. Jolie: Christophe Licoppe/Photonews via Getty
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Lily Lynch is a writer and journalist based in Belgrade.
May 16, 2023
In January 2018, Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg held an unprecedented press conference with Angelina Jolie. While InStyle reported
that Jolie “was dressed in a black off-the-shoulder sheath dress, a
matching capelet and classic pumps (also black)”, there was a deeper
purpose to this meeting: sexual violence in war. The pair had just
co-authored a piece for the Guardian entitled “Why NATO must defend
women’s rights”. The timing was significant. At the height of the #MeToo
movement, the most powerful military alliance in the world had become a
feminist ally. “Ending gender-based violence is a vital issue of peace
and security as well as of social justice,” they wrote. “NATO can be a
leader in this effort.”
This was a new and progressive face for Nato, the same one it has
since used to seduce much of the European Left. Previously, in the
Nordic countries, Atlanticists have had to sell war and militarism to
largely pacifist publics. This was achieved in part
by presenting Nato not as a rapacious, pro-war military alliance, but as
an enlightened, “progressive” peace alliance. As Timothy Garton Ash effused in the Guardian
in 2002, “NATO has become a European peace movement” where one could
watch “John Lennon meet George Bush”. Today, by contrast, following
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Sweden and Finland abandoned
their long-standing traditions of neutrality and opted for membership.
Nato is portrayed as a military alliance — and Ukraine a war — that
even former pacifists can get behind. All its proponents seem to be
singing is “Give War a Chance”.
The Jolie campaign marked a dramatic turn in what Katharine A.M. Wright and Annika Bergman Rosamond call
“Nato’s strategic narrative” in several ways. First, the alliance
embraced celebrity star power for the first time, imbuing its
unremarkable brand with elite glamour and beauty. Jolie’s star power
meant that the alluring images of the event reached apolitical audiences
with little knowledge of Nato. Second, the partnership seemed to usher
in an era in which women’s rights, gendered violence and feminism would
assume a more prominent role in Nato rhetoric. Since then, and
especially in the past 12 months, telegenic female leaders such as the
Finnish Prime Minister, Sanna Marin, German Foreign Minister, Annalena
Baerbock, and Estonian Prime Minister, Kaja Kallas, have increasingly
served as the spokespersons of enlightened militarism in Europe. The
alliance has also intensified its engagement with popular culture, new
technologies, and youth influencers.
Of course, Nato has always been PR-conscious, and has long engaged
culture, entertainment, and the arts. Who could forget the 1999 album Distant Early Warning from electronic duo Icebreaker International, recorded with funding from the defunct “NATOarts”
and inspired by the radar stations along Alaska and Canada’s northern
periphery built to alert Nato of an incoming Soviet nuclear strike? Or
the 2007 feature film HQ,
produced by Nato’s public diplomacy division, which depicts life inside
the alliance and a mock diplomatic response to a crisis in the
fictional state of Seismania? Just about everyone it turns out. But what
makes Nato’s more recent strategic turn so effective is that it has
successfully echoed candidate countries’ progressive local traditions
and identities.
No political party in Europe better exemplifies the shift from
militant pacifism to ardent pro-war Atlanticism than the German Greens.
Most of the original Greens had been radicals during the student
protests of 1968; many had demonstrated against American wars. The early
Greens advocated for West Germany’s withdrawal from Nato. But as the
founding members entered middle age, fissures began to appear in the
party that would one day tear it apart. Two camps began to coalesce: the
“Realos” were the moderate Greens, politically pragmatists. The
“Fundis” were the radical, uncompromising camp; they wanted the party to
remain faithful to its fundamental values no matter what.
Predictably, the Fundis believed that European peace would be best
served by West Germany’s withdrawal from the alliance and tended to
favour military neutrality. Meanwhile, the Realos believed that West
Germany needed Nato. They even argued that withdrawal would return
matters of security to the German nation-state and risk rekindling
militaristic nationalism. Their Nato was a post-national, cosmopolitan
alliance, speaking numerous languages and flying a multitude of flags,
protecting Europe from Germany’s most destructive impulses. But Nato
membership at the end of history was one thing. Germany going to war
again — the most forbidden of taboos after World War II — was something
else entirely.
Kosovo changed everything. In 1999 — the 50th anniversary of Nato’s
founding — the alliance began what academic Merje Kuus has called a
“discursive metamorphosis”. From the mere defensive alliance it was
during the Cold War, it was becoming an active military compact
concerned with spreading and defending values such as human rights,
democracy, peace, and freedom well beyond the borders of its member
states. The 78-day Nato bombing of what remained of Yugoslavia,
ostensibly to halt war crimes committed by Serbian security forces in
Kosovo, would forever transform the German Greens.
At a chaotic May 1999 party conference
in Bielefeld, the Realos and Fundis fought bitterly over the bombing.
Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, the most prominent Realo,
supported Nato’s war; for this, conference attendees pelted him with red
paint. The Fundis’ proposal called for an unconditional cessation of
the bombing, which would have also meant the collapse of the
Green-Social Democratic Party (SDP) coalition government. The peace
proposal failed, crushing the anti-war faction of the party, who would
leave the Greens in droves. Instead, the Realos’ moderate resolution
triumphed by a comfortable margin. After a brief pause, the bombing of
Yugoslavia was allowed to continue. With the Greens’ crucial support,
the Luftwaffe flew sorties over Belgrade, 58 years after their last
aerial bombardment of the Serbian capital. It was the first German
military operation undertaken in Europe since the Second World War.
Following the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine, the German
Greens’ Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has continued in Fischer’s
tradition, scolding countries with traditions of military neutrality and
imploring them to join Nato. She has invoked Desmond Tutu’s line:
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the
side of the oppressor.” And the Greens have even ventriloquised their
own dead members, including Petra Kelly, an anti-war icon and longtime
advocate for non-alignment who died in 1992. Last year, Greens
co-founder Eva Quistorp wrote an imaginary letter to Petra Kelly in the newspaper FAZ.
The letter borrows Kelly’s moral stances and inverts them to justify
the Greens’ embrace of war. Quistorp wants us to think that if Kelly
were alive today, she would have been a Nato supporter. Addressing the
long-dead Kelly, Quistorp asserts, “I bet you would shout out that
radical pacifism makes blackmail possible.”
Earlier this year, Germany’s Federal Foreign Office also rolled out a new “Feminist Foreign Policy”,
the latest of several European foreign ministries to have done so. This
new orientation, also adopted by France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg
and Spain, paints cosmopolitan militarism with a faux-radical feminist
gloss, opening the domain of war and security to women’s rights
activists. No-nonsense feminist leaders are depicted as the ideal foil to authoritarian “strongmen”.
Sweden was the first country to adopt such a policy in 2014,
permitting it to project its longstanding state feminism abroad, and to
assume a new moral posture in the international arena. Domestically,
there were positive Atlanticist stories in women’s magazines. In the
“Mama” section of the Swedish newspaper Expressen, targeted at female readers, one interview
with Angelina Jolie emphasised that Nato can protect women from sexual
violence in war. Jolie also stressed that there is little difference
between humanitarian aid workers and Nato soldiers, as they “are
striving towards the same goal: peace”.
The academic Merje Kuus has written that Nato enlargement involves “a two-fold legitimation”
strategy. First, Nato is rendered ordinary and unremarkable, pedestrian
and everyday, and second, it is portrayed as above reproach, vital, an
absolute moral good. The effect of this, she says, is the simultaneous
banalisation and glorification of Nato: it becomes so blandly
bureaucratic that it is below debate, and so “existential and essential”, that it is above
debate. And this legitimation strategy has been evident in the limited,
tightly-controlled debate about Euro-Atlantic integration in the Nordic
countries, neither of which held referendums on membership. After
decades of popular resistance to the alliance, Nato, it seems, is above
democracy. But as Kuss writes, that does not mean that Nato is imposed
on a society. The aim is instead “to integrate it into entertainment,
education, and civic life more broadly”.
Evidence of this is everywhere. In February, Nato held its first ever gaming event. A young employee of the alliance joined popular Twitch streamer ZeRoyalViking to play Among Us
and casually chat about the danger disinformation poses to democracy.
With them was a mountaineer influencer and environmental activist named
Caroline Gleich. As their astronaut avatars navigated a cartoon
spaceship, they spoke about Nato in glowing terms. By the event’s end,
the stream had turned into a recruitment effort: the alliance employee
talked about the perks of his job and encouraged viewers to check the
Nato website for employment opportunities in fields such as graphic
design and video editing.
The event was part of Nato’s “Protect the Future”
campaign. This year it included a graphic novel competition for young
artists. The alliance also courted dozens of influencers with large
followings on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, and brought them
out to the headquarters in Brussels. Other influencers were dispatched
to last year’s Nato Summit in Madrid, where they were asked to create content for their audiences.
The European Left has been utterly captivated by this show. Following
the path taken by the German Greens, major Left-wing parties have
abandoned military neutrality and opposition to war and now champion
Nato. It is a stunning reversal. During the Cold War, the European Left
organised mass protests
attended by millions against US-led militarism and Nato’s deployment of
Pershing-II and cruise missiles in Europe. Today, little more than the
hollowed-out radical rhetoric remains. With hardly any remaining
opposition to Nato left in Europe, and the alliance’s creeping expansion beyond the Euro-Atlantic area, its hegemony is now nearly absolute.
