Security community
In their seminal work Political Community and the North Atlantic Area: International Organization in the Light of Historical Experience, Deutsch and his collaborators defined a security community as "a group of people" believing "that they have come to agreement on at least this one point: that common social problems must and can be resolved by processes of 'peaceful change'".
[3] Peaceful change was defined as "the resolution of social problems, normally by institutionalized procedures, without resort to large-scale physical force".
They redefined the security community by shared identities, values, and meanings; many-sided direct interactions; and reciprocal long-term interest.
[4] Adler and Barnett further divided the mature security communities into "tightly" and "loosely coupled", depending on the level of their integration.
The first one is "the capacity of the participating political units or governments to respond to each other's needs, messages, and actions quickly, adequately, and without resort to violence".
[3] However, more recent empirical research showed that the often hypothesized role of liberal values and general trust in the development of security communities is overestimated.
[7] Since amalgamation is more demanding than integration, Deutsch identified eight conditions that should be satisfied if amalgamation is to succeed: the mutual compatibility of main values, a distinctive way of life, capabilities and processes of cross-cutting communication, high geographic and social mobility, multiplicity and balance of transactions, a significant frequency of some interchange in group roles, a broadening of the political elite, and high political and administrative capabilities.
[3] Carol Weaver has posited that, in order to arise and endure, security communities need to be based on balanced multipolarity.
