NATO and the European System of Liberal-Democratic Security Communities

Abstract

Since 1990, the organizations of the so-called European Security Architecture have paid unprecedented attention to the development of democratic institutions in the neighbouring European area. The Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE later OSCE) was the first to set an explicit link between democracy-building and security developing innovative security community-building processes and practices according to a new comprehensive concept of security within which the basic principles of liberal democracy apply (Adler, 1997, 1998; Flynn and Farrell, 1999). Other organizations followed and enacted a series of policies aimed at creating security and stability in the neighbouring Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) by means of democracy-building practices. In other words, acting as if they were rediscovering the theory of democratic peace of Kantian memory, all institutions of the so-called European Security Architecture responded to the possibly destabilizing effects of the collapse of Communism by adopting mutandis mutatis, Immanuel Kant’s recipe for ‘Perpetual Peace’ (Kant, 1795/1991): domestic democracy, international foedus of democratic countries and the development of cosmopolitan law.