C OLLECTIVE S ECURITY

Roland N. Stromberg

Collective security may be defined as a plan for maintaining peace through an organization of sovereign states, whose members pledge themselves to defend each other against attack. The idea emerged in 1914, was extensively discussed during World War I, and took shape rather imperfectly in the 1919 Covenant of the League of Nations and again in the Charter of the United Nations after World War II. The term has subsequently been applied to less idealistic and narrower arrangements for joint defense such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The shorthand term "collective security," not used until the 1930s, is more accurately "security for individual nations by collective means," that is, by membership in an international organization made up of all or most of the states of the world pledged to defend each other from attack. "Collective security" is a handier term, and it entered deeply into the international vocabulary when—from about 1931 to 1939—many hoped, in vain, that the League of Nations through its machinery for collective action might avert war by checking the "aggression" of the revisionist powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan.

See also A LLIANCES , C OALITIONS, AND E NTENTES ; A RBITRATION , M EDIATION, AND C ONCILIATION ; G LOBALIZATION ; I NTERNATIONALISM ; I NTERNATIONAL O RGANIZATION ; I NTERVENTION AND N ONINTERVENTION ; P EACE M OVEMENTS .