The Spread of Security Communities: Communities of Practice, Self-Restraint, and NATO's Post—Cold War Transformation

TLDR

The article argues that practices are central to explaining the expansion of security communities. The study contends that security communities grow because collective meanings evolve cognitively and because shared rational and moral expectations of self‑restraint underpin them. The expansion of NATO’s security‑community identity to Central and Eastern Europe was enabled by a cooperative‑security community of practice that emerged from the Helsinki Process. This process successfully extended NATO’s security‑community identities to Central and Eastern European countries in the 1990s.

Abstract

This article invokes a combination of analytical and normative arguments that highlight the leading role of practices in explaining the expansion of security communities. The analytical argument is that collective meanings, on which peaceful change is based, cognitively evolve — i.e. they are established in individuals' expectations and dispositions and they are institutionalized in practice — because of communities of practice. By that we mean like-minded groups of practitioners who are bound, both informally and contextually, by a shared interest in learning and applying a common practice. The normative argument is that security communities rest in part on the sharing of rational and moral expectations and dispositions of self-restraint. This thesis is illustrated by the example of the successful expansion of security-community identities from a core of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) states to Central and Eastern European countries during the 1990s, which was facilitated by a `cooperative-security' community of practice that, emerging from the Helsinki Process, endowed NATO with the practices necessary for the spread of self-restraint.