Democratic Peace and the European Security Community: The Paradox of Greece and Turkey

In the decade since the end of the Cold War, the dynamics of European security have altered out of all recognition. The new realities have prompted a rethinking of the central concept of security and the creation of a new political vocabulary to address the objectives of national and international security policy.

When the Warsaw Pact disintegrated and the Soviet Union withdrew its forces from Eastern Europe, many of the newly emerging Eastern European states feared that they would be left in a zone of "diluted security" between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Russian near abroad. They sought to consolidate their democracies and the economic transition process by pursuing early membership in the key European organizations, NATO and the European Union.

There was a clear feeling that if these countries were left outside of these organizations, their independence and security would remain threatened, while inside the organizations they would be secure. This perception was based on the belief that NATO was a democratic alliance that would defend democratic member states and that membership in the EU had been a vital stabilizing and democratizing factor in the successful democratic transitions of Spain, Portugal, and Greece in the 1970s and 1980s.

Similarly NATO, with its Cold War rationale gone, sought to redefine its mission as one of securing and expanding a zone of democratic peace in Europe. In doing so it appeared to embrace two important concepts of security. The first was the Kantian democratic peace thesis. ¹ This is the idea that democracies do not go to war with one another. Kant, in "Perpetual Peace," ² had gone further and argued that what he called the republican (that is, democratic) state was less prone to war than those with other forms of government. Subsequent history and research have led the contemporary proponents of the democratic peace thesis to advance the modest claim that, while democracies are just as willing to use force as any other kind of state, they appear to be unwilling to go to war with other democracies. ³

The second concept is the idea of evolutionary security communities associated with Karl Deutsch. ⁴ Deutsch and his colleagues, in exploring the question of the place of war in international relations, chose to sidestep the usual question of "why do wars occur?" and seek instead an explanation for the fact that certain groups of states appear to be exceptions to the assumption that war is an inevitable reality. Explain why and how these "security communities" were created and sustained, Deutsch believed, and there would be at least the possibility of abolishing war from all regions of the world. In the past one hundred years the most dramatic emergence and consolidation of a security community has been that of Western Europe.

British defense secretary Michael Portillo, discussing the NATO enlargement process in the mid-1990s, used arguments typical of the NATO members at the time: "By embedding the democratic process in certain countries, and by providing standards to which others will aspire, enlargement will enhance transparency and security throughout the trans-Atlantic community." ⁵ Almost identical wording could have been used by the proponents of the current expansion of the EU.

This perspective makes crucial assumptions. It assumes that NATO is a family of democracies, that it is a security community, and that by joining it, new democracies will ipso facto consolidate on the Western model as free-enterprise democracies, and that since democracies presumably do not fight each other, they would thereby expand the borders of the security community. Expansion in turn was to occur at a slow and careful pace, so that new members would not be brought in whose presence might threaten the existing benefits enjoyed by the other members of the security community. At the NATO summit in Brussels in January 1994, the NATO Council reaffirmed...