Henrik Lindbo Larsen
PhD-student
January 23, 2013
From this blog, you can follow my experience as a research fellow with the Harvard Kennedy School over the next 6-7 months. I am going to the Kennedy School in the write-up phase of my dissertation to discuss and present my research to the community of IR scholars and with the intention of acquiring – and bringing home – new inspiration from an American top research institution.
My research is a NATO project funded in a joint programme between the Center for War Studies (CWS) and the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS). My dissertation addresses one particular aspect of NATO’s external agenda, the projection of democracy, defined as the rise of political NATO and the commitment to think security in close conjunction with the spread of democratic values. While enlargement, and thus the ability to use the alliance as a vehicle for democratic change, is consolidating in the Western Balkans, NATO faces considerable challenge to its political agenda in its Eastern neighbourhood as well as in Afghanistan. The interesting question is to understand what drives NATO as a security organisation to assume such soft security responsibilities in face of these challenges and what can explain policy variance from one phase to another. I explore this problem using neoclassical realism emphasising both power and purpose: the projection of democracy follows the projection of power as a junior partner promoted as long as it is perceived to improve a state’s long-term geostrategic influence without having a negative short-term impact on national security.
The Kennedy School’s Professor Joseph Nye offers the concept of soft power, which however only provides partial explanation to how NATO seeks to project its power and values externally. While democracy could be counted into the soft power category in terms of ideological attraction, my project argues that NATO’s world order projection is predominantly more reliant on the exertion of hard power. NATO rewards democratic behaviour with positive security incentives (membership/collective defence guarantee or partnerships/military expertise), and aspirant states seek membership of NATO primarily because of the security benefits that this entails for national security and prestige. Alternatively, NATO punishes undemocratic behaviour with negative security incentives (armed intervention, regime change, or imposed state-building) or at the very least through coercive means seeks to change the facts on the ground. The spread of democracy carries along with it increased transparency about decision-making, thus reducing the risk of conflict following military or political action taken out of insecurity, as Professor Stephen Walt from the Kennedy School could tell us about states’ inclination to balance according to threat perceptions.
At the Kennedy School, I seek inspiration to understand the areas in which NATO has enjoyed relative success in its soft power projection: the Western Balkans and the 2011-Libya intervention. While most recent research has been devoted to understand the material and ideological decline of the West and the crisis of the liberal world order, it is often forgotten that one big project remains to be completed in Europe’s south-eastern neighbourhood. Huge ethnic and democratic problems remain but NATO in the Western Balkans faces no resurgent great power, contrary to Eastern Europe (Russia), making political consolidation a lot easier. The Libya intervention in 2011, moreover, was an example of how NATO strained by declining national defence budgets was nevertheless able to affect significant change on the ground. NATO in Libya refrained from a direct post-conflict role in contrast to its very costly (and depressing) experience from Afghanistan.
Stay tuned! – more posts will follow on this blog on how world events are seen and analysed from the perspective of the Harvard Kennedy School.