INTERNATIONAL,
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INTERNATIONAL SECURITY
SAGE LIBRARY OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS...
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INTERNATIONAL,
SECU*R!l[TY VOLUME II
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-.-.
L
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INTERNATIONAL SECURITY
SAGE LIBRARY OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
INTERNATIONAL SECURITY VOLUME I1 The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda Edited by
Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen
OSAGE Publications Los Angeles
London New Delhi Singapore
Introduction and editorial arrangement 0 Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen 2007 First published 2007 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. Every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge all the copyright owners of the material reprinted herein. However, if any copyright owners have not been located and contacted at the time of publication, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver's Yard 55 City Road London E C l Y 1SP SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B 111 1, Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road New Delhi 1 10 044 SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 33 Pekin Street #02-01 Far East Square Singapore 048763 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-4129-2139-8 (set of four volumes) Library of Congress Control Number: 2006938798 Typeset by Televi~ayTechnologies (P) Limited, Chennai Printed on paper from sustainable resources Printed and bound in Zrinski d.d Croatia
VOLUME I1 The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda 22. Economic Structure and International Security: The Limits of the Liberal Case Barry Buzan 23. Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals Carol Cohn 24. Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union As Other Simon Dalby 25. International Security Studies: A Report of a Conference on the State of the Field Joseph S. Nye, Jr. and Sean M. Lynn-Jones 26. Base Women
Cynthia Enloe
27. The Case Against Linking Environmental Degradation and National Security Daniel Deudney 28. Security, Sovereignty, and the Challenge of World Politics R.B.]. Walker 29. How the West was One: Representational Politics of NATO Bradley S. Klein 30. Soft Power Joseph S. Nye, Jr.
31. Security and Emancipation
Ken Booth
32. The Renaissance of Security Studies Stephen M. Walt 33. The Quagmire of Gender and International Security Rebecca Grant 34. Renaissance in Security Studies? Caveat Lector! Edward A. Kolodziej 35. A Tale of Two Worlds: Core and Periphery in the Post-Cold War Era James M. Goldgeier and Michael McFaul 36. Japan's National Security: Structure, Norms, and Policies Peter J. Katzenstein and Nobuo Okawara 37. The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict
Barry R. Posen
38. The Clash of Civilizations? Samuel P. Huntington 39. The Emerging Structure of International Politics Kenneth N. Waltz
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Contents
40. Common, Comprehensive, and Cooperative Security David Dewitt 41. New Dimensions of Human Security Human Development Report 1994
42. 'Message in a Bottle'? Theory and Praxis in Critical Security Studies Richard Wyn Jones
Economic Structure and International Security: The Limits of the Liberal Case Barry Buzan
T
he theory that a liberal international economy is a necessary factor in sustaining an international security system which avoids major conflict and war is widespread. The economic theory of security rests on arguments that connect economic structure to the use of force: specifically, that a liberal economic system substantially discourages the use of force among states, while a mercantilist economic structure stimulates it. In this article I shall challenge the validity of this theory on two levels. First, I shall argue that the theory is seriously unbalanced in its attempt to associate liberal structures exclusively with benign effects on the use of force, and mercantilist structures exclusively with malign ones. Liberal structures can also, and in their own terms, stimulate the use of force, while mercantilist structures can be benign. Second, I shall argue that the whole attempt to link economic structure, whether liberal or mercantilist, to international security overrates the determining role of economic factors in the broader issues of peace and war. Noneconomic factors provide much more powerful explanations than do economic ones for the major phenomena that are usually cited as supporting the theory. The immediate relevance of these arguments is to the current concern that the decline of American hegemony will lead to a collapse of the liberal economic system and therefore to a renewed cycle of conflict and war along the lines of events during the 1930s. If the arguments made here are correct, then this concern is misplaced. The current liberal system does not have to be maintained for security reasons, and security reasons are not a convincing motive for opposing a transition to some form of mercantilist economic system. I start by examining the intellectual origins of the liberal case, and by identifying which of its supporting arguments still plausibly connect economic structure to the use of force within the context of the international system since 1945. Section 2 outlines the nature of the decline in the use of force associated with the post-1945 liberal system, and it argues that noneconomic factors Source: International Organization, 38(4) ( 1984): 597-624.
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The Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security Agenda
provide more convincing explanations for the observed phenomena than do economic ones. Section 3 argues that the liberal case against mercantilism on security grounds is not credible under the conditions of the 1980s and that a good case can be made for a benign view of mercantilism. Section 4 makes the case that liberal systems contain a severe structural instability, which means that they, like mercantilist systems, can stimulate as well as constrain the use of force.
I . The L i b e r a l C a s e
The essence of the liberal case is that a liberal economic order makes a substantial and positive contribution to the maintenance of international security. Where a liberal economic order prevails, states will be less inclined to use force in their relations with each other than would otherwise be the case. Economics thus gives rise to a structural theory of international security, which posits an unspecified, but significant, level of causal linkage between the structure (basic ordering principle) of international economic relations and the noneconomic behavior of states (the use of force).' The theory is politically influential precisely because the arguments are structural: a liberal system in any historical period should generate significant restraint on the use of force. The intellectual foundations of the liberal case are closely linked to the revolution in economics triggered by Adam Smith. The new political-economics reflected the interests of the rising commercial class. Its proponents, among them Bentham and Paine, looked forward to a society based on individual rights, in which public opinion would play a major role and the state would be minimal. They believed that a natural harmony of interest both within and between states could be obtained by these reforms and that free trade was the key mechanism by which this harmony could be realized. They opposed the existing system of mercantilism, in which economic and individual interests were subordinated to the pursuit of state power and international relations were corrupted by secret diplomacy. They saw this system as serving the narrow class interests of the aristocracy, and they castigated it for both its economic inefficiency and its encouragement of unnecessary conflict. The classical liberal case thus amalgamated political and economic reforms. Free trade was central to the case, but only its most extreme advocates argued that free trade alone was a sufficient condition for peace.2 The great free-trade campaigner Richard Cobden probably represents the high point in the making of the classical liberal case. Liberal assumptions about harmony of interest lead naturally to the conclusion that a liberal economic system would be substantially less war-prone than a mercantilist one. But Cobden connected the two politically during the 1840s by bringing the peace movement into the free-trade coalition. This alliance sealed the connection between free trade and peace, a connection that still underlies the
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economic theory of international security. The belief that free trade was good for peace as well as good for prosperity was bolstered by the subsequent halfcentury experience of the Pax Britannica. So strongly embedded did it become that even the catastrophe of the First World War did not greatly diminish its intellectual and political appeal.' The economic crisis of the interwar years finally destroyed the political reign of free trade in Britain. But the experience of neomercantilism during the 1930s, and of the world war that seemed to result from it, stimulated a powerful revival of the free-trade and peace connection in the United States. Whatever the historical merits of this interpretation, Cordell Hull and others in the Roosevelt administration were strongly committed to the liberal case, believing that "If goods can't cross borders, soldiers will."4 With America finally acting as heir to Britain's role, Hull and his colleagues had both the will and the means to create an international order in which the hope for peace was strongly tied to the rebuilding of an open trading system among countries that were either democratic by tradition or else made so as a result of occupation and reform. This orthodoxy has dominated and legitimized American hegemony for the past four decades. Commitment to it underlies the current sense of crisis created by America's inability to maintain the liberal order. Protectionism, and the demand for it, is everywhere on the rise, creating the fear that another neomercantilist revival will once again set the world on the path to war. The arguments used to support the liberal case have not remained constant over the two centuries of its existence. Central to the economic side of the theory is the assumption that we have only two choices about the form of economic structure: liberal, based on free trade, and mercantilist, based on protection. Because the relationship between the two is mutually exclusive, only limited possibilities exist for policies that combine elements of both. Within this very restricted framework of choice, arguments connecting economic structure to the use of force have been made on two levels: domestic and international. In the period leading up to the triumph of free trade, arguments on the domestic level dominated the liberal case. Mercantilism was seen to arise from the nature of aristocratic states, and therefore the ~ o l i t i c a priority l of liberals was to topple the interventionist, power-seeking state structures that were the legacy of the eighteenth century. Liberals envisaged states that, because the bourgeoisie dominated national politics, would be both inherently disinclined to seek power and anxious to avoid war. The classical liberal view was, therefore, that the character of international relations was determined principally by the character of states. Liberal states would produce a harmonious system, mercantilist states a discordant one. Free trade straddled the domestic- and international-level arguments. It served on the one hand as a device for attacking the domestic bastions of the mercantilist state and on the other, as both the natural expression of the liberal state and the mechanism by which international harmony could be realized.
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The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
Unfortunately, neither the minimal states nor the perfectly competitive markets envisaged by the classical liberals developed, and consequently neither did the international harmony that they were supposed to generate. Instead, states moved toward nationalism and mass politics, and interventionist governments and highly distorted markets became everywhere the rule.5 Because history did not unfold in line with liberal assumptions, the arguments about the relationship between domestic structure and the use of force have become confused and controversial. The image of the liberal state has been subtly usurped by mass democracies whose domestic structures are far removed from those envisaged by the early 19th-century liberals. Such states still derive some of their legitimacy from the carry-over of the classical liberal image, the principal connection between the two being the ideological primacy of individualism and democracy. But the rise of socialist and Marxist ideologies - a phenomenon associated with the absorption of the lower classes into the political life of the state - has raised all sorts of new perspectives on, and new controversies about, the impact of domestic structure on the use of force. Collectivists have devised extensive critiques of capitalist democracies based on the charge that their domestic structures generate international conflict through the mechanisms of imperialism and neocolonialism. In return, the advocates of capitalist democracy have made collectivist states, whether fascist or communist, the heirs to the villainies of mercantilism. Despite their totally different class base, the neomercantilist states are seen to be as power-seeking and expansionist as their aristocratic forebears. This dispute muddies the whole contemporary question about the relationship between domestic structure and the use of force, and it denies the capitalist democracies any clear claim to the classical liberal arguments linking domestic structure to international harmony. Historical realities have also done violence to classical liberal assumptions about free trade and international harmony of interest. The original liberal assumptions were formulated in the context of a strikingly simple international economic system. Britain was the sole industrial power. Trade was therefore conducted primarily in functionally different items and reflected the high harmony of real interdependence implicit in Ricardian assumptions about comparative advantage.6 But despite the triumph of free trade in the middle of the century, or perhaps because of it, the international economic system rapidly became much more complex, and serious flaws disturbed the harmony of the long 19th-century peace. Free trade was accompanied by a massive expansion of imperialism despite vigorous opposition to such developments from the advocates of free trade.' Indeed, Lenin's interpretation sees the 19th-century harmony as resulting from the availability of colonial territory, thereby discounting the whole liberal case.8 More recent versions of this line of thinking implicate free trade as a cause of the chronic weakness of states in the periphery. Because of the rather confused balance between free trade and protectionism leading up to 1914, however, the First World War is not normally interpreted by those arguing
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Economics and Security
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within the liberal tradition as providing clear evidence either for or against the liberal case.y Equally as disturbing as imperialism was the effect of increasing numbers of industrial countries. Not only did this increase result in the growth of intense trade competition, which fed into the imperialist drive, but it also undermined the real interdependence of trade in functionally dissimilar items.'[' Rising competition also led to problems of surplus capacity and therefore, ironically, to rising demands for protectionism, as characterized most clearly by the situation in the 1980s. But despite these assaults on free trade, two important lines of argument survive that link it firmly to declining incentives for states to use force in their relations with each other. These arguments are first, that free trade substantially reduces the number of targets to which force might appropriately be applied in the pursuit of state interests; and second, that it increases the vulnerability of actors, therefore making them disinclined to entertain the risks of resorting to force. These arguments rest on direct structural consequences of free trade. Their logic - therefore stands independent of all the controversies that surround the other aspects of the liberal case. Furthermore, these arguments are on the international rather than on the national level. Their impact requires only that states be willing to implement free-trade policy. The arguments thus allow a considerable degree of flexibility in the domestic structure of states, a feature that fits well with the actual composition of the liberal economy since 1945 and no doubt accounts for some of the wide influence of the liberal case in the postwar era. Given the controversy attending the other aspects of the liberal case, especially the highly ideological debate surrounding the character of capitalist democracies, these two arguments have provided the case's backbone in the period since 1945. The balance of the liberal case has thus changed dramatically. In the classical period the absence of democracy caused the weight of argument to be focused on the domestic structure of states. But in the modern period both the predominance of democracy in the core states and the disputes about its political effects have largely shifted the burden of the case onto arguments at the international level. It is important to note that these arguments do not require perfect free trade. The modern liberal case requires only that the level of restriction on trade be sufficiently low to allow the principle of comparative advantage to operate effectively. When that condition is met, both the separation of wealth from territory and the increase in vulnerability can come into play. The logic does not require free movement of labor or capital, but the relatively free movement of money is an important factor in maintaining trade. Thus a highly imperfect free-trade system will still count as liberal. Several writers have commented on the first argument - the connection between a liberal economy and the declining attractiveness of traditional targets for the use of force - noting particularly the lowered interest in territory and wealth as objects of force in the post-1945 context." In a liberal
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
economic system the costs of using force in pursuit of economic interests are likely to outweigh any gain, because markets and resources are already available on competitive terms. The liberal claim to separate the pursuit of wealth from the control of territory marks a major distinction between liberal and mercantilist systems, and it is the basis for much of the connection between free trade and peace. When wealth and welfare are directly associated with territorial control, force has a high utility within the economic sphere. That this high utility is likely to lead to actual use of force is compellingly evinced by the history of both the 1930s and the long period of classical mercantilism that preceded the 19th-century Pax Britannica, It is this contrast with the mercantilist system that makes the role of free trade so important. Liberal economics can be offered not only as being positively conducive to peace in its own right but also as being a specific cure for the problems of mercantilism. The second argument - that free trade increases the vulnerability of states and therefore reduces their incentives to resort to force - is most frequently found in the literature on interdependence.12 The complex network of dependencies that results from free trade requires individual actors to depend increasingly on the availability of both key imports and export markets for indigenous products. This dependence on the larger pattern of exchange relations means that states become vulnerable. Participation in a liberal economy automatically erodes the pursuit of economic self-reliance. Because states in a liberal economy are more vulnerable, the use of force declines for two reasons. First, instruments other than military ones become a more effective, appropriate, reliable, and economical means of conducting international relations. Second, because states are dependent across a range of relationships, their fear of self-damage will incline them to refrain from using force even when the issues are not economic ones. These effects are amplified when the liberal system has been in operation for many years and its higher levels of welfare have become institutionalized in domestic political life. When high levels of domestic welfare are dependent on the maintenance of liberal economic relations, governments become especially vulnerable to economic pressure, as Britain discovered during the Suez crisis. In effect, interdependence becomes addictive. The preservation of accumulated joint gains necessarily becomes a core government objective. Both economic activity and political expectation structure themselves around its continuance, and withdrawal becomes increasingly costly and painful.13 Knowledge of this situation constrains governments from using military instruments for any except the most basic objectives. But if we take these two strong international-level arguments and try to use them to explain the long peace since 1945, a large anomaly emerges, namely, that the liberal system is not universal in extent. If the liberal economic system is only partially applicable to the international system as a whole, its ability to explain a period of relative harmony must be correspondingly limited. The most obvious consequence of nonuniversality is the inevitable relationship of force between the liberal subgroup and any other large international
K i i i , ~ Economics and Security
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power. Since actors outside the liberal sphere cannot be assumed to be subject to its logic, the liberal subgroup must play the balance-of-power game in order to ensure its own security. The character of that larger game will clearly determine the overall pattern of peace and war to a much greater extent than will the internal dynamic of the liberal subsystem. Nonuniversality also has serious consequences for the liberal case on the domestic level. Two domestic lines of argument relate to those stemming from interdependence. First, it can be argued that the pressure of economic competition causes states within a liberal system to favor resource allocations to investment rather than to defense.14 Second, it can be argued that liberal economics sustains individualist, materialist, and humanist values, which erode the will of the state to use force. (A more cynical version of this second argument holds that the democratic mass politics that arises from these values forces governments to favor resource allocations to civil consumption over defense.) To the extent that these arguments are true, states within a liberal system will consistently tend to underprovide themselves with military capability. This domestic liberal dynamic traps governments within a liberal subgroup in a permanent policy dilemma. They must resolve on a continuing basis the contradiction between the internal pressure t o minimize their relationship with force and the external pressure to play the balance of power. If domestic liberalism leads to underprovision or underuse of force, governments risk the external destruction of their values. But if they overreact to external threat, they risk the internal destruction of liberal values, and possibly of the liberal economic system, by militarism. In this sense the political dynamic of liberalism, like that of any other revolutionary political ideology, is seriously constrained in realization by not being universally applied.
2. Noneconomic Explanations for the Decline in the U s e of Force since 1945 The fact that the post-1945 liberal system is not universal requires us to ask how well it corresponds to the decline in the use of force during the same period. If major discrepancies exist, the decline in the use of force must also be explained in noneconomic terms. If other explanations appear plausible, the liberal case is diminished to the extent that the alternatives are powerful. The principal area of decline in the use of force since 1945 has been the absence of war among the major powers. More arguably, there are grounds for thinking that decolonization has reduced the use of force in relations between North and South. These two categories of decline have been in what Robert Art calls the "physical" use of force: war or direct violence between states. But in what he calls the "peaceful" use of force, the picture is quite different.'' Deterrence has offset the decline in war among the major powers, by substituting a "peaceful" use far a "physical" one. Almost everywhere else the use
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The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
of military power short of fighting flourishes in the traditional fashion. Considering just "peaceful" uses of force, it is only among relations within the Western group of states that one can identify a major decline. Hardly any of these states deploy their forces against each other, and hardly any of them view others in the group as a significant source of military threat.16 Thus, while there has been no uniform decline in the use of force, there have been some significant sectional declines." By far the largest decline is centered on the Western states, particularly in relations among them but extending also to relations between them and the Soviet bloc, and perhaps between them and the countries of the Third World. The fact that the decline in the use of force has been most pronounced for the states that constitute the core of the liberal economy would seem to augur well for the liberal case, even though the liberal logic cannot explain the absence of war between East and West. But a wealth of other powerful explanations exist that cover all of the observed phenomena, both within and outside the Western group. Some of these explanations stem from military factors, others from political ones. The military paralysis that has resulted from nuclear weapons is almost universally accepted as the principal explanation for the absence of war among the major powers. Under these conditions fear of consequences becomes the prime cause of the decline in the "physical" use of force, and the emphasis of policy shifts naturally toward the narrower "peaceful" use of force represented by deterrence.18 Military factors also explain the decline in, or change in character of, the use of force by North against South. The proliferation of both political mobilization and modern military hardware to the countries of the Third World has been a major trend of the last four decades. In combination with the steep rise in the cost of conventional armed forces, this trend has substantially raised the power of resistance of the periphery to the center.19 Some of this effect might be attributed to the liberal economy through the mechanism of the arms trade. But given the extent of superpower rivalry in conditioning the distribution of arms, the economic cause does not look at all dominant. Few liberals would anyway wish to embrace this potential credit with much enthusiasm. The main political argument turns on patterns in the distribution of power, controversy centering on the relative effect of bipolar versus multipolar systems on the "physical" use of force. The proponents of bipolarity can point to the lengthening peace of the period since 1945, and the proponents of multipolarity can cite the 19th-century Pax Britannica in support of the balance-of-power case. I have assessed this debate elsewhere.20 It is often conducted in competitive tones, but both sides make the case that political structure constrains the use of force. The contemporary bipolar structure acts against the use of force both between and within its major blocs. Particularly within the Western bloc, it imposes a rigid external order that effectively constrains the significant "physical" use of force by secondary members against each other and strongly
Buzan
Economics and Security 9
downgrades incentives for most, though not all, "peaceful" uses. At this point the strategic structure blends into the economic one. We can see that the decline in the use of force among the states of the Western group has as much to d o with their political and military organization as it has to do with their membership in a liberal economic system. We can only conclude that there is a very compelling case for factors other than economic ones being prime movers in the decline in the use of force. The logic of fear stemming from military developments is both strong and rational. And the logic of political structure leads us precisely to where the effect is strongest, namely within the Western group and between that group and the Soviet bloc. The military and political factors constraining force are much more universal in extent than the economic ones, and consequently the logic of the military and political cases is not undermined by being only partial in extent. The case for the primacy of noneconomic explanations for the decline in the use of force is strengthened by the compelling argument that a liberal economic system requires, as a prior condition of its own creation, an environment in which the use of force is restrained. The logic here is analogous to the traditional arguments stemming from Hobbes, that without adequate protection of property rights by the state, economic activity will be inhibited. History reinforces this logic. In both historical examples of liberal systems hegemonic leaders (Britain and the United States, respectively) have fulfilled the prior security condition. This analysis is scarcely controversial. Many writers have commented on the importance of American military power as the foundation of interdependence and on the significance of European and Japanese security dependence on the United States for America's ability to manage the liberal economic system overalL2' One can infer from these arguments that non-universality was a major asset, perhaps even a necessary condition, for the founding of a liberal economic system after the Second World War. The fact that a liberal economy depends, as a prior condition, on the effect it is supposed to cause does not undercut the arguments made about the liberal impact on the use of force in section 1. It does, however, reinforce the claim to primacy of military and political factors as the major causes of the-decline in the use of force. At best, the liberal economic arguments can be read only as reinforcing a decline in the use of force that is already under way for other reasons.
3. How Valid is the Malevolent View of Mercantilism?
The arguments in the previous section would appear to dispose of the major security pretensions of the liberal case. But one important shot still remains in the liberal locker. Even if the liberal system itself makes only a minor contribution to peace, it can still be argued that because free trade is the only alternative to protectionism, a liberal system is the only alternative
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
to mercantilism. Since mercantilism is widely associated with periods of war, the liberal system can claim a security benefit inasmuch as its continuance prevents a reversion to protectionism. But as Robert Gilpin points out, there are benign as well as malevolent views of m e r ~ a n t i l i s mThe . ~ ~ benign view sees a mercantilist system of large, inward-looking blocs, where protectionism is predominantly motivated by considerations of domestic welfare and internal political stability. Such a system potentially avoids many of the organizational problems of trying to run a global or quasi-global liberal economy in the absence of political institutions on a similar scale. The malevolent view sees a rerun of the mercantilist dynamic of the past, in which protectionism is motivated primarily by considerations of state power. Much of the liberal claim to contribute to international security depends on the malevolent view being both valid and dominant. There is an assumption in the liberal case, usually not made explicit, that the dynamic of protectionism tends automatically to generate the conditions specified in the malevolent view. If one accepts this assumption, then the negative act of holding off a war-prone mercantilist alternative can be seen as an important, perhaps even vital, role even if the positive contribution of a liberal economy to international security is not all that great. Like some medicines, a liberal system might not be good for the patient in itself, but it may still save life by preventing a fatal condition. But is this assumption valid? While it may be true historically that mercantilism is associated with the pursuit of state power, the economic policy seems much more to result from the political one than the other way around. As illustrated by the history of the Soviet Union, power-seeking states other than the hegemon, and whether defensive or aggressive in outlook, will always have strong incentives to adopt protectionism, because self-reliance has high military and security value. But there is no compelling evidence that protectionism pursued for welfare-state purposes must inevitably, or even probably, lead to power-seeking policies. There is an ideological element here which explains why the liberal case is supported with such passion. Free trade and protectionism vie with each other for dominance over the orthodoxy of purely economic thinking. The choice between them is zero-sum, and the lines of economic dispute run deep. The economic merits of the two positions can be argued out in their own right, though as we shall see, these arguments are not wholly unrelated to the security issue. The fervor with which liberal advocates seek to condemn mercantilism thus has more to do with economic issues than with security ones. Since liberals have been in the ascendant for more than three decades, it is only natural that their malevolent view of mercantilism has become part of the conventional wisdom. The malevolent view of mercantilism derives from two theoretical propositions and a set of historical examples. The first proposition concerns the economic inefficiency of a mercantilist system, particularly its propensity to produce situations of joint loss as opposed to the potential joint gains of free
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trade. Charles Kindleberger describes this phenomenon succinctly in the context of the interwar depression: In advancing its own economic good by a tariff, currency depreciation o r foreign exchange control, a country may worsen the welfare of its partners by more than its own gain. Beggar-thy-neighbor tactics may lead to retaliation, so that each country ends up in a worse position from having pursued its own gain .... When every country turned to protect its national private interest, the world public interest went down the drain, and with it the private interests of all.'" The mechanism of joint loss is self-reinforcing because, in the malevolent view, declining production and rising unemployment increase pressure on governments to pursue competitive and mutually damaging economic behavior. This leads to a destructive spiral, which continues until domestic instability provides the seedbed for the rise of extreme nationalist governments not averse to the use of force. At some point this dynamic begins to interact with the second proposition, discussed in section 1, that a mercantilist system tends to associate power and wealth with direct control over territory. In a system of protected economies and restricted trade, control over territory guarantees access to needed markets and raw materials. As competition heightens toward conflict, major industrial centers will therefore be pushed by the economic dynamic into a dangerous, zero-sum game of empire building. Each will try to ensure itself a sphere large enough to sustain its own industrial economy, and in this process, war among the great powers is a likely outcome. The requirements of imperial control and competition necessitate the enhancement of state power, and a form of warfare-state mercantilism ensues in which the economy is heavily directed toward military and strategic purposes. This scenario was played out during the 1930s. The Soviet Union and its empire can be seen as a massive leftover from that period, still displaying the ominous character of warfare mercantilism, with its economic inefficiency, militarism, state control, political resilience, and territorialism. The experience of neomercantilism in the 1930s, and the horrors of the war that terminated it, left a deep impression on the postwar period and provided much of the rationale for the American-led liberal system founded at the end of the war. Joan Spero provides a typical statement: National protectionism and the disintegration of world trade in the 1930s created a common interest in an open trading order and a realization that states would have to cooperate to achieve and maintain that order.. .. The retreat into protectionism in the interwar period led not only to economic disaster, but also to international war.24 The fear that any return to protectionism would mean a rerun of the interwar scenario is widespread. Its typical form is a somber reference to the
12
The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
dangers of returning to the situation of the 1930s, and it underlies much of the contemporary concern about the declining liberal order.25 The anxiety to find ways of keeping the liberal system going, despite the deterioration of American leadership, reflects not only economic concerns but also deep fears that a shift in economic structure would trigger a massive deterioration in the international security e n ~ i r o n m e n t . ~ ~ But are these fears realistic? Is the past useful or deceptive as a guide to the future? Must a return to economic protectionism necessarily recreate an international system in the malevolent image of historical neomercantilism? Since I have already argued in section 2 that the factors affecting the use of force are substantially independent of economic structure, there are certainly grounds for questioning any fatalistic view that the dismal history of the 1930s must inevitably repeat itself as a consequence of a contemporary shift to protectionism. Some degree of joint loss and territorialism appear to be unavoidable tendencies in a mercantilist system. But must their consequences so dominate international relations as to produce conflict and war? Given the contemporary focus of this analysis, we can safely set aside the lessons of the classical period of mercantilism. Not only was the understanding of economics vastly less sophisticated then than now, but the international dynamics of a preindustrial economic and military system also offer few parallels for the contemporary impact of economic structure on international relations. The case of 1930s' neomercantilism is much more important. Quite what the interwar experience represents, however, is a matter of dispute. In what follows, I shall treat it in the conventional way, as a case of neomercantilism. In the next section, I shall look at it as a model for a collapsing liberal system. If we compare the conditions relevant to the use of force in the 1930s with those prevailing in the 1980s, it becomes obvious that there is no compelling case for the inevitability, or even the significant probability, of a historical rerun. In essence, the dominant noneconomic factors tending to constrain the use of force were weak in the 1930s and are strong in the 1980s. In addition, the economic conditions for protectionism in the 1980s seem much less likely than those of the 1930s to lead to competitive empire building. Upon examination the contemporary military and political factors look very different from their counterparts in the 1930s. Although what I have elsewhere called the defense dilemma2' - a divorce between defense and security arising from the destructiveness of modern weapons, and the consequent fear of war - was strong in Europe by the 1930s, it was not accompanied by the certainty of mutual devastation that derives from the nuclear arsenals of the 1980s. Offensive weapons dominated both periods, but the distinction between victory and defeat arising from their use was very stark in the 1930s and is almost nonexistent in the 1980s. In the 1930s military instruments were powerful enough to cause general terror: some images from the time of war involving aerial high-explosive and gas attacks are strikingly similar to modern images of nuclear war. But these weapons still offered to successful
R u ~ a n Economics and Security
13
users a good prospect of real and massive victory. In the 1980s nuclear weapons make a competitive empire-building scenario like that of the 1930s wildly unrealistic. The constraints on the use of force that arise from the nature of contemporary military instruments and targets d o not by any means render armed forces completely useless. But they d o make irrational in the extreme the idea of military conflict among the major powers over economic objectives. Likewise, the political structure of the international system in the 1980s is much less conducive to empire building than was the case during the 1930s. During the 1930s the balance of power was seriously weakened by the relative isolationism of the United States and the Soviet Union. China was weak and internally divided, and so a potential victim. Virtually all of Afro-Asia was incorporated within European empires and consequently offered low indigenous resistance to a change of masters. In the revisionist countries the explicitly militaristic and war-oriented ideology of fascism held sway. Empire was in vogue almost everywhere, and the disproportion between the distribution of power and the distribution of empire, when combined with a truncated balance of power, made conditions for a war over empire almost ideal. In the 1980s political conditions for empire building could hardly he worse. The balance-of-power system is extremely active and sensitive worldwide. The Soviet Union and the United States are both heavily engaged in world politics, and China has become a unified main actor in the international system. Fascism has largely been purged from the major centers of power in the West, and historical memory acts as a major block against any political revival of aggressively militaristic ideologies. Empire has become exceptionally unfashionable everywhere except, paradoxically, within the ostensibly anti-imperialist Soviet bloc, and the Third World countries have developed the political and military capability to mount strong resistance to foreign occupation. Even in the absence of nuclear weapons these conditions would raise enormously the costs and risks of imperial ventures. It makes n o difference to our analysis whether the Soviet Union is considered to be militaristic and expansionist or defensive and benign. Given the nonuniversality of the liberal system, the Soviet bloc is a constant in the analytical distinction between contemporary liberal and mercantilist international economic systems. The same is true of China. Some important elements of a bloc mercantilist system are therefore already in place, and they have a significant history within the framework of the lengthening postwar peace. O n the economic side the incentives to build empires arising from a reversion to protectionism also appear much weaker in the 1980s than during the 1930s. In the earlier period Germany, Italy, and Japan faced a severe economic squeeze as a result of the shift to protectionism. The other industrial centers all possessed adequate markets and resources, either because of their continental scale (the United States and the Soviet Union) or because of their large overseas empires (Britain and France). Unless they could carve
14
The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
out spheres commensurate with their industrial capacity, the three excluded states faced a serious deterioration in their international position. In addition, the economic collapse in the late 1920s was both rapid and deep, and so left little time for a considered adjustment. In the 1980s no major industrial power, with the possible exception of Japan, faces a serious squeeze as a result of a shift to protectionism. The Western European states already have the makings of a joint bloc, and the United States, the Soviet Union, China, and India all enjoy continental scale. The peripheral countries are free from foreign empire and would have strong incentives either to associate with an industrial core area or to maintain trade from a position of independence. The effect of the more independent position of the peripheral countries in the 1980s is illustrated by the behavior of those Third World states where Soviet influence is substantial. Algeria, Libya, and Angola all maintain strong economic ties to the West, and Cuba would like to if the Americans would allow it. The independence of the peripheral states also makes room for the argument that multinational corporations could continue to serve as a nonterritorial vehicle for economic expansion in a mercantilist system. This option existed during the 1930s on only a relatively small scale. Opinion is divided about the merits of a bloc mercantilist international system.28 However, there can be little doubt that its relatively easy availability sharply divides the character of the present international system from that during the 1930s. It does not seem unrealistic to think that regional blocs would substantially obviate the incentives to embark on 1930s-style expansionism. The key to a benign version of mercantilism lies in the existence of bloc actors sufficiently large to contain most of the resources and markets needed by their industrial cores. When such blocs exist, they create an oppportunity to synthesize the normally antagonistic policies of mercantilism and free trade. They can do so by compensating for their external protectionism with an internal cultivation of liberal economics.29This combination of a protectionist/liberal synthesis with a size sufficient for economies of scale offers a good prospect for avoiding the dynamics of the malevolent scenario. Three contemporary factors contribute to the prospects for a successful benign mercantilism. First, if one of the main incentives for expansionism in a mercantilist system is the pressure to match industrial capacity to control of markets, it can be argued that even on the level of individual states, current conditions act to diminish such pressure. Within a large regional bloc pressure might be reduced to insignificance. Domestic markets are now much larger than they used to be, both because of higher populations and because of great increases in per capita levels of consumption. Within a regional bloc markets should be large enough to provide economies of scale, and so meet the point, argued eight decades ago by J.A. Hobson, that pressures for imperialism could be countered by raising domestic c o n s ~ m p t i o n . ~ ~ Second, possession of advanced technology opens up a host of substitution possibilities for critical resources. Such technology offers a standing
Ruin11
Economics and Security
15
alternative to assertion of control over territories containing some desired resource. Investment in a technological enterprise, such as substituting nuclear power for hydrocarbons in electricity generation or developing ceramics or plastics as substitutes for scarce metals, seems likely to be more appealing than resort to the costs and uncertainties of military expansion. Even if substitution does not result in cost savings, it may still be worth pursuing as a way of achieving substantial self-reliance in such vital sectors as defense, energy, and food. The pursuit of such self-reliance would increase econon~ic security by reducing such sources of international tension and conflict as that which arose over oil during the 1970s. A third argument supporting the benign case is the predominance of welfare motives in the current shift toward protectionism." These motives revive the classical liberal assumption about the impact of public opinion on foreign policy. They are substantially divorced from the concern with state power that dominated both classical and neomercantilism. Welfare motives, unlike power motives, do not provide obviously fertile soil for the growth of extreme nationalism in domestic politics. In a system dominated by welfare mercantilism the mutual perception of motives among the actors therefore should not excite the security dilemma in anything like the same way as would mutual perceptions of welfare-mercantilist motives. The welfare motive offers a possibility of keeping alive many of the more useful normative elements of relations in a liberal system in a way that would be impossible were protectionism seen to be aimed openly at the pursuit of state powec3' Such nationalist tendencies are anyway more difficult to mobilize within the context of a bloc. If the bloc is composed of many small and mediumsized states, like the European Community, it is most likely to be a liberal system internally, in which case the question of aggressive nationalism hardly arises. Even if the bloc is dominated by an authoritarian, hegemonic state, the requirements of bloc cohesion create pressure on the leader to avoid excesses of either exploitation or domination. The Soviet experience in COMECON illustrates the point. Although there is not space here to develop a full picture of a benign mercantilist system, it should be noted that the bloc system outlined above could be quite similar to some variants of weak liberal systems. Because mercantilist blocs can combine liberalism and protectionism, they can serve as the basis for weak liberal systems along either rule-based or collective-leadership lines. Such a system might be called either "protected liberalism" or "liberal protectionism," according to its emphasis. The point of so labeling it is to indicate that viable and stable options exist in the middle ground between the traditionally irreconcilable poles of liberalism and mercantilism. The mercantilist part of such an economic structure would reduce the scale and scope of the international economic management problem. Without some reduction, it seems unlikely that weak management structures could maintain a liberal system. But with less to manage, because more management would be decentralized to the bloc level, a weak macromanagement system might
16
The Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security Agenda
well suffice. Welfare-protectionist blocs would seek a considerable measure of self-reliance for the reasons already argued, but they would still want some, perhaps substantial, trade and so would still require a macromanagement system of some sort. On this model the distinction between a weak, nonhegemonic liberal system and a benign mercantilist one begins to blur. The possibility emerges of a hybrid system that combines most of the security advantages of both its parents while minimizing their disadvantages. We can only conclude from this comparison of the conditions of the 1930s with those in the 1980s that there is no strong case for the malevolent view of mercantilism under the conditions of the contemporary international system. Both the economic and the noneconomic factors that influence the use of force are so different between the two periods that no significant structural parallel can be drawn between them. This conclusion does not deny the basic logic of the argument that, other things being equal, a successfully functioning liberal economic system provides more constraints on the use of force than does a mercantilist one. As we have seen, that logic is both internally coherent and powerful. The purpose of the present exercise is to set the logic in its proper context, for only then does its relatively minor importance as a mover of events become clear. Taken by itself, the liberal logic deceives more than it enlightens. Because it ignores, or discounts, both the impact of other factors bearing on the use of force and the influence of variables within the economic domain itself, the liberal argument produces a distorted, and excessively gloomy, image of mercantilism. For the 1980s and beyond, both the general constraint on the use of force and the nature of economic conditions make the benign image of mercantilism look credible. Although a mercantilist system does give rise to pressures for conflict, the argument is that under contemporary conditions these pressures will be both muted by economic factors and contained by political and military ones.
4. Liberal Economic Structure as a Stimulant to the Use of Force
So far, we have focused on the constraining effects of a liberal economy on the use of force. Although we have not found the liberal case to be very compelling, that conclusion does not detract from the many economic and security benefits that a liberal economy provides. If, however, we find that a liberal economy actually stimulates the use of force in significant ways, liberalism will join mercantilism in the shadow of the suspicion that its security costs might outweigh its other benefits. The traditional critique of the liberal position on international security derives from Lenin's work on imperialism. Its arguments about the expansionist, exploitative, competitive, and violent nature of capitalism are well understood and do not need to be rehearsed here. Because of its ideological content, this critique has become part of a rigid and institutionalized division of opinion, within which the pressure is more to take sides than it is to
Ruzav
Economics and Security
17
engage in constructive debate. As a consequence of this politicization, critiques of liberalism along these lines are unlikely to have much impact on policy regardless of their merits. Much more important, therefore, are critiques mounted from ideological positions closer to, or better within, the liberal tradition itself. Here we can find two lines of argument connecting a liberal economy positively to the use of force. One is minor and is in some senses ideologically derived from the Marxist view. The other is major and sits squarely within the liberal logic. The major argument concerns the structural instability of liberal international economies and their tendency to produce periodic collapses of such magnitude as to destabilize the whole pattern of international relations. The minor one concerns the pattern of center-periphery relations, even within a successful liberal economy, as a cause of conflict and interventionism in the periphery. I have made the argument about center-periphery relations elsewhere."' In essence it is that a liberal economy concentrates power at a center to the detriment of its peripheral members. The dynamic of the international economy works to keep state structures in the periphery weak and to concentrate wealth and welfare benefits disproportionately toward the center. Because the periphery is both politically weak and economically poor, the use of force is common in the domestic political life of the states there. Intervention by center interests in this use of force is normal, although direct intervention has, in the postcolonial era, become unfashionable almost everywhere except in Francophone Africa." When the liberal economy is not universal in extent, the problem of intervention in the periphery is exacerbated by the global competition among the leading states within the balance of power. Although this argument is not without significance, it is also not without critics and does not constitute, in my opinion, a substantial indictment of the liberal economic system on the grounds of its relationship to the use of force. Even if the argument is accepted in full, it seems more than offset by the contribution of a free-trade economy to a general restraint on the use of force. That restraint has been best illustrated by the unwillingness of the Western powers during the 1970s to use force against, or even to threaten seriously, the Middle Eastern oil-poducing states. But perhaps the most telling point against it is that the problems of the periphery arise primarily from the relative political, economic, and military weakness of its component states. Their weakness has many causes and is so deeply ingrained that the choice between a liberal and a mercantilist economic system as the context for it would make very little difference to the problem in anything but the very long term. While the liberal economy may not have lived up to its own best hopes for the periphery, it has not performed conspicuously worse in the matter of the use of force than any realistic alternative. These arguments, unfortunately, are not susceptible t o proof one way or the other. However, the major argument about structural instability leads to a very serious indictment of the liberal economic system in its own terms. It hinges on the requirement of the liberal economy for a level of political and economic
18
The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
order sufficient to allow the development of international patterns of trade and production. A security system has to be provided, as discussed above in section 2, and also a basic set of economic rules and services. As Kindleberger argues, the system needs an underwriter to "provide a market for distress goods, a steady if not countercyclical flow of capital, and a rediscount mechanism for providing liquidity," as well as to "manage, in some degree, the structure of foreign exchange rates, and provide a degree of coordination of domestic monetary policies."35 Without these services a large-scale interdependent international economy cannot develop in the essentially hostile environment of the anarchic international political system. The essence of the problem is that a liberal economy must try to organize itself on a scale that far outreaches the level of political organization available in the highly fragmented state system. Ideally, the solution would be a world government of some sort, but that is unlikely to be available within the foreseeable future. Only three other options exist: the services can be provided by a single relatively powerful state that is able and willing to play hegemonic leader; they can be provided by a coalition of leading powers acting jointly, where none is strong enough to take the hegemonic role; or they can be provided by general agreement on, or at least adherence to, a set of rules based on a broadly understood and accepted view of collective interest. Both historical experience and the weight of expert opinion support the view that a hegemonic leader is by far the most realistic of these options and indeed that it may well be the only viable one. The key point is that liberal international economies seem to arise only as a result of exceptionally powerful states projecting their own economic interests into the wider international environment. The two historical cases of a liberal system are both based on hegemonic leaders seeking to enhance their economic primacy by opening the rest of the international system to free trade. In addition, the theory of collective goods gives strong support to the case that hegemonic leadership is the best, and probably the only, option for creating and managing a liberal international economy.36The theory points out that shared interest is not a sufficient condition for the creation of the management structures necessary to provide the desired collective good. Consequently, such goods are most likely to be provided when a single large actor produces them for the rest of the system as a byproduct of its pursuit of its own interests, as both the United States and Britain have done. So long as the international political structure remains anarchic, it seems most unlikely that a liberal system could be created by any mechanism other than a hegemonic actor. The interesting question is whether or not an already existing liberal system can be maintained by other means when the originating hegemonic power no longer has sufficient relative strength to act as underwriter. These other means - collective management and pure rules systems - tend to get serious consideration only as fallback positions when hegemonic leadership is failing. They are, for obvious reasons, most vigorously promoted by the declining hegemon itself, and their prospects depend on the existence of widespread support for the system among its principal
fiiic,ir
Economics and Security
19
participants. If the other participants see the system more as a quasi-imperial expression of the hegemon than as a cooperative order based on mutual perceptions of harmonious self-interests, these weaker forms of management will have little chance of success."' Neither collective management nor a rules-only system has been tried extensively in practice. Neither attracts much intellectual enthusiasm, not least because both are subject to the powerfully adverse logic of collective goods theory. That logic holds even if common perceptions of joint interest are held quite firmly. If the consensus on common interests is weak, or significantly contested, the weak management options become even more doubtful as viable alternatives to hegemonic leadership. The bases for collective leadership in the contemporary system are not at all obvious given the very different and contradictory domestic pressures affecting governments in the United States, Japan, and Europe. Furthermore, the problems that cause the decline of the hegemonic leader seem likely to exacerbate divisions within a collective leadership, which, because of its inevitably less cohesive structure, would have lower resistance to them than would a single actor. Significant disputes about the benefits of the system automatically invalidate the rules option, since it requires, by definition, a tight consensus. That requirement appears to limit rules systems to a lowest common denominator, which may well be so weak as to differ little from the benign mercantilist system outlined in the previous section. Once the hegemon loses control, there seems to be no escape from the pressures to bring the international economic structure closer into line with that of the more fragmented international political structure. From that perspective, benign bloc mercantilism stands as an attractive middle option between the unstable universal pretensions of liberalism and a destructive reversion to protectionism on a national scale. If we accept that a liberal economic system needs a hegemonic leader to provide its required framework of collective goods, then we arrive at the essence of the problem. Hegemonic leaders do not endure, and when their leadership fails, a high risk is created of major disruption of the pattern of international relations. Such disruption is very likely to increase dramatically the incentives for the use of force. Two types of crisis can result from the failure of a hegemonic leader. Either there is a struggle for succession, such as the one that attended the decline of Britain, or there is no successor, as with the United States in the 1980s. In the first instance, as Gilpin rather blandly observes, "Unfortunately, the world had to suffer two world conflicts before an American-centered liberal world economy was substituted for a British-centered one."" In the second instance there is a drawn-out attempt to fill the growing vacuum at the center with collective leadership and rules. This attempt may be sustained by the momentum and habits of the successful hegemonic period for quite some time after the hegemon has ceased to lead effectively. Its strength and longevity depend on the balance of power within the secondary core states, between those who see the liberal system as a cooperative exercise reflecting joint interests and those who see it as a quasi-imperial extension
20
The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
of the hegemon's interests. We are condemned to live through the history that will give us a full-term case study of this type of crisis. In either case the collapse of the liberal system, if it occurs, places tremendous strains on all the actors enmeshed within it. As we have seen, actors progressively adapt their behavior to the workings of the liberal economy. This economic restructuring is accompanied by social and political shifts, which are much harder to readjust quickly than are the patterns of investment and production that give rise to them. Patterns of employment and welfare expectation get rooted in the domestic life of the nation and pose serious political problems when the economic conditions necessary for their maintenance disappear. Economic interdependence, as argued in section 1, has an addictive quality for those actors caught up in it. While such a quality is useful as a support for the stability of the liberal system, it increases hardship when the system breaks down. If the economic collapse is relatively quick, as it was in the 1930s, the adjustment problem is severe. Even when it is slow, as has been the case during the 1970s and 1980s, the difficulty of domestic adjustment combined with hopes for continuance of the liberal system may contrive to prevent a measured adaptation and so lead to a rapid collapse at some point. The risk in all this is that a precipitate collapse in the liberal economy may create such strains in the fabric of international relations that the incentives for the use of force increase. The classic scenario here is once again that of the 1930s. Should the interwar period be seen as a case study of mercantilism or as a case study of a collapsing liberal system? The conventional wisdom sees it as a demonstration of the evils of mercantilism along the lines argued above. But as David Calleo points out, the events leading up to the Second World War can also be seen as a consequence of the collapsing liberal system." The wreckage of a failed liberal system, in which each state is striving to defend its interests, is hardly ideal ground on which to build benign mercantilism, and the period itself is a very short one on which to base judgments about mercantilism as a whole. The argument is that liberal systems are unstable. Whatever their merits when they are functioning successfully, liberal systems pose periodic threats of a considerable stimulus to the use of force. The underlying cause of this problem is the apparent inability of the liberal system to create durable political institutions of sufficient scale and strength to match its economic reach. The expedient of a hegemonic leader can produce an effective liberal system, but only for a limited period. Hegemonic leaders cannot sustain their position indefinitely, and many explanations are on offer for the apparently inexorable process of their decline. Some of these explanations relate to the character of the hegemonic state, and the impact on it of the hegemonic role, others relate to the character of the system that the hegemon has to manage and the tendencies for the managerial problem to become more difficult.40 With regard to the impact on the hegemonic leader, attention focuses on several problems: long-term economic self-weakening through the export of inflation,41 and the outflow of capital and technology;42 the growth of
Rwan
Economics and Security
21
structural rigidities in the economy as a result of sociopolitical demands arising from the sustained experience of power and s u c c e ~ s ; ~ b nthe d disproportionate costs, particularly military, that burden the hegemon's economy in relation to its rivals.44It can also be argued, but more controversially, that the cumulative political effects of a liberal economic system tend to erode the hegemonic leader's will to use force, thereby undermining its ability to sustain its security role in the system. With regard to the problem of system management, attention focuses on the rising domestic resistance in member countries to the pressure for rapid and continuous socioeconomic adaptation created by the operation of a liberal economy;4s the tendency for resentment to mount against the hegemon either because of its advantaged position or because of real or alleged abuse of privilege;46 the increasing difficulty of the management problem because of the growing volume and complexity of transactions in a successful trading system;47and the tendency for the hegemonic state to create a more plural system because of the way in which its export of capital and technology encourages the growth of competing industrial centers.4x The last of these points feeds back strongly into the first through the mechanism of unemployment, thus creating an ironic parallel to the liberal image of malevolent mercantilism outlined in section 3. As the liberal economy succeeds in creating more and stronger industrial centers, problems of surplus capacity arise. Intense competition easily leads to loss of trade and hence to unemployment in the older industrial areas. This problem of surplus capacity is illustrated clearly by the contemporary fate of technologically accessible industries like shipbuilding and steel. By this route a liberal system ends up producing the domestic political pressures conventionally associated with mercantilism. A last point on the system level derives from the traditional political argument that the logic of the balance of power works against the existence of a hegemonic power. A concentration of power sufficient to enable a hegemonic leader to exist is naturally antagonistic to the anarchic dynamic that tends to counterbalance any accumulation of power sufficient to overawe the system as a whole. This older wisdom may be no more than the sum of the more detailed points made above. It certainly explains why liberal systems have been the historical exception rather than the rule.4' The dependence of a liberal economy on a hegemonic leader, the apparent impossibility of any state's sustaining that role, the considerable uncertainty about the viability of alternative management techniques, and the disruption of international relations by a collapse of a liberal economy, all point to a serious risk of a liberal system undermining international security. The reality of this risk is illustrated by the two world wars associated with the decline of Britain. We can conclude that liberalism, like mercantilism, can be either benign or malevolent in relation to the use of force. With liberalism, the effect is most likely to be sequential, with a benign period being followed by a malevolent one as the strength of the hegemonic power declines. With mercantilism, the effect is most likely t o be clear one way or
22
The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
the other, the outcome depending on the motives underlying protectionism. Where the motives concern the pursuit of state power, the malign effect is likely. Where they concern welfare, benign mercantilism becomes possible. But in neither case are factors arising from economic structure likely to dominate the use of force. As I argued in section 2, the use of force is influenced much more powerfully by military and political factors than by economic ones. The danger arises when a malevolent economic structure, whether liberal or mercantilist, coincides with military and political conditions conducive to the use of force. This was the case during the 1930s, but it does not appear to be a significant hazard for the foreseeable future.
Conclusion We are left with a rather evenly balanced set of arguments about the relationship between economic structure and international security. Because of the dominance of military and political factors in determining the use of force, the impact of economic structure on international security is anyway subordinate. Within that subordinate position the choice between liberalism and mercantilism offers no decisive direction. Benign and malevolent features attend both options, but their effects are not strong enough to determine the basic character of international relations. In other words, the effect of either a liberal or a mercantilist economic structure is too heavily influenced by the particularities of other historical conditions to have, by itself, a predictable impact on the stability of international relations. O n these grounds, we can conclude that the conventional wisdom of the liberal case is extremely weak. Liberal economic structure has neither a strong nor an unconditional constraining effect on the use of force. Security considerations therefore cannot be used convincingly either as a major support for maintaining the contemporary international economic system or as a decisive point against moving toward a more mercantilist structure of international economic relations. This conclusion lacks the simple blackand-white certainty of the liberal case. But it does have the advantage of making available the benign mercantilist option as an acceptable alternative when the liberal system begins to look unsustainable. Such an alternative goes a long way toward removing the dilemma that liberal ideologues create for themselves. Because they reject mercantilism on security as well as on economic grounds, they are left with nowhere to turn when the liberal system collapses. If these arguments are correct, recent thinking on how to manage a liberal system in the absence of hegemonic leadership might fruitfully be reoriented toward the more salient problem of how to manage the transition from a liberal to a mercantilist international economic structure. A major issue within that transition is how to ensure that the new mercantilism is organized on a scale sufficient to avoid serious economic difficulties. A shift of thinking along these lines should be helped by the realization that the polarization between
li~i/dri
Economics a n d Security
23
liberal and mercantilist systems is frequently overdrawn. The middle ground is not merely a space that has to be crossed in the transition from one extreme to another. It contains real options, which could well be more stable than the theoretical ideals of efficiency and self-reliance that lie on either side.
Acknowledgements 1 would like to thank Charles Jones, Robert Skidelsky, Chris Farrands, and the reviewers for International Organrzation for their comments on various drafts of this article.
Notes 1. Some wrlters, for example, R~chardK. Ashley, T h e Polttrcal Economy of War and P e a ~ e (London: Pmter, 1980), pp. 269-86, and Immanuel Wallerstem, "The Rise and Future Dein~se Comparatrve Studres rn Socrety and H r s t ~ r y16, 4 (1974), of the World C a p ~ t a l ~ System," st pp. 387-415, would take the view that this is too narrow a conception of economic structure: that it represents at best a substructure within a larger framework. Of other theories about the relationship between economic structure and the use of force, Marxism-Leninism is an obvious example. For a summary and critique of the Marxist view, see Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 75-84. 2. The extreme liberal position has already been adequately dismissed, for example, in Lord Robbins, Money, Trade and International Relatrons (London: Macmillan, 1971),chaps. 9 and 1 1. 3. On the intellectual history of liberal thinking, and its connection to free trade, see F.H. Hlnsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 196.3), chaps. 5 and 6 . On the history of free trade up to the 1930s, see Norman McCord, ed., Free Tradc: Theory and Practice from Adam Smith t o Keynes (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1970). 4. Richard N. Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Drplomacy: T h e Origins and Prospects of O u r Internotronal Econonllc Order (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 7-9. See also pp. 101-12, 382-84. 5. For a summary of this development, see E.H. Carr, Natiotralrsm and After (1945; rpr. 1.ondon: Macmillan, 19681, pp. 1-33. 6. Kenneth Waltz, "The Myth of Interdependence," in Charles Kindleberger, ed., The. international Corporatzon (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970), pp. 205-6. 7. See John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, "The Imperialism of Free Trade," and Oliver MacDonagh, "The Anti-Imperialism of Free Trade," both in A.G.L.. Shnw, ed., Great Brrtarn and the Colorizes 181.5-186.5 (London: Methuen, 1970), chaps. 7 and 8; and D.C.M. I'latt, "The Imperialism of Free Trade: Some Reservations," Economic History Review 2 1 , 2 ( 1968 1, pp. 296-306. 8. V.I. Lenm, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalisnz (1916). For a less ideological discussion of the role of "environmental supply" in international relations, see Richard Rosecrance, international Relations: Peace or War? (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), chap. 6. 9. See Robert Skidelsky, "Retreat from Leadership: The Evolution of British Economic Foreign Policy, 1870-1939," in Benjamin Rowland, ed., Balance of Power or Hegemony: T h e Interwar Monetary System (New York: New York University Press, 1976), pp. 147-92, and Stephen D. Krasner, "State Power and the Structure of International Trade," World Politics 28. 3 (1976), pp. 317-47. 10. Waltz, "Myth of Interdependence," pp. 205-20. 1 I. Klaus Knorr, Power and Wealth (Imndon: Macrnillan, 1973), p. 196, and "On the International Uses of Military Force in the Contemporary World," Orbrs 2 1, 1 ( 1977), pp. 7-9, 16; Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, Power and Interdependence (Boston: I.ittle, Brown, 1977), p. 28; Robert W. Tucker, T h e inequality of Nations (London: Robertson, 19771,
24
The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
pp. 174-75; Robert J. Art, "To What Ends Military Power?" lnternational Security 4, 4 (1980), pp. 31-35; and Wolfram Hanrieder, "Dissolving International Politics: Reflections on the Nation-State," American Political Science Review 72, 4 (1978), pp. 1279-80. 12. See, for example, Keohane and Nye, Power a n d Interdependence, pp. 28-29; Tucker, Inequality of Nations, pp. 174-75; and Robert Gilpin, US. P o u w and the Multinational Corporation (London: Macmillan, 1976), p. 227. 13. Edward L. Morse, "Interdependence in World Affairs," in J.N. Rosenau, K.W. Thompson, and G. Boyd, eds., World Politics (New York: Free I'ress, 1976), p. 676; Knorr, Power and Wealth, p. 9; C.A. Murdock, "Economic Factors as Objects of Security," in Klaus Knorr and Frank Trager, eds., Economic Issues and National Security (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1977), pp. 70-72; and Hanrieder, "Dissolving International Politics," pp. 1279-80. 14. For discussion, see Gilpin, War and Change, chap. 4. 15. Art, "To What Ends," p. 5. Thomas Schelling and Robert Osgood have also made extensive use of a very similar distinction. See Schelling, Arms a n d Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), chap. 1, and Osgood and Robert W. Tucker, Force, Order andlustice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), pt. I, chaps. 1 and 3. 16. Greece and Turkey are notable exceptions t o this generalization. 17. For the disutility view, see Walter Millis, "The Uselessness of Military Power," in William Coplin and Charles Kegley Jr., eds., A Multi-Method Introduction to International Politics (Chicago: Markham, 1971), pp. 114-27. Public doubts about the utility of force arose both from the paralysis of deterrence and from America's debacle in Vietnam. They stimulated a host of rebuttals, most of which focused on the continued utility of "peaceful" uses of force despite increased restraints on its "physical" use. See Art, "To What Ends," pp. 27-29; Michael Howard, "Military Power and lnternational Order," lnternational Affairs 4 0 , 3 (1964), p. 405; Osgood and Tucker, Force, Order and Justice, p. 179; Edward A. Kolodziej and Robert Harkavy, "Developmg States and the International Security System," Journal of International Affairs 34, 1 (1980), p. 59; Laurence Martin, "The Changed Role of Military Power," International Affairs special issue (November 1970), p. 107. For a useful overview of the debate, see Knorr, "On the International Uses," pp. 5-27. 18. O n this theme see Martin, "Changed Role," pp. 101-6; Howard, "Military Power," pp. 397-408; Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (London: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 189-94; and Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear: The National Security Problem rn lnternational Relations (Brighton: Harvester, 1983), chap. 6. 19. Keohane and Nye, Power a n d Interdependence, pp. 28-29; Knorr, Power and Wealth, respectively, p. 196, and pp. 7-9, 13-15, 18-19; and Kolodziej and Harkavy, "Developing States," pp. 59-87. 20. Buzan, People, States and Fear, chap. 4. For the bipolar case, see Kenneth Waltz, Theory of Internatronal Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979), chap. 8. 21. For example, Art, "To What Ends," pp. 29-30; Charles L. Schultze, "The Economic Content of National Security Policy," Foreign Affairs 51, 3 (1973), pp. 529-35; Fred Hirsch and Michael Doyle, "Politicization in the World Economy: Necessary Conditions for an International Economic Order," in Hirsch, Doyle, and Edward L. Morse, Alternatives to Monetary Disorder (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977), pp. 25-34; Gilpin, War a n d Change, pp. 253-55; and L.B. Krause and J.S. Nye, "Reflections on the Economics and Politics of International Economic Organizations," in C.F. Bergsten and Krause, eds., World Politrcs a n d International Economics (Washingon, D.C.: Brooking, 1975), pp. 324-25. 22. Gilpin, U.S. Power, pp. 234-35. 23. Charles P. Kindleberger, The World in Depressron 1929-19.39 (London: Allen Lane, 1973), pp. 26, 292. 24. Joan E. Spero, The Politics of International Economic Relations (London: Allen & Unwin, 1977), p. 65. See also Robert Gilpin, "Economic Interdependence and National Security in Historical Perspective," in Knorr and Trager, Economic Issues, p. 55; Krause and Nye, "Reflections," p. 324; David H. Blake and Robert S. Walters, The Politics of Global Economic Relatrons (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976), pp. 11-12; Hirsch and Doyle, "Politicization," p. 15.
Buran
Economics and Security
25
25. For example, Blake and Walters, Politics of Global Economic Relations, p. 26; Douglas Evans, The Polrtics of Trade: The Evolution of the Superbloc (1.ondon: Macmillan, 1974), pp. 15-16; Schultze, "Economic Content," pp. 538-39. 26. For one left-of-center scenario, see Mary Kaldor, T h e Disintegrating West (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978). 27. Buzan, People, States and Fear, chap. 6. 28. David Calleo, "The Decline and Rebuilding of an International Economic System," in Calleo et al., Money and the Comtng World Order (New York: New York University Press, 1976), pp. 51-62, and "The Historiography of the Interwar Period: Reconsiderations," in Rowland, Balance of Power, pp. 232-51, is perhaps the strongest proponent of bloc mercantilism. Hirsch and Iloyle, "Politicization," pp. 49-55, seem to lean in this direction, though they do nor make their position explicit. Evans, Politics of Trade, sees such blocs as a coming trend but has mixed vlews abour their merits, fearmg that they will recreate the environment of the 1930s. Charles Kindleberger, "Systems of International Economic Organization," in Calleo et al., Money and the Coming World Order, pp. 28-30, thinks that a hloc system would not work. 29. The economic debate on this idea is suggestive but inconclusive. The original work hy Jacob Vlner, The Customs Union lssue (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1950), argued that a customs union (for example, a regional bloc) might well compensate in internal efficiencies what it lost by imposing trade barriers between itself and the rest of the world. This would be so particularly if the global tradlng system already deviated substantially from free-trade behavior. Static analysis, however, does not cope well with this problem, and the exist~nglirrrarure has made little headway against the mass of nonstandard and dynamic v ~ r i ahles that mfluence the outcome in any given case. See Peter Robson, The Economics of lnternational Integration (London: Allen & Unwin, 1980), and Am El-Agraa and A.J. Jo~les, Theory of Customs Unions (Oxford: Allan, 1981). See also the fairly positive econon~icview of a hloc mercantilist projection in lnterfutures: Facrng the Future (Paris: OECD, 1979). 30. J.A. Hohson, Imperialism: A Study (London: Nisbet, 1902), pp. 91, 99. David Calleo and Benjamin Rowland, America and the World Political Economy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), chap. 10, argue for a slmilar approach. 31. Predominantly welfare motives in protectionism have roots golng back at least as far as F. List in the 19th century, and they can also be found in the work of Polanyi, Keynes, arid E.H. Carr (see David J. Sylvan, "The Newest Mercantilism," International Organization 35, 2 1198 I ] , pp. 381-82). In the contemporary context, Melvyn B. Krauss, The N e w Protectronrsm: The Welfare State and lnternational Trade (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), esp. pp. xx-xxiii, gives a detailed, but unsympathetic, account of welfare protectionism. John C;. Ruggie, "Internarional Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in rhe Posrwar Economic Order," Internatronal Organization 36, 2 (1982), pp. 379-415, gives a penetrating insight into the links between the post-1945 liberal system and the emergent welfare protectionism. 32. On the continuity o f these normative elements, see Ruggie, "International Regimes," esp. pp. 393-415. 33. Buzan, People, States and Fear, chap. 5. See also Calleo and Rowland, America and the World, chaps. 9 and 10, and Johan Galtung, "A Structural Theory of Imperialism," Journal of Peace Research 8, 2 (1971), pp. 8 1-1 18. 34. O n this theme, see Barry Buzan, "Security Strategies for Dissociation," in lohn Ruggie, ed., The Antinomies of Interdependence: National Welfare and the International Uiz~isionof Labor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), chap. 8. 35. Charles P. Kindleberger, "Dominance and Leadership in the International Economy," International Studies Quarterly 25, 2-3 (1981), p. 247. 36. On the collective goods point, see Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations: E c o n o m ~ rGrowth, Stagflation, and Social Rzgidities (New Haven: Yale IJniversity Press, 1982); Olson and R. Zeckhauser, "An Economic Theory of Alliances," Revieu, o f Eronomri.s and Statistics 48, 3 (1966), pp. 266-79; Bruce M. Russett and John D. Sullivan, "Collect~ve Goods and International Organization," lnternational Organization 2 5 , 4 ( 1 971), pp. 845-65; and Olson, "Increasing the Incentives for lnternat~onal Cooperation," Irtternatio~~al Orgonrzation 25, 4 ( 1 9 7 l ) , pp. 866-74.
26
The Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security Agenda
37. Views in support of the necessity of a hegemonic leader can be found in Skidelsky, "Retreat from Leadership"; Kindleberger, "Systems," pp. 35-38, World in Depression, pp. 26-28, 292-308, and "Dominance and Leadership," pp. 242-53; Robert 0 . Keohane, "The Theory of Hegemonic Stability and Changes in International Economic Regimes, 1967-1977," in Ole Holsti, R. Siverson, and A.L. George, eds., Change in the International System (Boulder: Westview, 1980); and Gilpin, U.S. Power. One of the few sources explicitly enthusiastic about collective leadership is Keohane and Nye, Power and Interdependence, pp. 229-35. Views against the practicality of collective leadership can be found in Kindleberger, "Dominance and Leadership," p. 253, "Systems," pp. 35-37, and World in Depression, pp. 299-308; and Calleo, "Decline and Rebuilding," pp. 51-52. Ruggie, "International Regimes," argues with some enthusiasm for the potential of a rule-based system, and Cleveland, in Calleo et al., Money and the Coming World Order, and Hanrieder, "Dissolving International Politics," lean in this direction, but more out of resignation than enthusiasm. Kindleberger, "Systems," pp. 37-38, rejects the rules system explicitly. Even Ruggie views the rules system primarily as an extension of a prior period of hegemonic leadership. 38. Gilpin, U.S. Power, p. 259. 39. Calleo, "Historiography of the Interwar," pp. 252-60. 40. Kindleberger, "Dominance and Leadership," pp. 242-53, makes the distinction between leadership greed and free riders as the cause of entropy in a liberal system. For a detailed discussion of this question generally, see Gilpin, War a n d Change, chaps. 4 and 5. See also Buzan, People, States and Fear, pp. 1 4 6 4 9 . For a historical examination of the British decline from leadership, see Skidelsky, "Retreat from Leadership." 41. Calleo, "Decline and Rebuilding," pp. 50-51, "Historiography of the Interwar," p. 259, and "Inflation and American Power," Foreign Affairs 5 9 , 4 (1981), pp. 781-812; C.F. Bergsten, Robert Keohane, and J.S. Nye, "International Politics and International Economics: A Framework for Analysis," lnternational Organization 29, 1 (1975), pp. 11-18. 42. Skidelsky, "Retreat from Leadership," pp. 154-68; Krasner, "State Power," p. 320; Sylvan, "Newest Mercantilism," pp. 376-78. 43. Olson, Rise and Decline, elevates the role of domestic structural rigidities t o the status of a general perspective o n macroeconomics. See also Keohane, "Theory of Hegemonic Stability"; R.I. Meltzer, "Contemporary Dimensions of International Trade Relations," in Knorr and Trager, Economic Issues, p. 215. 44. OECD, Interfutures, pp. 377-78; Calleo, "Inflation and American Power," pp. 794-812. 45. William Diebold, Jr., "Adaptation to Structural Change," International Affairs 54, 4 (1978), pp. 573-88; Jacques Pelkmans, "The Many Faces of National Economic Security," and Theo Peeters, "National Economic Security and the Maintenance of the Welfare State," in Frans A.M. Alting von Geusau and Pelkmans, eds., National Economic Security: Perspectives, Threats and Policies (Tilburg, Netherlands: John F. Kennedy Institute, 1982), chaps. 1 and 3; OECD, Interfutures, pp. 122-86; Klaus Knorr, "Economic Interdependence and National Security," C.A. Murdock, "Economic Factors as Objects of Security," and Gilpin, "Economic Interdependence," all in Knorr and Trager, Economic Issues. Many of these negative pressures are common to both the hegemon (see note 43) and other states within the liberal economic system. See also Buzan, People, States and Fear, pp. 142-44. 46. Gilpin, "Economic Interdependence," pp. 34-35, 39-42; Calleo, "Decline and Rebuilding," pp. 4 4 4 5 , 50-51, and "Historiography of the Interwar," p. 259. 47. Morse, "Interdependence," pp. 670-81. 48. Skidelsky, "Retreat from Leadership," pp. 163-64. 49. Hirsch and Doyle, "Politicization," p. 34; Evans, Polrtics of Trade, p. viii.
Sex and Death in t h e Rational W o r l d o f Defense Intellectuals Carol Cohn
"I can't believe that," said Alice. "Can't you?" the Queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes." Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said. "One can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." [LEWIS CAKKOLL, Through the Looking Class] y close encounter with nuclear strategic analysis started in the summer of 1984. I was one of forty-eight college teachers (one of ten .women) attending a summer workshop on nuclear weapons, nuclear strategic doctrine, and arms control, taught by distinguished "defense intellectuals." Defense intellectuals are men (and indeed, they are virtually all men) "who use the concept of deterrence to explain why it is safe to have weapons of a kind and number it is not safe to use."' They are civilians who move in and out of government, working sometimes as administrative officials or consultants, sometimes at universities and think tanks. They formulate what they call "rational" systems for dealing with the problems created by nuclear weapons: how to manage the arms race; how to deter the use of nuclear weapons; how to fight a nuclear war if deterrence fails. It is their calculations that are used to explain the necessity of having nuclear destructive capability at what George Kennan has called "levels of such grotesque dimensions as t o defy rational understanding."' At the same time, it is their reasoning that is used to explain why it is not safe to live without nuclear weapons.' In short, they create the theory that informs and legitimates American nuclear strategic practice. For two weeks, I listened to men engage in dispassionate discussion of nuclear war. I found myself aghast, but morbidly fascinated - not by nuclear weaponry, or by images of nuclear destruction, but by the extraordinary Source: S~gns:Jo~rrnalo f Women In Culture and Society, 12(4)( 1 987): 687-71 8.
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The Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security Agenda
abstraction and removal from what I knew as reality that characterized the professional discourse. I became obsessed by the question, How can they think this way? At the end of the summer program, when I was offered the opportunity to stay on at the university's center on defense technology and arms control (hereafter known as "the Center"), I jumped at the chance to find out how they could think "this" way. I spent the next year of my life immersed in the world of defense intellectuals. As a participant observer, I attended lectures, listened to arguments, conversed with defense analysts, and interviewed graduate students at the beginning, middle, and end of their training. I learned their specialized language, and I tried to understand what they thought and how they thought. I sifted through their logic for its internal inconsistencies and its unspoken assumptions. But as I learned their language, as I became more and more engaged with their information and their arguments, I found that my own thinking was changing. Soon, I could no longer cling to the comfort of studying an external and objectified "them." I had to confront a new question: How can I think this way? How can any of us? Throughout my time in the world of strategic analysis, it was hard not to notice the ubiquitous weight of gender, both in social relations and in the language itself; it is an almost entirely male world (with the exception of the secretaries), and the language contains many rather arresting metaphors. There is, of course, an important and growing body of feminist theory about gender and l a n g ~ a g eIn . ~addition, there is a rich and increasingly vast body of theoretical work exploring the gendered aspects of war and militarism, which examines such issues as men's and women's different relations to militarism and pacifism, and the ways in which gender ideology is used in the service of militarization. Some of the feminist work on gender and war is also part of an emerging, powerful feminist critique of ideas of rationality as I am indebted to all of these .~ they have developed in Western c ~ l t u r eWhile bodies of work, my own project is most closely linked to the development of feminist critiques of dominant Western concepts of reason. My goal is to discuss the nature of nuclear strategic thinking; in particular, my emphasis is on the role of its specialized language, a language that I call "technostrat e g i ~ . "I~have come to believe that this language both reflects and shapes the nature of the American nuclear strategic project, that it plays a central role in allowing defense intellectuals to think and act as they do, and that feminists who are concerned about nuclear weaponry and nuclear war must give careful attention to the language we choose to use - whom it allows us to communicate with and what it allows us to think as well as say.
Stage 1 : Listening Clean Bombs and Clean Language
Entering the world of defense intellectuals was a bizarre experience - bizarre because it is a world where men spend their days calmly and matter-of-factly
Cohn
Defense Intellectuals
29
discussing nuclear weapons, nuclear strategy, and nuclear war. The discussions are carefully and intricately reasoned, occurring seemingly without any sense of horror, urgency, or moral outrage - in fact, there seems to be no graphic reality behind the words, as they speak of "first strikes," "counterforce exchanges," and "limited nuclear war," or as they debate the comparative values of a "minimum deterrent posture" versus a "nuclear warfighting capability." Yet what is striking about the men themselves is not, as the content of their conversations might suggest, their cold-bloodedness. Rather, it is that they are a group of men unusually endowed with charm, humor, intelligence, concern, and decency. Reader, I liked them. At least, I liked many of them. The attempt to understand how such men could contribute to an endeavor that I see as so fundamentally destructive became a continuing obsession for me, a lens through which I came to examine all of my experiences in their world. In this early stage, I was gripped by the extraordinary language used to discuss nuclear war. What hit me first was the elaborate use of abstraction and euphemism, of words so bland that they never forced the speaker or enabled the listener to touch the realities of nuclear holocaust that lay behind the words. Anyone who has seen pictures of Hiroshima burn victims or tried to imagine the pain of hundreds of glass shards blasted into flesh may find it perverse beyond imagination to hear a class of nuclear devices matterof-factly referred to as "clean bombs." "Clean bombs" are nuclear devices that are largely fusion rather than fission and that therefore release a higher quantity of energy, not as radiation, but as blast, as destructive explosive power.' "Clean bombs" may provide the perfect metaphor for the language of defense analysts and arms controllers. This language has enormous destructive power, but without emotional fallout, without the emotional fallout that would result if it were clear one was talking about plans for mass murder, mangled bodies, and unspeakable human suffering. Defense analysts talk about "countervalue attacks" rather than about incinerating cities. Human death, in nuclear parlance, is most often referred to as "collateral damage"; for, as one defense analyst said wryly, "The Air Force doesn't target people, it targets shoe f a c t o r i e ~ . " ~ Some phrases carry this cleaning-up to the point of inverting meaning. The MX missile will carry ten warheads, each with the explosure power of 3 0 0 4 7 5 kilotons of TNT: one missile the bearer of destruction approximately 250-400 times that of the Hiroshima bombing.' Ronald Reagan has dubbed the MX missile "the Peacekeeper." While this renaming was the object of considerable scorn in the community of defense analysts, these very same analysts refer to the MX as a "damage limitation weapon.""' These phrases, only a few of the hundreds that could be discussed, exemplify the astounding chasm between image and reality that characterizes technostrategic language. They also hint at the terrifying way in which the existence of nuclear devices has distorted our perceptions and redefined the
30
T h e Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security A g e n d a
world. "Clean bombs" tells us that radiation is the only "dirty" part of killing people. To take this one step further, such phrases can even seem healthfull curative/corrective. So that we not only have "clean bombs" but also "surgically clean strikes" ("counterforce" attacks that can purportedly "take out" - i.e., accurately destroy - an opponent's weapons or command centers without causing significant injury to anything else). The image of excision of the offending weapon is unspeakably ludicrous when the surgical tool is not a delicately controlled scalpel but a nuclear warhead. And somehow it seems to be forgotten that even scalpels spill blood.' White M e n i n T i e s Discussing Missile Size
Feminists have often suggested that an important aspect of the arms race is phallic worship, that "missile envy" is a significant motivating force in the nuclear build-up.12 I have always found this an uncomfortably reductionist explanation and hoped that my research at the Center would yield a more complex analysis. But still, I was curious about the extent to which I might find a sexual subtext in the defense professionals' discourse. I was not prepared for what I found. I think I had naively imagined myself as a feminist spy in the house of death - that I would need to sneak around and eavesdrop on what men said in unguarded moments, using all my subtlety and cunning to unearth whatever sexual imagery might be underneath how they thought and spoke. I had naively believed that these men, at least in public, would appear to be aware of feminist critiques. If they had not changed their language, I thought that at least at some point in a long talk about "penetration aids," someone would suddenly look up, slightly embarrassed to be caught in such blatant confirmation of feminist analyses of What's Going On Here.13 Of course, I was wrong. There was no evidence that any feminist critiques had ever reached the ears, much less the minds, of these men. American military dependence on nuclear weapons was explained as "irresistible, because you get more bang for the buck." Another lecturer solemnly and scientifically announced "to disarm is to get rid of all your stuff." (This may, in turn, explain why they see serious talk of nuclear disarmament as perfectly resistible, not to mention foolish. If disarmament is emasculation, how could any real man even consider it?) A professor's explanation of why the MX missile is to be laced in the silos of the newest Minuteman missiles, instead of replacing the older, less accurate ones, was "because they're in the nicest hole - you're not going to take the nicest missile you have and put it in a crummy hole." Other lectures were filled with discussion of vertical erector launchers, thrust-to-weight ratios, soft lay downs, deep penetration, and the comparative advantages of protracted versus spasm attacks - or what one military adviser to the National Security Council has called "releasing 70 to 80 percent of our megatonnage in one orgasmic whump."14
iat,
Defense Intellectuals
31
There was serious concern about the need to harden our missiles and the need to "face it, the Russians are a little harder than we are." Disbelieving glances would occasionally pass between me and my one ally in the summer program, another woman, but no one else seemed to notice. If the imagery is transparent, its significance may be less so. The temptation is to draw some conclusions about the defense intellectuals themselves - about what they are really talking about, or their motivations; but the temptation is worth resisting. Individual motivations cannot necessarily be read directly from imagery; the imagery itself does not originate in these particular individuals but in a broader cultural context. Sexual imagery has, of course, been a part of the world of warfare since long before nuclear weapons were even a gleam in a physicist's eye. The history of the atomic bomb project itself is rife with overt images of competitive male sexuality, as is the discourse of the early nuclear physicists, strategists, and SAC commanders.'" Both the military itself and the arms manufacturers are constantly exploiting the phallic imagery and promise of sexual domination that their weapons so conveniently suggest. A quick glance at the publications that constitute some of the research sources for defense intellectuals makes the depth and pervasiveness of the imagery evident. Air Force Magazine's advertisements for new weapons, for example, rival Playboy as a catalog of men's sexual anxieties and fantasies. Consider the following, from the June 1985 issue: emblazoned in bold letters across the top of a two-page advertisement for the AV-8B Harrier 11 - "Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick." The copy below boasts "an exceptional thrust to weight ratio" and "vectored thrust capability that makes the ... unique rapid response possible." Then, just in case we've failed to get the message, the last line reminds us, "Just the sort of 'Big Stick' Teddy Roosevelt had in mind way back in 1901 . " I 6 An ad for the BKEP (BLU-106IB) reads: The Only Way to Solve Some Problems is to Dig Deep. THE BOMB, KINETIC ENERGY PENETRATOR "Will provide the tactical air commander with efficient power to deny or significantly delay enemy airfield operations." "Designed to maximize runway cratering by optimizing penetration dynamics and utilizing the most efficient warhead yet designed."" (In case the symbolism of "cratering" seems far-fetched, I must point out that I a m not the first to see it. The French use the Mururoa Atoll in the South Pacific for their nuclear tests and assign a woman's name to each of the craters they gouge out of the earth.) Another, truly extraordinary, source of phallic imagery is to be found in descriptions of nuclear blasts themselves. Here, for example, is one by
32
The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
journalist William Laurence, who was brought to Nagasaki by the Air Force to witness the bombing. "Then, just when it appeared as though the thing had settled down in to a state of permanence, there came shooting out of the top a giant mushroom that increased the size of the pillar to a total of 45,000 feet. The mushroom top was even more alive than the pillar, seething and boiling in a white fury of creamy foam, sizzling upward and then descending earthward, a thousand geysers rolled into one. It kept struggling in an elemental fury, like a creature in the act of breaking the bonds that held it down."18 Given the degree to which it suffuses their world, that defense intellectuals themselves use a lot of sexual imagery does not seem especially surprising. Nor does it, by itself, constitute grounds for imputing motivation. For me, the interesting issue is not so much the imagery's psychodynamic origins, as how it functions. How does it serve to make it possible for strategic planners and other defense intellectuals to do their macabre work? How does it function in their construction of a work world that feels tenable? Several stories illustrate the complexity. During the summer program, a group of us visited the New London Navy base where nuclear submarines are homeported and the General Dynamics Electric Boat boatyards where a new Trident submarine was being constructed. At one point during the trip we took a tour of a nuclearpowered submarine. When we reached the part of the sub where the missiles are housed, the officer accompanying us turned with a grin and asked if we wanted to stick our hands through a hole to "pat the missile." Pat the missile? The image reappeared the next week, when a lecturer scornfully declared that the only real reason for deploying cruise and Pershing I1 missiles in Western Europe was "so that our allies can pat them." Some months later, another group of us went to be briefed at NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command). On the way back, our plane went to refuel at Offut Air Force Base, the Strategic Air Command headquarters near Omaha, Nebraska. When word leaked out that our landing would be delayed because the new B-1 bomber was in the area, the plane became charged with a tangible excitement that built as we flew in our holding pattern, people craning their necks to try to catch a glimpse of the B-1 in the skies, and climaxed as we touched down on the runway and hurtled past it. Later, when I returned to the Center I encountered a man who, unable to go on the trip, said to me enviously, "I hear you got to pat a B-1." What is all this "patting"? What are men doing when they "pat" these high-tech phalluses? Patting is an assertion of intimacy, sexual possession, affectionate domination. The thrill and pleasure of "patting the missile" is the proximity of all that phallic power, the possibility of vicariously appropriating it as one's own. But if the predilection for patting phallic objects indicates something of the homoerotic excitement suggested by the language, it also has another side. For patting is not only an act of sexual intimacy. It is also what one does to babies, small children, the pet dog. One pats that which is small,
Ch)
h n Defense Intellectuals
33
cute, and harmless - not terrifyingly destructive. Pat it, and its lethality disappears. Much of the sexual imagery I heard was rife with the sort of ambiguity suggested by "patting the missiles." The imagery can be construed as a deadly serious display of the connections between masculine sexuality and the arms race. At the same time, it can also be heard as a way of minimizing the seriousness of militarist endeavors, of denying their deadly consequences. A former Pentagon target analyst, in telling me why he thought plans for "limited nuclear war" were ridiculous, said, "Look, you gotta understand that it's a pissing contest - you gotta expect them to use everything they've got." What does this image say? Most obviously, that this is all about competition for manhood, and thus there is tremendous danger. But at the same time, the image diminishes the contest and its outcomes, by representing it as an act of boyish mischief.
Fathers, Sons, and Virgins "Virginity" also made frequent, arresting, appearances in nuclear discourse. In the summer program, one professor spoke of India's explosion of a nuclear bomb as "losing her virginity"; the question of how the United States should react was posed as whether or not we should "throw her away." It is a complicated use of metaphor. Initiation into the nuclear world involves being deflowered, losing one's innocence, knowing sin, all wrapped up into one. Although the manly United States is no virgin, and proud of it, the double standard raises its head in the question of whether or not a woman is still worth anything to a man once she has lost her virginity. New Zealand's refusal to allow nuclear-armed or nuclear-powered warships into its ports prompted similar reflections on virginity. A good example is provided by Retired U.S. Air Force General Ross Milton's angry column in Air Force Magazine, entitled, "Nuclear Virginity." His tone is that of a man whose advances have been spurned. He is contemptuous of the woman's protestation that she wants to remain pure, innocent of nuclear weapons; her moral reluctance is a quaint and ridiculous throwback. But beyond contempt, he also feels outraged - after all, this is a woman we have pazd for, who still will not come across. He suggests that we withdraw our goods and services - and then we will see just how long she tries to hold onto her virtue.'' The patriarchal bargain could not be laid out more clearly. Another striking metaphor of patriarchal power came early in the summer program, when one of the faculty was giving a lecture on deterrence. To give us a concrete example from outside the world of military strategy, he described having a seventeen-year-old son of whose TV-watching habits he disapproves. ~ e - d e a lwith s the situation by threatening to break his son's arm if he turns on the TV again. "That's deterrence!" he said triumphantly. What is so striking about this analogy is that at first it seems so inappropriate. After all, we have been taught to believe that nuclear deterrence is a relation between two countries of more or less equal strength, in which one
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
is only able to deter the other from doing it great harm by threatening to do the same in return. But in this case, the partners are unequal, and the stronger one is using his superior force not to protect himself or others from grave injury but to coerce. But if the analogy seems to be a flawed expression of deterrence as we have been taught to view it, it is nonetheless extremely revealing about U.S. nuclear deterrence as an operational, rather than rhetorical or declaratory policy. What it suggests is the speciousness of the defensive rhetoric that surrounds deterrence - of the idea that we face an implacable enemy and that we stockpile nuclear weapons only in an attempt to defend ourselves. Instead, what we see is the drive to superior power as a means to exercise one's will and a readiness to threaten the disproportionate use of force in order to achieve one's own ends. There is no question here of recognizing competing but legitimate needs, no desire to negotiate, discuss, or compromise, and most important, no necessity for that recognition or desire, since the father carries the bigger stick.20 The United States frequently appeared in discussions about international politics as "father," sometimes coercive, sometimes benevolent, but always knowing best. The single time that any mention was made of countries other than the United States, our NATO allies, or the USSR was in a lecture on nuclear proliferation. The point was made that younger countries simply could not be trusted to know what was good for them, nor were they yet fully responsible, so nuclear weapons in their hands would be much more dangerous than in ours. The metaphor used was that of parents needing to set limits for their children. Domestic Bliss
Sanitized abstraction and sexual and patriarchal imagery, even if disturbing, seemed to fit easily into the masculinist world of nuclear war planning. What did not fit, what surprised and puzzled me most when I first heard it, was the set of metaphors that evoked images that can only be called domestic. Nuclear missiles are based in "silos." On a Trident submarine, which carries twenty-four multiple warhead nuclear missiles, crew members call the part of the submarine where the missiles are lined up in their silos ready for launching "the Christmas tree farm." What could be more bucolic - farms, silos, Christmas trees? In the ever-friendly, even romantic world of nuclear weaponry, enemies "exchange" warheads; one missile "takes out" another; weapons systems can "marry up"; "coupling" is sometimes used to refer to the wiring between mechanisms of warning and response, or to the psychopolitical links between strategic (intercontinental) and theater (European-based) weapons. The patterns in which a MIRVed missile's nuclear warheads land is known as a " f ~ o t p r i n t . "These ~ ~ nuclear explosives are not dropped; a "bus" "delivers" them. In addition, nuclear bombs are not referred to as bombs or even warheads; they are referred to as "reentry vehicles," a term far more bland and
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benign, which is then shortened to "RVs," a term not only totally abstract and removed from the reality of a bomb but also resonant with the image of the recreational vehicles of the ideal family vacation. These domestic images must be more than simply one more form of distancing, one more way to remove oneself from the grisly reality behind the words; ordinary abstraction is adequate t o that task. Something else, something very peculiar, is going on here. Calling the pattern in which bombs fall a "footprint" almost seems a willful distorting process, a playful, perverse refusal of accountability - because to be accountable to reality is to he unable to do this work. These words may also serve to domesticate, to tame the wild and uncontrollable forces of nuclear destruction. The metaphors minimize; they are a way to make phenomena that are beyond what the mind can encompass smaller and safer, and thus they are a way of gaining mastery over the unmasterable. The fire-breathing dragon under the bed, the one who threatens to incinerate your family, your town, your planet, becomes a pet you can pat. Using language evocative of everyday experiences also may simply serve to make the nuclear strategic community more comfortable with what they are doing. "PAL" (permissive action links) is the carefully constructed, friendly acronym for the electronic system designed to prevent the unauthorized firing of nuclear warheads. "BAMBI" was the acronym developed for an early version of an antiballistic missile system (for Ballistic Missile Boost Intercept). The president's Annual Nuclear Weapons Stockpile Memorandum, which outlines both short- and long-range plans for production of new nuclear weapons, is benignly referred to as "the shopping list." The National Command Authorities choose from a "menu of options" when deciding among different targeting plans. The "cookie cutter" is a phrase used to describe a particular model of nuclear attack. Apparently it is also used at the Department of Defense to refer to the neutron bomb.12 The imagery that domesticates, that humanizes insentient weapons, may also serve, paradoxically, to make it all right to ignore sentient human bodies, human l i v e s . ' ~ e r h a p s it is possible to spend one's time thinking about scenarios for the use of destructive technology and to have human bodies remain invisible in that technological world precisely because that world itself now includes the domestic, the human, the warm, and playful - the Christmas trees, the RVs, the affectionate pats. It is a world that is in some sense complete unto itself; it even includes death and loss. But it is weapons, not humans, that get "killed." "Fratricide" occurs when one of your warheads "kills" another of your own warheads. There is much discussion of "vulnerability" and "survivability," but it is about the vulnerability and survival of weapons systems, not people.
There is one set of domestic images that demands separate attention - images that suggest men's desire to appropriate from women the power of giving
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life and that conflate creation and destruction. The bomb project is rife with images of male birth.24In December 1942, Ernest Lawrence's telegram to the physicists at Chicago read, "Congratulations to the new parents. Can hardly wait to see the new arrival."2s At Los Alamos, the atom bomb was referred to as "Oppenheimer's baby." One of the physicists working at Los Alamos, Richard Feynman, writes that when he was temporarily on leave after his wife's death, he received a telegram saying, "The baby is expected on such and such a day."26At Lawrence Livermore, the hydrogen bomb was referred to as "Teller's baby," although those who wanted to disparage Edward Teller's contribution claimed he was not the bomb's father but its mother. They claimed that Stanislaw Ulam was the real father; he had the all important idea and inseminated Teller with it. Teller only "carried it" after that.27 Forty years later, this idea of male birth and its accompanying belittling of maternity - the denial of women's role in the process of creation and the reduction of "motherhood" to the provision of nurturance (apparently Teller did not need to provide an egg, only a womb) - seems thoroughly incorporated into the nuclear mentality, as I learned on a subsequent visit to U.S. Space Command in Colorado Springs. One of the briefings I attended included discussion of a new satellite system, the not yet "on line" MILSTAR system.28 The officer doing the briefing gave an excited recitation of its technical capabilities and then an explanation of the new Unified Space Command's role in the system. Self-effacingly he said, "We'll do the motherhood role - telemetry, tracking, and control - the maintenance." In light of the imagery of male birth, the extraordinary names given to the bombs that reduced Hiroshima and Nagasaki to ash and rubble - "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" - at last become intelligible. These ultimate destroyers were the progeny of the atomic scientists - and emphatically not just any progeny but male progeny. In early tests, before they were certain that the bombs would work, the scientists expressed their concern by saying that they hoped the baby was a boy, not a girl - that is, not a General Grove's triumphant cable to Secretary of War Henry Stimson at the Potsdam conference, informing him that the first atomic bomb test was successful read, after decoding: "Doctor has just returned most enthusiastic and confident that the little boy is as husky as his big brother. The light in his eyes discernible from here to Highhold and I could have heard his screams from here to my farm."30 Stimson, in turn, informed Churchill by writing him a note that read, "Babies satisfactorily born."31 In 1952, Teller's exultant telegram to Los Alamos announcing the successful test of the hydrogen bomb, "Mike," at Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands, read, "It's a boy."" The nuclear scientists gave birth to male progeny with the ultimate power of violent domination over female Nature. The defense intellectuals' project is the creation of abstract formulations to control the forces the scientists created - and to participate power. thereby in their world-~reatingldestro~ing The entire history of the bomb project, in fact, seems permeated with imagery that confounds man's overwhelming technological power to destroy
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nature with the power to create - imagery that inverts men's destruction and asserts in its place the power to create new life and a new world. It converts men's destruction into their rebirth. William L. Laurence witnessed the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb and wrote: "The big boom came about a hundred seconds after the great flash the first cry of a new-born world .... They clapped their hands as they leaped from the ground - earthbound man symbolising the birth of a new force."" Watching "Fat Man" being assembled the day before it was dropped on Nagasaki, he described seeing the bomb as "being fashioned into a living thingmi4Decades later, General Bruce K. Holloway, the commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command from 1968 to 1972, described a nuclear war as involving "a big bang, like the start of the universe."" C o d and t h e Nuclear Priesthood
The possibility that the language reveals an attempt to appropriate ultimate creative power is evident in another striking aspect of the language of nuclear weaponry and doctrine - the religious imagery. In a subculture of hard-nosed realism and hyper-rationality, in a world that claims as a sign of its superiority its vigilant purging of all nonrational elements, and in which people carefully excise from their discourse every possible trace of soft sentimentality, as though purging dangerous nonsterile elements from a lab, the last thing one might expect to find is religious imagery - imagery of the forces that science has been defined in opposition to. For surely, given that science's identity was forged by its separation from, by its struggle for freedom from, the constraints of religion, the only thing as unscientific as the female, the subjective, the emotional, would be the religious. And yet, religious imagery permeates the nuclear past and present. The first atomic bomb test was called Trinity - the unity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the male forces of Creation. The imagery is echoed in the language of the physicists who worked on the bomb and witnessed the test: "It was as though we stood at the first day of creation." Robert Oppenheimer thought of Krishna's words to Arjuna in the Bhagauad Gita: "I am become Death, the Shatterer of Worlds." Perhaps most astonishing of all is the fact that the creators of strategic doctrine actually refer to members of their community as "the nuclear priesthood." It is hard to decide what is most extraordinary about this: the easy arrogance of their claim to the virtues and supernatural power of the priesthood; the tacit admission (never spoken directly) that rather than being unflinching, hard-nosed, objective, empirically minded scientific describers of reality, they are really the creators of dogma; or the extraordinary implicit statement about who, or rather what, has become god. If this new priesthood attains its status through an inspired knowledge of nuclear weapons, it gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "a mighty fortress is our God."
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Stage 2: Learning to Speak the Language Although I was startled by the combination of dry abstraction and counterintuitive imagery that characterizes the language of defense intellectuals, my attention and energy were quickly focused on decoding and learning to speak it. The first task was training the tongue in the articulation of acronyms. Several years of reading the literature of nuclear weaponry and strategy had not prepared me for the degree to which acronyms littered all conversations, nor for the way in which they are used. Formerly, I had thought of them mainly as utilitarian. They allow you to write or speak faster. They act as a form of abstraction, removing you from the reality behind the words. They restrict communication to the initiated, leaving all others both uncomprehending and voiceless in the debate. But, being at the Center, hearing the defense analysts use the acronyms, and then watching as I and others in the group started to fling acronyms around in our conversation revealed some additional, unexpected dimensions. First, in speaking and hearing, a lot of these terms can be very sexy. A small supersonic rocket "designed to penetrate any Soviet air defense" is called a SRAM (for short-range attack missile). Submarine-launched cruise missiles are not referred to as SLCMs, but "slick'ems." Ground-launched cruise missiles are "glick'ems." Air-launched cruise missiles are not sexy but magical - "alchems" (ALCMs) replete with the illusion of turning base metals into gold. TACAMO, the acronym used to refer to the planes designed to provide communications links to submarines, stands for "take charge and move out." The image seems closely related to the nicknames given to the new guidance systems for "smart weapons7' - "shoot and scoot" or "fire and forget." Other acronyms work in other ways. The plane in which the president supposedly will be flying around above a nuclear holocaust, receiving intelligence and issuing commands for the next bombing, is referred to as "kneecap" (for NEACP - National Emergency Airborne Command Post). The edge of derision suggested in referring to it as "kneecap" mirrors the edge of derision implied when it is talked about at all, since few believe that the president really would have the time to get into it, or that the communications systems would be working if he were in it, and some might go so far as to question the usefulness of his being able to direct an extended nuclear war from his kneecap even if it were feasible. (I never heard the morality of this idea addressed.) But it seems to me that speaking about it with that edge of derision is exactly what allows it to be spoken about and seriously discussed at all. It is the very ability to make fun of a concept that makes it possible to work with it rather than reject it outright. In other words, what I learned at the program is that talking about nuclear weapons is fun. I am serious. The words are fun to say; they are racy, sexy, snappy. You can throw them around in rapid-fire succession. They are quick, clean, light; they trip off the tongue. You can reel off dozens
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of them in seconds, forgetting about how one might just interfere with the next, not to mention with the lives beneath them. I am not describing a phenomenon experienced only by the perverse, although the phenomenon itself may be perverse indeed. Nearly everyone I observed clearly took pleasure in using the words. It mattered little whether we were lecturers or students, hawks or doves, men or women - we all learned it, and we all spoke it. Some of us may have spoken with a self-consciously ironic edge, but the pleasure was there nonetheless. Part of the appeal was the thrill of being able to manipulate an arcane language, the power of entering the secret kingdom, being someone in the know. It is a glow that is a significant part of learning about nuclear weaponry. Few know, and those who do are powerful. You can rub elbows with them, perhaps even be one yourself. That feeling, of course, does not come solely from the language. The whole set-up of the summer program itself, for example, communicated the allures of power and the benefits of white male privileges. We were provided with luxurious accommodations, complete with young black women who came in to clean up after us each day; generous funding paid not only our transportation and food but also a large honorarium for attending; we met in lavishly appointed classrooms and lounges. Access to excellent athletic facilities was guaranteed by a "Temporary Privilege Card," which seemed to me to sum up the essence of the experience. Perhaps most important of all were the endless allusions by our lecturers to "what I told John [Kennedy]" and "and then Henry [Kissinger] said," or the lunches where we could sit next to a prominent political figure and listen to Washington gossip. A more subtle, but perhaps more important, element of learning the language is that, when you speak it, you feel in control. The experience of mastering the words infuses your relation to the material. You can get so good at manipulating the words that it almost feels as though the whole thing is under control. Learning the language gives a sense of what I would call cognitive mastery; the feeling of mastery of technology that is finally not controllable but is instead powerful beyond human comprehension, powerful in a way that stretches and even thrills the imagination. -.Themore conversations I participated in using this language, the less frightened I was of nuclear war. How can learning to speak a language have such a powerful effect? One answer, I believe, is that the process of learning the language is itself a part of what removes you from the reality of nuclear war. I entered a world where people spoke what amounted to a foreign language, a language I had to learn if we were to communicate with one another. So I became engaged in the challenge of it - of decoding the acronyms and figuring out which were the proper verbs to use. My focus was on the task of solving the puzzles, developing language competency - not on the weapons and wars behind the words. Although my interest was in thinking about nuclear war and its prevention, my energy was elsewhere.
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By the time I was through, I had learned far more than a set of abstract words that refers to grisly subjects, for even when the subjects of a standard English and nukespeak description seem to be the same, they are, in fact, about utterly different phenomena. Consider the following descriptions, in each of which the subject is the aftermath of a nuclear attack: Everything was black, had vanished into the black dust, was destroyed. Only the flames that were beginning to lick their way up had any color. From the dust that was like a fog, figures began to loom up, black, hairless, faceless. They screamed with voices that were no longer human. Their screams drowned out the groans rising everywhere from the rubble, groans that seemed to rise from the very earth itself.37 [You have to have ways to maintain communications in a] nuclear environment, a situation bound to include EMP blackout, brute force damage to systems, a heavy jamming environment, and so on.38 There are no ways to describe the phenomena represented in the first with the language of the second. Learning to speak the language of defense analysts is not a conscious, cold-blooded decision to ignore the effects of nuclear weapons on real live human beings, to ignore the sensory, the emotional experience, the human impact. It is simply learning a new language, but by the time you are through, the content of what you can talk about is monumentally different, as is the perspective from which you speak. In the example above, the differences in the two descriptions of a "nuclear environment" stem partly from a difference in the vividness of the words themselves - the words of the first intensely immediate and evocative, the words of the second abstract and distancing. The passages also differ in their content; the first describes the effects of a nuclear blast on human beings, the second describes the impact of a nuclear blast on technical systems designed to assure the "command and control" of nuclear weapons. Both of these differences may stem from the difference of perspective: the speaker in the first is a victim of nuclear weapons, the speaker in the second is a user. The speaker in the first is using words to try to name and contain the horror of human suffering all around her; the speaker in the second is using words to ensure the possibility of launching the next nuclear attack. Technostrategic language can be used only to articulate the perspective of the users of nuclear weapons, not that of the victim^.^' Thus, speaking the expert language not only offers distance, a feeling of control, and an alternative focus for one's energies; it also offers escape escape from thinking of oneself as a victim of nuclear war. I do not mean this on the level of individual consciousness; it is not that defense analysts somehow convince themselves that they would not be among the victims of nuclear war, should it occur. But I do mean it in terms of the structural position the speakers of the language occupy and the perspective they get from that position. Structurally, speaking technostrategic language removes them
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from the position of victim and puts them in the position of the planner, the user, the actor. From that position, there is neither need nor way to see oneself as a victim; no matter what one deeply knows or believes about the likelihood of nuclear war, and no matter what sort of terror or despair the knowledge of nuclear war's reality might inspire, the speakers of technostrategic language are positionally allowed, even forced, to escape that awareness, to escape viewing nuclear war from the position of the victim, by virtue of their linguistic stance as users, rather than victims, of nuclear weaponry. Finally, then, I suspect that much of the reduced anxiety about nuclear war commonly experienced by both new speakers of the language and longtime experts comes from characteristics of the language itself: the distance afforded by its abstraction; the sense of control afforded by mastering it; and the fact that its content and concerns are that of the users rather than the victims of nuclear weapons. In learning the language, one goes from being the passive, powerless victim to the competent, wily, powerful purveyor of nuclear threats and nuclear explosive power. The enormous destructive effects of nuclear weapons systems become extensions of the self, rather than threats to it.
Stage 3: Dialogue
It did not take very long to learn the language of nuclear war and much o f the specialized information it contained. My focus quickly changed from mastering technical information and doctrinal arcana to attempting to understand more about how the dogma was rationalized. Instead of trying, for example, to find out why submarines are so hard to detect or why, prior to the ~ i i d e n t11, submarine-based ballistic missiles were not considered counterforce weapons, I now wanted to know why we really "need" a strategic triad, given submarines' " i n ~ u l n e r a b i l i t ~ I. "also ~ ~ wanted to know why it is considered reasonable to base U.S. military planning on the Soviet Union's military capabilities rather than seriously attempting to gauge what their intentions might be. This standard practice is one I found particularly troubling. Military analysts say that since we cannot know for certain what Soviet intentions are, we must plan our military forces and strategies as if we knew that the Soviets planned to use all of their weapons. While this might appear to have the benefit of prudence, it leads to a major problem. When we ask only what the Soviets can do, we quickly come to assume that that is what they intend to do. We base our planning o n "worst-case scenarios" and then come to believe that we live in a world where vast resources must be committed to "prevent" them from happening. Since underlying rationales are rarely discussed in the everyday business of defense planning, I had to start asking more questions. At first, although I was tempted to use my newly acquired proficiency in technostrategic jargon, I vowed to speak English. I had long believed that one of the most important functions of an expert language is exclusion - the denial of a voice
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to those outside the professional community.41I wanted to see whether a well-informed person could speak English and still carry on a knowledgeable conversation. What I found was that no matter how well-informed or complex my questions were, if I spoke English rather than expert jargon, the men responded to me as though I were ignorant, simpleminded, or both. It did not appear to occur to anyone that I might actually be choosing not to speak their language. A strong distaste for being patronized and dismissed made my experiment in English short-lived. I adapted my everyday speech to the vocabulary of strategic analysis. I spoke of "escalation dominance," "preemptive strikes," and, one of my favorites, "subholocaust engagements." Using the right phrases opened my way into long, elaborate discussions that taught me a lot about technostrategic reasoning and how to manipulate it. I found, however, that the better I got at engaging in this discourse, the more impossible it became for me to express my own ideas, my own values. I could adopt the language and gain a wealth of new concepts and reasoning strategies - but at the same time as the language gave me access to things I had been unable to speak about before, it radically excluded others. I could not use the language to express my concerns because it was physically impossible. This language does not allow certain questions to be asked or certain values to be expressed. To pick a bald example: the word "peace" is not a part of this discourse. As close as one can come is "strategic stability," a term that refers to a balance of numbers and types of weapons systems - not the political, social, economic, and psychological conditions implied by the word "peace." Not only is there no word signifying peace in this discourse, but the word "peace" itself cannot be used. To speak it is immediately to brand oneself as a softheaded activist instead of an expert, a professional to be taken seriously. If I was unable to speak my concerns in this language, more disturbing still was that I found it hard even to keep them in my own head. I had begun my research expecting abstract and sanitized discussions of nuclear war and had readied myself to replace my words for theirs, to be ever vigilant against slipping into the never-never land of abstraction. But no matter how prepared I was, no matter how firm my commitment to staying aware of the reality behind the words, over and over I found that I could not stay connected, could not keep human lives as my reference point. I found I could go for days speaking about nuclear weapons without once thinking about the people who would be incinerated by them. It is tempting to attribute this problem to qualities of the language, the words themselves - the abstractness, the euphemisms, the sanitized, friendly, sexy acronyms. Then all we would need to do is change the words, make them more vivid; get the military planners to say "mass murder" instead of "collateral damage" and their thinking would change. The problem, however, is not only that defense intellectuals use abstract terminology that removes them from the realities of which they speak. There is
idm Defense Intellectuals 43 no reality of which they speak. Or, rather, the "reality" of which they speak is itself a world of abstractions. Deterrence theory, and much of strategic doctrine altogether, was invented largely by mathematicians, economists, and a few political scientists. It was invented to hold together abstractly, its validity judged by its internal logic. Questions of the correspondence to observable reality were not the issue. These abstract systems were developed as a way to make it possible to "think about the unthinkable" - not as a way to describe or codify relations on the g r o ~ n d . ~ ' So the greatest problem with the idea of "limited nuclear war," for example, is not that it is grotesque to refer to the death and suffering caused b y any use of nuclear weapons as "limited" or that "limited nuclear war" is an abstraction that is disconnected from human reality but, rather, that "limited nuclear war" is itself an abstract conceptual system, designed, embodied, achieved by computer modeling. It is an abstract world in which hypothetical, calm, rational actors have sufficient information to know exactly what size nuclear weapon the opponent has used against which targets, and in which they have adequate command and control to make sure that their response is precisely equilibrated to the attack. In this scenario, no field commander would use the tactical "mini-nukes" at his disposal in the height of a losing battle; no EMP-generated electronic failures, or direct attacks on command, and control centers, or human errors would destroy communications networks. O u r rational actors would be free of emotional response to being attacked, free of political pressures from the populace, free from madness or despair or any of the myriad other factors that regularly affect human actions and decision making. They would act solely on the basis of a perfectly informed mathematical calculus of megatonnage. So to refer to "limited nuclear war" is already to enter into a system that is de facto abstract and removed from reality. To use more descriptive language would not, by itself, change that. In fact, I am tempted to say that the abstractness of the entire conceptual system makes descriptive language nearly beside the point. In a discussion of "limited nuclear war," for example, it might make some difference if in place of saying "In a counterforce attack against hard targets collateral damage could be limited," a strategic analyst had to use words that were less abstract - if he had to say, for instance, "If we launch the missiles we have aimed at their missile silos, the explosions would cause the immediate mass murder of 10 million women, men, and children, as well as the extended illness, suffering, and eventual death of many millions more." It is true that the second sentence does not roll off the tongue or slide across one's consciousness quite as easily. But it is also true, I believe, that the ability to speak about "limited nuclear war" stems as much, if not more, from the fact that the term "limited nuclear war" refers to an abstract conceptual system rather than to events that might take place in the real world. As such, there is no need to think about the concrete human realities behind the model; what counts is the internal logic of the system.43
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This realization that the abstraction was not just in the words but also characterized the entire conceptual system itself helped me make sense of my difficulty in staying connected to human lives. But there was still a piece missing. How is it possible, for example, to make sense of the following paragraph? It is taken from a discussion of a scenario ("regime A") in which the United States and the USSR have revised their offensive weaponry, banned MIRVs, and gone to a regime of single warhead (Midgetman) missiles, with no "defensive shield" (or what is familiarly known as "Star Wars" or SDI): The strategic stability of regime A is based on the fact that both sides are deprived of any incentive ever to strike first. Since it takes roughly two warheads to destroy one enemy silo, an attacker must expend two of his missiles to destroy one of the enemy's. A first strike disarms the attacker. The aggressor ends up worse off than the a g g r e s ~ e d . ~ ~ "The aggressor ends up worse off than the aggressed"? The homeland of "the aggressed" has just been devastated by the explosions of, say, a thousand nuclear bombs, each likely to be ten to one hundred times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and the aggressor, whose homeland is still untouched, "ends up worse off"? How is it possible to think this? Even abstract language and abstract thinking do not seem to be a sufficient explanation. I was only able to "make sense of it" when I finally asked myself the question that feminists have been asking about theories in every discipline: What is the reference point? Who (or what) is the subject here? In other disciplines, we have frequently found that the reference point for theories about "universal human phenomena" has actually been white men. In technostrategic discourse, the reference point is not white men, it is not human beings at all; it is the weapons themselves. The aggressor thus ends up worse off than the aggressed because he has fewer weapons left; human factors are irrelevant to the calculus of gain and loss. In "regime A" and throughout strategic discourse, the concept of "incentive" is similarly distorted by the fact that weapons are the subjects of strategic paradigms. Incentive to strike first is present or absent according to a mathematical calculus of numbers of "surviving" weapons. That is, incentive to start a nuclear war is discussed not in terms of what possible military or political ends it might serve but, instead, in terms of numbers of weapons, with the goal being to make sure that you are the guy who still has the most left at the end. Hence, it is frequently stated that MIRVed missiles create strategic instability because they "give you the incentive to strike first." Calculating that two warheads must be targeted on each enemy missile, one MIRVed missile with ten warheads would, in theory, be able to destroy five enemy missiles in their silos; you destroy more of theirs than you have expended of your own. You win the numbers game. In addition, if you do not strike first, it would theoretically take relatively few of their MIRVed
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missiles to destroy a larger number of your own - so you must, as they say in the business, "use 'em or lose 'em." Many strategic analysts fear that in a period of escalating political tensions, when it begins t o look as though war may be inevitable, this combination makes "the incentive to strike first" well nigh irresistible. Incentive to launch a nuclear war arises from a particular configuration of weapons and their hypothetical mathematical interaction. Incentive can only be so narrowly defined because the referents of technostrategic paradigms are weapons - not human lives, not even states and state power. The fact that the subjects of strategic paradigms are weapons has several important implications. First, and perhaps most critically, there simply is no way to talk about human death or human societies when you are using a language designed to talk about weapons. Human death simply is "collateral damage" - collateral to the real subject, which is the weapons themselves. Second, if human lives are not the reference point, then it is not only impossible to talk about humans in this language, it also becomes in some sense illegitimate to ask the paradigm to reflect human concerns. Hence, questions that break through the numbing language of strategic analysis and raise issues in human terms can be dismissed easily. N o one will claim that the questions are unimportant, but they are inexpert, unprofessional, irrelevant to the business at hand to ask. The discourse among the experts remains hermetically sealed. The problem, then, is not only that the language is narrow but also that it is seen by its speakers as complete or whole unto itself - as representing a body of truths that exist independently of any other truth or knowledge. The isolation of this technical knowledge from social or psychological or moral thought, or feelings, is all seen as legitimate and necessary. The outcome is that defense intellectuals can talk about the weapons that are supposed to protect particular political entities, particular peoples and their way of life, without actually asking if weapons can d o it, or if they are the best way to d o it, or whether they may even damage the entities you are supposedly protecting. It is not that the men I spoke with would say that these are invalid questions. They would, however, simply say that they are separate questions, questions that are outside what they do, outside their realm of expertise. So their deliberations go o n quite independently, as though with a life of their own, disconnected from the functions and values they are supposedly t o serve. Finally, the third problem is that this discourse has become virtually the only legitimate form of response to the question of how to achieve security. If the language of weaponry was one competing voice in the discussion, or one that was integrated with others, the fact that the referents of strategic paradigms are only weapons would be of little note. But when we realize that the only language and expertise offered to those interested in pursuing peace refers to nothing but weapons, its limits become staggering, and its entrapping qualities - the way in which, once you adopt it, it becomes so hard to stay connected to human concerns - become more comprehensible.
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S t a g e 4: The Terror As a newcomer to the world of defense analysts, I was continually startled by likeable and admirable men, by their gallows humor, by the bloodcurdling casualness with which they regularly blew up the world while standing and chatting over the coffee pot. I also heard the language they spoke - heard the acronyms and euphemisms, and abstractions, heard the imagery, heard the pleasure with which they used it. Within a few weeks, what had once been remarkable became unnoticeable. As I learned to speak, my perspective changed. I no longer stood outside the impermeable wall of technostrategic language and, once inside, I could no longer see it. Speaking the language, I could no longer really hear it. And once inside its protective walls, I began to find it difficult to get out. The impermeability worked both ways. I had not only learned to speak a language: I had started to think in it. Its questions became my questions, its concepts shaped my responses to new ideas. Its definitions of the parameters of reality became mine. Like the White Queen, I began to believe six impossible things before breakfast. Not because I consciously believed, for instance, that a "surgically clean counterforce strike" was really possible, but instead because some elaborate piece of doctrinal reasoning I used was already predicated on the possibility of those strikes, as well as on a host of other impossible things.4s My grasp on what I knew as reality seemed to slip. I might get very excited, for example, about a new strategic justification for a "no first use" policy and spend time discussing the ways in which its implications for our force structure in Western Europe were superior to the older version.46And after a day or two I would suddenly step back, aghast that I was so involved with the military justifications for not using nuclear weapons - as though the moral ones were not enough. What I was actually talking about - the mass incineration caused by a nuclear attack - was no longer in my head. Or I might hear some proposals that seemed to me infinitely superior to the usual arms control fare. First I would work out how and why these proposals were better and then work out all the ways to counter the arguments against them. But then, it might dawn on me that even though these two proposals sounded so different, they still shared a host of assumptions that I was not willing to make (e.g., about the inevitable, eternal conflict of interests between the United States and the USSR, or the desirability of having some form of nuclear deterrent, or the goal of "managing," rather than ending, the nuclear arms race). After struggling to this point of seeing what united both positions, I would first feel as though I had really accomplished something. And then all of a sudden, I would realize that these new insights were things I actually knew before I ever entered this community. Apparently, I had since forgotten them, at least functionally, if not absolutely. I began to feel that I had fallen down the rabbit hole - and it was a struggle to climb back out. - -
(
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Conclusions Suffice it to say that the issues about language do not disappear after you have mastered technostrategic discourse. The seductions remain great. You can find all sorts of ways to seemingly beat the boys at their own game; you can show how even within their own definitions of rationality, most of what is happening in the development and deployment of nuclear forces is wildly irrational. You can also impress your friends and colleagues with sickly humorous stories about the way things really happen on the inside. There is tremendous pleasure in it, especially for those of us who have been closed out, who have been told that it is really all beyond us and we should just leave it to the benevolently paternal men in charge. But as the pleasures deepen, so d o the dangers. The activity of trying to out-reason defense intellectuals in their own games gets you thinking inside their rules, tacitly accepting all the unspoken assumptions of their paradigms. You become subject to the tyranny of concepts. The language shapes your categories of thought (e.g., here it becomes "good nukes" or "bad nukes," not, nukes or no nukes) and defines the boundaries of imagination (as you try to imagine a "minimally destabilizing basing mode" rather than a way to prevent the weapon from being deployed at all). Yet, the issues of language have now become somewhat less vivid and central to me. Some of the questions raised by the experiences described here remain important, but others have faded and been superseded by new questions. These, while still not precisely the questions of an "insider," are questions I could not have had without being inside, without having access to the knowledge and perspective the inside position affords. Many of my questions now are more practical -which individuals and institutions are actually responsible for the endless "modernization" and proliferation of nuclear weaponry? What role does technostrategic rationality actually play in their thinking? What would a reasonable, genuinely defensive "defense" policy look like? Others are more philosophical. What is the nature of the rationality and "realism" claimed by defense intellectuals for their mode o f thinking? What are the many different grounds on which their claims to rationality can be shown to be spurious? M y own move away from a focus on the language is quite typical. Other recent entrants into this world have commented to me that, while it is the cold-blooded, abstract discussions that are most striking at first, within a short time "you get past it - you stop hearing it, it stops bothering you, it becomes normal - and you come to see that the language, itself, is not the problem." However, I think it would be a mistake to dismiss these early impressions. They can help us learn something about the militarization of the mind, and they have, I believe, important implications for feminist scholars and activists who seek to create a more just and peaceful world. Mechanisms of the mind's militarization are revealed through both listening to the language and learning to speak it. Listening, it becomes clear
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that participation in the world of nuclear strategic analysis does not necessarily require confrontation with the central fact about military activity that the purpose of all weaponry and all strategy is to injure human bodi e ~ . ~In' fact, as Elaine Scarry points out, participation in military thinking does not require confrontation with, and actually demands the elision of, this reality.48 Listening to the discourse of nuclear experts reveals a series of culturally grounded and culturally acceptable mechanisms that serve this purpose and that make it possible to "think about the unthinkable," to work in institutions that foster the proliferation of nuclear weapons, to plan mass incinerations of millions of human beings for a living. Language that is abstract, sanitized, full of euphemisms; language that is sexy and fun to use; paradigms whose referent is weapons; imagery that domesticates and deflates the forces of mass destruction; imagery that reverses sentient and nonsentient matter, that conflates birth and death, destruction and creation - all of these are part of what makes it possible to be radically removed from the reality of what one is talking about and from the realities one is creating through the disc~urse.~' Learning to speak the language reveals something about how thinking can become more abstract, more focused on parts disembedded from their context, more attentive to the survival of weapons than the survival of human beings. That is, it reveals something about the process of militarization - and the way in which that process may be undergone by man or woman, hawk or dove. Most often, the act of learning technostrategic language is conceived of as an additive process: you add a new set of vocabulary words; you add the reflex ability to decode and use endless numbers of acronyms; you add some new information that the specialized language contains; you add the conceptual tools that will allow you to "think strategically." This additive view appears to be held by defense intellectuals themselves; as one said to me, "Much of the debate is in technical terms - learn it, and decide whether it's relevant later." This view also appears to be held by many who think of themselves as antinuclear, be they scholars and professionals attempting to change the field from within, or public interest lobbyists and educational organizations, or some feminist antimilitarist^.^^ Some believe that our nuclear policies are so riddled with irrationality that there is a lot of room for wellreasoned, well-informed arguments to make a difference; others, even if they do not believe that the technical information is very important, see it as necessary to master the language simply because it is too difficult to attain public legitimacy without it. In either case, the idea is that you add the expert language and information and proceed from there. However, I have been arguing throughout this paper that learning the language is a transformative, rather than an additive, process. When you choose to learn it you enter a new mode of thinking - a mode of thinking not only about nuclear weapons but also, de facto, about military and political power and about the relationship between human ends and technological means.
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Thus, those of us who find U.S. nuclear policy desperately misguided appear to face a serious quandary. If we refuse to learn the language, we are virtually guaranteed that our voices will remain outside the "politically relevant" spectrum of opinion. Yet, if we d o learn and speak it, we not only severely limit what we can say but we also invite the transformation, the militarization, of our own thinking. I have no solutions to this dilemma, but I would like to offer a few thoughts in an effort to reformulate its terms. First, it is important to recognize an assumption implicit in adopting the strategy of learning the language. When we assume that learning and speaking the language will give us a voice recognized as legitimate and will give us greater political influence, w e are assuming that the language itself actually articulates the cri-
teria and reasoning strategies upon which nuclear weapons development and deployment decisions are made. I believe that this is largely an illusion. Instead, I want to suggest that technostrategic discourse functions more as a gloss, as an ideological curtain behind which the actual reasons for these decisions hide. That rather than informing and shaping decisions, it far more often functions as a legitimation for political outcomes that have occurred for utterly different reasons. If this is true, it raises some serious questions about the extent of the political returns we might get from using technostrategic discourse, and whether they can ever balance out the potential problems and inherent costs. I d o not, however, want to suggest that none of us should learn the language. I d o not believe that this language is well suited to achieving the goals desired by antimilitarists, yet at the same time, I, for one, have found the experience of learning the language useful and worthwhile (even if at times traumatic). The question for those of us who d o choose to learn it, I think, is what use are we going to make of that knowledge? O n e of the most intriguing options opened by learning the language is that it suggests a basis upon which to challenge the legitimacy of the defense intellectuals' dominance of the discourse on nuclear issues. When defense intellectuals are criticized for the cold-blooded inhumanity of the scenarios they plan, their response is to claim the high ground of rationality; they are the only ones whose response to the existence of nuclear weapons is objective and realistic. They portray those who are radically opposed to the nuclear status quo as irrational, unrealistic, too emotional. "Idealistic activists" is the pejorative they set against their own hard-nosed professionalism. Much of their claim to legitimacy, then, is a claim to objectivity born of technical expertise and t o the disciplined purging of the emotional valences that might threaten their objectivity. But if the surface of their discourse - its abstraction and technical jargon - appears at first to support these claims, a look just below the surface does not. There we find currents of homoerotic excitement, heterosexual domination, the drive toward competency and mastery, the pleasures of membership in an elite and privileged group, the ultimate importance and meaning of membership in the priesthood, and the
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The Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security Agenda
thrilling power of becoming Death, shatterer of worlds. How is it possible to hold this up as a paragon of cool-headed objectivity? I do not wish here to discuss or judge the holding of "objectivity" as an epistemological goal. I would simply point out that, as defense intellectuals rest their claims to legitimacy on the untainted rationality of their discourse, their project fails according to its own criteria. Deconstructing strategic discourse's claims to rationality is, then, in and of itself, an important way to challenge its hegemony as the sole legitimate language for public debate about nuclear policy. I believe that feminists, and others who seek a more just and peaceful world, have a dual task before us - a deconstructive project and a reconstructive project that are intimately linked? Our deconstructive task requires close attention to, and the dismantling of, technostrategic discourse. The dominant voice of militarized masculinity and decontextualized rationality speaks so loudly in our culture, it will remain difficult for any other voices to be heard until that voice loses some of its power to define what we hear and how we name the world - until that voice is delegitimated. Our reconstructive task is a task of creating compelling alternative visions of possible futures, a task of recognizing and developing alternative conceptions of rationality, a task of creating rich and imaginative alternative voices diverse voices whose conversations with each other will invent those futures.
Notes 1. Thomas Powers, "How Nuclear War Could Start," New York Review of Books (January 17, 1985), 33. 2. George Kennan, "A Modest Proposal," New York Review of Books (July 16, 1981), 14. 3. It is unusual for defense intellectuals to write for the uublic. rather than for their colleagues, but a recent, interesting exception has been made by a group of defense analysts from Harvard. Their two books provide a clear expression of the stance that living with nuclear weapons is not so much a problem to be solved but a condition to be managed rationally. Albert Carnesale and the Harvard Nuclear Study Group, Living with Nuclear Weapons (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984); and Graham T. Allison, Albert Carnesale, and Joseph Nye, Jr., eds., Hawks, Doves, and Owls: An Agenda for Avoiding Nuclear War (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1985). 4. For useful introductions to feminist work on gender and language, see Barrie Thorne, Cheris Kramarae, and Nancy Henley, eds., Language, Gender and Society (Rowley, Mass.: Newbury Publishing House, 1983); and Elizabeth Abel, ed., Writing and Sexual Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 5. For feminist critiques of dominant Western conceptions of rationality, see Nancy Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power (New York: Longman, 1983); Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka, eds., Discovering Reality: Feminrst Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and the Philosophy of Scrence (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1983); Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985); Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Woman in Social and Political Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981); Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: "Male" and "Female" in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), which contains a particularly useful bibliographic essay; Sara Ruddick, "Remarks on the Sexual Politics of Reason," in Women and Moral Theory, ed. Eva Kittay and Diana
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Meyers (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, in press). Some of the growlng feminist work on gender and war is explicitly connected to critiques of rationality. See Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, Brace, lovanovich, 1966); Nancy C.M. Hartsock, "The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Grounds for a Specifically Feminist H~storicalMaterialisnl," in Harding and Hintikka, eds., 283-310, and "The Barracks Community in Western Political Thought: Prologomena to a Feminist Critique of War and Politics," in Women and Men2 Wurs, ed. Judith Hicks Stiehm (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1983);Jean Bethkc Elshtain, "Reflect~onso n War and Political Discourse: Realism, Just War and Feminism in a Nuclear Age," Politlcnl Theory 13, no. 1 (February 1985): 39-57; Sara Ruddick, "Preservar~ve Love and Military Destruct~on:Some Reflections on Mothering and Peace," In Mothering: Essays rn kelnlnrst Theory, ed. Joyce Trebilcot (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984), 231-62; Genevieve I h y d , "Selfhood, War, and Masculinity," in Fernmist C:hallenges, ed. E. Gross and C. Pateman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986). There is a vast and valuable literature o n gender and war that indirectly informs my work. See, e.g., Cynth~aEnloe, Does Khaki Beconre You? The Milrtarrzation of Women's 1,ives (Boston: South End Press, 1984); Stiehm, ed.; Jean Bethke Elshtain, "On Beautiful Souls, Just Warriors, and Feminist Consciousness," in Stiehm, ed., 3 4 1 4 8 ; Sara Rudd~ck,"Pacifying the Forces: Drafting Women in the Interests of Peace," S1g~7s: Journal of Women in Ctilture and Society 8, no. 3 (Spring 1983):471-89, and "Draftmg Women: Pieces of a Puzzle," in Conscripts and Volunteers: Military Requirements, Social Values, arrd the All-Volunteer Force, ed. Robert K . Fullinw~der(Totowa, N.J.: Rownian ti: Allanheld, 1983); Amy Swerdlow, "Women's Strike for Peace versus HUAC:," Fenzinist Stttdres 8, no. 3 (Fall 1982): 493-520; Mary C. Segers, "The Catholic Bishops' Pastoral Letter on War and Peace: A Femin~st Perspective," Feminrst Studies 11, no. 3 (Fall 1985): 6 1 9 4 7 . 6. I have coined the term "technostrategic" to represent the intertwined, inextricable nature of technological and nuclear strategic thinking. The first reason is that strategic thmking seems to change in direct response to technological changes, rather than polltical thinking, or some independent paradigms that might be isolated as "str,ltegic." (On this polnt, see Lord Solly Zuckerman, Nuclear Illusions and Reality [New York: Vik~ngPress, 19821).Even more important, strategic theory not only depends on and changes in response to technological objects, ~tIS also based on a k ~ n d of thinking, a way of looking at problems - formal, mathematical modeling, systems analysis, game theory, linear programming - that are part of technology itself. So I use the term "technostrategic" to indicate the degree to which nuclear strategic language and thinking are imbued with, indeed constructed out of, modes of thinking t h ~ are t associated with technology. 7. Fusion weapons' proportionally srn~lleryield of rad~oactivefallout led Atoni~cEnergy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss to announce in 1956 that hydrogen bomb tests were important "not only from a military point of view hut from a humanitarian aspect." Although the bombs being tested were 1,000 times more powerful than those that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the proportional reduction of fallout apparently qualified them as not only clean but also humanitarian. Lewis Strauss is quoted in Ralph Lapp, "The 'Humanitarian' H-Bomb," Bulletin of Atomic Scierrtists 12, no. 7 (September 19.56): 263. 8. I must point out that we cannot know whether to take this particular example liter,llly: America's list of nuclear targets is, of course, classifled. The defense analyst quoted, however, is a man who has had access to that list for at least two decades. He is also a man whose thinking and speaking is careful and precise, so I think it is reasonable to assume that his statement is n o t a distortion, that "shoe factories," even if not themselves literally targeted, accur,ltely represent a category of target. Shoe factories would he one among many "military targets" other than weapons systems themselves; they would be military targets because an army needs boots. The likelihood of a nuclear war lasting long enough for foot soldiers to wear out their boots might seem to stretch the limits of credibdity, but that is an insufficient reason to assume that they are not nuclear targets. Nuclear targeting and nuclear strategic planning in general frequently suffer from "conventionalization" - the tendency of planners to think in the old, familiar terms of "conventional" warfare rather than fully assimilating the ways in which nuclear weaponry has changed warfare. In avoidlng talking about murder, the defense community has long been ahead of the State Department. It was not until 1984 that the State Department announced it will n o longer use the word "killing," much less "murder," in official reports on -
~
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
the status of human rights in allied countries. The new term is "unlawful or arbitrary deprivation of life" (New York Times, February 15, 1984, as cited in Quarterly Review of Doublespeak 11, no. 1 [October 19841: 3). 9. "Kiloton" (or kt) is a measure of explosive power, measured by the number of thousands of tons of T N T required to release an equivalent amount of energy. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima is estimated to have been approximately 12kt. An M X missile is designed to carry up to ten M k 21 reentry vehicles, each with a W-87 warhead. The yield of W-87 warheads is 300kt, but they are "upgradable" to 475 kt. 10. Since the M X would theoretically be able to "take out" Soviet land-based ICBMs in a "disarming first strike," the Soviets would have few ICBMs left for a retaliatory attack, and thus damage to the United States theoretically would be limited. However, t o consider the damage that could be inflicted on the United States by the remaining ICBMs, not to mention Soviet bombers and submarine-based missiles as "limited" is to act as though words have no meaning. 11. Conservative government assessments of the number of deaths resulting from a "surgically clean" counterforce attack vary widely. The Office of Technology Assessment projects 2 million to 20 million immediate deaths. (See James Fallows, National Defense [New York: Random House, 19811, 159.) A 1975 Defense Department study estimated 18.3 million fatalities, while the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, using different assumptions, arrived at a figure of 5 0 million (cited by Desmond Ball, "Can Nuclear War Be Controlled?" Adelphi Paper no. 169 [London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 19811). 12. The phrase is Helen Caldicott's in Missile Envy: The Arms Race and Nuclear War (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1986). 13. For the uninitiated, "penetration aids" refers to devices that help bombers o r n~issiles get past the "enemy's" defensive systems; e.g., stealth technology, chaff, o r decoys. Within the defense intellectual community, they are also familiarly known as "penaids." 14. General William Odom, "C31 and Telecommunications at the Policy Level," Incidental Paper, Seminar on C31: Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Center for Information Policy Research, Spring 1980), 5. 15. This point has been amply documented by Brian Easlea, Fathering the Unthinkable: Masculinity, Scientists a n d the Nuclear Arms Race (London: Pluto Press, 1983). 16. Air Force Magazine 68, no. 6 (June 1985): 77-78. 17. h i d . 18. William L. Laurence, Dawn over Zero: The Study of the Atomic Bomb (London: Museum Press, 1974), 198-99. 19. U.S.A.F. Retired General T.R. Milton, "Nuclear Virginity," Air Force Magazine 68, no. 5 (May 1985): 44. 20. I am grateful to Margaret Cerullo, a participant in the first summer program, for reporting the use of this analogy to me and sharing her thoughts about this and other events in the program. The interpretation I give here draws strongly o n hers. 21. MIRV stands for "multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles." A MIRVed missile not only carries more than one warhead; its warheads can be aimed at different targets. 22. Henry T. Nash, "The Bureaucratization of Homicide," Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (April 1980), reprinted in E.P. Thompson and Dan Smith, eds., Protest a n d Survive (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981), 159. The neutron bomb is notable for the active political contention that has occurred over its use and naming. It is a small warhead that produces six times the prompt radiation but slightly less blast and heat than typical fission warheads of the same yield. Pentagon planners see neutron bombs as useful in killing Soviet tank crews while theoretically leaving the buildmgs near the tanks intact. Of course, the civilians in the nearby buildings, however, would be killed by the same "enhanced radiation" as the tank crews. It is this design for protecting property while killing civilians along with soldiers that has led people in the antinuclear movement to call the neutron bomb "the ultimate capitalist weapon." However, in official parlance the neutron bomb is not called a weapon at all; it is an "enhanced radiation device." It is worth noting, however, that the designer of the neutron bomb did not conceive of it as an anti-tank personnel weapon to be used against the Russians. Instead, he thought it would be useful in an area where the enemy did not have nuclear weapons to use. (Samuel T. Cohen,
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in an interview on National Public Radio, as reported in Fred Kaplan, "The Neutron Bomh: What It Is, the Way It Works," Bulletin o f Atomic Scientists [October 1981 1, 6.) 23. For a discussion of the functions of Imagery that reverses sentient and ~nsentientmatter, that "exchange[s] ... idioms between weapons and bodies," see Elaine Scarry, T h e Body in Pain: T h e Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford Un~versityPress, 198.5), 60-1 57, esp. 67. 24. For further discussion of men's desire to appropriate from women the power of giving life and death, and its implications for men's war-maktng activities, see Dorothy Dinnerste~n, T h e Mermaid and the Minotaur (New York: Harper LY( ROW, 1977). For further analys~sof male birth imagery in the atomic bomb project, see Evelyn Fox Keller, "From Secrets of Life to Secrets of Death" (paper delivered at the Kansas Seminar, Yale University, New Haven, Conn., November 1986); and Easlea (n. 1.5 'lbove), 81-1 16. 25. Lawrence is quoted by Herbert Childs in A n American Genius: T h e Life of Ernest Orlando 1,awrence (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1968), 340. 26. Feynman writes about the telegram in Richard P. Feynrnan, "Los hlamos from Below," in Reminiscences of Los Alamos, 1943-1 94 Y, ed. Lawrence Badash, Joseph 0.Hirshfelder, and Herbert P. Broida (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publish~ngCo., 1980), 130. 27. Hans Bethe is quoted as saying that "Ulam was the father of the hydrogen bomb and Edward was the mother, because he carried the baby f o r quite a while" (J. Bernstein, Hans Bethe: Prophet o f Energy (New York: Basic Kooks, 19801, 95). 28. The MILSTAR system is a communications satelhe system that is jam resistant, &ISwell as having an "EMP-hardened capability." (This means that the electromagnetic pulse set oft by a nuclear explosion would theoretically not destroy the satellites' electronic systems.) There are, of course, many things to say about the sanity and morality of the idea of the MILASTARsystem and of spending the millions of dollars necessary to EMP-harden it. The most obvious point is that this is a system designed to enable the United States to fight a "protracted" nuclear war - the EMP-hardening is to allow it to act as a conduit for command and control of successive nuclear shots, long after the initial exchange. The practicdity of the idea would also appear to merlt some discussion - who and what is going to be communicating to and from after the initial exchange? And why bother to harden it against EMP when all an opponent h x to do to prevent the system from functioning is to blow it up, a feat certain to become technologically feasible In a short time? But, needless to say, exploration of these questions was not part of the briefing. 29. The concern about having a boy, not a girl, is written about by Robert Jungk, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, trans. James Cleugh (New York: Harcourt, Brace LYc Co., 1956), 197. 30. Richard E. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, T h e Ncw World, 1 9.39/46: A History o f the United States Atomic Energy Commission, 2 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962), 1: 386. 3 1. Winston Churchill, T h e Second World War, vol. 6., Trrttmph and Tragedy (London: Cassell, 1954), 551. 32. Quoted by Easlea, 130. 33. Laurence (n. 18 above), 10. 34. Ibid., 188. 35. From a 198.5 interview in which Holloway was explainmg the logic of a "decapitating" strike against the Soviet leadership and command and control systems - and thus how nuclear war would be different from World W x 11, which was a "war of attrition," in which transportation, supply depots, and other targets were hit, rather than being a "big hang" (Daniel Ford, "The Button," N e w Yorker Magazine 61, no. 7 [Apr~l8, 19851, 49). 36. Jungk, 201. 37. Hisako Matsubara, Cranes at Dusk (Garden C~ty,N.Y.: Dial Press, 1985). The author was a child in Kyoto at the time the atomlc bomb was dropped. Her description is based o n the memories of survivors. 38. General Robert Rosenberg (formerly on the Natmnal Security Council staff during the Carter Administration), "The Influence o f Policymaking on C31," Incidental Paper, S e n ~ i n ~ i r o n C'I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Center for Informat~onPolicy Research, Spring 1980). 59.
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39. Two other writers who have remarked on this division of languages between the "victims" and the professionals (variously named) are Freeman Dyson and Glenn D. Hook. Dyson, in Weapons and Hope (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), notes that there are two languages in the current discussion of nuclear weapons, which he calls the language of "the victimsfland the language of "the warriors." He sees the resulting problem as being the difficulty the two groups have in communicating with each other and, thus, in appreciating each other's valid concerns. His project, then, is the search for a common language, and a good portion of the rest of the book is directed toward that end. Hook, in "Making Nuclear Weapons Easier to Live With: The Political Role of Language in Nuclearization," Journal of Peace Research 22, no. 1 (1985): 67-77, follows Camus in naming the two groups "the victims" and "the executioners." H e is more explicit than Dyson about naming these as perspectives, as coming from positions of greater or lesser power, and points out that those with the most power are able to dominate and define the terms in which we speak about nuclear Issues, so that n o matter who we are, we find ourselves speaking as though we were the users, rather than the victims of nuclear weapons. Although my analysis of perspectives and the ways in which language inscribes relations of power is similar to his, 1 differ from Hook in finding in this fact one of the sources of the experts' relative lack of fear of nuclear war. 40. The "strategic triad" refers to the three different modes of basing nuclear warheads: at land, on intercontinental ballistic missiles; at sea, o n missiles in submarines; and "in the air," o n the Strategic Air Command's bombers. Given that nuclear weapons based o n submarines are "invulnerable" (i.e., not subject to attack), since there is not now nor likely to be in the future any reliable way to find and target submarines, many commentators (mostly from outside the community of defense intellectuals) have suggested that the Navy's leg of the triad is all we need to ensure a capacity to retaliate against a nuclear attack. This suggestion that submarine-based missiles are an adequate deterrent becomes especially appealing when it is remembered that the other basing modes - ICBMs and bombers - act as targets that would draw thousands of nuclear attacks to the American mainland in time of war. 41. For an interesting recent discussion of the role of language in the creation of professional power, see JoAnne Brown, "Professional Language: Words That Succeed," Radical History Review, no. 34 ( 1 9861, 33-51. 42. For fascinating, detailed accounts of the development of strategic doctrine, see Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983); and Gregg F. Herken, The Counsels of War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985). 43. Steven Kull's interviews with nuclear strategists can be read to show that on some level, some of the time, some of these men are aware that there is a serious disjunction between their models and the real world. Their iustification for continuine to use these models is that "other people" (unnamed, and on asking, unnameable) believe in them and that they therefore have an important reality ("Nuclear Nonsense," Foreign Policy, no. 5 8 [Spring 19851, 28-52). 44. Charles Krauthammer, "Will Star Wars Kill Arms Control?" New Republic, no. 3, 653 (January 21, 1985), 12-16. 45. For an excellent discussion of the myriad uncertainties that make it ludicrous to assume the targeting accuracies posited in the notion of "surgically clean counterforce strikes," see Fallows (n. 11 above), chap. 6. 46. "No first use" refers to the commitment not to be the first side to introduce nuclear weapons into a "conventional" war. The Soviet Union has a "no first use" pol~cy,but the United States does not. In fact, it is NATO doctrine to use nuclear weapons in a conventional war in Western Europe, as a way of overcoming the Warsaw Pact's supposed superiority in conventional weaponry and troop strength. 47. For an eloquent and graphic exploration of this point, see Scarry (n. 2 3 above), 73. 48. Scarry catalogs a variety of mechanisms that serve this purpose (ibid., 60-157). The point is further developed by Sara Ruddick, "The Rationality of Care," in Thinking about Women, War, and the Military, ed. Jean Bethke Elshtain and Sheila Tobias (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, in press). 49. My discussion of the specific ways in which this discourse creates new realities is in the next part of this project, entitled, "The Emperor's New Armor." I, like many other social
< i , @ r i Defense intellectuals
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scientists, have been influenced by poststructuralist literary theory's discussion of deconstructlng texts, point of view, and narrative authority within texts, and 1 take the language and social practice o f the defense intellect~lalsas a text to he read in this way. For a class~cintroduction t o t h ~ s literature, see Josue Harari, ed., Textual Strategies: Perspcctrues rn Post-strrrctscralist Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979); and Jacques Derrick, Of Granzmatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 50. Perhaps the most prominent proponent of this strategy 1s Sheila Tobias. See, e.g., "Demystifying Defense: Closing the Knowledge Gap," Social Polrcy 13, no. 3 (1983): 29-.32; and Sheila Tobias, Peter Goudinoff, Stefan Leader, and Shelah I.eader, W h a t Ktnds of Guns Are T h e y Buyrng for Your Butter? ( N e w York: William Morrow & Co., 1982). 51. H a r d ~ n gand Hintikka, eds. (11. 5 above), ix-xix, esp. x.
Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union As Other Simon Dalby
Geopolitics a n d t h e Soviet Threat
T
he vociferous criticisms of superpower detente heard repeatedly in Washington, and to a lesser extent in other NATO capitals, in the 1970s, were supported by arguments concerning a massive political and military "Soviet threat" to Western security. Among the highest profile proponents of the "Soviet threat" was the Washington-based Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), many of whose members subsequently attained important policy-making positions in the Reagan Administration. Their arguments in favor of a reversion to the foreign policy of containment militarism,' have had a significant influence. To date, while the CPD's political campaign has been examined in some detail,2 and its links to the "Team B" intelligence estimates review process have been t r a ~ e d no , ~ comprehensive examination has been made of the structuring of their arguments. This paper shows how they drew on a series of "security discourses," namely sovietology, the realist literature in international relations, nuclear strategy, and geopolitics to ideologically construct the Soviet Union as a dangerous "Other." It traces how each of these discourses operate ideologically to hinder progressive political change and to perpetuate militarization. After a lengthy absence, the term "geopolitics" is back in vogue in policy-making circle^.^ While the earlier taints of Nazism have largely disappeared, geopolitics remains a contentious term, with a number of overlapping meanings. It refers to the academic and policy literature drawn from the classic geopolitical texts, particularly those of MacKinder and Spykman."t also refers to general analyses of international affairs in terms of rivalry between the superpowers. In addition, the term is used to discuss the relations of space and power. While the classical geopolitical texts were rejected by many scholars in the 1940s and 1 9 5 0 ~the , ~ overall perspective of power understood as military control over territory has remained influential, and is often conflated with the perspective of political realism with its emphasis on power.' Source: Alternatives, XIII(4) (1988):415-42.
Dalb! Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union As Other
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During the Cold War, US policy-makers drew not only on the discourses of realism and geopolitics, but also on sovietology, which crystallized out as a discourse in this period, and nuclear strategy in order to construct an ideological rationale for the US national security state. This paper shows how these discourses were used again by the CPD in the 1970s to structure their arguments for reintroducing the policies of containment militarism. Each of these discourses uses a conception of security in terms of the spatial exclusion of Otherness; they are tied together in an overall geopolitical framework, geopolitical understood in this case in all three senses of power and space, superpower rivalry, and the power potential inherent in the geographical arrangement of states. The theme of geopolitics is important because it provides a key dimension to the depiction of the Soviet threat that is often overlooked in academic and political debates concerning international security. The assumptions of geopolitical discourse include the ontological primacy of absolute space, and a conception of politics as a matter of territorial control in the form of sovereignty over geographically specified sections of the pregiven absolute space. The links between nuclear strategy and geopolitics have been substantially ignored even by political geographers, despite a recent call to investigate these matter^.^ Of particular concern for this paper is the way that the geopolitical dimension has been omitted in many of the criticisms o f the influential nuclear war fighting theories of the 1970s, theories which were closely associated with the CPD. This paper emphasizes the importance of the articulation of the security discourses the CPD used as a way of explaining the ideological power of their political position. The next section elaborates on theoretical and methodological matters, turning first to the question of the relations of power and knowledge in terms of discourse. The subsequent sections turn to the importance of security discourse in modern political arrangements. This is followed by an analysis of the CPD's articulation of security discourses. Finally a critique of their position shows how these discursive practices support self-perpetuating processes of militarization. In conclusion the paper suggests that security has to be reformulated in ways that transcend the geopolitical metaphysics of security conceptualized as the spatial exclusion of Otherness.
Discourse a n d Otherness In Foucault's terms,9 discourses are much more than linguistic performances; they are also plays of power which mobilize rules, codes and procedures to assert a particular understanding, through the construction of knowledge within these rules, codes and procedures. Because they organize reality in specific ways that involve particular epistemological claims, they provide legitimacy, and indeed provide the intellectual conditions of possibility of particular institutional and political arrangements. The rules governing practices, often
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
implicit and not clearly articulated, but understood subconsciously by practitioners, are socially constructed in specific contexts. Foucault has analyzed the discursive practices of medicine, sex and penology, showing how the conception of madness is created in antithesis to reason, deviance to normalcy and delinquent to reformed. His concerns are often with the structuring of identity against the boundary of an external Other. Discourse involves not just language, but practices and social positions which embody power: the psychiatrist who designates who is reasonable and who is mad, the therapist who pronounces on normalcy, the parole officer who judges when the delinquent has reformed. Thus discourse refers also to the rules by which behavior is structured, regulated and judged. Foucault's analysis makes clear the role of the creation of the Other as the excluded against which behavior is judged and defined; the mad defines the sane, the deviant the normal. Specifying difference is a linguistic, epistemological and crucially a political act; it constructs a space for the Other distanced and inferior from the vantage point of the person specifying the difference.1° Practices function on the bases of these definitions; prisons are built to incarcerate the delinquent, mental hospitals to shut away the mad. Both operate to exclude the Other, shutting Otherness away in regimes where it can be monitored, surveyed and hence known and controlled. In "security" matters the enemy is specified in a series of security discourses, tied to the functioning of the state security and defense agencies. The practitioners of penology or medicine practice on their objects, prisoners or patients, but they do so in socially constructed positions of authority and power; by regulating the Other they also regulate the rest. Security discourse, while ostensibly dealing with external Others, also has important domestic political effects. In the CPD discourse the Soviet Union is the dangerous Other that has to be contained controlled and monitored using their superior and their "correct" knowledge to ensure the security of the United States. In Western thought, bifurcations of reality involve conceptions of Others as difference against which the "I," "we" or "the same" are defined. Aristotle's formulation of political philosophy is premised on a clear distinction between the Greeks who lived within the "political space" of the polis, and the Orientals, the outsiders that inhabited the rest of the ancient world." This spatial bifurcation of East and West is a theme continued to this day, a theme that runs at the heart of rationalist discourse on politics, and once more is present in the CPD's identification of the US polity with enlightenment and universal human progress, in distinction from the Soviet system, based in their understanding, solely on force and coercion. The spatial dimension of Otherness is clear. The Other inhabits somewhere else. The notion of distance in space can be relatively simple and somewhat arbitrary. As Said puts it:I2
... this universal practice of designating in one's mind a familiar space which is 'ours' and an unfamiliar space beyond 'ours' which is 'theirs' is a
I
Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union As Other
59
way of making geographical distinctions that can be entirely arbitrary. I use the word 'arbitrary' here because imaginative geography of the 'our land barbarian land' variety does not require that the barbarians acknowledge the distinction. It is enough for 'us' to set up these boundaries in our own minds; 'they' become 'they' accordingly, and both their territory and their mentality are designated as different from 'ours'. Thus identity can be formulated in a negative sense; "we" are not "barbarians" hence we are "civilized." This theme is present in numerous texts which situate themselves in a spatial arrangement to identify their space in distinction from the space of their object. More generally Foucault focuses on the crucial links between space, knowledge and power, and the role of concepts with a geographical dimension; "Territory is no doubt a geographical notion, but it's first of all a juridicopolitical one: the area controlled by a certain kind of power."Ii Combining these themes provides a way of theorizing the crucial ideological dimension of geopolitics. The exclusion of the Other and the inclusion, incorporation and administration of the Same is the essential geopolitical moment. The two processes are complementary; the Other is excluded as the reverse side of the process of incorporation of the Same. Expressed in terms of space and power this is the basic process of geopolitics in which territory is divided, contested and ruled. The ideological dimension is clearly present in how this is justified, explained and understood by the populations concerned; "the Other" is seen as different if not an enemy; "We" are "the Same" in that we are all citizens of the same nation, or parts of the Western system. TodorovI4 makes the question of the Other the key methodological device for his investigation of how a number of leading European explorers and conquerors constructed the ontological and epistemological categories that facilitated their conquest and domination of the indigenous civilizations of the Americas. He points to the complexity of the construction of the Other, for it is rarely constructed along a single axis. Todorov suggests that there are at least three axes. First of all, there is the value judgement (an axiological level): the other is good or bad, I love or d o not love him, or as was more likely to be said at the time, he is my equal or my inferior (for there is usually no question that I a m good and that I esteem myself). Secondly, there is the action of rapproachment or distancing in relation to the other (a praxeological level): 1 embrace the other's values, 1 identify myself with him; or else I identify the other with myself, I impose my own image upon him; between submission to the other and the other's submission, there is also a third term, which is neutrality or indifference. Thirdly, I know or a m ignorant of the other's identity (this would be the epistemic level); of course there is no absolute here, but an endless gradation between the lower or higher states of knowledge.
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T h e Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security Agenda
He argues that these three levels are interconnected but there is "no rigorous implication; hence, we cannot reduce them to one another, nor anticipate one starting from the other." Todorov's analysis provides the point of departure for Shapiro's analysis15of much more recent creations of Otherness in the same region, particularly the creation of Guatemala as Other in American foreign policy. He focuses on the discursive practices of foreign policy making which support the export of US capital and emphasizes "the modes of representation abetting this widely orchestrated form of domination by making it acceptable and coherent within the dominant ethos that constructs domestic selves and exotic Others." Shapiro notes how the foreign policy discourse depluralizes and dehistoricizes Guatamalan "society" by reducing it to a "fact" where those who lose in political struggles tend to be ignored in the political code. Guatemala was formerly created in Spain's expansion, now it is meaningful in terms of superpower rivalry. Never is it understood in the terms of the original inhabitants whose place it once was. Foreign policy thus, "is the process of making 'foreign' or exotic, and thus different from the self, someone or thing. Given the usual esteem within which the self is constituted, the exoticising of the Other almost invariably amounts to the constitution of that Other as a less than equal subject."16 But the creation of Other in distinction from Self is constructed on more than one axis. Thus the construction of Self and Other in moral terms is coupled to the discursive practices of foreign policy making ("the policy of making foreign") which constitute the international arena as one concerned with power and "security." The making of Other as something foreign is thus not an innocent exercise in differentiation. It is clearly linked to how the self is understood. A self construed with a security-related identity leads to the construction of Otherness on the axis of threats or lack of threats to that security, while a self identified as one engaged in 'crisis management' - a current self-understanding of American foreign policy thinking - will create modes of Otherness on a ruly versus unruly axis." Coupling the moral superiority dimension of Otherness to the geopolitical/ security ones, "the foreign policy discourse as a whole becomes a vindication for the US intervention to seek to control another state's steering mechanism for its own moral benefit as well as for purposes of US strategic and domestic interests."18 As Ashley and Walker have emphasized,19 the discourses of international relations are structured in terms of identity and difference, the incorporation of Sameness within the community of the state in distinction from the formulation of international politics as an anarchy. Political actions are initiated according to the discursive specifications of geopolitics, according to how "their" space is specified in distinction from "our" space. In general, US political discourse and in particular the CPD's discourse specifies the Soviet
Dnlbv
Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union As Other
61
Union as Other through the use of interconnected security discourses, each of which is constructed in geopolitical terms.
Security, Discourse, Geopolitics
The twin European developments of the emergence of capitalism and the closure of political space mark the beginning of the "modern" era which has spread both its dominant political organization; i.e., the nation-state, and the interrelated economic organizations of capitalism across the globe.20 This form of the closure of political space in terms of territorially defined states involves simultaneously the territorial demarcation of political space within identifiable boundaries, and the extension of the concept of sovereignty to one of absolute power in the sense that there is no higher authority with the power to enforce its will. Prior to the emergence of this "modern" system, codified in the mid-17th century, there had been a multiplicity of authorities, lords and chieftains, bishops and cardinals, cities and empires. The feudal landscape was one of many overlapping claims to allegiance, claims not solely related to the territory that the subject of these claims inhabited. The rise of capitalism and the rise of the modern state with absolute sovereignty were accompanied by the rise of political conceptions based on the individual, rather than social collectivities. They concern the individual as a resident of a particular place. This combination gave rise to the modern bourgeois notions of citizenship, the state and property, the key structuring concepts of modern political discourse. These formulations are clear in the 17th-century political theories of Thomas Hobbes. They rely on a formulation of political theory in terms of isolated human "individuals" related to each other by contracts. The formation of states involves the rational individual trading some of his freedom of action to the supra individual state in return for a guarantee of protection from threats external to the state boundaries, and the regulation of internal matters to maintain order. In Hobbes' terms order means the protection of the rights of owners of property to maintain their possessions." Within this order the quintessential bourgeois human can then act to maximize his self-interest. It follows from this conception of humans (in fact men) as individuals living within the reification of space of private property at the small scale, and the territorial delimitation of sovereignty, that security is defined in spatial terms of exclusion; enemies are created as Others, inhabiting some other territory. States are thus a form of political container, within which the state provides security. Thus the contract theory of the state relates directly to the creation of Otherness and the political creation of the identities of Self in terms of the state in whose territory one exists. This conception of security, and the related notion of peace, are defined in negative terms. "Peace as a contract is a right that never becomes a duty - a law that never becomes a moral ~ b l i g a t i o n . "International ~~ politics is thus
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
defined in negative terms, or in Walker's slightly different f ~ r m u l a t i o n , ~ " security is an essentially empty concept. The sphere of diplomacy and interstate relations is the sphere of state activity. Responsibility is designated to the state to defend against other states and dangers from beyond the boundaries of the state. Security is thus about the spatial exclusion of Otherness. Many theories of politics "have sought to limit sovereignty but have not questioned this authoritarian mechanism resulting from the connection between property, the corresponding system of rights, and political guarantees necessary for their m a i n t e n a n ~ e . "But ~ ~this state of affairs requires that the state identify with the interests of the population it supposedly protects. The ideological guise that this identification usually takes is some form of nationalism, whereby the citizens of the state are distinguished as having a common identity.25 Since the Second World War these conceptions have been complicated by the predominant clash of the two superpower social systems, both claiming legitimacy in terms of inevitable historical progress, or the dialectical unfolding of history, and armed with weapons systems that threaten not only the security of each other's state structures but the very existence of humanity itself. Here, however, the negative pattern of security thinking still operates, Otherness is mobilized to support domestic control and progress. The contest between the cultural modernism of US hegemony or the "counter modernity" of the Soviet system remains tied into the bourgeois reification of political space in terms of territorial inclusion and exclusion;26identity is still privileged over difference. In Shapiro's terms2' foreign policy still involves making foreign, only the scale has changed. These divisions of space in turn are predicated on the Newtonian view of absolute space. The Newtonian departure theorizes space as apart from matter, a pregiven existence, parts of which are filled with matter. This requires a break with earlier conceptions of space which are related in some way to material events.28Newton theorized a secondary conception of relative space that was related to material events. But absolute space is constructed as the pregiven container of all events which can be designated a position in absolute space. Space is made into a thing in itself, in Smith's terms "an abstraction of abstractions." The primacy of this metaphysical construction is crucial to the construction of the space of states. They are understood as spatial entities, and the societies of which they are composed are contained within their boundaries. This privileging of the geometric entity over the real societal practices of the ~ on the conception region is based on the spatialization of c ~ l t u r e , 2premised of absolute space. As Shapiro30reminds us, the cartographical designation of states as geometric entities with precisely definable boundaries hypostatizes states and denies large parts of social reality. This discursive practice of reification is crucial to the operation of geopolitics. But these reifications are historical products, not the universal structures of absolute space in which they are construed. The division of political space remains the basis of the debates on international arrangements, it underlies the literature of nuclear strategy, it is explicit in geopolitics. It is a conceptualization of political affairs that is
I
Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union As Other
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clearly hegemonic. It is accepted as inevitable, assumed to be commonsense, and naturalized in that it renders eternal a transitory political arrangement, that of modernity.jl The rapid growth of state functions in capitalist states since the Second World War - their increased role in national and international economic management, their role in the provision of "the welfare state," as well as the growth of the "security state" in a perpetual condition of partial military mobilization - has expanded the need for ideological justifications of the functions of these states. These new political arrangements have been accompanied by an expansion of the role of specialized discourses of technical expertise. These discourses act to reduce the role of political discussion by recasting political issues in terms of technical problems to which they can, by using their specialized procedures, find "correct" or "optimal7' answers. They act to maintain hegemony by reducing politics to a matter of administrating programs devised on the basis of the definition of social situations contained in these discourses. They depoliticize issues by invoking technical expertise in the place of political decision-making, in the process displacing explicit political discussion and replacing it with expert discourse. Nuclear technologies and their political arrangements have added an important dimension to processes whereby consent is generated for the maintenance of the political arrangements of Western capitalism. The threat of complete societal annihilation renders the legitimation of the existence of these weapons particularly necessary, while the social and cultural processes of militarization" that accompany their deployment simultaneously reduce the scope for democratic decision-making3" In the West, and the United States in particular, the weapons and their institutions are justified in terms of the omnipresent fear of the external enemy, present in the form of the Soviet Union.34
U S Security Discourse
As has been made clear by a number of writers, the numerous contemporary critiques of militarization repeatedly run into the limitations of what can be said in certain circumstances, a process revealing the hegemonic discursive structures of the nuclear state:js In response to peace movement critiques, "security intelle~tuals"~use, among others, the ideological device of distinguishing between legitimate "free speech" and illegitimate protest.j7 More important for this paper is the use of the widespread and powerful understanding of the Soviet Union as an expansionist Other that requires deterring, to marginalize not only peace movements, but many advocates of detente and arms control with the Soviet Union. Dissenters are vilified as giving support and assistance to the external enemy. The Other provides the axis on which acceptable and unacceptable political activities and identities are constructed. These identities are constructed through the "security discourses" of "strategy," "sovietology," "realism" and "geopolitics" which were
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T h e Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
mobilized to describe, explain and legitimate the doctrines of "containment,'' "deterrence" and the provision of "national security." Realism dominated discussions of international relations in the postwar period, and the key concept of interest understood in terms of power is important in the postwar political discourse. Interests are intimately related to security, understood in the sense of preventing the potential adversary from invading one's (territorially understood) space, which in turn relates to physical protection and political alignments at, in the US case, the global scale. The anarchy of international politics assumes the inevitable clash of competing interests, and also the historical perpetuation of the nation-state as the only significant actor in political affairs.38 Strategy defined the superpower contest in terms of nuclear coercion and the policy of deterring the aggressive totalitarian Soviet Union.39 The complex and at times arcane discussions of this discourse premised their analysis on the eternal enmity of the two systems, and reinforced these assumptions with a series of worse-case analyses. These assumptions drew on the abstract calculations of game theory much more than detailed sociopolitical analysis.40Where such input was sought it was drawn from the literature of the emergent field of sovietology which theorized the Soviet Union as unchanging and driven by internal geopolitical factors as well as the expansionist logic of totalitarianism to expand and hence to threaten US interests around the globe. The assumption that the polity was completely dominated by the central party elite, whose ultimate goal was global domination precluded the possibility of serious or long-term cooperation between the superpower^.^^ All these are structured within understandings of political power in spatial terms, within an implicit division of political space into territorially demarcated states. These states in turn are strategically important because of their relative location in terms of the geopolitical theme of heartlands and rimlands. The presence of geopolitics here is clear, the geographical occupation of the MacKinderian heartland of Asia42 and the potential Soviet domination of the Eurasian land-mass, are persistent themes of US security discourse, even foreign policy was if the term geopolitics is rarely menti~ned.~Wperational structured in the terms of an implicit geopolitical understanding of global events in which the motive force is the bilateral competition of the USSR and the "free world" led by the United States. This competition, and with it deterrence as the key to Western survival, necessitates a global militarization to contain the expansion of the totalitarian sphere led by the USSR. All the principal aspects of the political discourse of postwar US politics are present here. In combination they acted to limit the fields of discourse, asking ultimately "but what about the Russians?" to close off potentially counter-hegemonic formulations by invoking the presence of the Other. This discourse of the Other is geopolitical in the sense that it creates an external antagonist in a particular way vis-a-vis domestic political concerns. It is also geopolitical in that it is a particular exercise in geopolitical " ~ c r i p t i n g " ~ ~ which draws on the traditional texts of MacKinder and Spykman to explicate
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Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union As Other
65
a particular geography of the Other, a geography which is interpreted in deterministic terms. This discourse of the Other is also geopolitical in the sense that it accepts the reification of political power in the particular relation of the power and space of territorially defined states. The interplay of each of these themes reinforces the whole text of the Other. In addition to this, each of the security discourses is structured in terms of powerful ideological moves of exclusion. As will be seen below, the totalitarian interpretation of sovietology relies on a determinist interpretation of Russian history to preclude the possibility of peaceful coexistence with the Soviet regime. Realism assumes that conflict in the pursuit of interest is what is ultimately important in political matters, providing for the deferment of the political objectives of development, environment and justice, giving primacy to "power politics." Strategy moves considerations of security out of the realm of politics to technical considerations of weaponry and scenarios for their use. Geopolitics reduces matters to the military control of territory and operates to reduce political matters to a zero sum game between the superpowers squeezing out the concerns and aspirations of the peoples whose territory becomes a section of cartographic space in which each superpower's "projected power" seeks spatially to contain that of the other.
The CPD and Geopolitical Discourse The CPD drew on each of these security discourses and used their key ideological moves of exclusion to privilege their geopolitical conceptions of US foreign policy. The CPD represents the themes of containment militarism as "common sense." Political reality is defined in terms of a military and strategic situation. The CPD constructs this reality as one that the CPD is uniquely privileged to enunciate. Because of its expertise, the academic and policy experience of its members, the CPD knows the "true" nature of the Soviet Union. Its position is free from the "illusions" of detente. They argue that the Soviet Union is involved in a campaign for global supremacy, searching out influence in the Third World to gain military bases with which to threaten Western interests. It is morally different, motivated entirely by power sought in its own interest, and set apart from the United States which is defined as a morally principled actor in the tradition of "moral e~ceptionalism."~' Not only this but the global interests of humanity are invoked as the rationale for US policy. But the United States is in danger of appeasing the Soviet Union, repeating the mistakes of the 1930s because it is lulled into complacency by the illusion of detente. The clearest signs of this "present danger" are in the supposed US geopolitical retreat of the 1970s and the imminence of Soviet nuclear strategic superiority. This "present danger" requires that all "liberal" agendas of human rights, economic development, environmental concerns, be deferred until the military threat is dealt with first. All other political agendas are subsidiary.
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The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
The necessity of this is constantly reiterated by the CPD, because it "knows" the true (threatening) nature of the Other. The Other, however, is "known" through the discursive practices of the security discourses. The knowledge of the Other depends on these practices. These security discourses produce a Soviet Union whose actions are at least partly determined by its geographical location and the major influence this has had on its history. Totalitarian regimes strive for total control, the Soviet Union seeks global control by a long-term, well thought out, grand strategy which privileges military power as a key player. Nuclear weapons, as the weapons of greatest power are the lynchpin in all this. Hence the necessity to focus on the strategic implications of the SALT process. If the Soviet Union gains an undeniable strategic superiority, so the argument continues, then it will be able to expand its geopolitical reach, gradually taking over a series of strategically important states and in the process unravelling the US alliance system and eventually isolating the United States. The concern for military supremacy is tied to the matter of geopolitical control over the Third World as well as Europe. But the essential prerequisite of this is the nature of the Soviet Union. Otherness and geopolitics are intertwined at all stages of the argument. Each of the security discourses that the CPD used can be reviewed briefly,46focusing on the geopolitical dimensions of space, power and Otherness, and drawing on the writings of leading members of the CPD and the CPD policy statements. (In 1984 the CPD published its collected papers; for convenience all citations below are from this collection.) Sovietology
The CPD constructs its Other by explicit references to how the Soviet Union is different. "We strove to contrast the radical differences between our two societies and to illustrate the danger the Soviets constitute to the United " ~ ~ logic of this statement and much of States and to other d e m o ~ r a c i e s . The the rest of the CPD literature rests on the connections made between difference and threat. Crucially, difference is primarily "rooted in ... history and geography, its economic conditions and structure, and its political system and ideology."48 Geography gets first mention among these factors: Notwithstanding its vast territory and rich mineral resources, the Soviet Union can only with difficulty support its population. Its extreme northern latitude makes for a short agricultural season, a situation aggravated by the shortage of rain in areas with the best soil. Its mineral resources, often located in areas difficult to reach, are costly to extract. Its transportation network is still inadequate. These factors have historically been among those impelling Russia - Tsarist and Soviet alike - toward the conquest or domination of neighbouring lands. No empire in history has expanded so persistently as the Russian. The Soviet Union was the only great power to have emerged from World War I1 larger than it was in 1939.
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Without any further discussion of the nature of the Soviet economy, we are informed, in the sentence that follows this quotation, that the deficiencies in the economic system are aggravated by the regime and its attempts to maintain power. The totalitarian interpretations of sovietology are rehearsed here. There is no possibility of an alternative explanation, no mention of the numerous invasions of Russia and the Soviet Union through history; no possibility that the option of detente, using Western technology to overcome the transportation difficulties, to develop the mineral resources and to strengthen the economy, might be a less-hazardous course for Soviet policy than building up armed forces and threatening neighboring countries. Crucially, in the last sentence of this passage the Soviet Union is presented as unique because of its territorial expansion. The geopolitical theme is clear; the understanding of power in terms of territorial factors is explicit. The ruling elite, it seems, is caught in the same determinist geopolitical trap as its Tsarist predecessors. Later we learn that "it is driven by internal, historical and ideological pressures toward an expansionist policy.. .."4y This "ruling elite" is the key to understanding the USSR. It maintains itself in comfort "while the remaining 250 million citizens not only have few material advantages but are deprived of basic human liberties." This state of affairs is maintained because the elite manages to keep the population "under effective control." But the elite sees itself as the leaders of a "revolutionary society" and their ultimate objective is "the worldwide triumph of Communism" which "would give the Soviet elite ready access to the world's resources, both human and material" as well as doing away "with all external challenges to its privileged position by eliminating once and for all alternative political and social systems." All this fairly standard rendition of the totalitarian interpretation of sovietology is based on a crude geographical determinism. This geographical motif is a recurring theme in Harvard history professor and leading CPD member Richard Pipes' writings. In his major history of R u s ~ i a , 'Pipes ~ argues that environment is the essential factor in the formation of preindustrial or "patrimonial" societies. Later he argues that the Russian patrimonial system is "accounted for" by geographical factors:" Climate and topography conspire to make Russia a poor country, unable to support a population of high density: Among such causes are an exceedingly short agricultural season, abundant rainfall where soil is of low quality and unreliable rainfall where it happens to be fertile, and great difficulties of transport (long distances, severe winters, and so on). The result has been unusually high population mobility, a steady outflow of the inhabitants in all directions, away from the historic centre of Great Russia in the taiga, a process that, to judge by the census of 19.59 and 1970, continues unabated to this very day. The movement is partly spontaneous, partly government sponsored. It is probably true that no country in recorded history has expanded so persistently and held on so tenaciously to every inch of conquered land.
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And further on the geographical theme: Thanks to its topography (immense depth of defence, low population density, and poor transport) Russia has always been and continues to be the world's most difficult country to conquer, as Charles XII, Napoleon, and Hitler each in turn found out. As for buffers, it is no secret that today's buffers have a way of turning into tomorrow's homeland, which requires new buffers to protect it. Pipes argues that East Europe is just the latest buffer, acquired with Western acquiescence, but that "it is far better to seek the causes of Russian expansionism in internal impulses springing from primarily economic conditions and the habits that they breed." A final point on the theme of expansion is that the migrating populations have learned how to subjugate and dominate the populations that they came in contact with through exploiting the political weaknesses of their neighbors prior to annexation. "No other country has a comparable wealth of accumulated experience in the application of external and internal pressures on neighbors for the purpose of softening them prior to conquest." Pipes makes the link particularly clear in his later paper on "Militarism and the Soviet State.'js2 He asserts that the assumption that economic resources spent on military expenditures is wasted, as Western economics might suggest, is not true because of the historical experience of Russia, as well as because of the exigencies of Marxism-Leninism. Pipes argues that historically the vast majority of the Russian state budget was spent on the military, and it often operated to conquer adjacent territories. There is a cycle of poverty necessitating conquest, involving large military forces, which impoverish the state. Thus population pressure led to Russian expansionism and militarism. The military also provided a crucial internal service to the Tsarist regime; that of ensuring internal order. While the communist state that came later had different ideological concerns, it "inherited the same land with the same traditions and many of the same problems: it would be surprising, therefore had it entirely discarded that or any other legacy of Russia's past."5" The roots of the CPD explanation of the Soviet geopolitical expansion lie in this determinist interpretation of history. This determinism has the powerful ideological advantage of removing any possibility of political choice from politics. The course of Soviet expansionism is deeply embedded in Russian history. Against this trajectory mere political and diplomatic maneuvers like detente are worse than useless. The determinist interpretation of Soviet conduct is thus a very powerful discursive move which acts to exclude any alternative interpretations. Realism
This sovietological specification of Otherness dovetails very well with CPD advocacy of realism or power politics as the only legitimate perspective
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from which to assess international politics. Their privileging of power politics is clear from the proceedings of a Washington Foreign Policy Association meeting held in March 1978. The CPD provided a panel consisting of Richard Pipes, Eugene Rostow and Paul Nitze to discuss their perspective. In his contribution to the CPD panel Rostow applies the analogy of the 1930s British appeasement of Hitler to the 1970s. Here he issues a warning that the same historical mistakes are likely to be repeated by US leaders unless drastic changes are made. There is an urgent need to "arrest the slide toward chaos before it explodes into war." This may happen if:'4 we feel ourselves threatened and coerced; if we sense that the last vestige of our power to govern our own destiny is slipping out of our hands; if the Soviet Union takes control of one strong point after another, and achieves domination in Western Europe or Japan, or in a number of places whose power in combination spells hegemony. We can never recall too often Thucydides' comment that the real cause of the Pelopennesian War was not the episodes of friction and conflict which preceded it, but the rise in the power of Athens, and the fear that this caused Sparta. And later, "The pressures of Soviet policy have been greater since 1970 or so than ever before. The agreements for peace in Indo-China were torn up and disregarded. The Soviets supported aggressive and large scale war in Bangladesh, in the Middle East, and in Africa. There has been an alarming slide toward chaos."" Rostow concludes his remarks by arguing that the British could afford to be weak and fail to provide firm leadership in 1913 and 1938, because the Americans were the ultimate guarantor that they would win in the end. But the United States in the 1970s "has no sleeping giant to save us from our folly." This historical analogy is important to the CPD position. They conflate the totalitarian foreign policy tactics of the USSR with those of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. The parallels include the use of threat by the USSR to accomplish expansion. Military intimidation is a key tactic. Apart from being a paranoid interpretation of Soviet foreign policy, this position also assumes that the United States is really militarily unprepared. Other commentator^'^ have pointed to the historical analogy of 1914 as more appropriate. This analogy points to a situation of complex alliance structures with numerous foreign entanglements and interests facing each other; accidents waiting to happen to drag them into a war that neither side wants but which the logic of events compels them to fight. The consequences of adopting this historical analogy are fundamentally different, pointing to the need to negotiate a series of agreements that limit the possibilities of entanglement and escalation, and also limit the overall number of nuclear weapons. This is a conclusion that the CPD cannot accept because of their axiological specification of the Other as evil and threatening, and the United States as purely defensive. With this specification
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the only possible source of war, accidental or deliberate is ultimately traceable to the actions of that Other. This is because in the realist terms the Soviet Union is a revisionist power, one attempting to change the international order to its benefit. The CPD focus on "the present danger" is in terms of power politics understood in terms of both military confrontation and geopolitical expan~ion.~'
... certainly the centerpiece of the Soviet strategic view of world politics has always been that if Russia could control Western Europe and bring it under its dominion, and the areas upon which Western Europe is dependent in the Middle East and Africa, that it would thereby control the world. There can be no question that Soviet reduction of Western Europe or equally China, but more emphatically Western Europe, either envelopement or through direct attack, or through coercion and political influence, would be read in Japan and in China and in many other parts of the world as a clear political signal that the balance of power had shifted disastrously against the United States, that American guarantees were no longer effective or credible and that China and Japan would correspondingly make the best deal they could with the Soviet Union. If this should happen then the consequences would be severe. Without credible deterrents the constructive relationship with China could evaporate and the alliances erode. "Then we would face the world alone and isolated in a position of total military inferiority."s8 This specification of the Soviet Union as expansionist is essential in the CPD formulation of the international situation. The specification of the USSR as evil on the axiological dimension of Otherness denies the applicability of concerns with international order and stability. Because the USSR is expansionist, and because the CPD "knows" its true nature by the application of its superior "historical method" the "interests" of the USSR can be dismissed as illegitimate. This realist move excludes anything but power defined in military and territorial terms from serious consideration. This discursive move of exclusion is essential to the CPD position. In answer to a suggestion that the threat to world peace lies not with the Soviet Union but with unrest in the Third World, Paul Nitze's reply linked "North-South" issues to "East-West" issues arguing that they couldn't be separated because, " ... the point of Russia's interest in Africa is to ... create positions there which will outflank the Middle East. Why are they interested in the Middle East? Because that will create positions which will outflank Europe and Japan and that, in turn, is of great strategic interest to the United state^."^^ The use of the term "outflank" borrowed from military parlance stretches its meaning to absurd lengths, calling into question Nitze's understanding of either the term, or of the geographical arrangements of the continents. R o s t ~ w also ~ ~uses this geographical allusion repeatedly. However, it also suggests the use of the logic of domino^,^' where an increase in influence by the USSR in one part of the globe is automatically
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followed by other increases in noncontiguous areas, by mechanisms that are left unexplained. It reduces the complexity of international politics to a spatially homogenous arena like a chessboard where pieces act in purely geometric terms. Local considerations, the aspirations of other peoples are simply not present in these discussions. This specification of the Third World as a playing field constructs a physical model of the area as a politically empty part of "absolute space" waiting to be "filled" by "projected" power. What is important in global terms are not local cultures or politics, but the abstract clashing of military power in spaces that can be used to outflank the West if not filled with Western "power." Again the assumptions of space as the container of political activity is present; security is defined in the geopolitical terms of spatial exclusion and territorial control.
Underlying these themes is the old geopolitical theme of the heartland power attempting to wrest total control over the rimlands from naval powers.h2 The expansion of the Soviet Union into the rimlands is of serious concern in all of the CPD texts. Although they rarely explicitly use geopolitical language, Soviet domination of the Eurasian land-mass is referred to. The most explicit statement of the geopolitical theme and the utility of its overarching conceptualizations of the global political scene is found in Colin Gray's attempt h 3 to update the work of MacKinder and S ~ y k r n a nHe . ~ ~argues that their ideas of geopolitics are not only still relevant to the understanding of international politics, but that they are the essential basis to any adequate understanding of global affairs. Gray's reinterpretation of the classical geopolitical texts links to his conception of the Soviet Union as an expansionist empire, drawing together his geopolitical writings with the geographic rationale for Russian and Soviet expansion provided by Richard Pipes. The postwar policy of containment militarism, originally encapsulated in the 1950 National Security Council document number 6 8 (NSC 68),h' involved the conflation of realism and the "national interest" with the military concerns about forward defense against the Soviet Union. Power was equated with the military domination of territory; containment was a geopolitical strategy.h%ray's rationale for reassessing the literature on geopolitics is to rearticulate the themes of containment militarism precisely because the geopolitical premises of foreign policy were no longer accepted by the detente advocates and the arms controllers. "The primary intention is to outline an appropriate framework of assumptions for the analysis of East-West relation^."^' We are informed that the only approach to the field of international relations that "enables the student to appreciate the essence of the field" is the approach best termed "power politics." He charges that international relations practitioners have forgotten that the central concern of their craft is with relative influence and physical survival, ultimately a matter of power." The rationale for geopolitics as a framework for understanding international relations is reintroduced to direct "attention to matters of enduring importan~e."~'
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More specifically geopolitics is defined in Saul Cohen's70 terms as "the relation of international political power to the geographical settingn71
... geopolitics is not simply one set of ideas among many competing sets that help to illuminate the structure of policy problems. Rather it is a meta- or master framework that, without predetermining policy choice, suggests long term factors and trends in the security objectives of particular territorially organised security communities. The leitmotiv of geopolitics, we are informed, is the struggle of land power against sea power. Nuclear weapons and their methods of delivery have, Gray argues, led to the abandonment of geopolitical thinking by US academics and policy-makers. A major war between the superpowers is now conceived as a matter of immediate massive nuclear missile attack. Gray asserts that the major geographical features of the planet continue to pose unresolved problems of nuclear strategy for Western strategists. He argues that the global situation is best seen as a long-term struggle between the "insular imperium" of the United States and the "heartland imperium" of the USSR.72 More specifically, in an argument consistent with Nitze's concerns with Soviet "outflanking" of the Middle East and Europe we are offered the following credo:
1. Control of the World Island of Eurasia-Africa by a single power would, over the long term, mean control of the world. 2. Land power and sea power meetlclash in the Eurasian-African Rimlands and marginal seas. Control of those Rimlands and marginal seas by an insular power is not synonymous with control of the World Island, but it does mean the denial of eventual global hegemony to the Heartland power (that is, the Soviet Union). In line with the CPD position, we are informed that the "proximate stake" in this conflict is the control of Europe which the Soviet Union might gain by military conquest, "Finlandisation," or by control over the oil production areas of the Middle East. Europe remains the key to limiting Soviet expansion. Thus there will be, in his geopolitical scheme, a continued need for the United States to maintain forces there to defend its interests. He argues that a familiarity with geopolitical ways of thinking would remove the difficulties in seeing this. The second geopolitical theme of importance in Gray's scheme is the conceptualization of the Soviet polity in terms of an "imperial thesis."73 Gray states that the Soviet Union is continually misunderstood in the West because it is not appreciated specifically as an empire.74The specifics of the geopolitical predicament facing the Soviet empire are of particular importance. According to G r a y , 7 b h o cites Pipes to support his argument in the key passages, Soviet geopolitical problems are tied centrally to the Russian tradition of
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"patrimonialism" and to Russian, and subsequently, Soviet militarism. Thus: "The conquest of the black earth belt of the steppe, and later of the entire Eurasian Heartland, by a state that had its origins in the northern taiga must be explained in terms of reactions to physical geography." From this Gray argues that the key to the Soviet Empire is geographical, in terms of territorial control; "As with all empires, the Great Russian has a core area (Muscovy, Byelorussia) and succeeding layers, each protecting the others. Time after time since the early 1950s the Soviet Union has shown that it is trapped in the dynamics of empire."76 This dynamic is a situation in which the outermost holdings protect those nearer the centre, a failure to hold on to control over the outer areas in turn calls into question the legitimacy and effectiveness of the central control over inner areas. For long-term maintenance the empire must not shrink, preferably to shore-up and support internal legitimacy it should expand, at least in visible influence if not in physical dimensions. Increased internal control that follows from increased influence outside the imperial boundaries. Thus the domination of Western Europe can, within the imperial logic, be seen in purely defensive terms as a removal of a threat to Eastern Europe. "The USSR is not merely a country surrounded by potential enemies, it is an empire that virtually by definition can have no settled relations of relative influence with its neighbour~."~' Gray asserts that the geopolitical inheritance of the USSR is to believe that "boundaries are fighting places," this being the "natural belief for a country without natural frontier^."'^ L'The imperial thesis is vital because it settles, persuasively, arguments about Soviet intentions." Thus, in an expansion of Pipes' arguments in geopolitical terms, the Soviet empire is fundamentally insecure, only expansion to gain territories beyond its borders and hence increase the degree of external control offers any increase in security. The whole structure rests on force, usually latent, the leaders know that they cannot rule a universal empire even if they could create one, "but they are condemned by circumstance to try."79 They must, in this scheme, attempt to reduce other centres of power that abut their borders because as long as any alternative sources of power offer alternative models of society the rule of the Communist Party will remain insecure. Their means to accomplish these ends are geopolitical expansion through military intimidation, up to and including the ultimate levels of strategic nuclear power. Strategy The CPD argued that the Soviet negotiating posture in SALT was merely an attempt to negotiate unilateral advantages in crucial weapons systems, in particular "heavy" ICBMs with their potential to carry numerous warheads on a single missile. Combining this purported emerging strategic superiority with their geopolitical campaign of expansion and intimidation and, crucially, with a war fighting nuclear strategy, the CPD argued that the Soviet Union was aiming for global domination. The key article that triggered a wide public
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debate in the strategic and policy communities is Richard Pipes' "Why the Soviet Union Thinks it Can Fight and Win a Nuclear War."80 Pipes argues that nuclear war fighting is part of the Soviet grand strategy for world domination. This in turn requires a US nuclear strategy capable of thwarting any Soviet attempts to use nuclear weapons to intimidate in a crisis or win in a war. Although Nitze8' introduced them early, Colin Gray is a key figure in spreading ideas of new strategic departures, in particular in his "theory of victory."82 The nuclear strategy arguments provide the direct rationales for the Reagan Administration's massive strategic weapons procurement policy8" and the complete lack of progress in arms control negotiations in its first term of office.x4While the Reagan Administration build-up of weapons and the nuclear war fighting strategies have come under sustained criticism from numerous sources, the critics have often been talking past the issues as seen from the CPD perspective, because they have not understood CPD articulation of the security discourses. Pipes7 strategic arguments are a continuation of his earlier papers on the essential expansionist and militarist tendencies in the Soviet Union, and the essential interlinkage between the two. In one of his statements on this e the argutheme which was to subsequently cause o ~ t r a g e , ~ % summarizes ment thus: The novelty of nuclear weapons consists not in their destructiveness that is, after all, a matter of degree, and a country like the Soviet Union which, as Soviet generals proudly boast, suffered in World War I1 the loss of over 20 million casualties, as well as the destruction of 1,710 towns, over 70,000 villages, and some 32,000 industrial establishments to win the war and emerge as a global power, is not to be intimidated by the prospect of destruction. In case there is any doubt Pipes quotes the following "Clausewitzian" argument from S o k o l o ~ s k i i :"It ~ ~is well known that the essential nature of war as a continuation of politics does not change with changing technology and armament."87 Thus nuclear war is not suicidal, it can be fought and won, the exact opposite, he argues, of the current doctrinal position in the United States. Pipes' comments that what literature comes from the Soviet Union on the impossibility of winning a nuclear war is intended solely for Western consumption, it does not reflect official thinking. The distinction between what the Soviets write for themselves and foreigners is a neat move to exclude all counter-arguments. Because the Soviet Union is defined as a totalitarian monolith, it follows that learned military journals will produce the central line of official policy. Hence when officers discuss military operations in their journals this can be interpreted as a statement of political intention. Because of the monolithic assumption there is no distinction between the institutional requirements that officer corps discuss military eventualities and the actual intentions of political leaders. The CPD was particularly concerned with the SALT process because they thought that it would prevent the development of new US strategic weapons
h h Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union As Other 75 and ensure a Soviet "superiority" which would be used to force political concessions from the United States and lead to its gradual isolation in world affairs. In particular this lack of US superiority would ensure that the United States would have to back down in conflicts over the Middle East and elsewhere where resources essential to the US economy are located. They argued that the United States would be self-deterred because of its lack of nuclear superiority. But the strategic arguments d o not stop there. Assuming that the United States built the weapons that the CPD called for there is a further requirement for worked out strategies for their use in conflict, so the argument goes, to bring about political defeat of the Soviet Union in a nuclear war. This theme was explicitly worked out in Gray's "theory of victory."8xHe argues that US official thinking and planning does not embrace the idea that it is necessary to try to effect the defeat of the Soviet Union. First and foremost the Soviet leadership fears defeat, not the suffering of damage and defeat ... has to entail the forcible demise of the Soviet State." Gray argues that the 1970s' counter-economic recovery targeting strategies might not bring the demise of the state because, The Soviet Union, like Czarist Russia, knows that it can absorb an enormous amount of punishment (loss of life, industry, productive agricultural land, and even territory), and recover, and endure until final victory provided the essential assets of the state (original emphasis) remain intact. The principal assets are the political control structure of the highly centralised CPSU and government bureaucracy; the transmission belts of communication from the centre to the regions; the instruments of central official coercion (the KGB and the armed forces); and the reputation of the Soviet state in the eyes of its citizens. Counter-economic targeting should have a place in intelligent US war planning, but only to the extent to which such targeting would impair the functioning of the Soviet State. While Gray admits that the problems of dividing the state apparatus from the rest of the society and the economy would be formidable, nonetheless targeting the Soviet Union with the avowed aim of destroying the political apparatus and control mechanisms would at least provide a coherent war aim which would provide a potentially desirable state of affairs in the postwar world. While not easy to operationalize, at least a theory of this sort offers some guidelines as to how to plan to fight a war in a way that the Soviet leadership would consider credible, and such a risk to their survival that they would be deterred from initiating a war. "Stated directly, the Soviets should know that if they prosecute a major war against the West they stand to lose (in their own tevms) (original emphasis). In a conflict over the most important political stakes, our principal war aim should be to effect the demise of the Soviet state: It should not be to kill Soviet postwar economic recovery."8y Gray argues that five key facts are crucial to devising this kind of a strategy. Each of these is drawn from Richard Pipes' work on Russian history, specifically from Russia Under the Old Regime and "Detente: Moscow's vie^."'^) The imperial thesis provides the framework from which Gray draws
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this targeting strategy. Thus we are told first that the Soviet peoples have no affection for their political system; second, the colonial peoples within the empire have no love for the Soviet Union; third, the state is very careful with its domestic respect and reputation because it is so fragile; fourth, the overcentralization of the system suggests that it can be paralyzed if the lower levels of political command are severed from the central "brain;" and fifth, the peoples of Eastern Europe are only likely to maintain respect for the Soviet Union so long as its armed forces are not defeated or tied down in a long and interminable war. Thus Gray argues that the war fighting strategy of targeting the Soviet apparatus would, in the context of conflict that could not easily be defined as self-defense of Mother Russia, seriously undermine the legitimacy of the system. It would also work to undermine the legitimacy of the regime if it were fighting a war in distant parts, and the domestic devastation were limited to clearly identifiable political targets. Precisely because the Soviet Union is an empire, without, supposedly, any legitimacy in the peripheral areas, it would be vulnerable to this kind of strategy.91 A theory of victory over the Soviet Union can be only partially military in character - the more important part is political. The United States and its allies probably should not aim at achieving the military defeat of the Soviet Union, considered as a unified whole; instead, it should seek to impose such military stalemate and defeat as is needed to persuade disaffected Warsaw Pact allies and ethnic minorities inside the Soviet Union that they can assert their own values in very active political ways. Crucial to all of this is Gray's amalgamation of the imperial thesis, drawn from Pipes' writing, with the strategic considerations of nuclear war fighting. This interconnection is the lynchpin of the whole discourse on the Soviet threat.92 The imperial thesis is directly inserted into nuclear planning. The key to Gray's theory of victory thus resides in Pipes' interpretation of Russian history, more SO than, as Freedman return to the political science of Douhet and the early air power theorists, or as Herken suggests,94the early RAND writings on the nature of the Soviet power structure. This historical scheme is linked with strategic, realist and geopolitical themes each of which is interconnected to support the exclusion of any other way of comprehending international politics. Together they lead inevitably to nuclear war planning and increased militarization.
The Ideology of Security Discourse
Each of the security discourses operates to define their object of study by excluding other approaches and by defining as legitimate a particular ensemble of practices. They all operate on assumptions that security is a negative operation of spatially corraling Otherness. These are powerful ideological
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operations reproducing the past of the Cold War and attempting to defer all other considerations to some future time when the Cold War has been resolved in favor of the United States, a resolution understood by Gray and Pipes to be the internal reform of the USSR to make it more acceptable to the United States; a redefinition of Otherness to more of the same, i.e. more like the United States. These formulations reduce the world to simplistic dualisms which contain powerful constraints on how the world is understood. The nuclear strategy and sovietology perspectives reduce the world to a zero-sum game in which one side always gains at the other's expense. The geopolitical discourse squeezes out of consideration the complexity of international interaction, the "Third World" is reduced to a field on which the superpowers play out their rivalry. Any indigenous interests are removed from consideration in the global space of superpower rivalry, a space filled only by projected technological power. The object of the geopolitical discourse is the enhancement of security by the spatial limitation of the domain in which the adversary can project power. The state is privileged by the realist discourse as the only actor in the international arena which is worthy of consideration. The very term international relations defines matters in terms reminiscent of diplomatic procedures. Economic, cultural, historical and political factors are removed from the foreground, unnecessary clutter in the exercise of the rituals of realist power. Any wider considerations of social theory are excluded from the realm of international relations." As far as the CPD is concerned, power is about the ability to militarily confront the Soviet Union; economic, cultural and political developments are all secondary to the overarching need for nuclear supremacy, the ultimate arbiter of everything else. The totalitarian conceptualization denies politics and history by creating an Other as perpetual adversary. Key to its understandings of the USSR is the specification of it as monolithic and unchanging." This denial of history reduces the possibilities of politics, by erecting the spectre of the permanent adversary, against which perpetual vigilance is needed." It denies the possibility of an alternative vision of the future on either side of the great divide, hence perpetuating the political status quo. The device is simple and in ideological terms hugely effective. The responsibility for all "our" problems is neatly encapsulated in the creation of the Other. Thus the particular specification of Otherness in terms of a geopolitical expansionist threat is the key element which articulates all the security discourses together. It provides the point of articulation for the CPD version of US hegemony. It reinforces its position in blatantly ethnocentric fashion, but an ethnocentrism that reinforces its arguments precisely by how it specifies the Other. The CPD argues that by analyzing the USSR in terms of its internal historical and geopolitical makeup "we" will understand what their society is like and hence "we" will act accordingly and move to counter it by developing appropriate nuclear strategies. The crucial ethnocentric move is related to the totalitarian formulation in which all information and writing is designed
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to further the purposes of the political leaders. All arguments that purport to be conciliatory to the West must be dismissed as disinformation. The additional step is then easy. "They" really do know that "their" society is as "we" now understand it, i.e. it is totalitarian and bent on world domination, hence US military preparations will be interpreted in the USSR as d e f e n ~ i v e . ~ ~ Here the possibility that there might be other thinking in the Soviet Union is excluded by the "superiority" of the "historical method" which focuses on the "real" factors rather than those dreamt up by political scientists concerned with abstract models, or strategists who ignore the history of the USSR. The whole matter is a neatly circular argument, any possible bases on which one might construct a critique are disallowed in advance. It is precisely these series of exclusions that gives their arguments their coherence, and hence, when articulated together, their ideological power. This series of ideological moves, discussed here in terms of the articulation of the security discourses supports the overall hegemony of US modernity. Within the West the language of politics is inscribed within discussions of modernity, rationality and specific references to time and space. As Said shows,yythe process of European imperial expansion was coupled with, and defined in terms of, the expansion of enlightenment, whether in religious terms of salvation of the heathen or in terms of scientific progress. With this went the incorporation and administration of the primitive (distant in time) and " ignorant." Modernity comes with universal space and time, within which the great drama of development unfolds. There is continuity in the development of progress, a continuity through time that ultimately marginalizes, subsumes, negates or destroys that which is the Other, primitive, different. Progress is identified with the West, rationality, science, the expansion of civilization. The ultimate triumph of reason is equated in the United States in particular with the triumph of that particular polity.100 The same pattern of domination, exclusion and incorporation is present in the CPD discourse; totalitarian communism is the last remaining Other which has to be overcome, subdued, colonized and finally remade into a society like us, an extension of the identity of enlightenment. That military coercion and the economic ~enaltiesof arms racing will finally force the Soviet Union to reform into a more Western-style society is a repeated theme of containment literature from Kennanlo1 through NSC 68,'02 to Pipes"03 recent geopolitical writing. This theme reinforces the formulation of security as spatial exclusion and limitation. The Other is at the same time a disgrace, a challenge to the supremacy of the Western universalizing culture, one that ultimately undermines the legitimacy of its project. It has to be shut off in a separate space to be kept under observation, controlled and reformed. With reference to Foucault's concerns with the discourses of madness, the medical analogy is apt in the link between power, observation and control. Communism is often likened to the spread of a contagion.Io4 A geopolitical threat requires a response in territorial terms; security is understood in these terms, a move of spatial exclusion. '
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Combining this geopolitical concern with nuclear weapons and with the denial of politics in realism, and also with the totalitarian approach to the USSR, provides powerful inhibiting framework for the evolution of broader conceptions of security and international relations. In the United States the hegemonic understanding of the global geopolitical arena, involves an acceptance of the necessity of extended deterrence, and Third World intervention. Thus underlying the many debates on nuclear weapons within the United States is the overall assumption of the geopolitical divide of the globe into them and us, requiring that the United States must always be prepared to intervene in distant lands and must be prepared to use nuclear weapons to ensure a local victory. To d o this requires a constant edge in nuclear technology, and the ability to develop a damage limitation capability that allows extended deterrence to be credible. But "in an era of parity, the attempt to develop the degree of damage limitation required to restore credibility to extended deterrence will invariably subvert not only the SALT process, but arms control in general."'0" These overall assumptions were not unquestionably accepted after the Vietnam war, detente, the Nixon doctrine, and the global managerialist approaches to international affairs promoted by the Trilateral Commission.'('" The CI'D led the ideological assault in an attempt to ensure that the security discourses were reasserted such that the consensus on the basic necessity of extended deterrence is no longer seriously open to political debate. The technical details of nuclear war fighting are the-logic df this reassertion, but the geopolitical dimension is ultimately more important because it underlies the technical arguments: it sets the terms of political debate. But it is a debate that excludes politics by reducing the possibilities of discourse to a number of intellectual specializations, the discourses of security, which monopolize that which may be discussed. The expert, equipped with the theoretical knowledge derived from intellectual work, versed in its techniques and competent in the rituals of the discourses, is the only competent participant in the process. Wider political participation is denied or coopted within the strategic discourses.107 Learning the specialized languages is not unduly difficult, but having learnt them they in turn delimit what it is possible to discuss.'0x Thus the security discourses act in a profoundly conservative political manner, delimiting the possibilities of discourse by the categorizations they impose and the rituals and methodologies they legitimate. These discursive practices reproduce the Cold War in a series of categorizations which limit the possibilities of political intervention precisely by how they categorize.
Rethinking Geopolitics
The ideological moves of geopolitics are powerful because of how they act to exclude alternative formulations of politics. They are powerful because
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they draw on a number of "common sense" themes in Western metaphysics. Specifically this paper suggests that rethinking geopolitics requires a refusal of the dichotomous formulation of the identity-difference theme in security matters. Geopolitics is about the formulation of security in spatial terms of identity and difference, difference being inherently inferior to identity. Universalizing a particular identity does not lead to security but to a replication of security problems at a larger scale,'09 or to a blatantly imperialistic situation. Security requires a reformulation in terms that refuse the dichotomous structures of them and us, Same and Other. But security is also a matter of technological domination of abstract space. Hence the fate of the Third World as a collection of dominos of at best a politically empty arena in which the great geopolitical game is played. This isn't just a matter of demonology or the dehumanization of other cultures and peoples, it is often a simple denial of their cultural existence. The negative conception of security coupled to technology and space leads ultimately to the logic of "Star Wars" as a "peace shield" to spatially exclude incoming missiles. Politics, denied in the totalitarian interpretation of the Soviet system is finally completely removed by the possibility of entirely automatic warfare. This is the ultimate move of the ideological practices of security discourse. Security requires a reformulation that refuses these technological definitions and conceptions of absolute space. The essential political move of all these security discourses is to privilege a certain political reality, a geopolitical one in which militarization is primary. The CPD documents explicitly argue that all other matters of human rights, environment and development must be deferred until the military sphere is dealt with. Linked to the other neoconservative and reactionary political formulations of the 1980s these ideological moves have profoundly deleterious effects on the potential for progressive political change. They act to increase the realm of state power beyond democratic control, in terms of foreign interventions, military budgets and the massive build-up of "intelligence" agencies dedicated to the prosecution of "low intensity warfare" in the Third World.'lo All these developments are premised on the geopolitical formulation of security in terms of territorial control and spatial exclusion with the Third World as a geometric arena of competition. Challenging these formulations requires simultaneously a recognition of how deeply structured these discursive practices are in thinking about politics, criticizing them on both practical political grounds and at the theoretical level, as well as reformulating security discourse to incorporate a plurality of cultural presences and the possibility of political change and cooperation.'" It requires also a refusal to equate the state with the provision of security by the persistent posing of the question of "security for whom?" l2 Alternative formulations of space, power and security need to start from the active political practices of progressive social collectivitiesl'~atherthan from the abstractions of absolute space and the negative formulation of security as exclusion. These latter formulations lead to self-perpetuating confrontation, permanent adversaries and militarization, and technological violence, the exact opposite of what "security" should provide.
b i b L Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union As Other
81
Notes a n d References
1. Sanders, Peddlars of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Contarnment (Boston: South End, 1983). R. Scheer, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War (New York: Vintage, 1983); A.M. Cox, Russian Roulette: The Superpower Game (New York: Times Books, 1982); and A. Wolfe, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Threat (Boston: South End, 1984). I.. Freedman, US Intelligence and the Souiet Strategic Threat (London: Macmillan, 1 9 8 6 ) ; and J. Prados, The Soviet Estimate (New York: Dial, 1982). The notable exception to this "silence" of geopolitics is Kissinger's use of the term, although he used the term in an idiosyncratic manner not clearly linked to the earlier rradition, L.W. Hepple, "The Revival of (;eopolitics," Political Geography Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 4, Supplement, 1986, pp. S21-S36; Z. Brzezinski, Game Plan: A Geostrategrr Frametuork for the Conduct o f the US-Soviet Contest (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986); and C.E. Zoppo, and C. Zorgbibe (editors) O n Geopolrtics: Classrcal and Nuclear (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985). H.J. MacKinder, "The Geographical Pivot of History," Geographical Journal, Vol. 23, 1904, pp. 421-42; H.J. MacKinder, Democratzc ldeals and Realrty: A Study in the Politics o f Reconstruction (London: Constable, 19 19); N. Spykman, Amrricak Stmtegy in World Politics (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1942); and N. Spyknian, The Geography o f tl7c Peace (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1944). L.K.D. Kristof, "The Origins and Evolution of Geopolitics," journal of Cmflrct Resolution, Vol. 4, No. I , 1960, pp. IS-51. G. Parker, Western Geopolitical Thought in the Twentieth Century (London: Croom Helm, 1985); G. Trofimenko, The US Military Doctrzne (Moscow: Progress, 1986); ~ n d R.E. Walters, The Nuclear Trap: An Escape Route (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974). I). Pepper, and A. Jenkins, "Reversing the Nuclear Arms Race: Geopolitical Bases for Pessimism," Professional Geographer, Vol. 36, No. 4, 1984, pp. 419-27. M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972); M. Foucault, The Order of Thzngs: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973); M. Foucault, Language, Counter-Memorx Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University I'ress, 1977); and M. Foucault, PowerlKnowledge (Brighton: Harvester, 1980). I. Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columb~aUniversity Press, 1983). S. Dossa, "Political Philosophy and Orientalism: The Classical Origins of a Discourse," Alternatrves, Vol. 12, No. 3, 1987, pp. 343-58. E. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). 0 p cit, note 9. T. Todorov, The Conquest of Amerrca: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper and Row, 1984). M. Shapiro, "The Constitution of the Central American Other: The Case of Guatemala," paper presented at the annual Griffith Lecture, School of International Service (American University, Washington, 1987). Ihid. Ihid. Ihid. R. Ashley, "The Geopolitics of Geopolitical Space: Toward a Critical Social Theory of International Politics," Alternatives, Vol. 12, No. 4, 1987, pp. 403-34; and R.B.J. Walker, "Genealogy, Geopolitics and Political Community: Richard K. Ashley and the Critical Social Theory of International Politics," Alternatives, Vol. 13, No. 1, 1988, pp. 84-8. P. Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974); and N. Smith, Uneven Development (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984). This is not the place for an extensive analysis the writings of Thomas Hobbes or bourgeois political theory. For its relevance to international politics and security see below. T. Hohhes, Leviathian (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968); B. Buzan, I'eople, States and Fear: The National Security Problem in International Relations (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1983); A. linklater,
82
22. 23.
24. 25.
26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.
33. 34.
35.
36. 37. 38. 39.
40.
41.
42.
The Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security Agenda Men and Citizens in the Theory of International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1982); L. Paggi, and P. Pinzauti, "Peace and Security," Telos, No. 63, 1985, pp. 3 4 0 ; M. Wight, "Why is there no International Theory?," in H. Butterfield, and M. Wight (editors), Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory o f lnternational Politics (London: Allen and Unwin, 1966); R.B.J. Walker, "The Territorial State and the Theme of Gulliver," lnternational Journal, Vol. 34, 1984, pp. 529-52; and R.B.J. Walker, "Realism, Change and International Political Theory," International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 3 1, No. 1, 1987, pp. 65-86. Paggi and Pinzauti, ibid. R.B.J. Walker ( 1 9 8 8 ~ "The ) Concept of Security and lnternational Relations TheoryM (San Diego: University of California Institute of Global Conflict Cooperation, Working Paper No. 3, 1988). Ib~d. B.R. Anderson, Imagined Communzties: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); and R. Munck, The Difficult Dialogue: Marxism and Nationalism (London: Zed, 1986). B.S. Klein, "Beyond the Western Alliance: The Politics of Post Atlanticism," paper presented at the British lnternational Studies Association Meeting (Reading, 1986). O p cit, note 15. O p cit, note 20. D. Gross, "Space, Time and Modern Culture," Telos, No. 50, 1981-82, pp. 59-78. O p cit, note 15. O p cit, note 26. R. Luckham, "Armament Culture," Alternatwes, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1984, pp. 1 4 4 ; and R.B.J. Walker, "Culture, Discourse, Insecurity," Alternatives, Vol. 11, No. 4, 1986, pp. 485-504. R.A. Falk, The Promise of World Order: Essays in Normative International Relations (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987). J. Kovel, Against the State of Nuclear Terror (Boston: South End Press, 1983); and E.P. Thompson, The Heavy Dancers (London: Merlin, 1985); E.P. Thompson, Double Exposure (London: Merlin, 1985); and op cit, note 2. C. Bay, "Hazards of Goliath in the Nuclear Age: Need for Rational Priorities in American Peace and Defence Policies," Alternatives, Vol. 8, No. 4, 1983, pp. 501-42; C. Cohn, "Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defence Intellectuals," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 12, No. 4, 1987, pp. 687-719; ibid: op cit note 26; J . Galtung, "Social Cosmology and the Concept of Peace," Journal o f Peace Research, Vol. 18, No. 2, 1981, pp. 183-99; E.P. Thompson, Zero Option (London: Merlin, 1982); R.B.J. Walker, "Contemporary Militarism and the Discourse of Dissent," Alternatives, Vol. 9, No. 3, 1983-84, pp. 303-22; and N. Witheford, Nuclear Text, unpublished MA thesis (Department of English, Simon Fraser University, 1987). O p cit, note 32. P. Chilton (editor), Language and the Nuclear Arms Debate: Nukespeak Today (London: Francis Pinter, 1985). 0 p cit, note 19. M. MccGwire, "Dilemmas and Delusions of Deterrence," World Policy Journal, Vol. 1, No. 4, 1984, pp. 745-67; and M. MccGwire, "Deterrence: the Problem - Not the Solution," International Affairs, Vol. 62, No. 1, 1985-86, pp. 55-70. L. Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: St Martin's, 1983); G. Herken, Counsels of War (New York: Knopf, 1985); M. Kaku, and D. Axelrod, To Win a Nuclear War: The Pentagon's Secret War Plans (Boston: South End, 1987); and F. Kaplan, The Wizards of Armaggedon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983). S.F. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History Since I91 7 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); and F. Griffiths, "Through the Oneway Glass: Mutual Perception in Relations Between the US and S.U.," paper presented at the Third World Congress of Soviet and East European Studies (Washington, DC, 1985). O p cit, note 5.
I
.
Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union As Other
83
43. S. Dalby, "American Geopolitics ,lnd the Soviet Threat," unpuhl~shedPhD dissertation (Geography Department, Simon Fraser University, 1988). 44. J . Agnew and G. O'Tuathail, "The Historlogaphy o f American (;eopolitics," paper presented to the Internat~onalStudies Association annual convention (Washington, DC, April 1987); and G. O'Tuathail, "The Geopolitics of Southern Africa: The US State Department and the Scripting of Southern Africa, 1969-1986," paper presented at the annual meeting of thc Association of American Geographers (Portland, April 1987). 45. J. Agnew, "An Excess of 'National Exceptionalism': Towards a New Political Geography of American Foreign Policy," Political Geogaphy Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 2, 1983, pp. 151-66. 46. The presentation of these arguments is necessarily compressed, tor an extensive documentation of the CPD position see Dalb): op cit, note 40. 47. M. Kampleman, "Introduction to Committee o n the Present Danger," C:. Tyroler ( e d ~ t o r ) , Alerting America: The Papers of the Committee o n t l ~ ePresent Danger (New York: Pergamon Brassey, 1984). 48. Committee on the Present Danger, C. Tyroler (editor),Alertrng America: The Papers of the Committee o n the Present Danger. Ihid. R. Pipes, Russra Under the Old Regime (1.ondon: Wiedenfeld and Nicholson, 1974). R. Pipes, US-Soviet Relations in the i5rn of Detente (Boulder: Westview, 1981). K. Pipes, "Milltar~smand the Soviet State," Daedalus, Vol. 109, No. 4, 1980, pp. 1-12, O p cit, note 5 1. O p cit, note 48. Ihid. M. Kahler, "Rumors of War: The 1914 Analogy," Foreign Affarrs, Vol. 58, No. 2, 1979, pp. 374-96. O p cit, note 48. Ihid. Ihid. E.V. Rostow, "The Safety of the Republic: Can the Tide he Turned?," Strategic Revieu: Vol. 4, N o . 2, 1976, pp. 12-25. P. O'Sullivan, "Antidomino," Political Geography Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1982, pp. 57-64. O p (it, note 5. C.S. Gray, The Geopolitics of the Nuclear Era: Heartlands, Rwnlands, and t l ~ c Technological Revolution (New York: Crane, Russack & Co., 1977). O p c ~ tnote , 5. S.E Wells, "Sounding the Tocsin: NSC68 and the Soviet Threat," International Security, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1979, pp. 116-58. S. Dalby, "The Political Geography of Security," paper presented to the annual meeting ot the American Association o f Geographers (Phoenix, Arizona, April 1988). O p cit, note 64. C.S. Gray, "Fore~gn Policy - There is n o Choice," Foreign Policy, No. 24, 1976, pp. 1 14-27. Op cit, note 64. S. Cohen, Geography and Polltics in u World Divided (New York: Random House, 1963). O p cit, note 64. Ihid. C.S. Gray, "The Most Dangerous Decade: Historic Mission, Legitimacy and Dynamics o f the Soviet Empire in the 1980s," Orbis, Vol. 25, No. 1, 1981, pp. 23-28; C.S. Gray, "Understanding Soviet Military Power," Problems of Communism, Vol. 30, No. 2, 198 1, pp. 64-7; C.S. Gray, "Reflections on Empire: The Soviet Connection," Mditary R ~ I J I P I L J , Vol. 62, No. 1, 1982, pp. 2-13; and R.V. Strode, and C.S. Gray, "The Imperial Dimension of Soviet Military Power," Problems of Communiswz, Vol. 30, No. 6, 1981, pp. 1-15. [bid. O p cit, note 64. Op cit, note 73.
The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. R. Pipes, "Why the Soviet Union Thinks it Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War," Commentary, Vol. 64, No. 1, 1977, pp. 21-34. P. Nitze, "Assuring Strategic Stability in an Era of Detente," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 54, No. 2, 1976, pp. 207-32. C.S. Gray, "Nuclear Strategy: The Case for a Theory of Victory," International Security, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1979, pp. 54-87. F. Knelman, Reagan, God and the Bomb: From Myth to Policy (Toronto: McLelland and Stewart, 1985); and op cit, note 40. S. Talbott, Deadly Gambits: The Reagan Adminrstratron and the Stalemate in Nuclear Arms Control (New York: Vintage, 1985). Scheer, op cit, note 2. V.D. Sokolovsky (editor), Military Strategy: Soviet Doctrine and Concepts (New York: Praeger, 1963). O p cit, note 5 1. O p cil, note 82. Ibid. R. Pipes, "Detente: Moscow's View," in R. Pipes (editor), Soviet Strategy in Western Europe (New York: Crane, Russak & Co., 1976); and op cit, note 50. O p cit, note 82. It might be objected that the imperial thesis was only elaborated subsequent to the 1979 appearance of the "theory of victory," op cit, note 73. However the crucial passage in the 1979 paper refers to Pipes' analysis of Russian imperialism. The five key factors that Gray draws on are taken directly from Pipes' formulations, note 73 refers to these writings as "the imperial thesis;" and op cit, note 82. O p cit, note 40. Ibid. O p cit, note 19. O p cit, note 41. 0 p cit, note 39. K . Booth, Strategy and Ethnocentrism (London: Croom Helm, 1979). O p cit, note 12. O p cit, note 15. G. Kennan (alias "X"), "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 25, No. 4, 1947, pp. 566-82. O p cit, note 65. R. Pipes, Survival is not Enough: Soviet Realities and America's Future (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984). O p cit, note 61. D.J. Arbess and S.A. Sahaydachny, "Nuclear Deterrence and International Law: Some Steps Toward Observance," Alternatives, Vol. 12, No.1, 1987, pp. 83-111. S. Gill, "Hegemony, Consensus and Trilateralism," Review of lnternational Studies, Vol. 12, 1986, pp. 205-22. 0 p cit, note 35. Ibid. Walker, op cit, note 21. M.T. Klare and P. Kornbluh (editors), Low Intensity Warfare: Counterinsurgency, Proinsurgency and Antiterrorrsm in the E~ghties(New York: Pantheon, 1988). O p cit, note 66. O p cit, note 23. R.B.J. Walker, One World/Many Worlds: Struggles for a Just World Peace (Boulder: Lynn Reinner, 1988); Gustavo Esteva, "Regenerating People's Space," Alternatives, Vol. 12, No. 1,1987, pp. 125-152.
International Security Studies: A Report of a Conference on the State of the Field Joseph S. Nye, Jr. and Sean M. Lynn-Jones
I
n February 1987, the Center for Science and International Affairs (CSIA) convened a conference on "The Past, Present and Future of International Security Studies." Although undertaken as background for a report to the trustees of the Ford Foundation for their mid-decade review, the conference also presented an opportunity to survey the field that is the focus of this journal. Thus we believe that the ideas generated at the conference will interest our readers. Participants from several nations and seven disciplines brought a wide variety of views to the conference. Although there was no effort to reach a consensus, certain tendencies were clear. The interpretation and extrapolation of those tendencies is our own, supplemented by references to published works. What follows reflects our personal perspective rather than an agreed conference report or a systematic bibliographic study of the field.
Defining t h e S c o p e of t h e Field
International security is not a discipline but a problem, as one participant put it. It developed around military capabilities and East-West issues that were easy to grasp. Deterrence theory and game theory provided a powerful unifying framework for those central issues, but often at the cost of losing sight of the political and historical context. The economic, cultural, and psychological aspects of security were initially given scant attention. The field is necessarily interdisciplinary, a point upon which most participants agreed. The central questions are concerned with international violence, but there are also other threats t o the security of states. This range of problems is too diverse to be viewed solely through the prism of a single discipline but, because political conflicts between sovereign states are the key to many critical issues in international security, political science will continue to occupy the central place among the disciplines concerned with questions of war and peace.' Source: Intematfonal Security, 12(4)( 1 9 8 8 ) :5-27.
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
As long as the fate of the earth could depend on how states address security issues, it will remain imperative not to overlook the potential contributions offered by other disciplines, such as economics, sociology, history, physical sciences, anthropology, psychology, and law. The interdisciplinary nature of international security studies makes it difficult to fit the field into the traditional structure of academic departments of most universities, but does not detract from the scholarly status of the field. Despite difficulties in drawing precise boundaries, it is possible to identify the subjects that form the central focus of international security studies. These are general issues, such as the causes of war and of alliances, as well as policy-oriented research on military and other threats confronting particular countries. The field includes basic theoretical work on the causes of conflict and war in the international system, the dynamics and outcomes of conflict, the nature and perception of threats, and efforts to ameliorate or resolve conflicts caused by such threats. Analyses of the problems of nuclear strategy, arms control, and deterrence, of conventional deterrence and conventional strategy, of the determinants of the defense policies of states, studies of military organizations and civil-military relations, and military history are familiar parts of the field. Economic, sociological, and psychological dimensions of threats, and institutional responses to security dilemmas are equally important. A subject that is only remotely related to central political problems of threat perception and management among sovereign states would be regarded as peripheral. Tank tactics fall into the category of military science, and depletion of fisheries falls into ecological sciences, not international security s t ~ d i e s . ~ The label applied to the field does not change the contents, but it does influence how the field is perceived and thus how it develops. Most participants were content to call the field "international security studies," but many names have been used. Strategic issues are part of international security studies, but the name "strategic studies" suggests that the field is concerned primarily with the choices between alternative strategies for states. Such a definition might exclude some of the more basic theoretical questions about the causes of war or the relationship between international economics and international security. Labels such as "defense studies" or "military affairs" would exclude nonmilitary dimensions of security.~imilarly,"national security affairs" implies that the field is wholly concerned with the promotion of the security of a given state. Moreover, as Arnold Wolfers pointed out two decades ago, "national security" is an ambiguous and emotion-laden term, a fact which often complicates its analytic use.4 Calling the field "international security studies" makes it clear that contemporary security problems are international in scope.'
Evolution a n d Achievements of International Security Studies International security studies, thus defined, is a relatively young field, developed after World War 11. Its progress has been halting and the definitive
,iiici i ~ 1 1 1 ;/otn~- State of the Field
87
intellectual history of the field has yet to be written. As Colin Gray suggested, perhaps "a field of ambiguous scholarly status is not often interested in tracing its own intellectual h i ~ t o r y . "We ~ do not mean to fill this gap, but t o provide a brief summary of some of the important developments in the field. The impetus for the development of international security studies came from the twin revolutions in American foreign policy and military technology caused by the emergence of the cold war and the development of atomic weapons. The unprecedented nature of the security problems confronting the United States attracted civilians to consider issues hitherto the province of the military.' Scientists involved in wartime atomic research remained involved in the continuing debates over the implications of their discoveries. At the same time, American thinking about international politics was transformed by the almost universal acceptance of the realist paradigm, which held that the idealism and isolation of the interwar period must be replaced by a rigorous appreciation of power politics and the importance of the national i n t e r e ~ t . ~ The realist school provided a simplified political context for the elaboration of concepts of nuclear strategy and deterrence.Qfter the initial reaction to the atomic bomb, American thinking on nuclear weapons generated few new ideas until the development of the hydrogen bomb and the pronouncement of the "massive retaliation" policy of the Eisenhower administration prompted a search for more "rational" means of making nuclear weapons serve U.S. foreign policy. Concepts such as counterforce, first and second strike capabilities, strategic force vulnerability, crisis stability, arms race stability, competitive risk-taking, escalation, damage limitation, flexible response, and limited nuclear war were elaborated in this period. Many of the works explicating these notions remain classics in the field.'" This wave of theorizing also led to consideration of how arms control, rather than disarmament, could contribute to the stability of the nuclear balance." The general preoccupation with nuclear issues limited the attention given to many problems of conventional strategy, but the Korean War and the formation and maintenance of the NATO alliance prompted consideration of the issues of limited war and the military situation in Europe. l 2 Many have noted that creative thinking about security issues virtually disappeared after the conceptual innovations of the late 1950s and early 1960s.13 This stagnation at least partially reflects the impact of the Vietnam War on the entire enterprise of thinking about military affairs. As one observer has argued, "there is n o doubt that the disillusionment, which the ending of the Vietnam intervention represented, made strategic studies in the United States less fashionable, however illogically."'4 The emergence of US-Soviet detente and the apparent reduction in the danger of nuclear war led to a dramatic reduction in public interest in nuclear weapons issues, despite the continued increase in U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenal^.'^ Although there was a hiatus in thinking about nuclear strategy, the international security field saw several important developments in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The elaboration of the bureaucratic politics paradigm,
88
The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
relevant to many foreign-policy issues, was particularly applicable to decisionmaking in security affairs. Important works during this period developed concepts for analyzing decision-making processes in complex organizations and applied them to a variety of defense issues and particular weapons systems.16 The late 1960s and early 1970s also saw several attempts to apply psychological concepts to international security issues," as well as the beginnings of a scholarly debate over the tenets of deterrence theory.18 The oil crises of 1973 and 1979 helped to revive interest in the relationship of economic interdependence and international security."
intellectual Problems in International Security S t u d i e s When conference participants were asked to identify major lacunae in the intellectual development of the field, certain issues kept recurring: the shortcomings of deterrence theory, the inadequacy of basic theoretical work in the field, the lack of attention to history, and the pitfalls of ethnocentrism due to American dominance of the field. D e t e r r e n c e Theory
Although it is probably the most impressive theoretical achievement of international security studies, deterrence theory has been criticized by many analysts.20Although it may offer some insights, deterrence theory can easily be invoked too often in an attempt to explain too much. The most basic criticism has been that the abstract formulations of deterrence theory - often derived from game theory - disregard political realities. As Hedley Bull argued, "the technical rigor and precision of much strategic analysis has been achieved at the cost of losing touch with political variety and change."21 This problem was demonstrated by the attempt to apply concepts drawn from deterrence theory to the conduct of the Vietnam War.22A number of conference participants criticized deterrence theory for being too abstract, static, and apolitical. Some pointed out that the particularities of culture and domestic politics sometimes belie predictions about "Country B" or "Country A" in abstract models of deterrence. Others faulted deterrence theory for assuming a constant level of rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union rather than looking at how domestic change or political cooperation might alter the relationship and reduce risks of war. Deterrence theory suffers from a tendency to neglect domestic political factors. Many analysts have overlooked the importance of maintaining domestic support for strategies of deterrence. As Michael Howard observed, in much of deterrence theory, "governments are treated as being as absolute in their capacity to take and implement decisions, and the reaction[s] of their societies are taken as little into account as were those of the subjects of the princes who conducted warfare in Europe in the eighteenth century."23
Nke a n d Lynn-lo~rcc; State of
the Field
89
The failure of those in the international security studies field to take into account domestic factors was also revealed by the Vietnam War.
Inadequate Basic Theoretical Work Several participants noted that, with the exception of the deterrence and arms control theories of the late 1950s and the early 1960s, the international security field has produced few general theoretical propositions. Richard Smoke has argued that "national security affairs is a field relatively lacking in broad general theories or even pretheories .... Most of the national security literature is not devoted to general theory building."24 Laurence Martin laments that, compared to analysis of technological and weapons developments, "general theories of the role of armaments, possible causes of war, the dynamics of military competition, the so-called arms race, and so on, have been much less suc~essful."~" As a result, international security studies remains theoretically underdeveloped; fundamental propositions have not been subjected to serious scrutiny. This shortcoming undermines scholarly respect for research on international security and can leave academic researchers in a precarious position in university departments where their interdisciplinary orientation already may render them suspect. The absence of basic theoretical work has been attributed in part to the emphasis the field has placed on analyzing short-term policy questions. Foundation funding patterns and the policy fads of the day tend to encourage researchers to concentrate on current policy p r i ~ r i t i e s .The ~ ~ result is that the field produces many articles and edited volumes with a brief shelflife, but relatively few major theoretical books that stand the test of time. This problem is hardly new. Samuel Huntington recognized it twenty-five years ago when he observed that, "compared to descriptively analytical studies, prescriptive writings on strategy have a relatively short life.... Even the best books on strategy are usually 'dated' two years after publication."" The problem has become more acute since Huntington wrote. Although there is a continuing need for short-term policy studies, international security studies cannot afford a situation in which "the desire for policy relevance will lead to the production of analyses of pressing problems at the expense of basic research and the development of intellectual capital of the field."'"n the early 1960s there was at least some effort being devoted to creative and general theorizing about the dilemmas of deterrence. Since then the field has grown in size, but so has the proportion of policy-oriented work. Given the urgent nature of many of the issues addressed by international security studies, it would be unrealistic to expect researchers to remain totally divorced from current policy questions. As a number of participants pointed out, some exposure to the actual workings of governments and military institutions was consistent with the early creative scholarly work in the field." But others pointed out that constant involvement in policy-making or in an advisory capacity can limit analysts' abilities to reassess fundamental assumptions. Many of the policy-oriented studies in the field rest on
90
T h e Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security A g e n d a
weak but rarely examined theoretical assumptions. Many participants felt that more of the field's intellectual resources must be devoted to the continuing exploration of basic theoretical questions. Analysts should not ignore important policy issues, but must from time to time step back to assess and generalize. In the long run, stagnant theory can only lead to stunted policy analysis. Lack of Attention to History
The nuclear revolution in international politics may have given international security studies one of its raisons d'gtre, but it has led to a preoccupation with contemporary issues and a neglect of pre-nuclear problems of war and peace and of the broader economic and social context of security. Even much of the history of the nuclear age remains poorly understood. The very fact that nuclear weapons were new and had not been used in a war between two nuclear powers encouraged those theorists who excelled at abstract reasoning to enter the field. In the fortunate absence of empirical data on nuclear exchanges, the field encouraged nonempirical analyses. New technology also played a role. As one analyst has pointed out, "the premium on trying to keep up with the onrushing pace of technology, as well as of world events, generates a tendency among specialists toward a h i s t o r i ~ i s m . "Although ~~ technological developments rarely render theories obsolete, the widespread perception that they do diverts attention from fundamental issues. Moreover, military history has been a stepchild of the American historical profession, and economic historians have rarely focused on security issues. The importance of the nuclear revolution notwithstanding, historical studies of the pre-nuclear period can shed light on contemporary problems. The behavior of military organizations, for example, may not have been changed fundamentally by nuclear weapons, even if analysts believe it should have been. The lessons of pre-1945 conflicts retain their relevance in the nuclear age. The problems of pre-emption and mobilization that influenced the outbreak of World War I, for example, are relevant to potential conventional wars and may offer lessons for maintaining stability in a nuclear crisis.31 Similarly, studies of economic embargoes and sanctions before 1945, and of the effects of changes in the economic basis of states' military power, remain relevant today.32If nothing else, the study of pre-nuclear conflicts can help reveal more clearly the changes ushered in by the advent of nuclear weapons. Ethnocentrism
The overwhelming majority of specialists in international security studies have been American. The policy issues that have attracted the most attention have therefore been U.S. policy issues. Most of the major concepts and
theories in the field have been developed by Americans." Given that the United States has played a central role in international politics since World War 11, this should not be surprising. The predominance of American perspectives on security affairs does not bode well, however, for the long-term health of the field. There is a danger that American analysts will overlook the influences of American culture on their modes of analysis. Conclusions may he skewed by idiosyncrasies of American thinking. This problem is particularly acute because national styles of strategy may reflect cultural differences." As Colin Gray has argued, "the United States is only one culture, and for a field of inquiry as critical to the human future as strategic studies to be rooted in so narrow and unique a set of predispositions can only impoverish its capacity to accommodate the true diversity of strategic styles that exists w ~ r l d w i d e . " ' ~
Promising Recent Developments in International Security Studies
In the last decade, there have been many promising developments in the field of international security studies.'" number of conference participants warned against focusing so much on problems that achievements were ignored. Younger scholars from a number of disciplines who entered the field in the 1970s and early 1980s have begun to publish their research. Renewed public interest in defense and foreign-policy issues has encouraged scholarly efforts. More attention is being devoted to history, psychology, and the security aspects of economic interdependence. Some of the most significant recent developments can be identified in the following areas.
The late 1970s and early 1980s witnessed a renewed debate over deterrence theory. Prompted by the U.S. failure to ratify the SALT I1 treaty and the Carter administration's enunciation of the "countervailing strategy," many analysts began t o reconsider problems of nuclear deterrence that had received scant attention for almost twenty years." The debate was characterized by a sharp division between those who believed that some sort of war-fighting posture was necessary for deterrence and those who held that an assured destruction capability was s~fficient.'~ It was also distinguished by greater attention to how the apparent contrast between Soviet and U.S. political culture and strategic styles shaped the requirements of deterren~e.'~ After President Reagan's March 1983 "Star Wars" speech, the debate broadened to reconsider the fundamental assumptions that form the basis for the superpowers' nuclear posture. Basic questions of the relationship between offense and defense were integrated into the discussion of contemporary policy choice^.^" Deterrence theory also has been enriched by greater attention to the organizational context in which decisions about nuclear weapons are made. Over twenty years ago, Aaron Wildavsky argued that "an organization theory of
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
deterrence might make a great deal of sense. We need to know not so much about individual rationality as about organizational rationality in particular types of political system^."^' Recent studies on how political crises might lead to nuclear war, and on the command and control of nuclear forces, have done much to fill this gap by pointing out the organizational factors that constrain attempts to maintain stable d e t e r r e n ~ e . ~ ~ Psychological Approaches
Many recent writings on international security have applied psychology to security issues. Psychological insights previously had been evident in discussions of crisis decision-making and intelligence failure.43 More recent work has built upon this tradition but also applied psychological concepts to deterrence theory and the origins of the cold war.44 The result has been a richer understanding of the complex context of decision-making by individuals in large organizations. Ideas derived from psychology have helped to modify the oversimplified models offered by realism and deterrence theory. Ethical Q u e s t i o n s R e c o n s i d e r e d
Critics of international security studies have often suggested that ethical questions are neglected by the field.45Despite a flurry of interest in the ethical dilemmas of nuclear deterrence in the early 1960s, the charge was substantially correct until recently.46In the 1970s there was renewed attention to the ethics of war and inter~ention.~' In the early 1980s, scholars began to devote more attention to the ethical aspects of nuclear deterrence and conventional war. Normative judgments that had been smuggled into deterrence theory were made explicit. The enormous gaps between the approaches of policy analysts and professional ethicists were somewhat narrowed. The "just war" tradition was updated and considered in relation to the nuclear dilemma. Many in the international security field reconsidered the morality of deterrence from a variety of per~pectives.~' The R e d i s c o v e r y o f History
Scholars in the international security field have begun to show greater interest in using history. First, numerous important historical studies of the nuclear age have recently appeared. Taking advantage of the declassification of U.S. government documents, researchers have been able to produce histories of the evolution of American strategic nuclear doctrine and the role of nuclear weapons in cold war diplomacy.49 These works have been invaluable for correcting misconceptions about the history of the nuclear age, but much more remains to be done. Second, historians of international security affairs have shown a greater willingness to incorporate theories and concepts from political science into their work. Although historians use such theories primarily as a means of
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explanation, not for prediction, this development suggests that a healthy interaction is taking place between the two fields."' Finally, political scientists have shown a much greater willingness to use historical case studies to test and refine hypotheses about international security. Many recent works have used the comparative case-study method to integrate historical cases into the building and testing of political science theories." Moreover, even when they have not employed a rigorous casestudy method, researchers have made much greater use of historical examples to inform their thinking about contemporary security i s s ~ e s . ' ~ Cooperation and Regime Theory Some writings on international cooperation have applied game theory particularly the Prisoner's Dilemma game - to security issues to identify the conditions under which cooperation is likely to emerge."3 Uses of game theory sometimes ignore important differences between abstract games and the realities of international politics. They can be enriched, however, by applying theories of the development of international regimes (norms and institutions) to efforts to ameliorate the security dilemmas that are often modeled as single play Prisoner's Dilemma." Cooperation theory represents a promising area for further research. Not only has it the potential to shift the focus of the field away from an exclusive emphasis on conflict, but it also offers hope that the gap between international security and international political economy can be bridged by the application of the same theoretical framework to both sets of problem^.^' e Relation of Security Studies to International Relations Theory
Several significant books importing useful concepts from international relations theory into international security studies have been published in the last decade. The realist paradigm of the early 1950s, which was subjected to widespread criticism in the 1960s and 1970s, has been re-examined and elaborated by Kenneth Waltz and Robert Gilpin, among ~ t h e r s . Although '~ the structural realism that emerged, often called "neo-realism," has been criticized by many scholars, it represents a more rigorous and parsimonious reformulation of many of the ambiguous concepts and fuzzy theories of earlier realists." Some of the ideas emerging from neo-realism and related efforts to apply rational choice theory to international relations have also been incorporated into research on balance of power and alliance issues.F8 There was considerable difference among the participants about the fruitfulness of such approaches. Some stressed the potential benefits of insights about learning and redefinitions of interests that are prominent in neo-liberal theories. Most agreed, however, with Stanley Hoffmann's argument that if "sound and fury are good for creative scholarship," the field of international security will profit from a healthy debate over fundamental propositions of international relations theory."
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The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda Future Prospects
Despite some promising developments in the last decade, the future of international security studies remains unclear. The field has recovered from the trauma of the Vietnam era; it has attracted many young scholars and stimulated vigorous debate on many policy and theoretical issues. The apparent increase in the risk of US.-Soviet conflict in the early 1980s led to increased public interest in security issues. It also produced an explosion in foundation support for research on international security. The Ford Foundation, which had been among the few to support security research in the 1970s, was joined by the Carnegie Corporation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Olin Foundation, and others. In the coming years, public concern and foundation support will almost certainly diminish. The theoretical health of the field would be maximized by more consistent funding. As a recent report on the field concluded, "feast and famine is as bad for intellectual enterprises as it is for public It is therefore imperative that international security studies define an intellectually solid research agenda so that available resources are not wasted. Although many have called for "new approaches" to international security, there is no consensus on what methods, approaches, and issues deserve priority. The following suggestions for future research in international security studies focus on recommendations about general approaches on which there is more agreement, rather than a diverse list of pet research topics. Although the list is not comprehensive, it exemplifies the type of work discussed at the conference as central to the intellectual health of the field. - -
Basic Theoretical Research
In 1975, Richard Smoke observed that "much more basic research and theorization has long been very badly needed."" Despite the progress noted above, the comment remains timely. However, a word of caution is necessary. Participants pointed out that many of the foundations supporting research in international security call for the articulation of new approaches without having a clear idea of how they relate to the central theories in the field. There is a danger that such calls may simply proliferate unrelated studies from a variety of disciplines and that efforts at novelty will inhibit cumulative work. The field needs work on basic questions such as the causes of war, the sources of cooperation, the formation of alliances, the implications of the nuclear revolution, the security effects of economic interdependence, the domestic sources of foreign policy, the consequences of offensive or defensive doctrines, and the cultural and cognitive biases of decision-makers. Such research should attempt to test and refine the many theoretical notions that are implicit or explicit in the international relations and international security literature. Many theories and hypotheses have been elaborated, only to remain untested when research attention has moved on to the next government policy or private foundation fad.
Scholars may find it difficult to resist the temptation to engage in work with more immediate policy relevance, particularly when foundations are willing to fund such work, but sustained cumulative theoretical work is essential i f the field is to deserve scholarly respect and remain intellectually healthy in the long run.
Research on fundamental theoretical questions should be complemented by greater attention to how large complex security organizations implement policy, including how they conduct military operations. A great weakness of deterrence theory has been its neglect of questions of how large organizations implement abstract principles. Friction is inevitable. Good research must take it into account. Abstract theories of nuclear deterrence, escalation control, war termination, or crisis management are of little use if they ignore the organizational and operational problems that confront statesmen and the military who must try to implement such ideas. Military operations have been neglected, at least partly because the details of war plans are often classified, while the public debate focuses on particular weapons and declaratory postures. Some scholars may also regard such problems as purely questions of military science and therefore outside their purview. Many operational questions do seem apolitical, but rigorous analysis related to larger theoretical concerns is necessary. Recent scholarship has begun to address operational problems from such a broader perspective, but much more research is needed on both historical and contemporary operational iss~es.~'
Many participants regarded the rediscovery of history as one of the most promising recent developments in international security studies. Research on the history of the nuclear age should profit tremendously in the coming years as Western governments make archival materials available to historians." Better histories of the nuclear age should correct some widely held misconceptions about the evolution of nuclear forces and strategy. Such work will also offer a rich source of empirical evidence on propositions about deterrence, coercive diplomacy, and the behavior of military organizations. We also need more histories of the post-1945 international system and the sources of its stability and instability. Pre-nuclear history also deserves greater attention from social scientists. Although recent scholarship in political science has drawn on history to generate and test hypotheses, little attention has been paid to many important historical periods. World War I, for example, has received considerable attention in recent years, but far less attention has been devoted to analysis of the important campaigns of World War 11. The international politics of Asia before and after 1945 deserve more attention. The Vietnam War - particularly
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
military operations by the United States - has been the subject of many recent works, but less has been written about the Korean conflict.64 Area S t u d i e s a n d Security S t u d i e s
Much of the work in international security studies has neglected the regional political context of security problems. Many American scholars and policymakers made recommendations for U.S. policy in the Vietnam War in almost complete ignorance of the politics of Southeast Asia. Most contemporary security issues arise out of political rivalries in specific regions. It is impossible, for example, to understand the sources of conflict in the Middle East without first examining the politics of the Arab world and the causes of the ArabIsraeli dispute. As Ken Booth has written, "strategic studies divorced from area studies is largely thinking in a void."6S Scholars in the field should seek greater expertise in the politics of particular regions. Ford Foundation programs have helped to bridge the gap between international security studies and West European and Soviet studies, but there remains a need for dual competency in security studies and other area studies. Much of the energy expended on American security concerns has been at the expense of comparative analyses.66 Greater attention to area studies might lay the foundation for more comparative work on security questions. Conventional Warfare I s s u e s
The international security field has devoted much of its attention to questions of nuclear weapons and arms control. This emphasis is eminently justifiable, given the potentially catastrophic consequences of nuclear war, but conventional deterrence and strategy should not be ignored. All the wars fought since 1945 have been conventional, and any nuclear conflict would almost certainly begin at the conventional level. Some scholars have begun to examine these question^,^' but conventional warfare issues have yet to receive the sustained, rigorous attention given to nuclear issues. D o m e s t i c A s p e c t s of Security Affairs
The interaction between domestic politics and security affairs has been overlooked by most analysts in the international security studies field.68Nowhere was this more evident than in the failure of American strategists to consider the domestic consequences of the Vietnam War. The relationship between domestic factors and security issues is complex. Domestic political constraints may limit the alternatives available to states attempting to provide for their security. Most security policies result from the interplay of domestic and international factors. Perceived threats to the security of a given state may also influence its domestic political structure. States confronting dire threats, for example, may be more likely to adopt authoritarian forms of government. Scholars in the field need to examine the domestic conditions that make
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possible the pursuit of various security policies and to study such questions in a comparative context,69and to make greater use of the methods of traditional disciplines such as sociology and political science. Such research will shed light on important questions. Economics and Security The division between the fields of international political economy and international security is one of the most serious problems within the discipline of political science. Scholars on each side of the divide have often ignored the work done on the other side. As a result, economic dimensions of security have received short shrift. Yet a strong case can be made that in a world of nuclear stalemate, economic dimensions of power and conflict will become more important. A number of participants pointed to the effect that domestic economic factors are having on both U.S. and Soviet security policies and to the difficulty the United States faces in its economic competition with its Japanese ally. Others pointed to the way that the economic relations among major powers affect their overall relationship and the potential for conflict. Not only does economic interdependence affect the underlying basis of military power, but the manipulation of interdependence can be a power instrument. The participants strongly believed that more attention should be paid to such issues. Specific Topics for Further Research Everyone in international security studies has his or her own research agenda, and this was no less true of the conference participants. Among the topics mentioned were: the origins and evolution of Soviet security policy; questions of learning and institutional memory in large complex security organizations in different cultures; the prospects and implications of different types of proliferation; the effects of biotechnology on weaponry; questions of why arms races occur and when they are destabilizing; whether arms control has contributed to stability; the risks and benefits in different types of naval strategy; the causes and effects of terrorism; and the cost, benefits, and justice of different types of intervention. Such a list could go on and on, demonstrating that there is no shortage of interesting questions.
Summary a n d Conclusions The cadre of specialists on security and arms control outside of government is being replenished and expanded. An infrastructure of institutions and international networks now supports independent viewpoints and the study of alternative policies. There are more sources of information for the public. Scholarship has advanced. A substantial literature on bureaucratic politics and psychological aspects of international politics emerged in the 1970s. Toward the end of the decade younger scholars turned their attention to
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The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
problems of conventional deterrence and warfare. More recently, renewed attention has been given to ethical questions related to international security. Recent work on theories of international cooperation may begin to integrate the contributions of international political economy with those of international security. The uses of history have been rediscovered. Further historical research - which will add to the data available as more documents are declassified - and greater use of history by social scientists is planned. Despite these achievements, the field of international security studies also has several problems. First, there has been little central theoretical innovation since the development of the deterrence paradigm in the 1950s and early 1960s. For all its conceptual elegance, this paradigm articulated over 25 years ago is not sufficient for understanding many of the most important current research and policy priorities. The tendency to equate international security studies with strategic studies unduly narrows the scope of the field and cuts it off from its political, economic, and historical context. Second, much of the work, particularly in the U.S., reflects a preoccupation with current policy fads. The urgency of many contemporary issues and the difficulty of keeping up with the esoteric details of current strategic developments drive scholars and other researchers to neglect cumulative work with a potential for long-term impact. Third, the absence of theoretical development, the faddishness of much work, and the narrow scope of some research makes it difficult to establish the field in some university departments. As a result, much of the analysis is heavily politicized, as foundations on the left and right support analysts, and scholars with palatable views. Contract research ("Beltway Bandits") represents the industrialization of security studies rather than the generation of useful work. Fourth, the development of security studies in the United States more than in other countries has caused many analyses to suffer from ethnocentric biases. The U.S. perspective often emphasizes superpower rivalry, nuclear arms control, and American policy debates. This is, to a certain extent, justifiable given the overriding significance of nuclear weaponry and the dominance of the superpowers since 1945, but it has led to neglect of many equally significant issues. In particular, regional security issues (apart from Western Europe), domestic politics, and economic security have received inadequate attention. Finally, the field has suffered from a severe shortage of good data. Particularly on contemporary issues, there is no agreed-upon data base. Debates are based on differences over estimates of force capabilities, but often there is no agreed way to resolve such issues. Moreover, the very nature of policy issues makes governments reluctant to declassify information for scholars and independent analysts. The annual Military Balance prepared by the International Institute for Strategic Studies helps to fill this gap, but further efforts are needed. Equally important is the need to develop a better history of security problems since 1945. More sources are being declassified and projects ~ l a n n e d ,but much remains to be done.
Our concern is not to advocate one research topic or another but to give a general picture of the achievements and weaknesses of a rapidly growing field. We have tried to summarize general tendencies expressed at the 1987 CSIA conference, making reference to some of the relevant literature. We probably left out some important work. Our choices involved a large amount of subjective judgment. We do not pretend to be definitive. Our hope is to stimulate r e f l e c t i o n and f u r t h e r debate on p i o r i t i e s w h i c h are of central c o n c e r n to t h e field and to this journal. Priority setting is essential to ensure that, whether or not financial famine replaces feast, the ensuing diet will not mean intellectual starvation. Notes
I . A 1966 survey found that political scientists formed the largest group in the field. See Roy E. Iicklsder, T h e Private Nuclear Strategzsts (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 19711, p. 95. Although Licklider predicted that "the study of strategy and disarmament will make the shift from an interdisciplinary field to a specialty area of political science," (p. 117), most observers continue to see the field as interdisciplinary, even if political sclence is held to occupy a central role. For a discussion o f the central role of political science in inters~ationalsecurlty studies, see Robert Jervis, Joshua Lederberg, Robert North, Stephen Rosen, John Steinbruner, and D i m Zinnes, T h e Fzeld of National Security Studies: Report t o the National Resmrc-h Council (Washington, D.C.: 1986), p. 2. Colin Gray argues that: "strategic studies lacks integrity as a field of study let alone as a discipline, in that it makes no sense considered apart from tnternational relations (another non-discipline) and political sc~ence." See Colin Gra); Strategic Studies: A Critical Assessment (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1982), p. 13. 2. See Richard Smoke, "National Security Affairs," in Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby, eds., Hundhook of Political Sc~ence,Vol. 8, Intern~ztional Politzcs (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1975), p. 251. 3. On the nonmilitary aspects of international security, see Richard H. Ullman, "Redefining Security," International Security, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Summer 1983), pp. 129-153. An additional term that delineates an area o f inquiry but that has not gained w ~ d eusage i< "military politics." As defined by Samuel P. Huntington, military politics includes the mslitary but not the n o n military aspects of security and also extends to the political activities of the military in domestic affairs. See his "Recent Writing in Military Politics - Foci and Corpora," in Samuel P. Huntington, ed., Changing Patterns o f Mzlitary Polltzcs (Glencoe, 111.: The Free I'ress of Glencoe, 1962), p. 237. 4. Arnold Wolfers, Discord and Collahoratzon (Baltimore: The Johns H o p k ~ n sUniversity Press, 1 962), ch. 10. 5. See Smoke, "National Security Affairs," p. 251. See also Barry Buzan, People, St'ztrs and Fear (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolma Press, 1983), pp. 1-9. 6. Colin S. Gray, Strutegic. Studres and Puhlic Polic-y (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), p. 46. In recent years, several histor~esof th~nkingabout nuclear strategy have appeared. See Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981); Gregg Herken, T h e Counsels of War (New York: Knopf, 1985); and Fred M. Kaplan, T h e Wzzards of Armageddon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983). In ad& ition, James E. King has written an unpublished history of nuclear strategy entitled T h e NPLU Strategy. more works are needed on questions of conventional warfare and theories of International security. 7. The first two c~vilianefforts to address the issues raised by atomic weapons were William Borden, There Will Be N o Time: The Revolution in Strategy (New York: Macmillan, 1946); and Bernard Brodie, ed., T h e Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946).
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8. The classic realist work is Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Knopf, 1948 and later editions). See also George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900-1 950 (Chicago:University o f Chicago Press, 1951); and Robert Endicott Osgood, Ideals and Self-lnterest in America's Foreign Relations (Chicago:University o f Chicago Press, 1953). 9. For a discussion o f the political dimensions ignored by the realist approach, see K.J. Holsti, The Dividing Discipline: Hegemony and Diversity in International Theory (Winchester, Mass.: Allen and Unwin, 1985), and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., "Neo-realism and Neo-liberalism," World Politics, Vol. 40, No. 2 (January1988). 10. See Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1959); Albert Wohlstetter, "The Delicate Balance o f Terror," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 37, No. 2 (January 1959), pp. 211-234; Herman Kahn, O n Thermonuclear War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960); William Kaufmann, ed., Military Policy and National Security (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956); Henry A. Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957); Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), and Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966); and Glenn Snyder, Deterrence and Defence (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1961). 11. See Donald Brennan, ed., Arms Control, Disarmament, and National Security (NewYork: Braziller, 1961); Thomas C . Schelling and Morton H . Halperin, Strategy and Arms Control (New York:The Twentieth Century Fund, 1961); and Louis Henkin, ed., Arms Control: Issues for the Public (Englewood Cliffs,N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1960). 12. See Robert E. Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1957) and Osgood, NATO: The Entangling Alliance (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1962); Klaus Knorr, ed., NATO and American Security (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1959); and Morton H. Halperin, Limited War in the Nuclear Age (New York: Wiley, 1963). 13. See Smoke, "National Security Affairs," pp. 303-304; John Steinbruner, "Beyond Rational Deterrence: The Struggle for New Conceptions," World Politics, Vol. 28, No. 2 (January 1976), p. 224; and Licklider, The Private Nuclear Strategists, p. 154. 14. Peter Nailor, "Military Strategy" in Trevor Taylor, ed., Approaches and Theory in International Relations (London:Longman, 1978), p. 180. 15. See Robert Paarlberg, "Forgetting About The Unthinkable," Foreign Polrcy, No. 10 (Spring 1973), pp. 132-140. 16. For expositions o f these concepts o f decision-making, see Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971); Morton H . Halperin, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1974); John D. Steinbruner, The Cybernetic Theory of Decision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974); and Graham T. Allison and Morton H. Halperin, "Bureaucratic Politics: A Paradigm and Some Policy Implications," in Raymond Tanter and Richard H. Ullman, eds., Theory and Policy in lnternational Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 40-79. For an example o f the application o f such concepts to particular weapons systems, see Ted Greenwood, Making the MIRV: A Study of Defense Decision-Making (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1975). 17. See Robert Jervis, The Logic o f Images in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970); and Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). 18. See Philip Green, Deadly Logic: The Theory of Nuclear Deterrence (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1966); and Alexander L. George and Richard Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974). 19. See Robert 0. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Power and Interdependence (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976); David A. Deese and Joseph S . Nye, Jr., eds., Energy and Security (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1980); and David A. Baldwin, Economic Statecraft (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
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20. A useful overview of some of the literature critical of deterrence theory is Robert Jervis, "Deterrence Theory Revisited," World Politics, Vol. 31, No. 2 (January 1979), pp. 289-324. 21. Hedley Bull, "Strategic Studies and its Critics," World Politics, Vol. 20, No. 4 (July 1968), p. 600. 22. Thomas Schelling reportedly found it difficult to think of ways to translate the corlcepts he developed in The Strategy of Conpzct and Arms and Inf[uence into strategies applicable to the situation in Vietnam in 1965. See Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, p. 335. 23. Michael Howard, "The Forgotten Dimensions of Strategy," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 57, No. 5 (Summer 1979), p. 982. 24. Smoke, "National Security Affairs," p. 258. 25. Laurence Martin, "The Future of Strategic Studies," Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 3, No. 3 (December 1980), p. 94. 26. Stanley Hoffmann, "An American Social Science: International Relations," Daedalirs, Vol. 106, No. 3 (Summer 1977), pp. 50, 55. 27. Huntington, "Recent Writing In Military Politics - Foci and Corpora," pp. 240-241. 28. Jervis, et al., The Field of Natronal Security Studies, pp. 20-27. 29. See Bernard Brodie, "Why Were We So (Strategically) Wrong?" Foretgn Policy, No. 5 (Winter 1971-72), p. 160. For another perspective, see Colm S. Gray, "What RAND Hath Wrought," Foreign Policy, No. 4 (Fall 1971), pp. 111-129. 30. Smoke, "National Security Affairs," p. 259. 3 1. See Steven E. Miller, ed., Military Strategy and the Origins of the First World KGrr (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). 32. See Paul M. Kennedy, "The F m t World War and the lnternational Power System," lnternational Security, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Summer 1984), pp. 7-40; see also Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic and Military Conflict from 1.700-2000 (New York: Random House, 1987). 33. This is also true of the broader field of international relations that provides the theoret~cal basis for international security studies. See Hoffmann, "An Amencan Soclal Science." Hoffrnann identifies three significant advances in the broader field: the concept of ~nternationalsystem; the literature on deterrence; and work on the political effects of economic interdependence. 34. See Ken Booth, Strategy and Ethnocentrrsm (1,ondon: Croorn Helm, 1978). 35. Gray, Strategic Studies and Public Policy, p. 194. For a discussion of how Soviet culture influences Soviet strategic thinking, see Jack L. Snyder, The Soviet Strategic Culture: Implications for Limrted Nucleizr Operations (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, September 1977). 36. T h ~ ssection draws o n "The Secur~tyAffairs Field: What Has It Achieved? Where Should It Go?," a working paper prepared at a Social Science Research Council Conference, New York Clty, November 20-23, 1986, pp. 1-4. 37. See Walter Slocombe, "The Countervailing Strategy," Internatlonal Security, Vol. i, N o . 4 (Spring 1981), pp. 18-27; Warner R. Schilling, "U.S. Strategic Nuclear Concepts In the 1970s: The Search for Sufficiently Equivalent Countervailing Parity," International Serunty, Vol. 6, NO. 2 (Fall 1981), pp. 49-79; and Robert Jervis, The lllogic of American Nuclear Strategy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). 38. See Spurgeon M . Keeny, Jr. and Wolfgang K.H. Panofsky, "MAD Versus NUTS: Can Doctrine or Weaponry Remedy the Mutual Hostage Relationship of the Superpowers?," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 60, No. 2 (Winter 1981/82), pp. 287-304; Colm S. Gray, "Nuclcar Strategy: The Case for a Theory of Victory," International Security, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Summer 1979), pp. 54-87; and Robert Jervis, "Why Nuclear Superiority Doesn't Matter," Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Winter 1979/80), pp. 617-633. 39. See Fritz W. Errnartb, "Contrasts in American and Sov~etStrategic Thought," Internatlonal Security, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Fall 1978), pp. 138-155; Richard Pipes, "Why the Russians Think They Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War," C:ommentary (July 1977), pp. 21-34; and David Holloway, The Soviet Union and the Arms Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).
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40. See Keith B. Payne and Colin S. Gray, "Nuclear Policy and the Defensive Transition," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 62, No. 4 (Spring 1984), pp. 820-842; Charles L. Glaser, " W h y Even Good Defenses May Be Bad," International Security, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Fall 1984), pp. 92-123; and Charles L. Glaser, " D o W e Want the Missile Defenses W e Can Build?" lnternational Security, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Summer 1985), pp. 25-57. 41. Aaron Wildavsky, "Practical Consequences o f the Theoretical Study o f Defense Policy," Public Admtnistration Review, Vol. 25, No. 1 (March 1965),p. 100. 42. See John D. Steinbruner, "National Security and the Concept o f Strategic Stability," Journal of Confltct Resolution, Vol. 22, No. 3 (September 1978), pp. 411-428; Graham T. Allison, Albert Carnesale, and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., eds., Hawks, Doves and Owls: An Agenda for Avoiding Nuclear War ( N e w York: Norton, 1985); Bruce G. Blair, Strategic Command and Control: Redefining the Nuclear Threat (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1985); Paul J . Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces ( N e w Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); and Desmond Ball, "Can Nuclear War Be Controlled?" Adelphi Paper No. 169 (London:International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1981).For a discussion o f how to change U.S. nuclear strategy, stressing organizational factors, see Morton H. Halperin, Nuclear Fallacy: Dispelling the Myth of Nuclear Strategy (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1987). 43. See Irving L.. Janis, Victims of Groupthink (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972);Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics; and Ralph K . White, Nobody Wanted War: Misperception in Vietnam and Other Wars (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968). 44. See Richard Ned Lebow, Between Peace and War: The Nature of lnternational Crisis (Baltimore:The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein, Psychology and Deterrence (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); and Deborah Welch Larson, Origins of Containment: A Psychological Explanation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). For contrasting perspectives on the relevance o f psychology, see James G. Blight, "The New Psychology o f War and Peace," lnternational Security, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Winter 1986/87), pp. 175-186; and Stanley Hoffmann, " O n the Political Psychology o f War and Peace: A Critique and An Agenda," Political Psychology, Vol. 7, No. 1 (March 1986), pp. 1-21. 45. See, for example, Anatol Rapoport, Strategy and Conscience ( N e w York: Harper and Row, 1964); and Green, Deadly Logic. 46. For an example o f an early attempt to address the ethics o f nuclear deterrence, see Paul Ramsey, War and the Christian Conscience: How Shall Modern War Be Conducted Justly? (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1961). 47. See Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars ( N e w York: Basic Books, 1977); and Stanley Hoffmann,Duties Beyond Borders (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse Un~versityPress, 1981),chapter 2, for general discussions o f ethics and war. 48. See National Conference o f Catholic Bishops, The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response (Washington, D.C.: United States Catholic Conference, May 3, 1983); Michael Novak, Moral Clarity in the Nuclear Age (Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson, 1983); James E. Dougherty, Midge Decter, Pierre Hasner, Laurence Martin, Michael Novak, and Vladimir Bukowsky, Ethtcs, Deterrence and National Security (Washington, D.C.: PergamonBrassey's, 1985); Geoffrey Goodwin, ed., Ethics and Nuclear Deterrence (London: Croom Helm, 1982); Russell Hardin, John J . Mearsheimer, Gerald Dworkin, and Robert E. Goodin, Nuclear Deterrence: Ethics and Strategy (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1984); and Joseph S . Nye, Jr., Nuclear Ethics ( N e w York: The Free Press, 1986). 49. See Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon; Herken, Counsels of War; David Alan Rosenberg, "The Origins o f Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945-1960," lnternational Security, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Spring 1983), pp. 3-71; Aaron F. Friedberg, " A History o f the U.S. Strategic 'Doctrine' - 1945 to 1980," Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 3, No. 4 (December 1980), pp. 37-71; Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, 194.5-19.50 ( N e w York: Knopf, 1980); and Richard K. Betts, Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1987). 50. See, for example, John Lewis Gaddis, "The Long Peace: Elements o f Stability in the Postwar International System," International Security, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Spring 1986),pp. 99-142;
and Marc Trachtenberg, "The Influence of Nuclear Weapons in the Cuban Miss~leCrisih," lnternat~onalSecurity, Vol. 10, N o . 1 (Summer 1985), pp. 137-1 63. See also the special issue on "Causes of Major Wars," Journal of lnterdisciplinary History, forthcoming. For a useful discussion of how historians and political scient~stscould learn from one another, see John I.ewia Gaddis, "Expanding the Data Base: Historians, Political Scient~sts,and the Enrichment of Security Studies," International Security, Vol. 12, N o . 1 (Summer 1987), pp. 3-21. 51. For discussions of this method, see Alexander L. George, "Case Studies and Theory Development," paper presented a t the Second Annual Symposium o n Information Processing in Organizations, Carnegie-Mellon Univers~ty, October 15-1 6, 1982; and George, "Case Studies and Theory Development: The Method of Structured, Focused Base Women
121
insurgents. She went for occasional carriage rides and had tea with the few other American women then in Manila. But she didn't want to be in the Philippines. She only sailed to Asia out of wifely duty. She counted the days until her husband's tour was over. And she was happy when she could repack her trunks and sail back home. There were no elaborate American bases when Jessie Anglum endured her damp hotel stay. But in the ninety years since her arrival the US government has made up for that deficiency. Today the now independent Philippines hosts a score of US military facilities. Subic Bay Naval Base and Clark Air Force Base, both situated on the main island of Luzon, are deemed by Pentagon strategists to be among the most crucial for American global defense. When American military planners look at the world these days they imagine the territories encircling the Pacific Ocean as part of a single security - or insecurity - chain. To be secure, this 'Pacific Rim' must be strung with a necklace o f American-controlled military bases: from Anchorage to San Diego, Hawaii, Vladivostok, Seoul, Yokahama, Cam Ranh Bay, Subic Bay and Clark, Wellington, Belau and Kwajalein. Having created this mental map, this assumption of militarized interconnectedness, the American strategist is on the look-out for gaps and disturbances. The Soviet Union's Pacific coastline catches the strategist's eye; so now does Cam Ranh Bay, a large naval base built by the Americans during the Vietnam War, but since 1975 given over by the Vietnamese government to the Soviet military for its use. Less tinged with outright hostility, but still worrying for the strategists are the political changes that make American ships, planes and personnel less welcome in New Zealand, South Korea, Belau and the Philippines. The American-Philippines bases agreement comes to an end in 1991. The American government must persuade the post-Marcos government of President Corazon Aquino, under pressure from both anti-base nationalists on the left and anti-communist army officers on the right, to renew the bases agreement. Failure would mean radically redesigning the necklace meant to secure the Pacific Rim. This would entail finding another country willing to accept some of the world's largest military bases and the social problems they bring with them. The social problem that has attracted most Filipino attention is prostitution. Filipinos, like South Koreans, Okinawans, Guameans, Thais and Belauans, have held foreign military bases responsible for creating or exacerbating conditions which promote prostitution. Consequently, as the American bases have become the objects of nationalist ideas and campaigns, so prostitution has to become an issue defined in terms of nationalist anger and nationalist hopes. The arrival of AIDS in the Philippines in 1987 only served to escalate nationalists' sense that the current American-Philippines .bases agreement violates not just Filipino women's rights but ('more fundamentally' some might say) the sovereignty and integrity of the Filipino nation as a whole. Filipino feminists took up militarization as a women's issue. During the 1970s and early 1980s they began analyzing how the Marcos regime's
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growing reliance on coercion undermined women's already fragile support systems. Since the fall of Marcos in 1986, Filipino women activists have charted with dismay the Aquino regime's continuation of militarization as a strategy for resolving the country's deepening social crises. Integrating anti-militarism into their analysis and practice has made it easier for women active in Gabriela and other feminist organizations to find common cause with other nationalist, anti-militarist political groups, even if those groups did not accord women's concerns top priority in their own work. Subic Bay Naval Base overshadows the town of Olongapo. The Navy base is home for many of the 35,000 American military personnel and their families stationed in the Philippines. When an aircraft-carrier docks, another 18,000 men pour into town. The Subic Bay base relies on civilian Filipino labor to keep it running. Workers are paid at lower rates than workers on American bases in South Korea or Japan, but for many Filipino men and women these base jobs provide a livelihood. By 1985 the US military had become the second largest employer in the Philippines, hiring over 40,000 Filipinos: 20,581 full-time workers, 14,249 contract workers, 5,064 domestics and 1,746 concessionaries. The sum of their salaries amounted to almost $83 million a year. By 1987 the American bases were employing over 68,000 Filipinos, who enjoyed medical insurance as well as other benefits not commonly offered by most Filipino employers. Many were women. Many more women were married to or mothers of male workers. On the other hand, some Filipino analysts warned against letting this figure weigh too heavily, for those employees amounted to a mere 5 per cent of the 1.18 million people employed by the Philippines government itself.42 As the price of sugar has declined on the international market and as large landowners have pushed more and more Filipinos into landless poverty, more young women have come to make a living by servicing the social and sexual needs of American military men. In 1987 the Aquino government estimated that there were between 6,000 and 9,000 women entertainment workers registered and licensed in Olongapo City. Independent researchers, taking account of unlicensed as well as licensed women, put the figure as high as 20,000. Another 5,000 women often come to Olongapo City from Pampanga province and Manila when one of the American aircraft-carriers comes into port.43 In addition, in recent years rising numbers of children have been recruited into the prostitution trade. Of the approximately 30,000 children born each year of Filipino mothers and American fathers, some 10,000 are thought to become street children, many of them working as prostitutes servicing American pedophiles. Some of the Amer-Asian children who avoid the streets have been sold. An insider described the racialized market to Filipino researchers: 'Those Caucasian-looking children are each allegedly sold for $50-200 (around P1,000-4,000), whereas the Negro-fathered ones fetch only $25-30 (around P500-600).'44 There are more Filipino women working as prostitutes in the tourist industry than around US bases. Filipino feminists have drawn the links between
the two, revealing how distorted investment, patriarchal conventions and short-sighted government priorities have together forced thousands of poor women off the land and out of exploitative jobs to service civilian as well as military men. It has been militarized prostitution, however, that has been made the most prominent symbol of compromised sovereignty by the maleled nationalist movement. Without feminist prompting, these anti-bases organizations rarely delve into the ptriarchal causes for women coming to Ol~ngapo.~~' Two quite disparate worries have made American officials somewhat less complacent about prostitution around their Philippines bases in the late 1980s: Defense Department women's advocates' claim that prostitution is lowering American women's morale; and the spread of AIDS. The US Defense Advisory Committee on the Status of Women in the Services (DACOWITS) is a group of civilian men and women appointed by the Secretary of Defense to monitor the conditions under which women in the US military serve. It has become an in-house advocate for equal promotions, for attacking sexual harassment, for redefining 'combat'. DACOWITS members traveled to Asia in 1987 to inspect the conditions under which American women soldiers and sailors were serving overseas. For the first time in its history, DACOWITS members began to make a connection between the treatment of local women around the American bases and the treatment of American women on the bases. They blamed American Navy women's low morale on the sexist environment created by the 'availability of inexpensive female companionship from the local population and its adverse consequences for legitimate social opportunities of Service women'.4h Still, the American DACOWITS members fell far short of allying with Filipino women. They confined their brief to the well-being of American servicewomen. They were concerned with the impact housing was having on Navy women's heterosexual relationships. Women serving on Okinawa and at Subic Bay told them that the command's policy of placing women personnel in barracks separated from the male sailors' barracks, when combined with the condoning of local prostitution, was fostering a base-wide impression that American servicewomen were merely 'second team' members. 'More serious', according to DACOWITS members, such policies were contributing to 'conditions in which extremist behavior [lesbianism] is fostered ... For example, one barracks at Camp Butler is widely referred to as Lessy Land.'47 But it has been AIDS that has sparked alarm - and confusion - among the military and local policy-makers responsible for managing a system of sexual relations that supports the American Pacific Rim security strategy. By January 1987 doctors had recorded twenty-five HIV-positive cases in the Philippines. All twenty-five carriers were women. Twenty-two of them worked as entertainers in bars around Clark, Subic and Wallace US military bases. Six of the twenty-five showed signs of AIDS. Women in Gabriela, the umbrella feminist organization active in the anti-bases campaign, helped open Olongapo's first Women's Center and started to make the information known. Women criticized the Manila government for not giving HIV-positive women
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any counseling or medical care and for blaming the women themselves for AIDS, pointing to them as a threat not only to American men but to other Filipinos. Who are the producers of AIDS in the Philippines? Why does prostitution exist and proliferate in the military bases and our tourist spots? The danger and damage of AIDS to women and the existence o f prostitution are, in fact, crimes against women. We are the products, the commodities in the transaction ... Who, then, we ask, are the real criminals of AIDS and prostitution? Indict them, not Filipino women activists called for a reversal of the century-old formula for safeguarding the morale and physical health of soldiers serving on overseas bases. Specifically, Gabriela members called on the Philippines government to insist that the American government institute a policy that all servicemen or base employees showing any signs of AIDS not be allowed 'on Philippine soil': In the same way that American servicemen demand VD clearance from the women, the Filipinos have the right to demand AIDS and VD clearance from the s e r v i ~ e m e n . ~ ~ A year later the Philippines Immigration Commissioner declared that henceforth US military personnel and all foreign sailors arriving in the Philippines would be required to present certificates showing that they are free of AIDS." If this policy is actually implemented, it will make it far harder for American military planners to maintain their Pacific Rim strategy. Either they will have to fundamentally alter servicemen's assumptions about what rewards they deserve in return for months away from home and weeks cooped up on board ship. O r they will have to modify their global security doctrine in order to rely on fewer and more modest bases abroad.
Conclusion Belizean women (and, some say, imported Guatemalan women) have a lot to tell us about how the British armed forces use sexuality to conduct their foreign Northern Irish and West German women who date British troops have important insights to share with the women in Belize. British women married to British soldiers could help round out the picture, as could British women peace activists and those in uniform. All together, these women's seemingly different experiences add up to a gendered government bases policy. But it is the very divisions between these women that provide a military base with its security. The armed forces need women to maintain their bases, but they need those women to imagine that they belong to mutually exclusive categories. Women from different countries are separated by distance,
Enloe
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and often race and inequalities of political influence. Prostitutes, girlfriends, wives, peace activists and women soldiers have learned to view each other as sexual or ideological rivals. An anti-bases movement uninformed by feminist questioning leaves these divisions in place. In this sense, an anti-bases movement that ignores the armed forces' dependence on the complex relations between women leaves the structure of military bases intact even if it manages to close down a particular base. A woman living on a military base as a wife wants to feel secure. And her own advancement depends on her husband performing successfully enough to win promotion. Thus she sees women peace activists camped outside her gates as the enemy, not an ally. The woman in uniform is trying to challenge the military's masculinist conventions; she sees herself as a warmaking partner, not a sexually available object for her male team-mates. So it is not surprising that she deeply resents the women who work as prostitutes outside (and sometimes inside) the base gates, eroticizing, she thinks, her workplace. Girlfriends of soldiers are never quite sure whether the soldier they are dating may have a wife back home, whether the promises of marriage - will be realized when a superior warns against marrying a foreign women or when the tour of duty is over and the need for local companionship comes to an abrupt end. Thus when Kenyan and Filipino women met in Nairobi in 1985 and launched the Campaign Against Military Prostitution (CAMP) to create a network of women in all countries hosting American bases, they were taking a step towards dismantling the global gender structure on which each individual base depends." So, too, are Filipino anti-bases activists who try to imagine what their actions might mean for the already politically conscious women in the small Pacific nation of Belau, the US military's favored back-up site for its giant Subic Bay naval base." When a base is successfully ousted from one place it is likely to be moved somewhere else. If women active in anti-bases movements see developing contacts with women in alternative countries as integral to their work, there is a better chance of the removal of a military base producing a fundamental reassessment of global strategy, not simply a transfer of equipment and personnel. If military wives and women soldiers begin to explore the ways that prostitution pollutes not only their on-base lives but the life of the country off which they are living, the respect they seek for themselves is likely to have deeper roots. Such an exploration might also prompt them to broaden their political horizons, to focus less exclusively on benefits and ask more questions about the consequences of militarization.
Notes 1. E.P. Thompson, 'Introduction', in E.P. Thompson, Mary Kaldor et al., Mad Dogs: T l ~ c US Raids on L h y a , I.ondon, Pluto Press, 1987, p. 6 . 2. Michael Kidron and Dan Smith, The War Atlas, London, Pan Books, New York, Simon CI: Schuster, 1983, m a p 17. See also 'Pulling Back', a report on US bases policies by the American
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T h e Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security A g e n d a
Friends Service Committee, Philadelphia; New York Times, December 2 3 and December 25, 1988. 3. Duncan Campbell, The Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier: American Military Power in Britain, London, Paladin Books, 1986. 4. Ibid., p. 16. 5. The following account draws on Graham Smith, W h e n J i m Crow Metlohn Bull: Black American Soldiers in World War 11 Britain, London, I.B. Travis, 1987; New York, St Martin's Press, 1988. Also, Mary Penick Motley, editor, The Invincible Soldier: The Experience of the Black Soldier, World War 11, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1987. 6. O n racial policies in the armed forces, see Cynthia H. Enloe, Ethnic Soldiers: State Security in Divided Societies, London, Penguin, 1980. 7. Graham Smith, op. cit., p. 188. 8. Ibid., pp. 192-3. An oral history of Black American women in military service during the World Wars is being compiled by Julia Perez, William Joiner Center, University of Massachusetts, Boston. 9. Graham Smith, op. cit., p. 186. 10. Ibid., p. 200. 11. John Costello, Virtue Under Fire: How World War I1 Changed Our Social and Sexual Attitudes, Boston, Little, Brown & Company, 1985, p. 254. O n British women who married Canadian soldiers, see Joyce Hibbert, War Brides, Toronto, New American Library of Canada, 1980. 12. Graham Smith, op. cit., p. 206. 13. Norman Lewis, 'Essex', Granta, no. 23, London and New York, Penguin, Spring, 1988, p. 112. 14. O n military wives, see Myna Trustram, Women of the Regiment: Marriage and the Victorian Army, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 1984; Cynthia Enloe, Does Khakr Become You? The Militarization of Womenk L i t w , London and Winchester, MA, Pandora Press, 1988; Mona Macmillan, 'Campfollower: A Note on Wives in the Armed Forces', in Hilary Callan and Shirley Ardener, editors, The Incorporated Wife, London, Croom Helm, 1984; Rosemary McKechnie, 'Living with Images of a Fighting Elite: Women and the Foreign Legion', in Sharon Macdonald, Pat Holden and Shirley Ardener, editors, lmages of Women in Peace and War, London, Macmillan, 1987, Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin Press, 1988, pp. 1 2 2 4 7 ; a play depicting Britlsh army wives' lives, Gillian Richmond, The Last Waltz, available from Valerie Hoskins, Eagle House, 109 Jermyn Street, London, SW1; research in progress by Helena Terry, Women's Studies, York University, Toronto, Canada; on Canadian military wives' organizing, Lucie Richardson Laliberti, Law School, Queens University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada; Ximena Bunster, 'Watch Out for the Little Nazi Man That All of Us Have Inside: The Mobilization and Demobilization of Women in Militarized Chile', Women's Studies International Forum, vol. 11, no. 5, 1988. 15. O n American military daughters' reactions to living on military bases, Mary Wertsch, Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress, New York, Crown, forthcoming. O n the social networks created by British officers out of their enclosed worlds, Barbara Rogers, Men Only, London and Winchester, MA, Pandora Press, 1988. 16. Quoted in the New York Times, March 20, 1988. See also 'The Flip Side of Volunteering', Washington Report, OctoberINovember, 1987, p. 3: published by Women's Equity Action League, 1250 I Street NW, Washington, DC 20005. 17. New York Times, December 18, 1988. 18. Correspondence with Janice Hill, Women and the Military Project, Military Counseling Network, Rottenburg, West Germany, July, 1988. 19. Quoted by Joan Smith, 'Ghost Riders in the Sky', New Statesman and Society, June 10, 1988, p. 16. 20. Ibid., p. 17. 21. Norman Lewis, op. cit., p. 115. 22. Ibid., p. 116. 23. Lynchcornbe, At Least Cruise is Clean, UK, Niccolo Press, 1984.
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Base Women
127
24. Ihid. 2.5. Alice Cook and Gwyn Kirk, Greenhorn Women Everywhere, London, Pluto, Boston, South End Press, 1983. 26. Lynne Jones, 'Perceptions of Peace Women at Greenham ( h n m o n 1981-1985', in Sharon Macdonald, et al., op. cit., pp. 179-204. 27. Beatrix Campbell, The Iron Ladies: Why D o Women Vote Tory?, London, Virago, 1987, p. 126. 28. For a map of women's peace camps: Jon1 Seager and Ann Olson, Women in the Wovld: An international Atlas, London, Pan Books, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1987, map 39. 29. Members of the Faslane peace camp, Faslane: Diary of a Peace Camp, Edinburgh, Polygon Books, 1984, p. 78. For debates within all-women and mixed peace camps, see We Are Ordinary Women: A Chronicle of the Puget Sound Women's Peace Camp, Seattle, Seal Press, 1985; Jane Held, 'The B r ~ t ~ sPeace h Movement: A Critical Exammarlon of Attitudes to Male Violence within the Brit~shPeace Movement, as Expressed with Regard to the "Molesworth Rapes"', Womenk Studies International Forum, vol. 11, no. 3, 1988, pp. 211-21. 30. Rebecca Johnson, quoted in Cook and Kirk, op. cit,. p. 68. 31. Yarrow Cleaves, 'Greenham Common: One World, Many Women', in Greenhim Women Against Cruise Missiles, a newsletter edited by Gwyn Kirk, 339 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10012, December, 1988. 32. Rebecca Green, 'Greenham to Aldermaston', Everywomen, February, 1988. Wc Are Ordinary Women, op. cit., also describes a peace camp outside a weapons factory. 33. Mariano Aguirre, 'Spain's Nuclear Allergy', The Nation, December 26, 1988, pp. 722-3. John Gilbert, 'F-16s Find a New Home After Spain Evicts Them', The Guardran (US), February 24, 1988, pp. 16-17. Elisahetta Addis, an editor of the Italian peace journal Giuno, suggests that ltalian feminists and peace activ~stsdid not mount a campaign against acceptance of the new US base in part because they were preoccupied with the issue of the Palestinia~iuprising on the West Bank and in part because it was difficult to galvanize local opposit~ongiven the economic depression in the reglon selected for the base: conversation, Cambridge, MA, December 10, 1988. 34. James Markham, 'Over the Screeching Jets, Germans Cry Enough', New York Times, August 10, 1988. 1 am indebted to Peter Armitage and Wendy Mishkin of Labrador for sharlng inforn~ationabout the impact assessments and local debates surrounding the proposed expansion of the Goose Bay air force base. 3 5 . Soviet bases in Third World countries do not appear to provoke public debate about prostitution. Two of the Soviet Union's largest overseas bases are Cam Ranh Bay, in Vietnam, and, untd mid-1988, Kabul in Afghanistan. Prostitution, while it may exlst, has not attracted sufficient attention to make it politically salient. One well-researched description of personnel problems experienced h y the Sov~etmilitary during its engagement in Afghanistan does not mention nrostitution o r VD at all. The r e w r t - written under contract for the US army and thus with every incentive to reveal any warts on the Sowet army - cites drug abuse, inter-rank hullying and ethnic hostility between Slavic and Muslim Soviet sold~ersas the problems o f most concern to Soviet officers.'(' 36. Alexander Alexiev, Inside the Sozliet Army in Afghanistan, Santa Monica, CA, Rand Corporation, 1988. 37. Joanna Liddle and Rama josh^, 'Gender and Imperialism in British India', Emnonm. and Polltrral Weekly, New Delhi, vol. 20, no. 43, October 26, 1985, special supplement o n Women's Studies in India, p. WS-74. See also Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race a n d Sex irnd Class under the Kaj, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980. 38. The Dawn, no. I , May, 1888, p. 5. The collected volumes of The Dawn are avaihble at the Fawcett Library, City of London Polytechnic, 1.ondon. For a feminist interpretation of Josephine Butler's attitudes toward imperialism, see Antoinette Burton, 'The White Wom'ln's Burden: Brit~shFem~nistsand "The Indian Woman", 1865-1915', in Margaret Strohel and Nupur Chaudhuri, guest editor\, 'European Women and Imperialisnl', special issue of Women's Studies lnternatronal Forum, vol. 13, no. 2, 1990. 39. The Dawn, no. 27, May, 1895, pp. 1-2.
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40. On military prostitution debates in the US, see Allan Brandt, No Magic Bullet, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1987; Katherine Bushnell, 'Plain Words to Plain People', a World War I pamphlet, undated, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA; Cynthia Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? op. cit. The Canadian debate about soldiers' sexuality during World War I1 is discussed in Ruth Roach Pierson, 'They're Still Women Afterall': The Second World War and Canadian Womanhood, Toronto, McClelland & Stewart, 1986. 41. Jessie Anglum, unpublished diary, 1901-1902, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA. 42. Alexander R. Magno, 'Cornucopia or Curse: The Internal Debate on the US Bases in the Philippines', Kasarinlan, Third World Studies Program, University of the Philippines, Quezon City, vol. 3, no. 3, 1988, pp. 9-12; Pilar Ramos-Jimenez and Elena Chiong-Javier, 'Social Benefits and Costs: People's Perceptions of the US Bases in the Philippines', Research Center, De La Salle University, Manila, 1987, pp. 9-10; Philippine Resource Center Monitor, no. 3, August 12, 1988, available from PO Box 40090, Berkeley, CA 94704. 43. Ramos-Jimenez and Chiong-Javier, op. cit., p. 16. 44. Ibid., p. 17. 45. Sr. Mary John Mananzan, editor, Essays on Women, Manila, St Scholastica's College, 1987; Pennie S. Azarcon, editor, Kamalayan: Feminist Writings in the Philippines, 12 Pasaje de la Paz, Quezon City, Pilipina, 1987; Sergy Floro and Nana Luz, editors, Sourcebook on Philippine Women in Struggle, Berkeley, CA, Philippine Resource Center, 1985. 46. Jacquelyn K. Davis, 'Summary of Findings of 1987 DACOWITS WestPac Trip', memo to the Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger, August 26, 1987, p. 6. 47. Ibid.; Nonna Cheatham, 'Report of DACOWITS Spring, 1988 Meeting', Minerva, vol. 6, no. 2, Summer, 1988, pp. 1 4 2 ; testimony of Carolyn Becraft, Women's Equity Action League, House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Personnel, October 1, 1987. 48. 'AIDS is Here! Fight AIDS!', Women's World, ISIS, no. 14, 1987, p. 37. 49. Ibid., p. 38. 50. Christian Science Monitor, February 18, 1988. 51. Jacqui Alexander, an Afro-Caribbean feminist and sociologist, has reported that Belizean women activists believe that British authorities are bringing Guatemalan women into Belize to provide sexual services for British soldiers stationed there; this has caused some tension between Belizean and Guatemalan women. Jacqui Alexander, in conversation, Cambridge, MA, December, 1988. 52. Sister Soledad Perpinan, one of the founders of CAMP, Third World Movement Against the Exploitation of Women, Manila, Philippines; lecture at Clark University, Worcester, MA, April, 1987; Leopoldo Moselina, 'Prostitution and Militarization', in Cast the First Stone, Quezon City, World Council of Churches in the Philippines, 1987, pp. 49-65; Saundra Sturdevant, 'The Bargirls of Subic Bay', The Nation, April 3, 1989, pp. 444-6. 53. For more on the impact of military bases on Pacific women and women's anti-nuclear activism in the Pacific, see Jane Dibblin, Day of Two Suns: US Nuclear Testing and the Pacific Islands, London, Virago, 1988. Also, Women Working for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific, c/o Beech Range, Levenshulme, Manchester, M I 9 2 E 0 .
The Case Against Linking Environmental Degradation and National Security Daniel Deudney
Introduction
L
ike all biological organisms, humans are vitally dependent upon their physical environment. Since the emergence of human life on earth, humans have been able simply to take as given the presence of some environmental conditions - clean air, shielding from ultraviolet radiation, etc. - that are now in jeopardy. Other environmental elements, particularly fertile soil, water and earth minerals, have been subject to intense, often violent, intergroup competition.' For the last two centuries, the explosive progress in science and technology and the emergence of societies of unprecedented wealth seemed to have loosened the iron grip of natural scarcity upon human life. In the last several decades, however, alarming evidence has accumulated that both the developed industrial countries and those striving to achieve this state are dangerously damaging the ecological systems that underpin all human life. Given these trends, environmental issues are likely to become an increasingly important dimension of political life at all levels - locally, inside states, as well as internationally. How institutions respond to these emerging constraints is likely to shape politics in a profound manner. Because state and interstate conflict are such central features of both world politics and geopolitical theory, there is a strong tendency for people to think about environmental problems in terms of national security and to assume that environmental conflicts will fit into the established patterns of interstate conflict. The aim of this essay is to cast doubt upon this tendency to link environmental degradation and national security. Specifically, I make three claims. First, it is analytically misleading to think of environmental degradation as Source: Millennium: Journal of lnternatronal Studies, 19(3)(1990):461-76. T h ~ sarticle first appeared in Millennium.
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a national security threat, because the traditional focus of national security interstate violence - has little in common with either environmental problems or solutions. Second, the effort to harness the emotive power of nationalism to help mobilise environmental awareness and action may prove counterproductive by undermining globalist political sensibility. And third, environmental degradation is not very likely to cause interstate wars.
The Weak Analytical Links b e t w e e n Environmental Degradation a n d National Security
One striking feature of the growing discussion of environmental issues in the United States is the attempt by many liberals, progressives and environmentalists to employ language traditionally associated with violence and war to understand environmental problems and to motivate action. Lester Brown, Jessica Tuchman Matthews, Michael Renner and others have proposed 'redefining national security' to encompass resource and environmental threats2 More broadly, Richard Ullman and others have proposed 'redefining security' to encompass a wide array of threats, ranging from earthquakes to environmental degradati~n.~ Hal Harvey has proposed the concept of 'natural security': and US Senator Albert Gore has spoken extensively in favour of thinking of the environment as a national security issue.5 During the renewed Cold War tensions of the late 1970s and early 1980s, such concepts were advanced to prevent an excessive focus on military threats. As the Cold War winds down, such links are increasingly popular among national security experts and organisations looking for new missions, as exemplified by US Senator Sam Nunn's recently enacted 'strategic environmental research program', in which US$200 million will be spent for military efforts in environmental monitoring and research.9ue to the interest and support of several foundations, numerous conferences and researchers are addressing issues of 'environmental security'. Historically, conceptual ferment of this sort has often accompanied important changes in politics.' New phrases are coined and old terms are appropriated for new purposes. Epochal developments like the emergence of capitalism, the growth of democracy and the end of slavery were accompanied by shifting, borrowing and expanding political language. The wideranging contemporary conceptual ferment in the language used to understand and act upon environmental problems is therefore both a natural and an encouraging development. But not all neologisms and linkages are equally plausible or useful. Until this recent flurry of reconceptualising, the concept of 'national security' (as opposed to national interest or well-being) has been centred upon organised ~ i o l e n c eAs . ~ is obvious to common sense and as Hobbes argued with such force, security from violence is a ~ r i m a human l need, because loss of life prevents the enjoyment of all other goods. Of course, various resource
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factors, such as access to fuels and ores, were understood as contributing to states' capacities to wage war and achieve security from violence. Before either 'expanding' the concept of 'national security' to encompass both environmental and violence threats, or 're-defining' 'national security' or 'security' to refer mainly to environmental threats, it is worth examining just how much the national pursuit of security from violence has in common with environmental problems and their solutions. Military violence and environmental degradation are linked directly in at least three major ways. First, the pursuit of national-security-from-violence through military means consumes resources (fiscal, organisational and leadership) that could be spent on environmental restoration. Since approximately one trillion US dollars is spent worldwide on military activities, substantial resources are involved. However, this relationship is not unique to environmental concerns, and unfortunately there is no guarantee that the world would spend money saved from military expenditures on environmental restoration. Nor is it clear that the world cannot afford environmental restoration without cutting military expenditures. Second, war is directly destructive of the environment. In ancient times, the military destruction of olive groves in Mediterranean lands contributed to the long-lasting destruction of the lands' carrying capacities. More recently, the United States' bombardment and use of defoliants in Indochina caused significant environmental damage. Further, extensive use of nuclear weapons could have significant impacts on the global environment, including altered weather (i.e., 'nuclear winter') and further depletion of the ozone layer. Awareness of these environmental effects has played an important role in mobilising popular resistance to the arms race and in generally de-legitimising the use of nuclear explosives as weapons. Third, preparation for war causes pollution and consumes significant quantities of resources. In both the United States and the Soviet Union, significant quantities of radioactive waste have been produced as a by-product of the nuclear arms race, and several significant releases of radiation have occurred - perhaps most disastrously when a waste dump at a Soviet nuclear weapons facility exploded and burned, spreading radioactive materials over a large area near the Urals. Military activities have also produced significant quantities of toxic wastes. In short, war and the preparation for war are clearly environmental threats and consume resources that could be used to ameliorate environmental degradation. In effect, these environmental impacts mean that the war system has costs beyond the intentional loss of life and destruction. Nevertheless, most of the world's environmental degradation is not caused by war and the preparation for war. Completely eliminating the direct environmental effects of the war system would leave most environmental degradation unaffected. Most of the causes and most of the cures of environmental degradation must be found outside the domain of the traditional national security system related to violence.
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The war system is a definite but limited environmental threat, but in what ways is environmental degradation a threat to 'national security'? Making such an identification can be useful if the two phenomenon - security from violence and security from environmental threats - are similar. Unfortunately, they have little in common, making such linkages largely useless for analytical and conceptual purposes. Four major dissimilarities, listed in Table 1, deserve mention. Table 1: Conceptual and Organisational Mismatches
Conventional National Security type of threat
source of threat
degree of intentionality
violent death, - destruction of property, - loss of independence - mainly outside - other states armed with weapons -
- direct and high -
types of organisations involved
'accidental' war
- specialised, -
secretive, removed from civil society
Global Habitabilitv - wide range of harms: aesthetics, disease, natural integrity - both inside and outside - wide range of sources: individuals, corporations, governments - largely unintentional side-effects of routine activities - accidental spill, release, etc. - all sizes - in situ change of many mundane activities: land use, waste treatment, farming, factory design.
First, environmental degradation and violence are very different types of threats. Both violence and environmental degradation may kill people and may reduce human well-being, but not all threats to life and property are threats to security. Disease, old age, crime and accidents routinely destroy life and property, but we do not think of them as 'national security' threats or even threats to 'security'. (Crime is a partial exception, but crime is a 'security' threat at the individual level, because crime involves violence.) And when an earthquake or hurricane strikes with great force, we speak about 'natural disasters' or designate 'national disaster areas', but we do not speak about such events threatening 'national security'. If everything that causes a decline in human well-being is labelled a 'security' threat, the term loses any analytical usefulness and becomes a loose synonym of 'bad'. Second, the scope and source of threats to environmental well-being and national-security-from-violence are very different. There is nothing about the problem of environmental degradation which is particularly 'national' in
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character. Since environmental threats are often oblivious of the borders of the nation-state, they rarely afflict just one nation-state. Nevertheless, this said, it would be misleading to call most environmental problems 'international'. Many perpetrators and victims are within the borders of one nationstate. Individuals, families, communities, other species and future generations are harmed. A complete collapse of the biosphere would surely destroy 'nations' as well as everything else, but there is nothing distinctively national about either the causes, the harms or the solutions that warrants us giving such privileged billing to the 'national' grouping. A third misfit between environmental well-being and national-securityfrom-violence stems from the differing degrees of intention involved. Violent threats involve a high degree of intentional behaviour. Organisations are mobilised, weapons procured and wars waged with relatively definite aims in mind. Environmental degradation, on the other hand, is largely unintentional, the side-effects of many other activities. N o one really sets out with the aim of harming the environment (with the so far limited exception of environmental modification for military purposes). Fourth, organisations that provide protection from violence differ greatly from those in environmental protection. National-security-from-violence is conventionally pursued by organisations with three distinctive features. First, military organisations are secretive, extremely hierarchical and centralised, and normally deploy vastly expensive, highly specialised and advanced technologies. Second, citizens typically delegate the goal of achieving national security to remote and highly specialised organisations that are far removed from the experience of civil society. And third, the specialised professional group staffing these national security organisations are trained in the arts of killing and destroying. In contrast, responding to the environmental problem requires almost exactly opposite approaches and organisations. Certain aspects of virtually all mundane activities - for example, house construction, farming techniques, sewage treatment, factory design and land use planning - must be reformed. The routine everyday behaviour of practically everyone must be altered. This requires behaviour modification in situ. The professional ethos of environmental restoration is husbandmanship - more respectful cultivation and protection of plants, animals and the land. In short, national-security-from-violence and environmental habitability have little in common. Given these differences, the rising fashion of linking them risks creating a conceptual muddle rather than a paradigm or world view shift - a de-definition rather than a re-definition of security. If we begin to speak about all the forces and events that threaten life, property and well-being (on a large-scale) as threats to our national security, we shall soon drain the term of any meaning. All large-scale evils will become threats to national security. To speak meaningfully about actual problems, we shall have to invent new words to fill the job previously performed by the old spoiled ones.
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The Risks in Harnessing the Rhetorical and Emotional Appeals of National Security for Environmental Restoration Confronted with these arguments, the advocate of treating environmental degradation as a national security problem might retort: Yes, some semantic innovation without much analytical basis is occurring, but it has a sound goal - to get people to react as urgently and effectively to the environmental problem as they have to the national-security-fromviolence problem. If people took the environmental problem as seriously as, say, an attack by a foreign power, think of all that could be done to solve the problems! In other words, the aim of these new links is not primarily descriptive, but polemical. It is not a claim about fact, but a rhetorical device designed to stimulate action. Like William James, these environmentalists hope to find a 'moral equivalent to war' to channel the energies behind war into constructive directions. But before harnessing the old horse of national security to pull the heavy new environmental wagon, prudence demands a closer look at its temperament. The potential disadvantages as well as the apparent advantages should be considered. The sentiments associated with national security are so powerful, because they relate to war. As the historian Michael Howard has observed: Self-consciousness as a Nation implies, by definition, a sense of differentiation from other communities, and the most memorable incidents in the group memory usually are of conflict with, and triumph over, other communities. It is in fact very difficult to create national self-consciousness without a war.' Such sentiments often run deep, but they also run in directions different from those needed for successful environmental politics. If the emotional appeals of national security can somehow be connected to environmental issues, then it is also possible that other, less benign, associations may be transferred. To make a balanced assessment of such 'mindset' factors is (like most of the things that matter in politics) to grapple with intangibles not easily quantified - but vital nevertheless (see Table 2). At first glance, the most attractive feature of linking fears about environmental threats with national security mentalities is the sense of urgency engendered, and the corresponding willingness to accept great personal sacrifice. If in fact the basic habitability of the planet is being undermined, then it stands to reason that some crisis mentality is needed. Unfortunately, it may be difficult to engender a sense of urgency and a willingness to sacrifice for extended periods of time. Crises call for resolution, and the patience of a mobilised populace is rarely long. For most people, exertion
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in a crisis is motivated by a desire to return to normalcy, for the problem to be resolved once and for all. Such a cycle of arousal and somnolence is not likely to make much of a contribution to establishing sustainable patterns of environmentally sound behaviour. The limits of attempting to create a 'moral equivalent of war' mentality to reform long-term resource-use patterns was vividly demonstrated during the late 1970s when US President Carter's effort to mobilise public awareness and forge a public consensus about energy conservation produced a flurry of activity that subsided once the immediate symptoms of the problem receded. Furthermore, 'crash' solutions are often bad ones - more expensive, more oppressive and more poorly designed than typical government programmes, as exemplified by such US white elephants as the proposed synfuels programme, the 'energy mobilization board' and the Byzantine system of price controls spawned by the 'energy security' crisis. Table 2: Associated Mindsets
Conventional National Security 1. urgency / crisis; make sacrifices; no expense is too great 2. worse case scenarios as basis for planning 3. mainly zero-sum 4. short-term time horizons 5. nationalism; us us. them
Global Habitability 1. urgency / crisis?; make sacrifices; n o expense is too great or frugality? 2. worse case scenarios as basis for planning 3. common benefits 4. long-term time horizons 5. 'the enemy is us'; polluters in other countries are threat; pollution in other countries is threat
A second apparently valuable similarity between the national security mentality and the environmental problem is the tendency to use worse case scenarios as the basis for planning. However, the extreme conservatism of military organisations in responding to potential threats is not unique to them. The insurance industry is built around preparations for the worst possibilities, and many fields of engineering, such as aeronautical design and nuclear power plant regulation, routinely employ extremely conservative planning assumptions. These can serve as useful models for improved envlronmental policies. Third, the conventional national security mentality and its organisations are deeply committed to zero-sum thinking. 'Our' gain is 'their' loss. Trust between national security organisations is extremely low. The prevailing assumption is that everyone is a potential enemy, and that agreements mean little unless congruent with immediate interests. If the Pentagon had been put in charge of negotiating an ozone layer protocol, we might still be stockpiling chlorofluorocarbons as a bargaining chip. Fourth, conventional national security organisations have short time horizons. The pervasive tendency for national security organisations to discount
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the future and pursue very near-term objectives is a poor model for environmental problem solving. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is the fact that the 'nation' is not an empty vessel or blank slate waiting to be filled or scripted, but is instead profoundly linked to war and 'us us. them' thinking. The tendency for people to identify themselves with various tribal and kin groupings is as old as humanity. In the last century and a half, however, this sentiment of nationalism, amplified and manipulated by mass media propaganda techniques, has been an integral part of totalitarianism and militarism. Nationalism means a sense of 'us us. them', of the insider us. the outsider, of the compatriot us. the alien. The stronger the nationalism, the stronger this cleavage, and the weaker the transnational bonds. Nationalism reinforces militarism, fosters prejudice and discrimination, and feeds the quest for 'sovereign' autonomy. These fundamental features of nationalism are often forgotten by intellectuals who often reject such sentiments as irrational. National security thinking and action is all premised upon a relatively sharp distinction between 'us' and 'them', between friend and foe. Of course, taking the war and the 'us us. them' out of nationalism is a noble goal. But this may be like taking the sex out of 'rock and roll', a project whose feasibility declines when one remembers that 'rock and roll' was originally coined as a euphemism for sex. In contrast, in the environmental sphere 'we' - not 'they' - are the 'enemy', as Pogo reminds us. As noted earlier, existing 'us vs. them' groupings in world politics match very poorly the causal lines of environmental degradation. At its most basic level, the environmental problem asks us to redefine who 'us' encompasses. Coping with global problems and new forms of interdependence requires replacing or supplementing national with other forms of group identity. Intense nationalism directly conflicts with the globalism that has been one of the most important insights of environmentalism. If in fact resolution of the global environmental problem, and particularly the global climate change problem, requires great, even unprecedented, types of international cooperation, then nationalist sentiment and identification is a barrier to be overcome. Thus, thinking of national security as an environmental problem risks undercutting both the globalist and common fate understanding of the situation and the sense of world community that may be necessary to solve the problem. In short, it seems doubtful that the environment can be wrapped in national flags without undercutting the 'whole earth' sensibility at the core of environmental awareness. If pollution comes to be seen widely as a national security problem, there is also a danger that the citizens of one country will feel much more threatened by the pollution from other countries than by the pollution created by their fellow citizens. This could increase international tensions and make international accords more difficult to achieve, while diverting attention from internal clean-up. Citizens of the United States, for example, could become much more concerned about deforestation in Brazil than in reversing the
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centuries of North American deforestation. Taken to an absurd extreme - as national security threats sometimes are - seeing environmental degradation in a neighbouring country as a national security threat could trigger various types of interventions, a new imperialism of the strong against the weak. Instead of linking 'national security' to the environmental problem, environmentalists should emphasise that the environmental crisis calls into question the national grouping and its privileged status in world politics. The environmental crisis is not a threat to national security, but it does challenge the utility of thinking in 'national' terms. Proponents of thinking of environmental degradation as a national security problem may react to my objections with the following argument: Yes, nationalist, statist and militarist features of 'national security' thinking are evil and rampant, but we globalists now know that security in the old and limited sense of protection from organised violence can now only be achieved in common. Henceforth, both the environmental and the violence threats to our security can only be achieved in 'common'. Such a response reveals a key feature of the political sociology of environmentalism, namely, that most people who take environmentalists seriously adhere to a 'common security' understanding of the organised violence problem. The notion of 'common security' has since the beginning of this century enjoyed great vogue among progressive intellectuals, particularly in Englishspeaking and Nordic countries. With the coming of nuclear explosives, the 'common security' characterisation of the violence problem would seem to take on the air of the obvious. But the concept of 'common security' is not widely accepted in principle outside certain progressive circles, despite the sound reasoning behind it. Nor is it significantly reflected in the actual practice of state violence-security organisations. Indeed, the conceptual apparatus of 'common security' thinking has in large measure been fashioned as a fundamental alternative to mainstream 'national security' thinking and practice. The phrase 'common security' as applied to the organised violence problem is still 'revolutionary' and 'radical' in the sense that it would alter beyond recognition the practice and mindset of protection-from-violence organisations. All the talk about a 'nuclear revolution' should not obscure the fact that we are in a 'revolutionary predicament' rather than in a 'postrevolutionary state'. Given this reality, it is premature to characterise environmental degradation as a threat to 'security' until we can be more confident that people do in fact think 'common' whenever they hear 'security'. Fortunately, environmental awareness need not depend upon co-opted national security thinking. Integrally woven into ecological awareness are a powerful set of values and symbols - ranging from human health and property values to beauty and concern for future generations. These v a l ~ ~ eand s symbols draw upon basic human desires and aspirations and are powerful motivators of human action. Far from needing to be bolstered by national
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security mindsets -which in the wake of the nuclear revolution are themselves of dubious value, even on their own terms - this 'green' sensibility can make strong claim to being the master metaphor for an emerging post-industrial civilisation. Instead of attempting to gain leverage by appropriating national security thinking, environmentalists should continue to develop and disseminate this rich emergent world view.
Environmental Degradation and Interstate War Many people are drawn to calling environmental degradation a national security problem, in part because they expect this phenomenon to stimulate interstate conflict and even violence. States often fight over what they value, particularly if related to 'security'. If states begin to be much more concerned with resources and environmental degradation, particularly if they think environmental decay is a threat to their 'national security', then states may well fight resource and pollution wars. Much of the recent literature on the impacts of climate change upon world politics posits conflictual and violent outcomes.1° As Arthur Westing has noted: Global deficiencies and degradation of natural resources, both renewable and non-renewable, coupled with the uneven distribution of these raw materials, can lead to unlikely - and thus unstable - alliances, to national rivalries, and, of course, to war." In emphasising such outcomes, environmental analysts essentially assume along with realist international relations scholars - that international political life follows a conflictual and violent pattern. To analyse fully the prospects for violent outcomes is a vast and uncertain undertaking.I2 Since there are more than 150 independent states and since resource and environmental problems are diverse and not fully understood, any generalisation will surely have important exceptions. However, in order to make a first rough assessment of the prospects for resource and pollution wars, I will examine five routes by which environmental deterioration could possibly cause interstate conflicts leading to war. In general, I argue that interstate violence is not likely to result from environmental degradation, because of several deeply rooted features of the contemporary world order - both material and institutional - and because of the character of environmental and resource interests. Few ideas seem more intuitively sound than the notion that states will begin fighting each other as the world runs out of usable natural resources. The popular metaphor of a lifeboat adrift at sea with declining supplies of clean water and rations suggests there will be fewer and fewer opportunities for positive-sum gains between actors. Many ideas about resource war are derived from the cataclysmic world wars of the first half of the twentieth century. Influenced by geopolitical theories that em~hasisedthe importance
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of land and resources for Great Power status, Hitler in significant measure fashioned Nazi war aims to achieve resource autonomy.' The aggression of Japan was directly related to resource goals: lacking indigenous fuel and minerals, and faced with a slowly tightening embargo by the Western colonial powers in Asia, the Japanese invaded Southeast Asia for oil, tin and rubber.14 Although the United States had a richer resource endowment than the Axis powers, fears of shortages and industrial strangulation played a central role in the strategic thinking of American elites about world strategy." And during the Cold War, the presence of natural resources in the Third World helped turn this vast area into an arena for East-West conflict.Ih Given this record, the scenario of conflicts over resources playing a powerful role in shaping international order should be taken seriously. There are, however, three strong reasons for concluding that the familiar scenarios of resource war are of diminishing plausibility for the foreseeable future. First, the robust character of the world trade system means that states no longer experience resource dependency as a major threat to their military security and political autonomy. During the 1930s, the world trading system had collapsed, driving states to pursue autarkic economies. In contrast, the resource needs of contemporary states are routinely met without territorial control of the resource source, as Ronnie Lipschutz has recently shown.'Second, the prospects for resource wars are diminished, since states find it increasingly difficult to exploit foreign resources through territorial conquest. Although the invention of nuclear explosives has made it easy and cheap to annihilate humans and infrastructure in extensive areas, the spread of small arms and national consciousness has made it very costly for an invader, even one equipped with advanced technology, to subdue a resisting population - as France discovered in Indochina and Algeria, the United States in Vietnam and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Schemes of resource imperialism are now more appealing to romantic militarists than practical policy-makers. At the lower levels of violence capability -those that matter for conquering and subduing territory - the Great Powers have lost an effective military superiority and are unlikely soon to regain it. Third, the world is entering what H.E. Goeller and Alvin M. Weinberg have called the 'age of substitutability', in which industrial civilisation is increasingly capable of taking earth materials such as iron, aluminum, silicon and hydrocarbons (which are ubiquitous and plentiful) and fashioning them into virtually everything needed." The most striking manifestation of this trend is that prices for vktually every raw material have been stagnant or falling for the last several decades, despite the continued growth in world output. In contrast to the expectations voiced by many during the 1970s that resource scarcity would drive up commodity prices to the benefit of Third World raw material suppliers - prices have fallen, with disastrous consequences for Third World development. In a second scenario, increased interstate violence results from internal turmoil caused by declining living standards. Many commentators on the environmental crisis emphasise that the basic source of environmental distress
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is the modern success in producing wealth. Some maintain that new technology, institutional reform, new attitudes and more efficient capital investment can largely solve the environmental problem without sacrificing high standards of livings. Others, however, are more pessimistic, asserting that the great levels of wealth produced since the industrial revolution cannot be sustained. In this view, the only way to prevent ecological collapse (and the resulting economic collapse) is for people to accept radically lower standards of living. Ramifications of economic stagnation upon politics and society could well be major and largely undesirable. Although the peoples of the world could perhaps live peacefully at lower standards of living, reductions of expectations to conform to these new realities will not come easily. Faced with declining living standards, groups at all levels of affluence can be expected to resist this trend by pushing the deprivation upon other groups. Class relations would be increasingly 'zero-sum games', producing class war and revolutionary upheavals. Faced with these pressures, liberal democracy and free-market systems would increasingly be replaced by authoritarian systems capable of maintaining minimum order.20 The international system consequences of these domestic changes may be increased conflict and war. If authoritarian regimes are more war-prone because of their lack of democratic control and if revolutionary regimes are more war-prone because of their ideological fervour and lack of socialisation into international norms and processes, then a world political system containing more such states is likely to be an increasingly violent one. The historical record from previous economic depressions supports the general proposition that widespread economic stagnation and unmet economic expectations contribute to international conflict. Although initially compelling, this scenario has flaws as well. First, the pessimistic interpretation of the relationship between environmental sustainability and economic growth is arguably based on unsound economic theory. Wealth formation is not so much a product of cheap natural resource availability as of capital formation via savings and more efficient ways of producing. The fact that so many resource-poor countries, like Japan, are very wealthy, while many countries with more extensive resource endowments are poor, suggests that there is no clear and direct relationship between abundant resource availability and national wealth. Environmental constraints require an end to economic growth based on increasing raw material through-puts, rather than an end to growth in the output of goods and services. Second, even if economic decline does occur, interstate conflict may be dampened, not stoked. In the pessimistic scenario, domestic political life is an intervening variable connecting environmentally induced economic stagnation with interstate conflict. How societies respond to economic decline may in large measure depend upon the rate at which such declines occur. An offsetting factor here is the possibility that as people get poorer, they will be less willing to spend increasingly scarce resources for military capabilities. In this regard, the experience of economic depressions over the last
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two centuries may not be relevant, because such depressions were characterised by under-utilised ~ r o d u c t i o ncapacity and falling resource prices. In the 1930s, increased military spendmg had a stimulative effect, but in a world in which economic growth had been retarded by environmental constraints, military spending would exacerbate the problem. Third, environmental degradation may affect interstate relations in such a way as to cause war by altering the relative power capacities of states. Alterations in relative power positions can contribute to wars, either by tempting the newly strengthened states t o aggress upon the newly weakened ones or by leading the newly weakened ones to attack and lock in their power position relative to their neighbours before their power ebbs any further. Support for such scenarios can be drawn from history, and international relations scholars have extensively studied such p h e n ~ r n e n o n . ~ ' Nevertheless, such alterations in the relative international power potential of states might not lead to war as readily as the lessons of history suggest, because economic power and military power are perhaps not as tightly coupled as in the past. The relative economic power positions of major states, such as Germany and Japan, have altered greatly since the end of World War 11. But these changes, while requiring many complex adjustments in interstate relations, have not been accompanied by war or threat of war. In the contemporary world, whole industries rise, fall and re-locate, often causing quite substantial fluctuations in the economic well-being of regions and peoples, but wars do not result. What reason is there for believing that changes in relative wealth and power position caused by the uneven impact of environmental degradation would be different in their effects? Part of the reason for this loosening of the economic-military link has been the nuclear revolution, which has made it relatively cheap for the leading states to sustain a mutual kill capacity. Given that the superpowers field massively oversufficient nuclear forces at the cost of a few per cent of their GNP, environmentally-induced economic decline would have to be extreme before their ability to field a minimum nuclear deterrent would be jeopardised. Environmental degradation in a country or region could become so extreme that the basic social and economic fabric comes apart. Should some areas of the world suffer this fate, the impact of this outcome on international order may not, however, be very great. If a particular country, even a large one like Brazil, were tragically to disintegrate, among the first casualties would be the capacity of the industrial and governmental structure to wage and sustain interstate conventional war. As Bernard Brodie observed in the modern era, 'the predisposing factors to military aggression are full bellies, not empty ones'.22The poor and wretched of the earth may be able to deny an outside aggressor an easy conquest, but they are themselves a minimal threat to outside states. Offensive war today requires complex organisational skills, specialised industrial products and surplus wealth. In today's world everything is connected, but not everything is tightly coupled. Regional disasters of great severity may occur, with scarcely a ripple
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in the rest of the world. After all, Idi Amin drew Uganda back into savage darkness, the Khmer Rouge murdered an estimated two million Cambodians and the Sahara has advanced across the Sahel without the economies and political systems of the rest of the world being much perturbed. Indeed, many of the world's citizens did not even notice. A fourth possible route from environmental degradation to interstate conflict and violence involves pollution across state borders. It is easy to envision situations in which country A dumps an intolerable amount of pollution on a neighbouring country B (which is upstream and upwind), causing country B to attempt to pressure and coerce country A into eliminating its offending pollution. We can envision such conflict of interest leading to armed conflict. Fortunately for interstate peace, strongly asymmetrical and significant environmental degradation between neighbouring countries is relatively rare. Probably more typical is the situation in which activities in country A harm parts of country A and country B, and in which activities in country B also harm parts of both countries. This creates complex sets of winners and losers, and thus establishes a complex array of potential intrastate and interstate coalitions. In general, the more such interactions are occurring, the less likely it is that a persistent, significant and highly asymmetrical pollution 'exchange' will result. The very multitude of interdependency in the contemporary world, particularly among the industrialised countries, makes it unlikely that intense cleavages of environmental harm will match interstate borders, and at the same time not be compensated and complicated by other military, economic or cultural interactions. Resolving such conflicts will be a complex and messy affair, but the conflicts are unlikely to lead to war. Finally, there are conflict potentials related to the global commons. Many countries contribute to environmental degradation, and many countries are harmed, but since the impacts are widely distributed, no one country has an incentive to act alone to solve the problem. Solutions require collective action, and with collective action comes the possibility of the 'free rider'. In the case of a global agreement to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, if one significant polluter were to resist joining the agreement, with the expectation that the other states would act to reduce the harms to a tolerable level, the possibility would thus arise that those states making the sacrifices to clean up the problem would attempt to coerce the 'free rider' into making a more significant contribution to the effort. It is difficult to judge this scenario, because we lack examples of this phenomenon on a large scale. 'Free-rider' problems may generate severe conflict, but it is doubtful that states would find military instruments useful for coercion and compliance. If, for example, China decided not to join a global climate agreement, it seems unlikely that the other major countries would really go to war with China over this. In general, any state sufficiently industrialised to be a major contributor to the carbon dioxide problem will also present a very poor target for military coercion.
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To summarise, the case for thinking that environmental degradation will cause interstate violence is much weaker than commonly thought. In part, this is because of features of the international system - particularly the hypertrophy of violence capability available to states - t h a t have little to do directly with environmental matters. Although many analogies for such conflict draw from historical experience, they fail to take into account the ways in which the current interstate system differs from earlier ones. Military capability sufficient to make aggression prohibitively costly has become widely distributed, making even large shifts in the relative power potential of states less likely to cause war. Interstate violence seems to be poorly matched as a means to resolve many of the conflicts that might arise from environmental degradation. The vitality of the international trading system and the more general phenomenon of complex interdependency also militate against violent interstate outcomes. The result is a world system with considerable resiliency and 'rattle room' to weather significant environmental disruption without significant violent interstate conflict.
Conclusion
The degradation of the natural environment upon which human well-being depends is a challenge of far-reaching significance for human societies everywhere. But this challenge has little to d o with the national-securityfrom-violence problem that continues to plague human political life. Not only is there little in common between the causes and solutions of these two problems, but the nationalist and militarist mindsets closely associated with 'national security' thinking directly conflict with the core of the environmentalist world view. Harnessing these sentiments for a 'war on pollution' is a dangerous and probably self-defeating enterprise. And fortunately, the prospects for resource and pollution wars are not as great as often conjured by environmentalists. The pervasive recourse to national security paradigms to conceptualise the environmental problem represents a profound and disturbing failure of imagination and political awareness. If the nation-state enjoys a more prominent status in world politics than its competence and accomplishments warrant, then it makes little sense to emphasise the links between it and the emerging problem of the global habitabilit~.~' Nationalist sentiment and the war system have a long-established logic and staying power that are likely to defy any rhetorically conjured 're-direction' toward benign ends. The movement to preserve the habitability of the planet for future generations must directly challenge the tribal power of nationalism and the chronic militarisation of public discourse. Environmental degradation is not a threat to national security. Rather, environmentalism is a threat to 'national security' mindsets and institutions. For environmentalists to dress their programmes in the blood-soaked garments of the war system betrays their core values and creates confusion about the real tasks at hand.
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Earlier versions of this essay were presented at: the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston, MA in November 1989; the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Princeton University, Princeton, NJ in December 1989; the Five College Peace Consortium in January 1990; and the Center for International Cooperation and Security Studies at the University of Wisconsin in March 1990. The author would like to thank Eric Arnett, Tad Homer Dixon, Hal Feiveson, Willett Kempton, Michael Lerner, Richard Matthew, Martha Snodgrass, Rob Socolow, Valerie Thomas, Paul Wapner and Wesley Warren for providing valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
References 1. For an overview of the role of environmental factors in early theories of politics, see Daniel Deudney, 'Early Theories of the Influence of Geography and the Environment Upon Politics', Global Geopolitics: Materialist World Order Theories of the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries (Unpublished PhD dissertation, Politics Department, Princeton University, 1989), Chapter 111. 2. Lester Brown, Redefining National Securlty (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Paper, No. 14, October 1977);Jessica Tuchman Matthews, 'Redefining Security', Foreign Affairs (Vol. 68, No. 2, 1989), pp. 162-77; Michael Renner, National Security: The Economic and Enuironmental Dimensions (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Paper, No. 89, May 1989); and Norman Myers, 'Environmental Security', Foreign Policy (No. 74, 1989), pp. 23-41. 3. Richard Ullman, 'Redefining Security', International Security (Vol. 8, No. 1, Summer 1983), pp. 129-53. 4. Hal Harvey, 'Natural Security', Nuclear Times (MarchIApril 1988), pp. 24-26. 5. Philip Shahecoff, 'Senator Urges Military Resources to be Turned to Environmental Battle', The New York Times, 29 June 1990, p. 1A. 6. 'Strategic Environmental Research Program', Congressional Record (28 June 1990), pp. S.8929-43. 7. Quentin Skinner, 'Language and Political Change', and James Fair, 'Understanding Political Change Conceptually', in Terence Ball, et al., (eds.), Political Innouatron and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 8. For a particularly lucid and well-rounded discussion of security, the state and violence, see Barry Buzan, People, States, a n d Fear: The National Security Problem in lnternational Relations (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), particularly pp. 1-93. 9. Michael Howard, 'War and the Nation-State', Daedalus (Fall, 1979). Emphasis in original. 10. See, in particular, Peter Gleick, 'The Implications of Global Climatic Changes for International Security', Climatic Change (Vol. IS), pp. 309-25; and Peter Gleick, 'Global Climatic Changes and Geopolitics: Pressures on Developed and Developing Countries', in A. Berger et al., (eds.), Climate and Geo-Sciences (Amsterdam: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989). 11. Arthur H. Westing, 'Global Resources and International Conflict: An Overview', in Arthur H. Westing (ed.), Global Resources and Environmental Conflict: Environmental Factors in Strategic Policy and Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press and Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 1986), p. 1. 12. For a useful survey of theories relevant for such analysis, see Tad Homer Dixon, Enurronmental Change and Human Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Working Paper, American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, 1990). 13. For discussions of resource autarky during the 1930s, see Brooks Emeny, The Strategy of Raw Materials (New York: Macmillan, 1934); Norman Rich, Hider's War Aims: Ideology, The Nazi State, and the Course of Expansion (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1973); William Carr, Arms, Autarchy, and Aggression: A Study in C e m a n Foreign Policy, 1933-1939
f)euiint,\
14.
15. 16.
17. 18.
19.
20.
21. 22.
23.
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(London: Edward Arnold, 1972); and Daniel Deudney, 'Haushofer, Burnham, and (hrr: Panregional Superstates', in Deudney, op cit., in note 1 , Chapter VII. James Crowley, Jupun's Quest for Autonomy: N~itionalS e u r ~ t yand Forergn Policy, 19.30- 19.38 (Princeton, NJ: I'rinceton University Press, 1966). Nicholas J o h n Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics: T h e United States and t h Bulance of Power (New York: Harcourr, Brace and Co., 1942). Alfred E. Eckcs, Jr., T h e United States i ~ n dthe Global Struggle for Minerals (Austin, I'X: University of Texas Press, 1979). Konnie D. Lipschutz, W h e n Nations C;liish: Raw Matermls, Ideology and Foreign Policy (New York: Ballinger, 1989). Among the most recent versions o f the argument that war is of declining viabil~tyare: Evan h a r d , T h e Blunted Sword: T h e Erosron of Military Power ut Modern World Polrtics (New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1989); and John Mueller, Rctrcat from D o o m s d q : T h e C)hsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989). H.E. Goeller and Alvin Weinberg, 'The Age o f Substitutability', Sciencc (Vol. 201, 2 0 February 1967). For some recent evidence supporting this hypothesis, see Erlc D. L.xson, Marc H. Koss and Kobert H. Williams, 'Beyond the Era of Materials', Sc-ientific American (Vol. 254, l986), pp. 34-4 1. For a discussion of authoritarian and conflictual consequences of environmental constrained economies, see W~lliamOphuls, Ecolog)~and the Polltics o f Scarcity (San Franc~sco,CA: Freeman, 1976), p. 152. See also Susan M. Leeson, 'Philosophical Implications of the Ecological Crisis: The Authoritarian Challenge to L.iberalism', Polity (Vol. 11, No. 3 , Spring 1979); Ted Gurr, 'On the Political Consequences of Scarcity and Economic Decline', International Studies Quarterly (No. 29, 1985), pp. 51-75; and Robert Heilhroner, Au Inquiry Into the Human Prospect (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974). See, for example, Robert Gilpin, War and C h m g e in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Bernard Brodie, 'The Impact of Technological Change on the International System', in David Sullivan and Martin Sattler (eds.), Change and the Future of the International System (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), p. 14. For a particularly lucid argument that the nation-state system is over-developed relative to its actual problem-solving capacities, see George Modelski, Principles of World Politics (New York: The Free Press, 1972).
Security, Sovereignty, and the Challenge of World Politics R.B.J. Walker
The Security of States and the Security of People
T
he dilemma before us seems obvious enough. Threats to people's lives and well-being arise increasingly from processes that are worldwide in scope. The possibility of general nuclear war has been the most dramatic expression of our shared predicament, but potentially massive ecological disruptions and gross inequities generated by a global economy cause at least as much concern. Nevertheless, both the prevailing interpretations of what security can mean and the resources mobilized to put these interpretations into practice are fixed primarily in relation to the military requirements of supposedly sovereign states. We are faced, in short, with demands for some sort of world security, but have learned to think and act only in terms of the security of states. Symptoms of this dilemma are readily apparent. States are less and less convincing in their claims to offer the security that partly legitimizes their power and authority. Moreover, processes set in motion by the demands of military defense evidently make us all more and more insecure as inhabitants of a small and fragile planet. Whether judged through apocalyptic images of extermination, in terms of the comparative costs of missiles and medical facilities, or on the basis of accounts of the integration of military production into the seemingly benign routines of everyday life, we know that it is scarcely possible to invoke the term "security" without sensing that something is dreadfully wrong with the way we now live. Elements of this dilemma have been familiar for a considerable time. They have provoked controversy ever since the states system emerged from the decaying feudal hierarchies of early modern Europe. The contradiction between the presumed legitimacy of war and claims about reason, progress, enlightenment, and civilization has proved especially awkward. For the Source: Alternatives, XV(1) (1990): 3-27.
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most part, the contradiction has been resolved through a trade-off between freedom and necessity; that is, the necessities of war have been understood as the ultimate guarantee of the freedom and autonomy of states unwilling to submit to other states' ambitions of empire. Moreover, states have long been understood as sources of danger as well as agents of protection. Thomas Hobbes was content to argue in the seventeenth century that the dangers could not possibly be as intolerable as the miseries and brutalities of an ungoverned state of nature. Others have subsequently worked out accounts of democratic accountability that are rightly regarded as major achievements of modern political life. Even so, it is in relation to claims about the security of states that democratic processes have remained most seriously qualified. In whatever way these suspicions may have been dealt with in the past, they have now become especially acute. They converge on a widespread complaint that conventional accounts of security are much too restrictive in two distinct but interrelated senses. First, demands are issued for a broader understanding of whose security is at stake - for an effective account of the security of people in general, not just for the inhabitants of particular states. Hence concepts such as collective, common, as well as world security emerge. These demands are usually reinforced by accounts of the transformative character of the modern age, especially of the increasingly interdependent character of something that may be appropriately called world politics rather than just interstate or international relations. Second, demands are made for a broader understanding of just what security itself involves. Power comes not just from the barrel of the gun. It is thus possible to define the meaning of security in relation to social, cultural, economic, and ecological processes, as well as to geopolitical threats from foreign powers. Hence, for example, peace researchers insist on the need to break down artificial distinctions between security and development. Hence also concepts such as structural violence are elaborated on as ways of avoiding simplistic distinctions between peace and war. The general implication usually drawn from these lines of analysis concerns the need for a more global perspective o n human affairs in general and on the reconstruction of security arrangements in particular. If it now makes some sense to speak of a planetary ecology, a world economy, a potential global annihilation, or, more positively, even a global civilization, then surely, as many have suggested, it ought to be possible to envisage global political structures responsive to the security needs of the twentyfirst rather than the seventeenth century.'
Security a n d Political Community Unfortunately, the dilemma before us is not quite as obvious or straightforward as it is often made to seem. Calls for a broader understanding of security are inevitably challenged by familiar forms of skepticism. The institutions
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of state power are not noticeably withering away despite the complex patterns of global interdependence and territorial penetration in which states have become enmeshed. States still engage in geopolitical conflict and are jealous of their autonomy. Accounts of interdependence stimulate contrary accounts of dependence - of the structural disparities and exclusions that are at least as much a part of modern world politics as are patterns of integration. Moreover, the skeptics say, it may be true that purely military definitions of security are far too narrow, but if the meaning of security is extended too far, so as to become almost synonymous with, say, development or even justice, then it will soon cease to have any useful analytical or operational meaning at all. Most seriously, however, even if we admit that we are all now participants in common global structures, that we are all rendered increasingly vulnerable to processes that are planetary in scale, and that our most parochial activities are shaped by forces that encompass the world and not just particular states, it is far from clear what such an admission implies for the way we organize ourselves politically. The state is a political category in a way that the world, or the globe, or the planet, or humanity is not.2 The security of states is something we can comprehend in political terms in a way that, at the moment, world security cannot be understood. This is an elementary point, and it is often made in a regrettably crude and ahistorical way. People, it is said, have competing interests and allegiances. They are always likely to put the interests of their own society and state above any claims about a common humanity. In any case, the ongoing record of large-scale violence shows just how naive it is to hope for any political arrangements that give priority to some general human interest over the particular interests of states. Consequently, this argument typically asserts, if you want peace, then prepare for war. The crudity of this kind of formulation should not detract from the key insight common to many who are skeptical about the potential for any broader understanding of security in the modern world. This insight concerns the extent to which the meaning of security is tied to historically specific forms of political community. Political communities have emerged historically; their character is not preordained by some unchanging human nature or law of the jungle. In the modern world, states have managed to more or less monopolize our understanding of what political life is and where it occurs. To engage in politics now is to become obsessed with the historical achievements of states. This obsession is common to all significant political ideologies. Why engage in political life at all if not to challenge and even take over the reins of power? And what power is held by humanity as such, or can be represented through claims about world politics and world security? The security of states dominates our understanding of what security can be, and who it can be for, not because conflict between states is inevitable, but because other forms of political community have been rendered almost unthinkable. The claims of states to a monopoly of legitimate authority in a particular territory have succeeded in marginalizing and even erasing other expressions of political identity - other answer to questions about who we are.
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This success did not come about lightly. Much of the history of the last half millennium can be written as an account of the energy and violence required to ensure that the monopolistic claims of states be respected. Whether through appeals to the nation, the flag, or the national interest, states continue to deploy immense resources on an everyday basis to ensure that this monopoly is maintained. The dominant understandings of what politics is all about, and thus of what security must mean, arise precisely because the very form of statist claims to a monopoly on legitimate authority challenges the very possibility of referring to humanity in general - and by extension to world politics or world security - in any meaningful way. It may be that the dilemma before us is painfully obvious. We live amidst appalling levels of violence and threats of even more appalling violence to come. Security policies predicated on the military defense of states alone are clearly inadequate to the task before us. But what exactly is to be done? And by whom? And for whom? Two kinds of answers to questions like these are relatively easy to comprehend. But because our prevailing understanding of security is so closely tied to statist claims to legitimate authority, it is necessary to situate both kinds of answers in a third and prior set of considerations. One kind of response is to focus on specific policy proposals. Appalling levels of violence demand immediate and often drastic policy initiatives. It is in this context that the past few years have sustained a renewed optimism in some parts of the world as the name of Gorbachev has become synonymous with a revitalization of dktente, an admission of the obsolescence of old policies, and a willingness to slash military commitments in a way hardly thought possible in the mid-1980s. Another kind of response is to speculate about the structural forms - the institutions, semiformal regimes, and so on - through which more appropriate security policies can be put into effect. But both responses depend, tacitly or explicitly, on some understanding of precisely what it means to be secure, and whose security is being ensured. The obviousness of the dilemma we are in does not, unfortunately, help us respond adequately to questions like these. In fact, there is a danger that without serious attention to these broader questions, both the search for more effective policies and attempts to construct new institutional arrangements may lead us to merely reproduce or reorganize the status quo. This is especially important because prevailing accounts of security not only offer relatively coherent - although arguably quite unsatisfactory - answers to such questions, they also set certain limits on the way we have been able to think about more desirable alternatives. Those limits are clearly visible, for example, in the seemingly endless debate between the so-called realists and utopians - a debate that has effectively undermined any sustained attempt, in either academic scholarship or popular debate, to reconsider the meaning of security in the modern world." In what follows, therefore, I want to explore some of these limits in order to show to what degree contemporary thinking about world security has been caught within, but also has at least partly escaped from, the established
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rituals of debate about security. Four themes seem to me to be crucial: (1)the extent to which conventional accounts of security depend on certain assumptions embodied in the principle of state sovereignty; (2) the extent to which this account of security has subsequently been fixed in the categories of modernist theories of international relations; (3) the extent to which the principle of state sovereignty, the concept of security, and the categories of international relations theory reflect and reproduce deeply entrenched assumptions about progressive political action; and (4) the extent to which many of the most interesting attempts to reconstruct the meaning of security have been forced to place many of these cherished assumptions into question. In all four cases, I will suggest, the appropriate context in which to think about security is not the established discourses that have so successfully claimed the subject as their own - international relations theory, strategic studies, and so on - but the attempt to rethink the nature and possibility of political community in an age of evident transformations, dangers, and opportunities.
Security and State Sovereignty
Although aspirations for peace and alternative forms of security have become central to progressive forms of political action, and despite the contentiousness of specific security policies, the meaning of security itself has attracted relatively little attention. Compared with controversies accompanying claims about democracy, freedom, or even development, the absence of sustained debate about the meaning of security is rather odd. The literature on both the technicalities and ethics of military deployments can now fill substantial libraries, but the concept of security itself is usually used as if its meaning is entirely straightforward. This is because it is, in fact, quite straightforward, at least within the established conventions of political analysis. Attempts to articulate alternative accounts of structural violence, common or global security, and so on, necessarily challenge accounts of security that have congealed into the taken-for-granted conventions of what passes for common sense. Symptomatically, a preoccupation with guns and bombs, with violence and realpolitik, is not readily associated with an interest in abstract or philosophical problems. But when such an interest does arise, it tends to be concerned with either the technical character of strategic possibilities or the application of ethical principles to questions about war. Much of the debate about nuclear deterrence, for example, has occurred as a confrontation between technical and ethical standpoints. In both cases, explicitly political considerations are easily marginalized. Ethics, for example, comes to refer to principles of conduct that somehow transcend the grubby demands of political life, to the need to speak some sort of eternal truth to the corruptions of power. A preoccupation with technical considerations, on the other hand,
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tends to drift into a language of efficiency and rational action - a language in which it is all too tempting t o speak of mass murder in the soothing jargon of game theory and certain kinds of economics. Fortunately or unfortunately, disputes about the precise nature of ethical conduct or about how to speak truth to power d o not seem likely to diminish in the near future. And the extent to which supposedly rational accounts of efficient conduct have been incorporated into structures of violence remains a dark shame cast over the entire twentieth century. Consequently, although much is said about the techniques and ethics of security policy, it does not necessarily help us to clarify precisely what is at stake when conventional understandings of security are considered inadequate. The primary reason why the meaning of security is usually regarded as straightforward, and why so much of even the critical discussion of security policy avoids coming to terms with the explicitly political problems posed by the concept of security, is that this concept is so closely tied to the principle of state sovereignty. This principle, too, has become so much a part of our taken-for-granted understanding of what modern political life is all about that we have largely lost sight of what it means to call it into question. And this is, of course, what attempts to rethink the meaning of security must do. The principle of state sovereignty is usually expressed in one of two different ways. For theorists of international relations, it refers to the fragmentation of political life into autonomous political units. But interpretations of what it means to be autonomous also vary considerably. Some analysts interpret autonomy negatively, stressing a capacity for selfish and even paranoid behavior; Hobbes's image of individuals in a state of nature has been especially influential here. Others stress the positive connotations of freedom and selfdevelopment. They may follow Kant in hoping for a world of states all acting in accordance with universal principles of rational conduct. O r they may be more nationalist in inspiration, stressing the opportunity for different ways of life to emerge in different historical and cultural settings. Interpretations of the character of the political units can vary as well. Some analysts are content to refer to political units as relatively featureless black boxes, whereas others are more interested in the complexity and variety of states as historically constructed forms of political life. Despite all these potential variations, however, the central theme of state sovereignty as a matter of fragmentation is treated as the primary "fact" of international relations - a fact to which almost everything else of any significance is seen as a mere corollary. For analysts of political life within states, by contrast, sovereignty refers not t o fragmentation but to centralization - to the monopoly of power and/ or authority in a particular territory. Again there are significant variations on the theme. The ambiguous relationship between power and authority offers considerable scope for the proliferation of accounts of the source and character of political legitimacy. Similarly, uncertainty as to whether sovereignty lies ultimately in the state as a sort of abstract entity or with the people who
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are somehow represented in and by the state offers sufficient room for endless debate about the most appropriate meaning of concepts like democracy and freedom. Theorists of international relations refer to state sovereignty in terms of fragmentation, whereas theorists of political life within states refer to the centralization of powerlauthority. But these are simply two ways of saying the same thing, depending on whether the state is viewed internally or externally. The complementary character of these two perspectives in the autonomous or sovereign nature of states is crucial, for it literally defines the conditions under which it has been possible to think about security in the modern world. The principle of state sovereignty refers neither to just the fact of fragmentation nor to the fact of centralized authority, but to a specific claim about the relationship between both tendencies. State sovereignty is in effect an exceptionally elegant resolution of the apparent contradiction between centralization and fragmentation, or, phrased in more philosophical language, between universality and particularity. Conventional accounts of security retain their authority precisely because they are able to build upon this specific resolution. Alternative accounts of security necessarily have to suggest other ways in which the apparent contradiction might be resolved. This is why demands for a new understanding of security cannot be demands about security alone. The principle of state sovereignty emerged in early modern Europe as a replacement for the principle of hierarchical subordination. The claims of church and empire, the obligations of feudal patterns of socioeconomic organization, as well as the categories of philosophical and theological speculation all rested on a hierarchical articulation of the relationship between universality and particularity. These hierarchical arrangements gradually collapsed and were replaced by explicitly modern constructs, most crucially by the secular, territorial state. Particular states came to be distinguished from other particular states. The principle of hierarchical subordination gradually gave way to the principle of spatial exclusion. The advantage of principles of hierarchical subordination, of course, is that they provide a plausible account of the relationship between particular individuals and the world in which they participate. They permit an understanding of the world as a continuum from low to high, from the many to the few, from God's creatures to God, from the temporal to the eternal. With the transformations of the early modern era, this relationship became highly problematic. For Descartes this was expressed as the difficulty of the autonomous knower being certain about the world to be known. For the Protestant reformers it was expressed as the difficulty of understanding the unmediated relationship between the individual and God. Politically, however, the crucial dilemma was posed as the difficulty of reconciling the claims of people as people, as members of a presumed universal humanity, and the claims of the citizens of particular ~ t a t e s . ~ The principle of state sovereignty responds to this dilemma by affirming the priority of citizenship over any presumed humanity while simultaneously
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suggesting ways in which the contradiction between these opposing claims might be re~olved:~First, it suggests that there is one world, or world system, but many particular communities. Thus it can be said that, compared to the hierarchical subordination of empires, the resolution permits a greater degree of freedom and autonomy. Moreover, the complaint that such a resolution encourages war as the only means of settling disputes can be met in two ways. O n the one hand, it can be argued that wars generated by a system of autonomous states are not much worse than the violence endemic under more hierarchical arrangements. O n the other hand, it can be argued that autonomy does not necessarily imply anarchy. Indeed, contrary to the familiar claim that the international system is anarchical, so that pure power politics is the only possible option, most accounts of the modern states system since its inception have stressed the possibility of cooperation, rules of the game, and even institutionalized modes of conduct. This is the possibility opened up by Hobbes's insistence that the behavior of states is not directly analogous to the behavior of individuals, despite the constant references to the international system as a Hobbesian state of n a t ~ r e In . ~ this context, neither the United Nations nor recent theories about international regimes, interdependence, and so on are as novel as they have so often been made to seem. Second, the principle of state sovereignty suggests a spatial demarcation between those places in which the attainment of universal principles might be possible and those in which they are not. That is, it suggests a spatial demarcation between authentic politics and mere relations. Within states, it is assumed to be possible to pursue justice and virtue, to aspire to universal standards of reason. Outside, however, there are merely relations. In this context, it may be possible to aspire to order and some degree of pragmatic accommodation, but not to the kind of political community that would permit any sustained concern for justice. This spatial demarcation explains two of the key features of modern theories of political life. It explains the strict separation of theories of interstate relations from theories about political community. For theorists of interstate relations this takes the form of a prohibition on transferring assumptions about politics from within states to the analysis of relations between them. For political theorists it has usually meant passing over questions about interstate relations in relative silence.' The spatial demarcation also explains the paradoxical quality of so many claims about the achievements of modern political life. Inside particular states we have learned to aspire to what we like to think of as universal values and standards - claims about the nature of the good society, freedom, democracy, justice, and all the rest. But these values and standards have in fact been constructed in relation to particular con~munities.They depend on a tacit recognition that these values and standards have been achieved only because we have been able to isolate particular communities from those outside - an isolation that implies the continuing legitimacy of war and violence. Security policy thus has a very special character. It is not just another form of politics as usual. It occurs on the boundary between claims about
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political community inside and the lack of community outside. Security policy is not just a matter of defense against external threat. It is also the site at which particular political communities become aware of the limits to their own claim to pursue universalizing standards of conduct. It is the point at which democracy, openness, and legitimate authority must dissolve into claims about realpolitik, raison d'etat, and the necessity of violence. Third, the principle of state sovereignty suggests a temporal demarcation, a distinction between the progress toward universalizing standards possible within states and the mere contingency characterizing relations between them. Especially since the eighteenth century, Western political theory has been guided by a reading of history as a grand march from barbarism toward enlightenment and modernity. Theories of international relations, however, build on an intense suspicion of any theories of progress, indeed of claims about the possibility of fundamental change of any kind. Progress is possible within states, but, it is said, between them there can only be the same old rituals of power politics played over and over again. By offering both a spatial and a temporal resolution of the relationship between universality and particularity, the principle of state sovereignty affirms a specific account of who we are - citizens of particular states who have the potential to work toward universal standards of conduct by participating in statist political communities - and denies the possibility of any other altemative. The denial follows from what has been said so far. First, the principle of state sovereignty denies both the possibility and the desirability of talking about humanity as such. This is not because it depends on any notion of the innately aggressive character of human nature nor on an account of the impossibility of reconciling competing interests. It is because other resolutions of the relationship between universality and particularity seem to imply either an embrace of hierarchical empires or a rejection of politics entirely. Those who seek a more coherent account of global security do want to speak of humanity as such. They see the principle of state sovereignty as the major obstacle to an all-embracing global order. But from the point of view of those who affirm state sovereignty as a progressive principle, claims about humanity as such can be interpreted as a danger - as a willingness to abandon the freedom and autonomy of life within sovereign states in favor of a renewal of hierarchical subordination. Moreover, it might be argued, evidence of incipient hierarchies is not difficult to find. Some like to interpret the behavior of the two superpowers in this way, whereas others are more concerned about the role of multinational corporations. In either case, state sovereignty can still be understood as a progressive response to the threat of domination from above. More crucially, the principle of state sovereignty has become established as the most plausible way of reconciling claims about universality and those of diversity. It does establish the most widely accepted account of our political identity. This account is certainly under challenge. The modern world, in fact,
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is characterized by an often startling proliferation of competing political identities, some regional and some cultural or ethnic in character. The demand for world security is, in effect, a demand for a radically new understanding of political identity. But it cannot be claimed that such an identity, such an account of who we are in relation to other people, has yet been established in any effective way. Rather, such an identity is often defined in opposition to politics - in terms of philosophical, religious, biological, or ecological accounts of our commonalities but not in terms of how these presumed commonalities might be translated into effective forms of political community and legitimate authority. Until such a translation is made, defenders of state sovereignty can argue, it is necessary to define and work for security through the only form of collective action we have at our disposal - the state. Second, the principle of state sovereignty denies the possibility of any other resolution of the relationship between universality and particularity because of the way it affirms the presence of political community in territorial space. That is, political community, and therefore the potential for universalizing values, is understood to be present in some places and absent in others. Hence a familiar pattern: "We" are rational, enlightened, and developed; We would be happy to cooperate with other peoples on the basis of rational and enlightened standards of civilized behavior; but unfortunately "They" are uncivilized and irrational; consequently, We must resort to force in order to protect the standards We have striven so hard to maintain. Aspirations for peace are all very well, it might be said, but what about the -(fill in the name of your favorite enemy of the moment)? In this sense, the concept of state security has much in common with the concept of development. Where state security affirms a spatial distinction between friend and enemy, development affirms a temporal distinction between the backward and the advanced. The logic is the same in both cases. We have, or at least aspire to, universal standards; They do not. They may be encouraged to join us, but if They do not, or cannot, then We are justified in applying different moral criteria to Them.x This may mean paternalism, theories of the stages of modernization, policies of "trickle down," or war against the barbarians at the gate. The principle of state sovereignty is consistent with all these accounts of the "Other" as the negation of our own understanding of who we are.' As long as it is impossible to invoke some great Other as the enemy of all peace-loving peoples, then of course, it is easy enough to conclude it is only states that can be secure, not humanity as such. Third, the principle of state sovereignty denies alternative possibilities because it fixes our understanding of future opportunities in relation to a distinction between history and progress within statist political communities and mere contingency outside them. The only plausible model of a political community we have is the state. Interstate relations do not constitute a political community in this sense. It may be possible to envisage them being transformed into a political community modeled on the state, but this would be
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to run into all the difficulties that have already been canvassed. Given that we have not achieved a form of world politics that is somehow analogous to statist politics - given, for example, that the United Nations must be understood primarily as a form of interstate cooperation rather than a nascent world government - it is easy enough to argue that little has really changed in the way interstate relations work. Hence, there continue to be references to Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau as prescient "realists" who grasped the eternal verities that determine the workings of the modern states system.10
The Rituals of International Relations Theory Even from these brief remarks, it should be clear that the principle of state sovereignty is not trivial. It cannot be dismissed as simply the problem of political fragmentation. It is, in effect, our most persuasive - for many commentators our only plausible - political answer to all the grand questions about who we are, where we have come from, and the future possibilities open to us. State sovereignty fixes an account of where politics occurs, and what political life itself can be. It identifies who can be made secure: the political community inside state boundaries. It also identifies the location and general character of the threat that renders security necessary: the realm of ungoverned contingency and other different (potentially absolutely Other) political communities outside. And it denies the possibility of alternative arrangements on the ground that only through the state do we now seem capable of resolving all those contradictions - between universality and diversity, between space and time, between men and citizens, between Them and Us - that were once resolved by the subordinations and dominations of feudal hierarchy, monotheistic religion, and empire. Given that the domination of hierarchical subordination remains such an unwelcome prospect, the autonomy offered by a system of sovereign states is undoubtedly very attractive. On the other hand, the advent of nuclear weapons and other instruments of mass destruction has brought us to a position in which the costs of statist autonomy are becoming perhaps even more unwelcome. Hence, we have the demand for global security, but also we have the difficulty of determining what this could possibly mean, either in theory or in practice. Much of this difficulty arises because speculation about alternatives has been so dependent on the options opened up and then closed off by the resolutions of state sovereignty. Much of the literature known as the theory of international relations can be understood in this way. Although often treated as a separate field of inquiry, one requiring a rather special expertise and training, most of what passes for theory in the analysis of interstate relations is derived from the answers to questions about the nature and location of politics provided by the principle of state sovereignty. Here it is necessary
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only to consider the continuing influence of binary oppositions on the primary theoretical disputes and categories that inform this literature. These binary oppositions begin with the identification of relations between states as a specialized area of inquiry. If the theory of international relations is concerned with the outside, with the contingent realm of other potentially threatening communities, then it can be understood as the simple opposite of theories about the normal politics conducted inside states. Community inside, anarchy outside; justice inside, power and, at best, order outside; effective institutions with legitimate authority inside, shifting alliances and fragile balancing mechanisms outside - however normal politics is understood, interstate politics may be presented as its negation. This is why the opposition between realism and utopianism has been so tenacious in this context. As an opposition, it clearly reduces an enormous range of philosophical and political problems to an impossibly crude choice between artificial alternatives. It is scarcely possible to open any of the classic works on interstate politics, like E.H. Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis or Hans J.Morgenthau's Politics Among Nations, without being drawn into an almost Manichaean schism between optimism and pessimism, the ideal and the real, the tragic necessities and the irresponsible dreams. In other realms of inquiry, these problems generate large and often very sophisticated literatures about, for example, the relationships between matter and consciousness, universality and diversity, knowledge and power. These literatures tend to suggest, especially, that the concept of power or the status of ethical claims in political life are indeed highly problematic, but not because there is some clear-cut difference between reality and idealistic speculation. In the context of international relations, however, all these other problems are secondary. They have to be understood in relation to the primary puzzles generated by the principle of state sovereignty. In this context, realism refers to the necessities generated within a system of autonomous states. Utopianism is then understood not as the desire for a more ideal or visionary world as such, but as the desire for a form of global community understood as a state writ large. Questions about ethics or universalist aspirations already have their proper place - inside but not outside the statist political community. Anyone who understands this, who is thus . prepared to deny . the relevance of ethics and universalist aspirations in interstate relations, is entitled to claim the title of realist. Anyone who transgresses this fundamental rule is immediately identified as naive or even dangerous." A similar logic governs our conventional understanding of war and peace. In this case, peace is understood negatively as the absence of war. Because there has not been a full-scale conflict between the superpowers since 1945, for example, nuclear deterrence has been credited with maintaining a condition of peace. However, the post-1945 era has not exactly been free from violence. And whatever the merits of claims about the prevention of war between the superpowers, many have noted that nuclear deterrence contributes to the further institutionalization of violence in the modern world. Consequently, if there is one thing that the many perspectives
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now grouped together under the rubric of peace research can agree upon, it is that peace cannot usefully be identified as the mere absence of war.12 Attempts to articulate a more positive account of peace are nevertheless caught in a dilemma. O n the one hand, conventional understanding of war and peace as a clear-cut opposition permits the simple invocation of some great Other as a reminder of the necessities of life in a world of civilization inside and barbarism outside. Thus complaints about the enormous social, economic, and psychic costs of nuclear deterrence are easily deflated. Even the possibility of species annihilation can be justified in this way. O n the other hand, more positive visions are drawn to emulate the conditions of justice modeled on life within statist communities. Quite apart from the general prohibition on this move formalized in the principle of state sovereignty, questions then arise about precisely which statist community offers the most appropriate model of a more positive peace. It makes a difference, for example, whether peace is understood in relation to self-satisfied accounts of privileged societies in which social conflict and inequalities are believed to be resolvable through regularized democratic procedures, or those less privileged societies in which the possibility of peace, or better yet, justice, is more obviously conceivable only through fundamental social and economic transformation. Thus the struggle for peace often merges into a struggle for development, justice, and even revolution. And again, therefore, attempts to think about security outside the established conventions of debate necessarily engage with the broadest questions about the nature and possibility of political life in general in the late twentieth century. Faced with these questions, one can understand the desire to deal with immediate problems of military extermination. Ban the bomb! But what about the - ? And on it goes. It is perhaps easy enough to point to the deficiencies of the binary divisions that sustain such a rhetoric of war and peace, realism and idealism. But it is not always so easy to escape the categories and assumptions based on them. One particularly important example of this is the so-called "levels of analysis" scheme that has become the most influential way of classifying explanations of war, and indeed, of organizing our understanding of interstate relations in general.13 In this scheme, explanations of war are divided into three categories. Some explanations focus on the individual, or more usually on the account of human nature in general that is in this context so often taken to explain the behavior of individuals. Others focus on the state. Still others focus on the structure of the states system, on, say, the balance of power, the presence or absence of great or hegemonic states, patterns of geopolitical advantage, and so on. In some respects, this is undoubtedly a useful, even common-sense classification. But it is strictly derivative from the principle of state sovereignty, and carries with it all those assumptions about the impossibility of any other resolution of fundamental political questions than that formalized by state sovereignty. Explanations that focus on the individual pose questions about the character of political life within states, and specifically about the status, obligations,
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and freedoms of individuals subject to the authoritative claims and collective practices of states. (Reference to human nature in general, it should be emphasized, is simply an all too common way of depoliticizing our understanding of what it means to be an individual.) Explanations that focus on the interstate system pose questions about the structural patterns that arise in the supposed noncommunity outside. In between lies that enigma, the state. And sandwiched in this way, it must remain an enigma - a repository of variables influencing decisionmaking or policy formation, or even a black box emulating the imaginary atoms of ancient physicists. It must remain an enigma because the practices through which states are constructed and mediate between life inside and outside can be turned into a mere line distinguishing between categories. Not surprisingly, accounts of interstate relations that take these categories for granted are unlikely to call the principle on which it based into question. It is no accident, in fact, that those who place the greatest reliance on the levels of analysis schemes tend to work with especially primitive accounts of the state and to insist that patterns of interstate relations are more or less immutable.14 The difficulty goes further than this. Against those who take the pessimistic view that we have to live with the permanent tragedies of the states system come counter arguments about the extent to which the modern world is being radically transformed. Many of these accounts hark back to so-called functional or neofunctional theories of international integration popular in the 1960s and 1970s. According to this general view, the fragmentation and conflict endemic in the "high politics" of interstate relations might be overcome through cooperation on relatively mundane functional or "low" politics. The classic example concerns the beginnings of the European Economic Community in various low-key arrangements involving coal and steel. The aim of integration, and thus one meaning now associated with the term interdependence, was clearly modeled on the images of a statist political community. Moreover, in view of "1992," the European case may be interpreted as confirmation that hopes for a more inclusive form of security might be achieved through the enlargement of political community in this manner. Nevertheless, the term interdependence has taken on a related but significantly different meaning as a consequence of a sharp reaction against functional and neofunctional theories of integration. The patterns of integration visible in Europe have been accompanied by continuing fragmentation and conflict elsewhere. Much of the optimism of the earlier literature was undermined by the collapse of ditente in the late 1970s and the onset of a more icily pessimistic reassertion of realism. But this was not the old realism of Carr or Morgenthau. It was rather a realism articulated in the fashionable garb of social science, and especially of econometrics and the theory of rational choice. Moreover, even in the midst of renewed Cold War, this kind of "structure" or "neorealism" could not ignore widespread evidence that something identifiable as interdependence was under way. Thus, if integration toward some kind of global community seemed too grandiose, too susceptible to the Utopian temptation of replacing conflict between states with the peaceful community
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of a state writ large, then at least interdependence might be understood as the possibility of cooperation under conditions of anarchy.15 Here we can understand the curious amalgam of claims about novelty and what is in some ways just another reinvention of the wheel in recent thinking about interstate politics. It is an amalgam that confirms the continuing grip of state sovereignty on our capacity to imagine alternative futures. The novelty involves the way recent attempts to describe emerging patterns of interdependence build on accounts of the rational character of individual actions - accounts that have been most influential among liberal economists. This is a rather contentious understanding of why people act as they do, but it has played an important role in the development of Western social and political thought. It emerged, essentially, as a reworking of the assumptions that led Hobbes to conclude that life in a state of nature must be nasty, brutish, and short. For Hobbes, the key assumptions involved the autonomy and equality of individuals. Because individuals were autonomous and equal, they found themselves in a situation of intense competition and thus in what theorists of interstate relations later came to call a "security dilemma." Different versions of this have been articulated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the "parable of the stag hunt" and by more recent writers as the "tragedy of the commons." Something obviously happened after Hobbes to turn these same assumptions into the basis not of anarchy but of precisely the sort of competitive market society in which progress and cooperation are deemed possible, even as preconditions for democracy and civilization. Where the older realists drew upon an account of the relation between individual and state familiar from the social contract theorists of the seventeenth century, the more recent neorealists draw on late eighteenth and early nineteenth century accounts of the virtues of liberal capitalism and modernity. Novel as this may be in some ways, it is not difficult to interpret it as a rehash of familiar themes. Two interpretations of interdependence are especially interesting. In one interpretation, we can see yet another projection of an account of life within states into the realm outside states. It is, moreover, a very specific account of life within states that is being projected, one especially associated with privileged market societies. Moreover, it carries with it rather heavy philosophical and political baggage. It accepts a modernistic account of individuals as autonomous beings in the sense that they are free from social constraints and separate from nature. It makes no use of categories like class or accounts of the productive processes that would be central to a Marxist understanding of political life. In fact, on this interpretation it is difficult not to see such accounts of interdependence as one more attempt, typical of the United States, to portray all political life in terms of itself. And although this interpretation of interdependence may emphasize how it resists the utopian temptation to translate the model of the centralized state into the solution to problems of interstate conflict, it also emphasizes its submission to the temptation to translate a specific model of social and economic processes from one realm to the other.
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O n another interpretation, however, interdependence becomes a synonym for a rather conventional understanding of interstate cooperation. Because, as Hobbes insisted, interstate relations is not the anarchy so often associated with his name, it is possible to envisage mechanisms, rules, agreements, institutions, and laws governing, in the broadest sense, the community of states.lh Interdependence, in this interpretation, is simply a continuation of processes and practices that have been a central feature of interstate relations from the beginning.
Security within and against State Sovereignty
The principle of state sovereignty is easily mistaken for a bloodless and abstract legal concept, far removed from the immediate demands of policy and politics. But this is in itself an effect of concrete political practices. These practices reproduce and extend specific answers to questions about who we are into the conditions under which it has become possible to think, speak, and act in relation to "security." State sovereignty defines what peace can be and where peace can be secured: the unitary community within autonomous states. Consequently, it also defines a place where neither peace nor security are possible for very long: the noncommunity of contingencies, Others, and mere relations outside the boundaries of the state. In addition to this, state sovereignty raises hope that at some point in the future the kind of political life attained within (at least some) states might be projectable from inside to outside - from the national community to the world community. But at the same time as these hopes are raised, state sovereignty denies that they can ever be fulfilled. It does so through a claim that only through the state is it possible to resolve all contradictions - between universality and particularity, space and time, Them and Us - in a politically plausible manner. Claims about world politics, world order, world security, and so on, it suggests, can offer no credible way of responding to counterclaims about the need for autonomy, freedom, national identity, or diversity in general. Instead, it is said, such claims must either disguise a dangerous yearning for hierarchical authority and empire or an equally dangerous refusal to understand that universalist claims about humanity or the planet as such have no effective political expression. Once locked into this logic - this discourse that is at once ritualized into disciplines and clichks and enshrined in the most powerful structures of violence the world has ever known - only two options seem to remain open. One is to push this logic to its extreme. If the world is in fact organized as a series of sharp divisions between inclusion and exclusion, community and anarchy, civilization and barbarism, then the maxim that preparations for war are the only guarantee of peace does make some sense. And it is precisely because disciplines like strategic studies and the cultural codes of the Cold War era have pushed this logic to extremes that the crudest fanaticism has been able to masquerade as realistic and responsible policy. The other option is to relax
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this logic in order to permit accommodation and cooperation. It is in this context that it is possible to envisage continuity between conventional accounts of security, some interpretations of what it means to be interdependent, and more far-reaching aspirations for authentically global or world politics. On this second reading what is required is a further evolution in cooperative arrangements between states. That is, early modern European accounts of political community, and thus the legitimacy of the modern state, are left essentially unchallenged, but our understanding of what this means is no longer informed by pseudo-Hobbesian accounts of anarchy and the security dilemma. On the contrary, state autonomy and the pursuit of statist selfinterest seem to be open to much the same kind of revaluation of the implications of autonomy that occurred in relation to the individual after Hobbes. The more extreme utilitarians are content to extrapolate this revised account of individual rationality directly on to the behavior of states. Others are wary of such analogical and metaphorical reasoning (even if it is articulated in the guise of an objective social science) and stress the multiple ways in which norms, rules, regimes, practices, and institutions are generated historically." In either case, it is possible to at least partly escape the extreme consequences of state sovereignty and envisage the creation of a cooperative and thus more secure interstate order. It is in this context that so much stress has been placed on arms control arrangements, confidence-building measures, the reproduction of destabilizing strategic structures and deployments, the revitalization of the United Nations, and so on. Exactly at what point in this reading it becomes permissible to speak of world politics rather than just interstate relations is not entirely clear. But it is important to stress the possibility of understanding the demand for world security not as a utopian dream but as an outgrowth of practices that in one form or another have always been crucial for the operation of a states system. Yet there is obviously one major difference between traditional accounts of interstate cooperation and accounts that have been canvassed more recently. In the older accounts, war was understood to be legitimate because it offered the only way of resolving conflict and responding to demands for change. Nuclear weapons have placed the legitimacy of war into such radical question that even many conservatives have concluded that traditional hopes for interstate cooperation must give way to fundamentally new forms of political organization. But it is necessary to be very careful when entertaining conclusions of this kind. It is often said, for example, that with nuclear weapons everything has changed but our thinking. Such statements can be as misleading as the contrary claim that states will always remain locked in some sort of gladiatorial combat. Indeed both claims are easily identifiable as part of the same delineations of options defined by the principle of state sovereignty. Nevertheless, two things have changed. We are no longer able to survive in a world predicated on an extreme interpretation of the logic of state sovereignty. Nor are we able to survive in a states system in which war remains an option for system change. Neither of these conditions implies that the state is obsolete or about to wither away. States are complex social structures and
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have always been changing in response to new historical conditions. The typical realist claim that because states persist we must prepare for war is predicated on a particular reading of the principle of state sovereignty, not on a serious understanding of states as highly variable and ever-changing forms of political community. Realists may privilege or even "fetishize" the state, but they rarely offer any serious account of what states are. Nor do these two changed conditions undermine the need for more effective forms of cooperation between states. These forms have also evolved and need to be developed still further in response to the genuinely novel conditions introduced by nuclear weapons. World security, in short, will continue to depend on the extension of traditional accounts of the security of states. But - and this is a huge qualification - it cannot depend on the security of states alone. If the demand for world security and the challenge of world politics can be understood as a continuation of practices that both grow out of and also serve to mitigate the worst consequences of state sovereignty, they can also be understood in a far more profound way. By this I d o not mean that profundity lies in recognizing the fragmentations of state sovereignty as the source of all our problems. On the contrary, I argue, this would be to work within, not to challenge, options prescribed by state sovereignty. Neither state sovereignty nor statist accounts of security arise from patterns of fragmentation alone. State sovereignty offers an account of both fragmentation and integration, of anarchy outside and community within, of a place of war and a place of peace. The majority of our most influential accounts of peace confirm this logic; we must move, they suggest, from fragmentation to integration, from anarchy to community, from war to peace. This is why the dilemma before us seems so obvious and yet irresolvable. We have learned to think and act this way because it confirms our deepest and most entrenched beliefs about goodness, truth, and beauty. Neither state sovereignty nor the ways out of our predicament suggested by state sovereignty can be understood apart from the broad cultural, political, and philosophical contexts in which resolutions affirmed by state sovereignty have come to seem so natural. Nor will it be surprising if we discover that challenges to state sovereignty must also be challenges to our most entrenched beliefs about goodness, truth, and beauty. Most especially, we should not be surprised if we are forced to revise our understanding of the relationships between universality and particularity, Them and Us, or space and time. It is well to remember that our current understandings of these relationships displaced another set of (hierarchical) resolutions that once also seemed entirely natural. The principle of state sovereignty emerged out of profound socioeconomic and political upheavals and only makes sense within the philosophical categories that began to be articulated in early modern Europe. We seem to be faced with upheavals and transformations on a comparable scale. Consequently, the search for world security must be more than a search for more effective interstate cooperation. It must also be more than an attempt to overcome fragmentation through some more inclusive account of a global community or humanity as such. It must be a
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challenge to the answers to the most fundamental questions about who "We" are that are posed by state sovereignty. This means challenging the claim that only the state is capable of resolving claims about participation in a political community and claims about humanity in general. It also means challenging the distinction between Us and Them - between the authentic universalizing community within and the contingent realm of others outside. But it also means resisting the temptation to turn Them into Us, to resolve all differences into our preferred image of a universal humanity. This temptation is overwhelming. It informs many of our images of peace and theories of development. It has generated claims that we are at last witnessing the end of ideology and the victory of the forces of emancipation over superstition and totalitarianism. But self-righteousness cannot be the basis for my account of what an authentic world politics must now be. Nor can it provide any useful guidance as to what world security might involve in addition to greater cooperation between states. An alternative perspective is therefore called for. Such a perspective must be guided not by the kind of abstract accounts of a potential universal humanity generated by the principle of state sovereignty but by a sustained analysis of how contemporary insecurities are being created and intensified by the increasingly global organization of human endeavor. It must also be guided by a sensitivity to the ways in which people have been able to respond to these insecurities by reworking their understanding of how their own predicament fits into broader structures of violence and oppression. It is especially instructive, in this context, to reflect on the extent to which so many contemporary forms of insecurity are simply uncomprehendible within the conventional categories of international relations theory. These categories are in fact less useful as ways of understanding contemporary political life than as expressions of our inability to understand politics in categories delineated by state sovereignty. Ethnic conflict, terrorism, human rights, maldevelopment, famine, environmental degradation - none of these fit easily into debates between realists and utopians nor into discrete levels of analysis. But they have now become integral themes in contemporary debates about security. They all stimulate far-reaching debates about who we are - in relation to cultural groupings that will not be reduced to the territorial exclusions of statist nationalism; in relation to changing patterns of inclusion and exclusion generated by contemporary forms of production, distribution, and exchange; and in relation to planetary processes that render everyone vulnerable to the most local abuses of the physical environment. And they force us to ask how we might now secure our differences while knowing that we all participate in something that can plausibly, but still only vaguely, be called world politics. In the long run it will be these struggles to recast our understanding of who we are in relation to other people and to the planet on which we live that must inform our understanding of what world politics and world security can be,18 provided, of course, that in the short run we can enhance the mechanisms of ~eacefulchange between states. But then, short run and long
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run, present and future are not opposites. Attempts to create a secure world both by working within and by challenging the accounts of the nature and location of political life formalized by the principle of state sovereignty will be with us for some time to come.
Notes 1. Recent expressions of this theme include Mel Gurtov, Global Politics in the Human lnterest (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1988); R.B.J. Walker, One World, Many Worlds: Struggles for a Just World Peace (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1988); Richard A. Falk, The Promise of World Order (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); and Dan Smith and E.P. Thompson, eds., Prospects for a Habrtable Planet (London: Penguin, 1987). O n the consequent need for a fundamental rethinking of security policy, see, for example: Yoshikazu Sakamoto, ed., Strategic Doctrines and Theu Alternatives (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1987); and Friedrich Kratochwil, "The Challenge o f Security in a Changing World," Journal of International Affairs 43(1, Summer/Fall 1989): 11 9-141. 2. For a helpful discussion of the limits o f contemporary political thought in t h ~ srespect, see John Dunn, Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 3. I have explored this theme in some detail elsewhere; see especially R.B.J. Walker, "Contemporary Militarism and the Discourse of Dissent," in R.B.J. Walker, ed., Culture, Ideology and World Order (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1984), pp. 182-216; and Walker, "Culture, Discourse, Insecurity," in Saul H. Mendlovitz and R.B.J. Walker, eds., Towards a Just World Peace: Perspectives from Social Movements (London: Butterworths, 1987), pp. 171-190. 4. Andrew Linklater, Men and Citizens in the Theory of International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1982). 5. The following discussion draws on R.B.J. Walker, State Sovereignty, Global Ciuiltziztion and the Rearticulation of Political Space, World Order Studies Program Occas~onalPaper No. 18 (Princeton: Princeton University Center of International Studies, 1988); Walker, "Sovereignty, Identity, Community: Reflections on Contemporary Political Practice," in R.B.J. Walker and Saul H. Mendlovitz, eds., Contendrng Soverergnties: Redefining Political Communtty (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1990); and Walker, "Ethics, Modernity and the Theory of International Relations" (forthcoming). My account of state sovereignty as a constitutive principle of a specifically modern account o f politics parallels and draws upon the important critical analysis by Richard K. Ashley. See especially Ashley, "Untying the Sovereign State: A Double Reading of the Anarchy Problematique," Mdlennium: Journal of International Studies 7 (2, Summer 1988): 227-272, and Ashley, "Livmg o n Border Lines: Man, Poststructuralism and War," in James Der Derian and Michael Shapiro, eds., InternationaNIntertextual Relatrons (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1989), pp. 259-321. For a more conventional, indeed largely atheoretical account, see F.H. Hinsley, Sovereignty, 2nd ed. (Cambr~dge:Cambridge University Press, 1986). 6. "Yet in all times, Kings, and Persons of Soveraigne authority, because of their Independent): are in continuall jealousies, and in the state and posture of Gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another. ... Bur because they uphold thereby, the Industry o f their Subjects; there does not follow from it, that misery, which accornpanles the Liberty of particular men." Thomas Hobbes, Leviuthan (1651),chapter 13, C.B. Macpherson, ed. (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 188. 7. The classic discussion of this theme is Martin Wight, "Why Is There N o International Theory?" in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight, eds., D~plomatrcInvestigations (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1966), pp. 17-34. 8. On this general theme, see Edward Said, Orientalisrrz (New York: Random House, 1979); Tzveton Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of tile Other (New York: Harper and Row, 1982); and Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
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9. The classic expression is Carl Schmitt's account of sovereignty as the capacity to decide o n the "exception." See especially Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Souerergnty (1922), George Schwab trans. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985). Together with Max Weber's nationalism, Schmitt's authoritarian conservatism has been a primary influence on the rendition of political realism that has become influential in the modern theory of international relations, especially through the influence of Hans J. Morgenthau. See, for example, Alfons Sollner, "German Conservatism in America: Morgenthau's Political Realism," Telos 72(Summer 1987): 161-172. 10. For a critical discussion of claims about such a tradition in this context, see R.B.J. Walker, "The Prince and the Pauper: Tradition, Modernity and Practice in the Theory of International Relations," in Der Derian and Shapiro, eds., note 5, pp. 75-148. 11. The rule has, nevertheless, been transgressed very frequently; see the important discussion in Hidemi Suganami, The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 12. See, for example, Mendlovitz and Walker, note 3; and Bradley Klein, "After Strategy: The Search for Post-Modern Politics of Peace," Alternatives 1 3 (July 1988): 293-318. 13. Kenneth Waltz, Man, The State and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959). 14. Kenneth Waltz, Theory of lnternational Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1979). It is instructive that the one sustained attempt to subject the concept of security to analytical scrutiny within the mainstream literature o n international relations theory still takes the level of analysis schema as its major premise. See Barry Buzan, People, States a n d Fear: The National Security Problem in lnternational Relatrons (Brighton, UK: Wheatsheaf, 1983); Buzan, "Peace, Power and Security: Contending Concepts in the Study of International Relat~ons,"Journal of Peace Research 2 1 (2, 1984): 109-125; and Buzan, "The Concept of National Security for Developing Countries," in Mohammed Ayooh and ChaiAran Samudavanija, eds., Leadership Perceptions and National Security (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1989), pp. 1-28. 15. Kenneth A. Oye, ed., Co-operation Under Anarchy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); and Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Co-operation (New York: Basic Books, 1984). 16. See, especially, Hedley Bull, The Anarchrcal Society (London: Macmillan, 1977). The most sophisticated recent elaboration of this theme is Friedrich Kratochwil, Rules, Norms and Decisions: O n the Conditions of Practical a n d Legal Reasonrng in lnternational Relations and Domestic Affairs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). One of the central concerns of accounts of a community of states - the role of the great powers - has also been taken up by more popular texts informed by utilitarian accounts of economic rationality. See especially Robert Keohane, After Hegemony: Co-operation a n d Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and Stephen Krasner, ed., lnternational Regimes (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983). 17. The difference between utilitarian forms of social science and more hlstoricallv oriented and interpretive modes of inquiry has generated considerable controversy in the recent literature. See Robert 0. Keohane, "International Institutions: Two Approaches," International Studies Quarterly 32 (December 1988): 379-396; Friedrich Kratochwil and John G. Ruggie, "International Organizations: A State of the Art on an Art of the State, International Organization, 40 (4, Autumn 1986); and R.B.J. Walker, "History and Structure in the Theory of International Relations." Millennium 18 12. , , Summer 1989): 163-183. 18. In this sense, contemporary debates about security cannot be separated from debates about development or democracy. For an elaboration of this argument, see Walker, note 1.
How t h e W e s t was One: Representational Politics o f NATO Bradley S. Klein
Conventional Accounts
W
estern strategists can be proud of having ''won7' the Cold War. The editorial columns of newspapers and the pages of many journals are crammed these days with words of heady self-confidence proclaiming the demonstrable superiority of the First World to the Second. The great ideological battles of history are now apparently over. Communism, once so virile, lies tattered and beaten, whether in the streets of Prague or in the ballot boxes of East Germany and Hungary. With the waning of the East-West military standoff across the German-German border and the gradual incorporation of a divided Europe into something like a regional community, the historic need for NATO and the Warsaw Pact will alter dramatically. Already, the Pact has all but disintegrated. NATO, by contrast, will not fade away so quickly - nor, in the conventional account, should it. Forty years of peace, what J o h n Lewis Gaddis (1987) has called "the long peace," now appear to be giving way to a new era of security politics. NATO's future is yet to be determined, though likely it will involve a graduated reduction of its traditional military presence and an enlarged role as the political coordinator for an expanded European community. Conventional accounts of NATO, established upon the analytic base offered by realism and strategic studies, focus upon the ability of the member states to coordinate their national policies and to meet the challenge offered by the Warsaw Pact (Langer, 1986; Flanagan, 1988). NATO has overseen an era of prosperity and security unprecedented in European history. Considering the depth and intensity of continental rivalries dating back centuries, the postwar era of NATO policy coordination must accordingly stand as a most impressive diplomatic-military achievement (Schmidt, 1969; Schwartz, 1983; Source: International Studies Quarterly, 34(3) ( 1 990): 31 1-25.
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DePorte, 1986). However much NATO divests itself of certain militarytechnical functions, there is no reason to believe it should rid itself entirely of a guiding role in the future of European security. Not even the renewed attention accorded the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe justifies doing away with NATO as the organization principally responsible for shepherding European security into the next century. Memoirs, monographs, and textbooks all testify to the magnitude of transnational negotiations that led to the Alliance's creation in 1949. The basic story, with some variation, is that a war-torn and war-exhausted Western Europe could not, on its own resources, mobilize a successful response to the challenge posed by postwar Communism, a challenge posed in the dual form of political subversion and Stalin's armed forces. Accounts vary, reflecting the immediate postwar debate about whether the primary threat was posed by the Red Army on the Eastern bank of the Elbe River or by the domestic social and economic weakness of the West. The first years of the postwar era were characterized by this disagreement. Dean Acheson, for instance, writing in 1948, argued that the Soviet Union could well be within reach of "the greatest prize in history without military effort on its part - a power-system stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific and comprising most of the industry and resources of the world" (Acheson, 1949: 4). Perhaps it is not so surprising that subsequent accounts of NATO's formation downplay the seriousness of this founding debate and describe the postwar era retrodictively, as if the military threat emanating from the East had been unambiguous (L. S. Kaplan, 1988). Early debate raged, however, between the U.S. State Department's Policy Planning Staff and the War Department as to the degree of military threat (Etzold and Gaddis, 1978; Nathanson, 1988). George F. Kennan, after all, ultimately left the State Department in frustration when it became clear to him that his 1947 "X" article was being read literally and that the armed services were exploiting claims about Soviet military might to the detriment of any political-diplomatic solution to the German question. Kennan consistently opposed the militarization of European relations and argued passionately - if fruitlessly - against the sweeping geographic and ideological scope accorded the proposed North Atlantic Alliance (Kennan, 1967). A number of analysts have subsequently confirmed that then-contemporary claims about Soviet military capacities lacked empirical validity. The very process of making intelligence estimates about the Soviet strategic threat has been fraught with institutional and interpretive difficulties that reduced accounts of Soviet power to a thoroughly politicized guessing game (Freedman, 1986). In the absence of satellite surveillance or electronic eavesdropping capabilities in the immediate postwar period, the process of gaining accurate information was a precarious enterprise. Two subsequent assessments of what American analysts would have found had they had full access to actual figures on troop deployments and weapons readiness at that time reveal levels of Soviet armaments that were woefully inadequate for offensive, Westerndirected operations (Evangelist, 1982183; Mueller, 1988).
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The entire postwar era was characterized by estimates and claims about the nature of the Soviet threat that were scarcely sustained by the empirical evidence available even at the time. Critics of Western strategy often claim that the problem resides in strategic analysts having radically distinguished between Soviet "intentions" and Soviet "capabilities" (Booth, 1979: 110-21). The critique claims that Western threat assessments have been made exclusively on the basis of material recountings of available weapons systems, regardless of the political purposes to which such weaponry might reasonably be put. But such a critique is nearly 180 degrees off the mark; strategic analysis recurrently privileged claims about intentions over actual operational capabilities. What continually carried the day in the absence of reliable intelligence estimates was a series of discursively constructed claims about the nature of the Soviet totalitarian state and about its implacable global purposes (Spiro and Barber, 1970). The most influential postwar document of all, NSC-68 (1950), contains not a single empirical claim about actual Soviet deployments. Subsequent invocations of "the bomber gap," "the missile gap," "the INF-gap," and "the window of vulnerability" derived their value as significations of imminent danger only by drawing upon salient claims, sometimes explicated but, often allowed to reside in a tacit subtext, about the alien-ness and "other-ness" of Soviet political culture (F. Kaplan, 1983; Sanders, 1983; Campbell, 1989). The ensuing sense of distance enabled analysts to make all sorts of claims about potential strategic moves. Even if the imputation was within the realm of possibility, let alone the question of plausibility, the mere reference to the question of "what would happen if ...? " granted credibility to invocations of a threat. A whole generation of strategists reified such claims about intentions into an argument about the basic structure of international relations as a Hobbesian security dilemma (Herz, 1950; Buzan, 1987). With these various arguments, analyses of military policy could be sustained regardless of any empirical evidence indicating operationally feasible aggressive policies on the part of an adversary. The important point here is not that the Soviet threat is or is not a mythic construct, but that the creation and perpetuation of NATO required a particular representation of Soviet strategy. The imaginative construction of the Soviet threat as a constitutive dimension of the Cold War cannot he chalked up to false consciousness or deliberate deception on the part of policy makers. Nor can a crudely materialistic accounting of ideology and interest mediation explain the linkages between the domestic armaments sectors and the nature of extended nuclear deterrence. The historical record of strategic debates reveals that nuclear deterrence strategy follows its own internal logic and that much of what passes for strategic modernization is an attempt not to meet the latest level of Soviet deployments but to resolve contradictions and dilemmas internal to Western strategy. In this sense, when it comes to NATO, the external referrent of the Soviet threat begins to pale in importance to the concerns expressed by strategists themselves regarding the need to construct certainty about life at home (Dalby, 1988).
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A Genealogy of NATO
In a recent essay devoted to the symbolic character of nuclear politics, Robert Jervis argues that Western strategy in Europe after 1945 was not primarily interested in the instrumental purposes to which Soviet force might be applied. The concerns, rather, had more to do with allaying fears of vulnerability which attended the uncertainties of the postwar order. "Indeed, when NATO was formed, the American decision makers were preoccupied not with the danger of Soviet invasion but with the need for and difficulties of European economic and political reconstruction." (Jervis, 1989: 206). This suggests that strategic debates derive their power from their affinity with widely circulated representations of cultural and political life (Shapiro, 1989). Western military strategy, despite its focus on weapons and technology, is no cxccption. It draws its capital from its ability to provide a sense of order and rationality to the world. Classical strategists like Hedley Bull (1977), Michael Howard (1984), Henry Kissinger (1954,1965) and Hans Morgenthau (1976) have continually argued that alliances in general, and NATO in particular, must articulate a specific form of cultural life and preserve certain historical achievements. In this conservative tradition, the processes through which inter-state "order" and the "society" of states are established are inherently problematic. The conservatism consists in assuming that such "order" and "structure" are available and normatively worthy as pursuits and that they are not to be achieved through narrowly instrumental, weaponstechnocratic approaches to security. A genealogical account of alliance defense policy explores the practices by which certain boundaries of political space became demarcated across Central Europe. It explores, as well, the forms of identity which came to prevail over other possible forms that Western politics - and global security practices - could have assumed. Such an analysis does not result in a singular master narrative, but rather in an open, internally differentiated set of practices in which elements of power are always in the process of being contested and rearticulated (Foucault, 1977; Der Derian, 1987; Ashley, 1987, 1988, 1989). NATO as a political practice constructed a particular architecture of global space (Dillon, 1989). But that design was never according to a master plan, and it did not emanate from some sovereign source of power. NATO's success was due not to having deterred Soviet aggression, nor to having successfully managed repeated crises among its allies, but to having ~ r o d u c e dthose various allies in the first place. The account that follows is somewhat at odds with those critical studies of NATO and Western strategy that focus on armaments and the postwar world military order (Senghaas, 1972; Kaldor, 1978, 1981; Luckham, 1987). In examining the links between the domestic armaments base and international relations, these studies argue that NATO occupies a hegemonic place among world alliance systems and that its combined economic, military, and
Klcin Representational Politics of
NATO
17 1
political resources have endowed it with the privilege to disseminate transnational infrastructures of rule throughout the postwar multilateral system of Western-oriented trade. Such a perspective on Western policy offers a more critical and globalist interpretation than traditionally realist, state-centered views that have enjoyed widespread circulation among more conventional political-military strategists (Gilpin, 1981; Kennedy, 1988). Yet both of these approaches, the one radical, the other more traditional, emphasize structural dimensions of global power and impose a greater order and logic on world politics than can be substantiated through a detailed examination' of how an actual alliance system functions.
For Kennan, the primary threat to Western security lay not in Soviet military power but in the weakened fabric of Western life. To counter this weakness, he argued, the decisive policies should not be military encirclement but the rebuilding of Western infrastructures. Writing in 1948 in the context of debates about the European Recovery Plan, the ERP, Kennan argued: This is the significance of the ERP, the idea of European Union, and the cultivation of a closer association with the U.K. and Canada. For a truly stable world order can proceed, within our lifetime, only from the older, mellower and more advanced nations of the world - nations for which the concept of order, as opposed to power, has value and meaning. If these nations do not have the strength to seize and hold real leadership in world affairs today, through that combination of political greatness and wise restraint which goes only with a ripe and settled civilization, then as Plato once remarked: " ... cities will never have rest from their evils, - no nor the human race, as I believe." (Kennan, 1948: 100) Kennan's famous "Long Telegram" of 1946 (Kennan, 1946: 63) concluded with the observation that "Much depends on health and vigor of our own society. World communism is like a malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue." This medicalized representation was to find a more sustained account in the work of W.W. Rostow, the architect of modernization theory and a key figure in the articulation of modern Western identity. In Rostow's memorable words (1960: 162, 1961: 23.51, "Communism is a disease of the transition" from traditional to modern society. It would require Western military intervention in the form of anti-guerrilla insurgents to staunch the infection. To reconstruct the West, and to bring the rest of the world along with it, would require therapies of "modernization." These would prove crucial in the development of a recognizably Western world order, for "to modernize" would come to mean to improve, to upgrade, to make something better by technical refinement. In both economic development and military deterrence, themes of "modernization" were to animate public policy.
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Economic modernization refers to the process of enforced changes, implemented from above by a secular state system, that strategically alter the social landscape and prepare the way for a capitalist, market-oriented political economy. The master plan for this reworking of international life was the self-consciously proclaimed handbook of Westernization, Rostow's The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960). The book was crucial in setting the terms of the subsequent "development" paradigm (Gendzier, 1985: 6). The basic idea was to absorb the newly independent, formerly colonial states into a global political economy. Rostow's stages of growth presented the clearest attempt to draw the post-colonial world into the Western orbit. His teleological unfolding of the various stages of development culminates in "the age of high mass consumption." As Rostow's words attest, the millennia1 deliverance of life that results is truly an inspiring achievement: "The second stage of growth embraces societies in the process of transition; that is, the period when the preconditions for take-off are developed; for this is the time to transform a traditional society in the ways necessary for it to exploit the fruits of modern science, to fend off diminishing returns, and thus to enjoy the blessings and choices opened up by the march of compound interest" (Rostow, 1960: 6). This paean to impending affluence is a useful example of how "modernization" draws its sustenance from particular representations of life. Implicit in this celebratory account of development is a series of conceptual commitments that need to be brought to the foreground if practitioners concerned with "developing" societies are to understand fully what analysts have in store for them. "Traditional" societies are seen as mired in a pre-Newtonian world, confined to natural horizons with a fixed "ceiling on the level of attainable output per head" (Rostow, 1960: 4). Such a limiting cosmology has to be transformed for modernization to proceed. This "pre-modern" world view is to be replaced by a recognizably "modern" one of unlimited growth. Nature thereby becomes a resource for use by human beings who now stand at the center of all things. A network of representations is called into play here: mutually dependent conceptions of nature, man, goods, and society. A set of dichotomies is invoked, with the "pre-Newtonian" world on one side and "modern" affluent cultures on the other: traditional societylmodern society, naturelscience, subsistencelwealth. Only by tacitly invoking these dichotomous representations and invoking one side continually against the other is Rostow's discourse of development possible. But the mediation of the transition processes required here is by no means politically neutral. It is strikingly violent. Rostow's developmental discourse draws upon a key assumption that modern, Western developed societies are simply better and more desirable than traditional, pre-modern societies. Ever the economist, he calls this "the demonstration effect" of modern technology and lifestyles. The world's people really want Western products. But just in case they don't - and here Rostow's text gets murky - they can always look over the shoulder of traveling salesmen and see battleship guns in the harbor.
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Surely, this is an impressive sight, one that demonstrates the (potentially) superior effects of modern Western society. Spurred on by these "demonstration effects" of Western goods, the peoples of the formerly colonial world are induced to follow along and to develop themselves in the footsteps of their uninvited guests. When problems develop in the modernization process, the state steps in to expedite change. Rostow, writing in the heady days of development, was characteristically sanguine about this process, seeing as the only obstacle the unfortunate tampering by Communist elements - whom, he argued, could be dealt with through covert action and counter-insurgency warfare. When more profound social problems threatened the developmental process, more sophisticated forms of military and paramilitary involvement would be needed. Samuel P. Huntington, with a keener eye than Rostow towards the political difficulties of modernization and thus more attuned to the prerequisites of institution building, delivered the theoretical justification for the constructive, socially transformative role of Third World military elites in his Political Order and Changing Societies (1968).Looking favorably upon the contribution to modernization of such reformers as Ataturk, Nasser, and Sukarno, Huntington argued that in elite-bound, traditional societies, the military represents a new and liberating political force that can break the hold of reactionary forces and loosen their hold upon the economy and culture. In other words, the domestic military had to be cultivated as part of the state building process, in the name of enforced modernization from above. To prepare local elites for this task, a whole series of measures would be needed, ranging from police training, the sale of arms designed for local use against domestic sources of turbulence, and the defeat of revolutionary labor movements in the name of creating favorable climates for international investment and wage assembly work (Packenham, 1973; Augelli and Murphy, 1988; Klein and Unger, 1989). This, too, was the stuff of modernization. It was always part of postwar U.S. strategy, and it represents the dark underside of the developmental process. As a discourse of reconstruction, developmental modernization provided an architecture for the physical and social reshaping of the global landscape. In Europe this was conducted under the umbrella of the Marshall Plan. Globally, the impetus for this reorientation of life was provided by the World Bank, Truman's Point Four Program, Kennedy's Peace Corps, and a panoply of political-economic-military alliance projects that linked domestic state building with transnational integration under the U.S. aegis (Barnet, 1972; Fagen, 1979). In the absence of any identifiable external threats to such areas as Latin America or the Southwest Pacific, for instance, the only plausible argument for the creation of the Rio Pact in 1947 or ANZUS was to use a military security bond as the cutting edge for statelsociety building along modern, Western lines. In Europe, however, the invocation of an external security threat enjoyed a modicum of plausibility merely through the existence of Soviet "other-ness." Continental unity had been shattered, after all. Central Europe disappeared in the spring of 1945. Throughout the
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postwar era, there were only East and West. The task of defining the boundaries and limits of Western identity was made considerably easier with the creation on the other side of the Iron Curtain of an adversary whose culture and world view offered, it was argued, a reverse image of everything celebrated by the emergent allies. Deterrence
In the immediate postwar era, deterrence was developed and institutionalized by strategiclsecurity studies. The initial effort was strikingly Americo-centric (Hoffman, 1977; F. Kaplan, 1983; Klein, 1988). Within a decade the logic of deterrence came to be accepted in Western Europe as a convenient means for linking the fate of the developed industrial powers under U.S. sponsorship. Strategic think tanks first developed in the United States immediately after World War I1 in order to coordinate the newfound power of nuclear bombs. The prime sponsor of this effort was the Air Force, which maintained until the mid-1950s a monopoly of the means to deliver the weapon. A crucial discursive shift from "defense" to "security" enabled a whole profession to emerge as a subdiscipline of international relations and to rationalize the possession of weapons - not to win a war, as with past armed forces, but to prevent a war from ever again rising. This was the charge issued by Bernard Brodie (1946) in his classic work, The Absolute Weapon. The academic subdiscipline of strategic studies becomes a decisive force in trans-Atlantic politics around the mid- to late-1950s. Crucial to the emergence of a unifying approach to strategy was the export of the field from the United States to Western Europe. Here it is impossible to overstate the importance of the London-based Institute for Strategic Studies, founded in 1958 and renamed in 1963 as the International Institute for Strategic Studies. The IISS became a site for the articulation of a Western strategic consensus, not necessarily in terms of complete agreement, but in terms of the language and policy problems that came widely to be shared among responsible managers of alliance affairs (Skaggs, 1987; Howard, 1989). Throughout the first half of the 1950's there had been anything but agreement on trans-Atlantic defense strategy. The 1952 Lisbon Accords calling for a NATO troop strength of 90 divisions immediately proved unworkable because of the economic and demographic toll that would have been entailed. Economic reconstruction and the need to draw upon a working-age labor force dictated that none of the West European powers would accede to such demands on its populace. When President Eisenhower's fiscal conservatism suggested nuclear guarantees of Massive Retaliation for Europe, John Foster Dulles immediately came under criticism for having articulated an inflexible non-strategy that lacked credibility in the face of conventional Soviet probes westward (Kaufmann, 1956; Nitze, 1956; Kissinger, 1957; Taylor, 1960; Schmidt, 1961). Such criticisms were heightened a short time later when the Soviets developed a thermonuclear capacity that could be delivered upon Western Europe (though not yet upon the U.S.A).
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Common, Comprehensive, and Cooperative Security
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constraints - reassurances if that language is preferred - against the rigidification of process, structure, or agenda. What cooperative security really provides is a means for challenging long-held or emergent fears, for overcoming the hesitancy that accompanies political risk taking, for lowering the walls which have been erected between societies, governments, and countries in the wake of the colonial, pre-independence and cold war periods, and for transcending the barriers of sectarian and national interests. The Primacy of State InterestsIA Diffuse International System
Because cooperative security acknowledges the primacy of state interests, the realities of territorial defence, the inevitability of competing and, at times, conflicting interests, and the increasing interpenetrability of states, other actors within the region, and of global politics, it also explicitly argues that the enhancement of security must not be seen in a zero-sum, security dilemma context. In order to facilitate this, there is a recognition that bilateral relations are likely to remain, at least for the short term, as a principal means by which states ensure their place in the international community and that, as with comprehensive security, states necessarily must attend to the betterment of their domestic situation. In an increasingly diffuse international system devoid of a well-defined bipolar dominant structure, so-called small and middle powers will have increasingly important roles to play in setting the agenda and constructing coalitions of intersecting interests. This will occur because of illdefined leadership, because of reduced bloc loyalties and a re-orientation of which blocs count, because of an increasingly dense set of transboundary networks of interests and capabilities, because of the need to share both responsibilities and burdens more equitably, and because of the desire to constrain possible unilateral actions being taken either by powers in decline or by those who wish to accede to positions of d ~ m i n a n c e . ' ~In such a diffuse international system, states a rung or two below the level of great powers will harness capabilities in pursuit of their interests, undertaking to establish extended bilateral relations while, simultaneously, seeking multilateral fora for the pursuit of wider, systemic concerns, most notably military security and economic stability, and in so doing enhance both their own and the coalition's stature and legitimacy. This process, if pursued in a fully consultative manner with sensitivity towards the range of interests and actors involved, will promote not only cooperative security but cooperative stability and a more resilient and adaptive regional system. A Time of Opportunity for Cooperative Action
In the immediate post-cold war period, this period of uncertain transition is a time of opportunity for responsible cooperative action, not against others but with them. Hence, within Asia-Pacific, both the United States and Russia remain important actors, but in a manner and style transformed from even a few years ago; similarly, but for other reasons, with China and Japan. Periods of transition are not appropriate for the creation of new institutions
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if all that does is replicate the politics of the past. Yet it also is the case that one cannot presume too readily that animosity, distrust, and the will and capacity to employ military force in support of elite, regime, government, state, or sub-state interests will wither as quickly as Leninism. That was only a 70-year experiment; the presence and use of force in support of community interests, whatever those might be, is part of human history. Hence, the habit of dialogue accompanied by regular and informal undertakings facilitates a movement towards political transparency. This should stimulate the creation of modalities for focused and purposeful engagement on issues of common concern, including military hardware acquisition, border disputes, secure points of entry, exit, and transit, ecological matters, illicit movement ~ ~ tentative results of the May 1993 of drugs, people, or t e ~ h n o l o g y .The Senior Officials Meeting held in Singapore are indicative of the promise and opportunity held out by this process. For all these reasons, countries involved in Asia-Pacific security affairs have been articulating and discussing new concepts of inter-state security over the past few years. Cooperative security, common security, and comprehensive security are among the more widely used terms, complementing more traditional views such as collective security, collective defence, deterrence, and mutual assurance. These latter terms focus almost solely on the territorial state and highlight the military dimensions of (in)security and threat.40 The former concepts, however, acknowledge a more inclusive definition of security and challenges to security, encompassing but moving beyond the traditional notion of military threat and response. They recognize the continuing problems associated with military conflict, but argue that other factors also increasingly threaten the survivability and coherence of the state, but not only the state. There is an explicit identification of problems which place not only the nation-state but also subnational units as well as transnational or regional arenas in dire peril: demographic factors; large or distinct population movements; illicit or unregulated flow of drugs, technology, or information; equitable access to scarce resources, markets, and strategic minerals; air, land, and marine pollution and degradation; global ecological changes; and human rights abuses, for example. Further, there is a recognition that many of these new and profound problems are not amenable either to military intervention alone, to military action at all, or to unilateral action of any kind. Rather, if not addressed in a cooperative and constructive undertaking, they may well deteriorate into traditional modes of military violence, thereby threatening in the classic sense - the state, its governing regime, and its society.4'
The Regionalization of Security Politics in Asia-Pacific States will Organize on Functional and Regional Terms It is with such a backdrop that regional politics will now take centre stage.42 And it is because of the asynchronous tension between the globalization of
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economic forces and the localization of personal, community, regime, and state security that states will, of necessity, coalesce and organize on functional and regional terms. To borrow from Robert Scalapino's recent writing, 'the appropriate analogy is one of concentric arcs, situation-specific-arcs rather than circles so that there can be interaction among them' where the United States 'will be caused to serve with others in building collective approaches to specific problems'.43 I would take that still one step further and suggest that we are moving into an era of the regionalization of security politics and political security. The 'habit of dialogue' among all states party to the issues and to the location will form the foundation upon which a more positive sense of security will be built. In Asia-Pacific, multilateralism must complement productive bilateral relations. The degree of formalism involved can be enginkered, but with caution. Smaller states benefit by being at the table and, in coalition, having greater opportunity to constrain the unilateralism of the more powerful. These, on the other hand, can employ multilateral process and structure to achieve consensus and legitimacy of purpose. Cooperative security, as distinct from the European notion of security cooperation, provides some loose signposts and guidelines by which to ensure inclusiveness, promote means other than military to resolve differences, acknowledge divergence of interests, practices, and capabilities without presuming a zero-sum universe, and facilitate the modalities of a more secure and creative potential. In the midst of the uncertain transition from the bipolar dominant cold war politics of global competition and containment, what we are likely moving towards is the regionalization of security politics and economic security. The challenge is to prevent either the reduction of security to narrow sectarian and localized interests or the total aggregation of economic capacity to the point where governments lose control over their productive capabilities and consumptive capacities, while the free flow of goods, services, and finance are hindered by bloc politics.
Prevent the Reduction of Security to Sectarian Interests Future attempts to create a new security architecture for the Asia-Pacific region confront several organizing principles, among them: broad-brush versus building-bloc approach; comprehensive versus selective security; great power concert versus UNGAIequality of actors-type approach. These principles also highlight the potential for contradictions between various approaches to security. A broad-brush approach is more focused and specific as a guide of policy, but necessarily less flexible and evolutionary than a building-bloc approach. Comprehensive security is a desirable and in some respect unavoidable goal, albeit challenging and open to the vicissitudes of domestic affairs which are increasingly hostage to global and international economic forces. However, expanding the agenda of security cooperation so that it mirrors the diversity of locally-defined priorities also expands the scope for disagreement, especially as the number and variety of state actors also
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
expands. A security framework which recognizes the equality of actors is ideal and more acceptable to regional states who resent great power dominance, but it also ignores the reality of power disparities in the region. Cooperative security is thus broader than comprehensive security and more flexible than common security; it is also less ethnocentric and regionbound. If cooperative security, understood conceptually to incorporate aspects of both common security and comprehensive security (especially as it acknowledges the importance of national resilience if that is to mean the ability of the state to withstand shocks both from within and externally) offers an approach to security issues in the absence of a bipolar, geostrategic, deterrence-dominated structure, its applicability to regional security thinking, and particularly to the Asia-Pacific region, invites some speculation as to the form, the content, and the means. Cooperative Security Requires lnclusivity Most obviously, cooperative security requires inclusivity. Thus, to the extent possible, dialogue must involve as many relevant principal actors - particularly governments - across a full spectrum of issue areas normally considered within the prerogative of the state. Hence, if there is to be membership, then in principle44 the club must not impose criteria for participation or for the agenda other than acknowledged relevance to the defined region. For the cooperative security agenda, this means that the 'hard' side of security (by which I mean the full range of military issues) cannot be isolated from inclusiveness. It will not be good enough to dwell on trade, investment, and financial concerns with all, ecological, environmental, and demographic concerns with some, while reserving military security issues for a few more privileged and like-minded number.45 Arms transfers, indigenous arms developments, and relevant registries, military deployments, military exercises, defence white papers, confidence- and security-building measures, conventional and nonconventional non-proliferation must all be part of the cooperative security dialogue. In order to ensure that no participant's interests are uniquely jeopardized or unfairly threatened, groups of experts - probably officials at the outset, but preferred and hopefully of the 'track two' variety46- should be established with mandates, agendas, and time frames that are both reasonable in scope and manageable in expectation. Incrementalism (or 'gradualism' to use Geoffrey Wiseman's term) thereby will contribute to transparency in process, in structure, and in content through ensuring that all the parties are to some extent in control of their own pace and extent of engagement, thereby alleviating some of the risks and fears attendant with overly rapid moves towards full disclosure and complete transparency. 'Opaqueness' Rather Than 'Transparency' Initially, given the characteristics of the Asia-Pacific region, on some topics 'opaqueness' rather than 'transparency' may have to become the intermediate
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goal until sufficient trust is established through experience. The process could build on existing habits of dialogue, in some cases sub-regional, just as structures (e.g., a coordinating secretariat) could be grafted on to existing ones, though over time it is likely that the preferred outcome will be a wholly new institutionalized process reflecting the unique characteristics and mandate of a region-wide cooperative security framework. But, as I noted earlier, cooperative security per se does not depend on the establishment of formal organizations. Indeed, during this time of transition, that probably should be a ~ o i d e d . ~One ' would not want to create the means for inertia, inflexibility, and rigidity in membership, o n agendas, or in process, all of which have been experienced not only in many international institutions and in collective defence arrangements (such as alliances including the regional alliances established as part of the policy of containment), but also in the two collective security systems of this century. In other words, we should be thinking less about multilateral institutions which 'focus on the formal organizational elements of international life ...' and more about the institution of multilateralism which 'is grounded in appeals to the less formal, less codified habits, practices, ideas, and norms of international society'.48 Institutions may evolve; they may indeed be the desirable goal, but more immediately and for the mid-term, multilateralism as process, structure, and regularized activities on an agenda of common concern is more important than multilateral as institution.
A Blurring between Domestic and Foreign Policy
Today it is generally agreed that there is a blurring between domestic and foreign policy. The United Nations has become focused on the emergent challenges to the tradition of the inviolability of the nation-state and its borders. Inter-dependence, so fashionable a term in the 1970s and 1980s, no longer adequately captures the changing nature of global politics, the place of the national community, and the penetrability and complexity of the nexus of cross-cutting interests, intersecting influences, and challenges to state regimes both from below and above. Security policy might well be seen as a screen or prism through which domestic and foreign policy are filtered, out of which comes both traditional defence policy and our new range of policy initiatives which complement defence policy because they address issues which threaten the well-being of the country, the stability of the region, and the prosperity of the peoples, yet are not readily handed through the military instrument. However, we must go one step further, because in this uncertain world in transition, it also is evident that little can be managed unilaterally or through coercion alone. Cooperative security seeks to facilitate the ability of governments to advance positive security, to reduce the attendant fears of an (in)security dilemma, and to manage the increasingly diverse sets of demands and interests challenging each state. Importantly, unlike traditional conceptions of international security, while recognizing the disparities in military and economic power along with the diversities in
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
interests, cooperative security focuses on the benefits of inclusiveness and equivalence within a loose multilateral structure having a regularized multilateral process. Institutionalization is a secondary and derivative issue, neither necessary but not to be avoided if it is universally viewed as beneficial and self-regulating or adaptive.
'The Slaying of a Beautiful H y p o t h e s i s by a n Ugly Fact' 'Habits of dialogue' across a broad range of issues where management and negotiated resolution of differences are the guide, where instruments are put into place to reassure, where transparency is but a mid-point towards the normalization of security politics such that the much promised but yet unrealized peace dividend will occur to the benefit of all is evident in varying degrees in comprehensive security, in common security, and in cooperative security. Each of these approaches to security, both in principle and to the Asia-Pacific region in particular, are incomplete and flawed. The empirical world has a way of doing that to us. As the nineteenth-century scientist and philosopher, Thomas Aldous Huxley, commented about the negative side of doing research and working on theories: 'The slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact'. While I have not really done justice to the fullness of the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of comprehensive, common, and cooperative security, I trust that I have suggested some of the problems as well as strengths, providing some attractive targets to colleagues who will follow well armed with 'ugly facts' which challenge us to think somewhat more concretely about security - the concepts and their operationalization - in the Asia-Pacific region.
Author's N o t e I would like to acknowledge the substantial assistance provided t o me by Dr. Amitav Acharya in drafting an earlier version of the sections on comprehensive security and common security. I also wish to note the many helpful comments I received from those who read and heard the earlier and more extensive paper prepared for the Seventh Annual Asia Pacific Roundtable, Kuala Lumpur, 6-9 June 1993. That paper is forthcoming in a conference proceedings being prepared for publication by ISIS-Malaysia. My thanks to Dr. Noordin Sopiee, Director General, ISIS-Malaysia and to my colleague, Professor Paul Evans, Director, Joint Centre for Asia Pacific Studies, Toronto for their invitation to participate in the Roundtable and for their comments o n the earlier draft.
Notes 1. Subsequent generations of American strategic thinkers have more or less retained this definition. According to Wolfers, the 'common usage' of the term 'national security' 'implies that security rises and falls with the ability of a nation to deter an attack'. See, Arnold Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Deilvitt
Common, Comprehensive, and Cooperative Security
425
University Press, 1962), p. 150. In the 1970s, some scholars moved away from the war-centrlc view of security and allowed for the considerat~onof some categories of non-military (especially economic) threats. Thus, according t o Klaus Knorr, 'national security concerns arise when vital or core values are threatened by external actlons or events'. See Klaus Knorr and Frank N. Trager (eds.), Economic Issues and National Security (Kansas: Regents Press of Kansas for the National Security Education Program, 1977), p. 8. 2. Joseph S. Nye and Sean M. Lynn-Jones, 'International Security Studies: Report of a Conference on the State of the Field', International Security Vol. 12, No. 4, 1988, pp. 5-27. 3. Geoffrey Wiseman has written extensively on the genesis of security concepts. For one of his earlier pieces, see Geoffrey Wiseman, Common Security and Non-Provocative Defence: Altevnative approaches to the secu~itydilemma (Australian National University, Canberra: Peace Research Centre, Research School of Pacific Studies, 1989). 4. See the NPCSD Working Paper Series published by the Centre for International and Strategic Studies, York Un~versity,on behalf of the North Pacific Cooperative Security Research Program; for example, Stewart Henderson, 'Canada and Asla Pacific Security: The North Pacific Cooperative Security Dialogue - Recent Trends', No. 1; B r ~ a nL. Job, 'Canadian Interests and Perspectives Regarding the Emerging Pacific Security Order', No. 2; David Dewitt and Paul Evans, 'The Changing Dynam~csof Asia Pacific Security: A Canad~anPerspective', No. 3. 5. J.W.M. Chapman, R. Drifte and I.T.M. Grow, Japank Quest for C o m p r e h e n s i ~ Security (London: Frances Pinter, 1983), p. x i [ . 6 . Chapman et al., Japank Quest, pp. xvi-xviii. For an excellent overview of the evolut~on of Japanese security policy, see Umemoto Tetsuya, 'Comprehensive Security and the Evolution of the Japanese Security I'osture', in Robert A. Scalapino et a/. (eds.), Asian Security lssues: Regional m d Glohul (Berkeley: University of California, Inst~tuteof East Asian Studies, 1988). T h ~ Report s also was known as the I n o k ~report after its chair, the distmguished professor and chairman of Japan's Research Inst~tutefor Peace and Security. As Tetsuya d~scusses,this w ~ s hut one of three major studies undertaken hv the governments of the day. 7. S. Javed Maswood, Japanese Defence: The Seurch for Politic-ul Pouwv (Singapore: ISEAS, IYYO), p. 39. 8. Yukio Satoh, The Evolutron ofjapank Security Polrcy, Adelphi Paper No. 178 (London: llSS, 1982), p. 7. 9. Chapman et a/., Japan's Quest, p. 149. It should he noted that post-war Japanese political culture has discouraged public discussion and political activism in Issues directly related to milltary security. Given the prlmacy of the Japan-United States defence and security arrangements and the focus on promoting Japanese economic growth both at home and globally, it is not surprising that the economic aspects of comprehensive security have dominated. For an overview of related military security issues, see Masashi Nishihara, East Asian Security und the Trrlateval Countries (New York: New York Un~versityPress, 1985), a report to The Tr~lateralCommission; also David B. Ikwitt, 'Japan's Role In Regional and International Secur~ty',In Don J. Daly and Tom T. Sekine (eds.), Discovering Japan (Toronto: Captus University Publications, 1990). 10. Chapman et al., japan's Quest, p. xur. I I. The principal rationale here is that extra-regional alliances, and perhaps alliances in general, will be irrelevant in dealing with internal threats against the government. This may be less the case ~fthe region becomes a focus of coordinated insurgencies against more than one regime, say by Islamists or others, who wish to alter not only the characteristics of the governing regime and the very nature of the state, but to do so 111 the context of changing regional and inter-regional politics. 12. David Irvine, 'Making Haste Slowly: ASEAN from 1975', in Alison Bromowski (ed.), Understanding ASEAN (Imndon; Macmillan, 1982), p. 40. 13. Jusuf Wanandi, 'Security Issues In the ASEAN Region', in Karl Jackson and M. Hadi Soesastro (eds.), ASEAN Security and Economic Development (Berkeley CA: University of Califorma, Institute of East Asian Studies, 1984), p. 305. 14. Muthiah Alagappa's piece, 'Comprehensive Security: Interpretations In M E A N Countries', in Robert A. Scalapino et al. (eds.), Asian Security Issues: Regronill and G k ~ b f l l (Berkeley CA: Univers~tyof California, Institute of East A s ~ a nStudies, 1988) provides a superb
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The Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security Agenda
overview and analysis of this topic. In his essay he notes at least five factors behind the origin and development of the doctrine of national resilience with its focus on internal threats (pp. 58-62). For a very clear introduction to comprehensive security in che Malaysian context, in addition to Alagappa's overview, see Noordin Sopiee, 'Malaysia's Doctrine of Comprehensive Security', a paper prepared for the conference on East Asian Security: Perceptions and Realities, 25-27 May 1984, Seoul. 15. Cited in Alagappa, 'Comprehensive Security', pp. 63, 67-8. 16. Olaf Palme et al., Common Security: A Blueprint for Survival (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), pp. 7-11. 17. Within the last few years, critics of deterrence have not relied solely o n the 'end of the Cold War' thesis. Rather, there is emerging both a conceptually sophisticated and empirically rich research which challenges deterrence in both its nuclear and non-nuclear variants, including as well the issues related to extended deterrence and reassurance. See, for instance, the debates between Paul Huth and Bruce Russett versus Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein in the American journal, World Politics, in Vols. 4 1 and 42, 1988-1990. 18. Wiseman, Common Security a n d Non-Provocative Defence provides a superb discussion of these and related thinking on defence and common security. There is a substantial literature on these topics, most easily accessible through what might loosely be called the European (principally Scandinavian, German, and Dutch) peace research community. 19. An excellent synthesis of the literature and discussion concerning collective security, concerts, and evolving Europe is to be found in Charles A. Kupchan and Clifford A. Kupchan, 'Concerts, Collective Security, and the Future of Europe', lnternational Security, Vol. 16, No. 1, 1991, pp. 114-61. Some of my own concerns about the weaknesses of collect~vesecurity models are reflected in this piece. 20. Janice Gross Stein, 'Detection and Defection: Security "Regimes" and the Management of International Conflict', International Journal, Vol. XL, No. 4, 1985, p. 600. 21. Robert Jervis, 'Security Regimes', lnternational Organizations, Vol. 36, No. 2, p. 357. 22. The attempts by the CSCE, in conjunction with the UN, NATO, and the WEU to address the Yugoslavian and CIS issues, however unsuccessful to date, are indicative of a primitive collective security approach to conflict management. In this sense, it is an attempt to stabilize and resolve internal threats which risk the viability of the nascent security community rather than a collective response to externalities. 23. On the Australian proposal and related issues see Geoffrey Wiseman, 'Common Security in the Asia-Pacific Region', The Pacific Review, Vol. 5, No. 1, 1992, pp. 42-59; Patrick M. Cronin, 'Pacific Rim Security: Beyond Bilateralism?' The Pacific Review, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1992, pp. 209-20; and Gary Klintworth, 'Asia-Pacific: More Security, Less Uncertainty, New Opportunities', The Pacific Review, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1992, pp. 221-31. 24. The problems of applying European-style CSBMs to the Asia-Pacific region are discussed in Trevor Findlay, 'Confidence-building Measures for the Asia-Pacific: The Relevance of the European Experience', in Muthiah Alagappa (ed.), Building Confidence - Resolving Conflicts (Kuala Lumpur: Institute for International and Strategic Studies, 1989), pp. 55-74. For a survey of regional attitudes towards CSBMs at the time, see Trevor Findlay, Asia-Pacific CSBMs: A Prospectus (Canberra: Australian National University, Peace Research Centre, 1990). This issue of transferring knowledge from one political security arena to another is becoming increasingly relevant. CSBMs have been discussed and even pursued in Latin America, the Middle East, and recently in North Asia. The United Nations also has undertaken a number of special working groups t o explore these issues and for the last few years a substantially higher profile has been accorded regional multilateral meetings on security. 25. 'Asian Security in the 1990s: Integration in Economics: Diversity in Defense', a speech by Richard Solomon, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, at the University of San Diego, 30 October 1990, excerpts published in US Department of State Dispatch, 5 Novemher 1990. Solomon argued that 'East Asia is a region so vastly different from Europe in terms of its history, cultural diversity, levels of economic development and geopolitical architecture that imposing the logic of European security is simply inappropriate. The Cold War did not weld the region into two opposing blocs and there is n o single threat
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Common, Comprehensive, and Cooperative Security
427
commonly perceived across the region. Instead, there is a multiplicity of security concerns that vary from one sub-region to another ...' 26. The Strarts Times, 7 August 199 1. 27. See David B. Dewitt, 'Confidence- and Security-Building Measures In the Third World: Is There a Role?', Internutional]ournal, Vol. 52, No. 3, 1987, pp. 509-35; Masahiko Asada, 'Conf~dence-BuildingMeasures in East Asia: A Japanese Perspective', Asian Survey, Vol. 28, No. 5, 1988, pp. 489-508; Findlay, 'Confidence-Building Measures for the Asia-Pacific'. 28. A carefully formulated presentation on how one might construct through discrete incremental steps a limited operational regional security framework can be found in Desmond Ball, Building Blocks for Regronal Security: An Australian Perspectrue on Confidence and Security Building Measures (CSBMs) in the AsialPacific Region. Canberra Papers on Strategy and Defence No. 8 3 (Canberra: Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Research School of the Pacific, Australian National University, 199 1 ). 29. The Straits Times, 10 July 1991. 30. For an important new analysis on ASEAN, especially as it concerns regional security Issues, see Anutav Acharya, A New Regional Order in South-East Asra: ASEAN in t l ~ ePostCold War Era, Adelphi Paper 279 (London: The International Institute for Strategic Studies, August 1993). 31. Sukhumbhand Parihatra, 'Meeting the Challenge of the Post-Cold War World: Some Reflections on the Making of a New Southeast Asia', paper presented to the Fourth Southeast Asian Forum, organized by the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia, Kuala I.unipur, 15-18 January 1992, pp. 24-5. 32. In addition to Wiseman and Kl~ntworthnoted above, see also Desmond Ball, 'Tasks for Security Cooperation in Asia', paper prepared for the Third Conference on Security Cooperat~on in the Asia-Pacific, Seoul, 1-3 November 1992. Overall, there is a substantial amount of academic thinking and policy discuss~onoccurring on Asia-Pacific security after the Cold War. 33. See Wiseman, 'Common Security in the Asia Pacific Region' where he notes that both common security and cooperative security are gradualist in approach. 34. In all these ways, cooperative security in this context is not what three American scholars recently have written, confirming once again how diff~cultit is to transcend both academic tradition and political security culture. In this case, it is as much 'from where you come and where you sit' ( t o borrow from Graham Allison) as what you know that seems to make the difference. See Ashton B. Carter. William 3. Perry and John D. Steinbruner, A New Concept of Cooperatwe Security (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1992). They, in effect, build on the Idea of 'security cooperation' and focus solely on the challenges facing the postcold war world where horizontal proliferation, along with other m~litary-securitydynamics, 'have created some new problems [for the United States, especially] of managing international security in the longer term. ... For U.S. security policy in particular, the conceptual cr~sisis acute' (p. 4 ) . Their primary concern, not unreasonable but clearly coming from the position o f assumlng that the United States must be, if not the policeman then the fireman, is '[steerage] toward safe and stable outcomes'. In any case, their employment of the term 'cooperative security' with its focus on military threats does not embrace either the content or the intent of the use of this term within either the Asia-Pacific context as initially proposed within the North Paclfic arena, or as conceived by policymakers and academics in considering its more generalizable applicability across regions. 35. As the idea of cooperative security has been developed and discussed within Canada, it was not viewed as uniquely applicable for Asia-Pacific hut rather as a more generalized reconceptualization of the substance, process, and structure of security polltics in the post-cold war transition, and probably beyond. While Canadian officials and academics first applied it to the North Pacific for obvious reasons (absence of regional ~nstitutionsand habits of dialogue even among the like-m~nded, heavy concentration of strategic and tactical non-conventional weapons systems, exceptionally large standing armies, superpower naval and alr capabilities, etc. and a11 on Canada's western and northern approaches) other regions, notably Latin America and the Middle East, also are b a n g reassessed through this prlsm. One might even see traces of cooperative security thinking in post-Agenda for Peace United Nations activities.
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
36. See Kupchan and Kupchan, 'Concerts, Collective Security, and Europe' for a fine encapsulation of the underlying literature and arguments. While cooperation is an outcome of collective security, in order for it actually t o happen the necessary preconditions include an inclusive system in which n o state has the capacity effectively to challenge o r to nullify the combined power of the collective, where major powers of the system agree on those factors fundamental to ensuring a stable order and the defining characteristics of that order, and where each of the major states must be internally resilient and their elites sharing common views o n long-term natlonal and collective interests. 37. See Dewitt and Evans, NPCSD Working Paper No. 3, Appendix I. Evans has since undertaken a still more thorough assessment of the increasing number and variety of transPacific channels as well as the complementary initiatives being undertaken by a range of actors throughout the region. I purposefully used the term 'to converse' rather than 'to discuss' or 'to have a dialogue' since the former implies a real interest in both listening and in sharing understanding, not merely the exchange of information o r the presentation of positions which the latter t w o terms more readily connote. 38. Part of the rationale behind pushing for NATO being a political as well as military alliance (ie, the so-called Canadian article in the Charter) was to facilitate a more generalized ability of the members of the alliance to restrain thc United States from unilateral action and to contain the influence of the three UNSC permanent members -Britain, France, and the United States - within NATO corridors. O n the interesting auestion of Dowers in decline versus challengers, there is a fairly rich international relations literature (both theoretical and empirical), although there is little agreement on which of the competing theories and perspectives is 'correct'; ie, has greater explanatory power. See, for example, A.F.K. Organski and J. Kugler, The War Ledger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Robert Gilpin, War and Peace in World Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politrcs (Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1979); and, of course, more recently the 'United States in decline' debate with Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1.500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987) and a range of authors responding. 39. I hesitate to use the term 'cooperative engagement' since that has been developed rather creatively by Admiral Charles R. Larson, CINCPAC, and his colleagues. See, for example, the papers prepared for the conference, Cooperative Engagement and Economic Security in the Asia-Pacific Region, sponsored by National Defense University and United States Pacific Command, 3-4 March 1993, Honolulu. 40. See Brian L. Job (ed.), The Insecurity Dilemma: National Security of Third World States (Boulder & London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1992), especially his introductory chapter, 'The Insecurity Dilemma: National, Regime, and State Securities in the Third World', pp. 11-36. 41. Challenges to security and the shape of a new and preferred world order have been regular themes after major breakpoints in world affairs. Usually these have been cataclysmic and acute, such as world wars or major natural disasters. Currently lt is in the throes of the uncertainty of the post-cold war transformation and the debates around power, structure, and process, and whether there are universal norms - such as human rights and democracy - to which all peoples should aspire and by which all societies and governments will be judged. The literature on these themes is expanding daily. 42. This emerging focus on regions requires a much more careful examination of the complex relationships between economic capacity, military-security dynamics, and political culture than one normally finds in the literature. While economists long have been aware of issues of scale, comparative advantage, market penetration, and so forth, those of us who have focused our attention primarily on matters of military security have tended t o be overly constrained by the mid-twentieth century definition of strategic studies which, unlike its predecessors, focused on military power often to the exclusion of social, economic, and cultural forces. 43. Robert A. Scalapino, 'Historical Perceptions and Current Realities regarding Northeast Asian Regional Cooperation', NPCSD Working Paper No. 20 (York University, Centre for International and Strategic Studies, October 1992). 44. The principles of collective security are drawn from a thorough reading of the literature wrltten primarily during the first decade or so after the end of the Second World War. For
".
L)CM it t
Common. Comprehensive, and Cooperative Security
429
a review and assessment, see Kupchan and Kupchan, 'Concerts, Collective Security, and Europe'. In practice, one could envisage an argument for exclusion if agreed basic norms which, when violated and therefore threaten the peace and security of the global community, are abrogated. Today one might note the issue of clandestine nuclear proliferation or being a non-signatory to the NPT. Thus, once the door is open to establishing such criteria, as sensible as they may seem they easily permit uneven application. A still more difficult example is human rights, which the UNGA and the UNSC clearly have noted as fundamental and universal, yet in practice acknowledging the need to be context sensitive, thus once again heading down that slippery slope. Of course, we all recognize the classic phdosophical debate between absolutes, relatives, and conditionals and that politics becomes the art of the possible in an effort to maximize the greatest good. Thus, at the end all one can expect is that reasonable people will pursue reasonable means to ach~cvegoals which, through negotiat~onand compromise, have been agreed to by all members of the collective. In the case of regional multilateral cooperative security, this means accepting a degree of elasticity in establishing criteria for entry and exit of both membership and agenda items, but always aiming for inclusiveness and breadth wherever possible. 45. The obverse is also true as regards human rights and development issues. 46. Having the 'track two' process operational not only broadens the type of expertise, but also can enhance confidence in the overall programme. While it is clear that in many areas officlals will have a privileged position, the ability to draw in experts from the academic, foundation, private economic, and other sectors as appropriate not only facilitates challenging conventional wisdom and standard operating procedures, but it broadens the domestic as well as trans-national basis of support upon which to move to a new way of doing things. If democratization or participation in the political, economic, and social life of the countries, along with a movement towards so-called liberal, free market economies are, together, becoming generally accepted, then it will be rather short-sighted if one were to retreat into the old thinking which assumes that security affairs and international polltics are the preserve of the privileged few. Increasingly, modern communications technologies the world over are empowering polities in ways never before seen. While the so-called masses may still be manipulated by elites, there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that leaders do so at rather substantial personal and regime risk. See, for example, the chapters by David V.J. Bell and Robert Cox in Dewitt, Haglund, and K~rton(eds.), Building a New Global Order. 47. In structural terms, therefore, one could think in terms of a security regime, although in both process and agenda it is likely to be broader than what is normally considered in the literature a security regime. See, for instance, the issue of the American journal, International Organizations, which focused on the notion of regimes; for example, Jervis, 'Security Regimes'. 48. Quoted from James A. Caporaso, 'International Relations Theory and Multilateralism: The Search for Foundations' International Organizations, Vol. 46, N o . 3, 1992, p. 602.
N e w Dimensions of Human Security Human Development Report 1994
F
ifty years ago, Albert Einstein summed up the discovery of atomic energy with characteristic simplicity: "Everything changed." He went on to predict: "We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive." Although nuclear explosions devastated Nagasaki and Hiroshima, humankind has survived its first critical test of preventing worldwide nuclear devastation. But five decades later, we need another profound transition in thinking - from nuclear security to human security. The concept of security has for too long been interpreted narrowly: as security of territory from external aggression, or as protection of national interests in foreign policy or as global security from the threat of a nuclear holocaust. It We need another has been related more to nation-states than profound transition to people. The superpowers were locked in in thinking - from an ideological struggle - fighting a cold war all over the world. The developnuclear security to ing nations, having won their independence human security only recently, were sensitive to any real or perceived threats to their fragile national identities. Forgotten were the legitimate concerns of ordinary people who sought security in their daily lives. For many of them, security symbolized protection from the threat of disease, hunger, unemployment, crime, social conflict, political repression and environmental hazards. With the dark shadows of the cold war receding, one can now see that many conflicts are within nations rather than between nations. For most people, a feeling of insecurity arises more from worries about daily life than from the dread of a cataclysmic world event. Will they and their families have enough to eat? Will they lose their jobs? Will their streets and neighbourhoods be safe from crime? Will they be tortured by a repressive state? Will they become a victim of violence because of their gender? Will their religion or ethnic origin target them for persecution (box I ) ? Source: Human Development Report 1994 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 22-40.
BOX 1 Human security
- a s people see it
How individuals regard security depends very much on their immediate circumstances. Here are some views of security gathered from around the world, through a special sample survey by UNDP field offices.
Primary school pupil in Kuwait " I feel secure because I am living with my family and I have friends. However, I did not feel secure during the Iraqi invasion. If a country is at war, how are people supposed to feel secure?" Woman in Nigeria " M y security is only in the name of the Lord who has made heaven and earth. I feel secure because I am at liberty to worship whom I like, how I like, and also because I can pray for all the people and for peace all over the country." Fourth-grade schoolgirl in Ghana "I shall feel secure when I know that I can walk the streets at night without being raped." Shoe-mender in Tbailand "When we have enough for the children to eat, we are happy and we feel secure." Man in Namibia "Robberies make me feel insecure. I sometimes feel as though even my life will be stolen." Woman in Iran " I believe that a girl cannot feel secure until she is married and has someone to depend on." Public administrator in Cameroon "Security for me means that my job and position are safe and I can continue to provide for the needs of my family and also have something for investment and friends." Woman in Kyrgyzstan "Human security indicates faith in tomorrow, not as much having to do with food and clothing, as with stability of the political and economic situation." Secondary school pupil in Mongolia "Before, education in this country was totally free, but from this year every student has to pay. Now I do not feel very secure about finishing my studies." (Continued)
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The Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security Agenda
(Continued )
Woman in Paraguay " I feel secure because I feel fulfilled and have confidence in myself. I also feel secure because God is great and watches over me." Man in Ecuador
"What makes you feel insecure above all is violence and delinquency as well as insecurity with respect t o the police. Basic services are also an important part of security."
In the final analysis, human security is a child who did not die, a disease that did not spread, a job that was not cut, an ethnic tension that did not explode in violence, a dissident who was not silenced. Human security is not a concern with weapons - it is a concern with human life and dignity. The idea of human security, though simple, is likely to revolutionize society in the 21st century. A consideration of the basic concept of human security must focus on four of its essential characteristics:
0
0
Human security is a universal concern. It is relevant to people everywhere, in rich nations and poor. There are many threats that are common to all people - such as unemployment, drugs, crime, pollution and human rights violations. Their intensity may differ from one part of the world to another, but all these threats to human security are real and growing. The components of human security are interdependent. When the security of people is endangered anywhere in the world, all nations are likely to get involved. Famine, disease, pollution, drug trafficking, terrorism, ethnic disputes and social disintegration are no longer isolated events, confined within national borders. Their consequences travel the globe. Human security is easier to ensure through early prevention than later intervention. It is less costly to meet these threats upstream than downstream. For example, the direct and indirect cost of HIVIAIDS (human immunodeficiency viruslacquired immune deficiency syndrome) was roughly $240 billion during the 1980s. Even a few billion dollars invested in primary health care and family planning education could have helped contain the spread of this deadly disease. Human security is people-centred. It is concerned with how people live and breathe in a society, how freely they exercise their many choices, how much access they have to market and social opportunities - and whether they live in conflict or in peace.
Several analysts have attempted rigorous definitions of human security. But like other fundamental concepts, such as human freedom, human security
Humall L)eveIul~~riciit Report l i N 1
Human Security 413
is more easily identified through its absence than its presence. And most people instinctively understand what security means. Nevertheless, it may be useful to have a more explicit definition. Human security can be said to have two main aspects. It means, first, safety from such chronic threats as hunger, disease and repression. And second, it means protection from sudden and hurtful disruptions in the patterns of daily life whether in homes, in jobs or in communities. Such threats can exist at all levels of national income and development. The loss of human security can be a slow, silent process - or an abrupt, loud emergency. It can be human-made - due to wrong policy choices. It can stem from the forces of nature. O r it can be a combination of both - as is often the case when environmental degradation leads to a natural disaster, followed by human tragedy. In defining security, it is important that human security not be equated with human development. Human development is a broader concept - defined in previous Human Development Reports as a process of widening the range of people's choices. Human security means that people can exercise these choices safely and freely - and that they can be relatively confident that the opportunities they have today are not totally lost tomorrow. There is, of course, a link between human security and human development: progress in one area enhances the chances of progress in the other. But failure in one area also heightens the risk of failure in the other, and history is replete with examples. Failed or limited human development leads to a backlog of human deprivation - poverty, hunger, disease or persisting disparities between ethnic communities or between regions. This backlog in access to power and economic opportunities can lead to violence. When people perceive threats to their immediate security, they often become less tolerant, as the antiforeigner feelings and violence in Europe show. Or, where people see the basis of their livelihood erode - such as their access to water - political conflict can ensue, as in parts of Central Asia and the Arab States. Oppression and perceptions of injustice can also lead to violent protest against authoritarianism, as in Myanmar and Zaire, where people despair of gradual change. Ensuring human security does not The world will never be mean taking away from people the responsecure from war if men sibility and opportunity for mastering their and women have no lives. To the contrary, when people are insecure, they become a burden on society. The concept of human security stresses that people should be able to take care of themselves: all ~ e o d eshould have the opportunity to meet their most essential needs and to earn their own living. This will set them free and help ensure that they can make a full contribution to development - their own development and that of their communities, their countries and the world. Human security is a critical ingredient of participatory development. A
L
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The Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security Agenda
Human security is therefore not a defensive concept - the way territorial or military security is. Instead, human security is an integrative concept. It acknowledges the universalism of life claims. It is embedded in a notion of solidarity among people. It cannot be brought about through force, with armies standing against armies. It can happen only if we agree that development must involve all people. Human security thus has many components. To clarify them, it helps to examine them in detail.
Components of Human Security
There have always been two major components of human security: freedom from fear and freedom from want. This was recognized right from the beginning of the United Nations. But later the concept was tilted in favour of the first component rather than the second. The founders of the United Nations, when considering security, always gave equal weight to territories and to people. In 1945, the US secretary of state reported to his government on the results of the conference in San Francisco that set up the United Nations. He was quite specific on this point: The battle of peace has to be fought on two fronts. The first is the security front where victory spells freedom from fear. The second is the economic and social front where victory means freedom from want. Only victory on both fronts can assure the world of an enduring peace. ... N o provisions that can be written into the Charter will enable the Security Council to make the world secure from war if men and women have no security in their homes and their jobs. It is now time to make a transition from the narrow concept of national security to the all-encompassing concept of human security. People in rich nations seek security from the threat of crime and drug wars in their streets, the spread of deadly diseases like HIVIAIDS, soil degradation, rising levels of pollution, the fear of losing their jobs and many other anxieties that emerge as the social fabric disintegrates. People in poor nations demand liberation from the continuing threat of hunger, disease and poverty while also facing the same problems that threaten industrial countries. At the global level, human security no longer means carefully constructed safeguards against the threat of a nuclear holocaust - a likelihood greatly reduced by the end of the cold war. Instead, it means responding to the threat of global poverty travelling across international borders in the form of drugs, HIVIAIDS, climate change, illegal migration and terrorism. The prospect of collective suicide through an impulsive resort to nuclear weapons was always exaggerated. But the threat of global poverty affecting all human lives - in rich
nations and in poor -is real and persistent. And there are no global safeguards against these real threats to human security. The concept of security must thus change urgently in two basic ways: 0
r
From an exclusive stress on territorial security to a much greater stress on people's security. From security through armaments to security through sustainable human
development. The list of threats to human security is long, but most can be considered under seven main categories: 0
0 0
0 0
Economic security Food security Health security Environmental security Personal security Community security Political security. Economic Security
Economic security requires an assured basic income - usually from productive and remunerative work, or in the last resort from some publicly financed safety net. But only about a quarter of the world's people may at present be economically secure in this sense. Many people in the rich nations today feel insecure because jobs are increasingly difficult to find and keep. In the past two decades, the number of jobs in industrial countries has increased at only half the rate of GDP growth and failed to keep pace with the growth in the labour force. By 1993, more than 35 million people were seeking work, and a high proportion were women. Young people are more likely to be unemployed: in the United States in 1992, youth unemployment reached 14%, in the United Kingdom 15%, in Italy 33% and in Spain 34%. Often, the unemployment rate also varies with ethnic origin. In Canada, the unemployment rate among indigenous people is about 20% - twice that for other Canadians. And in the United States, the unemployment rate for blacks is twice that for whites. Even those with jobs may feel insecure if the work is only temporary. In 1991 in Finland, 13% of the employed were temporary workers, and the figures were even higher elsewhere - 15% in Greece, 17% in Portugal, 20% in Australia and 32% in Spain. Some people do, of course, choose to work on a temporary basis. But in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Belgium and the Netherlands, more than 60% of workers in temporary jobs accepted them because they could not find full-time employment. To have work for everybody, industrial countries are experimenting with job-sharing.
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The problems are even greater in developing countries, where open registered unemployment is commonly above l o % , and total unemployment probably way beyond that. Again, this is a problem especially for young people: for youths in Africa in the 1980s, the open unemployment rate was above 20%. And it is one of the main factors underlying political tensions and ethnic violence in several countries. But unemployment figures understate the real scale of the crisis since many of those working are seriously underemployed. Without the assurance of a social safety net, the poorest cannot survive even a short period without an income. Many of them, however, can rely on family or community support. Yet that system is rapidly breaking down. So, the unemployed must often accept any work they can find, however I may at present be I unproductive or badly paid. The most insecure working condieconomically secure tions are usually in the informal sector, which has a high proportion of total employment. In 1991, it accounted for 30% of all jobs in Latin America and 60% of those in Africa. The global shift towards more "precarious" employment reflects changes in the structure of industry. Manufacturing jobs have been disappearing, while many of the new opportunities are in the service sector, where employment is much more likely to be temporary or part-time - and less protected by trade unions. For many people, the only option is self-employment. But this can be even less secure than wage employment, and those at the bottom of the ladder find it difficult to make ends meet. In the rural areas, the poorest farmers have little access to land, whose distribution can be gauged by the Gini coefficient a measure of inequality that ranges from 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (absolute inequality). In Kenya, the Gini coefficient for land is 0.77, in Saudi Arabia 0.83 and in Brazil 0.86. And even those who have some land or know of productive investment opportunities often find it difficult to farm and invest effectively because they have little access to credit. This, despite the mounting evidence that the poor are creditworthy. In many developing countries, 40% of the people receive less than 1% of total credit. The shift to more precarious work has been accompanied by increasing insecurity of incomes. Nominal wages have remained stagnant, or risen only slowly, but inflation has sharply eroded their value. Some of the worst examples of inflation in the 1980s: Nicaragua 584%, Argentina 417%, Brazil 328% and Uganda 107%; and in the 1990s: Ukraine 1,445%, Russian Federation 1,353% and Lithuania 1,194%. As a result, real wages in many parts of the world have declined. In Latin America in the 1980s, they fell by 20%, and in many African countries during the same period, the value of the minimum wage dropped sharply by 2 0 % in Togo, 40% in Kenya and 80% in Sierra Leone. Worse off are women - who typically receive wages 30-40% lower than those of men for
H u m a n Developnwnt Repoit 100 1 Human Security
437
doing the same jobs. In Japan and the Republic of Korea, women in manufacturing jobs earn only about half as much as men. Income insecurity has hit industrial countries as well. In the European Union, 44 million people (some 28% of the workforce) receive less than half the average income of their country. In the United States, real earnings fell by 3% through the 1980s. Minority ethnic groups are usually among the hardest hit: in Canada, nearly half the indigenous people living on reservations now rely on transfer payments for their basic needs. Some sections of the population face a particularly difficult situation. In 1994, about 65 million disabled people need training and job placement to attain economic security. Only 1% will receive meaningful services. The disabled are, by and large, found among the poorest quarter of the population. And their unemployment rate is as high as 8 4 % in Mauritius and 4 6 % in China. With incomes low and insecure, many people have to look for more support from their governments. But they often look in vain. Most developing countries lack even the most rudimentary forms of social security, and budgetary problems in industrial countries have unravelled social safety nets. In the United States between 1987 and 1990, the real benefits per pensioner declined by 40%, and in Austria by 50%. In Germany, where maternity compensation has already been cut to 25% of full pay, the government decided that over the next three years unemployment and welfare payments will be cut by some $45 billion - the largest cut in postwar German history. The result: increasing poverty. In both the United States and the European Union, nearly 1 5 % of the people live below the poverty line. The incidence of poverty varies with ethnic origin. In Germany, while the national average has been estimated at 11 %, the incidence of poverty among foreign-born residents is 24%. But the most acute problems are in the developing countries, where more than a third of the people live below the poverty line - and more than one billion people survive on a daily income of less than $1. One of economic insecurity's severest effects is homelessness. Nearly a quarter of a million New Yorkers - more than 3% of the city's population and more than 8 % of its black children - have stayed in shelters over the past five years. London has about 400,000 registered homeless people. France has more than 500,000 - nearly 10,000 in Paris. The situation is much worse in developing countries. In Calcutta, Dhaka and Mexico City, more than 25%) of the people constitute what is sometimes called a "floating population". Figures 1 and 2 on the following page give selected indicators of economic insecurity. For industrial countries, these indicators refer to job security. But for developing countries, because of data limitations, the data refer only to income security.
Food security means that all people at all times have both physical and economic access to basic food. This requires not just enough food to go
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The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
round. It requires that people have ready access to food - that they have an "entitlement" to food, by growing it for themselves, by buying it or by taking advantage of a p h l i c food distribution system. The availability of food is thus a necessary condition of security - hut not a sufficient one. People can
Figure 1 : Falling Incomes Threaten Human Security 1991 C.NP p r capita as a pcrrcnrrge of 19RO'r
Ethiopia
Nicaragua C h dd'lvoire
Figure 2: High Unemployment in Industrial Countries Total unemployed
.............................................. Unemployed more than 12 mnnthr
Huin'in De~c~ic'.prrrc*nt lirp
,ti
)
1 Human Security
4'39
still starve even when enough food is available - as has happened during many famines (box 2).
BOX 2 Starvation amid plenty - the Bengal famine of 1943 Famines are commonly thought of as Nature's revenge on hapless humanity. Although Nature can certainly create local food shortages, human beings turn these shortages into widespread famines. People go hungry not because food is unavailable - but because they cannot afford it. The Bengal famine of 1943 shows why. Between two million and three million lives were lost, even though there was no overall shortage of food. In fact, the per capita supply of foodgrains in 1943 was 9% higher than in 1941. The famine was partly a product of an economic boom. Sudden increases in war-related activities exerted powerful inflationary pressures on the economy and caused food prices to rise. In the urban areas, those with work could pay these prices. But in the rural areas, agricultural labourers and other workers found they could no longer afford to eat, and thousands headed for the cities, particularly Calcutta, in the hope of survival. Prices were then driven even higher by speculation and panic buying. The famine could probably have been averted by timely government action. But the colonial government did nothing to stop hoarding by producers, traders and consumers. The general policy was "wait and see". Relief work was totally inadequate, and the distribution of foodgrains to the rural districts was inefficient. Even in October 1943, with 100,000 sick and destitute people on the streets of Calcutta, the government continued to deny the existence of a famine. The result was one of the largest man-made catastrophes of our time.
The overall availability of food in the world is not a problem. Even in developing countries, per capita food production increased by 18% on average in the 1980s. And there is enough food to offer everyone in the world around 2,500 calories a day - 200 calories more than the basic minimum. But this does not mean that everyone gets enough to eat. The problem often is the poor distribution of food and a lack of purchasing power. Some 800 million people around the world go hungry. In Sub-Saharan Africa, despite considerable increases in the availability of food in recent years, some
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240 million people (about 30% of the total) are undernourished. And in South Asia, 30% of babies are born under- the highest ratio for any region in weight People go hungry not the world and a sad indication of inadequate because food is access to food, particularly for women, who unavailable - but are often the last to eat in the household. because they cannot Table 1 gives selected indicators of food securafford it ity in developing countries. T a b l e I : Indicators of Food Security in Selected Countries
Country
Food Production Per Capita Index ( 1979/81 = 100) 1991
Food Import Dependency Ratio Index ( 1969/71=100) 1988/90
Daily Per Capita Calorie Supply as % of Requirements 1988-90
Ethiopia Afghanistan Mozambique Angola Rwanda Somalia Sudan Burundi Haiti
Government and international agencies have tried many ways of increasing food security - at both national and global levels. But these schemes have had only a limited impact. Access to food comes from access to assets, work and an assured income. And unless the question of assets, employment and income security is tackled upstream, state interventions can do little for food insecurity downstream. Health Security
In developing countries, the major causes of death are infectious and parasitic diseases, which kill 17 million people annually, including 6.5 million from acute respiratory infections, 4.5 million from diarrhoea1 diseases and 3.5 million from tuberculosis. Most of these deaths are linked with poor nutrition and an unsafe environment - particularly polluted water, which contributes to the nearly one billion cases of diarrhoea a year. In industrial countries, the major killers are diseases of the circulatory system (5.5 million deaths a year), often linked with diet and life style. Next comes cancer, which in many cases has environmental causes. In the United States, there are considered to be 18 major cancer-causing environmental risks, with indoor pollution at the top of the list. In both developing and industrial countries, the threats to health security are usually greater for the poorest, people in the rural areas and particularly
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441
Figure 3: Children's Health Percentage of ch~ldrenunder 5 who are underweight
children (figure 3). In the developing countries in 1990, safe water was available to 85% of urban people but to only 62% of rural people. In industrial countries, the poor and the racial minorities are more exposed to disease. In the United States, one-third of whites live in areas polluted by carbon monoxide, but the figure for blacks is nearly 50%. In 1991, life expectancy was 72 years for Canada's indigenous people, compared with 77 years for all Canadians. The disparities between rich and poor are similar for access to health services. In the industrial countries on average, there is 1 doctor for every 400 people, but for the developing countries there is 1 for nearly 7,000 people (in Sub-Saharan Africa the figure is 1 per 36,000). There also are marked disparities in health spending among developing countries. The Republic of Korea spends $377 per capita annually on health care, but Bangladesh only $7. People in the industrial countries are much more likely to have access to health care, but even here the disparities in health security are sharp - and for many people getting worse. In the United States between 1989 and 1992, the number of people without health insurance increased from 35 million to 39 million. While poor people in general have less health security, the situation for wornen is particularly difficult. One of the most serious hazards they face is childbirth: more than three million women die each year from causes related to childbirth. Most of these deaths could be prevented by ensuring access to
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The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
safe and affordable family planning and offering the most basic support at home during pregnancy and delivery, with the option of referrals to clinics or hospitals for women with evident complications. The widest gap between the North and the South in any human indicator is in maternal mortality - which is about 18 times greater in the South. Thus a miracle of life often turns into a nightmare of death just because a society cannot spare the loose change to provide a birth attendant at the time of the greatest vulnerability and anxiety in a woman's life. Another increasing source of health insecurity for both sexes is the spread of HIV and AIDS (box 3). Around 15 million people are believed to be HIV-positive - 80% of them in developing countries. By 2000, this figure may rise to 40 million (13 million of them women).
BOX 3 HIV and AIDS - a global epidemic The cumulative number of HIV-infected people worldwide is now around 1 5 million, with more than 12.5 million in developing countries - 9 million in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1.5 million in Latin America and 2 million in Asia. Most HIV-infected people live in urban areas, and 70% are in the prime productive ages of 2 0 4 0 years. One million are children. In the United States, AIDS is now the prime cause of death for men aged 2 5 4 4 , and the fourth most important for women in that age group. The cumulative direct and indirect costs of HIV and AIDS in the 1980s have been conservatively estimated at $240 billion. The social and psychological costs of the epidemic for individuals, families, communities and nations are also huge - but inestimable Future projections are alarming. By 2000, the number of HIVinfected people is expected to rise to between 3 0 and 40 million 13 million of them women. By that time, the epidemic would have left more than nine million African children as orphans. The geographical distribution of HIV and AIDS is changing. In the mid-1980s, the epidemic was well established in North America and Africa, but by 2000, most of the new infections will be in Asia. In Thailand today, there are a n estimated 500,000 HIV-infected people, and in India, more than a million. The global cost - direct and indirect - of HIV and AIDS by 2000 could be as high as $500 billion a year - equivalent to more than 2 % of global GDP.
Environmental Security Human beings rely on a healthy physical environment - curiously assuming that whatever damage they inflict on the earth, it will eventually recover. This
W umnn Detrlopm~ritRepo~tI S W
Human Security 443
clearly is not the case, for intensive industrialization and rapid population growth have put the planet under intolerable strain. The environmental threats countries are facing are a combination of the degradation of local ecosystems and that of the global system. The threats to the global environment are discussed later. Here the focus is environmental threats within countries. In developing countries, one of the greatest environmental threats is that to water. Today, the world's supply of water per capita is only one-third of what it was in 1970. Water scarcity is increasingly becoming a factor in ethnic strife and political tension. In 1990, about 1.3 billion people in the developing world lacked access to clean water (figure 4). And much water pollution is the result of poor sanitation: nearly two billion people lack access to safe sanitation. But people in developing countries have also been putting pressure on the land. Some eight to ten million acres of forest land are lost each year areas the size of Austria. And deforestation combined with overgrazing and poor conservation methods is accelerating desertification. In Sub-Saharan Africa alone in the past 50 years, 65 million hectares of productive land turned to desert. Even irrigated land is under threat - from salt residues. Salinization damage affects 25% of the irrigated land in Central Asia, and 20% in Pakistan. In industrial countries, one of the major environmental threats is air pollution. Los Angeles produces 3,400 tons of pollutants each year, and London 1,200 tons. Harmful to health, this pollution also damages the natural environment. The deterioration of Europe's forests from air pollution Figure 4: More t h a n a Billion P e o p l e in D e v e l o p i n g Countries Still Lack Safe Drinking Water
I'opulat~on with x c e s s to s ~ f water c
Population without access t u safe water
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The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
causes economic losses of $35 billion a year. And the estimated annual loss of agricultural production due to air pollution is $1.5 billion in Sweden, $1.8 billion in Italy, $2.7 billion in Poland and $4.7 billion in Germany. Although the character of environmental damage differs between industrial and developing countries, the effects are similar almost everywhere. Salinization is also severe in the United States. And air pollution is also acute in cities in the developing world. Mexico City produces 5,000 tons of air pollutants a year, and in Bangkok, air pollution is so severe that more than 40% of the city's traffic police reportedly suffer from respiratory problems. Many environmental threats are chronic and long-lasting. Others take on a more sudden and violent character. Bhopal and Chernobyl are the more obvious sudden environmental catastrophes. Many chronic "natural" disasters in recent years have also been provoked by human beings. Deforestation has led to more intense droughts and floods. And population growth has moved people into areas prone to cyclones, earthquakes or floods - areas always considered dangerous and previously uninhabited (box 4). Poverty and land shortages are doing the same - driving people onto much more marginal territory and increasing their exposure to natural hazards. The result: disasters are more significant and more frequent. During 1967-91, disasters hit three billion people - 80% of them in Asia. More than seven million people died, and two million were injured Most developing countries have plans to cope with natural emergencies Bangladesh, for example, has an elaborate warning system for cyclones arriving in the Bay of Bengal. Sometimes the scale is beyond national resources and calls for international action. Responses, however, are often slow, inadequate and uncoordinated. Current humanitarian efforts, particularly in the UN system, are seriously underfunded. And many of the most vulnerable people perish before any international help arrives. Personal Security
Perhaps no other aspect of human security is so vital for people as their security from physical violence. In poor nations and rich, human life is increasingly threatened by sudden, unpredictable violence. The threats take several forms:
0
0
0
0
Threats from the state (physical torture) Threats from other states (war) Threats from other groups of people (ethnic tension) Threats from individuals or gangs against other individuals or gangs (crime, street violence) Threats directed against women (rape, domestic violence) Threats directed at children based on their vulnerability and dependence (child abuse) Threats to self (suicide, drug use)
Human Development Report I9O.i
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BOX 4 The rising tide of disasters
The frequency and severity of disasters have increased sharply over the past two decades. There were 16 major disasters in the 1960s, 29 in the 1970s and 70 in the 1980s. According to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the major causes of deaths from natural disasters during 1967-91 were droughts (1.3 million), cyclones (0.8 million), earthquakes (0.6 million) and floods (0.3 million). But accounting for the largest number of disaster incidents over the period were floods (1,358), followed by accidents (1,284). A disaster is defined as an event that has killed at least ten people, or affected at least 100. Probably the most significant cause of the rise in the number and impact of disasters is population growth, which is forcing people to live in more marginal and dangerous places - low-lying land liable to flooding or areas close to active volcanoes. And as more and more of the planet is settled, earthquakes are more likely to strike inhabited areas. Population increases and industrial development also lead to environmental degradation. Deforestation and overgrazing, for example, have increased the number and severity of droughts and floods. Poor people are much more exposed to disasters than are rich ones. It is they who occupy the steep hillsides vulnerable to landslides. It is they who occupy the fragile delta islands that lie in the paths of cyclones. And it is they who live in the crowded and poorly built slum buildings shaken to the ground by earthquakes. There also are international disparities. Droughts or floods in Africa do much more damage than those in North America. So, of the global disaster incidents between 1967 and 1991, 22% were in the Americas and 15% in Africa. But 60% of the resulting deaths were in Africa, and only 6% in the Americas. Poor nations obviously are less equipped to cope with natural disasters. Disasters also cause considerable economic damage, and here too the figures have been rising. Global losses for the 1960s were estimated at $10 billion, for the 1970s at $30 billion and for the 1980s at $93 billion. Most of these losses (over 60%) were in the industrial countries - though as a proportion of GNP, the economic costs were higher for the developing countries. Disasters in developing countries are an integral part of their poverty cycle. Poverty causes disasters. And disasters exacerbate poverty. Only sustainable human development -which increases the security of human beings and of the planet we inhabit - can reduce the frequency and impact of natural disasters.
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In many societies, human lives are at greater risk than ever before (figure 5). For many people, the greatest source of anxiety is crime, particularly violent crime. Many countries report disturbing trends. In 1992 in the United States, 14 million crimes were reported to the police. These crimes exact a serious economic toll - estimated at $425 billion a year. Reported crimes in Germany in the same year went up by 10%. In the second half of the 1980s, the murder rate in Italy and Portugal doubled, and in Germany it tripled. The increase in crime is often connected with drug trafficking. In Canada, 225 people in every 100,000 - and in Australia, 400 - suffer each year from drug-related crimes. In the second half of the 1980s, drug-related crimes roughly doubled in Denmark and in Norway - and increased more than thirtyfold in Japan. Crime and violence are also facts of life in developing countries. Four children are murdered every day in Brazil, where the killing of minors has increased by 40% in the past year. In Kenya in 1993, there were 3,300 reported car thefts - an increase of 200% over 1991. In China, violent crime and rape are on the increase. Industrial and traffic accidents also present great risks. In industrial countries, traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for people aged 15-30 - with some of the highest injury rates in Austria, Belgium, Canada and the United States. And in developing countries, traffic accidents account for at least 50% of total accidental deaths. The highway death toll in South Africa in 1993 was 10,000, three times the number of deaths from political violence. Violence in the workplace has also increased. In 1992, more than two million US workers were physically attacked at their workplace, nearly 6.5 million others were threatened with violence, and 16 million were harassed in some way. The cost of all this in lost work and legal expenses came to more than $4 billion. About a sixth of the deaths on the job in that year were homicides. Among the worst personal threats are those to women. In no society are women secure or treated equally to men. Personal insecurity shadows them from cradle to grave. In the household, they are the last to eat. At school, they are the last to be educated. At work, they are the last to be hired and the first to be fired. And from childhood through adulthood, they are abused because of their gender. True, women are getting better educated and entering employment, often as primary income-earners. Millions of women are now heads of households - one-third of households In no society are in the world as a whole, and up to one-half in some women secure or African countries, where women produce nearly 90% of the food. But there still are many shocking treated equally
El to men
lence. It was indicators of recently gender insecurity estimated and that physical one-thirdvioof wives in developing countries are physically battered. One woman in 2,000 in the world is reported to have been raped. In the
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Figure 5: Profile of Human Distress in Industrial Countries
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
United States, there were more than 150,000 reported rapes in 1993 alone. Sexual harassment on the job is common. In India, women's groups claim that there are about 9,000 dowry-related deaths each year. For 1992, the government estimates that the figure was 5,000. Children, who should be the most protected in any society, are subject to many abuses. In the United States, nearly three million children were recently reported to be victims of abuse and neglect, and in 1992, nearly 7,000 US children (20 a day) died from gunshot wounds. In developing countries, poverty compels many children to take on heavy work at too young an age often at great cost to their health. In Brazil, more than 200,000 children spend their lives on the streets. Even conservative estimates put the combined number of child prostitutes in Thailand, Sri Lanka and the Philippines at 500,000. Community Security
Most people derive security from their membership in a group - a family, a community, an organization, a racial or ethnic group that can provide a cultural identity and a reassuring set of values. Such groups also offer practical support. The extended family system, for example, offers protection to its weaker members, and many tribal societies work on the principle that heads of households are entitled to enough land to support their family - so land is distributed accordingly. But traditional communities can also perpetuate oppressive practices: employing bonded labour and slaves and treating women particularly harshly. In Africa, hundreds of thousands of girls suffer genital mutilation each year because of the traditional practice of female circumcision. Some of these traditional practices are breaking down under the steady process of modernization. The extended family is now less likely to offer support to a member in distress. Traditional languages and cultures are withering under the onslaught of mass media. On the other hand, many oppressive practices are being fought by people's organizations and through legal action. Traditional communities, particularly ethnic groups, can also come under much more direct attack -from each other. About 40% of the world's states have more than five sizable ethnic populations, one or more of which faces discrimination. In several nations, ethnic tensions are on the rise, often over limited access to opportunities -whether to social services from the state or to jobs from the market. Individual communities lose out, or believe they lose out, in the struggle for such opportunities. As a result, about half of the world's states have recently experienced some interethnic strife. And this has been especially serious where national conflict was exacerbated by cold war rivalry. Ethnic clashes often have brutal results (table 2). Since 1983 in Sri Lanka, more than 14,000 people have died in the conflict between the Tamils and the Sinhalese. Since 1981 in former Yugoslavia, more than 130,000 people have
Human ~ e v e l a ~ r n e Report nt 10111 Human Security
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been killed and more than 40,000 helpless women reportedly raped in what , shamelessly was named "ethnic cleansing", while most ~ ~ tensions h are ~ i of ~the world watched silently from the sidelines. In Somalia in 1993, there were up to on the rise, often 10,000 casualties - about two-thirds of them Over limited access women and children - from clashes between to opportunities rival factions or with UN peace-keepers.
1
1
Table 2: Ethnic a n d Religious Conflicts
Country Afghanistan Mozambique Iraq Somalia Ethiopia Liberia Angola Myanmar Sudan Sri Lanka
G r o u p Rebelliona 1980-89
Major A r m e d conflictsb 1989-92
Yes no Yes Yes Yes no Yes yes Yes Yes
yes Yes Yes Yes Yes yes Yes yes Yes Yes
R e f u g e e s from t h e Country (Thousands) 1992 4,720 1,730 1,310 870 840 670 400 330 270
180
a. Group rebellion occurs when non-state communal groups arm themselves and organize more than 1,000 fighters and engage in vlolent activities against other such groups. b. Major armed conflicts are defined as contested conflicts that concern government or territory, in which there IS use of armed force by the two parties, of which at least one is the government (or parts of government) of a state, and which has resulted in more than 1,000 battle-related deaths durlng the course of the conflict.
The United Nations declared 1993 the Year of Indigenous People to highlight the continuing vulnerability of the 300 million aboriginal people in 70 countries. In Venezuela in 1986, there were 10,000 Yanomami people - but now their survival is increasingly in danger. Indigenous groups often lose their traditional freedom of movement. During the drought of the 1970s, the one million Tuareg nomads in the Sahara found it much more difficult to move their herds to faraway water holes, and as many as 125,000 people starved to death. Indigenous people also face widening spirals of violence. In Canada, an indigenous person is six times more likely to be murdered than other Canadians. And symptoms of depression and despair are all too common: in 1988, there were a reported 40 suicides per 100,000 indigenous people, nearly three times the national rate. Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu gives her view of the importance of the International Decade of Indigenous People (special contribution, page 450).
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SPECIAL CONTRIBUTION
The International Decade of Indigenous People We believe in the wisdom of our ancestors and wise people who passed on to us their strength and taught us the art of language - enabling us to reaffirm the validity of our thousand-year-old history and the justice of our struggle. My cause was not born out of something good, it was born out of wretchedness and bitterness. It has been radicalized by the poverty in which my people live. It has been radicalized by the malnutrition which I, as an Indian, have seen and experienced. And by the exploitation and discrimination which I have felt in the flesh. And by the oppression which prevents us from performing our ceremonies, and shows no respect for our way of life, the way we are. At the same time, they've killed the people dearest to me. Therefore, my commitment to our struggle knows no boundaries or limits. That is why I have travelled to so many places where I have had the opportunity to talk about my people. The international struggle has been of vital importance, especially in the last decade. It has resulted in our achieving a world audience at the United Nations. Promoting the rights of indigenous people has been a tremendous challenge, both for the indigenous peoples themselves and for the member states of the United Nations. But in time and with determination, important successes have been achieved. These include the creation of the Task Force on Indigenous Peoples, the proposed Declaration of the United Nations on Indigenous People, the adoption of 1993 as the International Year of Indigenous People and recently the proclamation by the UN General Assembly of 1994 as the preparatory year for the International Decade of the World's Indigenous People. The marking of the fifth centenary of the arrival of Columbus in America was an opportunity not only to reiterate the justice of the historic claims of the indigenous people but also to demonstrate our readiness to continue the struggle to achieve them. At the same time, it helped stimulate awareness in international institutions and the communications media of the problems which indigenous people face - as well as explicitly emphasize the significance of our presence within countries and in the world in general. The International Year of Indigenous People enabled us to strengthen the unity within our organizations, to bring together our aspirations and plans and above all to bear witness to the emptiness and the painful situation of misery, marginalization and humiliation in which we continue to live. The International Year of Indigenous People enabled the
(Continued)
(Continued ) indigenous peoples themselves to carry out an enormous number of their own activities and initiatives, including the two summit meetings (Chimaltenango and Oaxtepec). These helped us to bring together our
demands and resolutions which we hope the international community will take into account. At the same time, it was possible to disseminate information about the current situation of our people - and start to overcome many of the old cultural and historic prejudices. I would like to pay my respects to all the organizations, communities, leaders and representatives of indigenous peoples who gave me the wonderful opportunity to bear witness to their aspirations, desires for justice and hopes for peace - in the world of uncertainty, of death and of difficult conditions in which the majority of people currently live. I would also like to reaffirm, together with my fellow indigenous people, our commitment to carry on our own struggle. The International Decade for Indigenous People is one more step towards building new relationships between states and indigenous peoples on the basis of mutual respect.
Rigoberta Menchu, winner of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize
One of the most important aspects of human security is that people should be able to live in a society that honours their basic human rights. In this respect, at least, there has been considerable progress. The 1980s were in many ways a decade of democratic transition - as many military dictatorships ceded power to civilian administrations and one-party states opened themselves up to multi-party elections. Yet there still is a long way to go in protecting people against state repression. According to a 1993 survey by Amnesty International, political repression, systematic torture, ill treatment or disappearance was still practised in 110 countries. Human rights violations are most frequent during periods of political unrest. In 1992, Amnesty International concluded that unrest resulted in human rights violations in 112 countries, and in 105 countries there were reports of political detention and imprisonment. Unrest commonly results in military intervention - as in 64 countries. But the police can also be used as agents of repression - they are commonly cited as the perpetrators of human rights violations in both Eastern and Western Europe.
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Along with repressing individuals and groups, governments commonly try to exercise control over ideas and information. UNESCO's index of press freedom finds the least free areas to be North Africa, Western Asia and South Asia. One of the most useful indicators of political insecurity in a country is the priority the government accords military strength - since governments sometimes use armies to repress their own people. If a government is more concerned about its military establishment than its people, this imbalance shows up in the ratio of military to social spending (table 3). The two nations with the highest ratios of military spending to education and health spending in 1980 were Iraq (8 to 1)and Somalia ( 5 to 1).Is it any surprise that these two nations ran into serious trouble during the 1980s and that the same powers that supplied them arms a decade ago are now struggling to disarm them? Among these seven elements of human security are considerable links and overlaps. A threat to one element of human security is likely to travel like an angry typhoon - to all forms of human security.
Global Human Security
Some global challenges to human security arise because threats within countries rapidly spill beyond national frontiers. Environmental threats are one of the clearest examples: land degradation, deforestation and the emission of greenhouse gases affect climatic conditions around the globe. The trade in drugs is also a transnational phenomenon - drawing millions of people, both producers and consumers, into a cycle of violence and dependency. Other threats take on a global character because of the disparities between countries - disparities that encourage millions of people to leave their homes in search of a better life, whether the receiving country wants them or not. And in some cases, frustration over inequality can take the form of religious fundamentalism - or even terrorism. So, when human security is under threat anywhere, it can affect people everywhere. Famines, ethnic conflicts, social disintegration, terrorism, Table 3: Ratios of Military to Social Spending, 1990/91 (Military Expenditure as % of Combined Education and Health Expenditure) Syrian Arab Rep. Oman Iraq Myanmar Angola Somalia Yemen Qatar Ethiopia Saudi Arabia Jordan
373 293 271 222 208 200 197 192 190 151 138
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pollution and drug trafficking can no longer be confined within national borders. And no nation can isolate its life from the rest of the world. This indivisibility of global human security extends to the consequences of both prosperity and poverty. International trade is widening people's range of choices. Instant global communication enables many more to participate in world events as they happen. Every minute, computer networks transfer billions of dollars across international frontiers at the touch of a keyboard. But if prosperity is becoming globalized, so is poverty, though with much less fanfare. Millions of people migrate to other countries in search of work. Drug traffickers now have one of the best-organized and best-financed international networks. Ethnic tensions can spill over national frontiers. And one person can carry an incurable disease - such as AIDS - to any corner of the world. Nor does pollution respect borders. And we may yet witness the scary sight of a small nuclear weapon in the hands of a determined international terrorist. The real threats to human security in the next century will arise more from the actions of millions of people than from aggression by a few nations threats that will take many forms: Unchecked population growth Disparities in economic opportunities Excessive international migration Environmental degradation Drug production and trafficking International terrorism. It is in the interest of all nations to discover fresh ways of cooperating to respond to these six emerging threats (and others, should they arise) that constitute the global framework of human insecurity. Unchecked Population Growth
The rapid rate of population growth - coupled with a lack of developmental opportunities - is overcrowding the planet, adding to the enormous pressures on diminishing non-renewable resources. This growth - at the root of global poverty, international migration and environmental degradation - is unprecedented in history. It took one million years to produce the first one billion people on earth. It will now take only ten years to add the next billion to today's 5.5 billion. The response has to be multifaceted. Certainly, family planning information and services must be available to all those who want them - particularly to the 100 to 200 million couples whose current demand is not being met. But it is folly to treat population growth as a clinical problem. It is a development problem. Indeed, in many societies, human development (especially the education of females) has proven the most powerful contraceptive. Any plan of action to slow population growth must receive both national and international support, and include both family planning services and
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targeted human development programmes. A major opportunity to design such a response is the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in September 1994. Despite the considerable international rhetoric on unchecked population growth, population programmes go underfinanced. The World Bank estimates that if cost-effective methods are adopted, it would take only an additional $2 billion a year to provide family planning services to the 120 million women in developing countries desiring such services. But this amount has yet to be pledged, just like the $2.5 billion a year of additional investment it would take to remove gender disparities in education. Disparities in Economic Opportunities During the past five decades, world income increased sevenfold (in real GDP) and income per person more than tripled (in per capita GDP). But this gain has been spread very unequally - nationally and internationally and the inequality is increasing. Between 1960 and 1991, the share of world income for the richest 20% of the global population rose from 70% to 85%. Over the same period, all but the richest quintile saw their share of world income fall - and the meagre share for the poorest 20% declined from 2.3% to 1.4% (figure 6). One-fifth of humankind, mostly in the industrial countries, thus has well over four-fifths of global income and other developmental opportunities. These disparities reflect many other disparities - in trade, investment, savings and commercial lending. Overall, they reflect unequal access to global market opportunities. Such disparities entail consequences for other aspects of human security. They encourage overconsumption and overproduction in the North, and they perpetuate the poverty-environment link in the South. Inevitably, they breed resentment and encourage migration from poor countries to rich. Migration Pressures One of the clearest consequences of population growth and deepening poverty in developing countries is the growth in international migration. At least 35 million people from the South have taken up residence in the North in the past three decades - around one million join them each year. Another million or so are working overseas on contracts for fixed periods. The number of illegal international migrants is estimated to be around 15 to 30 million. In addition, there are large numbers of refugees. In the developing countries today, there are nearly 20 million internally displaced people - and worldwide, probably, around 1 9 million refugees (figure 7). These pressures are likely to increase. Expanding populations, limited employment opportunities, closed international markets and continuing environmental degradation will force millions more to leave their own countries. But the affluent nations are closing their doors - since they face stagnating economies, high unemployment and the prospect of "jobless growth':
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Figure 6: T h e Widening G a p b e t w e e n t h e Rich and t h e Poor
Ratio ot income shares richest 20%: poorest 20% of world populatwn
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Sometimes, the policies of the industrial countries intensify migration pressures. First, they restrict employment in developing countries by raising trade and tariff barriers that limit their export potential: if the job opportunities do not move towards the workers, the workers are likely to move towards the job opportunities. Second, the industrial countries do have a real demand for workers whether for highly educated scientists or for the unskilled labour to do the difficult manual jobs that their own workers reject. This demand leads to highly ambivalent attitudes towards immigration: official disapproval, with systems of enforcement less effective than they might be so that enough construction workers, fruit pickers or nannies can find their way in.
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Figure 7: Refugees of the Past Three Years could Populate a Major City or a Country Popularion in millions, 1992
Control of international migration is not just an administrative issue. It is primarily an economic issue - requiring a new framework of development cooperation that integrates foreign assistance with trade liberalization, technology transfers, foreign investments and labour flows. Environmental Degradation Most forms of environmental degradation have their most severe impact locally. But other effects tend to migrate. Polluted air drifts inexorably across national frontiers, with sulphur dioxide emissions in one country falling as acid rain in another. About 60% of Europe's commercial forests suffer damaging levels of sulphur deposition. In Sweden, about 20,000 of the country's 90,000 lakes are acidified to some degree; in Canada, 48,000 are acidic. And the source of the problem in these instances is not only within the country. The emission of chlorofluorocarbons also has an international, indeed a truly global, effect - as the gases released in individual countries attack the ozone layer. In 1989, research teams found that the ozone layer over Antarctica was reduced to only 50% of its 1979 level. And in 1993, satellite measurements over the heavily populated mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere showed the ozone layer to he at record lows, with serious implications for human health. Ozone filters out ultraviolet radiation, which can lead to various kinds of skin cancer. Between 1982 and 1989 in the United States, the incidence of the most dangerous form of skin cancer, melanoma, rose by more than 80%. The production of greenhouse gases in individual countries also has a global impact. Layers of these gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, accumulating in the upper atmosphere contribute to global warming because they reflect back infrared radiation that would otherwise escape into space. In 1989, the United States and the former Soviet Union were the largest
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producers of such gases - respectively responsible for 18% and 14% of total emissions. But the effects will be felt all over the globe - and could have their greatest impact on the poorest countries. With a one-metre rise in sea level partly due to global warming, Bangladesh (which produces only 0.3% of global emissions) could see its land area shrink by 17%. Biological diversity is more threatened now than at any time in the past. Tropical deforestation is the main culprit, but the destruction of wetlands, coral reefs and temperate forests also figures heavily. Germany and the Netherlands lost nearly 60% of their wetlands between 1950 and 1980. And a recent analysis of tropical forest habitats, which contain 50-90% of the world's species, concluded that, at current rates of loss, up to 15% of the earth's species could disappear over the next 25 years. Today, only 45% of the world's temperate rainforests remain. The trends of the past 20 years show an accelerated destruction of coastal marine habitats, increases in coastal pollution, and in many areas, a shrinking of the marine fish catch. In 1990, the global fish catch declined for the first time in 13 years - a result of overfishing, coastal habitat destruction and water pollution. Coral reefs will also come under greater pressure. Approximately one billion people will live in coastal cities by 2000, increasing the danger to reefs from overfishing, pollution and soil erosion. As habitats are fragmented, altered or destroyed, they lose their ability to provide ecosystem services - water purification, soil regeneration, watershed protection, temperature regulation, nutrient and waste recycling and atmospheric maintenance. All these changes threaten global human security. Drug Trafficking
The trade in narcotic drugs is one of the most corrosive threats to human society. During the past 20 years, the narcotics industry has progressed from a small cottage enterprise to a highly organized multinational business that employs hundreds of thousands of people and generates billions of dollars in profits (box 5). The retail value of drugs, as estimated in a recent study, now exceeds the international trade in oil - and is second only to the arms trade. The main producing countries are Afghanistan, Bolivia, Colombia, Iran, Pakistan, Peru and Thailand. And while consumption is rapidly spreading all over the world, the highest per capita use is reported to be in the United States and Canada. In the United States alone, consumer spending on narcotics is thought to exceed the combined GDPs of more than 80 developing countries. In recent times, the countries of Eastern Europe have also become prominent in drug trafficking - at least 25% of the heroin consumed in Western Europe now passes through Eastern Europe. Despite the magnitude of the threat, the international community has yet to produce a coherent response. But some individual countries have drawn up their own action plans. In Bolivia, coca producers have been paid to take coca out of production - $2,000 a hectare - and since 1989, they have annually converted more than 5,000 hectares of land to other crops.
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BOX 5 The international narcotics trade
Narcotic drugs have become one of the biggest items of international trade, with the total volume of drug trafficking estimated at around $500 billion a year. The OECD estimates that $85 billion in drug profits is laundered through financial markets each year, of which $32 billion passes through the United Kingdom. Since almost all the production and trade in these drugs is illegal, statistics are notoriously unreliable, The largest exporter of cocaine is probably Colombia, followed by Peru and Bolivia, while Myanmar seems to be the leading source of heroin. Pakistan is one of the major exporters of cannabis. One study of the nine major producing countries estimated their annual production of cocaine at around 300 tons, heroin at around 250 tons and cannabis at well over 25,000 tons. Drug addiction causes immense human distress. And the illegal production and distribution of drugs have spawned worldwide waves of crime and violence. International efforts to stamp out this noxious trade began more than 80 years ago, when opium was brought under international jurisdiction. Since then, there have been numerous conventions and conferences on drug abuse and illicit trafficking. In 1990, the General Assembly of the United Nations declared the 1990s the UN Decade against Drug Abuse. But thus far, efforts to eliminate the drug menace have prompted rather more righteous indignation than effective action - mainly because the costs of significantly reducing production or consumption are just too high. Successfully eradicating crops like opium or coca demands offering farmers equally valuable alternative crops. But given the high prices for drugs, this is almost impossible. In Bolivia, the coca-cocaine industry is thought to be worth as much as 20% of GNP. Most efforts at stifling drug production have brought limited benefits. Eradicating crops in one place tends to shift production elsewhere. When Mexico suppressed marijuana production, it sprang up in Colombia. When Thailand managed to reduce opium crops, producers moved to Myanmar and the Lao People's Democratic Republic. Reducing consumption is equally difficult. Many wealthy and educated people use small amounts of drugs much as they might use alcohol and tobacco - and are prepared to risk the consequences. But many of the heaviest drug users are poor and desperate - seeking some kind of an anaesthesia for the hopelessness of their lives. For them, drugs may be dangerous, but they have little left to lose. This underclass is not limited to the industrial countries. The United States is the largest single market for drugs, but developing countries, particularly (Continued)
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(Continued ) those that are drug producers, also have serious addiction problems. Pakistan, for example, is thought to have more than one million heroin users, and Thailand has around 500,000 addicts. One radical alternative is decriminalization. This would reduce the violence and crime associated with drugs and allow for production and consumption in less squalid and dangerous circumstances. The risk, however, is that it might increase overall consumption. In the end, probably the only solution will be to remove the kind of social distress that feeds drug addiction and to promote human development, which can strengthen families and communities and offer young people more productive outlets for their time and energies.
Trade in narcotic drugs is one of the most corrosive threats t o human society
But such lone efforts are not an effective, durable answer. As long as the demand persists, so will the supply. The real solution has to lie in addressing the causes of drug addiction - and in eradicating the poverty that tempts farmers into drug production.
International Terrorism Violence can travel from one country to another through conventional warfare - and through terrorism. Between 1975 and 1992, there were an average of 500 international terrorist attacks a year. Bombings are the most common type of incident (60%), followed by armed attacks, and in individual years there have also been large numbers of arson attacks or aircraft hijackings. The peak in recent decades was in 1987, with 672 incidents. In 1992, the number dropped to 362, the lowest since 1975. Between 1968 and 1992, the number of annual casualties was never less than 2,000, and 1985 was the worst year, with 3,016 casualties - 816 people killed and 2,200 wounded. Most of the victims have been the general public though in 1980-83 the majority were diplomats, and in the past two years most attacks have been made against businesses. While the number of their victims may not look high, the fear that these attacks spread among the world's population at large is immense. The focus of terrorist activity tends to move around the world. Until the early 1970s, most incidents were in Latin America. Then the focus switched to Europe. In the mid-1980s, most of the incidents were in the Middle East. And now, terrorist incidents take place all over the world. Terrorism, with no particular nationality, is a global phenomenon.
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Needed Policy Action This discouraging profile of human insecurity demands new policy responses, both nationally and internationally. Over the past five decades, humankind gradually built up an edifice of global security - an edifice of nuclear deterrents, power balances, strategic alliances, regional security pacts and international policing through the superpowers and the United Nations. Much of this global security framework now needs change. In its place or, at least, by its side - must be raised a new, more encompassing structure to ensure the security of all people the world over. Some global concerns require national actions - others, a coordinated international response. Early Warning I n d i c a t o r s
Experience shows that where there are multiple problems of personal, economic, political or environmental security, there is a risk of national breakdown (box 6). One question that preoccupies the international community is whether it is possible to get early warning signals of the risk of national breakdown. Such signals could help in agreeing on timely preventive action and avoiding conflict and war, rather than waiting until it is too late, as in Bosnia and Somalia. One might want to see which countries currently face similar multiple threats. Some indicators discussed earlier in this chapter can be useful for this purpose: deteriorating food consumption, for example, high unemployment and declining wages, human rights violations, incidents of ethnic violence, widening regional disparities and an overemphasis on military spending. Identifying potential crisis countries is not an indictment - it is an essential part of preventive diplomacy and an active peace policy. A clear set of indicators, and an early warning system based on them, could help countries avoid reaching the crisis point. Consider Afghanistan, Angola, Haiti, Iraq, Mozambique, Myanmar, Sudan and Zaire. As analyzed in annex 1, these countries are already in various stages of crisis. Determined national and international actions - including both preventive and curative development - are needed to support processes of social integration. There are several countries where current national and international efforts need to be reinforced to promote human security. The list of such countries extends to all world regions, and it ranges from countries in the midst of ongoing crises - such as Burundi, Georgia, Liberia, Rwanda and Tajikistan to other countries experiencing either severe internal tensions - such as Algeria or large regional disparities - such as Egypt, Mexico and Nigeria. Preventive action can also avoid larger costs for the world community at a later stage. Today's UN operations in Somalia, for example, cost more than
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BOX 6 Selected indicators of human security
Precise quantification of human security is impossible, but some useful indicators can provide an early warning of whether a country is facing problems of human insecurity and heading towards social disintegration and possible national breakdown. The following indicators are particularly revealing;
Food insecurity - measured by daily calorie supply as a percentage of basic human needs, the index of food production per capita and the trend of the food import dependency ratio. Job and income insecurity - measured by high and prolonged unemployment rates, a sudden drop in real national income or in real wages, extremely high rates of inflation and wide income disparities between the rich and the poor. Human rights violations - measured by political imprisonment, torture, disappearance, press censorship and other human rights violations. Ethnic or religious conflicts - measured by the percentage of population involved in such conflicts and by the number of casualties. Inequity - measured mainly by the difference between the HDI values of different population groups. Military spending - measured by the ratio of military spending to combined expenditure on education and health. This is only. a partial set of indicators. But even though it captures only a few dimensions, if several of the indicators point in thesame direction, the country may be heading for trouble. These indicators would sound an alarm if applied to such countries as Afghanistan, Angola, Haiti, Mozambique, Myanmar, Sudan and Zaire, countries included in the various tables of this chapter and the case studies. They might also sound an alarm if used to measure human security in some of the successor states of the former Soviet Union, notably those in Central Asia. Ideally, there should also be a set of indicators to identify global threats to human security. And combining national and global indicators would highlight the coincidence of national and global insecurities - as with high unemployment and heavy international migration. -
$2 billion in 1993 alone. A similar investment in the socio-economic development of Somalia ten years ago might have averted the current crisis. Soldiers in blue berets are no substitute for socio-economic reform. Nor can shortterm humanitarian assistance replace long-term development support.
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Policies for Social Integration Although the international community can help prevent future crises, the primary responsibility lies with the countries themselves. And often it lies with the people themselves. In Somalia today, where there is no central government, people and their local communities are doing more than government authorities may ever have done. But several countries also offer encouraging examples of what deliberate public policies of social integration can achieve. Malaysia, Mauritius and Zimbabwe, for example, are countries whose governments have taken courageous national actions to overcome potentially dangerous national schisms (annex 2). The policies pursued by these countries reconfirm many of the policy lessons set forth and explored in boxes 7 and 8. First is the importance of allowing everyone, of whatever race or ethnic group, the opportunity to develop his or her own capacities -particularly through effective health and education services. Second is the need to ensure that economic growth is broadly based - so that everyone has equal access to economic opportunities. Third is the importance of carefully crafted affirmative action programmes designed so that all sections of society gain - but that the weaker groups gain proportionally more. And the most important lesson conveyed by the country case studies on Malaysia and Mauritius is that where human security and social integration are ensured, economic growth and human development can progress too. Many countries have unfortunately chosen a different path - and allowed inequalities to rise to a disturbing extent. The data presented on Egypt, Mexico, Nigeria and South Africa show the dangers that this can bring. The World Summit for Social Development offers a fresh opportunity for the international community to shift its emphasis from the first pillar of territorial security in the past 50 years to the second pillar of human security in the next 50 years. In light of the analysis here, the Summit might wish to consider the following: Endorsing the concept of human security as the key challenge for the 21st century. Calling on people to make their full contribution to global human security and to bind together in solidarity. Requesting national governments in rich and poor countries to adopt policy measures for human security. They should ensure that all people have the basic capabilities and opportunities, especially in access to assets and to productive and remunerative work. They should also ensure that people enjoy basic human rights and have political choices. Recommending that all countries fully cooperate in this endeavour regionally and globally. To this end, a new framework of international cooperation for development should be devised, taking into account the indivisibility of global human security - that no one is secure as long as someone is insecure anywhere.
BOX 7
lob-sharing
Lavovare meno, lavovare tutti - work less and everybody works - a slogan that recently appeared in Italian workplaces. Indeed, throughout the industrial world, the idea of job-sharing is gathering momentum. The basic principle is simple. Rather than a five-day work week for some workers, with others remaining unemployed, the work week should be reduced to, say, four days with a corresponding pay cut, so that more people can share the available work. The German auto-maker BMW in 1990 introduced a four-day, 36-hour week at one of its plants, with an agreement for more flexible working. The productivity gains more than offset the cost of taking on more workers, so there was no need for a wage cut. A more recent deal at another German car-maker, Volkswagen, involves a four-day week along with a 10% pay cut. This has not created new jobs, but it saved 31,000 jobs that would otherwise have been eliminated. In France, a subsidiary of the computer company Hewlett-Packard has introduced a more flexible four-day week for workers. This has enabled the plant to be run seven days a week, round the clock, rather than five days on day shifts. Production has tripled, employment has risen 20%, and earnings have remained unchanged. In Japan, the large steel companies have been closing two days a month and offering workers 80-90% of their pay. Exactly how many jobs could be saved if countries were to adopt such schemes is difficult to say. But for France, it has been estimated that the universal adoption of a four-day 33-hour work week with an average 5% reduction in salary would create around two million new jobs - and save $28 billion in unemployment insurance. Job-sharing has its critics. Some companies may simply use reductions in work time as a way of cutting costs. And it may be harder to implement the plan in smaller companies that have less room for manoeuvre. Workers and trade unions are concerned, too, that this approach might in the long term concentrate work into a few high-paid, highproductivity jobs, leaving many more workers without jobs or incomes. Job-sharing could, nevertheless, be the germ of an idea that offers greater freedom for workers, along with an improved private life -while contributing much to reducing unemployment. Clearly, the question of work and employment needs a basic, fundamental review - nationally and globally. It will no doubt be a central issue for discussion at the 1995 World Summit for Social Development.
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BOX 8
Credit for all
Study after study on credit schemes for the poor confirm that the poor are creditworthy: The poor can save, even if only a little. The poor have profitable investment opportunities to choose from, and they invest their money wisely. The poor are very reliable borrowers and hence a very good risk. Repayment rates of 90% and more are not rare. The poor are able and willing to pay market interest rates, so that credit schemes for the poor stand a good chance of becoming viable, self-financing undertakings. The reason credit schemes for the poor work is that they significantly improve the incomes of the poor - typically by more than 20%, and at times even by more than 100%. Smaller loans are administratively more costly than larger ones. Yet the literature on credit schemes for the poor abounds with examples of how some organizations and programmes manage to keep their adrninistrative costs low. Among the successful measures: lending to peer groups, standardizing loan terms, collaborating with community-based and other developmental non-governmental organizations, eschewing traditional banking requirements and procedures and being located in the community and knowing local people and local investment opportunities. Many savings schemes for the poor today do mobilize the modest funds that poor communities have to spare. But rarely do they reinvest the money only in poor neighbourhoods. Just the opposite should be the case. Not only should the poor's savings be reinvested in poor neighbourhoods. The savings of the rich should also be encouraged to flow into these neighbourhoods. Governmental incentive policies can help in this. For example, governments could subsidize, for a defined interim period, the increased overhead costs that banks would incur in lending to the poor. If the aim were to serve about 120 million poor a year - every tenth poor person - this could cost some $10 billion. The poor know best their opportunities for productive and remunerative work. What they really need are modest amounts of start-up capital for their microenterprises. As one study put it, the old parable about feeding people for a day by giving them a fish, or feeding them for life by teaching them how to (Continued)
(Continued ) fish, needs a 20th-century postscript: what really matters is who owns the pond.
Small credit can make a difference Integrated Rural Development Programme, India Among beneficiaries, 64% increased their annual family income by 50% or more. Seventy percent of the assisted families belonged to the poorest group; however, their share in the benefits of IRDP was only 29%. In 71% of cases, the assets procured by the IRDP beneficiaries were found to be intact after two years. Metro Manila Livelihood Programme, Philippines Business for Social Progress, Philippines The average increase in income from an average loan of $94 was 41%. Women received 80% of loans. Borrowers had an average of 5.7 dependents. Revolving Loan Fund, Dominican Republic The average increase in income from 101 loans was 27% a year. The job creation rate among borrowers was more than 20 times that of the control group of non-borrowers. Revolving Loan Fund, Costa Rica The average increase in income from 450 small loans was more than 100% a year. A new job was created for every $1,000 lent.
Requesting that the United Nations step up its efforts in preventive diplomacy - and recognizing that the reasons for conflict and war today are often rooted in poverty, social injustice and environmental degradation and back these efforts up through preventive development initiatives. Recommending further that today's framework of global institutions be reviewed and redesigned to prepare those institutions fully for doing their part in tackling the urgent challenges of human security, all within the framework of a paradigm of longer-term sustainable human development. Chapter 4 will return to the question of a new framework for international development cooperation and new global institutions. But before that, chapter 3 addresses one critical source of insecurity that deserves more explicit treatment than it received here, one that arises from the world's previous preoccupation with deterrence and territorial security - excessive militarization and the international arms trade.
'Message in a Bottle'! Theory and Praxis in Critical Security Studies Richard Wyn Jones
Strategy is not a neutral pursuit and its only purpose is to strengthen one's own side in the contention of nations. Edward N.Luttwak'
I cast about, sometime here, sometime there, for traces of a reason that unites without effacing separation that binds without unnaming difference, that points out the common and the shared among strangers, without depriving the other of otherness. Jiirgen Habermas2
Introduction
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or Critical Theorists, the question of the relationship between theory and praxis is of primary concern. One of the central claims of Critical Theory in all its many guises is that, in Robert Cox's neat summary, ~ Theory's claim 'all theory is for someone and for some p ~ r p o s e ' .Critical to superiority over what Horkheimer described as 'traditional theory', and Cox himself describes as 'problem solving theory', is that Critical Theory is aware of the intimate connections between the supposedly abstract realm of the theory and the social world.4 Furthermore, Critical Theory is committed to developing an understanding of the world that promotes emancipatory socio-cultural, economic and political change. But whilst all Critical Theorists take seriously Marx's injunction in his Thesis on Feuerbach that 'Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it hardly need be underscored how difficult it is to translate this deceptively simple formulation into practice. However, one important implication of this orientation towards praxis is that, in the words of Nancy Fraser, 'it is in the crucible of political practice that critical theories meet the Source: Contemporary Security Policy, 16(3) ( 1 995): 299-3 19.
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ultimate test of vitality'.This article will attempt to explore the vexed issue of the relationship between Critical Theory and emancipatory political praxis in more depth, paying particular attention to the role of intellectuals in general, and academics in particular. Such a discussion has obvious relevance to the whole project of Critical International Theory. However, the following discussion of theory and praxis will concentrate on the relationship between Critical Theory-inspired attempts to focus on issues of security (that is 'Critical Security Studies') and the practices of global security. There are two reasons for this. First the relationship between the meta-theory of Critical International Theory and any form of global politics is so mediated as to make any attempt to trace the relationship in anything but the most general terms very difficult. Therefore, by concentrating on a sub-field of Critical International Theory such as Critical Security Studies (which will be delineated and discussed later), our analysis will be more concrete and thus more amenable to critical engagement. The second, and main, reason relates to the general perception that the provision of security is still the primary raison $&re of the sovereign state and, as such, it remains its most jealously guarded preserve. As a result, any attempt to create an alternative discourse in the field of security, and in particular, any attempt to problematize the role of the state as the provider of security, is likely to be strongly resisted. This was clearly seen in Britain in the early 1980s when the state made determined efforts to combat the peace movement and marginalize those who were perceived as its supporters in academia: witness, for example, the Thatcher-inspired demonization of Peace Studies.' Another problem for those attempting to develop Critical Security Studies arises from the fact that, as Simon Dalby points out, security as it is traditionally conceived 'is inherently politically conservative precisely because it emphasises permanence, control, and predi~tability'.~ The political sensitivity of the security issue, as well as the innately conservative nature of the prevailing security discourse, means that the issue of the relationship between Critical Theory and emancipatory praxis is raised in a particularly acute way for proponents of Critical Security Studies.
Critical Theory and Emancipatory Politics
Merely to pose the issue of the relationship between Critical Theory and emancipatory political praxis is immediately to raise a whole host of other extremely problematic, even perhaps insoluble questions and puzzles. For example, one is forced to address the question of the social role of intellectuals and intellectual activity, and the role that they play in supporting, and/or promoting social change. This in turn raises the thorny issue of the audience to which Critical Theorists are addressing their ideas. Ultimately, of course, these questions lead us inexorably to one of the central issues of all social theory, that of the relationship between agents and structures: the agent-structure debate.
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Whilst recent discussions of this debate in International Relations have tended to concentrate on the perhaps rarefied issues of levels of analysis and ontology,9 any discussion of the social role of Critical Theory also has to consider the problematic relationship between agents and structure at the microlevel of academic life. Quite simply, how are Critical Theorists to pursue what must inevitably be their twin goals of academic respectability and political relevance? How much autonomy does the agent, in this case the Critical Theorist, enjoy within the largely hostile structures of Western academe? Can one successfully bridge the chasm between, on the one hand, the ghettoizing nature of academic language itself as well as the professional constraints created by tenure requirements, research selectivity exercises and the like, and on the other, the desire to disseminate and make accessible one's Critical theorizing? Jiirgen Habermas frames these issues well when he wonders, rather ruefully one feels, 'how theories that have wrapped themselves up in their own problems, and have retreated so far into the scientific system under the pull of the social division of labor - how such autistic undertakings are at all able to place themselves in relation to praxis and to develop a force for the direction of action'.'() Given the centrality of emancipatory political praxis to the claims of Critical Theory it is hardly surprising that Habermas is not the first thinker from this tradition to reflect upon the nature of the relationship between theory and practice. Rather, successive generations of Critical Theorists have agonized and argued over the question of whether their ideas can indeed 'develop a force for the direction of action', and if so, how to set about attaining this objective?" However, whilst proponents of Critical Theory in general have discussed the theory-practice nexus at some length, it has certainly not been dealt with in any systematic way in the work of those scholars attempting to develop Critical International Theory. Robert Cox, for example, has described the task of Critical Theorists as providing 'a guide to strategic action for bringing about an alternative order'.I2 Whilst he has also gone on to identify possible agents for change and has outlined the nature and structure of some feasible 'alternative orders', he has not explicitly indicated whom he regards as the addressee of Critical Theory (i.e. who is being 'guided'), and thus, how the theory can hope to become a part of the political process.I3 Similarly Andrew Linklater has argued that 'a critical theory of international relations must regard the practical project of extending community beyond the nation-state as its most important problem'.14 However, he has little to say about the relationship between theory and praxis of this 'practical project'. Indeed his main point is to suggest that the role of Critical Theory 'is not to offer instructions on how to act but to reveal the existence of unrealised po~sibilities'.'~ But the question still remains: 'reveal' to whom? Is the audience enlightened statesmen and women; particular social classes; particular social movements; or particular (and presumably ~articularized)communities? Given Linklater's primary concern with emancipation, we might expect more guidance as to who is to be emancipated, whom he expects might do the
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emancipating, and how Critical Theory can impinge upon the emancipatory process. There is, similarly, little help in Mark Hoffman's important contribution. He argues that Critical International Theory: seeks not simply to reproduce society via description, but to understand society and change it. It is both descriptive and constructive in its theoretical intent: it is both an intellectual and a social act. It is not merely an expression of the concrete realities of the historical situation, but also a force for change within those conditions.I6 However, once again, we are given no suggestion as to how this 'force for change' is to be operationalized and what role Critical Theory will play in changing society.
T h e Relationship b e t w e e n International Relations Theory a n d Global Politics
From our discussion thus far, it seems clear that proponents of Critical International Theory have, so far at least, been remarkably unreflective as to the relationship between their theories and emancipatory political praxis. This lack of reflectiveness as to the nature of the relationship between International Theory and international political practice is shared with other approaches to international relations. Indeed the issue provides a striking omission from the vast literature on international relations." However, any cursory survey will find that very different attitudes to the theory-practice nexus have been adopted by the differing approaches to academic study of international relations. During the pioneer years of the 1920s and 1930s the fledgling discipline reflected its origins in Welsh liberal internationalism and peace activism by concerning itself explicitly with political practice.lx Indeed it is clear that David Davies, who endowed the first chair, hoped that the discipline would become the academic arm of the League of Nations, providing the world body with both intellectual support and practical advice: in effect, he regarded theory and praxis as inextricably linked, with the whole point of the former being to inform and improve the latter." However, after the Second World War, the ruling Realist orthodoxy in international relations adopted an explicitly positivist approach to the subject which has attempted to disentangle theory from praxis by claiming to distinguish sharply between questions of 'fact' and 'value'. Questions of 'fact' have been seen as those pertaining to the nature of political reality, and regarded as the only valid subject for scientific inquiry. Furthermore, the knowledge accrued through such study has been claimed to be value-neutral; that is containing no implicit world-view, or indeed, policy prescriptions. Policy prescription has always been relegated to the realm of 'value' and thus
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seen as falling beyond the purview of objective social theory. While theorists may well have their own views as to correct or desirable political practice, the dominant forms of Realism - currently, of course, Neorealism - have tended to disregard these views as mere reflections of subjective personal opinion which, whilst they may well be theoretically informed, are seen as extrinsic to the theoretical activity itself. Of course, this form of positivist international relations theory has almost always proven willing to supplicate itself before the great god of 'policy relevance' as well as pursue research agendas which reflect the preoccupation's of policy-makers.20However, the point is that this concern with policy - with political practice - was seen by post-war Realists as an 'optional extra'. Furthermore, if scholars did attempt to feed their ideas into the political process, then they almost exclusively limited themselves to addressing policy-makers and elite 'opinion formers'. The aim was - and indeed is - to gain the ear of the powerful rather than engage with those who are presently powerless. As is well known, this quest has met with varying degrees of success. In the United States, for example, there has been a close, symbiotic relationship between academia and government, whilst in Britain, it is usually argued that relations have remained more distant. However, at this point it is as well to remind ourselves that appearances, in the British case at least, may be deceptive. Commenting on the apparent lack of contact between academics and what he terms 'practitioners', A.J.R. Groom claims that: 'little communication between them was necessary since their paradigmatic unity [by which he means, allegiance to the Realist model of power politics] was so strong that they could go their separate ways safe in the knowledge that their work was ~ompatible'.~' From which we can infer that, in the main, British International Relations specialists - by effect, if not, perhaps, by intention - have provided academic justification for the main thrust of British foreign policy. Here Groom's argument resonates with Critical Theory critiques of Positivist international relations theory which charge that the distinction between 'fact' and 'value', between 'is' and 'ought', is spurious: 'all theory is for someone and for some purpose'. Far from providing an objective view of political reality, Realist international relations theory has helped produce, reproduce and legitimate global realpolitik. Thus whilst on its own terms the relationship between theory and practice is unproblematic for Positivist International Theory, Critical Theory argues that this 'peace of mind' is a product of, at best, a certain naivete' as to the social role of theory. In contrast, Critical Theory claims that all theory is intimately and inescapably linked with political praxis and dedicates itself to furthering emancipation. But whilst these criticisms of Realism are well-taken, as we have already seen, Critical International Theory has thus-far failed to provide a convincing account of its own relationship to this emancipatory praxis. Given the centrality of praxis to Critical Theory it is arguable that without some plausible account of the mechanisms by which it hopes to aid
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in the achievement of its emancipatory goals, Critical International Theory resents the next stage in the development of International Relations theory'.22 Indeed, without an understanding of the theory-practice nexus, Critical International Theory will remain an atrophied and autistic enterprise. Having delineated the nature of the problem, we will now try to outline possible approaches to the relationship between theory and praxis which are consistent with Critical International Theory. This will be attempted via an exposition of the differing, and indeed, contradictory approaches to this issue that have been adopted by the various Critical theorists who have inspired writers like Cox, Linklater and Hoffman. This will lead us to a discussion of a possible model for social change based on Gramsci's revolutionary strategy of a 'war of position'. It will be argued that Gramsci's discussion of a 'war of position' provides important insights into the role of theory in supporting progressive social change. However, Gramsci's faith in the revolutionary potential of the working class and the guiding role of the 'modern prince' - the Communist Party - will be rejected as not only anachronistic but fundamentally misplaced. Rather it will be argued that the experience of the (so-called) new social movements suggests possible agents for change and addressees for theory.
Critical Theory o n t h e Role of Intellectuals Critical International Theory has drawn on two main intellectual strands in its development, which can be summarized under the headings of the 'Italian School' and the 'Frankfurt School'.23Writers like Cox and Gill have drawn heavily on the work of Antonio Gramsci, one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, in their attempt to develop critical approaches to international political economy. Other theorists, most notably Linklater and Hoffman, have drawn on the Critical Theory of the so-called Frankfurt School. Although there are many broad similarities between Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, there are also important differences.14One difference relates to the role of intellectuals. Of all the thinkers in the Western Marxist tradition, it is perhaps Gramsci who devoted most thought to the role of the intellectuals, and indeed of ideas in general, in society. This is hardly surprising given his consistent stress on eschewing the abstract in order to concentrate on the concrete: on theorizing with a practical, and revolutionary, intent. In his Prison Notebooks he referred to his reading of Marxism as 'the philosophy of praxis'. It is usually claimed that this was done in order to confuse the prison censors. However, as Cox points out, if this is true, then the censors 'must have been particularly slow-witted'.lFA more plausible explanation is provided by the English translators of the Notebooks who suggest that: "'philosophy of praxis" is both a euphemism for Marxism and an autonomous term used by Gramsci to define
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what he saw to be the central characteristic of the philosophy of Marxism, the inescapable link it establishes between theory and practice, thought and action'.26 It is this light that Gramsci developed his theory of the intelle~tual.~' Gramsci's first move is to broaden the concept of intellectuals by arguing that 'All men are intellectuals ... but not all men have in society the function of intellect~als.'~~ He then argues that those with the social function of intellectuals fall into two groups. On the one hand he refers to 'traditional intellectuals'. This concept represents the way in which most intellectuals view their own role in society. Traditional intellectuals, according to their self-image, have a relatively autonomous social role which lifts them above the class cleavages of society to the Mannheimian realm of universal, 'free-floating' thinkers. For Gramsci, this independence is a chimera. Rather, he ultimately regards 'traditional intellectuals' as playing a vital, if subconscious role, in producing and reproducing the hegemony which provides an indispensable buttress to the prevailing patterns of domination within society. These 'traditional intellectuals' are contrasted with 'organic intellectuals'. 'Organic intellectuals' play a crucial, and far more self-conscious role in articulating and organizing the interests and aspirations of a particular social class. Each class has its own 'organic intellectuals' - although, as we have seen, the intellectuals of the ruling strata can often see themselves in a different, 'traditional' light. However, due to its social position (rather than some mental deficiency a la the conservative American Charles Murray), it is the working class that has least intellectual resources at its disposal. Gramsci therefore stresses the need for that class to develop its own 'organic intellectuals' and argues that they have a crucial role to play in advancing proletarian, and thus human, emancipation. Discussing their role Gramsci argues: 'The mode of being of the new intellectuals can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organiser, "permanent persuades" and not just a simple orator.'29 Their central political task is to aid in the construction of a counterhegemony and thus undermine the prevailing patterns of discourse and interaction which make up the currently dominant hegemony. This task is accomplished through educational activity, for, as Gramsci argues, 'every relationship of "hegemony" is necessarily a pedagogic relationship'." Discussing the relationship of the 'philosophy of praxis' to the political practice, Gramsci claims that: The philosophy of praxis does not tend to leave the 'simple' in their primitive philosophy of common sense, but rather to lead them to a higher conception of life. If it affirms the need for contact between intellectuals and 'simple' it is not in order to restrict scientific activity and preserve unity at the low level of the masses, but precisely in order to construct an intellectual-moral bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small intellectual groups."
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This attempt to construct an alternative 'intellectual-moral bloc' will take place, according to Gramsci, under the auspices of the Communist Party, which he described as the 'modern prince'. Just as Machiavelli hoped to see a Prince unite Italy, rid the country of foreign 'barbarians', and create a virtu-ous state; Gramsci believed that the 'modern prince' could lead the working class on its journey towards its revolutionary destiny of an emancipated society.31 Gramsci's relative optimism about the possibility of progressive theorists playing a constructive role in emancipatory political practice is predicated on his belief in the existence of a 'universal class' with revolutionary potential. As is well known, it was a gradual loss of faith in this axiom that led the founders of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory to their extremely pessimistic prognosis about the possibilities of progressive social change.33 This in turn led them to a very different model of the role of the critical intellectual within society. For Theodor Adorno, in particular, the all-pervasiveness of structures of domination within society meant that the only role the critical intellectual could adopt was that of the metaphorical exile.z4Given his belief that 'Nothing complicitous with this world can have any truth'," the only legitimate stance for the intellectual was one of unrelenting negativity. Any attempt by the intellectual to suggest alternatives, or to engage in the pseudo-politics of the 'totally administered society', would immediately be reified and form yet another layer in the already over-determined structures of domination. The only honourable role for the intellectual was to remain an outsider, to observe, as it were, from the sidelines, and to refuse as far as humanly possible the blandishments of comforting conformity. In a contemporary world caught up in a dialectic between stultifying mundanity and inhuman cruelty, the duty of the intellectual was to provide a note of dissonance and dissent. For Theodor Adorno there was no hope or expectation of influencing political practice: in effect, in the modern world he believed that the relationship between theory and practice, or at least between Critical Theory and progressive praxis, had been severed. Rather, he regarded his philosophy in terms of a 'message in a bottle' to be cast on the waters of history with perhaps the hope, certainly not expectation, that it might be picked up at some point in the future by persons unknown. Even should this happen, Adorno did not expect his theory to influence praxis; rather his hope was, in the words of Edward Said, 'not that he will have an effect on the world, but that someday, somewhere, someone will read what he wrote exactly as he wrote it'.jh Thus we find in the Critical Theory tradition two very different models of the role of intellectuals. Gramsci, as we have seen, posits the possibility of politically engaged intellectuals playing a vital role in the struggle for emancipation. However Adorno regards this model as a chimera. Indeed even attempting to pursue this strategy will be worse than futile: it will probably be counter-productive. Adorno realizes that his understanding of society led him to an extraordinarily uncomfortable, even fatalistic position. Engagement is not an option, however he is aware that his peferred
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strategy of disengagement 'leads to destruction' and 'a loveless disregard for things which necessarily turns against people too'." The ultimate dilemma for Adorno is that, 'Wrong life cannot be lived rightly'.38 In a world characterized by warfare, extreme yet seemingly casual cruelty, obscene disparities of wealth, prejudice, famine and all kinds of unnecessary suffering, Adorno's position is an understandable one. In the world of Rwanda, Angola, Bosnia, Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Bhopal, deforestation, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, and Marlboro, one can easily succumb to despair or nihilistic rage. One can certainly understand why Adorno himself adopted a position of unrelenting negativity given his own life experience as a left-wing German Jew in the 1920s and 1930s: significantly, his masterpiece Minima Moralia is subtitled Reflections from damaged life. However, I regard his pessimism as ultimately unwarranted. In Raymond Williams' phrase, there are 'resources of hope' within all societies.39Progressive change is not only possible but it actually occurs. Even in the particularly intractable realm of security, change is occurring even if only very slowly. For example, interstate war is gradually being delegitimated.40 Of course, this change is occurring due to many factors. Many cite the growing destructiveness of modern weapons and others may cite changes in the global mode of production: internationalization of production and so on. Whilst there may be an element of truth in both suggestions, change is not simply determined by material factors; rather it is a product of the (dialectical) interaction between material reality and ideas. One clear, security-related example of the role of critical thinking and thinkers in aiding and abetting progressive social change can be seen in the experience of the peace movement of the 1980s. Then, the ideas of dissident defence intellectuals encouraged, as well as drew strength from peace activism. Together they had an effect not only on short-term policy but, far more importantly in the long run, on the dominant discourses of strategy and security. Witness, for example, the fate of 'common security'. In the early 1980s, mainstream defence intellectuals dismissed the concept as idealistic; it certainly had no place in their allegedly hard-headed and 'realist' view of the world. Since then the concept has gone on something of a rollercoaster ride. Initially taken up by Gorbachev, the concept has gradually become part of the adopted 'common sense' [sic] of Western security d i s c ~ u r s e .Although ~' a concept like 'common security', like 'collective security' before it, does tend to become debased in the usage of governments and military services, enough of the residual meaning survives to shift the parameters of the discourse in a potentially progressive direction. Its adoption by official circles most certainly provides critics with a useful tool for critiquing aspects of security p o k y . This example is highly instructive. First, it indicates that critical intellectuals can be politically engaged and lay a role, however small, in making the world a better and certainly safer place. Second, it points to potential future addressees for Critical Theory in general, and Critical Security Studies in particular. Third, it also hints at the role of ideas in the evolution of society.
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Critical Security Studies and the Theory-Practice Nexus Whilst proponents of Critical International Theory will certainly wish to reject aspects of Gramsci's theory of 'organic intellectuals', in particular his exclusive concentration on class and his stress on the guiding role of the party, the desire for engagement and relevance remains at the heart of their project. The example of the peace movement suggests that Critical Theorists can still play the role of 'organic intellectuals' and that this organic relationship need not confine itself to a single class but, rather, can involve alignment with different coalitions of social movements which campaign on an issue, or series of issues, pertinent to the struggle for emancipation. Said captures this broader orientation when he suggests that critical intellectuals 'are always tied to and ought to remain an organic part of an ongoing experience in society: of the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the p o w e r l e s ~ ' .In ~~ the specific case of Critical Security Studies this means placing the experience of those men and women and communities for whom the present world order is a cause of insecurity rather than security, at the centre of our agenda. Such an approach, placing common humanity rather than raison d'e'tat at the centre of our normative concerns, has given rise to an attempt by some Critical Theorists to rethink fundamentally the shibboleths of Strategic S t ~ d i e s . ~ ~ Critical Security Studies has begun to challenge the hegemonic security discourse and the prevailing practices of global (in)security by asking a series of fundamental questions. Despite their apparent simplicity, these questions are deeply subversive of the ruling orthodoxy on questions of strategy and security. They are, first, what is security? Second, who is being secured by the prevailing order, and who or what are they being secured against? Third, and directly connected to this, we have the fundamental issue of whose security we should be concerning ourselves, and by which agents and through which strategies should this security be attained?44 In recent years, calls to broaden our conception of 'what is security' have become almost c o m m ~ n p l a c eTraditionally, .~~ security was conceived in very narrow, almost exclusively military terms. The threat or reality of interstate war was regarded as the primary cause of insecurity and, certainly, the only one worthy of serious consideration by strategists. However, since the mid1980s, perhaps even since the oil-shocks of the 1970s, this limited, traditional conception of security has become increasingly untenable. Other issues, for example economic, environmental, human rights, have forced their way on to the security agenda.46 However, whilst erstwhile strategists may appear to have acknowledged these wider concerns by adopting the moniker 'security studies' to replace 'strategic studies', this re-baptism seems to have been a typically 1990s piece of repackaging. The name may have changed, but the substance remains the same.47 But if security studies is content to pay lip-service to broader conceptions of security even while carrying on with 'business as usual' by concentrating on the new 'threats' that have (so conveniently) arisen to take the place of the vanquished communist menace, Critical Security
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Studies insists on taking the broader security agenda seriously. This does not entail any attempt to deny or ignore the continuing salience or importance of military security. It does mean, however, that proponents of Critical Security Studies, by placing 'the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless' at the centre of its agenda, recognize that for most of the world's population, apparently 'marginal' or 'esoteric' concerns - such as environmental security, food security and economic security - are far more real and immediate threats to security than interstate war. Indeed in very many cases, and not only in the disadvantaged South, the arms purchased and the powers accrued by governments under the guise of protecting their citizens from interstate war are far more potent threats to the security of those citizens than any putative foreign enemy. Eschewing the statism of mainstream security discourse, proponents of Critical Security Studies recognize that, globally, the sovereign state is one of the main causes of insecurity: it is part of the problem rather than the solution. This leads us to consideration of who is being secured by the currently hegemonic discourses and practices of security. The 'referent' of the orthodox discourse on security was, and remains, the state.48 That is, the sovereign state, conceived of as a distinct territory and a particular form of government, is regarded as the entity which is to be 'secured'. The perceived threat to its security was, of course, other states who were regarded, in Hobbesian fashion, as eyeing their neighbours rapaciously, ready to pounce at any sign of weakness. The normative justification for privileging the state in this way is that states are, allegedly, the agents which provide their citizens with security at the domestic level. Thus by ensuring a stable international order, the ultimate result is prosperity for the state's citizens.49Critical Security Studies fundamentally challenges this dominant account. As we have seen, it argues, on empirical grounds, that any normative claims for privileging the state are untenable. The overwhelming majority of states create insecurity rather than foster an atmosphere within which stability can be attained, and prosperity created. Those relatively few states which can afford their citizens circumstances enabling them to enjoy a deal of security do so because of their position within a global economy which reinforces grotesque disparities of wealth, environmental degradation, and class and gender inequalities. Their citizens' security is brought at the price of insecurity for the vast majority of the inhabitants of those chronically insecure states. Furthermore, rather than viewing the orthodox discourses and practices of security as aimed at securing states from potential challenges from other states, a Critical approach suggests that those discourses and practices are primarily aimed at those within the states who deign to challenge the status quo. In the states which form the core of the global economy, these practices and discourses are also aimed at those in the periphery foolish enough to attempt to refuse their allotted role in the global division of labour. Rejecting the traditional fetishization of the state, Critical Security Studies proposes other referents for security discourse. Security should focus variously, or indeed interchangeably, on the individual, on society, on civil society,
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on community, on the continuing integrity of ethnic or cultural groups, on global society.50Furthermore, not only should the referent be different but so should the aim of the security. According to Ken Booth, the discourses and practices of security should be concerned with the struggle for human eman~ i ~ a t i o nHere . ~ ' the project stands full-square with the tradition of Critical Theory. If 'all theory is for someone and for some purpose', then Critical Security Studies is for those who are, in Said's words, '... the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless', and its purpose is their emancipation. This orientation is in stark contrast to traditional theories of security, which, Critical Theorists would argue, are for soldiers and statesmen [sic] and whose purpose is to maintain and strengthen these groups7already dominant position. In line with this rejection of the sovereign state as the referent for security and as the agent through which security is ultimately provided, Critical Security Studies stresses other agents which can effect emancipatory change. Eschewing the traditional stress on diplomacy and the military, it aligns itself with critical or 'new' social movements such as those engaged in peace activism, those engaged in the struggle for human rights and the survival of minority cultures, and so on.j2 It is through these movements that Critical Security Studies can hope to become 'a force for the direction of action'. At this point we return to the role of theory in effecting social change which, once again, leads us back to Gramsci. In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci advances a sophisticated analysis of how dominant discourses play a vital role in upholding particular political and economic orders:jZin Gramsci's terminology, paricular historic blocs. Gramsci adopted Machiavelli's view of power as a centaur, that is half man, half beast: a mixture of consent and c ~ e r c i o n . ' ~ Consent is produced and reproduced by a ruling hegemony which holds sway through civil society and through which ruling or dominant ideas become widely dispersed." In particular, Gramsci describes how ideology becomes sedimented in society and takes on the status of 'common sense', that is it becomes unconsciously accepted and even regarded as beyond question. Obviously, for Gramsci, there is nothing immutable about the values which permeate society; they can and do change. In the social realm, ideas and institutions which were once seen as natural and beyond question (i.e. commonsensical) in the west, such as feudalism and slavery, are now seen as anachronistic, unjust and unacceptable. In Marx's phrase, 'all that is solid melts into the air'. Gramsci's intention is to harness this potential for change and ensure that it moves in the direction of emancipation. To d o this he suggests a strategy of a 'war of p o s i t i ~ n ' In . ~ ~states with developed civil societies, such as those of the developed countries, Gramsci argued that any successful attempt at progressive social change requires a slow, incremental, even molecular, struggle to break down the prevailing hegemony and construct an alternative counterhegemony to take its place. Organic intellectuals have a crucial role to play in this process by helping to undermine the 'naturalness', the 'common sense', internalized nature of the status quo. This in turn helps to create political space within which alternative conceptions of politics can be developed and
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new historic blocs created. I would contend that Gramsci's strategy of a 'war of position' suggests an appropriate model for proponents of Critical Security Studies to adopt in relating their theorizing to praxis.
The Tasks of Critical Security Studies When the project of Critical Security Studies is conceived in terms of a 'war of position' then we can see that the main task of those intellectuals who align themselves with the enterprise is to attempt to undermine the prevailing hegemonic security discourse. This may be accomplished by utilizing specialist information and expertise to engage in an immanent critique of the prevailing security regimes: that is, comparing the justifications of those regimes with actual outcomes. As we have already seen, when this is attempted in relation to the security field then the prevailing structures and regimes are found to fail grievously on their own terms. Additionally, such an approach also involves challenging the pronouncements of those intellectuals, be they traditional or organic, whose views serve to legitimate, and hence reproduce, the prevailing world order.57 This entails teasing out the often unconscious, and certainly unexamined, assumptions which underlie their arguments,j8 whilst also drawing attention to the normative viewpoints which are smuggled into mainstream thinking about security behind its positivist falade. In this sense, if no other, proponents of Critical Security Studies approximate to Foucault's notion of 'specific intellectuals' who use their expert knowledge to challenge the prevailing 'regime of truth'.59 However, Critical Theorists might wish to reformulate this sentiment along more 'modernist' lines of 'speaking truth to power'.60 Of course, mainstream strategists like Colin S. Gray can, and indeed do aspire to a similar role.61 The difference between Gray and proponents of Critical Security Studies is that, while the former seeks to influence policymakers in particular directions without questioning the basis or effects of their power, the latter aim at a thorough-going critique of all that mainstream strategic studies has taken for granted. Furthermore, Critical Theorists base their critique on the presupposition, elegantly stated by Adorno, that 'The need to lend suffering a voice is the precondition of all truth'.62 The purpose of Critical Theorists' attempts to undermine the prevailing orthodoxy is ultimately educational, bearing in mind that, as we have seen, 'every relationship of "hegemony" is necessarily a pedagogic relation~hip'.~~ Thus by criticizing the hegemonic discourse and advancing alternative conceptions of security based on different understandings of human potentialities, one is simultaneously playing a part in eroding the legitimacy of the ruling historic bloc, and contributing to the development of a counter-hegemonic position. There are, of course, a number of avenues open to the Critical Security specialist in pursuing this educational strategy. As teachers we can try to foster and encourage scepticism towards 'accepted wisdom' and open minds towards other possibilities. We can also take advantage of the seemingly unquenchable thirst of the media for instant punditry to forward alternative
lones Theory and Praxis in Critical Security Studies 479 views onto a broader stage. These points are summarized by Nancy Fraser who argues that, 'As teachers, we try to foster an emergent pedagogical counterculture ... as critical public intellectuals we try to inject our perspectives into whatever cultural or political public spheres we have access to.'64 Perhaps significantly, we can find support for this type of emancipatory strategy even in the work of the ultra-pessimistic Adorno who argues that: 'In the history of civilization there have been not a few instances when delusions were healed not by focused propaganda, but, in the final analysis, because scholars, with their unobtrusive work habits, studied what lay at the root of the d e l ~ s i o n . " ~ However, this 'unobtrusive yet insistent work' does not of itself create the social change to which Adorno alludes. We must be wary of the conceptual as well as the practical dangers of collapsing praxis into theory. Rather, through their educational activities, proponents of Critical Theory must aim to provide support for those social movements who promote emanc i p a t o r ~social change. By providing a critique of the prevailing order and legitimating alternative views, Critical Theorists can perform a valuable role in opening political space for social movements. That said, it should be stressed that the role of theorists is not to 'direct' and 'instruct' those movements with which they are aligned. Rather, the relationship is reciprocal. Indeed, the experience of the European, North American and Antipodean peace movements of the 1980s shows how influential social movements can become when their efforts are harnessed to the intellectual and educational activity of critical thinkers.66 In Europe, North America and the Antipodes, the peace movements and the dissident defence intellectuals drew strength and succour from each other's efforts. If, however, such critical social movements do not exist then this creates obvious difficulties for the Critical Theorist. But even under these circumstances the theorist need not abandon all hope of an eventual orientation towards praxis. Once again, the peace movement of the 1980s provides the evidence. Then, the movement benefited from the intellectual work undertaken in the lean years (in peace movement terms) of the 1970s. Some of the theories and concepts developed then, such as 'common security' and 'nonoffensive defence', were even taken up by the Kremlin and played a crucial role in defusing the Second Cold War. In this case, those ideas developed in the 1970s can be seen in terms of a 'message in a bottle', but this time, contra Adorno, they were picked up and used to support a programme of emancipatory political praxis.67 Obviously one would be naive to understate the difficulties facing those attempting to develop alternative, critical approaches within academia. Some of these problems have been alluded to already and involve the structural constraints of academic life itself. Said argues that many problems are caused by what he describes as the growing 'professionalization' of academic life.6x Academics are now so constrained by the requirements of job security and marketability as to make most extremely risk-averse. It pays (in all senses) to stick with the crowd and avoid the 'exposed limb' by following the prevalent
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disciplinary preoccupations, publish in certain prescribed journals and so on. The result is, of course, the profoundly autistic and deeply tedious navelgazing so prevalent in the study of international relations and the seeming inability of security specialists to deal with the changes brought about by the end of the Cold War. These difficulties are arguably compounded for critical voices attempting to intervene in, and challenge the prevailing security discourse. As we have already argued, sensitivity here is heightened by the states' very real interest in marginalizing dissent. 'Gate-keeping' appears particularly strong - journals avoiding articles which are 'too heavily theoretical', i.e. those which attempt to challenge the prevailing 'common sense' assumptions. In addition the material lures which reward conformity are also very substantial. Defence consultancy on the part of academics involves large amounts of money, and governments and commercial concerns alike often wish to add a layer of academic respectability and legitimacy to their enterprises.
Conclusion Nevertheless, whilst not wishing to underestimate the practical difficulties engendered by these obstacles, Critical Security Studies is an idea whose time has come. The contemporary world 'order' exhibits all the morbid symptoms of the interregnum period foreseen by Gramsci 'when the old is dying and the new cannot be born'.69 The 'old' is certainly withering: not only have we seen the Warsaw Pact disintegrate following the collapse of the Soviet empire, and the NATO alliance paralysed by the Bosnian tragedy, but, far more fundamentally, the Westphalian system itself is losing its legiti m a ~ ~ .The ~ O main reason for this 'legitimation crisis'" is that those political structures whose justification rests on their ability to provide security namely sovereign states and the states system which they form - are patently failing in their task. When 'security' is considered in its widest, comprehensive sense, incorporating ecological concerns, economic questions, human rights both individual and communal - as well as military issues, those proffering traditional solutions to contemporary problems are engaging in a Canute-like attempt to ignore the rising tide of change. The nature of the 'new' is still, however, undecided. Barbarism is a strong possibility. Barbarism will become more of a probability if the mindset exhibited in the quotation by Edward N. Luttwak at the start of this article continues to be widely adopted by those engaged in the study of security. However, there is also the possibility of the development of a peaceful and rational world order: what Adorno foresaw as a 'landscape of benignly interacting particularities'." Such a development will undoubtedly be aided if those intellectuals concerned with issues of security attempt to emulate Habermas in seeking out 'traces of reason that unites without effacing separation, that binds without unnaming difference, that points out the common and the shared among
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and just world order. Whilst Critical Security Studies can assist those political practices which aim at providing real security through emancipation, it cannot be a substitute for them. Unfortunately Critical Theorists cannot hope to emulate those Australian aboriginal people so memorably portrayed by Bruce Chatwin in his book The Songlines, who, during their 'dreamtime', sang their world into e~istence.'~ However, Critical Security Studies can become an important voice informing and legitimating those political practices that could turn the dream of 'a world of benignly interacting particularities' into a reality.
Notes I would like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance and support of Ken Booth, Susie Carruthers, Steve Smith and Nicholas Wheeler. Earlier drafts of this paper were presented to the Cambrian Discussion Group in Aberystwyth, and to the Critical Security Studies panels at the 1994 annual conference of the British International Studies Association and the 1995 annual conference of the International Studies Association. A number of those who attended these sessions also contributed useful comments and suggestions for which I am most grateful. 1. Edward N. Luttwak, Strategy and History: Collected Essays, Volume Two (New Brunswick and Oxford: Transaction Books, 1985), p. xiii. 2. Jiirgen Habermas interviewed by Michael Haller, The Past as Future, trans. Max Pensky (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), pp. 119-20. 3. Robert W. Cox, 'Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory', Mzllennium: Journal of international Studies, Vol. 10 (Summer 1981), p. 128 [emphasis in original]. 4. Max Horkheimer, 'Traditional or Critical Theory', trans. Matthew J. O'Connell, in M a x Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York: Continuum, 1992), pp. 188-243, and Robert Cox, op. cit., pp. 128-9. 5. Karl Marx, 'Thesis o n Feuerbach', in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 5 (1845-47) (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), p. 5. 6. Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender m Contemporary Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 1989), p. 2. 7. The persecution of the Department of Peace Studies a t Bradford was dicussed in a lecture by the former head of department, James O'Connoll. See The Guardian, 16 October 1993, and The Times, 2 5 October 1993. 8. Simon Dalby, 'Security, Modernity, Ecology: The Dilemmas of Post-Cold War Security Discourse', Alternatives, Vol. 1 7 (Winter 1992), p. 98. 9. See, for example, the exchanges between Alexander Wendt and Martin Hollis and Steve Smith In Review of International Studies, Vol. 1 7 (October 1991), pp. 383-410 and 18 (April 1992), pp. 181-8, and also Walter Carlsneas, The Agency-Structure Problem in Foreign Policy Analysis', International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 36 (April 1992), pp. 245-70, and Martin Hollis and Steve Smith, 'Two stories about structure and agency', Review of lnternatronal Studies, Vol. 20 (July 1994), pp. 241-51. 10. Jurgen Habermas, p. 116. 11. For an extended discussion of the relationship between theory and praxis in the work of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, see Helmut Dubiel, Theory and Politics: Studies rn the Development of Critical Theory, trans. Benjamin Gregg (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1985). 12. Cox, p. 130. 13. See ibid., passim, and Robert W. Cox, 'Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay in Method', Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Vol. 12 (Summer 1983), pp. 162-75.
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14. Andrew Linklater, Beyond Realism and Marxism: Critical Theory and International Relations (London:Macmillan, 1990),p. 171. 15. Ibid.., D. 172. 16. Mark Hoffman,'Critical Theory and the Inter-paradigm Debate', Millennrum: Journal of International Studies, Vo1.16 (Summer 1987), p. 233 [emphasis in original]. 17. The literature on the relationship between the theory and practice o f international relations is sparse. The main studies, in chronological order, are: R. Tanter and R.H. Ullman (eds.), Theory and Policy in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); Coral Bell (ed.). Academic Studies and International Politics (Canberra: Department o f International Relations, ANU, 1982);A.J.R. Groom, 'Practitioners and Academics: Towards a Happier Relationship?', in Michael Banks (ed.),Conflict in World Society: A new perspective on international relatrons (New York: St Martin's Press, 1984); Christopher Hill and Pamela Beshoff (eds.), Two Worlds of International Relatrons: Academics, Practrtioners and the Trade in Ideas (London:Routledge, 1994). 18. Goronwy J . Jones, Wales and the Quest for Peace (Cardiff:University o f Wales Press, 1969) gives a flavour o f the activism o f which the foundation o f the world's first chair in International Politics at the University o f Wales, Aberystwyth in 1919, formed only a part. 19. See Brian Porter, 'David Davies: a hunter after peace', Review o f International Studies, Vol. 15 (January1989), pp. 27-36. 20. See Stanley Hoffman, 'An American Social Science: International Relations', Daedalus, Vol. 106, No. 3 (1977),pp. 41-60, and Ekkehart Krippendorf, 'The Dominance o f American Approaches in International Relations', Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 16 (Summer 1987), pp. 207-14. See also Christopher Hill, 'Academic International Relations: The siren song o f policy relevance', in C . Hill and P. Beshoff (eds.),in note 17, pp. 16-19. 21. A.J.R. Groom, p. 194. 22. M . Hoffman,p. 244. 23. See Stephen Gill, 'Epistemology, ontology, and the "Italian school"', in Stephen Gill (ed.), Gramsci, historical materialrsm and international relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993),pp. 2 1 4 8 . 24. For a discussion o f some broad themes see Renate Holub, Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism (London:Routledge, 1992), pp. 3-30. 25. Cox, 'Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations ...', p. 175ff. 26. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and GeoffreyNowell Smith (London:Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), p. xiii. 27. As is almost invariably the case with Gramsci, his theory o f intellectuals and the role o f intellectual activity is presented in a series o f fragmentary notes scattered throughout the Notebooks. Obviously, Gramsci can hardly be blamed for this given the conditions he was forced to endure during their writing. It does however mean that his theory has to be reconstructed from these fragments and it is not without its contradictions. The main fragments in the Notebooks dealing with intellectuals are 'The Intellectuals', pp. 5-23, and 'The Study o f Philosophy', pp. 323-77. 28. Ibid., p. 9. 29. Ibid., p. 10. 30. Ibid., p. 350. 31. Ibid., pp. 332-3. 32. See Ibid., pp. 125-205. 33. On the Frankfurt School see, for example, Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge:Polity, 1994) and Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research, 1923-1 950 (Boston:Little, Brown and Company, 1973). 34. Adorno's bleak assessment o f the pathologies o f contemporary society can be found in Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London:Verso, 1989).Adorno's conception o f the role o f the intellectual are discussed concisely in Edward W . Said, Representations of the Intellectual (London:Vintage, 1994),pp. 40-4. 35. Cited in Frederic Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic (London:Verso, 1992), pp. 177-8.
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36. Edward Said, p. 42. 37. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from damaged lzfe, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1991), p. 39. 38. Ibid. 39. Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism (London: Verso, 1989). 40. See, for example, John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Malor War (New York: Basic Books, 1990). 41. The term 'commom security' originated in the German security debate but was popularized by the Palme Commission report, see Independent Commission o n Disarmament and Security Issues, Common Security. A programme for drsarmament (London: Pan, 1982). O n the adoption of 'common security', as well the concept of 'non-offensive defence', by Gorbachev and some of hls advisors see, for example, Thomas Risse-Kappen, 'Ideas d o not float freely: transnational coalitions, domestic structures, and the end of the cold war', International Organisation, Vol. 48 (Spring 1994), pp. 185-214. 42. Said, p. 84. 43. For a classic summary of the fundamental assumptions of Strategic Studies see John Garnett, 'Strategic Studies and Its Assumptions', In John Baylis, Ken Booth, John Garnett and Phil Williams (eds.), Contemporary Strategy Vol. I: Theories and Concepts (2nd edition) (London: Croom Helm, 1987), pp. 3-29. 44. A more detailed series of such questions can be found in Ken Booth, 'A Security Regime in Southern Africa: Theoretical Consideration', South Afrzcan Perspectives, No. 30 (February 1994) (Centre for Southern African Studies, University of the Western Cape), pp. 26-7. An attempt to answer those questions in the Southern African context is made in Ken Booth and Peter Vale, 'Critical Security Studies and Regional Insecurity: The Case of Southern Africa', in Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams (eds.), Critical Security Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming). 45. For a more extended commentary on contemporary discussions regarding the concept o f security see Richard Wyn Jones, "'Travel without maps": Thinking about Security after the Cold War', in Jane Davis (ed.),Security Issues in the Post-Cold War World (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, forthcoming), pp. 232-55. 46. Perhaps the most influential statement of the case for expanding the concept of security is Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies zn the Post-Cold War Era, Second Edition (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991 ). 47. For an extended discussion see Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams, 'From Strategy to Security: Foundations of Critical Security Studies', in Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams (eds.), Critical Security Studies. 48. This is also ultimately the case for Barry Buzan despite his broader conception of security. For a discussion see Richard Wyn Jones, "'Travel without Maps"'. 49. O n this point see Christian Reus-Smit, 'Realist and Resistance Utopias: Community, Secur~ty and Political Action in the New Europe', Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1 (1992), pp. 14-18. 50. Ken Booth argues that the individual should be a central referent in any attempt to rethink security. See Ken Booth, 'Strategy and emancipation', Review of International Studies, Vol. 1 7 (October 1991), pp. 319-21. Martin Shaw argues that society should be the primary referent of security in 'There is no such t h q as society: beyond individualism and statism in international security studies', Revfew of lnternutional Studies, Vol. 1 9 (April 1993), pp. 159-75. Ole Wzver discusses the concept of societal security in a book which stresses the importance of ethno-national identity as the focus of the European security agenda in the postCold War era. See Ole Wzver, Barry Buzan, Morten Kelstrup and Pierre Lemailtre, ldentlty, Migration and the New Security Agenda in Europe (London: Pinter, 1993), esp. pp. 1 7 4 0 . Linklater's stress on the importance of community would seem to suggest another candidate for a successor to the state as the primary referent of the theory and practice of security. See Andrew Linklater, 'Community', in Alex Danchev (ed.), The Meaning of the Twentieth Century (London: Tauris Academic Press, 1995), and 'The Achievements of Critical Theory', in Ken Booth, Steve Smith and Marysia Zalewski (eds.), International Theory: Positivism and
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beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 1995). Ken Booth and Peter Vale suggest that it is appropriate for any Critical Security Studies approach to focus on different referents, at different times, in different locations. See Booth and Vale, op. cit. For a critical discussion of these various positions see Richard Wyn Jones, op. cit. 51. See Ken Booth, 'Security and Emancipation', passim. 52. For a discussion of social movements from a Critical Theory perspective see Larry J. Ray. Rethinking Critical Theory: Emancipation in the age of Global Social Movements (London: Sage, 1993), esp. pp. 57-77. 53. See, in part~cular,Gramsci, op. cit., pp. 323-77. 54. Cox, 'Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations ...', op. cit., p. 164. 55. For an attempt to apply some of Gramsci's concepts to the study of foreign policy see Enrico Augelli and Craig Murphy, America's Quest fur Supremacy and the Thzrd World (London: Pinter, 1988). 56. Gramsci, op. cit., pp. 229-39. 57. It could be argued that many strategists, for example Colin S. Gray and Edward N. Luttwak, are organic intellectuals in that they explicitly orientate their ideas towards the interests of a specific strata within society, in their case the ruling elites. See, for example, Gray, Strategic Studies and Public Policy: The American Experience (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), pp. 185-95. 58. For an attempt to interrogate the assumptions about the role of technology which underlie much nuclear strategy see Richard Wyn Jones, "The Nuclear Revolution', in Alex Danchev (ed.), op, cit. 59. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 19721977, edited by Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), p. 132. 60. This approach has recently been eloquently rearticulated by Edward W. Said, op. cit., pp. 63-75. 61. Gray, op. cit., p. 193. 62. Cited in Frederic Jameson, op. cit., p. 66. 63. See note 31. 64. Nancy Fraser, op. cit., p. 11. 65. Theodor W. Adorno, cited in Douglas Kellner, The Persian Gulf TV War (Boulder, CO and Oxford: Westview, 1992), p. vii. 66. See, for example, the discussion of the 'Nuclear Freeze Movement in the United States' in David Cortright, Peace Works: The Citizen's Role in Ending the Cold War (Boulder, CO and Oxford: Westview, 1993), pp. 5-13. Michael C. Pugh cites the importance of the visits of such figures as Helen Caldicott and Richard Falk in changing the political climate in New Zealand and aiding the growth of the country's anti-nuclear movement. Michael C. Pugh, The ANZUS crisis, nuclear visiting and deterrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 108. 67. See note 41. 68. Said, op. cit., pp. 49-62. 69. This is cited by one of the pioneers of Critical Security Studies, Ken Booth, following its use by the South African novelist Nadine Gordimer. See Ken Booth, 'Introduction The interregnum: world politics in transition', in Ken Booth (ed.), New Thinking about Strategy and International Security (London: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 1. The original source of this quotation is Gramsci, op. cit., p. 276. 70. See, for example, James R. Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 71. Jiirgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (London: Heinemann, 1976). 72. Martin Jay, Adorno (London: Fontana, 1984), p. 20. 73. See note 2. 74. Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987).