NATO, energy security and institutional change

ABSTRACT

In recent years, NATO expressed increasing interest in addressing the broader range of security challenges confronting its Allies. Energy security was included in 2010 in the NATO Strategic Concept and in the following years NATO developed its mandate in energy security. This research resorts to process tracing to capture the interaction between factors that led to NATO developing a mandate in energy security. NATO Member States, particularly Central and Eastern European countries, played an important role in NATO working on energy security. The NATO bureaucracy also supported the organisation in developing a mandate in this field. The study finds rational choice institutionalism particularly useful in explaining the expansion of the NATO mandate in energy security and contributes in this way to the ongoing debate on which theoretical approach best explains the contemporary evolution of NATO. The research is based on original data collected through fieldwork and interviews conducted at the NATO headquarters with high NATO officials working on energy security (including NATO Deputy Secretary Generals and NATO heads of sections), as well as with high officials from NATO Member States.

KEYWORDS:

• Energy security
• NATO
• emerging security challenges
• institutionalism
• institutional change

Disclosure statement

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

Notes on contributor

Alexandra-Maria Bocse is an academic based at LSE. She completed a PhD in Politics and International Studies at University of Cambridge, UK and an MPhil in International Relations at the same institution. In 2015–2016 Alexandra was a Fulbright-Schuman Fellow at Harvard University. Alexandra also worked in the past for the EU and the UN in analysis and advisory roles. Her research and analysis interests are related to European Affairs, energy and environmental politics, security, as well as international governance. She has experience teaching at both undergraduate and graduate levels European Politics, Global Energy and Environmental Politics, and International Affairs at University of Cambridge, London School of Economics, and King’s College London.

Notes

1 In addition, as successful engagement in military action is dependent on access to energy sources, NATO defense planning units have been always preoccupied with providing energy supplies to the forces. The NATO Pipeline System set up during the Cold War is meant to supply fuel to NATO. The 10,000 kilometres long system runs through 12 NATO Member countries connecting “storage depots, military air bases, civil airports, pumping stations, truck and rail loading stations, refineries and entry/discharge points” (NATO 2017).

2 The North Atlantic Council is NATO’s main political decision-making body. It includes high-level representatives of the NATO Member States that meet to discuss policy or operational issues requiring common decisions.

3 Definitions of what energy security entails vary. Energy security has a different meaning for energy importing countries (most EU and NATO Members) than it has for energy exporting countries. From the importers’ perspective, energy security is achieved when there are adequate energy supplies from reliable sources at competitive prices that cause limited harm to the environment (European Commission 2000, Proedrou 2012 building on the definitions of Eng 2003, Qingyi 2006, Gore, Bolton and Winstone 2007). Other energy security definitions try to reconcile the points of view of the importers and exporters and define energy security as the balance between energy supply and demand facilitating sustainable economic and social development (Daojiong 2006).

4 Historical, sociological and other types of institutionalism showed limited explanatory power when their assumptions were tested against the empirics of the case studied by this paper. Given the space constraints of the paper, I will not include the analysis that led to their refutation, nor their key assumptions.

5 NATO’s Istanbul Cooperation Initiative was launched in 2004 and provides a security cooperation platform between the countries of the broader Middle East region and NATO to increase long-term global and regional security.

6 None of these are operations that aim exclusively at enhancing energy security, but they serve energy security purposes (interview with Slovak official 2015).

7 The 1999 NATO Strategic Concept did not include the word “energy” or the phrase “energy security”, but pointed to the fact that “Alliance security interests can be affected by other risks of a wider nature, including acts of terrorism, sabotage and organized crime, and by the disruption of the flow of vital resources” (NATO 1999, part II, article 24).

8 Article 5 refers to NATO’s Allies’ collective defense obligation in case any of them is subject to an attack: “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them” (NATO 1949, article 5).