The decision to enlarge NATO and the EU took place in a community environment in which all state actors shared a liberal political culture and had subscribed to the constitutive organizational rules. In a rhetorical perspective, the problem of enlargement decision-making in this environment was not a conflict between competing validity claims. There was no controversy about, or controversial interpretation of, the criteria for legitimate membership; no member state openly challenged the principle that democratic European states were entitled to join the Western organizations. The problem was one of compliance with the practical consequences of this principle. For the CEEC aspirants, the question was how to induce the reluctant member states to acquiesce in Eastern enlargement; for their opponents, it was how to avoid or, at least, put off honoring their commitments as members of the Western community. In this situation (and given that transnational social mobilization did not promise to be effective), the rhetorical action hypothesis predicts that the proponents of enlargement use arguments based on the community culture to shame the opponents into compliance.

For three reasons, the NATO case study analyzes the US domestic decision-making process on NATO enlargement in addition to international interaction. First, the fact that the United States, in 1994, became the most determined advocate of Eastern enlargement in the Alliance was the only major puzzle for the rationalist explanation of enlargement preferences (see chapter 8). How then can we account for the change in US enlargement preferences?