The “double shocks” in post Cold War international affairs.
The end of the Cold War fundamentally altered the global geostrategic context. In particular, the end of the nuclear “balance of terror” between the USA and USSR, coupled with the relaxation of tensions between their respective client states and regional alliances, produced a paradigm shift in views of international security. Not only was there a move away from the bi-polar configuration of global military-political blocs and a general move towards political democracy, something that was argued to be conducive to the modern equivalent of Kant’s “perpetual peace” (recently recast as the so-called “democratic peace thesis”).
There was also a shift in Western security paradigms. Instead of the Cold War emphasis on collective security agreements that provided for mutual defense in the case of attack (and which therefore served to deter attacks), like those that underpinned the NATO and ASEAN alliances, there began a move towards cooperative security based on increased transparency and establishment of comprehensive confidence and security-building measures (CSBMs). Under the new paradigm former adversaries shared information about military capabilities in order to diminish the threat and fear of attack. The objective was not to deter aggression as much as it was to prevent it by addressing root causes. This included de-emphasis on nuclear and large-scale conventional war preparation and a shift in orientation towards counter-terror, peace keeping and nation-building operations under multilateral aegis (most often under UN mandate).
The shift towards cooperative security arrangements was particularly welcomed by the armed forces of smaller countries, which saw in multilateral peacekeeping operations a renewed justification for augmenting their capabilities. Political elites also saw merit in the shift, as it theoretically turned international security decision making into a multilateral enterprise as well. Even so, the shift in perspective was not universally accepted, much less codified by international agreement. If anything, it enjoyed regional credence more than global appeal. Eastern European and Latin American countries were among the most keen to accept the cooperative security paradigm, whereas Middle Eastern and Asian countries preferred to retain traditional, state-centric perspectives with collective security overlays.
In fact, although embraced in principle by many Western nations, the tenets of co-operative security were severely tested, if not put to the sword on a number of fronts. These included the ethic and sectarian violence that flared in places such as Kosovo, Bosnia and Somalia throughout the decade, and which eventually compelled a US-led NATO military intervention against Serbia. Rather than adopt CSBMs, India and Pakistan bucked the nuclear non-proliferation trend by testing atomic devices in a show of mutual deterrence. North Korea and Iran continue to pursue nuclear weapons as a deterrent rather than a first-strike option (rhetoric aside). Low intensity conflicts, including transnationalized non-state terror, proliferated within the Muslim world and increased in the wake of the Iraq occupation, while genocidal campaigns were undertaken in Burundi and Rwanda, other areas of Sub-Saharan Africa and the Indonesian archipelago that the West was powerless to prevent. Even the US, which had championed the adoption of cooperative security during the first Clinton administration, shied away from the concept after the debacle of Moghadishu, Somalia (where US troops deployed in a UN-mandated peace enforcement mission under theater command of Pakistani officers were not reinforced by non-US troops after being ambushed in an unauthorized raid on a warlord’s suspected hideout).
A few years later, using the justification that cooperative security was just a cover for NATO expansion, Russia partially invaded Georgia, then parts of Ukraine, annexing territory in both countries including Crimea, followed by a full-scale assault on Ukraine in 2022 that continues to this day. The Russian narrative that NATO expansion—something that did occur while the concept of cooperative security was in vogue in Europe—was the cause of its preventative wars because it constituted an existential threat to the Russian Motherland, was increasingly accepted by Western nationalists (who saw a globalist agenda at play) and some international relations scholars who saw NATO expansion under the aegis of cooperative security agreements as diverting away from Western existential threats while needlessly provoking the Russians, thereby creating a cycle of escalation based on asymmetrical perceptions of their shared threat environment. In other words, rather than an era of perpetual peace, pursuit of cooperative security in Europe replaced the Cold War status quo (which was mostly peaceful) with an increased danger of “hot” war outbreaks, as eventually proved the case along the Southeastern European flank and which threatens to expand northward into Poland and the Northern Tier.
In parallel, the retreat from cooperative security was accelerated after the attacks of 9/11, to which the US responded by invading Afghanistan and toppling the Taliban regime in 2001-02, followed by the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. At that point notions of cooperative became a distant memory for many Western security planners. If the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the short-lived era of cooperative security, then September 2001 marked the end of the cooperative security era and the rise of something very different. As of that date, the international community was faced with the strategic complexities and political requirements of the so-called War on Terror. In spite of the malapropism (since terror is a subjective state of being and terrorism is a tactic used in unconventional warfare), this new global conflict was characterized by the emergence of non-State actors and so-called “rogue states” as primary strategic threats to global order. The major response from the US was the adoption of the policy of unilateral preemption and preventative war, which in turn caused deep divisions within the West over its rationale and suitability.
The result of these trends saw the emergence of a threat environment that was increasingly “glocalized” or “intermestic” (Kenny, 1999; Dominguez, 1998), in which the line between state and non-state actors was increasingly blurred. Facilitated by the explosion of high technologies in communications, transportation and warfare (think social media, space militarisation and autonomous weapons platforms), this evolution saw the growth of a “grey” or “covert” world that resulted from the expansion and overlapping of private and public security agencies, transnational criminal enterprises and intelligence services, military and paramilitary organizations (Cox, 2000). To these have now been added international Islamicist irredentism and the overlapping of the boundaries between internal and external security apparatuses in the West. All of this complicates the security “matrix” in which national armed forces have to operate, regardless of size.
Even so, expansion of NATO to include several Eastern European members, coupled with successful attempts to halt nuclear weapons research and ballistic missile testing by Argentina and Brazil after their respective transitions to democracy in the 1980s, continue to give hope to proponents of the cooperative security paradigm. For this school co-operative security approaches remain an effective alternative to the collective security policies of the Cold War and irregular thrust of the War on Terror, if nothing else because they address the causes rather than the consequences of militarism. With creative extension to non-state actors and other sub- or transnational belligerents, the desire remains that the root causes of armed conflict in the present era can be addressed and diminished.
This matters because small states like the peripheral democracies studied here continue to have an principled interest in a scheme that expands international security decision-making beyond a small circle of military powerful states, if nothing else as a reinforcement of multilateralism as an organizing principle of the international community. But for the time being, a different situation prevails.The larger point is that this changing security environment has a discernible impact on the way in which small peripheral democracies have had to re-configure their armed forces and strategic outlooks after 2001, but is set in deeper historical and institutional context.
The reason for addressing the longer-term historical backdrop is important. Much of the literature on military strategy, to include the so-called “revolution in military affairs,” speaks to evolving security paradigms without fully addressing the dynamics underpinning the transitional global moment that has existed since 1990. In military-security terms, this transitional period is defined by the “double shocks” of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001. These defining moments—what could also be called bracketing events or critical junctures (Collier and Collier, 1992)– were in turn part of a longer transition from authoritarianism to democratic governance that began in the early 1970s in Mediterranean Europe. That process of regime change was continued in Latin America throughout the 1980s, overlapping towards the end of the decade with similar transitions in Southeast Asia. These were paralleled by the fall of Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and of the apartheid regime in South Africa. As these new electoral regimes struggled to consolidate, the “third wave” (Huntington, 1991) of democratization began to be felt in other areas of the world, most notably Sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East.
Although it is clear that much will have to be done to justify labeling many of these emerging regimes as “democratic,” it is also clear that their emergence has itself complicated the security environment in which small peripheral democracies must operate. The dual move towards electoral forms of political representation and market steerage of national economies, set against a backdrop of the globalization of production in an increasingly inter-dependent system of trade, served as the root causes for the end of Stalinism (and thus the end of the Cold War). Subsequently, as the process advanced to the heart of the Muslim world, it precipitated the fundamentalist backlash that occasioned the terrorist attacks on that fateful day in 2001. That, in turn, brought with it another response, in the form of unilateral preemption and the emergence of preventive war as the organizing principle behind the so-called “War on Terror.”
In effect, the “bracketing” events of the end of the Cold War and 9/11 attacks constitute the immediate backdrop to national civil-military relations and the formulation and implementation of military strategy (to include issues of force composition, size, orientation, training and deployment). But they are not the only backdrop, and are embedded in broader historical processes. The end of the Cold War may have prompted a move away from nuclear deterrence and collective security arrangements and towards peacekeeping, nation-building and cooperative security, but it was premised on a universal move (sooner or later) towards democratic capitalism. After 9/11, engagement in the War on Terror and the doctrines of unilateral preemption and preventive war announced by the United States forced all military and security forces to once more reassess their strategic outlooks, including commitment to democratic governance and principles. Among other things, this gave impetus to the expansion of internal security agencies in virtually the entire Western world. It spelled the end of cooperative security as the dominant, if short-lived, strategic paradigm in the West, and shifted emphasis to asymmetric and low intensity conflicts involving non-state actors using unconventional warfare approaches and tactics. These developments are not considered to be salutary from a democratic governance standpoint, especially in regions where the very concept of democratic governance is being challenged. Moreover, the advance of democratic capitalism as a presumed universal good has been slowed by the contradictory dynamics of the so-called “war on terror” and problems of market-driven macroeconomics in general.
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