Imperfect Unity, newleftreview.org

[…] Member states had already demonstrated their willingness to bend over backwards to please Erdoğan. On 6 July, a Swedish court made the unprecedented decision to convict a member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. He will serve a four-and-a-half year prison sentence in Sweden before being extradited to Turkey. Among the large Swedish-Kurdish diaspora, the case was widely viewed as a political stitch-up: another human sacrifice on NATO’s altar. The seemingly bottomless capacity to accommodate autocratic Turkey is, of course, difficult to reconcile with the framing of the current confrontation with Russia, as a civilizational struggle between an enlightened band of Western democracies and Putin’s Oriental despotism. NATO’s 2022 Strategic Concept, unveiled in Madrid, states that ‘authoritarian actors challenge our interests, values, and democratic way of life’ – but this refers solely to authoritarians outside NATO, not those within it. It remains to be seen whether the Atlantic alliance can maintain its current popularity while forfeiting any pretense to ‘shared values’. In 2014, a policy paper from the Norweigan Centre for Integrity in the Defense Sector warned that ‘unless NATO is seen as a community of values, public support and mutual solidarity may easily become undermined’. Läs artikel