ollective Security was a familiar term during much of the twentieth century. In the decades after the First World War, and again after the Second, it signaled political correctness of a high order and even schoolchildren were drilled in its virtues. For the past twenty or so years, however, the term and the idea it describes have almost disappeared.
Its absence was notable last week when the White House announced that 9,500 U.S. troops would depart from Germany. The act itself should not be controversial. The U.S. troop presence there has ebbed and flowed for many decades, but the overall number has declined from around 310,000 in 1946 to slightly over 34,000 today.
What is curious is the nature of the decision. It was reported to have been taken without much consultation with allies or even inside the U.S. bureaucracy. It came only a few days after German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that she would not attend a proposed G7 meeting in the United States.
That anyone would regard the deployment of U.S. troops overseas primarily as political favor or even as a manifestation of American preferences shows how much “collective security” has been forgotten.
Each part of the term has a precise meaning. A collective relationship is closer than a partnership. It is one of mutual dependence and composition, where each member understands the interests, vulnerabilities, and responsibilities of the other members as interrelated with its own. And security means more than defense. It relates to nearly every aspect of human life—in political, economic, social, and even cultural relations.
When did Americans begin to abjure collective security? It’s easy to point a finger at those who took decisions to go to war—in Kosovo, Iraq, and elsewhere—over the opposition of allies and in some cases without a mandate from the UN Security Council. When institutions and norms of collective security were remembered at all, they were usually described, like the laws of armed conflict, as “obsolete” or “quaint.”
However, in retrospect it appears that “collective security” may have been a casualty as much of peacemaking as of war. Last week the National Security Archive released some newly declassified memoranda from an earlier moment. One is the transcript of an important and much related conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and James Baker III in May 1990. Baker was trying to reassure Gorbachev over the prospect of a united Germany in NATO. Gorbachev challenges the logic of Baker’s point and its strategic wisdom at a time when both NATO and the Warsaw Pact were trying to put the Cold War behind them.
“Let’s take… the question of a united Germany,” Gorbachev begins. “Your position on this I believe is contradictory…. both in Europe and here in the Soviet Union we recognize the need for U.S. presence. It’s very clear to us, it is very clear to Europeans that there has to be a U.S. presence. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a military presence but there has to be a U.S. presence in all European processes…. But I would ask you, if you trust the Germans why do you feel it’s not [sic] necessary to include them in NATO? You know I could understand it if you offered a realistic analysis that said if Germany is out of NATO that would seriously undermine the infrastructure of NATO…. But if you are saying that, then there’s a problem. Because then you’re saying you continue to need a bloc when the other alliance is disappearing. We shouldn’t have one alliance displace the other.”
“Now you ask,” Baker replies, “if you trust Germany, why does Germany need to be in NATO? And I might reverse that question and say if you trust Germany, why can’t you let them choose. We’re not forcing Germany into NATO. But we do think it’s important that Germany be a part of NATO, not out of any fear of the Soviet Union but because we think unless we find a way to truly anchor Germany to European institutions we will sow the seeds for history to repeat itself.”
The interesting aspect of this conversation is that both men insisted on the same goal: a peaceful, stable, and well-integrated Europe, or what Gorbachev liked to call a European common home. Both men depicted European security in that broad sense. Yet, whereas Gorbachev sought to replace Cold War military alliances with a different set of institutions with different purposes, Baker sought to strengthen and adapt existing institutions, namely NATO, to a post-Cold War reality.
Thus “collective security” would appear to have split in the Cold War succession between two minds: the Soviet, whose Union was about to dissolve, insisting on the form of collective institutions dictating the substance of security; and the American, whose country would soon be declared the principal beneficiary of a “unipolar moment,” insisting on it happening the other way around.
That Baker got his way is beside the point. Thirty years later, there still is no European common home, and now an apparent belief that the American presence Gorbachev mentioned is expendable. “Decoupling” is the new buzzword.
However, interdependence in human relations is a fact of modern life, and that is why “collective security” and the security communities that fulfill them were invented. The U.S. troops in Germany give a good illustration of such interdependence, with so many decades of being “completely integrated… [in] mixed marriages, mixed families.”
Soldiers needn’t be the main agents of such integration; others do it as well. So, it could make sense to bring some troops home—just so long as collective security isn’t tossed into the dustbin of history.
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The Vanishing Ideal of Collective Security
June 16, 2020
C
ollective Security was a familiar term during much of the twentieth century. In the decades after the First World War, and again after the Second, it signaled political correctness of a high order and even schoolchildren were drilled in its virtues. For the past twenty or so years, however, the term and the idea it describes have almost disappeared.
Its absence was notable last week when the White House announced that 9,500 U.S. troops would depart from Germany. The act itself should not be controversial. The U.S. troop presence there has ebbed and flowed for many decades, but the overall number has declined from around 310,000 in 1946 to slightly over 34,000 today.
What is curious is the nature of the decision. It was reported to have been taken without much consultation with allies or even inside the U.S. bureaucracy. It came only a few days after German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that she would not attend a proposed G7 meeting in the United States.
That anyone would regard the deployment of U.S. troops overseas primarily as political favor or even as a manifestation of American preferences shows how much “collective security” has been forgotten.
Each part of the term has a precise meaning. A collective relationship is closer than a partnership. It is one of mutual dependence and composition, where each member understands the interests, vulnerabilities, and responsibilities of the other members as interrelated with its own. And security means more than defense. It relates to nearly every aspect of human life—in political, economic, social, and even cultural relations.
When did Americans begin to abjure collective security? It’s easy to point a finger at those who took decisions to go to war—in Kosovo, Iraq, and elsewhere—over the opposition of allies and in some cases without a mandate from the UN Security Council. When institutions and norms of collective security were remembered at all, they were usually described, like the laws of armed conflict, as “obsolete” or “quaint.”
However, in retrospect it appears that “collective security” may have been a casualty as much of peacemaking as of war. Last week the National Security Archive released some newly declassified memoranda from an earlier moment. One is the transcript of an important and much related conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and James Baker III in May 1990. Baker was trying to reassure Gorbachev over the prospect of a united Germany in NATO. Gorbachev challenges the logic of Baker’s point and its strategic wisdom at a time when both NATO and the Warsaw Pact were trying to put the Cold War behind them.
“Let’s take… the question of a united Germany,” Gorbachev begins. “Your position on this I believe is contradictory…. both in Europe and here in the Soviet Union we recognize the need for U.S. presence. It’s very clear to us, it is very clear to Europeans that there has to be a U.S. presence. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a military presence but there has to be a U.S. presence in all European processes…. But I would ask you, if you trust the Germans why do you feel it’s not [sic] necessary to include them in NATO? You know I could understand it if you offered a realistic analysis that said if Germany is out of NATO that would seriously undermine the infrastructure of NATO…. But if you are saying that, then there’s a problem. Because then you’re saying you continue to need a bloc when the other alliance is disappearing. We shouldn’t have one alliance displace the other.”
“Now you ask,” Baker replies, “if you trust Germany, why does Germany need to be in NATO? And I might reverse that question and say if you trust Germany, why can’t you let them choose. We’re not forcing Germany into NATO. But we do think it’s important that Germany be a part of NATO, not out of any fear of the Soviet Union but because we think unless we find a way to truly anchor Germany to European institutions we will sow the seeds for history to repeat itself.”
The interesting aspect of this conversation is that both men insisted on the same goal: a peaceful, stable, and well-integrated Europe, or what Gorbachev liked to call a European common home. Both men depicted European security in that broad sense. Yet, whereas Gorbachev sought to replace Cold War military alliances with a different set of institutions with different purposes, Baker sought to strengthen and adapt existing institutions, namely NATO, to a post-Cold War reality.
Thus “collective security” would appear to have split in the Cold War succession between two minds: the Soviet, whose Union was about to dissolve, insisting on the form of collective institutions dictating the substance of security; and the American, whose country would soon be declared the principal beneficiary of a “unipolar moment,” insisting on it happening the other way around.
That Baker got his way is beside the point. Thirty years later, there still is no European common home, and now an apparent belief that the American presence Gorbachev mentioned is expendable. “Decoupling” is the new buzzword.
However, interdependence in human relations is a fact of modern life, and that is why “collective security” and the security communities that fulfill them were invented. The U.S. troops in Germany give a good illustration of such interdependence, with so many decades of being “completely integrated… [in] mixed marriages, mixed families.”
Soldiers needn’t be the main agents of such integration; others do it as well. So, it could make sense to bring some troops home—just so long as collective security isn’t tossed into the dustbin of history.
