This edited volume contains 12 chapters on 16 NATO member states that are structured according to these variables: strategic culture, threat perception, public opinion, dependency on the United States and NATO, interests versus values, domestic politics, level of commitment to NATO, and the view of future challenges. This list is so comprehensive that it covers almost every aspect of security and defense policy. Yet, this is also a weakness when wanting to tease out causality.
The country chapters are the merit of this book: they provide detailed insights into the factors that affect a member state’s role in NATO. The contributors are well-established scholars in the field, such as Marc Webber on the United Kingdom, Alice Pannier on France, Heidi Hardt on the United States, Mats Berdal on Norway, and Sten Rynning on Denmark, to mention only some. The country chapters are comparative because they are structured around the same variables, therefore enabling scrutiny of various aspects of security policy.
However, the chapter on Turkey by Kan Casapoglu is far too modest in describing Turkey’s obstinate behavior in the alliance: it almost reads like a diplomatic statement at times, ignoring the problematic role that President Erdogan has assumed in NATO. Although the author hints that Turkish behavior “led to some divergencies between the country and its traditional Western partners at times” (108), this is a fundamental understatement: Turkey is NATO’s enfant terrible, as seen in its unwillingness to ratify Swedish entry.
There is also a strange structure of analyzing two states in one chapter—for example, Denmark and the Netherlands, and Canada and Norway. There is no logical reason for this. It would be better to have lumped together Norway and Denmark if one needed to, because the Nordics have much in common. Treating the Baltic states in one chapter makes sense because they are similar small states with a common communist history and are located in the same place.
The chapters are useful and thorough, but the sheer number of variables that are included preclude rigorous comparison; the variables also overlap to a considerable degree. “Everything” is to be covered and is equally “important.” Standing alone, each chapter is useful empirically as an analysis of a given state. The problem is, however, that there is no clear analytical framework for the book. Why are all these variables important, and how do they interrelate?
Nor are the states analyzed in this book selected according to any method. Yet, that is acceptable: because NATO has 31 members—and 32, if Turkey finally ratifies Sweden’s accession—most anthologies on NATO contain a selection of states. But the problem arises when the empirical material in the country chapters yields conclusions that are not warranted. Some states are listed in the group of “non-NATO aligned states with a broad security agenda”: the United States, France, and Turkey. Others are “NATO-aligned states with a non-Russian security agenda”—the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Nordics, the Netherlands, and Canada. Finally, there are “NATO-aligned states with a Russian-centric security agenda”: Poland, the Baltic states, and Romania. The book is structured in these three categories, but they are very debatable. Norway’s defense policy is clearly conditioned by its geopolitical proximity to Russia, and the United Kingdom has Russia as a key parameter of the former. In addition, the first category, organized according to the curious criterion of being “non-NATO aligned” lumps together France, the United States, and Turkey. The intention is perhaps that these three states are less dependent on the others in NATO than the rest, but this is still awkward. Finally, can one be “non-NATO aligned” as a member of the alliance?
This classification of the chapters exemplifies the major problem with this volume, which is its analytical framework—or rather the lack of a rigorous framework. Chapter 1 is devoted to explaining this framework, but unfortunately it is more confusing than clarifying.
In the introduction the editor, Thierry Tardy, presents the two key concepts of the analysis, relevance and cohesion. Relevance “is understood as the congruence or alignment of NATO with its security environment” (2), and cohesion is defined in much the same manner: “Cohesion …reflects how much states agree on what threatens them and how much the Alliance is perceived as an appropriate response to these threat” (4). As Tardy emphasizes, threat perception can be both subjective and objective; hence a state’s perception of NATO’s relevance becomes its basis for cohesion. To put it simply, states that find NATO relevant also boost its cohesion.
The problem here is that key analytical concepts overlap, and Tardy neither specifies how they differ or how to operationalize them. At times, he discusses “the two levels of cohesion and relevance” (5), and in other places, cohesion seems to refer to subjective concepts like identity (6). Thus, “strong cohesion within the Alliance positively impacts on its relevance” (6): Does this mean that cohesion is the cause of relevance? Or vice versa? Further, common sense dictates that a military alliance that is relevant in terms of threat will have a cohesive membership. But in NATO the importance of Russia as a threat differs in each state for geopolitical reasons.
These concepts are confusing and do not contribute to analytical sharpness. The same goes for the subchapter titled “Methodology” (7) which allows for all sorts of variables to be important but notes that variables may be “essential for certain allies and non-essential for others” (8). Furthermore, each and every theory in IR— realism, liberal theory, constructivism—seems equally relevant. The only hypothesis seems to be that member states determine what NATO does and is, but this is trivial: NATO by definition is an intergovernmental organization. The editor visits the hypothesis that NATO as an organization has an impact on member states, and this is a central area of research in IR. It would have been interesting to pursue.
This open-ended framework is not helpful for the authors of individual chapters, although the editor claims that this volume is different from others because “it looks at the policies of NATO nations in a sequential and systematic manner” (8).
Finally, a note on terminology is in order: although NATO uses the term “nations” instead of the correct term “member state,” scholars should not. There are thousands of nations in the world—none of them members of any international organization—and only 193 states, of which 31 are NATO members. Further, the words “alliance” and “allies” are not spelled with a capital a.
