CHAPTER FIVE
Denationalizing Defense Planning and Foreign Policy
In 2003, Poland was the fourth largest provider of military forces to the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, contributing approximately 2,500 soldiers and special forces. Over the following two years, as Poland was administering one of only three “stabilization” zones in Iraq, with 9,500 troops under its command, Romania, Ukraine, and Hungary also sent forces. All four countries had also contributed to the multinational effort to eradicate the Taliban in Afghanistan, in some cases sending forces well in excess of those committed by their western European counterparts. For countries that only a decade before were variously pursuing large-scale civil territorial defense programs, ethno-nationalist mobilization linked to historical rivalries, and admission to NATO based on the perceived danger of Russian revanchism, these sizable contributions to multilateral “out-of-area” military operations represented a sea change in international orientations and military cultures.1 In this chapter I examine why this change occurred, arguing that from the early 1990s NATO was active in denationalizing the frames through which central and eastern European (CEE) states viewed their foreign and defense policies.
Defense planning and foreign policy are among the most revealing public policy manifestations of a state’s international purpose. Absent a total breakdown in channels of government authority, the organization of military forces reveals the notions of at least some state actors of what constitutes a threat, who the relevant enemies and allies are, and what priorities command the greatest urgency. Questions concerning security challenges and how best to meet them are almost never subject to objective assessment that results in a spontaneous consensus. Rather, competing perceptions of threat among domestic actors stem from political struggles over interpretations of the past and the relevance of those interpretations for the future. Such struggles and their resolution have consequences, in turn, for resource allocation among competing groups in society, rival foreign policy priorities, and military-society relations.
For CEE states, domestic political debates about how to restructure defense planning in the post–Cold War period were altered by yet another layer of interference, in addition to the usual domestic and historical factors: NATO enlargement. On the face of it, NATO and many postcommunist states might have shared the same strategic objective—namely, the consolidation of democracy and capitalism, in part through the repudiation of Soviet, and later Russian, authoritarianism and expansionism. Although NATO had been formed in large measure with Soviet containment in mind, the end of the Cold War, the violent break-up of Yugoslavia, and the growing political salience of international terrorism all served to invalidate the alliance’s original mission, at least in the minds of NATO’s founding members (NATO 1999, 2005). At the same time, however, if there was any unifying rationale underpinning CEE states’ desire to join NATO, it was first and foremost to win protection from the Soviet Union, and later from Russia. Even if CEE leaders could appreciate that medium-term trouble was unlikely, instability in the Caucasus, the war in Chechnya, Russian interference in the domestic politics of the “near abroad,” and creeping authoritarianism in the post-Gorbachev and post-Yeltsin periods were more than enough to keep at least one lesson from the past very much alive: prepare for Russian aggression.
It was in the tension between CEE’s very recent memories of Soviet domination and the changing international strategic context that the first divisions over NATO’s perceived purpose emerged. While many postcommunist states were intent on pursuing territorial defense in connection with NATO membership, leaders within the alliance were instead making the case for smaller, more mobile units that could be used for power projection to locales beyond the Article V security guarantee.2 Conflicts over defense planning priorities reflected divergent perceptions of threat that later translated into disagreements over resource allocations. No doubt to the surprise of many CEE leaders who had campaigned vigorously for NATO enlargement, participation in the alliance would sooner mean supporting operations in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq than repositioning troops from West to East.3 Given the “blatant disregard of the East European states’ national interests in decisions regarding military doctrine” and that such disregard had been among the “most important complaints of dissidents and democratizers throughout the region’s Communist period,” it is little wonder that competing threat perceptions and strategic priorities between the alliance and NATO candidates were sometimes a source of tension (Barany 1995, 111).
This chapter examines the extent to which NATO was able to subdue traditional security concerns in postcommunist Europe, both between newly independent states and Russia and among historical rivals that had long-standing anxieties about borders, minorities, and diasporas. I argue that the alliance did much to denationalize defense planning and foreign policy by delegitimizing arguments for defense self-sufficiency that were based on historical vulnerability. In direct confrontations with their CEE interlocutors, Western officials made the case that NATO enlargement was not directed against Russia, that the alliance’s mission was evolving to meet not just European but also global security challenges, and that striving for defense self-sufficiency was neither necessary nor financially feasible (NATO 1999). By 2005, NATO had hardly succeeded in putting all of the historically rooted security concerns to one side. But it had dampened suspicions by marginalizing particular nationalist discourses and sidelining potentially provocative policies.
The defense planning and foreign policy outcomes that NATO helped secure included, depending on the country, the softening of ethno-nationalist rhetoric, abandonment of civil territorial defense or a reduction in resources devoted to such programs, and creation of small, specialized, and highly mobile forces for deployment in multilateral operations abroad—referred to by Jacoby (2005, 234) as “niche forces” or “showcase units” (see table 5.1 for deployments to Iraq, for example).
Preceding these last two developments was the transformation in public discourse on the reasons for seeking NATO membership. Just as they had coached CEE leaders on how to frame the question of NATO enlargement (see chapter 4), alliance officials also privately argued to their CEE interlocutors that the correct rationale for joining was related to internal stabilization, modernization, and democratization, not Russian revanchism. Although initially causing considerable confusion among postcommunist leaders—who might have been forgiven for thinking that NATO was primarily a security guarantee against imperial ambitions in the region—the alliance’s urging on this point did change the official discourse over the course of a decade. By 1999, even Wojciech Jaruzelski, retired general and first secretary of the Communist Party in Poland when the regime imposed martial law in December 1981, claimed to have come around to the view that NATO membership would be a boon because of its prospective stabilizing, democratizing, and modernizing influences.4
TABLE 5.1
Troop Deployments for Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and Stabilization
NATO INFLUENCE OVER DEFENSE AND FOREIGN POLICY: UNCERTAINTY, STATUS, AND CREDIBILITY
By exploiting uncertainty (H1), domestic actors’ perception of NATO’s elevated status (H2), and the credibility of its own policies (H3), NATO promoted collective security and thereby undermined competing claims for either defense self-sufficiency or nationalist recruitment (see chapter 1 on the three study hypotheses). As the social context shifted, so too did states’ willingness to comply with the NATO version of strategic concerns. Changing articulations of threats underline the contingency of maximizing security. As such, the denationalization of defense planning should be understood as a process through which states’ international purposes and orientations are constructed. Since the measures on uncertainty, status, and credibility varied across countries, NATO encountered uneven resistance and achieved variable outcomes.
With respect to territorial defense, uncertainty was weaker in Romania and Ukraine than in Poland and Hungary, because of historical legacies (H1). While Hungary lacked the ambition to pursue the establishment of independent territorial forces during the Cold War, Poland did try to establish such a system but was frustrated in its efforts by Soviet fears that it would undermine the Warsaw Pact’s ability to subdue nationalist resistance to Soviet hegemony (Jones 1981; Sanford 1986). Romania, which began extricating itself from the structures of the Warsaw Pact in the late 1950s, established the “War of the Entire People” doctrine while still a member of the Pact, making this country the strongest case of sectoral continuity and thus the weakest case of uncertainty (Watts 2003, 133–34). Ukraine was similarly wedded to national defense. Based on this measure alone, NATO should have exercised less influence over Romania and Ukraine than over the other two countries in debates on territorial defense, because of the continuity of territorial defense in Romania and Ukraine through the transition.
There was also variation over time and across countries in the degree to which domestic actors perceived NATO as having elevated status (H2). Perceived status and the salience of international opinion correspond in part to the quality of political competition. As in the civil-military relations case, however, public confidence in the utility of military power, measured in terms of public trust in the armed forces and public support for NATO membership, also predicts how powerful NATO’s approbation will be. Where publics believed that military power is an effective means of attaining national ends, they tended to support high levels of compliance with alliance prescriptions, even when compliance was demanding of resources. But where publics held military power in low regard (as in Hungary and the Czech Republic), social recognition from NATO was a less powerful influence and participation in NATO out-of-area operations was less motivating (see table 4.1 on public support for NATO). The status variable highlights the fact that threat perceptions and compliance with NATO’s denationalizing strategy vary more according to social relations than to geostrategic realities.
The weak credibility of NATO policies, measured in terms of both consensus and normative consistency, compromised the alliance’s denationalizing power in foreign policy and defense planning (H3). In Europe, at least, territorial defense had provided the organizational basis for military deployments throughout the Cold War, making it difficult for NATO representatives to argue against territorial defense—especially to CEE leaders who initially believed they were joining an alliance dedicated to containing Russian power. Moreover, even some years after the Cold War had ended, western Europe had failed to shift many of its resources from territorial objectives to power projection. Whereas the United States had an established record of investing in power projection dating from the Cold War, by the early 2000s Europe deployed less than 5 percent of its more than 2 million troops in out-of-area missions (Yost 2000).5 The lack of consensus on the urgency to develop power projection at the expense of territorial defense would also undermine NATO arguments in favor of denationalization—in the East as well as in the West.
NATO also encountered resistance to its denationalizing prescriptions because of claims that the West had traditionally reneged on its security guarantees. Although the alliance could point to more than four decades of solidarity against the Soviet Union, CEE leaders were more concerned about earlier events. Just as victory of the Allied forces in World War II had vastly different meanings for eastern and western European powers (Davies 2004), so the salience of unfulfilled alliances varied in the minds of French, Polish, Russian, and British leaders more than fifty years on.
But when it came to demonstrating good relations with neighbors as a criterion for membership, NATO’s credibility was high.6 With the partial exception of Turkey and Greece (Krebs 1999), which suffered conflict both before and after their admission to NATO, the alliance had a convincing record not only of “keeping Germany down” but also of maintaining high levels of trust, transparency, and stability among members (Wallander 2000). NATO’s credibility in this domain made ethno-nationalist mobilization in CEE much harder to defend in the light of both NATO and European practice.
NATO failed to win full compliance with its policy prescriptions from any state. But the alliance did shift CEE defense and foreign policy away from nationalist and territorial concerns and toward collective security and goals of power projection. A skeptic would probably wonder whether the subordination of regional threat perceptions concerning the former Soviet Union, or other historical rivalries, to NATO’s more optimistic assessment of dangers in the region would do anything to alter the material facts underpinning those fears—including a history of Soviet domination, provocatively drawn borders with the dismantlement of empires, and repeated mistreatment of minorities.
But while international institutions cannot eradicate such facts from the political landscape, their policies can do much to undermine their salience in political discourse and policymaking. Thus Polish, Hungarian, or Romanian politicians may couch their reasons for joining NATO in terms of internal stabilization, modernization, and democratization, but they may privately privilege the strategic advantages of Western security guarantees. Simply altering what actors say may seem a superficial outcome if contradictory beliefs endure. But altering what politicians say produces pressure for consistent actions—especially where international institutions and the international and local media scrutinize official discourse and its policy manifestations. It was precisely such pressure that led to a downplaying of the Russian threat across central Europe, the abandonment of civil territorial defense in Poland, and the moderation in tone among Hungarian and Romanian nationalists in the run-up to NATO’s first post–Cold War enlargement in 1999.
DEFUSING HISTORICAL THREATS: THE UNCERTAINTY OF ACTORS (H1)
Poland
The measure on uncertainty in the defense planning sphere was mixed for Poland. Civilians had strong views about Poland’s historical experience, Russian intransigence, and what these implied for Polish defense. But most were not seasoned experts in formulating and implementing defense policy, providing NATO with its first point of access to defense planning debates.7 Much as they had inherited a certain idea about the balance of power between civilians and military personnel that encouraged military autonomy (as manifested in the Żabiński Commission report; see chapter 4), political leaders also carried a particular set of beliefs, stemming from the Cold War and earlier, about where Poland should seek security. But as in civil-military relations, by the late 1990s, most civilians were willing to defer to NATO on the question of how best to advance the alliance’s agenda.
Polish certainty about the ongoing threat posed by Russia, even in the post-Soviet period, complicated NATO strategy in CEE. Polish-Russian relations were tense through the turbulence of the early 1990s, which fortified Polish calls for NATO enlargement.8 Central European fears of Russian instability intensified in 1993 with the unexpectedly strong showing of Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s nationalist Liberal Democratic Party, which won 78 of 450 seats in the State Duma, the lower house of parliament.9 With the alliance still hedging its bets on whether to enlarge, calls multiplied from some of CEE’s highest-ranking leaders for a stronger commitment from NATO—much to the consternation of Western leaders. The latter feared that it was precisely the characterization of NATO as the savior of central Europe from Russia that would fan the flames of Russian nationalism and undermine attempts to stabilize Western-Russian relations.10
In an effort to win both enlargement on NATO’s terms and Russian acceptance of it, NATO initiated a concerted, albeit private, campaign to change the way Polish officials articulated threats to national security and their reasons for wanting to join the alliance. The objective was to cultivate pacific Polish-Russian relations and to persuade Russian politicians that just as NATO had “solved Russia’s German problem” by insisting on democratizing civil-military relations and restraining Germany’s expansionist impulses, the alliance’s mission now was to stabilize CEE, not to isolate Russia.11 NATO officials counseled Polish politicians and defense officials that it was counterproductive to justify Poland’s closer ties to the alliance in terms of the threat that Russia might pose.12 Understanding that antagonizing Russia was incompatible with NATO’s larger strategy, Polish officials began to highlight instead the stabilizing and modernizing benefits that membership might bring. In harmonizing Poland’s public threat perceptions with its own, NATO narrowed the terms of debate and minimized the justification of Polish defense and foreign policies by reference to Russian hostility.
According to one NATO representative who worked with the Polish defense establishment in the early 1990s, “We were telling them [the Poles] that they couldn’t talk about it this way because collective security is as important to Russia as it is to Poland and we [NATO] are trying to be Russia’s partner.” He explained the apparent paradox to his Polish interlocutors thus: “You want us to let you into the alliance to put you under the security umbrella safe from Russia. How can we be saying both that NATO is not the enemy of Russia but we admit Poland to protect it from Russia?”13
But NATO officials’ efforts to align Polish foreign policy with that of the alliance were only partially successful. While some of the country’s most prominent foreign policy experts were willing to adopt much of the NATO rhetoric, Polish fears about being subordinated to Russian interests were nevertheless manifest. The Poland-NATO Report illustrates both tendencies. Published in 1995 and designed to persuade Western leaders of the pressing need to enlarge the alliance, the report stated that “Poland is not today in danger” (Ananicz et al. 1995, 9) and that democratic consolidation was inextricably linked to transatlantic security (10). The report also pointed out, using NATO’s own logic of internal stabilization, that “the lack of basic decisions by the West is having an adverse influence on the internal situations of the Central European countries,” not least by allowing communist successor parties to regain power throughout much of the region (31). But the authors also noted that while it is fine to engage Russia, the West should not be seduced into believing that Russian elites wished to create a European order based on integration (27). Rather, Russian skepticism toward NATO should be interpreted as that country’s effort to forestall enlargement until Russia was strong enough to have “a real say in decisions affecting European security” (27).14
One area in which the uncertainty of domestic actors did provide NATO with access to defense planning processes in Poland was territorial defense. Whereas Romania had succeeded in creating enough distance between itself and the Warsaw Pact to conduct defense planning independently, the Soviet Union had kept Poland firmly within the fold. This meant that although Poland undertook some independent foreign policy initiatives and strove to preserve its own distinctive military tradition, the Soviet Union prevented the country from developing territorial defense in the 1960s as Polish nationalists had hoped to do.15 Discontinuity in territorial defense between the communist and postcommunist periods made it much more difficult for Polish officials to follow through on 1997 campaign pledges to organize, fund, and deploy the large-scale civil territorial initiative that members of Solidarity Electoral Action (AWS) had proposed.
The uncertainty of actors contributed to a social context in which NATO’s interpretations of the past and their relevance for the future would ultimately prevail—but not without friction along the way. By advising CEE elites that a constructive justification for joining NATO was internal stabilization rather than external threats, the alliance limited the basis on which politicians could legitimately mobilize domestic support—fearmongering based on the Russian threat was not acceptable from the alliance’s perspective. NATO’s private campaign to moderate the tone of Polish politicians also undermined military strategies that were blatantly at odds with the alliance’s strategic concepts, most notably civil territorial defense. The pressure for consistency between public declarations and actual public policy contributed to the political infeasibility of civil territorial defense in the late 1990s.
Hungary
The uncertainty of actors and the discontinuity between modes of defense planning under the Warsaw Pact and in the postcommunist period also gave NATO some access to Hungarian national security rhetoric and policy. Although historically different, the uncertainty variable worked in similar ways in Hungary and Poland. Important differences begin with the fact that Hungary was among the last of Hitler’s allies, albeit a very reluctant ally by the end of the war. The Hungarian public’s subsequent ambivalence toward the armed forces has in all likelihood been fueled as much by the military’s passive and muddled role vis-à-vis the Soviet Union (including during the 1956 revolution) as by its lack of success on the battlefield.16 As in Poland, but not Romania, the army, however reluctantly, also took part in the suppression of Czechoslovakia’s Prague Spring in 1968.
Notwithstanding the introduction of a milder regime in Hungary after 1956, perhaps the only things that dampened Hungarian-Russian alienation in the post–Cold War period were the absence of a common border and the perception of even more pressing threats to Hungarian security (Vachudova 2005). Having lost close to two-thirds of its pre–World War I territory and three-fifths of its population in the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, Hungary had long-standing rivalries with Czechoslovakia and Romania as well as concerns about Hungarian minorities in parts of Yugoslavia, Ukraine, and, to a lesser extent, Austria (Barany 1993, 30; Linden 2000; Williams 2002, 229). Whereas the exigencies of surviving Soviet hegemony had mostly sublimated the desire to act on behalf of Hungarian minorities during the Cold War (Barany 1995, 112; Bunce 1999), the postcommunist period provided a new opportunity to organize foreign policy in part by attending to the grievances of the Hungarian diaspora. Indeed, Hungary’s amended 1990 Constitution obliged its leaders to do so.
As in Poland, the government that came to power in the transition in Hungary was comprised of former opponents to the communist regime who had little prior governing experience—and thus some uncertainty when it came to formulating policy. Discontinuity in leadership proved to be as important in foreign policy as in other areas in facilitating international influence. The inexperience of Hungarian civilian leaders and their lack of authority over the armed forces made them susceptible to NATO and other international institutional demands in foreign policy matters. Thus, when the new prime minister, József Antall, proclaimed in 1990 that in spirit he was prime minister of 15 million Hungarians (referring not only to the 10.5 million living in Hungary but the millions more scattered throughout CEE), at least one observer explained the inflammatory remark in terms of inexperience rather than revanchism (Barany 1999, 79; also see Williams 2002, 230).17 Initially, the Hungarian national security debate was characterized by a lack of clear vision, partly owing to inexperienced leadership (Kiss 2003, 138).
Just as supporters of Polish membership in NATO did not initially understand that they would be joining not the “old” NATO organized to contain Russian power but a new one concerned with regional stability and out-of-area missions, Hungarian politicians similarly misconstrued the purposes of a range of Western institutions as their member states had previously defined them. One Hungarian foreign policy official noted that at the outset of transition, his countrymen “had a very romantic idea about how international organizations would view Hungary.”18 As they soon learned, however, international organizations had interests and values of their own. Perhaps taking the righteousness of their aims for granted, Hungarian leaders sought to use the country’s frontrunner status with Western institutions to pressure Hungary’s neighbors into adopting more democratic measures sooner, in an effort to ensure the minority rights of Hungarian-speakers (Szayna 2001, chap. 2; Williams 2002). Hungarian strategy even went so far as to try to exclude offending nations (Romania and Slovakia) from Western international agreements (Williams 2002, 239).
In the dilemma over whether to prioritize either the welfare of minorities abroad or constructive relations with Western opinion, it was ultimately international organizations, including NATO and the European Union, that imposed a choice. NATO and EU pressure coaxed the political class into formulating and ratifying basic treaties with Slovakia in 1995 and Romania in 1996. These organizations also made it clear that they would not tolerate Hungarian obstruction when it came to judging the viability of any other state for NATO or EU membership.19 Like the European Union, NATO, with its open-door policy, sought to defuse tensions between states in the region and therefore needed to prevent new members from using their elevated status (and, in NATO’s case, security guarantees) to provoke or intimidate states still on the outside (Szayna 2001, 16, 22).
Civilian foreign-policy makers in Hungary also proved susceptible to NATO’s influence over managing relations with Russia—again pointing to the power of uncertainty among domestic actors. The withdrawal of 78,000 Soviet troops from Hungary by the end of 1991 was welcomed even if Hungarians had given little consideration to how they would defend themselves thereafter (Barany 1999, 75). But despite the country’s geographic vulnerability and historical animosity toward the Soviet Union, by 1995, at NATO’s urging, Hungary’s foreign policy officials were doing their “best to assuage Moscow’s fears about the diminution of Russian security after NATO’s expansion” (Barany 1999, 80). An official also argued that “everything must be done … to explain to the Russian public … that NATO’s expansion does not threaten Russia; that on the contrary it also serves the interests of their security.” The same official went on to describe Russia as a “great state” that should also “join the community of democratic states.”20
A final area of sectoral discontinuity and thus uncertainty facilitated NATO influence over Hungarian foreign policy and defense planning. Whereas Poland had tried but failed to develop national territorial defense within the Warsaw Pact and Romania had tried and succeeded, Hungary had never aspired to such levels of military independence from the Soviet Union. More so than Poland and Romania, Hungary remained an obedient if weak contributor to the Warsaw Pact. To be sure, Hungary gained greater maneuverability vis-à-vis the Soviet Union in other areas—especially with economic liberalization and introduction of the New Economic Mechanism in the late 1960s. But the country never challenged the Soviet Union on military grounds. The largely successful Warsaw Pact domination of Hungarian military affairs meant that in the post–Cold War period, NATO did not have to confront a revival of national mythologies that celebrated defense self-sufficiency, as it did in Poland and, to a certain extent, Romania.
Romania
Unlike Poland and Hungary, Romania inherited from the communist period a vast professional and civil territorial defense apparatus. This led to a weak measure on uncertainty in the Romanian case. Decades of industrial organization, institutional preparation, and societal mobilization around the idea of defense self-sufficiency proved a formidable barrier to recasting Romanian security goals. The ideational legacy of nationalist military planning limited NATO’s access to the country’s defense planning reforms into the 1990s.
Although formally a member of the Warsaw Pact until the Pact’s demise in 1991, Romania began agitating for national independence in the late 1950s. The head of the Romanian Communist Party, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, persuaded Nikita Khrushchev to withdraw Soviet troops from Romania in 1958, in part by arguing that the absence of a foreign military presence would bolster domestic support for the communist regime. But by 1964 it was clear that the Romanian leadership had still greater autarkic ambitions. Romania had stopped sending its officers to Soviet military academies, refused to host Warsaw Pact training exercises on Romanian soil, sent few troops to participate in such exercises elsewhere, and replaced the Main Political Administration with party committees styled on the Yugoslav model. Lacking troops on Romanian soil, the Soviets had little means to thwart such initiatives and, particularly given the severing of political ties between the Romanian Main Political Administration and its Soviet counterpart, no remaining channels of political indoctrination (Jones 1981, 36–39, 83–85).
Following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Romania went to some lengths to demonstrate not only its political independence from the Soviet Union (by not participating in the crushing of the Prague Spring) but also its defense self-sufficiency. According to Jones (1981, 83), Ceauşescu mobilized the country’s 520,000 regular armed forces as well as 700,000 members of the Patriotic Guard in response to the Soviet Union’s actions in Czechoslovakia. The “War of the Entire People” doctrine that provided the rationale for large numbers of regular and reserve military personnel was probably initiated in the late 1950s or early 1960s by Ceauşescu’s predecessor, and by the 1970s it included an additional 20,000 troops attached to the interior ministry, Youth Defense Training Formations for sixteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, and a separate department and command for the defense industry.
The Soviet failure to penetrate the Romanian armed forces and the decidedly anti-Soviet orientation of Romanian foreign policy and defense planning from the late 1950s might seem to give the country some natural advantages for NATO accession.21 But anti-Sovietism is not the same as internationalism, just as the desire to join the alliance never translated into a spontaneous alignment of strategic priorities with NATO in any of the candidate states. In Romania, inherited security institutions as well as ideational legacies reduced its defense planning uncertainty and limited its willingness to reconfigure its forces in line with NATO priorities of the 1990s.
NATO also lacked decisive access to Romanian foreign policy because the first post-revolution government consisted mostly of former communists who had been marginalized in Ceauşescu’s regime. They created the National Salvation Front (FSN), which won overwhelmingly in the 1990 elections. They also inherited all of the political conflicts implied by the large-scale presence of ethnic minorities, including a sizable population of Hungarian-speakers. The significant continuity in personnel limited the degree of influence that international institutions could exercise, at least until 1996 when opposition parties coalesced within the Democratic Convention of Romania (CDR) and replaced the communist successor–dominated government with a coalition of their own.
The only area of uncertainty and thus access for NATO might have been provided by the inexperience of civilian leaders in directly managing the military and governing its daily operations. The alliance did ultimately encourage Romania to take on a limited role in multilateral operations in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In addition, FSN leaders (by 1993, the Party of Social Democracy of Romania, PDSR) responded to NATO membership criteria by initiating an offer of reconciliation with Hungary that culminated in a basic treaty in 1996 (Linden 2000, 131). However, it is unlikely that the uncertainty of actors early in transition played a role in the bilateral treaty with Hungary, given the continuity in the armed forces and leadership outlined here.
Ukraine
The inclusion of Ukraine, the only non-NATO country under consideration here, helps us assess the validity of two claims. The first is that defense and foreign policy denationalization is not simply a consequence of the end of the Cold War and shrinking Russian power. At different points and to varying degrees, Poland, Hungary, and Romania all embraced policies symptomatic of defense denationalization during the 1990s—including rejection of territorial defense in favor of power projection, a shift in emphasis from conscription to professionalization, and abandonment of ethno-nationalist mobilization. That Ukraine did not begin to follow these trends until the social context facilitating NATO influence was in place corroborates my claim that defense denationalization is not “best practice” as defined by strategic context. Rather, contrasts among countries in the 1990s show the independent effect of NATO where the alliance had access to domestic reform processes. NATO’s independent effect was the shift in favor of its strategic priorities at the expense of national or historical ones.
The second claim is that even in the absence of clear incentives, international institutions can elicit state compliance given a social context informed by uncertainty, hierarchy, and credibility. The relationship between NATO and Ukraine was changing in the early 2000s. The changes were partly linked to the increasing quality of political competition in Ukraine. Because of the increased status of international institutions, although Ukraine failed to comply with many aspects of defense denationalization it did become a contributor to NATO and US-led multinational military operations.
Through the 1990s, NATO had no significant access to Ukrainian defense reform, because of the lack of uncertainty among domestic reformers. Indeed, from 1991 to 1996 NATO was ambivalent about Ukrainian accession, owing to the perceived incompatibility of the country’s economy, political situation, and military-security apparatus with the alliance and Russian claims to a certain sphere of influence. Likewise, Ukraine did not initially strive for membership. It did, however, seek integration with Euro-Atlantic structures. Ukraine joined the Partnership for Peace (PfP) in February 1994 and signed the Charter on a Distinctive Partnership between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Ukraine in July 1997. In more radical moves that ended the country’s official status as a nonaligned country, Ukraine joined NATO’s Planning and Review Process in 2001 and, on May 23, 2002, declared NATO membership as its ultimate goal. Despite the leadership’s apparent desire to join, however, NATO has had only a muted impact in key areas such as the democratization of civilian control (see chapter 4) and defense planning. NATO’s access to Ukrainian domestic debates has been limited in large measure by the social context—starting with the strong continuity in the military-security apparatus and its commitment to national territorial defense.
Ukraine inherited a substantial defense establishment from the Soviet Union when it declared its independence in 1991. A multinational force of more than 800,000 Soviet military personnel was stationed on what became Ukrainian soil (Grytsenko 1997, 5). Twelve thousand officers and warrant officers who were unwilling to pledge their allegiance to Ukraine were eventually repatriated; 33,000 more servicemen from abroad were then reabsorbed (Sherr 2005, 163). Because the force had been wholly integrated into the Soviet military command, Ukraine lacked some obvious features of an autonomous national defense apparatus, including a Ministry of Defense (MoD; or parallel governing institutions) and an independent weapons production capacity (Grytsenko 1997, 6). Nongovernmental oversight, in the form of free media or independent research institutions, did not exist.
Equally important legacies of the Warsaw Pact and Soviet military control in Ukraine, however, were the attitudes and skills they left behind—both within the officer class and, to a certain extent, within the ranks. The “general war ethos” had not primarily been organized around Ukrainian territorial defense: as an integral part of the Soviet bloc, forces in Ukraine in the Cold War were positioned to launch an offensive on Western territory. And although central, eastern, and even western European states have increasingly moved from conscript to professional armies (Epstein and Gheciu 2006), the idea was anathema to many in both the Russian and Ukrainian military establishments throughout the 1990s. Because conceptions of military service and citizenship were inextricably linked, paying people to undertake military service was traditionally considered “immoral” (Sherr 2005, 166). Finally, in sharp distinction to either Poland or Hungary (but similar to Romania), high-ranking Ukrainian officers benefited from significant command experience. For whereas the Warsaw Pact had been designed to keep the national militaries of the Soviet satellites (such as Poland and Hungary) weak, Ukrainian officers had been an integral part of Soviet command (Jones 1981).
The idea of territorial defense in Ukraine, which dates back to the 1920s, also weakened the measure on uncertainty. For most of the Ukrainian people’s history independent statehood had not been a core political objective, but a kind of ethno-political nationalism did finally emerge at the beginning of the twentieth century. Before that time, Ukrainian populations had been integrated mostly into Polish and Russian empires and few had ever imagined or aspired to independence. In the country’s western regions, the Ukrainian elite did not conceive of political status independent of Poland (Prizel 1998, 314). In the east, they identified strongly with their Russian counterparts and at most aimed for greater autonomy, but within a larger Russian federation (306). The growing brutality of both the Polish and Russian regimes in the second half of the nineteenth century fomented a new kind of Ukrainian nationalism, however, such that even after the Ukrainian national project failed in 1920, the Ukrainian elite, particularly within the Soviet empire, sought the trappings of statehood—including a territorial army “with Ukrainian as its language of command” (329).22
Strong sectoral continuity in the military-security apparatus from the communist period through Ukraine’s independence limited the uncertainty of actors in defense planning. NATO therefore had less access to defense planning debates and less power over foreign policy orientation in Ukraine than in Poland or Hungary, because in no sense were Ukrainian commanders novices. Civilians, however, were—as elsewhere in the region. It is notable that Ukraine’s growing integration with the alliance in the 1990s and its commitment to join NATO, announced in 2002, were led by civilians. Uncertainty was muted in Ukraine as in Romania, however, because of the continuity in personnel between the communist and postcommunist periods, at least until the quality of political competition improved in the early 2000s.
NATO’S STATUS AND DEFENSE DENATIONALIZATION (H2)
Poland
Domestic political conditions supported NATO’s strong status in Poland. Political competition effectively dated back through the communist period, for even without a competitive party system, the Solidarity trade union movement served as an alternative source of legitimacy and power to the state-socialist regime. It also provided the wedge that NATO would use in the 1990s to access debates on defense planning. As in Hungary, but not Romania or Ukraine, political competition from the outset of transition ensured that winning international credibility was a major mobilizing force for political parties in Poland. It was not just the fact of political competition that affected reform trajectories, but also the nature of opposition movements in Poland and Hungary, which were democratic and ideologically Western in orientation. Opposition under communism ensured in both countries that the political leaders who took control in the transition aspired to Western practice as the “civilizational standard.”23
As noted in the civil-military relations case, the Polish public also had high regard for military power, which stemmed from Polish military history. The public’s traditional support of the armed forces’ mission, coupled with a strong desire for social recognition from international institutions, resulted in a willingness to abide by NATO policy prescriptions, even if in some cases this was against the better judgment of politicians. Poland has been willing to maintain NATO-set target levels of defense spending—unlike Hungary, with its weaker public support for military power and its own armed forces. Higher levels of military spending in Poland in turn have allowed greater scope for compliance with NATO policy goals, especially regarding operational forces for NATO missions (see table 5.2 on military spending).
TABLE 5.2
Military Expenditure as Percentage of GDP
The relation between NATO and Polish officials was a hierarchical one, partly because political competition in Poland forced parties to submit to the scrutiny and judgment of international opinion. The perceived subordinate status of Polish actors in relation to their authoritative NATO advisors was also the result of historical factors that are not easily captured by the political competition variable. Polish admiration for military power is a better approximation: NATO commanded respect in Poland for having won the Cold War. Polish outcomes, and the paths by which they were secured, demonstrate the centrality of the status variable.
Hungary
One would expect Hungary, like Poland, to comply with NATO’s denationalizing policies because of its desire for social recognition from Western institutions. Hungary proved more susceptible to NATO’s demand that it denationalize its foreign policy than to the alliance’s preference that it also internationalize its defense planning. Thus while Hungary stepped away from ethno-nationalist rhetoric in response to NATO pressure it was a poor contributor to multilateral military missions, and thus a weaker complier than Poland overall on the denationalization outcome.
Variation in Hungary’s receptivity to the NATO version of denationalization stemmed from contradictory measures on the status hypothesis. Hungary had strong political competition, which explains the movement away from ethno-nationalist mobilization. But it had weak public support for military power, which explains why Hungary did not become a powerful player in NATO’s out-of-area operations. Political competition ensured that international opinion figured prominently in how political parties competed and how they adjusted over time to international institutional approbation and condemnation. But in Hungary there was a counterintuitive twist on which political groups would be most susceptible to Western institutions’ appraisal. For it was not the opposition leaders who replaced the communists in the transition that had the greatest sympathy with NATO’s denationalizing worldview: indeed, members of the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) assumed office believing—wrongly—that international institutions would accommodate their nationalist goals.
Just as the communist successors in Hungary proved ultimately more open to Western demands for economic liberalization (Hanley, King, and Tóth János 2002; also see chapters 2 and 3), it was Prime Minister Gyula Horn and his Hungarian Socialist Party (MSzP) that reversed the country’s foreign policy course after 1994. Horn cited NATO membership as a key reason for abandoning a nationalist discourse, arguing that failure to reach agreement with Romania and Slovakia on minority rights was among the biggest foreign policy failures of the previous government (Nelson and Szayna 1998; Williams 2002, 234–35). Due to Hungary’s strong opposition to communism and support for Western integration, its communist successor party could legitimize itself by out-Westernizing its anticommunist counterparts—a pattern found across CEE.24
Although Polish membership in NATO was never threatened by the proclivities of conservative politicians for defense self-sufficiency, Hungary’s status with respect to NATO in the early and mid-1990s was uncertain—and the country’s politicians knew it.25 Hungary was not geographically contiguous with NATO’s Article V territory, and its military was of questionable use to the alliance. One might therefore conclude that social recognition was a less powerful force for foreign policy change than simply the threat of exclusion from the alliance. But as I argue elsewhere in this volume, an either/or approach to understanding compliance is the wrong way to conceptualize the problem: social forces and incentives must be considered together because it is the social context that constitutes the power of incentives.
Thus, the incentive of membership alone does not explain Hungary’s, and especially the MSzP’s, attentiveness to the concerns of international institutions with the country’s foreign policy toward its neighbors. This is borne out by the fact that in the mid-1990s, Hungarian public support for NATO membership was only 32 percent.26 It was only through a media campaign, supported by NATO, that the socialists secured the minimum support required for membership by referendum.27 Tepid public interest in joining NATO probably stemmed in large measure from low levels of support for military power, as reflected in Hungary’s poor military-society relations.
Despite low levels of public support for joining NATO, Hungarian politicians staked their reputations on Western institutions’ assessments, because Western institutions, including NATO, had defined over decades what it meant to be “European.” Thus NATO’s conditionality, to the extent that it was used against Hungary, was not meaningful because the impetus to join was so self-evident—as underwhelming levels of support for membership attest, joining was not self-evident. Rather, conditionality was powerful because NATO membership, and the implicit social recognition that went with it, was elemental in showing that Hungary was becoming a normal Western democracy. It was especially critical that communist successor parties were seen to be actively engaged in the normalization process. Thus the incentive of membership was crucial, but only because of what membership had come to mean: the achievement of Western, liberal democracy and capitalism, with historical disputes relegated to the past.
Romania
The status variable receives only partial confirmation in the case of foreign policy and defense denationalization in Romania, because this country registered somewhat stronger compliance than the social context would predict. Poland had strong political competition and high regard for military power, making NATO’s status a force for embracing its strategic vision. Hungary had strong political competition but weak regard for military power, resulting in an uneven desire for NATO recognition—while that desire was powerful for politicians, it was not for the Hungarian public. Romania, like Hungary, had mixed measures on the status variable, but in reverse: little political competition until 1996, but strong public confidence in the armed forces (see table 4.2).
The continuity in personnel between the communist regime and the FSN, led by Ion Iliescu, that came to power in December 1989 limited the influence of international institutions on Romania’s political discourse and policy. Although there were competitive elections in 1990 and 1992, the opponents of the FSN (which ultimately coalesced in the CDR under Emil Constantinescu) did not pose a serious threat to Iliescu until 1996, when they won both a parliamentary plurality and the presidency. Given the absence of a Western-oriented democratic opposition under communism (unlike in Poland, Hungary, or even Czechoslovakia), Romanian emulation of Western norms was a much less salient part of policymaking in the early 1990s, even if public support for membership of Western institutions was very high.28
The continuity in Romanian territorial defense (and thus the lack of uncertainty) and the absence of political competition (and thus the irrelevance of international opinion) boded poorly for institutional influence. It is perhaps surprising, therefore, that Iliescu’s PDSR made as many concessions to NATO as it did by 1996. Linden points out, for example (2000, 130–31), that the Romanian-Hungarian basic treaty on Hungarian-speakers’ rights in Transylvania was a Romanian initiative in response to the forthcoming Study on NATO Enlargement (NATO 1995b), which the elite knew would make peaceful relations among neighbors a prerequisite for NATO membership.29 Bacon also notes that even in the early 1990s, at least one Romanian lieutenant general (Nicolae Spiroiu) was overseeing the writing of new “laws which redefined the [Defense] Ministry’s organization and its relationship with state authority in ways consistent with Western standards and Romania’s aspirations of integration into Euro-Atlantic security structures” (1999, 191).
Romanian compliance with NATO norms in the absence of the social context that, I have argued, makes conditionality meaningful and powerful suggests that the social context specified here may not always be essential for winning compliance. The Romanian basic treaty initiative could simply have been a result of Iliescu wanting to defuse tensions with Hungary for domestic political reasons, although this is unlikely given that the treaty alienated the PDSR’s coalition partners (the Romanian National Unity Party, PUNR; the Socialist Party of Labor, PSM; and the Greater Romania Party, PRM).30 An explanation closer to my theory would argue that by August 1995 political competition was taking shape in Romania and that the opinions of international institutions had begun to matter. Given that the elections were still more than a year away, however, this explanation is also not compelling. The most likely explanation for Iliescu’s treaty initiative with Hungary is simply that NATO criteria figured prominently in Romanian foreign policy even in the absence of a conducive social context.
But Romanian compliance on the bilateral treaty issue does not seriously undermine my central claim: a particular social context, informed by the uncertainty of target actors, their desire for social affirmation from international institutions, and the credibility of policies, is key to understanding a target state’s embrace of Western ideas. Both the Romanian treaty initiative and the authoring of laws are empirically significant pieces of compliance. It is also important to note, however, that the same lieutenant general who began reforming Romania’s military-security apparatus was summarily fired from the MoD for doing so (Bacon 1999, 191). The point is that while NATO was able to win a broad consensus for its strategic vision in Poland, due to a generally propitious social context, NATO cultivated no such consensus in Romania. It would be years before the expectations and behaviors of both civilians and officers would catch up with Lieutenant General Spiroiu’s legislative efforts. Ratification of the basic treaty with Hungary similarly had little bearing on how Romanians would ultimately choose to allocate their defense resources, although it does show that the social context specified here is not the only possible condition that elicits compliance.
Ukraine
Through the 1990s and early 2000s, NATO exercised relatively little influence over Ukraine’s foreign policy and defense planning agenda because the alliance’s status was compromised by weak political competition. Unlike Poland and Hungary, Ukraine did not have a democratic opposition movement under communism that sought close association with the values of Western international institutions. Before Yalta, US and British governments concluded that Ukrainian national aspirations were too weak to champion, and thereafter Ukraine had little in the way of intellectual, economic, or cultural exchange with Western states (Prizel 1998, 342). To the extent that Ukraine developed dissident movements during the Cold War, they tended to be weak and fragmented. Moreover, there was little connection between the aspirations of nationalists in the west or east of the country and a larger population that was mostly cowed and apathetic.
By the mid-1980s, Ukrainian opposition to the communist regime did take on a mass character. The 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, as well as revelations of Soviet atrocities against Ukrainians during World War II, underlined the injurious consequences of Soviet rule (Prizel 1998, 358–59). By 1990, mass protests, although comprised of groups almost exclusively west of the Dnieper, signified a new Ukrainian national consciousness. The failed coup against Gorbachev in 1991, in addition to Yeltsin’s declaration of Russian sovereignty, finally pushed leaders in the Communist Party of Ukraine to move toward Ukrainian independence—even if leader Leonid Kravchuk would have preferred a successful anti-Gorbachev coup to put an end to Gorbachev’s liberalizing policies (Prizel 1998, 361–62). Ukraine then voted overwhelmingly in favor of independence from the Soviet Union in December 1991.
But more like Romania than Poland or Hungary, Ukraine also experienced strong continuity between its communist-era leadership and post-independence governments. Low-quality political competition translated into narrow access for international institutions to the country’s policy debates. By the early 2000s, however, large-scale demonstrations (with crowds reaching into the tens of thousands) did begin to agitate against the government. And by 2004, political competition was sufficiently powerful in Ukraine to prevent Leonid Kuchma and Moscow’s preferred presidential candidate, Viktor Yanukovich, from taking office. With increasing political competition in Ukraine, the country’s standing in relation to international institutions became more salient and NATO’s access to foreign policy and defense planning increased.
The status of NATO in Ukraine was simultaneously undermined, however, because Russia provided an alternative point of reference for many Ukrainians. For Poland, Hungary, and Romania, escaping Russia’s sphere of influence was viewed as essential to national survival. For at least some Ukrainians, however, Russia’s own worldview—centered on strong executive leadership and state control of the economy and the distribution of wealth—was a viable alternative to Western norms.31 Whereas political battles had been fought in Poland, Hungary, and Romania between honoring national traditions and historical experience or adopting Western practices, Ukraine’s historical experience had been bound to Russia.
In sum, one could not expect Ukraine to internationalize defense planning or denationalize foreign policy on the basis of its perception of NATO’s elevated status in the 1990s. In the absence of democratic opposition under communism and without meaningful political competition until the early 2000s, even if NATO had conferred elevated status on Ukraine, it was unlikely to have carried much weight in domestic politics. Given the Russian or Slavic orientation of large swathes of the population, building a too close relationship with NATO too early might well have jeopardized the political fortunes of Ukrainian leaders.
NATO’S COMPROMISED CREDIBILITY AND PROBLEMS WITH COMPLIANCE (H3)
The credibility of a policy is measured first in terms of whether institutions or their founding members carry out the policies they urge upon others, and second in terms of whether there is an international, or at least Western, consensus underpinning prescribed practice. CEE perceptions of NATO’s compromised credibility in defense planning denationalization complicated the alliance’s efforts to denationalize defense policy in the region. NATO’s consistency was undermined in the minds of nationalists by inadequate security guarantees from the West in the run-up to World War II. Moreover, there was no obvious consensus among existing alliance members on the shift from territorial to power projection capabilities. On a third measure, however—namely, the rejection of ethno-nationalist mobilization—NATO was credible, given that relations among NATO members (with the exception of Greece and Turkey) were cooperative.
The first weakness in NATO’s credibility sprang from history. Poland and Czechoslovakia had staked their hopes on Western security guarantees before World War II, only to be abandoned to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The deal agreed to at Yalta among Allied leaders, in which the region was essentially traded away to the Soviet sphere of influence, was regarded as a second betrayal—particularly by those CEE states that had contributed troops to the Allied war effort. Although these events took place well before NATO was formed, they nevertheless undermined the perceived credibility of Western security guarantees, given NATO’s close association with many of the states that had been such disappointing allies in the past.
Of the four countries under consideration here, Poland’s defense planning debates were most affected by these historical factors. By contrast, Hungary and Romania had aligned with Nazi Germany, however reluctantly, with Romania only switching sides in 1944—albeit with an enormous contribution of personnel to the Allied effort thereafter (Watts 2003, 132).32 Ukraine, as part of the Soviet Union, had neither relied on Western security guarantees nor suffered unexpectedly under Yalta. But for Poland, the country that proportionately suffered the greatest loss of life in World War II, themes of vulnerability, betrayal, and self-reliance remained potentially resonant even after the Cold War.
Poland
It was precisely by building on themes of vulnerability, betrayal, and self-reliance that conservative members of Poland’s Solidarity Electoral Action mobilized support for a large-scale civil territorial defense program. Deputy Minister of Defense Romuald Szeremietiew placed civil territorial defense (Obrona Terytorialna, OT) at the center of his AWS campaign and made a more formal proposal in late 1997 with the assistance of Radek Sikorski, a former deputy minister of defense under Jan Parys.33 Szeremietiew’s program would have preserved universal conscription and eliminated service deferrals, which were routine in Poland by the late 1990s and had reduced the proportion of those who served to just 15 percent. While maintaining an operational force of both professional and conscript soldiers, Szeremietiew also proposed training a 1.5 million troop territorial force that would be armed with small arms, mines, mobile grenade launchers, and anti-tank and anti-aircraft rockets.34
The perceived lack of credibility of NATO and some of its members provided the AWS with justification for OT. In one of his early articles as deputy minister of defense, Szeremietiew wrote that although Poland’s prospective membership in NATO was preferable to the kind of alliances made with Britain and France before World War II, he believed that an unhealthy mentality of dependence persisted in Poland. Critiquing the SLD-PSL (Democratic Left Alliance–Polish Peasant Party) coalition that had governed from 1993 until 1997, Szeremietiew argued that Poland had shown excessive compliance with NATO pressure as though “we cannot manage without the West.”35 The emphasis placed by Szeremietiew and others on self-sufficiency had additional policy implications. Reversing the dependence mentality would also mean patriotic awareness education and military training in high schools.36 Calls for reintegration of the military into society and societal responsibility for national defense reflected Szeremietiew’s view that the military could and should be used as a tool to shape the Polish state. Another OT supporter remarked that the consigning of national defense solely to the state and its military was “absolute nonsense” and argued instead for embedding vigilance against the country’s enemies in society as a whole and all its institutions.37 Szeremietiew and other OT advocates shared this view.38
Conservative members of the AWS also argued that greater self-reliance required domestic production of arms to equip territorial defense units—an idea popular with workers in the failing defense manufacturing sector. Among the threats to Poland’s security listed by Szeremietiew was political pressure to purchase foreign-made weapons that, as he argued, were neither as militarily effective nor as economically efficient as locally produced small arms.39 Another risk, according to OT supporters, stemmed from the idea, perpetuated by NATO, that Poland faced no immediate threat. For a country sandwiched between Russia and Germany, one high-level defense official argued that historical experience would suggest otherwise.40 At least two defense officials linked what they saw as dangerous passivity toward NATO to past socialization within the Warsaw Pact.41
Territorial defense also had supporters in the military because of doubts about Western security guarantees. Contrary to conventional wisdom of the 1990s that a small, vulnerable, and recently liberated state had little choice but to seek powerful allies, some military personnel argued that mounting a defense was relatively easy and low-cost, given a strong public commitment to take responsibility for national security. One general argued that while it was typical of powerful, wealthy states to impose a high-tech vision of military organization on weaker powers, more important was an “inner resolve not to give in to invasion.” Citing World War II, he noted that Poland had invested in expensive, heavy equipment at the time, but, after being abandoned by its allies, ended up sending its prized submarines and destroyers into service for other states.42 OT would also ensure that not all of Poland’s troops were subordinated to NATO command.43 From the point of view of protecting territorial integrity and national autonomy, then, the bulk of NATO training, which in the 1990s was already geared toward offensive missions, made little sense to either civilian or military OT advocates.44
Another reason that NATO’s credibility was undermined in the eyes of OT advocates was the lack of uniform consensus in the West on the appropriate balance between territorial and internationally mobile units. Thus, while NATO compatibility emphasized power projection, the alliance de-emphasized territorial security. Given that many Western countries have something equivalent to a home guard, supporters of Poland’s civil territorial defense initiative wondered why the country should not be like “any other normal” or “sovereign state.”45
It is surprising that a territorial defense program at odds with NATO priorities emerged at all in a country facing geostrategic uncertainty and seeking legitimacy through constructive relations with a range of international institutions. In a clear example of how historical experience, social practice, and arguments constitute alliances and enmities, the emergence of OT and the rationale behind it highlight the ways in which the normative inconsistency of the West fueled mistrust among at least some Polish officials. But as discussed in detail below, an equally powerful testament to the role of social relations in structuring interstate affinities and hostilities is the method NATO used to marginalize Polish territorial defense and achieve a greater commitment of resources to its own priorities—namely, collective security.
Hungary
As noted, there are three areas in which NATO’s credibility can be gauged: the consistency of defense planning within the alliance, the credibility of security guarantees, and the ethno-nationalist basis for foreign policy. Although it was primarily the first two that affected Poland’s debate on territorial defense, Hungary was more strongly influenced by the third. Because the Soviets exercised almost total control over the Hungarian armed forces under the Warsaw Pact, and because military-society relations deteriorated over the same period, Hungary’s defense planning in the early 1990s revealed a general lack of interest rather than a rush to fill a looming security vacuum.
At the outset of transition, and well before NATO membership was on offer, the defense doctrine debate in Hungary veered between two extremes—defense self-sufficiency and abolition of the armed forces. In the end, the country settled on a wholly defensive strategy to forestall military defeat until its allies could assist it, but even this modest plan was under-resourced and poorly implemented (Barany 1999, 80–81). Hence the question of whether Hungary had a defense at odds with or complementary to NATO norms did not surface, except insofar as Hungary had great difficulty delivering the requisite level of defense spending into the 2000s (see table 5.2).
Regarding the credibility of security guarantees, arguments based on Western betrayal did not resonate as in Poland and Czechoslovakia, because Hungary had been a German ally through most of World War II. But the United Nations failed to assist Prime Minister Imre Nagy’s neutrality initiative during the 1956 revolution (Barany 1993, 63; Nelson and Szayna 1998), ultimately resulting in the execution of Nagy and two thousand others, and this contributed to public support for neutrality in the 1990s.
However, there was one area in which the alliance’s credibility was sound. NATO had been very clear in its expectation that candidates, like members, should “settle any international disputes in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered” (NATO 1995b, 3).46 With the partial exception of Turkey and Greece, members of the alliance have generally sought noncombative ways of settling disputes. As Hungarian Foreign Minister László Kovács observed, “There is nothing that makes the West more nervous than to accept quarrelling Central or East European countries into multilateral structures” (quoted in Williams 2002, 233). Having little discursive space to challenge NATO’s stipulation that ongoing interstate disputes be settled peacefully in advance of accession, this is what the MSzP set out to do.
Romania
Like their Hungarian counterparts, Romanian leaders were susceptible to NATO norms on the incompatibility between bilateral tensions and alliance membership. Although there was not a seamless accommodation by Romania of the whole range of Western policies, NATO’s consistency on the importance of minority rights protection and resolving conflicts with neighboring states strongly influenced President Iliescu’s decision to launch a basic treaty initiative with Hungary in 1995. As a result, Iliescu’s PDSR forfeited the support of three smaller political parties that had been part of the governing coalition, the PRM, PSM, and PUNR (Linden 2000, 134).
The lack of consensus within NATO over force structures contrasted with its consistency on pacific relations among its members. Hungary, because of its low regard for military power and a general lack of interest in defense planning, was less affected by this kind of inconsistency than were Romania and Poland. But in these latter two states, where the military had long been viewed as the appropriate guardian of national independence, the absence of a single model of force projection created considerable discursive space concerning the appropriate balance of territorial and operational forces.
There was very little discussion in Romania about the credibility of NATO security guarantees. That these guarantees were a source of debate in Poland but not in Hungary or Romania reflects diverging experiences during World War II rather than more uniform experiences (at least with the West) during the Cold War. As German allies for much or all of World War II, neither Hungary nor Romania had the same embittering experience of abandonment by the West.47
Ukraine
In Ukraine, as elsewhere in the region, the absence of any single model establishing a balance between territorial and operational forces within NATO put the alliance in a weak position regarding its preference for power projection. The lack of Western consensus on threat perceptions and force structures lay behind Ukraine’s mostly territorial approach to defense planning, which was generally unaffected by NATO’s preferences.
The perceived credibility of NATO security guarantees was irrelevant to Ukraine—unlike in Poland, where some, mainly right-wing politicians, played on the country’s treatment during World War II and at Yalta. Stalin’s promises of semi-autonomy for Ukraine within the Soviet Union after the war proved illusory, with federation quickly giving way to Russification, recollectivization, surveillance, imprisonment, and attacks on Ukrainian nationalism (Prizel 1998, 340–48). Although some western Ukrainians had tried to cultivate Western support for Ukrainian independence at the close of World War II, the real source of disappointment—in both the east and west of the country—was the Soviet Union.
The lack of debate in Ukraine about the viability of NATO security guarantees was not, however, a symptom of Ukraine’s indifference to NATO’s military power. Ukrainian-Russian tensions emerged at several points over Russia’s refusal to acknowledge, even years after Ukraine had formally established its independence, that there was in fact a border between the two countries. Presumably Russia’s policy was a symptom of its reluctance to admit that, after three centuries of federation with Russia, Ukraine was finally a separate entity. In the late 1990s Ukrainian-Russian relations were sufficiently tense that Ukraine did seek NATO security guarantees against Russia (Kuzio 2003, 33). Not until April 2004 did both Ukrainian and Russian parliaments finally ratify an initiative on their shared border, concluding an agreement that presidents Kuchma and Putin had signed more than a year earlier.48 Interest in NATO security guarantees did not elicit strong compliance with NATO policy prescriptions, however—either in defense planning or in civil-military relations.
Western insistence on the inappropriateness of an ethno-nationalist foreign policy might have had some effect on Ukrainian foreign policy. Ukraine was the first country to conclude a bilateral treaty with Hungary (in December 1991) that provided the 150,000- to 200,000-strong Hungarian minority with collective rights to cultural and administrative autonomy (Williams 2002, 234). Hungary agreed in return to renounce any territorial claims—the source of some controversy in the Hungarian parliament. It was reported that Leonid Kravchuk (the first post-Soviet Ukrainian president) pursued the agreement to bolster Western support for Ukrainian independence (Oltay 1992). But given that the agreement was negotiated long before NATO was engaged in the region, there could only have been an indirect link between Western norms and Ukrainian foreign policy.
Whether NATO contributed to Ukraine’s foreign policy denationalization later in the decade is open to question. Hungary and Romania were clearly in clined to mobilize domestic political support by making ethno-nationalist claims, and Western international institutions subdued that tendency. Given Ukraine’s scant experience with statehood and its people’s long-standing participation in multiethnic societies, it is not clear that ethno-nationalist sensitivities would have resonated broadly in Ukraine. To the extent that NATO promoted bilateral accommodation among candidate states, in part by renouncing the exploitation of minority issues for political gain, this was a norm already embedded in Ukrainian society.49
TRANSNATIONAL COALITIONS AND OUTCOMES
Poland
Uncertainty, a perceived hierarchy between domestic actors and international institutions, and the credibility of international institutions’ policy prescriptions all facilitate the compliance of target states. NATO’s coalition-building power in Poland was based on the first two conditions. Some uncertainty about how to structure defense policy gave NATO access to defense reform debates at the outset of transition, because a new party came to power and civilians had little defense expertise. Measures on hierarchy were also high, given robust political competition and strong public support for military power. NATO influence in Poland was circumscribed, however, by right-wing politicians’ mistrust of Western security guarantees and the lack of Western consensus on the importance of power projection. Thus although Poland did not have a legacy of national territorial defense from the Warsaw Pact, this did not prevent a range of actors, both civilian and military, from mobilizing in support of one in the 1990s. Shifting Poland’s strategic orientation away from regional threats to out-of-area missions would first require scuttling Szeremietiew’s civil territorial defense plan.50
NATO objected to the OT initiative on three grounds. First, given the alliance’s insistence that publics support their countries’ accession, the fomenting of fear by OT advocates that NATO might or might not provide assistance in an emergency called into question the viability of NATO security guarantees. Second, admitting a member whose political parties insisted on mobilizing public support by demonizing Russia complicated and contradicted one of NATO’s most basic messages: that the aim of the alliance was regional stabilization, not Russian isolation. While NATO officials had varying views about the seriousness of these first two issues, there was virtual unanimity on a third: that territorial defense on the scale proposed by Szeremietiew would divert scarce resources from projects that would more clearly advance NATO’s mission.
When German officials first became aware of AWS campaign pledges to pursue OT once in office, the German embassy in Warsaw notified other NATO members.51 NATO officials then began taking steps to curb the program. In delegations to Poland and to Polish delegations in Brussels, NATO representatives repeatedly stressed in closed-door meetings their preference that Poland focus on the basic issues of integration and compatibility with the alliance rather than on territorial defense.52 They argued that because Poland did not have a single transport vehicle capable of moving troops,53 the issue of how economical territorial defense would be compared with operational forces was irrelevant: every defense zloty should be allocated to modernizing and equipping NATO-capable forces. NATO communicated this message with such conviction and consistency that Poland’s pursuit of OT became an embarrassment around the Polish MoD.54
Not only NATO but also some high-level Polish officials objected to the plan. Representing different points on Poland’s political spectrum, policymakers explained in private why they hoped Szeremietiew’s initiative would fail. Defense Minister Janusz Onyszkiewicz opposed territorial defense because he understood that it was inconsistent with NATO’s strategic orientation—he had been among those coached by NATO officials early on about the right and wrong reasons for wanting to join the alliance.55 As a member of the Freedom Union (Unia Wolności, UW), however, and in coalition with Szeremietiew’s party (the AWS), he was politically trapped into not rejecting the plan outright. Two other former officials with contrasting political legacies also wanted to see the territorial defense program fail—and for similar reasons. In addition to challenging NATO’s credibility, they argued, OT advocates’ views were anachronistic and reminiscent of aspirations to build a self-sufficient, neutral “Great Poland” (Polska Wielka).56 The debate over territorial defense also divided the military insofar as some viewed territorial forces as second class while others viewed operational units as an extravagance of dubious merit.57
One publication, Nie—recognized for saying what others were only thinking—articulated what critics of civil territorial defense would reveal in private. Reporting that NATO had recently sent “a document specifying what it expects from the Polish Army,” the author observed that the “cost of meeting all of them [NATO’s expectations] is much higher than our financial capabilities.” As a still prospective member of the alliance, the article concluded, it would be inadvisable for Poland to send signals indicating that its defense officials believed NATO to be “a pro-Russian slacker.” “Exotic strategies” (i.e., territorial defense) put Poland in a “bad bargaining position.”58
To kill the program and limit opportunities to exploit territorial defense for political gain, NATO resolved to confront Szeremietiew directly. The US embassy, in cooperation with Andrzej Karkoszka (former deputy minister of defense), arranged for a meeting in February 1998.59 A US official briefed Szeremietiew in advance of what promised to be a tense encounter, providing Szeremietiew with an opportunity to save face by preparing an appropriate response ahead of time. In the meeting itself, Western officials first emphasized to Szeremietiew that regardless of historical precedent set by Poland’s Western allies, NATO would not abandon a member state under threat. Second, they argued that Russia did not pose either a short- or medium-term threat, but that NATO would nevertheless continue to assess the situation and adapt its strategy accordingly. Finally, given these facts, NATO representatives argued that it was unnecessary for Poland to pursue territorial defense.
In addition to the substantive arguments, the meeting included a forceful message. In what one US official present at the meeting described as a “harsh” encounter, NATO bluntly told Szeremietiew that he should not pursue the plan, because it was incompatible with alliance priorities. Without threatening to exclude Poland from the alliance, NATO officials impressed upon Szeremietiew that there were many other more constructive projects that he could pursue while in office. They urged him, “don’t do this.”60 Shortly thereafter, Szeremietiew stopped pursuing the plan, although there was never a public admission that OT had been inconsistent with NATO objectives.61 Following the private meeting at the US embassy, Szeremietiew denied that OT had ever been in conflict with NATO. Altering the original intent of territorial defense, he rearticulated the once-perceived need for OT as consistent with NATO aims, and explained its abandonment exclusively in terms of domestic debates and budgetary constraints.62
The AWS abandoned OT not just because of an isolated incident at the US embassy, but rather because the confrontation with Szeremietiew took place against a backdrop of growing conflict and isolation. Over the previous seven years, the alliance had exploited the uncertainty of domestic actors and its own elevated status in Poland to cultivate coalitions that would support its positions. NATO turned to Karkoszka to set up the crucial meeting with Szeremietiew precisely because the former deputy minister of defense had accrued both domestic and international credibility for his role in democratizing Polish civil-military relations (see chapter 4). Karkoszka’s involvement signaled Szeremietiew that he had powerful opponents, not only in NATO but in Poland as well.
Furthermore, some of the same officials whom NATO had already persuaded of the necessity for constructive relations with Russia had initially supported territorial defense.63 They had halted their public pronouncements on the subject, however, once NATO aired its objections in terms of the need to harmonize Polish and NATO strategy, which included building bridges to the east, not burning them. This shrank Szeremietiew’s political base still further.
Finally, OT had become an embarrassment among Polish MoD officials, who without NATO discouragement might have been perfectly amenable to it—it was, after all, consistent with Polish military tradition and had been discontinued in the 1960s only on account of hated Soviet domination. But the incompatibility of OT with NATO’s preferences as recognized by MoD officials and critics in the media would have made it difficult for Szeremietiew to sustain support among his colleagues in government had he continued to criticize NATO for insufficient security guarantees. NATO, through its long-term cultivation of sympathetic coalitions, thereby orchestrated Szeremietiew’s political isolation, undermining the credibility of his original claims. The abandonment of OT shows the extent to which international institutions, with the help of domestic actors, can delegitimize particular lines of reasoning.64
Given that not only NATO but also some Polish officials objected to Szeremietiew’s plans, one could argue that OT would have been defeated even without NATO intervention. But two factors suggest otherwise. First, Szeremietiew used OT to galvanize support from the domestic arms–producing constituency and nationalists in his ongoing rivalry with Janusz Onyszkiewicz (a pro-NATO reformer and defense minister on two occasions in the 1990s). As it was a successful element of AWS campaigning, Szeremietiew most likely would not have abandoned his rhetoric on Polish self-sufficiency without external pressure to do so. Second, it was hard for domestic politicians to argue against territorial defense in the light of Poland’s very real historical strategic vulnerability and the strength of the domestic arms manufacturers’ lobby. NATO’s objections to civil territorial defense thus gave its domestic critics a politically convenient means of portraying their own reservations in the most patriotic light possible. Rather than seeming to reject a certain interpretation of the past that celebrated Polish military tradition, OT critics could simply adopt a low profile while NATO pursued its agenda.
Hungary
Hungary registered strong compliance with NATO demands on bilateral basic treaties with two of the country’s historical rivals, Romania and Slovakia. Also, Hungary never posed the kind of problems for NATO that Poland did with its proposals for large-scale territorial defense; it had never aspired to such a system— not even during the Cold War. But Hungarian compliance was much weaker in making meaningful military contributions to NATO’s out-of-area operations. Whereas Poland became a leader in the alliance, Hungary had trouble meeting even the minimum defense spending expectations of 2 percent of GDP.
If uncertainty in Hungary was stronger than in Poland, due to the absence of any historical territorial defense aspirations, Hungary’s lower measures on hierarchy and the drive for NATO social recognition translated into weaker compliance elsewhere. Political competition was strong in Hungary and, when combined with NATO’s credibility on peaceful bilateral relations, it explains the MSzP’s willingness to pursue bilateral treaties. But because regard for military power was weak, as reflected in poor military-society relations, there was little impetus to spend the expected resources on modernization or to make strong contributions to multilateral missions.
Hungary was consistently politically supportive of NATO missions, even if its military contributions were small (see table 5.3 for 2006 military deployments). Hungary assisted NATO in its missions in the former Yugoslavia, relaxed a law that prevented Hungarian troops being deployed outside the country without parliamentary approval, and designated some units for NATO use (Barany 1999, 86; Jacoby 2004, 172).65 In the Kosovo crisis, Hungary was generally politically supportive but militarily inconsequential. The Fidesz–Hungarian Civic Party (Fidesz-MPP) government, in power from 1998, pledged support for NATO bombing and gave the alliance unlimited access to Hungarian facilities and airspace (over the objections of the socialist opposition), but declined to participate directly. The inadequacy of the Hungarian Defense Force was revealed by Hungary’s capacity to patrol its own airspace for only two hours a day and with MiG-29s that lacked NATO-compatible “friend or foe” communications equipment (Jacoby 2005, 240–42).
The Hungarian case raises the question of how enduring the denationalization of its foreign and defense policy is likely to be. For even before Hungary’s accession to NATO in March 1999, there was evidence of backsliding. In September 1997, for example, the MSzP foreign minister admitted to officials in Washington, DC, that Hungary’s defense expenditure would fall short of its commitments. Such shortfalls have generally been the norm for Hungary (Jacoby 2004, 138). By 2006, Hungarian projections for defense spending in 2007 had fallen to the lowest in the alliance, at 1.1 percent of GDP. After accession, Hungary could not support NATO’s out-of-area power projection capability in any significant way, while the country’s politicians still seemed intent on acting on behalf of aggrieved minorities abroad (Wallander 2002, 5–6).
TABLE 5.3
Troop Deployments by Selected Postcommunist States, 2006
Since the noncompliance described above occurred after Hungary’s invitation to join NATO in July 1997 or after its accession in March 1999, one could conclude that the incentive of membership was the only impetus for even limited compliance. I would argue, however, that mixed measures on the variables under consideration do in fact explain Hungary’s uneven compliance. As already noted, military-society relations in Hungary remained weak through the period examined here. That Hungary had only a “small and obsolete force that still [carried] most of the characteristics but not the size of a mass army” by the early 2000s stemmed from a lack of interest in military-security issues (Martinusz 2002, 12). Because the public did not have confidence in military power, it did not favor devoting resources to national security. A key source of NATO’s power was therefore absent—that is, the public’s ability to pressure politicians into maintaining constructive relations with the alliance.
Further to the question of whether compliance stops at the date of entry, not until after NATO accession did some of Hungary’s most important defense reviews begin (Simon 2003). Given the problems encountered during the Kosovo campaign and the recommendations of multiple external reviews, at least one of which was so critical as to be devastating, the Hungarian elite became concerned with their country’s standing in the alliance.66 With respect to democratizing civil-military relations and internationalizing defense planning and foreign policy, it was the embarrassment of noncompliance, mostly experienced by Hungary’s elites, that spurred the country to action in the early 2000s.
Romania
Romania differs from Poland and Hungary in having lower levels of uncertainty, a lack of party turnover in transition, and the subsequent absence of party competition. NATO’s status was thus compromised in Romania for much of the 1990s. The continuity in personnel from the communist to the first postcommunist governments limited NATO influence with respect to uncertainty. Romania also had extensive territorial defense during the Cold War, potentially complicating NATO’s drive for new power projection capabilities. The lack of political competition until the mid-1990s also delayed the exertion of NATO influence based on Romania’s desire for social recognition. Given these starting conditions, I would expect NATO to exercise little control over Romanian foreign and defense planning until at least after the CDR took power in late 1996. Further, because of the existence of territorial defense during the Cold War, I would expect considerable friction over NATO demands that Romania develop power projection capabilities at the expense of territorial defense.
But, in fact, Romanian compliance with NATO foreign and defense policy denationalization exceeded the predictions of my theoretical framework. Even in advance of high-quality political competition, the communist successor PDSR in 1995, under the leadership of President Iliescu, had initiated the basic treaty with Hungary—in all likelihood to conform with NATO’s expectations of candidate states and at considerable domestic cost. The loss of support from three, smaller nationalist parties on the left and right weakened the PDSR’s power base. Only one variable from the social context—the credibility of NATO on the importance of settling disputes—can help explain Romania’s willingness to adopt the alliance’s priorities.
The denationalization of Romanian defense planning is more consistent with the predictions of the uncertainty, status, and credibility hypotheses, although even here one finds less emphasis on territorial defense than expected given the country’s history of territorial forces and geostrategic vulnerability. The continuity in territorial defense does explain why NATO’s strategic priorities were the source of conflict (Watts 2005, 103). An advisor to the Romanian presidency, Marian Zulean, noted that the effort since 1999 to move from a “neutralist type of Territorial Defence model and then to strongly emphasise power projection capabilities” had generated significant tension by the early 2000s (2002, 129–30). The result, however, as in Poland, was ultimate deferral to NATO’s strategic goals and the redirection of resources toward operational forces to bring them up to NATO standards, with territorial forces getting fewer funds and dependent on “trickle down” (130).
TABLE 5.4
Troop Levels: Selected Postcommunist States, 1989–1990 to 2004–2005
By 2003, Romania’s defense strategy reflected alliance concerns more than Romanian military or political tradition. The country had reduced its active-duty military personnel to 97,200 from 171,000 in 1989 (see table 5.4), in keeping with Membership Action Plan suggestions that “countries develop smaller, more capable forces” that “could be used for NATO operations” (NATO Parliamentary Assembly 2002, 7). Fifty thousand troops were dedicated to high states of readiness, while 25,000 territorial force personnel were deployable in 90 to 360 days (Watts 2005, 102). Romania’s former reserve forces were dismantled (see table 5.4 for troop reductions).67
Between 1989 and 2005, Romania deployed more than 14,000 military personnel to myriad operations around the world. Following 9/11, Romania replaced US forces in the Balkans in an effort to free US troops for the Bush administration’s “war on terror.” In addition to serving in Bosnia and Kosovo, Romanian forces have also taken part in military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Unlike Hungary or the Czech Republic, both wealthier states, Romania has increased defense spending to support such operations even in times of relative austerity—and with substantial public support (Watts 2005, 107–8).
Poland and Hungary are typically grouped together as similar cases that, because of their histories of democratic opposition to communism, enjoyed “front-runner” status vis-à-vis Western institutions from the early 1990s. Such shared legacies did not translate into equal degrees of military reform, however. Poland and Romania have embraced NATO’s geostrategic vision to a greater extent than Hungary. The central difference is in public regard for military power, as reflected in military-society relations. Although Romania initially undertook fewer reforms in anticipation of NATO accession than either Poland or Hungary, because of the continuity in its governing personnel from the communist era, by the late 1990s and early 2000s political competition in Romania and strong public support for military power provided NATO with far-reaching access to the country’s defense planning review processes. Tension around the forsaking of territorial defense in favor of NATO’s operational goals is attributable to the prominent historical role of territorial forces in Romania and the lack of consensus in NATO on power projection capabilities.
Ukraine
NATO has exercised only limited influence over Ukrainian defense planning. While Ukraine remains primarily committed to territorial defense and has maintained a proportionately larger force than Poland, Hungary, or Romania, it has also participated in multilateral missions led by the United States and NATO, including in Iraq and Afghanistan (Sherr 2005, 171). Ukrainian outcomes suggest there is no “best practice” in defense planning in that the country has sustained large land forces, even if some downsizing and professionalization conform with post–Cold War trends. Ukrainian multilateralism also suggests, however, that NATO can influence policies even in the absence of a clear commitment to expanding its membership.
The social context in Ukraine remained unfavorable from NATO’s perspective through the 1990s. There was strong continuity through the transition, both in the regime and in the military-security apparatus, which limited uncertainty. Political competition was also weak, undermining the salience of international opinion and, with it, NATO’s status. Finally, although Ukrainians did not question the credibility of Western security guarantees in the way nationalistic Poles did, the Ukrainian population in the east mistrusted NATO and questioned its credibility because of the country’s traditional ties with Russia. With public protest against Kuchma’s reign beginning in 2000 and increased political competition with Yushchenko’s presidential victory in 2004, NATO influence over Ukrainian defense planning seemed to increase in the 2000s.
Given that Ukraine had as much (or more) to fear from Russia as a newly independent state in the post-Soviet period as did Poland, Hungary, or Romania, it might have tried to fulfill NATO membership criteria, even if it was not on explicit offer, in a bid to win over the alliance. Although much of Ukraine’s population still favored strong ties to Russia into the twenty-first century, and public support for NATO membership remained low, the population—whether Russian- or Ukrainian-speaking—was overwhelmingly in favor of Ukrainian independence (see Kuzio 2003, 31–32). Moreover, Russia acted on several occasions to diminish that independence—by refusing to recognize the international border, by provoking a crisis to ensure Russian access to the Sea of Azov, or by interfering in Ukrainian elections. Indeed, in response to Russian policy, Ukraine has at specific points enlisted NATO assistance. But despite the evident incentives of membership, there was no clear hierarchical relation between Ukraine and NATO through the 1990s and thus only limited compliance on the Ukrainian side.
Ukrainian military reform has been influenced both by national constraints and, to a lesser extent, by NATO advising. The country had downsized its active forces to between 200,000 and 300,000 by 2004 (see table 5.4), partly a result of resource constraints, although this figure excludes the hundreds of thousands more in other security services, some of which have been created since 1991 (Grytsenko 1997).
More directly linked to NATO urging, Ukraine is also moving from a conscript to a more extensively professional force, despite serious misgivings among many senior officers. The country has also taken part in several UN and NATO missions since 1991. Finally, Ukrainian participation in multinational missions could be seen as an aligning of Ukrainian and Western security concerns. But Ukraine’s participation in Iraq has also been interpreted as a gesture of contrition for having sold radar systems to Iraq in 2000 in violation of UN sanctions rather than as an expression of common strategic interest (Kuzio 2003, 25).68
In fact, a range of Ukrainian reforms reveals that in terms of strategic priorities, Ukraine and NATO still had little in common even as the country was becoming more serious about its intentions to join the alliance. Despite the move to professionalization and away from conscription, by the early 2000s senior military officers still regarded the armed forces’ principal duty as the defense of Ukrainian territory from external enemies. NATO’s view that war-fighting strategies should focus less on interstate war and more on transnational, terrorist, or criminal threats “would be disputed with conviction even by many of the most reformist Ukrainian military officers” (Sherr 2005, 162). In addition, although the “general war ethos” that implied an East-West conflagration no longer formed the basis of defense planning in Ukraine, officers still took it for granted that they should plan for defense self-sufficiency, regardless of the country’s evolving ties to NATO.
Another area in which NATO has failed to exercise influence in Ukraine is in the discourse on why Ukrainian supporters of NATO membership should pursue that policy. Whereas NATO successfully encouraged Polish and Hungarian officials to talk about the benefits of membership in terms of internal modernization, democratization, and collective security, Ukrainian supporters of NATO continued to insist that membership was primarily about protecting the country’s independence against Russian interference and imperialism. A key goal of the NATO information office in Ukraine is the dissemination of the notion that NATO enlargement should not be construed as a means of containing Russia.69 But in stark contrast to Poland, Hungary, and Romania, supporters of NATO membership in Ukraine, who mostly reside in the west of the country, argue that strategic balancing against Russia is precisely the reason they want to join, not the democratization or modernization of the security forces. Ukrainian understanding of the image that NATO tries to project, and the centrality of collective security within it, was still very shallow in 2005.70
If the social context, rather than incentives alone, facilitates compliance, then more than an invitation to join NATO would be needed to redefine Ukrainian foreign policy toward the Euro-Atlantic community after so many years of un-consolidated national identity. Several processes—a collapse of the Ukrainian military-security apparatus, an increase in the intensity and quality of political competition in the country, and the standardization of a defense planning model within NATO itself—would give the alliance greater access to Ukrainian defense planning and foreign policy. Such changes would likely encourage military reformers to more actively seek NATO expertise at the expense of national tradition and would heighten the salience of international opinion.
The first two of these processes were already underway at the time of writing (late 2007). Ongoing crises of material deterioration and low morale in the armed forces have contributed to downsizing and professionalization, in keeping with NATO preferences but at odds with Ukrainian tradition. Political competition has already encouraged the center-right in Ukraine to seek legitimacy through NATO recognition. President Viktor Yushchenko, for example, has had the political mandate to initiate more thorough reforms than were possible under his center-left predecessors. Political competition could also undermine the disproportionate power of oligarchs whose economic ties to Russia have undermined the formulation of a coherent foreign policy (Prizel 1998; Kuzio 2003). Public support for NATO membership remains low in Ukraine. But evidence from Hungary and the Czech Republic, in particular, suggests that cultivating the minimum level of public support necessary for NATO’s purposes is not that difficult. Evidence from those two countries also shows, however, that while helpful to compliance, public support is not as crucial to reform as is uncertainty among domestic actors or perceptions of a hierarchy between domestic elites and NATO representatives. For even after Hungary secured support for NATO membership in a referendum, compliance did not markedly improve.
CONCLUSION
NATO’s engagement of central and eastern Europe, through enlargement, the Partnership for Peace, an open-door policy, and myriad other agreements, has substantially—thought not wholly—denationalized defense planning and foreign policy in the region. The alliance has de-emphasized territorial defense, discouraged rhetoric that derived its credibility from historical rivalries, narrowed the scope for ethno-nationalist mobilization, and supported bilateral peace agreements. Less positively for CEE armed forces’ morale, NATO has also presided over the rise of two-tiered armies that undermine national military traditions by allocating disproportionate resources to units dedicated for NATO missions. NATO-capable units have in turn been used in a range of NATO or US-led operations that at times have been deeply unpopular among CEE publics. Although the desire of CEE states to join NATO was linked to their historical vulnerability, their military-security apparatuses have paradoxically been refashioned to pursue missions largely divorced from those domestic concerns.
Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine have varied in their willingness to embrace NATO’s strategic priorities. And, in keeping with my argument, such variation corresponded more faithfully to a social context defined by uncertainty, status, and credibility than to incentives. Poland and Hungary were equally vigorous in their political campaigns to win membership, and Hungary declared its desire to join before Poland. But Poland has made a far stronger military contribution, while Hungary has consistently spent closer to only half of what NATO asks of its members—both before and after being admitted. This degree of variation is more closely associated with each country’s relationship to NATO than with incentives as such, which were basically uniform. In Poland and Hungary, that “relationship” is informed by the perceived status of the alliance. Strong regard for military power in Poland accentuated the alliance’s power there, while lower regard for the armed forces in Hungary undermined it.
Romania again shows how similar incentive structures can result in different outcomes. Despite strong public support for NATO membership and a viable candidacy in the 1990s, Romania manifested little compliance with the alliance’s prescriptions until political competition elevated the status of NATO in late 1996. The single exception was Romania’s effort to forge a bilateral treaty with Hungary as early as 1995. By 2001, however, after two episodes of party turnover in which elections were fought in part over the country’s status in relation to international institutions, Romania had surpassed Hungary’s level of compliance, measured in terms of defense spending and meaningful military contributions to out-of-area missions (see tables 5.2 and 5.3).
Ukraine declared its intention to join NATO in 2002, and the alliance has kept the possibility of membership alive in the hopes of encouraging Ukraine’s Western reorientation. Strong continuity in the regime through the transition, an enduring military structure and culture, and the absence of political competition around constructing a Western identity until at least the early 2000s—all prevented NATO’s access to reform debates until the competitive elections of 2004. Thus the Ukrainian focus remained more strongly linked to territorial forces than in Poland, Hungary, or Romania. Nevertheless, NATO and the United States did persuade Ukraine to participate in multilateral missions. And evolving political competition and deterioration of the armed forces’ material conditions may yet give the alliance more influence over defense restructuring in Ukraine.
Conditionality was not strictly applied in either Poland or Hungary, although the latter was certainly aware of its precarious position with respect to the alliance in the 1990s, given its weak military, tepid public support, and discontiguous geography. Hungarian bilateral agreements with Slovakia and Romania could be interpreted as resulting from Hungary’s questionable status. But as the evidence shows, compliance did not materialize until political competition allowed the socialists to compete with the MDF for NATO approbation—a feature of the facilitating social context. The power of conditionality independent of a particular social context is also called into question by Polish compliance with NATO’s request that the AWS abandon civil territorial defense in favor of stronger operational forces. Poland’s inclusion in the first round of enlargement was never threatened. Deputy Minister of Defense Szeremietiew and his cohort changed course because they eventually understood that they were significantly out of step with alliance expectations and were embarrassed by that fact. By making territorial defense an embarrassment around the MoD, NATO shifted the meaning of territorial defense from patriotic to anachronistic. A hierarchical relationship that is as well defined and as broadly perceived as that between Poland and NATO can obviate the need for conditionality to elicit compliance.
Whatever the current extent of defense planning and foreign policy denationalization in these four states, domestic actors had conflicting preferences. Some wanted to pursue strategies that closely reflected historical concerns, and they yielded to the NATO agenda only reluctantly. Others perceived a modernizing advantage to aligning with NATO’s out-of-area emphasis. In both instances the alliance has had significant constitutive effects in the region. For whether actors comply out of conviction or because of social or material pressure, a state’s foreign policy goals and military organization signal its international purpose and orientation. Without NATO, CEE concerns would certainly be regional, with resources allocated to address traditional threats. The shift toward an entirely different set of strategic priorities necessitated changes that bear on what kind of states are evolving in central and eastern Europe, with powerful implications for how they behave internationally.
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