Maybe you were onto something, Deutsch...

In response to Holly’s post (and Chris’s statement in class), I think that perhaps Deutsch was doing an ok thing, only using a small selection of cases, and having them only from a small segment of the world. In addition to Holly’s argument, I’d like to mention that he originally set out to try to make a North Atlantic security community, and I guess I hadn’t thought fully about why only looking at North Atlantic security communities wasn’t a good idea. In fact, the purpose served is that he is looking at cultures that naturally interact with each other and are mostly structured in the same way (a lot were historically either colonies of each other, or parts of the same empire). In this way, there was already something upon which to build security community, a somewhat common history. Also, with similar government structures, amalgamation would be much simpler, and pluralist government structures would be more likely to mutually understand each other.

I think it is also interesting to read this against Rousseau’s government structures – that the bigger they get, the weaker they end up being. After reading Deutsch, I’d respond that Rousseau was really writing for a different time, a time in which the world was not inextricably interconnected financially and in terms of communication. I thought that Rousseau had it right, but now I wonder if we(the world) haven’t outgrown his social contract.