Stable Peace through Security Communities? Steps towards Theory-building

What makes security relations stable and, therefore, conducive to permanent peace? When and why is the peace in a region so stable that the outbreak of a major war is unlikely or perhaps even inconceivable? There are essentially two ways to answer these questions; either a given system must possess necessary structural prerequisites of stability, or the social and cognitive conditions of stability must be embedded in the relations among the key actors. The structural model has three different variants. The focus on the imbalance of power, and especially the preponderance of the offensive capacity, assumes that the lack of balance fosters both offensive and defensive expansionism and undermines the political management of disputes. Thus, the offense-defense balance reinforces the foundations of peace. Conversely, the evolution of mutual, binding economic ties promotes stable peace, in particular if the countries in the region are ruled by liberal-internationalist coalitions that have mutual interests in free trade and economic growth (Solingen 1998, 64-71). Finally, collective security can mitigate mutual military competition and, ultimately, eliminate international anarchy. Stable peace can be achieved by the mutual commitment to defend each other against any aggression. All these approaches to stable peace have their merits and one may even doubt whether a robust theory of stable peace can be constructed without them. They all suffer, however, from the neglect of a societal perspective; the actors do not react only to objective external conditions, they also draw upon intangible resources such as knowledge, trust, and predictability. Trust may