Collective Security Treaty Organisation
- January 8, 2022
- Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
- Category: DPN Topics
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Collective Security Treaty Organisation
Subject – IR
Context – CSTO helping Kazakhstan President deal with protesters
Concept –
- When the Cold War drew to a close in 1991, the Warsaw Pact, an alliance of eight socialist states, and the Soviet Union’s answer to NATO, dissolved. Less than a year later, Russia and five of its allies in the Commonwealth of Independent States, which was nothing but a loose club of post-Soviet countries, signed a new Collective Security Treaty, which came into force in 1994.
- Although it wasn’t as powerful as the Warsaw pact, in 2002, as Central Asia loomed larger in geopolitics — America had invaded Afghanistan the previous year — it declared itself the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, a full-blown military alliance.
- Today it has six members: Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan. Uzbekistan had quit the alliance in 2012.
- This week, though, was the first time that the organsation invoked Article 4, which is very similar to NATO’s Article 5.
- Article 5 says that the response may include armed force, but it does not mandate it.
- All that NATO actually promises is to take “such action as it deems necessary” to restore and maintain security. That could be anything from nuclear war to a stiff diplomatic protest.
- For Russia, the CSTO is a useful tool to tighten its grip on Central Asia, against both Western and Chinese encroachments. It justifies Russian military facilities in member countries, while also giving Russia a veto over any other foreign bases in the region.
To know more about CSTO, please refer September 2021 DPN.