Political Community in the North Atlantic Area

"Yes, I see the final two books on my list, Karl Deutsch’s Political Community in the North Atlantic Area and John Ikenberry’s After Victory, in some ways as a conceptual antidote to the first three books. The first three books are all about power, about the projection of power, about conflict and the tensions and the geo-political rivalries that emerge among great powers as they contend for primacy. I am someone who believes that the default position in international politics is one of rivalry; war has been the norm through history. But I am also someone who believes that we can do better. I think that the international system can be tamed and that we can find ways of escaping rivalry. I think the Deutsch and Ikenberry books have been the most influential in my own thinking about how to tame the international system. What kinds of policy instruments and what kinds of concepts can we gravitate towards to escape from the pattern of the rise and fall of great powers and hegemonic war. Karl Deutsch’s book was one of the first to theorise about how communities emerge in the world in which war has become unthinkable. He wrote in the 1950s at the beginning of what we call today the Atlantic Alliance and the Euro-Atlantic community – examining how it is that the Atlantic democracies came to be not just allies but members of a political community in which war has been de-legitimated as a tool of statecraft. The chances of war between the United States and the UK today are very slim to put it mildly and Deutsch tried to figure out how that comes about. He focuses largely on integration, interaction, and the formation of a sense of ‘we-ness’ among nations."

"This is a book that has had an enormous influence over how scholars think about NATO, and indeed about the countries that make up NATO. Its great benefit is that it’s very accessible, even though it’s clearly aimed at an academic audience. It makes an argument, which at the time was part of a movement called Neo-Functionalism, which is the idea that states cooperate: that they have a shared economic, or political, or cultural interdependence. There was a great attempt at the time to measure this stuff through trade, movement of population, and—before the internet—things like the movement of mail. So Deutsch and others were Neo-Functionalist in the sense that they tried to measure how the countries in western Europe were coming together, and the prospects over time for them to become what they referred to as a ‘security community’ as well as a political community. A security community is something that seems intuitively straightforward: this is a group of countries that do not go to war with one another. Nor do they plan to do so. So their foreign policy is therefore quite predictable when they face off against one another. Now, in 1957, this was not an easy thing to say. It was only 12 years after the Second World War . It was partly a prediction, partly measuring existing trends. But to come forward with the idea that France and Germany were part of an emerging security community was quite a novel argument to make, given that they had been involved in two World Wars and also the Franco-Prussian war in the 19th century. So that was the big idea. Then it sort of disappeared for three decades, and the idea of the security community was revived in the late 1990s, in another very influential book simply called Security Communities , in which Deutsch was rediscovered. People re-read it, they found in it a whole load of arguments about the importance of shared identity. So rather than national identities getting in the way of cooperation, Deutsch came up with this idea of what we called ‘we feeling’; that we regard each other as a ‘we’, not ‘you’ and ‘I’. That came about through cultural movements. The states had similar political systems. They were economically interdependent. This idea moves us beyond simple Neo-Functionalism to argue that some deeper cultural identity could be formed over time. And so states don’t go to war with each other—and not just because it’s bad for business. They don’t go to war with each other because they are increasingly empathetic towards one another. Later there would be a strand of theorising in international relations called Social Constructivism, which was very influential in the 1990s and the first decade of this century. Social Constructivism was all about the importance of ideas and norms and identity. But Deutsch sort of got there 30 years before everybody else, although sadly he wasn’t recognised for it at the time and had passed by the time his ideas became influential. “A security community is a group of countries that do not go to war with one another. In 1957, this was not an easy thing to say” Now, NATO is very important in all of that, because the security community in the North Atlantic area, becomes institutionalised in NATO. So NATO has a very important role in facilitating the growth of that community through institutional procedures, where states come together in effect on a weekly or even daily basis to discuss their defence and military needs. But remember what I said earlier—also their political issues. NATO made a very deliberate effort in the 1950s to try to talk through things like the Cyprus crisis between Greece and Turkey. They tried, but didn’t get very far, in discussing economic cooperation. In the late 1960s, they started discussing scientific cooperation. All of this was a conscious effort to bring together an idea of political community, which would sit next to the military alliance. Now, the people doing this in NATO, of course, hadn’t read Deutsch. But what they were doing was an affirmation of what Deutsch had theorised. So for me it’s a very interesting and influential take on NATO as an institution, and the much broader political, geographic, economic world of which it is part. It makes real some of the claims, which many people dismiss as rhetoric, around the time NATO was formed. It’s been 65, almost 70, years since it was published, and much of what he anticipated has come to pass. Not all of it. But the depth of political and security community is, I think, a vindication of his very insightful way of looking at things. I say ‘him’. It was not only him. The front piece of the book has another seven authors, so it was a team effort. But Deutsch was the lead author, and it has proven, as I said, enduring and very, very influential. I think anyone who wants to seriously understand transatlantic relations, and the durability of NATO, needs to read this."