NATO, liberal internationalism, and the politics of imagining the Western security community

Abstract

International Relations scholars often assume that NATO represents the institutional expression of a pre-existing, liberal-democratic Western security community. However, far from simply representing a pre-given community, NATO has always been involved in power-filled processes of constructing “the West.” At the heart of those processes lie practices of collective (re)imagining of the Western world, as well as the representation of internal tensions as feuds within a community united by liberal values. Today, the task of managing internal differences has become particularly complicated due to the rise of radical conservative political forces in several allied states. This has translated into an unprecedented clash between liberal and illiberal interpretations of the Western community. This paper also shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, middle powers have played important roles both in the construction of the liberal Western security community, and, more recently, in articulating an alternative—radical conservative—vision of the West.