Why NATO, however ambiguous its role, is here to stay
By David G. Haglund
Alliances represent the most long-lived form of institutionalized security and defence cooperation that contemporary international states have ever known. In fact, they are even older than these states themselves — which, as a system of government, likely date back to 1648, in the immediate aftermath of the cataclysmic Thirty Years’ War. No one can really say when the first alliances between discrete political entities sprang up, but we certainly know that Thucydides had a central place for them in his account of the Peloponnesian War back in the 5th Century BC.
More important, however, than trying to date the origins of those numerous alliances that have dotted the history of our “own” system from the mid 17th Century to the present, is the business of trying to say something useful about why alliances form, and how they function. In this essay, I pose four key questions regarding alliances, asking: first, what alliances are; second, how they differ from other security arrangements; third, whether they are, from the ethical perspective, positive, negative, or neutral aspects of global politics; and fourth, how and why they evolve, and what this tells us about their life expectancy. I will centre my analysis around the premier alliance of our time, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), with reflections on other collective-defence arrangements into which Canada and its partners have entered.
Probably the best, or at least the most elegant, definition has been supplied by Harvard Professor Stephen M. Walt, who (in The Origins of Alliances, 1987) wrote: “I define alliance as a formal or informal relationship of security cooperation between two or more sovereign states. This definition assumes some level of commitment and an exchange of benefits for both parties…” In the nature of things, there is much room for nuance insofar as the obligations and benefits of membership are concerned, but the core thought contained in the definition is that allies sense that something out there, in the international system, threatens them, and that they agree to pool their resources as a means of enabling them better to deter or defend against that apprehended threat. Theirs is the logic limned so appropriately in this quatrain from Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem, The Hunting of the Snark:
“But the valley grew narrow and narrower still,
And the evening got darker and colder,
Till (merely from nervousness, not from goodwill)
They marched along shoulder to shoulder.”
In short, the logic of collective defence is, at the outset, a logic of fear and, just as with the Butcher and the Beaver of Carroll’s poem, states forming alliances do so because they seek the safety that numbers might provide against a tangible threat. The manner in which they choose to pool their resources might be decided by means of a treaty (for example, the Washington treaty of 1949 through which the U.S., Canada, and 10 European countries created NATO), or it can come about through less formal mechanisms, such as the agreements and arrangements that brought into existence, in August 1940, the Canada-U.S. alliance, which remains America’s oldest unbroken alliance and Canada’s most important one. Whether treaty-created or not, there is an expectation that should collective action be required of an alliance, the members’ response will resemble that of Athos, Portos and Aramis — the three musketeers of Alexandre Dumas — whose watchword was “all for one, and one for all.” The reality is otherwise, with the solidarity pledge getting regularly honoured more in the breach than in the observance.
To put limits on the concept of alliance, one can distinguish it from a related form of security and defence cooperation with which it is sometimes confused: the significant, albeit sometimes poorly respected, conceptual boundary separating collective-defence arrangements from collective-security ones. Usually, it is simply sloppiness and not deliberate intent that accounts for the boundary transgressions — as, for instance, when NATO is said to have found for itself a collective-security vocation after the Cold War. Those who make such assertions fail to notice how profoundly collective security differs in inspiration from collective defence — a difference that shows up most starkly when we examine the charter mandates of the two premier organizations associated with these respective logics, the United Nations (for collective security) and NATO (for collective defence).
The UN, just like its predecessor organization, the League of Nations, was founded on a wonderful vision, of preserving peace through the concerted efforts of a collectivity seized of its responsibilities to exercise vigilance against interstate aggression, no matter where or when it might rear its ugly head. This vision was enshrined in the League’s covenant, and in the UN’s charter. It is a vision much nobler than the one that inspires collective defence, and its operating principle is certainly a different one — so different that it stands as the antithesis of the very “balance of power” mechanisms that are part and parcel of the concept of an alliance.
Unlike collective defence, collective security presupposes that we cannot know in advance the identity of challengers to the international status quo (taken to mean those states that would violate the territorial integrity of member-states by invasion). We can only be guided by the conviction that if all “peace-loving” states agree to take stern measures (including military as well as economic measures) against international scofflaws, then very soon there will be no more scofflaws. For not only will actual aggressors find their aggressions undone by the will of the community, but would-be aggressors would see their malignant designs expire on the drawing-board, as they will have been deterred by the evidence of swift and sure retribution against those who did dare to aggress, and paid the price for their daring.
Needless to say, because it has such an ambitious agenda, collective security faces a much tougher challenge than collective defence in demonstrating its effectiveness. For it to work, a couple of essential conditions must be in place. There must first be an identification of the guilty party, for unless one knows against which international miscreant(s) counter-measures are required, it is impossible to mobilize them. The problem here is that most wars originate in such confusing circumstances that it is no easy matter, even with the benefit of hindsight, to figure out just who or what actually “caused” them. For collective security to work, there can be no waiting upon hindsight, given that counter-action must come swiftly if it is to come at all. The collective-defence logic of alliances, on the other hand, is much simpler to put into operation, since the adversary has been identified from the outset: it was the state or group of states that provided, after all, the alliance’s raison d’être.
No less important is a second consideration, regarding the stakes involved in threats to peace. Collective-security logic rests on an assumption that states act out of a sense of “enlightened self-interest,” such that they understand why they should involve themselves in conflicts that may erupt in parts of the world that might otherwise possess little or no strategic importance to them. Collective defence, on the other hand, is intended to safeguard core, and immediately apparent (some say “vital”) interests — namely the protection of the territorial integrity of one’s own group, not some hypothesized “international community.” The difference is captured in Mark Twain’s quip that while anyone worth their salt might fight to defend their own homes, no one has yet to encounter someone willing to risk life and limb for the sake of their boarding house.
Our third question concerns the ethical justification of alliances. It might seem, given what was said above, that as the decks are stacked against collective-security arrangements, which pretty much get adjudged to be feckless a priori, alliances must therefore inherit by default the moral high ground, if only because they can show at least some capacity for being able to function. By comparison, the record of collective security in operation under the League was abysmal, and not much improvement has been recorded during the six-plus decades of the UN’s existence.
It takes nothing away from the policy successes of certain alliances to recall that the balance-of-power system possesses a rather severe downside of its own, and that the numerous collective-defence arrangements that were made and unmade during that long period of time known as the “era of multipolarity” — i.e., the period spanning 1648 and 1945 — correlated with a system that was nothing if not war-prone. Nor can it be denied that it was disgust with both the balance-of-power and the alliances it spawned that gave rise, albeit only for a brief time, to the dream of escaping the war trap through collective security in the aftermath of the two world wars of the 20th Century.
So what can we say about the ethical merits of alliances, as a means of maintaining peace? We can only say that the record is mixed: It is an easy matter to establish a strong correlation between alliances and great-power war — or at least it was easy so to do during the era of multipolarity — thus it is not hard to equate alliances with death and destruction. Lately, though, the experts seem to have become convinced that the peril of great-power war is long in the past; yet, to the surprise of some, there is little evidence that the end of alliance can be expected any time soon.
NATO keeps on going, defying many prophesies of impending demise. Bilateral defence and security ties abound in the contemporary system. Many of these link the U.S. with lesser partners (for example, its alliances with Japan and Israel, both dating from the 1960s), but some also involve such other countries as Russia (with its 1992 pact, misleadingly called the Collective Security Treaty Organization, linking it to Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan). Therefore, while it may be an easy matter to implicate alliances in conflicts, including great-power conflicts in days gone by, it is much more difficult a thing to imagine a world without alliances, or even to speculate that a world without alliances must be a peaceful world.
In the end, the ethical merits of alliances, in general, get assessed against the record of the one alliance that seems to matter so much more than all of the others put together, and that, of course, is NATO. The thinking is that if NATO is doing some good, then alliances cannot be said to be all bad. So, the fourth and final question assesses the manner in which this particular alliance has evolved. Earlier, I referred to the confusion that has often attended discussions of NATO activities after the ending of the Cold War — activities that in the judgment of some observers constituted proof that NATO’s purpose had now become collective security. There are reasons for the confusion, even if not good ones. Some who mistake today’s NATO for a collective-security organization might suffer not from lack of memory but from remembering too much, for they would be recalling that the Declaration of the United Nations (January 1, 1942 ) was emphatically a pronouncement of alliance — of collective defence — pitting our side (Canada, the U.S., Britain, the Soviet Union, and myriad other partners) against their side (Germany, Japan, Italy and several lesser states). But this UN was radically different in purpose from the UN that emerged in October 1945.
Others who commit the fallacy of deeming NATO to be a collective-security organization reason, not incorrectly, that much of what the Western alliance has actually been doing in recent decades, starting with its involvement in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and continuing today (for instance, in Libya this past year), resembles missions that the UN itself promotes. Indeed, at times it looks as if the UN has contracted out some of its heaviest lifting to NATO.
Ergo, conclude these observers, if NATO does the things that the collective-security organization itself does (or wishes to see done), then the alliance must also have been transformed into a collective-security organization. The problem with this reasoning is that what the UN does, and what it has been doing almost exclusively since its inception, is something quite different from collective security, a dream that died once Cold War rivalries sundered the prospect of unity on the Security Council, and a dream that only once since then (in 1991 with the war to chase Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait) was allowed to flicker briefly.
Whatever we choose to call the security endeavours of the UN — preventative diplomacy and peacekeeping were, for a time, the names of choice, and later these became human security and humanitarian intervention — the endeavours are far removed from the logic of collective security. You could almost say they turn on its head that very logic, for collective security was envisioned as a means of safeguarding the sovereign integrity of the member-states, while humanitarian intervention, especially in its current guise as a “responsibility to protect,” presupposes that it might be necessary to use force to violate the sovereignty of member-states. That NATO itself may be undertaking similar missions to the UN is, therefore, absolutely no basis for claiming it has given itself over to collective security.
Exactly what, then, has NATO been doing ever since the demise of the adversary that had been required for it to have come into existence — an adversary, moreover, whose disappearance many believed, we now know how wrongly, would lead to NATO’s disappearance as well? For starters, it never has renounced its collective-defence mandate, any more than the UN has abandoned its mandate of collective security. The organizations are similar in another, more relevant, way: They are each involved in undertakings that are only loosely deducible (if that) from those charter mandates.
If we can accept that NATO’s primary function during the Cold War was to protect members from the prospect of Soviet territorial aggression against them, we surely have to acknowledge that ever since the disappearance of the USSR this function has ceased to make any sense. Nor would simply replacing the Soviet Union with Russia really do much to account for the survivability of the alliance, even if it is true that some of NATO’s current 28 members are primarily worried about Russia when they scan their security horizons. But this applies to only a small minority — four states in particular (the three Baltic republics and Poland); as for the rest, when they think of how NATO relates to their respective national interests, they produce a variety of responses, all of which have little or nothing to do with Russia.
Indeed, if we had to generalize, the safest thing to claim about the post-Cold War activity of this regional security organization is that it has busied itself with two primary functions, neither of which can be even remotely subsumed under a collective-security or a collective-defence mandate. The first of these, put into practice through NATO’s partnership and enlargement initiatives from the early 1990s to the present, can be classified under the rubric “cooperative security,” or perhaps even better can be expressed as an injunction to spread the “democratic zone of peace” by enhancing the prospects of liberal-democratic institutions taking root in newly democratizing member-states. Often this process is accompanied by initiatives aimed at “security sector reform” in the new and aspirant member-states.
The second function, glimpsed initially first in Bosnia in 1995 and then four years later in Kosovo, concerns conflict management, encapsulated more and more under the heading of “stabilization” operations. This applies, in spades, to NATO’s most ambitious commitment of the past two decades, the mission in Afghanistan, but it can also be discerned in the recently concluded air operations in Libya.
Does this mean that there is nothing left to the old garment of collective defence, and that Athos, Portos and Aramis have little to say about today’s alliance? Yes, more or less; for a bit like nostalgia, collective defence is not what it used to be. In fact, it never was what some people think it was, and this for two reasons. First, there has been an unfortunate tendency for interpreters of NATO’s collective-defence mandate, encapsulated in the Washington treaty’s famous Article 5, to read too much into the solidarity commitment. I would be a rich professor indeed if I had a nickel for every time I have heard it remarked that Article 5 obliges member-states to take military reprisals against anyone who dares to attack an ally. The article does not do this. Some allies, for instance Iceland, do not even have a military; others, as in the majority, are keen on nothing so much as limiting the liability that might be theirs if they really did have to go to war whenever an ally happened to be under attack. What Article 5 actually commits each ally to do is to “tak[e] forthwith, individually, and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force.” In other words, allies may use military force to support an attacked ally, but they do not have to. They can do whatever they deem it best to do, including hardly anything at all.
In any event, it bears stressing that Article 5 has been invoked a grand total of once in the alliance’s 63-year history, following the attacks of 9/11, and that the American response to this declaration of solidarity was, to put it mildly, one of restrained gratitude, a “thanks, but no thanks” reaction on the part of a government that was still smarting from the negative “lessons learned” regarding the NATO (aka committee) way of war — lessons gleaned from the Kosovo war two years earlier. The bad news here may be that the solidarity of allies is less than total. (If it were more genuine and widespread, NATO would have long ago ceased to worry about the problem of “burden sharing”.) The good news is that it is as unlikely as it has always been that allies will be “entrapped” into going to war because one (or more) of their NATO partners happens to be fighting — unless, of course, they wish to join their ally in combat. This simply means that NATO is a coalition of the willing, not of the dragooned.
As such, this particular alliance shows little sign of ending, for what it would take to close the book on NATO’s existence would be a willingness of the membership to fold it up. Despite a provision in the Washington Treaty (Article 13) specifying the means by which a member can leave the alliance, no state has ever thought of decamping, not even France in 1966 when it (temporarily) withdrew from the integrated military command of the alliance but not from the alliance itself. Just the reverse: More states have wanted to join. Barring an unlikely American defection from NATO, it is difficult to the point of being impossible to imagine this alliance disappearing.
David Haglund is a professor of political studies at Queen’s University in Kingston. His most recent books are The North Atlantic Triangle Revisited: Canadian Grand Strategy at Century’s End (2000); and Over Here and Over There: Canada-U.S. Defence Cooperation in an Era of Interoperability (2001).
