The Alliance Without Enemy: a Post Cold War History of West: (A Story of Change from 1989 to 2005)

By Dr. Priyabhishek Sharma

This book has the following features:
• When we say “West,” what do we really mean? The prologue sets out to explore this question from literary, historical, strategic, philosophical, and cultural vantage points
• In order to understand today’s West, different shades of the long and arduous transatlantic dialogue starting with Christopher Columbus’s accidental discovery of America to the collapse of Soviet Union have been reasonably accounted for. The second chapter traces back this evolutionary journey in simple, easily understandable way.
• The book has been a fifteen-year story of phenomenal change, which redefined the very nature of the Western Alliance after the collapse of Soviet Union.
• Changes in the geopolitical map of Europe, emergence of European Union, re-orientation of NATO, and the mutual play between the United States and Europe all throughout the decade of 1990s have been woven into the narrative of this book with the aim to understand how the West, if at all, has changed.
• Three major events of post–Cold War history—the Balkan Crisis, the 9/11, and Iraq War 2003—had played major stimulus in re-understanding the West. Detailed chronological accounts of these events have been presented before the reader.
• What are the rationale, motivations, and implications of EU and NATO’s enlargements to the East, and how has the enlargement impacted the Alliance.
• The epilogue reflects upon what has changed and what continues in today’s West across different historical phases.
• How have the schemes of European security in post-cold war era been coexisting with the changing face of NATO is yet another theme this book seeks to address.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Jul 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543705607

Dr. Priyabhishek Sharma

Having earned doctorate on the topic this book is about, this has been an effort to recraft West by a curious Eastern mind with formal training in Internatioal Relations and history but deep interest in litrature and philosophy. So in this craft, Eastern understanding approaches the West, wondering and trying to tell how the West changed, if at all, after the cold war. ( Author of this book has earned his doctorate from Himachal Pradesh University, Shimla. He has closely been associated with Jawahar Lal Nehru University, New Delhi. His writings on International Relations had reguraly made appearance in leading Foreign Policy Journal of India. During his student life, he had qualified many competitive exams including the prestigious Indian Civil Services Exam. Currently, he has been employed as Assistant Professor in Political Science with the Department of Higher Education, Himachal Pradesh, India.)

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To

The Love and Quest for knowledge

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Chapter 1   European Integration and Transatlantic Relationship

Theoretical Approaches to European Integration

Neofunctionalism

Intergovernmentalism

New Institutionalism

State-Centric Models vs Multilevel Governance Models

European Union as International Actor

Realism and Neorealism

Europeanisation Model

Social Constructivism

Conceptualising the Transatlantic Relationship

Security Community

Soft Power vs Hard Power

Debate on Growing Rift

Chapter 2   Evolution of Western Alliance in Historical Context

Formative Years of American Foreign Policy and Foreign Outlook

International Metamorphosis: Manifest Destiny, National Construction, and Rise to World Stage

The United States and Europe through the World Wars to the Cold War

Formal Beginning of the Transatlantic Alliance

Unity and Diversity: Transatlantic Alliance during the Cold War

Chapter 3   Redefining the Mutual Roles From 11/9 to 9/11

Germany Reunites and Soviet Union Disintegrates (1989–1991): Changing Geopolitical Landscape of Europe

First Gulf War: The New Unipolar World Order

NATO’s Existential Dilemma

Incarnation of European Union

Balkan Crisis (1991–1997): Nascent EU, Resurrecting NATO, and Decisive United States

Role of the United States in Bosnia

Eurption Reaches Kosovo

EU and NATO Decide to Enlarge Eastwards

European Security and Defence Policy

Chapter 4   Solidarity, Drift, and Rift 9/11, Iraq War, and

Beyond

9/11: War on Terror

Iraq War (2003): The Alliance in Danger

Enlargements of NATO and EU: Persisiting and Shifting Equations

Epilogue

Appendix I

Appendix II

References and Notes

References

LIST OF TABLES

Table 2.1 Five Schools of Thought on Europeanisation

Table 2.2 Dimensions, Mechanisms, and Outcomes of the Europeanisation of Foreign Policy

Table 2.3 Security Communities vs Functional Cooperation and Traditional Alliances

Table 3.1 Timeline of the Original Colonies of the USA

Table 4.1 Three Pillars of European Union

Table 4.2 Results of Referendum in All Four States

Table 5.1 EU and NATO Membership after Enlargement in 2004

Table 5.2 EU Member States Defence Expenditure (2003)

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS USED

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Till the final publication of this book, I was fortunate to receive collaboration from various quarters. The first words of acknowledgement deservedly belong to Himachal Pradesh University Shimla, which not only hosted and groomed me as a student but also gave the permission to use my doctorate thesis or a portion thereof in this pursuit of inquisitive but unending quest. If, however, the quest to understand the West could finally materialise in the form of this book, it was at the instance and guidance of my friend and mentor Dr Mahesh Ranjan Debata, Assistant Professor at the Centre for Inner Asian Studies, Jawahar Lal Nehru University, New Delhi. He was the one who had inspired me to ceaselessly embark on this journey. It is not enough to thank him, this work is as much his as mine. Two of my bosom friends from Himachal Pradesh University Dr Ved Prakash Sharma and Dr Devender Sharma need a word of appreciation and gratitude for providing the selfless assistance all across the smooth as well as tumultuous terrains in this journey. My sincere acknowledgement is also due to the invaluable contribution made by yet another close friend of mine from the field of English literature Dr Atul Acharya, who read the initial manuscript of the book and provided penetrating inputs on it. In the process of final publication, my editors were well informed, learned and vastly experienced. They altered me to numerous errors of fact and grammar. To work along with such a learned and professional team of scholars is always a fun and great learning experience. I am also thankful to them. While any merit worth name in this book belongs to all of those who have collaborated, assisted and inspired me in active or ‘subtle’ ways, the errors that still remain in the finished work are entirely my own.

PROLOGUE

Understanding the West

West is a subjective term with pejorative undercurrents. Yet it is nonetheless customary when it comes to the usage in journalistic and academic worlds. Subjectivism of the West as a construct arises from the multiple underpinnings shaped over the course of a long history. It is also due to its dependence on the location of the perceiver—geographical and ideological. But in common parlance, when the West is invoked, it is generally taken to mean the United States and its allies in Europe. In this understanding, Russia does not constitute the West, nor do the countries of South America. But former Soviet republics of Central and Eastern Europe will have no difficulty in being taken to form part of the West in this understanding, given their recent induction into the EU and NATO. But such an understanding of the West is strictly limited to only one dimension which scholarship on international relations has termed as geostrategic.

Other dimensions underpinning the West as a construct are civilisational and political. In civilisational terms, a distinction is made between the West and the East, which, in other phraseology, are also invoked as the Orient and the Occident. Now this, in recent times, has emerged as the most controversial category. At the heart of this controversy lies the newly emerging wisdom shaped by recent research, which has seriously challenged the Eurocentric glorification of the West at the cost of the East, and aggressive response to this line of reasoning by the subscribers of the former school of thought. The twentieth-century anthropologist–historian Eric Robert Wolf, for instance, raises a penetrating challenge to Eurocentrism by reminding the reader that

we have been taught inside the classrooms and outsides of it that there exists an entity called the West and one can think of this West as a society and civilisation independent of and even in opposition to other societies and civilisations. Many of us even grow up believing that this West has genealogy according to which ancient Greece begat Rome, Rome begat Christian Europe, Christian Europe begat the Renaissance, the Renaissance the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment political democracy and the industrial revolution. Industry crossed with democracy, in turn yielded the United States… . This is misleading; first, because it turns history into a moral success story, a race in time in which each runner of the race passes on the torch of liberty to the next relay. History is thus converted into a tale about the furtherance of virtue, about how the virtuous win out over the bad guys.¹

In response to this line of reasoning, many contemporary subscribers of Eurocentrism have been trying to forcefully restore the historical glory and exclusive pre-eminence of Western civilisation. The title of the book written in this line of argumentation by Ricardo Duchesne in 2011, for instance, sufficiently explains both the direction and the content of this school of reasoning: The Uniqueness of Western Civilization.

Amid and in these contesting points of view, a new strong intellectual current has made forceful way which speaks in terms of ‘post’—post-materialism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, post-structuralism. This ‘post’ genre is not a homogeneous category, but one thing is common in it that makes it something of a common intellectual movement. It is their rationalistic reconsideration of established wisdom. In this stream of thought, civilisational categories matter the least.

Then there is the political dimension of the West. In this sense, the West stands for a set of political and economic values which the West claims ownership and patronage of, despite occasional voices challenging such a claim. These values, in crisp terms, are liberalism, individualism, and democracy. In the post-Soviet world, keeping in view the penetration of globalisation in the otherwise impenetrable furthest corners of world, the same cannot be conceded about this dimension of the West as was conceded about the civilisational dimension—that this has gone redundant. Experience points to the contrary.

In spite of several inconsistencies involved in the notion of the West which writers, while using it in order to mention a geopolitical collection of nation states or a civilisational island of distinguishable characteristics, generally tend to overlook, current linguistic debates have come to recognise that the meaning of language is determined in relation to the social context in which language is used and understood. The name of the great linguistic philosopher of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein, is worthy to be recalled in this context. He has revolutionised mankind’s understanding about language by stipulating that it is the social context and social understanding of the meaning of language that determines the language instead of any structure inherent to language itself, as proclaimed by the preceding linguistic school of the early twentieth century, known as logical positivism. The meaning of the West within this framework is dependent on how the audience popularly takes it to mean, irrespective of the epistemological difficulties involved in such a reception of the concept.

While thinking about the West in this framework, there arises a difficulty which the extension of Wittgenstein’s theory would implicitly carry. This can be called the fallacy of relativism. While speaking about the West, there has to be a ‘contrasting other’ in relation to which it can be understood. This ‘contrasting other’ has historically been different, but mostly the East—a binary contrast between the West and the East shaped by geographical and spatial understandings of directions. Like the West, the East is also pregnant with multiple connotations and subjective considerations. In a civilisational and cultural sense, the East is understood to correspond to the mystic Hindu–Buddhist and Zen–Taoist tradition, as against the Judeo–Hellenic tradition of the West. In this sense, today’s Russia and Latin America are as much a part of the West as perhaps today’s West Asian Islamic world would mistakenly be taken to be part of the Orient. Even if not part of the East, it will certainly be a ‘contrasting other’ to the West. Here it becomes clear that constructs like the West and the East are meaningful only in relation to each other and not in spite of each other. Similarly, these constructs are partial to the factual reality, partisan to the historical authenticity, and prejudicial to the fair treatment of the other category. That is what Edward Said, in his monumental study on Orientalism, has observed—how the scholars and policymakers of the West were constructing colonised territories and people of the Orient into a conceptualisation of an inviting racial and cultural inferiority. Another characteristic of this binary contrast is the flawed assumption that both the West and the East are two different and mutually distinct entities. Succinctly countering such an assumption, John Hobson has shown in his aptly titled work, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation, that the West and the East have been fundamentally and consistently interlinked through globalisation ever since 500 CE.²

A more apt term for a ‘contrasting other’ to the West can be non-West or rest, but difficulties involved with the civilisational dimension of the notion of the West will continue to prevail. In addition, it will become too encompassing and ‘totalising’ for a category, for the so-called non-West is a bit too diverse to be comprehended in a single category. The preceding century has also given a trio of divisions of the world in terms of the First World, the Second World, and the Third World. In the post-Soviet era, while usage of the first two worlds has been extinguished, corresponding to the extinction of the previous ideological divide between the two, the Third World, on the contrary, has acquired more currency both as a popularly used term to indicate a group of states and also as a hotspot for political and humanitarian troubles worthy of calling international attention. Samuel Huntington, the leading political scientist and civilisational theorist of the emerging world order, does not simplify the world into two binary ontological civilisational categories—West and East, or West and non-West—in his thesis of the clash of civilisations. He instead identifies eight civilisation zones amongst which potential for clash exists.

Turning back to the geostrategic dimension of the West, the picture becomes clearer but awfully reverses. In the mirror of the Cold War, this picture had two contrasting modes of human governance: one was liberal capitalism, represented by the United States and its allies in Western Europe, and another was communist socialism, which was practised by the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. The West and the East, in this mirror, were more political and ideological than cultural and civilisational. As the Cold War gradually progressed, the West and the East came to be firmly attributed to the western and eastern halves of Europe, where the principal line of division was politico-ideological first and then geostrategic-military later on, rather than cultural and civilisational. The reverberations of this competition were felt in the form of a bipolar tension around a web of power and interests. In the course of Cold War history, while ideological competition was relegated to the background, competition for power and interest came to acquire the driver’s seat. Scholarship on international relations witnessed its effect in the form of the ascendance of realism as a dominating tool of study in the field. In realism, ideological and cultural factors remain secondary in understanding states’ behaviour in an international system, and the primary place is occupied by national interests, defined primarily by national power. Conceptions of the East and the West in this scheme lost the ideational colour and acquired more materialistic connotations. Consequently, the clash between Eastern and Western blocs during Cold War became militaristic in nature rather than ideological, as reflected, for instance, in an intensifying arms race, a geopolitical manoeuvring over acquiring alliances and counter-alliances for gaining a strategic advantage.

But once the ‘contrasting other’ to the West collapsed at the turn of the century, the ideological genre was once again brought back to the debates on the nature of the post-Soviet world. Francis Fukuyama, for instance, argued in his End of History thesis that with the end of communism, ‘all viable alternatives to Western Capitalism have come to an end’, and now ‘the western liberal idea would witness the universal expansion’. With a somewhat different approach, Samuel Huntington also spoke about an imminent clash amongst civilisations in the post–Cold War world. Their conclusions might have been open—and are open—to debate, but their concerns lead to one common conclusion: that political and ideological factors have reacquired their lost relevance in debates on the post–Cold War world.

As shaped by the Cold War history and as reflected in generally prevailing usage worldwide, the West even today continues to be labelled and understood as the Western alliance. Even though the Iron Curtain no longer looms large over Europe, dividing the continent, and even when the contours of such concepts as West and East had undergone dramatic change in both sides—with the West expanding to the East through NATO and EU enlargements, and with the East shifting further east with the rise of states like India and China, Russia and Japan—the term West, whenever invoked, is intended and also perceived to connote the Western alliance. And when we speak about this West connoting the Western alliance, we mean the links which were forged across the Atlantic between the United States and its allies in Western Europe, more specifically after the Second World War. These links successfully survived for more than four decades during the Cold War because there was a rival East, both ideological and military, which was the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies.

A more appropriate term for the West, or the Western alliance for that matter, is the Atlantic alliance or transatlantic alliance. This is a comparatively more value-neutral term, dispelling some of the difficulties associated with the usage of West but not completely abnegating them. In recent times, with the emergence of new tensions in the theatre of Eurasia, as in Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine in the summer and fall of 2014, the term West has again become fashionable. Although it is not right to portray it as West vs East of the Cold War type, it is also equally erroneous not to concede that underneath these disturbances, there is a strong legacy and history of Cold War bipolarity between the West and the East.

Whatever nomenclature one prefers to adhere to, this will in no way undermine the curiosity and need to understand how the West has gone about after Soviet demise. For a person of outside location, as I am, and from a location in the East, as is mine, the post-Soviet West becomes a subject of fascination, interest, and bewilderment. With conscious and careful approach, influences of location can be reduced but cannot perhaps be completely eliminated. Indian political scientist Partha Chatterjee admits, for instance, how his ‘early career’ belief of ‘approaching political theory irrespective of one’s cultural and geographical location’ changed over times, making him ‘far more aware of the ways in which his location in India influences the questions about politics and society’, distancing him ‘to a position of relative remoteness from the body of Western social theories’.³ In somewhat similar fashion, there may creep remoteness between the narrations through which the story of this book has been constructed and the understandings and expectations of those whose ‘cultural and geographical location’ is closer to the space present writer chooses to write, i.e. the West. Let me therefore admit that from temperament, I have always cherished an interest in and a knack for literature and philosophy, but my training and formal education was in the field of political science and international relations. I have earned my doctorate on the topic I have chosen to write and of which a modest outcome is now in your hands. One will not be surprised to find the reflection of my temperament in the assertions and conclusions that follow in the book. But I have always remained conscious of the fact that instead of giving sweeping assertions and decisive conclusions, it is better to present an elaborate sequence of events before the reader so that she or he can have her or his own way while both asserting and deciding. In this approach, I was driven by the advice of Ramachandra Guha, the famous Indian historian of contemporary India, that in writing this book, ‘I have been driven by the curiosity rather than certainty, by wish to understand, rather than the desire to pass judgment’.⁴

This has been an effort of an Eastern mind—or more precisely, an Indian mind—to understand the West in the post-Soviet era. This is the West as defined and understood by the scholarship of international relations and not that of philosophical and literary fields. In the parlance of international relations, when West is used, we in this part take it to mean the United States, NATO, and Europe. This is where I will have to bracket myself down like every other explorer of area studies. In this selection, Canada and Turkey will not constitute the area of enquiry despite being intrinsic members of NATO. So is true of Australia and New Zealand, both of which are also counted as heirs of the Western civilisation. Likewise, Russia will also stay at the periphery. Europe itself is a nuanced and subjective term. Does it mean the European Union or individual countries of Europe or major players from the continent? These are the different dimensions which I have tried to open before the reader in the first chapter, within the range, requirement, and limitation of present work.

In short, this is a chronological account of the changes that have taken place in the transatlantic alliance after the end of the Cold War, in the form of new institutional developments, with respect to mutual role conceptions and perceptions, and to their historical engagement. Hence, changes in NATO, the development of the EU, the extent of the role of the United States in post–Cold War Europe, the centrifugal forces within the EU about that role, enlargements of the EU and NATO, and their impact on the alliance itself are the key themes around which and into which the story of this book has been woven. The external behaviour of nation states as reflected in foreign policies is determined, broadly simplifying, by domestic considerations and external milieu. A historical account venturing to approach a particular unit of study or region of the globe, as today’s West is and present endeavour does, has thus to be reflective on and representative of both these variables. The West has also taken current shape in the post–Cold War era, in the background of and in response to certain events, certain crises, and certain stimuli which I identify, or choose to identify, in four events: the falls of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, the Balkan crisis of the 1990s, the 11 September terrorist attacks in the United States, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. Hence, this is a story of change—and of continuity—in the nature of the Western alliance in the background of these four events. In this effort, I believe it is not an either–or scenario for the structure and actors in influencing the international reality, but rather, it is a ‘both structure and actors’ scenario. This holds particular truth for the Western alliance, which is not only guided by the tactical needs and long history of mutual engagement but also by the commonalties in political culture and in narratives about how the world works or should work. The study of Jeremy Ghez on alliances in the twenty-first century and their implications for the US–European partnership is mention-worthy in this regard. Making a distinction amongst four categories of alliances—tactical alliances, historical alliances, natural alliances, and overlapping and changing alliances—he grouped the alliance between the US and Europe in the category of natural alliances, which, in his opinion, go beyond the shared sense of history to adapt their commonalities in political culture and narratives about the world through a constant reconstruction of identities by telling or retelling history to better face the present and to adjust to the future.⁵

An endeavour of this kind, which seeks to address the audience about a recent historical period, has to work against certain constraints. The historian of The Twentieth-Century World, William Keylor, points to two circumstances which undermine the scholarly credibility of historical writing about the recent past. First is the paucity of primary resources, because public records and private papers of policymakers are declassified for public inspection only after a suitable interval (many countries follow a thirty-year rule in this regard). Second is the difficulty of impartially evaluating whatever evidence is available in public domain without allowing our own subconscious assumptions and imaginations to colour our judgements.⁶ Chronological distance between the time one writes and the time one is writing about is considered ideal for mitigating the second difficulty. So far as the first one is concerned, as Keylor himself admits, a solution lies in the accounts that appear through memoirs, acting as the sources of first-hand information, provided that the self-serving and self-congratulating part of such memoirs is taken care of. While being limited by these constraints yet not losing my awareness of them throughout, I would like to point to the third difficulty, which every explorer of my location has to face and come out of. This is the problem related to the utilisation of online sources, which have been my greatest companions throughout this journey. This is the problem of differentiation, elimination, and selection. With inexhaustible information available online, the first challenge remains: to differentiate the propagandist from the authentic, the ephemeral from the fundamental, the irrelevant from the relevant. The next step includes elimination of the former and selection of the latter. That’s how I tried to stay as professional as I could.

Lastly, my own hopes for this book are best expressed the same way my earlier quoted mentor, Ramachandra Guha, did for his work—in the words of Marc Bloch, who, writing about another country in another time, once said:

I could liken myself to an explorer making a rapid survey of horizon before plunging into the thickets from which wider view is no longer possible. The gaps in account are naturally enormous. I have done my best not to conceal any deficiencies, whether in the state of our knowledge in general or in my own documentation […] When time comes for my own work to be superseded by studies of deeper penetration, I shall feel well rewarded if confrontation with my false conjectures has made history learn truth about herself.⁷

CHAPTER 1

European Integration and Transatlantic Relationship

[Once] a theory becomes widely accepted, it moves into the realm of paradigm. This paradigm then structures further research, which tends to uphold and elaborate dominant interpretative framework. Over time, inconsistencies and contradictions arise and individual scholars begin to criticise the received wisdom. Still, a majority of investigators cling to the existing paradigm because anomalies have not yet reached a critical level. Eventually, the old interpretations’ contradictions become glaring and irreconcilable; simultaneously, the scholarly community, affected by both epistemological and social factors becomes receptive to new paradigm. In retrospect, the shift from one paradigm to another may appear to follow a natural progression, but at the moment when it occurs, the transition seems radical and surprising.

Thomas Kuhn

in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962⁸

The term transatlantic literally means ‘across both shores of the Atlantic Ocean’. When in scholarly nomenclature this term is used as an adjective to describe the geopolitical landscape, this is generally understood to mean ‘pertaining to the United States and Europe’. Transatlantic relations thus mean relations between the United States and Europe, even though, in wider connotations of the term, Canada is also included in its ambit. The origin of this term can be traced back to the ancient times when, at the dawn of civilisation, Hebrews and Greeks acted as the spiritual ancestors to what has, in modern times, come to be known as ‘the West’. But it was only after the conclusion of the Second World War, towards the mid twentieth century, that the alliance between the USA and Europe could formally materialise. Geographically, the presence of the North Atlantic Ocean, coupled with the common representation of the ideological tradition of the West and, more importantly, Western