Description
NATO’s persistence after the Cold war has generated a prolific inter-paradigmatic debate in IR. The article pinpoints two key limits of this discussion. They relate to the conception of NATO’s consensus as dysfunctional (because of the difficulty to reach multilateral agreements against the multi-faced risks of post-bipolar insecurity) and the static vision of the member states’ national interests as the drivers of NATO’s evolution. To overcome those limits, the article elaborates a renewed investigation of NATO’s durability, that sociologically captures the logics inhabiting the multiplicity of the Euro-Atlantic risk management in terms of threat perceptions and state interests involved. Based on a reworked version of the practice-based constructivism and 96 interviews, my hypothesis is that NATO’s consensus is not dysfunctional, but endures a double change in its social structure, related to NATO’s professional armature and the sites where the multilateral and professional struggles are performed. My main idea is that NATO’s security is segmented. The practice of power at NATO no longer follows a convergent pattern that concentrates the struggles around a delimited stake, as it was the case with the interstate rivalry of the Cold war. The risks being multiple, the exercise of power is reorganized along different policies (or segments), which are distinct in their socio-political logics and weakly structured in their internal dynamics. I illustrate my hypothesis with NATO’s post-9/11 counterterrorism trajectory as a case study. Doing so, the article takes to a new step the constructivist research on NATO and opens cross-theoretical dialogues in the study of the Alliance and the Euro-Atlantic security.
