The article presents the perspective of international institutions and focuses on NATO in particular. Kydd (2007) suggests that membership requirement and conditions of international institutions is likely to grow in future and become more restrictive as compared to what it is today to respond to the uncertainties related to state preferences. Moreover, the author thinks that the membership criteria for the international institutions will operate as a signaling device, and the commitment of the member states is likely to meet such criteria, but the member states that are not committed will not strive to meet these criteria (Kydd, 2007).
The author supports his argument by presenting an example related to the enlargement of NATO, which happened recently to comprise the former Warsaw Pact states such Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. All three member states were forced to meet the international standards of border and ethnic dispute resolution, democratization and civil control over the military (Kydd, 2007). These international standards are used to encourage cooperative behaviors among countries and establish the most cooperative member states that aspire to join the international institution. Nonetheless, the author argues that the enlargement of NATO has come at a price regardless of the establishment of trust and cooperation among the East European member states that obtained NATO membership earlier. Later this trust was broken leading to poising of the cooperation between Russia and NATO.
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But there are deeper drawbacks to the post-Cold War expansion, which required creative solutions, and they exist strictly within the Alliance itself; they have, essentially, to do with NATO’s size, both in terms of membership and geography. NATO has gone from 16 members at Cold War’s end to 29 at present (Kydd, 2007). This necessarily complicates NATO’s primary task of mutual self-defense in at least two main ways: first, since so many different national militaries need to achieve interoperability, which is a sufficiently challenging task. According to the author, since NATO requires unanimous consent within the North Atlantic Council to deploy its forces, this may become a severe challenge when time is a factor, but also to condense such widely differing national views into a singular decision (Kydd, 2007).
Therefore, the undesirable outcomes that the disagreement between Russia and NATO posed a huge dilemma which was witnessed during the security community’s expansion; whereas the expansion of security community led to the enlargement of mutual trust and zone of peace even though it brought fear among the outsiders (Holas, 2018). Nonetheless, the bigger challenge is that the expansion of NATO has failed to meet its main objectives and goals by failing to foster democracy among the member states and around the world as well.
NATO expansion has always been a matter of local self-determination, meaning each member state’s interest Alliance membership (Kydd, 2007). In the post-Cold War era this includes each prospective member’s needing to complete an individualized set of tasks (found in each Membership Action Plan); this has been the case from its first new members such as Poland, Czech Republic, and Hungary in 1999 to the most recent like the Republic of Macedonia, which just achieved all of its objectives this year, and should join at the next Summit. The article concludes that it is unfortunate that the national “self-determination” is now acceptable to the modern Kremlin only when any nation chooses “Russia” for economic or military collaboration; this was not always the case (Holas, 2018). Since the present-day NATO has taken on additional tasks beyond the defensive which it also considers essential thus the totality will need to rely on functioning economies. Possibly the greatest drawback for such a large military organization would be the need to maintain and grow the economic means.
Reference
Holas, L. (2018). Prospects for Russia-NATO relations: The SWOT analysis. Communist and Post-Communist Studies , 51 (2), 151-160.
Kydd, A. H. (2007). Trust Building, Trust Breaking: The Dilemma of NATO Enlargement . Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.
