Crypto-Atlanticism: The untold preferences of policy elites in neutral and non-aligned states

ABSTRACT

The existing scholarship shows that neutral and non-aligned countries in Europe closely and often covertly engage with NATO despite their official posture. However, we lack comparative insights into how this phenomenon plays out in various countries. To understand this phenomenon of crypto-Atlanticism (CA) better we develop a framework to capture variations depending on the strength of elites’ Atlanticist preferences and their perceptions of public opinion’s preferences for neutrality. We illustrate our framework with evidence from twenty-four interviews with policy elites from Austria, Serbia and Sweden conducted between 2020 and 2022. Our findings show that elites exhibited various forms of CA: while the strength of Atlanticism is stronger in Austria and Sweden than in Serbia, the degree of restriction in publicly expressing these preferences was less restrained in Sweden than in Austria and Serbia. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of our findings for the theory and practice of military neutrality.

KEYWORDS:

• Neutrality
• elites
• NATO
• Austria
• Serbia
• Sweden

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the participants in the consortium workshop held in Milan on 17 and 18 June 2022 for their valuable feedback on the earlier version of this manuscript. Filip Ejdus would particularly like to thank Tijana Rečević for her research assistance in the collection of interviews in Serbia and Austria and for inspiring discussions about neutrality in these two countries.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 It is usually juxtaposed with continentalism, which in the broadest sense can be defined as a geopolitical belief that political homogeneity should be sought within a continent (Suslov, 2020, p. 203). In different historic and geographical contexts, continentalism can acquire different meanings, but in Europe it most importantly encompasses preference for closer security cooperation within Europe which excludes the US (Mouritzen, 2006; Mouritzen 2007) or the continentalism in the Russian geopolitical thought which aims to create one political space in Eurasia with Russia in its center (Suslov, 2020, pp. 203–209).

2 In Serbia, the MoD did not allow interviews, but several interlocutors from other institutions had either worked in the defence sector or have close contacts with it and helped us understand the prevalent opinion there.

3 According to a poll conducted in August 2022, 91% of respondents found military neutrality important to them: https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/austria-neutrality/

4 See the exposé of the FRY Foreign Minister Svilanović in the Yugoslav Parliament, on October 24, 2001 (Dragojlović et al., 2011, p. 287).

5 See for example the recent poll conducted by Belgrade Centre for Security Policy according to which Russia (for 40% of respondents) and China (for 16% of respondents) are seen as the best friends of Serbia. Consequently, vast majority of respondents hold that Serbia should harmonize its foreign policy with Russia and China (57%), while only a fraction thinks that it should do it with the EU (13%) or the US (7%) (Belgrade Centre for Security Policy, 2020).

6 For a recent analysis see Kisić, 2022, March 21.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Volkswagen Foundation under the project titled “Fighting Together, Moving Apart: European Common Defence and Shared Security in an age of Brexit and Trump”. The project went through the ethics screening and was approved by the University of Exeter Ethics Committee (number 201920-067). More details: www.secEUrity.eu.

Notes on contributors

Filip Ejdus

Filip Ejdus is a Professor of security studies at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Belgrade. He currently serves as the President of the Central and East European International Studies Association.

Catherine Hoeffler

Catherine Hoeffler is an Associate Professor of political science at Sciences Po Bordeaux and Visiting Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre, European University Institute.