NATO’s Democratic Retrenchment Hegemony After the Return of History Modern Security Studies Series

Exploring NATO?s post-Cold War determination to support democracy abroad, this book addresses the alliance?s adaptation to the new illiberal backlashes in Eastern Europe, the Western Balkans and Afghanistan after the alleged ?return of history?.

The book engages the question of what has driven NATO to pursue democratisation in face of the significant region-specific challenges and what can explain policy expansion or retrenchment over time. Explaining NATO?s adaptation from the perspective of power dynamics that push for international change and historical experience that informs grand strategy allows wider inferences not only about democratisation as a foreign policy strategy but also about the nature of the transatlantic alliance and its relations with a mostly illiberal environment. Larsen offers a theoretical conception of NATO as a patchwork of one hegemonic and several great power interests that converge or diverge in the formulation of common policy, as opposed to NATO as a community of universal values.

This volume will appeal to researchers of transatlantic relations, NATO?s functional and geographical expansion, hegemony and great power politics, democracy promotion, lessons of the past, (Neoclassical) Realism, alliance theory, and the crisis of the liberal world order.

Introduction; PART I. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK; Chapter 1. Realism and democratisation; Chapter 2. Neoclassical realism: stringency and richness; PART II. EASTERN EUROPE; Chapter 3. NATO beside a resurgent Russia; Chapter 4. The shadows of Europe's past; Chapter 5. Explaining NATO in Eastern Europe; PART III. WESTERN BALKANS; Chapter 6. NATO in a patchwork of nationalisms; Chapter 7. Great-power strategies of regional security integration; Chapter 8. Explaining NATO in the Western Balkans; PART IV. AFGHANISTAN; Chapter 9. NATO adapting armed democratisation; Chapter 10. Budgetary dispositions and geopolitical interpretations; Chapter 11. Explaining NATO in Afghanistan; PART V. CONCLUSIONS; Chapter 12. The avenue of democratic realism; Chapter 13. NATO in an illiberal world;

Henrik Boesen Lindbo Larsen is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich). He served as a Political Adviser with the EU Delegation to Ukraine and before that with the EU Advisory Mission Ukraine. He was previously a Research Fellow with the Belfer Center at Harvard University’s Kennedy School and an EASI-Hurford Fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He completed his PhD jointly between the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) and the University of Southern Denmark and was Visiting Researcher at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.