Collective Security

Collective Security. Before 1914, many observers believed that the international balance of power had made a general European war improbable. World War I proved them wrong; its carnage persuaded many statesmen, led by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and British Viscount Robert Cecil, to craft a new collective‐security system that would align against an aggressor the combined might of the rest of the world. The League of Nations in 1920 became the world's first “collective‐security” organization, although the term itself was not commonly used until the mid‐1930s. No aggressor would threaten war, the league's founders believed, if faced with overwhelming collective force. In reality, the new system failed to prevent Japan from occupying Manchuria in 1931, Italy from invading Ethiopia in 1935, or Germany from precipitating World War II when it attacked Poland in 1939.

Although the breakdown of peace in the 1930s discredited the League of Nations, the allies incorporated collective security into theUnited Nation's Charter in 1945. To improve upon the league, the UN's founders permitted five states, including the United States and the Soviet Union, an absolute veto over collective action. Intended to revitalize collective security, the veto nearly killed it once Washington and Moscow became Cold War adversaries. The absence of genuine collective security during the Cold War did not prevent misuse of the term. For instance, the organizers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) used the rhetoric of collective security even though NATO and similar organizations, like the Soviet‐sponsored Warsaw Pact, were for the most part old‐style alliances.

Only twice did the U.N. come close to implementing collective security. When the Korean War began in 1950, the Security Council (with the Soviets absent and unable to exercise their veto) authorized armed resistence against North Korea. During the Persian Gulf Crisis of 1990, a post–Cold War Security Council endorsed military measures to end Iraq's occupation of Kuwait. Otherwise, collective security remained more an ideal than a reality as the twentieth century ended.
See also Internationalism; Persian Gulf War.

Bibliography

David Armstrong,, Lorna Lloyd,, and and John Redmond , From Versailles to Maastrict: International Organization in the Twentieth Century, 1996.

Gary B. Ostrower