interests and resistance to imple-ment needed reforms are among the reasons why military organizations pro-tract the endorsement of the new forces and delay the expansion of their re-sponsibilities. Finally, alliance membership facilitates the implementation of new multinational capabilities—NATO members are much more likely than its partners to comply with NAC’s decisions and deadlines as the latter are not necessarily bound to abide by NATO’s political and military decisions.

CRISIS PREVENTION AND RESPONSE: NATO RESPONSE FORCE (NRF)

Crisis prevention and response missions have several intrinsic characteristics that distinguish them from traditional peacekeeping. They are characterized by a sense of urgency, uncertainty, and time compression. In this operational environment decision-makers often become constrained in their choice of possible actions and, due to the increased urgency and uncertainty, their pri-mary goal is to avoid the least preferable outcome. Therefore, crisis response missions differ significantly from peacekeeping—unlike multinational task forces where the emphasis is on troops’ multinational character—these mis-sions require much more cohesive and mobile capabilities. Since multina-tional task forces alone were insufficient to meet the increasing needs for rap-idly deployable and effective forces, NATO initiated the Defense Capabilities Initiative (DCI), which was officially inaugurated at the Washington Summit in April 1999. By paying special attention to the need for crisis response, the new initiative transformed the understanding of non-Article Five missions. The emphasis no longer focused on the multinational character of the forces, but rather on their capacity to act as a single unit within a coherent and responsive alliance. The new forces were expected to maintain and supply activities far from their home bases while at the same time surviving and en-gaging effectively in long-term operations. New capabilities were designed to enable NATO troops to successfully engage an adversary in operations with high and low intensity, as well as protect forces and infrastructure against cur-rent and future threats. Based on the experience in Bosnia, DCI highlighted the importance of interoperable communications that would ideally facilitate command, control, and information systems among allies and enable them to effectively work together.16 The 1999 initiative emphasized the advancement of new defense capabilities intended to improve dramatically NATO’s time response to international crises. Thus, the shift from CJTFs to DCI depicts



a pattern of vertical evolution from peacekeeping and peace enforcement to more advanced capabilities designed to respond to and prevent international crises. Ironically, DCI was inaugurated amid another of NATO’s campaigns in the Former Yugoslavia—Operation Allied Force.

Although Defense Capabilities Initiative outlined goals for crisis preven-tion, it lacked precise commitments from individual allies, without which the success of the rapid response forces would be elusive. In order to offset the resistance of national militaries and to promote a more cooperative approach from its members, NATO endorsed a new initiative in November 2002 at its Summit in Prague. It was proposed by the U.S. Secretary for Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, two months earlier and aimed at creating a NATO rapid reaction force. The new initiative built on DCI foundations but also included more precise goals than had not been established previously. It was officially launched as a package of several transformational proposals and became known as the Prague Capabilities Commitment (PCC). Under PCC the new NATO forces were expected to close the capability gap between the North American and European allies and revise fundamentally the alliance’s mili-tary command structure.17

The meeting in Prague known as the transformation summit adopted three core decisions outlining the upcoming reforms. First, the creation of the NATO Response Force (NRF) was formally approved. NRF constituted a new type of standing expeditionary force of 20,000 troops that could be de-ployed quickly and sustained for thirty days. Second, the Alliance formally endorsed the Prague Capabilities Commitment (PCC).18 PCC entailed spe-cific commitments from individual members and coalitions to invest in new capabilities. In order to ensure the implementability of these commitments, a new command structure was introduced—Allied Command Transformation (ACT). ACT is based on the previous Atlantic Command in Norfolk, Vir-ginia. After 2002, it was reorganized into two new strategic commands—one in charge of allied operations and one in charge of transformation. Third, NATO also decided to open its door and invited seven small countries from Eastern Europe to join the Alliance.

The Prague Summit marked a significant milestone in NATO’s overall transformation. The decisions to introduce new multinational forces were driven by the need to support the new missions. PCC outlined a mechanism to manage NATO’s heterogeneity, ensuring that all members (old and new) would work closely with other allies to complement their capabilities. There-fore, the Summit launched new NATO forces that could better serve the need for crisis response and whose troops could move faster and further afield, applying military force more effectively and sustaining extended combat.19


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The NATO Response Force agreement also formed an integral part of the PCC. It was intended to solve problems related to efficiency, interoperability, and coordination created by CJTFs. Furthermore, the purpose of this rapid reaction force was to provide NATO with a robust and credible capacity to react quickly and efficiently to international crises. During its first stage, NRF was expected to deploy itself within five days and operate self-sufficiently for thirty days without re-supply. It was envisaged to function as a joint multi-national force. The military command would lay in the hands of a Strategic Commander for Operations and would flow from him or her to the Joint Force Commander (JFC). The need of each crisis response mission would determine the force’s size. In the meantime, NRF was expected to acquire certain military assets: command and control capabilities to support up to two hundred combat sorties per day, a brigade-sized land force, and maritime forces up to the size of a NATO Standing Naval Force, which translates into approximately 21,000 personnel. The units would train prior to an assign-ment to ensure that they can be deployed anywhere in the world on a seven to thirty days’ notice. The NRF concept combines high-readiness forces with CJTFs in order to better integrate NATO’s command and force structures to enhance “the deployability, sustainability, and fighting capability” of these troops given the new operational environment that they may face.20 The force was designed to distribute military burden equitably among different alliance members and avoid burgeoning capability gaps between them.21 Depending on the circumstances in which these forces would be initiated and the stage of the conflict in which they might intervene, NATO rapid reaction forces could operate either an initial entry force or as a follow-on force. The entry force would have limited engagement in the early stages of the conflict and would mainly facilitate standing force’s arrival, while the follow-on-force would be expected to accomplish a larger set of civil and military tasks address-ing the roots of the crisis, as well as aiding the conflict area’s rehabilitation. NRF also planned to function either as a stand-alone force or in combina-tion with other multinational forces or contingents. The level of engagement would vary—initial force would participate in quick response operations while follow-on force would perform a range of activities varying from non-combatant evacuation and counter-terrorism operations to embargo enforce-ment activities or support for coercive diplomacy as needed.22 In the early stages of its implementation, the force provided exclusively enhanced peace-keeping capabilities and, only after the it reached more advanced stages, NRF could perform crisis prevention and response tasks. In essence, the response force is composed of troops from several pools of multinational task forces based on the principle of rotation; it represents an advanced form of a multi-



national peacekeeping force that, if necessary, can also subsume peacekeep-ing responsibilities.23

Similar to DCI, PCC sought to improve members’ operational capabilities and to address evolving defense needs. In both instances the allies agreed that progress would be monitored on a regular basis. Unlike DCI, however, the Prague Summit determined a specific timeline for NRF to become fully op-erational. The introduction of specific targets and a timeline for their accom-plishment in Prague was especially pressing since the early conceptualization of rapid response capabilities proved too broad and diffuse. PCC was de-signed immediately after September 11 and focused on specific tools—airlift, secure communications, precision guided munitions (PGMs), and protection against weapons of mass destruction.24 In his speech before the Prague sum-mit, President Bush explicitly emphasized the link between PCC and the fight against terrorism, when he declared that “NATO must develop new military capabilities,” and its forces must be “better able to fight side-by-side.”25

In July 2003, NATO military leaders held a force-generation conference and agreed to officially launch the response force. NRF’s first headquarters were situated in Italy, and placed under the Netherlands’ Joint Force Com-mand. The first two forces were rotational and included about 9,500 person-nel from fifteen members. In 2004, the new force participated in several exercises, including live-fire training and maritime exercise off the cost of Sardinia. Elements of the NRF were deployed to help protect the Summer Olympics in Athens, and also successfully supported the 2004 Afghan presi-dential elections. Overall, the NRF’s initial years of operation were consid-ered successful by most observers.26

In 2005 the alliance held four separate exercises, which tested various NRF capabilities: long-distance force deployment, amphibious operations, disaster relief, and maritime capabilities but the first actual NRF operation took place in September 2005 after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast of the United States. NATO organized an air-bridge using aircraft from NATO’s Airborne Early Warning fleet during which almost two hundred tons of relief goods were delivered.27 A month later, in October 2005, a devastating earthquake struck Pakistan. Its government approached NATO with a request for as-sistance. NAC responded favorably, establishing another strategic air-bridge to Pakistan, which delivered much needed relief items, shelter, medical sup-plies, and warm clothing. NATO also sent a Disaster Relief Team of about one thousand personnel to the devastated areas. The team comprised NRF and national military and civil elements. It was equipped with a field hospital, helicopters, three light and one heavy engineer companies, and a helicopter re-fuelling station.28 In June 2006 the NRF carried out several exercises. Over


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seven thousand troops from practically all NATO nations participated in the largest of these exercises, Steadfast Jaguar, which simulated disaster relief, amphibious landing, precision fighter jet bombing, special force assaults, and naval bombardment. NRF passed successfully the last operational tests, after which the force was declared in full operational capability at the Summit in Riga, Latvia in November 2006.

The process of NRF’s actual implementation proved a more difficult task. During the early stages, in 2004 and 2005, its land component had major ca-pability shortfalls relative to the other two components (navy and air force). At times the activation of these response forces stalled due to problems associated with domestic legislation and low levels of coordination among the member states.29 Nonetheless, the NRF was successful partly because of SACEUR’s firm commitment that these rapid response capabilities would become fully operational. Gen. James Jones together with Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer continued to support the NRF and encouraged the members to move on with the force despite transatlantic bickering on the war in Iraq.

Even though the response force was supposed to, at short notice, field up to twenty-five thousand people by 2006, this target was never met and military command realized that this goal was not feasible. Instead, they changed the strategy toward a graduated approach, in which a smaller number of units (be-tween eight and ten thousand people) would be reserved for NRF’s rotation at the highest level of readiness with the potential to reach required levels of commitment if necessary. When the alliance re-examined the NRF’s overall planning and procedures and re-evaluated its financial arrangements and training methods, it became clear that these rapid response capabilities would be much more limited than had been originally planned.30 NATO clearly faced lack of willingness of its members to commit sufficient resources in terms of funding, training, and preparedness.

As a result, the follow-up NATO Summits in Istanbul (2004) and Riga (2006) did not announce any new goals. Instead, these meetings reviewed the implementation of existing commitments by setting out extensive programs and monitoring mechanisms. The Final Communiqué of the Istanbul Sum-mit (2004) reaffirmed “further the transformation of our military capabilities to make them more modern, more usable and more deployable to carry out the full range of Alliance missions.”31 NATO leaders urged some nations to invest their national military resources in critical areas such as deployability. The Istanbul Summit also approved the creation of a NATO Active Layered Theater Ballistic Missile Defense Program as an important element of force protection. The Riga Summit noted progress on airlift capacity and several other crisis response areas. It also urged the allies to improve interoperability



and capabilities in special operations, networking, intelligence sharing, and missile defense.32

Finally, several important conclusions can be inferred from this presen-tation: First, a direct causal link exists between the demand for new crisis response missions and the advancement of capabilities designed to support these missions as shown in the table below. Key features of these capabilities include cohesion, mobility and deployability, effectiveness, and the long-term duration of the operations as summarized in table 4.1 below. Second, the advancement of NATO’s capabilities illustrates a pattern of vertical evolution from less advanced peacekeeping to more sophisticated crisis response capa-bilities. This pattern, however, is not always linear and may be disrupted by the discrepancies of national interests or reluctance to transform and adapt the armed forces of individual nation due to various organizational or other do-mestic factors. Third, NATO’s new crisis response capabilities reflect a com-promise reached as a result of intergovernmental bargaining. The decision to develop rapid response capabilities occurred at the Washington and Prague Summits in 1999 and 2002, but the actual implementation was possible only after mechanisms for monitoring and review were introduced. Finally, NRF never achieved the originally projected levels of commitment. The force con-tinued to face a major identity problem—whether it was going to be a truly transatlantic or primarily European force. Since, for the most part, the United States possessed its own rapid reaction capabilities, Washington encouraged the Europeans to take main responsibility for fielding the NRF’s combat

Table 4.1. Features of Crisis Response Missions and Capabilities

Definition for Crisis Response Crisis Response Mission Crisis Response Capabilities

Attempt to control events during crisis to prevent systemic violence from occurring

Capacity to act as a single unit

NRF is essentially a CJTF (multinational, multi-service task force) based on rotation

Limit or control the level and scope of violence

Mobility and deployability Initial and Follow-on forces

Urgency, time compression, and uncertainty

Effective engagement Ability to deploy within 5 days

Efforts to neutralize/eliminate the roots of conflict

Long duration operations Self-sufficiency for 30 days

Implementability and outcome permanence

Survivability Stand-alone forces


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forces, while the American contribution would be limited to enabling support assets. This, on the other hand, discouraged some Europeans who interpreted the U.S. approach as a lack of firm commitment to build and use the NRF.33 Therefore, the introduction of NRF reaffirms that while the smaller states have a bigger stake in contributing to this new NATO force, it is imperative for the United States to become involved in NRF’s training and exercise in order to encourage the rest of the allies to improve their interoperability for expeditionary operations.

STABILITY AND RECONSTRUCTION CAPABILITIES

The stability, security, transition, and reconstruction (SSTR) operations are the most complex and versatile of all NATO post-Cold War operations. For the most part, they combine state- and nation-building efforts that involve sev-eral separate stages of implementation and are expected to last much longer than traditional peacekeeping or crisis response operations. During the initial stages, SSTR are expected to establish vital political and economic institu-tions and rule of law, while the later stages involve societal transformation that enables stable identities and viable democratic institutions. The interna-tional forces are often required to perform unfamiliar and unplanned tasks, such as fighting terrorists and criminal gangs, pacifying ethnic violence, and restoring the distribution of electrical power, water, food, and fuel.34 These complicated missions must be supported by a multinational presence that operates between war and peace and is ready to perform a variety of military and civilian tasks conducted at home and abroad.

Therefore, the traditional distinction between operations on the territories of the NATO members (or Article Five operations) and out-of-the-area (or non-Article Five) operations is no longer relevant. Consider, for example, disaster management and control capabilities. They are designed to respond to natural and human-made disasters that may occur in the U.S. Gulf Coast or anywhere in the North Atlantic Area, as well as in Pakistan. Normally, the protection of critical infrastructures, which requires plans for securing pipelines, offshore platforms, and ports to assure energy supplies during war-times, is primarily targeted at home. Stability and reconstruction capabilities are equally necessary for missions outside of the North Atlantic Area: if ter-rorists cut energy or water supplies, this could also affect directly or indirectly NATO members’ security, would substantially undermine the stability of lo-cal institutions, and could jeopardize the whole stability operation. The same observations can be made regarding cyber or bio-defense. Militaries need to possess versatile capabilities with the ability to adapt to a hostile environ-



ment, sustain themselves in that environment for an extended period of time, and gain the credibility of the population and authorities. Both the manage-ment of these operations and the development of the capabilities needed to support them are particularly cumbersome in the context of heterogeneous clubs like NATO which incorporate two and a half dozen nations, often holding diverging national interests. Capabilities to combat WMD prolifera-tion have direct implications for all NATO members, its partners, and other nations alike as they enhance overall international stability.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and its replacement with a number of new successor states with weak institutions increased the threats of WMDs. Due to a power vacuum in the former communist coun-tries, the alliance was called to respond swiftly. The foreign ministers met in Istanbul in June 1994 and adopted an “Alliance Policy Framework on Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction.”35 The new document called for the intensification of NATO’s political and defense efforts against the proliferation of WMDs. One of its aftermaths was a comprehensive statement of NATO’s approach to proliferation released in 1995. “NATO’s Response to Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction” addressed the need to develop specific capabilities in the area of WMDs. After conducting a “comprehen-sive assessment of the risks posed by proliferation,” the statement pinpointed three different tiers of capabilities “needed to support NATO’s defense pos-ture”—military, core, and a combination of a “mix” of different capabilities.36 While they recognized that NATO’s capabilities reinforced and comple-mented international efforts in this respect, it highlighted the importance of additional knowledge about supplier-proliferant relations acquired through advanced intelligence gathering capabilities. The advancement of “robust military capabilities” would send deterrent signals to proliferants about the seriousness with which the alliance approaches these risks, while the core integrative capabilities would have an impact on the overall effectiveness of NATO’s defense. The framework discussed the importance of strategic and operational intelligence; automated and deployable command, control, and communications; ground surveillance; nuclear, biological, and chemical agent detection, identification, and warning; and extended air defense. The efforts to curb WMD proliferation in the 1990s had several important impli-cations. First, NATO highlighted the importance of allied interoperability for the advancement of NATO’s new capabilities with an emphasis on enhanced intelligence; command, control, and communications; and ground surveil-lance. Second, the policy framework outlined in the 1990s called for the acquisition of capabilities for air defense, including Tactical Ballistic Missile Defense and Individual Protective Equipment for Deployed Forces. Third, the alliance’s approach to proliferation stressed the mix of civilian and military


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capabilities that would provide a firm basis for deterring or protecting against the risks from proliferation.

NATO celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in April 1999 at the Summit in Washington, D.C. The meeting adopted a new Strategic Concept, the second one after the fall of communism in 1990, and initiated reforms designed to improve the alliance’s stabilization capabilities. The 1999 Strategic Concept held that NATO forces “called upon to operate beyond NATO’s borders for dealing with proliferation risks must be flexible, mobile, rapidly deployable and sustainable.”37 It also reaffirmed the need to maintain flexibility and effectiveness of alliance’s response by ensuring uncertainty in the mind of any aggressor about the nature of this response. The allies recognized the importance of the flexibility and effectiveness of its military forces to respond to WMD threats, but did not include any concrete measures to improve the capabilities needed to diffuse these threats. As a result, the issue of non-proliferation was, once again, a subject of deliberation in 2002.

NATO’s Multinational Non-Proliferation Teams

The Prague Summit in 2002 served as a forum to persuade members to take on individual commitments toward improving NATO’s capabilities for peacekeeping, crisis response, and stability operations. PCC reflected a con-tinuing effort to improve and develop new military capabilities for “modern warfare in a high threat environment.”38 The Summit endorsed five ambitious defense initiatives designed to boost its capabilities to deal with nuclear, biological, and chemical threats. The participants agreed to establish several new tools that would significantly improve capabilities to react to possible WMD threats. These included prototype deployable nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) Analytical Laboratory; NBC Event Response Team; a vir-tual Center of Excellence for NBC Weapons Defense; a NATO Biological and Chemical Defense Stockpile; and a Disease Surveillance System.39 These new capabilities were designed with a greater emphasis on multinational commitments. Thus, smaller nations would be able to combine resources in order to purchase hardware that otherwise would be unaffordable for each ally to acquire individually.

The heads of state and government approved a comprehensive trans-formational package stressing the importance of niche capabilities or role specialization. One of the concrete achievements of PCC was the creation of multinational Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear (CBRN) De-fense Battalion in 2004. The battalion is specifically trained and equipped to address CBRN attacks against NATO forces or populations; it fulfills two capability commitments: a NBC Analytical Laboratory and a CBRN Event



Response team. The CBRN battalion and the event response team are high-readiness, multinational, multifunctional formations able to deploy quickly to participate in the full spectrum of NATO operations. Since 2003 twenty-one allies have contributed to the CBRN battalion on a voluntary basis for a six-month rotation. National commitments may vary but usually involve eight to ten nations involved per rotation. The personnel is based in their country of origin but comes together for training and deployment. There is a voluntary lead country in each rotation, which hosts the headquarters. It is responsible for command and control arrangements, the maintenance of standard op-erational procedures, and planning and conduct of multinational training. Contributing nations supply functional capabilities such as requisite troops, equipment, and logistical support.40

The Prague Summit provided the first opportunity for the three new en-trants from Central and Eastern Europe—the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland—to actively participate in the decision-making process. Some of the new members realized that development of niche capabilities was a chance for them to assert their role in NATO’s burden sharing. It encouraged relatively similar allies to combine their efforts and form various teams. The Czechs realized their comparative advantages in the areas of CBRN defense and took the initiative to lead the first and the eight rotation of the new bat-talion. Additionally, six new NATO members (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovenia) and five old allies (France, Portu-gal, Spain, Turkey, and the U.S.) have participated in at least three or more rotations during the first four years of battalion’s operation. There are also several other instances of multinational teams: One such team is led by the Netherlands; it buys conversion kits to transform conventional bombs into precision-guided munitions or PGMs. Germany manages a consortium that acquires strategic air transport capabilities, while Spain heads a group that would lease tanker aircraft. Norway and Denmark coordinate the procure-ment of sealift assets. The idea of multinational teams is even more relevant to new member states due to their scarce military resources. For this purpose, Romania develops capability in alpine troops, while Hungary possesses a skilled engineering corps that remains on call to join any multinational team whenever necessary.41

The Czech and Slovak multinational teams for chemical, biological, ra-diological, and nuclear protection illustrate best the tendency for cooperation between two small nations. The Czech Republic, a leader on countering the effects of CBRN weapons, teamed up with its neighbor Slovakia with whom they shared common statehood until 1993 to develop a team for CBRN pro-tection. During the Cold War, the Czechs specialized in protection against chemical and biological weapons. While the other East European countries


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relinquished their interest in developing CBRN capabilities after the Cold War, the Czech Republic continued to specialize in this niche. In 1991, a Czech unit participated in the Persian Gulf War and its skills were fully acknowledged by its allies, including the United States. In 2000 the Czech Republic again responded to the crisis in the Middle East by dispatching a CBRN protection unit of 251 soldiers to Kuwait. During the military cam-paign of 2003, the unit remained in the Gulf ready to protect Kuwait against expected retaliation by Saddam Hussein’s regime with missiles carrying CBRN agents.42

The multinational niche teams are formed if economies of scale exist that reduce costs and maximize the efficient use of military resources. In order to achieve such economies and maximize the efficiency of its CBRN capabili-ties, the Czech Republic offers its training facilities, know-how, and other non-proliferation detection instruments to club members. For example, prior to the 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens, Greek experts invited the Czechs to use their experience for training and transfer of expertise. This ar-rangement proved more cost-efficient to Greece than trying to acquire CBRN capabilities alone. The Czech and Slovak CBRN teams pinpoint to the fact that their optimal management is based on several core criteria: (a) relative homogeneity of participating countries; (b) appropriate size and scope of the team; and (c) expectation for a long-term cooperation. In order to function efficiently, such a team should comprise a unit no larger than a battalion.43 In the case of the Czech and Slovak teams, their niche specialization is based on similarities of common statehood, including technological, linguistic, and cultural compatibility.44 The success of these teams depends on the expecta-tion for long-term cooperation because of the serious investment necessary for professional training and preparedness. Thus, it is more beneficial for the allies to cooperate in fewer teams with a long-term perspective and versatile applicability than multiple, overlapping, short-term teams.

Compared to the 1999 Washington Summit, the decisions in Prague proved to be more target-oriented focusing on fewer, but more feasible, goals with an additional emphasis on multinational cooperation and specialization. The member states were requested to make specific commitments to acquire capa-bilities in the areas of non-proliferation, intelligence, surveillance, command, control, communications, combat effectiveness, and deployability.45 PCC’s approach encouraged club members to form homogeneous groups or sub-clubs based on the resources that they possessed. These mini-clubs essentially served as tools to diversify capabilities and manage more efficiently military resources. The Istanbul Summit reaffirmed the trend for specialization noting that the Alliance needed to continue efforts toward full operational capacity



of the multinational CBRN battalion and NATO response force.46 Both struc-tures reached such capacity in July 2004.

The tracing of the multinational teams’ evolution in the 2000s indicates that their success is determined by their ability to multiply allied capabili-ties, which can be accomplished through so-called force enablers. NATO has identified three critical sets of such enablers—(1) Strategic and Theater Lift; (2) Network Enabled Command, Control, and Communications; and (3) In-teroperable Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) platforms. The presence of these three categories of enabling capabilities is instrumen-tal for the smooth operation of the multinational teams. That is why NATO leadership seriously discussed changing the funding procedure in order to stimulate the allocation of resources for force enablers from the NATO Se-curity Investment Program (NSIP). The usual practice in these instances is to allocate funding from allies’ national budgets but, given members’ reluctance to spend on common defense, centralized funding from NSIP would certainly facilitate faster introduction of these enablers. The strategic lift includes land lift, sealift, and airlift and is essential to respond to both Article Five and non-Article Five operations. The other two components—the Network En-abled Command, Control, and Communications, and ISR platforms improve interoperability within NATO’s communications and information systems at the operational and tactical levels. They are aimed at improving the compati-bility of those NATO and national network systems (especially U.S. systems) which, up to this date, are not completely interoperable.47

To sum up, the evolution of NATO’s capabilities over time occurs through an accommodation of national positions intended to meet the growing needs of the new out-of-the-area missions. A series of agreements in the 1990s and 2000s encouraged the allies to focus on improved interoperability, special-ization, and development of niche capabilities. Allied specialization leads to economies of scale and more equitable contributions of smaller nations; it is also intended to reduce transaction costs and increase the benefits of inter-state cooperation. The alliance already has lots of military equipment (tanks, fighter aircraft, etc); that is why, asking old, new, and prospective members to enhance areas of expertise these states already have is pragmatic.

Along the same lines, in the process of allied negotiations the distribution of benefits reflects the participants’ bargaining power. As the most power-ful nation within NATO, the United States holds a unique role in setting up the transformational agenda, managing the bargaining process, and pushing various implementation mechanisms forward. The decisions in Prague reaf-firmed the observations that specialization is usually initiated by key players who endorse the new initiative as was the case of PCC. The U.S. Secretary of


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Defense Donald Rumsfeld warned the alliance that it needed to become mili-tarily effective if it was to remain relevant. The European allies understood that Washington would act outside of NATO as long as the other members had little to offer to collective defense. To avoid possible coalitions of the willing in the future, the allies realized that they needed to make a serious effort to redress successfully the military capabilities gap.

WORKING WITH THE ALLIES

“Allied Interoperability”

Interoperability entails one of the ways to measure the capacity of the allies to work together effectively. It includes multiple meanings that affect military organizations on various levels—political, economic, strategic, operational, tactical, and technological.48 The model presented earlier in the book implied that interoperability influences NATO’s capabilities to conduct peacekeeping, crisis response, and stability operations. Thus, although it does not represent a separate category of capabilities, interoperability directly affects their advance-ment and holds an important role for the overall success of NATO’s missions.

What is interoperability? The Department of Defense (DoD) defines in-teroperability as “the ability of systems, or forces to provide services to and accept services from other systems, units, or forces and to use the services so exchanged to enable them to operate effectively together.” In the narrow sense of the term, interoperability determines “the degree to which various organizations or individuals are able to operate together to achieve a com-mon goal.”49 In the broader sense, interoperability is situation-dependent and varies in its forms, degrees, and levels. Two separate conclusions can be drawn from this definition. First, interoperability refers to certain costs and limits. The costs may vary in their nature (i.e., military, political, and economic) and they determine the price at which certain nations operate with other allies or coalition members toward achieving a common goal. At the same time interoperability also imposes certain constraints on the extent to which any nation is willing to trust another. Consider, for example, common or interoperable information systems or databases. When the number of in-siders who have access to a database increases significantly, these common or interoperable databases or systems become more vulnerable to disruption, corruption, and theft of data. A similar situation occurred in the spring of 2007 when Estonia’s entire Internet infrastructure was under attack. At the peak of the crisis, bank cards, cell phone networks, and even entire govern-ment servers were temporarily frozen, setting off alarm bells in Tallinn, as



well as in NATO.50 The alliance responded by creating a new Division on Emerging Security Challenges that was charged with developing capabilities to assist its members in protecting their networks. Since then both the 2010 Lisbon Summit and NATO’s new Strategic Concept placed cyber security at the forefront of the new security challenges.

Club goods theory holds that each of the allies is expected to maintain a certain minimum level of interoperability as a part of membership costs to ensure that the club can function properly. Costs and limits associated with interoperability impact allied effectiveness—decreasing costs and the capac-ity to successfully resolve interoperability’s constraints improves alliance’s cohesion and stimulates efficiency, while growing costs and insurmountable constraints lead to inefficiency.

Interoperability functions on operational, tactical, and technological levels. The major benefits at operational and tactical levels derive from the “fungi-bility or interchangeability of force elements and units.”51 A coalition or an alliance may possess either integrated operations that require a high level of interoperability or, at a much lower level, it may result in coordinated partitioning of the mission into separate country-specific chunks. Therefore, the vertical evolution from CJTFs to better integrated NRF or multinational teams represents advancement from a lower to a higher level of interop-erability. At operational and tactical levels, integration may be achieved through common or interoperable command centers that include various networks, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems. Lastly, the technological implications of interoperability include, but are not limited to, communication networks, systems’ software, and hardware that improve the mission’s compatibility.

Similarly, interoperability affects allied capabilities on the same three levels. A higher level of interoperability contributes toward a more effi-cient use of available military resources, expands the existent capabilities or establishes new ones, and, finally, better serves the operational needs of the allied mission. For example, in the 1990s and 2000s, the improvement of allied interoperability has been an integral part of the NATO’s overall transformation. Both DCI and PCC emphasized that command, control, and information systems needed to be compatible with each other to enable forces from different countries to work together effectively. PCC outlined specific steps and timelines to achieve the required levels of compatibility. Third, interoperability constitutes an important ingredient of allied capabili-ties. At the same time, interoperability is an integral part of heterogeneous clubs’ management and cannot be studied outside of a specific institutional or alliance setting where the members share costs and enjoy benefits from cooperation.


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NATO’s initial military involvement in the 1990s revealed various prob-lems associated with interoperability that needed to be urgently addressed. Even the participants of the international coalition in the Gulf War of 1991 realized that they were not fully compatible. Nonetheless, this problem be-came much more salient in the mid- and late 1990s during NATO military campaigns in the former Yugoslavia. Consider, for example, Operation Allied Force against Serbia in 1999. During the seventy-eight days of bombing little doubt existed about the campaign’s outcome due to the disproportionality of capabilities between the two adversaries. Operation Allied Force indicated gaps in interoperability that caused discrepancy between European and American campaign contributions. Compared to American efforts, the Euro-peans contributed marginally—about 36 percent of the total aircraft deployed and less than half of the sorties. Of the European allies, France provided the highest contributions in terms of aircraft and total sorties (more than 100 aircraft and 2,414 sorties). The United Kingdom and Italy, respectively, were the second and third overall contributors. The advantage of the Italian and the German aircraft was that they were equipped with anti-radiation missiles and combat reconnaissance capabilities. The Dutch aircraft was furnished with forward-looking infrared sensors and possessed the ability to conduct night operations.52

The aftermath of Operation Allied Force led to the conclusion that substan-tial efforts were necessary to enhance coordination among allies. A NATO-led military operation would attest to the sufficiency of common values and the alliance’s strong resolve to terminate ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Such a decision required consensus in the NAC that was not easy to achieve. The alternative, an operation led by the U.S. or a fragile international coalition, would have had limited international legitimacy. Although the Council agreed on the substance of the operation, it had difficulty in generating con-sensus about the implementation of the bombing and the utilization of the integrated military command during the seventy-eight-day campaign. The difficulty in generating consensus was accompanied by insufficient levels of interoperability. This provoked a careful analysis that produced multiple reports on the interoperability gap. Britain acknowledged Europe’s reliance on the United States and noted several core areas of deficiency—a precision all-weather strike, strategic lift, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, air defense, and air-to-air refueling. The British report concerned itself with the European dependency on U.S. capabilities and favored an approach in which European views would carry more weight. The French, on the other hand, paid more attention to the political dimension of the capabilities gap and the need for greater European autonomy.

Rapid and secure communications constituted another area of deficiency. Most of the European equipment lacked frequency hopping, UHF, and radios



for encrypted communications. As a result, classified information had to be relayed “in the clear” or by hard copy. Some of the allies lacked a common identification friend or foe system. Reliance on American military power, as well as the gap between the U.S. and the rest of the allies, was illustrated by the fact that 70 percent of the deployed European allied forces performed a supportive role, such as aerial refueling, tactical jamming for SEAD mis-sions, and airlift operations. General Claus Naumann, the Chairman of the North Atlantic Military Committee, confessed in a testimonial before the Senate Armed Service Committee of the U.S. Congress: “As a European I am ashamed that we have to ask for American help to deal with something as small as Kosovo.”53 The level of interoperability between the French forces and the rest of NATO was most troublesome as French had been outside of the alliance’s military structures for over three decades.

EFFORTS TO ENHANCE REGIONAL COOPERATION: SEE BRIG AND BALTBAT

The experience with Kosovo had major implications with regard to the de-cisions for future expansions. If NATO wanted to fully integrate the new members from Eastern Europe into its military structures, it had to push for these nations’ adaptation to the needs of the new operations. Since most of them had outdated Soviet-style military equipment, separate efforts were nec-essary to improve interoperability between NATO and its partners, including potential entrants. As a result, NATO initiated two forms of regional inter-governmental cooperation—the Southeast European Multinational Brigade (SEE BRIG) and the Baltic Battalion (BALTBAT). The goal was to stimulate multilateral military cooperation among the former eastern bloc countries that would prepare them to work effectively together and with the rest of NATO in joint multinational missions.

The idea for a Southeast European Multinational Brigade originated in the mid-1990s and was part of three earlier initiatives: (1) the Partnership for Peace (PfP) program; (2) the regular regional meetings, known as the Southeastern Europe Defense Ministerial Process (SEDM); and (3) the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC). The region’s insecurity, caused by wars in the former Yugoslavia, prompted the establishment of a multilateral brigade of about five thousand troops. Seven nations contributed to this structure—Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, FYR of Macedonia, Romania, and Turkey. The United States, Slovenia, and Croatia joined with observer status. On September 26, 1997, the agreement was signed in Skopje, Macedo-nia. The defense ministers of each nation decided on rotational headquarters and a command. The brigade was hosted in Plovdiv, Bulgaria; Constanta,


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Romania; Istanbul, Turkey; and Larissa, Greece. The proposed format en-abled the improvement of interoperability at strategic, political, operational, and tactical levels.

Greece and Turkey, both of which have been NATO allies since 1952, played an instrumental role in facilitating the brigade’s successful launch: Turkey had a major impact on the implementation of the SEE BRIG project, while Greece’s strong support helped overcome most of the brigade’s initial organizational problems. Italy, Hungary, and Slovenia pooled their resources to form a multinational unit. SEE BRIG, in essence, constituted a multina-tional task force that was intended as an “on-call” land force of battalion-size units, with combined training in reconnaissance, command post exercises, field maneuvers, and crisis management.54 Thus, it was designed as a hybrid force with limited rapid reaction capabilities.

The brigade command is based on a two-year rotational basis; the com-mander assumes authority over subordinate units upon approval of all partici-pating nations. An executive body called the Steering Committee supervises, coordinates, and directs the brigade’s activities. In addition to contributing to confidence building in the region, one of the brigade’s core goals is to improve operational, tactical, and technological interoperability.55 With NA-TO’s admission of Bulgaria and Romania, followed by Albania,and Croatia, the brigade also became a hub to expand military cooperation between old and new NATO members in South Eastern Europe. The focus is targeted primarily in the Black Sea region, where the Ukraine also indicated interest to join the brigade.56

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Southeast European Brigade became a dormant structure of international cooperation and remained relatively inactive due to a lack of organizational autonomy and institutional capacity. In part these deficiencies can be attributed to limited commitments from the participating nations as well as their inability to reach satisfactory levels of interoperability.57 In December 2005, the Southeast European Brigade was re-activated at the SEDM ministerial meeting in Washington, D.C. During this meeting, defense ministers of participating nations approved a timeline for the Deployment of SEE BRIG in ISAF, as well as Annual Exercise, Training, and Travel Plans.58 The U.S. Secretary of Defense put forward a proposal to incorporate SEE BRIG in ISAF under direct NATO command. The defense ministers of the participating nations agreed that the brigade would assume peacekeeping responsibilities in Kabul. In February 2006, SEE BRIG took over its first overseas mission under the “Kabul Multinational Brigade IX.” After the 2004 and 2009 waves of NATO expansion, the brigade made signif-icant progress and was certified by NATO to participate in peacekeeping and crisis response operations. It was an interoperable tactical unit of ISAF with



three combat groups that conducted joint training and operations with the Af-ghan national police and army. Nonetheless, for the most part, SEE BRIG’s activities comprised four to five joint exercises annually. The reactivation of the brigade also became possible due to U.S. involvement. Washington has been an active proponent of SEE BRIG’s initiation and reactivation, and served as a mediator to overcome differences among participants, as well as improving participants’ coordination.

The Baltic peacekeeping battalion (BALTBAT) constitutes another in-stance of regional cooperation. In June 1992, the three Baltic nations—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—signed a protocol which established the foundation of the Baltic defense cooperation. Initially this cooperation was motivated by insecurity that resulted from the Soviet Union’s disintegration. Because the Baltic nations possessed very limited military and financial resources to advance national defense on their own, they decided to estab-lish a multinational regional battalion. The agreement was signed in 1994 and BALTBAT became the first trilateral military project between Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Although the Netherlands, France, the United States, and Germany endorsed the initiative, the crucial assistance in terms of fund-ing and training came from neighboring Finland, Sweden, and Denmark. BALTBAT’s successful contribution to the national defense of the three Bal-tic nations depended on its armed forces’ tactical, strategic, and technological interoperability.

BALTBAT was designed as a combined tri-national headquarters that included a representative from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania’s logistics and national infantry companies. Each of the three Baltic States provided one-third of the total staff amounting to approximately 720 people. The battalion was active in Kosovo, where, on a rotational basis, every member sent one company for six months, followed by another Baltic country.59 While the original idea behind BALTBAT was to strengthen Baltic defense capabilities, the absence of the Soviet threat made this multilateral structure a very useful tool for multinational peacekeeping in the Balkans. The battalion focused on enhancing interoperability among participating nations toward developing peacekeeping and crisis response capabilities. BALTBAT became an im-portant asset of regional cooperation between Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania under PfP and MAP. It also strengthened their NATO membership bid.

The battalion provided a good foundation for regional cooperation among these small countries and, as the armed forces of the Baltic nations became increasingly compatible, they expanded the scope of cooperation into defense education and surveillance. In 1998 they agreed to form BALTRON, a squad-ron aimed at enhancing the three nations’ naval capabilities. This beneficial and cost-effective project is currently incorporated into the training structure


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of NATO’s Mine Countermeasure (MCM) unit available for naval stability operations. When the partners reached a minimum level of interoperability, they realized that they needed to increase their capabilities to collect and share information. For this purpose BALTNET was established as a system for acquisition, coordination, distribution, and display of air surveillance data within the three Baltic countries. The regional Airspace Surveillance and Co-ordination Center was based in Lithuania. Once BALTBAT and BALTRON were operational, the Baltic nations realized that common defense education would favor cooperative military culture and facilitate the effectiveness of the new multinational teams. For this purpose, with the active encouragement and support of Denmark and Sweden, the Baltic nations decided to establish the Baltic Defense College for mid-career officers.60

The goal of BALTBAT and SEE BRIG was to encourage these small coun-tries to work together based on a similar geographic and cultural background. These regional structures additionally served as a litmus test of whether the prospective NATO members were able to cooperate in order to advance their capabilities. Naturally due to their similarities, the Baltic nations were the most likely candidates to expand military cooperation in areas in which they complement each other.61 NATO’s initial experience with non-Article Five operations in the former Yugoslavia confirmed that the improvement of allied interoperability forms a paramount component in optimizing the resources of individual states as well as advancing their capabilities. The introduction of standing regional battalions and brigades attests to the fact that the prospect for NATO membership the advancement of regional cooperation. Finally, outside support from key NATO members or regional partners significantly increases chances for the successful implementation of these regional initia-tives in their early stages of development. In the case of SEE BRIG such assistance came from the United States, while the major support for the Baltic cooperation came from neighboring Denmark, Finland, and Sweden. Once established, these regional military structures can be used not only in NATO-led operations, but also in missions under the EU command as the three Baltic and most of South East European nations are current or potential EU members as well.

Sharing NATO and European Union Capabilities

A brief survey of EU capabilities in the context of NATO’s overall transfor-mation is justified for several reasons. First, the EU and NATO have a largely overlapping membership and, therefore, share common military resources: as of December 2010 twenty-one nations belong to NATO and the EU; eleven



are from Western Europe, and ten from Central and Eastern Europe. In ad-dition to the United States and Canada, only five European countries belong to NATO but are not members of the European Union (Albania, Croatia, Iceland, Norway, and Turkey), while six EU nations are not parties to the Washington Treaty: Austria, Finland, Ireland, Sweden, Malta, and Cyprus.

The EU enlargements in 2004 and 2007 and the NATO expansion in 1999 and 2004 basically incorporated the same Central and East European coun-tries into these institutions.62 Second, both NATO and EU essentially identify similar security threats—the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, regional conflicts, and states failure; they also need similar capa-bilities to address these threats.63 Third, NATO and EU strategic documents emphasize that the capabilities for NATO- and EU-led missions should be “complementary, rather than being duplicative” thus implying “considerable potential for synergy” and cooperation between the two institutions.64

Scholars and policymakers associate the division of labor between NATO and the EU in terms of Madeleine Albright’s “three Ds:” avoiding decou-pling, duplication, and discrimination against NATO’s non-EU members.65 The first “D” refers to avoiding any decoupling between NATO and EU’s decision-making; the second “D” warns against unnecessary duplication of defense resources; and finally, the last “D” raises concerns about possible discrimination against NATO members who are not EU members. Albright’s warning refers to the decision-making processes of these two organizations regarding the management of their resources and the acquisition of new ca-pabilities. A parallel comparison of the EU and NATO’s efforts to develop such defensive capabilities highlights several distinctive features of these international organizations. In the case of NATO, the process of developing new allied capabilities began in 1994 with the Brussels Declaration, while the European Union addressed this issue for the first time in 1998 at the Franco-British meeting in San Mâlo. French President Jacques Chirac and British Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed that the core EU nations need to possess European capabilities for operations led by the Union. In 1998 only eleven out of fifteen European Union member-states were also NATO members, which points to the fact that from its very beginning, EU capabilities relied on military resources from NATO members.66 Thus, in terms of resources, the Union relies on NATO minus the United States, Canada, as well as Al-bania, Croatia, Norway, Turkey, and Norway. In addition, from club goods perspective both the EU and NATO are heterogeneous by their nature. While NATO’s role and influence in world politics has always been driven by its North American pillar led by the United States, EU politics has been heavily influence by a group of several most influential nations in the Union with


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relatively similar capabilities that includes France, Germany, Britain, and Italy. These are frequently referred to as directoire as often they steer the Union’s decision-making in the area of security and defense.

The European Union introduced its Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) in 1993. The Maastricht Treaty stipulates that CFSP concerns “all questions related to the security of the Union, including the eventual fram-ing of a common defense policy, which might in time lead to a common defense.”67 The subsequent EU basic document, the Treaty of Amsterdam, eliminated the CFSP’s consensual requirement introduced in the Maastricht Treaty, thus allowing for greater flexibility as the Union could move forward toward a decision without requiring consensus of all member states. The Am-sterdam Treaty also appointed a High Representative for the CFSP to address the policy’s day-to-day business.

The former Yugoslavia and Rwanda crises further motivated Britain and France to seek a common European security and defense. Cognizant of the 1950s European Defense Community (EDC) fiasco, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac began once again to dis-cuss in the late 1990s the possibilities for strengthening the security pillar of the European Union.68 Britain clearly expressed that it would oppose any “institutional reform of Europe’s security architecture which could weaken NATO and put the continued American military commitment to Europe at risk.”69 In San Mâlo, French and British leaders agreed that in the future, the EU should “acquire capacity for autonomous action backed up by cred-ible military forces, the means to decide to use them, and readiness to do so in order to respond to international crises.”70 The logic of the San Mâlo agreement rested on the idea that, when NATO could not become engaged, the European Union would step in and become involved if it had a vested interest to do so. Such a policy would allow making use of EU members’ military resources to conduct these operations. The agreement assumed that the European Union would essentially call on the same pool of resources that NATO does, mostly from European nations that are members of both organizations.71 NATO reaffirmed its support for the Franco-British agree-ment from San Mâlo at the Washington Summit in 1999 and provided access to its allied planning capabilities for EU operations in which the Alliance is not institutionally involved.

With regard to NATO, the San Mâlo Agreement held that these planning capabilities would be accessible only under a “presumption of availability,” but not “assured by default,” which is why the EU began to distinguish be-tween two types of operations depending on whether they would require the use of NATO assets or not.72 While confirming the goals set out in San Mâlo, the Cologne European Council reiterated in 1999 that in order for the EU



to play its “full role on the international stage, the CFSP must be backed by credible operational capabilities.”73 The Council also differentiated between completely autonomous operations and operations in which NATO resources have been used.

The EU leadership realized that autonomous European security and defense would not be feasible without EU crisis response capabilities. Otherwise, the Europeans would always be in a position to request certain “pre-approved” NATO capabilities that could be borrowed upon availability. For this pur-pose, in 1999, a Headline Goal Task Force was established to explore the possibility of creating a rapid reaction force of fifty to sixty thousand troops that would be deployable within sixty days and sustainable within one year. Originally, the expectation was that this force would be available by 2003 and that it would be open for use to countries outside of the European Union. These primarily included NATO members who could participate if the op-eration required recourse to NATO assets and capabilities. The unavoidable reliance on NATO’s capabilities persuaded the EU of the need to improve its coordination with the North Atlantic Alliance.

In December 2000, the EU leadership agreed at the European Council’s Nice Summit to establish three separate institutions addressing common EU security and defense. The EU presidency also sought permanent arrange-ments for consultations and cooperation. While the Nice Summit indicated that “the San Mâlo-Helsinki process did not involve the establishment of a European Army,” it also reiterated NATO’s key role in European defense and security. Therefore, the EU and NATO needed a special contractual arrange-ment to regulate the terms and conditions of sharing and borrowing resources and the overall scope of their partnerships. A NATO-EU agreement was not an easy task because it raised serious concerns with certain NATO members who were concerned that European security and defense operations could potentially be used against their national interests.74 This agreement, known as the Berlin Plus, was possible only after the two institutions were able to overcome their differences.

In November 2002, NATO Secretary-General George Robertson and the EU High Representative for CFSP signed the NATO-EU Declaration on CFSP that allowed the EU to draw on NATO-owned military assets. The Berlin Plus Agreement was preceded by a separate NATO-EU Agreement on the Security of Information (March 2002) and, for the first time, opened the possibility for the EU to become engaged in missions that, until then, were considered exclusively UN or NATO domain. The actual agreement became finalized and formally adopted in March 2003 and serves as a basis for practical cooperation since then. In order to sustain its peacekeeping, crisis response, and stability operations within ESDP, the EU needed to


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advance autonomous capabilities. The Union and its members initiated sev-eral projects meant to strengthen the ESDP pillar—the European Rapid Reac-tion Force (ERRF), the EU Battlegroups (EU BG), as well as Eurocorps and the European Gendarmerie Force (EGF).

The European Rapid Reaction Force (ERRF) constitutes one of several joint EU military structures developed in the context of ESDP. The Rapid Reaction Force was intended to intervene in violent crises and conflicts in Europe’s neighborhood before they become full-scale wars, thus releasing NATO from responsibility to intervene where the EU participation is also of strategic importance for the Union.75 The ERRF expands the EU peace-keeping goals set out in the Petersberg Tasks to include joint disarmament operations, military advice and assistance, and post-conflict stabilization.76 The European Council officially approved the force at the Summit in Helsinki (1999). The decision reflected the EU’s intention to contribute to the fight against terrorism, including the goal of “supporting third countries in com-bating terrorism in their territories.”77 The original goals, knows as Helsinki Headline Goals, were to establish, by 2003, an associated catalog of about fifty to sixty thousand troops. Based on the Helsinki guidelines, the Nice Summit in December 2000 initiated new structures holding responsibilities to oversee the policies, strategies, and implementation of ERRF operations.

The point of the Helsinki Summit was to put a reserve of actual forces at the disposal of the European Union, not to provide additional responsibilities of already existing national forces. Nonetheless, these goals were extremely optimistic and did not account for numerous political, administrative, and legal constraints originating from the various EU member countries. Nations like Germany, for example, held major domestic hurdles regarding participa-tion in military operations on foreign soil. At the same time, very few EU nations possessed even partial capabilities to transfer troops to distant areas. At least three major problems were identified with the Helsinki Goals. First, the quantitative target was set in the aftermath of the Bosnian conflict without taking actual contemporary strategic challenges into account. Second, only a tiny percentage of the presented catalog of forces offered actual rapid deploy-ability. Third, even when deficiencies were to be identified, the Union had no real incentives to remedy them.78

The EU Rapid Reaction Force was first put at test in Operation Concordia in Macedonia. The Union assumed command of the already existent Opera-tion Allied Harmony that had been previously managed by NATO. The opera-tion, initiated at the request of the Macedonian government, had been formed to provide assistance with the implementation of the Ohrid Agreement, and was possible with the completion of EU-NATO arrangements.79 The mission lasted six months, after which the responsibility for security was handed back



to the local government in Skopje. Concordia was a small scale operation of 320 soldiers and 80 civilians, half of which were provided by France alone. The European force patrolled the ethnic Albanian regions in Macedonia close to the borders of Albania, Serbia, and Kosovo. Since EU legislation does not allow funding from the Union’s budget, participants funded their share of the burden. Ultimately, Operation Concordia served as the first laboratory to test the EU capacity to deliver crisis response and many observers asserted that the operation was equally if not more important to the EU than to Macedo-nia.80 The experience with the EU’s first operation indicated to EU leadership that a major gap still existed between the actual and targeted capabilities. As a result, in 2001, a European Capabilities Action Plan (ECAP) was launched to address the problem. It focused primarily on procurement and structural or doctrinal initiatives, and therefore did not contribute directly to enhancing Europe’s own crisis response capabilities.81 One aspect of the problem was that until 2003 many EU countries had listed the same troops for several pools and registers. In addition to the Helsinki Force Catalog, the same units were also listed for use by NATO and the UN. As a result of this dual hatting, the EU members provided no new capabilities by 2003.

In addition to ERRF, the Helsinki Summit endorsed another category of smaller rapid response elements known as Battlegroups (EU BG). While the rapid response force was originally planned to comprise a structure of up to fifteen brigades, or fifty to sixty thousand troops deployable within sixty days and with their own command, EU BGs were intended to be much smaller. They included approximately fifteen hundred military personnel, sustained missions from 30 to 120, days and would be available and deployable at very high readiness (within fifteen days).82 The Battlegroup concept was put to test several months later during Operation Artemis. This was the first independent EU crisis response operation which took place in parts of the Democratic People’s Republic of Congo. Its mission was to improve the humanitarian situation and ensure the protection of the airport, displaced persons, and the civilian population. Originally, this was meant to be a French operation but the European leadership agreed that it was a good opportunity to test the new EU BG format. Artemis lasted only several months and was quite limited in terms of time, area, and available resources. The Union sent about 1,800 troops from several EU nations, whose task was to stabilize security condi-tions on the ground.

Upon the completion of this EU BG operation, France and Britain held a series of meetings to discuss the possibilities for further improvement of planning and deployment. The initial expectations were that these forces would achieve initial deployment of land, sea, and air forces within five to ten days.83 Several months later Germany joined the Franco-British group


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and, in February 2004, the nations produced a joint “food-for-thought paper” that outlined the framework of the Battlegroup concept. The agreed package set the size of the groups at approximately fifteen hundred military person-nel. The expectation was that they would be deployable within two weeks, and also sustain military operations between one and three months until these groups would be discharged by the UN or other regional organizations un-der whose mandate they would potentially act.84 In November 2004, the EU members made an initial commitment to the formation of thirteen such Bat-tlegroups. Based on lessons learned from Artemis, the Union concluded that the EU BGs must be prepared for high-intensity operations, either as stand-alone forces or as initial-entry forces for operations on a larger scale. Unlike ERRF which was designed as an inclusive multinational force, the Europeans agreed to a much more flexible format of the Battlegroups, composed of ei-ther national or multinational units.85 The assumption was that such a flexible framework would provide open options and also ensure both a timely and an effective reaction to the demand for rapid response. The EU BG reached initial operational capabilities in 2005 and full capabilities in 2007. The suc-cessful implementation of the EU Battlegroups enhanced the Union’s ability to “deploy force packages at high readiness in a response to a crisis” which was a key component of the 2010 Headline Goals.86

The decisions for the European Rapid Reaction Force and the EU Battle-groups were a product of the highest level institutional agreements made at the Helsinki Council Summit in 1999. Alternatively, Eurocorps and the Eu-ropean Gendarmerie Force (EGF) represent two projects that were launched as a result of a deal struck by several European states outside of ESDP. The origins of Eurocorps date back to the Elysée Treaty of 1963, an agree-ment that regulated the Franco-German post-World War II special relations. Nonetheless, it was not until the early 1990s that Paris and Berlin decided to intensify their military cooperation by creating a joint Franco-German Brigade.87 In 1993, Belgium joined the initiative with Spain and Luxembourg following suit later when the multi-lateral military cooperation was officially named Eurocorps. The inception of the Helsinki Headline Goals presented an opportunity for Eurocorps to focus on specific niche activities dealing with humanitarian and population assistance. Its capabilities were strengthened by a deployable force headquarters in Strasbourg, France, which was certified by NATO as a Rapid Reaction Force in 2002. Eurocorps participated in NATO’s peacekeeping efforts in Bosnia and Kosovo, and from August 2004 to Febru-ary 2005, served as the ISAF-6 Force in Afghanistan.

The European Gendarmerie Force (EGF) makes up another relatively new European security capability that formally came into existence in January 2006. It started as an initiative of five EU members—France, Italy, the Neth-



erlands, Portugal, and Spain—with headquarters in Vicenza, Italy. The EGF was designed to respond rapidly to a wide spectrum of civil security actions: it could act either on its own or in parallel with other forces to intervene in cri-ses that require the use of police forces in critical situations. Albeit important, the Gendarmerie force has largely been a supportive European capability. Currently the Gendarmerie’s focus has been on the development of a com-prehensive and coherent operational system that will enable prompt deploy-ment. This force was primarily designed to provide additional operational capabilities at the EU’s disposal, but could also be used by other international institutions dealing with peacekeeping and crisis response (e.g., NATO, the UN, and the OSCE), as well as various ad hoc coalitions.88

This brief survey of emerging EU capabilities indicates several noticeable similarities and differences in comparison to NATO’s capabilities. The evo-lution of the ERRF and, to a certain degree, the EU Battlegroups followed a pattern somewhat similar to NATO’s CJTFs and NRF. The initial goals set out by NATO in 1994 and the European Union in 1999 were very ambitious and their targets were not met by the originally assigned deadlines. NATO and the EU had to review them, then set up new, more realistic goals com-bined with effective oversight mechanisms to ensure that those goals would be met. Once the EU realized that the original ERRF goals could not be met in a timely manner, these were modified by introducing the Battlegroups as smaller, more flexible national or multinational units prepared for a variety of EU-led missions.

The first noticeable difference between NATO and the EU capabilities is the timeline—NATO realized the importance of CJTFs as early as 1994 and decided on Rapid Reaction Forces in 1998, while the EU did not take major steps toward actual capabilities (except the Franco-German brigade) before 1999. A second difference can be denoted in the format in which decisions are being made in NATO and the EU: While NATO’s decisions are generally binding to all members, the EU members can choose the extent to which they want to participate in common European security projects. This is known as a differentiated approach to integration. The idea is to allow for a greater degree of flexibility by which member-states can choose from a menu of EU initiatives and policies that they would like to join or opt out of if they deem these initiatives inconsistent with their national interests. While the ERRF and EU Battlegroups require all members to participate, the European secu-rity and defense, Eurocorps, and EGF represent a differentiated approach that allows EU countries to choose whether they want to partake or prefer to opt out.89 The third difference is the extent to which NATO and the EU ensure that individual allies possess the capacity to meet pre-determined goals. Un-like the EU, NATO’s focus on matters of international security increases the


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alliance’s capacity to persuade all of its members to join capabilities initia-tives and reduces significantly the likelihood that some members may walk away from their responsibilities. Even though an assessment of the ESDP’s success would be premature any time soon, the nature of EU politics which involves a labyrinth of “Byzantine, institutional set-up” with “overlapping agencies, wide array of voting rules, and babel of official languages” indi-cates that progress in common security and defense is not easy to reach.90 Such an institutional setup inadvertently creates impediments in coordinating common interoperable capabilities to enhance the EU’s participation in inter-national peacekeeping, crisis response, and stability operations.

This chapter surveyed NATO’s new capabilities in the context of the al-liance’s overall transformation. NATO’s experience with the wars in the Balkans during the 1990s and in the Middle East after September 11, 2001, pinpointed to the fact that the allies needed highly mobile and interoper-able troops that could be sent faster to accomplish very specific missions. Evidence from the combined multinational forces, NATO’s rapid response force, and various multinational teams shows that, over time, NATO’s new capabilities undergo a horizontal and a vertical evolution. The advancement of new regional and European capabilities, such as SEE BRIG, BALTBAT, ERRF, EGF, and Eurocorps illustrates the need for one or several lead nations to initiate and consistently support the multinational force as was the case of the U.S. support for SEE BRIG, the Nordic support for BALTBAT, and the Franco-German support for Eurocorps. Further, the survey confirmed that the acquisition of these new capabilities is not linear. The evidence from the negotiation of the CJTFs, NRF, and PCC indicates that oftentimes NATO sets itself unrealistic targets, after which the alliance is forced to review and scale down these targets. By the same token, the presence of institutional commit-ments facilitates reforms under external pressure. Thus, NATO membership contributes to the development of new capabilities and the improvement of member compatibility. Even though it is difficult to evaluate accurately the benefits of these capabilities relative to the costs associated with them, exploring the comparative advantages of the new members, by definition, enhances the benefits of the new capabilities as illustrated in the case of the CBRN battalion. Alternatively, attempts by allied governments to simply re-port already existent capabilities as new forces only decelerate the acquisition of new capabilities as shown in the development of ERRF.

Intergovernmental bargaining, nonetheless, remains an important com-ponent in optimizing members’ resources and the advancement of allied capabilities. After six waves of expansion between 1952 and 2009, reaching consensus in an alliance of twenty-eight members has certainly become in-creasingly difficult. As a result, NATO’s decision-making rules circumscribe



its capacity to deliver quick and effective reaction to major international crises. Nonetheless, this feature of alliance decision-making should not al-ways be seen as a weakness: The lengthy negotiations and the vague word-ing of NAC final documents actually facilitate the successful completion of mutually agreed and workable decisions and targets.91 The brief comparison with the pattern of advancing EU capabilities indicates striking similarities, but also several noticeable differences. Unlike the European Union, NATO remains exclusively involved in international security, which is why so far it has been more effective than the EU in its efforts to acquire new capabilities. The U.S. initiation of and support for CJTFs, PCC, and even SEE BRIG have further contributed to a successful implementation of allied commitments.

NOTES

1. “Prague Summit Declaration,” issued by the Heads of State and Government participating in the meeting of the North Atlantic Council, Prague, November 21, 2002, www.nato.int/docu/pr/2002/p02-127e.htm, (accessed August 20, 2009).

2. The operational definition in the NATO handbook discusses manpower and equipment as capabilities rather than military resources, but for the purposes of analytical distinction of this research, I will use the term resources to operationalize manpower, navy, army, and air force equipment as discussed earlier.

3. “The Combined Joint Task Forces Concept,” NATO Factsheet, August 9, 2000, www.nato.int/docu/facts/2000/cjtf-con.htm, (accessed December 10, 2006).

4. “Declaration of the Heads of State and Government participating in the meet-ing of the North Atlantic Council,” Brussels, Belgium, January 11, 1994 (also referred to as “The Brussels Summit Declaration”).

5. Charles Barry, “Combined Joint Task Forces in Theory and Practice,” in The Changing Shape of the Atlantic Alliance, ed. Philip Gordon (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997), 205.

6. Thomas Cooke, “NATO CJTF Doctrine: The Naked Emperor,” Parameters (Winter 1998), 124–36, www.carlisle.army.mil/, (accessed March 5, 2007).

7. Thomas Kelly, Security in the 21st Century: NATO’s Combined Joint Task Force (CJTF) Concept (Strategy Research Project, U.S. Army War College, 2001), 4.

8. These nations included Estonia, Latvia, Finland, Poland, Denmark, Lithuania, Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Russia, Turkey, and the United States.

9. Operation Joint Endeavor, www.globalsecurity.org/ops/joint_endeavor.htm, (accessed December 22, 2007).

10. “History of SFOR,” Task Force Eagle Official Web Page, www.tfeagle.army.mil/TFE/SFOR_History.htm, (accessed August 23, 2009).

11. “The European Security and Defense Identity,” in NATO Handbook.12. “The Combined Joint Task Forces Concept,” NATO Factsheet.


150 Chapter 4

13. “NATO’s Operational Military Command Structure,” in Allied Command Operations (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe Web page), www.nato.int, (accessed August 25, 2009).

14. “International Security Assistance Force,” Peace Operations Monitor: Civilian Monitoring of Complex Peace Operations, pom.peacebuild.ca/, (accessed September 12, 2009).

15. “Four Canadian Soldiers Killed By Roadside Bomb in Southern Afghanistan,” Red Orbit, April 22, 2006.

16. “NATO’s Defense Capabilities Initiative,” in NATO Handbook, chapter 2.17. “NATO’s Transformation Scorecard,” NATO Review (Spring 2005), www

.nato.int/docu/review/2005/issue1/english/art3.html, (accessed August 25, 2009).18. Carl W. Ek, “NATO’s Prague Capabilities Commitment,” CRS Report for

Congress, (Order Code RS21659, CRS-3), January 24, 2007.19. John Shimkus (Rapporteur—United States), “Progress on the Prague Capabil-

ity Commitments,” NATO Parliamentary Assembly Report (NATO Parliamentary Assembly Annual Meeting, 2005).

20. “NATO: Building New Capabilities for New Challenges,” The White House Factsheet, www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/11/20021121-6.html, (accessed March 15, 2007).

21. Daniele Riggio, “EU–NATO Cooperation and Complementarity between the Rapid Reaction Forces,” The International Spectator 3 (2003), 47–48.

22. “NATO Response Force,” NATO Factsheet.23. “NATO: Building New Capabilities for New Challenges,” The White House

Factsheet, www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/11/20021121-6.html, (accessed December 15, 2006).

24. Carl W. Ek, “NATO’s Prague Capabilities Commitment,” CRS Report for Congress, January 18, 2006, Order Code RS21659, CRS-3, www.opencrs.com/rpts/RS21659_20060118.pdf, (accessed March 15, 2007).

25. Bradley Graham and Robert G. Kaiser, “Ahead of NATO’s Summit, Bush Speaks of ‘New Capabilities,” Washington Post, September 24, 2002, also Carl Ek, “NATO’s Prague Capabilities.’”

26. Richard Kugler, “The NATO Response Force 2002–2006: Innovation by the Atlantic Alliance” in Case Studies in Defense Transformation, ed. Richard Kugler (Washington, DC: National Defense University, Center for Technology and National Security Policy, 2007), 7–8.

27. Frances L. Edwards and Friedrich Steinhäusler, eds., NATO and Terrorism on Scene: New Challenges for First Responders and Civil Protection (Springer, Dor-drecht, the Netherlands: NATO Science for Peace and Security Series), 150.

28. Edwards and Steinhäusler, NATO and Terrorism, 151.29. Riggio, “EU—NATO,” 48.30. “The NATO Response Force: Questions and answers,” Press Briefing by

NATO Spokesman James Appathurai, September 21, 2007, www.nato.int/docu/speech/2007/s070921a.html, (accessed August 26, 2009).

31. “Istanbul Summit Communiqué, issued by the Heads of State and Government participating in the meeting of the North Atlantic Council,” Istanbul, Turkey, June 28, 2004, www.nato.int/docu/pr/2004/p04-096e.htm, (accessed March 19, 2007).



32. “Riga Summit Declaration, issued by the Heads of State and Government par-ticipating in the meeting of the North Atlantic Council,” Riga, Latvia, November 29, 2006, www.nato.int/, (accessed March 19, 2007). See also Carl Ek, NATO’s Prague Capabilities.

33. Kugler, “The NATO Response Force,” 15.34. Daniel Hamilton et al., Alliance Reborn: An Atlantic Compact for the 21st

Century (The Washington NATO Project, February 2009), 25.35. “Alliance Policy Framework on Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruc-

tion,” Ministerial Meeting of the North Atlantic Council and the North Atlantic Co-operation Council, Istanbul, Turkey, June 9–10, 1994.

36. “NATO’s Response to Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction,” Press Release (95) 124, November 29, 1995, www.nato.int/docu/pr/1995/p95-124.htm, (ac-cessed March 19, 2007).

37. “The Alliance’s Strategic Concept, approved by the Heads of State and Govern-ment participating in the meeting of the North Atlantic Council,” Washington, Distirct of Columbia, April 23–24, 1999, Para 56, www.nato.int/docu/pr/1999/p99-065e.htm, (accessed March 15, 2007).

38. “Prague Summit Declaration, issued by the Heads of State and Government participating in the meeting of the North Atlantic Council,” Prague, the Czech Re-public, November 21, 2002, Para 4c, www.nato.int/docu/pr/2002/p02-127e.htm, (ac-cessed March 5, 2006).

39. “The Alliance’s Strategic Concept,” Para 4e.40. “Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Defence Battalion,” NATO

Web page, October 26, 2010, www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/topics_49156.htm, (ac-cessed December 25, 2010).

41. Ek, “NATO’s Prague Capabilities Commitment.”42. Borek Lizec, Transatlantic Team versus Transatlantic Partnership: European

and Transatlantic Institutional Architectures Through the Lenses of Two Alternative Visions (Doctoral Dissertation, Department of European Studies, University of Eco-nomics, Prague, the Czech Republic, 2005), 86–87.

43. Author’s personal interview with Mr. Jan Michal, Head of the Czech Delega-tion to NATO, Brussels, Belgium, January 24, 2006.

44. Author’s personal interview with Mr. Juraj Podhorsky, Deputy Head of the Slovak Delegation to NATO Brussels, Belgium, January 16, 2006.

45. Ek, “NATO’s Prague Capabilities.”46. “Istanbul Summit Communiqué, issued by the North Atlantic Council,” Is-

tanbul, Turkey, June 28, 2006, www.nato.int/docu/pr/2003/p03-148e.htm, (accessed March 3, 2007).

47. Hamilton et al., Alliance Reborn, 48.48. Myron Hura et al, Interoperability: A Continuing Challenge in Coalition Air

Operations (Rand Project Air Force, Santa Monica, California, 2000), xv.49. See Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Related Terms (Joint

Staff Publication, Department of Defense, Washington, District of Columbia, 1999); also Hura et al., Interoperability, 7.


152 Chapter 4

50. “Behind The Estonia Cyberattacks,” Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, March 6, 2009, www.rferl.org/content/Behind_The_Estonia_Cyberattacks/1505613.html, (accessed December 27, 2010).

51. Hura et al., Interoperability, 12.52. Carl Hodge, Atlanticism for a New Century: The Rise, Triumph and Decline of

NATO (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2005), 74.53. See Air Force Times 60, no. 15, November 1999; also Carl Hodge, Atlanti-

cism, 95.54. Vince Crawley, “Southeast Europe Ministers Approve Troop Brigade for Af-

ghanistan: Rumsfeld welcomes Romania basing deal; talks under way with Bulgaria,” International Information Agency, USINFO Current Issues, December 7, 2005, usinfo.state.gov/, (accessed March 19, 2007).

55. Author’s personal interview with Todor Tagarev, “G.S. Rakovski” Defense and Staff College, February 6, 2006, Sofia, Bulgaria.

56. Author’s personal interview with Velizar Shalamanov, former Deputy Minis-ter of Defense, February 3, 2006, Sofia, Bulgaria.

57. Dimitris Bourantonis and Panayotis Tsakonas, “The Southeastern Europe Mul-tinational Peace Force: Problems of and Prospects for a Regional Security Agency,” Politics 23, no. 2 (2003), 75–81.

58. Joint Statement at the SEDM Ministers of Defense Meeting, December 6, 2005, Washington, D.C.

59. Annikab Bergman, BALTBAT: The Emergence of a Common Defense Dimen-sion to Nordic Co-operation, Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, August 2000.

60. “Estonia Today: Support for NATO Membership,” Estonian Ministry of For-eign Affairs Factsheet, Tallinn, Estonia, December 2005.

61. Author’s personal interview with Toomas Kukk, Deputy Head of Mission, Estonian Delegation to NATO in Brussels, Belgium, January 12, 2006.

62. The three Visegrad nations (Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland) joined NATO in 1999 and were admitted to the EU in 2004 together with Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. The latter five countries, together with Bulgaria and Romania, joined NATO in 2004, but the Bulgarians and Romanians were not ready for EU membership until 2007. Finally, Albania and Croatia became NATO members in 2009. The eight-year timeline between the two rounds of EU and NATO expansions (1999–2007) indicates the interconnectedness of these processes. This pattern influences the outcome of European and transatlantic security.

63. “A Secure Europe in a Better World,” European Security Strategy, December 12, 2003, Brussels, Belgium, 3, www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cmsUpload/78367.pdf, (accessed September 21, 2007).

64. “EU Battlegroups,” Letter from Geoffrey Hoon, Secretary of State, Ministry of Defense to the Chairman of the Select Committee on European Union, The Par-liament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, February 19, 2005, www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200506/ldselect/ldeucom/16/16100.htm, (accessed September 21, 2007).

65. Madeleine Albright, “The Right Balance Will Secure NATO’s Future,” Finan-cial Times, December 7, 1998.



66. Currently twenty-one out of twenty-seven EU nations are also NATO allies: Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

67. Sten Rynning, “Autonomous Defense? The Role of Military Forces in EU Ex-ternal Affairs,” National Europe Centre Paper No. 17, Copenhagen Peace Research Institute (2002), 9.

68. Attempts to establish a Common European Defense were made in the 1950s and 1960s with the European Defense Community and the Fouchet Plan. These plans got caught in the “cross-currents of two conflicts”: one about institutions, one about purposes. Both plans failed in part due to the lack of consensus among the French political elite, and in part because “the orientations of France and Britain were fundamentally different with London so ‘Atlanticist’ and . . . Paris always eager to champion European autonomy.” West Germany, on the other hand, relied heavily on the U.S. forces in Europe for its defense. For further detail see Stanley Hoffman, “Toward Common European Common and Security Policy?” Journal of Common Market Studies 35, no. 2, (2000), 189–98.

69. Martin Reichard, “Some Legal Issues Concerning EU–NATO Berlin Plus Agreement,” Nordic Journal of International Law 73 (2004), 41.

70. Sten Rynning, “Why not NATO? Military Planning in the European Union,” Journal of Strategic Studies 26, no. 1 (2003), 53–72.

71. The eleven EU and NATO members in 1999 included Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

72. Reichard, “Some Legal Issues,” 42.73. Annex III of the Presidency Conclusions of the Cologne European Council,

June 3–4, 1999, 1.74. Turkey was worried that ESDP operations might be used in Cyprus against

its national interests. Ankara’s endorsement for the Berlin Plus agreement was given only after it was confirmed that the agreement between NATO and the European Union would apply only to those EU Member States which are either NATO allies or partners in the PfP, and have consequently concluded bilateral security agreements with the alliance. Such an arrangement would guarantee that since Cyprus was not a NATO member or a PfP partner, Nicosia would not participate in EU-led operations that use NATO resources. See Reichard, “Some Legal Issues,”45.

75. Chris Lindborg, “The EU Rapid Reaction Force: Europe Takes on a New Security Challenge,” Occasional Papers on International Security Policy 37 (2001), www.basicint.org/pubs/Papers/BP37.htm, (accessed September 28, 2007).

76. Petersberg Tasks were integrated in the Maastricht Treaty and address the establishment of EU military units that can accomplish humanitarian, rescue, peace-keeping, and peacemaking tasks.

77. Martin Ortega, “Petersberg Tasks and Missions for the EU Military Forces,” Institute for Security Studies of the European Union (February 2005).

78. Jean-Yves Haine, “Back to Transatlantic Pragmatism,” The International Spectator 2 (2005), 47.


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79. The Ohrid Framework Agreement was a political compromise between the government in Skopje and the ethnic Albanian guerrillas reached in August 2001. It put an end to the short-term conflict in the country. The agreement guarantees all minorities proportional representation and a quasi-veto power over sensitive political issues. It restored the political dialogue between the Slavic majority and the Alba-nian minority in the country based on the model of power-sharing and consensual democracy.

80. Lindborg, “The EU.”81. Tommi Koivula, “EU Battlegroup: The Big Picture,” in EU Battlegroups:

Theory and Development in the Light of Finnish-Swedish Cooperation, ed. Mika Kerttunen, Tommi Koivula, and Tommy Jeppsson (Helsinki, Finland: National De-fense College, 2005), 12.

82. “Conclusions of the European Council Presidency,” Annex IV, December 10–11, 1999, Helsinki, Finland, 22.

83. Franco-British Meeting in Le Touquet, February 2003, Franco-British Summit in London, November 2003; also Gustav Lindstrom, “Enter the EU Battle Groups,” Chaillot paper 97 (February 2007), 19.

84. Lindstrom, “Enter,” 11–12.85. Koivula, “EU Battlegroup,” 17.86. European Security Strategy (2003) and Headline Goal 2010, endorsed by the

European Council (2004), www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/, (accessed September 27, 2007).

87. “Eurocorps: A Force of the European Union and the Atlantic Alliance: His-tory,” Eurocorps Web page, www.eurocorps.net/history/, (accessed September 29, 2007).

88. “EGF Organization: Strategic and Political Levels,” European Gendarmerie Force Web page, www.eurogendfor.eu/, (accessed September 30, 2007).

89. Neil Walker, “Sovereignty and Differentiated Integration in the European Union,” in The European Union and Its Order: the Legal Theory of European Inte-gration, ed. Bankowski and Scott (Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 30–64.

90. Stanley Hoffman, “Toward Common European Common and Security Pol-icy?” Journal of Common Market Studies 35, no. 2 (2000), 198.

91. Author’s interview with the French Deputy Head of Mission at the NATO Headquarters in Brussels, January 19, 2006.


155

Over a ten-year period NATO added twelve new members who joined the Alliance in three separate waves in 1999, 2004, and 2009. The expansion led to an increase of membership from sixteen to twenty-eight nations and added another hundred million people defended under Article Five of the North Atlantic Treaty. This process became, without any doubt, the most visible component of NATO’s multifaceted transformation. Today’s alliance of twenty-eight nations and a population of 880 million people is much more heterogeneous and certainly functions quite differently than it did in its earlier formats.

The vast majority of the literature on NATO expansion studies this process from democratization perspective—that NATO included the new members in order to stabilize political institutions in Eastern Europe and to ensure the foundations of democracy there. Such an argument has been heavily criticized by traditional alliance theorists who argued that NATO is first and foremost a security alliance; it cannot and should not be involved in democ-ratization of transitional societies.1 If the West wanted to consolidate the new democracies, they should have used other political and institutional mecha-nisms. The main critique of NATO’s expansion is that the new members are relatively small and poor; therefore, they have very limited contributions to NATO’s burden sharing.

This chapter surveys the patterns of NATO expansion to answer the ques-tions whether membership negotiations surrounding the expansion process have contributed toward the advancement of allied capabilities. The argument presented below does not challenge the logic according to which the policy of enlargement, largely driven by the United States, was about extending

5Adding New Allies

Three Rounds of Post-Cold War NATO Expansion


156 Chapter 5

stability and security including consolidation of democracy and economic re-forms on a capitalist basis into the area of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Instead, it chooses to focus on a fairly understudied implication of the expan-sion—the extent to which NATO membership influenced the development of military capabilities. Albeit subtly, the study implies that the expansion cannot be studied separately from the introduction of the new missions or the advancement of new capabilities. In other words, that the integration of new members would not be possible if they did not undergo major military trans-formation that improved the management of their limited military resources and added peacekeeping, crisis management, and stabilization capabilities. Thus, the post-Cold War expansion was much different from earlier waves when Greece, Turkey, West Germany, or Spain were brought to NATO and clearly attests for the changing nature of the alliance.

An explanation that the new members needed to undergo organizational transformation in order to enhance their interoperability and to develop niche capabilities is pragmatic. Nonetheless, it would be exaggerated and incorrect to argue that NATO could tell the new or prospective members in the process of their own internal military restructuring what particular capabilities need to develop. Even though the aspirant nations supported the optimization and specialization approach, at the same time they also faced various internal and external constraints. Externally, the negotiations of the Partnership for Peace, Membership Action Plan, and subsequent decisions of the North Atlantic Council were conducted in a non-coercive environment in which allies were concerned primarily about their national interests and needed to adjust their bargaining positions. Externally, military transformation proved a more cum-bersome process as member-states often committed themselves to unrealistic targets that later needed to be revised in order to meet the responsibilities of membership. Domestically, political elites in the new members found it increasingly difficult to persuade their citizens that their countries should contribute additional resources to NATO’s new missions.2 As a result, despite the thresholds on defense spending established by NATO, the European share of NATO’s defense spending remained lower than expected throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century.

The presentation below is organized into three sections: First, it surveys the process of NATO expansion in the context of Eastern Europe’s military transformation in during the 1990s and 2000s. The goal of this section is to highlight the relevancy of this process during the partnership stage, the pre-accession (or Membership Action Plan) stage, and the stage after the admission of these countries into NATO. Second, the presentation checks the theoretical argument—that NATO membership improves the management of allied resources and contributes to acquisition of new capabilities—against


Adding New Allies 157

two other groups of nations: potential applicants for membership, and EU na-tions that have not expressed a desire to join the alliance.3 Thus, it discusses the differences between these groups of nations to highlight how the prospects for membership modify the NATO’s use of these nations’ resources and their contributions to non-Article Five operations. Finally, the chapter discusses the implications of heterogeneity due to the admission of new members.

NEGOTIATING THREE WAVES OF NATO EXPANSION AFTER THE END OF THE COLD WAR

NATO’s Partnerships in the 1990s

NATO’s expansion was not accomplished overnight. Instead, it underwent several major stages during which candidates prepared for their new burdens and responsibilities. The issue of admitting new members to NATO was first addressed at a special committee of the North Atlantic Assembly in January 1993. At this point in time, the applications of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic were given “serious consideration.”4 The Brussels Summit of 1994, which was of a historical significance for NATO’s overall transforma-tion, put forward a strategy to promote an expansionist agenda. The summit introduced the Partnership for Peace (PfP)—a new framework of managing relations with countries from the former communist bloc. PfP constituted a novel, cooperative framework and “a diplomatic invention of first order.”5 It presented a very flexible framework that provided a possibility to offer venue for cooperation with countries that had quite different military and political objectives for the future of their relationships with NATO. The proposed 16+1 formula allowed the sixteen members to commit to individual partner-ship programs with each nation from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. At the same time partners held the flexibility to determine the nature and depth of their cooperation with the alliance. Some of the East European nations wanted to become NATO members and insisted on more in-depth cooperation with NATO; others with no interest in becoming members preferred a loose and open relationship with the alliance. Policymakers in Brussels attempted, as best they could, to accommodate all the partners. PfP, nonetheless, communicated a clear message to potential entrants that their admission would be lengthy.

Given the specific political climate of the early post-Cold War years, the partnership’s loose framework made up the only format that could ac-commodate all new partners. Such a format, nonetheless, entailed several inherent weaknesses. First, the cooperation between NATO and its former


158 Chapter 5

adversaries was very broadly defined and did not outline any specific criteria for membership. The East European nations who wanted to become members were not given precise guidelines about their path to membership. Second, the flexibility of the PfP framework sent a somewhat unclear message to the leaders of Eastern Europe about their prospects to join the alliance. Even though NATO clearly expressed that felt concerned about their internal sta-bility and external security, no formal guarantees of security or clear prom-ises for membership were given. Thus, NATO ensured itself against possible accusations from Moscow that it was trying to entice these countries into the Western camp. Political precautions dominated over firm commitments and little practical progress was made in the beginning. Third, PfP incorporated a very diverse group of nations who varied in size, foreign policy orientation, and overall international influence. To make the partnerships work at this early stage, the alliance preferred to focus exclusively on peacekeeping and military planning.

Romania signed the PfP Framework Document in January 1994, being the first to do so, shortly followed by the other former adversaries from Central and Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union. Since, thirty-three nations have participated in the partnership, including twelve partners who between 1999 and 2009 “graduated” to membership status.6 Every country that joined the PfP signed an individual Peace Framework Document and was required to submit a Presentation Document. This new partnership was not solely intended as a confidence building forum for military cooperation similar to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Instead, it was much more about pragmatic cooperation in areas where this was recognized as most needed. One such area was multinational peacekeeping due to the surge in ethnic conflicts after 1990. It became clear from the very beginning that this cooperation would be intergovernmental in its nature. That is why NATO gave the initiative to its partners to identify areas where they wanted to work with the alliance. Originally, they presented overambitious projects that were later revised under NATO’s supervision.

Soon after PfP’s inception in 1994, the parties realized that they needed to include military planning in order to improve the prospects of cooperation. In January 1995 the allies and their partners began a Planning and Review Process (PARP). The process was based on a two-year cycle and aimed at improving interoperability between the allies and their partners. The scope of the PfP operations, nonetheless, remained relatively limited—it primar-ily included humanitarian aid, peacekeeping, search and rescue. Gradually, NATO leadership and partner nations realized the need for diversification and specialization of cooperation. A major re-organization of the partnership with Russia and Ukraine was implemented after Brussels and Moscow signed the



Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security in May 1997 and Russian forces joined the NATO-led Implementation Force (I-FOR) in Bosnia. In 2002 NATO-Russia relations were upgraded to a Permanent NATO-Russia Council built on the goals and principles of the 1997 Founding Act.7 In July the same year NATO signed a “Charter on a Distinctive Partner-ship between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Ukraine.”8 These documents formally recognized the special status of the partnerships with Russia and Ukraine, and also drew a much needed distinction between these two large partners and the other smaller PfP nations from Central and Eastern Europe, who ultimately sought membership into the organization.

The restructuring of NATO-Russia and NATO-Ukraine relations was fol-lowed by new partnership institutions—the relatively archaic structures of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council were replaced with a more flexible and efficient Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC) formally introduced at the Sintra Summit in May 1997. The new Council was designed to serve as a security forum and an enhanced framework for dialogue and consulta-tion about political and security-related issues between the sixteen allies and their partners. In addition to political dialogue, the new multilateral forum discussed several capabilities-related issues: peacekeeping and crisis man-agement operations, arms control and proliferation, defense planning and policy implementations in the context of regional conflicts, terrorism, emer-gency planning, and civil-military cooperation.9 The bilateral partnerships were managed by different partnership “cells” in which military and civilian officials of the PfP countries worked hand in hand with officials from NATO Headquarters and the member-states. A special partnership coordination cell was established in Mons, Belgium, at NATO’s European command to coordinate PfP activities. The mission in Bosnia, where members and part-ners served alike, was put under the direct command of the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe (SACEUR) and his staff. PfP was modified in 1997 when various tiers of partnership were introduced, thus allowing for deeper interaction with those countries who were interested in be coming members. The new format ultimately facilitated better planning and improved interoper-ability, as well as higher participation in joint operations.

Even after its reform in 1997, the PfP still remained unable to address the core issue concerning many of the Central and East European nations—the prospects for their membership. In December 1997, the ministerial meeting in Brussels only reconfirmed that the alliance’s door remained open and that Article 10 would be honored to all candidates that qualified for member-ship.10 NATO clearly communicated that the key criterion for the admission of new members would be the applicants’ capacity to work effectively within NATO’s Integrated Command Structure. The officials in Brussels were


160 Chapter 5

primarily concerned with the capacity of potential members to become ef-fective contributors to the Alliance. The United States also reaffirmed their commitment to the principles of expansion, and the first exploratory talks were conducted in 1996–1997 at the NATO Headquarters. All candidates’ applications were thoroughly examined, and the final decision was that the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, solely, would be invited to become members. This decision also aligned with the Clinton administration’s prefer-ences as Washington determined that the core package of the three Visegrad candidates would be “a sufficient challenge” for ratification at home and for absorption by the alliance.11

Ultimately, the Visegrad package was regarded on both sides of the Atlan-tic as an optimal choice for the first round of expansion. From Washington’s perspective the three countries could be sold to the U.S. Senate as strategi-cally important and politically acceptable. From Germany’s perspective, they “satisfied the desire to move off the front lines into Central Europe” and could serve as a buffer between Germany and Russia. The United Kingdom also favored a smaller package because London believed that too rapid or large an increase in membership would ultimately weaken NATO. Other allies, such as France and Italy, advocated a southern focus of expansion, emphasizing the specific assets that Slovenia and Romania would bring to NATO. Slovenia was considered one of the strongest candidates in terms of military preparedness whose application received substantial support in Eu-rope and in the U.S. Senate. As early as 2004, Ljubljana was the front runner in military reforms moving forward very positively and a case that continued “to challenge nearly all criticism of NATO expansion.”12 Romania, on the other hand, held an important strategic position in Southeastern Europe but lagged far behind in military reforms and the capacity to contribute to specific military capabilities. In the end, the compromise among the allies excluded both nations. While Slovenia was considered a given for the next round, the allies recognized that Romania needed to focus on “positive developments towards democracy and the rule of law” and encouraged Bucharest to further military reforms.13

The Madrid round of expansion was certainly a historic event not only for new entrants, but also for other applicants who were assured that they would be extended the same opportunity in the future. The experience of the Viseg-rad three was important in identifying potential challenges and streamlining the enlargement. As a result, several important conclusions were made. First, similar to other transformational projects, the Partnership for Peace started with unrealistic ambitions and was not tailored to meet the individual goals of different partners. Therefore, NATO needed better inclusion mechanisms



to prepare the aspirants for full membership while at the same time drawing a distinction between those who wanted to become members and those who wanted only to remain partners. Unlike the European Union, NATO pos-sessed very little experience with previous waves of expansion—after West Germany’s inclusion in 1955 it absorbed only two new members for over forty-five years: Spain in 1982 and the provinces of former East Germany in 1990. Therefore, the period following the invitation of the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland served as an opportunity to develop a comprehensive inclusion mechanism needed to prepare the organization for the challenges of expansion. By 1996, Brussels realized that a differentiated approach and reorganization of the PfP were imminent.

Second, even though the Partnership for Peace facilitated the advancement of new peacekeeping capabilities, it offered no mechanisms to develop criti-cal components including allied interoperability. The PfP mostly promoted political dialogue but could not exercise pressure for military reforms in the applicant countries. Despite the fact that NATO outlined formal criteria for membership in 1995, it failed to institute a detailed and rigorous monitoring process as part of the inclusion mechanism. Such monitoring was necessary to determine the problem areas of each applicant nation as well as improve-ments that would be needed to meet membership requirements.14

Third, inspire of NATO’s straightforward membership criteria, it seemed that the 1997 decision to expand was primarily based on political compro-mises, not so much on the applicants’ readiness to assume the membership responsibilities. A careful inclusion mechanism would have evaluated Slove-nia’s application positively and Ljubljana’s bid would have received a more thorough consideration.15 In part, the Clinton administration’s choice to back up the three Visegrad countries to Slovenia bore out that the main concern in Washington was not to select the most prepared, but rather the most accept-able at home and abroad candidates. That is why the 1999 expansion raised criticism that some of the prospective members were unprepared for mem-bership. Nonetheless, the experience from this first wave helped NATO craft new, rigorous mechanisms that carefully monitored the successful implemen-tation of military transformation.

Multilateral Diplomacy and Development of Allied Capabilities in the 2000s

A key component of NATO membership pointed to the concern that new members were expected to become compatible with the rest of the Alliance, a requirement which mandated substantial efforts to prepare their militaries for membership. As political elites in the aspirant nations faced bureaucratic and


162 Chapter 5

organizational resistance at home, NATO leadership took steps to promptly address these challenges. The Washington Summit (1999) pledged that the alliance would continue to welcome new members. With this in mind, NATO leaders and launched the Membership Action Plan (MAP), thus establishing a mechanism to review the progress of every individual applicant and provide feedback.16 MAP was designed on the experience with the first three entrants and made several major improvements in comparison to the PfP mechanism. First, the plan established a clearing-house to help coordinate NATO as-sistance in the needed areas of military reform. Second, it streamlined the Planning and Review Process (PARP) established under PfP. The new PARP measured the level of reforms of the potential members to become interoper-able with the rest of NATO and to prepare their force structures for future membership. Third, inter-ministerial meetings at the national level and other coordination mechanisms were set up by MAP to temper bureaucratic resis-tance to transformation, and review the fulfillment of the objectives set out in the individual plans.

Initially, nine applicants signed up for the plan—Albania, Bulgaria, Esto-nia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the Former Yugo-slav Republic of Macedonia. These nations were promised that the alliance would review the enlargement process again during the Prague Summit in 2002. Soon after the MAP was launched, these nine countries consolidated efforts in lobbying for their admission by forming the so-called Vilnius group (VG). After its inception, the Group began regular meetings at various ministerial and expert levels. Representatives from the aspirant nations met at NATO capitals with decision makers involved in the enlargement process. VG worked closely with the Headquarters in Brussels during EAPC meetings and with various policymakers and think-tanks in Washington. The Vilnius Group became a de facto support group of relatively similar nations working together on their political and military obstacles for membership. At the same time, VG constituted a multilateral forum for diplomacy established to serve a certain goal and, once the desired membership was achieved, the group simply disbanded itself.

The first indications that in the subsequent round of expansion NATO was willing to extend an invitation to a larger group of applicants came during President Bush’s June 2001 visit to Poland. He addressed faculty and students at Warsaw University and indicated that “all of Europe’s new democracies, from the Baltic to the Black Sea and all that lie between, should have the same chance for security and freedom—and the same chance to join the in-stitutions of Europe—as Europe’s old democracies have.” The President un-derlined that the Alliance should continue to admit new members and that its



doors would remain open “for all of Europe’s democracies that seek [NATO membership] and are ready to share the responsibilities that NATO brings.”17

The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, further strengthened the ex-pansionist case. A Brookings Institution study released in 2001 indicated that “the case of enlargement is stronger than ever before,” it “will contribute to the process of integration . . . and promote the development of strong new allies in the war on terrorism.”18 The “big bang” approach succeeded in part due to the high level of coordination among the aspiring nations. From June 2001 to July 2002 the foreign ministers of the Vilnius Group met four times; their prime ministers held three meetings and, finally, a Summit of the Heads of State was held in Sofia, Bulgaria. The intensified contacts and improved coordination among the ten capitals and between them and Brussels resulted in accepting these nations as a coherent group of well-motivated candidates ready to assume the burdens and responsibilities of membership.

Similarly, an invitation that included seven new entrants was also endorsed in the major European capitals. France supported a “big bang” round, but em-phasized the new allies should “contribute to security,” without “creating any difficulties.” The French position insisted that the entrants should not “dilute the alliance” from its core task of collective defense.19 In the early 2000s Germany was concerned that the expanded NATO may not be able to func-tion effectively. Berlin gave a green light after the applicants convinced their NATO partners they had acquired the skills to work together effectively not only in the Vilnius Group but also as effective alliance members. Once MAP was put into force, it ensured a minimum level of adaptability to guarantee effective contribution to the new allied operations. As a result, Germany sup-ported the U.S. approach because the applicants presented sufficient evidence that they were able to meet membership obligations.20

London, however, had felt consistently cautious in regard to another round of expansion. British support rested upon two imperatives: (a) the expansion should not endanger the political cohesion and military effectiveness of NATO and; (b) the process should not to antagonize Russia. More than any other major European ally, Britain’s support was linked to the candidates’ transfor-mational capacity. This capacity included, above all, the ability to “modernize their armed forces according to the provisions of MAP and the Defense Ca-pabilities Initiative (DCI), and make them available for the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP).”21 Thus, Berlin and London’s endorsements were also tied to the successful implementation of military reforms.

The invitation of the three Baltic nations—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithu-ania—was particularly troublesome because of Moscow’s opposition to expansion. Russia’s position that “the expansion is incapable of tackling the


164 Chapter 5

modern threats” remained unchanged throughout the entire process.22 More importantly, Moscow was particularly uneasy about inviting into NATO three of the former Soviet Republics with sizable ethnic Russian population. NATO leadership worked diligently to soften Moscow’s disapproval. In 2000 the then Secretary General, Lord George Robertson, initiated a compre-hensive strategy of engaging Russia in a security dialogue about enhanced military cooperation with NATO. Three days after the formal admission of the seven new allies, NATO Secretary General Jaap De Hoop Scheffer paid Moscow a symbolic visit, during which he reassured Russian leadership that the expansion was not targeted against Moscow. He consistently promoted dialogue within the Russia-NATO Council at subsequent NATO Summits in Istanbul (2004) and Riga (2006).23 Even though Russia’s official position re-mained unchanged, Moscow tacitly accepted the fact that an invitation would be extended to these nations as well.

The Prague Summit (2002) officially rubberstamped the “big bang” ap-proach to NATO expansion by inviting seven of the ten applicants from the Vilnius Group—Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. An interagency team led by the U.S. Ambassador to NATO, Nicholas Burns, visited the seven invitees in February and October 2003 and met with every President, Prime Minister, Foreign and Defense Minister as part of efforts to assess their readiness for NATO membership. The team found out that all of them were making efforts to reform and modernize their defense establishment. This assessment was fairly realistic—even though the majority of these fledging East European democracies remained transitional societies facing a variety of challenges at home, they had made substantial progress to honor the commitments they undertook before joining NATO. To ensure that each new ally would remain on track with the military reforms, they were asked to submit individual Timetables for the Completion of Re-forms prior to the signing of the Accession Protocols.

In these timetables NATO identified a list of common areas with specific measures that each of them needed to complete. The timelines followed a common template in which the members were requested to submit their re-sponses for anticipated reforms in five critical areas: political and economic issues, defense and military issues, resources, security, and legal issues. Each of the areas of improvement contained between two and fourteen common objectives and the invitees had to explain what accomplishments they had so far and how they planned to complete the reforms in these areas in the short term (i.e., prior to the NATO accession), medium term (the first three to five years after they join NATO), and in the long run (until 2010–2015). Even though the objectives were the same, the answers varied according to the troubled areas of each candidate. For example, on the objective for integra-



tion of society and the settlement of minority issues, each country’s responses varied considerably: The three Baltic nations explained what measures they had taken and planned to take in order to guarantee the rights of the ethnic Russians living in their countries or address adequately the legacy of the Holocaust. Alternatively, Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovakia had to explain their efforts to integrate their Roma minorities—one of the poorest and most underprivileged ethnic groups in Eastern Europe.

More importantly, the timetables constituted important political commit-ments undertaken by the invitees to guide them throughout the accession process and beyond. They also helped inform NATO and the allied parlia-ments about the status of these nations’ preparedness. The advancement of adequate allied capabilities was an instrumental part in the entire accession process. All entrants whose defense spending was below 2 percent promised to increase budget appropriations; those who were around 2 percent or higher took a commitment to maintain it at these levels. In the section on defense and military issues, NATO specifically asked the new members to identify in a series of objectives the steps that they had undertaken or planned to un-dertake to reach full interoperability. Brussels also requested about specific measures taken by the seven invitees to ensure connectivity of the air space, the availability of secure communications (voice and data), adequate military education, effective training, and national defense planning system set in place at the time of accession.

In objective three of the section on defense and military issues, the invitees had to list forces and capabilities they were able to commit, by the time of accession, for participation in allied operations. In this objective NATO gave these nations some freedom to identify areas of expertise they had already developed during the PfP and MAP and, in the process of their own internal military restructuring, were willing to develop as particular capabilities that they could sustain in the long run. Romania, the largest of the 2002 invitees, explained that it would focus on nuclear, biological, and chemical defense ca-pabilities, mountain troops, military police, air transportation, and reconnais-sance. Its southern neighbor, Bulgaria, who had previously contributed with a nuclear, biological, and chemical defense team in Afghanistan, identified several key areas of modernization and specialization: the air surveillance system, the reconstruction of the Graf Ignatievo Air Force base, as well as the development of Field Integrated Communications and Information System and Air Sovereignty Operational Center. Nicholas Burns testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “bringing Bulgaria and Romania into NATO would further extend stability into Europe’s most troubled re-gion—southeast Europe.”24 Slovenia, the wealthiest and the most stable of all seven invitees, chose to focus on de-mining, combat engineering, and


166 Chapter 5

mountain warfare capabilities. Ljubljana was the only of the seven invitees that organized a referendum in which the supporters of NATO membership won by a two-to-one margin. Finally, the three Baltic nations were advised by the alliance that, due to their limited military resources, they needed to re-organize their armed forces from traditional territorial defense to joint capabilities for NATO operations. In their timetables Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania indicated plans to develop small, battalion-sized mobile units and improve capabilities in the areas of minesweeping, air surveillance, and ex-plosives disposal. A detailed account for the measures provided in the seven invitees’ timetables is summarized in table 5.1 below.

The ratification by the U.S. Senate was one of the last hurdles before these seven applicants became full NATO members. On May 8, 2003, the U.S. Senate confirmed its support for the seven invitees by ratifying a bill with an amazing 96-0 vote that ultimately allowed them to join NATO in 2004. U.S. Senate support in 2004 was much stronger than in 1998 when it ratified the admission of Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland with an 80-12 vote. The comparison between the first and the second waves of post-Cold War expansion also indicates the instrumental influence that the United States possessed in this process. In the late 1990s, U.S. decision-makers were mostly concerned which applicants would be the least controversial picks. Alternatively, in 2002, the U.S. decision-makers operated from a different assumption—namely invitations should be extended to those nations that met requirements and who had completed the necessary adjustments required in their individual membership plans. This approach was universally accepted by the other major NATO allies as well. Thus, Washington’s support for a more inclusive wave of expansion focused on the candidates who were able to successfully accomplish their individual MAPs, an approach which ulti-mately secured endorsements from other major players like Britain, France, and Germany.

The North Atlantic Council decided in Prague that Albania, Croatia, and Macedonia were not prepared to join NATO. These three countries continued the tradition of the multilateral cooperation set up with the Vilnius Group. In May 2003 they established another forum of multilateral diplomacy, the so-called Adriatic Charter, and continued to follow MAP guidelines while also effectively lobbying in favor of their applications. The main difference between Albania, Croatia, and Macedonia, and the seven invitees from the VG was the level of political stability and military preparedness. Although each of the three countries faced different problems, the limited capacity of the political elites in Tirana, Zagreb, and Skopje to transform their civil and military institutions at home, ensure the rule of law, and facilitate coopera-


Tabl

e 5.

1.

Tim

etab

les

for

the

Com

plet

ion

of R

efor

ms

for

the

Seve

n In

vite

es (

2002

–200

3)

Polit

ical

and

Eco

nom

ic Is

sues

Def

ense

and

Mili

tary

Issu

esR

esou

rces

Secu

rity

and

Leg

al Is

sues

of

Acc

essi

on

Bul

gari

aTh

ree

mai

n ob

ject

ives

: ac

coun

tabi

lity,

tr

ansp

aren

cy, a

nd

enha

nced

effi

cien

cySt

rate

gy a

nd A

ctio

n Pl

an fo

r R

efor

m o

f the

Judi

ciar

y;

Lega

l ref

orm

s to

com

bat

corr

uptio

n; s

peci

al a

nti-

corr

uptio

n un

itsEf

fort

s to

impr

ove

the

stat

us

of th

e R

oma

min

ority

(e

duca

tiona

l, pr

ofes

sion

al

and

livin

g co

nditi

ons)

Nat

iona

l def

ense

pla

nnin

g pr

oces

s co

mpa

tible

with

N

ATO

’s d

efen

se p

lann

ing

Stra

tegi

c D

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se R

evie

w

(SD

R) w

ith fu

rthe

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adju

stm

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Key

Are

as o

f Mod

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n:

CC

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ms

and

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surv

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R

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Gra

f Ig

natie

vo A

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orce

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se, F

ield

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f its

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avy

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bat e

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men

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r 50

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2004

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45,

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te

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psEq

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ttalio

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200

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obile

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abili

ties

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g, e

xplo

sive

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ilita

ry p

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and

deco

ntam

inat

ion

units

Def

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spe

ndin

g $1

25 m

il (a

roun

d 2.

0% o

f GD

P)Jo

int d

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se p

roje

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of th

e th

ree

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tic r

epub

lics

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; Ex

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nit

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obile

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the

legi

slat

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Tabl

e 5.

1.

(con

tinu

ed)

Polit

ical

and

Eco

nom

ic Is

sues

Def

ense

and

Mili

tary

Issu

esR

esou

rces

Secu

rity

and

Leg

al Is

sues

of

Acc

essi

on

Latv

iaIm

prov

ed a

nd s

trea

mlin

ed

natu

raliz

atio

n pr

oces

s fo

r et

hnic

min

oriti

es—

Soci

ety

Inte

grat

ion

Prog

ram

to

inte

grat

e et

hnic

Rus

sian

s;

Con

sulta

tive

Cou

ncil

for

Inte

grat

ion

Issu

esH

isto

ry e

valu

atio

n pr

oces

s re

gard

ing

the

natio

n’s

role

in th

e H

oloc

aust

Enha

nced

/Impr

oved

Civ

il-M

ilita

ry C

oope

ratio

nIn

ter-

agen

cy N

ATO

In

tegr

atio

n C

ounc

il

Law

on

Stra

tegi

c G

oods

to

regu

late

arm

s an

d ex

port

co

ntro

lR

evie

w o

f Nat

iona

l Def

ense

C

once

pt a

nd F

orce

St

ruct

ure

A n

atio

nal b

riga

de

esta

blis

hed

to a

llow

the

rota

tiona

l dep

loym

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lion

size

task

fo

rces

Com

mitm

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o es

tabl

ish

com

man

d st

ruct

ure:

Lo

gist

ics

Supp

ort

Com

man

d; T

rain

ing

and

Doc

trin

e C

omm

and

Red

uctio

n of

the

num

ber

of

Nat

iona

l Gua

rd b

y th

e en

d of

200

4

Incr

ease

d de

fens

e sp

endi

ng

(from

abo

ut $

100

mil

to

over

$25

0 m

il)Em

phas

is o

n tr

ilate

ral m

ilita

ry

coop

erat

ion

with

the

othe

r B

altic

nat

ions

A s

peci

al N

SIP

offic

e se

t up

to p

rovi

de n

eces

sary

pe

rson

nel a

nd fa

cilit

ies

Har

mon

izat

ion

of th

e le

gisl

atio

n: P

aris

Agr

eem

ent;

Bru

ssel

s A

gree

men

t Lo

ndon

Agr

eem

ent

Lith

uani

aM

easu

res

to e

limin

ate

polic

e br

utal

ity a

nd c

orru

ptio

n;

impr

ovem

ent o

f pri

son

cond

ition

s

Tran

sitio

n to

bet

ter-

equi

pped

, rap

idly

depl

oyab

le p

rofe

ssio

nal

arm

ed fo

rces

Mili

tary

coo

pera

tion

with

Po

land

—jo

int c

oope

ratio

n in

stitu

tions

, inc

l. Li

thua

nian

-Po

lish

peac

ekee

ping

bat

talio

n

Lega

l mec

hani

sms

to g

uara

ntee

ci

vilia

n co

ntro

l of m

ilita

ry

and

inte

llige

nce

serv

ices


Rel

ativ

ely

high

pub

lic

opin

ion

supp

ort f

or

NA

TO m

embe

rshi

p 59

%

(Dec

200

2)H

isto

ry E

valu

atio

n Pr

oces

s of

the

Hol

ocau

stR

eins

titut

ion

of c

omm

unal

pr

oper

tyIm

prov

ed r

elat

ions

with

R

ussi

a—bo

rder

dis

pute

se

ttled

in 1

997;

Rus

sia

and

Bel

arus

obj

ect N

ATO

m

embe

rshi

p be

caus

e of

K

alin

ingr

ad

Def

ense

ref

orm

s—R

apid

R

eact

ion

Bri

gade

set

up

by 2

008;

incl

udes

3,8

00

men

sup

plem

ente

d by

te

rrito

rial

uni

tsEx

pect

s to

pro

vide

a

batta

lion-

size

d un

it de

ploy

able

for

over

seas

co

mba

t mis

sion

sFo

cus

on s

trat

egic

ca

pabi

litie

s: jo

int

min

esw

eepi

ng, d

emin

ing,

ai

r su

rvei

llanc

e ne

twor

k,

expl

osiv

e or

dina

nce

disp

osal

, med

ics,

and

en

gine

ers

Def

ense

spe

ndin

g $2

30.2

m

illio

n (1

.96%

of G

DP)

; th

e go

al is

2%

Bal

tic R

egio

nal C

oope

ratio

n is

a s

trat

egic

pri

ority

Har

mon

izat

ion

of th

e le

gisl

atio

n

Rom

ania

New

ant

i-co

rrup

tion,

cr

imin

al a

nd e

thic

al

legi

slat

ion

Key

eco

nom

ic r

efor

ms

and

impr

oved

exp

ort c

ontr

ol

syst

emEf

fort

s to

sol

ve c

omm

unity

an

d et

hnic

(Rom

a)

prob

lem

s Pu

blic

dip

lom

acy

effo

rts

to

impr

ove

supp

ort f

or N

ATO

m

embe

rshi

p

Rev

ised

Nat

iona

l Mili

tary

St

rate

gyC

omm

itmen

t to

prov

ide

the

follo

win

g ca

pabi

litie

s:

mou

ntai

n tr

oops

, m

ilita

ry p

olic

e, p

sy-

ops,

air

tran

spor

tatio

n,

reco

nnai

ssan

ce (U

AV

), an

d N

BC

Plan

ning

, Pro

gram

min

g,

Bud

getin

g, a

nd E

valu

atio

n Sy

stem

intr

oduc

ed

Def

ense

spe

ndin

g re

mai

ns

abou

t 2.4

% o

r hi

gher

Dow

nsiz

ing

of c

ivili

an

pers

onne

l by

40%

Abo

lishe

d co

nscr

ipt m

ilita

ry

serv

ice

in 2

006

NA

TO S

ecur

ity In

vest

men

t Pr

ogra

m a

nd p

erso

nnel

tr

aini

ng c

ompl

eted

by

2003

Nat

iona

l Sec

urity

Cle

arin

g an

d V

ettin

g of

the

pers

onne

l Pe

rson

nel t

rain

ing

to d

eal w

ith

NA

TO c

lass

ified

info

rmat

ion

Har

mon

izat

ion

of th

e le

gisl

atio

n


Tabl

e 5.

1.

(con

tinu

ed)

Polit

ical

and

Eco

nom

ic Is

sues

Def

ense

and

Mili

tary

Issu

esR

esou

rces

Secu

rity

and

Leg

al Is

sues

of

Acc

essi

on

Slov

akia

Legi

slat

ion

to a

ccel

erat

e ec

onom

ic r

efor

ms,

co

nsol

idat

e de

moc

ratic

de

velo

pmen

t, co

mba

t co

rrup

tion

Con

side

rabl

e ef

fort

s in

pr

otec

ting

min

ority

rig

hts;

fu

rthe

r ef

fort

s ne

eded

to

impr

ove

Rom

a ri

ghts

Publ

ic d

iplo

mac

y ne

eded

to

boo

st S

lova

k su

ppor

t fo

r N

ATO

mem

bers

hip

Arm

ed fo

rces

ref

orm

pr

ogra

ms:

Gen

eral

Sta

ff in

tegr

ated

into

the

Def

ense

Min

istr

y (D

M);

cons

titut

iona

l am

endm

ent t

o fa

cilit

ate

NA

TO m

embe

rshi

pN

ew N

atio

nal S

ecur

ity

Stra

tegy

, Def

ense

St

rate

gy, a

nd a

Mili

tary

St

rate

gyJo

int a

ir d

efen

se u

nit w

ith

the

Cze

ch R

epub

lic;

spec

ial u

nit t

rain

ing

in a

lpin

e co

mba

t, re

conn

aiss

ance

, and

en

gine

erin

g

Arm

ed fo

rced

red

uced

to

24,5

00 b

y 20

06Fu

lly p

rofe

ssio

nal a

rmed

fo

rces

afte

r Ja

nuar

y 1,

20

06In

crea

sed

defe

nse

spen

ding

to

$45

0 m

il (2

% o

f the

G

DP)

Stre

amlin

ed F

orce

St

ruct

ure—

grou

nd a

nd

air

forc

eC

onso

lidat

ed tr

aini

ng a

nd

supp

ort e

lem

ent

Inte

grat

ed g

ener

al s

taff

and

defe

nse

min

istr

y

New

lega

l fra

mew

ork

and

stra

tegy

for

natio

nal s

ecur

ityR

efor

m o

f arm

ed fo

rces

pr

iori

tized

und

er th

e M

AP

Law

on

the

prot

ectio

n of

cl

assi

fied

info

rmat

ion

(May

20

01)

Nat

iona

l Sec

urity

Offi

ce

esta

blis

hed

but u

nder

fund

ed

Slov

enia

Am

endm

ent o

f leg

isla

tion

to c

omba

t org

aniz

ed

crim

e an

d co

rrup

tion

Agr

eem

ent o

n th

e bo

rder

di

sput

e w

ith C

roat

iaG

radu

al in

crea

se o

f ann

ual

defe

nse

spen

ding

from

1.

4 to

2%

Stra

tegi

c D

efen

se R

evie

w

com

plet

ed 2

002–

2003

Bat

talio

n co

ntri

butio

n to

N

ATO

def

ense

pla

nnin

g (2

004–

2010

)N

iche

cap

abili

ties

in th

e fo

llow

ing

area

s: m

ilita

ry

polic

e, c

omba

t en

gine

erin

g,

com

mun

icat

ion

and

syst

em s

uppo

rt, a

nd

med

ical

sup

port

Abo

litio

n of

com

puls

ory

rese

rves

by

2010

Fully

pro

fess

iona

l arm

ed

forc

es a

fter

2004

Nat

iona

l NSI

P of

fice

to

inte

rfac

e w

ith N

ATO

C

omm

ands

, the

In

tern

atio

nal S

taff,

and

N

ATO

Com

mitt

ees

on

NSI

P pr

ojec

ts

(ope

ratio

nal a

fter

2003

)

By

2003

ado

pted

am

endm

ents

to

the

Cla

ssifi

ed In

form

atio

n A

ctC

oncl

uded

inte

rope

rabi

lity

proc

ess

by th

e en

d of

200

4A

ccre

dita

tion

of th

e sy

stem

s an

d co

nnec

tions


Sour

ces:

Nat

iona

l Tim

etab

les

for

the

Com

plet

ion

of R

efor

ms

for

Bul

gari

a, E

ston

ia, L

atvi

a, L

ithua

nia,

Rom

ania

, Slo

vaki

a an

d Sl

oven

ia (2

003)

; Ste

ven

Woe

hrel

, Jul

ie K

im, a

nd

Car

l Ek,

“N

ATO

App

lican

t Sta

tes:

A S

tatu

s R

epor

t,” R

epor

t for

Con

gres

s, C

ongr

essi

onal

Res

earc

h Se

rvic

e at

the

Libr

ary

of C

ongr

ess,

Apr

il 25

, 200

3, w

ww

.nat

o.in

t/cps

/en/

nato

live/

opin

ions

_206

32.h

tm?s

elec

tedL

ocal

e=en

(acc

esse

d on

Dec

embe

r 28

, 201

0)

Sour

ces

on B

ulga

ria:

Vid

eo I

nter

view

with

Am

bass

ador

Em

il V

alev

, H

ead

of t

he M

issi

on o

f th

e R

epub

lic o

f B

ulga

ria

to N

ATO

, O

ctob

er 2

7, 2

003,

ww

w.n

ato.

int/c

ps/e

n/na

toliv

e/op

inio

ns_2

0554

.htm

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ecte

dLoc

ale=

en, (

acce

ssed

on

Dec

embe

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, 201

0)

Sour

ces

on E

ston

ia: E

ston

ia T

oday

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onia

and

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acts

heet

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ust 2

004,

web

-sta

tic.v

m.e

e/st

atic

/faili

d/46

6/Es

toni

a-N

ato.

pdf (

acce

ssed

on

Dec

embe

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, 201

0)

Sour

ces

on L

atvi

a: w

ww

.mfa

.gov

.lv/e

n/se

curi

ty/4

478/

4493

/ (ac

cess

ed o

n D

ecem

ber

28, 2

010)

Sour

ces

on R

oman

ia: w

ww

.rom

ania

unog

.org

/str

ateg

ies/

Ref

orm

s.ht

m (a

cces

sed

on D

ecem

ber

28, 2

010)

Sour

ces

on S

love

nia:

nat

o.go

v.si

/eng

/topi

c/ra

tific

atio

n/tim

etab

le/le

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es/ (

acce

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Dec

embe

r 28

, 201

0)


172 Chapter 5

tion with various international bodies, significantly reduced their chances to persuade NATO that they were ready to join the alliance in 2002.

Isolated from the rest of the world during the Cold War, Albania expe-rienced a deficit of political leadership and lacked visionary reformist elite causing major political and economic disturbances in the early and mid-1990s. Continuing poverty, corruption, and the collapse of several pyramid investment schemes weakened the government and led to serious civil unrest in 1997. In the years after 1997, the government was unable to effectively ex-ercise the rule of law and some parts of the country remained under the con-trol of the opposition or criminal organizations. The parliamentary elections in the late 1990s and early 2000s were highly contested, and international monitoring groups admitted serious flaws in the election process. As a result, Albania’s progress at the Prague Summit was considered unsatisfactory to meet the requirements for membership. Albania’s political system stabilized after 2001, and Tirana successfully confronted corruption and organized crime at home as part of a larger effort to strengthen the rule of law. In 2002, these efforts were noticed in Brussels as the NATO Secretary General praised the country’s progress at home, its international efforts to settle the final status of neighboring Kosovo, and its valuable contribution to the ISAF mis-sion in Afghanistan. Even though additional efforts were needed to improve the efficacy of Albania’s military and judicial system, the Bucharest Summit took Tirana’s new stabilizing role into consideration and extended an invita-tion for membership.25

Similar to Albania, Macedonia’s biggest problem had been insufficient democratic governance as well as its unsatisfactory record at home, coupled with unsettled disputes with its neighbors. Societal relations between the Slavic majority and the large Albanian minority deteriorated prior to 2001. The major issues of contention included the use of minority languages and minority participation at various levels of local and administrative gover-nance. The ethnic Albanians felt alienation from the mainstream political institutions in this former Yugoslav republic that spiraled insurgency in areas with a high concentration of Albanian population. The activities of the Albanian guerrillas involved attacks against the police and military units, which, in the late spring and summer of 2001, threw the country onto the verge of civil war. Among the guerrillas’ political demands were changes to the Macedonian constitution, greater use of the Albanian language in official institutions, and increased participation of ethnic Albanians in the nation’s civil service. A political compromise was achieved in August, guaranteeing all minorities equitable representation and a quasi-veto over sensitive politi-cal issues, such as the choice of judges, legislation on local government, and the use of languages. Just like Albania, Macedonia made substantial progress



after 2001 with additional improvements required in the domains of judicial reform, police restructuring, and combating organized crime and corruption.26

Macedonia’s invitation to join NATO was turned down in 2008 not be-cause of insufficient institutional capacity but due to the Greek veto related to Macedonia’s outstanding naming dispute with it southern neighbor. The dispute between the two nations dates back to the early 1990s when Athens refused to recognize this newly independent nation under its constitutional name, the Republic of Macedonia. The argument behind Greece’s staunch opposition to Skopje’s constitutional name is that the name Macedonia is historically inseparably associated with Greek culture, ever since the ancient Kingdom of Macedonia. Skopje also claims the succession of the ancient Macedonian state and has persistently opposed any modification of its con-stitutional name. As a result, this former Yugoslav Republic was admitted to the United Nations and other international bodies with a provisional name pending the settlement of the differences that have arisen over the country’s name. A provisional agreement between Athens and Skopje was reached in 1995, but no permanent settlement has been achieved since then. The Greek foreign minister, Dora Bakoyannis, made clear in 2006 that the Greek parlia-ment would not “ratify the accession of the neighboring country to the EU and NATO if the name issue is not resolved beforehand.”27 Skopje’s political elite, on the other hand, chose to pursue a nationalist agenda at home and abroad by defending the constitutional name and refusing to make any com-promise on the issue.

Croatia presents the most different case within the Adriatic charter. The country joined MAP shortly before the decision on the fifth wave of enlarge-ment, in May 2002, and its application was, therefore, belated to be reviewed at the Prague Summit. Only after the death of its nationalist leader, Franjo Tudjman, in 1999, did Zagreb end the controversial period of its history fol-lowing independence in 1991. Thus, the initial refusal to turn over former Croatian military and civilian officials indicted of war crimes during the war of independence (1991–1995) significantly undercut the credibility of Croa-tia’s young democracy. The path of European and Euro–Atlantic integration was cleared after the Croatian government became more willing to cooper-ate with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia on the issues of war crimes committed by Croatian citizens during the wars of succession in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.28 However, the Croation political elite and public remained seriously divided about the level of in-teraction and compliance with the tribunal in The Hague. Even though this former Yugoslav Republic made significant progress toward political and military reforms, and, by 2006, was considered the most prepared of the three remaining MAP countries, its accession was possible only after the indicted


174 Chapter 5

war criminals were captured and Zagreb convinced its partners that it would cooperate effectively with the international communit and its partners.

AC continued the VG tradition conducting frequent tri-partite meetings between high-ranking Albanian, Croatian, and Macedonian officials. The three nations frequently reviewed the advancement of the “individual and cooperative efforts to “intensify and hasten domestic reforms” and check on each other’s progress for NATO membership. These reforms included the establishment of “democratic institutions, civil society, rule of law, market economies, and NATO-compatible militaries; to fight corruption and crime; and to protect human rights and civil liberties.”29 In order to receive invita-tions at the Bucharest Summit, these three small nations needed to persuade Brussels that they possessed the ability to work effectively together toward addressing their militaries’ shortcomingsand make progress in the areas of political and economic transformation. Indeed, the AC remained active longer than the VG—almost six years—and made significant contributions to institutionalized cooperation among its participants as shown in table 5.2.

Finally, the United States’ active engagement in the initiation and imple-mentation of the Charter’s principles proved to be instrumental in promoting dialogue and cooperation among these three nations and in overcoming their resistance to reforms. In May 2003, the U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell, signed the Charter with the three foreign ministers; in February 2006, Wash-ington hosted a meeting of the three foreign ministers. Later, Vice President Dick Cheney attended the May 2006 summit of the three prime ministers in Dubrovnik, Croatia. The U.S. support for the efforts of the Adriatic Group was also demonstrated at the meeting of the three prime ministers with Presi-dent George W. Bush in Tirana in June 2007 as part of his visit to Albania.

The Management of the New Members’ Resources

Not only did the Timetables for Completion of Reforms require the new allies to list specific capabilities they bring to NATO’s overseas operations, but also they listed a detailed account of how these nations planned to improve the use of their scarce resources. In particular, the restructuring included re-duction by 30 to 60 percent of the current armed forces, abolition of the con-script military service, purchase of new equipment compatible with the rest of the allies, improved training of the personnel, and full professionalization of the armed forces as shown in table 5.1. The optimization of new members’ resources was, nonetheless, often constrained due to resistance at home. An environment where different military units have their own customs can easily become a source of organizational and bureaucratic resistance to transforma-tion and adaptation. Eastern Europe was no exception in this respect as its political elites needed to persuade their sizable military bureaucracies that military reforms were paramount for NATO accession.



Table 5.2. The Process of NATO Expansion by Year

Year(s)Cornerstone Summit

Number of New

Members

New Partners/

Partnerships

Total Number of NATO Members

States Joining NATO or Entering

Partnerships

1994–1996 Brussels Summit

28 16 Partnership for Peace initiated

1997–1999 Madrid Summit

3 19 The Visegrad Group joined NATO: the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland

1999–2000 Washington Summit

9 Membership Action Plan initiated; Vilnius Group formed

2002–2004 Prague Summit

7 26 Vilnius Group (VG) joined NATO: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia

2003 3 Adriatic Charter (AC) formed

2008–2009 Bucharest Summit

2 28 Adriatic Charter joined NATO: Albania and Croatia; FYR of Macedonia not invited

2009 Strasbourg-Kahl Summit

1 Montenegro joined MAP


176 Chapter 5

Based on the relationship between the size of military bureaucracy and the level of organizational resistance to transformation, two categories of new members could be identified. The first category consists of those nations that possessed heavy Cold War armies and were once members of the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO)—Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Poland, Roma-nia, and Slovakia.31 The second group includes countries such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovenia. These countries had no experience with in-dependent statehood prior to 1990.32 These two groups differed in the nature of their transformations. For the nations with heavy Cold War armies the transformation was a lengthy, multi-dimensional process that included a sub-stantial reduction of various resources and their more effective re-allocation, whereas in the newly independent nations military reforms were conducted parallel to state- and institution-building. In some of these cases, building new military structures from scratch proved to be easier and more cost-efficient than modifying and reorganizing an already existing organization, in part, because the process of transformation “had direct effect on the lives of people.”33 As a result, the Baltic countries and Slovenia, which needed to build their institutions of independent statehood and national security from scratch, experienced much less trouble adapting their military organizations to the needs of modern peacekeeping, crisis response, and stability operations while becoming interoperable with the rest of NATO.34

Two alternative explanations account for the slow pace of resource opti-mization in some of the countries in Central and Eastern Europe: the lack of clear vision and roadmap for reforms outlined by NATO political and mili-tary leadership at the beginning of the partnership process, and protracted re-forms due to resistance of Eastern Europe’s military organizations. Consider, for example, the Partnership for Peace. Initially the PfP provided a loose framework for cooperation that did not encourage prospective members to transform their Cold War armies. As a result, most of the CEE countries that had submitted their membership applications before 1997 were not prepared to be invited at the Madrid Summit. Even the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland did not demonstrate full readiness to assume all membership respon-sibilities and, as a result, after their admission were “repeatedly castigated . . . for the relatively modest sums they spent on defense despite their earlier pledges to reform their militaries in accordance with NATO criteria.”35 Al-ternatively, when NATO provided clear guidelines for membership through the individual membership plans and expected timetables for completion of reforms, the aspirants focused on specific goals that enabled them to improve their capabilities.

In general, political elites become reluctant to conduct reforms if their cost is higher than the potential benefits. In the case of Eastern Europe, various



domestic and organizational players, as well as individuals who held high stakes in maintaining the status quo, exercised pressure upon the political elites to halt or slow the pace of reforms. Such an observation would be valid for almost all military organizations, including the U.S. armed forces. Yet, a significant variation exists in the extent to which the aspirant nations dealt with organizational resistance and managed successfully the advancement of allied capabilities. Slovakia and Bulgaria represent two examples of East European nations that faced the consequences of protracted military reforms.

In 1993 Czech and Slovak officials split Czechoslovakia and agreed to divide its military assets into a two to one ratio. The Slovaks were left with insufficient infrastructure as most of the Czechoslovak military facilities remained in the territory of the Czech Republic. Despite marginal reforms, Slovakia’s actual progress remained very limited until 1999. The pace of transformation accelerated after 1999 when Bratislava joined MAP. These re-forms included on reduction of the army’s personnel and a emphasis officers’ training. In 2001 the Slovak Ministry of Defense (MoD) underwent major reorganization and the country adopted important defense documents—the National Security Strategy and a Military Strategy—and, by 2006, approved the draft’s abolition. Even though the actual accomplishments fell short of original targets, the country persuaded its NATO partners that it was commit-ted to the goals outlined in the MAP. The Slovak political elite realized the need for reforms outlined in its individual MAP. As one Slovak official put it: “We always think that we did it because we had to do it anyway; not because we were required to do so.”36 In the late 1990s, Slovakia spent much less than 2 percent of its GDP on defense. Nonetheless, the country’s membership bid and participation in MAP in the early 2000s increased the government’s spending on defense to around 1.7–1.9 percent of the GDP, fairly close to the 2 percent benchmark set out by NATO. Furthermore, the Slovak politi-cal elite’s perception of national security evolved: Whereas in the early and mid-1990s it emphasized the significance of geography to national security, after 1999 Bratislava stressed the value of NATO membership. Following its admission to NATO, Bratislava became active in Afghanistan and Iraq as the country “did not want to be perceived as a free-rider in the Transatlantic Community.”37

Similar to Slovakia, prior to the inception of the MAP, Bulgaria notice-ably lagged behind the other CEE countries in military reforms. Although the country was among the first to join the PfP in the early 1990s, Bulgaria’s political elite experienced deep divisions on the issue of NATO membership, and after several rounds of consultations with its North Atlantic partners, Sofia concluded in 1995 that it did not want to pursue membership. Only after the change in government of February 1997 did Bulgaria formally an-


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nounce aspirations toward NATO membership. Because of its reluctance to conduct substantial military reforms, Sofia’s political institutions and military were largely unprepared for membership. Unlike the Visegrad nations, the Bulgarian government and military officials found themselves in a situation of “self-imposed isolation lacking an understanding of how far behind they are, as well as what they need to do.”38 The change of guard in February 1997, facilitated in large part by the country’s social and economic crisis, led to Bulgaria’s formal application for NATO membership. Sofia submitted its membership application too late for any consideration at the Madrid Summit and was not even mentioned as a potential invitee in the final communiqué of the Summit.39

The actual military reforms began in 1998 when Sofia conducted its first Strategic Defense Review with the help of the United States and the United Kingdom.40 Soon after, the parliament adopted a new National Security Con-cept, a new Military Doctrine, and the 2004 Plan which was designed for implementing these reforms. The 2004 Plan envisaged the army’s reduction from a hundred thousand people to about forty thousand which would consist of Rapid Reaction Corps and two additional corps. Upon the completion of the 2004 Plan, the government introduced a long-range strategy for mod-ernization of the armed forces until 2015.41 As a part of its commitment to modernization, since 1997 Bulgaria has been spending on average between 2 and 2.5 percent of its GDP for defense, one of the highest percentages among the applicants. Bulgaria’s pace of military reforms was similar to Slovakia and Romania where armed forces’ modernization lagged between two to four years on an average behind the Visegrad nations. For example, while the Czech Republic fully professionalized its armed forces by 2006, Bulgaria completed this process in 2008.42

The successful adaptation of new allies and their preparedness to assume the responsibilities of NATO membership are determined by the willingness of Eastern European political elites to implement needed reforms as well as the mechanisms put in place by the alliance to monitor their progress. Why did political elites in some East European countries, most notably Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovakia, experience such a strong resistance to reforms? In most of the cases, the improvement of the new members’ military effective-ness meant substantial budget cuts and reduction of personnel and outdated, often unnecessary, military equipment, which mandated unavoidable layoffs and resulted in job losses and increasing unemployment. These facts explain why certain segments in the militaries opposed the reforms, exercising all possible leverage to delay the pace of transformation. The history of military reforms elucidates, at least partially, why the optimization of military re-



sources and the boost of their allied capabilities in these East European coun-tries were not as robust as was the case of other NATO members. Therefore, the individual action plans and the timelines for accession served not only as forums for multilateral diplomacy, but also as mechanisms for exercising pressure against the resistance to reforms at home. Bureaucratic and organi-zational factors can account for delayed reforms, but they do not explain how states overcome these challenges. To get a better idea of these processes, it is necessary to compare how the new allies managed their resources compared to other European partners who are not NATO members.

MANAGING PARTNERS’ RESOURCES OUTSIDE OF THE CLUB

A survey of the NATO partners provides important insight into how these na-tions manage resources and the extent to which they acquire new capabilities to support overseas operations. These findings have also important policy im-plications for the future of NATO expansion. The question of whether NATO should continue to absorb new members in the decades to come is particularly relevant for nations like Azerbaijan, Georgia, Montenegro, and even Ukraine in lieu of their expected membership bids. After three rounds the expansion process has become more institutionalized, longer, and somewhat more dif-ficult for applicants. Its success does not solely depend on NATO’s capac-ity to coach the applicants en route to membership, but also by applicants’ preparedness to conduct reforms and meet membership criteria. NATO has vested interests to work closely with certain nations and has no reason to deny membership insofar as the new members meet the membership criteria and contribute to allied burden sharing. At the same time, however, the survey below indicates that the pool of potential applicants is not very strong as their level of preparedness is fairly low.

The logic of complementarities implies that the future of NATO expansion is driven by two foundational axioms. First, NATO does not need to incor-porate in its structures countries that experience major resistance at home or have to deal with various hurdles in the relations with their neighbors as these would be detrimental for the club. The negotiations over Macedonia’s mem-bership and the subsequent Greek veto in 2008 present a good example in this respect. Even though the dispute itself is unrelated to the way that the former Yugoslav Republic uses its military resources and has nothing to do with the advancement of allied capabilities, it reflects a sad and yet sobering reality of heterogeneous clubs—the admission of new members is inherently tied to the settlement of all disputes with their neighbors and regional partners.


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If Macedonia is not able to reach a compromise with Greece, Washington’s and Brussels’ approvals would not suffice to move forward Skopje’s applica-tion. Therefore, the expansion process entails hidden mechanisms that help minimize the adverse consequences of NATO’s increasing heterogeneity. NATO decision-makers were allured in the 1990s by the idea that expanding the Alliance would automatically bring democracy and prosperity in Eastern Europe and they seemed to underestimate some of the challenges associated with this process. The main concern in the 1990s was the political accept-ability of the invitees, which ultimately strengthened the anti-expansionist case in the long run. As the club grew bigger NATO policymakers started to focus on the club payoffs associated with the admission of new members. Similarly, when the alliance became more experienced in managing the ex-pansion, NAC raised the admission standards because of concerns for crowd-ing and possible negative externalities associated with the incorporation of unprepared or underprepared candidates.

Second, NATO’s experience with the accession of new members made the admission process more streamlined and target-oriented. The applicants’ capacity and commitment to resolve disputes with the neighboring coun-tries, their military contributions to various alliance activities, and degree of interoperability with the other members has become a subject to careful monitoring in Brussels. The potential allies were encouraged to work together in VG and AC and, in order to meet the membership criteria, they were re-quired to optimize their resource base, thus alleviating the consequences of possible congestion. Therefore, the expansion dynamic confirmed that the level of a nation’s progress has become a paramount factor in the selection of new members.

Potential Entrants: Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Ukraine

Aside from Macedonia, four other nations have expressed in one way or an-other desire to join NATO—Azerbaijan, Georgia, Montenegro, and Ukraine. In November 2003, Georgia’s application was put on the table after the Rose Revolution. The new reformist government led by President Mikhael Saa-kashvili focused on law enforcement and profound institutional reforms to reduce corruption and improve transparency.43 Georgia also upgraded its re-lationship with NATO under the PfP. In September 2006, NATO announced that Georgia’s application for Intensified Dialogue was approved and, in December 2007, the country formally joined this cooperative framework. The Dialogue was a substantial step forward for Tbilisi, whose efforts for military reforms were praised by the NATO Assistant Secretary General John Colston. Georgia is among the few NATO applicants that held a referendum,



on January 5, 2008, to ask its citizens whether or not they would like to join NATO. Georgian voters backed the membership bid with overwhelming approval of 72.5 percent.44 In the meantime Tbilisi drastically increased de-fense spending to more than 5 percent of the nation’s total budget.45 The new resources tremendously helped modernize Georgian army with training and equipment that meet NATO’s highest standards as most of the reforms have been conducted with U.S. assistance and under U.S. mentorship.

Nonetheless, the status of the two break-away republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia constitutes a major obstacle for Tbilisi’s highest foreign policy priority.46 After the breakup of the Soviet Union, the majority of the popula-tion in these autonomous territories remained loyal to Moscow and eventually expressed a desire to join the Russian federation. Both republics are located in Georgia and since 1992 have been effectively controlled by Ossetian, Abkha-zian, Russian, and Georgian peacekeepers. The parties agreed to minimize the use of force in settling these conflicts. Even though the international com-munity overwhelmingly recognized Georgia’s territorial integrity, the status of the two break-away territories has remained unsettled.

Led by President Saakashvili, Georgia made multiple diplomatic efforts to reach an agreement on the status of these territories. Nonetheless, a settlement would only be possible with Russia’s active participation and acceptance. The Russians have always disapproved Georgia’s aspirations to become a NATO member and the unsettled conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia provided Moscow with a de facto veto power to block Georgia’s accession into NATO. In 2006 Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov clearly stated that “Russia was preparing for war in light of the likelihood that NATO would soon be at its southern border.”47

In the summer of 2008 Georgia began a military operation in South Os-setia claiming that it was provoked by the pro-Russian break-away region of South Ossetia. On August 6, Russia responded immediately with a full scale military assault which lasted five days before peace was brokered.48 Three weeks later Russia recognized the independence of South Ossetia, an act condemned by the UN, EU, NATO, and all other major international organi-zations. As a result, the 2008 war between Georgia and Russia substantially decreased Georgia’s chances for NATO membership unless a final settlement of the status of Abkhazia and South Ossetia was reached. Despite the West’s sympathy with Georgia’s position regarding the status of Abkhazia and Os-setia, Washington and Brussels clearly stated that Tbilisi’s progress toward Euro-Atlantic integration would be contingent upon improved relations with its northern neighbor.

The settlement of all territorial disputes with aspirants’ neighbors has always been a key requirement for NATO membership—prior to joining


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NATO Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia were encouraged to sign similar bilateral agreements. In these so-called Basic Treaties NATO applicants declared to hold no territorial disputes with their neighbors; the agreements specifically regulated the status of the large Hungarian minorities in Slova-kia and Romania and became known as the Pact on Stability in Europe.49 Only after these Central European nations settled their bilateral relations did NATO agree to expand Article Five to Eastern Europe. Thus, membership remains a distant foreign policy goal for Georgia insofar as no progress has been made on the status of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Otherwise, NATO cannot agree to accept the burden of extending Article Five into territories with unsettled disputes that could potentially drag the Alliance into a direct military confrontation with Moscow.50

Even though gaining MAP status would be a major recognition by Brussels for Georgia’s efforts, repairing Tbilisi’s relations with neighboring Russia is a condition sine qua non before its bid for membership is seriously considered. The 2008 war rekindled images of the Cold War among decision-makers in the West, some of whom argued that NATO should admit Georgia in order to prevent Russia from bullying its neighbors.51 The theoretical framework proposed in this book takes a different approach: the incorporation of new members is contingent on their ability to settle disputes with their neighbors and contribute effectively to allied missions, not to balance out former, cur-rent, or potential rivals. It is inaccurate to argue that the incorporation of new members like Georgia should affect in any way the course of NATO-Russian relations (by worsening or improving them) and ipso facto Western-Russian relations. Russia maintains special relationship with Moscow in the NATO-Russia Council and this is the forum where major concerns should be dealt with. In addition to improved relations with its neighbors, another key cri-terion for membership includes the level of military reforms. In this respect, Tbilisi has already undergone, or plans to complete, reforms that would en-hance its allied capabilities. The country continues to allocate a substantial share of its National Product for defense, even though its GDP is much lower than any of the current NATO members ($4,090 per capita measured in PPP for 2009). The Georgian economy grew very quickly prior to the 2008 war and the start of the global recession (on average with 8 to 10 percent annu-ally). Therefore, as long as the country repairs its deteriorating relations with its northern neighbor, Tbilisi could become an attractive candidate because of its geography and allied capabilities.

Montenegro, the youngest state in Europe, declared independence from Serbia in 2006 and since then has made remarkable progress toward NATO membership. This new republic of the Former Yugoslavia joined PfP in 2006 at the Riga Summit and two years later, in 2008, NAC decided at the Bucha-rest Summit to extend an Individual Partnership Plan and Intensified Dia-



logue with Podgorica. Montenegro formally entered the Membership Action Plan in December 2009 and has made bold strides toward membership. The fact that the country started building its armed forces from scratch following the 2006 independence facilitated the completion of military reforms recom-mended by NATO. Nonetheless, public opinion may be the only possible obstacle en route to membership as sizable part of Montenegrin society is pro-Serbian and opposes integration into NATO. However, the past experi-ence with countries like Bulgaria and Slovakia indicates that public opinion may very easily shift in favor of membership once the political elites have reached a consensus and have taken on a campaign in support of this new foreign policy orientation at home.

Azerbaijan provides an interesting albeit very different from Montenegro case of a current PfP nation that has also expressed interest in becoming a NATO member. The country has been pressing ahead with plans to overhaul its armed forces in order to bring them up to standards. Furthermore, a special group in the Azeri Parliament was formed with a task to adopt a new stra-tegic and military doctrine.52 President Ilham Aliyev named integration into NATO a “top foreign policy priority for Azerbaijan.”53 The country became a participant in NATO’s Individual Partnership Action Plan (IPAP), a two-year renewable plan that encompasses various cooperative activities, reform plans, and political dialogue. Turkey, a NATO member holding strong ties to Azerbaijan, stepped in to assist in completing Baku’s military transforma-tion, and the two countries established a high-level military commission to coordinate their bilateral cooperation. Unlike other young democracies in Eastern Europe, Azerbaijan is not resource strapped. For the most part its military transformation is funded with the revenue generated by its oil and natural gas export, part of which could be successfully used to modernize the country’s armed forces.

However, Azerbaijan faces major political challenges at home: it holds the highest democratic deficit of all the PfP nations, which raises serious concerns about whether Baku would ever be able to reform and democratize its political system to manage effectively the revenue gained from its mineral deposits.54 Since early 1990s Azerbaijan has been locked in an unresolved conflict with neighboring Armenia over the break-away republic of Nagorno-Karabakh that significantly reduces any possibility the country would meet the enlargement conditions any time soon. These refer especially to resolving territorial disputes with neighboring countries and, thus, potentially contrib-uting to security in the North Atlantic Area, as provided under Article Ten of the Washington Treaty.

Finally, the Ukrainian bid to join NATO was given serious consideration after the pro-Western and pro-reformist government of Viktor Yushchenko came to power in the aftermath of the 2004–2005 Orange Revolution. Kiev


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has maintained a special relationship with NATO since 1997 when both par-ties signed a Charter on a Distinctive Partnership. The Prague Summit intro-duced the NATO-Ukraine Action Plan in 2002, the purpose of which was to “to identify clearly Ukraine’s strategic objectives and priorities in pursuit of its aspirations towards full integration into the Euro-Atlantic security struc-tures and to provide a strategic framework for existing and future NATO-Ukraine cooperation under the Charter.”55 The plan set short- and long-term objectives and provided for semi-annual and annual assessment meetings. In January 2008 the Ukrainian President, the Prime Minister, and the Speaker of the Parliament wrote a letter to NATO asking it to accept the country into the Membership Action Plan, as a first step en route to full membership. Nonetheless, the U.S., NATO, and Ukrainian officials agreed that the country needed a thorough public debate before its entry to the alliance.56

There are, however, several inherent impediments to Ukraine’s member-ship bid. First, Ukrainian society is deeply divided and the polls indicate that in the 2000s two-thirds of the population openly opposed membership.57 Second, these divisions influence the electoral process. For example, in the February 2010 elections Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions won almost half of the popular vote, thus sending Yushchenko and his coalition partners in opposition. One of the first steps of the new president was to send a letter to the NATO headquarters informing Brussels that Ukraine did not intend to pursue NATO membership in the near future, thus signaling that the nation remains deeply divided on the issue of NATO membership. Such a situation does not ensure much needed continuity in Kiev’s foreign policy. A decision to seek further integration with the Euro-Atlantic structures has to be based on a broad political consensus at home. The history of Ukraine’s integration into NATO indicates that having a government in Kiev that is committed to work toward pursuing membership may be a necessary condition; however, it is not sufficient to ensure the successful completion of the process.58 Third, seeking NATO membership should not necessarily be a priority for the political elite in Kiev if there is no consensus at home. Along with Russia, Ukraine has always maintained a special relationship with Brussels due to its size, geography, and strategic importance. The management of heterogeneous clubs indicated that swift military reforms and effective contributions to NATO’s new missions are needed before a nation’s membership bid is taken seriously. Even though Kiev has been active in Afghanistan, its military requires profound reforms and substantial adaptation to meet membership criteria in the future.

Not surprisingly, division exists among the proper allies with regard to the future of the expansion process. The new members tend to be much more enthusiastic about inviting new nations than are their West European counterparts. To a certain degree, the Visegrad and the Baltic nations tend



to approach this issue from an “emotional perspective.” They vehemently argue that bilateral and multilateral diplomacy should strongly encourage Georgia, Montenegro, and even Ukraine to continue with reforms and ensure the applicants that membership is imminent if they have previously shown “significant progress in terms of domestic, political and economic reforms in order to meet the standards of democracy.”59 Alternatively, members such as Germany and France feel more skeptical about new entrants. Even though France has generally supported the expansion process, Paris has raised sev-eral concerns: the first being that expansion should not result in deteriorating relations with other major powers like Russia, as could be the case of Ukraine and Georgia; the second being that the expansion process should be man-aged very carefully.60 These concerns primarily relate to NATO’s decision-making process, which requires consensus, capacity to absorb new members without reaching a point of congestion. Similarly, Germany’s official posi-tion warns against antagonizing Russia. Berlin has been concerned with the low public support of the expansion in Ukraine and deep political divisions on this issue in Ukraine and Georgia.61 The alliance should proceed carefully with future expansion especially in the volatile Caucasus Region, where stra-tegic concerns may well halt future invitations indefinitely. Despite the fact that NATO membership has always been appealing for the vast majority of Central and East European countries, the idea of becoming a part of the larg-est peacetime alliance remains somewhat unappealing for several European nations that joined the European Union, but prefer to remain neutral with regard to military alignments.

The EU Neutrals: Austria, Finland, Ireland, Sweden

Why do Austria, Finland, Ireland, and Sweden find NATO membership unat-tractive? How do they manage their military resources after joining the EU and does their reluctance to pursue NATO membership somehow affect their contribution to international peacekeeping and stabilization? By contrasting the security policy of these four EU nations and the new NATO members, this section provides further insight on the management of allied capabilities outside of NATO. The survey excludes Switzerland, as well as the other two new EU entrants, Cyprus and Malta. Switzerland represents a clear-cut case legal neutrality, where the so-called “culture of neutrality” is deeply embed-ded in Swiss national identity. Unlike Austria, Finland, Ireland, and Sweden, Switzerland is not bound to participate in any form of European security poli-cies and common defense.

EU membership entails a list of responsibilities for the four EU neutrals to in EU-led operations. The EU community law (acquis communautaire)


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posits that they should make military units available for such operations under the so-called Petersberg Tasks. These tasks are similar to NATO’s overseas missions: They comprise an integral part of the ESDP and include humani-tarian and rescue tasks, peacekeeping tasks, and tasks in crisis management. The EU membership required that these four nations harmonize and adjust their national legislation in accordance with the EU norms and policies that included legislative and even constitutional amendments. The Lisbon Treaty further ensures Union’s role in the Petersberg Tasks by stipulating that the EU members should assist each other in the spirit of solidarity in the event of a terrorist attack, natural, or human-made disaster. The Member States are re-quired to make available various instruments, including military resources.62

Despite their responsibilities in peacekeeping, crisis response, and stability operations, Austria, Finland, Ireland, and Sweden also vary in their historical experiences of neutrality. Austria assumed neutrality only after World War II, and its approach to the matter is more “legalistic” compared with the other three nations, being somewhat closer to Switzerland in this respect.63 The legal basis of Austrian neutrality is embedded in its constitution and every country that chooses to maintain diplomatic relations with Vienna is expected to accept its neutral status by default. Austria benefited tremendously from its neutrality during the Cold War, as it allowed the country to serve as a “neutral wedge” that bridged NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries.64 Currently the major implication of Austria’s neutrality is barring the over flight of military (including NATO) aircraft.

Unlike Austria, Ireland pursues a policy of military neutrality defined as non-membership of military alliances. Ireland’s neutrality does not ex-ist in any international treaty or any specific “domestic constitutional or legal basis.”65 Even after Dublin joined the European Union (then European Economic Community) in 1973, the country remained committed to a mini-malist approach to national security and since then has continued to allocate very limited defense resources. Ireland’s geography contributes to a security policy that avoids “expensive war games in order to sustain credibility.”66 Dublin’s reluctance to participate in expensive military activities explains why, despite high levels of public support, the country did not join the Part-nership for Peace until 1999.67 Nonetheless, EU membership required Ireland to become more active in various NATO and UN-led peacekeeping and crisis response activities such as Operation Allied Force in Kosovo, and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. The country joined SFOR in May 1997 and since then has sent about 7,000 Irish troops in Bosnia under EUFOR. Ire-land has been active in Kosovo since KFOR’s inception in 1999 and has since provided transport company. In August 2007, lasting for twelve months, the Irish took command of a Multinational Brigade whose principal mission was



to provide equipment and material lift to military units in KFOR, as well as to humanitarian organizations working with the UN. Unlike the operations in Bosnia and Kosovo, in which the Irish involvement is in response to EU membership responsibilities, the country’s contribution to ISAF, which is under the purveyance of NATO, has been quite marginal—only several personnel primarily serving in the Liaison and Negotiations Branch of the mission headquarters.68

Sweden also holds a long tradition of neutrality dating back to early nineteenth century. Stockholm approaches non-alignment as a policy that “has greatly facilitated, and is still contributing to, an independent and ac-tive policy in certain fields of international security, such as disarmament, non-proliferation and conflict resolution.”69 The biggest advantage of this policy is that, as a neutral nation, Sweden has provided special services in the international arena—good offices, mediation, and arbitration.70 Similarly, the participation in international peacekeeping has become a distinctive feature of Sweden’s modern identity—the country maintains close cooperation with NATO as its troops have been involved in various international efforts under NATO command in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan.

Finland probably constitutes the most distinct of the other three cases. Helsinki’s experience with neutrality started in the 1940s when it became an integral part of its foreign policy. World War II convinced the Finns that they could not rely on security guarantees or any forms of international alignments that ensured protection from major European powers. The overwhelming support for conscript service (more than 80 percent of the young people in 2005) is another indication of this self-reliance on national security as most of old and new NATO European members abolished in part or in full man-datory conscript service. This high support for mandatory military service results partially from the fact that it is relatively short—only six months—and because it is a much appreciated ritual into adulthood. About 60 percent of the Finns confirm that they would complete military service even were it not mandatory.71

Finland’s geography comprises another key determinant for its choosing neutrality. With the Soviet Union next door constantly reminding Helsinki of its expectations during the Cold War, Finland had to “successfully anticipate the Soviet reactions and proactively introduce initiatives designed to keep the potential menace at bay.”72 Helsinki recognized the major threat that was coming from the Soviet Union and signed a special agreement with Moscow, which stipulated a commitment to resist armed attacks by “Germany or its allies” (thus also implying NATO, the United States, and its allies) against the Soviet Union through Finland’s territory.73 If necessary, Finland was to ask for Soviet military aid to do so. As a result, the country fended off pressure


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from the neighboring USSR and avoided military confrontation with Mos-cow or its allies. Throughout the Cold War, Helsinki emphasized its foreign policy of neutrality and, similar to Stockholm, used its geography and foreign policy to provide good offices and mediation in the East-West conflict. This international position made Helsinki’s involvement in numerous international peacekeeping efforts possible under the CSCE/OSCE, NATO, EU, and UN auspices.

In 2005 Finland celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its participation in peacekeeping operations, with a total contribution of approximately fifty thousand troops, which in and of itself constitutes one of the highest inter-national contributions for the size of country. Finland has been active in the ISAF mission in Afghanistan and, together with Ireland, Norway, and Denmark, the country ranks among the highest per capita contributors in Afghanistan among all EU nations. In essence, it accomplishes peacekeeping and crisis response tasks identical to NATO and considers itself “a security producer” that is not bound by NATO membership.74

Such a foreign policy orientation is typical for other Scandinavian nations, as well, and can be attributed much more to the Nordic peacekeeping model than to any other institutional involvement.75 Several key factors influence Finland’s reluctance to join NATO. First, the policy of neutrality worked suc-cessfully in the bipolar world, which is why the public approaches prospects for NATO membership with serious concerns. In 2008 only 25 percent of all Finns expressed support for their country joining the Alliance while almost two-thirds opposed it. Thus, the public approval for NATO membership in Finland was much lower than was the case of the new allies preceding their accession into NATO, where the support for membership was in the range between 50 and 70 percent. Lower approval ratings can be attributed in part to the fact that, for the Finns, the division of labor between NATO, EU, and the United States vis-à-vis international peacekeeping remains unclear. Second, Finns perceive the British and Americans as the “hard task masters” in inter-national security and they feel a growing gap between the Europeans and the United States on a number of issues such as global environmental agreements (e.g., Kyoto Protocol) and the International Criminal Court. These added up especially during the presidency of George W. Bush, thus contributing to a “negative sentiment that plays against an early [NATO] membership.”76 In the early and mid-1990s, the initial support for NATO membership in this Nordic country came to more than 30 percent but dropped significantly after the wars in Kosovo and Iraq. In the 2000s most of the Finns believed, how-ever, that Finland would ultimately join NATO in spite of popular sentiments.

Several noticeable trends exist regarding Austria, Finland, Ireland, and Sweden’s management of their allied resources. First, aside from Ireland,



the other three EU nations maintain higher defense spending than an aver-age West European NATO member and much higher spending than most of the new members. Second, the four neutrals tend to maintain higher per capita military equipment and personnel than most NATO members. Third, relative to their size, Finland’s and Sweden’s navies are among the largest in Europe—only after Denmark, Norway, Greece, and Portugal’s navies. This tendency shows the four neutrals have not undergone the type of personnel and equipment reduction after 1990 which many (old and new) NATO al-lies were advised to complete. At the same time the four nations have had a remarkable presence in international peacekeeping. For example, in 2004 these EU neutrals contributed to overseas operations with between 150 and 280 troops per million inhabitants. A snapshot of troops’ deployment for NATO nations indicates that the old members sent in 2004 between 100–150 troops per million people to support overseas missions; Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, and Britain contributed twice as much—approximately two to three hundred troops—while new allies sent only fifty to eighty. As the Nordic nations traditionally rank among the highest contributors to inter-national operations, there have not been expectations from them to increase their international contributions and, therefore, no pressure to optimize the size of their armed forces.

How does the logic of complementarities explain the aspirations of Eastern Europe to join NATO coupled with Austria, Finland, Ireland, and Sweden’s reluctance to do so? It holds that club membership reduces overall defense expenditures because it produces a more efficient use of resources which translates into more effective capabilities. In the case of the four EU neutrals, however, remaining outside of NATO brings higher political value than com-mitting to an institution of collective defense. The elites in Austria, Finland, and Sweden manage a specific culture at home in which they mobilize higher than optimal levels of military resources in order to accomplish their commit-ments to national security and international peacekeeping while maintaining the policy of neutrality. As a result, they experience no constraints in motivat-ing their societies to allocate higher than of resources for defense, which is why NATO membership does not appeal to them. By the same token, from NATO’s perspective, these nations accomplish very similar tasks overseas without carrying the responsibilities of membership. Becoming NATO allies would not change drastically their participation in international peacekeep-ing, crisis response, and stability operations. At the end of the day, not being tied to an institutional membership is beneficial not only to these four na-tions, but also for NATO as it offsets the potential negative consequences of NATO’s crowding with divergent national interests and identities.


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MANAGING NATO’S INCREASING HETEROGENEITY: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

After three waves of post-Cold War expansion, today’s alliance is more heterogeneous than ever. To meet expectations for membership, the new allies needed to transform their militaries, improve their capabilities, and ad-equately contribute to the new alliance missions. As the former Supreme Al-lied Commander Europe Gen. James Jones jokingly said in 2006, “If [these] nations realized what they were signing up to in 2002, they probably wouldn’t have done it, because it does cost money and [it] has caused a lot of pain.”77 For these not-so-wealthy nations, joining NATO signified a membership to an expensive club that provides the exclusive benefit of collective defense under Article Five. At the same time, it also involves costs and responsibili-ties associated with investments in advanced modern military technology that creates interoperability among the new allies and the rest of the alliance and prepares the new members to participate successfully in overseas operations.

Expanding the club with twelve new members certainly affects its overall performance. Does this mean that NATO has already reached a point of congestion and should the alliance continue to expand? Club goods theory assumes that NATO can incorporate new members as long as the net benefits from the new entrants exceed or at least equal the costs associated with the utilization of the club during the membership.78 The proponents of NATO expansion observe that the incorporation of new members has created op-portunities for NATO—the alliance has always existed “off the largeness of contributing countries,” and the three waves of expansion provided “multi-national logistics and organic intelligence, which NATO has never had.”79 Alternatively, opponents make the case that the three waves of U.S.-backed NATO expansion contributed to the erosion of NATO’s military capabilities as it was already apparent in 2004 that “the states that joined NATO in 1999 had failed to meet [some of] the goals set for transforming their militaries to accord with NATO standards.”80

The concept of complementarities suggests a different explanation—the incorporation of new allies is warranted as long as they are able to optimize the use of available resources in order to improve their capabilities necessary for missions overseas. The survey of expansion dynamics shows that new allies are complying with membership requirements and, to the extent that it is feasible, they have generally responded positively to requests to send more troops to Kosovo, Afghanistan, or officers for security training in Iraq and Afghanistan. The study did not find evidence in support of the argument that the incorporation of new allies has, in fact, led to the erosion of NATO’s



capabilities. At the same time, the expansion was not a smooth process—the effect of bureaucratic inertia and organizational resistance that applicants experienced at home was further strengthened by NATO’s own inexperience to coach the applicants in the early stages of the process. Therefore, the new countries did not complete their reforms faster—in fact, it was not until the late 1990s that the Alliance was equipped with reliable and efficient institu-tional mechanisms to monitor the progress of individual applicants. Prior to the introduction of the Membership Action Plan Brussels lacked the ability to exercise pressure and control over new allies.

The three post-Cold War waves of expansion strengthened NATO’s over-all heterogeneity and created further cohesion in the members’ sub-clubs, leading to frequent alignments and various coalitions between some Allies and the United States. As a club of almost thirty different members, NATO inadvertently faces problems due to the effects of crowding and depreciation. In this institutional setting shifting alignments and attitudes toward threats confronting NATO have reduced the United States’ willingness to accept alli-ance constraints and encouraged issue-oriented caucuses or alignments. This effect is further coupled with the growing gap in capabilities among the vari-ous sub-clubs as discussed earlier in the book.81 Albeit correct, such observa-tion warrants an important clarification—no evidence exists that NATO’s role in international security has become more or less marginal compared to the period preceding the three waves of expansion. The obstacles in manag-ing a certain mission should not necessarily be attributed to the increasing number of allies or the effect of crowding. Consider, for example, the ISAF mission in Afghanistan. It requires capabilities needed to accomplish tasks that differ vastly from the tasks that NATO needed to accomplish in the 1990s in the Balkans. No evidence exists that, in a format of sixteen, nine-teen, twenty-eight, or thirty members, NATO may be able to accomplish the same tasks with a higher or lower degree of efficacy.82

A key aspect of heterogeneous club management includes not only its size, but also the identity of its members. Unlike the European Union, NATO has set in place a relatively streamlined structure of political and military decision-making bodies. When the precarious balance among different bod-ies is disrupted, this structure could create a depreciation of the organization. Such depreciation is not necessarily attributable to crowding effect. Consider the decision-making process in the Military Committee: Ideally, the process is designed to provide advice to the military, but sometimes is “in danger of becoming overrun by the early input of political influence before the military advice is developed.”83 When the rationale of military logic is overrun by political rhetoric, this threatens the efficient management of the club. The


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problem could be partially remedied with some structural reorganization that would preserve the integrity of military advice. For the most part, in the past six decades, NATO has proven resilient to such challenges and has developed mechanisms to deal with dissenting nations. The so-called silence procedure is one such mechanism which allows for the flexibility of opting out. In this way, the allies who disagree would feel unconformable to “break silence” and decisions tend to get passed.84 On certain occasions, however, the diverging identity of the allies may overcome the silence procedure and lead to some al-lies’ excessive use of veto power. This was the case with the Greek veto pre-ceding the extension of an invitation to membership for Macedonia; Athens clearly expressed that, unless both parties accept a mutually agreed settlement of the naming dispute, Skopje would not join the Alliance.

The dispute between Athens and Skopje once again highlights the need for modification or adjustment of the consensus rule. Consider the North Atlan-tic Council. Its work is supported by approximately 350 committees all of which operate on the rule of consensus. Even if twenty-seven countries agree on a particular decision, such a mechanism allows a single nation to block a decision if it chooses to do so. The rule has remained unrevised since 1949 and, given the perspective that NAC is getting bigger and bigger, NATO eventually needs to address this issue. A similar situation occurred at the Bucharest Summit leading to Macedonia’s failed invitation for membership. The Interim Accords of 1995 between the former Yugoslav Republic and its southern neighbor precluded that the name “Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” constituted a temporary solution until a definitive settlement would be reached. Breakthrough progress has not been made for over one and a half decades of negotiations despite different alternative names proposed by the UN special negotiator. Currently, more than 120 countries, including the United States and Russia, have recognized Skopje under its constitutional name and some argue that Greece takes unwarranted advantage of its insti-tutional membership into EU and NATO, using its veto power as a tool to extract excessive concessions in an attempt to settle the bilateral dispute on Athens’s terms.85

The European Union’s experience with decision on common security and defense shows that the consensus rule inevitably increases the gap between different sub-clubs which, in many cases, erodes the decision-making pro-cess. Such is the case of the French opposition in NATO. Paris has tradition-ally been among the staunchest proponents of the consensus rule. Contrary to general belief, France’s “constructive opposition” does not necessarily erode NATO’s decision-making. Participation in the NATO Training Mission in Iraq since 2004 presents one such example, as is discussed earlier in the book.



Aside from the added legitimacy due to French participation, having Paris on board became particularly meaningful in this case for the success of the mission on the ground. At the same time, the erosion of the consensus signifi-cantly reduces the possibilities for an optimal decision-making. For example, during the 2003 crisis of transatlantic relations, French diplomats and military experts admitted that they faced significant pressure from the French foreign ministry to take a firm stance at various NATO deliberating and decision-making bodies that could ultimately damage Paris’s bilateral relations and its transatlantic ties.86 Nontheless, the relations between Paris and the NATO Headquarters have significantly improved since France’s reintegration into the alliance’s military command in 2009.

In conclusion, the survey of NATO expansion in the 1990s and 2000s confirmed that membership optimizes the use of available resources and enhances the capabilities of its member. At the same time, the incorporation of new countries also strengthens the diverging identities within NATO. The adaptation of the new allies does not automatically fix potential conflicts among its members with regard to other members and partners, out-of-the-area operations, or new capabilities. For this reason, the admission of Aus-tria, Finland, Ireland, and Sweden has not been a priority since they actively contribute to international peacekeeping, crisis-management and stabilization without being NATO members. In fact, it would be somewhat beneficial for the alliance management if these European nations preserved their non-aligned status as their membership would add additional complications to the NAC’s decision-making process due to their historic commitment to the principles of neutrality. Alternatively, the incorporation of new NATO allies, specifically those who contribute only marginally to the alliance’s out-of-the-are a efforts could actually become a good investment in the long run insofar as the aspirants are able to transform their militaries in order to make them more efficient and compatible with the rest of the alliance.

NOTES

1. Chris Layne and Ted Carpenter have been among the staunchest opponents of NATO’s expansion. For details see Christopher Layne, The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present (Cornell University Press, 2006), and Ted Carpenter and Barbara Conry, NATO Enlargement: Illusions and Reality (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 1998).

2. During my interviews with political elite in Sofia, Bulgaria, the interviewees identified various reasons for reluctance to advance military transformation—lack of leadership and argumentation of the need for reforms, social and organizational


194 Chapter 5

resistance, and the clash of different lobbyists’ interests. For further reference see author’s interviews with Todor Tagarev, Nikolai Slatinski, and Velizar Shalamanov. Although the observations are valid for Bulgaria, to various degrees, they are relevant for the other new members, as well.

3. The cases of the Azerbaijan, Georgia, Montenegro, and Ukraine are discussed in the context of their admission to NATO, while Austria, Finland, Ireland, and Sweden represent four non-aligned EU nations that have not indicated any specific intentions to join the alliance.

4. Stanley Sloan, NATO, the European Union and the Atlantic Community: The Transatlantic Bargain Reconsidered (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publish-ers, 2003), 139.

5. Rob De Wijk, NATO on the Brink of the New Millennium: The Battle for Consensus (Herndon, Virginia: Brassey’s Atlantic Commentaries, 1997), 83. Also Sloan, NATO, 140.

6. Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Serbia joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace in December 2006. Montenegro entered MAP in December 2009, thus upgrading its relationship with Brussels. As of December 2010 twenty-two nations participate in PfP.

7. The NATO-Russia Founding Act was signed in May 1997 after four months of negotiations. It addressed various aspects of the relations between the former ad-versaries: a practice of consultation and cooperation between the alliance and Russia was introduced especially in terms of the participation of Russian troops alongside those of NATO and other partner countries in the peacekeeping efforts in the former Yugoslavia. The act also developed principles of partnership and mechanisms for consultations and cooperation in the areas of peacekeeping, crisis response, and non-proliferation.

8. “Charter on a Distinctive Partnership between the North Atlantic Treaty Or-ganization and Ukraine,” Madrid (July 9, 1997), www.nato.int/docu/basictxt/ukrchrt.htm, (accessed May 26, 2007).

9. For detailed information on the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council see NATO Handbook, www.nato.int/issues/eapc/index.html, (accessed January 20, 2008).

10. The general criteria for membership are incorporated in Article 10 of the North Atlantic Treaty. These include: (a) geographic location, i.e., only European states can join NATO; (b) requirement to “further the principles of the treaty”; and (c) expec-tation to “contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area.” See “NATO Basic Texts: the North Atlantic Treaty,” NATO online library, www.nato.int/docu/basictxt/treaty.htm, (accessed June 5, 2007).

11. Sloan, NATO, the European Union, 149.12. Ryan Hendrickson and Thomas Erthridge, “Slovenia and NATO Member-

ship: Testing the Criticisms of NATO Expansion,” Baltic Defense Review 12, no. 2, (2004), 114.

13. “Madrid Declaration on Euro-Atlantic Security and Cooperation,” issued by the Heads of State and Government, July 8–9, 1997, www.nato.int/docu/pr/1997/p97-081e.htm, (accessed May 27, 2007).



14. In September 1995, two months after the invitation to the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, Brussels communicated five political and military criteria for membership. The political criteria required that the applicants resolve disputes with neighboring countries and a commitment to solving international disputes peacefully. Also, they needed to contribute militarily to the Alliance and be willing to take steps to achieve interoperability with the other members. For details see Thomas Szayna, NATO Enlargement, 2000–2015: Determinants and Implications for Defense Plan-ning and Shaping (RAND Publication, 2001), 42–43.

15. The application of Slovenia also enjoyed substantial support in the U.S. Sen-ate represented by then Senator Joseph Biden (D-Del.) and Senator William Roth Jr. (R-Del.) because it would add a land bridge between Italy and Hungary. Otherwise, Hungary would be surrounded only by non-NATO neighbors. Nonetheless, the Clin-ton administration was worried about the opposition to the ratification process in the Senate and decided to advocate a minimalist package while leaving NATO’s doors open and keeping Slovenia as a given for the next round.

16. “An Alliance for the 21st Century,” Washington Summit Communiqué, issued by the Heads of State and Government participating in the meeting of the North At-lantic Council in Washington, D.C. on 24th April 1999, www.nato.int/docu/pr/1999/p99-064e.htm, (accessed June 5, 2007).

17. “Remarks by President George W. Bush in Address to Faculty and Students of Warsaw University,” Warsaw, Poland, June 15, 2001, usa.usembassy.de/etexts/docs/bush150601.htm, (accessed May 29, 2007).

18. Sloan, NATO, the European Union, 199.19. Author’s personal interview with the French Deputy Head of Mission to

NATO, Brussels, Belgium, January 19, 2006.20. Author’s personal interview with a representative from the Permanent Delega-

tion of The Federal Republic of Germany to NATO, Brussels, Belgium, January 20, 2006.

21. Jiri Šedivy, “The Puzzle of NATO Enlargement,” Contemporary Security Policy 22, no. 2 (2001), 7.

22. “Russia regards NATO Expansion as Big Strategic Mistake,” Pravda Online, April 12, 2004.

23. [Putin’s] Meeting with NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, April 8, 2004, Moscow, the Kremlin, www.cdi.org/russia/301-2.cfm, (accessed June 9, 2007).

24. R. Nicholas Burns, “Testimony on the Future of NATO,” U.S. Senate, Com-mittee on Foreign Relations, April 1, 2003, foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Burn-sTestimony030401.pdf, (accessed December 29, 2010).

25. “NATO Leader Praises Albania’s Progress toward Membership,” Interna-tional Information Programs of the State Department July 6, 2002, usinfo.state.gov/, (accessed May 29, 2007).

26. “NATO Chief Praises Macedonia’s Progress, Urges Serious Political Dia-logue,” Southeast European Times, February 15, 2007, http://www.setimes.com/, 05/29/2007.

27. Interview with the Greek Foreign Minister Dora Bakoyannis, Dnevnik Daily, Skopje, October 28, 2006.


196 Chapter 5

28. One of these officials included Ante Gotovina, a former lieutenant-general of the Croatian Army during the 1991–1995 war in Croatia. In 2001, he was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, but was not captured until December 2005. His arrest constituted one of the major stumbling blocs for Croatia’s accession talks into NATO and the European Union.

29. U.S. Department of State Factsheet, Office of the Spokesman, Washington, (May 2, 2003), www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2003/20153.htm, (accessed May 29, 2007).

30. The Czech Republic and Slovakia make up new states that emerged with the disintegration split of Czechoslovakia. These two nations shared common statehood for seventy-five years before splitting up in 1993. The Czechoslovak divorce led to a split of Czechoslovak military resources in a ratio of two to one, roughly correspond-ing to the contribution of each constituent part.

31. The Baltic nations gained independence after World War I and experienced in-dependent statehood in the interwar period but were occupied by the Soviets in 1945 before declaring independence in 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

32. Author’s personal interview with a representative from the Slovak Delegation to NATO, January 16, 2006, Brussels, Belgium, and Dr. Nikolay Slatinski, advisor of the President of the Republic of Bulgaria, Sofia, February 2, 2006.

33. Author’s personal interview with a representative from the Estonian Mission to NATO, January 12, 2006.

34. Zoltan Barany, The Future of NATO Expansion (Cambridge University Press, 2003), i.

35. Author’s personal interview with Deputy Head of the Slovak Permanent Del-egation to NATO, Brussels, Belgium, January 16, 2006.

36. Author’s personal interview with Deputy Head of the Slovak Permanent Del-egation to NATO.

37. Jeffrey Simon, “Bulgaria and NATO: 7 Lost Years,” National Defense Uni-versity, Washington DC, Institute for International and Strategic Studies, May 1998, www.ndu.edu/, (accessed June 13, 2007).

38. While by 1997 most of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic had reduced their armed forces by half, Bulgaria had not even started the optimization of its armed forces. Sofia did not make effective use of U.S. programs aimed at improving interoperability, became fairly inactive in international peacekeeping, and its defense budget remained very limited. For further details see Jeffrey Simon and Zoltan Ba-rany’s works.

39. Author’s personal interview with Dr. Velizar Shalamanov, former Deputy Minister of Defense, the George Marshall Center in Sofia, Bulgaria, February 3, 2006.

40. “Modernization Plan for Bulgarian Armed Forces 2002–2015,” Bulgarian Ministry of Defense, Sofia, Bulgaria 2002, www.mod.bg/bg/modern/plan.html, (ac-cessed June 14, 2007) (in Bulgarian).

41. Author’s personal interviews with Jan Michal, January 24, 2006 and Dr. Veli-zar Shalamanov, February 3, 2006.

42. Freedom House Country Report for Georgia, 2007 Edition, www.freedomhouse.org/, (accessed July 10, 2007).



43. “Georgia Referendum To Include NATO Membership Question,” Agence France-Presse, Tbilisi, November 26, 2007 and “Russia’s NATO Ambassador: Geor-gia Unqualified to Join NATO,” Agence France-Presse, Moscow, January 18, 2008.

44. “Georgia to Raise 2007 Defense Spending by $200 mln to $600 mln,” Global Security Online, August 29, 2007.

45. Abkhazia and South Ossetia are located in Georgia’s North and Northwest close to the border with Russia. Both entities broke away from Tbilisi in 1992 and sought protection for independence from Russia.

46. Kakha Jibladze, “Georgia Gains NATO Intensified Dialogue amid Russia Crisis,” Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst (CACI), 10/04/2006; http://www.cacianalyst.org/newsite/?q=node/4229, 07/11/2007.

47. Alima Bissenova, “Foes Say Saakashvili Distorted War Report,” Central Asia-Caucuses Institute Analyst, October 14, 2009.

48. “Pact on Stability in Europe (1995)” in NATO: An Encyclopedia of Interna-tional Security, edited by Julian Schofield, ABC-Clio, 2011.

49. Daria Vaisman, “Russia, Georgia Rattle Sabers over Ossetia: South Ossetia is pushing hard to break from Georgia with support from Russia,” The Christian Sci-ence Monitor, August 1, 2006; “Commission to Work on S. Ossetia Status,” Civil Georgia, Tbilisi, July 13, 2007, www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=15431, (accessed January 21, 2008).

50. Helene Cooper, “U.S. Won’t Push NATO to Admit Georgia,” The New York Times, August 14, 2008.

51. A. Huseynbala, “Special group to develop Azerbaijan’s Military Doctrine,” Trend News, July 7, 2009.

52. Khazri Bakinsky and Mina Muradova, “Azerbaijan Pursues NATO Integra-tion,” Eurasia Insight, March 16, 2007.

53. Freedom House Country Report for Azerbaijan (2007).54. “Introduction to the NATO-Ukraine Action Plan,” NATO Handbook, Brus-

sels, Belgium.55. Sabina Zawadzki And Yuri Kulikov, “Ukraine Says Ready for NATO Mem-

bership Steps,” Reuters, January 16, 2008, www.defensenews.com/, (accessed Janu-ary 1, 2008).

56. Author’s Personal Interview with Dr. Samuel Wells, director of the West European Studies Program, Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington DC, September 28, 2006.

57. Author’s Personal Interview with Dr. Jeremy Shapiro, Washington D.C., Sep-tember 29, 2006.

58. Author’s Personal Interview with Jan Michal, January 24, 2006.59. Author’s personal interview with a representative from the French Delegation

to NATO, January 19, 2006. 60. Author’s Personal Interview with a representative from the German Delegation

to NATO, January 20, 2006.61. Consolidated Treaty of Lisbon, Title VII Solidarity Clause, Article 222.


198 Chapter 5

62. This legal basis of neutrality is embedded in the Austrian constitution, which assumes automatic recognition by the states with which Austria has diplomatic rela-tions.

63. Hanspeter Neuhold, “Comments on the Austrian Positions,” in Neutrality and Non-Alignment in Europe Today, ed. Hanna Ojanen (Helsinki, Finland: The Finnish Institute of International Affairs, 2003), 15–16.

64. Keith McBean, “Ireland,” in Neutrality, 30.65. Patrick Keatinge, “Comments on the Irish Positions” in Neutrality, 38.66. Stanley R. Sloan, “NATO Enlargement and the Former European Neutrals,”

CRS Report for Congress (2008). 67. “Defense Forces: Overseas Operations,” Official Website of the Irish Defense

Forces, www.military.ie/, (accessed January 1, 2008).68. Anders Bjurner, “Sweden,” in Neutrality, 43.69. Bo Huldt, “Comments on the Swedish Positions,” in Neutrality, 48.70. Author’s personal interview with Ambassador Antti Sierla, January 17, 2006.71. Hanu Himanen, “Finland,” in Neutrality, 19.72. “Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance between Fin-

land and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” Encyclopedia Britannica, www.britannica.com/eb/article-26107/Finland#393175.hook, (accessed July 15, 2007).

73. Author’s personal interview with Ambassador Antti Sierla, January 17, 2006.74. Peter Viggo Jackobsen, “The Nordic Peacekeeping Model: Rise, Fall and

Resurgence,” International Peacekeeping 13, no. 3 (2006), 382. Jackobsen lists five factors that that are specific for the Nordic peacekeeping model and have made the Nordic governments more inclined to support UN policies: (1) suitability; (2) com-mon interests; (3) distinct national interests; (4) high overlap between national inter-ests and values and UN goals and ideals; and (5) the narrative of success.

75. Author’s personal interview with Ambassador Antti Sierla.76. Transcripts from the Atlantic Council Meeting with General James Jones,

December 21, 2006, 4.77. Richard Cornes and Todd Sandler, The Theory of Externalities, Public Goods

and Club Goods (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 236.78. Transcripts from the Atlantic Council Meeting with General James Jones,

December 21, 2006, 4.79. Renée De Nevers, “NATO’s International Security Role in the Terrorist Era,”

International Security 31, no. 4 (Spring 2007) 62.80. For details about NATO’s growing heterogeneity see James Golden’s The

Dynamics of Change in NATO (New York: Praeger, 1983). The implications of these findings in the post-Cold War NATO politics are discussed in chapter 1.

81. Speech of the U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates at the Munich Confer-ence on Security Policy in Munich, Germany, Sunday, February 10, 2008, www.defenselink.mil/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=1214, (accessed February 12, 2008).

82. Transcripts from the Atlantic Council Meeting with General James Jones, December 21, 2006, 6.

83. Celeste Wallander explains the silence procedure. When the office of the Secretary General seeks agreement on a decision, it drafts a memo to the permanent



representatives of all the member countries. The memo takes the form “I propose decision X, and unless I hear no from you, I will go ahead.” For details see Celeste Wallander, “Institutional Assets and Adaptability: NATO after the Cold War,” Inter-national Organization 54, no. 4 (2000), 724.

84. Anthee Carassava, “NATO Could Block Macedonia Over Name,” The New York Times, March 4, 2008.

85. These observations are based on my interviews with various representatives of the NATO member-states at the NATO Headquarters is Brussels who participate in various committees, as well as think-tank analysts in Washington, D.C., in 2006. Although policy makers did not openly reveal that they were pressured from Quai d’Orsay, they indirectly admitted that such tendencies existed.



201

In the 1990s and 2000s NATO became increasingly involved in a number of operations in the Balkans (Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia), the Mediter-ranean, Iraq, Afghanistan, and in Africa (mostly in support of the African Union in Sudan and Somalia). Nonetheless, the International Security Assis-tance Force (ISAF) remains by far the largest, the most comprehensive, and the most challenging out-of-the-area mission in NATO’s history. The allies recognized that Afghanistan would be instrumental in the fight against terror-ism—the Obama administration prioritized the mission’s success and called the developments in Afghanistan “an international security challenge of the highest order.”1 NATO’s handling of its largest out-of-the-area operation has several major implications for the future of the alliance. First, from an institutional perspective, the ISAF presents a cornerstone test whether NATO can deliver new types of capabilities for overseas operations in the new post-September 11 world. Second, NATO’s capacity to transform itself into a modern institution capable of handling successfully the twenty-first century security challenges ultimately presents a test for the relevancy of the institu-tion in the future. Third, from the perspective of international stabilization, the case of Afghanistan raises a discussion about the future of reconstruction and implementation of good governance in troubled areas with deeply rooted corruption, deficit of democracy, and absence of political stability. Finally, NATO’s involvement in Afghanistan holds broader international implica-tions with regard to the effectiveness of international strategies to combat terrorism and insurgency.

This chapter checks the argument presented throughout the book against ISAF’s history. The analysis does not address in detail NATO’s overall

6Managing Twenty-First Century Operations

NATO’s Involvement in Afghanistan


202 Chapter 6

capacity to fight insurgency and terrorism, or contribute effectively to Af-ghanistan’s reconstruction as these issues have been addressed in earlier studies. Instead, the survey focuses on the evolution of the mission and its operational needs, the supply of needed resources, and the availability of allied capabilities to accomplish the mission’s tasks. Therefore, the study reviews the extent to which the allies complement the collective efforts and effectively enhance the mission’s capabilities to conduct peacekeeping, crisis response, and stability operations.

The broader argument presented in the book holds that the successful conduct of NATO’s out-of-the-area operations rests on two factors: (1) the capacity of individual members to manage their resources efficiently and work with other members to advance their specific allied capabilities; and (2) their willingness to reach across the sub-clubs and accommodate existing differences. Reaching an agreement regarding allies’ contributions has become increasingly difficult over the years. As a result, some NATO members have chosen, on occasions, to act outside of the Alliance and seek a more flexible, bilateral, or coalition-based approach instead. Does this mean that certain mission challenges have eroded NATO’s consensus by inducing issue-oriented coalitions or alignments outside of the club? Is NATO, indeed, incapable to manage its heterogeneity anymore, thus becoming an inefficient institution unable to deliver on its commitments across the globe?

The concept of complementarities suggests that optimization of NATO’s resources has been constrained by numerous hurdles. Some of them can be attributed to the nature of intergovernmental bargaining and the difficulty of forging consensus among allies; others are related to a shortage of resources and the insufficiency of allied capabilities. Even though NATO has improved its capabilities over time, for the most part, these have been inadequate to meet ISAF’s ever growing operational needs. Finally, the faltering progress of the mission in Afghanistan can, in part, be attributed to the changing nature and scope of the mission over time, as well as its complicated operational and command structures.

THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE INTERNATIONAL SECURITY ASSISTANCE FORCE

In response to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, a U.S.-led inter-national coalition conducted Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), which overthrew the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The mission was accomplished without substantial coalition ground force—with only approximately 100 Central Intelligence Officers, 350 U.S. Special Forces, and 15,000 Afghans


Managing Twenty-First Century Operations 203

from the Northern Alliance.2 These warfare tactics gave rise to the so-called Afghan model according to which “indigenous allies replace American con-ventional ground troops by exploiting U.S. airpower and small numbers of American special operations forces.”3 Some scholars argue that the tactics succeeded because local conditions were paramount for the Taliban’s fall; others attribute the operation’s success to direct air strikes which “were so powerful that the model could produce comparable results almost any-where.”4 Thus, OEF effectively ended the Taliban rule and paved the way for the new government in Kabul to prepare the transition toward democracy.

Meanwhile, prominent Afghan leaders and the international community met in Bonn, Germany, and rubberstamped an agreement that was expected to terminate four decades of civil war. The parties agreed on establishing an interim authority and administration, followed by adoption of a new constitu-tion that provided for power sharing and democratic institutions. The Bonn Agreements outlined a timeline for a transition to legitimate power structures that would be based on the rule of law and an effective judiciary system.5 The international community met in January 2002 and pledged $4.5 billion in sup-port of the reconstruction of Afghanistan. The United Nations took control on the ground and new assistance mission led by U.S., UK, Italy, and Germany was authorized to monitor and assist in the implementation of all aspects of the stabilization and reconstruction process. Hamid Karzai was appointed President of Afghanistan while the major ethnic groups took control of the key power institutions in the country. Subsequently, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1386 thereby endorsing the formation of an International Security Assistance Force in the area around the capital, Kabul. The UN-led mission was initially set up for six months to assist the Afghan Interim Au-thority in maintaining security, but its mandate was subsequently expanded.6 The Security Council charged NATO and its members participating in ISAF to “take all necessary measures to fulfill its mandate.”7 In August 2003 NAC unanimously agreed to take command and responsibility for the mission, which was limited only to Kabul. The UN and the EU special representa-tives publicly demanded an extension of the mission beyond the capital. The UNSC passed Resolution 1510 in October 2003 expanding ISAF’s mandate in support of the Afghan government. Thus, NATO took primary responsi-bility for security in Afghanistan which allowed U.S. forces to focus on the search for Bin Laden and other al-Qaeda members.8

The U.S. and NATO engagement in Afghanistan was very limited from the beginning. When the operational concept for Afghanistan was developed in 2001, the United States believed that for geopolitical reasons, the military footprint needed to be small—comprising a total of about 10,000 American


204 Chapter 6

soldiers, airmen, special operators, and helicopter assault crews once the major combat ended.9 Even though this strategy worked well in the early stages of the campaign to overthrow the Taliban government, in the long run it presented serious challenges for the mission’s success. Once the opera-tion entered the stabilization phase, too few Afghan and international troops were on the ground to implement the Bonn Agreements. As a matter of fact, in ISAF’s early stages the U.S. held one of the lowest per capita levels of military presence among all UN-led operations in Africa and Asia. The light footprint created a security vacuum on the ground that was filled by Afghan militia forces, thus undermining the power of the central government in the long run.

At least four different stages marked the advancement of ISAF during the first nine years of its operation. NATO committed only about five thousand troops during the first stage. Most of them came from member-states and operated primarily in Kabul and other “low risk” areas in the north. At its in-ception, about 90 percent of the mission’s force was from contributing NATO allies, of which Canada held the largest single-member contingent of almost two thousand people. Gradually, Germany, Italy, Spain, and some new allies (such as Romania) also stepped in and expanded their military presence. As early as 2002 the UN and EU special representatives publicly demanded the expansion of the ISAF mandate beyond Kabul, thus providing much needed security and power consolidation of the central administration in the country. Georgia was the first country from the former Soviet Union to join the mis-sion in 2004 with one hundred troops. Contributing nations soon realized the need to expand military presence in the area and decided to send additional helicopters, jets, and personnel. In the meantime NATO assumed the com-mand of the mission. ISAF’s first stage was completed in October 2004 under German leadership.10 The second stage marked the much needed expansion outside of Kabul, thus adding four more provinces—Badghis, Farah, Ghor, and Herat. This process, completed in the late summer of 2005 under the regional command of Italy, also prepared the transition to the operation’s next stage.

Formally, NATO’s involvement in Afghanistan existed under the auspices of two separate operations—OEF and ISAF. While OEF was an exclusively U.S.-led counter-terrorism operation, ISAF included much broader functions that varied from peacekeeping and stabilization to institution building and economic reconstruction. The two missions continued to co-exist, with the former focusing on counter-terrorism, and the latter on counter-insurgency. Over time this distinction became very blurred. Even though ISAF and OEF continued to operate under different chains of command, they have, in essence, performed the same enterprise. At this stage it became clear that



the mission in Afghanistan was much more fraught with peril compared to NATO’s earlier peacekeeping efforts in Bosnia or Kosovo.11 A major problem during the first two stages included the dual military command structure for ISAF and for Enduring Freedom. This structure was introduced as a result of the agreed division of labor between United States and the Europeans. While the former was going to continue fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the lat-ter were expected to focus on security, stabilization, and reconstruction in the country. A unified command would have saved resources and facilitated communication among the allies. Nonetheless, it was not until 2006, four years after ISAF’s inception, that such a unified command was established.12

During the third stage, between late 2005 and July 2006, the ISAF forces began to participate in actual combat operations against al-Qaeda in the Helmand province. With additional contributions from most of the partici-pating nations, but primarily the United States (4,000), Canada (2,000), and the Netherlands (400), the international military presence increased from 31,000 troops in 2005 to slightly over 40,000 troops in 2006.13 Not surpris-ingly, during the same period the U.S. military reported the fastest surge in violence—the number of suicide attacks increased by more than 400 percent, remotely detonated bombings more than doubled (from 783 to 1,677), and armed attacks nearly tripled (from 1,558 to 4,542). The Helmand Province was one of the centers of insurgency with a 60 percent rise of violence in less than one year.14

The new resources added on the ground gave confidence to NATO and U.S. military commanders to begin the implementation of ISAF’s fourth stage. Despite the surge in violence, the mission underwent its largest ter-ritorial expansion into the south and southeast adding a total of twenty new provinces, most of which were traditional Taliban and al-Qaeda strongholds as shown in figure 6.1. Canada took the lead of the South Command, cen-tered in Kandahar where, in September 2006, 8,000 ISAF soldiers initiated one of the mission’s largest offensive, known as Operation Medusa, against al-Qaeda. This essentially constituted a major shift not only in the territorial scope of the mission, but also in the type of military operations conducted on the ground (table 6.1).

The allies encountered fierce Taliban insurgency in the South and South-east of Afghanistan. The proximity of the border with Pakistan, the rugged terrain, and strong local support for the Talibans helped insurgents cross the border frequently, regroup unobstructed, and launch fierce offenses against the NATO-led international troops. As a result, insurgent attacks and casual-ties spiraled. While during ISAF’s first three stages the allies had on average about fifty casualties annually, in 2007 and 2008 their number jumped more than five times to 232. In 2009 they reached about 500 (figure 6.2).


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The dramatic rise of military and civilian casualties after 2006 can be at-tributed in part to the shift of the insurgents’ strategy to target civilians, as well as the shift in the operation’s scope. The insurgents conducted a wide variety of attacks against the U.S., coalition, and Afghan security forces, as well as civilians. Similarly, in the 1980s and 1990s, during mujahedeen re-sistance, the insurgents relied heavily on asymmetric tactics—they operated and conducted armed attacks from rural areas, while distributing propaganda, threatening, and intimidating the local population. In essence, the coalition troops that were stationed in the south and east could not conduct much

Table 6.1. The Advancement of International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan by Years (2002–2010)

Year(s) StageParticipating nations

Geographic Area Scope of the Mission

2002–2004

Stage one

The U.S., Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, Romania, and most of NATO members

Capital Kabul and the surrounding areas

Peacekeeping and peace enforcement; Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) introduced; NATO took over command in 2003

2004–2005

Stage two

The mission included non-NATO participants

Expansion in the north: Badghis, Farah, Ghor, and Heart provinces

Counter-terrorism added (primarily though OEF); combat against drug trafficking; more advanced stability and reconstruction

2005–2006

Stage three

The mission included over 40 contributing countries: NATO members, PfP partners, and other nations from Asia-Pacific region

Largest territorial expansion in the south: Helmand, Kandahar, Orizgan

Troop surge in the rise, primarily from NATO and United States; Eastern Europe doubled their contingents

2006–2010

Stage four

Some partners withdrew; other allies have been considering withdrawal

ISAF is in charge of the whole country but in effective control of only about half of the territory

Focus on counterinsurgency; the U.S. sends over 70,000 troops. The largest offensives since 2002: Mountain Thrust, Medusa, Achilles, Strike of the Sword, Panther’s Claw



peace enforcement and stabilization because the mission changed to a full-scale counterinsurgency campaign. Causalities came mostly from the nations which carried the burden of the mission’s expansion into the south and east where the battles with the insurgents occurred most intensely—the U.S., UK, Canada, the Netherlands, and Denmark. Alternatively, those allies whose troops were located in the center and north incurred a much smaller share of the combat and a much lower death toll. The nations that disproportionately carried the burden of the mission’s expansion raised concerns of equitable burden sharing, calling on the other allies to reallocate or add resources on the ground and become more active in efforts against the insurgency in troubled areas.16

This item was first placed on the NAC agenda in 2006. Two opposing camps emerged at the Riga Summit—those nations who took the lead in the ISAF’s expansion in the south and east, and others who favored the preservation of the status quo. France, Germany, Spain, and Italy implicitly indicated reluctance to send their troops into areas of high risk. Germany, for example, emphasized that the expansion of the Bundeswehr’s mandate and any additional German contributions to the mission needed the approval of the German legislature, the Bundestag. The legislators in Berlin could not agree on upgrading the mission from peace-building and stabilization to more comprehensive counter-insurgency efforts. Additionally, the German

Figure 6.1. Actual Troop Contribution to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan (2002–2009)15


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Constitutional Court decisions authorized the Bundestag to oversee military operations undertaken by the German armed forces, thus further obstructing a possible expansion of the German contingent as the legislators became in-creasingly wary of the declining popularity of the mission.17

Many of the contributing nations agreed to send additional troops after 2006, thus increasing their participation in absolute values. However, many of them also made it clear that they felt reluctant to do so and that they were will-ing to help only in cases of emergency. For example, in 2008–2009, France agreed to send additional helicopters and aircraft but no troops in support of the mission. Meanwhile, the ISAF Central Command was also able to real-locate approximately 2,500 troops from other areas. These adjustments did not dramatically alleviate the situation on the ground as need for new allied capabilities could not keep up with the skyrocketing insurgency. The allied reluctance to become more active in the south and southeast of Afghanistan prompting the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, to express his concern that NATO is, in essence, becoming “a two-tiered alliance, in which you have some allies willing to fight and die to protect peoples’ security, and others who are not.” He warned against the risk that this trend could put “a cloud over the future of the Alliance if this is to endure, or perhaps even get worse.”18

ISAF’s transition into high-risk areas during its fourth stage reflects an unexpected mission shift that posed major security challenges for the troops on the ground and the local population. The new mission not only required

Figure 6.2 Allied Casualties in Afghanistan (2002–2009)



additional resources for combat operations, but also new capabilities to work together in fighting insurgency. This situation pinpoints to the fact that NATO lacks mechanisms to manage burden sharing in situations dur-ing which individual allies are required to handle much worse than expected operational conditions. Therefore, the management of ISAF in the second half of the 2000s became one of the biggest tests for NATO’s capacity to transform and adapt itself in the entire history of the Alliance.

The presence of institutional commitments and major players like the United States facilitated reciprocal contributions made by most of the allies. Consider, for example, the increase of the U.S. contributions made between January 2009 and the summer 2010, of more than fifty thousand troops over a period of sixteen months. This surge was designed to match with ten to fifteen thousand additional troops from other allies. The supply of adequate capabili-ties from other members contributing to the counterinsurgency operation is equally important, nonetheless.

The evidence from the management of ISAF confirms that the multina-tional character of the operation introduces a number of constraints. The lack of political will from some of the coalition members is one such problem. Overall, NATO’s forces in Afghanistan have been competent despite varia-tions in their capabilities. However, some nations have chosen to introduce additional caveats that significantly constrain the scope of engagement from their national contingents. Other coalition participants did not have such caveats, but lacked adequate force enablers, such as attack and lift helicop-ters, smart munitions, intelligence, engineers, medical staff, logistics, digital command, and control that would make it possible for them to fully lever-age and sustain ground combat operations. Similarly, a major drawback for the success of the allied efforts in Afghanistan has been the lack of unity of command. Unlike previous NATO operations in the Balkans, during which the international community created a “high representative” to oversee recon-struction and stabilization, this appointment did not occur in Afghanistan. As a result, no single command could coordinate various international agencies and civilian efforts. Separate U.S. and NATO chains of military command remained in place even after NATO took control of most of the counterinsur-gency campaign in 2006.19

Finally, one of the most innovative aspects of ISAF counterinsurgency efforts includes the introduction of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs). These were either international or US-led teams comprising between sixty and a hundred soldiers with a vast array of responsibilities that included civil affairs units, Special Forces, force protection units, and psychological operations personnel. The U.S.-led PRTs held an impressive record in provid-ing security at elections and other major political events; they also facilitated


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various reconstruction efforts. The NATO-led PRTs held a somewhat mixed record, but in general were much more likely to succeed when working closely with the local population to coordinate reconstruction projects and se-cure their area of operations. Alternatively, when domestic politics dominated the lead nation’s agenda, especially concerns about the rules of engagement, successful completion of the mission’s tasks was much less likely.20

The implementation of the PRTs presented major challenges: Both U.S. and NATO-led teams were dominated by soldiers who had short tours of duty and limited, if any, experience in reconstruction and development. The teams experienced a persistent shortage of qualified civilian personnel to lead these efforts. Despite the fact that the U.S. and NATO were able to staff reconstruc-tion teams in every major Afghan population center, the sparsely populated rural areas remained outside of ISAF’s operational reach. The prospects of accomplishing stabilization tasks in these remote corners became even bleaker after the insurgency surged in 2006 and 2007. Thus, the deterioration of the security environment practically voided most of the accomplishments to rebuild the south and east of Afghanistan.

Despite the troop surge, the new allied commitments and the introduc-tion of the PRTs, the willingness and capacity of the contributing nations to allocate new resources and deliver much needed capabilities remained a central component for ISAF’s success in Afghanistan. Being the largest out-of-the-area operation in NATO’s history, and its first one outside of Europe, the International Security Assistance Force presented a true test of the Alli-ance’s capacity to work as a club in maintaining its effectiveness as a part of its overall adaptation to new security challenges in the context of the global fight against terrorism.21

ALLIED COMMITMENTS OF TROOPS AND RESOURCES

The literature on international interventions argues that resource base is one of the key factors in determining the success of any given military operation conducted by foreign powers and international organizations. Key resource variables include the number and performance of troops and police force, the amount of available funding, and the duration of the operation.22 Scholars and policymakers on Afghanistan agree that a wining plan for Afghanistan rests on a comprehensive strategy for dealing with insurgents and warlords includ-ing the allocation of additional resources in terms of international and local (i.e., Afghan) military and police presence backed with increased financial assistance.



Troop Contributions

The dynamic of troop contributions corresponds to the willingness and capacity of ISAF-contributing nations (allies and non-allies) to stand up to their commitments and carry their share of the burden. In 2001, the United States invaded Afghanistan with a minimum number of forces. The goal was to avert a large-scale resistance similar to what the Soviet Union encountered in the 1980s. The general belief was that small numbers of ground troops and airpower would be sufficient to establish much needed security. General Tommy Franks envisioned “a total of about 10,000 American soldiers, airmen, special operators, and helicopter assault crews, along with robust in-country close air support.”23 Even though this strategy worked well during the initial stages of Operation Enduring Freedom, it encountered major drawbacks in the later phases of the peace enforcement process. There were simply too few U.S. and allied forces on the ground to help stabilize the country. The Afghan government forces (military and police) were practically nonexistent and completely unprepared to deal with the threat of insurgency. Similarly, the insufficiency of forces available to secure Afghanistan’s porous borders enabled the insurgents to benefit from the proximity with neighboring Pakistan. Patrolling the sixteen-hundred-mile-long eastern border was particularly challenging especially because of the Pashtun tribesmen who crossed the border frequently and had intricate knowledge of the rugged terrain. General Franks’s fears of repeating the Soviet scenario were unwarranted. In fact, this strategy drew the wrong les-son from the Soviet experience. The problem of the Soviet tactics was that they were designed to fight a conventional war against an unconventional opponent and, thus, fundamentally manifested a misunderstanding of the nature of counterinsurgency warfare in Afghanistan.24 The Soviets terror-ized the local population and were completely unable to win the people over. At the same time, the United States, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and other governments saw this as an opportunity to take advantage of the situation on the ground by funding and training the mujahedeen-led insurgency. The post-2001 experience in Afghanistan indicates that the peace-making process following the Bonn Agreements should have been accompanied by a strong international military presence covering the entire territory of the country from the very beginning, and that reduction would be possible only when the long-term security on the ground had improved.

The data on allied contributions from 2002 to 2008 illustrate just the op-posite tendency—in 2003 and 2004 only several partners participated in the NATO-led international force. Most of the nations became actively involved between 2004 and 2005, slightly before or during the transition from the first


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to the second stage. The surge of allied participation came when popular sup-port in Afghanistan for the U.S. and NATO-led mission was already in de-cline. Second, the ISAF troops have been on a steady rise between 2004 and 2010: from under 20,000 in 2004 to over 60,000 in 2008 and close to 100,000 in 2009. Third, the troop surge follows the expansion of the mission’s ter-ritorial scope. In 2002 and 2003 ISAF was active only in the capital and in the northern parts of Afghanistan; it expanded into the high-risk regions of southern and eastern Afghanistan during later stages of the mission. The new dynamic resulted in an increased intensity of combat operations with the lo-cal insurgency, significant increase in casualties, and, ultimately, a desperate need for additional military resources.

All groups of NATO allies—the U.S., Western Europe, the new members, and most NATO partners—have sent additional troops charged with various mission responsibilities. Membership status also affects mission participa-tion: for example, most of the new allies sent troops in Afghanistan only after they received an invitation in 2002 to join NATO. Similarly, the burden of the mission has not been equitably distributed among all contributing nations. The United States, together with the other old NATO members, have had a disproportionately larger share—in 2009 they constituted about 77 percent of the population of all contributing nations and have provided on average between 85 and 95 percent of all troops since the mission’s inception in 2002. The U.S. alone, whose population share is about 30 percent, originally con-tributed approximately 35 percent of the troops on the ground, but after 2008 over three quarters of all servicemen and women in Afghanistan wore U.S. uniforms. Alternatively, the other two categories of ISAF participants—the new allies from Central and Eastern Europe and the non-NATO nations—held a disproportionately smaller share: In the case of the new allies, their contribution steadily rose in absolute and relative terms, but still remained be-low their population share of about 10 percent. Not surprisingly, the partners who are not bound by NATO membership have had the lowest contributions (about 5 percent) relative to their size (figure 6.3).

Second, the dynamics of burden sharing indicates significant variations in the U.S. contribution over the past eight years. Initially, during OEF in 2003 and 2004, the United States had the largest share of military presence in Af-ghanistan, but as Washington’s priorities shifted to Iraq in 2004, its relative share in ISAF dropped. The U.S. involvement increased once again in rela-tive and absolute terms in 2008 when the U.S. troops were sent in response to the growing insurgency in the southern and eastern provinces of Afghani-stan. Alternatively, the European allies had the highest share of contributions to ISAF between 2005 and 2007 during the second and third stages of the mission. This observation highlights another noticeable tendency—when



the mission task is to fight counterinsurgency the U.S. participation surges. Alternatively, when the focus shifts to peace enforcement and reconstruction, the share of other (mostly European) allies increases. In fact, previous studies on Afghanistan tend to overlook the involvement and assistance provided by the European Union and its members. Between 2002 and 2009, EU coun-tries have provided more than one third of all financial assistance and aid programs. In addition, individual members have taken the lead in allocating resources toward institution-building, such as police training (Germany), ju-diciary (Italy), and anti-narcotics (United Kingdom).25 Not all West European allies have contributed equitably, though: The United Kingdom, Norway, Netherlands, and Denmark have been among the highest contributors, send-ing on average between 100 and 140 soldiers per million people and, not surprisingly, they also have incurred the highest share of casualties. Most of these nations contributed between twenty and fifty soldiers per million, but nations like Spain, Portugal, Greece, and even Turkey participated with only a small fraction (no more than twenty soldiers per one million).26

Third, the per capita involvement of the new NATO members tends to be lower in comparison with the remaining contributors. Prior to 2005, East-ern Europe’s involvement was rather symbolic—only about 2 percent of the overall mission contributions—but after 2005 it tripled in absolute and relative terms to about 6 percent. This trend can be explained with the oc-currence of membership—seven of these nations joined NATO in 2004 and

Figure 6.3. Troop Contribution to the International Security Assistance Force in Af-ghanistan as a Percentage of All Troops (2002–2009)


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were requested to increase participation to meet their new responsibilities in international security. Even though prior to 2004 Eastern Europe’s participa-tion remained below the anticipated contribution of about 10 percent, a closer snapshot after this date reveals that these countries’ share is equitable to their West European counterparts: on average slightly less than forty soldiers per one million. As of 2010, the nations that joined NATO in 2004 have contrib-uted to ISAF somewhere between thirty-five and sixty troops per one million people. Bulgaria, Estonia, Lithuania, and Poland, as well as the two countries that joined NATO in 2009 (Albania and Croatia), were among the highest contributors.

Non-NATO partners hold the lowest per capita contributions to ISAF—fewer than twenty soldiers per million. Nonetheless, a tremendous variation exists among these partners. Nations like Australia, Sweden, and Jordan have been on the forefront of the military and civilian efforts and have had a larger contribution than some NATO members. On the other hand, partners like Azerbaijan, Austria, Ireland, and Ukraine maintained a rather symbolic pres-ence. Australia, for example, contributed to the hard security aspects of ISAF with a contingent that is based in the troubled southern province of Uruzgan and also assisted with reconstruction, logistics, and liaison personnel in Kan-dahar and Kabul.27 Australians introduced very few restrictions to their troops on the ground and as a result have maintained a very strong reputation among the ISAF nations and a very high degree of credibility among ISAF com-manders.28 Sweden and Jordan, on the other hand, chose to focus on peace-keeping and peace-enforcement; Swedes led the reconstruction efforts in Mazar-i-Sharif while the Jordanians supported a medical training partnership in Qalat City, Zabul province, and are in charge of the new hospital there.29

Allied contributions to ISAF illustrate several interesting patterns. First, even though members are more likely to step in and provide higher con-tributions, the distribution of these contributions is not equitable. Consider the U.S. involvement: it peaked during periods when robust combat capa-bilities were needed to deal with insurgency and guerrilla warfare or when the future of the mission was at stake because the alliance as a whole was unable to fulfill its broader commitment “to meet the force requirements of the commanders in the field.”30 Second, the increased American presence is followed by a strategy of engaging the other allies to proportionally increase their contributions. For example, the U.S. decision to send 3,200 marines to Afghanistan early in 2008 was followed by a letter from the Secretary of Defense addressed to each of his counterparts in NATO with a request “to dig deep and find these additional troopers to send to Afghanistan.”31 By the same token, the Obama administration’s February 2009 decision to send an addi-tional 17,000 American troops to Afghanistan was combined with a strategy



to engage the other ISAF members to reciprocate the U.S. decision.32 Such a strategy was partly successful—the U.S. partners committed themselves to send another 4,500 troops, of which 3,000 came from Western Europe, 900 from the new members, and 600 from the other partners. Finally, President Obama’s December 2009 announcement of 30,000 additional troops was presented as an international effort in which the U.S. commitment would be “joined by contributions from our allies . . . some have already provided addi-tional troops, and . . . there will be further contributions in the days and weeks ahead.”33 In fact, within hours of President Obama’s speech, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen emphasized that the mission in Afghanistan “is not just America’s war, this is an Alliance mission,” and that “at this very important moment, NATO must demonstrate its unity and its strength once again.” As a token of support for the U.S. efforts, he also confirmed that he would expect the rest of the allies to contribute at least five thousand troops more, and “probably a few thousand extra on top of that.”34

The evidence from the negotiations process regarding troop generation in 2008 and 2009 seems, at least on the surface, to support the exploitation of the big by the small hypothesis, i.e., the European allies are doing their best to avoid allied burden in Afghanistan and pass it onto the United States. The logic of heterogeneous clubs suggests that the decision to send troops overseas is contingent on multiple factors that shape the identity of the contributing nations. The alliance membership, or the prospects for a membership, consti-tutes one such factor. Others include the size of the nation, the levels of public opinion support, and the scope of the mandate that each national contingent is granted by the sending country. Specifically, the variation of allied identity with regard to a nation’s participation in ISAF can be attributed to the varia-tion in the institutional setup and political processes at home as outlined in the country’s constitution. Similarly, the identity of the contributing nations affects the scope of unilateral restrictions that these nations introduce. Other factors may include the role that allies envision for themselves in European defense, in the transatlantic bargain, and in overall international security.

Mission Caveats

The mission restrictions, often referred to as caveats, have created major re-sentment from those countries that must bear a greater share of the resulting burden. The caveats can be official and written or unofficial and unwritten. Usually, the countries formally notify the international organization and the mission command of official restrictions for their national contingents. This practice has allowed NATO commanders to keep track of the caveats and plan operations accordingly. In 2008 NATO commanders in Afghanistan


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had identified somewhere between fifty and eighty known caveats. For vari-ous reasons, contributing nations do not explicitly announce their unofficial restrictions and these can only be discovered as the mission advances over the course of time.

How do these caveats affect the overall outcome of the mission? They significantly hamper the operational flexibility of some contingents and, thus, limit their capacity to bring actual capabilities to the mission. Alternatively, countries with fewer caveats end up bearing a greater burden. As a result, some national contingents occupy physical space and register resource con-tribution, but add only marginally to the collective efforts. The past several NATO summits, especially those in Riga, Bucharest, and Kehl-Strasbourg, have focused major attention on this imbalance. Even though, in 2006, NATO leaders agreed that the contributing nations should lift their caveats so that their forces could be used anywhere in Afghanistan in extremis, imple-mentation has been slow as there has been no clear definition of what consti-tutes such an extreme situation. Consider, for example, the case of Germany discussed earlier in the chapter. The Bundestag has formally restricted the involvement of the German contingent in any kind of offensive operations, including any form of involvement in Operation Enduring Freedom. Thus, the pictures taken by German planes cannot be used for OEF-based counter-terrorism activities and only some intelligence information can be shared with the rest of the allies, which creates unnecessary complications for the ISAF command to circumvent these rules. Similarly, German troops cannot participate in stabilization efforts in the south and east of Afghanistan as their involvement would significantly impair the effectiveness of the ground operation. The requirement that the German units must return to their home base before nighttime is an example of an informal restriction. Other infor-mal caveats introduced by ISAF participating nations include the restriction to take members of the Afghan national army aboard their helicopters even if they are injured and participate in joint missions alongside troops from a historical rival.35

The introduction of these formal and informal caveats is determined by the political dynamic at home and reflects the variation of the contributing na-tions’ identity. Nonetheless, it is incorrect to argue that the ISAF participants have introduced a wide variety of restrictions just because they want to avoid the burden of the mission and prefer to pass it onto everybody else. As a mat-ter of fact, caveats represent only one aspect of a multi-layered process of intergovernmental bargaining: the force generation between 2002 and 2009 revealed increasing difficulties to have the allies commit to additional troops and resources, expedite decision-making process at national and international levels, and overcome slow adaptability to new operational needs. Similarly, it



is incorrect to argue that change is impossible due to allied obstinacy; adjust-ments simply occur at a much slower pace resulting in inability to meet the ever increasing needs on the ground.

The restrictions on national contingents certainly limit ISAF’s overall capabilities. Nonetheless, even if all contributing nations agreed to entirely lift their caveats, they would not be able to drastically improve the security situation on the ground simply because most of them are too small and weak to fight insurgency. The logic of complementarities indicates that while the vast majority of the ISAF participating nations cannot bring significant counterinsurgency capabilities, they can offer invaluable aid in peacekeep-ing, reconstruction, and stabilization efforts. Once the insurgency is defeated, the smaller NATO allies and partners could assist in securing stability and rebuilding population centers if they choose to explore their comparative advantages. The Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) and the NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan (NTM-A) provide examples of such tools of inter-allied civil-military cooperation.

THE MANAGEMENT OF ISAF’S MULTINATIONAL OPERATIONAL CAPABILITIES

Can civil-military cooperation influence positively mission outcomes in Afghanistan? Should we expect that the United States will continue to carry a disproportionately high share of all counterinsurgency and combat opera-tions, and can Provincial Reconstruction Teams alleviate the consequences of burden sharing between the U.S. and the remaining allies? The logic of collective goods theory underestimates the specific context of intra-club bargaining, thus not being able to draw distinction between combat and peace enforcement missions. Club goods theory chooses to explore the role of peacekeeping and reconstruction assets; it emphasizes the allies’ capacity to work together, accomplish common tasks, and find other “creative” ways to contribute to this mission. PRTs also reflect the degree to which allies are able to work together toward performing the role of a “blended” force that wages peace after a violent conflict or “system administrators” that manage the post-war reconstruction in the country.36

Nonetheless, heterogeneous clubs need an agent to manage the outcome of intra-club bargaining. If the identities of some allies prevent them from becoming involved in combat operations, key players like the United States can assist and direct them to areas with low-intensity combat where they can perform other supportive functions. Therefore, the efficient management of allied burden depends on the ability of key players to steer the course of


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intra-club bargaining, persuade nations to reallocate resources, and optimize their overall mission performance.

The concept of complementarities, which holds that the allies manage resources most efficiently in order to advance their capabilities, could also provide a valuable framework of analysis. It implies that in order to avoid bickering about equitable burden sharing in Afghanistan, the allies need to adjust and coordinate their positions beforehand. This logic has been illus-trated on several occasions. First, exerting additional pressure on contributing nations would have an adverse effect. Not only would it dissuade them from changing the rules of engagement, but could also stall negotiations and fuel antiwar sentiments. This tendency was noticed in Germany during the 2009 election campaign when the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, scrupu-lously avoided the word “war,” preferring euphemisms such as “stabilization deployment.”37 To ensure that Germany was on board, the United States and the other allies involved in insurgency operations in the southern and eastern parts of Afghanistan—Canada, the Netherlands, and Denmark—persuaded the German leadership to take a more active lead in training the Afghan po-lice and army, and provide additional airlift capabilities. Similarly, the allies with limited capabilities could instead patrol low-risk areas and participate in stationary peacekeeping, thus releasing allied forces to relocate to high-risk areas and engage in active combat.

Second, the allies need to engage the largest possible number of partici-pants. There are various mechanisms to accomplish this task: extending part-nerships with new ISAF nations beyond PfP, offering enhanced individual partnership programs, or even inviting nations to join MAP in order to raise the bar of expectations. Consider for example the negotiations of the last two waves of expansion in 2004 and 2009—the prospects for membership en-couraged most aspirant nations to send additional troops in Afghanistan. As a result, the latest entrants—Albania and Croatia—held the highest per capita contributions from Eastern Europe in 2009 and 2010.

Third, the logic of complementarities highlights the importance of niche capabilities. For example, NATO’s Strategic Vision outlined a common set of training standards for everyone going to Afghanistan. By working to-gether in multinational structures, the ISAF participating nations can provide economies of scale, synergize their efforts, and take advantage of their niche capabilities. The new NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan and Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) provide two instances in this respect.

The NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan

The decision to establish a separate Training Mission for Afghan military and police force (NTM-A) was taken in 2009. The allies discussed challenges the



international community faced in Afghanistan at the Summit in Strasbourg and Kehl and confirmed NATO’s long-term commitment to support the Afghan government by training and mentoring its national army (ANA) and police (ANP). The new mission, modeled after the NATO training mission in Iraq, is designed to provide additional trainers and mentors for the Afghan security institutions. Despite the fact that army and police training was one of the cornerstone priorities, the Office of the Inspector General of the U.S. Departments of State and Defense discovered in 2006 that very little progress was made toward that priority and that “ANP’s readiness level to carry out its internal security and conventional police responsibilities is far from ad-equate.”38 The ineffective field training program, illiterate recruits, a history of low pay, and pervasive corruption in an insecure environment were among the factors to blame for the lack of progress in army and police training.

Originally, police training was left to a team of German trainers who, in 2002, took the responsibility of restoring the police academy in Kabul. This task was critical, as no Afghan police officers had received any formal train-ing in the last two decades. The German approach focused on upper-level inspectors and lieutenants who were enrolled in a three-year program at the police academy in Kabul, where they were required to take a large variety of classes varying from human rights and police investigation to computer skills and Islamic law. This approach turned out to be time-consuming, inef-ficient, and seriously underfunded because only a handful of Afghan officers had actual access to quality training. In the mean time, Afghanistan needed a large number of policemen, trained over a short period of time who are able to perform vital security tasks. These alarming trends were confirmed by various international assessments: for example a German study concluded in 2006 that “neither the Afghan border police nor the customs authorities are currently in a position to meet the challenges presented by this long border.”39

The funding for police training tripled after 2006: the Afghan National Army Trust Fund and a number of donors and organizations made contribu-tions in support of ANP. In order to strengthen synchronized civil-military ef-forts across Afghanistan, the international community initiated an Integrated Approach. A steering body, called the International Police Coordination Board (IPCB), was set up via a joint German and U.S. initiative to oversee the training process, the coordination of the individual members’ contribu-tions, and possibly raise red flags for potential deficiencies or unnecessary duplication. This new strategy highlighted multilateral cooperation and was designed to capitalize on existing structures and synergies. Mentoring was provided by special teams that would draw on the experience of European multinational bodies such as the European Gendarmerie Force (EGF), as well as training activities conducted by the European Union police mission (EUPOL) in Afghanistan.40


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The underlying logic behind this strategy was that a larger and more ef-ficient local police force working closely with the National Army would help crack down the insurgency. NTM-A was formally activated in November 2009 and was intended to build on the experience of training the Afghan National Army, while adding much needed emphasis on the Afghan National Police. The new structures were designed to facilitate the integration of op-erations, as the training and mentoring activities of the new mission were incorporated into the ISAF headquarters to operate under a single, dual-hatted commander.41 The ultimate goal was to fully synchronize NTM-A and ISAF so that a sufficient number of military personnel could be trained in a short period of time. The plan was to increase progressively the servicemen in the Afghan National Army so that the target levels of 134,000 officers can be reached by 2012. The strategy also aligned with the indigenous approach crafted by Gen Tommy Franks in the early 2000s—namely to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people by relying on local forces. It was also con-gruent with the revised timeline of the Obama administration and their expec-tation that the insurgency was going to decrease after 2012 as the situation in the area stabilizes and some of the U.S. and allied forces would eventually withdraw from the area.

Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs)

In 2002, Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Afghanistan were introduced as integrated civilian-military organizations designed to extend the reach of the central government and facilitate reconstruction while at the same time guaranteeing security on the ground. In order to accomplish these goals, various programs of civil-military cooperation were introduced. The civilian representatives and military officers were expected to work together as a team in assessing the environment and developing strategies to meet the team goals.42 PRTs are relatively small—on the military side they comprise between sixty and a hundred soldiers including civil affairs units, special forces, force protection units, and psychological operations personnel.

At the end of 2009 there were more than twenty such teams operating in Afghanistan under U.S. or ISAF command. The participating nations were required to coordinate reconstruction projects with local government offices and national ministries and, if necessary, receive their approval. Once the teams gain experience, and conditions on the ground improve, additional ca-pabilities could be added through “reach-back to additional military and civil-ian assets.”43 PRTs represent new mechanisms for synergizing international efforts; they fit in the seam between war and peace and exercise a variety of administrative or “soft power” functions. These teams also serve as a litmus



test of the participating nations’ ability to work together and maximize the use of their resources.

PRTs were given the flexibility to adapt their scope and range of to spe-cific local conditions and engage NGOs, tribal leaders, and local communi-ties in their activities. The underlying assumption was that a one-size-fits-all approach would not work for Afghanistan’s diverse regions and the teams needed to adapt to the specific local culture and conflicting interests. Con-sider, for example, the PRT in Gardez. Among other functions, the recon-struction team supported an Afghan NGO dedicated to enabling dialogue be-tween the local tribes and the new central government. Building on this work, the Gardez PRT and the United Nations sponsored a reconstruction workshop that brought together tribal leaders and representatives of local and the central government. Similar meetings were organized in Jalalabad and other regions of the team’s area of operation. They were particularly helpful after May 2005 when riots broke out over alleged U.S. disrespect for the Koran, as the meetings provided a forum to address local concerns and rebuild confidence in the U.S. and NATO troops in the province. The PRT commander commit-ted to refurbishing the city’s main mosque in an effort to persuade the locals that the United States was not opposed to Islam.

The PRTs’ flexibility, nonetheless, did not always work to the best of everybody’s hopes and intentions. Even though many were extremely suc-cessful in addressing the most important issues in their area of responsibil-ity, the overall success of the teams varied. The shortcomings could be at-tributed to several groups of factors: Occasionally, when the teams were set up, the allies were unable to reach a consensus on removing impediments or formulating explicit rules. On other occasions, insufficient coordination existed between civilian and military sides. Finally, some PRTs suffered from overly ambitious goals coupled with insufficient funding and resource allocations.

As previously discussed, the restrictions introduced to some contingents have caused major setbacks. Consider, for example, the UK-led PRT in Mazar-e Sharif and German-led PRT in Konduz. The UK-led team helped mediate inter-factional fighting and widely used military and civilian tools to help stabilize the region. In contrast, Berlin instructed the German-led team to avoid casualties and it was, therefore, restricted to operate only within a thirty-kilometer radius to avoid areas with significant factional fighting. The German military in Afghanistan admitted in a series of reports to the German government that this risk-averse approach significantly constrained the abil-ity to operate on the ground and also undercut the effectiveness of the team.44

Another troubled area includes coordination between the civilian and mili-tary components. Most teams were dominated by soldiers, who had little or


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no experience with reconstruction and development while at the same time very few civilians were willing to work in war-torn areas.45 Simultaneously, on the military side, soldiers experienced short tours of duty, which made their acclimation to the local conditions difficult, and further constrained the development of skills need to support reconstruction activities. The Dutch Provincial Reconstruction Team (NL PRT) in Baghlan, a northern province of Afghanistan, illustrates how insufficient level of coordination and infor-mation sharing between this team and the humanitarian organizations in the area may undercut the team’s effectiveness. Even though the NL PRT would occasionally consult the humanitarian organizations for information related to specific projects and vice versa (i.e., the humanitarian organizations would approach NL PRT about safety-related issues), this information exchange was “often incidental and no continuous sharing took place.”46 A number of explanations can be offered as to why this was the case—unavailability of good information that could be used for humanitarian purposes, restricted access of humanitarian organizations to classified information, absence of liaison officers between the NL PRT and the NGOs operating in Baghlan. As a result, the NL PRT was often unaware of the activities or plans of humani-tarian organizations and did not take full advantage of their knowledge and experience. Lack of awareness due to poor communication occurred when the Dutch team contracted a local constructor to build a dam without consulting with the humanitarian organizations specializing in water management. The work was poorly done because the local contractor lacked basic skills and the strong current devastated the dam within weeks of its construction.47

Despite the lack of operational guidance, civil-military cooperation suc-ceeded occasionally because of the individual leadership style of command-ers on the ground. In the spring of 2005, the U.S.-led Combined Joint Task Force 76 (CJTF-76), operating in Paktika, decided to consolidate bases and gave a notice that the team had to relocate within twenty-four hours. Initially, none of the civilian organizations (USAID or the U.S. Embassy) had been notified. Only after they were consulted a decision was made to retain the PRT closer to the city. Even though coordination between the civilian and the military component averted future negative consequences, it occurred not as a result of interagency guidance but because the maneuver commander had a clear understanding of the importance of reconstruction and political engagement.48 Similarly, NATO-led teams failed to recognize other initia-tives in their area of operation intended to improve communications between the local authorities and the police sector, or disregarded programs run by the World Bank and private actors in the region. NL PRT, for example, had little insight into other actors operating in the Baghlan province. When a decision was made to collect this information, the different participants—the civilian



branch, the mission teams, and the political advisors—proceeded to collect the information on their own without much coordination, which logically caused greater duplication of efforts and waste of resources.49

Finally, evidence from the Dutch team shows that PRTs were not equipped with sufficient resources to accomplish all their tasks. For example, those teams that were in charge of police training were significantly understaffed and under-resourced. The ratio between PRT trainers and local trainees in the Afghan National Army was 1:5, while the same ratio for the ANP was 1:358.50 Appropriate police training was a critical step in winning the hearts and minds of the local population as one of the most frequent complaints was the abuse of power that has resulted in the population’s contempt and fear of the police. The data, however, does not confirm that law enforcement has im-proved, that the use of violence by the police against the local population has decreased, or that peacekeepers have been able to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan population.

In other instances when resources in terms of funding were available, they were not utilized most efficiently. For example, contracts to rebuild infrastructure were given to certain local companies with no previous expe-rience, without any bids and with minimum supervision and control of the construction process. The Dutch reconstruction team chose to deal with only two local construction companies who were approached directly and were offered contracts without any formal or informal bids. Thus, the team was unable to create significant and needed competition, and had to frequently overpay the cost of reconstruction. The construction of the infamous dam in the Baghlan province is only one such instance. PRTs used some of the fund-ing to purchase and distribute various goodies to the local people in an effort to win their hearts and minds—these included educational materials, carpet, fuel, toys, etc. Not everybody from the Afghan population received gift bas-kets—those who did not receive goodies felt abandoned and became envious and frustrated, while those who did receive aid usually preferred to sell it at the local market and, thus, turn it into hard cash. Either way, this system of disbursing international aid did not accomplish the desired effect.51

By the end of 2009, the record of the PRTs had been, to say the least, mixed. Does that mean that the case of Afghanistan does not support the logic of complementarities? Despite some of the PRTs’ shortcomings, it would be incorrect to label them inefficient or unsuccessful tools for reconstruction. The level of public support for PRTs among ordinary Afghans attests to their positive impact. In a series of polls conducted in 2004 and 2005, between 65 and 70 percent of Afghans held a favorable view of the U.S. government, and over 60 percent held a favorable view of the U.S. military. It is widely believed that U.S. and international PRTs, combined with other civil-military


224 Chapter 6

activities, may constitute one reason that public opinion polls in Afghanistan showed fairly high levels of support for the U.S. and Afghan government in the early stages of the operation. However, this approval started to decline in 2006 due to allegations of pervasive corruption among Afghan officials, in-creasing levels of violence in the east and south of Afghanistan, and growing frustration with the tardiness and inefficiency of the reconstruction process.

The history of ISAF-led PRTs in Afghanistan indicates striking similarities to the pattern by which the CJTFs and the NRF were implemented in the Bal-kans in the 1990s. Institutional bureaucracies and lack of organizational ex-perience in both instances posed significant constraints on the reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan. The main distinction between ISAF and the earlier missions in the Balkans, however, was the rapid change of operational needs due to deteriorating security. Similar problems did not cause disturbances in the Balkans as the missions there were easier to handle because organized resistance was practically nonexistent. The shortage of various resources on the ground (e.g., manpower, funding), the lack of coordination between the civilian and the military side, and the insufficiency of capabilities to conduct these types of operations only exacerbated the management of ISAF’s activi-ties. Nonetheless, even if ISAF was granted all needed resources (primarily troops and funding), the mission would still be experiencing shortage of adequate capabilities.

In fact, the frequency of contacts between the servicemen and women of different nations in these PRTs is likely to foster feelings of sympathy among different nations. However, improved cooperation among allies does not oc-cur automatically as values and images are fairly resistant to change. Frequent interaction over extended periods nurtures positive attitude that fosters coop-eration among contributing nations and ultimately enhances the effectiveness of reconstruction efforts. The German-Netherlands Corps, established in the early 1990s, is an instance of a truly international force that stimulates co-operation among contributing nations. Since 2003 over seventy servicemen and women from the UK, Norway, Denmark, France, Turkey, Italy, and the U.S. have been stationed in Kabul as a part of this High Readiness Force. A study of the Netherlands Defense Academy and the Social Research Institute of the German Bundeswehr indicated that, as a result of frequent interaction between the Germans and Dutch, the national contingents of the two nations have considerably converged on a degree of sympathy toward each other.52 Enhanced formal and informal communication has improved mutual under-standing and appreciation between these leading nations.

The experience with the U.S. and NATO-led PRTs also points to the managerial skills of the commanders, the instructions from the national gov-ernments, and the coordination skills of the central command as essential



factors for teams’ success. When a single nation with major capabilities takes the lead, the synergy between military and civilian efforts tends to increase. U.S. leadership in the joint task forces and multinational teams has been instrumental in overcoming differences among the participants, as well as in improving coordination and interoperability among the partners of these mul-tinational defense structures. Some of the old NATO allies and partners with significant capabilities and experience in peace enforcement—most notably Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, Italy, Spain, and Turkey—have provided leadership in multinational task forces and Provincial Reconstruc-tion Teams. Only several of the new allies, notably Poland, the Czech Re-public, and Hungary, have been able to hold a more leading role in the CJTFs and PRTs. Most of these NATO members participated in areas where their troops were primarily responsible for “soft” security and static peacekeeping.

There is little doubt that the U.S. and NATO-led reconstruction teams and other civilian-military formations will continue to be a major component of NATO’s involvement in Afghanistan in the near future. Even when most of the counterinsurgency campaign is complete, an international military pres-ence will still be in demand to secure the ongoing reconstruction process. The evidence from the mission in Afghanistan confirms that the interplay of civilian and military components will be increasingly important as the recon-struction efforts become a vital aspect of NATO’s and UN’s new missions, as well as a decisive factor for success in Afghanistan.

In conclusion, the reality of the intra-club dynamic indicates that there is no magic fix for the challenges that NATO faces in Afghanistan. This mission is very different from all previous operations that the alliance has undertaken thus far. It also stands in stark contrast with earlier military campaigns con-ducted by foreign forces in the region. The survey of NATO’s involvement in Afghanistan confirmed that, despite various internal and external setbacks, between 2002 and 2010 almost all contributing nations have sent additonal troops and allocated resources. Even though the new members increased their participation faster than their West European counterparts, they still hold a smaller share of allied contributions. Some ISAF partners have an impres-sive record in Afghanistan, while others a rather symbolic contribution to collective efforts. External events, such as expected invitation to join NATO, enhanced cooperation, or forthcoming membership, tend to increase resource allocation. NATO leadership is aware of this dynamic; that is why NATO Secretary General, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, and the U.S. Secretary of Defense on several occasions undertook recruitment missions to generate additional troops.

The United States, which has the highest share of mission contributions in absolute and relative terms, has been instrumental in ensuring consensus


226 Chapter 6

and sustaining NATO’s cohesion. As discussed earlier, the U.S. took most of the burden of the troop surge after 2007 when it became clear that NATO did not have sufficient capabilities to fight insurgency in the south and east of Afghanistan. Such policy of “lowest common denominator” may not only be ineffective, but also may ultimately be crippling for NATO because of the increasing Americanization of the conflict there. Even though these concerns are not unwarranted, ISAF’s legitimacy in Afghanistan is determined by ap-proximately forty contributing nations authorized by the UNSC to enforce peace on behalf of the international community. This analysis points to the fact that even though the U.S.-led surge has been crucial for the success of the counterinsurgency campaign, the United States alone cannot address all challenges on the ground. The long-term mission to enforce the peace and stability of Afghanistan cannot be accomplished by a single nation, even if it were the only superpower. As the mission shifts from counterinsurgency to stabilization and reconstruction, the involvement of all NATO members would be instrumental for ISAF’s overall success. Therefore, the United States needs to find various “creative” ways to step in and effectively engage different allies and partner countries.

The mission in Afghanistan also presents an excellent reality check of the allies’ long-run preparedness to meet the mission expectations outlined by Central Command. The adjustment of these expectations, as indicated by Defense Secretary Gates, constitutes an important first step in redefining NATO’s role for the future of the mission in Afghanistan.53 Little doubt ex-ists that a NATO-led stabilization and reconstruction mission will remain in the region in the near future even after 2014. This prospect presents unique opportunities for all allies to explore different niches and advance specific capabilities. Paradoxically, the challenges that the allies face today as a result of NATO’s extended involvement could further stimulate reforms and an ad-justment of armed forces at home that could lead to an improved coordination and division of labor abroad.

NOTES

1. “Remarks by the President on a New Strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Office of the Press Secretary, March 27, 2009, Washington, District of Columbia, www.whitehouse.gov/, (accessed January 29, 2009).

2. Seth Jones, “The Rise of Afghanistan’s Insurgency: State Failure and Jihad,” International Security 32, no. 4, (Spring 2008), 7.

3. Stephen D. Biddle, “Allies, Airpower, and Modern Warfare: The Afghan Model in Afghanistan and Iraq,” International Security 30, no. 3 (Winter 2005/06), 161.

4. Biddle, “Allies, Airpower,” 161.



5. Agreement on Provisional Arrangements in Afghanistan Pending the Re-Establishment of Permanent Government Institutions,www.afghangovernment.com/AfghanAgreementBonn.htm, (accessed January 25, 2009).

6. UN Security Council Resolution, Resolution 1386 (2001), adopted by the Se-curity Council at its 4443rd meeting, December 20, 2001, www.nato.int/isaf/topics/mandate/unscr/resolution_1386.pdf, (accessed January 19, 2009).

7. Resolution 1386 (2001), Resolution 1413 (2002), Resolution 1510 (2003), and subsequent resolutions.

8. Joshua Walker, “NATO’s Litmus Test: Prioritizing Afghanistan,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 5, no. 2 (2007), 173.

9. Seth Jones, Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, National Defense Research Institute, 2004, 90.

10. Klaus-Peter Klaiber, “The European Union in Afghanistan: Lessons Learned,” European Foreign Affairs Review 12 (2007), 8.

11. David P. Auerswald and Stephen M. Saideman, “Caveats Emptor: Multilater-alism at War in Afghanistan,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Interna-tional Studies Association in New York, February 2009, 18.

12. Klaiber, “The European Union,” 9.13. The data presented below are based on the Military Balance, London: Inter-

national Institute for Strategic Studies; the data are from 2001/02 through 2007/08. Additional data have been collected from NATO Official Webpage, www.nato.int, and www.globalsecurity.org.

14. Seth Jones, Counterinsurgency, 49. See also Pamela Constable, “Gates Visits Kabul, Cites Rise in Cross-Border Attacks,” Washington Post, January 17, 2007, p. A10.

15. ISAF Official Website, www.isaf.nato.int/; also Defense Department Casu-alty Page, www.defense.gov/news/casualty.pdf; and US War Watch Website, www.uswarwatch.org/afghdetails_currentmonth.html, March 2008–December 2009.

16. For further details on Canada’s position and the U.S. criticism expressed by Secretary Gates, see Jim Cox, “Afghanistan: Canada and the intra-NATO Dialogue,” Political and Social Affairs Division of the library of the British Parliament, April 22, 2008, www.parl.gc.ca/information/library/PRBpubs/prb0802-e.htm, (accessed January 19, 2009).

17. Andrew Purvis, “A Help Wanted Fight Over Afghanistan,” Time Magazine, February 7, 2008, www.time.com/, (accessed June 11, 2008).

18. “U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has warned the future of NATO is at risk due to differences over Afghanistan and that it may become a two-tier alliance,” BBC News, Thursday, February 7, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/, (accessed January 18, 2008).

19. Jones, Counterinsurgency, 106.20. Seth Jones cites the German-led PRT in Konduz as an example of a team that

was limited by the rules of engagement to travel only within a thirty-kilometer radius and was instructed by the German government to avoid areas with a risk of factional fighting. As a result, the aversion to casualties impacted PRT activities and its contri-bution to broader civil-military operations. See Jones, Counterinsurgency, 105.


228 Chapter 6

21. On the evolution of NATO’s non-Article Five Operations see “Towards and Beyond the Madrid Summit,” Remarks by the NATO Secretary General, April 24, 1997, www.nato.int/, (accessed January 19, 2009).

22. Seth G. Jones, “Averting Failure in Afghanistan,” Survival 48, no. 1 (March 2006).

23. See Tommy Franks, American Soldier (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 324.24. Jones, Counterinsurgency, 91–92.25. Klaiber, “The European Union,” 10.26. Turkey is one of the few Muslim countries working with U.S. forces in Af-

ghanistan. While its troops do not engage in combat, they are mostly involved in training the Afghan military. Ankara’s official policy is to maintain minimum men and women in uniforms in Afghanistan, while providing extensive non-military sup-port in forms of economic aid, engineering assistance, and humanitarian relief.

27. Australian Government, Department of Defense, www.defence.gov.au/opEx/global/opslipper/index.htm, (accessed January 24, 2009).

28. Auerswald and Saideman, “Caveats Emptor,” 32.29. “Jordanian Military Helps Its Neighbors,” Defense Link News, U.S. De-

partment of Defense, February 2, 2006, www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=14978, (accessed January 24, 2009).

30. Robert Gates, 44th Munich Conference on Security Policy, (accessed February 10, 2008).

31. Press conference by Dr. Robert M. Gates, U.S. Secretary of Defense, Febru-ary 7, 2008, www.nato.int/docu/speech/2008/s080207f.html, (accessed January 24, 2009).

32. Helene Cooper, “Putting Stamp on Afghan War, Obama Will Send 17,000 Troops,” New York Times, February 17, 2009.

33. “Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on the Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Eisenhower Hall Theatre, United States Military Acad-emy, West Point, New York, December 1, 2009; www.whitehouse.gov/, (accessed December 28, 2009).

34. NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Monthly Press Confer-ence, December 2, 2009; www.nato.int/, 12/28/2009.

35. Auerswald and Saideman, “Caveats Emptor,” 8.36. Thomas Barnett, Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating (New York:

G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2005), xix.37. “War in Afghanistan Affects German Elections,” Newsweek, September 14,

2009. 38. See Interagency Assessment of Afghanistan Police Training and Readiness,

Offices of Inspector General of the Departments of State and Defense (Washington, District of Columbia, 2006), 2; oig.state.gov/, (accessed December 30, 2009).

39. “Border Management in Afghanistan: A Regional Approach,” speech deliv-ered by the German Minister of the Interior Wolfgang Schäuble at the Doha II Con-ference on Border Management in Afghanistan (Doha, Qatar, 2006), www.en.bmi.bund.de/, (accessed December 30, 2009).



40. For details see “Germany’s support for rebuilding the Afghan police force,” The German Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, www.auswaertiges-amt.de/, (ac-cessed December 30, 2009).

41. “NATO’s new training mission for Afghanistan is activated in Kabul,” NATO Handbook, November 21, 2009, www.nato.int/, (accessed December 30, 2009).

42. “Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan: An Interagency Assess-ment,” Department of State and DoD, Joint Center for Operational Analysis (Wash-ington, District of Columbia, June 2006), 8.

43. “Provincial Reconstruction Teams,” 8.44. Jones, Counterinsurgency, 107.45. The United States almost doubled workforce and operating expenses for

2009–2011 fiscal years largely due to overseas operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, thus hoping to address the shortage of civilians working on the reconstruction of these areas. For details see David Sylvan and Stephen Majeski, “The Organizational Structure of U.S. Foreign Policy Change,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, September 2–5, 2010.

46. Sebastiaan J. H. Rietjens, “Managing Civil-Military Cooperation: Experiences from the Dutch Provincial Reconstruction Team in Afghanistan,” Armed Forces & Society 34, no. 2 (January 2008), 194.

47. Rietjens, “Managing Civil-Military,” 194.48. “Provincial Reconstruction Teams,” 13.49. Rietjens, “Managing Civil-Military,” 181.50. ISAF, Ministry of Interior Affairs & Afghan National Police (Kabul, Afghani-

stan: ISAF, 2005).51. Rietjens, “Managing Civil-Military,” 196.52. Rene Moelker, Joseph Soeters, and Ulrich Von Hagen, “Sympathy, the Ce-

ment of Interoperability: Findings on Tens Years of German Netherlands Military Cooperation,” Armed Forces and Society 33, no. 4 (July 2007), 512.

53. “Gates: Modest Goals, More Strikes,” The New York Times, January 27, 2009.



231

The 2010 NATO Strategic Concept, which is expected to guide the alliance in the next decade or so, highlights the importance of sufficient resources—financial, military, and human—to carry the new missions.1 The document recognizes that these essential resources must be used in the most efficient and effective way possible to ensure the security of populations and territory. But have the allies, indeed, been able to overcome their differences when it comes to managing their resources? Do they contribute effectively toward the advancement of specific capabilities needed for NATO’s overseas com-mitments? Does NATO need new allies and are they able to deliver nascent capabilities and contribute effectively to new out-of-the-area missions?

The findings of this study are centered around two core themes: First, the book argues that the three main aspects of NATO’s transformation—the invi-tation of new members, the expansion of the alliance missions, and develop-ment of new allied capabilities—are interconnected. Scholars of international relations have focused primarily on one aspect of NATO’s transformation (e.g., the invitation of new allies, or the expansion of new missions) and have failed to discuss in detail the connection between the introduction of new missions, the acquisition of new capabilities, and the admission of new members. Second, as a heterogeneous organization that incorporates almost thirty different nations, NATO occasionally faces constraints in its ability to agree on decisions of major importance for international security. When con-sensus is forged, it tends to ensure inclusive participation of its members and enhance legitimacy of international action. Alternatively, when consensus fails, unilateral or multilateral action by loose coalitions outside of NATO is encouraged. The latter lack the same degree of international legitimacy and, therefore, tend to foster sub-optimal outcomes. As a result, even though the

Conclusions


232 Conclusions

lowest common denominator policy may not always seem particularly effec-tive in the short run, it tends to secure much needed political endorsement and resource support in the long run.

NATO’s increasing out-of-the-area involvement ties in closely with the introduction of new, modern capabilities in the same way as the admission of new members is related to the efficient management of their scarce resources. The study evaluated the connection between available military resources and the advancement of new allied capabilities as these have became a cor-nerstone of NATO’s transformation and discovered a strong relationship between resources and allied capabilities related to old NATO members. The wealth of these nations did not influence their national contributions to overseas operations. Less wealthy nations like Portugal, Greece, or Turkey may, in fact, contribute more to NATO’s peacekeeping efforts than wealthier nations. In the case of the new NATO allies, however, the relationship be-tween military resources and allied capabilities is much weaker. In part, this weakness can be attributed to patterns of military transformation in Eastern Europe. Even though the new allies underwent very similar transitions after 1989, at least two distinctive paths of transformation were observed. The three Baltic Republics (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), Croatia, and Slovenia built armed forces from scratch. In contrast, nations like Albania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia had to reduce significantly some of their resource base and re-direct resources toward areas that would improve the overall effectiveness of their capabilities. They faced major challenges emanating from bureaucratic and organizational resistance to transformation, which is why their transformation of armed forces proved much more challenging than originally expected. The integration of the Visegrad nations indicated that, unless potential entrants are not confronted with a detailed laundry list of requirements and backed up by a strict moni-toring process, these nations experience difficulties to satisfy membership requirements.

Launched in 1999, the Membership Action Plan (MAP) was designed to cater to these needs. It was tailored to applicants’ individual needs and comparative advantages. In order to improve their bids for membership, the aspirant nations formed multilateral fora such as the Vilnius Group and the Adriatic Charter. In these semi-institutionalized structures of international cooperation, the applicants coordinated their lobbying efforts to persuade their western counterparts that they are, indeed, ready to assume member-ship responsibilities. The survey of the expansion process from the 1990s to the late 2000s indicates that the invitation and admission of new members became a longer, more rigorous, and cumbersome process. New allies needed time to prepare for membership and boost contributions to NATO’s growing


Conclusions 233

out-of-the-area involvement. Thus, MAP exercised needed pressure on politi-cal elites to help them overcome domestic resistance and mobilize resources.

Even though Brussels gave the applicants flexibility to select areas of transformation where they had competitive advantages (e.g., nuclear, bio-logical, or radiological protection, alpine troops, minesweeping, demining, air transportation, surveillance, combat engineering, etc.), it also provided very detailed guidelines with specific timetables for the completion of re-forms. The applications were again up for final review before any decision for expansion was made. In this final review the potential entrants had to list all measures that they had undertaken to implement reforms and the level of progress that they had made in all five critical areas of transformation: politi-cal and economic issues; defense and military issues; resources; security and legal issues. Such an approach departs from the traditional intergovernmental bargaining as NATO essentially coached prospective members in their own internal military restructuring to develop particular capabilities and closely monitored how they implemented their commitments. Similarly, the ability of these relatively small and not so wealthy nations to work together in various multinational forces or teams became a key test for the capacity of the new members to assume membership responsibilities. Specialization maximizes the benefits of cooperation and provides comparative advantages over other allies as illustrated by the CBRN defense battalion. Lastly, the prospects for membership also affect positively the optimization of resource base. The cases of Austria, Finland, Ireland, and Sweden, four EU countries with no intentions to join NATO, indicate that they have taken very few steps to downsize their military bureaucracies. Even though these nations made up the major contributors to international peacekeeping and crisis response, they do not see the need to re-organize their armed forces and abandon traditional territorial defense nor do their governments face external pressure to reform their armed forces.

Why do NATO governments experience difficulties to introduce and implement military reforms? The advancement of new capabilities is a result of non-coercive bargaining among different members. When such bargaining occurs, the distribution of benefits reflects the relative power of the allies. The advantages of cooperation are higher than the costs associated with it, but the implementation of the agreed-upon commitments is oftentimes difficult due to various domestic and elite-related factors. In most cases increased military effectiveness required an efficient funding allocation that led to a substantial reduction of military personnel and outdated equipment, layoffs, as well as job losses and increased unemployment. As a result, certain representatives of political and bureaucratic entities opposed and attempted to delay the pace of transformation. This trend was especially noticeable in Bulgaria and Slo-


234 Conclusions

vakia. By the same logic, some bilateral and multilateral forms of cooperation should be interpreted not only as tools of coordination among aspirants, but also as a form of pressure exercised by political elites against bureaucratic reluctance to reform armed forces at home. The Membership Action Plan, the subsequent Individual Partnership Action Plans, and the Timetables for Completion of Reforms coupled with the multilateral diplomacy at the Vil-nius Group and the Adriatic Charter provided apt examples of this dynamic.

Nonetheless, the advancement of new capabilities was not determined solely by the re-allocation and use of available resources, but also by the new missions’ features as discussed in chapters 3 and 4. That is why the Prague Summit in 2002 addressed the growing capabilities gap. The summit was es-sentially about all the NATO allies, especially the current members, so that they were not irrevocably left behind by the United States. Indeed, Washing-ton emphasized that NATO’s new missions in the Balkans and in Afghani-stan had become increasingly challenging to manage and drove the shift of the Summit’s focus to being that of military transformation. The European allies, understanding the military and political lessons of NATO’s recent experience, recognized that they needed to make a serious effort to redress successfully the military capabilities gap to meet the new operational needs.

NATO’s missions after the end of the Cold War evolved vertically and horizontally. Vertical evolution occurred due to the need for new types of missions that expanded beyond simple peacekeeping and included crisis response and stability operations. This trend is illustrated with the transi-tion from multinational task forces (CJTFs) to more advanced rapid reaction force (NRF) and various multinational teams charged with large civil and military tasks. Alternatively, when the mission tasks remain the same but new and improved capabilities are needed because of the change of the strategic environment, this leads to horizontal evolution. NATO’s peacekeeping and non-proliferation missions illustrate this tendency. Even though the term “peacekeeping missions” remained in use, most of the recent peacekeeping activities also incorporated more advanced peace enforcement and some form of stabilization. By the same token, the non-proliferation missions introduced various multinational teams originally dealing with chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) defense but gradually adding new recon-struction tasks that required civil-military coordination. Since then, teams have been used in a variety of stability operations in which every country specializes in its comparative advantages. NATO has taken a pragmatic ap-proach to ask new or prospective members, especially ones who have limited capabilities, to enhance coordination and develop such in areas of expertise these states already have. However, the evidence confirms that the NATO-


Conclusions 235

led resource optimization does not occur easily. Member-states often commit themselves to unrealistic targets, and later are forced to review and revise these targets in order to strike the right balance between the missions’ needs and the states’ capacity to deliver. Similarly, the successful advancement of new capabilities is also linked to the improvement of allied interoperability, i.e., the capacity of NATO members to work together efficiently in further-ance of the Alliance agenda. The Southeast European Brigade (SEE BRIG) and the Baltic Battalion (BALTBAT) constitute two such instances of mul-tilateral cooperation that enhance allied coordination and interoperability. Institutional commitments and the support of major players like the United States promote military reforms, help the allies’ governments to overcome domestic resistance, and, generally, facilitate successful cooperation among current and prospective NATO members.

The neutral EU nations comprise a different story. Austria, Finland, Ire-land, and Sweden can afford to maintain a higher or lower resource base compared with their NATO counterparts because these nations have not been constrained by any alliance membership. Their political elites operate in a culture of neutrality at home which requires the mobilization of additional military resources to maintain this policy. Even though the logic of comple-mentarities holds that club membership reduces overall defense expenditures because it provides economies of scale, Austria, Finland, and Sweden prefer to remain neutral because they choose independence in policymaking over efficiency. This is particularly relevant in the case of Finland, whose public favors neutrality and supports decisions to use ample resources for national defense, as well as for international peacekeeping.

THE POLITICS OF HETEROGENEOUS CLUBS

How does admission of new allies, the introduction of new missions, and the development of new capabilities affect NATO’s decision-making pro-cess? What foreign policy implications could be inferred from the proposed theory for the allies and their partners? As discussed earlier in the book, the club goods framework suggests that alliances hold features similar to clubs—voluntarism, the idea of sharing, cost-benefit analysis, and exclusion mechanisms.2 In the case of NATO, alliances work as heterogeneous clubs that comprise several relatively homogeneous sub-clubs.3 Operating in this analytical framework, the concept of complementarities implies that the management of alliances mandates: (a) a more efficient distribution and use of resources among its members relative to non-members; (b) specialization and development of niche capabilities for those countries that can provide


236 Conclusions

economies of scale; and (c) the ability to work together in multinational structures (e.g., CJTFs, NRF, CBRN, or PRT teams) that require enhanced interoperability among different allies. The argument developed throughout the book pinpoints to the expectation that NATO will continue to “engage in a process of continual reform, to streamline structures, improve working methods and maximize efficiency” while also providing collective defense to its members.4 This explanation has several important implications for the management of twenty-first century missions, the admission of new allies, and the overall conduct of transatlantic diplomacy.

Managing Twenty-First Century Operations

Two decades of non-Article Five operations in the Balkans and especially in Afghanistan confirmed that NATO’s transformation is far from complete. As indicated in the 2010 Strategic Concept, the alliance will continue to build new capabilities in order to further and successfully manage its mis-sions. Early withdrawal from troubled areas like Afghanistan is not an op-tion, as NATO continues to perform civil and military duties even after the projected troop reduction in 2014. At the same time, its doors remain open for new entrants—several applicants like FYR of Macedonia, Montenegro, and even Georgia are expected to join in the decade(s) to come. These na-tions are already a part and parcel of the allied overseas efforts and, together with NATO’s multiple global partners, are expected to participate even more actively in the years to come. Nonetheless, the history of NATO’s transfor-mation in the first two decades after the end of the Cold War confirmed that the simultaneous advancement of the expansion and transformation processes proved more challenging than expected.

The challenges of the mission in Afghanistan illustrate best this observa-tion. The expansion of the NATO-led ISAF has had limited success during its first nine years in countering the increasing insurgency there.5 NATO’s limited accomplishments in Afghanistan fuelled grim conclusions that “the U.S.-backed expansion of the Alliance contributed to the erosion of NATO’s military capabilities” and as a result, NATO played a “largely supportive role in the war on terror.”6 The limited success of its new missions raised doubts about the utility of the other two aspects of NATO’s transformation—the ad-dition of new allies and the development of new capabilities.

The proposed theory suggests a different interpretation—no evidence ex-ists that NATO’s challenges in Afghanistan and elsewhere are due to the increased number of allies. In other words, an alliance of sixteen or nineteen members would probably face the same difficulties on the ground. The ex-pansion has, indeed, increased NATO’s overall heterogeneity and has, quite


Conclusions 237

logically, raised the question of its future management. Instead, the challenges posted to its contemporary missions can be attributed to a variety of mission-specific requirements: limited capabilities for counterinsurgency operations, inability to operate in rugged terrain, lack of coordination between civilian and military participants, or inexperience with reconstruction tasks. Despite various internal and external setbacks between 2002 and 2009, all ISAF con-tributing nations have increased their troop participation in Afghanistan and also allocated new resources in support of the troubled mission there.

The evidence from the International Security Assistance Force runs coun-ter to the argument of NATO skeptics that the new members do not bring any additional capabilities and are, in essence, useless for new missions. In fact, government decisions to send new troops and other additional resources are influenced by external events, such as an anticipated invitation to join the alliance, upgraded cooperation or enhanced partnership, or formal admission into NATO structures. Similarly, the involvement of NATO leadership is instrumental for increased mission participation—in fact, NATO’s Secretary General and the Supreme Allied Commander have visited on several occa-sions the contributing nations to specifically request their increased participa-tion in these overseas operations.

Why is then NATO having difficulties to secure sufficient resources to combat the skyrocketing insurgency in Afghanistan? First, ISAF differs vastly from previous peacekeeping and peace enforcement operations, specif-ically those in the 1990s that took place in the former Yugoslavia: NATO has never been in a position to develop and support counterinsurgency campaigns and has very limited experience in such operations. Second, most of the old and new members possess limited capabilities to handle the new stability operations. Third, despite major efforts after 1999 to improve interoperability and enhance the coordination of multinational teams, NATO members were unable to reach a desired effect. The experience of the Provincial Reconstruc-tion Teams revealed major problems in sharing responsibilities between the lead nation and other contributing nations. Similarly, the level of coordination in the transfer of authority between the outgoing and incoming lead nations was far from satisfactory. For the most part, these reconstruction teams have been learning on the job and, despite noticeable improvements after 2006, their overall efficiency was relatively low.

While no quick fix could be offered for NATO’s dilemmas in Afghanistan, the heterogeneous club logic implies that the involvement of major allies is instrumental because of their significant capabilities and experience with counterinsurgency and guerrilla warfare. The United States, which has the highest share of mission contributions in absolute and relative terms, has been instrumental in securing additional resource contributions for ISAF.


238 Conclusions

Washington has born most of the burden of the post-2007 troop surge, par-ticularly in the south and east of Afghanistan, especially in areas where the alliance as a whole lacks agreement or the capacity to deliver. Also, the U.S. has played an instrumental role in persuading other allies and partners to ex-pand their role and match its contributions. Despite the numerous constraints, the United States will continue to rely on its allies in Afghanistan even more after the projected troop reduction there where civil-military teams will take over the leadership in international reconstruction. Therefore, the successful implementation of NATO’s new missions has also direct impact on the future of the expansion process.

The Future of the Expansion Process

The history of three rounds of NATO expansion after 1997 led to several major conclusions regarding NATO politics and the management of large heterogeneous alliances. First, since 1999 the expansion has become a more transparent and fairly straightforward process during which applicants are carefully evaluated based on their capacity and commitment to resolve dis-putes with neighboring countries, to contribute militarily to new missions, and to reach a minimum expected degree of interoperability with the rest of the alliance. They are encouraged to work together, as evidenced in the Vilnius Group and the Adriatic Charter. As a result, applicants needed to increase their participation in allied burden sharing that includes optimization of their resource base and major transformation of their armed forces. This was not clearly explained by the political elites in the new members, who chose to justify NATO membership with the excusive protection of Article Five and, on occasions, omitted the importance of burden sharing. Similarly, military reforms were presented as an external pre-condition for member-ship rather than a long-term investment in viable armed forces. The former SACEUR Gen. James Jones jokingly noted in 2006 that if the new allies “realized what they were signing up to in 2002, they probably wouldn’t have done it, because it does cost money and has caused a lot of pain.”7 In other words, NATO membership meant for these not so wealthy nations that they have joined an expensive club with exclusive benefits. This membership also comes with a price tag as the new members needed substantial investments in advanced military technology to improve their interoperability and overall capacity to successfully conduct complex operations.

Second, the survey of NATO expansion shows that this process has be-come longer, more institutionalized, and somewhat more cumbersome for new applicants. This tendency is partly due to the availability of the “qual-ity” applicants. In other words, countries with viable and efficient democratic


Conclusions 239

institutions whose political elites are more willing to work with Brussels to meet the membership requirements are also more likely to prepare faster for membership. Brussels made it clear that the new allies are expected to take a higher share of allied burden, i.e., send more, better equipped, and better trained troops in support of NATO’s missions. For example, new members should be able to allocate for defense at least 2 percent of their GDP and most barely meet this requirement. Since they are much poorer than their old coun-terparts, these countries need to manage their resources even more efficiently to provide adequate mission contributions. Identifying niche capabilities, like the CBRN, demining, or surveillance teams, or working together in multi-national PRTs in Afghanistan, provide venues for optimization of available resources. It also presents an opportunity for the new members from Central and Eastern Europe to persuade their partners that they are ready to bear a fair share of the common burden.

Third, the logic of complementarities indicates that NATO does not need to incorporate countries that face major social, political, or military chal-lenges at home or whose elites and bureaucracies resist transformation be-cause this would be detrimental for the club and the good that it provides. The alliance has always existed off of the largeness of its contributing nations, that is why the new entrants were closely monitored before invitations were extended and the ratification process was completed. Prior to 1997, NATO did not have much experience with the admission of former Soviet allies and Brussels did not know the exact scope and types of reforms needed in these countries. However, as the club grew bigger and the problems associated with these countries became clearer, NATO formulated more precise admission standards and monitoring mechanisms. The alliance also provided assistance in the process of internal military restructuring to identify particular areas where the new entrants could develop specific capabilities that they can sus-tain. Similarly, in their Timetables for the Completion of Reforms the invitees were requested to provide detailed information about the progress that they have made and the reforms they planned to undergo in the years to come. These precise commitments helped the new entrants overcome domestic or-ganizational and bureaucratic resistance.

Fourth, after the admission of Albania and Croatia in 2009, only a handful of “quality” applicants have not been admitted to NATO. The application of FYR of Macedonia, the last of the three AC members, was tabled in 2008 due to the long-standing naming dispute with neighboring Greece and the subsequent veto used by Athens.8 Montenegro was the only nation participating in ISAF in 2011 and together with Skopje expects to receive invitation to join the or-ganization in the years to come. Other NATO partners include Serbia, Bosnia, and most of the former Soviet Republics in the Caucasus and Central Asia, all


240 Conclusions

of which have developed partnerships with the alliance. Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Ukraine have expressed certain interest in upgrading their relations with NATO, but so far none of them qualifies for the Membership Action Plan.

Kiev and Tbilisi indicated in 2004 that they would seek NATO member-ship following the Orange and Rose Revolutions when the reformist regimes reaffirmed their commitment to Euro-Atlantic values. Some NATO countries and their leaders enthusiastically supported these aspirations, while others remained skeptical about the viability of the latest membership bids. Subse-quent events confirmed that these former Soviet societies are deeply divided on the issue of NATO membership: in the 2010 Ukrainian elections, Presi-dent Yushchenko and the pro-Western government suffered a stunning defeat by the pro-Russian candidate, Viktor Yanukovich, who confirmed that Kiev was no longer interested in pursuing membership.9 Obviously Ukraine was not ready to join MAP and no further plans for membership can be made until the political elite in this country reaches a consensus to move forward with the issue of membership. Unlike Kiev, all applicants who joined the alliance in the 1990s and 2000s had already reached such consensus at home.

Georgia is a different story. In 2008, the government in Tbilisi organized a referendum on NATO membership in which the pubic overwhelmingly sup-ported the membership bid—over 77 percent of the voters were in favor. This was a rare and unprecedented step as Georgia and Slovenia remained the only two nations from Eastern Europe to hold referenda on the issue of member-ship. Nonetheless, Georgia’s unsettled territorial integrity and the status of the break-away republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia remain the main obstacle en route to membership. In the summer of 2008, the dispute over the status of these two provinces led to a short-lived war with neighboring Russia. Despite the West’s sympathy for Georgia, no progress toward membership is possible before Tbilisi and Moscow reach a final settlement in the status of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. A similar approach was taken vis-à-vis Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia during their accession to NATO in the 1990s. These countries signed a series of bilateral treaties that regulated all outstanding ter-ritorial and minority disputes. A new Pact on Stability in the Caucasus needs to be concluded with the help of NATO prior to Georgia’s further integration. Without permanent settlement of these disputes, NATO faces the risk of be-ing entangled into unnecessary conflict with Moscow over tiny, remote, and sparsely populated provinces in the remote corners of the Caucasus.

Transatlantic Diplomacy

The incorporation of the new allies, the introduction of new missions, and the efforts to develop new capabilities have broader implications for NATO’s


Conclusions 241

decision-making as these processes took place without any major institutional adjustments. The North Atlantic Council (NAC) yet remains the primary decision-making body supported by about 350 committees, all of which operate on the rule of consensus. This mechanism allows a single nation to block a decision if it wants to do so even if the rest of the allies support a given proposal as was the case of the Greek veto that blocked Macedonia’s admission in 2008. The consensus rule has remained unchanged since 1949 and, given the perspective that NAC is getting bigger and bigger, NATO will have to streamline this process. The events surrounding NATO’s diplomacy in the 1990s and 2000s pinpoint to several conclusions regarding transatlantic diplomacy.

First, even though it seems easier to negotiate an agreement with a broad coalition, this accommodation is usually temporary as participants in flexible arrangements are more likely to walk away when they realize that it is not in their interest to partake in collective efforts anymore. Consider, for example, the case of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. The United States faced major resistance from France, Germany, and Belgium to proceed with contingency planning for Turkey’s defense in the event of a possible conflict in Iraq. All three European allies argued that NATO should not remain involved in any way in the U.S.-led invasion in Iraq. Washington decided to use the Defense Planning Committee (DPC) to avoid a likely French veto in the North Atlan-tic Council, where it faced Belgian opposition. After this point the negotia-tions became difficult and the United States chose to act unilaterally in Iraq, forming a loose collation of the willing that lacked the type of legitimacy that a NATO-led campaign would have had in the first place. Alternatively, when the Alliance was able to accommodate different positions, it worked out a compromise that steered toward a mutually acceptable decision. This was the case with the establishment of the NATO Training Mission in 2004, which allowed for most of the allies to participate in or outside of Iraq and use their full capacity “in order to help Iraq develop an effective, democratically led, and enduring security sector.”10

Second, NATO’s history after the 1990 London Declaration points to the fact that alliances matter much more than other, loose and flexible interna-tional coalitions. Heterogeneous clubs are, at times, difficult to manage and may occasionally entice leading nations to seek bargains outside of the estab-lished alliance structures among flexible groupings of small and friendlier al-lies as these could be more cooperative. Unlike alliances, which on occasions are harder to coordinate due to the diverging identities of their members, such ad hoc coalitions are temporary. Therefore, international alliances remain the more preferred form of cooperation because they tend to increase legitimacy, enhance overall allied capabilities, and stabilize reliability of commitments.


242 Conclusions

Third, the admission of new members after 1999 did, in fact, strengthen NATO’s overall heterogeneity, which ultimately contributed to the formation of alignments and coalitions between these countries and the United States in the 2000s. Some believe that this tendency is indicative for a shifting balance toward the Atlanticist camp in NATO. The evidence from the negotiations in the recent decades confirms that even if NATO’s decision-making rules are modified in the future, it will still need the widest consensus to adopt and implement any substantial decisions. The experience of the 2003 crisis in diplomatic bargaining shows that, in order to optimize its performance, the alliance needs to reach across the divisions of different sub-clubs.

It seems that the fate of the future alignments within NATO depends to a considerable degree on the political leadership in Washington. One may argue that the U.S. unilateralism can be explained by the Bush administration’s re-luctance, especially during its first term, to engage with international institu-tions, as a result of which the United States became increasingly unwilling to work with all allies in order to accommodate their differences. Alternatively, the Obama administration showed its intent to reach out to allies and repair transatlantic relations. Club goods theory attributes the outcomes of alliance bargaining to the size of the club members as well as their identity. Both categories are relatively stable and are not likely to change easily from one administration to another. That is why leading nations naturally find it easier to work closely with members whose positions (or the positions of the sub-club to which they belong) are close to their own rather than seeking a com-promise within the club as a whole. The personal style of U.S. presidents can only have marginal influence on NATO members—it is simply much easier to forge consensus on marginal issues while disagreement may prevail over the bigger strategy as a result of the members’ diverging identities. Consider for example the decision of the Dutch government to withdraw its contingent from Afghanistan in August 2010: even though NATO had wanted the Neth-erlands to extend its mission, the request triggered a political row that brought down the country’s coalition government in February as there was no con-sensus at home to extend the combat mission for another two-year term. This decision was a result of Netherlands’ internal political process—the Dutch parliament had already made a commitment to authorize the contingent only until 2010—and had nothing to do with the specific Dutch, U.S., or NATO leadership. In the meantime, analysts noted that after four years of operation the Dutch contingent had pioneered techniques which have since been held up as a model for other foreign forces.11 In order to reaffirm its commitment to the stabilization and reconstruction of Afghanistan, Netherlands decided to focus on military and police training—in January 2011 the government ap-proved a new mission with 545 trainers to provide training, intelligence and


Conclusions 243

logistical support, medical, and other supportive (but not combat) activities as a part of NTM-A.12

Fourth, the presence of players like the United States facilitates the implementations of necessary reforms, ensures the reliability of institutional commitments, and secures unobstructed functioning of heterogeneous clubs. Washington uses formal and informal diplomatic mechanisms to provide as-sistance to its allies when no one else is able or willing to do so. The path of diplomacy is often a long, time-consuming, and cumbersome process that requires tact, diplomatic skills at various levels, and a “language and set of behaviors that draws on the ability to see the world through the eyes of oth-ers.”13 In the long run, the benefits are, nonetheless, immeasurably higher compared with other forms of unilateral diplomacy. This logic also implies that all allies are valuable in spite of their capabilities to the extent that they enhance legitimacy, minimize costs, and share allied burden.

Fifth, the core NATO allies from Western Europe hold a special role in the transatlantic bargain: the aftermath of the transatlantic crisis in 2003 con-firmed that allies such as France and Germany are needed to actively endorse an alliance agenda that accommodates all groups of allies. Any equilibrium that excludes these allies is sub-optimal because it decreases dramatically the legitimacy of the new mission. These nations have to remain actively involved in the transatlantic bargain to ensure unity and cohesiveness—their positions can significantly amend earlier proposals which otherwise would not be acceptable for everybody in the club. The disengagement and self-isolation of the major transatlantic partners would be detrimental not only for these nations but also for the overall club dynamic.

By the same token, efforts by France, Belgium, Germany, or any other major European allies to seek independent EU military planning that is not coordinated with NATO cannot be successful. Not only would such planning be in conflict with the spirit of the Berlin Plus Agreement, but also it can-not rally substantial institutional support as it is not backed with sufficient military resources. The tone of the 2009 and 2010 Summits confirmed that a divide between Europeanist and Atlanticist camps is short lived and un-sustainable. After the crisis of 2003 the major European partners actively engaged in dialogue with other allies and partners in an attempt to facilitate a more fair distribution of burden and responsibilities among club members. The new Strategic Concept approved at the Lisbon Summit in November 2010 confirmed that political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic are will-ing to turn their back on political rhetoric and take a more pragmatic stance. The framework developed in the book implies that when allies understand and honor their commitments to transatlantic security, such an understanding stimulates mutuality and facilitates more predictable foreign policy behavior.


244 Conclusions

Thus, the chances of miscommunication are reduced to a minimum and future crises would be very rare.

In conclusion, the post-September 11 security environment confirmed—more than ever—the relevancy of international alliances. In the years since then, NATO shifted its domain from territorial defense and peacekeeping to more challenging crisis response and stability operations. As a result, coun-ter-terrorism and counterinsurgency became an integral part of transatlantic diplomacy. At the end of the day, will the alliance meet the new challenges and deliver its security commitments? Given the scope of investments allot-ted toward NATO in the six decades since its inception, pessimistic scenarios of NATO’s future do not seem credible. The club goods theory implies that states can afford to keep previously established international structures in business only if they are able to successfully accomplish the new tasks that they have been assigned. Despite the numerous challenges that NATO faces in integrating new allies, managing new missions, and promoting new capa-bilities, the neo-realist skepticism that the Alliance will become peripheral and eventually fade away seems unwarranted. The evidence presented in this book supports the argument that NATO is able to reach out to different allies and take advantage of its heterogeneity to meet the larger needs of the inter-national community as well as advance the national interests of its members.

NOTES

1. “Active Engagement, Modern Defense,” Strategic Concept for the Defense and Security of the Members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization adopted by Heads of State and Government in Lisbon, Portugal, November 19, 2010.

2. Todd Sandler, Collective Action: Theory and Applications, (Ann Arbor: Univer-sity of Michigan Press, 1992).

3. Richard Cornes and Todd Sandler, The Theory of Externalities, Public Goods and Club Goods (Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Todd Sandler and Keith Hartley, The Political Economy of NATO: Past, Present, and into the 21st Century (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

4. “Active Engagement, Modern Defense,” art. 37.5. See “NATO Launches Offensive Against Taliban,” The New York Times, March

6, 2007, and “NATO’s Success and Future Depend on Afghanistan,” Panel Discus-sion with the participation of the NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, Germany’s Minister of Defense Franz Josef Jung, Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs Alexander Downer, and Senator John McCain, 43rd Munich Conference on Security Policy, February 10, 2007, www.securityconference.de/konferenzen/2007/, (accessed July 11, 2007).

6. Renée De Nevers, “NATO’s International Security Role in the Terrorist Era,” International Security 31, no. 4 (Spring 2007), 63.


Conclusions 245

7. General James Jones, “Reflections on NATO,” The Atlantic Council of the United States, December 21, 2006, 4.

8. The Heads of State and Government agreed to invite Albania and Croatia at the Bucharest Summit, while the invitation of Macedonia was tabled until the name dispute with Greece is being settled.

9. Clifford Levy, “Presidential Election in Ukraine Goes to a Runoff,” New York Times, January 17, 2010.

10. “NATO Training Mission in Iraq,” NATO website: www.afsouth.nato.int/, (accessed March 11, 2008).

11. “Dutch Troops End Afghanistan Deployment,” BBC News, August 1, 2010.12. “Police Training Mission in Afghanistan,” Official Webpage of the Dutch

Government, www.government.nl/, (accessed January 26, 2011).13. Richard Harknett, “A World Challenged: Globalization, Sovereignty, and the

Material Capability to Harm,” Fulbright Public Lecture, March 19, 2002, Diplomatic Academy, Vienna, Austria.



247

Appendix: Assessing the Effect of Complementarities

Table A.1. Influence on Per Capita Deployment of Troops Abroad for Fifteen Old NATO Members (1993–2004)

Dependent Variable: Forces Abroad per capita

Variable Coefficient Standard error t-value Sig

Army Equipment per capita -.988 .275 -3.58 .00**Navy per capita 84.16 7.47 11.26 .00**Air Forces per capita 4.22 1.51 2.78 .01*Military Personnel per capita -7.44 3.54 -2.1 .037*Defense Spending (in US Dollars)

per capita-0.04 .023 1.1 .03*

GDP per capita (in US Dollars) per capita

-.41 .7 -.58 .56

Constant 26.05 18.15 3.59 .00*Adjusted R-squared .616F-statistic 41.99** on 6 and 147 degrees of freedom

* Significant at the .05 level.

** Significant at the .001 level.

Sources: The Military Balance (1993–2004), SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, www.sipri.org/contents/milap/milex/mex_database1.html (accessed December 11, 2005).

The data are available in SPSS format and can be accessed online at homepages.uc.edu/~ivanovid/data/NATO15.sav.


Table A.2. Influence on Per Capita Deployment of Troops Abroad for the New NATO Members (1993–2004)



Army Equipment per capita .374 .115 3.27 .002*Navy per capita -25.91 8.7 -2.98 .004*Air Forces per capita -.881 .97 -.91 .37Military Personnel per capita -6.03 2.87 -2.1 .039*Defense Spending (in US Dollars)

per capita0.07 .087 .771 .442


-2.22 2.5 -.89 .378

Constant 72.69 17.6 4.14 .000**Adjusted R-squared .207F-statistic 5.16** on 6 and 89 degrees of freedom



Sources: The Military Balance (1993–2004) and SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, www.sipri.org/con-tents/milap/milex/mex_database1.html, (accessed December 11, 2005).

The data are available in SPSS format and can be accessed online, homepages.uc.edu/~ivanovid/data/NATO10.sav.

Table A.3. Influence on Per Capita Deployment of Troops Abroad for Austria, Finland, Ireland, and Sweden (1993–2004)



Army Equipment per capita -.93 1.00 -.927 .36Navy per capita 57.56 15.99 3.6 .001Air Force per capita -3.37 1.79 -1.89 .067Military Personnel per capita -6.52 7.82 -.833 .41Defense Spending (in US Dollars)

per capita-.146 .13 -1.1 .281


-5.74 2.26 -2.54 .016

Constant 436.22 133.9 3.26 .002Adjusted R-squared .37F-statistic 5.21** on 6 and 37 degrees of freedom



Sources: The Military Balance (1993–2004) and SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, www.sipri.org/contents/milap/milex/mex_database1.html, (accessed December 11, 2005).

The data are available in SPSS format and can be accessed online, homepages.uc.edu/~ivanovid/data/NATO4.sa.


249

Chapters 1 and 3:

Sections reprinted from “The Relevance of Heterogeneous Clubs in Explain-ing Contemporary NATO Politics” by Ivan Dinev Ivanov. Published by the Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 8, no. 4 (December 2010): 337–61. Re-printed by permission of the publisher, Taylor & Francis Ltd.

Acknowledgments



251

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271

Active Endeavour. See Operation Active Endeavour

Afghanistan xiv, xxiv, 27, 47, 52–53, 69, 99, 150n15, 152n54, 165, 177, 184, 205, 221, 226nn1–18, 227nn22–26, 228nn37–39, 229nn41–50, 234, 242; caveats in, 33, 43n98, 216–17; CJTFs and, 120–1, 237; ISAF and, xxiii, xxiv, 35, 49, 60, 64, 81, 146, 172, 188, 191, 203, 204, 206, 207, 212–15, 226; missions in, xx, 11, 34, 55, 59, 61, 73n44, 98–100, 187, 201–2, 205, 208, 211, 236; NATO Training Mission (NTM-A) in, 78, 218–20, 243–44, 245n11; Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) in, 186, 202, 204; PRTs and, 209, 217–18, 220–25, 239; Agenda for Peace, 110n6, 81

Albania, xxiii, xxivn5, 73n47, 81, 88–92, 104–5, 112n38, 141, 145, 152n62, 153n79, 162–6, 172–4, 175, 195n25, 214, 218, 232, 239, 245n8; SEE BRIG and, 137–8

Albright, Madeleine, 110n5, 141, 152n65; Allied Force. See Operation Allied Force

Allied Harmony. See Operation Allied Harmony

Althea. See Operation Althea Amber Fox. See Operation Amber FoxArticle Six of the North Atlantic Treaty,

xx, xxv, 21Atlantic Clause, 97Austria, xxi, 35, 46, 59, 62–65, 68, 141,

185–9, 193, 194n3, 198nn6–64, 214, 233, 235, 245n13, 248

Azerbaijan, 179–80, 183, 194n3, 197n52, 197nn53–4, 214, 240

Balance-of-power theory, 2, 14, 39nn37–9; Balance-of-threat theory, 2, 14

Balance-of-interest theory, 3, 14BALTBAT. See Baltic BattalionBaltic Battalion, xvii, 116, 134,

137, 139, 148, 152n59, 235; air surveillance and, 140; BALTRON and, 140; MAP and, 139; mine-countermeasure and, 140; PfP and, 139

Baltic Defense College, 140BALTNET. See Baltic BattalionBALTRON. See Baltic Battalion

Index


272 Index

Belgium, 97, 106–108, 149n4, 152n66, 153n71, 159, 243; defense spending of, 28–29; Eurocorps and, 146; Operation Iraqi Freedom and, 241

Berlin Plus Agreement, xxiii; 85, 153n69, 243; Agreement on Security of Information and, 143; Declaration on CFSP and, 143; Turkey and, 153n74

Biological and Chemical Defense Stockpile, 130

Blair, Prime-Minister Tony (1997–2007), 90, 141–2

Bosnia. See Bosnia and HerzegovinaBosnia and Herzegovina, xi, xiv, xxi,

xxiii, 27, 34, 49, 79, 81, 83–85, 88, 92, 94, 98–99, 105, 110n12, 110nn14–21, 121–2, 144, 146, 187, 194n6, 201, 205; Bosnian Serbs in, 84; Dayton Peace Accords and, 88; defense reform in, 239; EU police mission in, 85; EUFOR in, 186; Implementation Force for (IFOR), 84–86, 159; Operation Deliberate Force in, 84; Operation Joint Endeavour in, 119; SACEUR and, 159; Srebrenica and, 83–84; Stabilization force (SFOR), 84–86, 105; UNPROFOR, 83

Britain. See United KingdomBrussels Summit, xxii, 42n90, 57, 103,

157, 175; declaration at, 72n36, 114n80, 149n4; CJTFs and, 117

Bucharest Summit, xxiii, xxivn5, 41n78, 172, 174, 175, 176, 192, 245n8

Bulgaria, xxiii, xxivn5, 17, 37, 42n87, 43nn94–95, 66, 67, 74n55, 80, 86, 91, 110nn3–4, 131, 152n62, 152n66, 162–5, 167, 171, 175, 176–8, 183, 194n2, 196nn38–41, 232–4; ISAF and, 214. SEE BRIG and, 137–8, 152nn54–56,

Burden-sharing, xxivn12, 4, 15, 17–20, 53, 69, 72n30, 131, 155, 179, 238–39, 243; Afghanistan and, 207, 209,

212, 216–18; defense spending and, 56–58

Bureaucratic politics, 50–51Bush, President George W. (2000–

2008): xiii, xxivn3, 80, 125, 150n25, 162, 174, 188, 195n17

Canada, 28–29, 33, 61, 141, 218; ISAF and, 121, 204–5, 206, 207, 225, 227n16

CBRN. See Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear teams

Center of Excellence for NBC weapons defense, 130

CFSP. See Common Foreign and Security Policy

Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear defense, xvii, 234; Batallion for, 116, 130–1, 148, 233; event response team for, xxiii, 131–2; force enablers for, 61; laboratory for, 131; protection unit for, 132; Chirac, President Jacques (1995–2007), 141; ESDP and, 142

CJTF. See Combined Joint Task ForcesClinton, President Bill (1993—2000),

32, 80, 91, 160–1, 195n15Collective defense, xv-xvi, xviii-xix,

13, 15, 19–21, 23, 26, 30, 34, 45, 53, 55, 57, 62, 79, 98, 117, 134, 163, 189–90, 236

Collective goods theory, 1, 15, 17–19, 41n69, 217; Mancur Olson and Richard Zeckhauser on, 13, 38n22, 40n59

Collective security, xix, 16–17, 19, 21, 41nn65–66

Combined Joint Task Forces, xvi, xxii, 36, 60–61, 69, 149nn3–5, 149n12, 224–5; non-Article Five missions and, 117, 135; multinational brigade and, 147–9; Task Force Aegis, 121; Task Force Eagle, 119, 121, 149n10

Common Foreign and Security Policy, 142; Amsterdam Treaty and, 142;


Index 273

High representative for, 143; Maastricht treaty and, 142

Complementarities, xii, xv, xix, 45–46, 55, 60, 63, 68, 77–78, 83, 189–90, 217–18, 223, 247; burden-sharing and, 53; collective defense and, 53, 62; coordinated market economies and, 52; cost-sharing and, 53; economic theories of, 52; heterogeneous clubs and, 53, 55, 235; institutionalism and, 54; liberal market economies and, 52; multi-good monopoly and, 52; NATO and, xvi-xvii, 53, 57, 67, 69–70, 179, 202, 239; resource management and, 57, 59

Concordia. See Operation ConcordiaContact Group for the Former

Yugoslavia, 88; Kosovo and, 89–90; Russia and, 89, 92; Talbott-Ahtisaari-Chernomyrdin talks and, 93, 95; United States and, 92

Counter Proliferation Initiative, 101, 103–4, 109, 113nn74–76,

CPI. See Counter Proliferation InitiativeCrisis Management. See crisis

prevention and responseCrisis prevention and response, xxii, 35,

58, 77–79, 87–88, 92, 98–100, 102, 111n28, 122–24, 127, 139, 143, 145, 147, 156, 188–89, 193, 194n7, 233; Kosovo and, 92, 94–95; Operations for, xvii, 100, 108–9, 115–16, 128, 130, 134, 138, 148, 159, 176, 186, 202, 234, 244

Croatia, xxiii, xxivn5, 73n47, 80, 137, 141, 152n62, 166, 170, 173–4, 175, 196n28, 214, 218, 239, 245n8; SEE BRIG and, 138,

Czech Republic, xxii, xxivn5, 42n87, 56, 66, 67, 75nn61–62, 80, 86, 112n56, 131, 152nn62–66, 157, 160–1, 166, 170, 175, 176–8, 195n14, 196nn31–39, 225, 232; CBRN protection unit and, 131–2; non-

proliferation teams and, 131; population of, 29

Dayton Peace Accords, 88, 94; IFOR and, 84; SFOR and, 86

DCI. See Defense Capabilities InitiativeDefense Capabilities Initiative, 18,

123, 150n16, 163; non-Article Five missions and, 122

Deliberate Force. See Operation Deliberate Force

Democratic Peace Theory, xviii -xix, 14; Michael Doyle on, 3, 72n28

Denmark, 33, 112n56, 131, 149n8, 152n66, 153n71, 188–9; BALTBAT and, 139–40; defense spending of, 28–29; ISAF and, 61, 207, 213, 218, 224

Deployable Forces, 47, 118–19Defense Planning Committee, 97,

241Disease Surveillance System, 130DGP. See Senior Defense Group on

ProliferationDPC. See Defense Planning Committee

EAPC. See Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council

EDC. See European Defense Community

EGF. See European Gendarmerie ForceEnduring Freedom. See Operation

Enduring FreedomERRF. See European Rapid Reaction

ForcesESDI. See European Security and

Defense IdentityESDP. See European Security and

Defense PolicyEssential Harvest. See Operation

Essential HarvestEstonia, xiii, xivn5, 67, 80, 149n8,

152nn60–66, 162–3, 164, 166, 167, 171, 175, 176, 232; Afghanistan and, 121, 214; BALTBAT and, 139;


274 Index

cyber security and, 134, 151n50; population of, 29, 66

EU BG. See European BattlegroupsEU Police Mission in Bosnia and

Herzegovina, 85, 219Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council, 67,

137, 159, 162, 194n9Eurocorps, 144, 146–8, 154n87European Battlegroups, 144–45, 147,

152n64, 152n81; Operation Artemis and, 146

European Defense Community, 142, 153n68

European Gendarmerie Force, 144, 146–7, 154n88, 219

European Rapid Reaction Forces, 147–48, 150n21; Helsinki Summit (1999) on, 145; Nice Summit on, 144; Operation Concordia and, 145; Petersberg Tasks and, 144

European Security and Defense Identity, xxii, 117, 120, 149n11

European Security and Defense Policy, 113n60, 143, 153n74, 163; Cologne European Council (1999) and, 144; Helsinki Goals Task Force on, 142; Petersberg Tasks and, 186

Exercise, 126Exercise Strong Resolve, 120

Finland, xxi, 35, 46, 59, 62–65, 68, 141, 149n8, 154nn81–82, 185–6, 187–89, 194n3, 198nn72–73, 233, 235, 248; BALTBAT and, 139–40

Force enablers, xi, 25, 61, 69; interoperable intelligence and, 209; ISR platforms for, 133; network enabled command, control and communications and, 133; strategic and theater lift and, 133; surveillance and reconnaissance platforms and, 133

Force multipliers, 60Force mobility, 57France, 4, 11, 33, 43n95, 47, 58,

86, 88–89, 96–97, 131, 139,

152nn66–68, 193, 207–8, 224, 241; defense spending of, 28–9; counter-proliferation initiative and, 102–3; EGF and, 146; ESDP and, 141–2, 145

Eurocorps and, 146–8; NATO enlargement and, 160, 163, 166, 185; NTM-I and, 78, 106–8, 113n60, 193

FYROM. See Macedonia, the former Yugoslav Republic of.

Georgia, the Republic of, xxiii, 204, 240; NATO enlargement and, 179–82, 185, 194n3, 197nn43–51, 236, 240; Russia and, 6, 19, 181

Germany, xiii, 4, 7–8, 33, 61, 80, 89, 96–7, 102, 131, 139, 152nn66–68, 152n71, 156, 198n82, 241, 243, 244n5; counter-proliferation initiative and, 103; CFSP and, 142–4; defense spending of, 28–9; EU BGs and, 145; Eurocorps and, 146; ISAF and, 203–4, 206, 207, 213, 216, 218, 218, 225, 228n40; NATO enlargement and, 160–1, 163, 166, 185, 195n20; NTM-I and, 78, 106, 108, 113n67

Global Partnerships, xxiii, 21Greece, 17, 29, 43n95, 56, 66, 90–91,

102, 132, 152n66, 153n71, 156, 189, 213, 232; defense spending of, 27–28, 56; FYROM and, 173, 180, 192, 239, 245n8; SEE BRIG and, 138–9

Helsinki Headline Goals, 144; Eurocorps and, 146; EU BGs and, 145; European Gendarmerie Force and, 146; ERRF and, 144; Nice Summit on, 144

Heterogeneous clubs, xv, xx, 15, 22, 23, 24–5, 36, 55, 98, 107, 121, 129, 135, 179, 184, 215, 217, 235, 241, 243

Hill, Ambassador Christopher, 89Homogeneous clubs, xv, 21–22, 23Horseshoe. See Operation Horseshoe.


Index 275

Hungary, xxii, 56, 66, 75n61, 112n56, 152nn62–66, 182, 196n39, 232; engineering corps of, 131; NATO enlargement and, xxivn5, 67, 80, 86, 157, 160–1, 166, 175, 176, 195nn14–15, 240; non-proliferation teams and, 131; peacekeeping and, 138, 225; population of, 29

Iceland, 35, 63; geographic location of, 26, 61–62

ICTY. See International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

IFOR. See Implementation Force for Bosnia and Herzegovina.

IISS. See International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Platforms, 60, 133, 135

Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government, 89–90, 92–93; See also Rambouillet Agreement

International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, 85, 173, 196n28

International Institute for Strategic Studies, 64, 73n50, 227n13

International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, xxiii, xxiv, 24, 33, 49, 60, 64, 78, 138–9, 146, 167, 172, 187–8, 201, 205, 206, 207, 211–16, 218, 226, 227n15, 227n50, 239; burden-sharing and, 209; capabilities of, 191, 202, 217; caveats of, 216; regional commands of, 121, 208, 220; stability operations and, 100, 210, 236–7; United Nations and, 203–4

Interoperability, xiv-xv, xxiii, 18, 69, 57, 59, 79, 93, 151nn48–51, 156, 158–9, 165, 170, 180, 190, 195n14, 196n39, 225, 229n52, 237–8; BALTBAT and, 134, 137, 139–40, 235; CJTFs and, 117–18, 124; command

centers for, 129; force multipliers and, 60; information systems and databases and, 133; integrated operations and, 135; transponders and, 59; intelligence and, 60, 86, 127, 129, 216; ISR Platforms and, 133; reconnaissance and, 60, 133, 136; Surveillance systems and, 60, 96, 129, 133, 135; SEE BRIG and, 138–9, 235

Iraq, xi, xiv, xxi, xxiii, 25, 34, 48, 55, 61, 64, 69, 74n55, 99, 114n85, 114nn90–1, 126, 177, 188, 201, 212, 226n3, 229n45; DPC and, 97, 241; NAC and, 97, 1–6, 108; NATO Training Mission in, 97–79, 81, 102, 106–8, 109, 191, 193, 219, 245n10; Operation Desert Storm in, 91; Operation Iraqi Freedom in, 95–98, 100, 112n54, 113n67, 241; UN Security Council Resolution 1441 and, 95, 112n53

Iraqi Freedom. See Operation Iraqi Freedom

Ireland, xxi, 35, 46, 59, 62–65, 68, 152n64, 185–6, 186, 188–9, 194n3, 198n65, 233, 235, 248

ISAF. See International Security Assistance Force

ISR Platforms. See Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Platforms.

Istanbul Cooperation Initiative, xxiiiIstanbul Framework, 104, 109Istanbul Summit, xxiii, 106, 108, 125,

150n31, 151n46; Active Layered Ballistic Missile Defense Program and, 126; CBRN teams and, 133–4; Final Communiqué of, 126

Italy, 28–9, 86, 96, 102, 141–2, 152n66, 153n71, 160, 195n15; EGF and, 146–7; ISAF and, 203–4, 206, 207, 213, 224–5; Operation Allied Force and, 136; SEE BRIG and, 137–8


276 Index

Joint Endeavour. See Operation Joint Endeavour

KFOR, xxii, 78, 93–4, 167, 186–7; NATO command and, 95; United Nations and, 93

Kosovo, xi, xiv, xx-xxi, 18, 27, 32–34, 49, 55, 59, 79, 81, 91–92, 98–99, 105, 109, 111n33–50, 137, 139, 145–6, 172m 187–88, 191, 201, 205; Democratic League of, 88; Interim Agreement, 95–96; KFOR in, 93–95, 186–7; Kosovar Albanians, 88–93, 104–5; Kosovar Serbs and, 89–90, 92, 94; liberation army of, 94, 105; Military Technical Agreement between NATO and Yugoslavia, 93; Operation Allied Force and, xxii, 90, 93, 136, 186; Serbian political elite and, 90; United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolutions on, 90, 93; verification mission for (KVM), 89

Kosovo Interim Agreement. See Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government

Latvia, xxiii, xxivn5, 66, 67, 149n8, 153n66, 166, 171, 176, 232; BALTBAT and, 139; NATO enlargement and, 80, 152n62, 162–4, 168, 175; population of, 29, 66

Liberal intergovernmentalism, 45; Andrew Moravcsik on, 4, 70n1

Lithuania, xxiii, xxivn5, 66, 67, 149n8, 153n66, 166, 171, 176, 232; BALTBAT and, 139–140; NATO enlargement and, 80, 152n62, 162–4, 168, 175

London Summit, xxii, 241Layne, Christopher, 8, 39n31, 39n35,

39n40, 79–80, 110nn1–2, 193n1Luxembourg, 28–29, 56, 75n60, 108,

153n66; Eurocorps and, 146

Macedonia, the former Yugoslav Republic of, xxi, xxiii, 79, 81, 89, 91, 114n83, 109, 175, 179–80, 192, 195n85, 201; Albanian minority in, 104–5; NATO enlargement and, 162, 166, 172–3, 236, 239, 241, 145n8; Operation Allied Harmony, 144; Ohrid Framework Agreement, 100, 105, 144, 153n79; Operation Amber Fox, 105; Operation Concordia, 144–5; Operation Essential Harvest, 105. SEE BRIG and, 137

Madrid Summit, xxii, 67, 160, 175, 176, 178, 194n13, 228n21

MAP. See Membership Action PlanMembership Action Plan, xi, xxii, 27,

67–68, 139, 156, 162–3, 165, 170, 175, 183–4, 191, 194n6, 218, 232, 234, 240; Adriatic Charter and, 166, 173–4, 232–3; Georgia and, 182; Slovakia and, 177; Ukraine and, 240

Military balance, 36, 64, 66, 73n50, 74n55, 227n13, 247–8

Military effectiveness, 49, 163, 178, 233; Military transformation, 36, 46–47, 49, 56, 58, 60, 67–68, 156, 161, 183, 194n2, 232, 234

Milosevic, Slobodan, 88–90, 92–3, 95Multigood monopoly, xvi, 23, 57Multinational Teams, xvi-xvii, xxiii, 25,

61, 69, 109, 115–116, 131, 133, 135, 140, 148, 225, 234, 237

NACC. See North Atlantic Cooperation Council GSS. See NATO’s Ground Surveillance

NATO’s Ground Surveillance xxiii, 60, 129

NATO Response Force, xi, xvi-xvii, xxiii, 61, 69, 116, 122, 124, 127, 128, 133, 135, 145, 147–8, 150n23, 150nn26–30, 224, 234, 236; counter-terrorism operations and, 124; disaster relief and, 125–6; joint force command of, 124–5; NATO standing


Index 277

naval force for, 124; PCC and, 60, 106, 116, 123

NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan, 78, 217–18, 220, 243n12

NATO Training Mission in Iraq, 78–79, 81, 100, 106, 109, 114n91, 193, 219, 145n10; Riga Summit and, 107–8

NATO’s Defense Planning Committee, 97, 241

NATO Security Investment Program, 133, 169

NATO’s Senior Political-Military Group on Proliferation, 103

NATO’s 1991 Strategic Concept, xxiiNATO’s 1999 Strategic Concept,

xxii, 151nn37–39, 228n21; non-proliferation and, 104, 130

NATO’s 2010 Strategic Concept, xiii, xx, xxii, xxiv, 104, 135, 231, 236, 244n1

Netherlands, 33, 121, 131, 153n66, 153n71, 189, 205, 207, 213, 218, 224–5, 229n52, 242; defense spending of, 28–9; EGF and, 146–7; NRF and, 125

Network Enabled Capabilities, xxiii, 133New NATO allies, 26, 35, 46, 64–65,

289, 293, 232. See also Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, FYR of Macedonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, NATO enlargement, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia

North Atlantic Cooperation Council, xxii, 67, 151n35, 159

North Atlantic Treaty, xiv, xx, xxivn7, 21, 40nn48–49, 41n77, 194n10; Article Five of, 10, 31, 34, 78, 97–8, 155; Article Six of, xxvn25, 21

Norway, 28–29, 61, 63, 131, 141, 149n8, 188–9, 213, 224–5; Norwegian military, 82–3

NRF. See NATO Response ForceNSIP. See NATO Security Investment

Program

NTM-A. See NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan

NTM-I. See NATO Training Mission in Iraq

Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Analytical Laboratory, 130–1

Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Event Response Team, 131, 165

Nuclear non-proliferation treaty, 101, 103

Obama, President Barack (2009—), xiii-xiv, xivn1, 201, 214–15, 220, 228n32, 242

Ohrid Agreement, 100, 105, 144, 153n79

Old NATO allies, 35, 42n87, 46, 63, 65, 225. See also Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Span, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States

Olson, Mancur, xxivn12, 6, 13, 38n22, 40n59, 41nn68–70

Omni-alignment, 3, 14Omni-balancing 3, 14OOTW. See Operations other than warOperation Active Endeavour, 75n6, 78Operation Allied Force, xxii, 18, 41n71,

90, 95, 122, 186interoperability and, 93, 136; sorties

and, 136–7Operation Allied Harmony, 105, 144Operation Althea, 85, 111n21Operation Amber Fox, 78, 105Operation Concordia, 105, 144–5Operation Deliberate Force, 84Operation Enduring Freedom, 186, 202,

205, 211, 216Operation Essential Harvest, 78, 105Operation Horseshoe, 90, 92Operation Iraqi Freedom, 95, 100, 107,

240Operation Joint Endeavour, 119, 149n9


278 Index

Operations other than war, 47–48, 82Organization for Security and

Cooperation in Europe, 84, 89, 117, 119, 147, 188

Organizational theory, 50–51, 54–55, 58, 120, 127, 138, 156, 162, 174–7, 179, 191, 194n2, 224, 229n41; See also, Organizational perspective, Organizational interests, Organizational resistance

OSCE. See Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe

PARP. See Planning and Review Process

Partnership for Peace, xi, xxii-xxiii, 21, 27, 67, 137, 139, 153n74, 156–62, 165, 175–7, 180, 182–3, 186, 194n6, 206, 218

PCC. See Prague Capabilities Commitment

Peacekeeping, xi, xiv, xvii, xxii, 35, 36, 53–54, 57, 61–62, 65–66, 68, 77–78, 87–88, 90, 94, 98–100, 102, 108, 110n9, 111n22, 114n84, 156, 176, 185, 189, 194n7, 198n75, 202, 232–33, 235, 244; Bosnia and, 67, 84–5, 187; CJTF and, 60, 116–19, 121, 234; EU and, 143–4, 146, 148, 153n76, 186, 188; first generation of, 83, 115; horizontal evolution of, 77, 82–83; ISAF and, 138, 204, 205, 206, 214, 217–18, 225, 237; non-proliferation and, 130; NRF and, 122–5; peace agreements and, 82, 117; PfP and, 156, 158–61; SSTR and, 128; third generation of, 83, 115; UN and, 62, 64, 81, 188; vertical evolution of, 77, 87, 108–9, 123, 127, 135

Petersberg Tasks, 144, 153nn76–77, 186

PfP. See Partnership for PeacePlanning and Review Process, 67, 158,

162

Poland, xxii, xxivn5, 43n94, 66, 67, 80, 112n56, 131, 149n8, 152n62, 168, 175, 176, 196n39, 214, 225, 232; defense spending of, 42n87; NATO enlargement and, 157, 160–2, 166, 195n14, 195n17; Population of, 29, 56

Portugal, xii, xxiv, 29, 86, 112n56, 131, 153n66, 153n71, 189, 213, 232; defense spending of, 28, 94n42, 66; EGF and, 147

Prague Capabilities Commitment, xxiii, 60, 104, 115, 135, 150n18, 149, 150nn24–25; airlift and, 125–7, 133; Allied Command Transformation and, 123–5; CBRN defense, 116, 130; NRF and, 123, 148; PGMs and, 125; WMDs and, 130; See also Prague Summit

PPP. See Purchasing Power Parities.Purchasing Power Parities, 62, 64, 66,

182; defense spending in, 57

Racak, 89Rambouillet Agreement. See Interim

Agreement for Peace and Self-Government.

Rapid Reaction Forces, 36; EU rapid reaction forces, 144–8, 150n21; NATO Response Force, xvi, 69, 116, 122–8, 135

Realism, 6, 8, 50; defensive, 7, 14; offensive, 7

Revolution in Military Affairs, 47Riga Summit, xxiii, 108, 151n32, 164

182, 216; intelligence sharing and, 127; interoperability and, 127; global partnerships and, 207; NRF and, 126

Rogovo, 89RMA. See Revolution in Military

AffairsRomania, xxiii, xxivn3, xxivn5, 43n94,

66, 74n55, 80, 86, 94, 110nn3–4, 153n66, 169, 171, 176, 178, 182, 204, 206, 232; alpine troops and,


Index 279

131; NATO enlargement and, 80, 152n62, 158, 160, 162, 164–5, 175, 240; population of, 29, 67; SEE BRIG and, 131, 137–8, 152n54

Rome Summit, xix, xxii, 101, 113n72Rumsfeld, Donald, 123, 134, 152n54Russia, xxii, 8, 16, 21, 23, 96, 169,

184, 192, 240; Kosovo and, 88–90, 92–95; NATO enlargement and, 160, 163–5, 167, 169, 185, 195n22; NATO-Russia partnerships, 84, 158–9, 194n7; Russia-Georgia Relations, 19, 181–2, 197nn44–50; UNPROFOR, 84, 119, 149n8

Rwanda, 47–48, 119, 142

SACEUR. See Supreme Allied Commander Europe

Scheffer, Jaap de Hoop, 97, 26, 164, 195n23, 244n5

Security communities, xix, 12, 54SEDM. See Southeast European

Defense Ministerial Process. SEE BRIG. See Southeast European

BrigadeSenior Defense Group on Proliferation,

103Senior Political-Military Group on

Proliferation, 103Serbia, xxiii, 33, 49, 145, 182–3; Bosnia

and, 83–4; Kosovo and, 49, 88–95; PfP and, 194n6, 239; Operation Allied Force and, 136; See also Yugoslavia, Federal Republic of

SGP. See Senior Political-Military Group on Proliferation

SIPRI. See Stockholm Peace Research Institute

SHAPE. See Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe

Slovakia, xxiii, xxivn5, 56, 66, 67, 75nn61–2, 94, 165, 170, 171, 176–8, 182–3, 196n31, 232, 234; CBRN protection unit and, 131; NATO enlargement and, 80, 162, 164,

175, 240; population of, 56, 152nn62–66

Slovenia, xxiii, xxivn5, 42n94, 66, 67, 75n61, 131, 165–6, 170, 171, 176, 232, 240; NATO enlargement and, 32, 43n97, 80, 152nn62–66, 160–2, 164, 175, 194nn12–15; population of, 29; SEE BRIG and, 137–8

Solana, Javier, 90Southeast European Brigade, 134, 139–

40, 148–9, 235; crisis management and, 138; EAPC and, 137; ISAF and, 138; peacekeeping and, 134, 138–9; SEDM and, 137–8

Southeast European Defense Ministerial Process, 137, 138, 152n58

Soviet Union, xiii, 110n1, 129, 187, 211; break-up of, 181, 196n32; former, 157, 204; threat from, xi, 7, 19, 50, 53, 139

Spain, 61, 86, 94, 96, 102, 152n66, 153n71, 156, 161, 204; CBRN teams and, 131; defense spending of, 29; EGF and, 146–7; ISAF and, 206, 207, 213

SSTR Operations. See stability operations

Stabilization, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction Operations, 98–99, 128. See also stability operations

Stability operations, 77, 98–101, 113nn62–65, 115–16, 134, 140, 186, 189, 202, 237, 244; CBRN teams, xvii, 61, 116, 130, 234; CJTFs, xvii, 234; EU and, 143, 148; FYROM and, 108; NTM-I, 81, 107–8

Steadfast Jaguar. Exercise Stockholm Peace Research Institute, 36,

64, 74nn53–55, 247, 248Strasbourg/Kehl Summit, xiii, xxiii, 216,

219Strong Resolve. See Exercise Strong

Resolve Supreme Allied Commander Europe,

97, 106, 126, 159, 238


280 Index

Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, 50, 150n13

Sweden, xxi, 35, 46, 59, 62–65, 68, 149n8, 185–6, 187–9, 193, 194n3, 198n69, 214, 233, 235, 248; BALTBAT and, 139–40

Transponders, 59Turkey, 42n87, 43n95, 63, 66, 96–97,

102, 131, 141, 149n8, 153n74, 156, 183, 232; defense spending, 27–29; ISAF and, 213, 224–25, 228n26; SEE BRIG and, 137–8

Ukraine, xxii, 101, 138, 245n9; ISAF and, 108, 214; NATO enlargement and, 179, 180, 184–5, 194n3, 240; NATO partnerships with, 158–9, 184, 194n8, 197nn55–56

United Kingdom, 4, 18, 33, 58, 113n60, 121, 136, 141–2, 189; defense spending, 27–29; ESDP and, 145, 152nn64–68, 163; ISAF and, 213, 221, 230; NATO enlargement and, 160, 166, 178; WMDs and, 96, 102–3; See also Britain

United Nations, xx, 6, 81, 94, 95, 110nn7–9, 111n32, 117, 173, 203, 221; Security Council of, 32, 83, 98, 112n53

United Nations Protection Force, 83–84, 119; See also UNPROFOR

United States, xv, xvii-xviii, 12, 19, 24, 30, 37, 49, 54, 71n11, 73n49, 83, 125, 128, 133, 141, 187, 221, 234, 243; Afghanistan and, 121, 203, 206, 209, 211–12, 215, 217, 218, 225–6, 229n45, 237, 238; alliances and, 4, 6, 18, 33, 47, 120,

191, 242; BALTBAT and, 139–40, 235; defense spending of, 27–29, 55; Europe and, 80, 96–97, 105–8, 112n56, 127, 186, 205, 241; KFOR and, 93, 95; NATO enlargement and, 155–6, 160, 166, 174, 178, 192; peacekeeping and, 82, 188; SEE BRIG and, 137, 235; SFOR/IFOR and, 86, 119, 149n8; WMDs and, 96, 101–3, 132

UNPROFOR. See United Nations Protection Force

Visegrad countries, xxii, xxiv, 152n62, 160–1, 175, 178, 184, 232; See also Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia.

Washington Summit, xxii, 122, 132, 142, 162, 175, 195n16

Weapons of Mass Destruction, xxiii, 100–103, 113n74, 129–30

West European Union, 117, 120WEU. See West European Union.WMD. See Weapons of Mass

DestructionWarsaw Pact, 5, 53, 57, 67, 176,

186. See also Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO)

Yugoslavia, Federal Republic of, xiv, xix, 32, 47, 48–49, 59–60, 88, 104–5, 109, 110n15, 119, 137, 140, 142, 182, 194n7, 237; International Criminal Tribunal for, 85, 173, 196n28; Operation Allied Force in, 18, 33, 90, 93, 123, 136; The contact group for, 88, 89; See also Serbia


281

Dr. Ivan Dinev Ivanov is visiting assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati. His research interests include alliance politics, NATO’s transfor-mation, international security, European politics and transatlantic relations; international organization and inter-governmental relations. He has published extensively on these topics in The Journal of Transatlantic Studies, Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Millennium Journal of International Studies, Contemporary Security Policy, and other publications. Dr. Ivanov has also taught classes in the areas of International Relations and European Politics at Muskingum University in New Concord, Ohio and Georgetown College in Kentucky. He is an active member of American Political Science Association and the International Studies Association where he has presented some of his work. Dr. Ivanov holds Masters’ degrees from Central European University in Budapest, Hungary and the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna, Austria, and holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Cincinnati.

About the Author

