Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has developed a network of partnerships with countries around the world. While the majority of these partnerships have either been with countries in Europe or within Europe’s immediate neighbourhood, NATO has also forged partnerships with countries further afield including within the Indo-Pacific region. In recent years, NATO has demonstrated a commitment to work more closely with its partners in the Indo-Pacific (Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea) to address global security challenges by inviting them to NATO’s summits, exploring the possibility of establishing a NATO Liaison office in Japan and strengthening bilateral ties through its individually Tailored Partnership Programmes. Focusing specifically on NATO relationships with Australia, the only Indo-Pacific partner with the status of Enhanced Opportunities Partner, this papers assesses the evolution of NATO-Australia relations to provide a comprehensive analysis of the factors which have contributed to a strengthening of bilateral ties given their geographical distance and differing strategic priorities. In particular, it seeks to assess the extent to which the relationship is primarily driven by shared values and interests, such as the maintenance of a global rules-based order, or whether the drive for enhancing the relationship is due to the prominent role of the United States within NATO and Australia’s security considerations. This paper will contribute to debates about the ‘added-value’ that partners can play in assisting NATO to achieve its strategic and operational objectives, and how third countries can utilise regional and multilateral bodies for their own national interests.

In 2016, NATO announced the deployment of a relatively modest, yet highly diverse military presence on its eastern flank. The so-called enhanced Forward Presence (eFP) model, consisting of a diverse group of countries, brought together a broad mix of strategic philosophies, military hardware, cultures, and languages. This article aims to scrutinize this novel force formation. Treating the Baltic region as a “laboratory of multinationalism”, the key aim of the analysis is to tease out both strengths and weaknesses of diverse military deployments. Several academic studies suggest that international missions, comprised of different nationalities, hold the promise of improved mission performance. That being said, previous NATO deployments, involving troops from multiple countries, have also brought to the surface issues of incompatible military equipment, lack of adequate English-language proficiency, and duplication of certain capabilities. The enhanced Forward Presence model serves as an ideal case study, allowing us to test such competing scholarly claims. With the help of interviews with relevant officials and examination of open source material, the article scrutinizes the extent to which diverse group nations have been able to fit together and work constructively under one common alliance’s flag.

Why do NATO leaders occasionally signal opposition to collective action? How do they justify this opposition to their allies and the public, and do their arguments influence public opinion within alliance member states? This puzzle has become increasingly relevant in light of NATO’s commitment to support Ukraine following the Russian invasion. Democratic leaders are generally sensitive to public opinion about war and have an incentive to shape popular support for military interventions in both domestic and foreign audiences. Though all NATO members have committed to the transatlantic consensus of aiding Ukraine, the observable trend of war fatigue in a number of prominent NATO countries indicates a shift in supportive attitudes as concerns of a frozen conflict loom. This paper proposes a population-based survey experiment in Germany to explore whose communication matters most for shaping public opinion towards the war in Ukraine, comparing messaging from the national leader with that of allied leaders and foreign leaders directly involved in the conflict. Not only is Germany an extremely important NATO member-state, but its political climate features salient ideological divides regarding the alliance. German public opinion towards NATO tends to be volatile, which indicates that elite cues may exert significant influence on public support for NATO’s engagements. The population-based, conjoint experiment explores the effects of negative cues (emphasizing war fatigue) and positive cues (emphasizing no war fatigue) from three important leaders: Chancellor Scholz, President Biden, and President Zelenskyy. Elite cues to (dis)continue national contributions to the war effort are likely more effective when individuals trust the elite, prompting an additional inquiry into the role of trust as a moderator in the relationship between communication and popular support for war.

The CSDP “traditional method” of decision-making – i.e., based on long consultations with stakeholders, a long process of mediation and balance between positions of a consistent number of actors to achieve solutions based on consensus and long-term policies – is values-oriented (cfr. art. 21 TEU) but in the contests of “hard crises”, such as that of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this type of political process can be challenged. The operationalization of values in policies can change due to the narratives of urgency driven by dynamics of securitization (or crisisification) and the same role of values in the CSDP can be questioned. Driven by the need to defend its eastern partner (Ukraine) from military aggression and by the need to (finally) build the much-mentioned “strategic autonomy”, the EU could move from a security policy based essentially on the balance between “values and butter”, to a tripartite balance between “values, butter and guns”.

Considering the scenario of the Euromaidan crisis of 2014 and the Russian invasion of 2022, analyzing EU official documents and through semi-structured interviews with civilian and military personnel from the EU (institutions and member states), this paper aims to study what role values play in mobilizing EU policies to deal with the Ukrainian crisis, how CSDP is designed/operationalized around values even during this major crisis and how narratives related to CSDP values are mobilized by EU decision-makers to legitimize these policies.

Since the Orange Revolution of 2004, Ukraine has attempted to attain a perspective of EU membership. Yet, while offering cooperation and association, the EU was divided on the issue and reluctant to commit itself. In 2022, however, Ukraine applied for EU membership immediately after the start of the Russian invasion and received the status of a candidate for membership on 23^rd June 2022. Why and how did the war push the EU into this quick and bold decision? The literature on EU enlargement is marked by theoretical controversy. Is enlargement driven by the EU’s security and economic interests or by the desire or obligation to promote liberal norms and values in Europe? My research will shed new light on this controversy and explain the actors, motivations and processes that have led to this momentous policy reversal between the start of the war on 24 February 2022 and the EU’s decision four months later. My study will start from the theoretical literature on the EU’s foreign actorness and enlargement. In a process-tracing analysis, it will uncover novel empirical data from the analysis of official documents and interviews with EU and Ukrainian policy-makers and experts.