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On Security, by Ronnie D. Lipschutz
Ronnie D. Lipschutz
This is a book about security. Unlike many books on the subject, however, this one is not about potential enemies or redefined strategies in an uncertain world or the future of NATO or U.S. defense postures in the 1990s or emerging threats by refugees or ethnic conflict or environmental degradation. Rather, this is a book that addresses the concept of security by asking a number of questions about it.
First, what is it that is being secured? More than half a decade after the opening of the Berlin Wall, more than four years after the end of the Cold War and, as this book was being written, with crises in Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, and imminently, perhaps, in Cuba, the answer to this question is by no means clear (if it ever really was). Is the international system being secured? The nation-state? The "West?" Societies? Cultures? No one seems sure.
Second, what constitutes the condition of security? Protection against enemies? External or internal ones? Protection against neighbors? Suppression of individuals of a particular color or religion? Insulation against economic pressures and competitors? Environmental sustainability? All of these have been proposed; none is easy to accomplish.
And, third, how do ideas about security develop, enter the realm of public policy debate and discourse and, eventually, become institutionalized in hardware, organizations, roles, and practices? Do they arise, as the conventional wisdom might suggest, from objective threats and conditions inherent to an anarchic world? Are they generated within, a consequence of notions about multiple selves and feared others? Or, are they socially constructed, the worst-case result of a dialectic between what is observed and what is imagined? This process is the least-understood of all, yet it is this third question that may be the most important one to be asked. 1
In a much-cited and often-criticized article published several years ago, John J. Mearsheimer told us why we would "soon miss the Cold War." 2 Presciently, he seems to have been correct, although not for the reasons he enumerated in the article. It is not the relative stability of the bipolar world that we seem to miss as much as having an enemy whose capacities and intentions were, if not confirmable, at least comprehensible. The missiles were, after all, clearly pointed in our direction. Today, in a time when minor warlords and rogue police chiefs seem able to frustrate the best the guardians of U.S. security have to offer, the relative clarity of the Cold War, and the "right" to weigh in on the "right" side, do begin to have their attractions. This book represents, therefore, an attempt to come to grips with some of the ontological and other dilemmas, such as those mentioned above, associated with security that have emerged in the aftermath of the Cold War. In a series of three meetings, held between August 1991 and September 1992, the contributors to this book met as a group to consider whether the concepts and practices of security, as they had emerged in academia and policymaking, could still be analyzed and applied as they had been between 1947 and 1991.
Epistemologically speaking, the members of the group ranged from a point somewhere in the neighborhood of contemporary realism (in its English variant) 3 to the postmodernist and constructivist end of international relations theory. 4 For the most part, no one was moved by the arguments presented during the meetings to change her or his initial positions. But members of the group did force each other to think through more carefully their understanding of "security," as will be evident from the essays found here; certainly, none of the authors or their essays take for granted as givens the assumptions that today inform most public debates over security postures and "redefining security." 5
None of the contributors assumed automatically that the shape of threats to come have the character often attributed to them by specialists on terrorism, fundamentalism, ethnicity, or Third World politics. And none of these essays should be seen as the product of solitary inductive or deductive efforts; they are the result of an ongoing process of discussion and mutual criticism among the authors. Thus, while some of the essays hew more closely than others to more "traditional" positions on security, all of the authors find themselves looking more closely at the conventional claims about security and the epistemologies underlying them. It seems safe to say that all of the participants have come away from this project with a much broader understanding of what we might call, for convenience, the "security problematique" of the late twentieth century, and we hope that you, the reader, will fare similarly.
This book is not, however, merely about seven authors in search of a topic; it also participates in the ongoing debate between neorealists, neoliberals, neoinstitutionalists, constructivists and postmodernists about the nature of political reality and its expression in international relations. Security practices are only one of a number of behaviors, ordinarily associated with states rather than other actors in the global system (except for those non-state actors in violent conflict with states). Whereas much of the intellectual debate takes the state more-or-less for granted as the subject of practice and the object of study, it seems to us that there are ontologically-prior questions that must be addressed first. Precisely what is the state? What is the nature of relations between states? And how do we account for behavior within the system of states? The contributors to this volume take a number of different tacks in trying to answer these questions and a set of shared hypotheses (suppositions might be a better word) does inform this introductory chapter and the ones that follow.
First, the structural features of international politics that constrained and directed security policies and practices between 1947 and 1991 have, for the most part vanished. Most of the institutions associated with the Cold War remain in place, to be sure, but they are now casting about for new ontologies of their own, not to mention policies, that can fit the hardware and procedures left behind. Thus, we have the members of NATO trying on a variety of new missions without being quite sure of their purpose. Is NATO to be a security "blanket," on standby against the eventuality of a newly aggressive and imperial Russia? Is it to become a security "regime," encompassing all of Europe, as well as North America and the ex-Soviet republics? Or can it best function as a security "maker," intervening in ethnic and other conflicts that appear to threaten European stability? The absence of what seemed to be clear and definable threats thus leads to the "hammer-nail" conundrum. 6
Second, the disappearance of the constraints associated with nuclear bipolarity have allowed other "historical structures" (to use Robert Cox's term 7 ) to resurface, thereby introducing high levels of uncertainty into parts of the world that, for decades, seemed quite fixed and stable. Thus, speculate some analysts, the conflicts in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Rwanda, et. al. would not have taken place had the Cold War not come to an end. But the working assumption of most such analyses is that these re-emergent structures are, somehow, premodern or primordial, and that they have emerged only in places not fully-socialized into twentieth- century modernity. It is, of course, also possible that they are fully reflective of such modernity, and that it is not only within the European Union, but in these places, as well, that we behold the future of world politics. If so, we may be starting to see the emergence of a "security dilemma" at the social, rather than interstate, level.
Third, the anchors that previously allowed self-reflective collectivities to identify themselves and others, friend and foe, and threats to the self and other, have come loose, making it ever more difficult to specify the self that is to be made secure. Moreover, a proliferation of new identities--as states, as cultures, as ethnies --are making it increasingly difficult to find new anchorages on which to base stable political relations, inasmuch as the fundamental units of international political interaction seem to be changing. This is not an argument that the state is obsolete, or that interdependence confounds sovereignty but, rather, that the boundaries that, for forty-odd years, disciplined states and polities, can no longer contain them. To rephrase Yeats's oft-cited line, it is not that the center cannot hold; rather, it is that the margins cannot be contained. And new margins are emerging everywhere, even in the center.
To be sure, amidst all of this change, war remains the defining limit of security, especially for those in the midst of one (although, as Kenneth Boulding once pointed out, at any given time, most of the world is not at war). 8 But even where wars are taking place, they are increasingly difficult to describe and define. Among and against whom are they fought? In Somalia, clans war against each other and the forces of the UN system. In the Caucusus, interstate wars, wars of secession and civil wars go on simultaneously, sometimes in the same place. In Afghanistan, multiple versions of Islam fight each other. In Rwanda and Burundi, social systems tear themselves apart through mutual genocide. Even the Gulf War, arraying international coalition against renegade state, now is seen to have been somewhat inconclusive. In the midst of such conceptual and practical confusion, against whom or what is anyone to be made secure?
Defining, "Redefining," or (Re)constructing Security?
The authors of a book entitled Defending America's Security tell us that:
In the most basic sense, what the American people have to deal with when they adjust to the world outside U.S. frontiers is 170 [sic] assorted nation-states, each in control of a certain amount of the earth's territory. These 170 nations, being sovereign, are able to reach decisions on the use of armed forces under their government's control. They can decide to attack other nations. 9
Despite the political and economic changes of the past decade, such sentiments still represent the basic premise of national security policy: There exist threats to the territory of one state posed by the activities of other states. In this neorealist world, with each state in command of a discrete territory and population, and with each capable of monopolizing the legitimate use of force within that territory, the essential security function remains, as the authors of the book quoted above and others suggest, self-defense and, if necessary, war. Other threats may exist and be of concern to governments but, according to the traditional line of thinking, they are not security threats.
Why, then, should we bother to revise security? In an essay published in Foreign Affairs in 1989, entitled "Redefining Security," Jessica Tuchman Mathews argued that the concept of security needed to be rethought. As she put it, "Global developments now suggest the need for . . . national security to include resource, environmental and demographic issues." 10 According to this view, the global expenditure of $1 trillion per year could no longer be justified when there were so many other problems that promised to undermine "national security" much more effectively than the Soviet Union. What Mathews and others left unexamined was the meaning of her use of the term "security." The concept seemed, at the time, self-evident: To secure the state against those objective threats that could undermine its stability and threaten its survival. In choosing as her audience the readers of Foreign Affairs , Mathews, who had been a member of the National Security Council during the Carter Administration, took aim at White House policymakers, the Cabinet agencies, the Pentagon, the U.S. Congress, and relevant interest groups and think tanks, all of whom played some role in assessing threats to the United States and formulating what they thought were appropriate responses. In retrospect, however, some basic problems with this formulation are evident.
Mathews, and others arguing along similar lines (myself included), understood security policy to be largely the result of the rational assessment, by knowledgeable analysts, of a universe of potential threats, of varying risk, to which a country might be subjected. These clearly defined and bounded threats could be countered by appropriate means, including the development and deployment of new weapons systems, shifts in military doctrine, and payoffs to allies. It seemed, in this scheme of things, a relatively easy proposition to shift the allocation of resources from one threat to another, so long as the new threat was conceptualized in terms of the state and couched in the language of "national security." The end of the Cold War seemed only to sharpen this argument; indeed, it was not long before President Bush, recognizing the ontological dilemmas inherent in the collapse of the Soviet Union, assigned to the CIA the task of searching for and analyzing new security problems. As one newspaper editorialized at the time, "Indeed, the major threats to security today are probably found in such disparate sources as the world's overcrowded classrooms, understaffed health facilities, shrinking oil fields, diverted rivers and holes in the ozone layer." 11
On closer inspection, however, it is evident that most of the threats posited by those who have argued for a redefinition of security have primarily to do with human health and welfare, social problems, internal sources of instability, and the costs imposed upon societies by the disruption of customary ways of doing things. While such threats certainly could affect the safety, cohesion, and stability of individuals, families, communities, societies, and even countries, it was and is by no means clear that these constitute "security threats" or problems of "national security" in the Cold War or neorealist sense of the term. (To be entirely fair, many things were done in the name of national security during the Cold War that were also more about social welfare and political stability than military threats, but this still did not make them objective threats or risks.) Nor, for that matter, was it obvious how the reconfiguration of security policy might make it possible to address such issues with the tools in hand. This dilemma was illuminated with great clarity in Somalia, where it has been not so much the survival of the Somali people(s) that has seemed to be at stake as the very concept and existence of the Somali state . That entity's dissolution into perpetually warring clans was closer to the Hobbesian state of Nature than even the so-called anarchic international system seemed able to tolerate at the time.
What the Somali case tells us is that defining security, or even redefining it, becomes problematic when the referent object of security itself is ill-defined or changing. What, under the circumstances described above, might security mean? Security is a word with multiple and contested meanings; as Barry Buzan points out in People, States & Fear , security is an "essentially contested concept." 12 Analysts and policymakers contest the definition of the term because at its core, claims Buzan, there are moral, ideological, and normative elements that render empirical data irrelevant and prevent reasonable people from agreeing with one another on a fixed definition. 13 Buzan brings to the fore the difficulty of specifying the referent of security and, in a search for a more precise meaning, argues that the state consists of three components: the idea of the state (nationalism); the physical base of the state (population, resources, technology); and the institutional expression of the state (administrative and political systems). 14 Having defined the state in this way, it becomes possible to imagine threats to each of these three components. But what happens when all three elements disappear?
In a cruel irony, the result is that the zero-sum geopolitics of realism and the Cold War come to be reproduced at the micro-level of household and society, with the complete and deliberate elimination of family and social group as official policy of whatever monopolizers of violence remain in existence. Often, there is no monopoly, as when control of violence has devolved to the level of household and social group as well. In Somalia, consequently, the security of one clan could be purchased only at the cost of another--with the United States and the UN playing the role of one clan among many--even if this meant wiping out entire extended families so as to deny the right of a clan to exist as a collective entity. What, under these conditions, could it mean to be Somali in the national sense, a concept that was, in any event, largely imagined into being by the British and Italian colonial authorities? If there were no Somalis in the nation-state sense, then there was no Somalia, and the national security of the Somali state would become, ipso facto , an empty set. Although Somalia is of marginal interest to most, an empty set where Somalia was once to be found does constitute something of a threat to the international system. The same sort of analysis could be applied to any of dozens of other so-called nation-states around the world that have collapsed, or are threatening to collapse, into a similar condition.
We could argue, of course, that these are simply zones of confusion and chaos, with little practical significance for states such as the United States or Germany or Israel. Countries and peoples with a strong sense of identity and social cohesion know who they are and who they are not (this being the essence of successful nationalism). Consequently, they presume to know what threatens them and they can take appropriate steps in response. The problem in the zones of chaos, one could argue, is that such identities crumbled, to be replaced by others, because their states became too weak to sustain them. But one might also argue that it was the crumbling of identities that weakened the states and made moot all notions of national security.
If the latter hypothesis is even remotely plausible, then "strong" states are in trouble, too. For more than forty years, the United States knew it was not the Soviet Union, the FRG knew it was not the GDR, Israel knew it was not Palestine. Who or what, now, are these places? What defines them when the defining enemy is gone? The answers are not so simple as one might think, as events have, and are likely to, illustrate. Nonetheless, these are among the dilemmas that confront us in defining, or redefining, security.
Creating Discourses of Security
Conceptualizations of security--from which follow policy and practice--are to be found in discourses of security . These are neither strictly objective assessments nor analytical constructs of threat, but rather the products of historical structures and processes, of struggles for power within the state, of conflicts between the societal groupings that inhabit states and the interests that besiege them. Hence, there are not only struggles over security among nations , but also struggles over security among notions . Winning the right to define security provides not just access to resources but also the authority to articulate new definitions and discourses of security, as well. As Karen Litfin points out, "As determinants of what can and cannot be thought, discourses delimit the range of policy options, thereby functioning as precursors to policy outcomes. . . . The supreme power is the power to delineate the boundaries of thought--an attribute not so much of specific agents as it is of discursive practices." 15 These discourses of security, however clearly articulated, nonetheless remain fraught with contradictions, as the chapters in this volume make clear.
How do such discourses begin? In his investigation of the historical origins of the concept, James Der Derian (Chapter 2: "The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche and Baudrillard") points out that, in the past, security has been invoked not only to connote protection from threats, along the lines of the conventional definition, but also to describe hubristic overconfidence as well as a bond or pledge provided in a financial transaction. To secure oneself is, therefore, a sort of trap, for one can never leave a secure place without incurring risks. (Elsewhere, Barry Buzan has pointed out that "There is a cruel irony in [one] meaning of secure which is `unable to escape.' " 16 ) Security, moreover, is meaningless without an "other" to help specify the conditions of insecurity. Der Derian, citing Nietzsche, points out that this "other" is made manifest through differences that create terror and collective resentment of difference--the state of fear--rather than a preferable coming to terms with the positive potentials of difference.
As these differences become less than convincing, however, their power to create fear and terror diminish, and so it becomes necessary to create ever more menacing threats to reestablish difference. For this purpose, Der Derian argues, reality is no longer sufficient; only the creation of a "hyperreal" world of computer and media-imaged and -imagined threats will do. Or, to cite Baudrillard, as Der Derian does: "It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real." It is the imagined, unnamed party, with the clandestinely assembled and crude atomic device, and not the thousands of reliable, high-yield warheads mounted on missiles poised to launch at a moment's notice, that creates fear, terror, and calls for greater surveillance and enforcement.
Yet, according to Der Derian, describing how the solitary computer wargaming of the Iraqi and American militaries were literally joined together in battle on the deserts of the Persian Gulf littoral, hyperreal threats do sometimes have an odd way of becoming material. The Gulf War created a "real" simulation, broadcast to the watching billions, that was later found out to have been a less-than-accurate representation. This does not mean that those who died suffered simulated deaths. Simulated threats may be imagined, but their ultimate consequences are all too real.
What this process suggests is that concepts of security arise, to a great degree, out of discursive practices within states and, only secondarily, among states. 17 Ole Wæver (Chapter 3: "Securitization and Desecuritization") illuminates this aspect of security, framing it not as an objective or material condition, but as a "speech act," enunciated by elites in order to securitize issues or "fields," thereby helping to reproduce the hierarchical conditions that characterize security practices. Thus, according to Wæver, much of the agenda of "redefining security" is a process of bringing into the field of security those things that, perhaps, should remain outside (but this struggle to redefine a concept can also be seen as an effort by heretofore-excluded elites to enter the security discourse). He warns, therefore, that redefining security in a conventional sense, either to encompass new sources of threat or specify new referent objects, risks applying the traditional logic of military behavior to nonmilitary problems. This process can also expand the jurisdiction of already-expansive states as well. As Wæver puts it, "By naming a certain development a security problem, the `state' [claims] . . . a special right [to intervene]." In intervening, the tools applied by the state would look very much like those used during the wars the state might launch if it chose to do so. This contradiction was apparent in the initial landing of U.S. Marines in Somalia in December, 1992. Demonstrably, there was a question of matching force to force in this case, but the ostensible goal of humanitarian assistance took on the appearance of a military invasion (with the added hyperreality of resistance offered only by the mass(ed) media waiting on shore). This does not mean that Wæver thinks that "security as a speech act" should not be applied to anything at all; only that it is necessary to consider with care what is implied or involved if we are indiscriminate in doing so.
Security is, to put Wæver's argument in other words, a socially constructed concept: It has a specific meaning only within a specific social context. 18 It emerges and changes as a result of discourses and discursive actions intended to reproduce historical structures and subjects within states and among them. 19 To be sure, policymakers define security on the basis of a set of assumptions regarding vital interests, plausible enemies, and possible scenarios, all of which grow, to a not-insignificant extent, out of the specific historical and social context of a particular country and some understanding of what is "out there." 20 But, while these interests, enemies, and scenarios have a material existence and, presumably, a real import for state security, they cannot be regarded simply as having some sort of "objective" reality independent of these constructions. 21 That security is socially constructed does not mean that there are not to be found real, material conditions that help to create particular interpretations of threats, or that such conditions are irrelevant to either the creation or undermining of the assumptions underlying security policy. Enemies, in part, "create" each other, via the projections of their worst fears onto the other; in this respect, their relationship is intersubjective. To the extent that they act on these projections, threats to each other acquire a material character. In other words, nuclear-tipped ICBMs are not mere figments of our imagination, but their targeting is a function of what we imagine the possessors of other missiles might do to us with theirs . 22
Security Dilemmas and Dilemmas of Security
The "Long Peace," as John Lewis Gaddis has stylized it, 23 continues to puzzle historians as well as students of war, peace, and arms control. How did it come about? Why was it so long? Can it continue? What can we do to maintain it? For many, the obvious answer to the puzzle is "nuclear deterrence" and "bipolarity." These were the two conditions that maintained a stable, armed peace between the two Great Powers. 24 The security dilemma led to a precarious stability, whose resilience was always open to question. Could nuclear weapons be used without provoking full-scale war? No one knew. Might a small, nuclear-armed country trigger war between the superpowers? No one knew that, either. Could war begin by accident? No one wanted to find out.
The result was the curious way in which nuclear weapons were used: While not being used in a literal sense, but only as threat, they were still being used. 25 The notion of "use" thus began to acquire a peculiar meaning. The threat to "use" nuclear weapons, as Thomas Schelling and others pointed out, was credible only to the degree that those in a position of power could convince not only others, but also themselves, that the weapons would be used under appropriate circumstances. 26 But such circumstances could never be too well-defined, for to do so might someday require an unwanted launch for the sake of credibility. The "use" of nuclear weapons consequently took the form of speech, backed up by doctrine and deployment, but hedged all about with hypotheticals and conditionals. For example, in testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1982, then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger argued that,
To deter successfully, we must be able--and must be seen to be able --to retaliate against any potential aggressor in such a manner that the costs we will exact will substantially exceed any gains he might hope to achieve through aggression. We, for our part, are under no illusions about the consequences of a nuclear war: we believe there would be no winners in such a war. But this recognition on our part is not sufficient to ensure effective deterrence or to prevent the outbreak of war: it is essential that the Soviet leadership understands this as well. 27
The inherent contradiction in such reasoning became all the more evident as the very same people who tried to define the hypothetical conditions of nuclear use also made every effort, first, to ensure "crisis stability," so that the weapons would not be used mistakenly or by accident during a periods of high international tension and, second, to convince the public at large, as Ronald Reagan tried to do, that any use of nuclear weapons would be catastrophic. Such arguments, as Steven Kull discovered, did little to convince policymakers themselves that they said what they meant or meant what they said. 28
A particularly vivid and nonfictional example of this process--only one among many--can be found in the deployment in Europe of the intermediate-range "Euromissiles"--Pershing-II and Ground Launched Cruise Missiles--in response to the Soviet SS-20s discovered in Eastern Europe during the mid-1970s. The SS-20s, it was claimed by then-West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, threatened the West by taking advantage of a "gap" in a largely hypothetical ladder of crisis escalation. This gap could be used by the Soviets, according to the argument made by Schmidt and others, to threaten Western Europe with certain destruction, were they to be launched. But the intent of emplacement was to intimidate, inasmuch as to launch would have unpredictable, not to mention undesirable, consequences. Facing such coercion, Western Europe could find itself "Finlandized" or forced to submit to demands made by the Soviet Union. 29
Such demands, of course, had not been made, and never were; they were demands that the West imagined might be forthcoming at some future date, and they were demands that, if met, would have changed Western Europe into something with a different identity and loyalty: a Greater Finland, perhaps? Nonetheless, imagined threats generated material responses. To remedy the hole in the whole of nuclear deterrence, policymakers determined that NATO must deploy its own equivalent missiles, thereby countering one set of imagined threats with another. Again, the Euromissiles were never intended to be launched ; they were put into Europe only to fill an imagined gap that had not existed prior to the deployment of the SS-20s. 30 To underline the imaginary quality of the threats invoked on both sides, in 1987, after some six years of off-again on-again negotiation, the gap disappeared, as if by sleight of hand. Both sides were now to be allowed to remain what they had been. 31 As is true with most magical thinking, the "gap" had never been real in any objective sense; it was created through discourses of deterrence and the projection of imagined intentions onto the "other." A whole world of the future was created out of dreams, casting its unreal shadow on the present. 32 Thus was mutual deterrence assured.
In the Euromissile episode, in other words, the state and its leaders sought to secure the citizenry against escape from the traps of security through new strategies of insecurity. This was accepted practice during the Cold War. It was a particularly common practice of the "nuclear state," which held its hostages in an eternal death grip as a means of credibly confronting the enemy, as Dan Deudney's essay (Chapter 4: "Political Fission: State Structure, Civil Society, and Nuclear Weapons in the United States") makes clear. But hostages are not always passive victims. As Deudney points out, they sometimes seek the means to escape from their maximum security situations; the "Stockholm Syndrome" does not necessarily hold where Mutually Assured Destruction is concerned. Indeed, it is the very self-disciplining security strategy of the state that may encourage resistance and "jailbreaks," as attempted by the pro-peace and anti-nuclear movements of the 1980s.
Deudney argues that it is very difficult for the state to maintain its legitimacy when its strategies of self-preservation promise to annihilate its own "secured" population in time of war as a means of preventing war. 33 Yet, it is only through such nuclear strategies that the state has any hope of maintaining its international autonomy and disciplining its citizens and borders. Ironically, perhaps, the contradiction is least problematic when the state least needs to establish its commitment to a strategy of nuclear deterrence, as is evident today. It was during the Reagan Administration, when the nuclear threat was thought most necessary to establishing state autonomy, that civil society was most resistant to the nuclear project and most concerned about creating alternative discourses of security. Only by silencing its saber-rattling--which threatened to undermine its autonomy--was the state able to dampen resistance to its nuclear policies.
The state's security strategy must, therefore, encompass not just body, but mind as well; the "delusions of deterrence" require continual self-deception. 34 Part of the effort to make threats to security "real" involved (and still does involve) the linking of the material interests of individual citizens to those of the state. Pearl-Alice Marsh (Chapter 5: "Grassroots Statecraft: Citizens Movements, National Security, and U.S. Foreign Policy") shows how attempts by the Reagan Administration to define security threats and capture the citizenry via this approach could, nonetheless, backfire. In southern Africa, the case discussed by Marsh, security policy was defined and pursued in such a way as to undermine U.S. national security policy in that part of the world. The Reagan Administration feared Communism winning the minds as well as the minerals of South Africa, and used this scenario to legitimize its ultimately unsuccessful policy of "constructive engagement."
Beginning in the 1970s (and drawing on the geopolitical theories of Admiral Thomas Mahan, Halford Mackinder, Nicholas Spykman, and Colin Gray), conservative analysts argued that Soviet activities in Africa were intended to "choke off" sources of critical strategic materials, a maneuver that would strike not just at U.S. security but also the material heart of American society. 35 As the President of the American Geological Institute put it during the 1980 Presidential campaign, "Without manganese, chromium, platinum and cobalt, there can be no automobiles, no airplanes, no jet engines, no satellites and no sophisticated weapons--not even home appliances ." 36 Was he correct? No one could say, since no one had tried to build such devices without low-cost minerals from southern Africa. 37 A more germane question is whether the Soviet threat to mineral supplies was even a plausible one, or the one to be most feared. 38
Groups based in U.S. civil society argued that South African apartheid was more likely to result in embargoes of strategic materials than Soviet intervention or subversion, for two reasons. First, the South African government was already in a strong position to control the flow of minerals as a means of manipulating public policy the United States; and, second, a favorable policy toward the South African government now (in the 1980s) could result in hostile relations when, in the future, apartheid was replaced by majority rule. In making such arguments, citizens groups constructed a counter-scenario that was, in the final analysis, more convincing to the U.S. Congress and the public than the threat of "ore wars." Ultimately, civil resistance was able to undermine the plausibility of the Reaganaut security discourse for the region. Whose threats were "real?" Whose were not? Perhaps both, perhaps, given the recent transfer of political power in South Africa, neither.
Transforming the State, Transforming the System
The struggle to define the parameters of a concept is only one part of the security problematique; of equal importance are very real questions about the referent object of security. What, in the final analysis, is being secured? If ozone holes are a threat, is the enemy us? If immigrants are a threat, do police become soldiers? If the economic competitiveness of our allies is a threat, is Corporate America to be protected against leveraged buyouts by foreign capital or against those who have been fired during self-protective downsizings? If one social group threatens the mores of another, are there front lines in the "culture wars?" Perhaps it is the unemployed college graduate who is most to be feared, since he or she has much time in which to plot the overthrow of the regime deemed responsible for that insecure status. 39 All of these possibilities raise questions about what is to be made secure through the security practices of the state. Paradoxically, perhaps, the particular phenomena alluded to above are all material consequences of a process of economic globalization that was first set in train by the Cold War security policies of the United States.
Material processes have consequences for security, it would seem and, in today's world, the effort to (re)define security results not only from a changing world but also from changes in the state itself. 40 These changes, having primarily to do with the global economic system, affect material conditions within states--safety, welfare, sovereignty--in ways that serve to undermine the traditional roles of governments, 41 making them less willing or able to protect their citizens from these forces or provide services that might mitigate their impacts. 42 These transformative forces also have effects on the capabilities of states, by creating contradictions between the accustomed practices of governments and the responses needed to buffer against those forces, as illustrated by the demise of the Soviet Union and the endless fiscal troubles suffered by the United States.
Consider, then, the consequences of the intersection of security policy and economics during and after the Cold War. In order to establish a "secure" global system, the United States advocated, and put into place, a global system of economic liberalism. It then underwrote, with dollars and other aid, the growth of this system. 43 One consequence of this project was the globalization of a particular mode of production and accumulation, which relied on the re-creation, throughout the world, of the domestic political and economic environment and preferences of the United States. That such a project cannot be accomplished under conditions of really-existing capitalism is not important; the idea was that economic and political liberalism would reproduce the American self around the world. 44 This would make the world safe and secure for the United States inasmuch as it would all be the self, so to speak.
The joker in this particular deck was that efforts to reproduce some version of American society abroad, in order to make the world more secure for Americans, came to threaten the cultures and societies of the countries being transformed, making their citizens less secure. The process thereby transformed them into the very enemies we feared so greatly. In Iran, for example, the Shah's efforts to create a Westernized society engendered so much domestic resistance that not only did it bring down his empire but also, for a time, seemed to pose a mortal threat to the American Empire based on Persian Gulf oil. Islamic "fundamentalism," now characterized by some as the enemy that will replace Communism, seems to be U.S. policymakers' worst nightmares made real, 45 although without the United States to interfere in the Middle East and elsewhere, the Islamic movements might have never acquired the domestic power they now have in those countries and regions that seem so essential to American "security."
The ways in which the framing of threats is influenced by a changing global economy is seen nowhere more clearly than in recent debates over competitiveness and "economic security." What does it mean to be competitive? Is a national industrial policy consistent with global economic liberalization? How is the security component of this issue socially constructed? Beverly Crawford (Chapter 6: "Hawks, Doves, but no Owls: The New Security Dilemma Under International Economic Interdependence") shows how strategic economic interdependence--a consequence of the growing liberalization of the global economic system, the increasing availability of advanced technologies through commercial markets, and the ever-increasing velocity of the product cycle--undermines the ability of states to control those technologies that, it is often argued, are critical to economic strength and military might. Not only can others acquire these technologies, they might also seek to restrict access to them. Both contingencies could be threatening. (Note, however, that by and large the only such restrictions that have been imposed in recent years have all come at the behest of the United States, which is most fearful of its supposed vulnerability in this respect.) What, then, is the solution to this "new security dilemma," as Crawford has stylized it?
According to Crawford, state decisionmakers can respond in three ways. First, they can try to restore state autonomy through self-reliance although, in doing so, they are likely to undermine state strength via reduced competitiveness. Second, they can try to restrict technology transfer to potential enemies, or the trading partners of potential enemies, although this begins to include pretty much everybody. It also threatens to limit the market shares of those corporations that produce the most innovative technologies. Finally, they can enter into co-production projects or encourage strategic alliances among firms. The former approach may slow down technological development; the latter places control in the hands of actors who are driven by market, and not military, forces. They are, therefore, potentially unreliable. All else being equal, in all three cases, the state appears to be a net loser where its security is concerned. But this does not prevent the state from trying to gain.
How can a state generate the conditions for legitimating various forms of intervention into this process? Clearly, it is not enough to invoke the mantra of "competitiveness"; competition with someone is also critical. In Europe, notwithstanding budgetary stringencies, state sponsorship of cutting-edge technological R&D retains a certain, albeit declining, legitimacy; in the United States, absent a persuasive threat, this is much less the case (although the discourse of the Clinton Administration suggests that such ideological restraints could be broken). Thus, it is the hyperrealism of Clyde Prestowitz, Karel Van Wolferen, and Michael Crichton, imagining a Japan resurgent and bent anew on (non-)Pacific conquest, that provides the cultural materials for new economic policies. Can new industrialized enemies be conjured into existence so as to justify new cold wars and the remobilization of capital, under state direction, that must follow? Or has the world changed too much for this to happen again?
In a widely ranging survey of the "state of the state," and "the state of the system," Barry Buzan (Chapter 7: "Security, the State, the `New World Order' and Beyond) suggests that, within the industrialized core of the system, security and the state are not likely to change radically, although the fears raised by the "peddlers of prosperity," as Paul Krugmann puts it, are not likely to materialize, either. 46 No single state, by itself, argues Buzan, is likely to emerge as a challenger to the "single coalition of major capitalist powers" that includes Japan, the European Community, and the United States (plus, perhaps, Central Europe and some of the former Soviet republics). In his opinion, this coalition is more likely to consolidate than disintegrate, with the result that security relations between core and periphery will take on greater overall importance, as evidenced by the growth in popularity of UN peacekeeping.
In Buzan's view, the central question is whether the coalition will choose to isolate itself from the periphery--in essence, trying to secure itself from external chaos in a sort of strategy of "self-containment"--or to intervene there in an effort to enlarge the zone of order--but thereby to risk being pulled into that chaos, as well. The choice will depend on how threats--and the social constructions of security--are framed. As is the case with the U.S. intervention in Somalia and, more recently, in Haiti, chaos can be framed as a threat to the core's moral legitimacy and supposed responsibilities to others. But chaos can also be framed as a threat to the limited zones of peace in the core, which continue to resist being pulled into the closer-to-home maelstrom of post-Yugoslavia and the Caucasian Republics. Neither threat can be escaped, but framing them in terms of moral burdens may ensure that the mentality of the laager --a self-protecting but neoisolationist zone of apparent peace amid chaos--does not come to dominate security discourses and practices.
In contrast to Buzan's political geography of core and periphery, an alternative view might see not a binary world with threats emanating from a periphery against which the core tries to protect itself. 47 Instead, we might also imagine a future in which "tame zones" and "wild zones" are scattered about the planet without any easily discernible pattern, having emerged out of the logic of capital mobility rather than territorial conquest. In such a world, some of the wildest zones might be found within tame ones, as South Central is within Los Angeles.
But even the tame zones might be further fragmented, not by territory but by modes of production, consumption, and accumulation. In this world, the Dow-Jones average becomes a representation of security: when it is up, we are strong; when it is down, we are weak. Yet, when the Dow is up, so paradoxically are interest rates on U.S. Treasury bonds. It costs U.S. citizens more to remain who they are, and this weakens them. When unemployment is up, inflation is down. This is good for finance capital, but not for labor (or the consumer markets on which many globalizing corporations depend). Who is stronger, who is weaker? In this context, does it make any sense to speak of "security" except as the need to prevent wild zones from penetrating tame ones?
In this latter scenario, almost all conventional wisdoms about security no longer hold. The orderly practices of the world of international relations embodied in neorealist discourse--the practices of power, not the absence of disorder--require constant reiteration and reification in mantra-like fashion, even as they become increasingly problematic in the hyperreality of the non-place and time bound worlds of transnational society. The place-bound concerns of neorealists, and their idealized decisionmakers, matter only insofar as they help to shore up a crumbling world view. Security, its discourses, and its modes of production thus become a means of stanching the dikes not against the external forces of chaos but the internal dynamics of state disintegration.
These two contrasting views, of separate and intermingled zones of order and chaos seem to be diametrically opposed, but perhaps they are not. The world of states continues to exist and operate along the logics of neorealism and interdependence. In that world, all states are external to one other and view each other intersubjectively. Security is defined in terms of one or more of these external actors penetrating the threatened state in some material fashion. Missiles, pollutants, and immigrants all come from the "outside" and menace the inside. The world of intermingled order and chaos, however, is already "inside," snatching bodies, as it were. If the financial world poses a threat to the state, it is because it is part and parcel of the body politic. Surviving the depredations of the robber barons of Wall Street (and London, Tokyo, et al.) will be much like a serious heroin addiction: take too little and you become ill; take too much and you die. The zone of tolerability--and security--might, for better or worse, come to lie on the fine line, and our ability to balance, between the two.
Note 1: See, e.g., Paul A. Kovert, "The Origins of Social Identity in International Politics," Paper prepared for the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, New York, September 1-4, 1994. Back.
Note 2: John J. Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future: Instability in Europe After the Cold War," International Security 15, no. 1 (Summer 1990): 5-56. A popular version was published in The Atlantic Monthly . Back.
Note 3: Barry Buzan, "From International System to International Society: Structural Realism and Regime Theory Meet the English School,"International Organization 47, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 327-52. Back.
Note 4: James Der Derian, Antidiplomacy--Spies, Terror, Speed, and War (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992). Timothy Luke was also a member of the group, but his contribution is not included here. Back.
Note 5: Among the books and articles that have recently arrived in my mail (admittedly a very small sample) are: Max Singer and Aaron Wildavsky, The Real World Order--Zones of Peace, Zones of Turmoil (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, 1993); Sean M. Lynn-Jones and Steven E. Miller, eds., America's Strategy in a Changing World (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992); Donald M. Snow, Distant Thunder--Third World Conflict and the New International Order (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993); Michael T. Klare and Daniel C. Thomas, World Security--Challenges for a New Century (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994); and Jeremy Brecher, John Brown Childs, and Jill Cutler, eds., Global Visions--Beyond the New World Order (Boston: South End Press, 1993). Back.
Note 6: Attributed, I believe, to Abraham Maslow, who was supposed to have observed that "if all you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail." Back.
Note 7: Robert W. Cox, Production, Power, and World Order--Social Forces in the Making of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). Back.
Note 8: Kenneth E. Boulding, Stable Peace (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), ch. 1. Back.
Note 9: Frederick H. Hartmann and Robert L. Wendzel, Defending America's Security (Washington: Pergamon-Brassey's, 1988), pp. 3-4. Back.
Note 10: Jessica Tuchman Mathews, "Redefining Security," Foreign Affairs 68, no. 2 (Spring 1989): 162. In 1982, International Security published a piece with the same title, in which Richard Ullman made much the same argument. Back.
Note 11: Editorial, San Francisco Chronicle , Dec. 28, 1991, p. A18. Back.
Note 12: The notion of an "essentially contested concept" comes from W. B. Gallie, "Essentially contested concepts," in Max Black, ed., The Importance of Language (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962) pp. 121-46. Cited in Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1991, 2nd ed), p. 7. Back.
Note 13: Buzan, People, States and Fear , p. 7. Back.
Note 14: Buzan, People, States and Fear , p. 65. Back.
Note 15: Karen Litfin, "Transnational Scientific Networks and the Environment: The Limits of Epistemic Cooperation," Paper delivered at the 1991 Western Regional Conference of the ISA, November 1-2, Los Angeles, p. 18-19. Back.
Note 16: Buzan, People, States and Fear , p. 37. Back.
Note 17: See Sanjoy Banerjee, "Reproduction of Subjects in Historical Structures: Attribution, Identity, and Emotion in the Early Cold War," International Studies Quarterly 35, no. 1 (March 1991): 19-38. For a more extended analysis of this phenomenon, see Steven Kull, "Nuclear Nonsense," Foreign Policy 58 (Spring 1985): 28-52; and Steven Kull Minds at War: Nuclear Reality and the Inner Conflicts of Defense Policymakers (New York: Basic Books, 1988). Back.
Note 18: For a specific application of the notion of social construction to policymaking, see Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram, "Social Construction of Target Populations: Implications for Politics and Policy," American Political Science Review 87, no. 2 (June 1993): 334-47. Back.
Note 19: Banerjee, "Reproduction of Subjects." Back.
Note 20: In other words, the enemy, and the threat it presents, possess characteristics specific to the society defining them. See, e.g., Jutta Weldes, "Constructing National Interests: The Logic of U.S. National Security in the Post-war Era," Ph.D. dissertation, Dept. of Political Science, University of Minnesota, 1992; Ronnie D. Lipschutz, When Nations Clash: Raw Materials, Ideology, and Foreign Policy (New York: Ballinger/Harper and Row, 1989); David Campbell, "Global Inscription: How Foreign Policy Constitutes the United States," Alternatives 15 (1990): 263-86; and David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). Back.
Note 21: To this, the realist would argue: "But states exist and the condition of anarchy means that there are no restraints on their behavior towards others! Hence, threats must be material and real." As Nicholas Onuf, Alex Wendt, and others have argued, even international anarchy is a social construction inasmuch as certain rules of behavior inevitably form the basis for such an arrangement. See Nicholas Onuf, World of Our Making--Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989); Alex Wendt, "Anarchy is what states make of it: the social construction of power politics," International Organization 46, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 405; Ronnie D. Lipschutz, "Reconstructing World Politics: The Emergence of Global Civil Society," Millennium 21, no. 3 (Winter 1992): 389-420. Back.
Note 22: See, e.g., R. Jeffrey Smith, "Bush Urged to Halve U.S. Nuclear Arsenal," San Francisco Chronicle , Jan. 6, 1992, p. A1:
Back."In a world with many potential enemies, the United States should draw up a plan for targeting nuclear and nonnuclear weapons `at every reasonable adversary' around the world, [a] panel of current and former Pentagon officials said. . . ." In June 1992, Presidents Bush and Yeltsin signed an agreement to drastically reduce levels of nuclear arms held by the two countries. It is interesting to note the warnings by "conservatives" in both the U.S. and Russia not to give away strategic advantage in the pursuit of domestic political advantage or economy.
Note 23: John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Back.
Note 24: The most prominent claimant of this notion is, of course, Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979). Waltz continues to mount this claim; see, for example, "Nuclear Myths and Political Realities," American Political Science Review 84, no. 3 (September 1990): 731-45; and Scott D. Sagan & Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995) A current version is John J. Mearsheimer, "The Case for a Ukrainian Nuclear Deterrent," Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 50-66. Back.
Note 25: Indeed, the essential task of deterrence was to convince the other that they would be used, although one would never want to get to the point that they might be used. For a full-blown exegesis of this point, see Timothy W. Luke, "On Post-War: The Significance of Symbolic Action in War and Deterrence," Alternatives 14 (1989): 343-62. Back.
Note 26: Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), ch. 2. Back.
Note 27: Casper Weinberger, "United States Nuclear Deterrence Policy," Testimony before the Foreign Relations Committee of the U.S. Senate, Dec. 14, 1982, pp. 2-3. First emphasis my own. Back.
Note 28: Kull, "Nuclear Nonsense"; Kull, Minds at War . These pronouncements did have the effect of scaring the hell out of citizens, many of whom mobilized against the nuclear arms race. See Dan Deudney's chapter in this volume. Back.
Note 29: The term "Finlandization" is worthy of an entire paper in itself. One used to hear people say that to be like Finland would not be so bad; today, no one wants to be like Finland, which is in an economic slump brought on by the collapse of trade with the ex-Soviet Union. Back.
Note 30: R. Jeffrey Smith, "Missile Deployments Roil Europe," Science 223 (Jan. 27, 1984): 371-76; "Missile Talks Doomed from the Start," Science 223 (Feb. 10, 1984): 566-70; "Missile Deployments Shake European Politics," Science 223 (Feb. 17, 1984): 665-67; "The Allure of High-Tech Weapons for Europe," Science 223 (March 23, 1984): 1269-72. Back.
Note 31: There was, at the time, some controversy over why the Soviets had put the SS-20s into Eastern Europe. While some argued that it was done to take advantage of the escalatory gap, others pointed to the deployment as simply the arcane workings of the Soviet military-industrial complex, which had taken one stage off of an unsuccessful, solid-fuelled intercontinental ballistic missile, thereby turning it into a working intermediate range one. The latter argument would, of course, have implied a state beset by bureaucratic conflict and inefficiency, rather than one bent on conquering the West. Back.
Note 32: It might be noted, in passing, that the eventual impacts of the SS-20s and Euromissiles were greater at home than in enemy territory. The waves of protest against the missiles in the West were viewed with great alarm in many NATO capitals. In the East, the episode was the occasion of growing contacts between Western peace activists and Eastern dissidents which, in the long run, must have contributed to the revolutions of 1989 and 1991. See, e.g., David Meyer, "How the Cold War was Really Won: A View From Below," Prepared for the ISA Annual Meeting, March 19-23, 1991, Vancouver, BC. Back.
Note 33: This was, of course, a central reason for arguments made during the 1980s on behalf of a precise counterforce targeting policy against the Soviet Union as well as ballistic missile defense via the Strategic Defense Initiative. Back.
Note 34: Kull, "Nuclear Nonsense"; Kull, Minds at War . Back.
Note 35: See, e.g., David Rees, "Soviet Strategic Penetration in Africa," Conflict Studies no. 77 (Nov. 1977); W. Kaltefleiter, "The Resource War: The Need for a Western Strategy," Comparative Strategy 4, no. 1 (1983): 31-49. Back.
Note 36: Quoted in R. Weston, Strategic Materials--A World Survey (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allenheld, 1984), p. 151. Back.
Note 37: Although experiences with temporary shortages in supplies of cobalt from Zaire in the late 1970s demonstrated a remarkable price elasticity where high-technology goods were concerned. Back.
Note 38: See Lipschutz, When Nations Clash ; Hans W. Maull, Raw Materials, Energy and Western Security (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). Back.
Note 39: "Since the same political forces are promoting the rapid spread of education [as growth in the labor force], that unemployed person is likely to be a high school or college graduate and therefore especially dangerous to political stability." Nathan Keyfitz, "The Growing Human Population," in: Scientific American, Managing Planet Earth (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1989), p. 52. Back.
Note 40: The whole notion of "global transformation" is one that cuts two ways. Economic integration is thought to be the major effect, in that flows of capital, loci of production, and changes in the deployment of labor are happening "everywhere." What is less noted are the cultural effects of this process, which seem to involve social and political fragmentation. See, for example, Mike Featherstone, ed. Global Culture (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1990); Stephen Gill, "Reflections on Global Order and Sociohistorical Time," Alternatives 16 (1991): 275-314. Back.
Note 41: I have in mind here the kinds of pressures that arise when governments, in trying to make their systems of production more competitive, are urged to eliminate budget deficits and entitlements. Back.
Note 42: In many cases, of course, governments are refusing to deliver services, for ideological as well as budgetary reasons, but I would argue that this refusal is not just domestically generated; see below and Herman Schwartz, "Can Orthodox Stabilization and Adjustment Work?" International Organization 45, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 221-56. For the Soviet case, many of these points can be found in Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, "Soviet reform and the end of the Cold War: Explaining Large-Scale Historical Change," Review of International Studies 17 (1991): 225-50. Jeff Frieden argues, however, that industrialized country governments are not nearly so much at the mercy of international economic forces as is often supposed; see "Invested Interests: The Politics of National Economic Policies in a World of Global Finance," International Organization 45, no. 4 (Autumn 1991): 425-52. Back.
Note 43: John G. Ruggie, "International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order, pp. 195-232, in: Stephen D. Krasner, ed., International Regimes (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983). Back.
Note 44: The project is impossible to realize because capitalism is premised on spatial differences in the costs of various factors of production; the "level playing field" is therefore something of a delusion. Back.
Note 45: William S. Lind, "Defending Western Culture," Foreign Policy 84 (Fall 1991): 40-50; Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 22-49. Back.
Note 46: Paul Krugmann, Peddling Prosperity (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994). Back.
Note 47: These thoughts are based on a paper by Timothy Luke, "Sovereignty, States and Security: New World Order or Neo-World Orders?" prepared for this project but not included in this volume. Back.
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