The North Atlantic Minus Everyone Else

I would like to go back to the discussion in class about the exclusion of 2/3 of the world in Deutsch’s hypothesized security community.  As well as being discussed at length in class it has also reappeared in blog entries by Miss A.F from A Bookish Affair, and Tully from Fight Blog, to name a few.   Well, yes, he does exclude a large portion of the world but lets look back at the context of the time that Deutsch was writing, 1957.  This is not too long after WWII and the “heating” up of the Cold War.  The trendy new word “globalization” had not made its appearance and the advent of the world wide web was far off.  So what’s my point?  Well, here we are in the year 2005, almost 2006 and the world still can’t unanimously concrete decision about anything.  We can’t even think of a world wide security community now, never mind then.  A security community should be rooted in a sense of “we-ness”, not small “wee” but shared values, in addition to other things, “we.”  “But we have the UN” you may say and subsequent other universal doctrines and commonalities.  This is true but these are just instances of representatives of countries put into a room, this doesn’t make them more likely to have a sense of commonality, even though it does offer the opportunity to collaborate it is still nothing concrete.  

Look at all the criticism Deutsch is receiving for his focus on just the North Atlantic, now imagine Deutsch had written on a global security community.  Would this make his idea more applicable and representative?  Sure it would represent more countries, in theory but in all practicality it wouldn’t be very likely.  At least with NATO, Deutsch had an existing organization with members who shared a common heritage and the similarity of western values.  Basically, the North Atlantic was what Deutsch knew so it’s what he wrote about.