Global and local rivalries in NATO's push towards the Caucasus

This article argues that the corridor that runs from the Balkans, via the Caucasus to Central Asia, has constituted a major axis of Western expansion for at least two decades, intimately connected but not reducible to energy pipeline issues. It interprets NATO as a structure through which the Atlantic, English-speaking heartland has sought to create a wider `West through military integration. This integration always had to contest with the legacy of rivalries dating from the epoch prior to it. From France in the long 18th century to China today, contender states developing a state-led alternative to Anglophone liberalism have been/are such rivals. All along, frictions accompanying integration into the expanding West (often in the wake of war) have complicated liberal-capitalist expansion, whilst the breakdown of contender state control over their societies has laid bare structural fault-lines causing endemic instability. The examples of the collapse of the USSR and the Balkan wars are given to illustrate intra-Western rivalries and the consequences of dispossessing contender state classes. A concluding section deals with the security issues concerning the wider Caucasus in these terms and argues that events here may mark the end of an era of Western expan-sion.