Security :sx new ideas , old ambiguities .sx Peter Mangold .sx After months of speculation and discussion , the first pieces of the new European security jigsaw puzzle are now in place .sx At their November summit in Paris , the leaders of the 34-member Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe ( CSCE ) agreed to reductions in military hardware .sx This should end decades of tension and nervous anxiety associated with the Soviet Union's conventional superiority in Europe .sx Other agreements included the establishment of a Centre for the Prevention of Conflict .sx The leaders also reaffirmed , this time with a sincerity notably absent when the Helsinki Final Act was signed in 1975 , their belief in democratic values .sx Europe has thus taken a major step towards becoming a militarily more stable region .sx It has also witnessed a critical and quite novel conjunction of political and strategic objectives , former ideological adversaries committing themselves to conditions for regional security based on what had become common political values .sx As security problems become diluted within the larger , more benign politico-economic agenda , they should lose much of the salience they have had over the last 40 years .sx However , before attention is allowed to shift to what remains of the strategic agenda - the future of NATO ( see next article ) , the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the security role of the European Community - we need to ask certain questions .sx Have we simply been seeing a shift in security arrangements in line with the political revolution in the East ?sx Or are we also witnessing something no less momentous , namely a fundamental shift in the way we think about security ?sx What is security ?sx Security has been one of the great obsessions of the twentieth century but , like many obsessions , it has attracted more attention than rigorous scrutiny .sx Those currently engaged in redefining 'security' away from traditional strategic-political concerns towards global economic and environmental issues fall into at least two traps .sx They confuse security with threats ; they also assume that it is possible to redefine a concept which has never been satisfactorily defined in the first place .sx For the hard fact is that national security has been allowed to remain what one critic has described as a " modern incantation " , a catch-all term which can be expanded to embrace whatever concerns happen to be strategically fashionable .sx The academic community has tended to steer clear of the task of introducing precision into a notoriously amorphous concept , so that while the number of books featuring security in their title or subtitle would by now fill a small library , the theoretical literature is sparse .sx It is both remarkable , and slightly scandalous , that so little has been done to develop the ideas in Arnold Wolfers' essay , National Security as an Ambiguous Symbol , first published in 1952 .sx Officials , by contrast , have either preferred to maintain the rhetorical mystique with which national security is so often invested , or have seen little point in worrying about general ideas which are perceived as providing few specific guides to policy .sx That view is shortsighted .sx Indirect it may often be , but I would suggest that there is a link between conceptual precision and the quality of policy .sx A clearer understanding of what does and does not contribute to real security , of why states under- and over - insure , may not have helped with the day-to-day questions of budgeting or weapons procurement .sx But it might well have made it much easier to retain that overview of the problem which so often appeared to be lacking during the years of the Cold War , when security was conceived in such narrow and expensive military terms .sx The way we think about security , the extent to which we allow that thinking to be determined by unexamined ( albeit often powerful and simplistic ) assumptions , goes a considerable way towards determining how much security we get and what it costs .sx The security structures established in the late 1940s owe much to the traditional belief that security is an essentially competitive business ; it is something which states gain at one another's expense .sx While the search for security was not quite perceived as a zero-sum game , the prospect for regulating competitive security strategies was never regarded as very promising .sx However much effort may have been invested in arms control , the net result was to 'limit' the increase in strategic arms ; conventional arms reduction never progressed beyond the years of fruitless wrangling in Vienna .sx The great leap forward in the mid-1980s by contrast is to be traced back to the reassertion of the alternative view that security is something which states can and need to 'share' .sx The hallmark of this latter approach is thus agreement rather than competition , the management of a common security environment rather than the maintenance of a balance of power .sx Viewed in the context of the reversal of the trends of more than four decades in which military factors came to play a uniquely dominant role in security policy , the radical nature of this change can hardly be exaggerated .sx But what is certainly new to Soviet policy-makers is rather less so to those with a broader geographical and historical perspective .sx The changes which have taken place over the last few years need to be seen as part of a much longer historical process .sx A conference which had as one of its major themes the assertion of democratic values was hardly likely to look too kindly on the precedent set by the 1815 Congress of Vienna , which had concerned itself with the rights of rulers rather than the ruled .sx Indeed , President Mitterand went so far as to describe it as the " anti-Congress of Vienna " .sx Yet those who look optimistically towards a new European order should recall that the Congress system , which evolved in the wake of the Napoleonic wars , did set an important precedent .sx For it represented what one historian has described as a coalition of states premised on the existence of a public law of Europe , for the defence of that law .sx They may also care to recall that the conference which met at Versailles in the wake of the First World War , for all its horrendous imperfections , took the first steps in fashioning the 'new' world order by establishing the blueprint for the joint management of a common international security environment .sx At its centre was , and remains , a set of rules upholding the right of all states to security .sx These were to be enforced by a system of collective security intended to operate in a world in which levels of armaments were low and disputes dealt with through arbitration .sx Despite its short-term failure , at least during the 1919-39 period , the basic ideas have not gone away .sx The prohibition on the use of force in the settlement of disputes laid down in the Charter of the League of Nations has been reasserted internationally by the United Nations , and at the regional level by bodies such as the Arab League , the Organisation of American States and the Organisation of African Unity .sx They are of course also highly relevant in the context of Europe and the CSCE .sx The 1939-45 European watershed .sx The extent to which these rules have been observed has depended ultimately on one of two conditions :sx a radical increase in the cost of force , or a reduction in the incentives for breaking them .sx It is in this context that the Second World War proved a watershed ( at least for the Europeans and their superpower Allies) .sx Whatever the hopes initially invested in the League's successor-organisation , the UN , the immediate emphasis shifted away from grand designs in the direction of an innovative pragmatism centred on the economic rather than the military bases of security .sx The Anglo-Saxons concentrated their efforts on fashioning a working model of economic internationalism , the major legacies of which remain the International Monetary Fund , the World Bank and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade .sx Their European counterparts looked towards regional economic integration as the means of drawing the sting out of assertive nationalisms .sx The European Coal and Steel Community established conditions in which the countries of Western Europe have 'shared' security in a quite unique way ; indeed they have shared it so closely that , following the establishment of the European Economic Community , security is no longer an issue between them .sx And at the risk of reiterating the obvious , it is the Community which has helped make German reunification such a relatively painless process .sx The third building-block of the new security order was the product of the next great international conflict .sx Nuclear weapons did indeed introduce a constraint on the use of force undreamed of when the League was founded , but those engaged in the Cold War failed to come to terms with the problems associated with the credibility and controllability of deterrence .sx This helps explain why the immediate impact of nuclear weapons was to reinforce rather than ameliorate the older , competitive notions of security .sx For nuclear weapons created a peculiar paradox .sx On the one hand they generated the kind of fear on which worst-case scenarios thrived ; on the other , they encouraged a certain complacency among the rival political leaderships who tacitly assumed of each other the very rationality and restraint which their force planners and strategists called into question .sx For it is difficult to believe that arsenals would have been allowed to have been built up so rapidly - or arms control allowed to proceed at such a leisurely pace - if strategic competition had not been seen as a relatively 'safe' substitute for more direct conflict .sx The emphasis here is of course on 'relatively' , for over the longer term this situation was bound to trigger some kind of reaction or reappraisal .sx The reaction is reflected in the peace movements as a symptom of underlying unease rather than the catalyst for change .sx The reappraisal came with the ideas of strategic stability which emerged in the United States in the 1960s .sx In retrospect the parameters of this new thinking seem rather narrow .sx The immediate issues were deterrence and the stabilisation of the arms race , rather than any wider attempt to rethink the problem of security .sx It took another 20 years before the idea of common security entered into general currency .sx The Palme Report , published at a time of renewed East-West tension , is in many respects an unsatisfactory document which at first sight does not add up to much more than the sum of its many proposals .sx But if short on intellectual rigour ( and not particularly innovative ) , it sought to build in positive form on the truth implicitly acknowledged in the famous or infamous acronym MAD ( Mutual Assured Deterrence ) , namely that nuclear adversaries had to achieve security with rather than against one another .sx What really put common security on the map was Mikhail Gorbachev with the 'new Soviet thinking' .sx Exactly how much the latter owes to the crisis of Communism , and how much to an incipient crisis of confidence in deterrence which can be detected in the Western debate of the same period , is still unclear .sx But it is evident that the broader re-conceptualisation of security on which Soviet thinkers engaged in the 1980s was part of an historical process which went well beyond any specially strategic reassessment .sx The 'new thinking' helped a new generation of Soviet leaders re-think the country's domestic and external policies .sx Soviet security policy , like the country's economic policy , was finally acknowledged to have reached a critical impasse .sx Far from increasing security , the over-insurance in which the country had so conspicuously engaged had actually diminished it .sx Geographically and economically overextended , the Soviet Union needed new concepts which would allow it to put the arms race into reverse and shift the fulcrum of security policy away from the military towards the political sphere .sx Only this way would it be possible for the Soviet Union to accept intrusive forms of verification and to make the asymmetrical concessions which have facilitated the agreements over Intermediate Nuclear Forces ( INF ) and Conventional Forces in Europe ( CFE ) , as well as putting up with the collapse of its strategic glacis in Eastern Europe .sx Contrary to some initial Western scepticism , the Soviet Union did not only preach common security , but practised it in a way which made it possible for its adversaries to follow suit .sx