Despite a long record of armed conflicts between Germany and France, the European security community has made war between these two less likely.

A security community is a region in which a large-scale use of violence (such as war) has become very unlikely or even unthinkable.^[1] The term was coined by the prominent political scientist Karl Deutsch in 1957. 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’”.^[2] Peaceful change was defined as “the resolution of social problems, normally by institutionalized procedures, without resort to large-scale physical force”.^[2] People in a security community are also bound by the “sense of community”, the mutual sympathy, trust, and common interests.^[2] The concept has not become a mainstream term in the field of international security despite its long history. One test, byMichael Haas, compared successful with unsuccessful security-community-oriented organizations, finding that the only variable with a statistically significant relationship out of Deutsch's 12 variables was mututal compatibility of man values.[7] After the end of the Cold War, it was adapted by constructivist scholars. A major impetus was the book Security Communities (1998) edited by Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett. They redefined the security community by shared identities, values, and meanings, many-sided direct interactions, and reciprocal long-term interest.^[3] Several regions of the world have been studied in the security community framework since then, most notably the European Union, the American-Canadian and American-Mexican dyads, Mercosur, and ASEAN.^[1] Michael Haas compared the Asian and Pacific Council, Asian-Pacific Parliamentarians Union, Association of South East Asian Nations, Indochinese Foreign Ministers Conference, South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, South-East Asia Treaty Organization, and the South Pacific Forum. The latter was later renamed the Pacific Islands Forum.