NATO, Kosovo and Crisis Management

NATO, Kosovo

and Crisis Management:

The Transition from Collective Defence

to Collective Security

by Donald Alexander Neill

2nd Edition (July 2012)

© Copyright Donald A. Neill

ISBN 978-0-9881421-4-5 (Smashwords Ed.)

License Notes

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http://diehardempiricist.blogspot.ca/

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Contents

Abstract

Foreword

INTRODUCTION

ARGUMENT

I – Crisis Management Organizations

II – NATO Adaptation

III – The Kosovo Crisis

ANALYSIS

IV – Force Transformation

V – European Integration

VI – Entangling Russia

VII – Unity and Cohesion

CONCLUSION

Post-Script

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Notes

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Abstract

This study examines the changes implemented in the course of NATO’s self-imposed process of transformation during the 1990s in order to determine whether they improved NATO’s ability to respond to the types of crises the Allies expected to face in the post-Cold War security environment. Years of intramural analysis and debate resulted in four distinct trends in institutional adaptation: transforming the Alliance’s operational forces and command structures to improve their ability to respond to international security crises; integrating former Soviet satellites into the European security architecture; engaging Russia in a mutually beneficial dialogue; and maintaining NATO’s political unity and cohesiveness in the face of new challenges. The efficacy of this process of transformation was tested when, during the Kosovo Crisis of 1998-99, NATO went to war for the first time in its fifty-year history.

In the course of this book I examine political-strategic decision making in the North Atlantic Alliance in terms of Barnard’s theory of organization, and in the context of the four transformation trends outlined above. The argument presented herein concludes that while NATO’s actions in Kosovo were effective in that the Allies’ stated aims were accomplished, they were inefficient in that the cost in internal discord and damage to NATO’s external relationships and credibility significantly degraded NATO’s ability to manage future crises. This study suggests that while consensus-based decision making at the political-strategic level is the cornerstone of NATO’s political unity, it is also its Achilles heel because it not only impedes efforts to take effective, efficient action in response to time-sensitive crises, but also prevents NATO from modifying its key internal decision making mechanism – the consensus principle itself.

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Foreword

My sincere thanks to the University of Kent at Brussels and the Brussels School of International Studies under the spirited leadership of my supervisor, Dr. Jarrod Wiener, for enabling me to undertake a doctoral programme while remaining a uniformed member of the Canadian Forces. The opportunities for scholarship for military personnel are few and far between, and flexibility and patience on the part of academic institutions and their professorial staff are therefore doubly appreciated – especially by me.

This work would not have been possible without the opportunity for in-depth, intimate observation of the internal operations of NATO’s political headquarters afforded by a two-year term of service as Executive Assistant to the Canadian Military Representative, Vice-Admiral James King, from 2000-02. In addition to providing me the unparalleled opportunity to speak at length with many HQ veterans of the Kosovo Crisis, this tour of duty required that I become intimately familiar with NATO’s decision making and crisis management mechanisms (including following a one-week course on the subject), and gave me a first-hand knowledge of how those mechanisms operated during a wide variety of crises, ranging from the relatively minor (e.g. NATO’s efforts to control the spread of small arms in Macedonia) to the overwhelmingly major (e.g. the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001). It is one thing to study NATO’s internal workings from the security of an office in the North American heartland; it is something else entirely to be evacuated from one’s office in NATO Headquarters in response to a specific terrorist threat; to be a part of a national delegation as Milosevic was first ousted from power, and then bundled unceremoniously aboard an aircraft for the short flight to The Hague; to be personally involved in the day-to-day management of political consensus (which is to say, to draft national interventions and breaches of silence on contentious issues); and to sit in the back of Conference Room One as NATO invoked, for the first time in its fifty-year history, the collective defence provisions of Article 5 of the Washington Treaty. Such opportunities are accorded only a few, and I am profoundly grateful for them. I am likewise grateful to Admiral King for allowing me time from my duties to attend classes and seminars, and for his patience in answering two years of questions about NATO’s handling of the Kosovo Crisis. Any errors of interpretation or fact are, of course, entirely my own.

This study is dedicated, with the greatest of thanks and humility, to my wife Linda, and to my children Alec and Anika, without whose indulgence it could never have been undertaken, let alone completed. Daddy’s done in the office, kids – at least for now.

- Donald A. Neill, 31 January 2006

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INTRODUCTION

This thesis is about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, commonly known as NATO. More specifically, it examines how NATO, during the period between the fall of the Berlin wall and the Kosovo Crisis of 1998-99,¹ attempted to transform itself into an organization suited to coping with the types of international security crises its members expected to have to face in the post-Soviet era. Studying the problem of self-directed institutional transformation requires examining three separate but intimately intertwined questions: what was NATO trying to achieve (in other words, what, from NATO’s contemporary perspective, constitutes a crisis, and therefore what constitutes crisis management); what did NATO do during the period in question to try to achieve it (in other words, to re-make itself into a better crisis management organization); and how well did NATO manage the job (i.e., what happened when the Kosovo Crisis exploded in NATO’s backyard and the Allies found themselves at war). The answers to these questions, particularly the last, will form the basis of the conclusion to this thesis, which is, in essence, an assessment of the success or failure of NATO’s attempt to transform itself.

This thesis argues that NATO’s transformational program followed four distinct but intimately interconnected channels: rethinking and reworking Allied force structures to render them smaller but more flexible; drawing former Soviet satellite states into close security cooperation with the traditional Allies; engaging Russia in a mutually beneficial dialogue; and sustaining the political solidarity of the Alliance. It further argues that the success (or failure) of this program in time of crisis is best understood when examined through the lens provided by certain elements of Chester Barnard’s theory of organizations.

In order to assess how well NATO reinvented itself to serve as a crisis management organization, this thesis examines NATO’s performance during the Kosovo Crisis of 1998-99. NATO is the foremost regional security organization in the world, and the Kosovo Crisis was both NATO’s first war, and the first humanitarian war in history (which is to say, the first war launched allegedly for purely altruistic reasons). Moreover, in the wake of the Kosovo Crisis, NATO has not engaged in any enterprise of similar scope and complexity. It could be, and indeed has been, argued that NATO shot its bolt in Kosovo. If this is so, it is important, for the future of NATO and of international security organizations in general, to understand why.

There are a number of original elements to this dissertation. Substantively, insofar as I have been able to determine, it is the first study to examine NATO’s self-imposed transformation process through a compilation of objectives and achievements as laid out in the Allies’ own public diplomacy documents. It is likewise the first study to assess NATO’s performance in the Kosovo Crisis against the Alliance’s transformation objectives; and this assessment is buttressed by the use of three original interviews with senior NATO officials conducted not for the purpose of eliciting original information, but rather to confirm the validity of my interpretation of NATO’s change process. The subject matter, moreover, is exceptionally important; the crisis did not threaten NATO’s core interests until NATO decided to become involved, and then was forced to either emerge victorious, or withdraw and accept a catastrophic loss of credibility. Kosovo, and NATO’s response to it, should serve as an object lesson for international security organizations about overestimating their ability to cope with different crises.

Procedurally, this study is original because it looks at international security organizations from an unusual perspective – that of organizations optimized for consensus-based decision making. In his Function of the Executive, Chester Barnard offers two crucial explanatory tools pertinent to international security organizations that are insufficiently developed in mainstream international relations theory. First, his concept of organizational persistence – that organizations destroy themselves by accomplishing the purposes for which they were established, and can only survive through a constant redefinition of those purposes – offers a more convincing explanation for NATO’s post-Soviet durability than any other explanation offered to date. I shall argue that NATO ensured its survival by reinventing itself from a collective defence organization designed for the continuous provision of one product (deterrence in peace, and defence in war, against an overwhelming but monolithic and predictable threat), to a collective security organization designed for the continuous provision of another (crisis management in the face of an unpredictable array of highly diverse threats). Indeed, the central core of this study is the examination of how the Alliance changed from the former to the latter, and the evaluation of how well the changes worked in time of crisis. In this context, this study will help to reframe key ongoing debates about how alliances and international security organizations can, and should, transform themselves. These are questions of no little contemporary relevance given, for example, the ongoing and highly contentious drive to reform the United Nations. Most significantly, a study of this nature can assist those charged with executing transformation processes by helping to identify the rate-limiting step in organizational decision making, which in most cases must be protected, streamlined or changed if transformation is to be successful.

Second, when the moment of crisis finally came and NATO found itself at war, Barnard’s approach to measuring organizational performance on the dual axes of effectiveness and efficiency offers a means of explaining how an international security organization can both win and lose when facing a complex and dangerous crisis. Under Barnard’s paradigm, NATO – more precisely, the North Atlantic Council – may be reduced to the machinery of its complex iterative decision making mechanisms. Moreover, the iterative nature of decision making and the effectiveness/efficiency criteria posited by Barnard offer an excellent reflection of the reality of NATO crisis management, because they remind us that however challenging the present crisis may appear, there will always be another crisis to manage in the future; and Barnard’s concept warns that any conclusions about success or failure must incorporate an assessment of the extent to which the handling of the present crisis is likely to affect an organization’s ability to cope with the next one.

In order to create the foundation for this dissertation, the remainder of this introduction will examine how NATO evolved from its roots as a primarily military alliance optimized for collective defence against the military forces of the Soviet Union and its allies, and then examine how NATO’s persistence after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact may be explained. I shall then delineate Barnard’s theories of organizational change, and describe how these may be applied to NATO’s process of self-transformation – and from this, develop three key research questions to form the testable hypotheses that will serve as the epistemological framework for the study. The framework will be further defined in subsequent chapters which will examine NATO’s approach to crisis management (Chapter 1); delineate the four strategic trends of NATO’s process of self-transformation from 1989-1998 (Chapter 2); and recount how the Kosovo Crisis unfolded (Chapter 3). I shall then move into the analytical portion of the study, evaluating NATO’s performance in handling the Kosovo Crisis in four separate chapters that will follow the strategic trends delineated in Chapter 2. Chapter 4 will examine the transformation of NATO’s forces; Chapter 5, the Allies’ attempts to integrate the former Soviet satellite states into NATO’s security architecture for Europe; Chapter 6, NATO’s efforts to engage Russia; and Chapter 7, the overriding and highly problematic attempt to maintain NATO’s political unity and cohesiveness as the crisis unfolded. I shall then, in the Conclusion, evaluate the success or failure of NATO’s program of self-transformation, draw answers to the research questions from the analysis, and suggest directions for further research.

Although developed on the basis of domestic business models, Barnard’s theory offers a novel means of examining and evaluating the performance of an international security organization like NATO. While at first glance there would appear to be little overlap between businesses and alliances, as will be shown below, Barnard’s paradigm lends a perspective on international security organizations not offered by other theories. Barnard invites students of the history of international politics to make objective judgements about the success or failure of instances of institutional change, and provides a comprehensive explanatory framework from which useful conclusions may be drawn. In the post-Cold War, post-9/11 international security environment, states that are not hyper-powers (and the vast majority are not) must act in concert with other states in pursuit of collective security, or accept the risks of standing alone. Any theory that may provide insight into how organizations for collective security may be optimized merits closer study.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization

…NATO is the world’s most effective military organization. It will not be in the lead in every crisis. But NATO has a vital role – in my view, the vital role – to play in multinational crisis prevention and crisis management.²

Thus spoke Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, tenth Secretary-General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. NATO had been designed to deter, and if necessary to defeat, a Soviet attack against Western Europe, and NATO’s member states had, during the 1990s, been forced to come to grips with the disappearance of their raison d’être, and either find a new role for the venerable Alliance, or face the gradual decline into irrelevance of the international security organization that had guaranteed the integrity of the Atlantic community virtually since the end of the Second World War, and upon which incalculable quantities of treasure and political capital had been lavished over the course of two generations. The route selected by the Allies in the face of uncertainty was to transform NATO from an organization focused on the collective defence of the West against a defined and identifiable external threat, to one with a less easily-circumscribed role: ensuring the collective security of its member states, and the Atlantic region writ large, against the unpredictable challenges that might lie in the wake of the Soviet collapse.

Eight years after the Allies launched a transformation process aimed at reinventing NATO to meet the demands of the new world order, a crisis erupted in Kosovo, and NATO – the defensive alliance – found itself firing the first shots in a new European war. In less than a decade, NATO’s strategic focus had shifted from preventing Moscow from interfering in Western European affairs, to attempting to co-opt Moscow in managing them. The Allies also found that the plethora of new internal mechanisms – new committees, intelligence-gathering and analysis capabilities, aids to political decision-making, flexible and deployable forces and headquarters, and vastly expanded political relationships with neighbouring (and even formerly hostile) states – were less than ideally adapted to the exigencies of crisis. Indeed, when Islamic terrorists attacked the United States, killing nearly three thousand Americans on September 11th 2001 (more than two years after the Kosovo Crisis was brought to an unsettled and uneasy conclusion), NATO still had no agreed definition of crisis.³ There is therefore good reason to question the ability of large, complex international organizations to reinvent their internal organizational structures and mechanisms.

There has never been any doubt about the nature and extent of the difficulties NATO has traditionally faced in attempting to cope with threats and challenges. As with any organization that brings together sovereign states on issues impacting their sovereignty, NATO is first and foremost a forum for international political discourse. Before nations can agree to cooperate on subordinate questions – e.g., on issues of tariffs, the precise location of boundaries, visas, or military operations – they must first resolve super-ordinate political questions in the areas of international trade relations, international law, and international cooperation on military operations in general. NATO’s fundamental purpose has always been to provide a forum in which such overarching issues could be resolved. The ultimate purpose of providing that forum, however, has always been to enable the quick, and relatively permanent, resolution of these questions so as to enable Allies to concentrate on the subordinate ones – and for NATO, the principal focus of the subordinate questions has always been how best to shape, marshal and employ the collective military strength of the Allies in order to accomplish together that which they could not accomplish separately.

In order to achieve this aim, NATO’s single most important capacity has always been (and, arguably, always will be) the ability to make decisions. In order to serve the needs of the Allies and meet the collective aims of the Alliance, decisions made in NATO’s political fora had to represent the collective will of the Allies; that is to say, they had to reflect an agreed position arrived at by consensus. NATO was founded on the basis of a straightforward quid pro quo; the smaller Allies lent their political support and credibility to NATO’s collective decision-making apparatus, and the larger Allies lent their military strength. The adoption of consensus as the basis of decision-making was designed to prevent the emergence of voting blocs, and to ensure that the larger Allies did not simply override the wishes of the smaller.

Consensus, however, was by no means the only criterion by which NATO’s decision-making processes were judged; as a military organization concerned with maintaining conventional and nuclear forces in sufficient numbers and at sufficiently advanced states of readiness to deter, and if necessary defeat, a Soviet attack, the rapidity with which decisions could be made was at least as important as the consensus principle. Long before Kosovo, NATO’s involvement in the Balkans, the fall of the Soviet Union, the Reagan-Gorbachev détente, or the political crises of the early 1980s, NATO nations recognized this challenge. In their Ministerial Guidance document, issued in May of 1977, for example, NATO’s Defence Ministers – addressing the need for a new approach to NATO Strategy and Crisis Management – argued that "for deterrence as well as defence[,] NATO governments need to be able to take prompt political decisions in times of tension, so that NATO can deploy its forces in a timely and orderly fashion."⁴

This admonition reflects, and serves as an important reminder of, the true nature of NATO. As with any international organization, the North Atlantic Alliance is not a self-governing, monolithic bloc capable of independent decision and action; it is nothing more or less than the sum of the political decisions taken by its component states.⁵ As a result, the rapidity with which the member states are able to reach political decisions directly influences NATO’s ability to reach a timely consensus when facing a crisis. Like the problem of collective decision-making, this fact was recognized early on in NATO’s evolution as well; one analyst, writing in the mid-1960s, noted that in NATO – or, indeed, in any Alliance of many countries – a fundamental challenge is how to handle emergencies. When decisions have to be made quickly, one cannot wait for the fifteenth government to make up its mind.⁶ And yet, because of the need to respect the overriding condition of consensus, the Allies will always have to wait for that fifteenth (or sixteenth, nineteenth or twenty-sixth) government.

Even while facing the existential challenge posed by the Soviet Union during its first forty years, NATO experienced no shortage of ancillary crises necessitating rapid, consensus-based political decision-making.⁷ Although it often proved a cumbersome means of arriving at decisions, consensus met the needs of the Allies throughout the Cold War, from NATO’s inception in 1949 up to the beginning of the period – 1989-1999 – that is the subject of the present study. The fact that NATO’s cumbersome decision making mechanisms did not lead Allies to abandon them in favour of some arrangement better suited to the post-Cold War international security environment, however, is another question; and the following section, therefore, will examine why NATO has survived long after the threat it was created to contain had disappeared.

Organizational Persistence and Change

NATO’s time has come and gone, and today there is no legitimate reason for it to exist…for both the United States and Europe, NATO is at best an irrelevant distraction and at worst toxic to their respective contemporary security needs.⁸

The existence of the North Atlantic Alliance long after the demise of its nemesis is directly linked to NATO’s function of consensus decision-making in time of crisis, and to the adaptability of internal organizational mechanisms for such decision-making to new demands and challenges. It is therefore appropriate to examine briefly some of the questions surrounding NATO’s persistence in the post-Soviet era.

Questions about NATO’s relevance did not spring up overnight; they have been a regular feature of scholarship throughout the life of the Alliance. In general, alarums about NATO’s impending collapse and calls for its deliberate dismantlement have traditionally fallen into two categories depending upon whether the individual sounding the tocsin is (or was) ideologically opposed to the idea of NATO’s continuity in the face of challenge, or an historical (and, in some cases, hysterical) opportunist decrying a single instance of political deadlock in the Council. Lawrence Freedman, writing in the early 1980s and accustomed to taking the longer view, noted somewhat wryly that

There is a limited stock of adjectives available to those who wish to write on the subject. They all convey a sense of an important structure under stress, but they vary in the extent of the crisis conveyed. In the more popular journals the Alliance always seems to be in disarray, never in array. In academic discussions, too, the talk is often of splits and collapses.⁹

Freedman adds, somewhat unnecessarily, that the habitual gloom has not been warranted.

This is not to suggest that NATO has not faced difficulties in reaching decisions, or crises of confidence about the Alliance’s purpose and goals. The latter have in recent years been both frequent and daunting, and the former innumerable. The challenges of the 1990s were presaged by the thaw in relations occasioned by the period of détente brought about by Messrs. Reagan and Gorbachev. As one former British Military Representative noted, Mr. Gorbachev could have found no surer way to unsettle the Alliance than to smile at it, for it is in the nature of alliances to be solid only when they are threatened[,] and [to] become quickly fissile when the times look good.¹⁰ Other pressures were the result of internal differences of opinion and approach, some of which appear to have been longer-standing and far more durable than recent editorials would have us believe. Speaking in 1986, Canadian Ambassador Gordon Smith argued that

There are, of course, some deeper problems in the Alliance which could play havoc with Atlantic consultations and complicate NATO’s capacity to go to war. I am referring to a widespread European perception that the United States is too prone to use military force, while a number of important Americans believe that Europeans are not prepared to participate in tough decisions required elsewhere in the world to assure international security.¹¹

But these are arguments from a standpoint of purpose and functionality. Predictions of NATO’s imminent demise have long been a hobby horse of the academic community as well. The most common argument was the dialectical postulate of alliances as opposites. Edwin Fedder, writing in 1980 on the subject of NATO’s internal politics, argued that the North Atlantic and Warsaw Treaty Organizations remained extant, viable and significant, largely by reason of mutual reinforcement. According to Fedder, if one of them were to disappear[,] the other might well vanish[,] to be neither missed nor yearned for save by those who invested so much time and thought in them.¹² While this is an obvious argument, the fact that NATO both antedated the Warsaw Pact, and has thus far survived its demise by more than a decade, suggests that the two were never mutually interdependent.

Speaking from a more objective and therefore more compelling standpoint, however, Fedder goes on to suggest that, from an historical perspective,

…alliances tend to be ephemeral institutions, being established to deal temporarily with shifting political events. Alliances tend to be most efficacious at the moment of creation, not at later dates….Alliances tend to suffer atrophy over time unless the conditions attending creation remain constant or a given alliance reflects the dynamic change experienced by the political actors themselves. If NATO and/or the Warsaw Pact continue to be viable, they must have accommodated the changes in the structural and behavioural environment; or else they would have suffered the same fate as CENTO and SEATO: they would have become anomalies awaiting final abrogation.¹³

Fedder’s argument, founded as it is in the ability of organizations to continue to function in the face of change in external environments and stimuli, is indeed compelling. Although he was writing a decade before the fact, Fedder’s thesis anticipates the events of 1989-1992. By his argument, because the Warsaw Pact was created in response to the creation of NATO, it ceased to be relevant, and was therefore dissolved, once NATO was no longer perceived to be an enemy. NATO, contrariwise, survived the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact because it had been formed for the purpose of defending the Atlantic community against external threats; and therefore survived, at least in part, because potential threats to the Atlantic nations did not end with the demise of the Warsaw Pact. While there are some problems with this thesis, it is more convincing than that which viewed NATO and the Warsaw Pact as bilaterally symmetrical polar opposites.

For the realists, the currency of power in political relationships meant that NATO was merely a tool designed to yoke the United States into a condominium aimed at maintaining the continental balance of power between the Soviet Union and the European Allies. Paul Kennedy, writing in 1993, argued that despite the importance of trans-Atlantic relations, absent the type and degree of threat posed by the defunct Soviet Union, Western states could expect the gradual dissolution of NATO.¹⁴ John Mearsheimer went further, predicting that the end of the Cold War would lead to a return to instability as opposing alliances crumbled. For Mearsheimer, The peacefulness of the postwar era arose for three principle reasons: the bipolarity of the distribution of power on the Continent, the rough equality in military power between those two polar states, and the appearance of nuclear weapons, which vastly expanded the violence of war, making deterrence far more robust.¹⁵ A significant change in any of these three – a sudden decline in Soviet conventional military capacity, a massive withdrawal or stand-down of NATO troops, or the de-linkage from European security affairs of America’s strategic deterrent, would destabilize the relationship and result in chaos.

Kenneth Waltz, maintaining that states enter into alliances to seek a balance of power against opposing states or coalitions, also predicted that the collapse of the Soviet bloc would occasion the demise of NATO. The cognitive dissonance resulting from NATO’s continued survival led Waltz to go to great lengths to explain how any alliance could survive the loss by its member states of the need to power-balance:

Liberal institutionalists take NATO’s seeming vigour as confirmation of the importance of international institutions and as evidence of their resilience. Realists, noticing that as an alliance NATO has lost its major function, see it simply as a means of maintaining and lengthening America’s grip on the foreign and military policies of European states….The ability of the United States to extend the life of a moribund institution nicely illustrates how international institutions are created and maintained by stronger states to serve their perceived or misperceived interests.¹⁶

There is something to be said for this interpretation; indeed, given Washington’s insistence (which will be examined in much greater depth in the course of this study) on maintaining the development of the European Security and Defence Initiative (ESDI) within NATO, it could be argued that Washington sees NATO as a mechanism for monitoring European security affairs and ensuring that attempts to develop a military capability for the European Union do not result in the emergence of a rival military power bloc on the Continent. In short, for Waltz, NATO’s persistence can be explained by Washington’s interest in maintaining its hegemony over European security affairs.¹⁷

While his tenacity is admirable, Waltz’s post-hoc explanations are not convincing. Writing a decade after NATO had stubbornly failed to fade away in accordance with his predictions, Waltz asserted that strong states use institutions, as they interpret laws, in ways that suit them, and postulated that NATO…survives and expands now not because of its institutions but mainly because the United States wants it to.¹⁸ It is difficult to credit this argument in view of the difficulties that Washington has experienced in wielding NATO to its advantage since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, or of the number of occasions on which Washington has elected to employ a coalition of the willing in order to enable it to accomplish what NATO could not. One also must ask why ten sovereign states have, since 1997, elected to join an allegedly moribund institution – particularly one which always seems to be on the brink of crisis.

While external crises have arisen from time to time, NATO has never really been free from internal crisis; the political difficulty inherent in coordinating consensus decision-making on issues closely touching national sovereignty (defence spending, defence planning, military procurement, force postures, states of readiness, troop, ship and aircraft deployments, and the ultima ratio regis, actually going to war) has ensured that the Allies have never lacked issues for contentious debate. As Laurence Martin noted in his foreword to Coker’s 1984 tome, The Future of the Atlantic Alliance,

…one could gain the impression that the Alliance has been in an almost permanent state of crisis. It would perhaps not be surprising if it had been, for alliances are by nature uneasy and changing bargains struck over the most fundamental of national interests: security. NATO has gone beyond precedent, however, and established a framework of standing collaboration and even integration more elaborate and enduring than any previous coalition. With its boundaries cast some 7-8000 miles apart, it would be amazing indeed if problems did not constantly arise.¹⁹

Political challenge, restlessness and ferment has therefore been the rule rather than the exception. James Schlesinger, Secretary of Defence under Nixon, recalled in a 1984 study on the future of the Alliance that in NATO’s early days, there had been a US Air Force Colonel, who kept on his desk a rubber stamp that said: ‘In this perilous moment in the history of the Alliance…’. According to Schlesinger, the Colonel used that stamp with great frequency.²⁰ Whether fact or legend, this story serves to illustrate the point that international security organizations like NATO are never entirely free from internal crisis or dissent, and that staff members accept questions about relevance, strategic direction and even raison d’être as a routine aspect of their day-to-day business.

One senior NATO staff official, interviewed more than five years after the resolution of the Kosovo Crisis, noted that throughout the 1990s, academics and journalists alike carried on the decades-old tradition of questioning NATO’s relevance in a constantly changing world. The official argued that these questions had long ceased to be a serious concern for NATO, suggesting that they were less a product of serious analysis than a reflex action on the part of people who were less than perfectly familiar with the internal workings and external goals of the Alliance. As a result, he argued, NATO staffs no longer paid a great deal of attention to such criticisms, and – he added – there was little evidence of any agonizing in the [North Atlantic Council] about it either. The Allies, throughout the 1990s, were simply too focussed and too preoccupied with NATO’s rapidly expanding involvement in mitigating and controlling the Balkan civil wars to spend much time debating existential questions.²¹

This explanation of NATO’s post-Cold War durability – that the Alliance was, in essence, too busy to dissolve – was in part anticipated by Freedman, who in 1983 suggested that the intense focus by the media, academics, and political pundits

…on the most dramatic but remote question concerning the Alliance – whether or not it will hold together – may have distracted attention from two equally large but less sensational questions. First, how competent is the Alliance in dealing with the common problems that its members confront? [And second,] does it offer an effective form of international problem-solving?²²

Always concise, Freedman posed the two essential questions for gauging success in any international security organization. Although expressed a decade before the demise of the Soviet Union, these are the key questions surrounding NATO’s post-Cold War survival and transformation, and underlie the present study.

The key question for the Allies, however, was that if the Alliance did not seem to be competent, and did not appear to offer an effective form of international problem-solving, then would their collective security interests be better served by repairing its inadequacies, or by abandoning it and creating something new? The following section discusses how Chester Barnard’s theory of organizational change may help to explain the Allies’ decision to repair NATO rather than try to replace it.

Barnard, Organizations and Change

The continuance of an organization depends upon its ability to carry out its purpose….[but] a paradox is involved in this matter. An organization must disintegrate if it cannot carry out its purpose. It also destroys itself by accomplishing its purpose. A very large number of successful organizations come into being and then disappear for this reason. Hence most continuous organizations require repeated adoption of new purposes.²³

This citation from Chester Barnard’s The Functions of the Executive offers an answer to one of the key questions surrounding NATO in the 1990s and beyond: why has the Alliance survived the demise of its nemesis ? Barnard asserts that if the purpose of an organization is to build and sell, for example, a car, then once it has done so its purpose has been fulfilled and it need no longer exist. In order to perpetuate itself the organization must adopt a continuous purpose, for example, building and selling many cars. This is an apt analogy for NATO in its first forty years; its purpose was the collective defence of the West against Soviet aggression, which could be described as a needed consumer service so long as Soviet aggression remained a realistic possibility. Once that possibility vanished, however, NATO, by Barnard’s lights, could be said to have obviated its reason for existence by accomplishing the purpose for which it had been constructed.

John Ikenberry, writing after Kosovo, and echoing Waltz, argued that the persistence of the postwar Western order is particularly a puzzle to neorealist theories of order.

Neorealist theories of balance expect alliance cohesion and cooperation in the West to decline with the disappearance of the Soviet threat. Without a unifying threat, balance-of-power theory predicts that strategic rivalry among the Western states will re-emerge, and specifically that the major postwar alliances – NATO and the U.S.-Japan pact – will slowly unravel. Neorealist theories of hegemony expect order also to unravel with the decline of American hegemony. Others have argued more recently that it is not the decline of American power that presages disorder but the intensification of American power. In this view, the revival of American power has created a uni-polar distribution of power that is not stable. American predominance will inevitably trigger counter-balancing responses.²⁴

By this argument, NATO should have either disappeared along with its enemies; or faded away as European Allies put their weight behind a purely European institution designed to counter-balance the overwhelming weight of American military primacy. Neither has taken place.

Those less enthralled with NATO as such have been somewhat more scathing in their criticisms. Stephen Meyer, for example, suggested that in the post-Soviet world, NATO was no longer an alliance by any traditional definition, arguing that it failed both Stephen Walt’s five… explanations for international alliances and Glen Snyder’s theory of alliance formation and management.²⁵ Such arguments illustrate the difficulties inherent in elevating theoretical over functional analyses, as the easiest means of countering them is to simply reply, as did Galileo, eppur si muove – and yet, it moves. If NATO, inarguably the largest, most successful and longest-lived military condominium in history, does not meet the theoreticians’ definition of what constitutes an alliance, then perhaps it is not NATO, but rather the definitions that are at fault.

At the same time, however, predictions that security relationships (like the U.S.-Japan special relationship) would decline in the absence of a threat seem prescient, given that this relationship in particular is, at time of writing, growing increasingly proximate and substantive due to the emergence of new threats in the form of a nuclear-armed North Korea and an increasingly regionally muscular China. Indeed, Ikenberry’s prediction that a uni-polar power distribution could provoke the emergence of countervailing power centers would go a long way towards explaining the attempts by the European Union to create a military and economic balance to American predominance in these fields. Given the lack of a new European threat, however, and the lack of interest in NATO in economic empire-building, none of these theories explains the persistence of the North Atlantic Alliance.

Celeste Wallander, in her examination of NATO after the Cold War, posited an economic model of alliance persistence founded on the opportunity cost of creating and maintaining institutions:

Institutions persist because they are costly to create and less costly to maintain, so they may remain useful despite changed circumstances….An institution will not persist if it no longer serves the interests of its members, and so alliances predicated only on threats are unlikely to survive when the threats disappear. But unlike mere alignments of states, security institutions – at least as far back as the Concert of Europe – may have multiple purposes. In addition to deterring external threats they cope with a variety of security problems, including instability, uncertainty and relation among allies.²⁶

This moves us closer to an understanding of NATO’s circumstances. Had the alliance been focussed throughout its forty-year history solely on containing (and if necessary defeating) the armed forces of the Warsaw Pact, it would have had nothing upon which to fall back when the Soviet menace evaporated. Ancillary foci, however, ranging from training and linguistic exchanges to cooperation in medical, disaster relief, parliamentary and even cultural arenas may have provided NATO with the post-Soviet longevity necessary to enable it to survive while casting about for a new purpose – a sort of existential bridge financing. NATO’s new focus was to broaden its area of interest beyond Europe, and its areas of concern beyond the defunct Soviet Union and its satellites, metamorphosing whatever elements of its structure were necessary to provide collective security rather than collective defence. According to Wallander’s interpretation, it was cheaper, in terms of the international effort necessary to build a new regional security organization, to change NATO than to do away with it and build something new, because if the marginal costs of maintaining an existing institution outweigh the considerable costs of creating an entirely new set of norms, rules and procedures, states will choose to sustain existing arrangements rather than abandon them. For this reason, Wallander argues, any theory purporting to explain how international institutions adapt to changing circumstances must be built on the logic of relative costs and the functions of institutions.²⁷

None of these arguments either lessens the premium on cooperation between member states in order to give effect to the aspirations of alliances or mitigates the complexities attending the consensus-building processes that lie at the core of any Alliance whose membership is voluntary rather than coerced. David Yost, examining new roles for NATO in the year preceding the Kosovo Crisis, argued that

…past attempts to build international order along Kantian or Wilsonian lines failed for multiple reasons that remain pertinent today…naïveté about the decision making of real governments, which prefer to assess their interests and options in specific cases, rather than following through with univeralist [sic] commitments; the absence of the other projected conditions for the order’s success, such as democracy and the rule of law; the continuing struggle over rival visions of national self-determination; and, indeed, the enduring nature of international politics, which involves power competitions as well as shared interests and values. ²⁸

Yost concluded that the practical constraints of international politics were such that combined action in support of collective security [would be] likely to be undertaken only on a selective basis, and such efforts [would] have to ‘coexist with national policies aimed at maintaining a power equilibrium.’²⁹ In other words, regardless of the nature of the reasons for which a collective security institution is formed, maintained and exercised, its operations will, in a practical sense, inevitably depend upon the ability of the member states to reconcile organizational goals with national interests