Understanding global security - Peter Hough

MILITARY THREATS TO SECURITY FROM STATES
history been realized. Pierre Dubois, writing in the early fourteenth century,
advocated the idea of the international community cooperating to keep the peace
and the Liberal philosophers Kant and Bentham revived the notion, as an alternative
to the balance of power, in the nineteenth century. The idea is also mentioned in the
Holy Qur’an (49:9). Under this system acts of aggression prompt collective responses
against the aggressors by the whole international community, rather than just by the
attacked state and its allies or other states who consider their interests to be affected
by the action. It was not until the League of Nations, however, that a system was put
in place to make this idea a reality. The League enshrined collective security in its
covenant, stating in Article 16 that a state waging war declared unjust by its member
states would be, in effect, waging war against the organization itself. A 15-member
Council of the League of Nations would make such judgements on behalf of the wider
membership.
As already discussed, the League’s peacekeeping mechanism failed and
collective security was never activated. The outbreak of the Second World War was,
of course, the clearest indication of this failure but by this time the League was an
irrelevance anyway, having failed to act against blatant acts of aggression by its
member states on a number of occasions throughout the 1930s. The 1931 Japanese
invasion of Manchuria, 1935 Italian invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and German
military re-occupation of the Saar prompted some condemnations, but no military
response. Soviet, German and Italian interventions in the 1936–39 Spanish Civil War
were similarly ignored and although the USSR were expelled from the League in
1939 for the invasion of Finland, this was too little too late.
The League failed to implement collective security for two key reasons.
1 It did not represent the whole international community: The League of Nations
was handicapped from the start by not being a truly ‘global’ organization. The
emerging superpower, the USA, never took up membership despite the fact
that its President Woodrow Wilson had at the Paris Peace settlement been
its chief advocate. The USA, instead, retreated into its shell after the First World
War, not to emerge until 1940 when the world had become a very different
place. The other emerging superpower, the USSR, only joined the League in
1934, while Germany, Japan and Italy withdrew their memberships in annoyance
at the token criticism they had received for their military adventurism.
Collective security rests on a genuinely collective commitment to upholding the
peace and this is unlikely to be found if militarily powerful states are unwilling
to contribute to this process or act against it.
2 Its decision-making procedure was unworkable: Shorn of any involvement by
the USA and any real commitment to peace from Germany, Japan, Italy and the
USSR, the League was left dominated by just two of the powerful states of
the day, France and Great Britain. These two countries held permanent seats
in the Council (as did the USSR during their membership) and represented
the only serious military antidote to violations of the League’s covenant. The
French and British however, having recently emerged from the bloodiest war
in their histories and now embroiled in economic depression, did not have the
stomach to become ‘world policemen’. The two governments’ policies towards
aggression from other great powers was at the time one of ‘appeasement’ rather
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