National Security and International Relations (Routledge Revivals) by Peter Mangold

Author:Peter Mangold [Mangold, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Diplomacy, General, Political Science, Arms Control, Security (National & International)
ISBN: 9781135046781
Google: Od1SAQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 18703371
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1990-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter five

Breaking out

The most radical alternative to traditional security strategies is of course political. It is the resolution of the underlying disputes from which insecurity derives, the attempt to transcend rivalries by putting relationships on a qualitatively new footing where security is no longer an issue. It is in other words a variation on the positive form of appeasement, defined as a policy of settling international quarrels ‘by admitting and satisfying grievances through rational negotiation and compromise, thereby avoiding the resort to an armed conflict which would be expensive, bloody and possibly very dangerous’.1 But if the most effective strategy, it is also one of the most difficult. The borderline between the appeasement of limited and legitimate grievances and the dangerous business of seeking to buy temporary peace at the price of ‘renewed molestation and higher demands after ever shortening periods of amicable forebearence’2 is a thin one. It is easily obscured by poor analysis and wishful thinking. While diplomacy may help to contain or temporarily ameliorate disputes, the large majority can only be resolved at a politically prohibitive price. It is rare to find instances where rivals or countries with a tradition of enmity and conflict have succeeded in breaking out of the entanglement of their mutual fears. And where they have done, the process has usually proved slow and difficult.

Two modern examples are most often cited: the US-Canadian reconciliation which led to the establishment of the famous North American ‘unguarded frontier’, and the post-war Franco-German rapprochement. The latter in particular merits close scrutiny. It provides one of the clearest examples of the way in which attempts to provide security against war can exert a positive impact on policy; it is institutionally innovative; and it resolved a conflict which dominated the European scene since the Franco-Prussian War. The bitterness generated by that war, together with the centuries of dynastic and other rivalries which preceded it, were responsible for some particularly counter-productive examples of overinsurance. Initial French demands in the wake of the Second World War were in many respects very similar to those advanced after the First World War. The French, it is true, did not talk about the division of Germany; they did not, unlike the American Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, seek to turn it into a country ‘primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character’. But they did seek lengthy occupation, the separation of the Rhineland, the internationalization of the Saar, as well as heavy reparations.3 It was only in 1950 that Robert Schuman broke with the centuries-old axiom that France’s strength lay in Germany’s weakness, by proposing the establishment of a European Coal and Steel Community which would place the key strategic industries of the two rivals under supranational control.4 ‘Coal and steel’, as Jean Monnet later wrote, ‘were at once the key to economic power and the raw materials for forging weapons of war. This double role gave them immense symbolic significance…. To pool them across frontiers would reduce their malign prestige and turn them instead into a guarantee of peace.

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