Nato In Search Of A Vision

As the NATO Alliance enters its seventh decade, it finds itself involved in an array of military missions ranging from Afghanistan to Kosovo to Sudan. It also stands at the center of a host of regional and global partnerships. Yet, NATO has still to articulate a grand strategic vision designed to determine how, when, and where its capabilities should be used, the values underpinning its new missions, and its relationship to other international actors such as the European Union and the United Nations. The drafting of a new strategic concept, begun during NATO’s 60th anniversary summit, presents an opportunity to shape a new transatlantic vision that is anchored in the liberal democratic principles so crucial to NATO’s successes during its Cold War years. Furthermore, that vision should be focused on equipping the Alliance to anticipate and address the increasingly global and less predictable threats of the post-9/11 world. This volume brings together scholars and policy experts from both sides of the Atlantic to examine the key issues that NATO must address in formulating a new strategic vision. With thoughtful and reasoned analysis, it offers both an assessment of NATO’s recent evolution and an analysis of where the Alliance must go if it is to remain relevant in the twenty-first century.

Since the Libya War in 2011 it has been widely suggested that NATO's role in US security policy has diminished, because Washington gives Europe less and Asia more strategic priority (a tendency that is reinforced by budget restraints), and because the US is no longer interested in always leading NATO activities that mainly concern European conditions. Several experts have suggested that the US expect that the European security challenges primarily should be handled by NATO's European allies in a new transatlantic burden sharing model, and that the US role should principally be Article V-focused. This book investigates to what extent these claims are valid, and what consequences they may have for European and international security.

Transforming NATO: New Allies, Missions, and Capabilities, by Ivan Dinev Ivanov, examines the three dimensions of NATO’s transformation since the end of the Cold War: the addition of a dozen new allies; the undertaking of new missions such as peacekeeping, crisis response, and stabilization; and the development of new capabilities to implement these missions. The book explains these processes through two mutually reinforcing frameworks: club goods theory and the concept of complementarities. NATO can be viewed as a diverse, heterogeneous club of nations providing collective defense to its members, who, in turn, combine their military resources in a way that enables them to optimize the Alliance’s capabilities needed for overseas operations. Transforming NATO makes a number of theoretical contributions. First, it offers new insights into understanding how heterogeneous clubs operate. Second, it introduces a novel concept, that of complementarities. Finally, it re-evaluates the relevance of club goods theory as a framework for studying contemporary international security. These conceptual foundations apply to areas well beyond NATO. They provide useful insights into understanding the operation of transatlantic relations, alliance politics, anda broader set of international coalitions and partnerships.

The enlargement of European-based organisations has reached a near terminal point. The Council of Europe and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) currently cover virtually all states of Europe (Belarus still remains excluded from the first of these). The EU and NATO have experienced extensive processes of enlargement and the scope for continuing enlargement is now limited largely to the Balkans and the European neutrals. Given this state of affairs it is now pertinent to think of a Europe characterised not by enlargement but by post-enlargement.In International Relations (IR) conceptual thinking on Europe (as opposed just to the EU) has been undertaken using a range of scholarly tools. In this volume, attention to Europe proceeds from English School (ES) thinking, and specifically its three-fold distinction between international system, international society and world society. It is the international society element (the development/institutionalisation of shared interests and identities buttressed by rules and norms) which signifies in their most concrete form different patterns of interaction or integration between states.This book will be of interest to international relations scholars, as well as practitioners within the European Union and other intergovernmental institutions.It was published as a special issue of the Journal of European Integration.

“Roger Kanet, a respected expert on the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, has assembled a stellar team of scholars, from Russia and the West, to examine Russia’s policy toward Europe. The individual chapters offer well-researched, provocative, and contrasting assessments, using theoretical frameworks ranging from realism to constructivism. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and support for the rebellion in Ukraine’s east have ignited a heated debate over the motivations and objectives shaping Russian policy in Europe. That makes this superb volume particularly timely.” –Rajan Menon, Anne and Bernard Spitzer Chair in Political Science, The City College of New York, USA This edited collection examines the factors that have contributed to the growing conflict in Eurasia between the Russian Federation and the European Union and the United States. The individual chapters, written by authors with different national backgrounds, highlight the factors that have contributed to the emerging competition between the two sides that has culminated in the confrontation over Ukraine and Syria. It also deals with questions concerning the possible emergence of a new security environment in Europe and Eurasia.

Formulating a strategy involves complex interactions between politicians, strategic commanders and generals in the field. The authors explore the strategic decisions made during NATO missions in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Afghanistan, Somalia and Libya.

Decolonial Politics in European Peripheries: Redefining Progressiveness, Coloniality and Transition Efforts is a timely contribution to the project of theorizing "Europe" through decolonial perspectives on the Left, as the European and global crisis has prompted new reflections on what it means to sit still at the European "peripheries". The book explores how the joint scholarship efforts of postcolonial and postsocialist scholars might come up with better-grounded and more detailed theoretical and methodological insights into the process of globalization, and subsequent peripheralization, if framed under a progressive and leftist perspective. The authors, many from the South-East Europe region, use a variety of analytical lenses to demonstrate how the nexus of postcolonial, postsocialist area studies and progressive developmental political thought could inspire changes in the future which are in dissonance with neoliberal and neoconservative capitalism. As the side effects of global capitalism continue to accelerate, scholars and activists in the postsocialist periphery are increasingly turning to the concept of decoloniality in the hope it might offer more options on how to begin to build up their framework. This book offers numerous examples of how decolonial theory can be applied to activist work in the fight against austerity and neo-liberalization, as well as examples of how decolonial critique can be mobilized to contest processes of Europeanization and Euro-Atlantic integration. This book will intrigue students and scholars of critical social scholarship in general, postsocialism, postcolonialism, critiques of right populism and the rise of white nationalism in Europe, as well as those studying the regions of South-Eastern Europe and Eurasia more generally. It will also interest activists, organizers, decision-makers, policy analysts, and leftists, both in the region and internationally.

A fifth edition of this book is now available. This elegantly written and comprehensive book is the only text that combines a unified set of both country case studies with sustained analysis of the European Union. The contributors, an authoritative group of Americans and Europeans, explore the new Europe—west and east—using intertwining themes of domestic politics, European integration, and European security. In this fourth edition, all existing chapters have been thoroughly revised and updated, and completely new chapters have been added on France, Italy, Poland, the global economic crisis, economic governance, law and politics, migration, and security. Cosmopolitan in outlook, realistic in analysis, this unique text will lead readers toward a coherent view of Europe today.