Flexible democratic conditionality? The role of democracy and human rights adherence in NATO enlargement decisions

What explains NATO’s decision to admit new members even when they fall short of the organisational expectations of democracy and adherence to human rights? After the end of the Cold War NATO put in place an elaborate scheme of democratic conditionality; however, recent waves of enlargement since 2004 have proven increasingly incompatible with these criteria. This paper argues that this policy results from gradual erosion in the prominence of democratic discourse within the organisation, normalising deviations from previous optimistic expectations that became increasingly unsustainable, inducing within-organisation socialisation. This process is paralleled by an increasingly hostile Russian foreign policy, that served as a catalyst for the cognitive normalisation process. To support the argument, the author conducts interviews with key NATO officials previously or presently involved in the enlargement process, building on unique institutional accessibility, performs content analysis of North Atlantic Council discussions (ministerial/heads of state level) and NATO Summit Declarations in 1995‒2019, diving into Albania’s accession in 2009 as a case study. The results suggest that NATO decision-making over expansion was subject to significant politicisation that increased over time, normalising the deviations, reducing the democratic discourse in periods that preceded the integration of states that did not meet the criteria for democracy (most notably, Albania in 2009, Montenegro in 2017, and North Macedonia in 2020). The results emphasise the place of cognitive processes in IO decision-making on enlargement.