"International Institutions and the Democratization of Central and East European Civil-Military Relations"

Epstein, Rachel. (2007) "International Institutions and the Democratization of Central and East European Civil-Military Relations". In: UNSPECIFIED, Montreal, Canada. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

[From the introduction]. The accession of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1999 and the accession of Romania in 2004 ought not to have been a vigorous test of that institution’s power to win compliance from candidate states. The proven vulnerability of all four made membership in the world’s most successful military alliance a patently logical goal. The rise of democratic opposition movements under communism in at least Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic should have made the idea of democratic civil-military relations attractive. Communist party armed forces that had helped prop up hated regimes might have been sufficiently discredited such that in theory, at least, they would have difficulty resisting new modes of governance. Despite these seemingly auspicious starting conditions for NATO, compliance with democratic civil-military relations proved to be problematic in all cases and strong compliance was ultimately the exception, not the rule. For although central and east European states had historically been vulnerable, publics were not uniformly supportive of membership. Even in the presence of democratic oppositionists, CEE states were unaware of NATO’s standards of democratic control in substance. Perhaps most surprisingly, militaries were not uniformly discredited throughout the region. Their continuing legitimacy as symbols of national independence in countries like Poland and Romania—in spite of everything—further complicated NATO’s efforts to transform power relations between the armed forces on the one hand and their would-be civilian overseers on the other.

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