INTERNATIONAL SECURITY IN PRACTICE: The Politics of NATO-Russia Diplomacy

Chapter 5 sets this one-year snapshot in historical context, first locating NATO and Russia in the "field" of post-Cold War international security by focusing on their use of what, following [Pierre Bourdieu], [Vincent Pouliot] calls materialinstitutional and cultural-symbolic "capital." Until the mid-1990s, he writes, there was a rough fitbetween Russia's weak "position" in the new international order and its "disposition" to accept the rules of the game, including NATO's tutelage in matters of European security. From 1994 on, however, the Russian pupil began to go astray, principally in reaction to NATO's "double enlargement." First, beginning in Bosnia, the alliance began to take on new peace-enforcement tasks farther afield and, second, it announced its intention to expand its membership eastward. That it took these decisions, and how it took them, signalled to Russia that NATO continued to view it as a junior partner and was "reneging on its own discourse of inclusive, mutual and cooperative security" (192). This hastened Moscow's resumption of its great-power "habitus" (Bourdieu again). Pouliot insists that NATO's double enlargement was decisive in reactivating Russia's great-power nationalists and undermining its Atlanticists. The result was "fierce symbolic power struggles," which played out most strikingly in the negotiation of the 1997 NATO -Rus sia founding act (182).