Security Community

Karl W. Deutsch and the Idea of Security Community

It was Karl W. Deutsch who coined the term and developed the idea of security community during the 1950s when the Cold War was at a high point and the prospects for peace seemed dim. At the time, Deutsch's main concern was the cessation of interstate violence and the creation of dependable expectations of peaceful change by way of strengthening relationships among a group of states. In a project entitled Political Community and the North Atlantic Area, Deutsch set out to map the road to the creation of security communities. His conviction was that once the conditions and processes that give rise to security communities were identified, it would be possible to replicate them in other parts of the world so that (the preparation for and the idea of) war would not enter into the calculations of those states.

In order to understand the processes and conditions that foster the creation of security communities, [Page 860]Deutsch studied the frequency and intensity of interstate transactions. He maintained that transactions generate responsiveness, reciprocity, and mutual predictability of behavior and lead to the discovery of new areas of interest and identifications, thereby resulting in the creation of security communities.

However, as Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett argued, in the absence of an account as to how actors' willingness to enter into transactions with each other could be molded by transnational forces, interactions, and structures that emerge and evolve due to the actions of the very same (state and nonstate) actors, the potential for the creation of security communities worldwide could not be fulfilled. They have maintained that Deutsch's emphasis on quantitative methods when analyzing the relationship between transactions and the shaping of states' interests and identities, although constituting a major contribution, did not enable him to develop a better understanding of the social relations that generate, and are in turn generated by, those transactions or the dynamic way in which actors' identities and interests are shaped and reshaped to enable, further, or forestall future transactions. Instead, Adler and Barnett proposed a constructivist framework that promised a better understanding of the mutually constitutive relationship between structure and actors' interactions.

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