Collective Security
집단안보
The line of Soviet diplomacy in the 1930s against the threat of Nazi Germany: the idea that threatened states should bind themselves against an aggressor in a web of mutual assistance treaties. It took shape in entry into the League of Nations (1934) and the mutual assistance pacts with France and Czechoslovakia (1935), with foreign commissar Litvinov as its emblem. Excluded at Munich and bankrupted by the failure of alliance talks with Britain and France in 1939, it gave way to the pact with Germany.
In depth
Out of what situation did the line emerge?
Hitler's accession in 1933 redrew the map of Soviet diplomacy: Germany, the partner since Rapallo, turned overnight into a threat professing open anti-Bolshevism and eastward expansion. The Soviet answer was collective security. As Litvinov's formula had it, peace is indivisible: let aggression pass anywhere, and everyone's turn comes next. The USSR joined the League of Nations in 1934, the very body it had long called a tool of the imperialist powers, and in 1935 signed mutual assistance pacts with France and Czechoslovakia. The Comintern's turn to the popular front was this state line's twin: against fascism, even yesterday's enemies, social democrats and liberals, were partners.
Why did it fail?
Distrust ran both ways. To Western conservatives the USSR remained an exporter of revolution, and after the purges swept away the Red Army's command its military worth itself looked doubtful. Seen from Moscow, appeasement read as a stratagem to turn Hitler's spearhead east. Munich in 1938 was the decisive blow: when Czechoslovakia's fate was settled in a room without the Soviet Union, the stake placed on collective security became unrecoverable. In the summer of 1939, as the three-power alliance talks with Britain and France dragged, Stalin replaced Litvinov with Molotov and turned to the bargain with Germany.
How is it judged?
It is one of historiography's long arguments. One side holds that collective security was a serious alternative killed by Western appeasement and exclusion (Haslam, Carley); the other, that for Stalin the German bargain and collective security were options weighed in parallel from the start, the Litvinov line merely one of them. Either way the conclusion is the same: in 1930s Europe an anti-fascist alliance let its possible moments slip, and the price of that failure was paid in the pact of 1939 and the war of 1941. Postwar Soviet diplomacy filed the experience under the lesson that the West cannot be trusted, a memory that fed the logic of bloc discipline in the Cold War.
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Related people
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Sources
- Jonathan Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe, 1933–39 (1984)
- Michael Jabara Carley, 1939: The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II (1999)
- Silvio Pons, Stalin and the Inevitable War, 1936–1941 (2002)