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Fotios Moustakis is a research fellow at the Scottish Centre for International Security, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Aberdeen, UK.Michael Sheehan is director of the Scottish Centre for International Security.
Democratic Peace and the European SecurityCommunity: The Paradox of Greece and Turkey
Fotios Moustakis and Michael Sheehan
In the decade since the end of the Cold War, the dynamics of Europeansecurity have altered out of all recognition. The new realities have prompteda rethinking of the central concept of 
 security
and the creation of a newpolitical vocabulary to address the objectives of national and internationalsecurity policy.When the Warsaw Pact disintegrated and the Soviet Union withdrew itsforces from Eastern Europe, many of the newly emerging Eastern Europeanstates feared that they would be left in a zone of “diluted security” betweenthe North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Russian near abroad. Theysought to consolidate their democracies and the economic transition processby pursuing early membership in the key European organizations, NATOand the European Union.There was a clear feeling that if these countries were left outside of theseorganizations, their independence and security would remain threatened,while inside the organizations they would be secure. This perception wasbased on the belief that NATO was a democratic alliance that would defenddemocratic member states and that membership in the EU had been a vitalstabilizing and democratizing factor in the successful democratic transitionsof Spain, Portugal, and Greece in the 1970s and 1980s.Similarly NATO, with its Cold War rationale gone, sought to redefine itsmission as one of securing and expanding a zone of democratic peace in
 
70Mediterranean Quarterly: Winter 2002
Europe. In doing so it appeared to embrace two important concepts of secu-rity. The first was the Kantian
 democratic peace
thesis.
1
This is the idea thatdemocracies do not go to war with one another. Kant, in “Perpetual Peace,”
2
had gone further and argued that what he called the republican (that is,democratic) state was less prone to war than those with other forms of gov-ernment. Subsequent history and research have led the contemporary pro-ponents of the democratic peace thesis to advance the modest claim that,while democracies are just as willing to use force as any other kind of state,they appear to be unwilling to go to war with other democracies.
3
The second concept is the idea of 
evolutionary security communities
asso-ciated with Karl Deutsch.
4
Deutsch and his colleagues, in exploring thequestion of the place of war in international relations, chose to sidestep theusual question of “why do wars occur?” and seek instead an explanation forthe fact that certain groups of states appear to be exceptions to the assump-tion that war is an inevitable reality. Explain why and how these “securitycommunities” were created and sustained, Deutsch believed, and therewould be at least the possibility of abolishing war from all regions of theworld. In the past one hundred years the most dramatic emergence and con-solidation of a security community has been that of Western Europe.British defense secretary Michael Portillo, discussing the NATO enlarge-ment process in the mid–1990s, used arguments typical of the NATO mem-bers at the time: “By embedding the democratic process in certain coun-tries, and by providing standards to which others will aspire, enlargementwill enhance transparency and security throughout the trans-Atlantic com-
1. Michael Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies and World Politics,”
 Philosophy and Public Affairs
12, no.3 (1983): 205–35.2. Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” in
 Kant’s Political Philosophy
, ed. H. Reiss (New York: Cam-bridge University Press, 1991).3. Bruce Russet,
Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post–Cold War World
(Princeton,N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); T. Clifton Morgan and Sally H. Campbell, “Domestic Struc-ture, Decisional Constraints and War: So Why Kant Democracies Fight?”
 Journal of Conflict Resolu- tion
35, no. 2 (1991): 187–211; Harvey Starr, “Democracy and War: Choice, Learning and SecurityCommunities,”
 Journal of Peace Research
29 (1992): 207–13.4. Karl Deutsch et al.,
 Political Community and the North Atlantic Area: International Organizationin the Light of Historical Experience
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957); KarlDeutsch,
 Political Communities at the International Level: Problems of Definition and Measurement
(New York: Archon, 1970).
 
Moustakis and Sheehan: Democratic Peace and the European Security Community71
munity.”
5
Almost identical wording could have been used by the proponentsof the current expansion of the EU.This perspective makes crucial assumptions. It assumes that NATO is afamily of democracies, that it is a security community, and that by joiningit, new democracies will ipso facto consolidate on the Western model asfree-enterprise democracies, and that since democracies presumably donot fight each other, they would thereby expand the borders of the securitycommunity. Expansion in turn was to occur at a slow and careful pace, sothat new members would not be brought in whose presence might threatenthe existing benefits enjoyed by the other members of the security com-munity. At the NATO summit in Brussels in January 1994, the NATOCouncil reaffirmed that the alliance remained open to membership forother European states, as provided for in Article 10 of the WashingtonTreaty.
6
NATO declared that it would welcome new members as part of anevolutionary process, taking into account political developments in thewhole of Europe. The alliance insisted that enlargement was not directedagainst any state and that it was one element of a broad European securityarchitecture that transcended and rendered obsolete the idea of dividinglines in Europe.
7
The idea that NATO is a security community is a common one, and it isdescribed as such in the works of, for example, Ole Waever and SteveWeber.
8
The
 Economist
in 1999 described NATO as “a club of democracieswhose stated aims include the promotion of lofty ideals like the rule of lawand civilian control over the armed forces.”
9
NATO has been describingitself in such terms consistently since the end of the Cold War, for examplein the 1990
 NATO Handbook
. Secretary-General Javier Solana was particu-
5. Michael Portillo, “Co-operation and Partnership for Peace: A Contribution to Euro-Atlantic Secu-rity into the 21st Century,” in Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies
, Co-operation and Partnership for Peace, RUSI Whitehall Paper
, no. 37 (1996): 5–6.6. Available online at www.nato.int/docu/basictxt/treaty.htm.7.
 NATO Enlargement Study
(Brussels: NATO, 1995), chap. 2, par. 9.8. Ole Waever, “Insecurity, Security and Asecurity in the Western European Non-War Community,” in
 Security Communities
, ed. E Adler and M Barnett (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press,1998), 69–118; Stephen Weber, “Does NATO Have a Future?” in
The Future of European Security,
ed. B. Crawford (Berkeley, Calif.: Center for German and European Studies, 1992), 366.9.
 Economist
, 7 August 1999, 46.
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