Mark Webber

• University of Birmingham

Donald Trump assumed office in January 2017, committed to revamping US foreign policy and putting ‘America First’. The clear implication was that long-held international commitments would be sidelined where, in Trump’s view, the American interest was not being served. NATO, in the crosshairs of this approach, has managed to ride out much of the cri...

The EU has long been recognised as a complex security actor with competences across a variety of security-relevant issues. These competences add up to a form of security governance, the purpose of which is to guard against a multiplicity of threats. How threats (and, for that matter, risks) are defined can be seen as the outcome of processes of sec...

Abstract There has been a wide debate on the distinctiveness of the EU as an international actor; in this context a gap between self-representation and performance have been noticed. However, the most striking departure of the EU’s self-representation —and largely overlooked—is the emergence of the EU as an agent of collective securitization. The f...

In securitisation theory (ST) little attention has been paid to how actors undertake securitisation collectively. The empirical focus of that theory has also, paradoxically, neglected the military-strategic sector and with it regional security organisations like NATO. Such an oversight is worth correcting for three reasons. First, NATO is constantl...

NATO moves toward its next summit (to be held in Newport, Wales in September 2014) in a mood of anxiety and uncertainty. This is not simply because telling questions are being asked of the alliance in relation to Afghanistan and Ukraine, but because the twin motors which have sustained NATO now show signs of considerable wear and tear. The first of...

If 9/11 is to be regarded as a watershed in global politics then it would be logical to assume that NATO, the globe’s most durable, extensive and powerful alliance, would be bound up in that process of transformation. For NATO, 9/11 accelerated changes already in train (namely, the need to focus out of area) and in so doing made possible a role for...

Afghanistan has provided NATO with its severest test of the post-Cold War period. The Alliance has set the end of 2014 as the target date for a withdrawal from combat operations and the consolidation of an Afghan lead in security provision throughout the country. It is an open question as to what the security situation will be once that crossroad i...

Two decades since the watershed of the Cold War, this book investigates NATO's staying power. This book investigates how the Alliance has adapted and managed to attend to new roles and purposes through the lens of International Relations theory. The Alliance will continue, but will remain subject to ongoing crises and challenges of change.

Drawing on a neoclassical realist approach, this article analyses the foreign policy conduct of different Italian governments from 1994 to 2008. Pressured by the post-cold war international system, these governments have been compelled to raise Italy's profile within the international system. However, the way in which successive governments have re...

Enlargement has been a byword of Europe’s international relations since the end of the Cold War. But enlargement has now reached a near terminus. For NATO and the European Union, it no longer animates grand debate. For the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, it is yesterday’s issue as no real scope exists...

NATO’s role in forging European order is undeniable, but the clarity and focus of Alliance purpose has changed considerably since the end of the Cold War. The ramifications of this change are considered via analysis of the trajectory of enlargement and a conceptualisation of the enlarged Alliance based upon English School thinking. Four categories...

NATO has throughout its history been the subject of prognostications of crisis and dissolution. Indeed, the alliance has been written off so many times that crisis as normality has come to typify its development. In the twenty-year history of NATO's post-Cold War development, Operation Allied Force stands midway between the existential moment that...

During the Bush years, NATO exhibited in stark form two trends which have long characterised its development: periodic exposure to crisis and division, and a subordination to American leadership. Despite signs of American indifference towards the alliance, talk of the Bush administration levering a break with NATO was always overstated, particularl...

Union' have been willing to accommodate themselves to an accelerated process of nuclear disarmament. In combination with the East-West rapprochement effected during the years of Mikhail Gorbachev's leadership of the Soviet Union (1985 -91) and the altered geopolitical status of the states of East-Central Europe as a consequence of the overthrow of...

This chapter explores how different forms of inclusion and exclusion relate to a broader system of security relations in post-Cold War Europe. In so doing, it utilises the notion of ‘security community’, which has features deducible from its core characteristic of regulated peace. It considers these features as a form of ‘security governance’ at th...

Is Russia part of the European security community? What is its relationship to the structures of European security governance? It was previously suggested that Russia occupies an ambiguous position—related to but not fully part of this community or its system of governance. This chapter elaborates this theme in greater detail, first by setting out...

As the Cold War ended, a reinvigorated role for the European Union (EU) required of its leaders a major political, even intellectual, readjustment. Prior to 1989, the European Community had enlarged on three occasions. To the original six members of the then European Economic Community (France, Italy, West Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxe...

This chapter assesses the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation's (NATO) relevance in terms of how it has contributed to a dynamic of inclusion and, in parallel, of exclusion in European security. It also highlights two fundamental developments which flowed from NATO's strategic response to the end of the Cold War and which have been reinforced by the...

The question of Turkey's relationship to Europe's security community is, in one sense, a seemingly superfluous one; the country has, after all, been a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation for decades. Yet in a post-Cold War Europe where security community and European security governance are increasingly linked to the European Union (EU...

In a book intended to have a contemporary bearing, it may seem idiosyncratic to devote an entire chapter to the Cold War. There are, after all, other more recent episodes which could be said to have shaped international politics and to which connections can be drawn with the book's central concerns of inclusion/exclusion and security. Yet security...

For those fortunate to live in a prosperous democratic state in the first decade of the 2000s, the politics of inclusion seems a natural state of affairs. It is indeed one of the most powerful legitimating claims of democratic political life. The ability to deliver welfare, prosperity and security to all citizens is the premise of successful electo...

This article seeks to develop a concept of ‘security governance’ in the context of post-Cold War Europe. The validity of a governance approach lies in its ability to locate some of the distinctive ways in which European security has been coordinated, managed and regulated. Based on an examination of the way governance is utilised in other political...

The enlargement of NATO and the development of a European-based military and defense capability have been hailed as among the most significant developments in European security affairs since the early 1990s. Not surprisingly, a great deal has been said and written about these twin processes. The relationship between them, however, has not given ris...

In 1999 NATO heads of state invited three states to join the alliance and are set to invite yet more states to join in November 2002 at the Prague summit. At present there are ten states that have declared their interest in gaining accession to NATO councils, and the prospect is that even more states will most likely be interested in joining in the...

The Common European Security and Defence Policy (CESDP) of the European Union (EU) was launched in 1999 and has been perceived as a landmark step toward European security cooperation, particularly in the field of crisis management. Still in its early stages, some difficult issues have become apparent. Of these, the so‐called ‘third‐country’ issue m...

The Third World was, in many respects, a creation of the Cold War — a third world, literally, that was distinct from the first world of capitalist industrial states and the second world of the Soviet-led socialist bloc.1 The Cold War’s various antagonisms pitted the first two worlds one against the other yet much of its competitive energies were ve...

NATO's future is again the subject of speculation and debate despite its having fought a recent and apparently successful war in Kosovo. This article proposes that there are three aspects to this challenge. First, NATO is facing a series of dilemmas in its relations with non-members: how should it manage relations with Russia, and with the applican...

The concept of governance is both ambiguous and controversial, with different analysis using the term in different ways. R.A.W. Rhodes, for example, has delineated six separate uses of the term “governance” with respect to the domestic political arena. In the realm of intentional politics it is equally possible to identify a range of closely relate...

If we are to believe the ‘democratic peace’ hypothesis, stability in Europe relies, in large part, on the extension of democratic, pluralistic political systems to the east of the continent, Russia included. The spread of democratic institutions, it is argued, provides domestic obstacles to belligerent acts by governments, while the diffusion of de...

List of Tables Preface List of Abbreviations Notes on the Contributors Introduction: Russia and Europe, Conflict or Cooperation? M.Webber The Place of Europe in Russian Foreign Policy M.Bowker Russia and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization C.Kennedy-Pipe Russia and the European Union J.Gower Russia and the Organization for Security and Cooperati...

We examine the development of the CIS under four separate headings: · cooperative projects outlined in CIS documentation and nominally subject to CIS oversight; · organisational development; · patterns of inter-state relations within the CIS area; and · attitudinal differences among CIS member states. These are intended to have an evaluative as wel...

The post-war period has witnessed a remarkable growth in the number of states, from around fifty in 1945 to more than 180 in 1996. These range from the tiny city states of Monaco and the Holy See all the way up to the Russian Federation and China, respectively the world’s largest and most populous states. During the twentieth century, there have be...

The transformation of Soviet foreign policy during the Gorbachev era was truly seismic in nature. Re-evaluations were effected in all areas of policy, resulting, most visibly, in the fundamental reordering of relations with the United States and fellow N.A.T.O. countries, and the demise of the Warsaw Pact and communist régimes in Eastern Europe. Eq...

The initial development of the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) of the European Union (EU) has been variously described as "dramatic", "momentous" and "a remarkable expression of collective political will". Two years on from the Cologne European Council, which committed the EU member states to the development of ESDP, the rhetoric has su...

The association of non-EU members has been a major preoccupation of those invested with responsibility for the development of the EU's European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP). This so-called inclusion or "third-party" issue has taken up a considerably amount of diplomatic energy but has resulted in a set of institutional arrangements that have,...