ANALYZING NATO EXPANSION: AN INSTITUTIONAL BARGAINING APPROACH

I would like to thank Trevor Nakagawa for his research assistance. Discussions with Beverly Crawford, Elizabeth Kier, and Daniel Verdier were invaluable. Comments from two anonymous referees were very helpful in revising the paper. 1 Unlike most security issues, knowing where one stands on NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) expansion does not help us to easily distinguish between realist and reflectivist views or, for that matter, between hawks and doves. Indeed, when we consider the accession of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic in a limited “first wave” expansion of NATO in March 1999, the contending sides become even more muddled. Put bluntly, the conventional theoretical approaches do not help us adequately understand and predict the implications of NATO’s enlargement. Rather than engage in policy advocacy, my purpose is to analyze the debate on NATO expansion and examine the likely implications of this expansion. To examine the policy process that led to the decision to engage in limited expansion of NATO, I use an “institutional bargaining game approach.”1 First, I consider the issue o