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On Security, by Ronnie D. Lipschutz
Ronnie D. Lipschutz
| How each nation answers the questions "who am I," "who are you," and ultimately, "who are we" determines how they [sic] address the realist problematic "whose side are you on," or the liberal institutionalist question, "what's in it for me?" |
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--Bruce Cronin 1 |
What is security? How do we define it? Who defines it? Who (or what) constitutes a threat? Why are they (it) threatening? Where do threats begin? Where do they end? What, when all is said and done, is being secured? In various ways, the contributors to this volume have taken up these, and other, questions having to do with conceptions, practices, and referents of security. Each has brought to her/his chapter differing epistemologies, methodologies and, indeed, ontologies. Some, taking their cues from what we might stylize as "postmodernism," have struggled with the languages, discourses, and speech acts that overpower and imprison us within a certain security logic. Others are of a more liberal bent, analyzing the attempts of government to define security policy, and the resistance of civil society to such a prerogative. Finally, there are those who come from a more traditional, "realist" position, and have looked at domestic and international struggles for power, and the power to define, in order to examine security as a condition or process.
As writer, reader and editor, I stand somewhere in the middle--in a literal, and not an epistemological sense--trying to understand where these three broad approaches might share boundaries, concepts and explanations. In my view, their major point of difference has to do with the question of whether security can be analyzed as an objective condition, or whether it is better understood as an intersubjective phenomenon, in which mutually constituted threats, and security problematiques, are as much about "negotiating the boundaries of difference" between and among states as about the material implements that, on the pain of war, reinforce those differences.
In this final chapter, I take on the task of looking more closely at the ways in which security is constituted. I first consider security as a "speech act" or discourse, which emerges from the particular logic of the state system and rests upon the differentiation between the self and the enemy. I then consider what happens to this process when the Enemy disappears and why, in the "new world" (which is by no means orderly), finding new enemies is proving difficult. Finally, I analyze the implications of these ideas and point out why efforts to "redefine security," are likely to prove difficult.
Security the "Speech Act"
"Intersubjectivity" among the actors in international relations includes not only the mutually constituted relationship between two actors--in terms of the logic of the state system, between potentially hostile states--but also interpretations of position and responses to interpretations that arise from the logic of that relationship. In other words, the structure of the system as it is commonly understood provides the setting within which interpretations take place. So far, this is not very different from the neorealist notion that anarchy and self-help require the state to ensure its own security. What the condition of intersubjectivity adds to this is the idea that there is nothing "objective" about this arrangement; it grows out of the mutual interpretations and responses to one another by the actors constituting the system.
The logic, the interpretation and the response together comprise the "speech act" of security. As Ole Wæver has put it,
With the help of language theory, we can regard "security" as a speech act . In this usage, security is not of interest as a sign that refers to something more "real"; it is the utterance itself that is the act. By saying it, something is done (as in betting, giving a promise, naming a ship). By uttering "security," a state-representative moves a particular development into a specific area, and thereby claims a special right to use whatever means are necessary to block it. 2
What then, is the form and content of this speech act? The logic of security implies that one political actor must be protected from the depredations of another political actor. In international relations, these actors are territorially defined, mutually exclusive and nominally sovereign states. A state is assumed to be politically cohesive, to monopolize the use of violence within the defined jurisdiction, to be able to protect itself from other states, and to be potentially hostile to other states. Self-protection may, under certain circumstances, extend to the suppression of domestic actors, if it can be proved that such actors are acting in a manner hostile to the state on behalf of another state (or political entity). Overall, however, the logic of security is exclusionist: It proposes to exclude developments deemed threatening to the continued existence of that state and, in doing so, draws boundaries to discipline the behavior of those within and to differentiate within from without. The right to define such developments and draw such boundaries is, generally speaking, the prerogative of certain state representatives, as Wæver points out. 3
Of course, security, the speech act, does draw on material conditions "out there." In particular, the logic of security assumes that state actors possess "capabilities," and the purposes of such capabilities are interpreted as part of the speech act itself. These interpretations are based on indicators that can be observed and measured--for example, numbers of tanks in the field, missiles in silos, men under arms. It is a given within the logic--the speech act--of security that these capabilities exist to be used in a threatening fashion--either for deterrent or offensive purposes--and that such threats can be deduced, albeit incompletely, without reference to intentions or, for that matter, the domestic contexts within which such capabilities have been developed.
Defense analysts within the state that is trying to interpret the meanings of the other state's capabilities consequently formulate a range of possible scenarios of employment, utilizing the most threatening or damaging one as the basis for devising a response. Most pointedly, they do not assume either that the capabilities will not be used or that they might have come into being for reasons other than projecting the imagined threats. Threats, in this context, thus become what might be done, not, given the "fog of war," what could or would be done, or the fog of bureaucracy, what might not be done. What we have here, in other words, is "worst case" interpretation. The "speech act" security thus usually generates a proportionate response , in which the imagined threat is used to manufacture real weapons and deploy real troops in arrays intended to convey certain imagined scenarios in the mind of the other state. Intersubjectivity, in this case, causes states to read in others, and to respond to, their worst fears.
It is important to recognize that, to the extent we make judgments about possibilities on the basis of capabilities, without reference to actual intentions, we are trying to imagine how those capabilities might be used. These imagined scenarios are not, however, based only on some idea of how the threatening actor might behave; they are also reflections of what our intentions might be, were we in the place of that actor, constructing imagined scenarios based on what s/he would imagine our intentions might be, were they in our place. . . . and so on, ad infinitum . Where we cut into this loop, and why we cut into the loop in one place and not another, has a great deal to do with where we start in our quest to understand the notion of security, the speech act.
Consider, once again, the tale told in chapter 1 of the Pershing-II and Ground Launched Cruise Missiles, placed in Europe as a response to the Soviet SS-20s. There was, at the time, some controversy over why these latter missiles had been deployed in Eastern Europe. The widely accepted argument, and the one that became the basis for policy, was that it was done to take advantage of an escalatory gap. But others suggested that the deployment was simply the result of the arcane workings of the Soviet military-industrial complex, which had taken one stage off an unsuccessful, solid-fueled 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 economic inefficiency, rather than one bent on threatening Western Europe.
Another example of this can be found in the idea of "environmental security." 4 If we apply the logic of security to the environment--and this is not really what the concept is intended to do--we might reasonably conclude that the major threats to the environment are the very people who seek security from the effects of a damaged environment. If we consider the concept in terms of societal and state disintegration, we are forced to conclude that the threat to security arises primarily from the activities of members of the society and the citizens of the affected state. 5 We are then left with the state "coercing conservation" by its citizens. This approach might work under certain limited circumstances but, in effect, it targets as enemies the very people who live within the damaged ecosystems under state jurisdiction. 6
Much the same conclusion follows from the application of other similar concepts, such as "economic security." So long as the economies of Great Powers were more-or-less autonomous from one another, they could exercise sufficient control over domestic economic conditions so as to reinforce such autonomy. The nationality of corporations mattered. Their behavior in time of peace and war was of concern to the state, and the state sought to discipline corporate behavior to its ends. The great experiment in global liberalism has made such a condition a thing of the past. Today, as Beverly Crawford makes clear, enforcing economic security in a traditional sense runs the risk of declaring economic warfare on the most productive and innovative actors in the economy. The logic of the market is quite different from that of the military, a point to which I will return, below.
As a speech act, security is about specifying, through discourse, the permitted conditions under which acts that "secure" the state can take place. In a world of relatively autonomous states, with low levels of interaction, it is possible to draw the conceptual boundaries that establish difference between two states and that also define a range of permitted behavior and beliefs. Specifying the goals of other states' behaviors, as friendly or hostile, could also be a part of this boundary-drawing. Whether we accept such boundary definition as justifiable or not is beside the point; the state is clearly the referent of security as speech act and as behavior.
The most secure state is, under these conditions, the one most successful in excluding outside influences by drawing boundaries that can be secured; in Barry Buzan's terms, a "closed" state. But, as Buzan's analysis suggests, a closed state is either very sure of itself and its purpose in the world, or very insecure about its viability. 7 It is either very confident of its ability to ward off the efforts of others to penetrate it, and very sure that it has the undying loyalty of its citizens, so that no social and economic intercourse is desirable or necessary. Or, it is so weak and insecure that, as in the case of North Korea, closure is the only way to ensure that the state and its citizens will not be subverted and "turned" by external influences.
Major difficulties arise when the referent of security becomes less clear. We can maintain the state as the referent of security, the speech act, but in doing so we may be muddying the waters. Indeed, the very notion of the state becomes problematic: On the one hand, it is assumed to be an independent and autonomous political entity that fulfills a particular set of constitutive characteristics codified in part in the Treaties of Augsberg and Westphalia; on the other hand, it is quite evident that the state of 1995 is not the same as the state of 1648. Giving the name "state" to particular political entities at a particular time does not mean that they meet the complete, idealized set of constitutive requirements imagined to apply at another time. 8 Consequently, applying unchanging concepts or practices to these entities, or to others that we might choose to define, does not mean that the logic of security follows today as it once did, either 30 or 300 years ago.
Closure is, consequently, a formula for poverty and destitution, as both Buzan and Beverly Crawford make clear. The citizens of such states are wont to escape their security in the interest of finding better lives and more "secure" livelihoods. Left behind is a hollow shell, less and less able to secure itself. For different reasons, open states are subject to much the same logic: As they engage in extensive social and economic intercourse, the boundaries separating one state from another become, more and more, lines on a map and, perhaps, lines on the ground, but lines that become quite unclear in the minds of citizens whose routines involve living in culturally diffuse "borderlands" that may, geographically, be quite distant from the lines on the ground.
Security, under these circumstances, is about the drawing and defense of lines and boundaries, about limits, and about exclusion and, in this sense, it is the quintessential "speech act" described by Ole Wæver. Defining security involves establishing a definition of the collective self vis-à-vis other collective selves. It is not only about "who is against us," but also, as the observation offered at the beginning of this chapter suggests, about "who we are" and whom we do not wish to be. It is, to a large degree, about boundaries of difference that are increasingly difficult to specify and negotiate.
Lose an Enemy, Lose Yourself
Some years ago, according to a now almost-apocryphal story, a U.S. diplomat was approached by a Soviet colleague and told, sotto voce , "We are about to do a terrible thing to you. We are going to deprive you of an enemy." 9 At the time, the story had a certain appealing charm to it: The Soviet Union was the primary threat to, and enemy of, the United States, as forty years of Cold War had definitively established. Without the Soviet Union as an enemy, a new era in international cooperation could begin. Financial resources allocated to the defense sector by the two superpowers and their allies could now be redirected to social welfare, basic infrastructure, technological innovation, and environmental protection. The security dilemma that had resulted in the manufacture of more than 50,000 nuclear weapons, the deployment of 300,000 American troops and a comparable number of Soviet soldiers in Europe, and the annual global expenditure of close to $1 trillion could be eliminated. A new Concert of states, acting through international institutions, would help to wind down the regional and civil wars fostered by the East-West conflict.
In retrospect, the clarity of those last days of bipolarity, only a few short years ago, was illusory; the Cold War appears to have been a period of great stability (although this, too, is something of an illusion), inasmuch as the world now seems to be rent by conflict and war to a degree that would have been difficult to imagine in 1989. These wars and conflicts are, however, largely of a quite unanticipated character: They are mostly intrastate and social , rather than interstate and political . Today's wars are mostly between literal neighbors, not neighboring states; the security dilemma has been domesticated and brought into the state (and, in some instances, down to the household level). 10 How can we explain this puzzling phenomenon?
Much of the analysis that currently purports to explain these wars revolves around the concepts of ethnicity and sectarianism : Increasingly, groups of people are defining themselves collectively, relative to others, in terms of certain shared or acquired characteristics such as appearance, religion, history, origins, language, and so on. This is not something new, of course; the very ideas of nationalism and the nation-state are based on such differences. But analyses based on the construction and application of ethnicity generally ignore the importance of the Other --whom one is not--in fostering the sense of collective identity so important to action centered on ethnicity or sectarianism. 11
Defining oneself in such terms requires defining someone else in different terms; differentiation thus draws a boundary between the self and the Other. This Other is not, at first, necessarily a threat in terms of one's own continued existence, although ethnicity can and does become securitized. 12 But the peaceful acceptance of an Other requires that boundaries be drawn somewhere else, and that security, the speech act, specify another Other (as in, for example, South Slavs against the Hapsburgs, or Yugoslavia against the Soviet Union). There are always implicit risks in the peaceful acceptance of an Other as a legitimate ontology, because doing so raises the possibility, however remote, of accepting the Other's characteristics as a legitimate alternative and, consequently, of being taken over by the Other. Given this epistemology of threats, it does not take much to be "turned." 13 How else to account for the life and death character of the distinctions among Serbs, Croats, and Muslims in Bosnia, which the untutored eye can hardly detect? 14 As James Der Derian puts it in his contribution to this volume, "The desire for security is manifested as a collective resentment of difference--that which is not us, not certain, not predictable." 15
The loss of an Enemy can be seen, therefore, as something of a catastrophe for an identity based on that Enemy, and it opens up a search for a new Other that can function as the new Enemy. And, make no mistake about it: While the myths underlying American identity are many, during the Cold War the strongest one had to do with not-being, and not-becoming, Communist, both individually and collectively. In a world dominated by Great Powers and balance-of-power politics, as was the case prior to World War II, losing one enemy was not a problem; there were others to be found. In the post-bipolar world, the search for enemies and new security threats is less easily solved, inasmuch as the disappearance of the only Other that counts leaves no other Others that can credibly fill its place.
One World or Many?
The Dialectics of Order and Chaos
Why are enemies so important to our collective selves? Why are we driven to find new ones when the body of the old one is hardly yet cold (and might yet be revived, perhaps with our unwitting assistance)? Consider what is said to threaten our security today. An incomplete list would include terrorism (infection by fanaticism); nuclear proliferation (infection by irradiation or, perhaps, blackmail--making us behave as we never would want to); environmental degradation (infection by Nature or ourselves); immigration (by religion and culture); drugs (by turning us into mindless robots); and AIDS (by tainting our bodily fluids). Consider how in the past, at one time or another, many of these "threats" were said to be fostered and assisted by the Kremlin and its state and non-state proxies. Now, when there is no one single enemy anywhere, there are enemies everywhere, inside as well as outside. If this is so, then the threat of social chaos, the loss of self, can arise from within, from the "wild zones" inside of each of us (shades of Hobbes!). Can the existence of such wild zones be tolerated by the "tame zones" of the industrial coalition proposed by Barry Buzan? Do the former not pose a threat to the very organizing principles of the latter? Can they be contained or excluded?
The chapters by Dan Deudney and Pearl-Alice Marsh remind us just how problematic it can be to discipline wildness and direct tameness, even when, to some, the world appears to be black and white. Even as nuclear doctrine sought to secure the United States against the enemy, it threatened the very people it was intended to protect. And, even as U.S. security policy in southern Africa promised to protect the home appliances apparently deemed so important to the American people by its leaders, so, too, did it also raise the possibility of a cessation in the very mineral flows that made those appliances feasible and affordable. Contradictory speech acts emerged from this process, undermining security policy and leaving behind less security, rather than more.
Today, a similar set of circumstances, brought on by economic globalization, seems to be developing and imposing costs and risks on the very people it is intended to benefit. In this context, talk of "economic security" becomes, once again, a speech act that seeks to legitimate a policy that promises very real insecurity for many. The market is a place full of risks, and only those who are willing to take risks in the market are likely to reap great benefits; given the logic of the market, these same individuals also risk bankruptcy and personal economic insecurity (an outcome only too evident in Orange County California's declaration of bankruptcy and Mexico's economic travails).
Indeed, as Beverly Crawford's chapter seems to suggest, in a world of economic globalism, in which states must collaborate to foster global capitalism, and the processes of production, consumption, and accumulation become decoupled from individual states, it becomes more and more difficult to constitute an Other that might be transformed into a threatening enemy, thereby legitimating the differential degrees of personal and national security awarded by the market. We have seen some feeble efforts, based on notions of economic competitiveness and technological innovation, and given illustration in Michael Crichton's xenophobic and misogynistic Rising Sun , but these seem not to be very persuasive. A few argue that we (the United States) must become more like the Other (Japan) if we are to be made secure. 16 How different this is from the world(s) of Morgenthau and Waltz!
Business and capital are only too aware of this paradox, whereas the world of states and military power seems blissfully oblivious to it. For capital, there are no enemies, only competitors; indeed, the market, while competitive, is a realm of cooperation , not conflict, as is often assumed. 17 Markets are rule-governed institutions and, to get along, you must go along. In the marketplace, nonexclusive identities are prized, not shunned, and multiple identities are encouraged in the name of consumer taste and "autonomy." This world is, as Kenichi Ohmae puts it, truly "borderless." 18 Not only are there no borders between countries, there are no borders between market and consumer, either. What can security possibly mean in such a world?
Not everyone is, of course, a participant in the market; indeed, there are billions of people and dozens of countries that are not. In spite of warnings about instability as the "enemy," these people and "states" are neither enemies nor threats to us in either an objective or intersubjective sense. Rather, the places in which many of them are found are more akin to realms constituted or consumed by chaos. The inhabitants of these zone participate in neither statist politics nor global markets as we understand them, not so much out of choice or desire as out of the logic of economic globalization driven by capitalism and the industrial coalition. But these zones of chaos are not just places "outside" of space or time; paradoxically, perhaps, they are sites of political experimentation, from which are emerging "world systems" that, if successful, could ultimately undermine the relative orderliness of the peaceful zones of the industrial coalition.
One example of such a world system can be seen in the collapse of Somalia, the state. Somali nationalism, such as it was, defined the Somali state in part by what it was not, yet yearned to be. The five-pointed star on the national flag referred not only to the former British and Italian colonial territories, now united into the authorized Somali state, but also to the missing parts of the body politic in the Ogaden Desert of Ethiopia, in Djibouti, and in Kenya, places where Somali identity could never be wholly secured. To reunite the parts of this body, in 1977, the Somali president, Siad Barre, sent his troops into the Ogaden to fight the enemy Amhara, rulers of Ethiopia and that contested region. They, with the help of the Soviet Union and the relative indifference of the United States, were able to throw back the invasion, thereby preventing Somalia from uniting the body, and sowing the seeds for a dismal future.
With the end of the Cold War, both Ethiopia and Somalia imploded, and with them went the borders that kept Somalis apart. Paradoxically, the disappearance of lines in the sand meant that long-separated groups could now be reunited, to reclaim lost identities. But these identities had little to do with the Somali state itself; rather, they were and are defined in terms of a pre-colonial but post-industrial "world-system" of families and clans, for whom borders were less lines drawn in the sand than in the family tree. The reconstruction of the Somali "state" would destroy this old-new world-system; Somalia the state is, thus, as much a threat to clan identities as anything else might be. Hence, those who would reconstitute Somalia as a state--certain clan leaders, the UN, the United States--came to be seen as threats to the security of those who preferred no state to one dominated by a single clan. 19
Is the "immature anarchy" of ex-Somalia tolerable to the state-centric world system of the industrial core? I would suggest that the apparent disorder of the African Horn, driven by a different organizing logic than the international system, is too much for even the anarchic state system to stomach, because it makes clear how weak are the boundaries between the relatively ordered politics of international society and the Hobbesian state of nature. The Somali world system, and the "world systems" of Bosnia, Georgia, and other zones of chaos, are all threats to the international state system even as that system is a threat to these micro-world-systems.
Which constitutes the greater threat to the other? The state system cannot cope with the "social warfare" that has atomized these zones of chaos into their fundamental particles; the "political" actors within these mini-world systems see no benefit in giving up power to others in the name of reconstituting the state and, with it, some oppressive international order. As Robert Kaplan points out in his provocative article, "The Coming Anarchy," many of the actors within these zones of chaos are now better off than they have ever been before; to put it another way, they have taken risks in the market, and see no reason to give up the benefits they have won. 20 The international state system does not want to--indeed, cannot afford to--bribe all of those who have benefitted from the chaos to rejoin the international order. All of this simply illustrates, as Nicholas Onuf implies in his discussion of the essential linkages between realism and liberalism, that the Hobbesian world is implicit in the modern capitalist state, not kept at bay by it. 21 This does not bode well for our future.
A Beginning, by Way of Conclusion
What, then, is security? The contributors to this volume have told us, if nothing else, that it irreducibly involves boundaries. As James Der Derian points out, it is the drawing of lines between the collective self and what is, in Nietzsche's words, "alien and weaker." Der Derian argues that "A safe life requires safe truths. The strange and the alien remain unexamined, the unknown becomes identified as evil, and evil provokes hostility--recycling the desire for security." 22 The boundary between known and unknown is reified and secured. But where are these boundaries to be drawn?
I have suggested above that they are drawn between the self and the Enemy, between the realm of safety and the realm of danger, between tame zones and wild ones. The practitioners of national security and security policy conventionally drew these boundaries between states, or between groups of states. By 1989, the roster of states had been fixed, the books closed for good. There were many "international" boundaries, but these were fixed and all there were or could be. States might draw imaginary lines, or "bordoids," as Bruce Larkin has stylized them, 23 in defining the parameters of their "national interests." They might extend their national boundaries in order to incorporate allies, as in practice of extended deterrence in Europe. Enemies and threats were, however, always across the line.
The revolutions of 1989 completed what had already been in the works for some time, the fluidization and disappearance of borders and boundaries, a phenomenon that many observers had, in the past, named "interdependence." But interdependence assumed a continuity of borders and boundaries, not their dissolution. Moreover, as old borders disappeared, new ones emerged. Compatriots within boundaries now found themselves on the opposite sides of borders, sometimes, as was the case with the 25 million Russians in the "near abroad," on the wrong side. New boundaries were drawn within what had once been states or titular republics, securitizing multiple new identities where there had been only one before . Even the industrial coalition might not be secure from this phenomenon: Ole Wæver suggests that, in some cases within Western Europe, "national communities might have to engage in a certain degree of securitization of identity questions in order to handle the stress from Europeanization." 24 The new post-1989 borders had much the same effect, with newly imagined nations securitizing their identities in order to establish their imagined autonomy from old ones. In doing this, however, these new nations rejected old ones, rendering them both illegitimate and undesirable.
But even new borders do not, and cannot, put an end to the old question: Who are you? Who am I? The setting of boundaries is never finalized, never set in stone markers. Borders are meant to discipline, but they also open up the possibility of "going too far" or "overstepping the bounds." Borderlands are always regions where mixing occurs, or might occur, and they are, in themselves, a threat to the security supposedly established by borders. The boundaries are always under challenge and they must always be reestablished, not only on the ground but also in the mind. During the final decade of the Cold War, as Dan Deudney and Pearl Alice Marsh point out, struggles were renewed over where to draw the lines, even as the lines began to dissolve. Star Wars would have drawn a line--or a surface--in the sky, a dome within which the self would be secure and secured, and outside of which was the eternal threat of the Other. Few believed that such a surface could be made at all, much less made secure.
Nuclear deterrence depended on lines on the ground and in the mind: To be secure, one had to believe that, were the Other to cross the line, both the self and the Other would cease to exist. The threat of nothingness secured the ontology of being, but at great political cost to those who pursued this formula. Since 1991, deterrence has ceased to wield its cognitive force, and the lines in the mind and on the ground have vanished, in spite of repeated efforts to draw them anew. To be sure, the United States and Russia do not launch missiles against each other because both know the result would be annihilation. But the same is true for France and Britain, or China and Israel. It was the existence of the Other that gave deterrence its power; it is the disappearance of the Other that has vanquished that power. Where Russia is now concerned, we are, paradoxically, not secure, because we see no need to be secured. 25 In other words, as Ole Wæver might put it, where there is no constructed threat, there is no security problem. France is fully capable of doing great damage to the United States, but that capability has no meaning in terms of U.S. security.
The search for new rationales for security leads, as Beverly Crawford's essay suggests, not to security redefined but to endless iterative loops. To be secure, we must become more self-reliant, inasmuch as to be reliant means depending on others who are potential Others. To depend on others means that they are more competitive than we are. To be less competitive means our survival may be threatened. But to be less reliant means that we forego the fruits of technological collaboration with others. To forego the fruits of collaboration means that we become less competitive, poorer and less secure than others might be. If we are poorer and less secure, we are more open to penetration by others, who might well take us over. If we were more like the Japanese, we would be the equal of Japan and secure; but if we were more like the Japanese, we would be less like Americans and therefore insecure. And so on through this new Hall of Mirrors. The "new economic security dilemma" is more of a contradiction than a dilemma. While U.S. policymakers fret over competition, U.S. corporations establish strategic alliances with their Japanese counterparts.
To put this another way, and as I suggested above, there are no security dilemmas in the globalized economy, although there are likely to be security dilemmas in economic globalization. As Barry Buzan puts it,
There is little reason to think that the capitalist coalition will succumb to the Leninist fate of falling into conflict over the redivision of the global market now that its external challenger has been seen off. Economic competition there will doubtless be, possibly quite fierce, as global surplus capacity in many industries begins to bite. But their prosperity and their economic processes are now so deeply interdependent that the costs of full-blown mercantilism act as an effective deterrent.
26
But the security dilemma might yet arise between those who participate in the global economy and those who do not, between the stable core and chaotic periphery. So long as instability can be contained within the periphery, the center will remain peaceful and secure. Some countries may be brought into the zone of peace; others may find themselves pushed outside, relegated to looking in. The boundaries within will fade away, but the boundary between center and periphery will remain clear. Then the question becomes: Is greater security achieved by keeping these peripheral Others out or by trying to bring them in and risking rejection? Inasmuch as the latter is a formula for endless heartbreak and tears, exclusion begins to look easier.
Is exclusion feasible, however? "Tame zones" are to be found not only in Rome but also in Rio; "wild zones" exist not only in Somalia but also in South Central. Where, in this world of intermixed, cheek-to-cheek order and chaos are we to draw new borders and boundaries? In Bosnia and Somalia, the lines have been drawn block-by-block; in Los Angeles, the cordon sanitaire of freeways separates one zone from its neighbor (at least until the "Big One" hits). The next time there is an altercation at Florence and Normandie, will the periphery flow toward the center? Will the lines give way?
For the state policymaker, the "security dilemma" thus has taken on a new meaning. Confronted by limited resources and forced to make choices, the fragmentation of states and the loss of certainty will make it that much more difficult to decide who or what constitutes a problem of security. Threats can always be constructed through the speech acts of security, but they do not always perform as expected nor are they always believed by those who are to be secured. Sometimes, they just go away, leaving behind them a security "vacuum" of a sort different than that posited by geopolitics and realists. As Constantine Cavafy put it,
Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.Now what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution. 27
Note 1: Bruce Cronin, "Defining a Raison d'être: The Politics of Identity and Purpose in the New World Order," Prepared for delivery at the Annual Meeting of the APSA, Washington, D.C., Sept. 2-5, 1993, p. 2. Back.
Note 2: This book, p. 55. Back.
Note 3: None of this is meant to suggest that the act of drawing boundaries is quick or easy. For an example of such "boundary-drawing," see William S. Lind, "Defending Western Culture," Foreign Policy 84 (Fall 1991): 40--50; Samuel Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 22-49. Back.
Note 4: This concept is not addressed in the present volume, but there is a rapidly-growing literature on the topic. See, for example, the work of Norman Myers, Thomas F. Homer-Dixon and Peter Gleick. Back.
Note 5: See, e.g., Thomas F. Homer-Dixon, "Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict: Evidence from Cases," International Security 19, no. 1 (Summer 1994): 5-40. Back.
Note 6: Nancy Peluso, "Coercing Conservation: The Politics of State Resource Control," in: Ronnie D. Lipschutz and Ken Conca, eds., The State and Social Power in Global Environmental Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 46-70. Back.
Note 7: Experience suggests that it is not the state whose viability is called into question but, rather, that of a government. Still, governments who try to close off a state tend to take the view that they are all that stand between state survival and its disappearance. Back.
Note 8: John G. Ruggie, "International Structures and International Transformation: Space, Time, and Method," in: Ernst-Otto Czempiel and James N. Rosenau, eds., Global Changes and Theoretical Challenges--Approaches to World Politics for the 1990s (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1989), pp. 21-36. Back.
Note 9: Cited in Thomas J. McCormick, America's Half-Century--United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 232. Back.
Note 10: John Mearsheimer has proposed, in the case of ex-Yugoslavia, that the security dilemma be restored to its proper place between states by separating ethnic groups and allowing them to arm, which would establish a stable and "peaceful" balance-of-power among them; see John J. Mearsheimer and Robert A. Pape, "The Answer," The New Republic , June 14, 1993, pp. 22-25, 28. Back.
Note 11: More to the point, scholars of nationalism tend to define it in positive, rather than negative, terms. See, for example, Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991, 2nd. ed.). Back.
Note 12: Clearly, in some, usually liberal, contexts, the identification of "others" does not lead to securitization. Loggers and environmentalists do not, for the most part, take up arms in an organized fashion with the intent of eliminating the other. At the same time, as will be seen below, the ways in which the language of war is sometimes used in a domestic context are intended to create a threat of existential annihilation by a feared Other. Back.
Note 13: In the film Dances with Wolves , for instance, the Kevin Costner character is accused by a soldier in the U.S. Cavalry of having "turned Indian." The implication is, of course, that Costner is a weak individual, who succumbed to the enemy when most U.S. soldiers would have been able to resist. See also Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate (New York: Jove, 1988). Back.
Note 14: And how else to account for the gradual acquisition of identifiable, and differentiable, characteristics, such as dress, if not to facilitate identification and assurance of loyalty? Back.
Note 15: This book, pp. 33. Back.
Note 16: While no one explicitly suggests the United States should adopt Japanese characteristics, a few observers have looked with some admiration at the technology policy fostered by the Japanese state. This is implicit, for example, in Daniel F. Burton, Jr., "High-Tech Competitiveness," Foreign Policy 92 (Fall 1993): 117-32. Back.
Note 17: George Breslauer used to call the U.S.-Soviet relationship one of "collaborative competition"; see "Soviet Policy in the Middle East, 1967-1972: Unalterable Antagonism or Collaborative Competition?" in: Alexander L. George, ed., Managing U.S.-Soviet Rivalry--Problems of Crisis Prevention (Boulder: Westview Press, 1983), pp. 65-106. Back.
Note 18: Kenichi Ohmae, The Borderless World--Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (New York: HarperCollins, 1990). Back.
Note 19: A good discussion of the clan and state politics of Somalia can be found in Patrick Giles, "From Peace-Keeping to Peace Enforcement--The Somalia Precedent," Middle East Report , no. 185 (Nov.-Dec. 1993): 21-24. Back.
Note 20: Robert D. Kaplan, "The Coming Anarchy," Atlantic Monthly , February 1994, pp. 44-76. Back.
Note 21: Nicholas Onuf, World of Our Making--Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989). Back.
Note 22: This book, p. 34 Back.
Note 23: Bruce Larkin, War Scripts/Civic Scripts , manuscript in preparation. Back.
Note 24: This book, p. 76. Back.
Note 25: Now, threats emerge because the lines of security, drawn around Russian nuclear facilities, have literally dissolved, allowing fissile materials to become commodified and objects of exchange. In the market, there are no boundaries, only risks. See, e.g., David Perlman, "Russian Nuclear Security So Bad It Almost Invites Bomb Thieves," San Francisco Chronicle , Aug. 22, 1994, p.A12. Back.
Note 26: This book, p. 197-98. Back.
Note 27: "Waiting for the Barbarians," in: Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, transl., George Savidis, ed., C.P. Cavafy--Collected Poems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). Copyright (c) 1992 by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, transl. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. Back.
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