Trine
Flockhart
Chair
of Security
Florence
School of Transnational Governance, European University Institute
Italy
trine.flockhart@eui.eu
NATO celebrates its 75th birthday on the 4th of April 2024. Yet, despite advancing age, NATO is not heading for retirement but is playing an active role in a European security environment that is now dominated by Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, if Putin’s aim was to weaken NATO by invading Ukraine, he was gravely mistaken as the war appears to have turned NATO from a rather sluggish - by Macron’s account “brain dead” alliance, into a dynamic, stronger, and bigger alliance that has taken decisions about its present and future role no one would have dreamt possible before February 2022.
Yet, despite the many positive developments such as the admission of Finland and Sweden and the important decisions at the summits in Madrid in 2022 and Vilnius in 2023 to strengthen NATO’s capacity to defend its member states, the birthday celebrations will take place in the shadow of a rapidly worsening European security environment, continued transformation of the global rules-based order, widespread contestations against the value foundations of the liberal international order, and growing nervousness about the status of the Alliance under a possible Trump presidency.
This brief article argues that whilst NATO certainly should be applauded for the swift reactions to the worsening security environment in Europe, NATO has been less successful in addressing persistent contestations against its value base and to plan policies in accordance to the emerging international system that can now be characterized as multi-order rather than multipolar.
What is a multi-order world?
Security practitioners seem convinced that the world is changing from unipolarity to multipolarity. However, the characterization of the global system as multipolarity is a view that is anchored in Eurocentric/Western understandings of the international system with an exaggerated emphasis on shifting power and without fully capturing the complexity of the current transformation and that the structure of global relations increasingly is fragmented into different clusters - or international orders.
To fully understand the challenges ahead for NATO, it is necessary to look beyond the impact in the European security environment of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and to consider the ongoing war as an integral part of the transformation into a multi-order system, consisting of several international orders, including the American-led liberal international order, the Russian-led Eurasian order and the Chinese-led Belt and Road order. More orders of either a regional or faith-based nature may well be in the making, which inevitably will produce a highly pluralistic global ordering architecture. Within this context, it is important to be clear about the increasing need for NATO to not only maintain its capacity to defend against threats to NATO members’ security, but also that NATO should prepare policies that can sustain the liberal international order’s position within the new multi-order world.
A multi-order global architecture constitutes a major change because the relational dynamics will be within and between different international orders, rather than between sovereign states. Such a change will require extensive rethinking about NATO’s roles in the future as NATO will have to manage relationships within the liberal international order and relationships between international orders – most notably between the liberal international order and the Russian-led and the Chinese-led orders. It is still uncertain if the multi-order world will be cooperative, competitive or conflictual, but it sems certain that NATO as the main security institution within the liberal international order, will have a significant role to play in ensuring constructive relationships between the orders of the multi-order world. In contemplating NATO’s future, it is therefore important to fully acknowledge NATO’s role within the multi-order world rather than to continue being fixated on past versions of polarity as the foundation for NATO’s future.
A continued adherence to the assumption of a return to multipolarity reflects anchoring in the past that is likely to be damaging for the future.
Between the pull of adapting to the future or going back to the past
The problem is that whilst NATO has been busy getting ready militarily for the new European security challenges, it appears to have overlooked the need to adapt to the changing global environment. Because NATO interprets the current order transformation as a move towards multipolarity rather than multi-order, it has failed to distinguish between NATO’s role within the liberal international order and NATO’s (more limited) role in forging constructive relations between the different international orders that are now part of the global rules-based order. This is a problem because the two require quite different policies. Policies within the liberal international order must be anchored in liberal values such as democracy, the rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of expression, freedom of the press and freedom of religion. Policies between different international orders, on the other hand, will be less focused on individual (human) rights, prioritizing instead state centric principles such as sovereignty and the principle of egality with more space for cultural and political diversity. In the context of assessing NATO’s role going forward, the distinction between the two is important to incorporate into policymaking in a way so that liberal values can be the foundation of policy and practice within the liberal international order, whilst thinner and more universally accepted values will be the best that can be hoped for in policy between different orders.
Today, NATO needs to urgently distinguish between the two and to take strategic decisions with the understanding that liberal policies will have little sway in the global rules-based order but are crucial for sustaining the liberal international order. Given the rapid and extensive deterioration of the European security environment and the potential for a dramatic change in the transatlantic relations underpinning NATO, it is understandable that NATO is overtly focused on its military preparedness. Yet, if NATO is to maintain a constructive role within the new global ordering architecture, it is imperative to proceed in a way that clearly distinguishes between policies within NATO and the liberal international order and policies that are geared towards the complexity of the multi-order world.
The argument briefly presented here can be found in more detail in the article ‘NATO in the Multi-Order World’ in the Special Issue of International Affairs for March 2024.