Abstract
At the beginning of the 1950s when introducing the security dilemma, Herbert Butterfield and John Herz noted that because humans need to cooperate they cannot avoid the threat they pose to one another by living in isolation. Butterfield called it the ‘absolute predicament’ or ‘irreducible dilemma’ that lay at the heart of all human conflict.2 Herz referred to it as man’s inhumanity to man and called it a primary fact in human social life.3 This need for interaction, coupled with the knowledge that the other might intend harm, creates uncertainty in statesmen’s minds about the other’s intentions. It is this uncertainty which Nicholas Wheeler and Ken Booth see as the defining feature of the security dilemma, hence their assertion that a ‘security dilemma exists when the military preparations of one state create an unresolvable uncertainty in the mind of another as to whether those preparations are for “defensive” purposes only (to enhance its security in an uncertain world) or whether they are for offensive purposes (to change the status quo to its advantage)’.4
The nature of the international system is of course such that states are constantly faced with dilemmas of one sort or another, and some can no doubt be avoided. There is, however, at least one which no states can wholly escape. This is the contradiction between the need for, and the pursuit of, friendship with at least some states, and the ultimate necessity, for reasons of national interest and survival, to be on guard against all states; to retain, as it were, a residual scepticism about intentions, even of those whose friendships are being sought, which is grounded on the general belief that all states will seek to protect their own interests first, and in so doing will, or may, sacrifice those of others.1
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Notes
Arnfinn Jorgensen-Dahl, Regional Organization and Order in South-East Asia ( London: Macmillan, 1982 ), pp. 114–115.
Herbert Butterfield, History and Human Relations ( London: Collins, 1951 ), p. 20.
John Herz, Political Realism and Political Idealism: A Study in Theories and Realities ( Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1951 ), p. 3.
Nicholas J. Wheeler and Ken Booth, The Security Dilemma’, in John Baylis and N.J. Rengger (eds.), Dilemmas of World Politics: International Issues in a Changing World ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992 ), p. 30.
Alexander Wendt, ‘Anarchy is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics’, International Organization 46/2 (Spring 1992), pp. 391–425.
Charles L. Glaser and Chaim Kaufmann, What is the Offense-Defense Balance and Can We Measure It?’, International Security, 22/4 (Spring 1998 ), p. 44.
Chaim Kaufmann, ‘Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Civil Wars’, International Security 20/4 (Spring 1996), p. 148.
Robert Jervis, War and Misperception’, in Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb (eds.), The Origin and Prevention of Major Wars ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 ), p. 113.
Robert Jervis, ‘Cooperation under the Security Dilemma’, World Politics, 30 /1 (January 1978), pp. 167–214.
Michael Yahuda, The International Politics of the Asia-Pacific, 1945–1995 ( London: Routledge, 1996 ), p. 186.
Rosemary Foot, ‘China in the ASEAN Regional Forum: Organizational Processes and Domestic Modes of Thought’, Asian Survey, 38 /5 (May 1998), p. 436.
Greg Austin, China’s Ocean Frontier: International Law, Military Force and National Development ( St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1998 ), p. 358.
Denny Roy, The Foreign Policy of Great-Power China’, Contemporary Southeast Asia, 19 /2 (September 1997), p. 132.
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© 2000 Alan Collins
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Collins, A. (2000). Conclusion: Application and Mitigation. In: The Security Dilemmas of Southeast Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333985632_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333985632_6
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