Types of Collective Security: An Examination of Operational Concepts

“The well-bred, throbbing sound that goes on behind the Bauhaus façade of the United Nations,” notes Alistair Cook, “is not the air-conditioning. It is the pulse of politics.” Ever since its inception in 1919, international organization somehow has been expected to operate above and beyond politics. It was to enshrine the universal aspiration for peace and stability. That “politics” could intrude upon—and indeed shape—institutions set up for the maintenance of collective security is only now being recognized by the public at large. That recognition, in turn, seems responsible for much of the current disillusionment with the United Nations, since its implications sully the pure ideal of solidarity for peace.Ideologically speaking, our experience with collective security has rested on two basic concepts: the notion of “universal moral obligations” of the League Covenant and the concert of the big powers implicit and explicit in the United Nations Charter. Thus political values held by groups and individuals were translated into legal and institutional terms in the two universal collective security organizations. Both global efforts have failed to result in the peace expected of them; but the institutions rather than the concepts on which they were based have become the object of criticism and attack. No doubt the ideological convictions associated with the advent of international organization generally have militated in favor of the continued purity of the concepts. However, unless the concepts associated with world organization possess at once a high degree of descriptive accuracy and an analytical property permitting a measure of prediction, informed discussion of United Nations issues must be indefinitely postponed.