The Asia-Pacific Security Lexicon (Upated 2nd Edition)

SECURITY COMMUNITY

211 SECURITY COMMUNITY Initially developed by Karl Deutsch and his co-authors in their 1957 study Political Community and the North Atlantic Ar ea.1 Put most simply, a security community exists when a gr oup of states have forged a sense of community or collective identity, meaning they will settle their dif ferences without r esorting to for ce. A security community is not the same as an alliance or a collective defence grouping, although security communities can potentially grow out of and co-exist with these kind of military r elationships.2 Deutsch identified two distinct categories of security communities: amalgamated and pluralistic. An amalgamated security community exists when there is a “formal merger of two or more previously independent units into a single lar ger unit, with some type of common government after amalgamation”. 3 An example would be the United States, in which the fifty states have united under a single federal government. In a pluralistic security community, by contrast, the members of the community “retain the legal independence of separate governments.” 4 Examples of a pluralistic security community include the relationship between the United States and Canada, W estern Europe, and the Baltic States r egion. Most applications of Deutsch’s concept assume that a security community must meet several r equirements. The first, and most 02 A_Pac Security Lexicon 9/28/07, 2:49 PM 211 212 important, is there must be a total absence of armed conflict, or prospects for such a conflict among the members who make up the community. This is not to suggest that these states will be without disagreements or disputes. Rather , it means some way has been found to prevent the governments involved from resorting to the use or threat of force. According to Deutsch, the community of states must share “dependable expectations of peaceful change” in their mutual relations and rule out the use of force as a means of problem solving. A second, and closely r elated, requirement for a security community is the absence of a competitive military build-up or arms race involving community members. Not only must the use of force no longer be considered within a security community, but preparations for it should also no longer be acceptable. Mor e specifically, states must for ego offensive weapons systems and must not engage in contingency planning or r esource mobilization for war against other actors within the community . The third requirement is the existence of “formal or informal institutions and practices” which serve to r educe, prevent, manage, and resolve conflicts. This is a stringent r equirement. As Amitav Acharya notes, “few regional groupings have performed this task with distinction and stood the test of time.” T o meet this prerequisite, the institutions and practices must be suf ficiently well established and durable enough to be able to assure peaceful change among members of the gr oup, with “reasonable certainty” over a long period. Finally, a security community r equires a “high degr ee of political and economic integration as a necessary pre-condition of peaceful relationships”. This does not necessarily mean any kind of supranational political authority , but could involve political cooperation on a range of issues or economic and functional integration, such as that found in fr ee trade areas, customs unions, and economic unions. This requirement is based on the assumption that a high degr ee of economic and political inter dependence increases the costs and reduces the benefits of using for ce between states, and will consequently promote the cooperative handling of security issues. In a book r evisiting Deutsch’s concept, Adler and Barnett offer a three-stage model of how security communities develop. 5 They argue that security communities begin in a “nascent” phase in which the peoples and/or governments of two or mor e states explore how they can coor dinate their relations to increase their SECURITY COMMUNITY 02 A_Pac Security Lexicon 9/28/07, 2:49 PM 212 213 mutual security.6 In the process, they often cr eate “third party” organizations or institutions to monitor and facilitate closer relations. Sometimes closer ties will be prompted by a cataclysmic event or by the pr ospect of war or a common thr eat, but where states develop close security ties, they also often develop other institutional and transactional linkages that bind them together (for example, in the ar eas of economics or the...