On NATO’s Identities and Temporalisations

Current IR theories bring ontological and temporal complications into the IR studies due to incompatibilities between the very act of theorising and the purely intersubjective nature of the IR field. In the absence of direct correspondence of IR entities, phenomena and events in the self-standing objectivity, the IR theorising, even in contrast to social sciences, tends to become its own ontological anchor. It tends to “precede” the pre-theoretical, intersubjective, immediate givenness and to attempt to fit it to its pre-postulated axiomatic grounds, constructs and narratives, thus altering and re-shaping it. This includes narrating geneses and their imposition on post-genetically given study objects, thus ensuring the coherence of the theoretical construct yet extending the alteration toward the temporality of study objects. However, it is possible to conduct the IR study on the ground of the pre-theoretical, intersubjective immediacy of the entity, phenomenon and event in their synthetic unity, as a phenomenological inquiry. This article attempts to outline such a study on NATO, focusing on its substance (identity) and the temporality in its relationship with its immediate intersubjective environment including its transformations. In this sense, NATO’s adjustment to the post-bipolarity through a double-identity and double-temporalisation setup appears to have been obstructing a new adjustment dictated by further changes in the interstate intersubjectivity. The systemic crisis created by Russia’s ongoing aggression toward Ukraine, which was facilitated by this obstruction, is likely to provide it with an end as well, the form of which being dependent on how the current war ends.