Summiting NATO and the NATO Summit

Security treaties are not my cup o' tea. They have their purpose and their function, I guess, but I am just not interested in them. Why?

Security policy is a response to a perceived threat. There is no way of creating policy for a threat that is occuring, so one has to make assessments of the surrounding environment and determine what is the best course of action to make the situation as safe as possible. The assessment is not of threats per se, but the calculation, rational or otherwise, that there is something threatening. Those who are looking for threats to security are always going to find them, creating a cycle of threat perception, fear, and more threat perception. I simply choose not to live my life in fear, therefore I do not perceive many threats. My use for a transnational security organization to protect me from threats that I don't believe exist is minimal at best, fear mongering at worst.

But I found reports from the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest rather interesting. The whole thing played out like a game of chess. Or, maybe more like Chutes N' Ladders. Pick your own analogy. Each sound byte, meeting, appearance by a particular president or minister (or lack of appearance), public press conference, and back room deal was a tactical maneuver to gain some leverage or extract some concession from the other country. Favors were bought and sold, political margins were called in, alliances were forged and broken, and feelings were surely hurt (Most of all, probably President Saakashvili of Georgia).

It was realpolitik at its finest. An exercize in realist international relations theory in all its glory. I don't need to summarize the horse-trading and bargaining here. The Wiki article has a pretty good summary of what occured.

My description here seems more appropriate for a gathering of political foes. The forging of the Treaty of Versaille, or the Yalta Summit, would seem to be described here. But this was a meeting of supposed allies who have the same strategic and normative outlook on transnational security (again, supposed).

So if this was a chess match, who check-mated whom? Its hard to say if one country won out. Russia accomplished its goals of keeping Georgia and Ukraine out of NATO for the time being, and it doesn't appear that it had to give up much. If there was one NATO member loser, it seems to be the USA. Not the current administration, but American foreign policy clout in general, and the American people. To get Ukraine and Georgia to send troops to Afghanistan, President Bush essentially promised the leaders of those countries that he and the U.S. would sponsor, if not guarantee, their entrance into NATO. Unfortunately for those two countries, Bush's political capital is spent and he wrote another check that he can't cash. It will be interesting to see if there is any popular backlash in Ukraine and Georgia (the former which is slightly pro-US although anti-NATO, the latter which is a majority pro-US) for not being able to make due with its promises. The summit all but consolidate Bush's lame-duck administration.

The American people lost out because concessions were made to the U.S. by many European countries to support missile defense in the Czech Republic and Poland. Billions more dollars will be spent protecting the American people from a perceived threat that, in this case, most certainly does not exist.

Democracy and Sovereignty in Kosovo

Last week in my comparative democracies class we discussed the different conceptions of constitutionalism, how constitutions develop, and what they mean for democracy. Basically, people typically confuse the two terms democracy and constitutionalism. But they are not they same and in an academic context, are actually polar opposites. Democracy is rule by popular sovereignty, consent of the governed, and implies majoritarian politics. Enlightenment thinkers in the 18th and 19th century were actually not to keen on the idea of democracy - it implied instability and tyranny of the majority over individual rights. Constitutionalism, then, is the institutionalized limits to pure democracy. It basically guarantees civil rights and protects individuals from majority mobs, irrational sways in public opinion, and arbitrary government action. The term consitutional democracy is somewhat of a contradiction, but it actually enables democracy to function better.

All of this got me thinking about the situation in Kosovo. As a newly independent state, they surely must have a constitution. And they do. You can read the highlights here. After reading through it, the things reeks to high heaven of the omniscient hand of international advisers. It starts, "we the people" as do almost all constitutions. Funny, I didn't know that Bruce Hitchner of Tufts University, who helped write the constitution, is Kosovar. For an independent country, Kosovo seems awfully dependent on their Western backers for just about everything. Consider the entrenchment of Camp Bondsteel, the U.S. military base in Kosovo. It houses about 7,000 U.S. troops, many NATO forces and just happens to sit next to an oil pipeline pumping Caspian Sea oil to the Mediterranean. I also heard, but have not been able to confirm, that the U.S. military is the single largest employer in Kosovo. It makes one wonder how sovereign Kosovo really is, and ever will be. Especially without the assistance of their nearest neighbor and dearest enemy, Serbia.