ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines two different understandings of multilateralism (‘rationalist’ and ‘critical’), shows how both of these have been used in the international political economy literature, and discusses what this implies for ‘multilateralism and international security’. Multilateral approaches to international security have had a chequered, and to a great extent, marginal, history in twentieth-century world politics. The failure of both the League of Nations and the United Nations experiments in collective security has given rise to general scepticism or outright suspicion about the practicality or desirability of any generalized multilateral arrangements to achieve security. The UN understanding restricted ‘peacekeeping’ to a minimalist form of intervention designed to prevent conflicts from spilling over beyond fairly narrow bounds and threatening the nuclear peace between Cold War blocs. Most observers who have commented upon the Council’s expanded notion of what constitutes a threat to international peace and security have argued that it forces a reconsideration of the justifiability, necessity or scope of humanitarian intervention.
