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Critical Reflections on Collective Security

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Common Security and Strategic Reform

Abstract

Collective security refers to policies authorised and conducted by the world community intended to deal with threats to international peace. Chapter 1 suggested that a close relationship could be drawn between such policies and common security, a point underlined by, among others, the Palme Commission.2 In theory, collective security could help establish and protect an international political climate conducive to the promotion of significant levels of disarmament. Furthermore, internationalised deterrence of, and defence against, aggression could enhance a sense of common international purpose and reshape perceptions of the role and legitimacy of national military forces.

Much of this chapter draws on Butfoy, ‘Collective Security: Theory, Problems and Reformulations’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 47:1 (May 1993), pp. 1–14; and Butfoy, ‘Themes Within the Collective Security Idea’, The Journal of Strategic Studies, 16:4 (December 1993), pp. 490–510.

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Notes

  1. At the time of writing the most significant exception here was Chinese-US relations. It is no accident that many saw China’s place in international relations, especially its policy towards Taiwan, as reflecting unfinished business from the Cold War era (similar connections were, of course, made with regard to the Korean peninsula). For a discussion of what many saw as the ‘China problem’, see David Shambaugh, ‘Growing Strong: China’s Challenge to Asian Security’, Survival, 36:2 (Summer 1994), pp. 43–59; in addition, see Buzan and Segal, ‘Rethinking East Asian Security’.

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  18. Anthony Parsons cautions against reading too much into the veto as a cause for the non-working of collective security during the Cold War. See his ‘The United Nations in the Post-Cold War Era’, International Relations, 11:3 (December 1992), pp. 189–200.

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  37. Hurrell, ‘Collective Security and International Order Revisited’, p. 45. However, as Hurrell notes on p. 50: ‘one can argue that the meshing of US policy into the United Nations was one of the more positive features of the war. It represented a very substantial shift away from the global unilateralism of the Reagan years. . .’. It should also be noted that the UN lacked the capacity to organise such a massive operation from within its own resources: see Mackinlay and Chopra, ‘Second Generation Multinational Operations’; and Barry Posen, ‘Military Mobilization in the Persian Gulf Conflict’ SIPRI Yearbook 1991 (Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 639–54.

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  44. Wheeler, ‘Pluralist or Solidarist Conceptions of International Society’, pp. 483–4. Of course a rather heavy qualification needs to be made here: the politics and wording of the UN resolution covering aid to the Kurds was explicitly tied to the interests of states; see Adam Roberts, ‘Humanitarian War: Military Intervention and Human Rights’, International Affairs, 69:3 (July 1993), pp. 429–49, especially pp. 436–9.

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  45. See Shaw, ‘Global Society and Global Responsibility’, especially pp. 431–4. See the related comments in Daniele Archibugi, ‘The Reform of the UN and Cosmopolitan Democracy: A Critical Review’, Journal of Peace Research, 30:3 (1993), pp. 301–15, and

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  48. Edward Luck and Toby Gati, ‘Whose Collective Security?’, The Washington Quarterly, 15:2 (Spring 1992), pp. 43–56, especially pp. 51–3;

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  50. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, ‘Empowering the United Nations’, Foreign Affairs 72:5 (Winter 1992/93), pp. 89–102; and Parsons, ‘The United Nations’.

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  51. See, for example, Gerald Helman and Steven Ratner, ‘Saving Failed States’, Foreign Policy, 89 (Winter 1992–93), pp. 3–20.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

    Andrew Butfoy (Lecturer in International Relations)

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  1. Andrew Butfoy
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© 1997 Andrew Butfoy

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Butfoy, A. (1997). Critical Reflections on Collective Security. In: Common Security and Strategic Reform. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25531-3_6

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