NATO, Ukraine, externalities, and "agency"
Every state has "agency" but that isn't enough to decide whether bringing a state into NATO is good
Should Ukraine join NATO? Did the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO motivate Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine? A popular reaction to questions like these is to invoke the “agency” of Ukrainians.
A broader form of “agency” argument defends NATO expansion by emphasizing the agency of Eastern Europeans or countries in general.
Sometimes an analogous point is made without the word “agency”…
…wait, no, there it is.1
These “agency” responses don’t actually answer the factual question of how much NATO motivated Russia to attack Ukraine, or the normative question of whether Ukraine (or Finland) should join NATO. Answering those questions with “agency” is almost always a fallacy.
The plainest way to show why it’s a fallacy may be to strip the relevant debates down to their barest logical structure.
Suppose someone claims that X’s overtures to Y (or Y’s overtures to X) are a reason why Z attacked Y. If your counter is “that can’t be true because Y has agency” then “agency” is either a shorthand for “the ability to prevent attacks by Z” — in which case it’s false, given that Z has in fact attacked Y — or it’s a non sequitur.
Alternatively, suppose someone claims that X shouldn’t ally with Y because that would antagonize Z. A rebuttal like “X should ally with Y because Y has agency” isn’t relevant, because the mere fact of Y having agency doesn’t dictate how Y (and certainly not X) ought to exercise that agency.
Perhaps that’s too abstract to follow. Or perhaps I’ll be accused of refusing to engage the messy facts, of hiding behind an abstraction that doesn’t confront the hard-hitting, complicated reality. (Never mind that any competent reader could just replace “X” and “Y” and “Z” with “NATO” and “Ukraine” and “Russia” in the previous two paragraphs.)
So I’ll use an actual messy disagreement to capture how argument by agency fails. Here’s part of another Twitter thread, where Molly “kegels4Kulaks” Maguire observes that Poland’s dependence on US/NATO/“the west” undermines the idea that Poland is purely exercising its own agency.
Klaus Richter replies to narrow the definition of “agency” to “the decision to join NATO”.
Molly Maguire comes back with the point that if “agency” refers only to deciding whether to join NATO then that “agency” isn’t really agency.
Then Klaus Richter, instead of addressing Molly Maguire’s rebuttal, brushes Maguire off as “too academic” and switches his justification for NATO expansion from “agency” to “survival”.
That’s emblematic of why invoking “agency” seldom works as an argument: “agency” is rarely the real justification for a military or diplomatic action. The real justification is usually something else, like keeping a state alive or halting aggression. Yet, instead of leading with that real justification, people lead with “agency” as the justification, only to swap out that justification as soon as it meets a staunch challenge.
Why isn’t the “agency” justification robust? One problem “agency” has is the symmetry problem: everybody has agency, not just Ukrainians (or Finns or Poles), so if “agency” can justify Ukrainians’ actions (or Finns’ or Poles’) then “agency” can justify anyone’s actions. One could invoke Russian agency as easily as Ukrainian/Finnish/Polish agency. One could even defend Russia’s invasion with “Russia has agency, you Western swine, so why are you denying Russia’s exercise of agency by criticizing its invasion of Ukraine?” — which I hope makes the absurdity plain.
Indeed, if “agency” works as an all-purpose justification, why not invoke the agency of the US or NATO? NATO’s refused to admit Ukraine for years, so why disrespect that expression of NATO’s agency?
Symmetry means that “agency” alone can’t indicate who’s in the right in a dispute, because “agency” is a defense every party to a dispute can use. That’s why it’s brittle as a defense of NATO expansion, and why arguers who rely on “agency” switch to a different justification when they meet resistance. They’re being selective.
That’s not all. Agency-based support for NATO expansion routinely commits the fallacy of neglecting externalities.
Which countries are in NATO doesn’t affect only Russia, existing NATO members, and potential NATO members. It affects other countries because NATO is not a “purely defensive” alliance: it’s bombed Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Libya, and Afghanistan, none of which were in NATO at the time (and only two of which are in NATO now). NATO therefore generates negative externalities: costs it imposes on third-party countries that made no deal with NATO.
Those externalities ought to enter any comprehensive calculation of whether an expansion of NATO is good or bad. That includes any rigorous calculation of whether Ukraine should join NATO. If adding Ukraine to NATO raises the risk of NATO bombing, for example, Belarus, one ought to account for the extra risk.
Externalities don’t automatically prove that NATO expansion is bad. But supporters of NATO expansion should contend with them, and crying “agency” is the opposite of contending with them. If one thinks that “Ukrainians have agency” is the start and end of the argument, one isn’t considering whatever interests Libyans, Afghans, or Serbians might have in not beefing up NATO.
I suspect that “agency” is a fallacy in many debates other than the debate about adding Eastern European countries to NATO, but a wider review has to wait for another time. For now I simply warn that “agency” doesn’t end the debate about NATO expansion; that international agreements can never be about the “agency” of one and only one state; and that selectively invoking one region’s “agency” can mean neglecting externalities suffered elsewhere.
There’s irony in someone complaining about others turning into cynical Kissingers, and about being treated as a pawn, right after endorsing NATO expansion. Better still: in another tweet Korhonen disavows the idea of telling Palestinians “that they must seek accommodation with Israel” — a respectable position, but not a very close analogy. A closer analogy would be the Palestinian National Authority and Hamas demanding the admission of the West Bank and Gaza to NATO, an admission liable to pit the nuclear-armed UK, US, and France against nuclear-armed Israel. I suspect Korhonen would be less sanguine about that!