Collective Security
Collective Security
Collective security is a method of managing the power relations of nation states through a partially centralized system of security arrangements. While the ultimate power remains diffused among independent sovereign states, authority in the specifically defined spheres of maintenance and enforcement of peace is vested in an international body.
Collective security is not wholly novel in the history of statecraft. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, nations sought to localize their neighbors’ conflict and limit its spread. After World War I, however, it was widely recognized that the modern state system was entering a new era, in which not all warring powers were entitled to equally impartial and neutral treatment by the rest of society. U.S. Secretary of State Henry Stimson, for example, said in 1932 that in future conflicts one or more of the combatants must be designated as wrongdoer; he added that we no longer “draw a circle about them and treat them with the punctilios of the duelist’s code. Instead we denounce them as lawbreakers” (Stimson & Bundy 1948, p. 259). This view—that nations may legally be held accountable for starting wars—became the cornerstone of the concept of collective security to which most statesmen have professed loyalty in the post–1945 period.
Development of the concept
Three far-reaching historical trends account for the rise of the new form of international relations and hence for the development of the concept of collective security. The first is the evolving sense of practical morality, according to which neither war nor poverty is any longer accepted as inevitable and foreordained. A succession of grand designs and peace plans originating in the philosophical concepts of the Enlightenment culminated in the League of Nations and the United Nations. The second far-reaching historical trend stems from a revolution in technology and in the world economy. Industrialization has caused the nations of the world to become interdependent. The activities and production of one region are increasingly required to gear and mesh with the functions of others. Industrialism has some of the qualities of a pro-found ecumenical movement drawing the world together. Third, the revolution in technology and the transformation of beliefs have accented the need for, and the trend toward, more rational and extensive international institutions. Organization and controls must be world-wide to manage world-wide relations and problems. A universalized system of collective security is intended to meet the demand for resistance to aggression and the maintenance of peace on a global scale.
The fundamental principle upon which collective security is founded provides that an attack on any one state will be regarded as an attack on all states. This principle was recognized by the League of Nations, whose Covenant implied that war any-where is the concern of every state (art. 11). Neutral states are impartial when conflict breaks out, give their blessings to combatants to fight it out, and defer judgment regarding the justice or injustice of the cause involved.
This simple picture of the idea of collective security hardly furnishes a useful and realistic perspective on the way such a system operates in post-1945 practice. Nor are we helped by comparing the structure of the two historic experiments in collective security, the League of Nations and the United Nations. The formal agencies for collective security after World War I were, in several important respects, unimpressive. Article 16 of the Covenant of the League of Nations provided that any member resorting to war contrary to the Covenant had committed ipso facto an act of aggression against all other members. It was intended that first economic measures and then overt force be applied against any offender. But there was no clear provision for the organization or implementation of these measures by a central enforcement agency. Each nation had full freedom to provide what troops it saw fit. The Council of the League could then advise on additional measures. In contrast, article 39 of the Charter of the United Nations commissions the Security Council to determine the existence of a threat to the peace or an act of aggression, and articles 43-47 obligate the members, upon the completion of agreements, to supply troops to the Military Staff Committee. The agencies for partial collective security, as can be seen from the constitutional provisions of regional organizations like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Treaty Organization, are even more impressive and formidable.
From the beginning, however, the real issue concerning collective security has had little to do with charters or compacts. The real issue is the question of why the implementation of a system that is logically so flawless and enjoys such impressive official devotion and popular support should have been accompanied by a period of virtually unprecedented collective insecurity. It is a sobering fact that the nineteenth century, with its old-fashioned balance of power system, was perhaps the most peaceful in modern times; the twentieth, by contrast, has been an epoch of unparalleled bloodshed. There were only 18 months in the nineteenth century when France, Russia, Austria, Prussia, England, and Spain found themselves at war with one another (excluding the Crimean War, which was essentially a colonial struggle). Our experience thus far with the novel machinery of collective security has hardly warranted the unqualifiedly optimistic postwar belief that with the creation of a new international organization power politics and war are being left far behind in our progress toward Utopia.
Basic problems
Four basic problems are responsible for the predicament of collective security: the problem of preconditions, the problem of conflicting national interests, the psychological problem, and the problem of peaceful change.
Preconditions
The first problem is, from one standpoint, the most basic, for the preconditions of collective security, being frequently misunderstood, have presented the most stubborn obstacle to the maintenance of international peace. Collective enforcement assumes a status quo, or situation of peace, that the nations with predominant strength agree to maintain. In practical terms, the peace that a collective system must defend is the territorial status quo at the time the system is brought into being. There is nothing in past experience to indicate that all nations, or even a combination sufficiently powerful to defy the rest, will agree on the nature of a particular status quo. Following every war, the defeated powers, and even some of the victors, come to oppose the established status quo. No practical arrangement has been worked out that is acceptable to the major powers, the Soviet Union and the United States, and on which the post-World War II status quo can be founded. The unresolved conflict between East and West has prevented the establishment of peace. Consequently, the latest experiment in collective security presents us with the anomalous picture of a system created to defend a status quo that has not yet been brought into being.
Collective security also demands that nations subscribing to the status quo be willing and able at all times to muster overwhelming strength for collective defense at successive points of conflict. The supporters of the status quo might, in theory, be capable of mobilizing effective and decisive power against any single aggressor who sought to defy them. Or by a pooling of the resources of all the nations in a permanently organized international force, collective enforcement could be made automatic, instantaneous, and preponderant. The first condition, however, is practically impossible of fulfillment, inasmuch as the threat to the status quo comes historically from more than one dissatisfied power or aggressor. The second condition would call for the unprecedented practice of having international contingents operate under an international agency empowered to decide conclusively when and how they should be used.
The United Nations Charter seems to take a long step toward this objective by providing that all members “make available to the Security Council, on its call and in accordance with a special agreement or agreements, armed forces, assistance, and facilities” (art. 43, paragraph 1). Through this provision, the incurable weakness of decentralized enforcement, by which past international systems have been rendered impotent, is ostensibly overcome. In the earlier experiments separate nations retained the right to determine whether or not military forces would be made available to meet particular crises. Yet in practice the provision in article 43 has, with two exceptions, remained a dead letter. The stalemate in the Military Staff Committee is fundamentally a symptom of the struggles between the two great powers and between supporters and opponents of the undefined status quo. The realization of the second condition of overwhelming strength for collective enforcement has constantly run afoul of special national demands for military security and supremacy.
The final prerequisite of collective security in a world of unequal powers is that at least the major powers enjoy a minimum of political solidarity and moral community. Such solidarity has never been realized between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Conflicting national interests
The chief practical obstacle to collective security is the political problem deriving from the conflict of independent national interests. The loyalties and interests of nations participating in international organizations and collective security systems are of a different order from those of individuals taking part in the more intimate communities of the family and the nation. There are institutions in integrated societies that provide common standards under which the individual can realize his aspirations. There need be no inherent conflict between an individual’s private interests and his national loyalties, for the latter can often promote the realization of the former. On the other hand, conflicts are frequently inevitable between national and supranational loyalties.
The psychological problem
The third problem is psychological. Collective security sometimes breaks down because of collective resentments or hatreds and reactions that express certain features of a particular national character. In 1931 the Japanese spilled over into Manchuria. Why was it that more positive action was not taken? Economically, the world was deep in a painful depression; politically, Manchuria seemed far away and of little immediate interest to Western nations. There was, in addition, a psychological factor. Certain groups in the West harbored deep resentments against these victims of Japanese imperialism. In particular, certain elements within the British trading community remembered private scores that had not been settled and the recent ingratitude of the Chinese toward the West. This sector of Western public opinion took a kind of vicarious pleasure in the punishment the Japanese were inflicting upon China and viewed the Japanese action as a retaliation against the whole anti-European movement that was sweeping Asia.
Peaceful change
The fourth problem relates to international change. Peaceful change involves the whole of society, with its orderly machinery through which social groups seek support for their claims, which must be compatible with the society’s fundamental values to be successful. It is the whole of domestic society, and not the legislature in isolation, that brings about social change. The role of legislatures is essentially to ratify the choices at which unorganized society has already arrived. This is made possible by the generally accepted framework of justice within which disputes can be settled.
It is obvious that the conditions and institutions that exist within domestic societies are not present or are greatly weakened in international society. Legislative bodies with lawmaking powers are conspicuously absent from the international scene. The United Nations General Assembly has the power to “make recommendations” on matters prescribed in the Charter; the Security Council may “decide” on measures to be taken and may “call upon” members to act. But although these powers appear to mark an advance, in practice they have not resulted in decisive steps toward international lawmaking or facilitated peaceful change.
Achievements
Yet, despite the inherent limitations, a relatively successful system of collective security evolved after World War II. The United Nations has provided machinery—a United Nations “presence”—for preserving peace in areas threatened by possible aggression. An emergency force was formed, drawing on national contingents, to maintain a truce following the 1956 conflict over the Suez Canal. The most ambitious program of collective security was the one undertaken to preserve the peace and maintain order in the Congo.
These efforts are noteworthy because they serve to prevent direct confrontation between the two great powers on issues that are not primarily bilateral in character. When the area in dispute lies outside the authority of either great power, policing by the United Nations is sometimes accepted by both as the smallest evil among available alternatives. In the Congo, for example, a United Nations presence was more acceptable to the Soviets than a U.S. presence and more acceptable to the Ameri-cans than a Soviet presence.
Thus, collective security, as it affects the areas lying outside the immediate zones of interest of great powers, can be relatively effective. The new system applied pragmatically and with restraint may not function precisely as its architects intended, but it does serve in useful and constructive ways.
Kenneth W. Thompson
[Directly related are the entriesBalance of power; International conflict resolution; National security. Other relevant material may be found in the articlesAggression; International organization.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Royal Institute of International Affairs 1938 International Sanctions: A Report by a Group of Members of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Oxford Univ. Press.
Stimson, Henry L.; and Bundy, McGeorge 1948 On Active Service in Peace and War. 2 vols. New York: Harper.
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