Postmodern Conservative.: Is NATO Dying?

Nick Gvosdev, my favorite Washington Realist, draws our attention to a provocative CATO report instructing the US to "begin discussions with our allies about what a post-NATO world would look like" [pdf]. NATO, you see, couldn't stop the recent Russian-originated cyberattack on member state Estonia, can't handle its Afghanistan mission, suffers flagging domestic support for that mission, and has been unable to effectively implement a way forward on the Czech/Polish missile program and the Kosovo situation. And then there's the little problem of being able to justify continued expansion ("Georgia? Why?") and seriously integrate it within NATO's central collective-security architecture ("Georgia? How?").

Since the '80s, heavies like Bob Keohane have been telling us that institutions create path dependencies, and that this is a good thing because they constrain conflict, increase and improve information, lower transactions costs, and constitutively reinforce relational habits that are fungible across issue areas even after the original purposes of the regimes have disappeared. This is a reasonably powerful argument, but not enough work has been done on when regimes encounter difficulty and failure in switching purposes. The obvious hypothesis is that difficulty hits not when purposes are switched, but when real costs of having switched are measurable as a result of actually implementing, that is, acting on, the new purpose. Presumably if institutions are path-dependent for good and ill, exogenous shocks after a purpose change would be likely to prompt a momentary but reflexive reversion to the original position (a spontaneous Russian invasion of Poland, for example, would likely trigger an old-style NATO response). But exogenous experiences which are the result of the endogenous enactment of new practices after a purpose change (NATO in Afghanistan) would be likely to trigger only those path-dependent reactions not affected by the purpose change itself: imaginably, if Finnemore is right, institutional pathologies foremost. If pathologies are both harder to change than regular practices and institutionally 'repressed', creating a mutually-reinforcing cycle of embeddedness, then the very conditions, practices, norms, and attitudes that have hampered NATO effectiveness in the past are likely to drive the institutional reaction to the earliest significantly measurable results of new practices after purpose change.

Unfortunately, if this logic is right, the reactions likely to issue from results-assessment may, paradoxically, not promote institutional collapse, dormancy, or irrelevancy. Institutions that extend their lifespans after the closure of their original purposes are likely to do so under the auspices of norms -- either as a 'cover' for egotistic bureaucratic inertia or as the 'real' internalization of a new mission statement. (Or both.) Regardless, if the switch to a new purpose requires the rhetorical reframing of mission norms, and the enactment of those norms in some kind of overt practice, then the reaction to a judgment (informed by old-purpose pathologies) of difficulty or strain in carrying out the new purpose is likely, one might hypothesize, to be informed precisely by the heightened danger into which the durability of the new purpose itself is placed. In other words, if NATO judges itself -- on the basis of its prior experience with carried-over pathologies -- to be struggling to carry out its post-purpose-change missions, the likely institutional reaction of its key agents will actually be to intensify and extend the scope of its new purpose. The new purpose will be seen to be failing because it is an incomplete, transitional position between the secure old purpose and the putatively secure future/fully-complete new purpose.

Thus you see Americans pushing to extend NATO around the world, not just across Europe, and you see Europe continuing to shirk, buck-pass, and bandwagon on NATO while pressing the same logic of infinite expansion on economic, not security terms (through the EU). Current experience filtered through old pathologies drives a path-dependent move toward a more radical expansion of the institution, not its chastened or confused rollback or dormancy.

So, no, I don't think NATO's dying, and I don't think it's likely to die any time soon, although its practices are very likely to change, and it may become much less active in some ways and much more active in others.