Security Institutions as Agents of Socialization? NATO and the ‘New Europe’

This article examines the dynamics and implications of practices of socialization enacted by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in post–Cold War Central and Eastern Europe. With particular emphasis on the Czech Republic and Romania, I argue that NATO relied extensively on mechanisms of teaching and persuasion to project a particular set of liberal-democratic norms of security into the former Eastern bloc. Several interrelated conditions affected NATO's ability to teach new norms to Central and East European actors: the parties' mutual recognition of their respective roles as “teachers” and “students”; the socializees' identification with the Western security community that NATO claimed to embody; and systematic interactions between teachers and students. In teaching new liberal-democratic norms, NATO exercised significant power: the power to shape its socializees' interpretations of the world and ideas about proper ways of acting in that world. The shared ideational framework established via teaching also empowered subsequent persuasive appeals launched in the name of liberal-democratic norms. NATO conducted a socialization process that targeted—and often affected—not simply the behavior of Central and East European socializees, but also their definitions of national identity and interests.For extremely helpful comments on previous incarnations of this article, I am grateful to the editors of International Organization, two anonymous reviewers, Jeffrey Checkel, Michael Zürn, Alastair Iain Johnston, Michael C. Williams, and all the participants in the IDNET workshops.