Collective Security

Collective Security, international political system, currently associated with the United Nations (UN), whereby states plan to combine to repel and punish any aggression committed by one of their own number. The international system of sovereign states that has prevailed in politics since the 17th century is technically one of anarchy, with no overriding authority to govern the behaviour of the individual states. In such a system, states have sought security from each other by their own defensive capability and by entering into alliances with others. The resulting relationship, often called a balance of power, has been characterized by frequent tests of the balance in war.

From time to time statesmen and writers have toyed with the idea of a world government to keep international order. Others, less ambitious, conceived the idea that nations, often hopefully called the peace-loving nations, might band together to help the victims of aggression, thus achieving an overwhelming preponderance of power to defeat the aggressor and preserve the status quo.

Such a system is commonly called one of collective security. The League of Nations, established after World War I, was the first full-scale attempt to institute such a system. Its failure led to the modified form embodied in the UN, founded in 1945.

The idea that independent actors should combine against an aggressor can be discerned in many embryonic domestic recipes for law enforcement. In medieval England, the “hue and cry” by which citizens were supposed to pursue and arrest a wrongdoer embodied the posse comitatus, or power of the community, and the term posse later became familiar in the American West. Indeed, during World War I the former United States President Theodore Roosevelt advocated a League to Enforce Peace that would constitute what he called the “posse of nations”.

Ideally, the known determination of all nations to band together against an aggressor should prove a powerful deterrent to aggression ever occurring, and collective security could be achieved with attractive cheapness. In practice, the system has serious flaws, some of which led to the collapse of the League. Universality of response requires great faith in the “indivisibility of peace”. In reality, states are reluctant to become involved in distant disputes. In nearer disputes, nations often have interests of their own to pursue, which may entail being reluctant to offend, let alone fight, the aggressor. This was characteristic of efforts to enforce collective security against Italy when it attacked Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935.

Where the aggressor is very powerful there may be doubt as to whether it would yield even to a powerful combination of states. It is to avoid this danger that the Big Five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council enjoy a veto that ensures collective security cannot even be attempted against them. When the world was divided into camps in the Cold War, the vetoes and potential vetoes of the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) made the UN system incapable of implementing full-scale collective security action. Indeed only two instances have come near realizing the formal conditions envisaged in the Charter: the Korean War, in 1950, when the Soviet Union had temporarily ceased attending the Security Council, and the Gulf War, in 1991, when the period of harmony following the end of the Cold War permitted unanimity among the Council's permanent members. In the latter case, however, enforcement did not involve a UN command as in Korea, but a coalition licensed by the Council to act under US control. Various formulae have been used to justify intervention in the former Yugoslavia, but in the major campaign waged by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) against Serbia over Kosovo there was no clear UN mandate. NATO fell back on claiming that legitimacy for the action could be derived from the consensus of a large number of democratic nations. There are obvious severe difficulties with such a position, for the UN system depends precisely on universality.

In line with this stance some have begun to term NATO a regional organization within the terms of the UN Charter, something NATO always eschewed during the Cold War, precisely because under the Charter such organizations require Security Council authorization for the actual use of force. A similar difficulty would exist, some have suggested, if the Organization for Cooperation and Security, which, like the Organization of American States and its African counterpart, the Organization of African Unity, is undoubtedly a regional security organization in terms of the Charter, tried to take enforcement action when the Security Council was deadlocked.