INTERNATIONAL,
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INTERNATIONAL SECURITY
SAGE LIBRARY OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS...
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INTERNATIONAL,
SECU*R!l[TY VOLUME II
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-.-.
L
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INTERNATIONAL SECURITY
SAGE LIBRARY OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
INTERNATIONAL SECURITY VOLUME I1 The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda Edited by
Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen
OSAGE Publications Los Angeles
London New Delhi Singapore
Introduction and editorial arrangement 0 Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen 2007 First published 2007 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. Every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge all the copyright owners of the material reprinted herein. However, if any copyright owners have not been located and contacted at the time of publication, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver's Yard 55 City Road London E C l Y 1SP SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B 111 1, Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road New Delhi 1 10 044 SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 33 Pekin Street #02-01 Far East Square Singapore 048763 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-4129-2139-8 (set of four volumes) Library of Congress Control Number: 2006938798 Typeset by Televi~ayTechnologies (P) Limited, Chennai Printed on paper from sustainable resources Printed and bound in Zrinski d.d Croatia
VOLUME I1 The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda 22. Economic Structure and International Security: The Limits of the Liberal Case Barry Buzan 23. Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals Carol Cohn 24. Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union As Other Simon Dalby 25. International Security Studies: A Report of a Conference on the State of the Field Joseph S. Nye, Jr. and Sean M. Lynn-Jones 26. Base Women
Cynthia Enloe
27. The Case Against Linking Environmental Degradation and National Security Daniel Deudney 28. Security, Sovereignty, and the Challenge of World Politics R.B.]. Walker 29. How the West was One: Representational Politics of NATO Bradley S. Klein 30. Soft Power Joseph S. Nye, Jr.
31. Security and Emancipation
Ken Booth
32. The Renaissance of Security Studies Stephen M. Walt 33. The Quagmire of Gender and International Security Rebecca Grant 34. Renaissance in Security Studies? Caveat Lector! Edward A. Kolodziej 35. A Tale of Two Worlds: Core and Periphery in the Post-Cold War Era James M. Goldgeier and Michael McFaul 36. Japan's National Security: Structure, Norms, and Policies Peter J. Katzenstein and Nobuo Okawara 37. The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict
Barry R. Posen
38. The Clash of Civilizations? Samuel P. Huntington 39. The Emerging Structure of International Politics Kenneth N. Waltz
378
vi
Contents
40. Common, Comprehensive, and Cooperative Security David Dewitt 41. New Dimensions of Human Security Human Development Report 1994
42. 'Message in a Bottle'? Theory and Praxis in Critical Security Studies Richard Wyn Jones
Economic Structure and International Security: The Limits of the Liberal Case Barry Buzan
T
he theory that a liberal international economy is a necessary factor in sustaining an international security system which avoids major conflict and war is widespread. The economic theory of security rests on arguments that connect economic structure to the use of force: specifically, that a liberal economic system substantially discourages the use of force among states, while a mercantilist economic structure stimulates it. In this article I shall challenge the validity of this theory on two levels. First, I shall argue that the theory is seriously unbalanced in its attempt to associate liberal structures exclusively with benign effects on the use of force, and mercantilist structures exclusively with malign ones. Liberal structures can also, and in their own terms, stimulate the use of force, while mercantilist structures can be benign. Second, I shall argue that the whole attempt to link economic structure, whether liberal or mercantilist, to international security overrates the determining role of economic factors in the broader issues of peace and war. Noneconomic factors provide much more powerful explanations than do economic ones for the major phenomena that are usually cited as supporting the theory. The immediate relevance of these arguments is to the current concern that the decline of American hegemony will lead to a collapse of the liberal economic system and therefore to a renewed cycle of conflict and war along the lines of events during the 1930s. If the arguments made here are correct, then this concern is misplaced. The current liberal system does not have to be maintained for security reasons, and security reasons are not a convincing motive for opposing a transition to some form of mercantilist economic system. I start by examining the intellectual origins of the liberal case, and by identifying which of its supporting arguments still plausibly connect economic structure to the use of force within the context of the international system since 1945. Section 2 outlines the nature of the decline in the use of force associated with the post-1945 liberal system, and it argues that noneconomic factors Source: International Organization, 38(4) ( 1984): 597-624.
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The Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security Agenda
provide more convincing explanations for the observed phenomena than do economic ones. Section 3 argues that the liberal case against mercantilism on security grounds is not credible under the conditions of the 1980s and that a good case can be made for a benign view of mercantilism. Section 4 makes the case that liberal systems contain a severe structural instability, which means that they, like mercantilist systems, can stimulate as well as constrain the use of force.
I . The L i b e r a l C a s e
The essence of the liberal case is that a liberal economic order makes a substantial and positive contribution to the maintenance of international security. Where a liberal economic order prevails, states will be less inclined to use force in their relations with each other than would otherwise be the case. Economics thus gives rise to a structural theory of international security, which posits an unspecified, but significant, level of causal linkage between the structure (basic ordering principle) of international economic relations and the noneconomic behavior of states (the use of force).' The theory is politically influential precisely because the arguments are structural: a liberal system in any historical period should generate significant restraint on the use of force. The intellectual foundations of the liberal case are closely linked to the revolution in economics triggered by Adam Smith. The new political-economics reflected the interests of the rising commercial class. Its proponents, among them Bentham and Paine, looked forward to a society based on individual rights, in which public opinion would play a major role and the state would be minimal. They believed that a natural harmony of interest both within and between states could be obtained by these reforms and that free trade was the key mechanism by which this harmony could be realized. They opposed the existing system of mercantilism, in which economic and individual interests were subordinated to the pursuit of state power and international relations were corrupted by secret diplomacy. They saw this system as serving the narrow class interests of the aristocracy, and they castigated it for both its economic inefficiency and its encouragement of unnecessary conflict. The classical liberal case thus amalgamated political and economic reforms. Free trade was central to the case, but only its most extreme advocates argued that free trade alone was a sufficient condition for peace.2 The great free-trade campaigner Richard Cobden probably represents the high point in the making of the classical liberal case. Liberal assumptions about harmony of interest lead naturally to the conclusion that a liberal economic system would be substantially less war-prone than a mercantilist one. But Cobden connected the two politically during the 1840s by bringing the peace movement into the free-trade coalition. This alliance sealed the connection between free trade and peace, a connection that still underlies the
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economic theory of international security. The belief that free trade was good for peace as well as good for prosperity was bolstered by the subsequent halfcentury experience of the Pax Britannica. So strongly embedded did it become that even the catastrophe of the First World War did not greatly diminish its intellectual and political appeal.' The economic crisis of the interwar years finally destroyed the political reign of free trade in Britain. But the experience of neomercantilism during the 1930s, and of the world war that seemed to result from it, stimulated a powerful revival of the free-trade and peace connection in the United States. Whatever the historical merits of this interpretation, Cordell Hull and others in the Roosevelt administration were strongly committed to the liberal case, believing that "If goods can't cross borders, soldiers will."4 With America finally acting as heir to Britain's role, Hull and his colleagues had both the will and the means to create an international order in which the hope for peace was strongly tied to the rebuilding of an open trading system among countries that were either democratic by tradition or else made so as a result of occupation and reform. This orthodoxy has dominated and legitimized American hegemony for the past four decades. Commitment to it underlies the current sense of crisis created by America's inability to maintain the liberal order. Protectionism, and the demand for it, is everywhere on the rise, creating the fear that another neomercantilist revival will once again set the world on the path to war. The arguments used to support the liberal case have not remained constant over the two centuries of its existence. Central to the economic side of the theory is the assumption that we have only two choices about the form of economic structure: liberal, based on free trade, and mercantilist, based on protection. Because the relationship between the two is mutually exclusive, only limited possibilities exist for policies that combine elements of both. Within this very restricted framework of choice, arguments connecting economic structure to the use of force have been made on two levels: domestic and international. In the period leading up to the triumph of free trade, arguments on the domestic level dominated the liberal case. Mercantilism was seen to arise from the nature of aristocratic states, and therefore the ~ o l i t i c a priority l of liberals was to topple the interventionist, power-seeking state structures that were the legacy of the eighteenth century. Liberals envisaged states that, because the bourgeoisie dominated national politics, would be both inherently disinclined to seek power and anxious to avoid war. The classical liberal view was, therefore, that the character of international relations was determined principally by the character of states. Liberal states would produce a harmonious system, mercantilist states a discordant one. Free trade straddled the domestic- and international-level arguments. It served on the one hand as a device for attacking the domestic bastions of the mercantilist state and on the other, as both the natural expression of the liberal state and the mechanism by which international harmony could be realized.
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The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
Unfortunately, neither the minimal states nor the perfectly competitive markets envisaged by the classical liberals developed, and consequently neither did the international harmony that they were supposed to generate. Instead, states moved toward nationalism and mass politics, and interventionist governments and highly distorted markets became everywhere the rule.5 Because history did not unfold in line with liberal assumptions, the arguments about the relationship between domestic structure and the use of force have become confused and controversial. The image of the liberal state has been subtly usurped by mass democracies whose domestic structures are far removed from those envisaged by the early 19th-century liberals. Such states still derive some of their legitimacy from the carry-over of the classical liberal image, the principal connection between the two being the ideological primacy of individualism and democracy. But the rise of socialist and Marxist ideologies - a phenomenon associated with the absorption of the lower classes into the political life of the state - has raised all sorts of new perspectives on, and new controversies about, the impact of domestic structure on the use of force. Collectivists have devised extensive critiques of capitalist democracies based on the charge that their domestic structures generate international conflict through the mechanisms of imperialism and neocolonialism. In return, the advocates of capitalist democracy have made collectivist states, whether fascist or communist, the heirs to the villainies of mercantilism. Despite their totally different class base, the neomercantilist states are seen to be as power-seeking and expansionist as their aristocratic forebears. This dispute muddies the whole contemporary question about the relationship between domestic structure and the use of force, and it denies the capitalist democracies any clear claim to the classical liberal arguments linking domestic structure to international harmony. Historical realities have also done violence to classical liberal assumptions about free trade and international harmony of interest. The original liberal assumptions were formulated in the context of a strikingly simple international economic system. Britain was the sole industrial power. Trade was therefore conducted primarily in functionally different items and reflected the high harmony of real interdependence implicit in Ricardian assumptions about comparative advantage.6 But despite the triumph of free trade in the middle of the century, or perhaps because of it, the international economic system rapidly became much more complex, and serious flaws disturbed the harmony of the long 19th-century peace. Free trade was accompanied by a massive expansion of imperialism despite vigorous opposition to such developments from the advocates of free trade.' Indeed, Lenin's interpretation sees the 19th-century harmony as resulting from the availability of colonial territory, thereby discounting the whole liberal case.8 More recent versions of this line of thinking implicate free trade as a cause of the chronic weakness of states in the periphery. Because of the rather confused balance between free trade and protectionism leading up to 1914, however, the First World War is not normally interpreted by those arguing
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Economics and Security
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within the liberal tradition as providing clear evidence either for or against the liberal case.y Equally as disturbing as imperialism was the effect of increasing numbers of industrial countries. Not only did this increase result in the growth of intense trade competition, which fed into the imperialist drive, but it also undermined the real interdependence of trade in functionally dissimilar items.'[' Rising competition also led to problems of surplus capacity and therefore, ironically, to rising demands for protectionism, as characterized most clearly by the situation in the 1980s. But despite these assaults on free trade, two important lines of argument survive that link it firmly to declining incentives for states to use force in their relations with each other. These arguments are first, that free trade substantially reduces the number of targets to which force might appropriately be applied in the pursuit of state interests; and second, that it increases the vulnerability of actors, therefore making them disinclined to entertain the risks of resorting to force. These arguments rest on direct structural consequences of free trade. Their logic - therefore stands independent of all the controversies that surround the other aspects of the liberal case. Furthermore, these arguments are on the international rather than on the national level. Their impact requires only that states be willing to implement free-trade policy. The arguments thus allow a considerable degree of flexibility in the domestic structure of states, a feature that fits well with the actual composition of the liberal economy since 1945 and no doubt accounts for some of the wide influence of the liberal case in the postwar era. Given the controversy attending the other aspects of the liberal case, especially the highly ideological debate surrounding the character of capitalist democracies, these two arguments have provided the case's backbone in the period since 1945. The balance of the liberal case has thus changed dramatically. In the classical period the absence of democracy caused the weight of argument to be focused on the domestic structure of states. But in the modern period both the predominance of democracy in the core states and the disputes about its political effects have largely shifted the burden of the case onto arguments at the international level. It is important to note that these arguments do not require perfect free trade. The modern liberal case requires only that the level of restriction on trade be sufficiently low to allow the principle of comparative advantage to operate effectively. When that condition is met, both the separation of wealth from territory and the increase in vulnerability can come into play. The logic does not require free movement of labor or capital, but the relatively free movement of money is an important factor in maintaining trade. Thus a highly imperfect free-trade system will still count as liberal. Several writers have commented on the first argument - the connection between a liberal economy and the declining attractiveness of traditional targets for the use of force - noting particularly the lowered interest in territory and wealth as objects of force in the post-1945 context." In a liberal
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
economic system the costs of using force in pursuit of economic interests are likely to outweigh any gain, because markets and resources are already available on competitive terms. The liberal claim to separate the pursuit of wealth from the control of territory marks a major distinction between liberal and mercantilist systems, and it is the basis for much of the connection between free trade and peace. When wealth and welfare are directly associated with territorial control, force has a high utility within the economic sphere. That this high utility is likely to lead to actual use of force is compellingly evinced by the history of both the 1930s and the long period of classical mercantilism that preceded the 19th-century Pax Britannica, It is this contrast with the mercantilist system that makes the role of free trade so important. Liberal economics can be offered not only as being positively conducive to peace in its own right but also as being a specific cure for the problems of mercantilism. The second argument - that free trade increases the vulnerability of states and therefore reduces their incentives to resort to force - is most frequently found in the literature on interdependence.12 The complex network of dependencies that results from free trade requires individual actors to depend increasingly on the availability of both key imports and export markets for indigenous products. This dependence on the larger pattern of exchange relations means that states become vulnerable. Participation in a liberal economy automatically erodes the pursuit of economic self-reliance. Because states in a liberal economy are more vulnerable, the use of force declines for two reasons. First, instruments other than military ones become a more effective, appropriate, reliable, and economical means of conducting international relations. Second, because states are dependent across a range of relationships, their fear of self-damage will incline them to refrain from using force even when the issues are not economic ones. These effects are amplified when the liberal system has been in operation for many years and its higher levels of welfare have become institutionalized in domestic political life. When high levels of domestic welfare are dependent on the maintenance of liberal economic relations, governments become especially vulnerable to economic pressure, as Britain discovered during the Suez crisis. In effect, interdependence becomes addictive. The preservation of accumulated joint gains necessarily becomes a core government objective. Both economic activity and political expectation structure themselves around its continuance, and withdrawal becomes increasingly costly and painful.13 Knowledge of this situation constrains governments from using military instruments for any except the most basic objectives. But if we take these two strong international-level arguments and try to use them to explain the long peace since 1945, a large anomaly emerges, namely, that the liberal system is not universal in extent. If the liberal economic system is only partially applicable to the international system as a whole, its ability to explain a period of relative harmony must be correspondingly limited. The most obvious consequence of nonuniversality is the inevitable relationship of force between the liberal subgroup and any other large international
K i i i , ~ Economics and Security
7
power. Since actors outside the liberal sphere cannot be assumed to be subject to its logic, the liberal subgroup must play the balance-of-power game in order to ensure its own security. The character of that larger game will clearly determine the overall pattern of peace and war to a much greater extent than will the internal dynamic of the liberal subsystem. Nonuniversality also has serious consequences for the liberal case on the domestic level. Two domestic lines of argument relate to those stemming from interdependence. First, it can be argued that the pressure of economic competition causes states within a liberal system to favor resource allocations to investment rather than to defense.14 Second, it can be argued that liberal economics sustains individualist, materialist, and humanist values, which erode the will of the state to use force. (A more cynical version of this second argument holds that the democratic mass politics that arises from these values forces governments to favor resource allocations to civil consumption over defense.) To the extent that these arguments are true, states within a liberal system will consistently tend to underprovide themselves with military capability. This domestic liberal dynamic traps governments within a liberal subgroup in a permanent policy dilemma. They must resolve on a continuing basis the contradiction between the internal pressure t o minimize their relationship with force and the external pressure to play the balance of power. If domestic liberalism leads to underprovision or underuse of force, governments risk the external destruction of their values. But if they overreact to external threat, they risk the internal destruction of liberal values, and possibly of the liberal economic system, by militarism. In this sense the political dynamic of liberalism, like that of any other revolutionary political ideology, is seriously constrained in realization by not being universally applied.
2. Noneconomic Explanations for the Decline in the U s e of Force since 1945 The fact that the post-1945 liberal system is not universal requires us to ask how well it corresponds to the decline in the use of force during the same period. If major discrepancies exist, the decline in the use of force must also be explained in noneconomic terms. If other explanations appear plausible, the liberal case is diminished to the extent that the alternatives are powerful. The principal area of decline in the use of force since 1945 has been the absence of war among the major powers. More arguably, there are grounds for thinking that decolonization has reduced the use of force in relations between North and South. These two categories of decline have been in what Robert Art calls the "physical" use of force: war or direct violence between states. But in what he calls the "peaceful" use of force, the picture is quite different.'' Deterrence has offset the decline in war among the major powers, by substituting a "peaceful" use far a "physical" one. Almost everywhere else the use
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The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
of military power short of fighting flourishes in the traditional fashion. Considering just "peaceful" uses of force, it is only among relations within the Western group of states that one can identify a major decline. Hardly any of these states deploy their forces against each other, and hardly any of them view others in the group as a significant source of military threat.16 Thus, while there has been no uniform decline in the use of force, there have been some significant sectional declines." By far the largest decline is centered on the Western states, particularly in relations among them but extending also to relations between them and the Soviet bloc, and perhaps between them and the countries of the Third World. The fact that the decline in the use of force has been most pronounced for the states that constitute the core of the liberal economy would seem to augur well for the liberal case, even though the liberal logic cannot explain the absence of war between East and West. But a wealth of other powerful explanations exist that cover all of the observed phenomena, both within and outside the Western group. Some of these explanations stem from military factors, others from political ones. The military paralysis that has resulted from nuclear weapons is almost universally accepted as the principal explanation for the absence of war among the major powers. Under these conditions fear of consequences becomes the prime cause of the decline in the "physical" use of force, and the emphasis of policy shifts naturally toward the narrower "peaceful" use of force represented by deterrence.18 Military factors also explain the decline in, or change in character of, the use of force by North against South. The proliferation of both political mobilization and modern military hardware to the countries of the Third World has been a major trend of the last four decades. In combination with the steep rise in the cost of conventional armed forces, this trend has substantially raised the power of resistance of the periphery to the center.19 Some of this effect might be attributed to the liberal economy through the mechanism of the arms trade. But given the extent of superpower rivalry in conditioning the distribution of arms, the economic cause does not look at all dominant. Few liberals would anyway wish to embrace this potential credit with much enthusiasm. The main political argument turns on patterns in the distribution of power, controversy centering on the relative effect of bipolar versus multipolar systems on the "physical" use of force. The proponents of bipolarity can point to the lengthening peace of the period since 1945, and the proponents of multipolarity can cite the 19th-century Pax Britannica in support of the balance-of-power case. I have assessed this debate elsewhere.20 It is often conducted in competitive tones, but both sides make the case that political structure constrains the use of force. The contemporary bipolar structure acts against the use of force both between and within its major blocs. Particularly within the Western bloc, it imposes a rigid external order that effectively constrains the significant "physical" use of force by secondary members against each other and strongly
Buzan
Economics and Security 9
downgrades incentives for most, though not all, "peaceful" uses. At this point the strategic structure blends into the economic one. We can see that the decline in the use of force among the states of the Western group has as much to d o with their political and military organization as it has to do with their membership in a liberal economic system. We can only conclude that there is a very compelling case for factors other than economic ones being prime movers in the decline in the use of force. The logic of fear stemming from military developments is both strong and rational. And the logic of political structure leads us precisely to where the effect is strongest, namely within the Western group and between that group and the Soviet bloc. The military and political factors constraining force are much more universal in extent than the economic ones, and consequently the logic of the military and political cases is not undermined by being only partial in extent. The case for the primacy of noneconomic explanations for the decline in the use of force is strengthened by the compelling argument that a liberal economic system requires, as a prior condition of its own creation, an environment in which the use of force is restrained. The logic here is analogous to the traditional arguments stemming from Hobbes, that without adequate protection of property rights by the state, economic activity will be inhibited. History reinforces this logic. In both historical examples of liberal systems hegemonic leaders (Britain and the United States, respectively) have fulfilled the prior security condition. This analysis is scarcely controversial. Many writers have commented on the importance of American military power as the foundation of interdependence and on the significance of European and Japanese security dependence on the United States for America's ability to manage the liberal economic system overalL2' One can infer from these arguments that non-universality was a major asset, perhaps even a necessary condition, for the founding of a liberal economic system after the Second World War. The fact that a liberal economy depends, as a prior condition, on the effect it is supposed to cause does not undercut the arguments made about the liberal impact on the use of force in section 1. It does, however, reinforce the claim to primacy of military and political factors as the major causes of the-decline in the use of force. At best, the liberal economic arguments can be read only as reinforcing a decline in the use of force that is already under way for other reasons.
3. How Valid is the Malevolent View of Mercantilism?
The arguments in the previous section would appear to dispose of the major security pretensions of the liberal case. But one important shot still remains in the liberal locker. Even if the liberal system itself makes only a minor contribution to peace, it can still be argued that because free trade is the only alternative to protectionism, a liberal system is the only alternative
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
to mercantilism. Since mercantilism is widely associated with periods of war, the liberal system can claim a security benefit inasmuch as its continuance prevents a reversion to protectionism. But as Robert Gilpin points out, there are benign as well as malevolent views of m e r ~ a n t i l i s mThe . ~ ~ benign view sees a mercantilist system of large, inward-looking blocs, where protectionism is predominantly motivated by considerations of domestic welfare and internal political stability. Such a system potentially avoids many of the organizational problems of trying to run a global or quasi-global liberal economy in the absence of political institutions on a similar scale. The malevolent view sees a rerun of the mercantilist dynamic of the past, in which protectionism is motivated primarily by considerations of state power. Much of the liberal claim to contribute to international security depends on the malevolent view being both valid and dominant. There is an assumption in the liberal case, usually not made explicit, that the dynamic of protectionism tends automatically to generate the conditions specified in the malevolent view. If one accepts this assumption, then the negative act of holding off a war-prone mercantilist alternative can be seen as an important, perhaps even vital, role even if the positive contribution of a liberal economy to international security is not all that great. Like some medicines, a liberal system might not be good for the patient in itself, but it may still save life by preventing a fatal condition. But is this assumption valid? While it may be true historically that mercantilism is associated with the pursuit of state power, the economic policy seems much more to result from the political one than the other way around. As illustrated by the history of the Soviet Union, power-seeking states other than the hegemon, and whether defensive or aggressive in outlook, will always have strong incentives to adopt protectionism, because self-reliance has high military and security value. But there is no compelling evidence that protectionism pursued for welfare-state purposes must inevitably, or even probably, lead to power-seeking policies. There is an ideological element here which explains why the liberal case is supported with such passion. Free trade and protectionism vie with each other for dominance over the orthodoxy of purely economic thinking. The choice between them is zero-sum, and the lines of economic dispute run deep. The economic merits of the two positions can be argued out in their own right, though as we shall see, these arguments are not wholly unrelated to the security issue. The fervor with which liberal advocates seek to condemn mercantilism thus has more to do with economic issues than with security ones. Since liberals have been in the ascendant for more than three decades, it is only natural that their malevolent view of mercantilism has become part of the conventional wisdom. The malevolent view of mercantilism derives from two theoretical propositions and a set of historical examples. The first proposition concerns the economic inefficiency of a mercantilist system, particularly its propensity to produce situations of joint loss as opposed to the potential joint gains of free
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Economics and Security
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trade. Charles Kindleberger describes this phenomenon succinctly in the context of the interwar depression: In advancing its own economic good by a tariff, currency depreciation o r foreign exchange control, a country may worsen the welfare of its partners by more than its own gain. Beggar-thy-neighbor tactics may lead to retaliation, so that each country ends up in a worse position from having pursued its own gain .... When every country turned to protect its national private interest, the world public interest went down the drain, and with it the private interests of all.'" The mechanism of joint loss is self-reinforcing because, in the malevolent view, declining production and rising unemployment increase pressure on governments to pursue competitive and mutually damaging economic behavior. This leads to a destructive spiral, which continues until domestic instability provides the seedbed for the rise of extreme nationalist governments not averse to the use of force. At some point this dynamic begins to interact with the second proposition, discussed in section 1, that a mercantilist system tends to associate power and wealth with direct control over territory. In a system of protected economies and restricted trade, control over territory guarantees access to needed markets and raw materials. As competition heightens toward conflict, major industrial centers will therefore be pushed by the economic dynamic into a dangerous, zero-sum game of empire building. Each will try to ensure itself a sphere large enough to sustain its own industrial economy, and in this process, war among the great powers is a likely outcome. The requirements of imperial control and competition necessitate the enhancement of state power, and a form of warfare-state mercantilism ensues in which the economy is heavily directed toward military and strategic purposes. This scenario was played out during the 1930s. The Soviet Union and its empire can be seen as a massive leftover from that period, still displaying the ominous character of warfare mercantilism, with its economic inefficiency, militarism, state control, political resilience, and territorialism. The experience of neomercantilism in the 1930s, and the horrors of the war that terminated it, left a deep impression on the postwar period and provided much of the rationale for the American-led liberal system founded at the end of the war. Joan Spero provides a typical statement: National protectionism and the disintegration of world trade in the 1930s created a common interest in an open trading order and a realization that states would have to cooperate to achieve and maintain that order.. .. The retreat into protectionism in the interwar period led not only to economic disaster, but also to international war.24 The fear that any return to protectionism would mean a rerun of the interwar scenario is widespread. Its typical form is a somber reference to the
12
The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
dangers of returning to the situation of the 1930s, and it underlies much of the contemporary concern about the declining liberal order.25 The anxiety to find ways of keeping the liberal system going, despite the deterioration of American leadership, reflects not only economic concerns but also deep fears that a shift in economic structure would trigger a massive deterioration in the international security e n ~ i r o n m e n t . ~ ~ But are these fears realistic? Is the past useful or deceptive as a guide to the future? Must a return to economic protectionism necessarily recreate an international system in the malevolent image of historical neomercantilism? Since I have already argued in section 2 that the factors affecting the use of force are substantially independent of economic structure, there are certainly grounds for questioning any fatalistic view that the dismal history of the 1930s must inevitably repeat itself as a consequence of a contemporary shift to protectionism. Some degree of joint loss and territorialism appear to be unavoidable tendencies in a mercantilist system. But must their consequences so dominate international relations as to produce conflict and war? Given the contemporary focus of this analysis, we can safely set aside the lessons of the classical period of mercantilism. Not only was the understanding of economics vastly less sophisticated then than now, but the international dynamics of a preindustrial economic and military system also offer few parallels for the contemporary impact of economic structure on international relations. The case of 1930s' neomercantilism is much more important. Quite what the interwar experience represents, however, is a matter of dispute. In what follows, I shall treat it in the conventional way, as a case of neomercantilism. In the next section, I shall look at it as a model for a collapsing liberal system. If we compare the conditions relevant to the use of force in the 1930s with those prevailing in the 1980s, it becomes obvious that there is no compelling case for the inevitability, or even the significant probability, of a historical rerun. In essence, the dominant noneconomic factors tending to constrain the use of force were weak in the 1930s and are strong in the 1980s. In addition, the economic conditions for protectionism in the 1980s seem much less likely than those of the 1930s to lead to competitive empire building. Upon examination the contemporary military and political factors look very different from their counterparts in the 1930s. Although what I have elsewhere called the defense dilemma2' - a divorce between defense and security arising from the destructiveness of modern weapons, and the consequent fear of war - was strong in Europe by the 1930s, it was not accompanied by the certainty of mutual devastation that derives from the nuclear arsenals of the 1980s. Offensive weapons dominated both periods, but the distinction between victory and defeat arising from their use was very stark in the 1930s and is almost nonexistent in the 1980s. In the 1930s military instruments were powerful enough to cause general terror: some images from the time of war involving aerial high-explosive and gas attacks are strikingly similar to modern images of nuclear war. But these weapons still offered to successful
R u ~ a n Economics and Security
13
users a good prospect of real and massive victory. In the 1980s nuclear weapons make a competitive empire-building scenario like that of the 1930s wildly unrealistic. The constraints on the use of force that arise from the nature of contemporary military instruments and targets d o not by any means render armed forces completely useless. But they d o make irrational in the extreme the idea of military conflict among the major powers over economic objectives. Likewise, the political structure of the international system in the 1980s is much less conducive to empire building than was the case during the 1930s. During the 1930s the balance of power was seriously weakened by the relative isolationism of the United States and the Soviet Union. China was weak and internally divided, and so a potential victim. Virtually all of Afro-Asia was incorporated within European empires and consequently offered low indigenous resistance to a change of masters. In the revisionist countries the explicitly militaristic and war-oriented ideology of fascism held sway. Empire was in vogue almost everywhere, and the disproportion between the distribution of power and the distribution of empire, when combined with a truncated balance of power, made conditions for a war over empire almost ideal. In the 1980s political conditions for empire building could hardly he worse. The balance-of-power system is extremely active and sensitive worldwide. The Soviet Union and the United States are both heavily engaged in world politics, and China has become a unified main actor in the international system. Fascism has largely been purged from the major centers of power in the West, and historical memory acts as a major block against any political revival of aggressively militaristic ideologies. Empire has become exceptionally unfashionable everywhere except, paradoxically, within the ostensibly anti-imperialist Soviet bloc, and the Third World countries have developed the political and military capability to mount strong resistance to foreign occupation. Even in the absence of nuclear weapons these conditions would raise enormously the costs and risks of imperial ventures. It makes n o difference to our analysis whether the Soviet Union is considered to be militaristic and expansionist or defensive and benign. Given the nonuniversality of the liberal system, the Soviet bloc is a constant in the analytical distinction between contemporary liberal and mercantilist international economic systems. The same is true of China. Some important elements of a bloc mercantilist system are therefore already in place, and they have a significant history within the framework of the lengthening postwar peace. O n the economic side the incentives to build empires arising from a reversion to protectionism also appear much weaker in the 1980s than during the 1930s. In the earlier period Germany, Italy, and Japan faced a severe economic squeeze as a result of the shift to protectionism. The other industrial centers all possessed adequate markets and resources, either because of their continental scale (the United States and the Soviet Union) or because of their large overseas empires (Britain and France). Unless they could carve
14
The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
out spheres commensurate with their industrial capacity, the three excluded states faced a serious deterioration in their international position. In addition, the economic collapse in the late 1920s was both rapid and deep, and so left little time for a considered adjustment. In the 1980s no major industrial power, with the possible exception of Japan, faces a serious squeeze as a result of a shift to protectionism. The Western European states already have the makings of a joint bloc, and the United States, the Soviet Union, China, and India all enjoy continental scale. The peripheral countries are free from foreign empire and would have strong incentives either to associate with an industrial core area or to maintain trade from a position of independence. The effect of the more independent position of the peripheral countries in the 1980s is illustrated by the behavior of those Third World states where Soviet influence is substantial. Algeria, Libya, and Angola all maintain strong economic ties to the West, and Cuba would like to if the Americans would allow it. The independence of the peripheral states also makes room for the argument that multinational corporations could continue to serve as a nonterritorial vehicle for economic expansion in a mercantilist system. This option existed during the 1930s on only a relatively small scale. Opinion is divided about the merits of a bloc mercantilist international system.28 However, there can be little doubt that its relatively easy availability sharply divides the character of the present international system from that during the 1930s. It does not seem unrealistic to think that regional blocs would substantially obviate the incentives to embark on 1930s-style expansionism. The key to a benign version of mercantilism lies in the existence of bloc actors sufficiently large to contain most of the resources and markets needed by their industrial cores. When such blocs exist, they create an oppportunity to synthesize the normally antagonistic policies of mercantilism and free trade. They can do so by compensating for their external protectionism with an internal cultivation of liberal economics.29This combination of a protectionist/liberal synthesis with a size sufficient for economies of scale offers a good prospect for avoiding the dynamics of the malevolent scenario. Three contemporary factors contribute to the prospects for a successful benign mercantilism. First, if one of the main incentives for expansionism in a mercantilist system is the pressure to match industrial capacity to control of markets, it can be argued that even on the level of individual states, current conditions act to diminish such pressure. Within a large regional bloc pressure might be reduced to insignificance. Domestic markets are now much larger than they used to be, both because of higher populations and because of great increases in per capita levels of consumption. Within a regional bloc markets should be large enough to provide economies of scale, and so meet the point, argued eight decades ago by J.A. Hobson, that pressures for imperialism could be countered by raising domestic c o n s ~ m p t i o n . ~ ~ Second, possession of advanced technology opens up a host of substitution possibilities for critical resources. Such technology offers a standing
Ruin11
Economics and Security
15
alternative to assertion of control over territories containing some desired resource. Investment in a technological enterprise, such as substituting nuclear power for hydrocarbons in electricity generation or developing ceramics or plastics as substitutes for scarce metals, seems likely to be more appealing than resort to the costs and uncertainties of military expansion. Even if substitution does not result in cost savings, it may still be worth pursuing as a way of achieving substantial self-reliance in such vital sectors as defense, energy, and food. The pursuit of such self-reliance would increase econon~ic security by reducing such sources of international tension and conflict as that which arose over oil during the 1970s. A third argument supporting the benign case is the predominance of welfare motives in the current shift toward protectionism." These motives revive the classical liberal assumption about the impact of public opinion on foreign policy. They are substantially divorced from the concern with state power that dominated both classical and neomercantilism. Welfare motives, unlike power motives, do not provide obviously fertile soil for the growth of extreme nationalism in domestic politics. In a system dominated by welfare mercantilism the mutual perception of motives among the actors therefore should not excite the security dilemma in anything like the same way as would mutual perceptions of welfare-mercantilist motives. The welfare motive offers a possibility of keeping alive many of the more useful normative elements of relations in a liberal system in a way that would be impossible were protectionism seen to be aimed openly at the pursuit of state powec3' Such nationalist tendencies are anyway more difficult to mobilize within the context of a bloc. If the bloc is composed of many small and mediumsized states, like the European Community, it is most likely to be a liberal system internally, in which case the question of aggressive nationalism hardly arises. Even if the bloc is dominated by an authoritarian, hegemonic state, the requirements of bloc cohesion create pressure on the leader to avoid excesses of either exploitation or domination. The Soviet experience in COMECON illustrates the point. Although there is not space here to develop a full picture of a benign mercantilist system, it should be noted that the bloc system outlined above could be quite similar to some variants of weak liberal systems. Because mercantilist blocs can combine liberalism and protectionism, they can serve as the basis for weak liberal systems along either rule-based or collective-leadership lines. Such a system might be called either "protected liberalism" or "liberal protectionism," according to its emphasis. The point of so labeling it is to indicate that viable and stable options exist in the middle ground between the traditionally irreconcilable poles of liberalism and mercantilism. The mercantilist part of such an economic structure would reduce the scale and scope of the international economic management problem. Without some reduction, it seems unlikely that weak management structures could maintain a liberal system. But with less to manage, because more management would be decentralized to the bloc level, a weak macromanagement system might
16
The Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security Agenda
well suffice. Welfare-protectionist blocs would seek a considerable measure of self-reliance for the reasons already argued, but they would still want some, perhaps substantial, trade and so would still require a macromanagement system of some sort. On this model the distinction between a weak, nonhegemonic liberal system and a benign mercantilist one begins to blur. The possibility emerges of a hybrid system that combines most of the security advantages of both its parents while minimizing their disadvantages. We can only conclude from this comparison of the conditions of the 1930s with those in the 1980s that there is no strong case for the malevolent view of mercantilism under the conditions of the contemporary international system. Both the economic and the noneconomic factors that influence the use of force are so different between the two periods that no significant structural parallel can be drawn between them. This conclusion does not deny the basic logic of the argument that, other things being equal, a successfully functioning liberal economic system provides more constraints on the use of force than does a mercantilist one. As we have seen, that logic is both internally coherent and powerful. The purpose of the present exercise is to set the logic in its proper context, for only then does its relatively minor importance as a mover of events become clear. Taken by itself, the liberal logic deceives more than it enlightens. Because it ignores, or discounts, both the impact of other factors bearing on the use of force and the influence of variables within the economic domain itself, the liberal argument produces a distorted, and excessively gloomy, image of mercantilism. For the 1980s and beyond, both the general constraint on the use of force and the nature of economic conditions make the benign image of mercantilism look credible. Although a mercantilist system does give rise to pressures for conflict, the argument is that under contemporary conditions these pressures will be both muted by economic factors and contained by political and military ones.
4. Liberal Economic Structure as a Stimulant to the Use of Force
So far, we have focused on the constraining effects of a liberal economy on the use of force. Although we have not found the liberal case to be very compelling, that conclusion does not detract from the many economic and security benefits that a liberal economy provides. If, however, we find that a liberal economy actually stimulates the use of force in significant ways, liberalism will join mercantilism in the shadow of the suspicion that its security costs might outweigh its other benefits. The traditional critique of the liberal position on international security derives from Lenin's work on imperialism. Its arguments about the expansionist, exploitative, competitive, and violent nature of capitalism are well understood and do not need to be rehearsed here. Because of its ideological content, this critique has become part of a rigid and institutionalized division of opinion, within which the pressure is more to take sides than it is to
Ruzav
Economics and Security
17
engage in constructive debate. As a consequence of this politicization, critiques of liberalism along these lines are unlikely to have much impact on policy regardless of their merits. Much more important, therefore, are critiques mounted from ideological positions closer to, or better within, the liberal tradition itself. Here we can find two lines of argument connecting a liberal economy positively to the use of force. One is minor and is in some senses ideologically derived from the Marxist view. The other is major and sits squarely within the liberal logic. The major argument concerns the structural instability of liberal international economies and their tendency to produce periodic collapses of such magnitude as to destabilize the whole pattern of international relations. The minor one concerns the pattern of center-periphery relations, even within a successful liberal economy, as a cause of conflict and interventionism in the periphery. I have made the argument about center-periphery relations elsewhere."' In essence it is that a liberal economy concentrates power at a center to the detriment of its peripheral members. The dynamic of the international economy works to keep state structures in the periphery weak and to concentrate wealth and welfare benefits disproportionately toward the center. Because the periphery is both politically weak and economically poor, the use of force is common in the domestic political life of the states there. Intervention by center interests in this use of force is normal, although direct intervention has, in the postcolonial era, become unfashionable almost everywhere except in Francophone Africa." When the liberal economy is not universal in extent, the problem of intervention in the periphery is exacerbated by the global competition among the leading states within the balance of power. Although this argument is not without significance, it is also not without critics and does not constitute, in my opinion, a substantial indictment of the liberal economic system on the grounds of its relationship to the use of force. Even if the argument is accepted in full, it seems more than offset by the contribution of a free-trade economy to a general restraint on the use of force. That restraint has been best illustrated by the unwillingness of the Western powers during the 1970s to use force against, or even to threaten seriously, the Middle Eastern oil-poducing states. But perhaps the most telling point against it is that the problems of the periphery arise primarily from the relative political, economic, and military weakness of its component states. Their weakness has many causes and is so deeply ingrained that the choice between a liberal and a mercantilist economic system as the context for it would make very little difference to the problem in anything but the very long term. While the liberal economy may not have lived up to its own best hopes for the periphery, it has not performed conspicuously worse in the matter of the use of force than any realistic alternative. These arguments, unfortunately, are not susceptible t o proof one way or the other. However, the major argument about structural instability leads to a very serious indictment of the liberal economic system in its own terms. It hinges on the requirement of the liberal economy for a level of political and economic
18
The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
order sufficient to allow the development of international patterns of trade and production. A security system has to be provided, as discussed above in section 2, and also a basic set of economic rules and services. As Kindleberger argues, the system needs an underwriter to "provide a market for distress goods, a steady if not countercyclical flow of capital, and a rediscount mechanism for providing liquidity," as well as to "manage, in some degree, the structure of foreign exchange rates, and provide a degree of coordination of domestic monetary policies."35 Without these services a large-scale interdependent international economy cannot develop in the essentially hostile environment of the anarchic international political system. The essence of the problem is that a liberal economy must try to organize itself on a scale that far outreaches the level of political organization available in the highly fragmented state system. Ideally, the solution would be a world government of some sort, but that is unlikely to be available within the foreseeable future. Only three other options exist: the services can be provided by a single relatively powerful state that is able and willing to play hegemonic leader; they can be provided by a coalition of leading powers acting jointly, where none is strong enough to take the hegemonic role; or they can be provided by general agreement on, or at least adherence to, a set of rules based on a broadly understood and accepted view of collective interest. Both historical experience and the weight of expert opinion support the view that a hegemonic leader is by far the most realistic of these options and indeed that it may well be the only viable one. The key point is that liberal international economies seem to arise only as a result of exceptionally powerful states projecting their own economic interests into the wider international environment. The two historical cases of a liberal system are both based on hegemonic leaders seeking to enhance their economic primacy by opening the rest of the international system to free trade. In addition, the theory of collective goods gives strong support to the case that hegemonic leadership is the best, and probably the only, option for creating and managing a liberal international economy.36The theory points out that shared interest is not a sufficient condition for the creation of the management structures necessary to provide the desired collective good. Consequently, such goods are most likely to be provided when a single large actor produces them for the rest of the system as a byproduct of its pursuit of its own interests, as both the United States and Britain have done. So long as the international political structure remains anarchic, it seems most unlikely that a liberal system could be created by any mechanism other than a hegemonic actor. The interesting question is whether or not an already existing liberal system can be maintained by other means when the originating hegemonic power no longer has sufficient relative strength to act as underwriter. These other means - collective management and pure rules systems - tend to get serious consideration only as fallback positions when hegemonic leadership is failing. They are, for obvious reasons, most vigorously promoted by the declining hegemon itself, and their prospects depend on the existence of widespread support for the system among its principal
fiiic,ir
Economics and Security
19
participants. If the other participants see the system more as a quasi-imperial expression of the hegemon than as a cooperative order based on mutual perceptions of harmonious self-interests, these weaker forms of management will have little chance of success."' Neither collective management nor a rules-only system has been tried extensively in practice. Neither attracts much intellectual enthusiasm, not least because both are subject to the powerfully adverse logic of collective goods theory. That logic holds even if common perceptions of joint interest are held quite firmly. If the consensus on common interests is weak, or significantly contested, the weak management options become even more doubtful as viable alternatives to hegemonic leadership. The bases for collective leadership in the contemporary system are not at all obvious given the very different and contradictory domestic pressures affecting governments in the United States, Japan, and Europe. Furthermore, the problems that cause the decline of the hegemonic leader seem likely to exacerbate divisions within a collective leadership, which, because of its inevitably less cohesive structure, would have lower resistance to them than would a single actor. Significant disputes about the benefits of the system automatically invalidate the rules option, since it requires, by definition, a tight consensus. That requirement appears to limit rules systems to a lowest common denominator, which may well be so weak as to differ little from the benign mercantilist system outlined in the previous section. Once the hegemon loses control, there seems to be no escape from the pressures to bring the international economic structure closer into line with that of the more fragmented international political structure. From that perspective, benign bloc mercantilism stands as an attractive middle option between the unstable universal pretensions of liberalism and a destructive reversion to protectionism on a national scale. If we accept that a liberal economic system needs a hegemonic leader to provide its required framework of collective goods, then we arrive at the essence of the problem. Hegemonic leaders do not endure, and when their leadership fails, a high risk is created of major disruption of the pattern of international relations. Such disruption is very likely to increase dramatically the incentives for the use of force. Two types of crisis can result from the failure of a hegemonic leader. Either there is a struggle for succession, such as the one that attended the decline of Britain, or there is no successor, as with the United States in the 1980s. In the first instance, as Gilpin rather blandly observes, "Unfortunately, the world had to suffer two world conflicts before an American-centered liberal world economy was substituted for a British-centered one."" In the second instance there is a drawn-out attempt to fill the growing vacuum at the center with collective leadership and rules. This attempt may be sustained by the momentum and habits of the successful hegemonic period for quite some time after the hegemon has ceased to lead effectively. Its strength and longevity depend on the balance of power within the secondary core states, between those who see the liberal system as a cooperative exercise reflecting joint interests and those who see it as a quasi-imperial extension
20
The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
of the hegemon's interests. We are condemned to live through the history that will give us a full-term case study of this type of crisis. In either case the collapse of the liberal system, if it occurs, places tremendous strains on all the actors enmeshed within it. As we have seen, actors progressively adapt their behavior to the workings of the liberal economy. This economic restructuring is accompanied by social and political shifts, which are much harder to readjust quickly than are the patterns of investment and production that give rise to them. Patterns of employment and welfare expectation get rooted in the domestic life of the nation and pose serious political problems when the economic conditions necessary for their maintenance disappear. Economic interdependence, as argued in section 1, has an addictive quality for those actors caught up in it. While such a quality is useful as a support for the stability of the liberal system, it increases hardship when the system breaks down. If the economic collapse is relatively quick, as it was in the 1930s, the adjustment problem is severe. Even when it is slow, as has been the case during the 1970s and 1980s, the difficulty of domestic adjustment combined with hopes for continuance of the liberal system may contrive to prevent a measured adaptation and so lead to a rapid collapse at some point. The risk in all this is that a precipitate collapse in the liberal economy may create such strains in the fabric of international relations that the incentives for the use of force increase. The classic scenario here is once again that of the 1930s. Should the interwar period be seen as a case study of mercantilism or as a case study of a collapsing liberal system? The conventional wisdom sees it as a demonstration of the evils of mercantilism along the lines argued above. But as David Calleo points out, the events leading up to the Second World War can also be seen as a consequence of the collapsing liberal system." The wreckage of a failed liberal system, in which each state is striving to defend its interests, is hardly ideal ground on which to build benign mercantilism, and the period itself is a very short one on which to base judgments about mercantilism as a whole. The argument is that liberal systems are unstable. Whatever their merits when they are functioning successfully, liberal systems pose periodic threats of a considerable stimulus to the use of force. The underlying cause of this problem is the apparent inability of the liberal system to create durable political institutions of sufficient scale and strength to match its economic reach. The expedient of a hegemonic leader can produce an effective liberal system, but only for a limited period. Hegemonic leaders cannot sustain their position indefinitely, and many explanations are on offer for the apparently inexorable process of their decline. Some of these explanations relate to the character of the hegemonic state, and the impact on it of the hegemonic role, others relate to the character of the system that the hegemon has to manage and the tendencies for the managerial problem to become more difficult.40 With regard to the impact on the hegemonic leader, attention focuses on several problems: long-term economic self-weakening through the export of inflation,41 and the outflow of capital and technology;42 the growth of
Rwan
Economics and Security
21
structural rigidities in the economy as a result of sociopolitical demands arising from the sustained experience of power and s u c c e ~ s ; ~ b nthe d disproportionate costs, particularly military, that burden the hegemon's economy in relation to its rivals.44It can also be argued, but more controversially, that the cumulative political effects of a liberal economic system tend to erode the hegemonic leader's will to use force, thereby undermining its ability to sustain its security role in the system. With regard to the problem of system management, attention focuses on the rising domestic resistance in member countries to the pressure for rapid and continuous socioeconomic adaptation created by the operation of a liberal economy;4s the tendency for resentment to mount against the hegemon either because of its advantaged position or because of real or alleged abuse of privilege;46 the increasing difficulty of the management problem because of the growing volume and complexity of transactions in a successful trading system;47and the tendency for the hegemonic state to create a more plural system because of the way in which its export of capital and technology encourages the growth of competing industrial centers.4x The last of these points feeds back strongly into the first through the mechanism of unemployment, thus creating an ironic parallel to the liberal image of malevolent mercantilism outlined in section 3. As the liberal economy succeeds in creating more and stronger industrial centers, problems of surplus capacity arise. Intense competition easily leads to loss of trade and hence to unemployment in the older industrial areas. This problem of surplus capacity is illustrated clearly by the contemporary fate of technologically accessible industries like shipbuilding and steel. By this route a liberal system ends up producing the domestic political pressures conventionally associated with mercantilism. A last point on the system level derives from the traditional political argument that the logic of the balance of power works against the existence of a hegemonic power. A concentration of power sufficient to enable a hegemonic leader to exist is naturally antagonistic to the anarchic dynamic that tends to counterbalance any accumulation of power sufficient to overawe the system as a whole. This older wisdom may be no more than the sum of the more detailed points made above. It certainly explains why liberal systems have been the historical exception rather than the rule.4' The dependence of a liberal economy on a hegemonic leader, the apparent impossibility of any state's sustaining that role, the considerable uncertainty about the viability of alternative management techniques, and the disruption of international relations by a collapse of a liberal economy, all point to a serious risk of a liberal system undermining international security. The reality of this risk is illustrated by the two world wars associated with the decline of Britain. We can conclude that liberalism, like mercantilism, can be either benign or malevolent in relation to the use of force. With liberalism, the effect is most likely to be sequential, with a benign period being followed by a malevolent one as the strength of the hegemonic power declines. With mercantilism, the effect is most likely t o be clear one way or
22
The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
the other, the outcome depending on the motives underlying protectionism. Where the motives concern the pursuit of state power, the malign effect is likely. Where they concern welfare, benign mercantilism becomes possible. But in neither case are factors arising from economic structure likely to dominate the use of force. As I argued in section 2, the use of force is influenced much more powerfully by military and political factors than by economic ones. The danger arises when a malevolent economic structure, whether liberal or mercantilist, coincides with military and political conditions conducive to the use of force. This was the case during the 1930s, but it does not appear to be a significant hazard for the foreseeable future.
Conclusion We are left with a rather evenly balanced set of arguments about the relationship between economic structure and international security. Because of the dominance of military and political factors in determining the use of force, the impact of economic structure on international security is anyway subordinate. Within that subordinate position the choice between liberalism and mercantilism offers no decisive direction. Benign and malevolent features attend both options, but their effects are not strong enough to determine the basic character of international relations. In other words, the effect of either a liberal or a mercantilist economic structure is too heavily influenced by the particularities of other historical conditions to have, by itself, a predictable impact on the stability of international relations. O n these grounds, we can conclude that the conventional wisdom of the liberal case is extremely weak. Liberal economic structure has neither a strong nor an unconditional constraining effect on the use of force. Security considerations therefore cannot be used convincingly either as a major support for maintaining the contemporary international economic system or as a decisive point against moving toward a more mercantilist structure of international economic relations. This conclusion lacks the simple blackand-white certainty of the liberal case. But it does have the advantage of making available the benign mercantilist option as an acceptable alternative when the liberal system begins to look unsustainable. Such an alternative goes a long way toward removing the dilemma that liberal ideologues create for themselves. Because they reject mercantilism on security as well as on economic grounds, they are left with nowhere to turn when the liberal system collapses. If these arguments are correct, recent thinking on how to manage a liberal system in the absence of hegemonic leadership might fruitfully be reoriented toward the more salient problem of how to manage the transition from a liberal to a mercantilist international economic structure. A major issue within that transition is how to ensure that the new mercantilism is organized on a scale sufficient to avoid serious economic difficulties. A shift of thinking along these lines should be helped by the realization that the polarization between
li~i/dri
Economics a n d Security
23
liberal and mercantilist systems is frequently overdrawn. The middle ground is not merely a space that has to be crossed in the transition from one extreme to another. It contains real options, which could well be more stable than the theoretical ideals of efficiency and self-reliance that lie on either side.
Acknowledgements 1 would like to thank Charles Jones, Robert Skidelsky, Chris Farrands, and the reviewers for International Organrzation for their comments on various drafts of this article.
Notes 1. Some wrlters, for example, R~chardK. Ashley, T h e Polttrcal Economy of War and P e a ~ e (London: Pmter, 1980), pp. 269-86, and Immanuel Wallerstem, "The Rise and Future Dein~se Comparatrve Studres rn Socrety and H r s t ~ r y16, 4 (1974), of the World C a p ~ t a l ~ System," st pp. 387-415, would take the view that this is too narrow a conception of economic structure: that it represents at best a substructure within a larger framework. Of other theories about the relationship between economic structure and the use of force, Marxism-Leninism is an obvious example. For a summary and critique of the Marxist view, see Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 75-84. 2. The extreme liberal position has already been adequately dismissed, for example, in Lord Robbins, Money, Trade and International Relatrons (London: Macmillan, 1971),chaps. 9 and 1 1. 3. On the intellectual history of liberal thinking, and its connection to free trade, see F.H. Hlnsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 196.3), chaps. 5 and 6 . On the history of free trade up to the 1930s, see Norman McCord, ed., Free Tradc: Theory and Practice from Adam Smith t o Keynes (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1970). 4. Richard N. Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Drplomacy: T h e Origins and Prospects of O u r Internotronal Econonllc Order (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 7-9. See also pp. 101-12, 382-84. 5. For a summary of this development, see E.H. Carr, Natiotralrsm and After (1945; rpr. 1.ondon: Macmillan, 19681, pp. 1-33. 6. Kenneth Waltz, "The Myth of Interdependence," in Charles Kindleberger, ed., The. international Corporatzon (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970), pp. 205-6. 7. See John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, "The Imperialism of Free Trade," and Oliver MacDonagh, "The Anti-Imperialism of Free Trade," both in A.G.L.. Shnw, ed., Great Brrtarn and the Colorizes 181.5-186.5 (London: Methuen, 1970), chaps. 7 and 8; and D.C.M. I'latt, "The Imperialism of Free Trade: Some Reservations," Economic History Review 2 1 , 2 ( 1968 1, pp. 296-306. 8. V.I. Lenm, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalisnz (1916). For a less ideological discussion of the role of "environmental supply" in international relations, see Richard Rosecrance, international Relations: Peace or War? (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), chap. 6. 9. See Robert Skidelsky, "Retreat from Leadership: The Evolution of British Economic Foreign Policy, 1870-1939," in Benjamin Rowland, ed., Balance of Power or Hegemony: T h e Interwar Monetary System (New York: New York University Press, 1976), pp. 147-92, and Stephen D. Krasner, "State Power and the Structure of International Trade," World Politics 28. 3 (1976), pp. 317-47. 10. Waltz, "Myth of Interdependence," pp. 205-20. 1 I. Klaus Knorr, Power and Wealth (Imndon: Macrnillan, 1973), p. 196, and "On the International Uses of Military Force in the Contemporary World," Orbrs 2 1, 1 ( 1977), pp. 7-9, 16; Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, Power and Interdependence (Boston: I.ittle, Brown, 1977), p. 28; Robert W. Tucker, T h e inequality of Nations (London: Robertson, 19771,
24
The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
pp. 174-75; Robert J. Art, "To What Ends Military Power?" lnternational Security 4, 4 (1980), pp. 31-35; and Wolfram Hanrieder, "Dissolving International Politics: Reflections on the Nation-State," American Political Science Review 72, 4 (1978), pp. 1279-80. 12. See, for example, Keohane and Nye, Power a n d Interdependence, pp. 28-29; Tucker, Inequality of Nations, pp. 174-75; and Robert Gilpin, US. P o u w and the Multinational Corporation (London: Macmillan, 1976), p. 227. 13. Edward L. Morse, "Interdependence in World Affairs," in J.N. Rosenau, K.W. Thompson, and G. Boyd, eds., World Politics (New York: Free I'ress, 1976), p. 676; Knorr, Power and Wealth, p. 9; C.A. Murdock, "Economic Factors as Objects of Security," in Klaus Knorr and Frank Trager, eds., Economic Issues and National Security (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1977), pp. 70-72; and Hanrieder, "Dissolving International Politics," pp. 1279-80. 14. For discussion, see Gilpin, War and Change, chap. 4. 15. Art, "To What Ends," p. 5. Thomas Schelling and Robert Osgood have also made extensive use of a very similar distinction. See Schelling, Arms a n d Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), chap. 1, and Osgood and Robert W. Tucker, Force, Order andlustice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), pt. I, chaps. 1 and 3. 16. Greece and Turkey are notable exceptions t o this generalization. 17. For the disutility view, see Walter Millis, "The Uselessness of Military Power," in William Coplin and Charles Kegley Jr., eds., A Multi-Method Introduction to International Politics (Chicago: Markham, 1971), pp. 114-27. Public doubts about the utility of force arose both from the paralysis of deterrence and from America's debacle in Vietnam. They stimulated a host of rebuttals, most of which focused on the continued utility of "peaceful" uses of force despite increased restraints on its "physical" use. See Art, "To What Ends," pp. 27-29; Michael Howard, "Military Power and lnternational Order," lnternational Affairs 4 0 , 3 (1964), p. 405; Osgood and Tucker, Force, Order and Justice, p. 179; Edward A. Kolodziej and Robert Harkavy, "Developmg States and the International Security System," Journal of International Affairs 34, 1 (1980), p. 59; Laurence Martin, "The Changed Role of Military Power," International Affairs special issue (November 1970), p. 107. For a useful overview of the debate, see Knorr, "On the International Uses," pp. 5-27. 18. O n this theme see Martin, "Changed Role," pp. 101-6; Howard, "Military Power," pp. 397-408; Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (London: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 189-94; and Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear: The National Security Problem rn lnternational Relations (Brighton: Harvester, 1983), chap. 6. 19. Keohane and Nye, Power a n d Interdependence, pp. 28-29; Knorr, Power and Wealth, respectively, p. 196, and pp. 7-9, 13-15, 18-19; and Kolodziej and Harkavy, "Developing States," pp. 59-87. 20. Buzan, People, States and Fear, chap. 4. For the bipolar case, see Kenneth Waltz, Theory of Internatronal Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979), chap. 8. 21. For example, Art, "To What Ends," pp. 29-30; Charles L. Schultze, "The Economic Content of National Security Policy," Foreign Affairs 51, 3 (1973), pp. 529-35; Fred Hirsch and Michael Doyle, "Politicization in the World Economy: Necessary Conditions for an International Economic Order," in Hirsch, Doyle, and Edward L. Morse, Alternatives to Monetary Disorder (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977), pp. 25-34; Gilpin, War a n d Change, pp. 253-55; and L.B. Krause and J.S. Nye, "Reflections on the Economics and Politics of International Economic Organizations," in C.F. Bergsten and Krause, eds., World Politrcs a n d International Economics (Washingon, D.C.: Brooking, 1975), pp. 324-25. 22. Gilpin, U.S. Power, pp. 234-35. 23. Charles P. Kindleberger, The World in Depressron 1929-19.39 (London: Allen Lane, 1973), pp. 26, 292. 24. Joan E. Spero, The Politics of International Economic Relations (London: Allen & Unwin, 1977), p. 65. See also Robert Gilpin, "Economic Interdependence and National Security in Historical Perspective," in Knorr and Trager, Economic Issues, p. 55; Krause and Nye, "Reflections," p. 324; David H. Blake and Robert S. Walters, The Politics of Global Economic Relatrons (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976), pp. 11-12; Hirsch and Doyle, "Politicization," p. 15.
Buran
Economics and Security
25
25. For example, Blake and Walters, Politics of Global Economic Relations, p. 26; Douglas Evans, The Polrtics of Trade: The Evolution of the Superbloc (1.ondon: Macmillan, 1974), pp. 15-16; Schultze, "Economic Content," pp. 538-39. 26. For one left-of-center scenario, see Mary Kaldor, T h e Disintegrating West (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978). 27. Buzan, People, States and Fear, chap. 6. 28. David Calleo, "The Decline and Rebuilding of an International Economic System," in Calleo et al., Money and the Comtng World Order (New York: New York University Press, 1976), pp. 51-62, and "The Historiography of the Interwar Period: Reconsiderations," in Rowland, Balance of Power, pp. 232-51, is perhaps the strongest proponent of bloc mercantilism. Hirsch and Iloyle, "Politicization," pp. 49-55, seem to lean in this direction, though they do nor make their position explicit. Evans, Politics of Trade, sees such blocs as a coming trend but has mixed vlews abour their merits, fearmg that they will recreate the environment of the 1930s. Charles Kindleberger, "Systems of International Economic Organization," in Calleo et al., Money and the Coming World Order, pp. 28-30, thinks that a hloc system would not work. 29. The economic debate on this idea is suggestive but inconclusive. The original work hy Jacob Vlner, The Customs Union lssue (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1950), argued that a customs union (for example, a regional bloc) might well compensate in internal efficiencies what it lost by imposing trade barriers between itself and the rest of the world. This would be so particularly if the global tradlng system already deviated substantially from free-trade behavior. Static analysis, however, does not cope well with this problem, and the exist~nglirrrarure has made little headway against the mass of nonstandard and dynamic v ~ r i ahles that mfluence the outcome in any given case. See Peter Robson, The Economics of lnternational Integration (London: Allen & Unwin, 1980), and Am El-Agraa and A.J. Jo~les, Theory of Customs Unions (Oxford: Allan, 1981). See also the fairly positive econon~icview of a hloc mercantilist projection in lnterfutures: Facrng the Future (Paris: OECD, 1979). 30. J.A. Hohson, Imperialism: A Study (London: Nisbet, 1902), pp. 91, 99. David Calleo and Benjamin Rowland, America and the World Political Economy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), chap. 10, argue for a slmilar approach. 31. Predominantly welfare motives in protectionism have roots golng back at least as far as F. List in the 19th century, and they can also be found in the work of Polanyi, Keynes, arid E.H. Carr (see David J. Sylvan, "The Newest Mercantilism," International Organization 35, 2 1198 I ] , pp. 381-82). In the contemporary context, Melvyn B. Krauss, The N e w Protectronrsm: The Welfare State and lnternational Trade (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), esp. pp. xx-xxiii, gives a detailed, but unsympathetic, account of welfare protectionism. John C;. Ruggie, "Internarional Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in rhe Posrwar Economic Order," Internatronal Organization 36, 2 (1982), pp. 379-415, gives a penetrating insight into the links between the post-1945 liberal system and the emergent welfare protectionism. 32. On the continuity o f these normative elements, see Ruggie, "International Regimes," esp. pp. 393-415. 33. Buzan, People, States and Fear, chap. 5. See also Calleo and Rowland, America and the World, chaps. 9 and 10, and Johan Galtung, "A Structural Theory of Imperialism," Journal of Peace Research 8, 2 (1971), pp. 8 1-1 18. 34. O n this theme, see Barry Buzan, "Security Strategies for Dissociation," in lohn Ruggie, ed., The Antinomies of Interdependence: National Welfare and the International Uiz~isionof Labor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), chap. 8. 35. Charles P. Kindleberger, "Dominance and Leadership in the International Economy," International Studies Quarterly 25, 2-3 (1981), p. 247. 36. On the collective goods point, see Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations: E c o n o m ~ rGrowth, Stagflation, and Social Rzgidities (New Haven: Yale IJniversity Press, 1982); Olson and R. Zeckhauser, "An Economic Theory of Alliances," Revieu, o f Eronomri.s and Statistics 48, 3 (1966), pp. 266-79; Bruce M. Russett and John D. Sullivan, "Collect~ve Goods and International Organization," lnternational Organization 2 5 , 4 ( 1 971), pp. 845-65; and Olson, "Increasing the Incentives for lnternat~onal Cooperation," Irtternatio~~al Orgonrzation 25, 4 ( 1 9 7 l ) , pp. 866-74.
26
The Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security Agenda
37. Views in support of the necessity of a hegemonic leader can be found in Skidelsky, "Retreat from Leadership"; Kindleberger, "Systems," pp. 35-38, World in Depression, pp. 26-28, 292-308, and "Dominance and Leadership," pp. 242-53; Robert 0 . Keohane, "The Theory of Hegemonic Stability and Changes in International Economic Regimes, 1967-1977," in Ole Holsti, R. Siverson, and A.L. George, eds., Change in the International System (Boulder: Westview, 1980); and Gilpin, U.S. Power. One of the few sources explicitly enthusiastic about collective leadership is Keohane and Nye, Power and Interdependence, pp. 229-35. Views against the practicality of collective leadership can be found in Kindleberger, "Dominance and Leadership," p. 253, "Systems," pp. 35-37, and World in Depression, pp. 299-308; and Calleo, "Decline and Rebuilding," pp. 51-52. Ruggie, "International Regimes," argues with some enthusiasm for the potential of a rule-based system, and Cleveland, in Calleo et al., Money and the Coming World Order, and Hanrieder, "Dissolving International Politics," lean in this direction, but more out of resignation than enthusiasm. Kindleberger, "Systems," pp. 37-38, rejects the rules system explicitly. Even Ruggie views the rules system primarily as an extension of a prior period of hegemonic leadership. 38. Gilpin, U.S. Power, p. 259. 39. Calleo, "Historiography of the Interwar," pp. 252-60. 40. Kindleberger, "Dominance and Leadership," pp. 242-53, makes the distinction between leadership greed and free riders as the cause of entropy in a liberal system. For a detailed discussion of this question generally, see Gilpin, War a n d Change, chaps. 4 and 5. See also Buzan, People, States and Fear, pp. 1 4 6 4 9 . For a historical examination of the British decline from leadership, see Skidelsky, "Retreat from Leadership." 41. Calleo, "Decline and Rebuilding," pp. 50-51, "Historiography of the Interwar," p. 259, and "Inflation and American Power," Foreign Affairs 5 9 , 4 (1981), pp. 781-812; C.F. Bergsten, Robert Keohane, and J.S. Nye, "International Politics and International Economics: A Framework for Analysis," lnternational Organization 29, 1 (1975), pp. 11-18. 42. Skidelsky, "Retreat from Leadership," pp. 154-68; Krasner, "State Power," p. 320; Sylvan, "Newest Mercantilism," pp. 376-78. 43. Olson, Rise and Decline, elevates the role of domestic structural rigidities t o the status of a general perspective o n macroeconomics. See also Keohane, "Theory of Hegemonic Stability"; R.I. Meltzer, "Contemporary Dimensions of International Trade Relations," in Knorr and Trager, Economic Issues, p. 215. 44. OECD, Interfutures, pp. 377-78; Calleo, "Inflation and American Power," pp. 794-812. 45. William Diebold, Jr., "Adaptation to Structural Change," International Affairs 54, 4 (1978), pp. 573-88; Jacques Pelkmans, "The Many Faces of National Economic Security," and Theo Peeters, "National Economic Security and the Maintenance of the Welfare State," in Frans A.M. Alting von Geusau and Pelkmans, eds., National Economic Security: Perspectives, Threats and Policies (Tilburg, Netherlands: John F. Kennedy Institute, 1982), chaps. 1 and 3; OECD, Interfutures, pp. 122-86; Klaus Knorr, "Economic Interdependence and National Security," C.A. Murdock, "Economic Factors as Objects of Security," and Gilpin, "Economic Interdependence," all in Knorr and Trager, Economic Issues. Many of these negative pressures are common to both the hegemon (see note 43) and other states within the liberal economic system. See also Buzan, People, States and Fear, pp. 142-44. 46. Gilpin, "Economic Interdependence," pp. 34-35, 39-42; Calleo, "Decline and Rebuilding," pp. 4 4 4 5 , 50-51, and "Historiography of the Interwar," p. 259. 47. Morse, "Interdependence," pp. 670-81. 48. Skidelsky, "Retreat from Leadership," pp. 163-64. 49. Hirsch and Doyle, "Politicization," p. 34; Evans, Polrtics of Trade, p. viii.
Sex and Death in t h e Rational W o r l d o f Defense Intellectuals Carol Cohn
"I can't believe that," said Alice. "Can't you?" the Queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes." Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said. "One can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." [LEWIS CAKKOLL, Through the Looking Class] y close encounter with nuclear strategic analysis started in the summer of 1984. I was one of forty-eight college teachers (one of ten .women) attending a summer workshop on nuclear weapons, nuclear strategic doctrine, and arms control, taught by distinguished "defense intellectuals." Defense intellectuals are men (and indeed, they are virtually all men) "who use the concept of deterrence to explain why it is safe to have weapons of a kind and number it is not safe to use."' They are civilians who move in and out of government, working sometimes as administrative officials or consultants, sometimes at universities and think tanks. They formulate what they call "rational" systems for dealing with the problems created by nuclear weapons: how to manage the arms race; how to deter the use of nuclear weapons; how to fight a nuclear war if deterrence fails. It is their calculations that are used to explain the necessity of having nuclear destructive capability at what George Kennan has called "levels of such grotesque dimensions as t o defy rational understanding."' At the same time, it is their reasoning that is used to explain why it is not safe to live without nuclear weapons.' In short, they create the theory that informs and legitimates American nuclear strategic practice. For two weeks, I listened to men engage in dispassionate discussion of nuclear war. I found myself aghast, but morbidly fascinated - not by nuclear weaponry, or by images of nuclear destruction, but by the extraordinary Source: S~gns:Jo~rrnalo f Women In Culture and Society, 12(4)( 1 987): 687-71 8.
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The Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security Agenda
abstraction and removal from what I knew as reality that characterized the professional discourse. I became obsessed by the question, How can they think this way? At the end of the summer program, when I was offered the opportunity to stay on at the university's center on defense technology and arms control (hereafter known as "the Center"), I jumped at the chance to find out how they could think "this" way. I spent the next year of my life immersed in the world of defense intellectuals. As a participant observer, I attended lectures, listened to arguments, conversed with defense analysts, and interviewed graduate students at the beginning, middle, and end of their training. I learned their specialized language, and I tried to understand what they thought and how they thought. I sifted through their logic for its internal inconsistencies and its unspoken assumptions. But as I learned their language, as I became more and more engaged with their information and their arguments, I found that my own thinking was changing. Soon, I could no longer cling to the comfort of studying an external and objectified "them." I had to confront a new question: How can I think this way? How can any of us? Throughout my time in the world of strategic analysis, it was hard not to notice the ubiquitous weight of gender, both in social relations and in the language itself; it is an almost entirely male world (with the exception of the secretaries), and the language contains many rather arresting metaphors. There is, of course, an important and growing body of feminist theory about gender and l a n g ~ a g eIn . ~addition, there is a rich and increasingly vast body of theoretical work exploring the gendered aspects of war and militarism, which examines such issues as men's and women's different relations to militarism and pacifism, and the ways in which gender ideology is used in the service of militarization. Some of the feminist work on gender and war is also part of an emerging, powerful feminist critique of ideas of rationality as I am indebted to all of these .~ they have developed in Western c ~ l t u r eWhile bodies of work, my own project is most closely linked to the development of feminist critiques of dominant Western concepts of reason. My goal is to discuss the nature of nuclear strategic thinking; in particular, my emphasis is on the role of its specialized language, a language that I call "technostrat e g i ~ . "I~have come to believe that this language both reflects and shapes the nature of the American nuclear strategic project, that it plays a central role in allowing defense intellectuals to think and act as they do, and that feminists who are concerned about nuclear weaponry and nuclear war must give careful attention to the language we choose to use - whom it allows us to communicate with and what it allows us to think as well as say.
Stage 1 : Listening Clean Bombs and Clean Language
Entering the world of defense intellectuals was a bizarre experience - bizarre because it is a world where men spend their days calmly and matter-of-factly
Cohn
Defense Intellectuals
29
discussing nuclear weapons, nuclear strategy, and nuclear war. The discussions are carefully and intricately reasoned, occurring seemingly without any sense of horror, urgency, or moral outrage - in fact, there seems to be no graphic reality behind the words, as they speak of "first strikes," "counterforce exchanges," and "limited nuclear war," or as they debate the comparative values of a "minimum deterrent posture" versus a "nuclear warfighting capability." Yet what is striking about the men themselves is not, as the content of their conversations might suggest, their cold-bloodedness. Rather, it is that they are a group of men unusually endowed with charm, humor, intelligence, concern, and decency. Reader, I liked them. At least, I liked many of them. The attempt to understand how such men could contribute to an endeavor that I see as so fundamentally destructive became a continuing obsession for me, a lens through which I came to examine all of my experiences in their world. In this early stage, I was gripped by the extraordinary language used to discuss nuclear war. What hit me first was the elaborate use of abstraction and euphemism, of words so bland that they never forced the speaker or enabled the listener to touch the realities of nuclear holocaust that lay behind the words. Anyone who has seen pictures of Hiroshima burn victims or tried to imagine the pain of hundreds of glass shards blasted into flesh may find it perverse beyond imagination to hear a class of nuclear devices matterof-factly referred to as "clean bombs." "Clean bombs" are nuclear devices that are largely fusion rather than fission and that therefore release a higher quantity of energy, not as radiation, but as blast, as destructive explosive power.' "Clean bombs" may provide the perfect metaphor for the language of defense analysts and arms controllers. This language has enormous destructive power, but without emotional fallout, without the emotional fallout that would result if it were clear one was talking about plans for mass murder, mangled bodies, and unspeakable human suffering. Defense analysts talk about "countervalue attacks" rather than about incinerating cities. Human death, in nuclear parlance, is most often referred to as "collateral damage"; for, as one defense analyst said wryly, "The Air Force doesn't target people, it targets shoe f a c t o r i e ~ . " ~ Some phrases carry this cleaning-up to the point of inverting meaning. The MX missile will carry ten warheads, each with the explosure power of 3 0 0 4 7 5 kilotons of TNT: one missile the bearer of destruction approximately 250-400 times that of the Hiroshima bombing.' Ronald Reagan has dubbed the MX missile "the Peacekeeper." While this renaming was the object of considerable scorn in the community of defense analysts, these very same analysts refer to the MX as a "damage limitation weapon.""' These phrases, only a few of the hundreds that could be discussed, exemplify the astounding chasm between image and reality that characterizes technostrategic language. They also hint at the terrifying way in which the existence of nuclear devices has distorted our perceptions and redefined the
30
T h e Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security A g e n d a
world. "Clean bombs" tells us that radiation is the only "dirty" part of killing people. To take this one step further, such phrases can even seem healthfull curative/corrective. So that we not only have "clean bombs" but also "surgically clean strikes" ("counterforce" attacks that can purportedly "take out" - i.e., accurately destroy - an opponent's weapons or command centers without causing significant injury to anything else). The image of excision of the offending weapon is unspeakably ludicrous when the surgical tool is not a delicately controlled scalpel but a nuclear warhead. And somehow it seems to be forgotten that even scalpels spill blood.' White M e n i n T i e s Discussing Missile Size
Feminists have often suggested that an important aspect of the arms race is phallic worship, that "missile envy" is a significant motivating force in the nuclear build-up.12 I have always found this an uncomfortably reductionist explanation and hoped that my research at the Center would yield a more complex analysis. But still, I was curious about the extent to which I might find a sexual subtext in the defense professionals' discourse. I was not prepared for what I found. I think I had naively imagined myself as a feminist spy in the house of death - that I would need to sneak around and eavesdrop on what men said in unguarded moments, using all my subtlety and cunning to unearth whatever sexual imagery might be underneath how they thought and spoke. I had naively believed that these men, at least in public, would appear to be aware of feminist critiques. If they had not changed their language, I thought that at least at some point in a long talk about "penetration aids," someone would suddenly look up, slightly embarrassed to be caught in such blatant confirmation of feminist analyses of What's Going On Here.13 Of course, I was wrong. There was no evidence that any feminist critiques had ever reached the ears, much less the minds, of these men. American military dependence on nuclear weapons was explained as "irresistible, because you get more bang for the buck." Another lecturer solemnly and scientifically announced "to disarm is to get rid of all your stuff." (This may, in turn, explain why they see serious talk of nuclear disarmament as perfectly resistible, not to mention foolish. If disarmament is emasculation, how could any real man even consider it?) A professor's explanation of why the MX missile is to be laced in the silos of the newest Minuteman missiles, instead of replacing the older, less accurate ones, was "because they're in the nicest hole - you're not going to take the nicest missile you have and put it in a crummy hole." Other lectures were filled with discussion of vertical erector launchers, thrust-to-weight ratios, soft lay downs, deep penetration, and the comparative advantages of protracted versus spasm attacks - or what one military adviser to the National Security Council has called "releasing 70 to 80 percent of our megatonnage in one orgasmic whump."14
iat,
Defense Intellectuals
31
There was serious concern about the need to harden our missiles and the need to "face it, the Russians are a little harder than we are." Disbelieving glances would occasionally pass between me and my one ally in the summer program, another woman, but no one else seemed to notice. If the imagery is transparent, its significance may be less so. The temptation is to draw some conclusions about the defense intellectuals themselves - about what they are really talking about, or their motivations; but the temptation is worth resisting. Individual motivations cannot necessarily be read directly from imagery; the imagery itself does not originate in these particular individuals but in a broader cultural context. Sexual imagery has, of course, been a part of the world of warfare since long before nuclear weapons were even a gleam in a physicist's eye. The history of the atomic bomb project itself is rife with overt images of competitive male sexuality, as is the discourse of the early nuclear physicists, strategists, and SAC commanders.'" Both the military itself and the arms manufacturers are constantly exploiting the phallic imagery and promise of sexual domination that their weapons so conveniently suggest. A quick glance at the publications that constitute some of the research sources for defense intellectuals makes the depth and pervasiveness of the imagery evident. Air Force Magazine's advertisements for new weapons, for example, rival Playboy as a catalog of men's sexual anxieties and fantasies. Consider the following, from the June 1985 issue: emblazoned in bold letters across the top of a two-page advertisement for the AV-8B Harrier 11 - "Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick." The copy below boasts "an exceptional thrust to weight ratio" and "vectored thrust capability that makes the ... unique rapid response possible." Then, just in case we've failed to get the message, the last line reminds us, "Just the sort of 'Big Stick' Teddy Roosevelt had in mind way back in 1901 . " I 6 An ad for the BKEP (BLU-106IB) reads: The Only Way to Solve Some Problems is to Dig Deep. THE BOMB, KINETIC ENERGY PENETRATOR "Will provide the tactical air commander with efficient power to deny or significantly delay enemy airfield operations." "Designed to maximize runway cratering by optimizing penetration dynamics and utilizing the most efficient warhead yet designed."" (In case the symbolism of "cratering" seems far-fetched, I must point out that I a m not the first to see it. The French use the Mururoa Atoll in the South Pacific for their nuclear tests and assign a woman's name to each of the craters they gouge out of the earth.) Another, truly extraordinary, source of phallic imagery is to be found in descriptions of nuclear blasts themselves. Here, for example, is one by
32
The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
journalist William Laurence, who was brought to Nagasaki by the Air Force to witness the bombing. "Then, just when it appeared as though the thing had settled down in to a state of permanence, there came shooting out of the top a giant mushroom that increased the size of the pillar to a total of 45,000 feet. The mushroom top was even more alive than the pillar, seething and boiling in a white fury of creamy foam, sizzling upward and then descending earthward, a thousand geysers rolled into one. It kept struggling in an elemental fury, like a creature in the act of breaking the bonds that held it down."18 Given the degree to which it suffuses their world, that defense intellectuals themselves use a lot of sexual imagery does not seem especially surprising. Nor does it, by itself, constitute grounds for imputing motivation. For me, the interesting issue is not so much the imagery's psychodynamic origins, as how it functions. How does it serve to make it possible for strategic planners and other defense intellectuals to do their macabre work? How does it function in their construction of a work world that feels tenable? Several stories illustrate the complexity. During the summer program, a group of us visited the New London Navy base where nuclear submarines are homeported and the General Dynamics Electric Boat boatyards where a new Trident submarine was being constructed. At one point during the trip we took a tour of a nuclearpowered submarine. When we reached the part of the sub where the missiles are housed, the officer accompanying us turned with a grin and asked if we wanted to stick our hands through a hole to "pat the missile." Pat the missile? The image reappeared the next week, when a lecturer scornfully declared that the only real reason for deploying cruise and Pershing I1 missiles in Western Europe was "so that our allies can pat them." Some months later, another group of us went to be briefed at NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command). On the way back, our plane went to refuel at Offut Air Force Base, the Strategic Air Command headquarters near Omaha, Nebraska. When word leaked out that our landing would be delayed because the new B-1 bomber was in the area, the plane became charged with a tangible excitement that built as we flew in our holding pattern, people craning their necks to try to catch a glimpse of the B-1 in the skies, and climaxed as we touched down on the runway and hurtled past it. Later, when I returned to the Center I encountered a man who, unable to go on the trip, said to me enviously, "I hear you got to pat a B-1." What is all this "patting"? What are men doing when they "pat" these high-tech phalluses? Patting is an assertion of intimacy, sexual possession, affectionate domination. The thrill and pleasure of "patting the missile" is the proximity of all that phallic power, the possibility of vicariously appropriating it as one's own. But if the predilection for patting phallic objects indicates something of the homoerotic excitement suggested by the language, it also has another side. For patting is not only an act of sexual intimacy. It is also what one does to babies, small children, the pet dog. One pats that which is small,
Ch)
h n Defense Intellectuals
33
cute, and harmless - not terrifyingly destructive. Pat it, and its lethality disappears. Much of the sexual imagery I heard was rife with the sort of ambiguity suggested by "patting the missiles." The imagery can be construed as a deadly serious display of the connections between masculine sexuality and the arms race. At the same time, it can also be heard as a way of minimizing the seriousness of militarist endeavors, of denying their deadly consequences. A former Pentagon target analyst, in telling me why he thought plans for "limited nuclear war" were ridiculous, said, "Look, you gotta understand that it's a pissing contest - you gotta expect them to use everything they've got." What does this image say? Most obviously, that this is all about competition for manhood, and thus there is tremendous danger. But at the same time, the image diminishes the contest and its outcomes, by representing it as an act of boyish mischief.
Fathers, Sons, and Virgins "Virginity" also made frequent, arresting, appearances in nuclear discourse. In the summer program, one professor spoke of India's explosion of a nuclear bomb as "losing her virginity"; the question of how the United States should react was posed as whether or not we should "throw her away." It is a complicated use of metaphor. Initiation into the nuclear world involves being deflowered, losing one's innocence, knowing sin, all wrapped up into one. Although the manly United States is no virgin, and proud of it, the double standard raises its head in the question of whether or not a woman is still worth anything to a man once she has lost her virginity. New Zealand's refusal to allow nuclear-armed or nuclear-powered warships into its ports prompted similar reflections on virginity. A good example is provided by Retired U.S. Air Force General Ross Milton's angry column in Air Force Magazine, entitled, "Nuclear Virginity." His tone is that of a man whose advances have been spurned. He is contemptuous of the woman's protestation that she wants to remain pure, innocent of nuclear weapons; her moral reluctance is a quaint and ridiculous throwback. But beyond contempt, he also feels outraged - after all, this is a woman we have pazd for, who still will not come across. He suggests that we withdraw our goods and services - and then we will see just how long she tries to hold onto her virtue.'' The patriarchal bargain could not be laid out more clearly. Another striking metaphor of patriarchal power came early in the summer program, when one of the faculty was giving a lecture on deterrence. To give us a concrete example from outside the world of military strategy, he described having a seventeen-year-old son of whose TV-watching habits he disapproves. ~ e - d e a lwith s the situation by threatening to break his son's arm if he turns on the TV again. "That's deterrence!" he said triumphantly. What is so striking about this analogy is that at first it seems so inappropriate. After all, we have been taught to believe that nuclear deterrence is a relation between two countries of more or less equal strength, in which one
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
is only able to deter the other from doing it great harm by threatening to do the same in return. But in this case, the partners are unequal, and the stronger one is using his superior force not to protect himself or others from grave injury but to coerce. But if the analogy seems to be a flawed expression of deterrence as we have been taught to view it, it is nonetheless extremely revealing about U.S. nuclear deterrence as an operational, rather than rhetorical or declaratory policy. What it suggests is the speciousness of the defensive rhetoric that surrounds deterrence - of the idea that we face an implacable enemy and that we stockpile nuclear weapons only in an attempt to defend ourselves. Instead, what we see is the drive to superior power as a means to exercise one's will and a readiness to threaten the disproportionate use of force in order to achieve one's own ends. There is no question here of recognizing competing but legitimate needs, no desire to negotiate, discuss, or compromise, and most important, no necessity for that recognition or desire, since the father carries the bigger stick.20 The United States frequently appeared in discussions about international politics as "father," sometimes coercive, sometimes benevolent, but always knowing best. The single time that any mention was made of countries other than the United States, our NATO allies, or the USSR was in a lecture on nuclear proliferation. The point was made that younger countries simply could not be trusted to know what was good for them, nor were they yet fully responsible, so nuclear weapons in their hands would be much more dangerous than in ours. The metaphor used was that of parents needing to set limits for their children. Domestic Bliss
Sanitized abstraction and sexual and patriarchal imagery, even if disturbing, seemed to fit easily into the masculinist world of nuclear war planning. What did not fit, what surprised and puzzled me most when I first heard it, was the set of metaphors that evoked images that can only be called domestic. Nuclear missiles are based in "silos." On a Trident submarine, which carries twenty-four multiple warhead nuclear missiles, crew members call the part of the submarine where the missiles are lined up in their silos ready for launching "the Christmas tree farm." What could be more bucolic - farms, silos, Christmas trees? In the ever-friendly, even romantic world of nuclear weaponry, enemies "exchange" warheads; one missile "takes out" another; weapons systems can "marry up"; "coupling" is sometimes used to refer to the wiring between mechanisms of warning and response, or to the psychopolitical links between strategic (intercontinental) and theater (European-based) weapons. The patterns in which a MIRVed missile's nuclear warheads land is known as a " f ~ o t p r i n t . "These ~ ~ nuclear explosives are not dropped; a "bus" "delivers" them. In addition, nuclear bombs are not referred to as bombs or even warheads; they are referred to as "reentry vehicles," a term far more bland and
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benign, which is then shortened to "RVs," a term not only totally abstract and removed from the reality of a bomb but also resonant with the image of the recreational vehicles of the ideal family vacation. These domestic images must be more than simply one more form of distancing, one more way to remove oneself from the grisly reality behind the words; ordinary abstraction is adequate t o that task. Something else, something very peculiar, is going on here. Calling the pattern in which bombs fall a "footprint" almost seems a willful distorting process, a playful, perverse refusal of accountability - because to be accountable to reality is to he unable to do this work. These words may also serve to domesticate, to tame the wild and uncontrollable forces of nuclear destruction. The metaphors minimize; they are a way to make phenomena that are beyond what the mind can encompass smaller and safer, and thus they are a way of gaining mastery over the unmasterable. The fire-breathing dragon under the bed, the one who threatens to incinerate your family, your town, your planet, becomes a pet you can pat. Using language evocative of everyday experiences also may simply serve to make the nuclear strategic community more comfortable with what they are doing. "PAL" (permissive action links) is the carefully constructed, friendly acronym for the electronic system designed to prevent the unauthorized firing of nuclear warheads. "BAMBI" was the acronym developed for an early version of an antiballistic missile system (for Ballistic Missile Boost Intercept). The president's Annual Nuclear Weapons Stockpile Memorandum, which outlines both short- and long-range plans for production of new nuclear weapons, is benignly referred to as "the shopping list." The National Command Authorities choose from a "menu of options" when deciding among different targeting plans. The "cookie cutter" is a phrase used to describe a particular model of nuclear attack. Apparently it is also used at the Department of Defense to refer to the neutron bomb.12 The imagery that domesticates, that humanizes insentient weapons, may also serve, paradoxically, to make it all right to ignore sentient human bodies, human l i v e s . ' ~ e r h a p s it is possible to spend one's time thinking about scenarios for the use of destructive technology and to have human bodies remain invisible in that technological world precisely because that world itself now includes the domestic, the human, the warm, and playful - the Christmas trees, the RVs, the affectionate pats. It is a world that is in some sense complete unto itself; it even includes death and loss. But it is weapons, not humans, that get "killed." "Fratricide" occurs when one of your warheads "kills" another of your own warheads. There is much discussion of "vulnerability" and "survivability," but it is about the vulnerability and survival of weapons systems, not people.
There is one set of domestic images that demands separate attention - images that suggest men's desire to appropriate from women the power of giving
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life and that conflate creation and destruction. The bomb project is rife with images of male birth.24In December 1942, Ernest Lawrence's telegram to the physicists at Chicago read, "Congratulations to the new parents. Can hardly wait to see the new arrival."2s At Los Alamos, the atom bomb was referred to as "Oppenheimer's baby." One of the physicists working at Los Alamos, Richard Feynman, writes that when he was temporarily on leave after his wife's death, he received a telegram saying, "The baby is expected on such and such a day."26At Lawrence Livermore, the hydrogen bomb was referred to as "Teller's baby," although those who wanted to disparage Edward Teller's contribution claimed he was not the bomb's father but its mother. They claimed that Stanislaw Ulam was the real father; he had the all important idea and inseminated Teller with it. Teller only "carried it" after that.27 Forty years later, this idea of male birth and its accompanying belittling of maternity - the denial of women's role in the process of creation and the reduction of "motherhood" to the provision of nurturance (apparently Teller did not need to provide an egg, only a womb) - seems thoroughly incorporated into the nuclear mentality, as I learned on a subsequent visit to U.S. Space Command in Colorado Springs. One of the briefings I attended included discussion of a new satellite system, the not yet "on line" MILSTAR system.28 The officer doing the briefing gave an excited recitation of its technical capabilities and then an explanation of the new Unified Space Command's role in the system. Self-effacingly he said, "We'll do the motherhood role - telemetry, tracking, and control - the maintenance." In light of the imagery of male birth, the extraordinary names given to the bombs that reduced Hiroshima and Nagasaki to ash and rubble - "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" - at last become intelligible. These ultimate destroyers were the progeny of the atomic scientists - and emphatically not just any progeny but male progeny. In early tests, before they were certain that the bombs would work, the scientists expressed their concern by saying that they hoped the baby was a boy, not a girl - that is, not a General Grove's triumphant cable to Secretary of War Henry Stimson at the Potsdam conference, informing him that the first atomic bomb test was successful read, after decoding: "Doctor has just returned most enthusiastic and confident that the little boy is as husky as his big brother. The light in his eyes discernible from here to Highhold and I could have heard his screams from here to my farm."30 Stimson, in turn, informed Churchill by writing him a note that read, "Babies satisfactorily born."31 In 1952, Teller's exultant telegram to Los Alamos announcing the successful test of the hydrogen bomb, "Mike," at Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands, read, "It's a boy."" The nuclear scientists gave birth to male progeny with the ultimate power of violent domination over female Nature. The defense intellectuals' project is the creation of abstract formulations to control the forces the scientists created - and to participate power. thereby in their world-~reatingldestro~ing The entire history of the bomb project, in fact, seems permeated with imagery that confounds man's overwhelming technological power to destroy
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nature with the power to create - imagery that inverts men's destruction and asserts in its place the power to create new life and a new world. It converts men's destruction into their rebirth. William L. Laurence witnessed the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb and wrote: "The big boom came about a hundred seconds after the great flash the first cry of a new-born world .... They clapped their hands as they leaped from the ground - earthbound man symbolising the birth of a new force."" Watching "Fat Man" being assembled the day before it was dropped on Nagasaki, he described seeing the bomb as "being fashioned into a living thingmi4Decades later, General Bruce K. Holloway, the commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command from 1968 to 1972, described a nuclear war as involving "a big bang, like the start of the universe."" C o d and t h e Nuclear Priesthood
The possibility that the language reveals an attempt to appropriate ultimate creative power is evident in another striking aspect of the language of nuclear weaponry and doctrine - the religious imagery. In a subculture of hard-nosed realism and hyper-rationality, in a world that claims as a sign of its superiority its vigilant purging of all nonrational elements, and in which people carefully excise from their discourse every possible trace of soft sentimentality, as though purging dangerous nonsterile elements from a lab, the last thing one might expect to find is religious imagery - imagery of the forces that science has been defined in opposition to. For surely, given that science's identity was forged by its separation from, by its struggle for freedom from, the constraints of religion, the only thing as unscientific as the female, the subjective, the emotional, would be the religious. And yet, religious imagery permeates the nuclear past and present. The first atomic bomb test was called Trinity - the unity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the male forces of Creation. The imagery is echoed in the language of the physicists who worked on the bomb and witnessed the test: "It was as though we stood at the first day of creation." Robert Oppenheimer thought of Krishna's words to Arjuna in the Bhagauad Gita: "I am become Death, the Shatterer of Worlds." Perhaps most astonishing of all is the fact that the creators of strategic doctrine actually refer to members of their community as "the nuclear priesthood." It is hard to decide what is most extraordinary about this: the easy arrogance of their claim to the virtues and supernatural power of the priesthood; the tacit admission (never spoken directly) that rather than being unflinching, hard-nosed, objective, empirically minded scientific describers of reality, they are really the creators of dogma; or the extraordinary implicit statement about who, or rather what, has become god. If this new priesthood attains its status through an inspired knowledge of nuclear weapons, it gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "a mighty fortress is our God."
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Stage 2: Learning to Speak the Language Although I was startled by the combination of dry abstraction and counterintuitive imagery that characterizes the language of defense intellectuals, my attention and energy were quickly focused on decoding and learning to speak it. The first task was training the tongue in the articulation of acronyms. Several years of reading the literature of nuclear weaponry and strategy had not prepared me for the degree to which acronyms littered all conversations, nor for the way in which they are used. Formerly, I had thought of them mainly as utilitarian. They allow you to write or speak faster. They act as a form of abstraction, removing you from the reality behind the words. They restrict communication to the initiated, leaving all others both uncomprehending and voiceless in the debate. But, being at the Center, hearing the defense analysts use the acronyms, and then watching as I and others in the group started to fling acronyms around in our conversation revealed some additional, unexpected dimensions. First, in speaking and hearing, a lot of these terms can be very sexy. A small supersonic rocket "designed to penetrate any Soviet air defense" is called a SRAM (for short-range attack missile). Submarine-launched cruise missiles are not referred to as SLCMs, but "slick'ems." Ground-launched cruise missiles are "glick'ems." Air-launched cruise missiles are not sexy but magical - "alchems" (ALCMs) replete with the illusion of turning base metals into gold. TACAMO, the acronym used to refer to the planes designed to provide communications links to submarines, stands for "take charge and move out." The image seems closely related to the nicknames given to the new guidance systems for "smart weapons7' - "shoot and scoot" or "fire and forget." Other acronyms work in other ways. The plane in which the president supposedly will be flying around above a nuclear holocaust, receiving intelligence and issuing commands for the next bombing, is referred to as "kneecap" (for NEACP - National Emergency Airborne Command Post). The edge of derision suggested in referring to it as "kneecap" mirrors the edge of derision implied when it is talked about at all, since few believe that the president really would have the time to get into it, or that the communications systems would be working if he were in it, and some might go so far as to question the usefulness of his being able to direct an extended nuclear war from his kneecap even if it were feasible. (I never heard the morality of this idea addressed.) But it seems to me that speaking about it with that edge of derision is exactly what allows it to be spoken about and seriously discussed at all. It is the very ability to make fun of a concept that makes it possible to work with it rather than reject it outright. In other words, what I learned at the program is that talking about nuclear weapons is fun. I am serious. The words are fun to say; they are racy, sexy, snappy. You can throw them around in rapid-fire succession. They are quick, clean, light; they trip off the tongue. You can reel off dozens
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of them in seconds, forgetting about how one might just interfere with the next, not to mention with the lives beneath them. I am not describing a phenomenon experienced only by the perverse, although the phenomenon itself may be perverse indeed. Nearly everyone I observed clearly took pleasure in using the words. It mattered little whether we were lecturers or students, hawks or doves, men or women - we all learned it, and we all spoke it. Some of us may have spoken with a self-consciously ironic edge, but the pleasure was there nonetheless. Part of the appeal was the thrill of being able to manipulate an arcane language, the power of entering the secret kingdom, being someone in the know. It is a glow that is a significant part of learning about nuclear weaponry. Few know, and those who do are powerful. You can rub elbows with them, perhaps even be one yourself. That feeling, of course, does not come solely from the language. The whole set-up of the summer program itself, for example, communicated the allures of power and the benefits of white male privileges. We were provided with luxurious accommodations, complete with young black women who came in to clean up after us each day; generous funding paid not only our transportation and food but also a large honorarium for attending; we met in lavishly appointed classrooms and lounges. Access to excellent athletic facilities was guaranteed by a "Temporary Privilege Card," which seemed to me to sum up the essence of the experience. Perhaps most important of all were the endless allusions by our lecturers to "what I told John [Kennedy]" and "and then Henry [Kissinger] said," or the lunches where we could sit next to a prominent political figure and listen to Washington gossip. A more subtle, but perhaps more important, element of learning the language is that, when you speak it, you feel in control. The experience of mastering the words infuses your relation to the material. You can get so good at manipulating the words that it almost feels as though the whole thing is under control. Learning the language gives a sense of what I would call cognitive mastery; the feeling of mastery of technology that is finally not controllable but is instead powerful beyond human comprehension, powerful in a way that stretches and even thrills the imagination. -.Themore conversations I participated in using this language, the less frightened I was of nuclear war. How can learning to speak a language have such a powerful effect? One answer, I believe, is that the process of learning the language is itself a part of what removes you from the reality of nuclear war. I entered a world where people spoke what amounted to a foreign language, a language I had to learn if we were to communicate with one another. So I became engaged in the challenge of it - of decoding the acronyms and figuring out which were the proper verbs to use. My focus was on the task of solving the puzzles, developing language competency - not on the weapons and wars behind the words. Although my interest was in thinking about nuclear war and its prevention, my energy was elsewhere.
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By the time I was through, I had learned far more than a set of abstract words that refers to grisly subjects, for even when the subjects of a standard English and nukespeak description seem to be the same, they are, in fact, about utterly different phenomena. Consider the following descriptions, in each of which the subject is the aftermath of a nuclear attack: Everything was black, had vanished into the black dust, was destroyed. Only the flames that were beginning to lick their way up had any color. From the dust that was like a fog, figures began to loom up, black, hairless, faceless. They screamed with voices that were no longer human. Their screams drowned out the groans rising everywhere from the rubble, groans that seemed to rise from the very earth itself.37 [You have to have ways to maintain communications in a] nuclear environment, a situation bound to include EMP blackout, brute force damage to systems, a heavy jamming environment, and so on.38 There are no ways to describe the phenomena represented in the first with the language of the second. Learning to speak the language of defense analysts is not a conscious, cold-blooded decision to ignore the effects of nuclear weapons on real live human beings, to ignore the sensory, the emotional experience, the human impact. It is simply learning a new language, but by the time you are through, the content of what you can talk about is monumentally different, as is the perspective from which you speak. In the example above, the differences in the two descriptions of a "nuclear environment" stem partly from a difference in the vividness of the words themselves - the words of the first intensely immediate and evocative, the words of the second abstract and distancing. The passages also differ in their content; the first describes the effects of a nuclear blast on human beings, the second describes the impact of a nuclear blast on technical systems designed to assure the "command and control" of nuclear weapons. Both of these differences may stem from the difference of perspective: the speaker in the first is a victim of nuclear weapons, the speaker in the second is a user. The speaker in the first is using words to try to name and contain the horror of human suffering all around her; the speaker in the second is using words to ensure the possibility of launching the next nuclear attack. Technostrategic language can be used only to articulate the perspective of the users of nuclear weapons, not that of the victim^.^' Thus, speaking the expert language not only offers distance, a feeling of control, and an alternative focus for one's energies; it also offers escape escape from thinking of oneself as a victim of nuclear war. I do not mean this on the level of individual consciousness; it is not that defense analysts somehow convince themselves that they would not be among the victims of nuclear war, should it occur. But I do mean it in terms of the structural position the speakers of the language occupy and the perspective they get from that position. Structurally, speaking technostrategic language removes them
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from the position of victim and puts them in the position of the planner, the user, the actor. From that position, there is neither need nor way to see oneself as a victim; no matter what one deeply knows or believes about the likelihood of nuclear war, and no matter what sort of terror or despair the knowledge of nuclear war's reality might inspire, the speakers of technostrategic language are positionally allowed, even forced, to escape that awareness, to escape viewing nuclear war from the position of the victim, by virtue of their linguistic stance as users, rather than victims, of nuclear weaponry. Finally, then, I suspect that much of the reduced anxiety about nuclear war commonly experienced by both new speakers of the language and longtime experts comes from characteristics of the language itself: the distance afforded by its abstraction; the sense of control afforded by mastering it; and the fact that its content and concerns are that of the users rather than the victims of nuclear weapons. In learning the language, one goes from being the passive, powerless victim to the competent, wily, powerful purveyor of nuclear threats and nuclear explosive power. The enormous destructive effects of nuclear weapons systems become extensions of the self, rather than threats to it.
Stage 3: Dialogue
It did not take very long to learn the language of nuclear war and much o f the specialized information it contained. My focus quickly changed from mastering technical information and doctrinal arcana to attempting to understand more about how the dogma was rationalized. Instead of trying, for example, to find out why submarines are so hard to detect or why, prior to the ~ i i d e n t11, submarine-based ballistic missiles were not considered counterforce weapons, I now wanted to know why we really "need" a strategic triad, given submarines' " i n ~ u l n e r a b i l i t ~ I. "also ~ ~ wanted to know why it is considered reasonable to base U.S. military planning on the Soviet Union's military capabilities rather than seriously attempting to gauge what their intentions might be. This standard practice is one I found particularly troubling. Military analysts say that since we cannot know for certain what Soviet intentions are, we must plan our military forces and strategies as if we knew that the Soviets planned to use all of their weapons. While this might appear to have the benefit of prudence, it leads to a major problem. When we ask only what the Soviets can do, we quickly come to assume that that is what they intend to do. We base our planning o n "worst-case scenarios" and then come to believe that we live in a world where vast resources must be committed to "prevent" them from happening. Since underlying rationales are rarely discussed in the everyday business of defense planning, I had to start asking more questions. At first, although I was tempted to use my newly acquired proficiency in technostrategic jargon, I vowed to speak English. I had long believed that one of the most important functions of an expert language is exclusion - the denial of a voice
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to those outside the professional community.41I wanted to see whether a well-informed person could speak English and still carry on a knowledgeable conversation. What I found was that no matter how well-informed or complex my questions were, if I spoke English rather than expert jargon, the men responded to me as though I were ignorant, simpleminded, or both. It did not appear to occur to anyone that I might actually be choosing not to speak their language. A strong distaste for being patronized and dismissed made my experiment in English short-lived. I adapted my everyday speech to the vocabulary of strategic analysis. I spoke of "escalation dominance," "preemptive strikes," and, one of my favorites, "subholocaust engagements." Using the right phrases opened my way into long, elaborate discussions that taught me a lot about technostrategic reasoning and how to manipulate it. I found, however, that the better I got at engaging in this discourse, the more impossible it became for me to express my own ideas, my own values. I could adopt the language and gain a wealth of new concepts and reasoning strategies - but at the same time as the language gave me access to things I had been unable to speak about before, it radically excluded others. I could not use the language to express my concerns because it was physically impossible. This language does not allow certain questions to be asked or certain values to be expressed. To pick a bald example: the word "peace" is not a part of this discourse. As close as one can come is "strategic stability," a term that refers to a balance of numbers and types of weapons systems - not the political, social, economic, and psychological conditions implied by the word "peace." Not only is there no word signifying peace in this discourse, but the word "peace" itself cannot be used. To speak it is immediately to brand oneself as a softheaded activist instead of an expert, a professional to be taken seriously. If I was unable to speak my concerns in this language, more disturbing still was that I found it hard even to keep them in my own head. I had begun my research expecting abstract and sanitized discussions of nuclear war and had readied myself to replace my words for theirs, to be ever vigilant against slipping into the never-never land of abstraction. But no matter how prepared I was, no matter how firm my commitment to staying aware of the reality behind the words, over and over I found that I could not stay connected, could not keep human lives as my reference point. I found I could go for days speaking about nuclear weapons without once thinking about the people who would be incinerated by them. It is tempting to attribute this problem to qualities of the language, the words themselves - the abstractness, the euphemisms, the sanitized, friendly, sexy acronyms. Then all we would need to do is change the words, make them more vivid; get the military planners to say "mass murder" instead of "collateral damage" and their thinking would change. The problem, however, is not only that defense intellectuals use abstract terminology that removes them from the realities of which they speak. There is
idm Defense Intellectuals 43 no reality of which they speak. Or, rather, the "reality" of which they speak is itself a world of abstractions. Deterrence theory, and much of strategic doctrine altogether, was invented largely by mathematicians, economists, and a few political scientists. It was invented to hold together abstractly, its validity judged by its internal logic. Questions of the correspondence to observable reality were not the issue. These abstract systems were developed as a way to make it possible to "think about the unthinkable" - not as a way to describe or codify relations on the g r o ~ n d . ~ ' So the greatest problem with the idea of "limited nuclear war," for example, is not that it is grotesque to refer to the death and suffering caused b y any use of nuclear weapons as "limited" or that "limited nuclear war" is an abstraction that is disconnected from human reality but, rather, that "limited nuclear war" is itself an abstract conceptual system, designed, embodied, achieved by computer modeling. It is an abstract world in which hypothetical, calm, rational actors have sufficient information to know exactly what size nuclear weapon the opponent has used against which targets, and in which they have adequate command and control to make sure that their response is precisely equilibrated to the attack. In this scenario, no field commander would use the tactical "mini-nukes" at his disposal in the height of a losing battle; no EMP-generated electronic failures, or direct attacks on command, and control centers, or human errors would destroy communications networks. O u r rational actors would be free of emotional response to being attacked, free of political pressures from the populace, free from madness or despair or any of the myriad other factors that regularly affect human actions and decision making. They would act solely on the basis of a perfectly informed mathematical calculus of megatonnage. So to refer to "limited nuclear war" is already to enter into a system that is de facto abstract and removed from reality. To use more descriptive language would not, by itself, change that. In fact, I am tempted to say that the abstractness of the entire conceptual system makes descriptive language nearly beside the point. In a discussion of "limited nuclear war," for example, it might make some difference if in place of saying "In a counterforce attack against hard targets collateral damage could be limited," a strategic analyst had to use words that were less abstract - if he had to say, for instance, "If we launch the missiles we have aimed at their missile silos, the explosions would cause the immediate mass murder of 10 million women, men, and children, as well as the extended illness, suffering, and eventual death of many millions more." It is true that the second sentence does not roll off the tongue or slide across one's consciousness quite as easily. But it is also true, I believe, that the ability to speak about "limited nuclear war" stems as much, if not more, from the fact that the term "limited nuclear war" refers to an abstract conceptual system rather than to events that might take place in the real world. As such, there is no need to think about the concrete human realities behind the model; what counts is the internal logic of the system.43
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This realization that the abstraction was not just in the words but also characterized the entire conceptual system itself helped me make sense of my difficulty in staying connected to human lives. But there was still a piece missing. How is it possible, for example, to make sense of the following paragraph? It is taken from a discussion of a scenario ("regime A") in which the United States and the USSR have revised their offensive weaponry, banned MIRVs, and gone to a regime of single warhead (Midgetman) missiles, with no "defensive shield" (or what is familiarly known as "Star Wars" or SDI): The strategic stability of regime A is based on the fact that both sides are deprived of any incentive ever to strike first. Since it takes roughly two warheads to destroy one enemy silo, an attacker must expend two of his missiles to destroy one of the enemy's. A first strike disarms the attacker. The aggressor ends up worse off than the a g g r e s ~ e d . ~ ~ "The aggressor ends up worse off than the aggressed"? The homeland of "the aggressed" has just been devastated by the explosions of, say, a thousand nuclear bombs, each likely to be ten to one hundred times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and the aggressor, whose homeland is still untouched, "ends up worse off"? How is it possible to think this? Even abstract language and abstract thinking do not seem to be a sufficient explanation. I was only able to "make sense of it" when I finally asked myself the question that feminists have been asking about theories in every discipline: What is the reference point? Who (or what) is the subject here? In other disciplines, we have frequently found that the reference point for theories about "universal human phenomena" has actually been white men. In technostrategic discourse, the reference point is not white men, it is not human beings at all; it is the weapons themselves. The aggressor thus ends up worse off than the aggressed because he has fewer weapons left; human factors are irrelevant to the calculus of gain and loss. In "regime A" and throughout strategic discourse, the concept of "incentive" is similarly distorted by the fact that weapons are the subjects of strategic paradigms. Incentive to strike first is present or absent according to a mathematical calculus of numbers of "surviving" weapons. That is, incentive to start a nuclear war is discussed not in terms of what possible military or political ends it might serve but, instead, in terms of numbers of weapons, with the goal being to make sure that you are the guy who still has the most left at the end. Hence, it is frequently stated that MIRVed missiles create strategic instability because they "give you the incentive to strike first." Calculating that two warheads must be targeted on each enemy missile, one MIRVed missile with ten warheads would, in theory, be able to destroy five enemy missiles in their silos; you destroy more of theirs than you have expended of your own. You win the numbers game. In addition, if you do not strike first, it would theoretically take relatively few of their MIRVed
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missiles to destroy a larger number of your own - so you must, as they say in the business, "use 'em or lose 'em." Many strategic analysts fear that in a period of escalating political tensions, when it begins t o look as though war may be inevitable, this combination makes "the incentive to strike first" well nigh irresistible. Incentive to launch a nuclear war arises from a particular configuration of weapons and their hypothetical mathematical interaction. Incentive can only be so narrowly defined because the referents of technostrategic paradigms are weapons - not human lives, not even states and state power. The fact that the subjects of strategic paradigms are weapons has several important implications. First, and perhaps most critically, there simply is no way to talk about human death or human societies when you are using a language designed to talk about weapons. Human death simply is "collateral damage" - collateral to the real subject, which is the weapons themselves. Second, if human lives are not the reference point, then it is not only impossible to talk about humans in this language, it also becomes in some sense illegitimate to ask the paradigm to reflect human concerns. Hence, questions that break through the numbing language of strategic analysis and raise issues in human terms can be dismissed easily. N o one will claim that the questions are unimportant, but they are inexpert, unprofessional, irrelevant to the business at hand to ask. The discourse among the experts remains hermetically sealed. The problem, then, is not only that the language is narrow but also that it is seen by its speakers as complete or whole unto itself - as representing a body of truths that exist independently of any other truth or knowledge. The isolation of this technical knowledge from social or psychological or moral thought, or feelings, is all seen as legitimate and necessary. The outcome is that defense intellectuals can talk about the weapons that are supposed to protect particular political entities, particular peoples and their way of life, without actually asking if weapons can d o it, or if they are the best way to d o it, or whether they may even damage the entities you are supposedly protecting. It is not that the men I spoke with would say that these are invalid questions. They would, however, simply say that they are separate questions, questions that are outside what they do, outside their realm of expertise. So their deliberations go o n quite independently, as though with a life of their own, disconnected from the functions and values they are supposedly t o serve. Finally, the third problem is that this discourse has become virtually the only legitimate form of response to the question of how to achieve security. If the language of weaponry was one competing voice in the discussion, or one that was integrated with others, the fact that the referents of strategic paradigms are only weapons would be of little note. But when we realize that the only language and expertise offered to those interested in pursuing peace refers to nothing but weapons, its limits become staggering, and its entrapping qualities - the way in which, once you adopt it, it becomes so hard to stay connected to human concerns - become more comprehensible.
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S t a g e 4: The Terror As a newcomer to the world of defense analysts, I was continually startled by likeable and admirable men, by their gallows humor, by the bloodcurdling casualness with which they regularly blew up the world while standing and chatting over the coffee pot. I also heard the language they spoke - heard the acronyms and euphemisms, and abstractions, heard the imagery, heard the pleasure with which they used it. Within a few weeks, what had once been remarkable became unnoticeable. As I learned to speak, my perspective changed. I no longer stood outside the impermeable wall of technostrategic language and, once inside, I could no longer see it. Speaking the language, I could no longer really hear it. And once inside its protective walls, I began to find it difficult to get out. The impermeability worked both ways. I had not only learned to speak a language: I had started to think in it. Its questions became my questions, its concepts shaped my responses to new ideas. Its definitions of the parameters of reality became mine. Like the White Queen, I began to believe six impossible things before breakfast. Not because I consciously believed, for instance, that a "surgically clean counterforce strike" was really possible, but instead because some elaborate piece of doctrinal reasoning I used was already predicated on the possibility of those strikes, as well as on a host of other impossible things.4s My grasp on what I knew as reality seemed to slip. I might get very excited, for example, about a new strategic justification for a "no first use" policy and spend time discussing the ways in which its implications for our force structure in Western Europe were superior to the older version.46And after a day or two I would suddenly step back, aghast that I was so involved with the military justifications for not using nuclear weapons - as though the moral ones were not enough. What I was actually talking about - the mass incineration caused by a nuclear attack - was no longer in my head. Or I might hear some proposals that seemed to me infinitely superior to the usual arms control fare. First I would work out how and why these proposals were better and then work out all the ways to counter the arguments against them. But then, it might dawn on me that even though these two proposals sounded so different, they still shared a host of assumptions that I was not willing to make (e.g., about the inevitable, eternal conflict of interests between the United States and the USSR, or the desirability of having some form of nuclear deterrent, or the goal of "managing," rather than ending, the nuclear arms race). After struggling to this point of seeing what united both positions, I would first feel as though I had really accomplished something. And then all of a sudden, I would realize that these new insights were things I actually knew before I ever entered this community. Apparently, I had since forgotten them, at least functionally, if not absolutely. I began to feel that I had fallen down the rabbit hole - and it was a struggle to climb back out. - -
(
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Conclusions Suffice it to say that the issues about language do not disappear after you have mastered technostrategic discourse. The seductions remain great. You can find all sorts of ways to seemingly beat the boys at their own game; you can show how even within their own definitions of rationality, most of what is happening in the development and deployment of nuclear forces is wildly irrational. You can also impress your friends and colleagues with sickly humorous stories about the way things really happen on the inside. There is tremendous pleasure in it, especially for those of us who have been closed out, who have been told that it is really all beyond us and we should just leave it to the benevolently paternal men in charge. But as the pleasures deepen, so d o the dangers. The activity of trying to out-reason defense intellectuals in their own games gets you thinking inside their rules, tacitly accepting all the unspoken assumptions of their paradigms. You become subject to the tyranny of concepts. The language shapes your categories of thought (e.g., here it becomes "good nukes" or "bad nukes," not, nukes or no nukes) and defines the boundaries of imagination (as you try to imagine a "minimally destabilizing basing mode" rather than a way to prevent the weapon from being deployed at all). Yet, the issues of language have now become somewhat less vivid and central to me. Some of the questions raised by the experiences described here remain important, but others have faded and been superseded by new questions. These, while still not precisely the questions of an "insider," are questions I could not have had without being inside, without having access to the knowledge and perspective the inside position affords. Many of my questions now are more practical -which individuals and institutions are actually responsible for the endless "modernization" and proliferation of nuclear weaponry? What role does technostrategic rationality actually play in their thinking? What would a reasonable, genuinely defensive "defense" policy look like? Others are more philosophical. What is the nature of the rationality and "realism" claimed by defense intellectuals for their mode o f thinking? What are the many different grounds on which their claims to rationality can be shown to be spurious? M y own move away from a focus on the language is quite typical. Other recent entrants into this world have commented to me that, while it is the cold-blooded, abstract discussions that are most striking at first, within a short time "you get past it - you stop hearing it, it stops bothering you, it becomes normal - and you come to see that the language, itself, is not the problem." However, I think it would be a mistake to dismiss these early impressions. They can help us learn something about the militarization of the mind, and they have, I believe, important implications for feminist scholars and activists who seek to create a more just and peaceful world. Mechanisms of the mind's militarization are revealed through both listening to the language and learning to speak it. Listening, it becomes clear
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that participation in the world of nuclear strategic analysis does not necessarily require confrontation with the central fact about military activity that the purpose of all weaponry and all strategy is to injure human bodi e ~ . ~In' fact, as Elaine Scarry points out, participation in military thinking does not require confrontation with, and actually demands the elision of, this reality.48 Listening to the discourse of nuclear experts reveals a series of culturally grounded and culturally acceptable mechanisms that serve this purpose and that make it possible to "think about the unthinkable," to work in institutions that foster the proliferation of nuclear weapons, to plan mass incinerations of millions of human beings for a living. Language that is abstract, sanitized, full of euphemisms; language that is sexy and fun to use; paradigms whose referent is weapons; imagery that domesticates and deflates the forces of mass destruction; imagery that reverses sentient and nonsentient matter, that conflates birth and death, destruction and creation - all of these are part of what makes it possible to be radically removed from the reality of what one is talking about and from the realities one is creating through the disc~urse.~' Learning to speak the language reveals something about how thinking can become more abstract, more focused on parts disembedded from their context, more attentive to the survival of weapons than the survival of human beings. That is, it reveals something about the process of militarization - and the way in which that process may be undergone by man or woman, hawk or dove. Most often, the act of learning technostrategic language is conceived of as an additive process: you add a new set of vocabulary words; you add the reflex ability to decode and use endless numbers of acronyms; you add some new information that the specialized language contains; you add the conceptual tools that will allow you to "think strategically." This additive view appears to be held by defense intellectuals themselves; as one said to me, "Much of the debate is in technical terms - learn it, and decide whether it's relevant later." This view also appears to be held by many who think of themselves as antinuclear, be they scholars and professionals attempting to change the field from within, or public interest lobbyists and educational organizations, or some feminist antimilitarist^.^^ Some believe that our nuclear policies are so riddled with irrationality that there is a lot of room for wellreasoned, well-informed arguments to make a difference; others, even if they do not believe that the technical information is very important, see it as necessary to master the language simply because it is too difficult to attain public legitimacy without it. In either case, the idea is that you add the expert language and information and proceed from there. However, I have been arguing throughout this paper that learning the language is a transformative, rather than an additive, process. When you choose to learn it you enter a new mode of thinking - a mode of thinking not only about nuclear weapons but also, de facto, about military and political power and about the relationship between human ends and technological means.
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Thus, those of us who find U.S. nuclear policy desperately misguided appear to face a serious quandary. If we refuse to learn the language, we are virtually guaranteed that our voices will remain outside the "politically relevant" spectrum of opinion. Yet, if we d o learn and speak it, we not only severely limit what we can say but we also invite the transformation, the militarization, of our own thinking. I have no solutions to this dilemma, but I would like to offer a few thoughts in an effort to reformulate its terms. First, it is important to recognize an assumption implicit in adopting the strategy of learning the language. When we assume that learning and speaking the language will give us a voice recognized as legitimate and will give us greater political influence, w e are assuming that the language itself actually articulates the cri-
teria and reasoning strategies upon which nuclear weapons development and deployment decisions are made. I believe that this is largely an illusion. Instead, I want to suggest that technostrategic discourse functions more as a gloss, as an ideological curtain behind which the actual reasons for these decisions hide. That rather than informing and shaping decisions, it far more often functions as a legitimation for political outcomes that have occurred for utterly different reasons. If this is true, it raises some serious questions about the extent of the political returns we might get from using technostrategic discourse, and whether they can ever balance out the potential problems and inherent costs. I d o not, however, want to suggest that none of us should learn the language. I d o not believe that this language is well suited to achieving the goals desired by antimilitarists, yet at the same time, I, for one, have found the experience of learning the language useful and worthwhile (even if at times traumatic). The question for those of us who d o choose to learn it, I think, is what use are we going to make of that knowledge? O n e of the most intriguing options opened by learning the language is that it suggests a basis upon which to challenge the legitimacy of the defense intellectuals' dominance of the discourse on nuclear issues. When defense intellectuals are criticized for the cold-blooded inhumanity of the scenarios they plan, their response is to claim the high ground of rationality; they are the only ones whose response to the existence of nuclear weapons is objective and realistic. They portray those who are radically opposed to the nuclear status quo as irrational, unrealistic, too emotional. "Idealistic activists" is the pejorative they set against their own hard-nosed professionalism. Much of their claim to legitimacy, then, is a claim to objectivity born of technical expertise and t o the disciplined purging of the emotional valences that might threaten their objectivity. But if the surface of their discourse - its abstraction and technical jargon - appears at first to support these claims, a look just below the surface does not. There we find currents of homoerotic excitement, heterosexual domination, the drive toward competency and mastery, the pleasures of membership in an elite and privileged group, the ultimate importance and meaning of membership in the priesthood, and the
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The Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security Agenda
thrilling power of becoming Death, shatterer of worlds. How is it possible to hold this up as a paragon of cool-headed objectivity? I do not wish here to discuss or judge the holding of "objectivity" as an epistemological goal. I would simply point out that, as defense intellectuals rest their claims to legitimacy on the untainted rationality of their discourse, their project fails according to its own criteria. Deconstructing strategic discourse's claims to rationality is, then, in and of itself, an important way to challenge its hegemony as the sole legitimate language for public debate about nuclear policy. I believe that feminists, and others who seek a more just and peaceful world, have a dual task before us - a deconstructive project and a reconstructive project that are intimately linked? Our deconstructive task requires close attention to, and the dismantling of, technostrategic discourse. The dominant voice of militarized masculinity and decontextualized rationality speaks so loudly in our culture, it will remain difficult for any other voices to be heard until that voice loses some of its power to define what we hear and how we name the world - until that voice is delegitimated. Our reconstructive task is a task of creating compelling alternative visions of possible futures, a task of recognizing and developing alternative conceptions of rationality, a task of creating rich and imaginative alternative voices diverse voices whose conversations with each other will invent those futures.
Notes 1. Thomas Powers, "How Nuclear War Could Start," New York Review of Books (January 17, 1985), 33. 2. George Kennan, "A Modest Proposal," New York Review of Books (July 16, 1981), 14. 3. It is unusual for defense intellectuals to write for the uublic. rather than for their colleagues, but a recent, interesting exception has been made by a group of defense analysts from Harvard. Their two books provide a clear expression of the stance that living with nuclear weapons is not so much a problem to be solved but a condition to be managed rationally. Albert Carnesale and the Harvard Nuclear Study Group, Living with Nuclear Weapons (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984); and Graham T. Allison, Albert Carnesale, and Joseph Nye, Jr., eds., Hawks, Doves, and Owls: An Agenda for Avoiding Nuclear War (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1985). 4. For useful introductions to feminist work on gender and language, see Barrie Thorne, Cheris Kramarae, and Nancy Henley, eds., Language, Gender and Society (Rowley, Mass.: Newbury Publishing House, 1983); and Elizabeth Abel, ed., Writing and Sexual Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 5. For feminist critiques of dominant Western conceptions of rationality, see Nancy Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power (New York: Longman, 1983); Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka, eds., Discovering Reality: Feminrst Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and the Philosophy of Scrence (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1983); Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985); Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Woman in Social and Political Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981); Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: "Male" and "Female" in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), which contains a particularly useful bibliographic essay; Sara Ruddick, "Remarks on the Sexual Politics of Reason," in Women and Moral Theory, ed. Eva Kittay and Diana
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Meyers (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, in press). Some of the growlng feminist work on gender and war is explicitly connected to critiques of rationality. See Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, Brace, lovanovich, 1966); Nancy C.M. Hartsock, "The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Grounds for a Specifically Feminist H~storicalMaterialisnl," in Harding and Hintikka, eds., 283-310, and "The Barracks Community in Western Political Thought: Prologomena to a Feminist Critique of War and Politics," in Women and Men2 Wurs, ed. Judith Hicks Stiehm (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1983);Jean Bethkc Elshtain, "Reflect~onso n War and Political Discourse: Realism, Just War and Feminism in a Nuclear Age," Politlcnl Theory 13, no. 1 (February 1985): 39-57; Sara Ruddick, "Preservar~ve Love and Military Destruct~on:Some Reflections on Mothering and Peace," In Mothering: Essays rn kelnlnrst Theory, ed. Joyce Trebilcot (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984), 231-62; Genevieve I h y d , "Selfhood, War, and Masculinity," in Fernmist C:hallenges, ed. E. Gross and C. Pateman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986). There is a vast and valuable literature o n gender and war that indirectly informs my work. See, e.g., Cynth~aEnloe, Does Khaki Beconre You? The Milrtarrzation of Women's 1,ives (Boston: South End Press, 1984); Stiehm, ed.; Jean Bethke Elshtain, "On Beautiful Souls, Just Warriors, and Feminist Consciousness," in Stiehm, ed., 3 4 1 4 8 ; Sara Rudd~ck,"Pacifying the Forces: Drafting Women in the Interests of Peace," S1g~7s: Journal of Women in Ctilture and Society 8, no. 3 (Spring 1983):471-89, and "Draftmg Women: Pieces of a Puzzle," in Conscripts and Volunteers: Military Requirements, Social Values, arrd the All-Volunteer Force, ed. Robert K . Fullinw~der(Totowa, N.J.: Rownian ti: Allanheld, 1983); Amy Swerdlow, "Women's Strike for Peace versus HUAC:," Fenzinist Stttdres 8, no. 3 (Fall 1982): 493-520; Mary C. Segers, "The Catholic Bishops' Pastoral Letter on War and Peace: A Femin~st Perspective," Feminrst Studies 11, no. 3 (Fall 1985): 6 1 9 4 7 . 6. I have coined the term "technostrategic" to represent the intertwined, inextricable nature of technological and nuclear strategic thinking. The first reason is that strategic thmking seems to change in direct response to technological changes, rather than polltical thinking, or some independent paradigms that might be isolated as "str,ltegic." (On this polnt, see Lord Solly Zuckerman, Nuclear Illusions and Reality [New York: Vik~ngPress, 19821).Even more important, strategic theory not only depends on and changes in response to technological objects, ~tIS also based on a k ~ n d of thinking, a way of looking at problems - formal, mathematical modeling, systems analysis, game theory, linear programming - that are part of technology itself. So I use the term "technostrategic" to indicate the degree to which nuclear strategic language and thinking are imbued with, indeed constructed out of, modes of thinking t h ~ are t associated with technology. 7. Fusion weapons' proportionally srn~lleryield of rad~oactivefallout led Atoni~cEnergy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss to announce in 1956 that hydrogen bomb tests were important "not only from a military point of view hut from a humanitarian aspect." Although the bombs being tested were 1,000 times more powerful than those that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the proportional reduction of fallout apparently qualified them as not only clean but also humanitarian. Lewis Strauss is quoted in Ralph Lapp, "The 'Humanitarian' H-Bomb," Bulletin of Atomic Scierrtists 12, no. 7 (September 19.56): 263. 8. I must point out that we cannot know whether to take this particular example liter,llly: America's list of nuclear targets is, of course, classifled. The defense analyst quoted, however, is a man who has had access to that list for at least two decades. He is also a man whose thinking and speaking is careful and precise, so I think it is reasonable to assume that his statement is n o t a distortion, that "shoe factories," even if not themselves literally targeted, accur,ltely represent a category of target. Shoe factories would he one among many "military targets" other than weapons systems themselves; they would be military targets because an army needs boots. The likelihood of a nuclear war lasting long enough for foot soldiers to wear out their boots might seem to stretch the limits of credibdity, but that is an insufficient reason to assume that they are not nuclear targets. Nuclear targeting and nuclear strategic planning in general frequently suffer from "conventionalization" - the tendency of planners to think in the old, familiar terms of "conventional" warfare rather than fully assimilating the ways in which nuclear weaponry has changed warfare. In avoidlng talking about murder, the defense community has long been ahead of the State Department. It was not until 1984 that the State Department announced it will n o longer use the word "killing," much less "murder," in official reports on -
~
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
the status of human rights in allied countries. The new term is "unlawful or arbitrary deprivation of life" (New York Times, February 15, 1984, as cited in Quarterly Review of Doublespeak 11, no. 1 [October 19841: 3). 9. "Kiloton" (or kt) is a measure of explosive power, measured by the number of thousands of tons of T N T required to release an equivalent amount of energy. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima is estimated to have been approximately 12kt. An M X missile is designed to carry up to ten M k 21 reentry vehicles, each with a W-87 warhead. The yield of W-87 warheads is 300kt, but they are "upgradable" to 475 kt. 10. Since the M X would theoretically be able to "take out" Soviet land-based ICBMs in a "disarming first strike," the Soviets would have few ICBMs left for a retaliatory attack, and thus damage to the United States theoretically would be limited. However, t o consider the damage that could be inflicted on the United States by the remaining ICBMs, not to mention Soviet bombers and submarine-based missiles as "limited" is to act as though words have no meaning. 11. Conservative government assessments of the number of deaths resulting from a "surgically clean" counterforce attack vary widely. The Office of Technology Assessment projects 2 million to 20 million immediate deaths. (See James Fallows, National Defense [New York: Random House, 19811, 159.) A 1975 Defense Department study estimated 18.3 million fatalities, while the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, using different assumptions, arrived at a figure of 5 0 million (cited by Desmond Ball, "Can Nuclear War Be Controlled?" Adelphi Paper no. 169 [London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 19811). 12. The phrase is Helen Caldicott's in Missile Envy: The Arms Race and Nuclear War (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1986). 13. For the uninitiated, "penetration aids" refers to devices that help bombers o r n~issiles get past the "enemy's" defensive systems; e.g., stealth technology, chaff, o r decoys. Within the defense intellectual community, they are also familiarly known as "penaids." 14. General William Odom, "C31 and Telecommunications at the Policy Level," Incidental Paper, Seminar on C31: Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Center for Information Policy Research, Spring 1980), 5. 15. This point has been amply documented by Brian Easlea, Fathering the Unthinkable: Masculinity, Scientists a n d the Nuclear Arms Race (London: Pluto Press, 1983). 16. Air Force Magazine 68, no. 6 (June 1985): 77-78. 17. h i d . 18. William L. Laurence, Dawn over Zero: The Study of the Atomic Bomb (London: Museum Press, 1974), 198-99. 19. U.S.A.F. Retired General T.R. Milton, "Nuclear Virginity," Air Force Magazine 68, no. 5 (May 1985): 44. 20. I am grateful to Margaret Cerullo, a participant in the first summer program, for reporting the use of this analogy to me and sharing her thoughts about this and other events in the program. The interpretation I give here draws strongly o n hers. 21. MIRV stands for "multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles." A MIRVed missile not only carries more than one warhead; its warheads can be aimed at different targets. 22. Henry T. Nash, "The Bureaucratization of Homicide," Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (April 1980), reprinted in E.P. Thompson and Dan Smith, eds., Protest a n d Survive (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981), 159. The neutron bomb is notable for the active political contention that has occurred over its use and naming. It is a small warhead that produces six times the prompt radiation but slightly less blast and heat than typical fission warheads of the same yield. Pentagon planners see neutron bombs as useful in killing Soviet tank crews while theoretically leaving the buildmgs near the tanks intact. Of course, the civilians in the nearby buildings, however, would be killed by the same "enhanced radiation" as the tank crews. It is this design for protecting property while killing civilians along with soldiers that has led people in the antinuclear movement to call the neutron bomb "the ultimate capitalist weapon." However, in official parlance the neutron bomb is not called a weapon at all; it is an "enhanced radiation device." It is worth noting, however, that the designer of the neutron bomb did not conceive of it as an anti-tank personnel weapon to be used against the Russians. Instead, he thought it would be useful in an area where the enemy did not have nuclear weapons to use. (Samuel T. Cohen,
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in an interview on National Public Radio, as reported in Fred Kaplan, "The Neutron Bomh: What It Is, the Way It Works," Bulletin o f Atomic Scientists [October 1981 1, 6.) 23. For a discussion of the functions of Imagery that reverses sentient and ~nsentientmatter, that "exchange[s] ... idioms between weapons and bodies," see Elaine Scarry, T h e Body in Pain: T h e Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford Un~versityPress, 198.5), 60-1 57, esp. 67. 24. For further discussion of men's desire to appropriate from women the power of giving life and death, and its implications for men's war-maktng activities, see Dorothy Dinnerste~n, T h e Mermaid and the Minotaur (New York: Harper LY( ROW, 1977). For further analys~sof male birth imagery in the atomic bomb project, see Evelyn Fox Keller, "From Secrets of Life to Secrets of Death" (paper delivered at the Kansas Seminar, Yale University, New Haven, Conn., November 1986); and Easlea (n. 1.5 'lbove), 81-1 16. 25. Lawrence is quoted by Herbert Childs in A n American Genius: T h e Life of Ernest Orlando 1,awrence (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1968), 340. 26. Feynman writes about the telegram in Richard P. Feynrnan, "Los hlamos from Below," in Reminiscences of Los Alamos, 1943-1 94 Y, ed. Lawrence Badash, Joseph 0.Hirshfelder, and Herbert P. Broida (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publish~ngCo., 1980), 130. 27. Hans Bethe is quoted as saying that "Ulam was the father of the hydrogen bomb and Edward was the mother, because he carried the baby f o r quite a while" (J. Bernstein, Hans Bethe: Prophet o f Energy (New York: Basic Kooks, 19801, 95). 28. The MILSTAR system is a communications satelhe system that is jam resistant, &ISwell as having an "EMP-hardened capability." (This means that the electromagnetic pulse set oft by a nuclear explosion would theoretically not destroy the satellites' electronic systems.) There are, of course, many things to say about the sanity and morality of the idea of the MILASTARsystem and of spending the millions of dollars necessary to EMP-harden it. The most obvious point is that this is a system designed to enable the United States to fight a "protracted" nuclear war - the EMP-hardening is to allow it to act as a conduit for command and control of successive nuclear shots, long after the initial exchange. The practicdity of the idea would also appear to merlt some discussion - who and what is going to be communicating to and from after the initial exchange? And why bother to harden it against EMP when all an opponent h x to do to prevent the system from functioning is to blow it up, a feat certain to become technologically feasible In a short time? But, needless to say, exploration of these questions was not part of the briefing. 29. The concern about having a boy, not a girl, is written about by Robert Jungk, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, trans. James Cleugh (New York: Harcourt, Brace LYc Co., 1956), 197. 30. Richard E. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, T h e Ncw World, 1 9.39/46: A History o f the United States Atomic Energy Commission, 2 vols. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962), 1: 386. 3 1. Winston Churchill, T h e Second World War, vol. 6., Trrttmph and Tragedy (London: Cassell, 1954), 551. 32. Quoted by Easlea, 130. 33. Laurence (n. 18 above), 10. 34. Ibid., 188. 35. From a 198.5 interview in which Holloway was explainmg the logic of a "decapitating" strike against the Soviet leadership and command and control systems - and thus how nuclear war would be different from World W x 11, which was a "war of attrition," in which transportation, supply depots, and other targets were hit, rather than being a "big hang" (Daniel Ford, "The Button," N e w Yorker Magazine 61, no. 7 [Apr~l8, 19851, 49). 36. Jungk, 201. 37. Hisako Matsubara, Cranes at Dusk (Garden C~ty,N.Y.: Dial Press, 1985). The author was a child in Kyoto at the time the atomlc bomb was dropped. Her description is based o n the memories of survivors. 38. General Robert Rosenberg (formerly on the Natmnal Security Council staff during the Carter Administration), "The Influence o f Policymaking on C31," Incidental Paper, S e n ~ i n ~ i r o n C'I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Center for Informat~onPolicy Research, Spring 1980). 59.
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39. Two other writers who have remarked on this division of languages between the "victims" and the professionals (variously named) are Freeman Dyson and Glenn D. Hook. Dyson, in Weapons and Hope (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), notes that there are two languages in the current discussion of nuclear weapons, which he calls the language of "the victimsfland the language of "the warriors." He sees the resulting problem as being the difficulty the two groups have in communicating with each other and, thus, in appreciating each other's valid concerns. His project, then, is the search for a common language, and a good portion of the rest of the book is directed toward that end. Hook, in "Making Nuclear Weapons Easier to Live With: The Political Role of Language in Nuclearization," Journal of Peace Research 22, no. 1 (1985): 67-77, follows Camus in naming the two groups "the victims" and "the executioners." H e is more explicit than Dyson about naming these as perspectives, as coming from positions of greater or lesser power, and points out that those with the most power are able to dominate and define the terms in which we speak about nuclear Issues, so that n o matter who we are, we find ourselves speaking as though we were the users, rather than the victims of nuclear weapons. Although my analysis of perspectives and the ways in which language inscribes relations of power is similar to his, 1 differ from Hook in finding in this fact one of the sources of the experts' relative lack of fear of nuclear war. 40. The "strategic triad" refers to the three different modes of basing nuclear warheads: at land, on intercontinental ballistic missiles; at sea, o n missiles in submarines; and "in the air," o n the Strategic Air Command's bombers. Given that nuclear weapons based o n submarines are "invulnerable" (i.e., not subject to attack), since there is not now nor likely to be in the future any reliable way to find and target submarines, many commentators (mostly from outside the community of defense intellectuals) have suggested that the Navy's leg of the triad is all we need to ensure a capacity to retaliate against a nuclear attack. This suggestion that submarine-based missiles are an adequate deterrent becomes especially appealing when it is remembered that the other basing modes - ICBMs and bombers - act as targets that would draw thousands of nuclear attacks to the American mainland in time of war. 41. For an interesting recent discussion of the role of language in the creation of professional power, see JoAnne Brown, "Professional Language: Words That Succeed," Radical History Review, no. 34 ( 1 9861, 33-51. 42. For fascinating, detailed accounts of the development of strategic doctrine, see Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983); and Gregg F. Herken, The Counsels of War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985). 43. Steven Kull's interviews with nuclear strategists can be read to show that on some level, some of the time, some of these men are aware that there is a serious disjunction between their models and the real world. Their iustification for continuine to use these models is that "other people" (unnamed, and on asking, unnameable) believe in them and that they therefore have an important reality ("Nuclear Nonsense," Foreign Policy, no. 5 8 [Spring 19851, 28-52). 44. Charles Krauthammer, "Will Star Wars Kill Arms Control?" New Republic, no. 3, 653 (January 21, 1985), 12-16. 45. For an excellent discussion of the myriad uncertainties that make it ludicrous to assume the targeting accuracies posited in the notion of "surgically clean counterforce strikes," see Fallows (n. 11 above), chap. 6. 46. "No first use" refers to the commitment not to be the first side to introduce nuclear weapons into a "conventional" war. The Soviet Union has a "no first use" pol~cy,but the United States does not. In fact, it is NATO doctrine to use nuclear weapons in a conventional war in Western Europe, as a way of overcoming the Warsaw Pact's supposed superiority in conventional weaponry and troop strength. 47. For an eloquent and graphic exploration of this point, see Scarry (n. 2 3 above), 73. 48. Scarry catalogs a variety of mechanisms that serve this purpose (ibid., 60-157). The point is further developed by Sara Ruddick, "The Rationality of Care," in Thinking about Women, War, and the Military, ed. Jean Bethke Elshtain and Sheila Tobias (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, in press). 49. My discussion of the specific ways in which this discourse creates new realities is in the next part of this project, entitled, "The Emperor's New Armor." I, like many other social
< i , @ r i Defense intellectuals
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scientists, have been influenced by poststructuralist literary theory's discussion of deconstructlng texts, point of view, and narrative authority within texts, and 1 take the language and social practice o f the defense intellect~lalsas a text to he read in this way. For a class~cintroduction t o t h ~ s literature, see Josue Harari, ed., Textual Strategies: Perspcctrues rn Post-strrrctscralist Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979); and Jacques Derrick, Of Granzmatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 50. Perhaps the most prominent proponent of this strategy 1s Sheila Tobias. See, e.g., "Demystifying Defense: Closing the Knowledge Gap," Social Polrcy 13, no. 3 (1983): 29-.32; and Sheila Tobias, Peter Goudinoff, Stefan Leader, and Shelah I.eader, W h a t Ktnds of Guns Are T h e y Buyrng for Your Butter? ( N e w York: William Morrow & Co., 1982). 51. H a r d ~ n gand Hintikka, eds. (11. 5 above), ix-xix, esp. x.
Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union As Other Simon Dalby
Geopolitics a n d t h e Soviet Threat
T
he vociferous criticisms of superpower detente heard repeatedly in Washington, and to a lesser extent in other NATO capitals, in the 1970s, were supported by arguments concerning a massive political and military "Soviet threat" to Western security. Among the highest profile proponents of the "Soviet threat" was the Washington-based Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), many of whose members subsequently attained important policy-making positions in the Reagan Administration. Their arguments in favor of a reversion to the foreign policy of containment militarism,' have had a significant influence. To date, while the CPD's political campaign has been examined in some detail,2 and its links to the "Team B" intelligence estimates review process have been t r a ~ e d no , ~ comprehensive examination has been made of the structuring of their arguments. This paper shows how they drew on a series of "security discourses," namely sovietology, the realist literature in international relations, nuclear strategy, and geopolitics to ideologically construct the Soviet Union as a dangerous "Other." It traces how each of these discourses operate ideologically to hinder progressive political change and to perpetuate militarization. After a lengthy absence, the term "geopolitics" is back in vogue in policy-making circle^.^ While the earlier taints of Nazism have largely disappeared, geopolitics remains a contentious term, with a number of overlapping meanings. It refers to the academic and policy literature drawn from the classic geopolitical texts, particularly those of MacKinder and Spykman."t also refers to general analyses of international affairs in terms of rivalry between the superpowers. In addition, the term is used to discuss the relations of space and power. While the classical geopolitical texts were rejected by many scholars in the 1940s and 1 9 5 0 ~the , ~ overall perspective of power understood as military control over territory has remained influential, and is often conflated with the perspective of political realism with its emphasis on power.' Source: Alternatives, XIII(4) (1988):415-42.
Dalb! Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union As Other
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During the Cold War, US policy-makers drew not only on the discourses of realism and geopolitics, but also on sovietology, which crystallized out as a discourse in this period, and nuclear strategy in order to construct an ideological rationale for the US national security state. This paper shows how these discourses were used again by the CPD in the 1970s to structure their arguments for reintroducing the policies of containment militarism. Each of these discourses uses a conception of security in terms of the spatial exclusion of Otherness; they are tied together in an overall geopolitical framework, geopolitical understood in this case in all three senses of power and space, superpower rivalry, and the power potential inherent in the geographical arrangement of states. The theme of geopolitics is important because it provides a key dimension to the depiction of the Soviet threat that is often overlooked in academic and political debates concerning international security. The assumptions of geopolitical discourse include the ontological primacy of absolute space, and a conception of politics as a matter of territorial control in the form of sovereignty over geographically specified sections of the pregiven absolute space. The links between nuclear strategy and geopolitics have been substantially ignored even by political geographers, despite a recent call to investigate these matter^.^ Of particular concern for this paper is the way that the geopolitical dimension has been omitted in many of the criticisms o f the influential nuclear war fighting theories of the 1970s, theories which were closely associated with the CPD. This paper emphasizes the importance of the articulation of the security discourses the CPD used as a way of explaining the ideological power of their political position. The next section elaborates on theoretical and methodological matters, turning first to the question of the relations of power and knowledge in terms of discourse. The subsequent sections turn to the importance of security discourse in modern political arrangements. This is followed by an analysis of the CPD's articulation of security discourses. Finally a critique of their position shows how these discursive practices support self-perpetuating processes of militarization. In conclusion the paper suggests that security has to be reformulated in ways that transcend the geopolitical metaphysics of security conceptualized as the spatial exclusion of Otherness.
Discourse a n d Otherness In Foucault's terms,9 discourses are much more than linguistic performances; they are also plays of power which mobilize rules, codes and procedures to assert a particular understanding, through the construction of knowledge within these rules, codes and procedures. Because they organize reality in specific ways that involve particular epistemological claims, they provide legitimacy, and indeed provide the intellectual conditions of possibility of particular institutional and political arrangements. The rules governing practices, often
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
implicit and not clearly articulated, but understood subconsciously by practitioners, are socially constructed in specific contexts. Foucault has analyzed the discursive practices of medicine, sex and penology, showing how the conception of madness is created in antithesis to reason, deviance to normalcy and delinquent to reformed. His concerns are often with the structuring of identity against the boundary of an external Other. Discourse involves not just language, but practices and social positions which embody power: the psychiatrist who designates who is reasonable and who is mad, the therapist who pronounces on normalcy, the parole officer who judges when the delinquent has reformed. Thus discourse refers also to the rules by which behavior is structured, regulated and judged. Foucault's analysis makes clear the role of the creation of the Other as the excluded against which behavior is judged and defined; the mad defines the sane, the deviant the normal. Specifying difference is a linguistic, epistemological and crucially a political act; it constructs a space for the Other distanced and inferior from the vantage point of the person specifying the difference.1° Practices function on the bases of these definitions; prisons are built to incarcerate the delinquent, mental hospitals to shut away the mad. Both operate to exclude the Other, shutting Otherness away in regimes where it can be monitored, surveyed and hence known and controlled. In "security" matters the enemy is specified in a series of security discourses, tied to the functioning of the state security and defense agencies. The practitioners of penology or medicine practice on their objects, prisoners or patients, but they do so in socially constructed positions of authority and power; by regulating the Other they also regulate the rest. Security discourse, while ostensibly dealing with external Others, also has important domestic political effects. In the CPD discourse the Soviet Union is the dangerous Other that has to be contained controlled and monitored using their superior and their "correct" knowledge to ensure the security of the United States. In Western thought, bifurcations of reality involve conceptions of Others as difference against which the "I," "we" or "the same" are defined. Aristotle's formulation of political philosophy is premised on a clear distinction between the Greeks who lived within the "political space" of the polis, and the Orientals, the outsiders that inhabited the rest of the ancient world." This spatial bifurcation of East and West is a theme continued to this day, a theme that runs at the heart of rationalist discourse on politics, and once more is present in the CPD's identification of the US polity with enlightenment and universal human progress, in distinction from the Soviet system, based in their understanding, solely on force and coercion. The spatial dimension of Otherness is clear. The Other inhabits somewhere else. The notion of distance in space can be relatively simple and somewhat arbitrary. As Said puts it:I2
... this universal practice of designating in one's mind a familiar space which is 'ours' and an unfamiliar space beyond 'ours' which is 'theirs' is a
I
Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union As Other
59
way of making geographical distinctions that can be entirely arbitrary. I use the word 'arbitrary' here because imaginative geography of the 'our land barbarian land' variety does not require that the barbarians acknowledge the distinction. It is enough for 'us' to set up these boundaries in our own minds; 'they' become 'they' accordingly, and both their territory and their mentality are designated as different from 'ours'. Thus identity can be formulated in a negative sense; "we" are not "barbarians" hence we are "civilized." This theme is present in numerous texts which situate themselves in a spatial arrangement to identify their space in distinction from the space of their object. More generally Foucault focuses on the crucial links between space, knowledge and power, and the role of concepts with a geographical dimension; "Territory is no doubt a geographical notion, but it's first of all a juridicopolitical one: the area controlled by a certain kind of power."Ii Combining these themes provides a way of theorizing the crucial ideological dimension of geopolitics. The exclusion of the Other and the inclusion, incorporation and administration of the Same is the essential geopolitical moment. The two processes are complementary; the Other is excluded as the reverse side of the process of incorporation of the Same. Expressed in terms of space and power this is the basic process of geopolitics in which territory is divided, contested and ruled. The ideological dimension is clearly present in how this is justified, explained and understood by the populations concerned; "the Other" is seen as different if not an enemy; "We" are "the Same" in that we are all citizens of the same nation, or parts of the Western system. TodorovI4 makes the question of the Other the key methodological device for his investigation of how a number of leading European explorers and conquerors constructed the ontological and epistemological categories that facilitated their conquest and domination of the indigenous civilizations of the Americas. He points to the complexity of the construction of the Other, for it is rarely constructed along a single axis. Todorov suggests that there are at least three axes. First of all, there is the value judgement (an axiological level): the other is good or bad, I love or d o not love him, or as was more likely to be said at the time, he is my equal or my inferior (for there is usually no question that I a m good and that I esteem myself). Secondly, there is the action of rapproachment or distancing in relation to the other (a praxeological level): 1 embrace the other's values, 1 identify myself with him; or else I identify the other with myself, I impose my own image upon him; between submission to the other and the other's submission, there is also a third term, which is neutrality or indifference. Thirdly, I know or a m ignorant of the other's identity (this would be the epistemic level); of course there is no absolute here, but an endless gradation between the lower or higher states of knowledge.
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T h e Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security Agenda
He argues that these three levels are interconnected but there is "no rigorous implication; hence, we cannot reduce them to one another, nor anticipate one starting from the other." Todorov's analysis provides the point of departure for Shapiro's analysis15of much more recent creations of Otherness in the same region, particularly the creation of Guatemala as Other in American foreign policy. He focuses on the discursive practices of foreign policy making which support the export of US capital and emphasizes "the modes of representation abetting this widely orchestrated form of domination by making it acceptable and coherent within the dominant ethos that constructs domestic selves and exotic Others." Shapiro notes how the foreign policy discourse depluralizes and dehistoricizes Guatamalan "society" by reducing it to a "fact" where those who lose in political struggles tend to be ignored in the political code. Guatemala was formerly created in Spain's expansion, now it is meaningful in terms of superpower rivalry. Never is it understood in the terms of the original inhabitants whose place it once was. Foreign policy thus, "is the process of making 'foreign' or exotic, and thus different from the self, someone or thing. Given the usual esteem within which the self is constituted, the exoticising of the Other almost invariably amounts to the constitution of that Other as a less than equal subject."16 But the creation of Other in distinction from Self is constructed on more than one axis. Thus the construction of Self and Other in moral terms is coupled to the discursive practices of foreign policy making ("the policy of making foreign") which constitute the international arena as one concerned with power and "security." The making of Other as something foreign is thus not an innocent exercise in differentiation. It is clearly linked to how the self is understood. A self construed with a security-related identity leads to the construction of Otherness on the axis of threats or lack of threats to that security, while a self identified as one engaged in 'crisis management' - a current self-understanding of American foreign policy thinking - will create modes of Otherness on a ruly versus unruly axis." Coupling the moral superiority dimension of Otherness to the geopolitical/ security ones, "the foreign policy discourse as a whole becomes a vindication for the US intervention to seek to control another state's steering mechanism for its own moral benefit as well as for purposes of US strategic and domestic interests."18 As Ashley and Walker have emphasized,19 the discourses of international relations are structured in terms of identity and difference, the incorporation of Sameness within the community of the state in distinction from the formulation of international politics as an anarchy. Political actions are initiated according to the discursive specifications of geopolitics, according to how "their" space is specified in distinction from "our" space. In general, US political discourse and in particular the CPD's discourse specifies the Soviet
Dnlbv
Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union As Other
61
Union as Other through the use of interconnected security discourses, each of which is constructed in geopolitical terms.
Security, Discourse, Geopolitics
The twin European developments of the emergence of capitalism and the closure of political space mark the beginning of the "modern" era which has spread both its dominant political organization; i.e., the nation-state, and the interrelated economic organizations of capitalism across the globe.20 This form of the closure of political space in terms of territorially defined states involves simultaneously the territorial demarcation of political space within identifiable boundaries, and the extension of the concept of sovereignty to one of absolute power in the sense that there is no higher authority with the power to enforce its will. Prior to the emergence of this "modern" system, codified in the mid-17th century, there had been a multiplicity of authorities, lords and chieftains, bishops and cardinals, cities and empires. The feudal landscape was one of many overlapping claims to allegiance, claims not solely related to the territory that the subject of these claims inhabited. The rise of capitalism and the rise of the modern state with absolute sovereignty were accompanied by the rise of political conceptions based on the individual, rather than social collectivities. They concern the individual as a resident of a particular place. This combination gave rise to the modern bourgeois notions of citizenship, the state and property, the key structuring concepts of modern political discourse. These formulations are clear in the 17th-century political theories of Thomas Hobbes. They rely on a formulation of political theory in terms of isolated human "individuals" related to each other by contracts. The formation of states involves the rational individual trading some of his freedom of action to the supra individual state in return for a guarantee of protection from threats external to the state boundaries, and the regulation of internal matters to maintain order. In Hobbes' terms order means the protection of the rights of owners of property to maintain their possessions." Within this order the quintessential bourgeois human can then act to maximize his self-interest. It follows from this conception of humans (in fact men) as individuals living within the reification of space of private property at the small scale, and the territorial delimitation of sovereignty, that security is defined in spatial terms of exclusion; enemies are created as Others, inhabiting some other territory. States are thus a form of political container, within which the state provides security. Thus the contract theory of the state relates directly to the creation of Otherness and the political creation of the identities of Self in terms of the state in whose territory one exists. This conception of security, and the related notion of peace, are defined in negative terms. "Peace as a contract is a right that never becomes a duty - a law that never becomes a moral ~ b l i g a t i o n . "International ~~ politics is thus
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
defined in negative terms, or in Walker's slightly different f ~ r m u l a t i o n , ~ " security is an essentially empty concept. The sphere of diplomacy and interstate relations is the sphere of state activity. Responsibility is designated to the state to defend against other states and dangers from beyond the boundaries of the state. Security is thus about the spatial exclusion of Otherness. Many theories of politics "have sought to limit sovereignty but have not questioned this authoritarian mechanism resulting from the connection between property, the corresponding system of rights, and political guarantees necessary for their m a i n t e n a n ~ e . "But ~ ~this state of affairs requires that the state identify with the interests of the population it supposedly protects. The ideological guise that this identification usually takes is some form of nationalism, whereby the citizens of the state are distinguished as having a common identity.25 Since the Second World War these conceptions have been complicated by the predominant clash of the two superpower social systems, both claiming legitimacy in terms of inevitable historical progress, or the dialectical unfolding of history, and armed with weapons systems that threaten not only the security of each other's state structures but the very existence of humanity itself. Here, however, the negative pattern of security thinking still operates, Otherness is mobilized to support domestic control and progress. The contest between the cultural modernism of US hegemony or the "counter modernity" of the Soviet system remains tied into the bourgeois reification of political space in terms of territorial inclusion and exclusion;26identity is still privileged over difference. In Shapiro's terms2' foreign policy still involves making foreign, only the scale has changed. These divisions of space in turn are predicated on the Newtonian view of absolute space. The Newtonian departure theorizes space as apart from matter, a pregiven existence, parts of which are filled with matter. This requires a break with earlier conceptions of space which are related in some way to material events.28Newton theorized a secondary conception of relative space that was related to material events. But absolute space is constructed as the pregiven container of all events which can be designated a position in absolute space. Space is made into a thing in itself, in Smith's terms "an abstraction of abstractions." The primacy of this metaphysical construction is crucial to the construction of the space of states. They are understood as spatial entities, and the societies of which they are composed are contained within their boundaries. This privileging of the geometric entity over the real societal practices of the ~ on the conception region is based on the spatialization of c ~ l t u r e , 2premised of absolute space. As Shapiro30reminds us, the cartographical designation of states as geometric entities with precisely definable boundaries hypostatizes states and denies large parts of social reality. This discursive practice of reification is crucial to the operation of geopolitics. But these reifications are historical products, not the universal structures of absolute space in which they are construed. The division of political space remains the basis of the debates on international arrangements, it underlies the literature of nuclear strategy, it is explicit in geopolitics. It is a conceptualization of political affairs that is
I
Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union As Other
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clearly hegemonic. It is accepted as inevitable, assumed to be commonsense, and naturalized in that it renders eternal a transitory political arrangement, that of modernity.jl The rapid growth of state functions in capitalist states since the Second World War - their increased role in national and international economic management, their role in the provision of "the welfare state," as well as the growth of the "security state" in a perpetual condition of partial military mobilization - has expanded the need for ideological justifications of the functions of these states. These new political arrangements have been accompanied by an expansion of the role of specialized discourses of technical expertise. These discourses act to reduce the role of political discussion by recasting political issues in terms of technical problems to which they can, by using their specialized procedures, find "correct" or "optimal7' answers. They act to maintain hegemony by reducing politics to a matter of administrating programs devised on the basis of the definition of social situations contained in these discourses. They depoliticize issues by invoking technical expertise in the place of political decision-making, in the process displacing explicit political discussion and replacing it with expert discourse. Nuclear technologies and their political arrangements have added an important dimension to processes whereby consent is generated for the maintenance of the political arrangements of Western capitalism. The threat of complete societal annihilation renders the legitimation of the existence of these weapons particularly necessary, while the social and cultural processes of militarization" that accompany their deployment simultaneously reduce the scope for democratic decision-making3" In the West, and the United States in particular, the weapons and their institutions are justified in terms of the omnipresent fear of the external enemy, present in the form of the Soviet Union.34
U S Security Discourse
As has been made clear by a number of writers, the numerous contemporary critiques of militarization repeatedly run into the limitations of what can be said in certain circumstances, a process revealing the hegemonic discursive structures of the nuclear state:js In response to peace movement critiques, "security intelle~tuals"~use, among others, the ideological device of distinguishing between legitimate "free speech" and illegitimate protest.j7 More important for this paper is the use of the widespread and powerful understanding of the Soviet Union as an expansionist Other that requires deterring, to marginalize not only peace movements, but many advocates of detente and arms control with the Soviet Union. Dissenters are vilified as giving support and assistance to the external enemy. The Other provides the axis on which acceptable and unacceptable political activities and identities are constructed. These identities are constructed through the "security discourses" of "strategy," "sovietology," "realism" and "geopolitics" which were
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T h e Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
mobilized to describe, explain and legitimate the doctrines of "containment,'' "deterrence" and the provision of "national security." Realism dominated discussions of international relations in the postwar period, and the key concept of interest understood in terms of power is important in the postwar political discourse. Interests are intimately related to security, understood in the sense of preventing the potential adversary from invading one's (territorially understood) space, which in turn relates to physical protection and political alignments at, in the US case, the global scale. The anarchy of international politics assumes the inevitable clash of competing interests, and also the historical perpetuation of the nation-state as the only significant actor in political affairs.38 Strategy defined the superpower contest in terms of nuclear coercion and the policy of deterring the aggressive totalitarian Soviet Union.39 The complex and at times arcane discussions of this discourse premised their analysis on the eternal enmity of the two systems, and reinforced these assumptions with a series of worse-case analyses. These assumptions drew on the abstract calculations of game theory much more than detailed sociopolitical analysis.40Where such input was sought it was drawn from the literature of the emergent field of sovietology which theorized the Soviet Union as unchanging and driven by internal geopolitical factors as well as the expansionist logic of totalitarianism to expand and hence to threaten US interests around the globe. The assumption that the polity was completely dominated by the central party elite, whose ultimate goal was global domination precluded the possibility of serious or long-term cooperation between the superpower^.^^ All these are structured within understandings of political power in spatial terms, within an implicit division of political space into territorially demarcated states. These states in turn are strategically important because of their relative location in terms of the geopolitical theme of heartlands and rimlands. The presence of geopolitics here is clear, the geographical occupation of the MacKinderian heartland of Asia42 and the potential Soviet domination of the Eurasian land-mass, are persistent themes of US security discourse, even foreign policy was if the term geopolitics is rarely menti~ned.~Wperational structured in the terms of an implicit geopolitical understanding of global events in which the motive force is the bilateral competition of the USSR and the "free world" led by the United States. This competition, and with it deterrence as the key to Western survival, necessitates a global militarization to contain the expansion of the totalitarian sphere led by the USSR. All the principal aspects of the political discourse of postwar US politics are present here. In combination they acted to limit the fields of discourse, asking ultimately "but what about the Russians?" to close off potentially counter-hegemonic formulations by invoking the presence of the Other. This discourse of the Other is geopolitical in the sense that it creates an external antagonist in a particular way vis-a-vis domestic political concerns. It is also geopolitical in that it is a particular exercise in geopolitical " ~ c r i p t i n g " ~ ~ which draws on the traditional texts of MacKinder and Spykman to explicate
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Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union As Other
65
a particular geography of the Other, a geography which is interpreted in deterministic terms. This discourse of the Other is also geopolitical in the sense that it accepts the reification of political power in the particular relation of the power and space of territorially defined states. The interplay of each of these themes reinforces the whole text of the Other. In addition to this, each of the security discourses is structured in terms of powerful ideological moves of exclusion. As will be seen below, the totalitarian interpretation of sovietology relies on a determinist interpretation of Russian history to preclude the possibility of peaceful coexistence with the Soviet regime. Realism assumes that conflict in the pursuit of interest is what is ultimately important in political matters, providing for the deferment of the political objectives of development, environment and justice, giving primacy to "power politics." Strategy moves considerations of security out of the realm of politics to technical considerations of weaponry and scenarios for their use. Geopolitics reduces matters to the military control of territory and operates to reduce political matters to a zero sum game between the superpowers squeezing out the concerns and aspirations of the peoples whose territory becomes a section of cartographic space in which each superpower's "projected power" seeks spatially to contain that of the other.
The CPD and Geopolitical Discourse The CPD drew on each of these security discourses and used their key ideological moves of exclusion to privilege their geopolitical conceptions of US foreign policy. The CPD represents the themes of containment militarism as "common sense." Political reality is defined in terms of a military and strategic situation. The CPD constructs this reality as one that the CPD is uniquely privileged to enunciate. Because of its expertise, the academic and policy experience of its members, the CPD knows the "true" nature of the Soviet Union. Its position is free from the "illusions" of detente. They argue that the Soviet Union is involved in a campaign for global supremacy, searching out influence in the Third World to gain military bases with which to threaten Western interests. It is morally different, motivated entirely by power sought in its own interest, and set apart from the United States which is defined as a morally principled actor in the tradition of "moral e~ceptionalism."~' Not only this but the global interests of humanity are invoked as the rationale for US policy. But the United States is in danger of appeasing the Soviet Union, repeating the mistakes of the 1930s because it is lulled into complacency by the illusion of detente. The clearest signs of this "present danger" are in the supposed US geopolitical retreat of the 1970s and the imminence of Soviet nuclear strategic superiority. This "present danger" requires that all "liberal" agendas of human rights, economic development, environmental concerns, be deferred until the military threat is dealt with first. All other political agendas are subsidiary.
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The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
The necessity of this is constantly reiterated by the CPD, because it "knows" the true (threatening) nature of the Other. The Other, however, is "known" through the discursive practices of the security discourses. The knowledge of the Other depends on these practices. These security discourses produce a Soviet Union whose actions are at least partly determined by its geographical location and the major influence this has had on its history. Totalitarian regimes strive for total control, the Soviet Union seeks global control by a long-term, well thought out, grand strategy which privileges military power as a key player. Nuclear weapons, as the weapons of greatest power are the lynchpin in all this. Hence the necessity to focus on the strategic implications of the SALT process. If the Soviet Union gains an undeniable strategic superiority, so the argument continues, then it will be able to expand its geopolitical reach, gradually taking over a series of strategically important states and in the process unravelling the US alliance system and eventually isolating the United States. The concern for military supremacy is tied to the matter of geopolitical control over the Third World as well as Europe. But the essential prerequisite of this is the nature of the Soviet Union. Otherness and geopolitics are intertwined at all stages of the argument. Each of the security discourses that the CPD used can be reviewed briefly,46focusing on the geopolitical dimensions of space, power and Otherness, and drawing on the writings of leading members of the CPD and the CPD policy statements. (In 1984 the CPD published its collected papers; for convenience all citations below are from this collection.) Sovietology
The CPD constructs its Other by explicit references to how the Soviet Union is different. "We strove to contrast the radical differences between our two societies and to illustrate the danger the Soviets constitute to the United " ~ ~ logic of this statement and much of States and to other d e m o ~ r a c i e s . The the rest of the CPD literature rests on the connections made between difference and threat. Crucially, difference is primarily "rooted in ... history and geography, its economic conditions and structure, and its political system and ideology."48 Geography gets first mention among these factors: Notwithstanding its vast territory and rich mineral resources, the Soviet Union can only with difficulty support its population. Its extreme northern latitude makes for a short agricultural season, a situation aggravated by the shortage of rain in areas with the best soil. Its mineral resources, often located in areas difficult to reach, are costly to extract. Its transportation network is still inadequate. These factors have historically been among those impelling Russia - Tsarist and Soviet alike - toward the conquest or domination of neighbouring lands. No empire in history has expanded so persistently as the Russian. The Soviet Union was the only great power to have emerged from World War I1 larger than it was in 1939.
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Without any further discussion of the nature of the Soviet economy, we are informed, in the sentence that follows this quotation, that the deficiencies in the economic system are aggravated by the regime and its attempts to maintain power. The totalitarian interpretations of sovietology are rehearsed here. There is no possibility of an alternative explanation, no mention of the numerous invasions of Russia and the Soviet Union through history; no possibility that the option of detente, using Western technology to overcome the transportation difficulties, to develop the mineral resources and to strengthen the economy, might be a less-hazardous course for Soviet policy than building up armed forces and threatening neighboring countries. Crucially, in the last sentence of this passage the Soviet Union is presented as unique because of its territorial expansion. The geopolitical theme is clear; the understanding of power in terms of territorial factors is explicit. The ruling elite, it seems, is caught in the same determinist geopolitical trap as its Tsarist predecessors. Later we learn that "it is driven by internal, historical and ideological pressures toward an expansionist policy.. .."4y This "ruling elite" is the key to understanding the USSR. It maintains itself in comfort "while the remaining 250 million citizens not only have few material advantages but are deprived of basic human liberties." This state of affairs is maintained because the elite manages to keep the population "under effective control." But the elite sees itself as the leaders of a "revolutionary society" and their ultimate objective is "the worldwide triumph of Communism" which "would give the Soviet elite ready access to the world's resources, both human and material" as well as doing away "with all external challenges to its privileged position by eliminating once and for all alternative political and social systems." All this fairly standard rendition of the totalitarian interpretation of sovietology is based on a crude geographical determinism. This geographical motif is a recurring theme in Harvard history professor and leading CPD member Richard Pipes' writings. In his major history of R u s ~ i a , 'Pipes ~ argues that environment is the essential factor in the formation of preindustrial or "patrimonial" societies. Later he argues that the Russian patrimonial system is "accounted for" by geographical factors:" Climate and topography conspire to make Russia a poor country, unable to support a population of high density: Among such causes are an exceedingly short agricultural season, abundant rainfall where soil is of low quality and unreliable rainfall where it happens to be fertile, and great difficulties of transport (long distances, severe winters, and so on). The result has been unusually high population mobility, a steady outflow of the inhabitants in all directions, away from the historic centre of Great Russia in the taiga, a process that, to judge by the census of 19.59 and 1970, continues unabated to this very day. The movement is partly spontaneous, partly government sponsored. It is probably true that no country in recorded history has expanded so persistently and held on so tenaciously to every inch of conquered land.
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And further on the geographical theme: Thanks to its topography (immense depth of defence, low population density, and poor transport) Russia has always been and continues to be the world's most difficult country to conquer, as Charles XII, Napoleon, and Hitler each in turn found out. As for buffers, it is no secret that today's buffers have a way of turning into tomorrow's homeland, which requires new buffers to protect it. Pipes argues that East Europe is just the latest buffer, acquired with Western acquiescence, but that "it is far better to seek the causes of Russian expansionism in internal impulses springing from primarily economic conditions and the habits that they breed." A final point on the theme of expansion is that the migrating populations have learned how to subjugate and dominate the populations that they came in contact with through exploiting the political weaknesses of their neighbors prior to annexation. "No other country has a comparable wealth of accumulated experience in the application of external and internal pressures on neighbors for the purpose of softening them prior to conquest." Pipes makes the link particularly clear in his later paper on "Militarism and the Soviet State.'js2 He asserts that the assumption that economic resources spent on military expenditures is wasted, as Western economics might suggest, is not true because of the historical experience of Russia, as well as because of the exigencies of Marxism-Leninism. Pipes argues that historically the vast majority of the Russian state budget was spent on the military, and it often operated to conquer adjacent territories. There is a cycle of poverty necessitating conquest, involving large military forces, which impoverish the state. Thus population pressure led to Russian expansionism and militarism. The military also provided a crucial internal service to the Tsarist regime; that of ensuring internal order. While the communist state that came later had different ideological concerns, it "inherited the same land with the same traditions and many of the same problems: it would be surprising, therefore had it entirely discarded that or any other legacy of Russia's past."5" The roots of the CPD explanation of the Soviet geopolitical expansion lie in this determinist interpretation of history. This determinism has the powerful ideological advantage of removing any possibility of political choice from politics. The course of Soviet expansionism is deeply embedded in Russian history. Against this trajectory mere political and diplomatic maneuvers like detente are worse than useless. The determinist interpretation of Soviet conduct is thus a very powerful discursive move which acts to exclude any alternative interpretations. Realism
This sovietological specification of Otherness dovetails very well with CPD advocacy of realism or power politics as the only legitimate perspective
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from which to assess international politics. Their privileging of power politics is clear from the proceedings of a Washington Foreign Policy Association meeting held in March 1978. The CPD provided a panel consisting of Richard Pipes, Eugene Rostow and Paul Nitze to discuss their perspective. In his contribution to the CPD panel Rostow applies the analogy of the 1930s British appeasement of Hitler to the 1970s. Here he issues a warning that the same historical mistakes are likely to be repeated by US leaders unless drastic changes are made. There is an urgent need to "arrest the slide toward chaos before it explodes into war." This may happen if:'4 we feel ourselves threatened and coerced; if we sense that the last vestige of our power to govern our own destiny is slipping out of our hands; if the Soviet Union takes control of one strong point after another, and achieves domination in Western Europe or Japan, or in a number of places whose power in combination spells hegemony. We can never recall too often Thucydides' comment that the real cause of the Pelopennesian War was not the episodes of friction and conflict which preceded it, but the rise in the power of Athens, and the fear that this caused Sparta. And later, "The pressures of Soviet policy have been greater since 1970 or so than ever before. The agreements for peace in Indo-China were torn up and disregarded. The Soviets supported aggressive and large scale war in Bangladesh, in the Middle East, and in Africa. There has been an alarming slide toward chaos."" Rostow concludes his remarks by arguing that the British could afford to be weak and fail to provide firm leadership in 1913 and 1938, because the Americans were the ultimate guarantor that they would win in the end. But the United States in the 1970s "has no sleeping giant to save us from our folly." This historical analogy is important to the CPD position. They conflate the totalitarian foreign policy tactics of the USSR with those of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. The parallels include the use of threat by the USSR to accomplish expansion. Military intimidation is a key tactic. Apart from being a paranoid interpretation of Soviet foreign policy, this position also assumes that the United States is really militarily unprepared. Other commentator^'^ have pointed to the historical analogy of 1914 as more appropriate. This analogy points to a situation of complex alliance structures with numerous foreign entanglements and interests facing each other; accidents waiting to happen to drag them into a war that neither side wants but which the logic of events compels them to fight. The consequences of adopting this historical analogy are fundamentally different, pointing to the need to negotiate a series of agreements that limit the possibilities of entanglement and escalation, and also limit the overall number of nuclear weapons. This is a conclusion that the CPD cannot accept because of their axiological specification of the Other as evil and threatening, and the United States as purely defensive. With this specification
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the only possible source of war, accidental or deliberate is ultimately traceable to the actions of that Other. This is because in the realist terms the Soviet Union is a revisionist power, one attempting to change the international order to its benefit. The CPD focus on "the present danger" is in terms of power politics understood in terms of both military confrontation and geopolitical expan~ion.~'
... certainly the centerpiece of the Soviet strategic view of world politics has always been that if Russia could control Western Europe and bring it under its dominion, and the areas upon which Western Europe is dependent in the Middle East and Africa, that it would thereby control the world. There can be no question that Soviet reduction of Western Europe or equally China, but more emphatically Western Europe, either envelopement or through direct attack, or through coercion and political influence, would be read in Japan and in China and in many other parts of the world as a clear political signal that the balance of power had shifted disastrously against the United States, that American guarantees were no longer effective or credible and that China and Japan would correspondingly make the best deal they could with the Soviet Union. If this should happen then the consequences would be severe. Without credible deterrents the constructive relationship with China could evaporate and the alliances erode. "Then we would face the world alone and isolated in a position of total military inferiority."s8 This specification of the Soviet Union as expansionist is essential in the CPD formulation of the international situation. The specification of the USSR as evil on the axiological dimension of Otherness denies the applicability of concerns with international order and stability. Because the USSR is expansionist, and because the CPD "knows" its true nature by the application of its superior "historical method" the "interests" of the USSR can be dismissed as illegitimate. This realist move excludes anything but power defined in military and territorial terms from serious consideration. This discursive move of exclusion is essential to the CPD position. In answer to a suggestion that the threat to world peace lies not with the Soviet Union but with unrest in the Third World, Paul Nitze's reply linked "North-South" issues to "East-West" issues arguing that they couldn't be separated because, " ... the point of Russia's interest in Africa is to ... create positions there which will outflank the Middle East. Why are they interested in the Middle East? Because that will create positions which will outflank Europe and Japan and that, in turn, is of great strategic interest to the United state^."^^ The use of the term "outflank" borrowed from military parlance stretches its meaning to absurd lengths, calling into question Nitze's understanding of either the term, or of the geographical arrangements of the continents. R o s t ~ w also ~ ~uses this geographical allusion repeatedly. However, it also suggests the use of the logic of domino^,^' where an increase in influence by the USSR in one part of the globe is automatically
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followed by other increases in noncontiguous areas, by mechanisms that are left unexplained. It reduces the complexity of international politics to a spatially homogenous arena like a chessboard where pieces act in purely geometric terms. Local considerations, the aspirations of other peoples are simply not present in these discussions. This specification of the Third World as a playing field constructs a physical model of the area as a politically empty part of "absolute space" waiting to be "filled" by "projected" power. What is important in global terms are not local cultures or politics, but the abstract clashing of military power in spaces that can be used to outflank the West if not filled with Western "power." Again the assumptions of space as the container of political activity is present; security is defined in the geopolitical terms of spatial exclusion and territorial control.
Underlying these themes is the old geopolitical theme of the heartland power attempting to wrest total control over the rimlands from naval powers.h2 The expansion of the Soviet Union into the rimlands is of serious concern in all of the CPD texts. Although they rarely explicitly use geopolitical language, Soviet domination of the Eurasian land-mass is referred to. The most explicit statement of the geopolitical theme and the utility of its overarching conceptualizations of the global political scene is found in Colin Gray's attempt h 3 to update the work of MacKinder and S ~ y k r n a nHe . ~ ~argues that their ideas of geopolitics are not only still relevant to the understanding of international politics, but that they are the essential basis to any adequate understanding of global affairs. Gray's reinterpretation of the classical geopolitical texts links to his conception of the Soviet Union as an expansionist empire, drawing together his geopolitical writings with the geographic rationale for Russian and Soviet expansion provided by Richard Pipes. The postwar policy of containment militarism, originally encapsulated in the 1950 National Security Council document number 6 8 (NSC 68),h' involved the conflation of realism and the "national interest" with the military concerns about forward defense against the Soviet Union. Power was equated with the military domination of territory; containment was a geopolitical strategy.h%ray's rationale for reassessing the literature on geopolitics is to rearticulate the themes of containment militarism precisely because the geopolitical premises of foreign policy were no longer accepted by the detente advocates and the arms controllers. "The primary intention is to outline an appropriate framework of assumptions for the analysis of East-West relation^."^' We are informed that the only approach to the field of international relations that "enables the student to appreciate the essence of the field" is the approach best termed "power politics." He charges that international relations practitioners have forgotten that the central concern of their craft is with relative influence and physical survival, ultimately a matter of power." The rationale for geopolitics as a framework for understanding international relations is reintroduced to direct "attention to matters of enduring importan~e."~'
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More specifically geopolitics is defined in Saul Cohen's70 terms as "the relation of international political power to the geographical settingn71
... geopolitics is not simply one set of ideas among many competing sets that help to illuminate the structure of policy problems. Rather it is a meta- or master framework that, without predetermining policy choice, suggests long term factors and trends in the security objectives of particular territorially organised security communities. The leitmotiv of geopolitics, we are informed, is the struggle of land power against sea power. Nuclear weapons and their methods of delivery have, Gray argues, led to the abandonment of geopolitical thinking by US academics and policy-makers. A major war between the superpowers is now conceived as a matter of immediate massive nuclear missile attack. Gray asserts that the major geographical features of the planet continue to pose unresolved problems of nuclear strategy for Western strategists. He argues that the global situation is best seen as a long-term struggle between the "insular imperium" of the United States and the "heartland imperium" of the USSR.72 More specifically, in an argument consistent with Nitze's concerns with Soviet "outflanking" of the Middle East and Europe we are offered the following credo:
1. Control of the World Island of Eurasia-Africa by a single power would, over the long term, mean control of the world. 2. Land power and sea power meetlclash in the Eurasian-African Rimlands and marginal seas. Control of those Rimlands and marginal seas by an insular power is not synonymous with control of the World Island, but it does mean the denial of eventual global hegemony to the Heartland power (that is, the Soviet Union). In line with the CPD position, we are informed that the "proximate stake" in this conflict is the control of Europe which the Soviet Union might gain by military conquest, "Finlandisation," or by control over the oil production areas of the Middle East. Europe remains the key to limiting Soviet expansion. Thus there will be, in his geopolitical scheme, a continued need for the United States to maintain forces there to defend its interests. He argues that a familiarity with geopolitical ways of thinking would remove the difficulties in seeing this. The second geopolitical theme of importance in Gray's scheme is the conceptualization of the Soviet polity in terms of an "imperial thesis."73 Gray states that the Soviet Union is continually misunderstood in the West because it is not appreciated specifically as an empire.74The specifics of the geopolitical predicament facing the Soviet empire are of particular importance. According to G r a y , 7 b h o cites Pipes to support his argument in the key passages, Soviet geopolitical problems are tied centrally to the Russian tradition of
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"patrimonialism" and to Russian, and subsequently, Soviet militarism. Thus: "The conquest of the black earth belt of the steppe, and later of the entire Eurasian Heartland, by a state that had its origins in the northern taiga must be explained in terms of reactions to physical geography." From this Gray argues that the key to the Soviet Empire is geographical, in terms of territorial control; "As with all empires, the Great Russian has a core area (Muscovy, Byelorussia) and succeeding layers, each protecting the others. Time after time since the early 1950s the Soviet Union has shown that it is trapped in the dynamics of empire."76 This dynamic is a situation in which the outermost holdings protect those nearer the centre, a failure to hold on to control over the outer areas in turn calls into question the legitimacy and effectiveness of the central control over inner areas. For long-term maintenance the empire must not shrink, preferably to shore-up and support internal legitimacy it should expand, at least in visible influence if not in physical dimensions. Increased internal control that follows from increased influence outside the imperial boundaries. Thus the domination of Western Europe can, within the imperial logic, be seen in purely defensive terms as a removal of a threat to Eastern Europe. "The USSR is not merely a country surrounded by potential enemies, it is an empire that virtually by definition can have no settled relations of relative influence with its neighbour~."~' Gray asserts that the geopolitical inheritance of the USSR is to believe that "boundaries are fighting places," this being the "natural belief for a country without natural frontier^."'^ L'The imperial thesis is vital because it settles, persuasively, arguments about Soviet intentions." Thus, in an expansion of Pipes' arguments in geopolitical terms, the Soviet empire is fundamentally insecure, only expansion to gain territories beyond its borders and hence increase the degree of external control offers any increase in security. The whole structure rests on force, usually latent, the leaders know that they cannot rule a universal empire even if they could create one, "but they are condemned by circumstance to try."79 They must, in this scheme, attempt to reduce other centres of power that abut their borders because as long as any alternative sources of power offer alternative models of society the rule of the Communist Party will remain insecure. Their means to accomplish these ends are geopolitical expansion through military intimidation, up to and including the ultimate levels of strategic nuclear power. Strategy The CPD argued that the Soviet negotiating posture in SALT was merely an attempt to negotiate unilateral advantages in crucial weapons systems, in particular "heavy" ICBMs with their potential to carry numerous warheads on a single missile. Combining this purported emerging strategic superiority with their geopolitical campaign of expansion and intimidation and, crucially, with a war fighting nuclear strategy, the CPD argued that the Soviet Union was aiming for global domination. The key article that triggered a wide public
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debate in the strategic and policy communities is Richard Pipes' "Why the Soviet Union Thinks it Can Fight and Win a Nuclear War."80 Pipes argues that nuclear war fighting is part of the Soviet grand strategy for world domination. This in turn requires a US nuclear strategy capable of thwarting any Soviet attempts to use nuclear weapons to intimidate in a crisis or win in a war. Although Nitze8' introduced them early, Colin Gray is a key figure in spreading ideas of new strategic departures, in particular in his "theory of victory."82 The nuclear strategy arguments provide the direct rationales for the Reagan Administration's massive strategic weapons procurement policy8" and the complete lack of progress in arms control negotiations in its first term of office.x4While the Reagan Administration build-up of weapons and the nuclear war fighting strategies have come under sustained criticism from numerous sources, the critics have often been talking past the issues as seen from the CPD perspective, because they have not understood CPD articulation of the security discourses. Pipes7 strategic arguments are a continuation of his earlier papers on the essential expansionist and militarist tendencies in the Soviet Union, and the essential interlinkage between the two. In one of his statements on this e the argutheme which was to subsequently cause o ~ t r a g e , ~ % summarizes ment thus: The novelty of nuclear weapons consists not in their destructiveness that is, after all, a matter of degree, and a country like the Soviet Union which, as Soviet generals proudly boast, suffered in World War I1 the loss of over 20 million casualties, as well as the destruction of 1,710 towns, over 70,000 villages, and some 32,000 industrial establishments to win the war and emerge as a global power, is not to be intimidated by the prospect of destruction. In case there is any doubt Pipes quotes the following "Clausewitzian" argument from S o k o l o ~ s k i i :"It ~ ~is well known that the essential nature of war as a continuation of politics does not change with changing technology and armament."87 Thus nuclear war is not suicidal, it can be fought and won, the exact opposite, he argues, of the current doctrinal position in the United States. Pipes' comments that what literature comes from the Soviet Union on the impossibility of winning a nuclear war is intended solely for Western consumption, it does not reflect official thinking. The distinction between what the Soviets write for themselves and foreigners is a neat move to exclude all counter-arguments. Because the Soviet Union is defined as a totalitarian monolith, it follows that learned military journals will produce the central line of official policy. Hence when officers discuss military operations in their journals this can be interpreted as a statement of political intention. Because of the monolithic assumption there is no distinction between the institutional requirements that officer corps discuss military eventualities and the actual intentions of political leaders. The CPD was particularly concerned with the SALT process because they thought that it would prevent the development of new US strategic weapons
h h Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union As Other 75 and ensure a Soviet "superiority" which would be used to force political concessions from the United States and lead to its gradual isolation in world affairs. In particular this lack of US superiority would ensure that the United States would have to back down in conflicts over the Middle East and elsewhere where resources essential to the US economy are located. They argued that the United States would be self-deterred because of its lack of nuclear superiority. But the strategic arguments d o not stop there. Assuming that the United States built the weapons that the CPD called for there is a further requirement for worked out strategies for their use in conflict, so the argument goes, to bring about political defeat of the Soviet Union in a nuclear war. This theme was explicitly worked out in Gray's "theory of victory."8xHe argues that US official thinking and planning does not embrace the idea that it is necessary to try to effect the defeat of the Soviet Union. First and foremost the Soviet leadership fears defeat, not the suffering of damage and defeat ... has to entail the forcible demise of the Soviet State." Gray argues that the 1970s' counter-economic recovery targeting strategies might not bring the demise of the state because, The Soviet Union, like Czarist Russia, knows that it can absorb an enormous amount of punishment (loss of life, industry, productive agricultural land, and even territory), and recover, and endure until final victory provided the essential assets of the state (original emphasis) remain intact. The principal assets are the political control structure of the highly centralised CPSU and government bureaucracy; the transmission belts of communication from the centre to the regions; the instruments of central official coercion (the KGB and the armed forces); and the reputation of the Soviet state in the eyes of its citizens. Counter-economic targeting should have a place in intelligent US war planning, but only to the extent to which such targeting would impair the functioning of the Soviet State. While Gray admits that the problems of dividing the state apparatus from the rest of the society and the economy would be formidable, nonetheless targeting the Soviet Union with the avowed aim of destroying the political apparatus and control mechanisms would at least provide a coherent war aim which would provide a potentially desirable state of affairs in the postwar world. While not easy to operationalize, at least a theory of this sort offers some guidelines as to how to plan to fight a war in a way that the Soviet leadership would consider credible, and such a risk to their survival that they would be deterred from initiating a war. "Stated directly, the Soviets should know that if they prosecute a major war against the West they stand to lose (in their own tevms) (original emphasis). In a conflict over the most important political stakes, our principal war aim should be to effect the demise of the Soviet state: It should not be to kill Soviet postwar economic recovery."8y Gray argues that five key facts are crucial to devising this kind of a strategy. Each of these is drawn from Richard Pipes' work on Russian history, specifically from Russia Under the Old Regime and "Detente: Moscow's vie^."'^) The imperial thesis provides the framework from which Gray draws
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this targeting strategy. Thus we are told first that the Soviet peoples have no affection for their political system; second, the colonial peoples within the empire have no love for the Soviet Union; third, the state is very careful with its domestic respect and reputation because it is so fragile; fourth, the overcentralization of the system suggests that it can be paralyzed if the lower levels of political command are severed from the central "brain;" and fifth, the peoples of Eastern Europe are only likely to maintain respect for the Soviet Union so long as its armed forces are not defeated or tied down in a long and interminable war. Thus Gray argues that the war fighting strategy of targeting the Soviet apparatus would, in the context of conflict that could not easily be defined as self-defense of Mother Russia, seriously undermine the legitimacy of the system. It would also work to undermine the legitimacy of the regime if it were fighting a war in distant parts, and the domestic devastation were limited to clearly identifiable political targets. Precisely because the Soviet Union is an empire, without, supposedly, any legitimacy in the peripheral areas, it would be vulnerable to this kind of strategy.91 A theory of victory over the Soviet Union can be only partially military in character - the more important part is political. The United States and its allies probably should not aim at achieving the military defeat of the Soviet Union, considered as a unified whole; instead, it should seek to impose such military stalemate and defeat as is needed to persuade disaffected Warsaw Pact allies and ethnic minorities inside the Soviet Union that they can assert their own values in very active political ways. Crucial to all of this is Gray's amalgamation of the imperial thesis, drawn from Pipes' writing, with the strategic considerations of nuclear war fighting. This interconnection is the lynchpin of the whole discourse on the Soviet threat.92 The imperial thesis is directly inserted into nuclear planning. The key to Gray's theory of victory thus resides in Pipes' interpretation of Russian history, more SO than, as Freedman return to the political science of Douhet and the early air power theorists, or as Herken suggests,94the early RAND writings on the nature of the Soviet power structure. This historical scheme is linked with strategic, realist and geopolitical themes each of which is interconnected to support the exclusion of any other way of comprehending international politics. Together they lead inevitably to nuclear war planning and increased militarization.
The Ideology of Security Discourse
Each of the security discourses operates to define their object of study by excluding other approaches and by defining as legitimate a particular ensemble of practices. They all operate on assumptions that security is a negative operation of spatially corraling Otherness. These are powerful ideological
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operations reproducing the past of the Cold War and attempting to defer all other considerations to some future time when the Cold War has been resolved in favor of the United States, a resolution understood by Gray and Pipes to be the internal reform of the USSR to make it more acceptable to the United States; a redefinition of Otherness to more of the same, i.e. more like the United States. These formulations reduce the world to simplistic dualisms which contain powerful constraints on how the world is understood. The nuclear strategy and sovietology perspectives reduce the world to a zero-sum game in which one side always gains at the other's expense. The geopolitical discourse squeezes out of consideration the complexity of international interaction, the "Third World" is reduced to a field on which the superpowers play out their rivalry. Any indigenous interests are removed from consideration in the global space of superpower rivalry, a space filled only by projected technological power. The object of the geopolitical discourse is the enhancement of security by the spatial limitation of the domain in which the adversary can project power. The state is privileged by the realist discourse as the only actor in the international arena which is worthy of consideration. The very term international relations defines matters in terms reminiscent of diplomatic procedures. Economic, cultural, historical and political factors are removed from the foreground, unnecessary clutter in the exercise of the rituals of realist power. Any wider considerations of social theory are excluded from the realm of international relations." As far as the CPD is concerned, power is about the ability to militarily confront the Soviet Union; economic, cultural and political developments are all secondary to the overarching need for nuclear supremacy, the ultimate arbiter of everything else. The totalitarian conceptualization denies politics and history by creating an Other as perpetual adversary. Key to its understandings of the USSR is the specification of it as monolithic and unchanging." This denial of history reduces the possibilities of politics, by erecting the spectre of the permanent adversary, against which perpetual vigilance is needed." It denies the possibility of an alternative vision of the future on either side of the great divide, hence perpetuating the political status quo. The device is simple and in ideological terms hugely effective. The responsibility for all "our" problems is neatly encapsulated in the creation of the Other. Thus the particular specification of Otherness in terms of a geopolitical expansionist threat is the key element which articulates all the security discourses together. It provides the point of articulation for the CPD version of US hegemony. It reinforces its position in blatantly ethnocentric fashion, but an ethnocentrism that reinforces its arguments precisely by how it specifies the Other. The CPD argues that by analyzing the USSR in terms of its internal historical and geopolitical makeup "we" will understand what their society is like and hence "we" will act accordingly and move to counter it by developing appropriate nuclear strategies. The crucial ethnocentric move is related to the totalitarian formulation in which all information and writing is designed
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to further the purposes of the political leaders. All arguments that purport to be conciliatory to the West must be dismissed as disinformation. The additional step is then easy. "They" really do know that "their" society is as "we" now understand it, i.e. it is totalitarian and bent on world domination, hence US military preparations will be interpreted in the USSR as d e f e n ~ i v e . ~ ~ Here the possibility that there might be other thinking in the Soviet Union is excluded by the "superiority" of the "historical method" which focuses on the "real" factors rather than those dreamt up by political scientists concerned with abstract models, or strategists who ignore the history of the USSR. The whole matter is a neatly circular argument, any possible bases on which one might construct a critique are disallowed in advance. It is precisely these series of exclusions that gives their arguments their coherence, and hence, when articulated together, their ideological power. This series of ideological moves, discussed here in terms of the articulation of the security discourses supports the overall hegemony of US modernity. Within the West the language of politics is inscribed within discussions of modernity, rationality and specific references to time and space. As Said shows,yythe process of European imperial expansion was coupled with, and defined in terms of, the expansion of enlightenment, whether in religious terms of salvation of the heathen or in terms of scientific progress. With this went the incorporation and administration of the primitive (distant in time) and " ignorant." Modernity comes with universal space and time, within which the great drama of development unfolds. There is continuity in the development of progress, a continuity through time that ultimately marginalizes, subsumes, negates or destroys that which is the Other, primitive, different. Progress is identified with the West, rationality, science, the expansion of civilization. The ultimate triumph of reason is equated in the United States in particular with the triumph of that particular polity.100 The same pattern of domination, exclusion and incorporation is present in the CPD discourse; totalitarian communism is the last remaining Other which has to be overcome, subdued, colonized and finally remade into a society like us, an extension of the identity of enlightenment. That military coercion and the economic ~enaltiesof arms racing will finally force the Soviet Union to reform into a more Western-style society is a repeated theme of containment literature from Kennanlo1 through NSC 68,'02 to Pipes"03 recent geopolitical writing. This theme reinforces the formulation of security as spatial exclusion and limitation. The Other is at the same time a disgrace, a challenge to the supremacy of the Western universalizing culture, one that ultimately undermines the legitimacy of its project. It has to be shut off in a separate space to be kept under observation, controlled and reformed. With reference to Foucault's concerns with the discourses of madness, the medical analogy is apt in the link between power, observation and control. Communism is often likened to the spread of a contagion.Io4 A geopolitical threat requires a response in territorial terms; security is understood in these terms, a move of spatial exclusion. '
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Combining this geopolitical concern with nuclear weapons and with the denial of politics in realism, and also with the totalitarian approach to the USSR, provides powerful inhibiting framework for the evolution of broader conceptions of security and international relations. In the United States the hegemonic understanding of the global geopolitical arena, involves an acceptance of the necessity of extended deterrence, and Third World intervention. Thus underlying the many debates on nuclear weapons within the United States is the overall assumption of the geopolitical divide of the globe into them and us, requiring that the United States must always be prepared to intervene in distant lands and must be prepared to use nuclear weapons to ensure a local victory. To d o this requires a constant edge in nuclear technology, and the ability to develop a damage limitation capability that allows extended deterrence to be credible. But "in an era of parity, the attempt to develop the degree of damage limitation required to restore credibility to extended deterrence will invariably subvert not only the SALT process, but arms control in general."'0" These overall assumptions were not unquestionably accepted after the Vietnam war, detente, the Nixon doctrine, and the global managerialist approaches to international affairs promoted by the Trilateral Commission.'('" The CI'D led the ideological assault in an attempt to ensure that the security discourses were reasserted such that the consensus on the basic necessity of extended deterrence is no longer seriously open to political debate. The technical details of nuclear war fighting are the-logic df this reassertion, but the geopolitical dimension is ultimately more important because it underlies the technical arguments: it sets the terms of political debate. But it is a debate that excludes politics by reducing the possibilities of discourse to a number of intellectual specializations, the discourses of security, which monopolize that which may be discussed. The expert, equipped with the theoretical knowledge derived from intellectual work, versed in its techniques and competent in the rituals of the discourses, is the only competent participant in the process. Wider political participation is denied or coopted within the strategic discourses.107 Learning the specialized languages is not unduly difficult, but having learnt them they in turn delimit what it is possible to discuss.'0x Thus the security discourses act in a profoundly conservative political manner, delimiting the possibilities of discourse by the categorizations they impose and the rituals and methodologies they legitimate. These discursive practices reproduce the Cold War in a series of categorizations which limit the possibilities of political intervention precisely by how they categorize.
Rethinking Geopolitics
The ideological moves of geopolitics are powerful because of how they act to exclude alternative formulations of politics. They are powerful because
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they draw on a number of "common sense" themes in Western metaphysics. Specifically this paper suggests that rethinking geopolitics requires a refusal of the dichotomous formulation of the identity-difference theme in security matters. Geopolitics is about the formulation of security in spatial terms of identity and difference, difference being inherently inferior to identity. Universalizing a particular identity does not lead to security but to a replication of security problems at a larger scale,'09 or to a blatantly imperialistic situation. Security requires a reformulation in terms that refuse the dichotomous structures of them and us, Same and Other. But security is also a matter of technological domination of abstract space. Hence the fate of the Third World as a collection of dominos of at best a politically empty arena in which the great geopolitical game is played. This isn't just a matter of demonology or the dehumanization of other cultures and peoples, it is often a simple denial of their cultural existence. The negative conception of security coupled to technology and space leads ultimately to the logic of "Star Wars" as a "peace shield" to spatially exclude incoming missiles. Politics, denied in the totalitarian interpretation of the Soviet system is finally completely removed by the possibility of entirely automatic warfare. This is the ultimate move of the ideological practices of security discourse. Security requires a reformulation that refuses these technological definitions and conceptions of absolute space. The essential political move of all these security discourses is to privilege a certain political reality, a geopolitical one in which militarization is primary. The CPD documents explicitly argue that all other matters of human rights, environment and development must be deferred until the military sphere is dealt with. Linked to the other neoconservative and reactionary political formulations of the 1980s these ideological moves have profoundly deleterious effects on the potential for progressive political change. They act to increase the realm of state power beyond democratic control, in terms of foreign interventions, military budgets and the massive build-up of "intelligence" agencies dedicated to the prosecution of "low intensity warfare" in the Third World.'lo All these developments are premised on the geopolitical formulation of security in terms of territorial control and spatial exclusion with the Third World as a geometric arena of competition. Challenging these formulations requires simultaneously a recognition of how deeply structured these discursive practices are in thinking about politics, criticizing them on both practical political grounds and at the theoretical level, as well as reformulating security discourse to incorporate a plurality of cultural presences and the possibility of political change and cooperation.'" It requires also a refusal to equate the state with the provision of security by the persistent posing of the question of "security for whom?" l2 Alternative formulations of space, power and security need to start from the active political practices of progressive social collectivitiesl'~atherthan from the abstractions of absolute space and the negative formulation of security as exclusion. These latter formulations lead to self-perpetuating confrontation, permanent adversaries and militarization, and technological violence, the exact opposite of what "security" should provide.
b i b L Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union As Other
81
Notes a n d References
1. Sanders, Peddlars of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Contarnment (Boston: South End, 1983). R. Scheer, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War (New York: Vintage, 1983); A.M. Cox, Russian Roulette: The Superpower Game (New York: Times Books, 1982); and A. Wolfe, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Threat (Boston: South End, 1984). I.. Freedman, US Intelligence and the Souiet Strategic Threat (London: Macmillan, 1 9 8 6 ) ; and J. Prados, The Soviet Estimate (New York: Dial, 1982). The notable exception to this "silence" of geopolitics is Kissinger's use of the term, although he used the term in an idiosyncratic manner not clearly linked to the earlier rradition, L.W. Hepple, "The Revival of (;eopolitics," Political Geography Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 4, Supplement, 1986, pp. S21-S36; Z. Brzezinski, Game Plan: A Geostrategrr Frametuork for the Conduct o f the US-Soviet Contest (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986); and C.E. Zoppo, and C. Zorgbibe (editors) O n Geopolrtics: Classrcal and Nuclear (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985). H.J. MacKinder, "The Geographical Pivot of History," Geographical Journal, Vol. 23, 1904, pp. 421-42; H.J. MacKinder, Democratzc ldeals and Realrty: A Study in the Politics o f Reconstruction (London: Constable, 19 19); N. Spykman, Amrricak Stmtegy in World Politics (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1942); and N. Spyknian, The Geography o f tl7c Peace (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1944). L.K.D. Kristof, "The Origins and Evolution of Geopolitics," journal of Cmflrct Resolution, Vol. 4, No. I , 1960, pp. IS-51. G. Parker, Western Geopolitical Thought in the Twentieth Century (London: Croom Helm, 1985); G. Trofimenko, The US Military Doctrzne (Moscow: Progress, 1986); ~ n d R.E. Walters, The Nuclear Trap: An Escape Route (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974). I). Pepper, and A. Jenkins, "Reversing the Nuclear Arms Race: Geopolitical Bases for Pessimism," Professional Geographer, Vol. 36, No. 4, 1984, pp. 419-27. M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972); M. Foucault, The Order of Thzngs: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973); M. Foucault, Language, Counter-Memorx Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University I'ress, 1977); and M. Foucault, PowerlKnowledge (Brighton: Harvester, 1980). I. Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columb~aUniversity Press, 1983). S. Dossa, "Political Philosophy and Orientalism: The Classical Origins of a Discourse," Alternatrves, Vol. 12, No. 3, 1987, pp. 343-58. E. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). 0 p cit, note 9. T. Todorov, The Conquest of Amerrca: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper and Row, 1984). M. Shapiro, "The Constitution of the Central American Other: The Case of Guatemala," paper presented at the annual Griffith Lecture, School of International Service (American University, Washington, 1987). Ihid. Ihid. Ihid. R. Ashley, "The Geopolitics of Geopolitical Space: Toward a Critical Social Theory of International Politics," Alternatives, Vol. 12, No. 4, 1987, pp. 403-34; and R.B.J. Walker, "Genealogy, Geopolitics and Political Community: Richard K. Ashley and the Critical Social Theory of International Politics," Alternatives, Vol. 13, No. 1, 1988, pp. 84-8. P. Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974); and N. Smith, Uneven Development (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984). This is not the place for an extensive analysis the writings of Thomas Hobbes or bourgeois political theory. For its relevance to international politics and security see below. T. Hohhes, Leviathian (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968); B. Buzan, I'eople, States and Fear: The National Security Problem in International Relations (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1983); A. linklater,
82
22. 23.
24. 25.
26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.
33. 34.
35.
36. 37. 38. 39.
40.
41.
42.
The Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security Agenda Men and Citizens in the Theory of International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1982); L. Paggi, and P. Pinzauti, "Peace and Security," Telos, No. 63, 1985, pp. 3 4 0 ; M. Wight, "Why is there no International Theory?," in H. Butterfield, and M. Wight (editors), Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory o f lnternational Politics (London: Allen and Unwin, 1966); R.B.J. Walker, "The Territorial State and the Theme of Gulliver," lnternational Journal, Vol. 34, 1984, pp. 529-52; and R.B.J. Walker, "Realism, Change and International Political Theory," International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 3 1, No. 1, 1987, pp. 65-86. Paggi and Pinzauti, ibid. R.B.J. Walker ( 1 9 8 8 ~ "The ) Concept of Security and lnternational Relations TheoryM (San Diego: University of California Institute of Global Conflict Cooperation, Working Paper No. 3, 1988). Ib~d. B.R. Anderson, Imagined Communzties: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); and R. Munck, The Difficult Dialogue: Marxism and Nationalism (London: Zed, 1986). B.S. Klein, "Beyond the Western Alliance: The Politics of Post Atlanticism," paper presented at the British lnternational Studies Association Meeting (Reading, 1986). O p cit, note 15. O p cit, note 20. D. Gross, "Space, Time and Modern Culture," Telos, No. 50, 1981-82, pp. 59-78. O p cit, note 15. O p cit, note 26. R. Luckham, "Armament Culture," Alternatwes, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1984, pp. 1 4 4 ; and R.B.J. Walker, "Culture, Discourse, Insecurity," Alternatives, Vol. 11, No. 4, 1986, pp. 485-504. R.A. Falk, The Promise of World Order: Essays in Normative International Relations (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987). J. Kovel, Against the State of Nuclear Terror (Boston: South End Press, 1983); and E.P. Thompson, The Heavy Dancers (London: Merlin, 1985); E.P. Thompson, Double Exposure (London: Merlin, 1985); and op cit, note 2. C. Bay, "Hazards of Goliath in the Nuclear Age: Need for Rational Priorities in American Peace and Defence Policies," Alternatives, Vol. 8, No. 4, 1983, pp. 501-42; C. Cohn, "Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defence Intellectuals," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 12, No. 4, 1987, pp. 687-719; ibid: op cit note 26; J . Galtung, "Social Cosmology and the Concept of Peace," Journal o f Peace Research, Vol. 18, No. 2, 1981, pp. 183-99; E.P. Thompson, Zero Option (London: Merlin, 1982); R.B.J. Walker, "Contemporary Militarism and the Discourse of Dissent," Alternatives, Vol. 9, No. 3, 1983-84, pp. 303-22; and N. Witheford, Nuclear Text, unpublished MA thesis (Department of English, Simon Fraser University, 1987). O p cit, note 32. P. Chilton (editor), Language and the Nuclear Arms Debate: Nukespeak Today (London: Francis Pinter, 1985). 0 p cit, note 19. M. MccGwire, "Dilemmas and Delusions of Deterrence," World Policy Journal, Vol. 1, No. 4, 1984, pp. 745-67; and M. MccGwire, "Deterrence: the Problem - Not the Solution," International Affairs, Vol. 62, No. 1, 1985-86, pp. 55-70. L. Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: St Martin's, 1983); G. Herken, Counsels of War (New York: Knopf, 1985); M. Kaku, and D. Axelrod, To Win a Nuclear War: The Pentagon's Secret War Plans (Boston: South End, 1987); and F. Kaplan, The Wizards of Armaggedon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983). S.F. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History Since I91 7 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); and F. Griffiths, "Through the Oneway Glass: Mutual Perception in Relations Between the US and S.U.," paper presented at the Third World Congress of Soviet and East European Studies (Washington, DC, 1985). O p cit, note 5.
I
.
Geopolitical Discourse: The Soviet Union As Other
83
43. S. Dalby, "American Geopolitics ,lnd the Soviet Threat," unpuhl~shedPhD dissertation (Geography Department, Simon Fraser University, 1988). 44. J . Agnew and G. O'Tuathail, "The Historlogaphy o f American (;eopolitics," paper presented to the Internat~onalStudies Association annual convention (Washington, DC, April 1987); and G. O'Tuathail, "The Geopolitics of Southern Africa: The US State Department and the Scripting of Southern Africa, 1969-1986," paper presented at the annual meeting of thc Association of American Geographers (Portland, April 1987). 45. J. Agnew, "An Excess of 'National Exceptionalism': Towards a New Political Geography of American Foreign Policy," Political Geogaphy Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 2, 1983, pp. 151-66. 46. The presentation of these arguments is necessarily compressed, tor an extensive documentation of the CPD position see Dalb): op cit, note 40. 47. M. Kampleman, "Introduction to Committee o n the Present Danger," C:. Tyroler ( e d ~ t o r ) , Alerting America: The Papers of the Committee o n t l ~ ePresent Danger (New York: Pergamon Brassey, 1984). 48. Committee on the Present Danger, C. Tyroler (editor),Alertrng America: The Papers of the Committee o n the Present Danger. Ihid. R. Pipes, Russra Under the Old Regime (1.ondon: Wiedenfeld and Nicholson, 1974). R. Pipes, US-Soviet Relations in the i5rn of Detente (Boulder: Westview, 1981). K. Pipes, "Milltar~smand the Soviet State," Daedalus, Vol. 109, No. 4, 1980, pp. 1-12, O p cit, note 5 1. O p cit, note 48. Ihid. M. Kahler, "Rumors of War: The 1914 Analogy," Foreign Affarrs, Vol. 58, No. 2, 1979, pp. 374-96. O p cit, note 48. Ihid. Ihid. E.V. Rostow, "The Safety of the Republic: Can the Tide he Turned?," Strategic Revieu: Vol. 4, N o . 2, 1976, pp. 12-25. P. O'Sullivan, "Antidomino," Political Geography Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1982, pp. 57-64. O p (it, note 5. C.S. Gray, The Geopolitics of the Nuclear Era: Heartlands, Rwnlands, and t l ~ c Technological Revolution (New York: Crane, Russack & Co., 1977). O p c ~ tnote , 5. S.E Wells, "Sounding the Tocsin: NSC68 and the Soviet Threat," International Security, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1979, pp. 116-58. S. Dalby, "The Political Geography of Security," paper presented to the annual meeting ot the American Association o f Geographers (Phoenix, Arizona, April 1988). O p cit, note 64. C.S. Gray, "Fore~gn Policy - There is n o Choice," Foreign Policy, No. 24, 1976, pp. 1 14-27. Op cit, note 64. S. Cohen, Geography and Polltics in u World Divided (New York: Random House, 1963). O p cit, note 64. Ihid. C.S. Gray, "The Most Dangerous Decade: Historic Mission, Legitimacy and Dynamics o f the Soviet Empire in the 1980s," Orbis, Vol. 25, No. 1, 1981, pp. 23-28; C.S. Gray, "Understanding Soviet Military Power," Problems of Communism, Vol. 30, No. 2, 198 1, pp. 64-7; C.S. Gray, "Reflections on Empire: The Soviet Connection," Mditary R ~ I J I P I L J , Vol. 62, No. 1, 1982, pp. 2-13; and R.V. Strode, and C.S. Gray, "The Imperial Dimension of Soviet Military Power," Problems of Communiswz, Vol. 30, No. 6, 1981, pp. 1-15. [bid. O p cit, note 64. Op cit, note 73.
The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. R. Pipes, "Why the Soviet Union Thinks it Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War," Commentary, Vol. 64, No. 1, 1977, pp. 21-34. P. Nitze, "Assuring Strategic Stability in an Era of Detente," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 54, No. 2, 1976, pp. 207-32. C.S. Gray, "Nuclear Strategy: The Case for a Theory of Victory," International Security, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1979, pp. 54-87. F. Knelman, Reagan, God and the Bomb: From Myth to Policy (Toronto: McLelland and Stewart, 1985); and op cit, note 40. S. Talbott, Deadly Gambits: The Reagan Adminrstratron and the Stalemate in Nuclear Arms Control (New York: Vintage, 1985). Scheer, op cit, note 2. V.D. Sokolovsky (editor), Military Strategy: Soviet Doctrine and Concepts (New York: Praeger, 1963). O p cit, note 5 1. O p cil, note 82. Ibid. R. Pipes, "Detente: Moscow's View," in R. Pipes (editor), Soviet Strategy in Western Europe (New York: Crane, Russak & Co., 1976); and op cit, note 50. O p cit, note 82. It might be objected that the imperial thesis was only elaborated subsequent to the 1979 appearance of the "theory of victory," op cit, note 73. However the crucial passage in the 1979 paper refers to Pipes' analysis of Russian imperialism. The five key factors that Gray draws on are taken directly from Pipes' formulations, note 73 refers to these writings as "the imperial thesis;" and op cit, note 82. O p cit, note 40. Ibid. O p cit, note 19. O p cit, note 41. 0 p cit, note 39. K . Booth, Strategy and Ethnocentrism (London: Croom Helm, 1979). O p cit, note 12. O p cit, note 15. G. Kennan (alias "X"), "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 25, No. 4, 1947, pp. 566-82. O p cit, note 65. R. Pipes, Survival is not Enough: Soviet Realities and America's Future (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984). O p cit, note 61. D.J. Arbess and S.A. Sahaydachny, "Nuclear Deterrence and International Law: Some Steps Toward Observance," Alternatives, Vol. 12, No.1, 1987, pp. 83-111. S. Gill, "Hegemony, Consensus and Trilateralism," Review of lnternational Studies, Vol. 12, 1986, pp. 205-22. 0 p cit, note 35. Ibid. Walker, op cit, note 21. M.T. Klare and P. Kornbluh (editors), Low Intensity Warfare: Counterinsurgency, Proinsurgency and Antiterrorrsm in the E~ghties(New York: Pantheon, 1988). O p cit, note 66. O p cit, note 23. R.B.J. Walker, One World/Many Worlds: Struggles for a Just World Peace (Boulder: Lynn Reinner, 1988); Gustavo Esteva, "Regenerating People's Space," Alternatives, Vol. 12, No. 1,1987, pp. 125-152.
International Security Studies: A Report of a Conference on the State of the Field Joseph S. Nye, Jr. and Sean M. Lynn-Jones
I
n February 1987, the Center for Science and International Affairs (CSIA) convened a conference on "The Past, Present and Future of International Security Studies." Although undertaken as background for a report to the trustees of the Ford Foundation for their mid-decade review, the conference also presented an opportunity to survey the field that is the focus of this journal. Thus we believe that the ideas generated at the conference will interest our readers. Participants from several nations and seven disciplines brought a wide variety of views to the conference. Although there was no effort to reach a consensus, certain tendencies were clear. The interpretation and extrapolation of those tendencies is our own, supplemented by references to published works. What follows reflects our personal perspective rather than an agreed conference report or a systematic bibliographic study of the field.
Defining t h e S c o p e of t h e Field
International security is not a discipline but a problem, as one participant put it. It developed around military capabilities and East-West issues that were easy to grasp. Deterrence theory and game theory provided a powerful unifying framework for those central issues, but often at the cost of losing sight of the political and historical context. The economic, cultural, and psychological aspects of security were initially given scant attention. The field is necessarily interdisciplinary, a point upon which most participants agreed. The central questions are concerned with international violence, but there are also other threats t o the security of states. This range of problems is too diverse to be viewed solely through the prism of a single discipline but, because political conflicts between sovereign states are the key to many critical issues in international security, political science will continue to occupy the central place among the disciplines concerned with questions of war and peace.' Source: Intematfonal Security, 12(4)( 1 9 8 8 ) :5-27.
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
As long as the fate of the earth could depend on how states address security issues, it will remain imperative not to overlook the potential contributions offered by other disciplines, such as economics, sociology, history, physical sciences, anthropology, psychology, and law. The interdisciplinary nature of international security studies makes it difficult to fit the field into the traditional structure of academic departments of most universities, but does not detract from the scholarly status of the field. Despite difficulties in drawing precise boundaries, it is possible to identify the subjects that form the central focus of international security studies. These are general issues, such as the causes of war and of alliances, as well as policy-oriented research on military and other threats confronting particular countries. The field includes basic theoretical work on the causes of conflict and war in the international system, the dynamics and outcomes of conflict, the nature and perception of threats, and efforts to ameliorate or resolve conflicts caused by such threats. Analyses of the problems of nuclear strategy, arms control, and deterrence, of conventional deterrence and conventional strategy, of the determinants of the defense policies of states, studies of military organizations and civil-military relations, and military history are familiar parts of the field. Economic, sociological, and psychological dimensions of threats, and institutional responses to security dilemmas are equally important. A subject that is only remotely related to central political problems of threat perception and management among sovereign states would be regarded as peripheral. Tank tactics fall into the category of military science, and depletion of fisheries falls into ecological sciences, not international security s t ~ d i e s . ~ The label applied to the field does not change the contents, but it does influence how the field is perceived and thus how it develops. Most participants were content to call the field "international security studies," but many names have been used. Strategic issues are part of international security studies, but the name "strategic studies" suggests that the field is concerned primarily with the choices between alternative strategies for states. Such a definition might exclude some of the more basic theoretical questions about the causes of war or the relationship between international economics and international security. Labels such as "defense studies" or "military affairs" would exclude nonmilitary dimensions of security.~imilarly,"national security affairs" implies that the field is wholly concerned with the promotion of the security of a given state. Moreover, as Arnold Wolfers pointed out two decades ago, "national security" is an ambiguous and emotion-laden term, a fact which often complicates its analytic use.4 Calling the field "international security studies" makes it clear that contemporary security problems are international in scope.'
Evolution a n d Achievements of International Security Studies International security studies, thus defined, is a relatively young field, developed after World War 11. Its progress has been halting and the definitive
,iiici i ~ 1 1 1 ;/otn~- State of the Field
87
intellectual history of the field has yet to be written. As Colin Gray suggested, perhaps "a field of ambiguous scholarly status is not often interested in tracing its own intellectual h i ~ t o r y . "We ~ do not mean to fill this gap, but t o provide a brief summary of some of the important developments in the field. The impetus for the development of international security studies came from the twin revolutions in American foreign policy and military technology caused by the emergence of the cold war and the development of atomic weapons. The unprecedented nature of the security problems confronting the United States attracted civilians to consider issues hitherto the province of the military.' Scientists involved in wartime atomic research remained involved in the continuing debates over the implications of their discoveries. At the same time, American thinking about international politics was transformed by the almost universal acceptance of the realist paradigm, which held that the idealism and isolation of the interwar period must be replaced by a rigorous appreciation of power politics and the importance of the national i n t e r e ~ t . ~ The realist school provided a simplified political context for the elaboration of concepts of nuclear strategy and deterrence.Qfter the initial reaction to the atomic bomb, American thinking on nuclear weapons generated few new ideas until the development of the hydrogen bomb and the pronouncement of the "massive retaliation" policy of the Eisenhower administration prompted a search for more "rational" means of making nuclear weapons serve U.S. foreign policy. Concepts such as counterforce, first and second strike capabilities, strategic force vulnerability, crisis stability, arms race stability, competitive risk-taking, escalation, damage limitation, flexible response, and limited nuclear war were elaborated in this period. Many of the works explicating these notions remain classics in the field.'" This wave of theorizing also led to consideration of how arms control, rather than disarmament, could contribute to the stability of the nuclear balance." The general preoccupation with nuclear issues limited the attention given to many problems of conventional strategy, but the Korean War and the formation and maintenance of the NATO alliance prompted consideration of the issues of limited war and the military situation in Europe. l 2 Many have noted that creative thinking about security issues virtually disappeared after the conceptual innovations of the late 1950s and early 1960s.13 This stagnation at least partially reflects the impact of the Vietnam War on the entire enterprise of thinking about military affairs. As one observer has argued, "there is n o doubt that the disillusionment, which the ending of the Vietnam intervention represented, made strategic studies in the United States less fashionable, however illogically."'4 The emergence of US-Soviet detente and the apparent reduction in the danger of nuclear war led to a dramatic reduction in public interest in nuclear weapons issues, despite the continued increase in U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenal^.'^ Although there was a hiatus in thinking about nuclear strategy, the international security field saw several important developments in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The elaboration of the bureaucratic politics paradigm,
88
The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
relevant to many foreign-policy issues, was particularly applicable to decisionmaking in security affairs. Important works during this period developed concepts for analyzing decision-making processes in complex organizations and applied them to a variety of defense issues and particular weapons systems.16 The late 1960s and early 1970s also saw several attempts to apply psychological concepts to international security issues," as well as the beginnings of a scholarly debate over the tenets of deterrence theory.18 The oil crises of 1973 and 1979 helped to revive interest in the relationship of economic interdependence and international security."
intellectual Problems in International Security S t u d i e s When conference participants were asked to identify major lacunae in the intellectual development of the field, certain issues kept recurring: the shortcomings of deterrence theory, the inadequacy of basic theoretical work in the field, the lack of attention to history, and the pitfalls of ethnocentrism due to American dominance of the field. D e t e r r e n c e Theory
Although it is probably the most impressive theoretical achievement of international security studies, deterrence theory has been criticized by many analysts.20Although it may offer some insights, deterrence theory can easily be invoked too often in an attempt to explain too much. The most basic criticism has been that the abstract formulations of deterrence theory - often derived from game theory - disregard political realities. As Hedley Bull argued, "the technical rigor and precision of much strategic analysis has been achieved at the cost of losing touch with political variety and change."21 This problem was demonstrated by the attempt to apply concepts drawn from deterrence theory to the conduct of the Vietnam War.22A number of conference participants criticized deterrence theory for being too abstract, static, and apolitical. Some pointed out that the particularities of culture and domestic politics sometimes belie predictions about "Country B" or "Country A" in abstract models of deterrence. Others faulted deterrence theory for assuming a constant level of rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union rather than looking at how domestic change or political cooperation might alter the relationship and reduce risks of war. Deterrence theory suffers from a tendency to neglect domestic political factors. Many analysts have overlooked the importance of maintaining domestic support for strategies of deterrence. As Michael Howard observed, in much of deterrence theory, "governments are treated as being as absolute in their capacity to take and implement decisions, and the reaction[s] of their societies are taken as little into account as were those of the subjects of the princes who conducted warfare in Europe in the eighteenth century."23
Nke a n d Lynn-lo~rcc; State of
the Field
89
The failure of those in the international security studies field to take into account domestic factors was also revealed by the Vietnam War.
Inadequate Basic Theoretical Work Several participants noted that, with the exception of the deterrence and arms control theories of the late 1950s and the early 1960s, the international security field has produced few general theoretical propositions. Richard Smoke has argued that "national security affairs is a field relatively lacking in broad general theories or even pretheories .... Most of the national security literature is not devoted to general theory building."24 Laurence Martin laments that, compared to analysis of technological and weapons developments, "general theories of the role of armaments, possible causes of war, the dynamics of military competition, the so-called arms race, and so on, have been much less suc~essful."~" As a result, international security studies remains theoretically underdeveloped; fundamental propositions have not been subjected to serious scrutiny. This shortcoming undermines scholarly respect for research on international security and can leave academic researchers in a precarious position in university departments where their interdisciplinary orientation already may render them suspect. The absence of basic theoretical work has been attributed in part to the emphasis the field has placed on analyzing short-term policy questions. Foundation funding patterns and the policy fads of the day tend to encourage researchers to concentrate on current policy p r i ~ r i t i e s .The ~ ~ result is that the field produces many articles and edited volumes with a brief shelflife, but relatively few major theoretical books that stand the test of time. This problem is hardly new. Samuel Huntington recognized it twenty-five years ago when he observed that, "compared to descriptively analytical studies, prescriptive writings on strategy have a relatively short life.... Even the best books on strategy are usually 'dated' two years after publication."" The problem has become more acute since Huntington wrote. Although there is a continuing need for short-term policy studies, international security studies cannot afford a situation in which "the desire for policy relevance will lead to the production of analyses of pressing problems at the expense of basic research and the development of intellectual capital of the field."'"n the early 1960s there was at least some effort being devoted to creative and general theorizing about the dilemmas of deterrence. Since then the field has grown in size, but so has the proportion of policy-oriented work. Given the urgent nature of many of the issues addressed by international security studies, it would be unrealistic to expect researchers to remain totally divorced from current policy questions. As a number of participants pointed out, some exposure to the actual workings of governments and military institutions was consistent with the early creative scholarly work in the field." But others pointed out that constant involvement in policy-making or in an advisory capacity can limit analysts' abilities to reassess fundamental assumptions. Many of the policy-oriented studies in the field rest on
90
T h e Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security A g e n d a
weak but rarely examined theoretical assumptions. Many participants felt that more of the field's intellectual resources must be devoted to the continuing exploration of basic theoretical questions. Analysts should not ignore important policy issues, but must from time to time step back to assess and generalize. In the long run, stagnant theory can only lead to stunted policy analysis. Lack of Attention to History
The nuclear revolution in international politics may have given international security studies one of its raisons d'gtre, but it has led to a preoccupation with contemporary issues and a neglect of pre-nuclear problems of war and peace and of the broader economic and social context of security. Even much of the history of the nuclear age remains poorly understood. The very fact that nuclear weapons were new and had not been used in a war between two nuclear powers encouraged those theorists who excelled at abstract reasoning to enter the field. In the fortunate absence of empirical data on nuclear exchanges, the field encouraged nonempirical analyses. New technology also played a role. As one analyst has pointed out, "the premium on trying to keep up with the onrushing pace of technology, as well as of world events, generates a tendency among specialists toward a h i s t o r i ~ i s m . "Although ~~ technological developments rarely render theories obsolete, the widespread perception that they do diverts attention from fundamental issues. Moreover, military history has been a stepchild of the American historical profession, and economic historians have rarely focused on security issues. The importance of the nuclear revolution notwithstanding, historical studies of the pre-nuclear period can shed light on contemporary problems. The behavior of military organizations, for example, may not have been changed fundamentally by nuclear weapons, even if analysts believe it should have been. The lessons of pre-1945 conflicts retain their relevance in the nuclear age. The problems of pre-emption and mobilization that influenced the outbreak of World War I, for example, are relevant to potential conventional wars and may offer lessons for maintaining stability in a nuclear crisis.31 Similarly, studies of economic embargoes and sanctions before 1945, and of the effects of changes in the economic basis of states' military power, remain relevant today.32If nothing else, the study of pre-nuclear conflicts can help reveal more clearly the changes ushered in by the advent of nuclear weapons. Ethnocentrism
The overwhelming majority of specialists in international security studies have been American. The policy issues that have attracted the most attention have therefore been U.S. policy issues. Most of the major concepts and
theories in the field have been developed by Americans." Given that the United States has played a central role in international politics since World War 11, this should not be surprising. The predominance of American perspectives on security affairs does not bode well, however, for the long-term health of the field. There is a danger that American analysts will overlook the influences of American culture on their modes of analysis. Conclusions may he skewed by idiosyncrasies of American thinking. This problem is particularly acute because national styles of strategy may reflect cultural differences." As Colin Gray has argued, "the United States is only one culture, and for a field of inquiry as critical to the human future as strategic studies to be rooted in so narrow and unique a set of predispositions can only impoverish its capacity to accommodate the true diversity of strategic styles that exists w ~ r l d w i d e . " ' ~
Promising Recent Developments in International Security Studies
In the last decade, there have been many promising developments in the field of international security studies.'" number of conference participants warned against focusing so much on problems that achievements were ignored. Younger scholars from a number of disciplines who entered the field in the 1970s and early 1980s have begun to publish their research. Renewed public interest in defense and foreign-policy issues has encouraged scholarly efforts. More attention is being devoted to history, psychology, and the security aspects of economic interdependence. Some of the most significant recent developments can be identified in the following areas.
The late 1970s and early 1980s witnessed a renewed debate over deterrence theory. Prompted by the U.S. failure to ratify the SALT I1 treaty and the Carter administration's enunciation of the "countervailing strategy," many analysts began t o reconsider problems of nuclear deterrence that had received scant attention for almost twenty years." The debate was characterized by a sharp division between those who believed that some sort of war-fighting posture was necessary for deterrence and those who held that an assured destruction capability was s~fficient.'~ It was also distinguished by greater attention to how the apparent contrast between Soviet and U.S. political culture and strategic styles shaped the requirements of deterren~e.'~ After President Reagan's March 1983 "Star Wars" speech, the debate broadened to reconsider the fundamental assumptions that form the basis for the superpowers' nuclear posture. Basic questions of the relationship between offense and defense were integrated into the discussion of contemporary policy choice^.^" Deterrence theory also has been enriched by greater attention to the organizational context in which decisions about nuclear weapons are made. Over twenty years ago, Aaron Wildavsky argued that "an organization theory of
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
deterrence might make a great deal of sense. We need to know not so much about individual rationality as about organizational rationality in particular types of political system^."^' Recent studies on how political crises might lead to nuclear war, and on the command and control of nuclear forces, have done much to fill this gap by pointing out the organizational factors that constrain attempts to maintain stable d e t e r r e n ~ e . ~ ~ Psychological Approaches
Many recent writings on international security have applied psychology to security issues. Psychological insights previously had been evident in discussions of crisis decision-making and intelligence failure.43 More recent work has built upon this tradition but also applied psychological concepts to deterrence theory and the origins of the cold war.44 The result has been a richer understanding of the complex context of decision-making by individuals in large organizations. Ideas derived from psychology have helped to modify the oversimplified models offered by realism and deterrence theory. Ethical Q u e s t i o n s R e c o n s i d e r e d
Critics of international security studies have often suggested that ethical questions are neglected by the field.45Despite a flurry of interest in the ethical dilemmas of nuclear deterrence in the early 1960s, the charge was substantially correct until recently.46In the 1970s there was renewed attention to the ethics of war and inter~ention.~' In the early 1980s, scholars began to devote more attention to the ethical aspects of nuclear deterrence and conventional war. Normative judgments that had been smuggled into deterrence theory were made explicit. The enormous gaps between the approaches of policy analysts and professional ethicists were somewhat narrowed. The "just war" tradition was updated and considered in relation to the nuclear dilemma. Many in the international security field reconsidered the morality of deterrence from a variety of per~pectives.~' The R e d i s c o v e r y o f History
Scholars in the international security field have begun to show greater interest in using history. First, numerous important historical studies of the nuclear age have recently appeared. Taking advantage of the declassification of U.S. government documents, researchers have been able to produce histories of the evolution of American strategic nuclear doctrine and the role of nuclear weapons in cold war diplomacy.49 These works have been invaluable for correcting misconceptions about the history of the nuclear age, but much more remains to be done. Second, historians of international security affairs have shown a greater willingness to incorporate theories and concepts from political science into their work. Although historians use such theories primarily as a means of
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explanation, not for prediction, this development suggests that a healthy interaction is taking place between the two fields."' Finally, political scientists have shown a much greater willingness to use historical case studies to test and refine hypotheses about international security. Many recent works have used the comparative case-study method to integrate historical cases into the building and testing of political science theories." Moreover, even when they have not employed a rigorous casestudy method, researchers have made much greater use of historical examples to inform their thinking about contemporary security i s s ~ e s . ' ~ Cooperation and Regime Theory Some writings on international cooperation have applied game theory particularly the Prisoner's Dilemma game - to security issues to identify the conditions under which cooperation is likely to emerge."3 Uses of game theory sometimes ignore important differences between abstract games and the realities of international politics. They can be enriched, however, by applying theories of the development of international regimes (norms and institutions) to efforts to ameliorate the security dilemmas that are often modeled as single play Prisoner's Dilemma." Cooperation theory represents a promising area for further research. Not only has it the potential to shift the focus of the field away from an exclusive emphasis on conflict, but it also offers hope that the gap between international security and international political economy can be bridged by the application of the same theoretical framework to both sets of problem^.^' e Relation of Security Studies to International Relations Theory
Several significant books importing useful concepts from international relations theory into international security studies have been published in the last decade. The realist paradigm of the early 1950s, which was subjected to widespread criticism in the 1960s and 1970s, has been re-examined and elaborated by Kenneth Waltz and Robert Gilpin, among ~ t h e r s . Although '~ the structural realism that emerged, often called "neo-realism," has been criticized by many scholars, it represents a more rigorous and parsimonious reformulation of many of the ambiguous concepts and fuzzy theories of earlier realists." Some of the ideas emerging from neo-realism and related efforts to apply rational choice theory to international relations have also been incorporated into research on balance of power and alliance issues.F8 There was considerable difference among the participants about the fruitfulness of such approaches. Some stressed the potential benefits of insights about learning and redefinitions of interests that are prominent in neo-liberal theories. Most agreed, however, with Stanley Hoffmann's argument that if "sound and fury are good for creative scholarship," the field of international security will profit from a healthy debate over fundamental propositions of international relations theory."
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The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda Future Prospects
Despite some promising developments in the last decade, the future of international security studies remains unclear. The field has recovered from the trauma of the Vietnam era; it has attracted many young scholars and stimulated vigorous debate on many policy and theoretical issues. The apparent increase in the risk of US.-Soviet conflict in the early 1980s led to increased public interest in security issues. It also produced an explosion in foundation support for research on international security. The Ford Foundation, which had been among the few to support security research in the 1970s, was joined by the Carnegie Corporation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Olin Foundation, and others. In the coming years, public concern and foundation support will almost certainly diminish. The theoretical health of the field would be maximized by more consistent funding. As a recent report on the field concluded, "feast and famine is as bad for intellectual enterprises as it is for public It is therefore imperative that international security studies define an intellectually solid research agenda so that available resources are not wasted. Although many have called for "new approaches" to international security, there is no consensus on what methods, approaches, and issues deserve priority. The following suggestions for future research in international security studies focus on recommendations about general approaches on which there is more agreement, rather than a diverse list of pet research topics. Although the list is not comprehensive, it exemplifies the type of work discussed at the conference as central to the intellectual health of the field. - -
Basic Theoretical Research
In 1975, Richard Smoke observed that "much more basic research and theorization has long been very badly needed."" Despite the progress noted above, the comment remains timely. However, a word of caution is necessary. Participants pointed out that many of the foundations supporting research in international security call for the articulation of new approaches without having a clear idea of how they relate to the central theories in the field. There is a danger that such calls may simply proliferate unrelated studies from a variety of disciplines and that efforts at novelty will inhibit cumulative work. The field needs work on basic questions such as the causes of war, the sources of cooperation, the formation of alliances, the implications of the nuclear revolution, the security effects of economic interdependence, the domestic sources of foreign policy, the consequences of offensive or defensive doctrines, and the cultural and cognitive biases of decision-makers. Such research should attempt to test and refine the many theoretical notions that are implicit or explicit in the international relations and international security literature. Many theories and hypotheses have been elaborated, only to remain untested when research attention has moved on to the next government policy or private foundation fad.
Scholars may find it difficult to resist the temptation to engage in work with more immediate policy relevance, particularly when foundations are willing to fund such work, but sustained cumulative theoretical work is essential i f the field is to deserve scholarly respect and remain intellectually healthy in the long run.
Research on fundamental theoretical questions should be complemented by greater attention to how large complex security organizations implement policy, including how they conduct military operations. A great weakness of deterrence theory has been its neglect of questions of how large organizations implement abstract principles. Friction is inevitable. Good research must take it into account. Abstract theories of nuclear deterrence, escalation control, war termination, or crisis management are of little use if they ignore the organizational and operational problems that confront statesmen and the military who must try to implement such ideas. Military operations have been neglected, at least partly because the details of war plans are often classified, while the public debate focuses on particular weapons and declaratory postures. Some scholars may also regard such problems as purely questions of military science and therefore outside their purview. Many operational questions do seem apolitical, but rigorous analysis related to larger theoretical concerns is necessary. Recent scholarship has begun to address operational problems from such a broader perspective, but much more research is needed on both historical and contemporary operational iss~es.~'
Many participants regarded the rediscovery of history as one of the most promising recent developments in international security studies. Research on the history of the nuclear age should profit tremendously in the coming years as Western governments make archival materials available to historians." Better histories of the nuclear age should correct some widely held misconceptions about the evolution of nuclear forces and strategy. Such work will also offer a rich source of empirical evidence on propositions about deterrence, coercive diplomacy, and the behavior of military organizations. We also need more histories of the post-1945 international system and the sources of its stability and instability. Pre-nuclear history also deserves greater attention from social scientists. Although recent scholarship in political science has drawn on history to generate and test hypotheses, little attention has been paid to many important historical periods. World War I, for example, has received considerable attention in recent years, but far less attention has been devoted to analysis of the important campaigns of World War 11. The international politics of Asia before and after 1945 deserve more attention. The Vietnam War - particularly
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
military operations by the United States - has been the subject of many recent works, but less has been written about the Korean conflict.64 Area S t u d i e s a n d Security S t u d i e s
Much of the work in international security studies has neglected the regional political context of security problems. Many American scholars and policymakers made recommendations for U.S. policy in the Vietnam War in almost complete ignorance of the politics of Southeast Asia. Most contemporary security issues arise out of political rivalries in specific regions. It is impossible, for example, to understand the sources of conflict in the Middle East without first examining the politics of the Arab world and the causes of the ArabIsraeli dispute. As Ken Booth has written, "strategic studies divorced from area studies is largely thinking in a void."6S Scholars in the field should seek greater expertise in the politics of particular regions. Ford Foundation programs have helped to bridge the gap between international security studies and West European and Soviet studies, but there remains a need for dual competency in security studies and other area studies. Much of the energy expended on American security concerns has been at the expense of comparative analyses.66 Greater attention to area studies might lay the foundation for more comparative work on security questions. Conventional Warfare I s s u e s
The international security field has devoted much of its attention to questions of nuclear weapons and arms control. This emphasis is eminently justifiable, given the potentially catastrophic consequences of nuclear war, but conventional deterrence and strategy should not be ignored. All the wars fought since 1945 have been conventional, and any nuclear conflict would almost certainly begin at the conventional level. Some scholars have begun to examine these question^,^' but conventional warfare issues have yet to receive the sustained, rigorous attention given to nuclear issues. D o m e s t i c A s p e c t s of Security Affairs
The interaction between domestic politics and security affairs has been overlooked by most analysts in the international security studies field.68Nowhere was this more evident than in the failure of American strategists to consider the domestic consequences of the Vietnam War. The relationship between domestic factors and security issues is complex. Domestic political constraints may limit the alternatives available to states attempting to provide for their security. Most security policies result from the interplay of domestic and international factors. Perceived threats to the security of a given state may also influence its domestic political structure. States confronting dire threats, for example, may be more likely to adopt authoritarian forms of government. Scholars in the field need to examine the domestic conditions that make
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possible the pursuit of various security policies and to study such questions in a comparative context,69and to make greater use of the methods of traditional disciplines such as sociology and political science. Such research will shed light on important questions. Economics and Security The division between the fields of international political economy and international security is one of the most serious problems within the discipline of political science. Scholars on each side of the divide have often ignored the work done on the other side. As a result, economic dimensions of security have received short shrift. Yet a strong case can be made that in a world of nuclear stalemate, economic dimensions of power and conflict will become more important. A number of participants pointed to the effect that domestic economic factors are having on both U.S. and Soviet security policies and to the difficulty the United States faces in its economic competition with its Japanese ally. Others pointed to the way that the economic relations among major powers affect their overall relationship and the potential for conflict. Not only does economic interdependence affect the underlying basis of military power, but the manipulation of interdependence can be a power instrument. The participants strongly believed that more attention should be paid to such issues. Specific Topics for Further Research Everyone in international security studies has his or her own research agenda, and this was no less true of the conference participants. Among the topics mentioned were: the origins and evolution of Soviet security policy; questions of learning and institutional memory in large complex security organizations in different cultures; the prospects and implications of different types of proliferation; the effects of biotechnology on weaponry; questions of why arms races occur and when they are destabilizing; whether arms control has contributed to stability; the risks and benefits in different types of naval strategy; the causes and effects of terrorism; and the cost, benefits, and justice of different types of intervention. Such a list could go on and on, demonstrating that there is no shortage of interesting questions.
Summary a n d Conclusions The cadre of specialists on security and arms control outside of government is being replenished and expanded. An infrastructure of institutions and international networks now supports independent viewpoints and the study of alternative policies. There are more sources of information for the public. Scholarship has advanced. A substantial literature on bureaucratic politics and psychological aspects of international politics emerged in the 1970s. Toward the end of the decade younger scholars turned their attention to
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The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
problems of conventional deterrence and warfare. More recently, renewed attention has been given to ethical questions related to international security. Recent work on theories of international cooperation may begin to integrate the contributions of international political economy with those of international security. The uses of history have been rediscovered. Further historical research - which will add to the data available as more documents are declassified - and greater use of history by social scientists is planned. Despite these achievements, the field of international security studies also has several problems. First, there has been little central theoretical innovation since the development of the deterrence paradigm in the 1950s and early 1960s. For all its conceptual elegance, this paradigm articulated over 25 years ago is not sufficient for understanding many of the most important current research and policy priorities. The tendency to equate international security studies with strategic studies unduly narrows the scope of the field and cuts it off from its political, economic, and historical context. Second, much of the work, particularly in the U.S., reflects a preoccupation with current policy fads. The urgency of many contemporary issues and the difficulty of keeping up with the esoteric details of current strategic developments drive scholars and other researchers to neglect cumulative work with a potential for long-term impact. Third, the absence of theoretical development, the faddishness of much work, and the narrow scope of some research makes it difficult to establish the field in some university departments. As a result, much of the analysis is heavily politicized, as foundations on the left and right support analysts, and scholars with palatable views. Contract research ("Beltway Bandits") represents the industrialization of security studies rather than the generation of useful work. Fourth, the development of security studies in the United States more than in other countries has caused many analyses to suffer from ethnocentric biases. The U.S. perspective often emphasizes superpower rivalry, nuclear arms control, and American policy debates. This is, to a certain extent, justifiable given the overriding significance of nuclear weaponry and the dominance of the superpowers since 1945, but it has led to neglect of many equally significant issues. In particular, regional security issues (apart from Western Europe), domestic politics, and economic security have received inadequate attention. Finally, the field has suffered from a severe shortage of good data. Particularly on contemporary issues, there is no agreed-upon data base. Debates are based on differences over estimates of force capabilities, but often there is no agreed way to resolve such issues. Moreover, the very nature of policy issues makes governments reluctant to declassify information for scholars and independent analysts. The annual Military Balance prepared by the International Institute for Strategic Studies helps to fill this gap, but further efforts are needed. Equally important is the need to develop a better history of security problems since 1945. More sources are being declassified and projects ~ l a n n e d ,but much remains to be done.
Our concern is not to advocate one research topic or another but to give a general picture of the achievements and weaknesses of a rapidly growing field. We have tried to summarize general tendencies expressed at the 1987 CSIA conference, making reference to some of the relevant literature. We probably left out some important work. Our choices involved a large amount of subjective judgment. We do not pretend to be definitive. Our hope is to stimulate r e f l e c t i o n and f u r t h e r debate on p i o r i t i e s w h i c h are of central c o n c e r n to t h e field and to this journal. Priority setting is essential to ensure that, whether or not financial famine replaces feast, the ensuing diet will not mean intellectual starvation. Notes
I . A 1966 survey found that political scientists formed the largest group in the field. See Roy E. Iicklsder, T h e Private Nuclear Strategzsts (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 19711, p. 95. Although Licklider predicted that "the study of strategy and disarmament will make the shift from an interdisciplinary field to a specialty area of political science," (p. 117), most observers continue to see the field as interdisciplinary, even if political sclence is held to occupy a central role. For a discussion o f the central role of political science in inters~ationalsecurlty studies, see Robert Jervis, Joshua Lederberg, Robert North, Stephen Rosen, John Steinbruner, and D i m Zinnes, T h e Fzeld of National Security Studies: Report t o the National Resmrc-h Council (Washington, D.C.: 1986), p. 2. Colin Gray argues that: "strategic studies lacks integrity as a field of study let alone as a discipline, in that it makes no sense considered apart from tnternational relations (another non-discipline) and political sc~ence." See Colin Gra); Strategic Studies: A Critical Assessment (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1982), p. 13. 2. See Richard Smoke, "National Security Affairs," in Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby, eds., Hundhook of Political Sc~ence,Vol. 8, Intern~ztional Politzcs (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1975), p. 251. 3. On the nonmilitary aspects of international security, see Richard H. Ullman, "Redefining Security," International Security, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Summer 1983), pp. 129-153. An additional term that delineates an area o f inquiry but that has not gained w ~ d eusage i< "military politics." As defined by Samuel P. Huntington, military politics includes the mslitary but not the n o n military aspects of security and also extends to the political activities of the military in domestic affairs. See his "Recent Writing in Military Politics - Foci and Corpora," in Samuel P. Huntington, ed., Changing Patterns o f Mzlitary Polltzcs (Glencoe, 111.: The Free I'ress of Glencoe, 1962), p. 237. 4. Arnold Wolfers, Discord and Collahoratzon (Baltimore: The Johns H o p k ~ n sUniversity Press, 1 962), ch. 10. 5. See Smoke, "National Security Affairs," p. 251. See also Barry Buzan, People, St'ztrs and Fear (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolma Press, 1983), pp. 1-9. 6. Colin S. Gray, Strutegic. Studres and Puhlic Polic-y (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), p. 46. In recent years, several histor~esof th~nkingabout nuclear strategy have appeared. See Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981); Gregg Herken, T h e Counsels of War (New York: Knopf, 1985); and Fred M. Kaplan, T h e Wzzards of Armageddon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983). In ad& ition, James E. King has written an unpublished history of nuclear strategy entitled T h e NPLU Strategy. more works are needed on questions of conventional warfare and theories of International security. 7. The first two c~vilianefforts to address the issues raised by atomic weapons were William Borden, There Will Be N o Time: The Revolution in Strategy (New York: Macmillan, 1946); and Bernard Brodie, ed., T h e Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946).
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8. The classic realist work is Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Knopf, 1948 and later editions). See also George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900-1 950 (Chicago:University o f Chicago Press, 1951); and Robert Endicott Osgood, Ideals and Self-lnterest in America's Foreign Relations (Chicago:University o f Chicago Press, 1953). 9. For a discussion o f the political dimensions ignored by the realist approach, see K.J. Holsti, The Dividing Discipline: Hegemony and Diversity in International Theory (Winchester, Mass.: Allen and Unwin, 1985), and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., "Neo-realism and Neo-liberalism," World Politics, Vol. 40, No. 2 (January1988). 10. See Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1959); Albert Wohlstetter, "The Delicate Balance o f Terror," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 37, No. 2 (January 1959), pp. 211-234; Herman Kahn, O n Thermonuclear War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960); William Kaufmann, ed., Military Policy and National Security (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956); Henry A. Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957); Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), and Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966); and Glenn Snyder, Deterrence and Defence (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1961). 11. See Donald Brennan, ed., Arms Control, Disarmament, and National Security (NewYork: Braziller, 1961); Thomas C . Schelling and Morton H . Halperin, Strategy and Arms Control (New York:The Twentieth Century Fund, 1961); and Louis Henkin, ed., Arms Control: Issues for the Public (Englewood Cliffs,N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1960). 12. See Robert E. Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1957) and Osgood, NATO: The Entangling Alliance (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1962); Klaus Knorr, ed., NATO and American Security (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1959); and Morton H. Halperin, Limited War in the Nuclear Age (New York: Wiley, 1963). 13. See Smoke, "National Security Affairs," pp. 303-304; John Steinbruner, "Beyond Rational Deterrence: The Struggle for New Conceptions," World Politics, Vol. 28, No. 2 (January 1976), p. 224; and Licklider, The Private Nuclear Strategists, p. 154. 14. Peter Nailor, "Military Strategy" in Trevor Taylor, ed., Approaches and Theory in International Relations (London:Longman, 1978), p. 180. 15. See Robert Paarlberg, "Forgetting About The Unthinkable," Foreign Polrcy, No. 10 (Spring 1973), pp. 132-140. 16. For expositions o f these concepts o f decision-making, see Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971); Morton H . Halperin, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1974); John D. Steinbruner, The Cybernetic Theory of Decision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974); and Graham T. Allison and Morton H. Halperin, "Bureaucratic Politics: A Paradigm and Some Policy Implications," in Raymond Tanter and Richard H. Ullman, eds., Theory and Policy in lnternational Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 40-79. For an example o f the application o f such concepts to particular weapons systems, see Ted Greenwood, Making the MIRV: A Study of Defense Decision-Making (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1975). 17. See Robert Jervis, The Logic o f Images in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970); and Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). 18. See Philip Green, Deadly Logic: The Theory of Nuclear Deterrence (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1966); and Alexander L. George and Richard Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974). 19. See Robert 0. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Power and Interdependence (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976); David A. Deese and Joseph S . Nye, Jr., eds., Energy and Security (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1980); and David A. Baldwin, Economic Statecraft (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
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20. A useful overview of some of the literature critical of deterrence theory is Robert Jervis, "Deterrence Theory Revisited," World Politics, Vol. 31, No. 2 (January 1979), pp. 289-324. 21. Hedley Bull, "Strategic Studies and its Critics," World Politics, Vol. 20, No. 4 (July 1968), p. 600. 22. Thomas Schelling reportedly found it difficult to think of ways to translate the corlcepts he developed in The Strategy of Conpzct and Arms and Inf[uence into strategies applicable to the situation in Vietnam in 1965. See Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, p. 335. 23. Michael Howard, "The Forgotten Dimensions of Strategy," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 57, No. 5 (Summer 1979), p. 982. 24. Smoke, "National Security Affairs," p. 258. 25. Laurence Martin, "The Future of Strategic Studies," Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 3, No. 3 (December 1980), p. 94. 26. Stanley Hoffmann, "An American Social Science: International Relations," Daedalirs, Vol. 106, No. 3 (Summer 1977), pp. 50, 55. 27. Huntington, "Recent Writing In Military Politics - Foci and Corpora," pp. 240-241. 28. Jervis, et al., The Field of Natronal Security Studies, pp. 20-27. 29. See Bernard Brodie, "Why Were We So (Strategically) Wrong?" Foretgn Policy, No. 5 (Winter 1971-72), p. 160. For another perspective, see Colm S. Gray, "What RAND Hath Wrought," Foreign Policy, No. 4 (Fall 1971), pp. 111-129. 30. Smoke, "National Security Affairs," p. 259. 3 1. See Steven E. Miller, ed., Military Strategy and the Origins of the First World KGrr (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). 32. See Paul M. Kennedy, "The F m t World War and the lnternational Power System," lnternational Security, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Summer 1984), pp. 7-40; see also Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic and Military Conflict from 1.700-2000 (New York: Random House, 1987). 33. This is also true of the broader field of international relations that provides the theoret~cal basis for international security studies. See Hoffmann, "An Amencan Soclal Science." Hoffrnann identifies three significant advances in the broader field: the concept of ~nternationalsystem; the literature on deterrence; and work on the political effects of economic interdependence. 34. See Ken Booth, Strategy and Ethnocentrrsm (1,ondon: Croorn Helm, 1978). 35. Gray, Strategic Studies and Public Policy, p. 194. For a discussion of how Soviet culture influences Soviet strategic thinking, see Jack L. Snyder, The Soviet Strategic Culture: Implications for Limrted Nucleizr Operations (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, September 1977). 36. T h ~ ssection draws o n "The Secur~tyAffairs Field: What Has It Achieved? Where Should It Go?," a working paper prepared at a Social Science Research Council Conference, New York Clty, November 20-23, 1986, pp. 1-4. 37. See Walter Slocombe, "The Countervailing Strategy," Internatlonal Security, Vol. i, N o . 4 (Spring 1981), pp. 18-27; Warner R. Schilling, "U.S. Strategic Nuclear Concepts In the 1970s: The Search for Sufficiently Equivalent Countervailing Parity," International Serunty, Vol. 6, NO. 2 (Fall 1981), pp. 49-79; and Robert Jervis, The lllogic of American Nuclear Strategy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). 38. See Spurgeon M . Keeny, Jr. and Wolfgang K.H. Panofsky, "MAD Versus NUTS: Can Doctrine or Weaponry Remedy the Mutual Hostage Relationship of the Superpowers?," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 60, No. 2 (Winter 1981/82), pp. 287-304; Colm S. Gray, "Nuclcar Strategy: The Case for a Theory of Victory," International Security, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Summer 1979), pp. 54-87; and Robert Jervis, "Why Nuclear Superiority Doesn't Matter," Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Winter 1979/80), pp. 617-633. 39. See Fritz W. Errnartb, "Contrasts in American and Sov~etStrategic Thought," Internatlonal Security, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Fall 1978), pp. 138-155; Richard Pipes, "Why the Russians Think They Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War," C:ommentary (July 1977), pp. 21-34; and David Holloway, The Soviet Union and the Arms Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).
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40. See Keith B. Payne and Colin S. Gray, "Nuclear Policy and the Defensive Transition," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 62, No. 4 (Spring 1984), pp. 820-842; Charles L. Glaser, " W h y Even Good Defenses May Be Bad," International Security, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Fall 1984), pp. 92-123; and Charles L. Glaser, " D o W e Want the Missile Defenses W e Can Build?" lnternational Security, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Summer 1985), pp. 25-57. 41. Aaron Wildavsky, "Practical Consequences o f the Theoretical Study o f Defense Policy," Public Admtnistration Review, Vol. 25, No. 1 (March 1965),p. 100. 42. See John D. Steinbruner, "National Security and the Concept o f Strategic Stability," Journal of Confltct Resolution, Vol. 22, No. 3 (September 1978), pp. 411-428; Graham T. Allison, Albert Carnesale, and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., eds., Hawks, Doves and Owls: An Agenda for Avoiding Nuclear War ( N e w York: Norton, 1985); Bruce G. Blair, Strategic Command and Control: Redefining the Nuclear Threat (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1985); Paul J . Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces ( N e w Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); and Desmond Ball, "Can Nuclear War Be Controlled?" Adelphi Paper No. 169 (London:International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1981).For a discussion o f how to change U.S. nuclear strategy, stressing organizational factors, see Morton H. Halperin, Nuclear Fallacy: Dispelling the Myth of Nuclear Strategy (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1987). 43. See Irving L.. Janis, Victims of Groupthink (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972);Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics; and Ralph K . White, Nobody Wanted War: Misperception in Vietnam and Other Wars (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968). 44. See Richard Ned Lebow, Between Peace and War: The Nature of lnternational Crisis (Baltimore:The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein, Psychology and Deterrence (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); and Deborah Welch Larson, Origins of Containment: A Psychological Explanation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). For contrasting perspectives on the relevance o f psychology, see James G. Blight, "The New Psychology o f War and Peace," lnternational Security, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Winter 1986/87), pp. 175-186; and Stanley Hoffmann, " O n the Political Psychology o f War and Peace: A Critique and An Agenda," Political Psychology, Vol. 7, No. 1 (March 1986), pp. 1-21. 45. See, for example, Anatol Rapoport, Strategy and Conscience ( N e w York: Harper and Row, 1964); and Green, Deadly Logic. 46. For an example o f an early attempt to address the ethics o f nuclear deterrence, see Paul Ramsey, War and the Christian Conscience: How Shall Modern War Be Conducted Justly? (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1961). 47. See Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars ( N e w York: Basic Books, 1977); and Stanley Hoffmann,Duties Beyond Borders (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse Un~versityPress, 1981),chapter 2, for general discussions o f ethics and war. 48. See National Conference o f Catholic Bishops, The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response (Washington, D.C.: United States Catholic Conference, May 3, 1983); Michael Novak, Moral Clarity in the Nuclear Age (Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson, 1983); James E. Dougherty, Midge Decter, Pierre Hasner, Laurence Martin, Michael Novak, and Vladimir Bukowsky, Ethtcs, Deterrence and National Security (Washington, D.C.: PergamonBrassey's, 1985); Geoffrey Goodwin, ed., Ethics and Nuclear Deterrence (London: Croom Helm, 1982); Russell Hardin, John J . Mearsheimer, Gerald Dworkin, and Robert E. Goodin, Nuclear Deterrence: Ethics and Strategy (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1984); and Joseph S . Nye, Jr., Nuclear Ethics ( N e w York: The Free Press, 1986). 49. See Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon; Herken, Counsels of War; David Alan Rosenberg, "The Origins o f Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945-1960," lnternational Security, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Spring 1983), pp. 3-71; Aaron F. Friedberg, " A History o f the U.S. Strategic 'Doctrine' - 1945 to 1980," Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 3, No. 4 (December 1980), pp. 37-71; Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, 194.5-19.50 ( N e w York: Knopf, 1980); and Richard K. Betts, Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1987). 50. See, for example, John Lewis Gaddis, "The Long Peace: Elements o f Stability in the Postwar International System," International Security, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Spring 1986),pp. 99-142;
and Marc Trachtenberg, "The Influence of Nuclear Weapons in the Cuban Miss~leCrisih," lnternat~onalSecurity, Vol. 10, N o . 1 (Summer 1985), pp. 137-1 63. See also the special issue on "Causes of Major Wars," Journal of lnterdisciplinary History, forthcoming. For a useful discussion of how historians and political scient~stscould learn from one another, see John I.ewia Gaddis, "Expanding the Data Base: Historians, Political Scient~sts,and the Enrichment of Security Studies," International Security, Vol. 12, N o . 1 (Summer 1987), pp. 3-21. 51. For discussions of this method, see Alexander L. George, "Case Studies and Theory Development," paper presented a t the Second Annual Symposium o n Information Processing in Organizations, Carnegie-Mellon Univers~ty, October 15-1 6, 1982; and George, "Case Studies and Theory Development: The Method of Structured, Focused <:omparison," in Paul Gordon Lauren, ed., Diplomacy (New York: The Free Press, 1979), pp. 43-68. Prominent recent examples of the use of historical case studies include Richard Smoke, War: Controlling Escalatron (Cambridge: Harvard University I'ress, 1977); Barry R. l'osen, T h e Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Gernfany between the World Wars (Ithaca: Cornell Univers~ty Press, 1984); John J. Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence (Ithaca: Cornell Univers~tyPress, 1983); and Jack Snyder, T h e ldeology of the Offensizw: Military Uecislon Making and the Disasters of 1914 (Ithaca: <:ornell University Press, 1984.) 52. See, for example, M~ller,ed., Military Strategy and the Origins of the First World War; and I.ebow, Between Peace and War. 53. See Robert Jervls, "Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma," World Politics, Vol. 30, No. 2 (January 1978), pp. 167-214; Robert Axelrod, T h e Evolution of Cooperatton (New York: Basic Books, 1984); and Kenneth A. Oye, ed., Cooperation Under Anarchy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). 54. For critical assessments of cooperation theory, see Robert Jervis, "Cooperation Under Anarchy: Problems and Limitations," unpublished paper, Columbia University, October, 1986; and Joanne Gowa, "Anarchy, Egoism, and Third Images: T h e Evolution of Cooperation and International Relations," lnternutional Organization, Vol. 40, No. I (Winter 1986), pp. 167-186. 011the application of regime theory t o security issues, see Joseph S. Nye, Jr., " N u c k a r [.earning and U.S.-Soviet Security Reg~mes," International Organization, Vol. 41, N o . 3 (Summer 1987), pp. 371-401; Janice Gross Stein, "Detection and Defection: Security 'Regi~nes' and the Management of International Conflicts," lnternatronal Journal, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Autumn 1985), pp. 599-627; and Alexander George, Philip Parley, and Alexander D a l l ~ n ,eds., U.S.-Soviet Security Cooperation: Achievements, Failures, 1.essons (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 5.5. Oye, Cooperation Under Anarchy, contains chapters on international political economy as well as international security. For an example of how cooperation theory has been applied to international polltical economy, see Robert 0. Keoha~ie,After Hegemon)' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). 56. See Kenneth N . Waltz, Theory o f Intcwzational Politic-s (Reading, Mass.: AddisonWesley, 1979); and Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 57. For a variety of perspectives o n neo-realism, see Robert 0 . Keohane, ed., Neo-Kealrsni and Its Critics (New York: Columbia Univers~tyPress, 1986). See also Robert 0. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., "Potuer and lnterdependetzcc Revisited," International Organization, Vol. 4 1 , No. 4 (Autumn 19871, pp. 725-7.53. 58. See Stephen M . Walt, The Origins of AIIzances (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987) and Walt, "Alliance Formation and the Balance of World Power," lnternutional Security, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Spring 198.5), pp. 3-43; and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, T h e War Trap ( N e w Haven: Yale University Press, I 9 8 1 ). 59. Hoffmann, "An American Social Science," p. 45. 60. Jervis, et al., T h e Field of National Security Studtes, p. 21. 61. Smoke, "National Security Affairs," p. 315. 62. See Ashton B. Carter, J o h n D. Steinbruner, and Charles A. Zraket, Mmagirtg Nnclci7r Operi7tiovzs (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1987); Bracken, The Cowrviand [ m i Contra/ of Nuclear Forms; Blair, StratC#lc (;ontmand and Control; Scott D. Sagan, "Nuclear
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Alerts and Crisis Management," International Security, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Spring 1985), pp. 99-139. A useful framework for analyzing organizational and operational issues for conventional forces is Allan R. Millett, Williamson Murray, and Kenneth N. Watman, "The Effectiveness of Military Organizations," International Security, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Summer 1986), pp. 37-71. See also Martin Van Creveld, Command in War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985) and Van Creveld, Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); and Edward N. Luttwak, "The Operational Level of War," International Security, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Winter 1980/81), pp. 61-79. 63. The Nuclear History Project, organized by historians in the United States, France, Great Britain and the Federal Republic of Germany, will involve scholars and present and former government officials in the collection of source materials and oral histories of the role of nuclear weapons in international relations. It will initially focus on the 1955-1965 period. 64. Important books on Vietnam include Harry Summers, Jr., O n Strategy: A Critrcal Appraisal of the Vietnam War (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1982); Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Bruce Palmer, Jr., The 25-Year War: America's Military Role in Vietnam (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1984), and Timothy J. Lomperis, The War Everyone Lost - and Won: America's Intervention in Viet Nam's Twin Struggles (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984). 65. Booth, Strategy and Ethnocentrism, p. 147. 66. P.G. Bock and Morton Berkowitz, "The Emerging Field of National Security," World Politics, Vol. 19, No. 1 (October 1966), p. 136. 67. See, for example, Mearshelmer, Conventional Deterrence, and Steven E. Miller, ed., Conventional Forces and American Defense Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). 68. This problem has been evident throughout the field of international relations. See Hoffmann, "An American Social Science," p. 58. 69. For a recent example of this type of work, see Josef Joffe, "Peace and Populism: Why the European Anti-Nuclear Movement Failed," International Security, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Spring 1987), pp. 3 4 0 .
Base Women Cynthia Enloe
merican bases in Britain are the objects of intense controversy among the British, while most Americans are scarcely aware of their .government's airfields and submarine installations around the globe. British journalists, Members of Parliament and peace activists highlight the US bases as launching pads for deadly weapons over which the British have no control. There is little discussion, on the other hand, about the dating practices of American soldiers. One occasionally hears rumors of 'barracks girls', young British girls who leave home and in time become resident sexual partners of American male soldiers. The debates that make the headlines, however, are about the capacity of the British government to protect British sovereignty: d o elected officials have any say in the deployment of American bombers stationed in Britain? Could the American government launch nuclear missiles from Greenham or Molesworth with little heed to British opinion? Nationalist pride, ignited by Britain's war against Argentina for the Falklands in 3 983, was wounded when the Americans used bases in East Anglia to launch their 1986 punitive bombing raid against Libya in 1986 without consulting Parliament. Most of this controversy over US bases has taken place as if only strategic doctrine and democratic accountability were involved. British critics have chastised the Labour and Conservative governments for waxing nostalgic over the 'special relationship' between Washington and London, while failing to notice that the 'gentlemanly period is over; the United States is attempting to flex its political muscles'.' Public discussions in Britain have brushed aside questions of American male soldiers' sexuality or British women's sexual availability. These issues may be pertinent t o American bases in the Philippines or Honduras, but not in Britain. So goes conventional reasoning. Except when the bases raise questions about international strategic doctrine or blatant infringements of national sovereignty, they seem to fade into the backdrop of ordinary life. Source: Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches & Rases: Making Femtnist Sense of International Polttrcs (Berkeley: University of Cal~forniaPress, 1989), pp. 65-92, 2 16-20.
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This sort of nationalist approach to American bases - or any foreign military bases - makes women invisible except occasionally as symbols. It thus serves to hide the strategic character of sexual politics; in so doing it misreads the actual character of military-bases agreements.
R a c e a n d S e x o n t h e Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier
There are literally thousands of military bases around the world. Some of them are the bases of the local armed forces; others service foreign militaries. By the mid-1980s there were 3,000 bases controlled by one country but situated in another country. Today there are British bases in West Germany, Cyprus, the Falklands and Belize. To many local residents and soldiers alike, Britain's bases in Northern Ireland feel like foreign bases. The Indian government stationed 45,000 of its soldiers on counter-insurgency duty in Sri Lanka. There have been 50,000 Cuban soldiers stationed in Angola. The Soviet Union maintains bases in Vietnam and Eastern Europe. Vietnamese troops only now are withdrawing from Kampuchea. The French military bases 8,000 of its soldiers in Chad, the Central African Republic, Gabon, Senegal, the Ivory Coast and Djibouti, as well as others in its remaining Pacific and Caribbean colonies. Canada sends troops to its bases in West Germany. Finnish, Fijian, Irish and other men serve overseas as part of United Nations peace-keeping forces. The United States government maintains that it needs all of its 1,500 military installations outside its borders to support 354,000 soldiers in Europe, 144,000 in the Pacific and Asia and thousands more on land and sea in the Caribbean, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.l Most bases have managed to slip into the daily lives of the nearby community. A military base, even one controlled by soldiers of another country, can become politically invisible if its ways of doing business and seeing the world insinuate themselves into a community's schools, consumer tastes, housing patterns, children's games, adults' friendships, jobs and gossip. O n any given day, therefore, only a handful of these scores of bases scattered around the world are the objects of dispute. Most have draped themselves with the camouflage of normalcy. Real-estate agents, town officials, charity volunteers, barmaids, local police, business owners - all accept the base, its soldiers and their families as givens. They may even see them as valuable, as good for their own well-being. Rumors of a base closing can send shivers of economic alarm through a civilian community that has come to depend on base jobs and soldiers' spending. Military alliances between governments need this daily acceptance. NATO and the Warsaw Pact would be far more fragile than they already are if local women and men didn't find reasons for accepting foreign military bases in their midst. American, British, French, Soviet governments - those with the most soldiers stationed outside their own borders - would find it more difficult to sustain their sense of world influence if they couldn't maintain military bases in other people's backyards.
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Understanding how a military base acquires its local camouflage - or perhaps loses it - is critical to making sense of how international military alliances are perpetuated, or undone. The normalcy that sustains a military base in a local community rests on ideas about masculinity and femininity. A foreign base requires especially delicate adjustment of relations between men and women, for if the fit between local and foreign men and local and foreign women breaks down, the base may lose its protective cover. It may become the target of nationalist resentment that could subvert the very structure of a military alliance. 'A friendly, unquestioning, geographically convenient but expendable launching point for the projections of US military power' is what many British people believe their country has become.' They feel as though their country is less a sovereign nation than an aircraft-carrier for the American armed forces. Between 1948, when American forces returned to post-war Britain, and 1986 the US military created some 130 bases and facilities in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. They did this with the British e . ~ of these installations are government's - often secret - a ~ ~ u i e s c e n cSome mere offices, hardly noticeable to the casual passer-by. Others, like those at Greenham Common, Molesworth, Mildenhall and Holy Loch, are fullfledged communities with elaborate facilities and large workforces. Most of the larger bases have their roots in the American installations which were established during World War 11. These were easier to re-establish during the Cold War precisely because they had become a familiar part of British life in the early 1940s. But even during World War I1 local acceptance could not be taken for granted. Policy-makers had to fashion policies that would make the introduction of thousands of foreign soldiers palatable to local civilians, without offending the people back home. In Britain this meant ensuring that British and American men could work together as allies, not sexual rivals. One of the most explosive topics of policy debate among British and American officers during World War I1 was relations between Black American male soldiers and white British women." During the course of the war 130,000 Black American soldiers were stationed in Britain. Though they represented only a fraction of all the American troops based there, they became the topic of intense controversy - in village pubs, the press, Parliament and war rooms. When the first soldiers arrived in 1942, the American military was a segregated institution. However, Blacks had become a political force to be reckoned with in America; the Democratic administration of Franklin Roosevelt had entered office indebted to thousands of Black voters in northern cities who had transferred their electoral support from the Republican to the Democratic party. British society in 1942 was overwhelmingly white, imbued with a sense of imperial superiority over the Asian and African peoples it still ruled. The British armed forces had fought World War I, and were fighting World War 11, with regiments mobilized in India and the West in die^.^ Both the British and American governments were ready with racial formulas when they sat
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down to talk about how to ensure that Black American men stationed in Britain would relate to white British women in ways that would enhance the joint war effort. When white British women dated Black American soldiers, they made comparisons between American and British manhood. Comparing Black and white American men, they often found the former more polite, better company and perhaps more 'exotic'. By 1943, some white British women were giving birth to children fathered by Black GIs. Some were choosing to marry their Black American boyfriends. Certain members of Winston Churchill's cabinet became alarmed at what they considered a dangerous trend. Top-level discussions had already begun in 1942. Three possible solutions were suggested in Cabinet sessions: (1) stop the Americans sending any Black male soldiers to Britain; (2) if that proved impossible, confine Black soldiers to certain coastal bases in Britain; ( 3 ) if all else failed, press the American armed forces to send more Black women soldiers and Red Cross volunteers to Britain so that Black male soldiers wouldn't have to look to white British women for companionship.' None of these proposals proved feasible. The Allies' war effort depended too much on optimum use of human resources to keep over 100,000 American troops out of Britain or holed up in coastal towns. Furthermore, experience of World War I, when British whites turned against West Indian Black men who had served as maritime workers in the port of Liverpool, suggested that coastal quarantining was no insurance against racial hostility. Finally, the American government refused to send thousands of Black women to Britain. NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) leaders made it clear to the Roosevelt administration that they did not see such a plan as respectful of Black womanhood: Black women were volunteering for the US army to be soldiers, not sexual companions. Furthermore, some of the British didn't think that the plan was wise; white British men might start dating the Black American women. In the end, only 800 Black military women were sent to Britain, and not until 1945; they were members of the 6888th Central Postal B a t t a l i ~ n . ~ As a result attempts to keep white British women from dating Black soldiers took the more diffuse forms of official and unofficial warnings directed at local women. To some observers this amounted to a campaign. British women who went out with Black men stationed at nearby bases were warned that they were more likely to get VD. Women who dated Black soldiers were branded as 'loose' or even traitorous to Britain. Whenever some infraction of disciplinary rules involved a Black soldier, the press was likely to specify his race. Parents who allowed their daughters to date Black GIs were portrayed by local papers as irresponsible. During the early years of the war, there was a widespread suspicion, expressed in British newspapers and by Members of Parliament, that Black American soldiers were more likely than white GIs to be charged for sexual offences such as rape and to receive harsher sentences if convicted. By 1945, while Blacks (the great majority of them male) constituted only 8 per cent of
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all US troops stationed in Europe, they represented 21 per cent of all American servicemen convicted of crimes. When the criminal convictions are broken down by category, the discrepancies are even more startling: Black soldiers were 42 per cent of those convicted of sex crimes.'None the less, in August 1942 Parliament passed the United States of America (Visiting Forces) Act, which gave the American authorities the right to try American soldiers for offences committed on British soil. It was one step towards permitting the Americans to maintain their kind of racial/sexual system despite the unusual circumstances of wartime. Many white Americans were afraid that if sexual relations between Black men and white women were allowed in wartime Britain, sexual segregation would be harder to maintain in post-war America. Governmental and press persuasion was hardly overwhelming in its success, however. A Mass Observation survey conducted in August 1943 revealed that only one in seven British people questioned disapproved of marriages between Blacks and whites; 25 per cent told interviewers that they had become more friendly toward Black people partly because of meeting Black American soldiers.10Yet by the end of the war, and especially after the first babies had been born of white British women and Black soldiers, it took considerable social courage for a young white British woman to go out to a local pub with a Black soldier. American military commanders weren't passive in these debates. General Dwight Eisenhower, senior US commander in Europe, tolerated white-Black dating because he believed that the US-British alliance would be harmed if Americans tried to impose segregationist 'Jim Crow' conventions on the British. Other American officers, however, thought that clashes between white and Black soldiers in Bristol and Leicester were due to white soldiers' justifiable resentment of Black troops 'using up' the limited pool of local white women. Some were also firmly opposed to 'mixed' marriages and used their authority to prohibit men under their command from marrying British women. By the end of the war at least 60,000 British women had filed applications with US officials to emigrate to America as war brides." Very few of those whose prospective husbands were Black were accepted. There appeared to be a 'gentleman's agreement' between British and American middle-level officials to forbid marriages between Black GIs and white British women. The Black soldier intent on marriage would be transferred and given a serious talking-to by a superior; the woman was counseled hy an American military officer or a British welfare officer.I2
Living with the Base
By the late 1960s the American military base at Effingham had become an integral part of the social and economic life of nearby Long Crendon, a modest English village in Essex. The expansion of the base in the 1950s had wrought subtle but fundamental changes in townspeople's lives. The Americans started to hire local men and women and soon became one of
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The Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security Agenda
the region's principal employers. More American soldiers arrived, bringing with them more wives and children. And with the families came Americanstyle consumption: 'air transports began to fly in to Effingham laden with deep-freezers, washing machines, pressure- and microwave cookers, hi-fi equipment, Hoovers, electric organs and even Persian carpets.'l"ome of the appliances made their way on to the now flourishing local second-hand market. Still, the ideological overspill from the American model of family life was contained by the married soldiers' preference for staying on the base, where the US Defense Department provided everything to make them feel as though they had never left home. Keeping soldiers happy on a foreign base requires keeping soldiers' wives happy. For a century both British and American military commanders had been weighing up the advantages and disadvantages of allowing their soldiers to marry. Would marriage raise the moral tenor of the troops and cut down on drunkenness and VD? O r would marriage divide a soldier's loyalty, make him slower to mobilize, while burdening the armed forces with responsibilities for maintaining housing, health care, family harmony? The debate remains unsettled today.14 Despite commanders' ambivalence, the inclusion of wives and their children in the armed forces has altered the nature of a military base. No longer can a soldier's wife be easily marginalized as a camp-follower, on the edge of military operations, cooking her husband food and doing his laundry in return for rations. There are too many of them. And for the British, Canadian and American armed forces, which today have to recruit - and keep - large numbers of expensively trained male soldiers without the aid of compulsory male conscription, wives' dissatisfaction with military life can produce worrisome manpower shortages. The Hoovers, washing machines and electric organs flown into the US base at Effingham are evidence of the American army's attempt to satisfy not only male soldiers, but also their wives, while serving abroad. Many women are quite content with these privileges. They find life on a base secure and comfortable. They adopt the military's way of viewing the world: the military's adversary is their adversary; their husband's rank is their rank. While serving overseas - and, though technically civilians, military wives refer to themselves as 'serving' - women become the backbone of social services on most bases. The armed forces depend on their largely unpaid work to transform an overseas base into a 'community'. For commanders responsible for bases on foreign soil the community works best if home-grown gender conventions are kept in place. Those conventions lower wives' expectations of paid work and careers of their own, encourage them to derive their own sense of self-worth from their husbands' accomplishments, and suppress wives' stories of depression and physical abuse for fear that they might damage their husbands' chances of promotion. Base commanders also need beliefs about femininity that encourage wives to take charge of family affairs when their husbands are away on maneuvers yet gladly relinquish any authority that comes from such responsibilities when
i rr lhul
Base Women
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the husband returns. They count on presumptions about both femininity and masculinity that will make military wives raise their daughters to look up to their fathers and their sons to emulate their fathers by choosing a military career themselves. A well-run military base not only serves today's military priorities, but also ensures a cohesive military a generation later. Any country's armed forces are more impervious to outside political control if they can reproduce themselves. Without military wives' active cooperation, a military cannot achieve this political goal." Relationships are changing between women and men on foreign and domestic bases, however, for several reasons. First, many armed forces are having to recruit substantial numbers of women in order to compensate for falling birthrates and to obtain the well-educated recruits a technologyladen military now requires. These women have begun to organize and acquire political lobbying skills. They are making alliances with legislators and civilian women to press for a wider selection of postings and for an end to sexual harassment and other obstacles barring their military advancement. They are less likely than women mobilized during World War 11 to maintain a stiff upper lip in the face of discrimination intended to keep women soldiers in their place. American servicewomen complain that pornographic magazines are still sold routinely in base stores, but many military bases are not quite the monolithic patriarchal enclaves they were a generation ago. Despite the problems of joint deployment, thousands of American servicemen are marrying servicewomen to form two-career military marriages. Despite their continuing illegality, lesbian relationships are being formed on military bases. Despite fears of 'fraternization', women soldiers are being stationed with male partners in underground nuclear missile silos. Nascent alliances are even being forged between women soldiers and military wives. Second, since the early 1980s military wives have become more aware of the services they render. Divorce settlements, in particular, have focussed the issue. In reaction to a series of what they perceived to be unfair alimony settlements, American military wives formed their own organizations and effectively lobbied the US Congress. Their political aim was to ensure that women who have been married to servicemen are compensated for all they have contributed not only to their husbands' careers but also to the military itself if, as so often happens, their husbands divorce them on retiring from the military. Third, Canadian, American and British military wives have begun to object publicly to the conventional assumption that they will surrender their paid jobs when their husbands reach senior rank in order to devote themselves exclusively to volunteer work on the base. In 1988 American women appeared before congressional committees to decry this practice. They wanted to be recognized as private citizens with financial and career aspirations and needs of their own. So, too, do Canadian military wives who discovered while petitioning for family dental insurance that, though legally civilians, they were prohibited from carrying on what a base commander deemed 'political'
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The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
activity. American women told legislators that they didn't want their husbands' chances of promotion to be jeopardized by their decisions to keep their paid jobs. The result: the Pentagon was compelled to issue formal statements affirming wives' autonomy. For instance, the Air Force Secretary told his base commanders in March 1988, 'no commander, supervisor or other Air Force official will directly or indirectly impede or otherwise interfere with' the decision by a military spouse to work outside the home. Furthermore, 'neither the decision of the spouse in this matter, nor the marital status of the military member, will be a factor used to affect the evaluation, promotion or assignment of the military member.'16 Finally, defense officials around the world are being pressed to slash expenditure on military personnel so that weapons procurement doesn't take the brunt of budgetary cuts. This has thrown into doubt the wisdom of sending soldiers' wives and children overseas. British, Canadian and American officials are considering new schemes to send soldiers abroad on shorter duties, to rationalize wives and children staying at home. The US Defense Department spends some $2 billion annually on dependent housing and services just in Europe.17 If wives could be kept in the US, a lot of money could be saved, which could be spent on costly weapons projects like the new Stealth bomber. But this maneuver would not be easy. It would entail shifting more family and emotional burdens on to military wives. It would also mean that thousands more male soldiers would be living far from home without their wives, a fact likely to foster complicated relationships between married American men and single British, Italian and West German women. Even without such a policy, many West German women have found themselves raising children fathered by American soldiers on their own when those men have ended relationships abruptly at the end of their tours.18 Young single soldiers stationed at Effingham were always more likely than married soldiers to form relationships with women off the base. They didn't have the wives and daughters and sons to help them create a sense of secure American domesticity in a foreign country; they also had more money to spend. Some of the American men who go into town are in search of no more than a bit of off-base companionship. Others are far more ambivalent about women as a direct result of their militarized sexuality. Women can seem as much a threat as a comfort to the modern warrior. A woman is to be destroyed just as the enemy is to be destroyed. At the Upper Heyford US Air Force Base, not far from Effingham, pilots of the 77th Tactical Fighter Squadron recently published their own songbook. The lyrics written by the pilots suggest the sexualization of military life as well as the militarization of male soldiers' sexuality. For the squadron's 'Victor Alert Song', they sing these lyrics to the tune of Rogers and Hammerstein's once-innocent 'My Favorite Things':
Reading our porno and picking our asses Checking our forms out and passing our gasses
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Silver sleek 6-61s slung below Nuclear war and we're ready to go." A few pages later, a pilot contributes lyrics that weave his dreams of sex with death: 1 fucked a dead whore b y the side of the road, I k n e w right away she was dead T h e skin was all gone from her t u m m y T h e hair was all gone from her head. A n d as I lay d o w n beside her, I k n e w right a w a y I had sinned
Young British women, like their mothers before them, make comparisons. They aren't always privy to the American soldiers' secret dreams when they weigh up the American and British varieties of masculinity. To the young women of the quiet villages around Effingham, the American soldiers 'were a godsend.' According to one local resident, 'The Essex girls found the Americans more polite, considerate and enthusiastic than the English boys.'21 The American's aura was enhanced by the social resources of the base, which easily outstripped the local pub or Saturday-night disco. 'A girl escorted to one by a local lad had to resign herself to a loutish rather than romantic experience. By contrast the weekend dances at the base offered a model of propriety and good order.'22 Still, parents worried about their daughters' reputations. Dating foreign soldiers wasn't the path to ladylike respectability. The daughters, for their part, chose to go out for their part, chose to go out with Americans as a way of asserting their autonomy. The more defiant dated Black American soldiers. And although local young men have to compete against the American soldiers for the women of Essex, they, too, seem to gain something from the base. More of them began to get jobs on the base, to acquire cars sold by the Americans and to modify the deferential attitudes traditional among working men in rural England. Thus the coming of an American base had to be negotiated at the ideological level of masculinity and femininity. But this occurred locally, out of the media's limelight. For their part, cabinet ministers and defense officials were content to let the crucial sexual politics of military-bases agreements take place beyond their accepted area of responsibility.
Greenham and Sexuality The British Ministry of Defence requisitioned Greenham Common for the war effort in 1941. The arrangement was to be 'temporary'. For five years after the war the airfield was unused; nearby Newbury's Chamber of Commerce called for its return to the town. But in 1952 the Labour government gave the
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The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
US Strategic Air Command permission to use Greenham Common as a base and to expand its facilities. The people of Newbury weren't unaccustomed to military bases in the area. The entire region southwest of London had become home for military facilities: RAF Welford, one of the world's largest ammunition stores, was a few miles away; the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment was at Aldermaston; the Royal Ordnance Factory helped build atomic bombs at Burghfield; the army depot at Thatcham was a main supplier of uniforms; and the School of Military Survey was at Hermitage. Each employed residents from the Newbury area. Moreover, Newbury was solidly Conservative. All this helped make the presence of a foreign military base if not normal, at least digestible. Helping the digestive process was the British government's legal stipulation that Greenham Common would remain nominally, if not practically, under RAF control and that the Ministry of Defence would pay the local authority L100,OOO a year instead of paying local taxes.23 When the government announced in 1981 that the Americans would be deploying nuclear warheaded cruise missiles at Greenham, the mostly middleclass, home-owning residents felt reassured because the new installations necessary to house the missiles were to be designed so that they were inconspicuous, thus not affecting house prices. Indeed, the Newbury Weekly News reported in 1983 that within two years the base would have 5,900 American Air Force staff and their wives and children, plus an additional 100 RAF personnel.24 For a variety of reasons -perhaps because so many of the American soldiers stationed at Greenham were married, the base was designed so that most of the Americans were content to do their socializing and shopping within its confines, most of the personnel were white, the local commander made a special effort to discourage sexual relations between his personnel and local residents - there appears to have been little sexualized politics around Greenham Common Air Force base, until 1981. That autumn a small group of women walked from Wales to Greenham and decided to establish a permanent encampment outside the base fence to protest against plans to deploy cruise missiles there.25It wasn't the American military men's sexuality or the sexuality of the civilian British men or civilian British women which became the object of controversy. It was the sexuality of the women protesters. The national press and local residents took the lead in describing the Greenham women - at times a small number of fulltime campers, at times several thousand day-long demonstrators - as irresponsible mothers, unwashed women, lesbians, hysterical political n a i ' f ~ . ~ ~ Whereas a military base is designed to keep the soldiers' wives domestic, respectable and politically quiescent, the peace camp, withstanding mud, rain and bulldozers, inevitably brought women face to face with each other and with soldiers and policemen. Conventionally feminine respectability was largely irrelevant to an anti-nuclear peace camp. As a result, the women at Greenham appeared to threaten not just defense policies and house prices, but the very meaning of being female. For some British women, however, the Greenham peace-campers' formulation of womanhood struck a chord. It ~ r o v i d e da way to rethink the
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divisions between private and public life. Even some Conservative women, when Conservative ministers were instructing authorities to bulldoze the camp, became more admiring than frightened of the women who pitched their make-shift tents or 'benders' outside the missile base. Journalist Beatrix Campbell interviewed one Tory woman who had cut her hair short to make it clear to her husband and sons that she identified with the Greenham women: 'Before Greenham I didn't realise that the Americans had got their missiles here. Then I realised. What a cheek! It was the fuss the Greenham Common women made that made me realise.' The peace camp became the source of endless attrition over the kitchen table: 'The men in this house [her husband and two sons] think they're butch, queers.' Did she? She thought for a moment. 'No.' Would it have bothered her if they were butch or if they were lesbians? She thought again. 'No.' Women irritated her men anyway, she said, not without affection. 'They never stop talking about Land Rovers and bikes, and they've not finished their dinner before they're asking for their tea.'" Women who have taken part in the peace camps have found that sustaining a peace encampment in the shadow of a masculinized base demands humor and ingenuity. It also requires a continuing reassessment by each woman of what it means to be feminine in a militarized world. At peace camps at Greenham, Comiso in Sicily, Saskatchewan in Canada, Seneca and Seattle in America, women have tackled questions about mothering, autonomy, safety, heterosexuality, fear and racial divisions between women.lX They began to chart the connections between violence and hierarchy on the one hand, and femininity and feminism on the other. What were the relationships between women who could climb over the base fence and those who could not? When soldiers from Greenham took cruise missiles out to the countryside on maneuvers, their wives and girlfriends stood at the fence to cheer them on. What were the connections between peace-camp women and women living and working on the base? H o w should peace-camp women relate to policemen and soldiers guarding the base? Some women peace activists believed that they could accomplish more if they joined peace camps organized by men and women. What did they risk in giving up the autonomy of a women-only camp? Okay, who wants tea? Coffee? One, two. Barleycup? Three, ... Humble equipment, limited space, a caravan outing multiplied by 365 days, divided by a dozen different opinions. I don't like cigarette smoke. He doesn't like garlic. Someone doesn't speak to someone else, and if I don't find that book I'm going to scream. Could you turn the radio down
please. Peace ... Anyone who goes to a peace camp thinking peace is a com modity dished out like lentil stew will have second thoughts."
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
Women who spent any time at Greenham began to sort out with each other what kinds of ideas about manhood seemed necessary to sustain a military base. They looked through the wire at the British policemen who were assigned to keep them out. They watched the American Air Force men who were kept at a distance, instructed by their superiors to keep a low profile. They talked about the civilian men from surrounding towns who came out to taunt campers and the government men sent to physically remove them again and again. I've been quite badly bruised by the police, but they are accessible ... just looking at them and saying, 'This is my body. I'm protecting my life with my body because I don't feel protected by you and these weapons ... Aren't you more threatened by cruise missiles?' I've not found a policeman able to use violence after thate3" Any military base is designed to be secure. By cutting the fences, dancing on the missile silos, challenging charges of trespassing in court, the Greenham women managed to transform the very meaning of a base, and of public security. A military base easily penetrated by a group of non-violent women was no longer a military base. In 1988 the United States and Soviet governments ratified the Intermediate Range Nuclear Force Treaty, a bilateral agreement to dismantle groundlaunched SS-20, cruise and Pershing I1 missiles. Reporters were eager to know what the Greenham women would do. Women at peace camps in North America and Western Europe expressed doubt that the INF treaty by itself would bring an end to the base mentality. It seemed likely that bases at Greenham, Comiso and elsewhere would be used for alternative American-controlled NATO weapons once the missiles were removed. Furthermore, air- and sea-launched nuclear warheaded missiles are still permitted under the INF treaty, encouraging NATO strategists to expand their Air Force and naval installations. Thus in October 1988 British women began adapting principles from Greenham to a women's peace action at Portsmouth, port of call for American missile-carrying submarines: 'The protest is non-violent; the group is a network of small groups organized autonomously; women's groups and mixed groups will cooperate without compromising women-only groups; land protest is an integral part of any sea action; swimming and sea-skills training will be undertaken on a voluntary basis; safety is a prime consideration.' They began offering swimming lessons while the cruise missiles were still in their silos underneath Greenham C~mmon.~' At the same time, other Greenham women created a new all-women's peace camp outside the nuclear weapons facility at nearby Aldermaston to draw attention to the role Britain itself was playing in the continued nuclear arms build-up. Aldermaston, though a weapons factory, not a base, was similar to a military base in that it nurtured a false sense of security behind a public fagade of masculinized strengtha31
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When B a s e s Move
NATO in the 1990s will not be the NATO of the 1960s. The United States cannot be so sure of its political dominance over the alliance as it once was. Canadian and European governments now have to pay at least some attention to sophisticated grassroots peace movements, movements fueled in large part by women's activism. In 1988 Spain's Socialist government was compelled to renegotiate its military bases agreement with the US because of a popular movement against the bases. While it stopped far short of ousting the American bases altogether, it did insist that the Americans transfer their F-16 fighter bombers, capable of carrying nuclear as well as conventional bombs. But where could the F-16s and their 3,800 personnel and families go? The search for a new base had implications for women in Greece and Italy, many of whom had already spoken out against the foreign military personnel in their midst. Ultimately, the Italian government, eager to prove its reliability as an ally, offered the Americans Calabria as a new home for the F-16s. In a region suffering from economic depression, Calabria's residents were assured that the bases would bring needed jobs. There was no public discussion of what the arrival of the ~ i l o t swould do to local women's sexual relationships or their sense of safety.'" In the eyes of military bases negotiators the world is a single 'market'. If a base is forced to close in one place, it will have to be relocated somewhere else. The alternative, to radically rethink the very nature of national security, is rarely considered. This single-market outlook ties women in current base towns and potential base towns together, though they have few resources for sharing information and tactics. It also means that a victory for women in one country can exacerbate the militarization of daily life for women in another country. Their region will be selected as a replacement site precisely because they do not have the resources to mount an effective political obstacle to a new base. Nowhere has this been more clear than in Goose Bay, Labrador. This northern Canadian region has been chosen by the Canadian government and its NATO allies as a perfect spot for an air force training base. Its remoteness from heavily populated centers allows pilots to practice low-level flying without kicking up embarrassing political dust. Canadian, British, Dutch, American and West German pilots are already sent there to develop their special skills. Now it appears likely that more West German pilots will be sent. West German civilians living near the huge air force base at Ramstein have successfully lobbied officials in Bonn to cut back the low-level flying and its deafening noise pollution. Bonn has announced that it will accede to its citizens' demands and send more of its pilots to train in Labrador. But Labrador isn't an empty land. It is the home of native Canadians of the Innu community. Innu leaders and their white supporters have been monitoring the sexual ramifications of having NATO pilots stationed nearby. They describe how pilots, their cars well stocked with beer, drive
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The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
from Goose Bay to the villages in search of young Innu women. Some of the girls, often teenagers, have been made pregnant by British, West German and American pilots. It then has been left to the Innu community to raise these children. Needless to say, the lives of Innu teenage girls have not been a topic of consideration in Ramstein or Bonn.j4
Foreign Bases in the Third World: Is Prostitution the Issue?
Military bases and prostitution have been assumed to 'go together'. But it has taken calculated policies to sustain that fit: policies to shape men's sexuality, to ensure battle readiness, to determine the location of businesses, to structure women's economic opportunities, to affect wives, entertainment and public health. It is striking that these policies have been so successfully made invisible around bases - local and foreign - in North America and Western and Eastern Europe, whereas they have attracted so much notoriety around bases in the poorer countries of the Third World. It is worth thinking about why military prostitution is so politically invisible in some places and so notorious in others. Which facets of foreign and domestic military base life have been deemed to be 'political' and so to warrant public action? In North America, Europe, New Zealand and Australia, local military bases only rarely become issues (often when threatened with closure), while foreign military bases have become politicized when local citizens have begun to see them as jeopardizing their own security and sovereignty. Prostitution and its attendant threats to public health and morality have been scarcely mentioned. By contrast, groups protesting against foreign bases in Third World countries have made prostitution a central issue.3" By the late nineteenth century the British government had its troops spread throughout the globe sustaining its empire. These troops were not so likely to seek sexual liaisons with working-class white women as with colonized women of color - Chinese women in Hong Kong, Indian women in India, Egyptian women in Egypt. British officials had been thwarted in their efforts to control white working-class women in Britain by the AntiContagious Diseases Acts Campaign led by feminists of the Ladies National League. They were determined not to lose control over colonial women. First, they refashioned marriage policies for soldiers, considering whether allowing British soldiers to marry Indian women would harm or enhance military readiness and white settler morale. Some officials believed that if British soldiers were allowed to marry Indian women, they might be less likely to frequent prostitutes and thus, presumably, be less likely to pick up venereal diseases. But on the other hand, such a policy of encouraging inter-racial marriage might have jeopardized British men's sense of their racial superiority. Second, they continued enforcing the Contagious Diseases Acts outside Britain after they had been repealed at home in the 1880s. These laws, called the Cantonment Acts overseas, permitted colonial police
ir
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authorities to conduct compulsory genital examinations on women around imperial military bases for the sake of allowing British soldiers overseas to have sexual relations with colonial women without fear of venereal disease. In 1888 Josephine Butler, founder of Britain's Ladies National League, launched an international campaign calling for the abolition of the Cantonment Acts. Her new journal, The Dawn, criticized British authorities' double standard: controlling of women's sexual behavior for the sake of protecting soldiers' sexual pleasures. Butler's movement was feminist in its analysis, but not in its organization. Her chief abolitionist allies appear to have been British men and educated men in the colonized societies. Colonial women - a study in 1891 found that 90 per cent of military prostitutes were widows were seen by abolitionists as the victims but rarely as organizational allies with political ideas and resources of their own.37 Anti-Cantonment Acts campaigners saw these policies in imperial perspective: if such regulations were allowed to persist in India, they would provide lessons for military authorities in other British colonies and even in the colonies of rival imperial powers, such as the Netherlands, who also needed to station soldiers abroad, provide them with sexual access to colonial women, and yet ensure that the soldiers were physically fit enough to carry out their military duties for the empire. A letter written in 1888 by one of Butler's Dutch correspondents charts the flow of military lessons: If you should succeed in your next great attack upon India, it will be an immense lever for us. We have dreadful accounts of this evil in our barracks in Batavia [Netherlands East Indies, now Indonesia 1 ... One of the official gentlemen quietly remarked that they thought of introducing the Anglo-Indian system of having separate tents inhabited by the licensed women in the camps. At present at a fixed hour in the evening the doors of the Barracks are opened in order to admit a certain number of these poor victims. I can scarcely record all that we have learned. Life in the Barracks is morally horrible ... The fact stated here shows that the bad example set by the English government in India is infecting Java, and no doubt other Colonies of other nations, thus doubling and trebling our motives for urging the Abolition of the hideous Indian Ordinances and Cantonment Acts
...'"
By 1895 Butler and her campaigners had persuaded the British government to repeal the Cantonment Acts. Nevertheless, her informants in the colonies, who continued to monitor barracks and police practices, found that forced examinations of local women continued despite the repeal. The Dawn published letters from British military officers who articulated the widespread official view that such practices remained necessary. They were allegedly necessary for individual British soldiers (not for Indian soldiers; they seemed to have a strikingly lower incidence of VD, which puzzled their British commanders), but also for the very well-being of the British empire.
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To this argument Josephine Butler's editorial retorted: 'We had not realized that the women of a conquered race, in the character of official prostitutes, constituted one of the bulwarks of our great E m ~ i r e ! ' ~ ~ Thus the connection between bases and prostitution has not been confined to colonies and poor countries. Governments in France, the United States and Canada all attempted to create military and civil law to control women for the sake of ensuring soldiers' morale and health.40 When they were not able to carry out those laws at home they tried to put them into effect abroad. Yet today it is mainly in poor countries that prostitution is used politically by opponents of bases to question whether military alliances are in the interests of the local population, as their governments argue they are. It may be that prostitution really doesn't exist around US bases in Britain or British bases in West Germany or Soviet bases in East Germany and Poland. Or it may be that prostitution - as distinct from white American servicemen having white British 'girlfriends' - is politically visible only when most of the foreign soldiers and the local women they date are from different racial groups. It would be surprising if a military base in Massachusetts, Belfast, Ramstein or Berlin were any less sexually constructed than bases in Belize, Honduras or Guam. The crucial difference, therefore, may be in the ways issues are politically constructed. It may be that West and East German, British, Italian, Spanish, Polish and Greek women have access to other forms of livelihood so they aren't pressed into taking jobs at dance halls and massage parlors. Or it may be that Western peace activists have assumed that security and sovereignty are their most serious grounds for anti-bases campaigns and so haven't looked closely to see whether, in reality, sexual politics defines the role that those bases play in their communities as much as weapons politics.
Aids, Bases and the 'Pacific Rim'
Mon. [Novemberl 4 - Rained all day. Tues. 5 - Rained all day Wed. 6 - Rained part of day. Got pay check. Thurs. 7 - Rained all day.41 Thus wrote Jessie Anglum, wife of an American army officer, in her diary. She did not enjoy her stay in the Philippines. The year was 1901. The American army had been sent by President McKinley to quash a Filipino insurgency which first fought the islands' Spanish colonizers and then resisted American plans for colonization. Jessie Anglum was one of the first American military wives to join her husband in the Philippines. She was put up in a Manila hotel. As the monsoon rains poured steadily outside the shutters, she was bored. Her husband spent most of his days on maneuvers against the
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insurgents. She went for occasional carriage rides and had tea with the few other American women then in Manila. But she didn't want to be in the Philippines. She only sailed to Asia out of wifely duty. She counted the days until her husband's tour was over. And she was happy when she could repack her trunks and sail back home. There were no elaborate American bases when Jessie Anglum endured her damp hotel stay. But in the ninety years since her arrival the US government has made up for that deficiency. Today the now independent Philippines hosts a score of US military facilities. Subic Bay Naval Base and Clark Air Force Base, both situated on the main island of Luzon, are deemed by Pentagon strategists to be among the most crucial for American global defense. When American military planners look at the world these days they imagine the territories encircling the Pacific Ocean as part of a single security - or insecurity - chain. To be secure, this 'Pacific Rim' must be strung with a necklace o f American-controlled military bases: from Anchorage to San Diego, Hawaii, Vladivostok, Seoul, Yokahama, Cam Ranh Bay, Subic Bay and Clark, Wellington, Belau and Kwajalein. Having created this mental map, this assumption of militarized interconnectedness, the American strategist is on the look-out for gaps and disturbances. The Soviet Union's Pacific coastline catches the strategist's eye; so now does Cam Ranh Bay, a large naval base built by the Americans during the Vietnam War, but since 1975 given over by the Vietnamese government to the Soviet military for its use. Less tinged with outright hostility, but still worrying for the strategists are the political changes that make American ships, planes and personnel less welcome in New Zealand, South Korea, Belau and the Philippines. The American-Philippines bases agreement comes to an end in 1991. The American government must persuade the post-Marcos government of President Corazon Aquino, under pressure from both anti-base nationalists on the left and anti-communist army officers on the right, to renew the bases agreement. Failure would mean radically redesigning the necklace meant to secure the Pacific Rim. This would entail finding another country willing to accept some of the world's largest military bases and the social problems they bring with them. The social problem that has attracted most Filipino attention is prostitution. Filipinos, like South Koreans, Okinawans, Guameans, Thais and Belauans, have held foreign military bases responsible for creating or exacerbating conditions which promote prostitution. Consequently, as the American bases have become the objects of nationalist ideas and campaigns, so prostitution has to become an issue defined in terms of nationalist anger and nationalist hopes. The arrival of AIDS in the Philippines in 1987 only served to escalate nationalists' sense that the current American-Philippines .bases agreement violates not just Filipino women's rights but ('more fundamentally' some might say) the sovereignty and integrity of the Filipino nation as a whole. Filipino feminists took up militarization as a women's issue. During the 1970s and early 1980s they began analyzing how the Marcos regime's
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growing reliance on coercion undermined women's already fragile support systems. Since the fall of Marcos in 1986, Filipino women activists have charted with dismay the Aquino regime's continuation of militarization as a strategy for resolving the country's deepening social crises. Integrating anti-militarism into their analysis and practice has made it easier for women active in Gabriela and other feminist organizations to find common cause with other nationalist, anti-militarist political groups, even if those groups did not accord women's concerns top priority in their own work. Subic Bay Naval Base overshadows the town of Olongapo. The Navy base is home for many of the 35,000 American military personnel and their families stationed in the Philippines. When an aircraft-carrier docks, another 18,000 men pour into town. The Subic Bay base relies on civilian Filipino labor to keep it running. Workers are paid at lower rates than workers on American bases in South Korea or Japan, but for many Filipino men and women these base jobs provide a livelihood. By 1985 the US military had become the second largest employer in the Philippines, hiring over 40,000 Filipinos: 20,581 full-time workers, 14,249 contract workers, 5,064 domestics and 1,746 concessionaries. The sum of their salaries amounted to almost $83 million a year. By 1987 the American bases were employing over 68,000 Filipinos, who enjoyed medical insurance as well as other benefits not commonly offered by most Filipino employers. Many were women. Many more women were married to or mothers of male workers. On the other hand, some Filipino analysts warned against letting this figure weigh too heavily, for those employees amounted to a mere 5 per cent of the 1.18 million people employed by the Philippines government itself.42 As the price of sugar has declined on the international market and as large landowners have pushed more and more Filipinos into landless poverty, more young women have come to make a living by servicing the social and sexual needs of American military men. In 1987 the Aquino government estimated that there were between 6,000 and 9,000 women entertainment workers registered and licensed in Olongapo City. Independent researchers, taking account of unlicensed as well as licensed women, put the figure as high as 20,000. Another 5,000 women often come to Olongapo City from Pampanga province and Manila when one of the American aircraft-carriers comes into port.43 In addition, in recent years rising numbers of children have been recruited into the prostitution trade. Of the approximately 30,000 children born each year of Filipino mothers and American fathers, some 10,000 are thought to become street children, many of them working as prostitutes servicing American pedophiles. Some of the Amer-Asian children who avoid the streets have been sold. An insider described the racialized market to Filipino researchers: 'Those Caucasian-looking children are each allegedly sold for $50-200 (around P1,000-4,000), whereas the Negro-fathered ones fetch only $25-30 (around P500-600).'44 There are more Filipino women working as prostitutes in the tourist industry than around US bases. Filipino feminists have drawn the links between
the two, revealing how distorted investment, patriarchal conventions and short-sighted government priorities have together forced thousands of poor women off the land and out of exploitative jobs to service civilian as well as military men. It has been militarized prostitution, however, that has been made the most prominent symbol of compromised sovereignty by the maleled nationalist movement. Without feminist prompting, these anti-bases organizations rarely delve into the ptriarchal causes for women coming to Ol~ngapo.~~' Two quite disparate worries have made American officials somewhat less complacent about prostitution around their Philippines bases in the late 1980s: Defense Department women's advocates' claim that prostitution is lowering American women's morale; and the spread of AIDS. The US Defense Advisory Committee on the Status of Women in the Services (DACOWITS) is a group of civilian men and women appointed by the Secretary of Defense to monitor the conditions under which women in the US military serve. It has become an in-house advocate for equal promotions, for attacking sexual harassment, for redefining 'combat'. DACOWITS members traveled to Asia in 1987 to inspect the conditions under which American women soldiers and sailors were serving overseas. For the first time in its history, DACOWITS members began to make a connection between the treatment of local women around the American bases and the treatment of American women on the bases. They blamed American Navy women's low morale on the sexist environment created by the 'availability of inexpensive female companionship from the local population and its adverse consequences for legitimate social opportunities of Service women'.4h Still, the American DACOWITS members fell far short of allying with Filipino women. They confined their brief to the well-being of American servicewomen. They were concerned with the impact housing was having on Navy women's heterosexual relationships. Women serving on Okinawa and at Subic Bay told them that the command's policy of placing women personnel in barracks separated from the male sailors' barracks, when combined with the condoning of local prostitution, was fostering a base-wide impression that American servicewomen were merely 'second team' members. 'More serious', according to DACOWITS members, such policies were contributing to 'conditions in which extremist behavior [lesbianism] is fostered ... For example, one barracks at Camp Butler is widely referred to as Lessy Land.'47 But it has been AIDS that has sparked alarm - and confusion - among the military and local policy-makers responsible for managing a system of sexual relations that supports the American Pacific Rim security strategy. By January 1987 doctors had recorded twenty-five HIV-positive cases in the Philippines. All twenty-five carriers were women. Twenty-two of them worked as entertainers in bars around Clark, Subic and Wallace US military bases. Six of the twenty-five showed signs of AIDS. Women in Gabriela, the umbrella feminist organization active in the anti-bases campaign, helped open Olongapo's first Women's Center and started to make the information known. Women criticized the Manila government for not giving HIV-positive women
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any counseling or medical care and for blaming the women themselves for AIDS, pointing to them as a threat not only to American men but to other Filipinos. Who are the producers of AIDS in the Philippines? Why does prostitution exist and proliferate in the military bases and our tourist spots? The danger and damage of AIDS to women and the existence o f prostitution are, in fact, crimes against women. We are the products, the commodities in the transaction ... Who, then, we ask, are the real criminals of AIDS and prostitution? Indict them, not Filipino women activists called for a reversal of the century-old formula for safeguarding the morale and physical health of soldiers serving on overseas bases. Specifically, Gabriela members called on the Philippines government to insist that the American government institute a policy that all servicemen or base employees showing any signs of AIDS not be allowed 'on Philippine soil': In the same way that American servicemen demand VD clearance from the women, the Filipinos have the right to demand AIDS and VD clearance from the s e r v i ~ e m e n . ~ ~ A year later the Philippines Immigration Commissioner declared that henceforth US military personnel and all foreign sailors arriving in the Philippines would be required to present certificates showing that they are free of AIDS." If this policy is actually implemented, it will make it far harder for American military planners to maintain their Pacific Rim strategy. Either they will have to fundamentally alter servicemen's assumptions about what rewards they deserve in return for months away from home and weeks cooped up on board ship. O r they will have to modify their global security doctrine in order to rely on fewer and more modest bases abroad.
Conclusion Belizean women (and, some say, imported Guatemalan women) have a lot to tell us about how the British armed forces use sexuality to conduct their foreign Northern Irish and West German women who date British troops have important insights to share with the women in Belize. British women married to British soldiers could help round out the picture, as could British women peace activists and those in uniform. All together, these women's seemingly different experiences add up to a gendered government bases policy. But it is the very divisions between these women that provide a military base with its security. The armed forces need women to maintain their bases, but they need those women to imagine that they belong to mutually exclusive categories. Women from different countries are separated by distance,
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and often race and inequalities of political influence. Prostitutes, girlfriends, wives, peace activists and women soldiers have learned to view each other as sexual or ideological rivals. An anti-bases movement uninformed by feminist questioning leaves these divisions in place. In this sense, an anti-bases movement that ignores the armed forces' dependence on the complex relations between women leaves the structure of military bases intact even if it manages to close down a particular base. A woman living on a military base as a wife wants to feel secure. And her own advancement depends on her husband performing successfully enough to win promotion. Thus she sees women peace activists camped outside her gates as the enemy, not an ally. The woman in uniform is trying to challenge the military's masculinist conventions; she sees herself as a warmaking partner, not a sexually available object for her male team-mates. So it is not surprising that she deeply resents the women who work as prostitutes outside (and sometimes inside) the base gates, eroticizing, she thinks, her workplace. Girlfriends of soldiers are never quite sure whether the soldier they are dating may have a wife back home, whether the promises of marriage - will be realized when a superior warns against marrying a foreign women or when the tour of duty is over and the need for local companionship comes to an abrupt end. Thus when Kenyan and Filipino women met in Nairobi in 1985 and launched the Campaign Against Military Prostitution (CAMP) to create a network of women in all countries hosting American bases, they were taking a step towards dismantling the global gender structure on which each individual base depends." So, too, are Filipino anti-bases activists who try to imagine what their actions might mean for the already politically conscious women in the small Pacific nation of Belau, the US military's favored back-up site for its giant Subic Bay naval base." When a base is successfully ousted from one place it is likely to be moved somewhere else. If women active in anti-bases movements see developing contacts with women in alternative countries as integral to their work, there is a better chance of the removal of a military base producing a fundamental reassessment of global strategy, not simply a transfer of equipment and personnel. If military wives and women soldiers begin to explore the ways that prostitution pollutes not only their on-base lives but the life of the country off which they are living, the respect they seek for themselves is likely to have deeper roots. Such an exploration might also prompt them to broaden their political horizons, to focus less exclusively on benefits and ask more questions about the consequences of militarization.
Notes 1. E.P. Thompson, 'Introduction', in E.P. Thompson, Mary Kaldor et al., Mad Dogs: T l ~ c US Raids on L h y a , I.ondon, Pluto Press, 1987, p. 6 . 2. Michael Kidron and Dan Smith, The War Atlas, London, Pan Books, New York, Simon CI: Schuster, 1983, m a p 17. See also 'Pulling Back', a report on US bases policies by the American
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Friends Service Committee, Philadelphia; New York Times, December 2 3 and December 25, 1988. 3. Duncan Campbell, The Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier: American Military Power in Britain, London, Paladin Books, 1986. 4. Ibid., p. 16. 5. The following account draws on Graham Smith, W h e n J i m Crow Metlohn Bull: Black American Soldiers in World War 11 Britain, London, I.B. Travis, 1987; New York, St Martin's Press, 1988. Also, Mary Penick Motley, editor, The Invincible Soldier: The Experience of the Black Soldier, World War 11, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1987. 6. O n racial policies in the armed forces, see Cynthia H. Enloe, Ethnic Soldiers: State Security in Divided Societies, London, Penguin, 1980. 7. Graham Smith, op. cit., p. 188. 8. Ibid., pp. 192-3. An oral history of Black American women in military service during the World Wars is being compiled by Julia Perez, William Joiner Center, University of Massachusetts, Boston. 9. Graham Smith, op. cit., p. 186. 10. Ibid., p. 200. 11. John Costello, Virtue Under Fire: How World War I1 Changed Our Social and Sexual Attitudes, Boston, Little, Brown & Company, 1985, p. 254. O n British women who married Canadian soldiers, see Joyce Hibbert, War Brides, Toronto, New American Library of Canada, 1980. 12. Graham Smith, op. cit., p. 206. 13. Norman Lewis, 'Essex', Granta, no. 23, London and New York, Penguin, Spring, 1988, p. 112. 14. O n military wives, see Myna Trustram, Women of the Regiment: Marriage and the Victorian Army, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 1984; Cynthia Enloe, Does Khakr Become You? The Militarization of Womenk L i t w , London and Winchester, MA, Pandora Press, 1988; Mona Macmillan, 'Campfollower: A Note on Wives in the Armed Forces', in Hilary Callan and Shirley Ardener, editors, The Incorporated Wife, London, Croom Helm, 1984; Rosemary McKechnie, 'Living with Images of a Fighting Elite: Women and the Foreign Legion', in Sharon Macdonald, Pat Holden and Shirley Ardener, editors, lmages of Women in Peace and War, London, Macmillan, 1987, Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin Press, 1988, pp. 1 2 2 4 7 ; a play depicting Britlsh army wives' lives, Gillian Richmond, The Last Waltz, available from Valerie Hoskins, Eagle House, 109 Jermyn Street, London, SW1; research in progress by Helena Terry, Women's Studies, York University, Toronto, Canada; on Canadian military wives' organizing, Lucie Richardson Laliberti, Law School, Queens University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada; Ximena Bunster, 'Watch Out for the Little Nazi Man That All of Us Have Inside: The Mobilization and Demobilization of Women in Militarized Chile', Women's Studies International Forum, vol. 11, no. 5, 1988. 15. O n American military daughters' reactions to living on military bases, Mary Wertsch, Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress, New York, Crown, forthcoming. O n the social networks created by British officers out of their enclosed worlds, Barbara Rogers, Men Only, London and Winchester, MA, Pandora Press, 1988. 16. Quoted in the New York Times, March 20, 1988. See also 'The Flip Side of Volunteering', Washington Report, OctoberINovember, 1987, p. 3: published by Women's Equity Action League, 1250 I Street NW, Washington, DC 20005. 17. New York Times, December 18, 1988. 18. Correspondence with Janice Hill, Women and the Military Project, Military Counseling Network, Rottenburg, West Germany, July, 1988. 19. Quoted by Joan Smith, 'Ghost Riders in the Sky', New Statesman and Society, June 10, 1988, p. 16. 20. Ibid., p. 17. 21. Norman Lewis, op. cit., p. 115. 22. Ibid., p. 116. 23. Lynchcornbe, At Least Cruise is Clean, UK, Niccolo Press, 1984.
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24. Ihid. 2.5. Alice Cook and Gwyn Kirk, Greenhorn Women Everywhere, London, Pluto, Boston, South End Press, 1983. 26. Lynne Jones, 'Perceptions of Peace Women at Greenham ( h n m o n 1981-1985', in Sharon Macdonald, et al., op. cit., pp. 179-204. 27. Beatrix Campbell, The Iron Ladies: Why D o Women Vote Tory?, London, Virago, 1987, p. 126. 28. For a map of women's peace camps: Jon1 Seager and Ann Olson, Women in the Wovld: An international Atlas, London, Pan Books, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1987, map 39. 29. Members of the Faslane peace camp, Faslane: Diary of a Peace Camp, Edinburgh, Polygon Books, 1984, p. 78. For debates within all-women and mixed peace camps, see We Are Ordinary Women: A Chronicle of the Puget Sound Women's Peace Camp, Seattle, Seal Press, 1985; Jane Held, 'The B r ~ t ~ sPeace h Movement: A Critical Exammarlon of Attitudes to Male Violence within the Brit~shPeace Movement, as Expressed with Regard to the "Molesworth Rapes"', Womenk Studies International Forum, vol. 11, no. 3, 1988, pp. 211-21. 30. Rebecca Johnson, quoted in Cook and Kirk, op. cit,. p. 68. 31. Yarrow Cleaves, 'Greenham Common: One World, Many Women', in Greenhim Women Against Cruise Missiles, a newsletter edited by Gwyn Kirk, 339 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10012, December, 1988. 32. Rebecca Green, 'Greenham to Aldermaston', Everywomen, February, 1988. Wc Are Ordinary Women, op. cit., also describes a peace camp outside a weapons factory. 33. Mariano Aguirre, 'Spain's Nuclear Allergy', The Nation, December 26, 1988, pp. 722-3. John Gilbert, 'F-16s Find a New Home After Spain Evicts Them', The Guardran (US), February 24, 1988, pp. 16-17. Elisahetta Addis, an editor of the Italian peace journal Giuno, suggests that ltalian feminists and peace activ~stsdid not mount a campaign against acceptance of the new US base in part because they were preoccupied with the issue of the Palestinia~iuprising on the West Bank and in part because it was difficult to galvanize local opposit~ongiven the economic depression in the reglon selected for the base: conversation, Cambridge, MA, December 10, 1988. 34. James Markham, 'Over the Screeching Jets, Germans Cry Enough', New York Times, August 10, 1988. 1 am indebted to Peter Armitage and Wendy Mishkin of Labrador for sharlng inforn~ationabout the impact assessments and local debates surrounding the proposed expansion of the Goose Bay air force base. 3 5 . Soviet bases in Third World countries do not appear to provoke public debate about prostitution. Two of the Soviet Union's largest overseas bases are Cam Ranh Bay, in Vietnam, and, untd mid-1988, Kabul in Afghanistan. Prostitution, while it may exlst, has not attracted sufficient attention to make it politically salient. One well-researched description of personnel problems experienced h y the Sov~etmilitary during its engagement in Afghanistan does not mention nrostitution o r VD at all. The r e w r t - written under contract for the US army and thus with every incentive to reveal any warts on the Sowet army - cites drug abuse, inter-rank hullying and ethnic hostility between Slavic and Muslim Soviet sold~ersas the problems o f most concern to Soviet officers.'(' 36. Alexander Alexiev, Inside the Sozliet Army in Afghanistan, Santa Monica, CA, Rand Corporation, 1988. 37. Joanna Liddle and Rama josh^, 'Gender and Imperialism in British India', Emnonm. and Polltrral Weekly, New Delhi, vol. 20, no. 43, October 26, 1985, special supplement o n Women's Studies in India, p. WS-74. See also Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race a n d Sex irnd Class under the Kaj, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980. 38. The Dawn, no. I , May, 1888, p. 5. The collected volumes of The Dawn are avaihble at the Fawcett Library, City of London Polytechnic, 1.ondon. For a feminist interpretation of Josephine Butler's attitudes toward imperialism, see Antoinette Burton, 'The White Wom'ln's Burden: Brit~shFem~nistsand "The Indian Woman", 1865-1915', in Margaret Strohel and Nupur Chaudhuri, guest editor\, 'European Women and Imperialisnl', special issue of Women's Studies lnternatronal Forum, vol. 13, no. 2, 1990. 39. The Dawn, no. 27, May, 1895, pp. 1-2.
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40. On military prostitution debates in the US, see Allan Brandt, No Magic Bullet, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1987; Katherine Bushnell, 'Plain Words to Plain People', a World War I pamphlet, undated, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA; Cynthia Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? op. cit. The Canadian debate about soldiers' sexuality during World War I1 is discussed in Ruth Roach Pierson, 'They're Still Women Afterall': The Second World War and Canadian Womanhood, Toronto, McClelland & Stewart, 1986. 41. Jessie Anglum, unpublished diary, 1901-1902, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA. 42. Alexander R. Magno, 'Cornucopia or Curse: The Internal Debate on the US Bases in the Philippines', Kasarinlan, Third World Studies Program, University of the Philippines, Quezon City, vol. 3, no. 3, 1988, pp. 9-12; Pilar Ramos-Jimenez and Elena Chiong-Javier, 'Social Benefits and Costs: People's Perceptions of the US Bases in the Philippines', Research Center, De La Salle University, Manila, 1987, pp. 9-10; Philippine Resource Center Monitor, no. 3, August 12, 1988, available from PO Box 40090, Berkeley, CA 94704. 43. Ramos-Jimenez and Chiong-Javier, op. cit., p. 16. 44. Ibid., p. 17. 45. Sr. Mary John Mananzan, editor, Essays on Women, Manila, St Scholastica's College, 1987; Pennie S. Azarcon, editor, Kamalayan: Feminist Writings in the Philippines, 12 Pasaje de la Paz, Quezon City, Pilipina, 1987; Sergy Floro and Nana Luz, editors, Sourcebook on Philippine Women in Struggle, Berkeley, CA, Philippine Resource Center, 1985. 46. Jacquelyn K. Davis, 'Summary of Findings of 1987 DACOWITS WestPac Trip', memo to the Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger, August 26, 1987, p. 6. 47. Ibid.; Nonna Cheatham, 'Report of DACOWITS Spring, 1988 Meeting', Minerva, vol. 6, no. 2, Summer, 1988, pp. 1 4 2 ; testimony of Carolyn Becraft, Women's Equity Action League, House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Personnel, October 1, 1987. 48. 'AIDS is Here! Fight AIDS!', Women's World, ISIS, no. 14, 1987, p. 37. 49. Ibid., p. 38. 50. Christian Science Monitor, February 18, 1988. 51. Jacqui Alexander, an Afro-Caribbean feminist and sociologist, has reported that Belizean women activists believe that British authorities are bringing Guatemalan women into Belize to provide sexual services for British soldiers stationed there; this has caused some tension between Belizean and Guatemalan women. Jacqui Alexander, in conversation, Cambridge, MA, December, 1988. 52. Sister Soledad Perpinan, one of the founders of CAMP, Third World Movement Against the Exploitation of Women, Manila, Philippines; lecture at Clark University, Worcester, MA, April, 1987; Leopoldo Moselina, 'Prostitution and Militarization', in Cast the First Stone, Quezon City, World Council of Churches in the Philippines, 1987, pp. 49-65; Saundra Sturdevant, 'The Bargirls of Subic Bay', The Nation, April 3, 1989, pp. 444-6. 53. For more on the impact of military bases on Pacific women and women's anti-nuclear activism in the Pacific, see Jane Dibblin, Day of Two Suns: US Nuclear Testing and the Pacific Islands, London, Virago, 1988. Also, Women Working for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific, c/o Beech Range, Levenshulme, Manchester, M I 9 2 E 0 .
The Case Against Linking Environmental Degradation and National Security Daniel Deudney
Introduction
L
ike all biological organisms, humans are vitally dependent upon their physical environment. Since the emergence of human life on earth, humans have been able simply to take as given the presence of some environmental conditions - clean air, shielding from ultraviolet radiation, etc. - that are now in jeopardy. Other environmental elements, particularly fertile soil, water and earth minerals, have been subject to intense, often violent, intergroup competition.' For the last two centuries, the explosive progress in science and technology and the emergence of societies of unprecedented wealth seemed to have loosened the iron grip of natural scarcity upon human life. In the last several decades, however, alarming evidence has accumulated that both the developed industrial countries and those striving to achieve this state are dangerously damaging the ecological systems that underpin all human life. Given these trends, environmental issues are likely to become an increasingly important dimension of political life at all levels - locally, inside states, as well as internationally. How institutions respond to these emerging constraints is likely to shape politics in a profound manner. Because state and interstate conflict are such central features of both world politics and geopolitical theory, there is a strong tendency for people to think about environmental problems in terms of national security and to assume that environmental conflicts will fit into the established patterns of interstate conflict. The aim of this essay is to cast doubt upon this tendency to link environmental degradation and national security. Specifically, I make three claims. First, it is analytically misleading to think of environmental degradation as Source: Millennium: Journal of lnternatronal Studies, 19(3)(1990):461-76. T h ~ sarticle first appeared in Millennium.
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a national security threat, because the traditional focus of national security interstate violence - has little in common with either environmental problems or solutions. Second, the effort to harness the emotive power of nationalism to help mobilise environmental awareness and action may prove counterproductive by undermining globalist political sensibility. And third, environmental degradation is not very likely to cause interstate wars.
The Weak Analytical Links b e t w e e n Environmental Degradation a n d National Security
One striking feature of the growing discussion of environmental issues in the United States is the attempt by many liberals, progressives and environmentalists to employ language traditionally associated with violence and war to understand environmental problems and to motivate action. Lester Brown, Jessica Tuchman Matthews, Michael Renner and others have proposed 'redefining national security' to encompass resource and environmental threats2 More broadly, Richard Ullman and others have proposed 'redefining security' to encompass a wide array of threats, ranging from earthquakes to environmental degradati~n.~ Hal Harvey has proposed the concept of 'natural security': and US Senator Albert Gore has spoken extensively in favour of thinking of the environment as a national security issue.5 During the renewed Cold War tensions of the late 1970s and early 1980s, such concepts were advanced to prevent an excessive focus on military threats. As the Cold War winds down, such links are increasingly popular among national security experts and organisations looking for new missions, as exemplified by US Senator Sam Nunn's recently enacted 'strategic environmental research program', in which US$200 million will be spent for military efforts in environmental monitoring and research.9ue to the interest and support of several foundations, numerous conferences and researchers are addressing issues of 'environmental security'. Historically, conceptual ferment of this sort has often accompanied important changes in politics.' New phrases are coined and old terms are appropriated for new purposes. Epochal developments like the emergence of capitalism, the growth of democracy and the end of slavery were accompanied by shifting, borrowing and expanding political language. The wideranging contemporary conceptual ferment in the language used to understand and act upon environmental problems is therefore both a natural and an encouraging development. But not all neologisms and linkages are equally plausible or useful. Until this recent flurry of reconceptualising, the concept of 'national security' (as opposed to national interest or well-being) has been centred upon organised ~ i o l e n c eAs . ~ is obvious to common sense and as Hobbes argued with such force, security from violence is a ~ r i m a human l need, because loss of life prevents the enjoyment of all other goods. Of course, various resource
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factors, such as access to fuels and ores, were understood as contributing to states' capacities to wage war and achieve security from violence. Before either 'expanding' the concept of 'national security' to encompass both environmental and violence threats, or 're-defining' 'national security' or 'security' to refer mainly to environmental threats, it is worth examining just how much the national pursuit of security from violence has in common with environmental problems and their solutions. Military violence and environmental degradation are linked directly in at least three major ways. First, the pursuit of national-security-from-violence through military means consumes resources (fiscal, organisational and leadership) that could be spent on environmental restoration. Since approximately one trillion US dollars is spent worldwide on military activities, substantial resources are involved. However, this relationship is not unique to environmental concerns, and unfortunately there is no guarantee that the world would spend money saved from military expenditures on environmental restoration. Nor is it clear that the world cannot afford environmental restoration without cutting military expenditures. Second, war is directly destructive of the environment. In ancient times, the military destruction of olive groves in Mediterranean lands contributed to the long-lasting destruction of the lands' carrying capacities. More recently, the United States' bombardment and use of defoliants in Indochina caused significant environmental damage. Further, extensive use of nuclear weapons could have significant impacts on the global environment, including altered weather (i.e., 'nuclear winter') and further depletion of the ozone layer. Awareness of these environmental effects has played an important role in mobilising popular resistance to the arms race and in generally de-legitimising the use of nuclear explosives as weapons. Third, preparation for war causes pollution and consumes significant quantities of resources. In both the United States and the Soviet Union, significant quantities of radioactive waste have been produced as a by-product of the nuclear arms race, and several significant releases of radiation have occurred - perhaps most disastrously when a waste dump at a Soviet nuclear weapons facility exploded and burned, spreading radioactive materials over a large area near the Urals. Military activities have also produced significant quantities of toxic wastes. In short, war and the preparation for war are clearly environmental threats and consume resources that could be used to ameliorate environmental degradation. In effect, these environmental impacts mean that the war system has costs beyond the intentional loss of life and destruction. Nevertheless, most of the world's environmental degradation is not caused by war and the preparation for war. Completely eliminating the direct environmental effects of the war system would leave most environmental degradation unaffected. Most of the causes and most of the cures of environmental degradation must be found outside the domain of the traditional national security system related to violence.
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The war system is a definite but limited environmental threat, but in what ways is environmental degradation a threat to 'national security'? Making such an identification can be useful if the two phenomenon - security from violence and security from environmental threats - are similar. Unfortunately, they have little in common, making such linkages largely useless for analytical and conceptual purposes. Four major dissimilarities, listed in Table 1, deserve mention. Table 1: Conceptual and Organisational Mismatches
Conventional National Security type of threat
source of threat
degree of intentionality
violent death, - destruction of property, - loss of independence - mainly outside - other states armed with weapons -
- direct and high -
types of organisations involved
'accidental' war
- specialised, -
secretive, removed from civil society
Global Habitabilitv - wide range of harms: aesthetics, disease, natural integrity - both inside and outside - wide range of sources: individuals, corporations, governments - largely unintentional side-effects of routine activities - accidental spill, release, etc. - all sizes - in situ change of many mundane activities: land use, waste treatment, farming, factory design.
First, environmental degradation and violence are very different types of threats. Both violence and environmental degradation may kill people and may reduce human well-being, but not all threats to life and property are threats to security. Disease, old age, crime and accidents routinely destroy life and property, but we do not think of them as 'national security' threats or even threats to 'security'. (Crime is a partial exception, but crime is a 'security' threat at the individual level, because crime involves violence.) And when an earthquake or hurricane strikes with great force, we speak about 'natural disasters' or designate 'national disaster areas', but we do not speak about such events threatening 'national security'. If everything that causes a decline in human well-being is labelled a 'security' threat, the term loses any analytical usefulness and becomes a loose synonym of 'bad'. Second, the scope and source of threats to environmental well-being and national-security-from-violence are very different. There is nothing about the problem of environmental degradation which is particularly 'national' in
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character. Since environmental threats are often oblivious of the borders of the nation-state, they rarely afflict just one nation-state. Nevertheless, this said, it would be misleading to call most environmental problems 'international'. Many perpetrators and victims are within the borders of one nationstate. Individuals, families, communities, other species and future generations are harmed. A complete collapse of the biosphere would surely destroy 'nations' as well as everything else, but there is nothing distinctively national about either the causes, the harms or the solutions that warrants us giving such privileged billing to the 'national' grouping. A third misfit between environmental well-being and national-securityfrom-violence stems from the differing degrees of intention involved. Violent threats involve a high degree of intentional behaviour. Organisations are mobilised, weapons procured and wars waged with relatively definite aims in mind. Environmental degradation, on the other hand, is largely unintentional, the side-effects of many other activities. N o one really sets out with the aim of harming the environment (with the so far limited exception of environmental modification for military purposes). Fourth, organisations that provide protection from violence differ greatly from those in environmental protection. National-security-from-violence is conventionally pursued by organisations with three distinctive features. First, military organisations are secretive, extremely hierarchical and centralised, and normally deploy vastly expensive, highly specialised and advanced technologies. Second, citizens typically delegate the goal of achieving national security to remote and highly specialised organisations that are far removed from the experience of civil society. And third, the specialised professional group staffing these national security organisations are trained in the arts of killing and destroying. In contrast, responding to the environmental problem requires almost exactly opposite approaches and organisations. Certain aspects of virtually all mundane activities - for example, house construction, farming techniques, sewage treatment, factory design and land use planning - must be reformed. The routine everyday behaviour of practically everyone must be altered. This requires behaviour modification in situ. The professional ethos of environmental restoration is husbandmanship - more respectful cultivation and protection of plants, animals and the land. In short, national-security-from-violence and environmental habitability have little in common. Given these differences, the rising fashion of linking them risks creating a conceptual muddle rather than a paradigm or world view shift - a de-definition rather than a re-definition of security. If we begin to speak about all the forces and events that threaten life, property and well-being (on a large-scale) as threats to our national security, we shall soon drain the term of any meaning. All large-scale evils will become threats to national security. To speak meaningfully about actual problems, we shall have to invent new words to fill the job previously performed by the old spoiled ones.
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The Risks in Harnessing the Rhetorical and Emotional Appeals of National Security for Environmental Restoration Confronted with these arguments, the advocate of treating environmental degradation as a national security problem might retort: Yes, some semantic innovation without much analytical basis is occurring, but it has a sound goal - to get people to react as urgently and effectively to the environmental problem as they have to the national-security-fromviolence problem. If people took the environmental problem as seriously as, say, an attack by a foreign power, think of all that could be done to solve the problems! In other words, the aim of these new links is not primarily descriptive, but polemical. It is not a claim about fact, but a rhetorical device designed to stimulate action. Like William James, these environmentalists hope to find a 'moral equivalent to war' to channel the energies behind war into constructive directions. But before harnessing the old horse of national security to pull the heavy new environmental wagon, prudence demands a closer look at its temperament. The potential disadvantages as well as the apparent advantages should be considered. The sentiments associated with national security are so powerful, because they relate to war. As the historian Michael Howard has observed: Self-consciousness as a Nation implies, by definition, a sense of differentiation from other communities, and the most memorable incidents in the group memory usually are of conflict with, and triumph over, other communities. It is in fact very difficult to create national self-consciousness without a war.' Such sentiments often run deep, but they also run in directions different from those needed for successful environmental politics. If the emotional appeals of national security can somehow be connected to environmental issues, then it is also possible that other, less benign, associations may be transferred. To make a balanced assessment of such 'mindset' factors is (like most of the things that matter in politics) to grapple with intangibles not easily quantified - but vital nevertheless (see Table 2). At first glance, the most attractive feature of linking fears about environmental threats with national security mentalities is the sense of urgency engendered, and the corresponding willingness to accept great personal sacrifice. If in fact the basic habitability of the planet is being undermined, then it stands to reason that some crisis mentality is needed. Unfortunately, it may be difficult to engender a sense of urgency and a willingness to sacrifice for extended periods of time. Crises call for resolution, and the patience of a mobilised populace is rarely long. For most people, exertion
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Environmental Degradation a n d National Security
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135
in a crisis is motivated by a desire to return to normalcy, for the problem to be resolved once and for all. Such a cycle of arousal and somnolence is not likely to make much of a contribution to establishing sustainable patterns of environmentally sound behaviour. The limits of attempting to create a 'moral equivalent of war' mentality to reform long-term resource-use patterns was vividly demonstrated during the late 1970s when US President Carter's effort to mobilise public awareness and forge a public consensus about energy conservation produced a flurry of activity that subsided once the immediate symptoms of the problem receded. Furthermore, 'crash' solutions are often bad ones - more expensive, more oppressive and more poorly designed than typical government programmes, as exemplified by such US white elephants as the proposed synfuels programme, the 'energy mobilization board' and the Byzantine system of price controls spawned by the 'energy security' crisis. Table 2: Associated Mindsets
Conventional National Security 1. urgency / crisis; make sacrifices; no expense is too great 2. worse case scenarios as basis for planning 3. mainly zero-sum 4. short-term time horizons 5. nationalism; us us. them
Global Habitability 1. urgency / crisis?; make sacrifices; n o expense is too great or frugality? 2. worse case scenarios as basis for planning 3. common benefits 4. long-term time horizons 5. 'the enemy is us'; polluters in other countries are threat; pollution in other countries is threat
A second apparently valuable similarity between the national security mentality and the environmental problem is the tendency to use worse case scenarios as the basis for planning. However, the extreme conservatism of military organisations in responding to potential threats is not unique to them. The insurance industry is built around preparations for the worst possibilities, and many fields of engineering, such as aeronautical design and nuclear power plant regulation, routinely employ extremely conservative planning assumptions. These can serve as useful models for improved envlronmental policies. Third, the conventional national security mentality and its organisations are deeply committed to zero-sum thinking. 'Our' gain is 'their' loss. Trust between national security organisations is extremely low. The prevailing assumption is that everyone is a potential enemy, and that agreements mean little unless congruent with immediate interests. If the Pentagon had been put in charge of negotiating an ozone layer protocol, we might still be stockpiling chlorofluorocarbons as a bargaining chip. Fourth, conventional national security organisations have short time horizons. The pervasive tendency for national security organisations to discount
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the future and pursue very near-term objectives is a poor model for environmental problem solving. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is the fact that the 'nation' is not an empty vessel or blank slate waiting to be filled or scripted, but is instead profoundly linked to war and 'us us. them' thinking. The tendency for people to identify themselves with various tribal and kin groupings is as old as humanity. In the last century and a half, however, this sentiment of nationalism, amplified and manipulated by mass media propaganda techniques, has been an integral part of totalitarianism and militarism. Nationalism means a sense of 'us us. them', of the insider us. the outsider, of the compatriot us. the alien. The stronger the nationalism, the stronger this cleavage, and the weaker the transnational bonds. Nationalism reinforces militarism, fosters prejudice and discrimination, and feeds the quest for 'sovereign' autonomy. These fundamental features of nationalism are often forgotten by intellectuals who often reject such sentiments as irrational. National security thinking and action is all premised upon a relatively sharp distinction between 'us' and 'them', between friend and foe. Of course, taking the war and the 'us us. them' out of nationalism is a noble goal. But this may be like taking the sex out of 'rock and roll', a project whose feasibility declines when one remembers that 'rock and roll' was originally coined as a euphemism for sex. In contrast, in the environmental sphere 'we' - not 'they' - are the 'enemy', as Pogo reminds us. As noted earlier, existing 'us vs. them' groupings in world politics match very poorly the causal lines of environmental degradation. At its most basic level, the environmental problem asks us to redefine who 'us' encompasses. Coping with global problems and new forms of interdependence requires replacing or supplementing national with other forms of group identity. Intense nationalism directly conflicts with the globalism that has been one of the most important insights of environmentalism. If in fact resolution of the global environmental problem, and particularly the global climate change problem, requires great, even unprecedented, types of international cooperation, then nationalist sentiment and identification is a barrier to be overcome. Thus, thinking of national security as an environmental problem risks undercutting both the globalist and common fate understanding of the situation and the sense of world community that may be necessary to solve the problem. In short, it seems doubtful that the environment can be wrapped in national flags without undercutting the 'whole earth' sensibility at the core of environmental awareness. If pollution comes to be seen widely as a national security problem, there is also a danger that the citizens of one country will feel much more threatened by the pollution from other countries than by the pollution created by their fellow citizens. This could increase international tensions and make international accords more difficult to achieve, while diverting attention from internal clean-up. Citizens of the United States, for example, could become much more concerned about deforestation in Brazil than in reversing the
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137
centuries of North American deforestation. Taken to an absurd extreme - as national security threats sometimes are - seeing environmental degradation in a neighbouring country as a national security threat could trigger various types of interventions, a new imperialism of the strong against the weak. Instead of linking 'national security' to the environmental problem, environmentalists should emphasise that the environmental crisis calls into question the national grouping and its privileged status in world politics. The environmental crisis is not a threat to national security, but it does challenge the utility of thinking in 'national' terms. Proponents of thinking of environmental degradation as a national security problem may react to my objections with the following argument: Yes, nationalist, statist and militarist features of 'national security' thinking are evil and rampant, but we globalists now know that security in the old and limited sense of protection from organised violence can now only be achieved in common. Henceforth, both the environmental and the violence threats to our security can only be achieved in 'common'. Such a response reveals a key feature of the political sociology of environmentalism, namely, that most people who take environmentalists seriously adhere to a 'common security' understanding of the organised violence problem. The notion of 'common security' has since the beginning of this century enjoyed great vogue among progressive intellectuals, particularly in Englishspeaking and Nordic countries. With the coming of nuclear explosives, the 'common security' characterisation of the violence problem would seem to take on the air of the obvious. But the concept of 'common security' is not widely accepted in principle outside certain progressive circles, despite the sound reasoning behind it. Nor is it significantly reflected in the actual practice of state violence-security organisations. Indeed, the conceptual apparatus of 'common security' thinking has in large measure been fashioned as a fundamental alternative to mainstream 'national security' thinking and practice. The phrase 'common security' as applied to the organised violence problem is still 'revolutionary' and 'radical' in the sense that it would alter beyond recognition the practice and mindset of protection-from-violence organisations. All the talk about a 'nuclear revolution' should not obscure the fact that we are in a 'revolutionary predicament' rather than in a 'postrevolutionary state'. Given this reality, it is premature to characterise environmental degradation as a threat to 'security' until we can be more confident that people do in fact think 'common' whenever they hear 'security'. Fortunately, environmental awareness need not depend upon co-opted national security thinking. Integrally woven into ecological awareness are a powerful set of values and symbols - ranging from human health and property values to beauty and concern for future generations. These v a l ~ ~ eand s symbols draw upon basic human desires and aspirations and are powerful motivators of human action. Far from needing to be bolstered by national
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security mindsets -which in the wake of the nuclear revolution are themselves of dubious value, even on their own terms - this 'green' sensibility can make strong claim to being the master metaphor for an emerging post-industrial civilisation. Instead of attempting to gain leverage by appropriating national security thinking, environmentalists should continue to develop and disseminate this rich emergent world view.
Environmental Degradation and Interstate War Many people are drawn to calling environmental degradation a national security problem, in part because they expect this phenomenon to stimulate interstate conflict and even violence. States often fight over what they value, particularly if related to 'security'. If states begin to be much more concerned with resources and environmental degradation, particularly if they think environmental decay is a threat to their 'national security', then states may well fight resource and pollution wars. Much of the recent literature on the impacts of climate change upon world politics posits conflictual and violent outcomes.1° As Arthur Westing has noted: Global deficiencies and degradation of natural resources, both renewable and non-renewable, coupled with the uneven distribution of these raw materials, can lead to unlikely - and thus unstable - alliances, to national rivalries, and, of course, to war." In emphasising such outcomes, environmental analysts essentially assume along with realist international relations scholars - that international political life follows a conflictual and violent pattern. To analyse fully the prospects for violent outcomes is a vast and uncertain undertaking.I2 Since there are more than 150 independent states and since resource and environmental problems are diverse and not fully understood, any generalisation will surely have important exceptions. However, in order to make a first rough assessment of the prospects for resource and pollution wars, I will examine five routes by which environmental deterioration could possibly cause interstate conflicts leading to war. In general, I argue that interstate violence is not likely to result from environmental degradation, because of several deeply rooted features of the contemporary world order - both material and institutional - and because of the character of environmental and resource interests. Few ideas seem more intuitively sound than the notion that states will begin fighting each other as the world runs out of usable natural resources. The popular metaphor of a lifeboat adrift at sea with declining supplies of clean water and rations suggests there will be fewer and fewer opportunities for positive-sum gains between actors. Many ideas about resource war are derived from the cataclysmic world wars of the first half of the twentieth century. Influenced by geopolitical theories that em~hasisedthe importance
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of land and resources for Great Power status, Hitler in significant measure fashioned Nazi war aims to achieve resource autonomy.' The aggression of Japan was directly related to resource goals: lacking indigenous fuel and minerals, and faced with a slowly tightening embargo by the Western colonial powers in Asia, the Japanese invaded Southeast Asia for oil, tin and rubber.14 Although the United States had a richer resource endowment than the Axis powers, fears of shortages and industrial strangulation played a central role in the strategic thinking of American elites about world strategy." And during the Cold War, the presence of natural resources in the Third World helped turn this vast area into an arena for East-West conflict.Ih Given this record, the scenario of conflicts over resources playing a powerful role in shaping international order should be taken seriously. There are, however, three strong reasons for concluding that the familiar scenarios of resource war are of diminishing plausibility for the foreseeable future. First, the robust character of the world trade system means that states no longer experience resource dependency as a major threat to their military security and political autonomy. During the 1930s, the world trading system had collapsed, driving states to pursue autarkic economies. In contrast, the resource needs of contemporary states are routinely met without territorial control of the resource source, as Ronnie Lipschutz has recently shown.'Second, the prospects for resource wars are diminished, since states find it increasingly difficult to exploit foreign resources through territorial conquest. Although the invention of nuclear explosives has made it easy and cheap to annihilate humans and infrastructure in extensive areas, the spread of small arms and national consciousness has made it very costly for an invader, even one equipped with advanced technology, to subdue a resisting population - as France discovered in Indochina and Algeria, the United States in Vietnam and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Schemes of resource imperialism are now more appealing to romantic militarists than practical policy-makers. At the lower levels of violence capability -those that matter for conquering and subduing territory - the Great Powers have lost an effective military superiority and are unlikely soon to regain it. Third, the world is entering what H.E. Goeller and Alvin M. Weinberg have called the 'age of substitutability', in which industrial civilisation is increasingly capable of taking earth materials such as iron, aluminum, silicon and hydrocarbons (which are ubiquitous and plentiful) and fashioning them into virtually everything needed." The most striking manifestation of this trend is that prices for vktually every raw material have been stagnant or falling for the last several decades, despite the continued growth in world output. In contrast to the expectations voiced by many during the 1970s that resource scarcity would drive up commodity prices to the benefit of Third World raw material suppliers - prices have fallen, with disastrous consequences for Third World development. In a second scenario, increased interstate violence results from internal turmoil caused by declining living standards. Many commentators on the environmental crisis emphasise that the basic source of environmental distress
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is the modern success in producing wealth. Some maintain that new technology, institutional reform, new attitudes and more efficient capital investment can largely solve the environmental problem without sacrificing high standards of livings. Others, however, are more pessimistic, asserting that the great levels of wealth produced since the industrial revolution cannot be sustained. In this view, the only way to prevent ecological collapse (and the resulting economic collapse) is for people to accept radically lower standards of living. Ramifications of economic stagnation upon politics and society could well be major and largely undesirable. Although the peoples of the world could perhaps live peacefully at lower standards of living, reductions of expectations to conform to these new realities will not come easily. Faced with declining living standards, groups at all levels of affluence can be expected to resist this trend by pushing the deprivation upon other groups. Class relations would be increasingly 'zero-sum games', producing class war and revolutionary upheavals. Faced with these pressures, liberal democracy and free-market systems would increasingly be replaced by authoritarian systems capable of maintaining minimum order.20 The international system consequences of these domestic changes may be increased conflict and war. If authoritarian regimes are more war-prone because of their lack of democratic control and if revolutionary regimes are more war-prone because of their ideological fervour and lack of socialisation into international norms and processes, then a world political system containing more such states is likely to be an increasingly violent one. The historical record from previous economic depressions supports the general proposition that widespread economic stagnation and unmet economic expectations contribute to international conflict. Although initially compelling, this scenario has flaws as well. First, the pessimistic interpretation of the relationship between environmental sustainability and economic growth is arguably based on unsound economic theory. Wealth formation is not so much a product of cheap natural resource availability as of capital formation via savings and more efficient ways of producing. The fact that so many resource-poor countries, like Japan, are very wealthy, while many countries with more extensive resource endowments are poor, suggests that there is no clear and direct relationship between abundant resource availability and national wealth. Environmental constraints require an end to economic growth based on increasing raw material through-puts, rather than an end to growth in the output of goods and services. Second, even if economic decline does occur, interstate conflict may be dampened, not stoked. In the pessimistic scenario, domestic political life is an intervening variable connecting environmentally induced economic stagnation with interstate conflict. How societies respond to economic decline may in large measure depend upon the rate at which such declines occur. An offsetting factor here is the possibility that as people get poorer, they will be less willing to spend increasingly scarce resources for military capabilities. In this regard, the experience of economic depressions over the last
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two centuries may not be relevant, because such depressions were characterised by under-utilised ~ r o d u c t i o ncapacity and falling resource prices. In the 1930s, increased military spendmg had a stimulative effect, but in a world in which economic growth had been retarded by environmental constraints, military spending would exacerbate the problem. Third, environmental degradation may affect interstate relations in such a way as to cause war by altering the relative power capacities of states. Alterations in relative power positions can contribute to wars, either by tempting the newly strengthened states t o aggress upon the newly weakened ones or by leading the newly weakened ones to attack and lock in their power position relative to their neighbours before their power ebbs any further. Support for such scenarios can be drawn from history, and international relations scholars have extensively studied such p h e n ~ r n e n o n . ~ ' Nevertheless, such alterations in the relative international power potential of states might not lead to war as readily as the lessons of history suggest, because economic power and military power are perhaps not as tightly coupled as in the past. The relative economic power positions of major states, such as Germany and Japan, have altered greatly since the end of World War 11. But these changes, while requiring many complex adjustments in interstate relations, have not been accompanied by war or threat of war. In the contemporary world, whole industries rise, fall and re-locate, often causing quite substantial fluctuations in the economic well-being of regions and peoples, but wars do not result. What reason is there for believing that changes in relative wealth and power position caused by the uneven impact of environmental degradation would be different in their effects? Part of the reason for this loosening of the economic-military link has been the nuclear revolution, which has made it relatively cheap for the leading states to sustain a mutual kill capacity. Given that the superpowers field massively oversufficient nuclear forces at the cost of a few per cent of their GNP, environmentally-induced economic decline would have to be extreme before their ability to field a minimum nuclear deterrent would be jeopardised. Environmental degradation in a country or region could become so extreme that the basic social and economic fabric comes apart. Should some areas of the world suffer this fate, the impact of this outcome on international order may not, however, be very great. If a particular country, even a large one like Brazil, were tragically to disintegrate, among the first casualties would be the capacity of the industrial and governmental structure to wage and sustain interstate conventional war. As Bernard Brodie observed in the modern era, 'the predisposing factors to military aggression are full bellies, not empty ones'.22The poor and wretched of the earth may be able to deny an outside aggressor an easy conquest, but they are themselves a minimal threat to outside states. Offensive war today requires complex organisational skills, specialised industrial products and surplus wealth. In today's world everything is connected, but not everything is tightly coupled. Regional disasters of great severity may occur, with scarcely a ripple
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in the rest of the world. After all, Idi Amin drew Uganda back into savage darkness, the Khmer Rouge murdered an estimated two million Cambodians and the Sahara has advanced across the Sahel without the economies and political systems of the rest of the world being much perturbed. Indeed, many of the world's citizens did not even notice. A fourth possible route from environmental degradation to interstate conflict and violence involves pollution across state borders. It is easy to envision situations in which country A dumps an intolerable amount of pollution on a neighbouring country B (which is upstream and upwind), causing country B to attempt to pressure and coerce country A into eliminating its offending pollution. We can envision such conflict of interest leading to armed conflict. Fortunately for interstate peace, strongly asymmetrical and significant environmental degradation between neighbouring countries is relatively rare. Probably more typical is the situation in which activities in country A harm parts of country A and country B, and in which activities in country B also harm parts of both countries. This creates complex sets of winners and losers, and thus establishes a complex array of potential intrastate and interstate coalitions. In general, the more such interactions are occurring, the less likely it is that a persistent, significant and highly asymmetrical pollution 'exchange' will result. The very multitude of interdependency in the contemporary world, particularly among the industrialised countries, makes it unlikely that intense cleavages of environmental harm will match interstate borders, and at the same time not be compensated and complicated by other military, economic or cultural interactions. Resolving such conflicts will be a complex and messy affair, but the conflicts are unlikely to lead to war. Finally, there are conflict potentials related to the global commons. Many countries contribute to environmental degradation, and many countries are harmed, but since the impacts are widely distributed, no one country has an incentive to act alone to solve the problem. Solutions require collective action, and with collective action comes the possibility of the 'free rider'. In the case of a global agreement to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, if one significant polluter were to resist joining the agreement, with the expectation that the other states would act to reduce the harms to a tolerable level, the possibility would thus arise that those states making the sacrifices to clean up the problem would attempt to coerce the 'free rider' into making a more significant contribution to the effort. It is difficult to judge this scenario, because we lack examples of this phenomenon on a large scale. 'Free-rider' problems may generate severe conflict, but it is doubtful that states would find military instruments useful for coercion and compliance. If, for example, China decided not to join a global climate agreement, it seems unlikely that the other major countries would really go to war with China over this. In general, any state sufficiently industrialised to be a major contributor to the carbon dioxide problem will also present a very poor target for military coercion.
1 %1
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To summarise, the case for thinking that environmental degradation will cause interstate violence is much weaker than commonly thought. In part, this is because of features of the international system - particularly the hypertrophy of violence capability available to states - t h a t have little to do directly with environmental matters. Although many analogies for such conflict draw from historical experience, they fail to take into account the ways in which the current interstate system differs from earlier ones. Military capability sufficient to make aggression prohibitively costly has become widely distributed, making even large shifts in the relative power potential of states less likely to cause war. Interstate violence seems to be poorly matched as a means to resolve many of the conflicts that might arise from environmental degradation. The vitality of the international trading system and the more general phenomenon of complex interdependency also militate against violent interstate outcomes. The result is a world system with considerable resiliency and 'rattle room' to weather significant environmental disruption without significant violent interstate conflict.
Conclusion
The degradation of the natural environment upon which human well-being depends is a challenge of far-reaching significance for human societies everywhere. But this challenge has little to d o with the national-securityfrom-violence problem that continues to plague human political life. Not only is there little in common between the causes and solutions of these two problems, but the nationalist and militarist mindsets closely associated with 'national security' thinking directly conflict with the core of the environmentalist world view. Harnessing these sentiments for a 'war on pollution' is a dangerous and probably self-defeating enterprise. And fortunately, the prospects for resource and pollution wars are not as great as often conjured by environmentalists. The pervasive recourse to national security paradigms to conceptualise the environmental problem represents a profound and disturbing failure of imagination and political awareness. If the nation-state enjoys a more prominent status in world politics than its competence and accomplishments warrant, then it makes little sense to emphasise the links between it and the emerging problem of the global habitabilit~.~' Nationalist sentiment and the war system have a long-established logic and staying power that are likely to defy any rhetorically conjured 're-direction' toward benign ends. The movement to preserve the habitability of the planet for future generations must directly challenge the tribal power of nationalism and the chronic militarisation of public discourse. Environmental degradation is not a threat to national security. Rather, environmentalism is a threat to 'national security' mindsets and institutions. For environmentalists to dress their programmes in the blood-soaked garments of the war system betrays their core values and creates confusion about the real tasks at hand.
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Earlier versions of this essay were presented at: the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston, MA in November 1989; the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Princeton University, Princeton, NJ in December 1989; the Five College Peace Consortium in January 1990; and the Center for International Cooperation and Security Studies at the University of Wisconsin in March 1990. The author would like to thank Eric Arnett, Tad Homer Dixon, Hal Feiveson, Willett Kempton, Michael Lerner, Richard Matthew, Martha Snodgrass, Rob Socolow, Valerie Thomas, Paul Wapner and Wesley Warren for providing valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
References 1. For an overview of the role of environmental factors in early theories of politics, see Daniel Deudney, 'Early Theories of the Influence of Geography and the Environment Upon Politics', Global Geopolitics: Materialist World Order Theories of the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries (Unpublished PhD dissertation, Politics Department, Princeton University, 1989), Chapter 111. 2. Lester Brown, Redefining National Securlty (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Paper, No. 14, October 1977);Jessica Tuchman Matthews, 'Redefining Security', Foreign Affairs (Vol. 68, No. 2, 1989), pp. 162-77; Michael Renner, National Security: The Economic and Enuironmental Dimensions (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Paper, No. 89, May 1989); and Norman Myers, 'Environmental Security', Foreign Policy (No. 74, 1989), pp. 23-41. 3. Richard Ullman, 'Redefining Security', International Security (Vol. 8, No. 1, Summer 1983), pp. 129-53. 4. Hal Harvey, 'Natural Security', Nuclear Times (MarchIApril 1988), pp. 24-26. 5. Philip Shahecoff, 'Senator Urges Military Resources to be Turned to Environmental Battle', The New York Times, 29 June 1990, p. 1A. 6. 'Strategic Environmental Research Program', Congressional Record (28 June 1990), pp. S.8929-43. 7. Quentin Skinner, 'Language and Political Change', and James Fair, 'Understanding Political Change Conceptually', in Terence Ball, et al., (eds.), Political Innouatron and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 8. For a particularly lucid and well-rounded discussion of security, the state and violence, see Barry Buzan, People, States, a n d Fear: The National Security Problem in lnternational Relations (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), particularly pp. 1-93. 9. Michael Howard, 'War and the Nation-State', Daedalus (Fall, 1979). Emphasis in original. 10. See, in particular, Peter Gleick, 'The Implications of Global Climatic Changes for International Security', Climatic Change (Vol. IS), pp. 309-25; and Peter Gleick, 'Global Climatic Changes and Geopolitics: Pressures on Developed and Developing Countries', in A. Berger et al., (eds.), Climate and Geo-Sciences (Amsterdam: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989). 11. Arthur H. Westing, 'Global Resources and International Conflict: An Overview', in Arthur H. Westing (ed.), Global Resources and Environmental Conflict: Environmental Factors in Strategic Policy and Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press and Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 1986), p. 1. 12. For a useful survey of theories relevant for such analysis, see Tad Homer Dixon, Enurronmental Change and Human Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Working Paper, American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, 1990). 13. For discussions of resource autarky during the 1930s, see Brooks Emeny, The Strategy of Raw Materials (New York: Macmillan, 1934); Norman Rich, Hider's War Aims: Ideology, The Nazi State, and the Course of Expansion (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1973); William Carr, Arms, Autarchy, and Aggression: A Study in C e m a n Foreign Policy, 1933-1939
f)euiint,\
14.
15. 16.
17. 18.
19.
20.
21. 22.
23.
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(London: Edward Arnold, 1972); and Daniel Deudney, 'Haushofer, Burnham, and (hrr: Panregional Superstates', in Deudney, op cit., in note 1 , Chapter VII. James Crowley, Jupun's Quest for Autonomy: N~itionalS e u r ~ t yand Forergn Policy, 19.30- 19.38 (Princeton, NJ: I'rinceton University Press, 1966). Nicholas J o h n Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics: T h e United States and t h Bulance of Power (New York: Harcourr, Brace and Co., 1942). Alfred E. Eckcs, Jr., T h e United States i ~ n dthe Global Struggle for Minerals (Austin, I'X: University of Texas Press, 1979). Konnie D. Lipschutz, W h e n Nations C;liish: Raw Matermls, Ideology and Foreign Policy (New York: Ballinger, 1989). Among the most recent versions o f the argument that war is of declining viabil~tyare: Evan h a r d , T h e Blunted Sword: T h e Erosron of Military Power ut Modern World Polrtics (New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1989); and John Mueller, Rctrcat from D o o m s d q : T h e C)hsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989). H.E. Goeller and Alvin Weinberg, 'The Age o f Substitutability', Sciencc (Vol. 201, 2 0 February 1967). For some recent evidence supporting this hypothesis, see Erlc D. L.xson, Marc H. Koss and Kobert H. Williams, 'Beyond the Era of Materials', Sc-ientific American (Vol. 254, l986), pp. 34-4 1. For a discussion of authoritarian and conflictual consequences of environmental constrained economies, see W~lliamOphuls, Ecolog)~and the Polltics o f Scarcity (San Franc~sco,CA: Freeman, 1976), p. 152. See also Susan M. Leeson, 'Philosophical Implications of the Ecological Crisis: The Authoritarian Challenge to L.iberalism', Polity (Vol. 11, No. 3 , Spring 1979); Ted Gurr, 'On the Political Consequences of Scarcity and Economic Decline', International Studies Quarterly (No. 29, 1985), pp. 51-75; and Robert Heilhroner, Au Inquiry Into the Human Prospect (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974). See, for example, Robert Gilpin, War and C h m g e in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Bernard Brodie, 'The Impact of Technological Change on the International System', in David Sullivan and Martin Sattler (eds.), Change and the Future of the International System (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), p. 14. For a particularly lucid argument that the nation-state system is over-developed relative to its actual problem-solving capacities, see George Modelski, Principles of World Politics (New York: The Free Press, 1972).
Security, Sovereignty, and the Challenge of World Politics R.B.J. Walker
The Security of States and the Security of People
T
he dilemma before us seems obvious enough. Threats to people's lives and well-being arise increasingly from processes that are worldwide in scope. The possibility of general nuclear war has been the most dramatic expression of our shared predicament, but potentially massive ecological disruptions and gross inequities generated by a global economy cause at least as much concern. Nevertheless, both the prevailing interpretations of what security can mean and the resources mobilized to put these interpretations into practice are fixed primarily in relation to the military requirements of supposedly sovereign states. We are faced, in short, with demands for some sort of world security, but have learned to think and act only in terms of the security of states. Symptoms of this dilemma are readily apparent. States are less and less convincing in their claims to offer the security that partly legitimizes their power and authority. Moreover, processes set in motion by the demands of military defense evidently make us all more and more insecure as inhabitants of a small and fragile planet. Whether judged through apocalyptic images of extermination, in terms of the comparative costs of missiles and medical facilities, or on the basis of accounts of the integration of military production into the seemingly benign routines of everyday life, we know that it is scarcely possible to invoke the term "security" without sensing that something is dreadfully wrong with the way we now live. Elements of this dilemma have been familiar for a considerable time. They have provoked controversy ever since the states system emerged from the decaying feudal hierarchies of early modern Europe. The contradiction between the presumed legitimacy of war and claims about reason, progress, enlightenment, and civilization has proved especially awkward. For the Source: Alternatives, XV(1) (1990): 3-27.
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most part, the contradiction has been resolved through a trade-off between freedom and necessity; that is, the necessities of war have been understood as the ultimate guarantee of the freedom and autonomy of states unwilling to submit to other states' ambitions of empire. Moreover, states have long been understood as sources of danger as well as agents of protection. Thomas Hobbes was content to argue in the seventeenth century that the dangers could not possibly be as intolerable as the miseries and brutalities of an ungoverned state of nature. Others have subsequently worked out accounts of democratic accountability that are rightly regarded as major achievements of modern political life. Even so, it is in relation to claims about the security of states that democratic processes have remained most seriously qualified. In whatever way these suspicions may have been dealt with in the past, they have now become especially acute. They converge on a widespread complaint that conventional accounts of security are much too restrictive in two distinct but interrelated senses. First, demands are issued for a broader understanding of whose security is at stake - for an effective account of the security of people in general, not just for the inhabitants of particular states. Hence concepts such as collective, common, as well as world security emerge. These demands are usually reinforced by accounts of the transformative character of the modern age, especially of the increasingly interdependent character of something that may be appropriately called world politics rather than just interstate or international relations. Second, demands are made for a broader understanding of just what security itself involves. Power comes not just from the barrel of the gun. It is thus possible to define the meaning of security in relation to social, cultural, economic, and ecological processes, as well as to geopolitical threats from foreign powers. Hence, for example, peace researchers insist on the need to break down artificial distinctions between security and development. Hence also concepts such as structural violence are elaborated on as ways of avoiding simplistic distinctions between peace and war. The general implication usually drawn from these lines of analysis concerns the need for a more global perspective o n human affairs in general and on the reconstruction of security arrangements in particular. If it now makes some sense to speak of a planetary ecology, a world economy, a potential global annihilation, or, more positively, even a global civilization, then surely, as many have suggested, it ought to be possible to envisage global political structures responsive to the security needs of the twentyfirst rather than the seventeenth century.'
Security a n d Political Community Unfortunately, the dilemma before us is not quite as obvious or straightforward as it is often made to seem. Calls for a broader understanding of security are inevitably challenged by familiar forms of skepticism. The institutions
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of state power are not noticeably withering away despite the complex patterns of global interdependence and territorial penetration in which states have become enmeshed. States still engage in geopolitical conflict and are jealous of their autonomy. Accounts of interdependence stimulate contrary accounts of dependence - of the structural disparities and exclusions that are at least as much a part of modern world politics as are patterns of integration. Moreover, the skeptics say, it may be true that purely military definitions of security are far too narrow, but if the meaning of security is extended too far, so as to become almost synonymous with, say, development or even justice, then it will soon cease to have any useful analytical or operational meaning at all. Most seriously, however, even if we admit that we are all now participants in common global structures, that we are all rendered increasingly vulnerable to processes that are planetary in scale, and that our most parochial activities are shaped by forces that encompass the world and not just particular states, it is far from clear what such an admission implies for the way we organize ourselves politically. The state is a political category in a way that the world, or the globe, or the planet, or humanity is not.2 The security of states is something we can comprehend in political terms in a way that, at the moment, world security cannot be understood. This is an elementary point, and it is often made in a regrettably crude and ahistorical way. People, it is said, have competing interests and allegiances. They are always likely to put the interests of their own society and state above any claims about a common humanity. In any case, the ongoing record of large-scale violence shows just how naive it is to hope for any political arrangements that give priority to some general human interest over the particular interests of states. Consequently, this argument typically asserts, if you want peace, then prepare for war. The crudity of this kind of formulation should not detract from the key insight common to many who are skeptical about the potential for any broader understanding of security in the modern world. This insight concerns the extent to which the meaning of security is tied to historically specific forms of political community. Political communities have emerged historically; their character is not preordained by some unchanging human nature or law of the jungle. In the modern world, states have managed to more or less monopolize our understanding of what political life is and where it occurs. To engage in politics now is to become obsessed with the historical achievements of states. This obsession is common to all significant political ideologies. Why engage in political life at all if not to challenge and even take over the reins of power? And what power is held by humanity as such, or can be represented through claims about world politics and world security? The security of states dominates our understanding of what security can be, and who it can be for, not because conflict between states is inevitable, but because other forms of political community have been rendered almost unthinkable. The claims of states to a monopoly of legitimate authority in a particular territory have succeeded in marginalizing and even erasing other expressions of political identity - other answer to questions about who we are.
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This success did not come about lightly. Much of the history of the last half millennium can be written as an account of the energy and violence required to ensure that the monopolistic claims of states be respected. Whether through appeals to the nation, the flag, or the national interest, states continue to deploy immense resources on an everyday basis to ensure that this monopoly is maintained. The dominant understandings of what politics is all about, and thus of what security must mean, arise precisely because the very form of statist claims to a monopoly on legitimate authority challenges the very possibility of referring to humanity in general - and by extension to world politics or world security - in any meaningful way. It may be that the dilemma before us is painfully obvious. We live amidst appalling levels of violence and threats of even more appalling violence to come. Security policies predicated on the military defense of states alone are clearly inadequate to the task before us. But what exactly is to be done? And by whom? And for whom? Two kinds of answers to questions like these are relatively easy to comprehend. But because our prevailing understanding of security is so closely tied to statist claims to legitimate authority, it is necessary to situate both kinds of answers in a third and prior set of considerations. One kind of response is to focus on specific policy proposals. Appalling levels of violence demand immediate and often drastic policy initiatives. It is in this context that the past few years have sustained a renewed optimism in some parts of the world as the name of Gorbachev has become synonymous with a revitalization of dktente, an admission of the obsolescence of old policies, and a willingness to slash military commitments in a way hardly thought possible in the mid-1980s. Another kind of response is to speculate about the structural forms - the institutions, semiformal regimes, and so on - through which more appropriate security policies can be put into effect. But both responses depend, tacitly or explicitly, on some understanding of precisely what it means to be secure, and whose security is being ensured. The obviousness of the dilemma we are in does not, unfortunately, help us respond adequately to questions like these. In fact, there is a danger that without serious attention to these broader questions, both the search for more effective policies and attempts to construct new institutional arrangements may lead us to merely reproduce or reorganize the status quo. This is especially important because prevailing accounts of security not only offer relatively coherent - although arguably quite unsatisfactory - answers to such questions, they also set certain limits on the way we have been able to think about more desirable alternatives. Those limits are clearly visible, for example, in the seemingly endless debate between the so-called realists and utopians - a debate that has effectively undermined any sustained attempt, in either academic scholarship or popular debate, to reconsider the meaning of security in the modern world." In what follows, therefore, I want to explore some of these limits in order to show to what degree contemporary thinking about world security has been caught within, but also has at least partly escaped from, the established
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rituals of debate about security. Four themes seem to me to be crucial: (1)the extent to which conventional accounts of security depend on certain assumptions embodied in the principle of state sovereignty; (2) the extent to which this account of security has subsequently been fixed in the categories of modernist theories of international relations; (3) the extent to which the principle of state sovereignty, the concept of security, and the categories of international relations theory reflect and reproduce deeply entrenched assumptions about progressive political action; and (4) the extent to which many of the most interesting attempts to reconstruct the meaning of security have been forced to place many of these cherished assumptions into question. In all four cases, I will suggest, the appropriate context in which to think about security is not the established discourses that have so successfully claimed the subject as their own - international relations theory, strategic studies, and so on - but the attempt to rethink the nature and possibility of political community in an age of evident transformations, dangers, and opportunities.
Security and State Sovereignty
Although aspirations for peace and alternative forms of security have become central to progressive forms of political action, and despite the contentiousness of specific security policies, the meaning of security itself has attracted relatively little attention. Compared with controversies accompanying claims about democracy, freedom, or even development, the absence of sustained debate about the meaning of security is rather odd. The literature on both the technicalities and ethics of military deployments can now fill substantial libraries, but the concept of security itself is usually used as if its meaning is entirely straightforward. This is because it is, in fact, quite straightforward, at least within the established conventions of political analysis. Attempts to articulate alternative accounts of structural violence, common or global security, and so on, necessarily challenge accounts of security that have congealed into the taken-for-granted conventions of what passes for common sense. Symptomatically, a preoccupation with guns and bombs, with violence and realpolitik, is not readily associated with an interest in abstract or philosophical problems. But when such an interest does arise, it tends to be concerned with either the technical character of strategic possibilities or the application of ethical principles to questions about war. Much of the debate about nuclear deterrence, for example, has occurred as a confrontation between technical and ethical standpoints. In both cases, explicitly political considerations are easily marginalized. Ethics, for example, comes to refer to principles of conduct that somehow transcend the grubby demands of political life, to the need to speak some sort of eternal truth to the corruptions of power. A preoccupation with technical considerations, on the other hand,
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tends to drift into a language of efficiency and rational action - a language in which it is all too tempting t o speak of mass murder in the soothing jargon of game theory and certain kinds of economics. Fortunately or unfortunately, disputes about the precise nature of ethical conduct or about how to speak truth to power d o not seem likely to diminish in the near future. And the extent to which supposedly rational accounts of efficient conduct have been incorporated into structures of violence remains a dark shame cast over the entire twentieth century. Consequently, although much is said about the techniques and ethics of security policy, it does not necessarily help us to clarify precisely what is at stake when conventional understandings of security are considered inadequate. The primary reason why the meaning of security is usually regarded as straightforward, and why so much of even the critical discussion of security policy avoids coming to terms with the explicitly political problems posed by the concept of security, is that this concept is so closely tied to the principle of state sovereignty. This principle, too, has become so much a part of our taken-for-granted understanding of what modern political life is all about that we have largely lost sight of what it means to call it into question. And this is, of course, what attempts to rethink the meaning of security must do. The principle of state sovereignty is usually expressed in one of two different ways. For theorists of international relations, it refers to the fragmentation of political life into autonomous political units. But interpretations of what it means to be autonomous also vary considerably. Some analysts interpret autonomy negatively, stressing a capacity for selfish and even paranoid behavior; Hobbes's image of individuals in a state of nature has been especially influential here. Others stress the positive connotations of freedom and selfdevelopment. They may follow Kant in hoping for a world of states all acting in accordance with universal principles of rational conduct. O r they may be more nationalist in inspiration, stressing the opportunity for different ways of life to emerge in different historical and cultural settings. Interpretations of the character of the political units can vary as well. Some analysts are content to refer to political units as relatively featureless black boxes, whereas others are more interested in the complexity and variety of states as historically constructed forms of political life. Despite all these potential variations, however, the central theme of state sovereignty as a matter of fragmentation is treated as the primary "fact" of international relations - a fact to which almost everything else of any significance is seen as a mere corollary. For analysts of political life within states, by contrast, sovereignty refers not t o fragmentation but to centralization - to the monopoly of power and/ or authority in a particular territory. Again there are significant variations on the theme. The ambiguous relationship between power and authority offers considerable scope for the proliferation of accounts of the source and character of political legitimacy. Similarly, uncertainty as to whether sovereignty lies ultimately in the state as a sort of abstract entity or with the people who
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are somehow represented in and by the state offers sufficient room for endless debate about the most appropriate meaning of concepts like democracy and freedom. Theorists of international relations refer to state sovereignty in terms of fragmentation, whereas theorists of political life within states refer to the centralization of powerlauthority. But these are simply two ways of saying the same thing, depending on whether the state is viewed internally or externally. The complementary character of these two perspectives in the autonomous or sovereign nature of states is crucial, for it literally defines the conditions under which it has been possible to think about security in the modern world. The principle of state sovereignty refers neither to just the fact of fragmentation nor to the fact of centralized authority, but to a specific claim about the relationship between both tendencies. State sovereignty is in effect an exceptionally elegant resolution of the apparent contradiction between centralization and fragmentation, or, phrased in more philosophical language, between universality and particularity. Conventional accounts of security retain their authority precisely because they are able to build upon this specific resolution. Alternative accounts of security necessarily have to suggest other ways in which the apparent contradiction might be resolved. This is why demands for a new understanding of security cannot be demands about security alone. The principle of state sovereignty emerged in early modern Europe as a replacement for the principle of hierarchical subordination. The claims of church and empire, the obligations of feudal patterns of socioeconomic organization, as well as the categories of philosophical and theological speculation all rested on a hierarchical articulation of the relationship between universality and particularity. These hierarchical arrangements gradually collapsed and were replaced by explicitly modern constructs, most crucially by the secular, territorial state. Particular states came to be distinguished from other particular states. The principle of hierarchical subordination gradually gave way to the principle of spatial exclusion. The advantage of principles of hierarchical subordination, of course, is that they provide a plausible account of the relationship between particular individuals and the world in which they participate. They permit an understanding of the world as a continuum from low to high, from the many to the few, from God's creatures to God, from the temporal to the eternal. With the transformations of the early modern era, this relationship became highly problematic. For Descartes this was expressed as the difficulty of the autonomous knower being certain about the world to be known. For the Protestant reformers it was expressed as the difficulty of understanding the unmediated relationship between the individual and God. Politically, however, the crucial dilemma was posed as the difficulty of reconciling the claims of people as people, as members of a presumed universal humanity, and the claims of the citizens of particular ~ t a t e s . ~ The principle of state sovereignty responds to this dilemma by affirming the priority of citizenship over any presumed humanity while simultaneously
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suggesting ways in which the contradiction between these opposing claims might be re~olved:~First, it suggests that there is one world, or world system, but many particular communities. Thus it can be said that, compared to the hierarchical subordination of empires, the resolution permits a greater degree of freedom and autonomy. Moreover, the complaint that such a resolution encourages war as the only means of settling disputes can be met in two ways. O n the one hand, it can be argued that wars generated by a system of autonomous states are not much worse than the violence endemic under more hierarchical arrangements. O n the other hand, it can be argued that autonomy does not necessarily imply anarchy. Indeed, contrary to the familiar claim that the international system is anarchical, so that pure power politics is the only possible option, most accounts of the modern states system since its inception have stressed the possibility of cooperation, rules of the game, and even institutionalized modes of conduct. This is the possibility opened up by Hobbes's insistence that the behavior of states is not directly analogous to the behavior of individuals, despite the constant references to the international system as a Hobbesian state of n a t ~ r e In . ~ this context, neither the United Nations nor recent theories about international regimes, interdependence, and so on are as novel as they have so often been made to seem. Second, the principle of state sovereignty suggests a spatial demarcation between those places in which the attainment of universal principles might be possible and those in which they are not. That is, it suggests a spatial demarcation between authentic politics and mere relations. Within states, it is assumed to be possible to pursue justice and virtue, to aspire to universal standards of reason. Outside, however, there are merely relations. In this context, it may be possible to aspire to order and some degree of pragmatic accommodation, but not to the kind of political community that would permit any sustained concern for justice. This spatial demarcation explains two of the key features of modern theories of political life. It explains the strict separation of theories of interstate relations from theories about political community. For theorists of interstate relations this takes the form of a prohibition on transferring assumptions about politics from within states to the analysis of relations between them. For political theorists it has usually meant passing over questions about interstate relations in relative silence.' The spatial demarcation also explains the paradoxical quality of so many claims about the achievements of modern political life. Inside particular states we have learned to aspire to what we like to think of as universal values and standards - claims about the nature of the good society, freedom, democracy, justice, and all the rest. But these values and standards have in fact been constructed in relation to particular con~munities.They depend on a tacit recognition that these values and standards have been achieved only because we have been able to isolate particular communities from those outside - an isolation that implies the continuing legitimacy of war and violence. Security policy thus has a very special character. It is not just another form of politics as usual. It occurs on the boundary between claims about
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political community inside and the lack of community outside. Security policy is not just a matter of defense against external threat. It is also the site at which particular political communities become aware of the limits to their own claim to pursue universalizing standards of conduct. It is the point at which democracy, openness, and legitimate authority must dissolve into claims about realpolitik, raison d'etat, and the necessity of violence. Third, the principle of state sovereignty suggests a temporal demarcation, a distinction between the progress toward universalizing standards possible within states and the mere contingency characterizing relations between them. Especially since the eighteenth century, Western political theory has been guided by a reading of history as a grand march from barbarism toward enlightenment and modernity. Theories of international relations, however, build on an intense suspicion of any theories of progress, indeed of claims about the possibility of fundamental change of any kind. Progress is possible within states, but, it is said, between them there can only be the same old rituals of power politics played over and over again. By offering both a spatial and a temporal resolution of the relationship between universality and particularity, the principle of state sovereignty affirms a specific account of who we are - citizens of particular states who have the potential to work toward universal standards of conduct by participating in statist political communities - and denies the possibility of any other altemative. The denial follows from what has been said so far. First, the principle of state sovereignty denies both the possibility and the desirability of talking about humanity as such. This is not because it depends on any notion of the innately aggressive character of human nature nor on an account of the impossibility of reconciling competing interests. It is because other resolutions of the relationship between universality and particularity seem to imply either an embrace of hierarchical empires or a rejection of politics entirely. Those who seek a more coherent account of global security do want to speak of humanity as such. They see the principle of state sovereignty as the major obstacle to an all-embracing global order. But from the point of view of those who affirm state sovereignty as a progressive principle, claims about humanity as such can be interpreted as a danger - as a willingness to abandon the freedom and autonomy of life within sovereign states in favor of a renewal of hierarchical subordination. Moreover, it might be argued, evidence of incipient hierarchies is not difficult to find. Some like to interpret the behavior of the two superpowers in this way, whereas others are more concerned about the role of multinational corporations. In either case, state sovereignty can still be understood as a progressive response to the threat of domination from above. More crucially, the principle of state sovereignty has become established as the most plausible way of reconciling claims about universality and those of diversity. It does establish the most widely accepted account of our political identity. This account is certainly under challenge. The modern world, in fact,
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is characterized by an often startling proliferation of competing political identities, some regional and some cultural or ethnic in character. The demand for world security is, in effect, a demand for a radically new understanding of political identity. But it cannot be claimed that such an identity, such an account of who we are in relation to other people, has yet been established in any effective way. Rather, such an identity is often defined in opposition to politics - in terms of philosophical, religious, biological, or ecological accounts of our commonalities but not in terms of how these presumed commonalities might be translated into effective forms of political community and legitimate authority. Until such a translation is made, defenders of state sovereignty can argue, it is necessary to define and work for security through the only form of collective action we have at our disposal - the state. Second, the principle of state sovereignty denies the possibility of any other resolution of the relationship between universality and particularity because of the way it affirms the presence of political community in territorial space. That is, political community, and therefore the potential for universalizing values, is understood to be present in some places and absent in others. Hence a familiar pattern: "We" are rational, enlightened, and developed; We would be happy to cooperate with other peoples on the basis of rational and enlightened standards of civilized behavior; but unfortunately "They" are uncivilized and irrational; consequently, We must resort to force in order to protect the standards We have striven so hard to maintain. Aspirations for peace are all very well, it might be said, but what about the -(fill in the name of your favorite enemy of the moment)? In this sense, the concept of state security has much in common with the concept of development. Where state security affirms a spatial distinction between friend and enemy, development affirms a temporal distinction between the backward and the advanced. The logic is the same in both cases. We have, or at least aspire to, universal standards; They do not. They may be encouraged to join us, but if They do not, or cannot, then We are justified in applying different moral criteria to Them.x This may mean paternalism, theories of the stages of modernization, policies of "trickle down," or war against the barbarians at the gate. The principle of state sovereignty is consistent with all these accounts of the "Other" as the negation of our own understanding of who we are.' As long as it is impossible to invoke some great Other as the enemy of all peace-loving peoples, then of course, it is easy enough to conclude it is only states that can be secure, not humanity as such. Third, the principle of state sovereignty denies alternative possibilities because it fixes our understanding of future opportunities in relation to a distinction between history and progress within statist political communities and mere contingency outside them. The only plausible model of a political community we have is the state. Interstate relations do not constitute a political community in this sense. It may be possible to envisage them being transformed into a political community modeled on the state, but this would be
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to run into all the difficulties that have already been canvassed. Given that we have not achieved a form of world politics that is somehow analogous to statist politics - given, for example, that the United Nations must be understood primarily as a form of interstate cooperation rather than a nascent world government - it is easy enough to argue that little has really changed in the way interstate relations work. Hence, there continue to be references to Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau as prescient "realists" who grasped the eternal verities that determine the workings of the modern states system.10
The Rituals of International Relations Theory Even from these brief remarks, it should be clear that the principle of state sovereignty is not trivial. It cannot be dismissed as simply the problem of political fragmentation. It is, in effect, our most persuasive - for many commentators our only plausible - political answer to all the grand questions about who we are, where we have come from, and the future possibilities open to us. State sovereignty fixes an account of where politics occurs, and what political life itself can be. It identifies who can be made secure: the political community inside state boundaries. It also identifies the location and general character of the threat that renders security necessary: the realm of ungoverned contingency and other different (potentially absolutely Other) political communities outside. And it denies the possibility of alternative arrangements on the ground that only through the state do we now seem capable of resolving all those contradictions - between universality and diversity, between space and time, between men and citizens, between Them and Us - that were once resolved by the subordinations and dominations of feudal hierarchy, monotheistic religion, and empire. Given that the domination of hierarchical subordination remains such an unwelcome prospect, the autonomy offered by a system of sovereign states is undoubtedly very attractive. On the other hand, the advent of nuclear weapons and other instruments of mass destruction has brought us to a position in which the costs of statist autonomy are becoming perhaps even more unwelcome. Hence, we have the demand for global security, but also we have the difficulty of determining what this could possibly mean, either in theory or in practice. Much of this difficulty arises because speculation about alternatives has been so dependent on the options opened up and then closed off by the resolutions of state sovereignty. Much of the literature known as the theory of international relations can be understood in this way. Although often treated as a separate field of inquiry, one requiring a rather special expertise and training, most of what passes for theory in the analysis of interstate relations is derived from the answers to questions about the nature and location of politics provided by the principle of state sovereignty. Here it is necessary
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only to consider the continuing influence of binary oppositions on the primary theoretical disputes and categories that inform this literature. These binary oppositions begin with the identification of relations between states as a specialized area of inquiry. If the theory of international relations is concerned with the outside, with the contingent realm of other potentially threatening communities, then it can be understood as the simple opposite of theories about the normal politics conducted inside states. Community inside, anarchy outside; justice inside, power and, at best, order outside; effective institutions with legitimate authority inside, shifting alliances and fragile balancing mechanisms outside - however normal politics is understood, interstate politics may be presented as its negation. This is why the opposition between realism and utopianism has been so tenacious in this context. As an opposition, it clearly reduces an enormous range of philosophical and political problems to an impossibly crude choice between artificial alternatives. It is scarcely possible to open any of the classic works on interstate politics, like E.H. Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis or Hans J.Morgenthau's Politics Among Nations, without being drawn into an almost Manichaean schism between optimism and pessimism, the ideal and the real, the tragic necessities and the irresponsible dreams. In other realms of inquiry, these problems generate large and often very sophisticated literatures about, for example, the relationships between matter and consciousness, universality and diversity, knowledge and power. These literatures tend to suggest, especially, that the concept of power or the status of ethical claims in political life are indeed highly problematic, but not because there is some clear-cut difference between reality and idealistic speculation. In the context of international relations, however, all these other problems are secondary. They have to be understood in relation to the primary puzzles generated by the principle of state sovereignty. In this context, realism refers to the necessities generated within a system of autonomous states. Utopianism is then understood not as the desire for a more ideal or visionary world as such, but as the desire for a form of global community understood as a state writ large. Questions about ethics or universalist aspirations already have their proper place - inside but not outside the statist political community. Anyone who understands this, who is thus . prepared to deny . the relevance of ethics and universalist aspirations in interstate relations, is entitled to claim the title of realist. Anyone who transgresses this fundamental rule is immediately identified as naive or even dangerous." A similar logic governs our conventional understanding of war and peace. In this case, peace is understood negatively as the absence of war. Because there has not been a full-scale conflict between the superpowers since 1945, for example, nuclear deterrence has been credited with maintaining a condition of peace. However, the post-1945 era has not exactly been free from violence. And whatever the merits of claims about the prevention of war between the superpowers, many have noted that nuclear deterrence contributes to the further institutionalization of violence in the modern world. Consequently, if there is one thing that the many perspectives
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now grouped together under the rubric of peace research can agree upon, it is that peace cannot usefully be identified as the mere absence of war.12 Attempts to articulate a more positive account of peace are nevertheless caught in a dilemma. O n the one hand, conventional understanding of war and peace as a clear-cut opposition permits the simple invocation of some great Other as a reminder of the necessities of life in a world of civilization inside and barbarism outside. Thus complaints about the enormous social, economic, and psychic costs of nuclear deterrence are easily deflated. Even the possibility of species annihilation can be justified in this way. O n the other hand, more positive visions are drawn to emulate the conditions of justice modeled on life within statist communities. Quite apart from the general prohibition on this move formalized in the principle of state sovereignty, questions then arise about precisely which statist community offers the most appropriate model of a more positive peace. It makes a difference, for example, whether peace is understood in relation to self-satisfied accounts of privileged societies in which social conflict and inequalities are believed to be resolvable through regularized democratic procedures, or those less privileged societies in which the possibility of peace, or better yet, justice, is more obviously conceivable only through fundamental social and economic transformation. Thus the struggle for peace often merges into a struggle for development, justice, and even revolution. And again, therefore, attempts to think about security outside the established conventions of debate necessarily engage with the broadest questions about the nature and possibility of political life in general in the late twentieth century. Faced with these questions, one can understand the desire to deal with immediate problems of military extermination. Ban the bomb! But what about the - ? And on it goes. It is perhaps easy enough to point to the deficiencies of the binary divisions that sustain such a rhetoric of war and peace, realism and idealism. But it is not always so easy to escape the categories and assumptions based on them. One particularly important example of this is the so-called "levels of analysis" scheme that has become the most influential way of classifying explanations of war, and indeed, of organizing our understanding of interstate relations in general.13 In this scheme, explanations of war are divided into three categories. Some explanations focus on the individual, or more usually on the account of human nature in general that is in this context so often taken to explain the behavior of individuals. Others focus on the state. Still others focus on the structure of the states system, on, say, the balance of power, the presence or absence of great or hegemonic states, patterns of geopolitical advantage, and so on. In some respects, this is undoubtedly a useful, even common-sense classification. But it is strictly derivative from the principle of state sovereignty, and carries with it all those assumptions about the impossibility of any other resolution of fundamental political questions than that formalized by state sovereignty. Explanations that focus on the individual pose questions about the character of political life within states, and specifically about the status, obligations,
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and freedoms of individuals subject to the authoritative claims and collective practices of states. (Reference to human nature in general, it should be emphasized, is simply an all too common way of depoliticizing our understanding of what it means to be an individual.) Explanations that focus on the interstate system pose questions about the structural patterns that arise in the supposed noncommunity outside. In between lies that enigma, the state. And sandwiched in this way, it must remain an enigma - a repository of variables influencing decisionmaking or policy formation, or even a black box emulating the imaginary atoms of ancient physicists. It must remain an enigma because the practices through which states are constructed and mediate between life inside and outside can be turned into a mere line distinguishing between categories. Not surprisingly, accounts of interstate relations that take these categories for granted are unlikely to call the principle on which it based into question. It is no accident, in fact, that those who place the greatest reliance on the levels of analysis schemes tend to work with especially primitive accounts of the state and to insist that patterns of interstate relations are more or less immutable.14 The difficulty goes further than this. Against those who take the pessimistic view that we have to live with the permanent tragedies of the states system come counter arguments about the extent to which the modern world is being radically transformed. Many of these accounts hark back to so-called functional or neofunctional theories of international integration popular in the 1960s and 1970s. According to this general view, the fragmentation and conflict endemic in the "high politics" of interstate relations might be overcome through cooperation on relatively mundane functional or "low" politics. The classic example concerns the beginnings of the European Economic Community in various low-key arrangements involving coal and steel. The aim of integration, and thus one meaning now associated with the term interdependence, was clearly modeled on the images of a statist political community. Moreover, in view of "1992," the European case may be interpreted as confirmation that hopes for a more inclusive form of security might be achieved through the enlargement of political community in this manner. Nevertheless, the term interdependence has taken on a related but significantly different meaning as a consequence of a sharp reaction against functional and neofunctional theories of integration. The patterns of integration visible in Europe have been accompanied by continuing fragmentation and conflict elsewhere. Much of the optimism of the earlier literature was undermined by the collapse of ditente in the late 1970s and the onset of a more icily pessimistic reassertion of realism. But this was not the old realism of Carr or Morgenthau. It was rather a realism articulated in the fashionable garb of social science, and especially of econometrics and the theory of rational choice. Moreover, even in the midst of renewed Cold War, this kind of "structure" or "neorealism" could not ignore widespread evidence that something identifiable as interdependence was under way. Thus, if integration toward some kind of global community seemed too grandiose, too susceptible to the Utopian temptation of replacing conflict between states with the peaceful community
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of a state writ large, then at least interdependence might be understood as the possibility of cooperation under conditions of anarchy.15 Here we can understand the curious amalgam of claims about novelty and what is in some ways just another reinvention of the wheel in recent thinking about interstate politics. It is an amalgam that confirms the continuing grip of state sovereignty on our capacity to imagine alternative futures. The novelty involves the way recent attempts to describe emerging patterns of interdependence build on accounts of the rational character of individual actions - accounts that have been most influential among liberal economists. This is a rather contentious understanding of why people act as they do, but it has played an important role in the development of Western social and political thought. It emerged, essentially, as a reworking of the assumptions that led Hobbes to conclude that life in a state of nature must be nasty, brutish, and short. For Hobbes, the key assumptions involved the autonomy and equality of individuals. Because individuals were autonomous and equal, they found themselves in a situation of intense competition and thus in what theorists of interstate relations later came to call a "security dilemma." Different versions of this have been articulated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the "parable of the stag hunt" and by more recent writers as the "tragedy of the commons." Something obviously happened after Hobbes to turn these same assumptions into the basis not of anarchy but of precisely the sort of competitive market society in which progress and cooperation are deemed possible, even as preconditions for democracy and civilization. Where the older realists drew upon an account of the relation between individual and state familiar from the social contract theorists of the seventeenth century, the more recent neorealists draw on late eighteenth and early nineteenth century accounts of the virtues of liberal capitalism and modernity. Novel as this may be in some ways, it is not difficult to interpret it as a rehash of familiar themes. Two interpretations of interdependence are especially interesting. In one interpretation, we can see yet another projection of an account of life within states into the realm outside states. It is, moreover, a very specific account of life within states that is being projected, one especially associated with privileged market societies. Moreover, it carries with it rather heavy philosophical and political baggage. It accepts a modernistic account of individuals as autonomous beings in the sense that they are free from social constraints and separate from nature. It makes no use of categories like class or accounts of the productive processes that would be central to a Marxist understanding of political life. In fact, on this interpretation it is difficult not to see such accounts of interdependence as one more attempt, typical of the United States, to portray all political life in terms of itself. And although this interpretation of interdependence may emphasize how it resists the utopian temptation to translate the model of the centralized state into the solution to problems of interstate conflict, it also emphasizes its submission to the temptation to translate a specific model of social and economic processes from one realm to the other.
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O n another interpretation, however, interdependence becomes a synonym for a rather conventional understanding of interstate cooperation. Because, as Hobbes insisted, interstate relations is not the anarchy so often associated with his name, it is possible to envisage mechanisms, rules, agreements, institutions, and laws governing, in the broadest sense, the community of states.lh Interdependence, in this interpretation, is simply a continuation of processes and practices that have been a central feature of interstate relations from the beginning.
Security within and against State Sovereignty
The principle of state sovereignty is easily mistaken for a bloodless and abstract legal concept, far removed from the immediate demands of policy and politics. But this is in itself an effect of concrete political practices. These practices reproduce and extend specific answers to questions about who we are into the conditions under which it has become possible to think, speak, and act in relation to "security." State sovereignty defines what peace can be and where peace can be secured: the unitary community within autonomous states. Consequently, it also defines a place where neither peace nor security are possible for very long: the noncommunity of contingencies, Others, and mere relations outside the boundaries of the state. In addition to this, state sovereignty raises hope that at some point in the future the kind of political life attained within (at least some) states might be projectable from inside to outside - from the national community to the world community. But at the same time as these hopes are raised, state sovereignty denies that they can ever be fulfilled. It does so through a claim that only through the state is it possible to resolve all contradictions - between universality and particularity, space and time, Them and Us - in a politically plausible manner. Claims about world politics, world order, world security, and so on, it suggests, can offer no credible way of responding to counterclaims about the need for autonomy, freedom, national identity, or diversity in general. Instead, it is said, such claims must either disguise a dangerous yearning for hierarchical authority and empire or an equally dangerous refusal to understand that universalist claims about humanity or the planet as such have no effective political expression. Once locked into this logic - this discourse that is at once ritualized into disciplines and clichks and enshrined in the most powerful structures of violence the world has ever known - only two options seem to remain open. One is to push this logic to its extreme. If the world is in fact organized as a series of sharp divisions between inclusion and exclusion, community and anarchy, civilization and barbarism, then the maxim that preparations for war are the only guarantee of peace does make some sense. And it is precisely because disciplines like strategic studies and the cultural codes of the Cold War era have pushed this logic to extremes that the crudest fanaticism has been able to masquerade as realistic and responsible policy. The other option is to relax
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this logic in order to permit accommodation and cooperation. It is in this context that it is possible to envisage continuity between conventional accounts of security, some interpretations of what it means to be interdependent, and more far-reaching aspirations for authentically global or world politics. On this second reading what is required is a further evolution in cooperative arrangements between states. That is, early modern European accounts of political community, and thus the legitimacy of the modern state, are left essentially unchallenged, but our understanding of what this means is no longer informed by pseudo-Hobbesian accounts of anarchy and the security dilemma. On the contrary, state autonomy and the pursuit of statist selfinterest seem to be open to much the same kind of revaluation of the implications of autonomy that occurred in relation to the individual after Hobbes. The more extreme utilitarians are content to extrapolate this revised account of individual rationality directly on to the behavior of states. Others are wary of such analogical and metaphorical reasoning (even if it is articulated in the guise of an objective social science) and stress the multiple ways in which norms, rules, regimes, practices, and institutions are generated historically." In either case, it is possible to at least partly escape the extreme consequences of state sovereignty and envisage the creation of a cooperative and thus more secure interstate order. It is in this context that so much stress has been placed on arms control arrangements, confidence-building measures, the reproduction of destabilizing strategic structures and deployments, the revitalization of the United Nations, and so on. Exactly at what point in this reading it becomes permissible to speak of world politics rather than just interstate relations is not entirely clear. But it is important to stress the possibility of understanding the demand for world security not as a utopian dream but as an outgrowth of practices that in one form or another have always been crucial for the operation of a states system. Yet there is obviously one major difference between traditional accounts of interstate cooperation and accounts that have been canvassed more recently. In the older accounts, war was understood to be legitimate because it offered the only way of resolving conflict and responding to demands for change. Nuclear weapons have placed the legitimacy of war into such radical question that even many conservatives have concluded that traditional hopes for interstate cooperation must give way to fundamentally new forms of political organization. But it is necessary to be very careful when entertaining conclusions of this kind. It is often said, for example, that with nuclear weapons everything has changed but our thinking. Such statements can be as misleading as the contrary claim that states will always remain locked in some sort of gladiatorial combat. Indeed both claims are easily identifiable as part of the same delineations of options defined by the principle of state sovereignty. Nevertheless, two things have changed. We are no longer able to survive in a world predicated on an extreme interpretation of the logic of state sovereignty. Nor are we able to survive in a states system in which war remains an option for system change. Neither of these conditions implies that the state is obsolete or about to wither away. States are complex social structures and
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have always been changing in response to new historical conditions. The typical realist claim that because states persist we must prepare for war is predicated on a particular reading of the principle of state sovereignty, not on a serious understanding of states as highly variable and ever-changing forms of political community. Realists may privilege or even "fetishize" the state, but they rarely offer any serious account of what states are. Nor do these two changed conditions undermine the need for more effective forms of cooperation between states. These forms have also evolved and need to be developed still further in response to the genuinely novel conditions introduced by nuclear weapons. World security, in short, will continue to depend on the extension of traditional accounts of the security of states. But - and this is a huge qualification - it cannot depend on the security of states alone. If the demand for world security and the challenge of world politics can be understood as a continuation of practices that both grow out of and also serve to mitigate the worst consequences of state sovereignty, they can also be understood in a far more profound way. By this I d o not mean that profundity lies in recognizing the fragmentations of state sovereignty as the source of all our problems. On the contrary, I argue, this would be to work within, not to challenge, options prescribed by state sovereignty. Neither state sovereignty nor statist accounts of security arise from patterns of fragmentation alone. State sovereignty offers an account of both fragmentation and integration, of anarchy outside and community within, of a place of war and a place of peace. The majority of our most influential accounts of peace confirm this logic; we must move, they suggest, from fragmentation to integration, from anarchy to community, from war to peace. This is why the dilemma before us seems so obvious and yet irresolvable. We have learned to think and act this way because it confirms our deepest and most entrenched beliefs about goodness, truth, and beauty. Neither state sovereignty nor the ways out of our predicament suggested by state sovereignty can be understood apart from the broad cultural, political, and philosophical contexts in which resolutions affirmed by state sovereignty have come to seem so natural. Nor will it be surprising if we discover that challenges to state sovereignty must also be challenges to our most entrenched beliefs about goodness, truth, and beauty. Most especially, we should not be surprised if we are forced to revise our understanding of the relationships between universality and particularity, Them and Us, or space and time. It is well to remember that our current understandings of these relationships displaced another set of (hierarchical) resolutions that once also seemed entirely natural. The principle of state sovereignty emerged out of profound socioeconomic and political upheavals and only makes sense within the philosophical categories that began to be articulated in early modern Europe. We seem to be faced with upheavals and transformations on a comparable scale. Consequently, the search for world security must be more than a search for more effective interstate cooperation. It must also be more than an attempt to overcome fragmentation through some more inclusive account of a global community or humanity as such. It must be a
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challenge to the answers to the most fundamental questions about who "We" are that are posed by state sovereignty. This means challenging the claim that only the state is capable of resolving claims about participation in a political community and claims about humanity in general. It also means challenging the distinction between Us and Them - between the authentic universalizing community within and the contingent realm of others outside. But it also means resisting the temptation to turn Them into Us, to resolve all differences into our preferred image of a universal humanity. This temptation is overwhelming. It informs many of our images of peace and theories of development. It has generated claims that we are at last witnessing the end of ideology and the victory of the forces of emancipation over superstition and totalitarianism. But self-righteousness cannot be the basis for my account of what an authentic world politics must now be. Nor can it provide any useful guidance as to what world security might involve in addition to greater cooperation between states. An alternative perspective is therefore called for. Such a perspective must be guided not by the kind of abstract accounts of a potential universal humanity generated by the principle of state sovereignty but by a sustained analysis of how contemporary insecurities are being created and intensified by the increasingly global organization of human endeavor. It must also be guided by a sensitivity to the ways in which people have been able to respond to these insecurities by reworking their understanding of how their own predicament fits into broader structures of violence and oppression. It is especially instructive, in this context, to reflect on the extent to which so many contemporary forms of insecurity are simply uncomprehendible within the conventional categories of international relations theory. These categories are in fact less useful as ways of understanding contemporary political life than as expressions of our inability to understand politics in categories delineated by state sovereignty. Ethnic conflict, terrorism, human rights, maldevelopment, famine, environmental degradation - none of these fit easily into debates between realists and utopians nor into discrete levels of analysis. But they have now become integral themes in contemporary debates about security. They all stimulate far-reaching debates about who we are - in relation to cultural groupings that will not be reduced to the territorial exclusions of statist nationalism; in relation to changing patterns of inclusion and exclusion generated by contemporary forms of production, distribution, and exchange; and in relation to planetary processes that render everyone vulnerable to the most local abuses of the physical environment. And they force us to ask how we might now secure our differences while knowing that we all participate in something that can plausibly, but still only vaguely, be called world politics. In the long run it will be these struggles to recast our understanding of who we are in relation to other people and to the planet on which we live that must inform our understanding of what world politics and world security can be,18 provided, of course, that in the short run we can enhance the mechanisms of ~eacefulchange between states. But then, short run and long
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run, present and future are not opposites. Attempts to create a secure world both by working within and by challenging the accounts of the nature and location of political life formalized by the principle of state sovereignty will be with us for some time to come.
Notes 1. Recent expressions of this theme include Mel Gurtov, Global Politics in the Human lnterest (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1988); R.B.J. Walker, One World, Many Worlds: Struggles for a Just World Peace (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1988); Richard A. Falk, The Promise of World Order (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); and Dan Smith and E.P. Thompson, eds., Prospects for a Habrtable Planet (London: Penguin, 1987). O n the consequent need for a fundamental rethinking of security policy, see, for example: Yoshikazu Sakamoto, ed., Strategic Doctrines and Theu Alternatives (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1987); and Friedrich Kratochwil, "The Challenge o f Security in a Changing World," Journal of International Affairs 43(1, Summer/Fall 1989): 11 9-141. 2. For a helpful discussion of the limits o f contemporary political thought in t h ~ srespect, see John Dunn, Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 3. I have explored this theme in some detail elsewhere; see especially R.B.J. Walker, "Contemporary Militarism and the Discourse of Dissent," in R.B.J. Walker, ed., Culture, Ideology and World Order (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1984), pp. 182-216; and Walker, "Culture, Discourse, Insecurity," in Saul H. Mendlovitz and R.B.J. Walker, eds., Towards a Just World Peace: Perspectives from Social Movements (London: Butterworths, 1987), pp. 171-190. 4. Andrew Linklater, Men and Citizens in the Theory of International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1982). 5. The following discussion draws on R.B.J. Walker, State Sovereignty, Global Ciuiltziztion and the Rearticulation of Political Space, World Order Studies Program Occas~onalPaper No. 18 (Princeton: Princeton University Center of International Studies, 1988); Walker, "Sovereignty, Identity, Community: Reflections on Contemporary Political Practice," in R.B.J. Walker and Saul H. Mendlovitz, eds., Contendrng Soverergnties: Redefining Political Communtty (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1990); and Walker, "Ethics, Modernity and the Theory of International Relations" (forthcoming). My account of state sovereignty as a constitutive principle of a specifically modern account o f politics parallels and draws upon the important critical analysis by Richard K. Ashley. See especially Ashley, "Untying the Sovereign State: A Double Reading of the Anarchy Problematique," Mdlennium: Journal of International Studies 7 (2, Summer 1988): 227-272, and Ashley, "Livmg o n Border Lines: Man, Poststructuralism and War," in James Der Derian and Michael Shapiro, eds., InternationaNIntertextual Relatrons (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1989), pp. 259-321. For a more conventional, indeed largely atheoretical account, see F.H. Hinsley, Sovereignty, 2nd ed. (Cambr~dge:Cambridge University Press, 1986). 6. "Yet in all times, Kings, and Persons of Soveraigne authority, because of their Independent): are in continuall jealousies, and in the state and posture of Gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another. ... Bur because they uphold thereby, the Industry o f their Subjects; there does not follow from it, that misery, which accornpanles the Liberty of particular men." Thomas Hobbes, Leviuthan (1651),chapter 13, C.B. Macpherson, ed. (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 188. 7. The classic discussion of this theme is Martin Wight, "Why Is There N o International Theory?" in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight, eds., D~plomatrcInvestigations (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1966), pp. 17-34. 8. On this general theme, see Edward Said, Orientalisrrz (New York: Random House, 1979); Tzveton Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of tile Other (New York: Harper and Row, 1982); and Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
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9. The classic expression is Carl Schmitt's account of sovereignty as the capacity to decide o n the "exception." See especially Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Souerergnty (1922), George Schwab trans. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985). Together with Max Weber's nationalism, Schmitt's authoritarian conservatism has been a primary influence on the rendition of political realism that has become influential in the modern theory of international relations, especially through the influence of Hans J. Morgenthau. See, for example, Alfons Sollner, "German Conservatism in America: Morgenthau's Political Realism," Telos 72(Summer 1987): 161-172. 10. For a critical discussion of claims about such a tradition in this context, see R.B.J. Walker, "The Prince and the Pauper: Tradition, Modernity and Practice in the Theory of International Relations," in Der Derian and Shapiro, eds., note 5, pp. 75-148. 11. The rule has, nevertheless, been transgressed very frequently; see the important discussion in Hidemi Suganami, The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 12. See, for example, Mendlovitz and Walker, note 3; and Bradley Klein, "After Strategy: The Search for Post-Modern Politics of Peace," Alternatives 1 3 (July 1988): 293-318. 13. Kenneth Waltz, Man, The State and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959). 14. Kenneth Waltz, Theory of lnternational Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1979). It is instructive that the one sustained attempt to subject the concept of security to analytical scrutiny within the mainstream literature o n international relations theory still takes the level of analysis schema as its major premise. See Barry Buzan, People, States a n d Fear: The National Security Problem in lnternational Relatrons (Brighton, UK: Wheatsheaf, 1983); Buzan, "Peace, Power and Security: Contending Concepts in the Study of International Relat~ons,"Journal of Peace Research 2 1 (2, 1984): 109-125; and Buzan, "The Concept of National Security for Developing Countries," in Mohammed Ayooh and ChaiAran Samudavanija, eds., Leadership Perceptions and National Security (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1989), pp. 1-28. 15. Kenneth A. Oye, ed., Co-operation Under Anarchy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); and Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Co-operation (New York: Basic Books, 1984). 16. See, especially, Hedley Bull, The Anarchrcal Society (London: Macmillan, 1977). The most sophisticated recent elaboration of this theme is Friedrich Kratochwil, Rules, Norms and Decisions: O n the Conditions of Practical a n d Legal Reasonrng in lnternational Relations and Domestic Affairs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). One of the central concerns of accounts of a community of states - the role of the great powers - has also been taken up by more popular texts informed by utilitarian accounts of economic rationality. See especially Robert Keohane, After Hegemony: Co-operation a n d Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and Stephen Krasner, ed., lnternational Regimes (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983). 17. The difference between utilitarian forms of social science and more hlstoricallv oriented and interpretive modes of inquiry has generated considerable controversy in the recent literature. See Robert 0. Keohane, "International Institutions: Two Approaches," International Studies Quarterly 32 (December 1988): 379-396; Friedrich Kratochwil and John G. Ruggie, "International Organizations: A State of the Art on an Art of the State, International Organization, 40 (4, Autumn 1986); and R.B.J. Walker, "History and Structure in the Theory of International Relations." Millennium 18 12. , , Summer 1989): 163-183. 18. In this sense, contemporary debates about security cannot be separated from debates about development or democracy. For an elaboration of this argument, see Walker, note 1.
How t h e W e s t was One: Representational Politics o f NATO Bradley S. Klein
Conventional Accounts
W
estern strategists can be proud of having ''won7' the Cold War. The editorial columns of newspapers and the pages of many journals are crammed these days with words of heady self-confidence proclaiming the demonstrable superiority of the First World to the Second. The great ideological battles of history are now apparently over. Communism, once so virile, lies tattered and beaten, whether in the streets of Prague or in the ballot boxes of East Germany and Hungary. With the waning of the East-West military standoff across the German-German border and the gradual incorporation of a divided Europe into something like a regional community, the historic need for NATO and the Warsaw Pact will alter dramatically. Already, the Pact has all but disintegrated. NATO, by contrast, will not fade away so quickly - nor, in the conventional account, should it. Forty years of peace, what J o h n Lewis Gaddis (1987) has called "the long peace," now appear to be giving way to a new era of security politics. NATO's future is yet to be determined, though likely it will involve a graduated reduction of its traditional military presence and an enlarged role as the political coordinator for an expanded European community. Conventional accounts of NATO, established upon the analytic base offered by realism and strategic studies, focus upon the ability of the member states to coordinate their national policies and to meet the challenge offered by the Warsaw Pact (Langer, 1986; Flanagan, 1988). NATO has overseen an era of prosperity and security unprecedented in European history. Considering the depth and intensity of continental rivalries dating back centuries, the postwar era of NATO policy coordination must accordingly stand as a most impressive diplomatic-military achievement (Schmidt, 1969; Schwartz, 1983; Source: International Studies Quarterly, 34(3) ( 1 990): 31 1-25.
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DePorte, 1986). However much NATO divests itself of certain militarytechnical functions, there is no reason to believe it should rid itself entirely of a guiding role in the future of European security. Not even the renewed attention accorded the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe justifies doing away with NATO as the organization principally responsible for shepherding European security into the next century. Memoirs, monographs, and textbooks all testify to the magnitude of transnational negotiations that led to the Alliance's creation in 1949. The basic story, with some variation, is that a war-torn and war-exhausted Western Europe could not, on its own resources, mobilize a successful response to the challenge posed by postwar Communism, a challenge posed in the dual form of political subversion and Stalin's armed forces. Accounts vary, reflecting the immediate postwar debate about whether the primary threat was posed by the Red Army on the Eastern bank of the Elbe River or by the domestic social and economic weakness of the West. The first years of the postwar era were characterized by this disagreement. Dean Acheson, for instance, writing in 1948, argued that the Soviet Union could well be within reach of "the greatest prize in history without military effort on its part - a power-system stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific and comprising most of the industry and resources of the world" (Acheson, 1949: 4). Perhaps it is not so surprising that subsequent accounts of NATO's formation downplay the seriousness of this founding debate and describe the postwar era retrodictively, as if the military threat emanating from the East had been unambiguous (L. S. Kaplan, 1988). Early debate raged, however, between the U.S. State Department's Policy Planning Staff and the War Department as to the degree of military threat (Etzold and Gaddis, 1978; Nathanson, 1988). George F. Kennan, after all, ultimately left the State Department in frustration when it became clear to him that his 1947 "X" article was being read literally and that the armed services were exploiting claims about Soviet military might to the detriment of any political-diplomatic solution to the German question. Kennan consistently opposed the militarization of European relations and argued passionately - if fruitlessly - against the sweeping geographic and ideological scope accorded the proposed North Atlantic Alliance (Kennan, 1967). A number of analysts have subsequently confirmed that then-contemporary claims about Soviet military capacities lacked empirical validity. The very process of making intelligence estimates about the Soviet strategic threat has been fraught with institutional and interpretive difficulties that reduced accounts of Soviet power to a thoroughly politicized guessing game (Freedman, 1986). In the absence of satellite surveillance or electronic eavesdropping capabilities in the immediate postwar period, the process of gaining accurate information was a precarious enterprise. Two subsequent assessments of what American analysts would have found had they had full access to actual figures on troop deployments and weapons readiness at that time reveal levels of Soviet armaments that were woefully inadequate for offensive, Westerndirected operations (Evangelist, 1982183; Mueller, 1988).
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The entire postwar era was characterized by estimates and claims about the nature of the Soviet threat that were scarcely sustained by the empirical evidence available even at the time. Critics of Western strategy often claim that the problem resides in strategic analysts having radically distinguished between Soviet "intentions" and Soviet "capabilities" (Booth, 1979: 110-21). The critique claims that Western threat assessments have been made exclusively on the basis of material recountings of available weapons systems, regardless of the political purposes to which such weaponry might reasonably be put. But such a critique is nearly 180 degrees off the mark; strategic analysis recurrently privileged claims about intentions over actual operational capabilities. What continually carried the day in the absence of reliable intelligence estimates was a series of discursively constructed claims about the nature of the Soviet totalitarian state and about its implacable global purposes (Spiro and Barber, 1970). The most influential postwar document of all, NSC-68 (1950), contains not a single empirical claim about actual Soviet deployments. Subsequent invocations of "the bomber gap," "the missile gap," "the INF-gap," and "the window of vulnerability" derived their value as significations of imminent danger only by drawing upon salient claims, sometimes explicated but, often allowed to reside in a tacit subtext, about the alien-ness and "other-ness" of Soviet political culture (F. Kaplan, 1983; Sanders, 1983; Campbell, 1989). The ensuing sense of distance enabled analysts to make all sorts of claims about potential strategic moves. Even if the imputation was within the realm of possibility, let alone the question of plausibility, the mere reference to the question of "what would happen if ...? " granted credibility to invocations of a threat. A whole generation of strategists reified such claims about intentions into an argument about the basic structure of international relations as a Hobbesian security dilemma (Herz, 1950; Buzan, 1987). With these various arguments, analyses of military policy could be sustained regardless of any empirical evidence indicating operationally feasible aggressive policies on the part of an adversary. The important point here is not that the Soviet threat is or is not a mythic construct, but that the creation and perpetuation of NATO required a particular representation of Soviet strategy. The imaginative construction of the Soviet threat as a constitutive dimension of the Cold War cannot he chalked up to false consciousness or deliberate deception on the part of policy makers. Nor can a crudely materialistic accounting of ideology and interest mediation explain the linkages between the domestic armaments sectors and the nature of extended nuclear deterrence. The historical record of strategic debates reveals that nuclear deterrence strategy follows its own internal logic and that much of what passes for strategic modernization is an attempt not to meet the latest level of Soviet deployments but to resolve contradictions and dilemmas internal to Western strategy. In this sense, when it comes to NATO, the external referrent of the Soviet threat begins to pale in importance to the concerns expressed by strategists themselves regarding the need to construct certainty about life at home (Dalby, 1988).
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A Genealogy of NATO
In a recent essay devoted to the symbolic character of nuclear politics, Robert Jervis argues that Western strategy in Europe after 1945 was not primarily interested in the instrumental purposes to which Soviet force might be applied. The concerns, rather, had more to do with allaying fears of vulnerability which attended the uncertainties of the postwar order. "Indeed, when NATO was formed, the American decision makers were preoccupied not with the danger of Soviet invasion but with the need for and difficulties of European economic and political reconstruction." (Jervis, 1989: 206). This suggests that strategic debates derive their power from their affinity with widely circulated representations of cultural and political life (Shapiro, 1989). Western military strategy, despite its focus on weapons and technology, is no cxccption. It draws its capital from its ability to provide a sense of order and rationality to the world. Classical strategists like Hedley Bull (1977), Michael Howard (1984), Henry Kissinger (1954,1965) and Hans Morgenthau (1976) have continually argued that alliances in general, and NATO in particular, must articulate a specific form of cultural life and preserve certain historical achievements. In this conservative tradition, the processes through which inter-state "order" and the "society" of states are established are inherently problematic. The conservatism consists in assuming that such "order" and "structure" are available and normatively worthy as pursuits and that they are not to be achieved through narrowly instrumental, weaponstechnocratic approaches to security. A genealogical account of alliance defense policy explores the practices by which certain boundaries of political space became demarcated across Central Europe. It explores, as well, the forms of identity which came to prevail over other possible forms that Western politics - and global security practices - could have assumed. Such an analysis does not result in a singular master narrative, but rather in an open, internally differentiated set of practices in which elements of power are always in the process of being contested and rearticulated (Foucault, 1977; Der Derian, 1987; Ashley, 1987, 1988, 1989). NATO as a political practice constructed a particular architecture of global space (Dillon, 1989). But that design was never according to a master plan, and it did not emanate from some sovereign source of power. NATO's success was due not to having deterred Soviet aggression, nor to having successfully managed repeated crises among its allies, but to having ~ r o d u c e dthose various allies in the first place. The account that follows is somewhat at odds with those critical studies of NATO and Western strategy that focus on armaments and the postwar world military order (Senghaas, 1972; Kaldor, 1978, 1981; Luckham, 1987). In examining the links between the domestic armaments base and international relations, these studies argue that NATO occupies a hegemonic place among world alliance systems and that its combined economic, military, and
Klcin Representational Politics of
NATO
17 1
political resources have endowed it with the privilege to disseminate transnational infrastructures of rule throughout the postwar multilateral system of Western-oriented trade. Such a perspective on Western policy offers a more critical and globalist interpretation than traditionally realist, state-centered views that have enjoyed widespread circulation among more conventional political-military strategists (Gilpin, 1981; Kennedy, 1988). Yet both of these approaches, the one radical, the other more traditional, emphasize structural dimensions of global power and impose a greater order and logic on world politics than can be substantiated through a detailed examination' of how an actual alliance system functions.
For Kennan, the primary threat to Western security lay not in Soviet military power but in the weakened fabric of Western life. To counter this weakness, he argued, the decisive policies should not be military encirclement but the rebuilding of Western infrastructures. Writing in 1948 in the context of debates about the European Recovery Plan, the ERP, Kennan argued: This is the significance of the ERP, the idea of European Union, and the cultivation of a closer association with the U.K. and Canada. For a truly stable world order can proceed, within our lifetime, only from the older, mellower and more advanced nations of the world - nations for which the concept of order, as opposed to power, has value and meaning. If these nations do not have the strength to seize and hold real leadership in world affairs today, through that combination of political greatness and wise restraint which goes only with a ripe and settled civilization, then as Plato once remarked: " ... cities will never have rest from their evils, - no nor the human race, as I believe." (Kennan, 1948: 100) Kennan's famous "Long Telegram" of 1946 (Kennan, 1946: 63) concluded with the observation that "Much depends on health and vigor of our own society. World communism is like a malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue." This medicalized representation was to find a more sustained account in the work of W.W. Rostow, the architect of modernization theory and a key figure in the articulation of modern Western identity. In Rostow's memorable words (1960: 162, 1961: 23.51, "Communism is a disease of the transition" from traditional to modern society. It would require Western military intervention in the form of anti-guerrilla insurgents to staunch the infection. To reconstruct the West, and to bring the rest of the world along with it, would require therapies of "modernization." These would prove crucial in the development of a recognizably Western world order, for "to modernize" would come to mean to improve, to upgrade, to make something better by technical refinement. In both economic development and military deterrence, themes of "modernization" were to animate public policy.
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Economic modernization refers to the process of enforced changes, implemented from above by a secular state system, that strategically alter the social landscape and prepare the way for a capitalist, market-oriented political economy. The master plan for this reworking of international life was the self-consciously proclaimed handbook of Westernization, Rostow's The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960). The book was crucial in setting the terms of the subsequent "development" paradigm (Gendzier, 1985: 6). The basic idea was to absorb the newly independent, formerly colonial states into a global political economy. Rostow's stages of growth presented the clearest attempt to draw the post-colonial world into the Western orbit. His teleological unfolding of the various stages of development culminates in "the age of high mass consumption." As Rostow's words attest, the millennia1 deliverance of life that results is truly an inspiring achievement: "The second stage of growth embraces societies in the process of transition; that is, the period when the preconditions for take-off are developed; for this is the time to transform a traditional society in the ways necessary for it to exploit the fruits of modern science, to fend off diminishing returns, and thus to enjoy the blessings and choices opened up by the march of compound interest" (Rostow, 1960: 6). This paean to impending affluence is a useful example of how "modernization" draws its sustenance from particular representations of life. Implicit in this celebratory account of development is a series of conceptual commitments that need to be brought to the foreground if practitioners concerned with "developing" societies are to understand fully what analysts have in store for them. "Traditional" societies are seen as mired in a pre-Newtonian world, confined to natural horizons with a fixed "ceiling on the level of attainable output per head" (Rostow, 1960: 4). Such a limiting cosmology has to be transformed for modernization to proceed. This "pre-modern" world view is to be replaced by a recognizably "modern" one of unlimited growth. Nature thereby becomes a resource for use by human beings who now stand at the center of all things. A network of representations is called into play here: mutually dependent conceptions of nature, man, goods, and society. A set of dichotomies is invoked, with the "pre-Newtonian" world on one side and "modern" affluent cultures on the other: traditional societylmodern society, naturelscience, subsistencelwealth. Only by tacitly invoking these dichotomous representations and invoking one side continually against the other is Rostow's discourse of development possible. But the mediation of the transition processes required here is by no means politically neutral. It is strikingly violent. Rostow's developmental discourse draws upon a key assumption that modern, Western developed societies are simply better and more desirable than traditional, pre-modern societies. Ever the economist, he calls this "the demonstration effect" of modern technology and lifestyles. The world's people really want Western products. But just in case they don't - and here Rostow's text gets murky - they can always look over the shoulder of traveling salesmen and see battleship guns in the harbor.
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Surely, this is an impressive sight, one that demonstrates the (potentially) superior effects of modern Western society. Spurred on by these "demonstration effects" of Western goods, the peoples of the formerly colonial world are induced to follow along and to develop themselves in the footsteps of their uninvited guests. When problems develop in the modernization process, the state steps in to expedite change. Rostow, writing in the heady days of development, was characteristically sanguine about this process, seeing as the only obstacle the unfortunate tampering by Communist elements - whom, he argued, could be dealt with through covert action and counter-insurgency warfare. When more profound social problems threatened the developmental process, more sophisticated forms of military and paramilitary involvement would be needed. Samuel P. Huntington, with a keener eye than Rostow towards the political difficulties of modernization and thus more attuned to the prerequisites of institution building, delivered the theoretical justification for the constructive, socially transformative role of Third World military elites in his Political Order and Changing Societies (1968).Looking favorably upon the contribution to modernization of such reformers as Ataturk, Nasser, and Sukarno, Huntington argued that in elite-bound, traditional societies, the military represents a new and liberating political force that can break the hold of reactionary forces and loosen their hold upon the economy and culture. In other words, the domestic military had to be cultivated as part of the state building process, in the name of enforced modernization from above. To prepare local elites for this task, a whole series of measures would be needed, ranging from police training, the sale of arms designed for local use against domestic sources of turbulence, and the defeat of revolutionary labor movements in the name of creating favorable climates for international investment and wage assembly work (Packenham, 1973; Augelli and Murphy, 1988; Klein and Unger, 1989). This, too, was the stuff of modernization. It was always part of postwar U.S. strategy, and it represents the dark underside of the developmental process. As a discourse of reconstruction, developmental modernization provided an architecture for the physical and social reshaping of the global landscape. In Europe this was conducted under the umbrella of the Marshall Plan. Globally, the impetus for this reorientation of life was provided by the World Bank, Truman's Point Four Program, Kennedy's Peace Corps, and a panoply of political-economic-military alliance projects that linked domestic state building with transnational integration under the U.S. aegis (Barnet, 1972; Fagen, 1979). In the absence of any identifiable external threats to such areas as Latin America or the Southwest Pacific, for instance, the only plausible argument for the creation of the Rio Pact in 1947 or ANZUS was to use a military security bond as the cutting edge for statelsociety building along modern, Western lines. In Europe, however, the invocation of an external security threat enjoyed a modicum of plausibility merely through the existence of Soviet "other-ness." Continental unity had been shattered, after all. Central Europe disappeared in the spring of 1945. Throughout the
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postwar era, there were only East and West. The task of defining the boundaries and limits of Western identity was made considerably easier with the creation on the other side of the Iron Curtain of an adversary whose culture and world view offered, it was argued, a reverse image of everything celebrated by the emergent allies. Deterrence
In the immediate postwar era, deterrence was developed and institutionalized by strategiclsecurity studies. The initial effort was strikingly Americo-centric (Hoffman, 1977; F. Kaplan, 1983; Klein, 1988). Within a decade the logic of deterrence came to be accepted in Western Europe as a convenient means for linking the fate of the developed industrial powers under U.S. sponsorship. Strategic think tanks first developed in the United States immediately after World War I1 in order to coordinate the newfound power of nuclear bombs. The prime sponsor of this effort was the Air Force, which maintained until the mid-1950s a monopoly of the means to deliver the weapon. A crucial discursive shift from "defense" to "security" enabled a whole profession to emerge as a subdiscipline of international relations and to rationalize the possession of weapons - not to win a war, as with past armed forces, but to prevent a war from ever again rising. This was the charge issued by Bernard Brodie (1946) in his classic work, The Absolute Weapon. The academic subdiscipline of strategic studies becomes a decisive force in trans-Atlantic politics around the mid- to late-1950s. Crucial to the emergence of a unifying approach to strategy was the export of the field from the United States to Western Europe. Here it is impossible to overstate the importance of the London-based Institute for Strategic Studies, founded in 1958 and renamed in 1963 as the International Institute for Strategic Studies. The IISS became a site for the articulation of a Western strategic consensus, not necessarily in terms of complete agreement, but in terms of the language and policy problems that came widely to be shared among responsible managers of alliance affairs (Skaggs, 1987; Howard, 1989). Throughout the first half of the 1950's there had been anything but agreement on trans-Atlantic defense strategy. The 1952 Lisbon Accords calling for a NATO troop strength of 90 divisions immediately proved unworkable because of the economic and demographic toll that would have been entailed. Economic reconstruction and the need to draw upon a working-age labor force dictated that none of the West European powers would accede to such demands on its populace. When President Eisenhower's fiscal conservatism suggested nuclear guarantees of Massive Retaliation for Europe, John Foster Dulles immediately came under criticism for having articulated an inflexible non-strategy that lacked credibility in the face of conventional Soviet probes westward (Kaufmann, 1956; Nitze, 1956; Kissinger, 1957; Taylor, 1960; Schmidt, 1961). Such criticisms were heightened a short time later when the Soviets developed a thermonuclear capacity that could be delivered upon Western Europe (though not yet upon the U.S.A).
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The difficulty of constructing allies was perhaps no more evident than with France's ambiguously independent place in world affairs (Johnstone, 1984: 81-135). Throughout the complex negotiations over the status of Berlin and Germany, France had made clear its reluctance to accept anything but a divided status for its historic rival. Cold War accounts focusing exclusively upon the Soviet Union's bargaining position vis a vis the United States overlook the importance of France's strategy to contain not only Soviet power but potential German power as well (Gaddis, 1972, 1982). Nothing would have been more disastrous for France's revived postwar economy than a repetition of the rivalry that had previously wracked its relations with Germany, especially over the Saarland and Rhineland. A peculiarly French quasi-imperial role was also evident in Paris' reluctance to liquidate its worldwide colonial holdings. Protracted post-colonial wars, first in Indochina then in Algeria, were the immediate results of France's stubbornly traditional aspirations throughout the nuclear era. Even today, France retains remarkable independence as a renegade power, free from various test ban treaties and arms control policies. It enjoys complete freedom in patrolling Francophone Northwest Africa and New Caledonia and freely utilizes its holdings in French Polynesia for nuclear testing, despite significant regional opposition. Possession of an independent nuclear force enabled France to persist in its imperial pretense. Gaullism benefited greatly from the symbolic independence afforded by the strategy of "deterrence in all directions:" targeted westward, in other words, at the unreliable Americans, as well as eastward at the Soviet Union. The peculiarity of French nuclear independence has been that the most likely target for the "force de frappe" was neither of the superpowers but West Germany, whose easternmost border was until recently the farthest that French land-based weapons could reach from their base on the Albion Plain. In the past few years, France has selectively extended its "sanctuary" to include southern Germany. But France's basic policy of enjoying an independent global strategy has been accompanied by a nuclear force that, even with submarine-based missiles, has never threatened more than minimal retaliation. Such a minimal strategy has been France's way of signalling its distrust of complex formulae for extended deterrence, flexible response, and ladders of escalation. France's suspicions of NATO strategy are well founded. Leon Sigal (1984: 164) has concisely captured the infeasible operational source of NATO's nuclear options. As he recently wrote, "The dilemmas of nuclear location, relocation, and dual capability suggest that if, as the saying goes, armies are designed by geniuses to be run by idiots, the reverse is true for short-range nuclear forces in Europe." Sigal's claim holds true for the history of NATO strategy. Small wonder the Alliance finds itself enmeshed in repeated crises of policy coordination (McNamara, 1962; Schwartz, 1983). N o NATO strategy calling for use of any level of nuclear forces has shown any operational promise. The muchheralded formula of flexible response as enshrined in NATO planning
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document MC1413 and the Harmel Report of 1967 (NATO, 1981: 98-100) was nothing more than a successful papering over of the divergent geostrategic interests of each of the NATO members. Flexible response was an agreement to disagree (Ball, 1982183). It was a political compromise, largely initiated by Europeans trying to bind reluctant Americans to come to their nuclear defense. The paradox of such a strategy is that it threatens Continental, indeed global, destruction to fend off the possibility of a local attack. This then raises thorny issues. The U.S. rightly fears being brought into the fray too early and argues for a more robust conventional deterrent. The European allies are unwilling to expend funds for full conventionalization, but are also afraid that American nuclear guarantees might be confined to a Continental war while preserving the major powers as sanctuaries. These have been intractable dilemmas, but it is mistaken to see them as merely military-technical in nature - or, for that matter, as evidence of NATO's impending demise. For the North Atlantic Alliance has derived its strength not from the plausibility of its externally directed deterrence posture but rather from the content of the distinctly modern forms of political identity which it has championed (Klein, 1989). Indeed, public opinion polls document a suspicion towards any weapons-technical strategy and a manifest rejection of every particular force structure as unworkable and unacceptable. But such a suspicion towards rearmament should not be mistaken for a repudiation of what those strategies are primarily about. Here it seems that popular opinion is considerably more sophisticated than much professional analysis. As polls over the last decade have repeatedly shown, public opinion, while rejecting particular deployments, overwhelmingly endorses the political purposes of the Alliance and supports NATO as a necessary means for the preservation of certain Western values (Flynn and Rattinger, 1985; Domke, Eichenberg, and Kelleher, 1987; Rochon, 1988; Eichenbeg, 1989). It seems that NATO is more widely appreciated in a political role than in a military one. Such a reading undercuts those from the peace research community who would exploit discontent about weapons systems but who themselves lack a political critique of NATO. At stake with NATO was not merely military security but also the consolidation of domestic consensus over dissident parties, labor movements, peace groups, and all those marginal or liminal groups whose aspirations could not find expression in the postwar order. The genius of NATO as a security alliance was the way in which its particularly modern accounts of development and security were enframed within a widely legitimate strategic discourse of deterrence. By effectively wedding itself to the defense of a distinctly modern, Western, Atlantico-centric cultural project, strategic discourse deflected criticism of the Alliance's otherwise obvious contradictions. The only defense of deterrence was that it worked to fend off a major international war. Until proven wrong by the outbreak of such a war, NATO's strategy was thus the only feasible means of securing that precarious historical construct called "the Western way of life."
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Instrumental arguments on behalf of deterrence effectively depoliticized nuclear arrangements by reducing them to a rational-technical problem of policy adjustment. The irony is that in order to strengthen the hand of deterrence, strategists had to acknowledge the apparent irrationality and absurdity of a security system which cultivated a version of peace through structural intimidation and the threat of mutual annihilation.
The strategiclsecurity enterprise is engaged in a politics of representation which helps constitute and delimit the identities of various peoples (Shapiro, 1988). Strategic studies celebrates the processes of modernity by reifying cultural construction into a completed historical act, enshrined as Western culture. But it is possible to acknowledge or recognize alternative ways of life within that Western space (Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Clifford, 1988). The exercise is a reminder of what, ethnographically speaking, the strategic equation excludes. For the ultimate question forestalled by modern Western strategy has been the one who or what "we" in "the West" are. In other words, the politics of strategy has to do with selecting this or that particular account of human life as dominant. Numerous forms of life are ruled out of the picture as inconsistent with the cultural claims of a singular, modern, progressive industrial order. There are many candidates for that liminal space which escapes Western "identity": Gypsies in Great Britain, those "Traveler" peoples whose caravans represent the last vestiges of freeholders dispossessed by enclosure movements; Balkan guest workers in West German cities, who are not eligible for service in the Bundeswehr but who occupy the kind of marginal work stations now deemed unacceptable by modern Europeans; Lapp reindeer herders, whose presence in the upper reaches of Scandinavia hardly seems a contribution to NATO's Northern Flank; Native Indians in the Canadian Northwest, who now share space with the surveillance installations of NORAD; and the former colonial peoples of the British Empire now seeking refuge in the core. A whole series of marginal categorizations and boundaries could be enumerated, and they need not be limited to the ethnographic. Fractures of class, gender, and race - of partisan politics and religious identity - all demark potential sites of contestation within the Western Alliance. Yet these are unacknowledged, except as internal threats to the unit and "identity" of the West. NATO's representations of modern geopolitical space presuppose an unproblematic singular human identity which all members of the West either embody or aspire towards. This is, after all, what is worth dying for or, in the modern age of deterrence, worth voting monies for in order to "secure." The classical strategic tradition has always enshrined this singular Western space as beyond politics. Those who would disturb it tamper with "order" and Western "stability." This is why oppositional peace groups in the last decade or two have remained so ephemeral in the West (Herf, 1986).Their critiques of militarytechnical strategy underplay the broader parameters of the life secured by
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deterrence strategies and modern weapons systems (Walker, 1984). Thus Western strategists find a greater reserve of support through emphasizing these cultural dimensions of Western policy than through emphasizing the latest round of measures to ensure security against threats from the East. Besides, in the Gorbachev era the invocation of such threats will ring hollow. In the absence of an overwhelmingly plausible sign of danger, there are grounds for exploiting certain political breaches that have recently opened up in NATO. Reading NATO documents and debates today leaves one with the unmistakable impression that the basic problem facing the alliance is the absence of a plausible threat to Western military security (Head, 1989). It turns out that Gorbachev poses the greatest challenge of all to NATO because he refuses to participate in the requisite duplication of the Cold War intertext (Joenniemi, 1989)- something that Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev were too unimaginative to contemplate. Even if Stalin's armies weren't large enough to roll over the West, NATO drew upon the existence of the Soviet's counter-offensive wartime strategy to justify its own existence (Holloway, 1984, 1988189; Snyder, 1987188). Gorbachev's strategy seems to take the Western project at face value and to sign on the Soviet Union as partner in a truly hegemonic global order. This can be seen as the next stage in the evolution of Soviet communism, a system that has always been more productivist and modernist than either its apologists or severest critics have wanted to acknowledge. But it would be too simple-minded to see such a development as confirming, in the words of Francis Fukuyama (1989), "The End of History." Nothing takes care of itself, least of all the completion of modernity writ large. Dramatic recent developments in Eastern Europe and the USSR suggest that initiatives undertaken or set in motion by Gorbachev embody a somewhat more critical and transformative politics than that hailed by Western celebrants of enhanced international interdependence. In effect, Gorbachev is challenging Western representations of modern political life at three levels. First of all, of course, recent Soviet policy calls into question the very idea of a Soviet threat, or a t least of an implacable one which can be countered only by the reciprocal threat of overwhelming counterforce. Second, moves toward "transarmament" and structurally defensive military orientations provided a weapons-technical response to the problem of Continental security. Whether this tendency, already implicit in recent Soviet moves to thin out tank and artillery formations among Warsaw Pact forces, will materialize in full form is a question that remains to be answered. But this initiative, drawing upon recent European debates about non-offensive defense (Bulletin, 1988; Meyer, 1988), is, curiously enough, an instrumental response that meets long-heralded security needs on the very terms presented and championed within strategic analysis. Recent developments in the democratic reorganization of East European countries open up possibilities that longstanding structures will slowly but irreversibly fade away. Gradual liberalization within certain Warsaw Pact
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countries is part of a broader loosening up of Soviet policy towards its eastern security glacis. The Brezhnev Doctrine is now obsolete. A remodernization of NATO defense arrangements seems hardly compatible with either public opinion or the imperatives of increasingly budget-conscious defense officials. Within a relatively brief time, NATO debates about a variety of new, innovative high-tech strategies - the Rogers Plan, AirLand Battle, Follow-On Forces Attack, or even something as straightforward as modernization of Lance short-range systems - have been cast aside as politically unmarketable. In the breach that has opened up, the opportunity has arisen for a reconceptualization of security practices long thought vital to the integrity of the Western Alliance. One need not succumb to blandishments like "the greening of defense budgets" to see that the whole logic of military blocs is increasingly susceptible to questioning from a variety of critical attitudes. The dual effect of domestic liberalization within the East bloc and reduced militarization across the German-German border would present strategists from both sides new opportunities unimaginable a decade ago. Third, and most important, the unraveling of Cold War representations raises for the first time the fundamental issue of Western identity. It is no longer clear who is to be legitimately incorporated within the space of modern Western culture. The imminent reconstitution of Central Europe as a functioning entity is but one version of a larger overturning of categories of political space and culture that were sacrosanct throughout the Cold War era. The divide between East and West was a divide between "us" and "them" (Williams, 1983). For Europeans this was a more violent and arbitrary interpretation of world politics than for North Americans. Today, the bifurcation works less well than ever. The contours of Western identity and values are no longer clearly drawn. In both East and West, modernist orientations toward humankind and nature are striving towards economic modernization through an expanded European community. Yet these cultures also claim a considerable share of orthodox, even fundamentalist, religiosity, including forms of nationalist essentialism that had been mistakenly thought more appropriate to the last century than to the next (Brzezinski, 1989190; Hough 1989190: 36-40). It would therefore be wrong to assume that a new politics of European security can be exhaustively defined in terms of universal striving towards national democratic self-determination. The political movements now poised to redefine the shape and nature of NATO and East-West relations are not readily assimilable within the conventional analytical categories of postwar strategic studies. The nationality strivings of the Soviet Baltic republics, for instance, offer the possibility of confederated state systems with all sorts of cooperation in economics and conventional military security. Simultaneous with such state-directed efforts are the longstanding social movements of opposition that have influenced NATO politics for at least two decades. Labor organizations, student groups, feminist cooperatives, and ecological groups have all been involved in the development of practices which are, to varying degrees, at odds with the singular progressivist
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trajectory of Western industrial culture. Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the peace movement is its critiques of technology and technological discourse (Nelkin and Pollack, 1981). They effectively opened up a space within the logic of modernization that enabled social movements at odds with modernity to secure a legitimate, if still decidedly subordinate, place. The articulation of post-modern, post-statist orientations towards political practice has occurred simultaneously with what can be referred to as the respatialization of the Third World: the realization that poverty, hopelessness, starvation, unequal development, and environmental exhaustion are not exclusively qualities of underdeveloped countries; they are endemic to modern, advanced industrial cities as well. The divide between First and Third World, itself a spatial representation of homogeneous geopolitical space, is effectively breaking down. Sweeping global generalizations, whether about "us" and "them" or about "core," "semi-periphery," and "periphery," are increasingly implausible. Who and what "we" are is not as clear-cut as claimed by analysts wedded to traditions of realism and empiricism, or for that matter, to traditions of materialism (Magnusson and Walker, 1988; Walker, 1988b). Whether he knows it or not, Gorbachev functions as a critical strategic theorist insofar as his actions destabilize and decenter long-heralded assumptions of international life. The self-evident legitimacy of NATO is only the most obvious issue now up for grabs. So, too, is the whole concept of security, along with the identity of those whose "security" was supposedly ensured by weapons-technical strategies of deterrence (Buzan, 1983; Walker, 1988a). It remains to be seen whether a modernist impulse will be able to contain these new dimensions of culture and political identity. The integrationist vision of 1992 is still bounded by a narrow, secular, and ultimately Western vision of political identity. It may be more enlightened than the attempt to reimpose the twenty-five years of the American Century through the techno-strategic vision of Discriminate Deterrence (Commission, 1988). But neither of these perspectives is capable of acknowledging the ongoing politics of redefining cultural "order." Classical strategic thought has never dared to address this dimension of security policy, nor has critical peace research. The world created under NATO's guidance is no longer subject to containment. Its boundaries have been eroded at the eastern-most margin. The result has been an unprecedented opening up of social and cultural politics. But this process is not confined to the member states of the Warsaw Pact. It has been going on all along in the West, despite NATO's efforts to formalize a unitary identity as part of its strategic project.
Author's Note The author thanks Hayward Alker, Richard K. Ashley, G.M. Dillon, Jane Nadel-Klein, and R.B.J. Walker for their criticisms.
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Soft Power Joseph S. Nye, Jr.
T
he Cold War is over and Americans are trying to understand their place in a world without a defining Soviet threat. Polls report that nearly half the public believes the country is in decline, and that those who believe in decline tend to favor protectionism and to counsel withdrawal from what they consider "overextended international commitments." In a world of growing interdependence, such advice is counterproductive and could bring on the decline it is supposed to avert; for if the most powerful country fails to lead, the consequences for international stability could be disastrous. Throughout history, anxiety about decline and shifting balances of power has been accompanied by tension and miscalculation. Now that Soviet power is declining and Japanese power rising, misleading theories of American decline and inappropriate analogies between the United States and Great Britain in the late nineteenth century have diverted our attention away from the real issue - how power is changing in world politics. The United States is certainly less powerful a t the end of the twentieth century than it was in 1945. Even conservative estimates show that the U.S. share of global product has declined from more than a third of the total after World War I1 to a little more than a fifth in the 1980s. That change, however, reflects the artificial effect of World War 11: Unlike the other great powers, the United States was strengthened by the war. But that artificial preponderance was bound to erode as other countries regained their economic health. The important fact is that the U.S. economy's share of the global product has been relatively constant for the past decade and a half. The Council on Competitiveness finds that the U.S. share of world product has averaged 23 per cent each year since the mid-1970s. The CIA, using numbers that reflect the purchasing power of different currencies, reports that the American share of world product increased slightly from 25 per cent in 1975 to 26 per cent in 1988. These studies suggest that the effect of World War 11 lasted about a quarter century and that most of the decline worked its way through the system by the mid-1970s. In fact, the big adjustment of American commitments Source: Forezgn Polrcy, 80: 153-71
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occurred with then President Richard Nixon's withdrawal from Vietnam and the end of the convertibility of the dollar into gold. The dictionary tells us that power means an ability to do things and control others, to get others to do what they otherwise would not. Because the ability to control others is often associated with the possession of certain resources, politicians and diplomats commonly define power as the possession of population, territory, natural resources, economic size, military forces, and political stability. For example, in the agrarian economies of eighteenthcentury Europe, population was a critical power resource since it provided a base for taxes and recruitment of infantry. Traditionally the test of a great power was its strength in war. Today, however, the definition of power is losing its emphasis on military force and conquest that marked earlier eras. The factors of technology, education, and economic growth are becoming more significant in international power, while geography, population, and raw materials are becoming somewhat less important. If so, are we entering a "Japanese period" in world politics? Japan has certainly done far better with its strategy as a trading state since 1945 than it did with its military strategy to create a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere in the 1930s. On the other hand, Japan's security in relation to its large military neighbors, China and the Soviet Union, and the safety of its sea routes depend heavily on U.S. protection. While they may diminish, these problems will not vanish with the end of the Cold War. One should not leap too quickly to the conclusion that all trends favor economic power or countries like Japan. What can we say about changes in the distribution of power resources in the coming decades? Political leaders often use the term "multipolarity" to imply the return to a balance among a number of states with roughly equal power resources analogous to that of the nineteenth century. But this is not likely to be the situation at the turn of the century, for in terms of power resources, all the potential challengers except the United States are deficient in some respect. The Soviet Union lags economically, China remains a lessdeveloped country, Europe lacks political unity, and Japan is deficient both in military power and in global ideological appeal. If economic reforms reverse Soviet decline, if Japan develops a full-fledged nuclear and conventional military capability, or if Europe becomes dramatically more unified, there may be a return to classical multipolarity in the twenty-first century. But barring such changes, the United States is likely to retain a broader range of power resources - military, economic, scientific, cultural, and ideological than other countries, and the Soviet Union may lose its superpower status.
T h e Great Power Shift
The coming century may see continued American preeminence, but the sources of power in world politics are likely to undergo major changes that
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will create new difficulties for all countries in achieving their goals. Proof of power lies not in resources but in the ability to change the behavior of states. Thus, the critical question for the United States is not whether it will start the next century as the superpower with the largest supply of resources, but to what extent it will be able to control the political environment and get other countries to do what it wants. Some trends in world politics suggest that it will be more difficult in the future for any great power to control the political environment. The problem for the United States will be less the rising challenge of another major power than a general diffusion of power. Whereas nineteenth-century Britain faced new challengers, the twenty-first century United States will face new challenges. As world politics becomes more complex, the power of all major states to gain their objectives will be diminished. To understand what is happening to the United States today, the distinction between power over other countries and power over outcomes must be clear. Although the United States still has leverage over particular countries, it has far less leverage over the system as a whole. It is less well-placed to attain its ends unilaterally, but it is not alone in this situation. All major states will have to confront the changing nature of power in world politics. Such changes, of course, are not entirely new. For example, the rapid growth of private actors operating across international borders, whether large corporations or political groups, was widely recognized in the early 1970s. Even Henry Kissinger, with his deeply rooted belief in classical balance-ofpower politics, conceded in a 1975 speech that "we are entering a new era. Old international patterns are crumbling. ... The world has become interdependent in economics, in communications, in human aspirations." By the late 1970s, however, the American political mood had shifted. Iran's seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan seemed to reaffirm the role of military force and the primacy of the traditional security agenda. Ronald Reagan's presidency accentuated these trends in the early 1980s. The U.S. defense budget increased in real terms for five straight years, arms control was downgraded, and public opposition to nuclear forces and deterrence grew. Conventional military force was used successfully, albeit against the extremely weak states of Grenada and Libya. The shifting agenda of world politics discredited the 1970s' concern with interdependence and restored the traditional emphasis on military power. But interdependence continued to grow, and the world of the 1980s was not the same as that of the 1950s. The appropriate response to the changes occurring in world politics today is not to abandon the traditional concern for the military balance of power, but to accept its limitations and to supplement it with insights about interdependence. In the traditional view, states are the only significant actors in world politics and only a few large states really matter. But today other actors are becoming increasingly important. Although they lack military power, transnational corporations have enormous economic resources. Thirty corporations today each have annual sales greater than the gross
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national products (GNPs) of 90 countries. In the 1980s, the annual profits of IBM and Royal DutcWShell Group were each larger than the central government budgets of Colombia, Kenya, or Yugoslavia. Multinational corporations are sometimes more relevant to achieving a country's goals than are other states. The annual overseas production by such corporations exceeds the total value of international trade. In a regional context, a portrait of the Middle East conflict that did not include the superpowers would be woefully inadequate, but so would a description that did not tell of transnational religious groups, oil companies, and terrorist organizations. The issue is not whether state or nonstate actors are more important - states usually are. The point is that in modern times, more complex coalitions affect outcomes. With changing actors in world politics come changing goals. In the traditional view, states give priority to military security to ensure their survival. Today, however, states must consider new dimensions of security. National security has become more complicated as threats shift from the military (that is, threats against territorial integrity) to the economic and ecological. For example, Canadians today are not afraid that U.S. soldiers will burn Toronto for a second time (as in 1813); rather they fear that Toronto will be programmed into a backwater by a Texas computer. The forms of vulnerability have increased, and trade-offs among policies are designed to deal with different vulnerabilities. The United States, for instance, might enhance its energy security by sending naval forces to the Persian Gulf; but it could accomplish the same goal by enlarging its strategic petroleum reserve, by imposing a gasoline tax to encourage conservation at home, and by improving cooperation in institutions like the International Energy Agency. While military force remains the ultimate form of power in a self-help system, the use of force has become more costly for modern great powers than it was in earlier centuries. Other instruments such as communications, organizational and institutional skills, and manipulation of interdependence have become important. Contrary to some rhetorical flourishes, interdependence does not mean harmony. Rather, it often means unevenly balanced mutual dependence. Just as the less enamored of two lovers may manipulate the other, the less vulnerable of two states may use subtle threats to their relationship as a source of power. Further, interdependence is often balanced differently in different spheres such as security, trade, and finance. Thus, creating and resisting linkages between issues when a state is either less or more vulnerable than another becomes the art of the power game. Political leaders use international institutions to discourage or promote such linkages; they shop for the forum that defines the scope of an issue in the manner best suiting their interests. As the instruments of power change, so do strategies. Traditionalists consider the goal of security and the instrument of military force to be linked by a strategy of balancing power. States wishing to preserve their independence from military intimidation follow a balancing strategy to limit the relative power of other states. Today, however, economic and ecological issues involve large elements of mutual advantage that can be achieved only through
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cooperation. These issues are often critical to the reelection of political leaders. A French president today would not interfere with Germany's increased economic growth because German growth is critical to French economic growth. The French decision to forego an independent economic policy and remain in the European monetary system in the early 1980s is one example of such interdependence. Traditionalist accounts of world politics often speak of an international system that results from the balancing strategies of states. Although bipolarity and multipolarity are useful terms, today different spheres of world politics have different distributions of power - that is, different power structures. Military power, particularly nuclear, remains largely bipolar in its distribution. But in trade, where the European Community acts as a unit, power is multipolar. Ocean resources, money, space, shipping, and airlines each have somewhat different distributions of power. The power of states varies as well, as does the significance of nonstate actors in different spheres. For example, the politics of international debt cannot be understood without considering the power of private banks. If military power could be transferred freely into the realms of economics and the environment, the different structures would not matter; and the overall hierarchy determined by military strength would accurately predict outcomes in world politics. But military power is more costly and less transferable today than in earlier times. Thus, the hierarchies that characterize different issues are more diverse. The games of world politics encompass different players at different tables with different piles of chips. They can transfer winnings among tables, but often only at a considerable discount. The military game and the overall structure of the balance of power dominate when the survival of states is clearly at stake, but in much of modern world polit~cs, physical survival is not the most pressing issue.
Converting Power The fragmentation of world politics into many different spheres has made power resources less fungible, that is, less transferable from sphere to sphere. Money is fungible, in that it can be easily converted from one currency to another. Power has always been less fungible than money, but it is even less so today than in earlier periods. In the eighteenth century, a monarch with a full treasury could purchase infantry to conquer new provinces, which, in turn, could enrich the treasury. This was essentially the strategy of Frederick I1 of Prussia, for example, when in 1740 he seized Austria's province of Silesia. Today, however, the direct use of force for economic gain is generally too costly and dangerous for modern great powers. Even short of aggression, the translation of economic into military power resources may be very costly. For instance, there is no economic obstacle to Japan's developing a major nuclear or conventional force, but the political cost both at home and
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in the reaction of other countries would be considerable. Militarization might then reduce rather than increase Japan's ability to achieve its ends. Because power is a relationship, by definition it implies some context. Diminished fungibility means that specifying the context is increasingly important in estimating the actual power that can be derived from power resources. More than ever, one must ask the question, "Power for what?" Yet at the same time, because world politics has only partly changed and the traditional geopolitical agenda is still relevant, some fungibility of military power remains. The protective role of military force is a relevant asset in bargaining among states. The dependence of conservative oil-producing states on the United States for their security, for example, limited their leverage on the United States during the 1973 oil crisis. The United States is still the ultimate guarantor of the military security of Europe and Japan, and that role is a source of bargaining power in negotiations with its allies. In general, the allies' need for protection strengthens American influence, and may continue to do so even with a reduced Soviet threat. During the Cold War, the United States often worried about the frailty of its allies and tended to sacrifice some economic interests in its effort to contain the perceived Soviet menace. Despite the waning of that threat, if the United States worries less than its allies do, it may be able to demand more of them. To evaluate power in a post-Cold War world, it is necessary to recognize instruments and balance-of-power strategies necessary for a successful policy. But new elements in the modern world are diffusing power away from all the great powers. Thus, any successful strategy must incorporate both continuity and change. The great powers of today are less able to use their traditional power resources to achieve their purposes than in the past. On many issues, private actors and small states have become more powerful. At least five trends have contributed to this diffusion of power: economic interdependence, transnational actors, nationalism in weak states, the spread of technology, and changing political issues. New forms of communications and transportation have had a revolutionary effect on economic interdependence. A century ago, it took two weeks to cross the Atlantic; in 1927, Charles Lindbergh did it in 33 hours; today, the Concorde flies across in three and a half hours. Modern telecommunications are instantaneous, and satellites and fiber-optic cables have led to a tenfold increase in overseas telephone calls in the last decade. The declining costs of transportation and communication have revolutionized global markets and accelerated the development of transnational corporations that transfer economic activity across borders. World trade has grown more rapidly than world product, becoming more important in all major economies. Trade has more than doubled its role in the U.S. economy over the past two decades. Changes in financial markets are even more dramatic. International monetary flows are some 25 times the world's average daily trade in goods. The rapid expansion of Eurocurrency and Eurobond markets (that is, currencies held outside their home country) has eroded the
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ability of national authorities to control their capital markets. In 1975, foreign exchange markets handled some $10-15 billion daily; by 1986, they handled $200 billion. Governments can intervene in such markets; but if they do so with a heavy hand, they will incur enormous costs in their own economic growth and risk unintended effects. For instance, efforts by the U.S. government in the 1960s to slow the export of capital by US.-based multinational firms encouraged those firms to keep and borrow dollars outside the United States. The result was the rapid burgeoning of Eurocurrency markets outside U.S. controls. In addition to constraining the way states pursue their national interests, transnational actors affect the way such interests are initially defined. Transnational investment creates new interests and complicates coalitions in world politics. For example, Honda of America is steadily turning into an American car maker. It plans to export 50,000 cars annually to Japan in the early 1990s. American officials are now pressing Europeans to open their market to Japanese automobiles produced in the United States. In other words, transnational investments have changed an American interest. The American case is not unique. For years, France restricted Japanese automobiles to 3 per cent of the French market and restricted investment by Japanese companies in France. When Japanese automakers began to establish plants in other European countries that could export to France, the French government dropped its restrictions. Transnational investments changed a long-standing French policy. The diffusion of power to private transnational actors and the resulting complication of national interests is likely to continue even though it is not recognized in many comparisons of the power resources of major states. Modernization, urbanization, and increased communication in developing countries have also diffused power from government to private actors. Military power is more difficult to apply today than in the past because a social awakening has stirred nationalism in otherwise poor or weak states. This increased social mobilization makes military intervention and external rule more costly. The nineteenth-century great powers carved out and ruled colonial empires with a handful of troops. In 1953, the United States was able to restore the Shah of Iran to his throne through a minor covert action. It is hard to imagine, however, how many troops would have been needed to restore the Shah in the socially mobilized and nationalistic Iran of 1979. The United States and the Soviet Union found the costs of maintaining troops in Vietnam and Afghanistan unsupportable. In each case, the cause was less an increase in the power of a weaker state than the costliness for outsiders of ruling actively antagonistic populations. Another trend in the diffusion of power is the spread of modern technology, which has enhanced the capabilities of backward states. While the superpowers have kept a large lead in military technology, the forces that many Third World states can deploy in the 1990s make regional intervention more costly than in the 1950s. In addition, at least a dozen Third World
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states have developed significant arms export industries. Meanwhile, many arms recipients have sought to diversify their purchases in order to gain leverage over the major or sole supplier. When arms are supplied from outside, the supplier often has leverage through technical assistance, spare parts, and replacements. The growth of indigenous arms industries removes that leverage. In addition, more countries are acquiring sophisticated weapons capabilities. Today about 20 countries have the capability to make chemical weapons, and by the year 2000 an estimated 15 Third World countries will be producing their own ballistic missiles. Five states had the bomb when the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty was signed in 1968; India, Israel, Pakistan, and South Africa have since developed some nuclear capability. Within the next decade Argentina, Brazil, and several others might also develop military nuclear capability. However, a small nuclear capability will not make these states contenders for global power; in fact, it may increase the risks they face if their neighbors follow suit or if the weapons fall into the hands of rebel or terrorist groups. On the other hand, nuclear capability would add to these states' regional power and increase the potential costs of regional intervention by larger powers. Technology also increases the power of private groups. For instance, handheld antiaircraft missiles helped guerrillas in Afghanistan and new plastic explosives are effective tools for terrorists. The ability of great powers with impressive traditional power resources to control their environments is also diminished by the changing nature of issues in world politics. Increasingly, the issues today do not pit one state against another; instead, they are issues in which all states try to control nonstate transnational actors. The solutions to many current issues of transnational interdependence will require collective action and international cooperation. These include ecological changes (acid rain and global warming), health epidemics such as AIDS, illicit trade in drugs, and terrorism. Such issues are transnational because they have domestic roots and cross international borders. As the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in the USSR demonstrated, even a domestic issue like the safety of nuclear reactors can suddenly become transnational. Although force may sometimes play a role, traditional instruments of power are rarely sufficient to deal with the new dilemmas of world politics. New power resources, such as the capacity for effective communication and for developing and using multilateral institutions, may prove more relevant. Moreover, cooperation will often be needed from small, weak states that are not fully capable of managing their own domestic drug, health, or ecological problems. For example, the United States cannot use its traditional power resources to force Peru to curtail the production of cocaine if a weak Peruvian government cannot control private gangs of drug dealers. And if the U.S. government cannot control the American demand, a transnational market for cocaine will survive. Although the traditional power resources of economic assistance and military force can assist in coping with terrorism, proliferation, or drugs, the ability of any great power to control its
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environment and to achieve what it wants is often not as great as traditional hard power indicators would suggest. The changing nature of international politics has also made intangible forms of power more important. National cohesion, universalistic culture, and international institutions are taking on additional significance. Power is passing from the "capital-rich" to the "information-rich." Information is becoming more and more plentiful, but the flexibility to act first on new information is rare. Information becomes power, especially before it spreads. Thus a capacity for timely response to new information is a critical power resource. With the rise of an information-based economy, raw materials have become less important and organizational skills and flexibility more important. Product cycles are shortening and technology is moving toward highly flexible production systems, in which the craft-era tradition of custom-tailoring products can be incorporated into modern manufacturing plants. Japan has been particularly adept at such flexible manufacturing processes; the United States and Europe need to do more, and the Soviet Union and China lag seriously behind. Timely response to information is not only important in manufacturing but also in critical services such as finance, insurance, and transportation. In the past, markets were defined by the limits of transportation and communication between buyers and sellers. Today, however, the new means of communication convey immediate information on market trends to buyers and sellers worldwide. Satellites and fiber-optic cables instantaneously and continuously link people watching little green screens in London, New York, and Tokyo. That China and the Soviet Union do not significantly participate in these transnational credit markets seriously limits their access to intangible aspects of power. In the 1980s, other governments such as Britain and Japan had to follow the United States in the deregulation of money markets and financial operations in order t o preserve their positions in these important markets. Intangible changes in knowledge also affect military power. Traditionally, governments have invested in human espionage. But now major powers like the United States and the Soviet Union employ continuous photographic and electronic surveillance from space, providing quick access to a variety of economic, political, and military information. Other countries, such as France, are beginning to make low-resolution satellite information commercially available, but the United States leads in high-resolution information. Another intangible aspect of power arises from interdependence. The overt distribution of economic resources poorly describes the balance of power between interdependent states. On the one hand, the influence of the ostensibly stronger state may be limited by the greater organization and concentration of its smaller counterpart. This difference helps to account for Canada's surprising success in bargaining with the United States. On the other hand, if a relationship is beneficial to both parties, the possibility that the weaker side might collapse under pressure limits the leverage of the seemingly stronger partner. The "power of the debtor" has long been known: If a man owes a
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bank $10,000, the bank has power over him. But if he owes $100 million, he has power over the bank. If Mexico or some Caribbean states became too weak to deal with internal poverty or domestic problems, the United States would face a new foreign policy agenda involving larger influxes of migrants, drugs, or contraband. Similarly, the failure of developing countries to prevent destruction of their forests will affect the global climate; yet those states' very weakness will diminish other countries' power to influence them. The current U.S. neglect of weak Third World countries may reduce its ability to affect their policies on the new transnational issues. The United States will have to devote more attention to the paradoxical power that grows out of political and economic chaos and weakness in poor countries.
T h e Changing F a c e of Power These trends suggest a second, more attractive way of exercising power than traditional means. A state may achieve the outcomes it prefers in world politics because other states want to follow it or have agreed to a situation that produces such effects. In this sense, it is just as important to set the agenda and structure the situations in world politics as to get others to change in particular cases. This second aspect of power - which occurs when one country gets other countries to want what it wants - might be called co-optive or soft power in contrast with the hard or command power of ordering others to do what it wants. Parents of teenagers have long known that if they have shaped their child's beliefs and preferences, their power will be greater and more enduring than if they rely only on active control. Similarly, political leaders and philosophizers have long understood the power of attractive ideas or the ability to set the political agenda and determine the framework of debate in a way that shapes others' preferences. The ability to affect what other countries want tends to be associated with intangible power resources such as culture, ideology, and institutions. Soft co-optive power is just as important as hard command power. If a state can make its power seem legitimate in the eyes of others, it will encounter less resistance to its wishes. If its culture and ideology are attractive, others will more willingly follow. If it can establish international norms consistent with its society, it is less likely to have t o change. If it can support institutions that make other states wish to channel or limit their activities in ways the dominant state prefers, it may be spared the costly exercise of coercive or hard power. In general, power is becoming less transferable, less coercive, and less tangible. Modern trends and changes in political issues are having significant effects on the nature of power and the resources that produce it. Cooptive power - getting others to want what you want - and soft power resources - cultural attraction, ideology, and international institutions - are not new. In the early postwar period, the Soviet Union profited greatly from
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such soft resources as communist ideology, the myth of inevitability, and transnational communist institutions. Various trends today are making cooptive behavior and soft power resources relatively more important. Given the changes in world politics, the use of power is becoming less coercive, at least among the major states. The current instruments of power range from diplomatic notes through economic threats to military coercion. In earlier periods, the costs of such coercion were relatively low. Force was acceptable and economies were less interdependent. Early in this century, the United States sent marines and customs agents to collect debts in some Caribbean countries; but under current conditions, the direct use of American troops against small countries like Nicaragua carries greater costs. Manipulation of interdependence under current conditions is also more costly. Economic interdependence usually carries benefits in both directions; and threats to disrupt a relationship, if carried out, can be very expensive. For example, Japan might want the United States to reduce its budget deficit, but threatening to refuse to buy American Treasury bonds would be likely to disrupt financial markets and to produce enormous costs for Japan as well as for the United States. Because the use of force has become more costly, less threatening forms of power have grown increasingly attractive. Co-optive power is the ability of a country to structure a situation so that other countries develop preferences or define their interests in ways consistent with its own. This power tends to arise from such resources as cultural and ideological attraction as well as rules and institutions of international regimes. The United States has more co-optive power than other countries. Institutions governing the international economy, such as the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, tend to embody liberal, free-market principles that coincide in large measure with American society and ideology. Multinational corporations are another source of co-optive power. British author Susan Strange argued in her 1988 book States and Markets that U.S. power in the world economy has increased as a result of transnational production: Washington may have lost some of its authority over the U.S.-based transnationals, but their managers still carry U.S. passports, can be subpoenaed in U.S. courts, and in war or national emergency would obey Washington first. Meanwhile, the U.S. government has gained new authority over a great many foreign corporations inside the United States. All of them are acutely aware that the U.S. market is the biggest prize. This power arises in part from the fact that 34 per cent of the largest multinational corporations are headquartered in the United States (compared to 18 per cent in Japan) and in part from the importance of the American market in any global corporate strategy. American culture is another relatively inexpensive and useful soft power resource. Obviously, certain aspects of American culture are unattractive to other people, and there is always danger of bias in evaluating cultural
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sources of power. But American popular culture, embodied in products and communications, has widespread appeal. Young Japanese who have never been to the United States wear sports jackets with the names of American colleges. Nicaraguan television broadcast American shows even while the government fought American-backed guerrillas. Similarly, Soviet teenagers wear blue jeans and seek American recordings, and Chinese students used a symbol modeled on the Statue of Liberty during the 1989 uprisings. Despite the Chinese government's protests against U.S. interference, Chinese citizens were as interested as ever in American democracy and culture. Of course, there is an element of triviality and fad in popular behavior, but it is also true that a country that stands astride popular channels of communication has more opportunities to get its messages across and to affect the preferences of others. According to past studies by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, the United States has been exporting about seven times as many television shows as the next largest exporter (Britain) and has had the only global network for film distribution. Although American films account for only 6-7 per cent of all films made, they occupy about 50 per cent of world screentime. In 1981, the United States was responsible for 80 per cent of worldwide transmission and processing of data. The American language has become the lingua franca of the global economy. Although Japanese consumer products and cuisine have recently become more fashionable, they seem less associated with an implicit appeal to a broader set of values than American domination of popular communication. The success of Japan's manufacturing sector provides it with an important source of soft power, but Japan is somewhat limited by the inward orientation of its culture. While Japan has been extraordinarily successful in accepting foreign technology, it has been far more reluctant to accept foreigners. Japan's relations with China, for example, have been hampered by cultural insensitivities. Many Japanese are concerned about their lack of "internationalization" and their failure to project a broader message. While Americans can also be parochial and inward-oriented, the openness of the American culture to various ethnicities and the American values of democracy and human rights exert international influence. West European countries also derive soft power from their democratic institutions, but America's relative openness to immigrants compared to Japan and Europe is an additional source of strength. As European scholar Ralf Dahrendorf has observed, it is "relevant that millions of people all over the world would wish to live in the United States and that indeed people are prepared to risk their lives in order to get there." Maintaining this appeal is important. In June 1989, after President George Bush criticized the Chinese government for killing student protesters in China, ordinary Chinese seemed more supportive of the United States than ever before. Subsequently, by sending a delegation of too high a level to Beijing to seek reconciliation, Bush squandered some of those soft-power resources. When ideals are an
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important source of power, the classic distinction between realpolitik and liberalism becomes blurred. The realist who focuses only on the balance of hard power will miss the power of transnational ideas. Amer~cansare rightly concerned about the future shape of a post-Cold War world, but it is a mistake to portray the problem as American decline rather than diffusion of power. Even so, concern about decline might be good for the United States if it cut through complacency and prodded Americans to deal with some of their serious domestic problems. However, pollsters find that excessive anxiety about decline turns American opinion toward nationalistic and protectionist policies that could constrain the U.S. ability to cope with issues created by growing international interdependence. There is no virtue in either overstatement or understatement of American strength. The former leads to failure to adapt, the latter to inappropriate responses such as treating Japan as the new enemy in place of the Soviet Union. As the world's wealthiest country, the United States should be able to pay for both its international commitments and its domestic investments. America is rich but through its political process acts poor. In real terms, GNP is more than twice what it was in 1960, but Americans today spend much less of their GNP on international leadership. The prevailing view is "we can't afford it," despite the fact that U.S. taxes represent a smaller percentage of gross domestic product than those of other advanced industrial countries. This suggests a problem of domestic political leadership rather than long-term economic decline. As has happened many times before, the mix of resources that shapes international power is changing. But that does not mean that the world must expect the cycle of hegemonic conflict with its attendant world wars to repeat itself. The United States retains more traditional hard power resources than any other country. It also has the soft ideological and institutional resources to preserve its lead in the new domains of transnational interdependence. In this sense, the situation is quite different from that of Britain at the century's beginning. Loose historical analogies and falsely deterministic political theories are worse than merely academic; they may distract Americans from the true issues confronting them. The problem for U.S. power after the Cold War will be less the new challengers for hegemony than the new challenges of transnational interdependence.
Note This article draws from his 1990 book, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books).
Security and Emancipation Ken Booth
Word Problems and World Problems
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ur work is our words, but our words do not work any more. They have not worked for some time. We can obviously start with the misleading label - 'International Polities' - which is given to our subject. As a result of this problem, I have wanted to use increasing numbers of inverted commas; but most have never seen the light of day because copy-editors have regarded them as an over-indulgence. Even so, the very temptation of these little scratches indicates that words at the heart of the subject are in trouble: We talk about 'sovereignty' but today it often comes down to arguing over symbols (like whether to keep the pint, or whether the queen's head should be on the Ecu). Sovereignty is a token of its former self. It is the colour of the flag people wear on their post-Fordist-produced boxer shorts. We talk about 'states'. But many only exist juridically, not as 'social facts'.' Many 'states' resemble mafia neighbourhoods - protection rackets - rather than the national societies of our text-books. We still talk about 'the superpowers'. But the United States cannot presently threaten a medium-sized war and keep open the national zoo, while the Soviet Union can still wreck the world in some circumstances, but cannot attract a single immigrant. And what about important words such as 'war', 'strategy' and 'weapon'? They each ring Clausewitzian bells of reasonable instrumentality, but when the adjective 'nuclear' is put in front of them, as it often is, Clausewitz marches out of the window. These, and other key concepts, are not trusty words with which to go theoretical tiger shooting. Source: Review of International Studies, 17(4)(1991): 313-26.
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Sharp subjects like international politics, and particularly the sub-field of strategic studies, want sharp-edged language. For realists even the software must be hardware. But word problems proliferate. There is the difficulty of inventing new words to replace those becoming obsolescent; the virtual impossibility of reinventing the meaning of old words for new circumstances; the conservatism of most people in the face of well-established concepts; and there is the desire of copy-editors for tidy pages. Other word problems do not help: the familiar 'semantic debasement" of concepts by ~oliticians;the notorious euphemisms used by strategists to mask reality; and the almost criminal obscurity of some international theorists. We are the creatures of words, as well as their creators, and in the study of international relations the medium often becomes the message. Words are all we have. Consequently we want the key ones to be tough enough for generalization and sharp enough to cut through the blizzard of information. In the seminar room it is usually possible to convince ourselves, and even more so our students, that the basic concepts are sound. Outside the seminar room, however, the language trends describing what is happening have been moving away from the neat and orderly world of mainstream theory. The dominant traditional language of the subject remains sharp-edged, and is mostly a language of division and exclusion. Yet the dominant processes now shaping world ~ o l i t i c require s words which imply a more porous, inclusive and interpenetrating world. Outside the seminar room the trends are towards interdependence, decomposing sovereignty, transparency, spreading capitalism, overlapping identities and so on. These words, it should be said, do not necessarily imply a future of international cooperation. For one thing, we cannot expect to deal successfully with world problems if we cannot sort out our word problems.
The Interregnum
One of the interesting word problems at the moment involves the difficulty of giving a satisfactory name to the present stage of world affairs. The phrase 'post-Cold War world' is widely used, but it is not apposite. The end of the Cold War obviously partly defines when we are living, but there is, and has been for years, much more to this turbulent era: the growth of complex interdependence, the erosion of sovereignty, amazing advances in communications, the declining utility of force, the degradation of nature, huge population growth, the internationalization of the world economy, the spread of global life styles, constant technological innovation, the dissemination of modern weaponry, the growing scope for non-state actors and so on. All these trends, and more, are changing the context of international studies, and too few books capture it. James Rosenau's latest, Turbulence in World Politics, is a rich exception.' Those processes described by Rosenau and just listed, are interacting and changing the context of the lives of people as individuals and
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groups. Rosenau describes our times as 'post-international politics'. This is meant to suggest the decline of long-standing patterns, as more and more of the interactions that sustain world politics do not directly involve states. Economic and loyalty patterns are becoming more complex. A recent book asks: 'Are Korean stocks purchased in London by a Turk part of the Korean, British or Turkish economy?' The answer it gives breaks out of the state framework and concludes that they are clearly part of a more complicated global e ~ o n o m y Meanwhile, .~ there is the simultaneous development of both more local and more global identities, as people want meaning and authenticity in their lives, as well as economic well-being. The local/global sense of identification is not mutually exclusive; it is part of the development of the more complex and overlapping identities which will characterize the future. The result will be the breaking down of the statist Tebbit-prinzip: ein passport, ein leader, ein cricket team. If we must name things correctly before we can 'live in truth', as Vaclev Have1 has put it, we need to name when we are living5 Marxism Today's label, 'New Times', is the most helpful so far. But if an entirely satisfactory label is still to be conceived, there is at least one neat form of words, from 60 years ago, which speaks exactly to the present. 'The old is dying,' Gramsci wrote, 'and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid s y m p t ~ m s . An ' ~ 'interregnum' is a useful way to think about the present. Thucydides would not find himself at a loss in an international relations seminar, as we talk about the role of power and the prevalence of mistrust between states; but his mind would be completely blown by such forces shaping the context of world politics as the terrible destructiveness of modern weapons, the 3 million people a day who zigzag the world by air, the frightening destruction of natural life, and the working fax machine, which knows no country. 'We are as we are because we got that way' is a typical Kenneth Boulding aphorism. How we get to become what we become (beyond the interregnum) will partly depend on our images and vision. There is always a dynamic interplay between image and reality in human relationships. If we insist upon old images, the future will naturally tend to replicate the past.
A Turning Point for Inter-State War
The forces shaping the new context for world politics, as ever, offer both dangers and opportunities. What demands our pressing attention is the unprecedented destruction threatened by modern military technology and environmental damage. Since the direct and indirect costs of failure in what might be termed global management are now so high, conscious cultural evolution is imperative.' One area where this has become increasingly apparent is security, which has been the first obligation of governments and is the transcendent value of strategic studies, a dominant sub-field of international politics since the mid-1950s.
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Until recently the security problematic was well-focused. A group of people like us, turning up at a conference like this, could predict what a speaker would talk about if 'security' was in the title of a talk. It is not long ago when issues such as Cruise, Pershing, SDI and the SS-20 made strategists out of all of us, and gave President Reagan sleepless afternoons. The dominating security questions were: Is the Soviet threat growing? What is the strategic balance? And would the deployment of a particular weapon help stability? In that period of looking at world politics through a missiletube and gun-sight, weapons provided most of the questions, and they provided most of the answers - whatever the weapon, whatever the context, and whatever the cost. This is brought out in a typical story about Richard Perle.8 In the early 1980s Perle based some of his arguments against the Nuclear Freeze movement on the proposition that nuclear weapons 'are good if they promote stability and contribute to deterrence of war, and bad if they diminish stability and weaken deterrence'. This is a proposition all except outright nuclear pacifists might accept. But then Perle characteristically proceeded to argue in favour of all the components of the Reagan administration's extravagant nuclear build up, some of which was very difficult to justify in terms of 'stability'. We live in what has been called a 'weapons culture'. Clausewitz does not always rule: Freud is sometimes a better guide. At the press conference which Henry Kissinger gave on the Mayaguez incident, just after the humiliating fall of Saigon, the Secretary of State declared: 'We are not going around looking for opportunities to prove our manhood'. A sharp-eared woman reporter later wrote that Kissinger's comment was curious, for nobody up to that point had suggested that what he was denying might have been the case; and so, she added, 'at a level very close to his consciousness, Secretary Kissinger knew that this was precisely what America's reaction had been all about'.' Reading between the lines is one of the enlivening aspects of the postmodern tendency in the study of international politics.I0 Any approach which makes us more self-aware of the scratches we (or increasingly our machines) put on paper is to be welcomed. But trying to explain the meaning of everything can obscure that meaning is not everything. Politics is about deciding, but the subtext is proving a disengaged standpoint for decisions. Post-modernism without praxis (or even with), advanced by Legends in their own logogames, offers no escape from might is right. Military questions will obviously continue to have an important part in the concerns of all students of international politics. However, it is doubtful whether they will be as central a preoccupation, except for some obvious regional conflicts. This is because the institution of inter-state war is in historic decline. History shows man to have been a truly inventive animal when it comes to war, always thinking of new things t o fight about. But most of those reasons now appear quite bizarre. Who today would kill and be killed in large numbers in order to procure a bride for a royal prince? Or to ensure foreign ships dipped their flags in salute? In the past intelligent people were
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willing to accept heavy costs for such 'benefits'. Today states will only fight, with the odd deviant, if they or their allies and associates are actually attacked. Otherwise states are running out of motives for war. Within states it is a different matter; there is no diminution of internal violence. Given the changing costs and benefits of inter-state war, it is too soon in history to describe the international system and the logic of anarchy as immutably a 'war system'. Indeed, there are accumulating signs that world politics is fitfully coming to the end of a 350-year span of history, which was dominated by the military competition between the technologically advanced states of the north, with realist outlooks, Machiavellian ethics and a Clausewitzian philosophy of war. The period of history just described - the 'Westphalian system' - produced a game, in Raymond Aron's noted formulation, played by diplomats and soldiers on behalf of statesmen. Through these centuries the security game states learned to play was 'power politics', with threats producing counterthreats, alliances counteralliances and so on. This has been the basic raw material of strategic studies for the past thirty years. The question we now face is: what security game should be played in the 'New Times' which do not yet have a suitable name?
Security in Our New Times
The elements of the new security game I want to propose should not be unfamiliar. The ingredients include ideas from such diverse sources as the World Society School, alternative security thinking, classical international relations, critical theory, peace research, strategic studies, and neo-realism. If these different approaches are conceived as tramlines, some are to be extended, some bent and others turned back on themselves, until they all reach a common point. I call this point of convergence utopian realism. It is a mixture of what William T.R. Fox called 'empirical realism'" with some notion of what others would call global ethics, or world order principles. The most obvious difference between security from a utopian realist perspective and traditional security thinking lies in the former's holistic character and non-statist approach. The last decade or so has seen a growing unease with the traditional concept of security, which privileges the state and emphasizes military power. This unease was expressed by a variety of alternative security thinkers in the West and by many Third World writers about security (though not by those Third World regimes for whom the idea of 'national security' was actually a cloak for state oppression). It was also evident in the political realm in the work of Palme, Brandt and some South-East Asian states, and of course in the historic role of the now beleaguered President of the Soviet Union (two more words that do not work together these days).I2 The unease with traditional security thinking has expressed itself in a frequent call for a 'broadening' or 'updating' of the concept of security.
Kooth Security and Emancipation 203 In practice little actual new thinking has taken place. A notable exception, of course, was Barry Buzan's People, States and Fear, first published in 1983. This remains the most comprehensive theoretical analysis of the concept in international relations literature to date, and since its publication the rest of us have been writing footnotes to it. But even that book, excellent as it is, can primarily be read as an explanation of the difficulties surrounding the concept. The book not only argues that security is an 'essentially contested concept' defying pursuit of an agreed definition, but it asserts that there is not much point struggling to make it uncontested. Such a conclusion is unsatisfying. If we cannot name it, can we ever hope to achieve it? Traditional security thinking, which has dominated the subject for half a century, has been associated with the intellectual hegemony of realism. This traditional approach has been characterized by three elements: it has emphasized military threats and the need for strong counters; it has been status quo oriented; and it has centered on states. The epitome of this approach was a book published some years ago by Edward Luttwak, in which he said that 'strategy is not a neutral pursuit and its only purpose is to strengthen one's own side in the contention of the nations'." These words represent the perfect expression of strategy as ethnocentrism writ large: the argument which follows is diametrically opposed to such an outlook. While no security concept should dismiss the danger of war, the importance of military power or the roles of states, the Luttwak Simplifier is neither appropriate for academics nor is it a rational way to see the world community through the interregnum. The pressures to broaden and update the concept of security have come from two sources. First, the problems with the traditionally narrow military focus of security have become increasingly apparent. It is only necessary here to mention the greater awareness of the pressures of the security dilemma, the growing appreciation of security interdependence, the widespread recognition that the arms race has produced higher levels of destructive power but not a commensurate growth of security, and the realization of the heavy burden on economies of extravagant defence spending. The second set of pressures has come from the strengthening claim of other issue areas for inclusion on the security agenda. The daily threat to the lives and well-being of most people and most nations is different from that suggested by the traditional military perspective. Old-fashioned territorial threats still exist in some parts of the world. Obviously much on the minds of everybody is Kuwait, which in August 1990 was occupied and then annexed by Saddam Hussein's forces. For the most part, however, the threats to the well-being of individuals and the interests of nations across the world derive primarily not from a neighbour's army but from other challenges, such as economic collapse, political oppression, scarcity, overpopulation, ethnic rivalry, the destruction of nature, terrorism, crime and disease. In most of the respects just mentioned people are more threatened by the policies and inadequacies of their own government than by the Napoleonic ambitions of their neighbour's. To countless millions of people in the world it is their own state, and
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not 'The Enemy' that is the primary security threat. In addition, the security threat to the regimes running states is often internal rather than external. It is almost certainly true that more governments around the world at this moment are more likely to be toppled by their own armed forces than by those of their neighbours. In the last few weeks alone there have been problems from the military in Argentina, and there are constant rumours of the military challenge even to the traditionally civilian-dominated Kremlin. The broader security problems just mentioned are obviously not as cosmically threatening as was the Cold War. But they are problems of profound significance. They already cost many lives and they could have grave consequences if left untreated. The repression of human rights, ethnic and religious rivalry, economic breakdown and so on can create dangerous instability at the domestic level which in turn can exacerbate the tensions that lead to violence, refugees and possibly inter-state conflict. The Lebanon and Kashmir are only two examples of 'domestic' problems with international implications which have been attracting attention through 1990. Communities which are wealthy and have a significant level of social justice do not seem to fight each other. There has not been a war since 1945 between the 44 richest countries.14 'Security communities' - islands of what Kenneth Boulding called 'stable peace'15 - have developed in several parts of the world. For whatever reason there does seem to be a correlation between democracy and freedom on the one hand and warlessness (within security communities) on the other. As a result even relatively conservative thinkers about international politics seem increasingly to accept that order in world affairs depends on at least minimal levels of political and social justice. This is where, finally, emancipation comes in.
Emancipation versus Power and Order Emancipation should logically be given precedence in our thinking about security over the mainstream themes of power and order. The trouble with privileging power and order is that they are at somebody else's expense (and are therefore potentially unstable). This was illustrated by the Sonnenfeldt doctrine for Eastern Europe. During the Cold War of the 1960s and 1970s there was military stability in Europe (hot war would not pay for either side) but there was no political stability (because millions were oppressed). In the end the vaunted 'order' created by dividing Europe into the two most heavily armed camps in history proved so unstable that it collapsed like a house of cards (and miraculously almost without violence). True (stable) security can only be achieved by people and groups if they do not deprive others of it. 'Security' means the absence of threats.'%mancipation is the freeing of people (as individuals and groups) from those physical and human constraints which stop them carrying out what they would freely choose to do. War and the threat of war is one of those constraints, together with poverty,
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poor education, political oppression and so on. Security and emancipation are two sides of the same coin. Emancipation, not power or order, produces true security. Emancipation, theoretically, is security. Implicit in the preceding argument is the Kantian idea that we should treat people as ends and not means. States, however, should be treated as means and not ends. It is on the position of the state where the conception of security as a process of emancipation parts company with the neo-realist conception as elaborated in People, States and Fear. The litmus test concerns the primary referent object: is it states, or is it people? Whose security comes first? I want to argue, following the World Society School, buttressed on this point by Hedley Bull, that individual humans are the ultimate referent. Given all the attention he paid to order between states, it is often overlooked that Bull considered 'world order' - between people - to be 'more fundamental and primordial' than international order: 'the ultimate units of the great society of all mankind', he wrote 'are not states ... but individual human beings, which are permanent and indestructible in a sense in which groupings of them of this or that sort are not'.': Those entities called 'states' are obviously important features of world politics, but they are unreliable, illogical and too diverse in their character to use as the primary referent objects for a comprehensive theory of security: States are unreliable as primary referents because whereas some are in the business of security (internal and external) some are not. It cannot serve the theory and practice of security to privilege Al Capone regimes. The traditional (national) security paradigm is invariably based upon a text-book notion of 'the state', but the evidence suggests that many do not even approximate it. Can 'security' be furthered by including the regimes of such as Hitler, Stalin or Saddam Hussein among the primary referents of theory or practice? It is illogical to place states at the centre of our thinking about security because even those which are producers of security (internal and external) represent the means and not the ends. It is illogical to privilege the security of the means as opposed to the security of the ends. An analogy can be drawn with a house and its inhabitants. A house requires upkeep, but it is illogical to spend excessive amounts of money and effort to protect the house against flood, dry rot and burglars if this is at the cost of the well-being of the inhabitants. There is obviously a relationship between the well-being of the sheltered and the state of the shelter, but can there be any question as to whose security is primary? States are too diverse in their character to serve as the basis for a comprehensive theory of security because, as many have argued over the years, the historical variety of states, and relations between them, force us to ask whether a theory of the state is m i s p l a ~ e d .Can ' ~ a class of political entities from the United States to Tuvalu, and Ancient Rome to the Lebanon, be the foundation for a sturdy concept of security?
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When we move from theory to practice, the difference between the neorealist and the utopian realist perspective on the primary referent should become clearer. It was personified in the early 1980s by the confrontation between the women of Greenham Common and Margaret Thatcher on the issue of nuclear weapons. Thatcher demanded Cruise and Trident as guarantors of British sovereignty. In the opinion of the prime minister and her supporters the main threat was believed to be a Soviet occupation of Britain and the overthrow of the Westminster model of democracy. It was believed that British 'sovereignty' and its traditional institutions safeguarded the interests of the British people. Thatcher spoke for the state perspective. The Greenham women sought denuclearization. The main threat, they and antinuclear opinion believed, was not the Soviet Union, but the nuclear arms build-up. They pinned tokens of family life, such as photographs and teddy bears, on the perimeter fence of the Greenham missile base, to indicate what was ultimately being threatened by nuclear war. People could survive occupation by a foreign power, they argued, but could not survive a nuclear war, let alone nuclear winter. By criticizing nuclearism, and pointing to the dangers of proliferation and ecological disaster, the women of Greenham Common were acting as a home counties chapter of the world community. The confrontation between the Greenham women and the Grantham woman sparked interesting arguments about principle and policy. I thought the Greenham women right at the time, and still do. But the path to nuclear abolition cannot be quick or easy; nor is it guaranteed. The hope of some anti-nuclear opinion for a grand abolition treaty (a sort of Hobbes today, Kant tomorrow) is not feasible.19But it is rational to act as though abolition is possible. Indeed, to do otherwise is to perpetuate the belief that there is ultimately no stronger basis for human coexistence than genocidal fear. Over a long period such minimalist thinking seems to be a recipe for disaster. The search for nuclear abolition has value as part of a process of extending the idea of moral and political community (which even realists like Carr saw as the ultimate foundation of security). Kant would have seen the search for total global abolition as a 'guiding ideal'; he might have called it a 'practical impracticality'.
The Case for Emancipation It is appropriate to place emancipation at the centre of new security thinking in part because it is the spirit of our times. This does not refer simply to the turn of the 1980s/90s, with the breaking ice in Eastern Europe and South Africa; our times refers to the whole of the twentieth century. (The theme of this conference - The End of Empires - is one testimony to it.) This century has seen the struggle for freedom of the colonial world, women, youth, the proletariat, appetites of all sorts, homosexuals, consumers, and thought.20The struggle for emancipation goes on in many places. Some groups have done and are doing better than others. For the moment there is a spirit of liberty abroad.
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In the struggle against political oppression, one striking feature of recent years has been the remarkable success of non-violent 'people power' in many countries, ranging from Poland to the Philippines. In the study of world politics, emphasizing emancipation is one way to help loosen the grip of the neo-realist tradition. Neo-realism undoubtedly highlights important dynamics in relations between states, and these cannot be disregarded. But to make world politics more intelligible it is necessary to go beyond these important but limited insights. The tradition of critical theory is helpful in this regard; its most important potential contribution in the present state of the subject lies in recapturing the idea that politics is open-ended and based in ethics." From this perspective strategy becomes not the study of the technological variable in inter-state politics, but a continuation of moral philosophy with an admixture of firepower. The next stage of thinking about security in world affairs should be marked by moving it out of its almost exclusively realist framework into the critical philosophical camp. In parallel with such a move it is necessary to reconsider much traditional thinking about liberty, which has tended to place freedom before equality. This tradition was clearly expressed by Theodore Sumberg in an argument about foreign aid as a moral obligation. The central value for Americans, it was asserted, is liberty not the abolition of poverty.22 Liberty is also the central value of emancipation, but emancipation implies an egalitarian concept of liberty. When the homeless are told, for example, that they now have more liberty, by people with hearts of pure polyester, because they can buy shares in privatized industries, that 'liberty' is meaningless. Whether the focus is Britain or the globe, liberty without economic status is propaganda. The new security game for the interregnum requires a comprehensive approach and a long-term perspective if it is to begin to cope with the expanding security agenda. Mainstream strategic thinking, as embodied in AngloAmerican nuclear deterrence theory, was notably static, and now, more clearly than ever, can be seen as timebound and ethnocentric. Over the years nuclear deterrence theory became increasingly esoteric, rococo and irrelevant. It led to a somewhat closed world, protected from politics and morality by 'mindguards' and 'nukespeak', and a belief in timeless success. Integral to emancipation is the idea of the reciprocity of rights. The implication of this is the belief that 'I am not truly free until everyone is free'. This is a principle everyone can implement in everyday life, and it has implications for international relations. Since 'my freedom depends on your freedom', the process of emancipation implies the further breaking down of the barriers we perpetuate between foreign and domestic policy. In this world of turbulent change it is less and less tenable to see the 'external world' - the subject-matter of traditional international politics -as a 'domain of its own'. In the interpenetrating world of global politics, economics and cultures, we need better attend to the linkages between 'domestic' and 'foreign' politics. Frontiers these days do not hold back either 'internal' or 'external' affairs. The continuing sharp distinction between what is 'domestic' and what is 'foreign' is one manifestation of the way the study of international politics has
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been bedevilled by unhelpful dichotomies. What are convenient labels for teaching can actually be misleading. It is only necessary to mention the polarization of order and justice, domestic and foreign policy, internal order and external anarchy, utopianism and realism, political and international theory, high and low politics, and peace research and strategic studies. Security conceived as a process of emancipation promises to integrate all these. It would encompass, for example, the 'top down' northern 'national security' view of security and the 'bottom up' southern view of 'comprehensive security' concerned with problems arising out of underdevelopment or o p p r e ~ s i o n . ~ ~ Overall, therefore, the concept of emancipation promises to bring together Martin Wight's 'theories of the good life', and 'theories of survival' into a comprehensive approach to security in world politics.
Teaching and Practice: What is to be Done? The strength of realism is always said to have been the way it dealt with the central problem of war. Those of us trained as students into the realist tradition had little scope for disagreement. By the 1970s, however, the problems with realism as the lens through which to look at the world became obvious; and in Vietnam and elsewhere it could be seen that realism was not even an uncontroversial guide to action. Now it is apparent to a small but growing body of opinion in the subject that a strategy of emancipation is both empirically and theoretically the soundest response to the problem of war. And not just war. Students of international politics should remember that nonwar violence in this century has been on a numbing scale, as numerous governments have slaughtered populations for political, ethnic or religious reasons - or unreason. Within states, as well as between them, Richard Rummel's work supports the argument that freedom eradicates violence; he argues that there is an inverse correlation between the political rights and civil liberties in nations, and both internal violence and war.24Emancipation, empirically, is security. The idea of seeing security as a process of emancipation will sound radical only to 'doctrinal realists'. Already international society is to some extent signed up for it. As Bull noted, through the UN and its Specialized Agencies international society is formally committed to much more than the preservation of minimum order between states. Through the promotion of human rights and the transfer of resources, it also espouses ideas of world order and justice.25 In the short term one is conscious of how little has been achieved: but if one takes the perspective of a century, then it is apparent that the changes have been significant. The hopes invested in the UN at the time of its foundation quickly collapsed first time round. The events of the last few years have given the world and the UN a second chance. When the iron curtain was created it put us all behind the wire, psychologically speaking. It entrapped old ways of thinking about the games nations play. Now the iron curtain has been dismantled it has caused a certain amount of professional disorientation.
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Gangs of strategists, for example, appear like old lags who have served time in prison, and who are now finding the space outside unnerving. There is a wish to return to the familiar parameters of order and predictability. The idea that Europe has now thrown away its superpower security blanket has been argued with obsessive neo-realism in John Mersheimer's much-quoted article, 'Back to the future'.26 When the French Revolution broke out, Hegel and his friends planted a tree of liberty. We, too, have been living through exciting times, but what did we in British international studies do in the last 1 5 months, in response to the ending of the potentially most catastrophic confrontation in history, and the actual freeing from tyranny of several hundred million people? Not much. The response was rather low key to say the least. The topics organized by various university departments in the September conference season did not reflect close engagement with the New Times. Southampton University held a conference on Mountbatten; at Keele there was one on the Falklands War; and Aberystwyth organized a meeting to discuss British strategic thinking in the 1950s. These were all subjects worthy of study, but they were indicative of the way we tended to turn our backs on a momentous moment. If as a community of scholars we could not become involved or excited about the historic events of the past 15 months, how can we expect to excite students in the subject? What does all this mean, finally, for the teaching and practice of security. In the teaching of international studies I would like t i s e e a re-evaluation of the role of strategic studies, for so long a dominant sub-field. People will argue that academic subjects, like fashion, have a cyclical life pattern, and that strategic studies will be back. This is possible, but there are stronger grounds for thinking that the 'Golden Age' package of strategic theory which has been taught since the early 1960s has had its day. This package, characterized by superpower nuclearism and epitomized by the writing of Kahn and the like, is a non-returnable timebound curiosity, like purple flares. Nuclearism went into deep crisis in the 1980s. The Reagan administration was probably the last roundup for nuclear warfighters, and what Gorbachev calls nuclear 'superabundance' will surely continue to be seen as futile. Historically speaking, there is a steady but uneven recognition that the costs of using military force are rising, while the benefits are shrinking. In recent times, we have witnessed the novel occurrence of arms reduction treaties being implemented before they were even signed (the CFE agreements) and the British government announcing sizeable cuts in the army at just the moment it was poised to fight a serious war in the Middle East. Instead of traditional strategic studies, largely organized around US thinking about nuclear weapons and arms control, I would prefer to see the encouragement a new breed of students trained in Security Studies, broadly defined. An understanding of defence would be essential, but they would also be required to know the language and practice of human rights, environmental issues, problems of economic development, and the subtleties of comparative politics; they would become able to discuss these matters with
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all the enthusiasm and facility previously reserved for SLCMs, START, FOFA and ET. 'Security' - we are increasingly discovering - is all of a piece. This was well brought out by Cynthia Enloe in a recent article, in which she tied together, in an interesting discussion of the Gulf crisis, such apparently diverse issues as military conquest, international debt, male-female relations and even laundry.27Feminist perspectives are integral to any people-centred subject. When it comes to political practice, the foregoing arguments lead to a process dominated approach with the aim of community-building to break down the barriers between 'us' and 'them'. This is not primarily a matter of changing structures. With a distant objective like human emancipation, in a real sense the means become the ends. The actual endpoint of what is proposed might be categorized as 'utopian', but realistic processes towards the goal of greater emancipation can be implemented both comprehensively and at once. Indeed, such processes have been underway for two decades in Europe, as a result of the work of leaders like Brandt, Genscher and Gorbachev; on the part of those who, against the odds in the Cold War, created a healthy civil society in Eastern Europe; and by alternative security and environmental groups who helped change agendas. An exact label for this philosophy of process is Joseph Nye's phrase 'process utopian'.28 The aim here is not to become overburdened by distant ideal structures, but to concentrate on reformist steps to make a better world somewhat more likely. At each political crossroad, there is always one route that seems more rather than less progressive in terms of global community-building. The process utopian approach is not confined to governments. There is growing scope for non-state actors, such as the 18,000 INGOs which are creating what Elise Boulding has called a 'global civic culture'.29 This is encouraging evidence supporting the process utopian approach: it gives scope for what might be called a 'post-foreign policy' world politics. It is in the area of practice where critical theory so far falls short. The literature to date does not tell its readers, for example, what to do about TASMs, or how many frigates to buy, or what policy to adopt in the Lebanon. Getting critical gets us only so far. But so does realism. Realism itself has never been the clear guide to action its reputation would suggest, as is evident from the wrangles between realists over the years on the issues of the day. But whether we are thinking about critical theory or realism we should never expect a guide to action in all circumstances; there will always be disputes about applying principles in practice. On such practical questions as TASMs, frigates and the Lebanon, the earlier arguments about emancipation and community suggest that strategists should see military policy not simply in terms of serving the state (as demanded by Luttwak) but instead as serving a nascent world order. It will be thought outlandish by some, and impossible by others, but the operating principle being proposed is that governments be encouraged to act in the strategic arena, as in others, according to Bull's notable phrase, as 'local agents of the This is a particularly appropriate perspective for world common those who work in universities. It is not naive 'utopianism' which is being
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advanced; it is a matter of building on evolving theory and practice. Out of the 'reality' of the second Cold War came the ideas and influence of an alternative security school - new as opposed to old thinkers in most states. Here was an attempt to integrate ideals and actuality, to merge the interests of the particular with the interests of the universal, and to reconcile power, order and justice. The 1980s in Europe showed that what is politically possible can indeed expand. Conclusion as Prologue
Reconciling ideas such as those just mentioned was one of the tasks John Vincent had been, and would be involved in. I was looking forward to what he might have said about an attempt to conceive security in terms of emancipation. I wanted (and still want) to claim his work as one of the pillars on which to build utopian realism. John Vincent's recent, shocking, premature death has left a hole in the academic study of international politics. He was one of a handful of highly respected colleagues who died much too young, like Hedley Bull in the mid-1980s and Wayne Wilcox in the mid-1970s. John, like them, was dealing with the great issues of war and peace, and power and justice. Like them he believed that if you are going to be academic about anything, it might as well be something important. Today it is difficult to think of issues more important than those on the expanded security agenda mentioned earlier. Understanding such issues in the 1990s will be the equivalent of what the Great War was in the 1920s. It is already evident that in the 1990s insecurity in one form or another will be all around. Fortunately, in this post-international politics/post-foreign policy world nobody has to wait for the Douglas Hurds. Some governments can exercise enormous power, but they are not the only agents, and they are not immune to influence. The implementation of an emancipatory strategy through process utopian steps is, to a greater or lesser extent, in the hands of all those who want it to be - the embryonic global civil society. In a world of global communications few should feel entirely helpless. Even in small and private decisions it is possible to make choices which help rather than hinder the building of a world community. Some developments depend on governments, but some do not. We can begin or continue pursuing emancipation in what we research, in how we teach, in what we put on conference agendas, in how much we support Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Oxfam and other groups identifying with a global community, and in how we deal with each other and with students. And in pursuing emancipation, the bases of real security are being established. Author's N o t e This is an edited version of the Plenary Address given at the Annual Conference of BISA, Newcastle University, 17 December 1990.
2 12
The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
Notes 1. R.H. Jackson and C.G. Rosenberg, 'Why Africa's Weak States Persist: The Empirical and the Juridical in Statehood', World Politics, 3 5 (1983), pp. 1-24. 2. As happened, for example, to 'collective security': see Inis J. Claude, Swords Into Ploughshares (London, 1966), p. 224. 3. James R. Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics, A Theory of Change and Continuity (Hemel Hempstead, 1990). 4. John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene, Megatrends 2000. Ten New Directions for the 1990s (New York, 1990), p. 19. 5. Vaclav Havel, Living in Truth (London, 1986), especially ch. 2, 'The Power of the Powerless'. 6. Nadine Gordimer took this quotation as the starting point for a novel o n black-white relations in South Africa: see her July's People (London, 1981). I took it as the starting point for thinking about the present era in international politics: see New Thinking About Strategy and International Security (London, 1991). 7. This is the theme of Robert Ornsteain and Paul Ehrlich, New World, New Mind (London, 1989). 8. New York T~mes,7 September 1982, quoted in The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, February 1983, p. 3. 9. Quoted by William Safire, Safire's Political Dictionary (New York, 1978), p. 394. 10. The first self-consciously 'post-modern' book is James Der Derian and Michael J. Shapiro (eds.), Internationalllntertextual Relations, Postmodern Readings of World Politics (Lexington, 1990). 11. W.T.R. Fox, 'E.H. Carr and Political Realism: Vision and Revision', Review of International Studies, 11 (1985), pp. 1-16. 12. See Common Security: A Programme For Disarmament. The Report of the Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues under the Chairmanship of Olof Palme (London, 1982); North-South: A Programme For Survival. The Report of the Commission on Internatzonal Development Issues under the Chairmanship of Willy Brandt (London, 1980); Multhiah Alagappa, 'Comprehensive Security: Interpretations in ASEAN countries', Research Papers and Poltcy Studzes, 26 (University of California, Berkeley, n.d.); Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika. New Thinking For O u r Country and the World (London, 1987). 13. Edward Luttwak, Strategy and History. Collected Essays, Volume Two (New Brunswick, 1985), p. xiii. 14. Naisbitt and Aburdene, Megatrends 2000, p. 29. 15. Kenneth Boulding, Stable Peace (Austin, 1979), passim. 16. The most thorough discussion is Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear (Hemel Hempstead, 2nd edn 1991). For some definitions, see pp. 16-18. 17. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (London, 1977), p. 22. 18. See, for example, David Held, 'Central Perspectives on the Modern State', pp. 1-55 in David Held et al. (eds.), States and Societies (Oxford, 1983). 19. As, for instance, in Jonathan Schell, The Abolition (London, 1984). 20. See Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring. The Great War a n d the Bwth of the Modern Age (Boston, 1989), especially pp. xiii-xvi. 21. See, by way of introduction, Mark Hoffman, 'Critical Theory and the Inter-Paradigm Debate', Millennium, 16 (1987), pp. 2 3 1 4 9 , and Andrew Linklater, Beyond Realism a n d Marxism. Critical Theory and International Relations (London, 1990). 22. Theodore Sumberg, Foreign Aid as Moral Obligation? The Washington Papers, no. 10 (Beverly Hills, 1973) discussed in Stanley Hoffmann, Duties Beyond Borders (Syracuse, 1981), p. 153. 23. See, for example, Caroline Thomas, 'New Directions in Thinking about Security in the Third World', pp. 267-89 in Ken Booth (ed.), New Thinking About Strategy and International
k
~h
~Security t and
Emancipation
2 1'3
Security (London, 1991 j, and Carolme Thomas and Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, eds., Conflict and Consenstrs in SouthlNorth Securzty (Cambridge, 1989). 24. R.J. Rummel, Understanding Conflict and War, vols. 1-5 (Beverly Hills, 1975-81). 2.5. Bull, The Anarchrcal Society, p. 87. 26. John J. Mersheimer, 'Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War', International Security, 15 (1990), pp. 5-56. 27. Cynthia Enloe, 'The Gulf Crisis. Making Feminist Sense of It', Pacrfic Research, 3 (1990), pp. 3-5. 28. See Joseph Nye, 'The Long-Term F ~ ~ t u rofe L)eterrence', pp. 245-7, in Roman Kolkow~cz(ed.), The Logic of Nuclear Terror (Boston, 1987). 29. Elise Boulding, Building a Glohal Civic Culture (Syracuse, 1988). 30. Hedley Bull, 'Order and Justice in Internat~onalRelations', Hagey Lectures (University of Waterloo, 1983), pp. 11-12 and 14.
The Renaissance of Security Studies Stephen M. Walt
I
n the mid-1970s, the field of security studies began a dramatic resurgence. In addition to a noticeable increase in professional activity and published work on security-related topics, security studies became more rigorous, methodologically sophisticated, and theoretically inclined. Scholars continued to differ on specific policy issues, but competing views were increasingly based on systematic social scientific research rather than on unverified assertions or arguments by authority. These developments help explain the recent prominence of the subfield and its growing acceptance within the academic world, and they establish a firm foundation for future work. Given the continued need for independent analyses of security issues, the resurgence of security studies is an important positive development for the field of international relations. This article examines this recent renaissance with several aims in mind. First, I seek to provide a survey of the field and a guide to the current research agenda.' Second, by examining the evolution of a particular subfield, I hope to offer some basic insights into the sociology of knowledge in international relations. What determines the prominence of different fields, the attention paid to specific topics within them, and their ability to generate cumulative knowledge? Finally, by tracing the rise, fall, and recovery of security studies, I seek to identify some practical lessons for managing the field in the years ahead. This article is divided into five sections. Part I offers a definition of security studies and describes its place within the broader field of international relations. Part I1 outlines the central features of the so-called Golden Age (1955-1965) and discusses why the field declined in the late 1960s. Part 111 describes the recent renaissance, examining both how the field has changed and why this rebirth occurred. Part IV summarizes the current research agenda and considers some potential pitfalls; Part V offers several lessons and guidelines for enhancing future progress. Source: Internatronal Studies Quarterly, 3 5 ( 2 )(1991):21 1-39.
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What is "Security Studies?" The boundaries of intellectual disciplines are permeable; as a result, any effort to delineate the precise scope of security studies is somewhat arbitrary. The main focus of security studies is easy to identify, however: it is the phenomenon of war. Security studies assumes that conflict between states is always a possibility and that the use of military force has far-reaching effects on states and societies (Bull, 1968; Martin, 1980).Accordingly, security studies may be defined as the study of the threat, use, and control of military force (Nye and Lynn-Jones, 1988). It explores the conditions that make the use of force more likely, the ways that the use of force affects individuals, states, and societies, and the specific policies that states adopt in order to prepare for, prevent, or engage in war. The security studies literature often overlaps with more general works on international relations, and most of it fits comfortably within the familiar realist paradigm. In general, however, the research program of security studies is usually informed by debates over central policy problems and tends to address phenomena that can be controlled by national leaders (Smoke, 1975: 259).' As a result, scholarship tends to concentrate on manipulable variables, on relationships that can be altered by deliberate acts of policy. Given the military power is the central focus of the field and is subject to political control, this tendency is appropriate.' Military power is not the only source of national security, and military threats are not the only dangers that states face (though they are usually the most serious). As a result security studies also includes what is sometimes termed "statecraft" - arms control, diplomacy, crisis management, for example. These issues are clearly relevant to the main focus of the field, because they bear directly on the likelihood and character of war. Because nonmilitary phenomena can also threaten states and individuals, some writers have suggested broadening the concept of "security" to include topics such as poverty, AIDS, environmental hazards, drug abuse, and the like (Buzan, 1983; N. Brown, 1989). Such proposals remind us that nonmilitary issues deserve sustained attention from scholars and policymakers, and that military power does not guarantee well-being. But this prescription runs the risk of expanding "security studies" excessively; by this logic, issues such as pollution, disease, child abuse, or economic recessions could all be viewed as threats to "security." Defining the field in this way would destroy its intellectual coherence and make it more difficult to devise solutions to any of these important problems. Moreover, the fact that other hazards exist does not mean that the danger of war has been eliminated. However much we may regret it, organized violence has been a central part of human existence for millennia and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Not surprisingly, therefore, preparations for war have preoccupied organized polities throughout history (McNeill, 1982). Any attempt to understand the evolution of human society,
2 16
The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
let alone the prospects for peace, must take account of the role of military force. Indeed, given the cost of military forces and the risks of modern war, it would be irresponsible for the scholarly community to ignore the central questions that form the heart of the security studies field.4 Throughout this essay, I concentrate primarily on works that meet the standards of logic and evidence in the social sciences. It is important to recognize, however, that much of the published work on security topics does not meet these standards." Because national security issues are highly politicized and the resources at stake are enormous, work on these topics is often written for political rather than scientific goals (Walt, 1987a). This tendency is exacerbated by classification procedures that limit public access to relevant information and is compounded further by the extensive network of consultants and "think tanks" supported by defense contractors or the Defense Department itself. Although some of this work meets basic scholarly standards, much of it should be viewed as propaganda rather than as serious scholarship. This is not true of all "policy analysis," which often employs sophisticated theoretical concepts and careful empirical research. But there is a difference between the scholarly side of security studies and works that are largely political advocacy, just as there is a difference between scholarship in criminology and the public debate on gun control.
The "Golden Age" of International Security Studies The field of security studies is a relatively recent creation. Prior to World War 11, interest in strategy and military affairs was primarily limited to the professional military, and scholarship on military issues was confined to military and ~ contributions to the study of strategy were disdiplomatic h i ~ t o r y .Civilian couraged, although the horrifying costs of World War I demonstrated that war was "too important to be left to the generals." Civilians became extensively involved in military planning for the first time during World War 11, setting the stage for the "Golden Age" or "first wave" of security studies (Jervis, 1979; Gray 1982: 45-58). As one would expect, the nuclear revolution cast a large shadow over the field, and analysts in the "Golden Age" devoted most of their efforts to understanding its implications.' The revolutionary impact of nuclear weapons was recognized immediately (Borden, 1946; Brodie, 1946) and the issues raised by the new technology preoccupied strategists throughout this period (Kaplan, 1983; Trachtenberg, 1989). The central question was straightforward: how could states use weapons of mass destruction as instruments of policy, given the risk of any nuclear exchange? The effort to grapple with this problem produced seminal works on deterrence, coercion, and escalation, along with numerous prescriptive works on alternative strategies (Kaufmann, 1956; Kissinger, 1957; Brodie, 1959,1966; Kahn, 1960,1965; Schelling, 1960,1966; Ellsberg, 1961; Snyder, 1961). Other works explored the causes of stability (Wohlstetter, 1959; Hoag, 1961), alternative targeting policies (Knorr and
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The Renaissance of Security Studies 2 17
Read, 1962), the potential value of arms control (Brennan, 1961; Bull, 1961; Schelling and Halperin, 1961; Singer, 1962), and the role of conventional forces and limited war in the nuclear age (Osgood, 1957). Significantly, these works were the product of an eclectic and interdisciplinary approach to specific real-world problems.8 Given the youth of the field and the novel problems it faced, this is hardly surprising. Strategic thought from the prenuclear era was only partly relevant to the issues raised by the nuclear revolution, and the lack of established scholars allowed analysts with very diverse backgrounds to enter the field (Trachtenberg, 1989: 309-1 I).' Although security studies has generally been centered in political science, it has always been an interdisciplinary enterprise. Much of the seminal research during the Golden Age was conducted at think tanks like the RAND Corporation (Smith, 1966; Kaplan, 1983).Access to information and a supportive institutional setting were obvious assets, but their close relationship with the Defense Department may have encouraged these scholars to view national security problems from an excessively military perspective (Green, 1966, 1968). In particular, this factor may explain some of the limitations of the first wave of scholarship. Limitations and Lacunae in the Golden Age
First, as many critics have noted, the early works in security studies offered little empirical support for their conclusions and prescriptions (Green, 1966; George and Smoke, 1974; Jervis, 1979). In general, these works contained little reliable information about the subjects they addressed and no systematic evidence supporting the authors' hypotheses or recommendations. Even a richly historical work like Bernard Brodie's Strategy in the Missile Age (1959) became vague and speculative when discussing contemporary issues. As a result, readers seeking to assess the adequacy of existing forces or the feasibility of a given strategy received little guidance from these works. This problem was somewhat unavoidable, of course. Much of the relevant information was classified, and apart from the bombing of Japan, there was no historical record of nuclear warfare upon which to base conclusions or recommendations. Scholars were forced to rely heavily on deductive techniques such as game theory, illustrated by analogies or evocative historical anecdotes (Schelling, 1960; Kahn, 1960). The early literature in security studies also employed a rather narrow definition of politics. The field tended to ignore nonmilitary sources of international tension and to focus solely on military balances. For example, deterrence theory assumed the existence of a hostile "aggressor" (the Soviet Union) and concentrated on how one made retaliatory threats credible, without asking why an opponent would want to challenge the status quo in the first place. Although Schelling and others recognized that beliefs and perceptions (such as the perceived risk of preemption) could affect the likelihood of war, the early works focused primarily on how different force postures could alter the incentive to strike first. Thus, the early literature tended
2 18
The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
to slight the political sources of international conflict or the potential role of accommodative diplomacy ( T r a ~ h t e n b e r1989: ~, 3 17-1 8). This limitation was partly a methodological artifact; the "rational actor" assumption that lay at the core of deterrence theory directed attention away from the organizational, psychological, and domestic political factors that also shape state behavior. The Cold War played a role here as well: because the Soviet desire to expand was taken for granted, more attention was paid to deterring it than to verifying the assumption or explaining its origins. And, as Defense Department employees, it is not surprising that the "civilian" strategists concentrated on military problems and downplayed domestic politics, misperception, and diplomacy. This tendency may have also encouraged the separation of security studies from other scholarly work on war and peace. For example, warnings about the danger of "conflict spirals" and the value of accommodation emerged primarily from academic scholars in the field of "peace research" rather than from the "civilian strategists7' (Etzioni, 1962; Osgood, 1962; Jervis, 1976: 109). Similarly, the most important general critiques of deterrence theory and much of the early interest in arms control came from academics as well, although some of them had close ties to government agencies.'' Finally, the "behavioral revolution" in the social sciences helped spawn a diverse array of research programs on international conflict, such as the Correlates of War Project at the University of Michigan." These programs made a major contribution to the methodological self-consciousness of the international relations profession (Singer, 1972; Vasquez, 1987; Gochman and Sabrosky, 1990), but they were not designed to address questions of direct concern to national leaders.12 In sharp contrast to the early works in security studies, therefore, these projects had little impact on public policy and were often dismissed as irrelevant by the security studies field. The End of the Golden Age
The first wave of security studies ended in the mid-1960s, and the field entered a period of decline. Several different causes were at work. First, the research program of security studies had reached something of a dead end by this time. The central questions identified by the rational deterrence paradigm were now well understood if not yet fully resolved, and the remaining issues, such as the tradeoff between the alleged need for first-strike options to make extended deterrence credible and the increased risk of war that these capabilities created, seemed beyond resolution within the existing theoretical framework (Trachtenberg, 1989: 332). Although doctrines and weapons programs could still be and were debated, further advances would require new conceptual approaches or more advanced analytical tools. A second problem was the failure of the first wave of scholars to produce a significant group of Ph.D. students. Although individuals like Albert Wohlstetter at the University of Chicago and William Kaufmann at MIT did
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train a number of protegis, they were more likely to become consultants or government officials than to enter academic departments. As a result, a large "successor generation" did not emerge until relatively recently. A third reason for decline was the Vietnam War. Not only did the debacle in Indochina cast doubt on some of the early work in the field (such as the techniques of "systems analysis" and the application of bargaining theory to international conflict), it also made the study of security affairs unfashionable in many universities. The latter effect was both ironic and unfortunate, because the debate on the war was first and foremost a debate about basic security issues. Was the "domino theory" accurate? Was U.S. credibility really at stake? Would using military force in Indochina in fact make the U.S. more secure? By neglecting the serious study of security affairs, opponents of the war could not effectively challenge the official rationales for U.S. involvement.'"he persistent belief that opponents of war should not study national security is like trying to find a cure for cancer by refusing to study medicine while allowing research on the disease to be conducted solely by tobacco companies. External events undermined the field in other ways as well. The emergence of US.-Soviet detente made the study of war seem less important, and the United States's declining economic position led to greater interest in the issues of international political economy. Accordingly, scholars began to question the utility of military force and to emphasize the role of economic issues. "Transnational relations" and "interdependence" became the new watchwords, as part of an explicit challenge to the realist paradigm (Cooper, 1968; Morse, 1970; Keohane and Nye, 1972, 1977). At roughly the same time, however, scholars in security studies began to abandon the relatively simple assumptions that had guided the first wave. The main accomplishment of this period was the application of organization theory to national security issues, primarily in studies of weapons procurement and foreign policy decision-making (Art, 1968; Allison, 1971; Halperin, 1974; Steinbruner, 1974; Beard, 1976). Despite its obvious policy relevance, however, this literature focused on questions of implementation rather than the central questions of strategy, force requirements, or the likelihood of war. As such, these advances did not reverse the decline of the field as a whole.
The Renaissance The renaissance of security studies began in the mid-1970s, signaled by the end of the Vietnam War, the Ford Foundation's decision to sponsor several academic centers in security affairs, and the founding of international Security, which became the main scholarly forum for the field. Although the field retained its interdisciplinary character and a close connection to realworld issues, the "new wave" differed from the Golden Age in several important respects.
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
N e w D e v e l o p m e n t s in Security S t u d i e s
The Use of History. Among the most important developments in security studies was greater reliance on history. Aided by increased access to relevant archival material, historians conducted increasingly detailed investigations of national security policy. These efforts led to revised interpretations of important historical events and a growing partnership between historians and political scientists (Gaddis, 1987, 1990). Even more important, scholars began to rely more heavily on historical cases as a means of generating, testing, and refining theories. Although case studies had been used for these purposes in the past, the method of "structured, focused comparison" refined by Alexander George and his associates encouraged scholars to use the historical record in a more disciplined fashion (George and Smoke, 1974; Smoke, 1977; George, 1979).j4 The comparative case study method was explicitly designed to counter the ahistorical approaches that had characterized the first wave. By focusing on concrete historical events, the method sought a more nuanced, "policyrelevant" theory (George and Smoke, 1974: 6 1 6 4 2 ) . Comparative case studies were not a panacea, of course; case selection remained a crucial issue, causal inferences were difficult to make with confidence, and these studies often produced rather modest "contingent generalizations" instead of powerful general theories. But as even its critics admit, the comparative case method expanded the set of relevant hypotheses and helped expose the limitations of existing theories (Achen and Snidal, 1989). The Challenge to Rational Deterrence Theory. The use of history was especially evident in the wide-ranging assault on deterrence theory. Drawing upon psychology, organization theory, and a host of historical studies, these works questioned the assumptions of perfect information and rational calculation that lay at the heart of the rational deterrence paradigm." The result has been a lively debate on the requirements of deterrence, the utility of the rational deterrence framework, and the appropriate strategies for evaluating it (George and Smoke, 1974, 1989; Steinbruner, 1976; Jervis, 1979, 1989; Lebow, 1981; Jervis, Lebow, and Stein, 1985; Orme, 1987; Huth, 1988; Achen and Snidal, 1989; Downs, 1989; Lebow and Stein, 1989, 1990; Huth and Russett, 1990). Nuclear Weapons Policy. New ideas and information transformed the analysis of nuclear weapons policy as well. As the recurring debates over strategic nuclear policy revealed, civilian analysts were increasingly capable of analyzing complex technical issues because the necessary data and analytical methods were now widely available (Davis and Schilling, 1973). The debate over nuclear strategy and arms control was closely linked to concerns about alleged Soviet superiority, the progress of various arms control negotiations, or new weapons proposals such as the M-X missile and the Strategic Defense Initiative (Gray, 1979; Jervis, 1984; Miller and Van Evera, 1986). These disputes have become increasingly sophisticated and well informed, reflecting the greater expertise and information available outside
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22 1
official circles (Epstein, 1987; May, Bing and Steinbruner, 1988; Eden and Miller, 1989; Glaser, 1990).lh As noted, the combination of organization theory and careful empirical research also produced significant innovations in deterrence theory. Where early work on nuclear strategy had assumed that each side's military forces would respond obediently to the commands of national authorities, scholars began to question this comfortable belief through sophisticated analyses of nuclear command and control systems (Steinbruner, 1978; Ball, 1981; Bracken, 1983; Blair, 1985; Carter, Steinbruner, and Zraket, 1987) and careful historical studies of past nuclear crises (Sagen, 1985; Belts, 1987; Bundy, 1988). These analyses suggested that civilian authorities had limited knowledge of and control over U.S. nuclear operations, and that the precise state of the strategic nuclear balance had little direct effect on international politics in general or crisis behavior in particular. Finally, increased access to the documentary record enabled historians to demolish a variety of myths about the history of nuclear weapons policy. These studies revealed the strong counterforce bias of U.S. strategic doctrine and reinforced the conclusion that limited nuclear exchanges would be difficult if not impossible to control (Rosenberg, 1979, 1983; Friedberg, 1980; Ball, 1981; Schilling, 1981; Ball and Richelson, 1986; Sagan, 1989). In short, where scholarship in the Golden Age was necessarily abstract and "data-free," the study of nuclear weapons policy during the renaissance rested on a much firmer base of empirical support. Conventional Warfaye. Apart from the "limited war" debate in the 1950s and a flurry of interest in counterinsurgency during the Vietnam War, conventional warfare was downplayed during the Golden Age. This tendency was reversed during the renaissance; the emergence of strategic parity and a concern over the conventional balance in Europe after Vietnam sparked renewed interest in the role of conventional military power. Although some of this work was straightforward policy analysis, many of these studies were based on new theoretical approaches and empirically tested propositions about conventional warfare. Even when flawed, such works laid the foundation for subsequent refinements. In addition to a lively debate on the conventional balance and the appropriate techniques for measuring it (Fischer, 1976; Mako, 1983; Posen, 1984-85, 1989; Biddle, 1988; Cohen, 1988; Thomson, 1988; Epstein, 1989; Kupchan, 1989b; Mearsheimer, 1989), scholars explored the requirements of conventional deterrence (Mearsheimer, 1983; Betts, 1985; Shimshoni, 1988), the lessons of Vietnam (Thies, 1980; Rosen, 1982; Krepinevich, 1986; Shafer, 1988; Clodfelter, 1989; Pape, 1990), the danger of surprise attack (Betts, 1982; Levite, 1987; Kam, 1988), and the merits of alternative force postures and doctrines (Luttwak, 1 9 8 0 4 1 ; Mearsheimer, 1981-82; Betts, 1983). Other studies debated strategies for the Rapid Deployment Force (Waltz, 1981; Epstein, 1981) and the U.S. Navy (Posen, 1982; Epstein, 1983-84; Brooks, 1986; Mearsheimer, 1986).In short, although nuclear weapons policy continued to receive attention, the study of conventional warfare figured prominently in the renaissance.
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U S . Grand Strategy, Grand strategy is a state's "theory" for creating security through military and diplomatic means (Posen, 1984: 13).Increased interest in the subject was especially evident in the United States, sparked by a growing sense that the United States was over-committed and needed to rethink its strategic priorities. In addition to several historical studies (Gaddis, 1982; Leffler, 1984), a host of books and articles debated the scope of U.S. interests, the utility of military force for defending them, and the likely responses of other states to alternative U.S. policies (Huntington, 1982; Calleo, 1987; Posen and Van Evera, 1987; Gray, 1988; David, 1989; Desch, 1989; Walt, 1989; Van Evera, 1990). Although a consensus on U.S. grand strategy remained elusive, the debate illustrated the growing tendency for scholars to base their recommendations on testable empirical and theoretical claims. Security Studies and International Relations Theory. The renaissance of security studies also saw the return of national security issues to the scholarly agenda among theorists of international politics. At the most general level, Kenneth Waltz's Theovy of international Politics (1979) presented a powerful reformulation of the realists perspective, aided by spirited defenses of realism within international political economy (Gilpin, 1975; Lake, 1987; Grieco, 1990).17In contrast to the liberal theories popular during the era of dktente, these works emphasized the enduring importance of anarchy and war as constraints on state behavior. Not surprisingly, renewed interest in the causes of war was evident as well. lmportant studies by Robert Jervis and George Quester sparked a lively exchange on the effects of offensive and defensive advantages (Quester, 1977; Jervis, 1978; Levy, 1984; Posen, 1984; Snyder, 1984; Van Evera, 1984; Sagan, 1986; Shimshoni, 1990-91), while Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's controversial "expected utility" theory of war prompted an equally intense debate (Bueno de Mesquita, 1981; Majeski and Sylvan, 1984; Wagner, 1984). Scholars also explored the effect of domestic politics, misperception, and system structure on the likelihood of war (for an excellent survey of this literature, see Levy, 1990). Other theoretical works with direct relevance for security affairs included studies of alliances (G. Snyder, 1984; Walt, 1987b), ditente (Lynn-Jones, 1986), and the strategies for cooperation between adversaries (Oye, 1986; George, Farley, and Dallin, 1988; Rock, 1989). In short, the renaissance of security studies was not limited to narrow policy research. Explicit theoretical studies formed a large part of the field, and scholars consciously sought to apply these results to specific policy problems. The Role of the Ivory Tower. The final characteristic separating the Golden Age from the recent renaissance is the growth of security studies within the academic world. Although several of the major figures of the first wave held university positions, they did their most influential work at think tanks like RAND. Although analysts outside the ivory tower remain important, the center of gravity has clearly shifted back toward academe.18 Since 1980, for example, membership in the International Security section of the International Studies Association has grown nearly twice as fast as overall membership. The creation of the International Security and Arms Control section within the American Political Science Association in 1988 reflects a similar trend.19
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The Renaissance of Security Studies
22'1
As this discussion suggests, the emergence of new policy problems and specific theoretical and empirical puzzles played the primary role in sparking the renaissance of security studies. The resurgence of the field was reinforced by several other developments as well. The End of the Vietnam War. The U.S. withdrawal from Indochina made it easier for students to study national security issues without being ostracized, and it may have reduced the suspicion with which scholars in security studies were viewed by academic departments. The defect also encouraged a reassessment of U.S. foreign and defense policy; as a result, younger scholars were inspired to study security issues in order to learn from past mistakes. If the Vietnam War undermined security studies in the 1960s, it helped revive it once the war was over. The Collapse of Detente. Interest in security affairs was also revived by the deterioration of U.S.-Soviet relations in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Although public concern for America's international position was exaggerated, the Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions, the SALT I1 treaty, and Soviet intervention in Africa and Afghanistan helped place national security issues back on the public and academic agenda. The Reagan Administration's dramatic defense build-up reinforced this trend by provoking fears that U.S. national security policy was extravagant at best and provocative at worst. Just as the Cold War launched the Golden Age and ditente caused security studies to languish, increased international tensions helped reinvigorate the field. Increased Access to Data. Another major cause of the renaissance was the increased quality and quantity of information available to scholars working outside the official national security establishment. In addition to the growing partnership between historians and political scientists and the increased use of archival material, security studies profited from greater access to data on contemporary security issues. This development was part of the general campaign against governmental secrecy inspired by Vietnam and Watergate, and by the mid-1970s authoritative data on defense policy were available from organizations such as the Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Technology Assessment, along with the Annual Report of the Secretary o f Defense and a variety of Congressional hearings and committee reports."' These official sources were supplemented by publications from private organizations such as the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), the Brookings Institution, the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies (IDDS), and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)." Like the official sources upon which they were based, some of these publications contained inevitable errors and biases (Brzoska, 1981; Blackaby and Ohlson, 1982). Exposure to public scrutiny helped correct these problems over time, however, and civilian analysts became increasingly adept in analyzing contemporary defense issues. In short, improved access to information was a necessary condition for the growth of the field. Increased Outlets for Publishing. New outlets for scholarly publishing were a boon to the field as well. In the past, the lack of refereed journals in
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security affairs was an obstacle to younger scholars in the academic world and may have contributed to the partial isolation of security studies from the university community.22 But the creation of International Security in 1976 and the Journal of Strategic Studies in 1978, the improved quality of publications such as Survival and The Adelphi Papers, and the founding of the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs in the early 1980s encouraged more ambitious and rigorous works on security topics.23 Even lnternational Organization, the premier journal in the field of international political economy, issued an explicit invitation for articles on security affairs during this period, which further underscored the enhanced legitimacy of the field. Financial Support. Like its medieval namesake, the renaissance of security studies was fueled by wealth. The Ford Foundation's early commitment to establishing research centers at Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Cornell and UCLA had an exceptionally strong impact, together with its long-standing commitment to the IISS. Increased public concern about national security issues encouraged generous support from institutions such as the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the Smith-Richardson Foundation, among others.24The programs these funds supported enabled scholars to conduct research free from official pressures, helped younger scholars complete their training, and allowed new members of the field to forge valuable professional networks within the diverse intellectual atmosphere of a university. It is not surprising, therefore, that many prominent younger scholars in security studies spent part of their careers in one of these programs. Security Studies and Social Science. Last but not least, the resurrection of security studies was facilitated by its adoption of the norms and objectives of social science. As a social science, security studies seeks to develop general explanatory propositions about the use of force in international politics, and to apply this knowledge to important contemporary issues. Like other social scientists, scholars in security affairs engage in three main activities: 1) theory creation, the development of logically related causal propositions explaining a particular phenomenon of interest; 2) theory testing, attempts to verify, falsify, and refine competing theories by testing their predictions against a scientifically selected body of evidence; and 3 ) theory application, the use of existing knowledge to illuminate a specific policy problem. The first two categories are often linked - the creation of new theories is usually accompanied by efforts to test them - while "policy analysis" in security affairs consists primarily of the third.25 Security studies seeks cumulative knowledge about the role of military force. To obtain it, the field must follow the standard canons of scientific research: careful and consistent use of terms, unbiased measurement of critical concepts, and public documentation of theoretical and empirical claims. Although no research enterprise ever lives up to these standards completely, they are the principles that make cumulative research possible. The increased sophistication of the security studies field and its growing prominence within
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the scholarly community is due in large part to the endorsement of these principles by most members of the field. To summarize: The renaissance of security studies was over-determined. It reflected a political climate in which the importance of national security problems was increasingly appreciated and in which academic institutions became more receptive t o work in this area. Although the renaissance began before the recent surge in financial support, these grants sustained its growth. Increased access to information and civilian expertise were both cause and effect, along with the marriage between security studies and social science. The result was the reemergence of an important subfield of international relations in a new and improved form.
Problems and Prospects for Security Studies
What lies ahead for security studies? On the one hand, the widespread belief that the end of the Cold War has decreased the risk of war may temporarily divert financial support and research energies in other directions. On the other hand, a permanent decline is unlikely for at least three reasons. First, as the war in the Persian Gulf reminds us, military power remains a central element of international politics, and failure to appreciate its importance invariably leads to costly reminders. Second, security studies has been institutionalized within many university departments; indeed, a graduate program lacking qualified experts in this area must now be considered incomplete. Thus, new Ph.D.s will emerge in due course and will enjoy adequate professional opportunities. Most important of all, the collapse of the Cold War order will create new policy problems and new research puzzles. In short, the scholarly agenda in security studies is expanding, not shrinking, and security studies will remain an active-sub-field for some time to come. Potential Problems
Despite these grounds for optimism, several dangers could undermine the future development of the field. As noted earlier, the resources at stake in debates over defense and foreign policy create a strong temptation to focus on short-term policy analysis. Moreover, as Hans Morgenthau once warned, active involvement in policy debates inevitably tempts participants to sacrifice scholarly integrity for the sake of personal gain or political effectiveness (Morgenthau, 1970; Walt, 1987a: 146-60). At the very least, there are powerful incentives to concentrate on consulting work and policy analysis rather than on cumulative scholarly research. If security studies neglects long-term research questions and focuses solely on immediate policy issues, a decline in rigor and quality will be difficult to avoid. Yet the opposite tendency may pose an even greater danger. O n the whole, security studies have profited from its connection to real-world issues; the main advances of the past four decades have emerged from efforts to solve
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important practical questions. If security studies succumbs to the tendency for academic disciplines to pursue "the trivial, the formal, the methodological, the purely theoretical, the remotely historical - in short, the politically irrelevant" (Morgenthau, 1966: 73), its theoretical progress and its practical value will inevitably decline. In short, security studies must steer between the Scylla of political opportunism and the Charybdis of academic irrelevance. What does this mean in practice? Among other things, it means that security studies should remain wary of the counterproductive tangents that have seduced other areas of international studies, most notably the "post-modern" approach to international affairs (Ashley, 1984; Der Derian and Shapiro, 1989; Lapid, 1989). Contrary to their proponents' claims, post-modern approaches have yet to demonstrate much value for comprehending world politics; to date, these works are mostly criticism and not much theory.26As Robert Keohane has noted, until these writers "have delineated ... a research program and shown ... that it can illuminate important issues in world politics, they will remain on the margins of the field" (Keohane, 1988: 392). In particular, issues of war and peace are too important for the field to be diverted into a prolix and self-indulgent discourse that is divorced from the real world. The use of formal models should also be viewed with some caution, though their potential value is greater. Formal methods possess obvious virtues: analytic assumptions tend to be stated more explicitly, gaps in evidence can be handled through systematic sensitivity analyses, and advanced mathematical techniques can identify deductive solutions to previously intractable problems (for recent examples, see O'Neill, 1989; Downs and Rocke, 1990; Powell, 1990). Formal analysis can also depict a theory's logical structure with precision, generating counterintuitive propositions and identifying inconsistencies. Yet despite these strengths, recent formal applications have had relatively little impact on other work in the field. This situation stands in sharp contrast to earlier formal works (Schelling, 1960; Olson and Zeckhauser, 1966), which had a broad and lasting influence. One reason is the tendency for recent works to rely on increasingly heroic assumptions, which render these models both impossible to test and less applicable to important realworld problems. The danger, as Schelling warned, is "the willingness of social scientists to treat the subject [of strategy] as though it were, or should be, solely a branch of mathematics" (1960: 10). Obviously, scholarship in social science need not have immediate "policy relevance." But tolerance for diverse approaches is not a license to pursue a technique regardless of its ultimate payoff; the value of any social science tool lies in what it can tell us about real human behavior. Formal models are useful when they do this, but they should not be viewed as ends in themselves. Unfortunately, despite the impressive technical firepower displayed in many recent formal works, their ability to illuminate important national security problems has been disappointing. Because scientific disciplines advance through competition, we should not try to impose a single methodological monolith upon the field. To insist that
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a single method constitutes the only proper approach is like saying that a hammer is the only proper tool for building a house. The above strictures are no more than a warning, therefore; progress will be best served by increased dialogue between different methodological approaches (Downs, 1989).27 genda for Security St Any attempt to define a research agenda will invariably omit important or unforeseen possibilities. Nevertheless, several subjects clearly merit further attention. The Role of Domestic Politics. Some of the most interesting advances in security studies have come from scholars focusing on different aspects of domestic politics. What unites these disparate theories is the belief that domestic politics is a powerful determinant of national security policy. For example, several prominent studies have argued that liberal democracies do not fight each other (Small and Singer, 1976; Chan, 1984; Weede, 1984; Doyle, 1986; Maoz and Abdolali, 1989); given the importance of this claim, further research is needed to resolve the remaining theoretical and empirical puzzles.2~imilarly,the long-standing debate over the military's role as a cause of war remains unresolved (Huntington, 1957; Vagts, 1959; Betts, 1977; Snyder, 1984; Van Evera, 1984), along with the validity of the so-called scapegoat and diversionary theories of war (Levy, 1988, 1990). Other recent works suggest that regime change or revolution is a potent cause of conflict as well (Maoz, 1989; Walt, 1990), but further research to measure and explain this effect is still needed. Students of arms races have long stressed the role of domestic factors (York, 1970; Kurth, 1971; Senghaas, 1972; Evangelists, 1988), and Jack Snyder's recent work (1991) on empires argues that the internal politics of rapidly industrializing societies encourages "log-rolled" domestic coalitions to unite behind highly expansionist foreign policies. Given the recent shifts in the domestic politics of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies, further work on these different approaches is clearly in order. The Causes of Peace and Cooperation. Another potential growth area is in greater attention to the causes of peace and cooperation. To be sure, most theories about the causes of war are also theories about peace (Van Evera, 1984; Blainey, 1988), and exploring ways to reduce the risk of war has been part of the field since its in~eption.~' In the past, however, security studies tended to view explicit research on peace as utopian or naive, perhaps based on a belief that realists should not be diverted into such idealistic pursuits. For their part, peace researchers tended to assume that the use of force was always irrational, that arms races were a powerful cause of conflict rather than a symptom, and that war was always the result of misperception. The tendency for some peace researchers to view capitalism as a powerful engine of conflict (despite the abundant evidence against this belief) divided the two fields even furthec3" Over time, however, the two perspectives have begun to converge. As discussed above, scholars in security studies have devoted considerable attention
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to misperception and domestic politics as causes of war, while some peace researchers have begun to address issues of military strategy and defense policy in a more sophisticated and well-informed way. This trend is perhaps most evident in the literature on "nonoffensive" defense: many of these writings acknowledge the need for military power while investigating alternative force structures that could ameliorate the security dilemma between states (Ahfeldt, 1983; Alternative Defense Commission, 1983; Agrell, 1987; Gates, 1987; Saperstein, 1987; Flanagan, 1988). Although primarily a product of the peace research community, these works bear a strong resemblance to the offenseldefense literature in security studies. Increased interest in peace and cooperation is evident in other ways as well. For example, scholars of security affairs have been understandably skeptical of "security regimes" in the past (Jervis, 1983), but more recent studies suggest that international regimes can have modest positive effects on the ability of states to cooperate on specific security issues (Lynn-Jones, 1985; Nye, 1987; George, Farley, and Dallin, 1988).Although self-help remains the primary imperative in international politics, institutional arrangements could still contribute to peace, particularly if they directly address the primary controllable causes of war identified by previous scholarly work?l Far from being a utopian ideal, efforts to reduce the danger of war are consistent with the central focus of security studies and with realism's traditional pessimism about the prospects for a durable peace. Moreover, preserving peace contributes directly to national security, at least for most states most of the time. Given their belief that war is always a possibility, realists should be especially interested in devising ways to ensure that it does not occur. In short, well-informed research on peace is a realistic response to anarchy and should be part of security studies. The Power of Ideas. Finally, interest in the "autonomous power of ideas" has also grown in recent years. The role of "strategic beliefs" in foreign and military policy has been stressed by historians (Howard, 1984), by scholars drawing upon psychology (Jervis, 1976; Kull, 1988), and by studies of military organizations and domestic politics (Snyder, 1984,1991; Van Evera, 1984; Thornson, 1990). More generally, John Mueller (1989) and James L. Ray (1990) have argued that war is a fading institution among advanced industrial societies, just as dueling and slavery become obsolete in the 19th century. Significantly, their arguments are not based on the dangers posed by nuclear weapons. Instead, they claim that the horrors of conventional war have discredited the earlier belief that it was a noble or heroic activity. This argument remains incomplete, however, for we lack a theory to account for the observed change in attitudes (Kaysen, 1990). Mueller attributes the shift to the dehumanizing experience of World War I, but this does not explain why earlier wars failed to produce a similar result. Without a theory of attitude change, we cannot estimate the durability of current antiwar attitudes or devise a workable strategy for reinforcing them. And as Mueller admits, the outbreak of World War 11 shows that if most but not all states believe war is too horrible to contemplate, those that do not share this view will be more likely to
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use force precisely because they expect opponents to acquiesce rather than fight. Unless popular revulsion against war becomes universal and permanent, it provides no guarantee that inter-state violence would end. Despite these limitations, the impact of changing attitudes on warfare remains a fascinating question, as part of the general subject of how states learn. The End of the Cold War. For the past forty years, the two superpowers defined their security policies pimarily in response to each other, and the rivalry between them shaped the conduct of most other states as well. Accordingly, the waning of U.S.-Soviet rivalry will have a significant impact on security studies. First, the study of grand strategy will be increasingly important. As discussed earlier, interest in U.S. grand strategy revived during the renaissance of security studies, but there are still no theoretical or comparative works on grand strategy and relatively few studies of other cases." Because both great and lesser powers will need new security arrangements once the Cold War is over, research on alternative grand strategies will be of obvious interest. Under what conditions should states employ military force and for what purposes? With the waning of the Soviet threat, what interests will the other great powers seek to defend? Can the United States and its allies now reduce their military forces, or should they be configured for other contingencies? These issues are certain to receive considerable attention, and some of it should come from experts without a professional interest in the outcome. Second, the end of the Cold War raises basic issues about the prospects for peace. Will the waning of U.S.-Soviet rivalry reduce the danger of war or allow familiar sources of conflict to reemerge? Will regional powers take more aggressive actions to improve their positions - as Iraq sought to do by invading Kuwait-or will they behave more cautiousIy in the absence of superpower support? Attempts to answer these and other questions will necessarily build on the existing knowledge base in the field, but will also stimulate new empirical studies and theoretical innovations. These concerns are already evident in the scholarly debate over the future of Europe. At least four main views can be identified. "Third-image pessimists"33 argue that the re-emergence of a multipolar Europe will restore the conditions that fueled war in Europe in the past; for this reason, the end of the Cold War will increase the danger of war. They recommend that U.S. military forces remain in Europe to dampen these effects and favor the managed spread of nuclear weapons (to Germany in particular) to alleviate the security fears they believe will accompany the superpowers' withdrawal from Europe (Mearsheimer, 1990). "Second-image pessimists" downplay systemic causes and emphasize the dangers arising from the weak democratic institutions in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. They fear that competing interest groups will use foreign policy to enhance their domestic positions; in the worst case, several factions would unite in a coalition combining their separate expansionist agendas, as occurred in Germany and Japan before the two world wars. The recommended antidote is Western assistance to support the new democracies in Eastern Europe, and the rapid
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integration of these states into the European Community (EC) (Snyder, 1990). Rejecting these pessimistic views, "second-image optimists" argue that the leveling of European societies, the dampening of militarism, and the extensive rewriting of nationalist history in Europe have removed the main causes of earlier wars. This view sees the possible dissolution of the Soviet Union as the main threat to peace, and favors Western efforts to encourage a peaceful transition and to prevent the re-emergence of the domestic forces that fueled aggression in the past (Van Evera, 1990-91). Finally, "institutional optimists" suggest that economic integration and international institutions (such as NATO, the EC, or the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe) will be strong enough to safeguard peace in Europe. A full scholarly presentation of this view is not yet available - though Snyder (1990) presents elements of one - but it implies using existing institutions to facilitate arms control and to manage economic and political tensions in an independent and increasingly united Europe (Hoffmann, 1990; Keohane, 1990). A brief summary cannot do justice to the subtlety and power of these competing views. It is worth noting, however, that all of them rely on scholarship developed or refined during the renaissance of security studies: the scholarly debate on the future of Europe is very much a contest between rival theoretical visions. It is also an issue with far-reaching implications for defense budgets, alliance commitments, and the likelihood of war. Far from signaling a declining role for security studies, in short, the end of the Cold War will keep security issues on the front burner for some time to come. Economics and Security. The relationship between economics and security is of growing interest as well. One obvious dimension is the connection between military spending and economic performance; the debate sparked by Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers illustrates the continued dissensus on this question (Kennedy, 1987; Adams and Gold, 1987; Huntington, 1988-89; Friedberg, 1989; Kupchan, l989a; Nye, 1990). Second, despite the attention that resource issues received after the 1973 oil shocks, disputes persist on the strategic importance of economic resources and their role as ~otentialcauses of international conflict (Shafer, 1982; Maull, 1984; Finlayson and Haglund, 1987; Johnson, 1989). The recent war in the Persian Gulf highlights the continued relevance of this issue, as well as the potential effectiveness of economic sanctions as a diplomatic instrument. A third issue linking economics and security is the political influence of the military-industrial complex (MIC). Although several recent works have analyzed the procurement process in detail (Gander, 1982, 1989; Stubbing, 1986; McNaugher, 1989), there has been little research on the MIC's political role in shaping national policy. Even our historical knowledge is deficient; there is still no adequate successor to Huntington's The Common Defense (1961), Schilling, Hammond, and Snyder's Strategy, Politics, and Defense Budgets (1962), and Enthoven and Smith's How Much is Enough? (1971). Indeed, there is no authoritative scholarly analysis of the U.S. defense buildup in the 1 9 8 0 ~Cross-national .~~ comparisons would be valuable as well, to supplement the few studies now available (Evangelists, 1988). Given the resources
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at stake, investigating how such decisions are made seems well worth the effort of economists and security experts alike. Refining Existing Theories. The discussion in this section underscores how new theories and approaches have sparked lively scholarly exchanges throughout the renaissance of security studies, on topics such as the impact of offensive and defensive advantages, the effect of domestic politics on war, the causes and consequences of arms races, the requirements of extended deterrence, the sources of military innovation, and the prospects for security cooperation. In most cases, however, competing hypotheses have not been subjected to systematic empirical tests. In addition to the usual efforts to devise new theories, therefore, refining and testing existing hypotheses through well-designed empirical studies should form a central part of future work. Protecting the Data Base. As noted earlier, the renaissance of security studies was facilitated by greater access to relevant information. Unfortunately, several recent developments suggest that the information so necessary for scholarship and for an informed public debate is being seriously curtailed. The Annual Reports produced by the Defense Department during the Reagan Administration were less informative than earlier versions, and this trend has continued under President Bush.jS The Reagan Administration was also more aggressive in prosecuting alleged leaks and in manipulating media coverage, thereby inhibiting journalists from investigative reporting and reducing the raw data available for use by scholars (Hertsgaard, 1988).j6 Even more worrisome, a recent volume of the Foreign Relations of the United States, the State Department's official record of U.S. diplomacy, contained such serious distortions that the Chairman of its Advisory Committee resigned in protest, accompanied by widespread condemnation from the Historical profession (Cohen, 1990; Kuniholm, 1990; Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, 1990).37 Efforts to shield government policy from outside evaluation pose a grave threat to scholarship in the field. N o doubt some government officials would like to deny ordinary citizens the opportunity to scrutinize their conduct; as a central part of that evaluative process, the scholarly profession should resist this effort wholeheartedly. The danger goes beyond the interests of any particular subfield; restricting information threatens the public debate that is central to democracy and essential to sound policy. Events as diverse as the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Iranlcontra affair, and the troubled development of the B-2 bomber remind us that excessive secrecy allows ill-conceived programs to survive uncorrected. Instead of limiting the study of security issues to a select group of official "experts," therefore, open debate on national security matters must be preserved. Such a debate requires that scholars retain access to a reliable and complete data base.
Conclusion: S o m e Lessons for t h e Future
The rise, fall, and recovery of security studies offer several guidelines for the future conduct of the field. To encourage continued progress, I conclude
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this essay by considering (1)the evolution of knowledge in the field, (2) the place of security studies in the academic world, ( 3 ) the role of research support, and (4)the norms and ethos of the field. T h e Evolution o f K n o w l e d g e
The history of security studies reveals several features about the evolution of social science. First, it illustrates how external events influence the scholarly agenda: as noted throughout this essay, research in security studies has been heavily shaped by changing international conditions. Obviously, an excessive focus on immediate policy issues can stifle long-term progress and increase the danger that research support will be subject to a "feast or famine" cycle as international tensions rise and fall (Jervis et al., 1986: 60; Nye & Lynn-Jones, 1988: 21). On the whole, however, the attention paid to policy issues has positive effects: it is the main source of new research questions and discourages any drift toward academic irrelevance. Second, the history of security studies also illustrates the mechanisms by which social science advances. One avenue is borrowing from other disciplines: like the rest of international relations, security studies has profited by drawing upon other bodies of knowledge. The other source of progress is competition between rival theories. Competition encourages contending approaches to refine their arguments and to seek better empirical support, and it usually leads them to incorporate each other's ideas as well. As noted earlier, the past decade has seen a partial convergence between the subfields of security studies, peace research, and international political economy, a development that is likely to benefit all three. The end of the Cold War will reinforce this trend by removing some of the substantive divisions between these subfields." The lesson, of course, is that while competition is essential for scientific progress, scholars with different theoretical perspectives can learn a great deal from each other.39 Security S t u d i e s a n d t h e Ivory T o w e r
A recurring theme of this essay has been the twin dangers of separating the study of security affairs from the academic world or of shifting the focus of academic scholarship too far from real-world issues. The danger of war will be with us for some time to come, and states will continue to acquire military forces for a variety of purposes. Unless one believes that ignorance is preferable to expertise, the value of independent national security scholars should be apparent. Indeed, history suggests that countries that suppress debate on national security matters are more likely to blunder into disaster, because misguided policies cannot be evaluated and stopped in time.40 As in other areas of public policy, academic experts in security studies can help in several ways. In the short term, academics are well placed to evaluate current programs, because they face less pressure to support official policy.4' The long-term effects of academic involvement may be even
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more significant: academic research can help states learn from past mistakes and can provide the theoretical innovations that produce better policy choices in the future. Furthermore, their role in training the new generation of experts gives academics an additional avenue of influence. Assuming they perform these tasks responsibly, academics will have a positive - albeit gradual impact on how states deal with the problem of war in the future. The Role of Research Support The renaissance of security studies was facilitated by increased financial support from several sources, especially private foundations. Managing the allocation of research support is an imposing challenge: among other things, there are no perfectly reliable criteria for assessing the merits of competing proposals or the benefits of earlier decisions. Outside review committees can help, but any attempt to evaluate the role of outside support should acknowledge the inherent problems donors face and the laudable aims that many of them seek. The renaissance of security studies suggests several lessons in this regard. Support for "scholarly infrastructure" has been the most effective way for private foundations to contribute to long-term progress. As discussed above, the Ford Foundation's support for several academic research centers was essential in resurrecting the field. Since then, the MacArthur Foundation's support for International Security, its institutional grants to a number of academic and research organizations, and the Ford Foundation's continued support for the IISS have provided forums for the publication of serious academic research and for the airing of scholarly disputes, along with direct support for individual scholars.42 The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John M. Olin Foundation have also provided extensive support for research programs in security studies. If groups such as these continue to offer adequate financial backing, the momentum gained during the renaissance should continue. The recent effort to enrich security studies by drawing scholars from other disciplines into the field (for example, through the MacArthurISSKC "dual expertise" program) has had more mixed results. Although some "retooling" programs were valuable (especially for language training and to encourage natural scientists to learn about security issues), the belief that security studies was intellectually impoverished paid insufficient attention to the interdisciplinary approach that had characterized the field since its inception. Furthermore, making a major contribution to any discipline requires serious and time-consuming preparation; the necessary expertise cannot be acquired in a year or two. Security studies is no exception to this rule, and it is therefore not surprising that progress during the renaissance has come primarily from scholars within the field who drew upon other disciplines rather than from experts from other fields who suddenly turned their attention to security issues. Foundations should take risks on occasion, of course, and the ultimate benefit of a particular initiative cannot be known in advance. Over the longer term, however, it is most important to maintain an active group of experts
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whose primary interest is security studies itself (Lebow, 1988: 515). Because these individuals will have the greatest impact on future debates over national security, foundations that hope to influence these debates should ensure that these experts are adequately supported. Accordingly, importing scholars from other fields should be no more than a supplement to support for those with a demonstrated interest and a solid background in the field.43 A more serious danger is the politicization of research support. In the past decade, a number of foundations with distinct ideological positions have entered the field.44 If access to research support becomes contingent on "correct" political views, the integrity of security studies will be gravely threatened. In the short term, the presence of several ideologically varied foundations and the existence of many separate research centers has ensured that no single set of views has come to dominate the field. But science is not a contest that the loudest or most lavishly funded forces should win; the quality of scholarship should be the dominant consideration. Over the longer term, foundations should support scholarship that follows the basic norms of science rather than research that conforms to particular political ~references.The goal is to encourage talented scholars to attack important questions, regardless of their ultimate conclusions. In short, keeping ideological litmus tests out of the funding process is essential to preserving the legitimacy of security studies as a scholarly enterprise. Norms and Ethos of the Security Studies Community The final set of lessons concerns the role of several informal norms within the field. These norms are neither unique to security studies nor universal among academic disciplines. Although a number of senior scholars provided important role models, these norms have been especially evident among younger members. Three principles merit special mention. First, security studies has profited from a collaborative ethos. Members of the field are encouraged to exchange ideas, evidence, and criticism freely despite significant substantive disagreements. Admittedly, this norm is more an aspiration than a universally-accepted reality, but the spirit of cooperative criticism has helped individual scholars be more productive and enabled the field to advance more quickly. This achievement is all the more remarkable given the range of opinion within the field. Far from being a clique of like-minded cronies, security studies has displayed extraordinary diversity over the past decade, punctuated by episodes of intense debate. One need only be familiar with the disputes already discussed (on deterrence theory, U.S. grand strategy, naval strategy, strategic weapons policy, surprise attack, the origins of World War I, and so on) to realize that the security studies field is not a unified group either methodologically, substantively, or politically. Yet with but a few notable exceptions, the field has avoided destructive professional rivalries. w h a t unites the field is a desire to increase our understanding of the role of force in international politics. Recurring debates testify to the strength of
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the field and are a major engine for its continued progress. As one participant has noted: "Scholarship on national security matters is, like all scholarship, a collective enterprise ... [Individuals] publish their findings; this invites criticism from their colleagues, [and] provides foundations and inputs for the work of others. ... By this method the community as a whole advances our understanding of specific methodological and substantive issues and of the field as a whole" (Posen, 1989: 145). A second norm is relevance, a belief that even highly abstract lines of inquiry should be guided by the goal of solving real-world problems. Because the value of a given approach may not be apparent at the beginning - game theory is an obvious example -we cannot insist that a new approach be immediately applicable to a specific research puzzle. On the whole, however, the belief that scholarship in security affairs should be linked to real-world issues has prevented the field from degenerating into self-indulgent intellectualizing. And from the Golden Age to the present, security studies has probably had more real-world impact, for good or ill, than most areas of social science. Finally, the renaissance of security studies has been guided by a commitment to democratic discourse. Rather than confining discussion of security issues to an elite group of the best and brightest, scholars in the renaissance have generally welcomed a more fully informed debate. To paraphrase Clemenceau, issues of war and peace are too important to be left solely to insiders with a vested interest in the outcome. The growth of security studies within universities is one sign of broader participation, along with increased availability of information and more accessible publications for interested citizens. Although this view is by no means universal, the renaissance of security studies has been shaped by the belief that a well-informed debate is the best way to avoid the disasters that are likely when national policy is monopolized by a few self-interested parties. Viewed as a whole, therefore, the renaissance of security studies has been a valuable development for international relations. As we are entering an era where new security problems will arise and new strategies for dealing with them will be required, the importance of security studies is manifest. If participants observe the norms that have guided the field in recent years and if adequate research support remains available, prospects for continued advances are good. And if future work both builds upon and challenges the results of the recent renaissance, that will be convincing evidence of the continued health of the field.
Author's Note I thank the following ~ndividuals for t h e ~ rcomments on earlier drafts of t h ~ spaper: Christopher Achen, Richard Betts, Dale Copeland, Michael Desch, George Downs, Alexander George, Charles Glaser, Alicia Levine, Jack Levy, Sean Lynn-Jones, John Mearsheimer, Andrew Moravcsik, Robert Pape, Barry Posen, Duncan Snidal, Jack Snyder, Rebecca Stone, and Stephen Van Evera. I am also grateful to Owen Cote and Kennette Benedict for useful discussions, and to James Marquardt for research assistance.
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Notes 1. This article is a personal and therefore subjective assessment of the field. I regret the inevitable omissions; given limited space, I have been forced to omit many important works. For other recent surveys of security studies, see Smoke (1975), Gray (1982),Jervis, Lederberg, North, Rosen, Steinbruner, and Zinnes (1986), Social Science Research Council (1986), Nye and Lynn-Jones (1988), and Freedman (1989). 2. Works of "pure" theory reflect changing political concerns as well, but the connections are often less direct and the policy implications less evident. 3. Many international relations theories contain concepts that are not easily controlled, such as "polarity," "lateral pressure," or "status inconsistency." By contrast, works in security studies tend to employ concepts that are controllable by national leaders, such as military doctrine and strategy, the tools of statecraft (e.g., deterrence) or the size and character of armaments. 4. I am indebted t o Michael Desch for discussion on these ooints. 5. Quasi-scholarly work o n security topics may be found in journals such as Strategic Review, Armed Forces Journal International, or International Defense Revrew, o r in books such as Graham (1983), Caldicott (1984), or Tyroler (1984). 6. Exceptions include studies of arms races (Richardson, 1960), the causes of war (Wright, 1942), and the geopolitics of U.S. grand strategy (Spykman, 1942). 7. According t o Laurence Martin, "the problem of [nuclear] deterrence d ~ more d than anything else to create the modern academic field of strategic studies" (1980: 93). 8. For example, the concept of the "manipulation of risk" emerged from the application of game theory to the problem of deterrence, while "stability theory" emerged from an empirical study of the vulnerability o f U S . bomber bases. See Trachtenberg (1989: 311-16) and Achen and Snidal (1989: 153). 9. Major figures in the Golden Age included economists (Thomas Schelling, Henry Rowen, Andrew Marshall, James Schlesinger), physicists (Herman Kahn, Leo Szilard), sociologists (Morris Janowitz, Hans Speier), psychologists (Paul Kecskemeti), mathematicians (Donald Brennan, Albert Wohlstetter), and political scientists (Bernard Brodie, William Kaufmann, Henry Kissinger, and Glenn Snyder). 10. O n deterrence theory, see Green (1966) and George and Smoke (1974). O n arms control, see the list of contributors in Brennan (1961). 11. Other examples include the Dimensionality of Nations ( D O N ) project and the Stanford Studies in International Conflict and Integration. See Rosenau (1976). 12. Some of these scholars did work on policy issues, and some components of the larger projects had policy relevance. See Singer (1962) and Holsti (1972). 13. An exception was the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, which produced a variety of publications outlining the case against U.S. involvement in Indochina. Among scholars of international politics, important statements against the war include Waltz (1967) and Morgenthau (1969). 14. Works that employed the comparative case-study method include Snyder and Diesing (1977), Lebow (1981), Betts (1982, 1987), Mearsheimer (1983), Posen (1984), Snyder (1984, forthcoming), Levite (1987), Walt (1987b), Evangelista (1988), George, Farley, Dallin (1988), Huth (1988), and Shimshoni (1988). 15. Advances in game theory have enabled scholars to relax the assumptions of the original deterrence model, although these new techniques require other restrictions to achieve formal solutions. See O'Neill 119891 , , and Powell 11990). , , 16. For example, it IS now con~monplaceto use dynamic campaign models to measure the effectiveness of alternat~vestrategic force postures. 17. By the 1980s, the perspective of some liberal theorists had moved substantially closer t o the realist position, without embracing it entirely. Compare Keohane and Nye (1972, 1977) with Keohane (1984) and Nye (1988). For a summary of this trend, see Grieco (1990). 18. Since 1982, the Mershon Center at Ohio State University has awarded an annual prize for the best first book in national security affairs. As of this writing, four of the recipients are university professors (John Mearsheimer, Barry Posen, the present author, and Aaron Friedberg),
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and two of the other winners (Bruce Blair and Andrew Krepinevich) received the award for books based on Ph.D. dissertations. 19. Membership in the International Security section of the ISA increased from 316 to 683 between 1980 and 1990 (an increase of 116 percent), while total ISA membership increased from 1892 to roughly 3000 over the same period (a 59 percent increase). 20. For examples, see Congressional Budget Office (1977) and Carter (1984). 21. For examples of these publications, see Cochran, Arkin, and Hoenig (1984), Epstein (1987), the IISS Military Balance and the SII'RI World Armaments and Disarmament Yearbook. 22. Prior to 1976, scholarly articles on security affairs were confined primarily to World Politics, International Studies Quarterly, or the Journal of Conflict Resolution. These lournals devoted much of their space to other topics, however, which reduced opportunities for scholars conducting serious analytical work in security stud~es.Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy published important scholarly articles on occasion, but they were more likely to publish undocumented policy advocacy by government officials, journalists, o r academics. 23. This development was obviously both cause and effect; the growth of publishing opportunities itself reflected growing interest in the field. Journals such as International Securrty helped improve the quality of scholarship by emphasizing cumulative research, careful documentation, policy relevance, and theoretical o r historical originality. 24. The MacArthur Foundation alone allocated $65 million for research on peace and security issues between 1984 and 1992, and it funded over 350 graduate students and 140 faculty members between 1985 and 1988 alone. See Benedict (1989). 25. As in other areas of public policy, policy recommendations in security affairs rest on vague notions about the impact of alternative pol~cies.Making these "folk theories," e.g., the "domino theory," the "window of vulnerability," explicit and testing them is a key part of academic research in the field. 26. Although Yosef Lapid cites Imre L.akatos's critique o f naive positivism approvingly (Lapid, 1989: 239, 245), he neglects Lakatos's key argument: theories are only overturned by the development of a superior alternative (Lakatos, 1970). 27. In the past, for example, security ~ t u d i e stended to dismiss quantltarlve research o n conflict as irrelevant, while the latter tended to view security studies as unscientific "policy analvsis." Both charges are undoubtedlv true in some cases. but a blanket dismissal 1s increasingly inappropriate. Instead, encouraging both groups to become more famihar with alternative approaches would improve both enterprises. For example, whenever these literatures reach d~fferentconclusions - such as o n the impact of domestic conflict or regime type on the likelihood of war - there is an obvious opportunity for further work. 28. In addition to problems of definition (were England and Germany liberal states in 1812 and 1914 respectively?) and the lack of independence between cases (many liberal stares were formerly unlted in the British empire), these studies have yet to offer a persuasive explanation for the "liberal peace." 29. For example, deterrence theory identifies the conditions that make decisions for war irrational, surely a worthy goal for opponents of war. 30. For surveys of peace research from a variety of perspectives, see Singer (1976), Boulding (1978), Wiberg (1981), and Quester (1989). 31. Examples include offensive military ~rnbalances,territorial disputes, xenophobia. and hypernationalism. The U.S.-Soviet arms control negotiations helped stabilize their deterrent relationship by limiting anti-ballistic m ~ s s ~ lsystems, e and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) led a largely successful campaign to eliminate nat~onalbiases within European textbooks (Dance, 1960). 32. Studies of grand strategy for non-U.S. cases include Handel (1973), 1,uttwak (1976), Ben-Horin and Posen (1981), Friedberg (1988), and Mandelbaum (1988). 33. "Third-image" theor~esview war as a result o f the anarchic ~nternationalsystem, "secondimage" theories focus on the internal character of states, and "first-image" theories address causes found in human nature. See Waltz (1959). 34. Instead, most recent writings on U.S. defense policy are journalistic, polemical, or narrowly focused (Fallows, 1982; Stubbing, 1986; or Kotz, 1988).
-
- -
~
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35. The Defense Department seems proud of its failure to inform us: its 1990 Annual Report boasts that it saved $121,800 by "tailoring the report directly to statutory requirements ... and eliminating unnecessary no-charge distribution." In other words, Secretary Cheney's staff included only what was absolutely required by law and reduced public access to its report! 36. The Bush Administration's handling of the Panama invasion and the Cult War suggests that it is following a similar approach, aided by a compliant media (Cook and Cohen, 1990). 37. Specifically, Volume X in the 1952-1954 series, covering U.S. policy in Iran, makes no mention of Operation AJAX, the U.S.-backed coup that ousted the Mossadegh government in 1953. According to Bruce Kuniholm, an historian of U.S.-Iranian relations and former State Department employee with access t o the complete account: "the misleading impression of U.S. non-involvement conveyed in the pages of this volume constitutes a gross misrepresentation of the historical record sufficient to deserve the label of fraud" (Kuniholm. 1990: 12). 38. In the past, security studies tended to focus primarily on East-West issues, while international political economy concentrated on West-West and, to a lesser extent, North-South issues. The end of the Cold War will lead both subfields to address similar issues, such as the future of Europe; the result will be a fruitful competition between contending theories. I am indebted to Tohn Mearsheimer for discussion on this ~ o i n t . 39. Scholars in security studies would also profit from greater attention to some of the findings of peace researchers, while the latter could learn much from the former about identifying important theoretical and practical issues. 40. Examples include Germany's Schlieffen Plan, the Japanese campaign of expansion in Asia in the 1930s, the Argentine junta's attempt to seize the Falkland Islands in 1981, and Israel's ill-fated invasion of Lebanon in 1982. In each of these cases., nublic discussion of strategy and foreign policy was suppressed, and the basic flaws in each strategy were not discussed openly. On this general problem, see Van Evera (1984, 1987) and Walt (1987a: 146-54). 41. Recent examples are Mearsheimer (1986) and Brown (1989). 42. In this respect, the MacArthur Foundation's recent decision to end its financial support for International Security threatens the health of the field, unless alternative sources of support can be found. 43. It should be noted that "dual expertise" programs have been a relatively small part of foundation activity; the bulk of recent funding in security studies has gone to established programs and topics. 44. Within the field, the MacArthur Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation are usually seen as left-wing in orientation, the Ford Foundation is centrist, and the Olin Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, Scaife Foundation, and Smith-Richardson Foundation are seen as rightwing. For background on the second group, see Morgan (1981) and Blumenthal (1986).
.
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Kupchan, C. (1989b) Setting Conventional Force Requirements: Roughly Right or Precisely Wrong? World Politics 41: 536-78. Kurth, J. (1971) A Widening Gyre: The Logic of American Weapons Procurement. PublicPolicy 19: 373-404. Lakatos, 1. (1970) Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes. In Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, edited by 1. Lakatos and A. Musgrave, pp. 91-1 96. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Lake, D. (1987) Power and the Third World: Toward a Realist Political Economy of North-South Relations. International Studies Quarterly 31 : 2 17-34. Lapid, Y. (1989) The Third Debate: O n the Prospects of International Theory in a PostPositivist Era. International Studies Quarterly 33: 235-54. Lebow, R.N. (1981) Between Peace and War: The Nature of International Crisis. Baltin~ore, MD: Johns Hopkins Un~versityPress. Lebow, R.N. (1988) Interdisciplinary Research and the Future of Peace and Security Studies. Politzcul Psychology 9: 507-25. I.ehow, R.N., and J.G. Stein (1989) Rational Deterrence Theory: I T h ~ n k Therefore , I Deter. World Polztics 41: 208-24. Lebow, R.N., and J.G. Stein (1990) Deterrence: The Elusive Dependent Variable. World Politics 42: 336-69. Leffler, M.P. (1984) The American Conception of National Security and the Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945-48. American Historical Review 89: 346-400. Levite, A. (1987) Intelligence and Strategic Surprises. New York: Columbia Un~versityPress. Levy, J. (1984) The Offensive/Defensive Balance in Military Technology: A Theoretical and H~storicalAnalys~s.lrzternational Studies Quarterly 28: 219-38. Levy, J. (1988) Domestic Politics and War. In The Origins and Prevention of Major War, edited by R. Rotberg and T. Raab, pp. 79-99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levy, J. (1990) The Causes of War: A Review of Theorm and Evidence. In Behavior, Society (2nd Nuclear War, Vol. I , edited by P. Tetlock et al. pp. 209-333. New York: Oxford University Press. Luttwak, F.. (1976) The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century A.D. t o the Third. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Luttwak, E. (1980-81) The Operational Level of War. lnternatronal Securzt)~5: 61-79. Lynn-Jones, S. (1985) A Quiet Success for Arms Control: Preventing Incidents at Sea. lnternatronal Security 9: 154-84. Lynn-Jones, 5. (1986) Detente and Deterrence: Anglo-German Relations, 191 1-1 9 14. International Security 11: 121-50. Majeski, S., and D. Sylvan (1984) Simple Choices and Complex Calculations: A Critique of The War Trap. Journal of Conflict Resolution 28: 316-40. Mako, W. (1983) U.S. Ground Forces and the Defense of Central Europe. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Mandelbaum, M. (1988) The Fate of Nations: The Search for Nationizl Security in the 19th anti 20th Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maoz, Z. (1989)Joining the Club of Nations: Political Development and International Conflict, 1 8 16-1 976. International Studies Quarterly 33: 199-23 1. Maoz, Z., and N. Abdolali (1989) Regime Types and International Conflict, 1816-1976. journal of Conflict Resolution 33: 3-36. Martin, L. (1980) The Future of Strategic Studies. journal of Strategic Studies 3: 9 1-99. Maull, H. (1984) Energy, Minerals and Western Securzty. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Un~versityPress. May, M., G. Bing, and J. Steinbruner (1988) Strategic Arms Reductions. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. McNaugher, T. (1989) N e w Weapons, Old Politics: America's Military Procurement Muddle. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. ~ of Power: Technology, Armed Force and Society sznce A.D. McNeill, W.H. (1982) T / JPursuit 1000. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Mearsheimer, J . (1981-82) Maneuver, Mobile Defense, and the NATO Central Front. International Security 6: 104-22. Mearsheimer, J. (1983)Conventional Deterrence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mearsheimer, J. (1986)A Strategic Misstep: The Maritime Strategy and Deterrence in Europe. Internationa[ Security 11: 3-57. Mearsheimer, J . (1989) Assessing the Conventional Balance: The 3:l Rule and Its Critics. International Security 13: 54-89. Mearsheimer, J . (1990) Back to the Future: Instability in Europe After the Cold War. International Security 15: 5-56. Miller, S., and S . Van Evera, eds. (1986)The Star Wars Controversy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Morgan, D. (1981)Conservatives: A Well-Financed Network. Washington Post January 4: A l , A14-15. Morgenthau, H.J. ( 1 966) The Purpose o f Political Science. In A Design For Political Science, edited by J.C. Charlesworth, pp. 63-79. Philadelphia: American Academy o f Political and Social Science. Morgenthau, H.J. (1969)A New Foreign Policy for the United States. New York: Praeger. Morgenthau, H.J. (1970)Truth and Power: Essays of a Decade, 1960-1 970. New York: Praeger. Morse, E. (1970)The Transformation o f Foreign Policies: Modernization, Interdependence, and Externalization. World Politics 22: 371-92. Mueller, J . (1989)Retreat From Doomsday: The Obsolescence o f Major War. New York: Basic Books. Nye, J.S. (1987)Nuclear Learning and U.S.-Soviet Security Regimes. International Organization 41: 371-402. Nye, J.S. (1988)Neorealism and Neoliberalism. World Polctics 40: 235-51. Nye, J.S. (1990)Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power. New York: Basic Books. Nye, J.S., and S . Lynn-Jones (1988)International Security Studies: A Report o f a Conference on the State o f the Field. International Security 12: 5-27. O'Neill, B. (1989) Game Theory and the Study o f the Deterrence o f War. In Perspectives on Deterrence, edited by P.C. Stern, R. Axelrod, R. Jervis, and R. Radner, pp. 134-56. New York: Oxford University Press. Olson, M., and R. Zeckhauser (1966)An Economic Theory o f Alliances. Review of Economics and Statistics 48: 266-79. Orme, J . (1987)Deterrence Failures: A Second Look. International Securtty 11: 96-124. Osgood, R.E. (1957)Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy. Chicago: University o f Chicago Press. Osgood, C.E. (1962)An Alternative to War or Surrender. Urbana: University o f Illinois Press. Oye, K.A., ed. (1986)Cooperation Under Anarchy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pape, R. (1990)Coercive Airpower in the Vietnam War. International Security 15: 103-46. Posen, B.R. (1982) Inadvertent Nuclear War?: Escalation and NATO's Northern Flank. Internattonal Security 7: 28-54. Posen, B.R. (1984)The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain and Germany Between the World Wars. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Posen, B.R. (1984-85) Measuring the European Conventional Balance: Coping with Complexity in Threat Assessment. International Security 9: 47-88. Posen, B.R. (1989)Correspondence. lnternational Security 13: 144-160. Posen, B.R., and S . Van Evera (1987)Reagan Administration Defense Policy: Departure from Containment. In Eagle Resurgent: The Reagan Era in American Foreign Policy, edited by K . Oye, R. Lieber, and D. Rothchild, pp. 75-114. Boston: Little, Brown. Powell, R. (1990) Nuclear Deterrence Theory: The Search for Credibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quester, G. ( 1 977) Offense and Defense in the International System. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
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Snyder, J. (1984) The Ideology of the Offensrue: Military Decisionmakrng and the Disasters of 1914. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Snyder, J. (1990) Avoiding Anarchy in the New Europe. International Security 14: 5-41. Snyder, J. (1 991) Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambitions. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Social Science Research Council (SSRC) (1986) The Security Affairs Field: What Has It Achieved? Where Should It Go? New York: SSRC. Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) (1990) Resolution on the Integrity of Foreign Relations of the United States Documentary History Volumes. SHAFR Newsletter 21: 33-40. Spykman, N. (1942) America's Strategy in World Politics: The United States a n d the Balance of Power. New York: Harper and Row. Steinbruner, J. (1974) The Cybernetic Theory of Decision: New Dimensions in Political Analysis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Steinbruner, J. (1976) Beyond Rational Deterrence: The Struggle for New Conceptions. World Politics 28: 223-42. Steinbruner, J. (1978) National Security and the Concept of Strategic Stability. Journal of Conflict Resolution 22: 4 1 1-28. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) (annual) World Armaments a n d Disarmament Yearbook. Stockholm: SIPRI. Stubbing, R. (1986) The Defense Game: An Insider Explores the Astonishing Realities of Amertca's Defense Establishment. New York: Harper and Row. Thies, W.J. (1980) When Gouernments Collide: Coercioiz a n d Diplomacy in the Vietnam Conflict, 1964-68. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thomson, J. (1988) An Unfavorable Situation: NATO and the Conventional Balance. N-2842FFIRC. Santa Monica, CA: The RAND Corporation. Thomson, J.E. (1990) State Practices, International Norms, and the Decline of Mercenarism. International Studies Quarterly 34: 23-48. Trachtenberg, M. (1989) Strategic Thought in America, 1952-1966. Political Science Quarterly 14: 301-34. Tyroler, C. (1984) Alerting America: The Papers of the Committee on the Present Danger. New York: Pergamon-Brassey's. Vagts, A. (1959) A History of Militarism: Civilian and Military. New York: Meridian Press. Van Evera, S.W. (1984) Causes of War. Ph.D. dissertation. Berkeley: University of California. Van Evera, S. (1987) Why States Believe Foolish Ideas: Non-Evaluation in Government and Society. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Sept. 3-6. Van Evera, S. (1990) Why Europe Matters, Why the Third World Doesn't: American Grand Strategy after the Cold War. /ournal of Strategic Studies 13: 1-51. Van Evera, S. (1990-92) Primed for Peace: Europe after the Cold War. lnternational Security 15: 7-57. Vasquez, J.A. (1987) The Steps to War: Toward a Scientific Explanation of Correlates of War Findings. World Politics 40: 108-45. Wagner, H. (1984) War and Expected Utility Theory. World Politics 36: 407-23. Walt, S.M. (1987a) The Search for a Science of Strategy: A Review Essay of Makers of Modern Strategy. International Security 12: 140-65. Walt, S.M. (1987b) The Origins of Alliances. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Walt, S.M. (1989) The Case for Finite Containment: Analyzing U.S. Grand Strategy. International Security 14: 5-49. Walt, S.M. (1990) Revolution and War. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Aug. 27-Sept. 1. Waltz, K. (1959) Man, the State a n d War: A Theoretical Analysis. New York: Columbia University Press. Waltz, K. (1967) The Politics of Peace. International Studies Quarterly 11: 199-21 1. Waltz, K. (1979) Theory of lnternational Politics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
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Waltz, K. (1981) A Strategy for the Rapid Deployment Force. Internatmzal Securrty 7: 49-73. Weede, E. (1984) De~nocracy and War Involvement. /ournal of Conflict Resolut~on28: 649-64. Wiberg, H. (1981) JPR 1964-80: What Have We 1.earned About Peace? Journal of Peace Research 18: 1 1 1-48. Wohlstetter, A. ( 1 959) The Delicate Balance o f Terror. Foreign Affairs 37: 2 1 1-34. Wright, Q. (1942) A Study o f War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. York, H. ( 1 970) Race t o Oblivion: A Partrclpantk Guide t o the Arms Race. New York: Simon and Schuster.
33 The Quagmire of Gender and International Security Rebecca Grant
W
ars have been fought by men, resolved by men, and chronicled by men. By the end of the twentieth century, however, female soldiers will reach higher rank and play an increasingly important role in the military in several nations. Journalists, scholars, and eventually, the historians who write on contemporary warfare will include women in their ranks. In practice, warfare and the process behind the decision to go to war are no longer the exclusive domains of men. Surely, this is a quiet triumph for feminism. Organized demands for equality and years of action on the part of individuals have given women access to one of the last bastions of male dominance. The participation of women in the state's mechanisms for war also marks a change in the relationship between women and the state. For those who study gender and international relations, there is the potential for a new source of material. As these developments unfold around us, however, we are left to wonder whether and how they will make a difference to theories of what constitutes security, and how security is attained and lost. Will the participation of women give us insights, or reveal a different set of values, which we can use to make better sense of the difficult choices between the norms of domestic civility and international anarchy? Is the feminist standpoint lost when feminist scholars are no longer confined to "a vantage point at the periphery," a "standpoint of people who have been systematically excluded from power?"' Can the experiences of women be used directly to reconstruct some of our views of the historical and current relationship between the state and the military? All these questions touch on a specific set of assumptions about feminist theory, and the role of a ~otentialfeminist epistemology within the security studies subfield of international relations. Women's participation in the military establishment is a narrow topic, but it raises an especially important and controversial set of issues that have relevance for other areas of research on gender. The idea of women as soldiers touches on the question of just how Source: V. Spike Peterson (ed.), Gendered States: Feminists (Re)Visions o f International Relations Theory (Boulder & London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1992), pp. 83-97.
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we are expecting to create and use a feminist perspective in international relations theory. Feminist enquiry can have many forms and different ideological overtones. However, by one definition it must take women's lives as the epistemological starting point. With this in mind, we can return to the issue of how archetypes of the male experience as warrior have contributed to construction of theories of the state. This is not the only source of theory o n states and international security. But many explanations - from Thucydides to modern versions of the stag hunt - rest on received foundations of archetypal male experience. With more women in the armed services, previous barriers are disappearing. We could in theory launch a new search for a particular feminist "epistemology," capable either of challenging male archetypes in security policy or of creating other ways to assess the unique aspects of women's experiences. The difficulty is that we may encounter a diversity of experiences and unexpected currents - such as a lack of distinction between the experience and viewpoints of the male and the female. This brings into question the assumption of difference between the experience of women and men in similar situations, and the criteria for a feminist view of security. Is difference essential, or can it fade as societal boundaries such as the taboo against a public role for women in the state begin to change? This chapter explores the premise that in the case of security, the experience of women alone is not a clear guide for defining a feminist epistemology. The experience of women in war zones, the end of their exclusion from the security apparatus of the state, etc., all encounter a competing assumption that a feminist perspective should be kept aloof from the grit of war and security policy. The counterintuitive slant of the premise discussed in this chapter is at odds with examples of highly successful feminist scholarship in several other academic fields. In the next section I will argue that a special set of questions is raised by the special place that security, with its set of archetypes of male experience, occupies in the foundation of the discipline of international relations.
Part One: Constraints in t h e Traditions of International Relations War and security were the most conspicuous issues in the early development of international relations as a separate discipline. Without the need to draw and defend boundaries we would not have "international" relations as such. This heritage has created constraints on the ability to establish a feminist perspective. Many of the constraints have been reinforced rather than overturned by recent research. The origin of the problem goes back to the fact that the early development of the discipline was influenced primarily by the Great War of 1914-191 9. Another wave of development followed after 1945, in the wake of the Second World War. The background for this second generation of
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scholars was the effort to establish the principles of the new and unprecedented global security role the United States had undertaken. At the same time, the special problem of nuclear weapons constituted a significant portion of the research agenda, drawing students and younger scholars to the field. Exemplified by E.H. Carr and others who wrote on the interwar period, the postwar scholars were driven in part by the need to develop a better understanding of international conflict in order to prevent it. Their focus on the problem of war - and of why peace movements failed became a defining assumption. For the most part, however, international relations was uncritical of the social relations that supported the international role of the state. Specifically, one of the features that escaped attention was the traditional practice of using gender roles as a basis for distinguishing between the morality for the private citizen and the citizen ready to sanction violence as a member of the public. Early international relations theory was ready to be analytical and prescriptive about politics among nations, but was not ready to explore the common basis for sanctioning war. Martin Wight believed, as Michael Howard put it, that international politics dealt with "the very fundamentals of life and death: with the beliefs, the habit structures which shape moral communities and for which it is considered appropriate to die - and worse, to kilLX2The implications of social roles based on gender are certainly part of that set of fundamental ideas. The emphasis on war and problems of security perhaps did more than anything else to distinguish international relations as a separate subject. International relations scholars might well agree that basically, this was the right thing to do, since it reinforced the initial premise that one could and should study the international system and its influence, instead of looking at diplomatic interaction purely as a legal or historical process. Although the emphasis on war was necessary to distinguish the new subject, it also created conditions that blocked off feminist enquiry in this discipline from the start. Only male citizens participated in wars. To the early international relations scholars, understanding why men acted the way they did was one of the basic questions. When this was universalized into the issue of understanding why "man in the state of nature" or "man in society" acted in certain it was easy to retain the male gender archetype proffered by political theory. Without question, the tools available to pioneers of international relations theory were already laden with gender bias. History, philosophy, law, and political theory rarely explored the implications of gender roles for each branch of thought. As the research of many feminist scholars has demonstrated, the public realm of political action was effectively closed to women beginning with the Greeks. Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Hegel, and others consciously assigned the citizen's role to the male."he role of the female in society was seen as having little connection to the practice of politics. The most difficult conception to challenge, however, was the notion that women had no role in maintaining the security of the state.
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What started as a practice of placing a lower value on the female role in politics became a means of excluding - intentionally or by tradition - many of the alternative perspectives of human values and behavior. The female gender role, so conspicuously outside the realm of war, was not considered as a basis for analyzing international relations. All the assumptions about state behavior in the international system were predicated on theories of interaction between male citizens, or men in the state of nature, or other androcentric archetypes. Assessments of the nature of competition depended almost entirely on the image of the male, the citizen who abides by one set of laws in domestic society and who is authorized and encouraged to follow another set as a soldier. Given their intellectual tradition, then, and their frequent preoccupation with war, the early twentieth-century theorists of international relations were little inclined to deal with the issue of gender in state-society relations. This intellectual history alone, however, produces too clean a picture. International relations theorists did more than swallow and perpetuate a tradition of gender bias that they had learned from political theory and history. The developments in feminist movements in the early twentieth century were frankly ignored. They were not seen as part of a wider social and cultural fabric that might be influencing the international system. Perhaps some would argue that "feminist enquiry" is even more of a newcomer in academia than the study of international relations, and that the early twentieth-century theorists had no feminist scholarship to discover. Yet this is not entirely the case. Feminism and the study of international relations are contemporaries. They grew up together and were stimulated by some of the same events. Both can look back to tracts by Machiavelli or Christine de Pisan, which set out some of the issues well before either field had a clear identity. By World War I, women were beginning to change their relationship to the state. Shortly before the war, for example, the activities of the suffragists in Britain reached their peak. The Asquith government was far from indifferent to the often spectacular activities of these women. During World War 1, women served at the front lines in more prominent roles than ever before. For many women in the United States and Europe, the cause of peace was one of the great organizing forces of feminism after the battle for women's suffrage had been won. While theorists were beginning to piece together the structure for studying international relations, women were asserting their political views on an unprecedented scale. Yet this dawn of a new source of commentary and experience went unnoticed. Some, like Harold Nicolson, who learned about feminism from his wife, Vita Sackville-West, and from her lover, believed that the feminine qualities of "zeal, sympathy, and intuition" were "dangerous qualities in international affair^."^ Actually the men and the women were proceeding in parallel. The year 1919 provides an example. While the victorious, "satisfied" powers (to quote E.H. Carr) met at Versailles, the International Congress of Women convened in Zurich. The women delegates were deeply concerned over the harsh provisions
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of the treaty under discussion at Versailles, and many were skeptical that the proposed League of Nations would offset the treaty's retribution. Future Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jane Addams, presiding officer of the congress, and her colleagues were becoming aware of the problems of peace at the same time that John Maynard Keynes and Harold Nicolson were preparing to publish their condemnations of the settlement. The International Congress of Women concluded that "a hundred million people of this generation in the heart of Europe are condemned to poverty, disease, and despair, which must result in the spread of hatred and anarchy within each n a t i ~ n . " ~ The analysis was correct. Through the 1920s and 1930s, international organizations of women flourished. Although this was one of the most striking developments of the era, it had little discernible impact on the men who pondered over the nature of relations between states. It would be too simplistic to argue that while feminists concentrated on peace, male international relations theorists were preoccupied with war, and hence the gender line was reinforced. Jane Addams did assert in testimony before the US Congress that war hysteria came primarily from men, because men were more prone to e m ~ t i o n a l i s m .But ~ Addams's line of thinking did not make the male agenda. The experience of women in the peace movement was ignored by those concerned with relations between states, despite the prominence of individuals like Addams. Men's conceptual schema of interstate relations were not equipped to take note of how gender roles affected activists. The understandable obsession with determining the causes of war was so great that it left little margin for assessing the significance of the feminist peace movements. The new discipline duplicated the sources of gender bias. The cost has been a discipline unequipped to comprehend the full range of causes that lie behind international events. World War 11 had at least one cause linked specifically to issues of gender. As Claudia Koonz has written, Hitler's primary war aim was not military triumph but the establishment of a new order in Germany based on race and sex.' Today, the gap between gender issues and the study of security is still wide. Although individual women have reached positions of authority in the foreign policy decision-making structure, the legacy of gender bias has gone largely undisturbed within international relations theory, and most of us are still startled by an assertion like Claudia Koonz's. Even in the trend toward "reflective" work on international relations theory, gender has not been accorded a place as part of the investigation into why states go to war. Most of the theorists writing during periods of reform in international relations theory have not opted to take into account the shifting relationship of women to the state and to international politics. For example, recent re-evaluations of concepts like security have sought to trace the concept in question back to ancient Greece, in order to clarify the origins of the contemporary dilemma. The aim of a body of research by Jervis, Gilpin, and others has been to look for traces of the neglected roots of cooperation theory in the earliest discussions of the security dilemma, such as
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25'3
are found in the writings of Thucydides. However, returning to ancient Greece does not go far enough to compensate for gender bias. The system of distinction between male and female gender roles was firmly in place during the Pelopponesian Wars. Jean Bethke Elshtain has commented that "for the Greeks, war was a natural state and the basis of society."x In Athenian society, the role of women was to produce the next generation of males to defend the city-state. It is tempting to suggest that the prevalence of war weighed heavily on the lack of political rights accorded to women. At the same time, the thinkers of ancient Greece had a final reason to exclude women from roles as citizens in the state: the interest of these thinkers in public society was founded in part on the assumption that war was a natural phenomenon and that only men were important in this realm. This legacy is particularly intriguing because there is evidence in the literature of the period that gender relations were an issue in Athenian society. Nonetheless, the male ruling class resolved the problem at the expense of according citizenship rights to females. All these tendencies implied that it was both desirable and necessary to maintain the distinctions between gender roles. There is, however, an exception. Thucydides and other writers did acknowledge an archetype of the woman as warrior: the Amazon. Fragments of myth about the Amazons indicate that they were regarded as a coherent, functioning society. In some versions, the men of the society were all dead; in others, the Amazons simply dominated their menfolk the way the Athenians did their women. There was a sense that the Amazons were a powerful "nation," but not a model for rational statehood in the eyes of the Athenians. The fighting prowess of the Amazons was acknowledged, but as a group they were emphatically a society apart from the Athenians; and Athens strove to separate itself from this and other foreign societies. Jason, leader of the Argonauts, dealt with the Amazons he encountered in one time-honored fashion: he married one of them.Y In the case of the Amazons, t h e ~ rsuccess as soldiers was not sufficient to entitle them to the attributes of rational political actors. Still, as part of the project of re-examining the Hellenic origins of the state, it would not be inappropriate to reflect on why the Amazons were feared, admired, scorned, and above all, rejected as part of the norm. The antipathy of the Athenians toward the Amazons indicates how the role of women as warriors was alien to the idea of citizenship and state structure. It is not the actual experience of women but the symbolic power of the female gender role that emerges from the shadows as an important element in the male polity. The female holds in trust both civic and martial virtues. Statues in nearly every capital of the world display figures of women symbolizing victory, glory, freedom, and other virtues. But action in the state belongs t o the male. The woman who pilots an Air Force C-141 transport plane or an army helicopter assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division is still an atypical figure. Even more striking is any imagery personifying the state as female. The very idea of women's values of care, affectivity, and connection smudges the clean
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division between the role of the female as symbol of ethereal civic values and martial glory, and the role of the male as political agent responsible for decent government. If this division comes into question, it rocks the image of how certain human social roles are categorized by gender in order to make it possible for society to embrace contradictions in what is expected of its members as a whole. Where international security is concerned, the discipline of international relations resists gender issues particularly well. The answer would seem to be to construct a feminist epistemology - an ordering of criteria based on defiance of the male archetypes and on construction of alternatives drawn from awareness of the female as different. Such an epistemology could cope with gender issues in the state as a factor in war, deliver a feminist view of cooperation, and pursue other avenues of enquiry as well. But the troubling hypothesis explored in the next section is that taking women as a starting point for gender theory may not fulfill the requirements of a feminist epistemology. Erasing the male archetypes by examining an assumed female alternative can point in a third direction that confirms neither.
Part Two: Women in Combat
Nothing illustrates the dilemmas of both feminism and international relations better than the issue of women in combat. This issue catches the discipline of international relations ill-prepared, but it also challenges some feminist approaches. In conventional accounts, women, in their femininity, are not supposed to have a stake in the fortunes of soldiers or to place a value on anything connected to the destructive enterprise of war. Some feminist perspectives have relied on a stereotype of women turning away from war and the numerous messy problems of international security as seen from the perspective of the state. A crucial distinction must be observed here. The experiences of women in combat are part, but not the sum, of feminist thinking on war and peace. A feminist perspective does not have to follow directly in the wake of the women who push the frontiers of equality in the professional military careers. Feminist enquiry by definition must take women's experience as its starting point. But it cannot, and perhaps must not, seek to value all of t h e 2 experiences equally, without reference to a set of criteria. Not all experiences of women (or men) in combat are uniform, but it is the potential for similarity across gender lines that could be disturbing in the search for a feminist epistemology. To some extent, the difference constituted by our conception of the female gender role must be preserved if it is to be used as a basis for critique.'' Taking account of women's views on peace and of the effect of combat experience on women should not be expected to yield a uniform perspective. After all, the example of the mysterious Amazons has done little more than hint that women may be just as good at the arts of war. At the least, however, the whole issue of women's service in the military and in government posts may offer a partial way to correct the exclusion of
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women's experiences from theory and to begin to formulate alternative views of security. The presence of women in these jobs is, in the eyes of some, a testament to the effectiveness of feminist movements. In the United States, women constitute about 11 percent of the armed services. The US military operations in Panama and in the Gulf under the Bush administration have pointed out starkly that the military depends on its female members and that women are now an indispensable part of the instrument of US military power. The Greek model applies no more. An act of Congress still prohibits women in two of the three services from serving in particular areas of armed combat, but it is being challenged, and women will most likely gain the right to qualify for most combat specialties, particularly those reserved for pilots. Few, however, question that women who serve near the front lines as pilots, logisticians, mechanics, medical personnel, etc., are likely to be drawn into combat in the event of war. Twenty years after the start of the second wave of women's liberation, women in the United States have won the right to die for their country. Death, so rarely mentioned in connection with security, snaps us out of the theoretical reverie on women's experience. How much of a victory is women's participation if it ultimately funnels into the same tragic waste? Here we are face to face with the dilemma of being pleased with equality and dismayed at the lack of transformation. Raising the issue of the actual experience of women neatly provides empirical data but does little to establish criteria for theory or critique. The current structures, both in international relations and in much feminist thought, contain potential pitfalls. It would still be easy for many to ignore the fact that some individuals involved in the fighting will be female. Certainly, the old stumbling block of seeing women as virtuous "beautiful souls"" who might inspire civic pride, but who ought to be kept apart from war and combat, can be identified and avoided. Nevertheless, there are more troubles to come. Although women are now closely involved in both politics and the military, the implications of their participation remain ambiguous. Society may come to regard women as equivalents to their male counterparts. By this line of thinking, both gender groups are "individuals" and the distinction of sex becomes irrelevant. O n the other hand, a society can take the attitude that while women should be "equals" in most ways, the job of "fighting" should stay with the men. The justifications for this second point of view are extremely diverse. Male chauvinists object that women are not capable of performing an equal role in combat. Ardent feminists suggest that enlightened women should not want or seek to engage in fighting. Either way, the debate cuts to the roots of the concept of citizenship and to the question of whether it is legitimate for the state to send people to war. Focusing on the actual experience of women in war is another perilous approach. Certainly, it breaks down the cherished stereotype of the "beautiful soul." It also undercuts, however, the idea that for women, the experience of war is essentially and irrevocably different from that of men. This poses a challenge to the relationship between an analytical feminist perspective (one part of which is that women experience the state and its violence differently) and the raw data of women's experience.
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The core of the question is whether the experiences of women in the armed forces meet the criteria for use in a feminist enquiry. If they do not, we must rethink the embracing definition of women's experience as a starting point. Women soldiers then become a category difficult to interpret in feminist scholarship. Their tales are undeniably fascinating. They are also compelling as glimpses of the forbidden role of the soldier, a role so familiar to the male gender role. There is a taste of power and perhaps a thread of enlightenment in the idea of women acting outside their socialized feminine identity. The feminist premise, however, that values like care and affectivity have a distinctive place in women's experience, does not come through unscathed. In actuality, exceptional women have already established a record as leaders and warriors. Feminist historians have done an excellent job of pointing out that women have often been involved in military engagements. Joan Scott Kelly documented the activities of noblewomen who led soldiers in defense of their lands during the early Renaissance period in Italy.12 Margaret of Anjou, formidable wife of the English King Henry VI, led her armies to the decisive battle of the War of the Roses at Tewkesbury in 1471. A century later, Queen Elizabeth I rallied England to face the threat of invasion from the Spanish Armada. Small numbers of women fought and were killed in the American Revolution and the American Civil War. In the twentieth century, the examples are even more diverse. They range from the women who ferried combat aircraft in Britain and the United States during World War 11, to the nearly 800,000 Soviet women who served in the armed forces, many in combat roles. The Soviet women volunteers constituted almost 8 percent of the total armed forces by the end of 1943. They served as combat pilots, tank crew members, and artillery specialists, a record not matched among the Western allies.13 The accounts of women who participated in combat roles present another challenge to the assumption of difference. Women's direct experience of war seems to bring out many of the qualities and emotions that are familiar from the stories told by men. Sophia Kuntsevich was a medic in the Ukraine. She recalled that in her first battle: "The bombs started to fall and I started to dig immediately. I only dug a few shovelsful and flung myself down and lay there with my arms covering my head." When the bombing stopped, she heard the cries of the wounded, and ran to one fallen man. "Then I just began, automatically, to bandage him, then another. A new wave of bombing started, but by now I was occupied, so it was not as frightening."14 In December 1941, Sophia Kuntsevich was wounded; when she recovered, she insisted on returning to the front. Her descriptions echo many themes of the male soldier: fear, uncertainty, the conviction that she was not brave, but just another soldier trying to do her job. Her request to return to frontline duty was a typical sign of the bonding of individuals who shared the dangers of combat. When the shooting stopped, however, it became clear that gender roles had not been substantially transformed. Society looked askance at the British
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women who served in mixed antiaircraft crews, especially those few who were stationed abroad after the Normandy invasion in 1944. The veterans pointed out that the exhaustion and filth of war were hardly conducive to romantic affairs. However, women of this era have also noted that the youth of the men and women, and society's taboos on premarital sex, were strong influences even in the pressure of war. Although women were serving in nontraditional functions, the gender roles were hardly eradicated by the experience. A Soviet woman remembered that despite initial discrimination from the men, the male soldiers were helpful, albeit within established roles: "They would help us carry things, when they could, and in return sometimes would ask us to help them wash their clothes or sew on buttons."" Much of the real debate over women in the military is distinct from the question of women's specific roles in war. It is the problem of maintaining adequate peacetime forces that makes recruitment of women indispensable. Furthermore, for the women who join the military, the decision is a pragmatic one. Women recruits cite education, opportunity, advancement in a professional environment, and very occasionally, patriotism, as their reasons for enlisting (a list that does not vary significantly for the male recruits.) The achievements of US women in the military since the mid-1970s have come in peacetime. It is true that in the national crisis faced by the USSR in the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis, restrictive gender roles were dramatically lifted and women funneled into frontline roles; the current debate in the United States over women in combat may focus as well on issues specifically linked to war. This debate, however, is a reflection of old prejudices and traditions in domestic society. In fact, the pressure to ensure equal opportunity for advancement to women pursuing careers in the military is a direct companion to similar demands of women pursuing careers in civilian life. The advancement of women in the military is one of the main achievements of the women's movement for equal opportunity. As the French revolutionary Pauline Leon asserted in 1791, women want the honor "of making tyrants see that women also have blood to shed for the service of the fatherland in danger."I6 Two hundred years later, women soldiers are proud of their roles and loyal to their units. They have chosen military careers for the opportunities offered to them, but they are also proud of serving their nation. Finally, the issue of women in combat leaves observers with a series of uncomfortable conclusions. Does it make war unacceptable when women soldiers are killed in the deserts of Arabia? Apparently not. Do the women serving in combat support branches alter the military psychology of their units in any way? Probably not. The media images of female reservists in Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm unexpectedly leaving behind their young children were poignant, but the press did an equitable job of pointing out that male single parents in the services faced similar problems. These points challenge the whole idea of gender difference as a basis for constructing an alternative view. With this challenge comes a broadside against the idea of a complete, alternative "other" (to use Simone de Beauvoir's term) that stands apart
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and draws sustenance from a source of perception merely waiting to be uncovered. Indeed we must still take women as the starting point, but perhaps we cannot expect a clear road. Combat makes the experience of women soldiers an ambiguous model for reform. As Ruth Roach Pierson concluded, there is no consistent women's response to the trials of war and revolution." Perhaps, after all, there is more to be learned from the women who did not fight. Yet if that is the case, has the success of the feminist movement in obtaining more equal opportunity been for naught in theoretical terms? Returning to the central question, must we modify the dictum that a feminist epistemology must take the experience of women as its starting point? If we start with a record of experience that demonstrates more similarities to male experience than differences from it, is it possible to construct a distinctive feminist epistemology? To discount women's actual experience seems to weaken the project. More disturbing still is the hypothesis that specific incarnations of the feminine gender role - the beautiful soul set above war and politics - may have to remain in partial use. This is exactly what a feminist epistemology, based on women's experience, is designed to avoid, by giving a genuine reading, not an ideal as seen from the eyes of men. Yet it appears that women's actual experience may not always serve the needs of a critical, transformative project. To be female is not necessarily to be feminist. Likewise, to experience is not necessarily to know. The brief survey of images of women in combat is enough to indicate that reclaiming experience and histories alone cannot build a feminist epistemology.
Conclusion
The quagmire of gender and international security is thickened by the ambiguity surrounding the experience of women. The findings of this section appear to challenge the adequacy of assuming that the experience of women is enough to construct a feminist epistemology. Writers and scholars who differ on the tenets of feminism have been preoccupied for some time with defining what does and does not constitute feminist insights. However, it is unsettling to see the difficulties reappear so clearly in the discussion of war and security, where one might have expected the lines to be more distinct. Given this dilemma, it is not unreasonable to ask if taking the experience of women as the starting point must remain at the heart of feminist scholarship. For international security, it might be necessary to identify a framework where states and systems and women are combined as starting points for a feminist epistemology. Under that rubric, the aim of research would not be to fill in a new role for women but to examine how changes in the roles of and attitudes about women shift the three-sided configuration of the state, the international environment, and women. But the effort to work within a feminist epistemology can never stray completely from the prime task of working from women's experience.
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Taking women as the starting point is inherently difficult because finding a pure source of "the experience of women" is elusive, even in feminist theory. Feminist postmodernism, as the name implies, develops an epistemology in which postmodern criteria are present. By no means is this a matter of women simply being "added on" to a fully developed epistemology that then marginalizes gender issues. The very complexity, though, of feminist postmodernism, or liberal feminism, or other variations, already means that women are not the only starting point. Women's experience is set in a context derived from a discipline or methodology that attaches other values: the deconstruction of texts, the content of language, etc. For example, the idea that language itself represents an accumulated experience of linguistic acts adds in another set of experiences to be considered along with those that are explicitly about women. For the female soldier, her experience is still set in the context of a maledominated institution and changes in meaning when set outside that context. The feminist perspective cannot stand entirely outside the context it addresses. This obligation also leads to a number of different commitments within feminism, and this in turn fragments the grounds for feminist epistemology. To those who are familiar with the tides of liberal, radical, and Marxist feminism (and other schools as well), the problem of a fragmented feminist perspective is not surprising. Each of these three broad schools has taken elements of other theories and applied them to feminism. Feminists of these different stripes have differed with each other partly because of their convictions about the agenda of feminism and partly because of the way they have chosen to coexist with other, nonfeminist schools of thought that are important to them. Even radical feminists have made that decision by refusing these other, patriarchal schools of thought. The combination of context and agenda invariably influences what is selected as the basis of knowledge for a feminist epistemology in any subject area. Feminist epistemology in the realm of international security must either decide to curtail the admission of all "women's experience" or accept, as other fields have done, that there is a need to judge and select, even within the feminist perspective. If the theorist chooses to work around the dismaying sameness of women's experience in combat settings, that is her choice, and her potential gain or loss. The ambiguity of the feminist perspective on women in combat is tenable because it is a gateway to a feminist epistemology, not an epistemology in itself. In the end, a feminist epistemology is not a clear map but a license to draw one. Joan Kelly illustrated this with her work in history, which, as Joan Scott describes it, makes "speculative, generalized, abstract explanations about women in history."18 Kelly's work has met a reasonable set of epistemological criteria: it started with women as subjects, stayed within the discipline of history, and produced theory. What she concluded about women and their lack of a renaissance was therefore only one of the contributions of her work. No question, the results can vary widely. The experience of women in combat seems to echo male experience because it emanates from the maledominated institution of the military. One could argue that the dilemma is
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simply part of the original problem of exclusion. Or, one could conclude that it is a mark of the universal nature of the human reaction to war. In the latter case, feminist theory becomes redundant. Or, one could say that it signals a way toward a more fully human understanding of the problem of war. This short exercise raises just some of the possibilities and they are not all equally attractive from most feminist perspectives. We may not readily be able to meet the challenge of incorporating both the experience of women and a discernible set of feminist values into an epistemology that we can call "feminist." What a feminist perspective can and should do is to identify gender bias, and provide criteria for a research agenda that leads toward a better understanding of aspects of human behavior that have been marginalized in theories of security. There may still be real value in using selected elements of the generalized feminine gender role as a source of ideas on the better aspects of human behavior. This is not a recommendation to return to the terrible trade-offs of the "beautiful soul" image. If feminine values are to be used as ontological and epistemological starting points, a careful set of criteria must be established by individual researchers. Inevitably the "experience of women" will have to be filtered to formulate a feminist perspective. What a feminist epistemology must do in time is to include tools for confronting the gender bias structured into the theories of security in international relations. It must also resolve the conflict of values between women's experiences in combat, and feminist assumptions about security that feed a feminist epistemology. Finally, a feminist epistemology must define how it functions given the presence of other epistemologies that cover the same agenda of war and security. Most likely, several versions of a feminist epistemology will emerge, and within them several theories about gender and international security may flourish. Virginia Woolf decried the basis of nationalism that would inspire women to fight when she wrote: "As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, I want no country. As a woman, my country is the world."19 Not all women may agree with this statement. Pauline Leon evidently did not, judging from the quotation cited earlier. Nor, at present, would the women who have experienced combat. As scholars we may well be more attracted to Woolf's point of view. That is a sign, in part, that developing a feminist perspective is also a normative task, and a heuristic one. Much will depend on the ability of the international relations discipline, and its personnel, to undergo adjustment and to tolerate a degree of ambiguity in both the feminist perspective and feminist epistemology. Tension remains between the experience of women, and the requirements of feminist scholarship. Still, there is every reason to press forward. Notes 1. Robert Keohane, "International Relations Theory: Contributions of a Feminist Standpoint," in Gender and International Relations, ed. Grant and Newland, 41.
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2. Quoted in Michael Howard, The Causes of Wars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). 3. See especially Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman. 4. Quoted in Carol Miller, "Women in International Relations? The Debate in Inter-war Britain," in Gender and International Kelatrons, ed. Grant and Newland, 75. 5. Charles de Benedetti, Peace Heroes rn Twentieth Century America (Bloorningron: Indiana University Press, 1986), 49-51. 6. De Renedetti, Peace Heroes, 44. 7. Claud~aKoonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and N a z ~Polrtics (London: Methuen, 1988), 392. 8. Jean Bethke Elshtain, "The Problem of Peace," Millennium 17 (Winter 1988): 44 1. 9. Ilse Kirk, "Images of Amazons: Marriage and Matriarchy," in Inzagcs of Women in Peace and War, ed. Sharon Macdonald, Pat Holden, and Shirley Ardener (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), 27-39. 10. "Gender is not a pomt to start from In the sense of being a given thing hut is, instead, a p o s ~ tor construct, formalizable in a nonarhitrary way through a matrix of habits, practices, and discourses. Further, it is an interpretation of our history within a particular discursrve constellation, a history in which we are both subjects of and subjected to social construction." Linda Alcoff, "Cultural Feminism Versus Post-Structuralisni: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory", Szgns 13 (Spring 1988): 431. 11. This is Elshtain's term in her Women und War. 12. See Joan Kelly, Women, History, and Theory (Chicago: University of Chlcago Press, 1984). 13. Shelley Saywell, Women in War (New York: Viking, 19851, 13 1. 14. Saywell, Women in War, 140-41. 15. Saywell, Women in War, 146. 16. Ruth Roach Pierson, "Women in War, Peace, and Revolut~on,"in Ztnages of Wa,: ed. Macdonald, Holden, and Archer, 208. 17. Pierson, "Women in War, Peace, and Revolution," 225. 18. Joan W. Scott "Response to Gordon," Signs (Summer 1990): 859. 19. Quoted in Ruth Pierson, "Women in War," 221.
Renaissance in Security Studies? Caveat Lector! Edward A. Kolodziej
Introduction
T
he publication by lnternational Studies Quarterly of Stephen M. Walt's essay, "The Renaissance of Security Studies,"opens a much needed debate about what scholars and practitioners mean by security and about what precisely they think they are studying and why.' This critique answers the essay's welcome call for "cooperative collaboration" and "diversity" to widen and deepen the discussion. The article, while helpful, errs on several critical counts. Analytically, it limits the objects of study and, ipso facto, constricts the scope of relevant theory needed to understand and explain what security is and what security problems are. Normatively, it focuses almost exclusively on American national security rather than on international security or security per se; and, in the name of relevance, delegates too much of the agenda of security studies to policymakers. Methodologically, it restricts security studies to a highly selective and largely traditional array of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches. As a consequence of these flaws, the essay is inevitably incomplete in its survey of security studies, in its assignation of worth and priority to different theoretical approaches and specific works, and in its sketch of a research agenda. The essay's avowedly neo-realist position, if permitted by default to guide the field, puts at risk several important aims shared by many accomplished scholars and scientists concerned with security studies: the legitimate pursuit of significant lines of research at odds with realist strictures; the field's potential growth within the academy; the interdisciplinary examination of security problems hitherto shunned or slighted by Cold War concerns; the flow of challenging ideas from the academy to policymakers; and the search for more varied disciplinary approaches and innovative methods to teach security studies. This critique also attempts to outline a richer conceptual, broader Source: lnternational Studies Quarterly, 36(4) (1992): 421-38.
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interdisciplinary, theoretically more inclusive, and, not ironically, a more policy-relevant understanding of security studies than the survey presents. Its aims are primarily analytical and normative. Citations are illustrative, not exhaustive, since space limitations unavoidably restrict yet another literature review. In any event, objections to the survey are conceptual and valuational, not bibliographic.
Flaws in Definition: implications for Social S c i e n c e Theory The essay defines "security studies ... as the study of the threat, use, and control of military force. To be included, as central, in the definition of security studies, a work must essentially "fit comfortably within the familiar realist paradigm" and "address phenomena that can be controlled by national leaders." These conditions - theoretical significance as realism and national relevance, as defined by factors under the purported control of policymakers - are key parameters of the essay's notion of the scope of security studies and of what are contributions to the literature. Alternative definitions of security are not posed, much less explored, nor is a case made for so narrow a conception of the field. Security is simply stipulated as the study of war and diplomacy and confined essentially to state-centric analysis. These issues are crucial. Definitional and level-of-analysis choices elicit questions that drive empirical and normative theory and problem solving. The questions asked, as any scientist or normative theorist knows, are more important than provisional answers. The task, then, is to ask the right questions, or - if one is charged with surveying a field - to ask, at least, how published scholars, statesmen, and national populations have posed the problem of security rather than preemptively to advance a particular answer to a question never fully raised, much less satisfactorily explored. If the essay's circumscribed idea of security studies were logically and systematically applied, important security problems, even on neo-realist exclusionary grounds, could not be reached, and, if addressed, then only indirectly and obliquely as tributaries of interstate conflict and war. If the essay rules in first-image international threats to the state, it rules out by omission those security threats posed by states to groups and individuals. The rationale, manipulative techniques, and coercive measures and institutionalized forms of repression of authoritarian regimes are proper and primary objects of study for security analysts and practitioners. Death squads in Central and Latin America, the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Pol Pot's Cambodia, as well as the causes of the Holocaust, the Gulag, and killing fields are security issues of the first magnitude. They need study by security scholars and policymakers whether they fall within the essay's conceptual horizon or not. Also worthy of study are the armed pursuits, strategies, and claims of nonstate actors, like Kurds, Serbs, or Tamil Tigers. Guerrilla warfare, terrorism, and low-intensity warfare, as the arm of the weak and disenfranchised, are
"'
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no less central to security studies. These forms of armed conflict (about which, incidentally, much has been written although this literature not reviewed in the survey) are likely to become increasingly more important as ethnic and nationality wars, within nation-states, and so-called internationalized civil wars that spill over national boundaries, such as Lebanon, become more frequent. Certainly the state is threatened by these movements (and they merit study from a state-centric perspective), but the emergence of these social movements also suggests that the state is often a major source of international insecurity. In this vein, given the criteria directing the essay's conception of security studies, the threats posed by military and police bureaucracies, militaryindustrial complexes, and standing armies to open societies are addressed primarily as incidental to interstate conflicts. Disciplining organized and institutionalized violence to civil purposes is tolerated in the survey, as a subfield of study, but only as a function of violent national conflicts, and not as an independent security issue in its own right. This exclusionary approach to theory and policy would then have to dismiss the normative and empirical questions posed by the Federalist writers in defining their security problems. Their problems began, but did not end, with threats of foreign invasion and intervention. An effective and legitimate central government had to be strong enough to deter and defend against external depredations, yet be limited in its power to preclude the tyranny of its own people. Security studies are not likely to progress very far if we do not pose the right questions or if we simplify our problems by ignoring the dilemmas and trade-offs inherent in constructing security regimes. Second-image analysis of security problems fares no better. Coups d'e'tat and civil wars, as the struggle between groups for the control of the state's monopoly of legitimate violence, are slighted as key security issues. These armed conflicts - arising, as often as not, from clashing atavistic urges and prompted by profound ideological, communal, national, ethnic, racial, class, and elite differences - are indiscriminately stuffed into a nation-state sack. Hiding this seeming clutter of qualitative distinctions for the sake of a forced simplicity merely begs both the security questions that need answering and relevant theory to confront them. Given the values at stake and the global reach of the British, French, American, Russian, and Chinese civil wars, it may well be argued that the primary level of analysis to focus security studies on is internal wars, not the interstate wars they spawned. Civil strife and conflict, arguably, raise more fundamental security problems about the legitimacy of coercion and the role of the state in regulating civil conflict than a state-centric focus. Indeed, such conflicts are now far more frequent and deadly than interstate wars (Lindgen, 1991). As the society of states moves gradually toward a world society of peoples, the issue of the legitimacy of a particular regime's rule becomes increasingly difficult to ignore as a critical security issue (Kothari, 1974; Bull, 1977). Explaining why the Soviet experiment proved defunct urges the question of legitimacy upon the consciousness of peoples and elites everywhere. From an even wider analytic perspective, as a global society of
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peoples and states gropes toward a provisional world order, what historians and social scientists have until now characterized as interstate wars may well be viewed as a long chain of civil strifes within what may progressively be viewed as a slowly emerging global system. Why else are we concerned, as a security issue, whether the ongoing Chinese and Russian revolutions will evolve toward open democratic forms and market economies, or whether they will revert to past forms of oppressive rule, if we are not ultimately concerned that the fate of these titanic struggles holds potentially catastrophic implications for the security interests of the world society and its diverse and divergent populations? The security issues raised by armed civil strife and by the violent efforts of groups to seize the monopoly power of the state to impose their will are only partially raised by the conflicts inherent in the nation-state system. A state-centric focus is only one of the provisional solutions to the global security dilemma, and then only in a fashion that prejudices the analysis in favor of the state at the expense of a satisfactory empirical and normative theory of international relations (Wight, 1966). The essay's strict constructionist conception of security studies narrows access of scholars and practitioners to needed theory to explain what they are studying and why. Giants of realist thought, like Hobbes, rooted the problem of security in the insatiable and incompatible needs of individuals and groups. In its purist form, security arises, paradoxically, from human freedom. Competing security regimes and the principles of authority and legitimacy relied upon to arbitrate between rival personal and group claims project the dilemma of freedom to the level of society and the state. Not without significance, Hobbes's universal characterization of the security problem arose from the upheaval of the English civil war, and not from its later manifestation in the nation-state system, only just beginning to emerge with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. In truncating Hobbes's grasp of the security dilemma and the problem of political legitimacy, the essay overlooks, not surprisingly, some of today's outstanding theorists, such as Robert Axelrod, and the new methods they employ in their insistence on posing the problem of security in the most theoretically inclusive terms that imply an integration of the several levels of security concerns sketched above. Axelrod succinctly states, in its most comprehensive sweep, the compelling problem confronting security theorists: "Under what conditions will cooperation emerge in a world of egoists without central authority?" (Axelrod, 1984: 3). The Walt essay would reduce the search for a solution to the security equation by searching for the value of a coefficient of only one of its terms, and not necessarily the most important element, viz., war between states. Never asked are the fundamental questions of whence and whither "states." Nor does there seem to be much interest in the survey in the theoretically demanding question of discovering how egoist actors at individual, societal, and state levels coordinate and integrate their conflicting preferences to get what they want. Do strategies of force and threats or those of consensus on rules and norms explain security outcomes
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and regimes? Axelrod leaves the answers to these questions open to empirical research. He does not load on force and threats, as Walt's review does, as the anticipated choice. Nor does Axelrod preclude the possibility of surmounting the security problem of cooperating egoists. Left open, too, is the Hobbesian question itself. Why not begin with the converse: why and how does egoism emerge under conditions of cooperation? The Walt review thus misses the mark on two counts. It is not true to its realist roots nor sensitive to a fundamental reformulation of the security problematic. The debate can perhaps best be joined, most clearly and concretely, on the very conceptual battleground chosen by Walt in his review. The beguiling assumption is made that "most theories about the causes of war are ~ logical implication of this reductionist position also causes of p e a ~ e . "The is that the rise and the demise of the Cold War can be explained only by ignoring the behavior of the participants to that struggle and by dismissing their conception of their security aims and interests that on inspection certainly include but also transcend interstate conflict and war. Let's begin at the end of the Cold War to show that its collapse and subsequent systemic change cannot be explained by collapsing theories of war and peace. As a bonus, a case will also be made for a broader conception of security and for a wider multidisciplinary approach to security studies than the survey will allow.4 When Soviet leaders commenced the dissolution of the Cold War system, they unwittingly unravelled, not one, but three analytically separable but mutually interdependent security structures: the bipolar balance in Europe and its sprawling and irregular extension to the developing world; the coercive undergirding of the Soviet Union's economic production and distribution system; and the Soviet state. The collapse of these three structures, as even casual observation readily reveals, has had a profound, if still dimly perceived, effect on the global security system. These revolutionary changes arise from the central roles that the Soviet Union's security structures played in influencing and shaping regional and global structures in preferred ways. By focusing primarily on the first structure, East-West bipolarity, defined by the U.S.-Soviet balance of terror and the confrontation of two massed armies in central Europe, security analysts and political leaders overlooked the decay and brittleness of the other two security structures on which the outcome of the East-West conflict critically depended. Fixed on one leg of a three-legged stool, the functioning of the other legs and their roles in maintaining Cold War institutions were ignored or neglected by security analysts, but not by the participants in the Cold War conflict. Unlike analysts, the Soviet elite were compelled to address the rot at the core of the institutions created to resolve their security dilemmas. They could not escape their self-created crises. They had to confront not simply the geopolitical demands of the Cold War struggle, but also primordial national and ethnic demands for independence that could no longer be quelled by the coercive measures employed by the Kremlin to keep itself in power. Moreover, the disenchantment of the Soviet elite and enlarging segments of the Soviet peoples
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with the abject failure of a centralized economy to meet the nation's welfare needs fatally weakened political support for Cold War institutions. A bloated military establishment, a costly foreign empire, and a burdensome Warsaw Pact were viewed increasingly as barriers to economic growth and development (Valkenier, 1983, 1986). Also exposed to internal view was the suppression by the organs of the Soviet state of demands, made by an ever-widening number of groups and individuals, for human rights and for a greater say in governing their affairs. As the effectiveness of Soviet security structures to address these economic and political imperatives gradually eroded, delegitimation inevitably spread, first among the very elites entrusted with the power and responsibility to make them work and gradually to the Soviet peoples. Let's parse the three interdependent security systems undone by the Soviet reform movement to expose some of the shortcomings of a cramped conception of security. This brief exposition may be sufficient to make the point that we, as analysts, should stress how far we have to go rather than how far we've come in explaining security. Academic realists, focused on interstate behavior, should have been among the first to anticipate the eventual dissolution of the Cold War regime. National self-determination is certainly the most powerful political force and the primary legitimating principle of the global governance system. These are first principles of classical realism (Morgenthau, 1985). Leading Western statesmen, such as Charles de Gaulle, who challenged Washington's leadership of the Cold War on these grounds (and who incidentally enjoyed little sympathy in American policy debates), predicted the eventual demise of the superpower bipolar system precisely because it could not prevail against powerful historical currents, driven by demands of national groups for selfdetermination and, accordingly, by the extension of the nation-state as the principal unit of organization of the world society (de Gaulle, 1970, vol. 5: 104-105). On the other hand, if neo-realist assumptions are adopted - viz., that the state and the anarchical system can be distinguished as separate levels of causation - we should not have expected the Cold War ever to have ceased, especially under conditions of bipolarity (Waltz, 1979). But hard facts confound the expectations of a flawed theory. The criticism directed at renaissance writers, therefore, is not simply that they were unable to anticipate the end of the Cold War (few did), but that they also abandoned the insights of classical realism for the dubious theoretical benefits of a purported scientifically founded neo-realism. At least classical realism of the Caullist and Morgenthau persuasion would have led to a presumption of Cold War instability because of the inability of this bipolar system ultimately to accommodate the aspirations of national groups for their own states. Nor does classical realism conceptualize the nation-state independently of the society of states of which each state is a part. Neither the anarchical structure of the system nor the irresistible demands of its member units for autonomy can be causally isolated one from the other since they depend on each other as imperatives of logic and observed behavior (Bull, 1977; Buzan, 1991).
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But even if security analysts had been loyal to classical realism, they would still have been only clever by a third. It is not enough to demonstrate the obvious, that nation-states make anarchical systems and that some are war-prone. Even if these critical parameters are conceded, it does not follow that this condition dictates that differences among members of the system must inevitably be resolved through violence and threats. Anarchy and disorder are not necessarily synonymous, nor need an anarchy of states assume a single historical form in order to conform to the limits of the theorist's imagination. The more intriguing and taxing problem for security analysts is to explain why some state systems have been able to relax and even surmount this geo-political constraint and why others have failed. And the Cold War is as good a laboratory to explore this problem as any. Left out of Walt's review is reference to functionalist (Mitrany, 1966) and integrationist theory (Haas, 1968) that provide a plausible basis for the proposition that geo-political security problems can be partially resolved or relaxed by non-coercive approaches. The spillover effects posited by Haas over a generation ago have begun to work again within the European Community and partly explain the recent progress made toward full market integration by 1993. Also excluded from view are the efforts of a half-century of resourceful European statesmen devoted to surmounting national differences, especially the Franco-German rivalry that led to three continental wars in less than a century. The European Coal and Steel Community was designed to integrate the French and German coal and steel industries to preclude their use for war against each other, to address common economic interests, and to moderate underlying mutual suspicions and conflicting national defense concerns. The European Community enlarged this integration process to twelve member states, which, while acutely conscious of their national differences, are joined in overcoming their bloody past through multinational cooperation and multilateral decisionmaking. In contrast, the Soviet Union's solution for the national divisions in Eastern Europe and within its own territory proved fatal. Whether the Western Europe solution will be more lasting remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that the Western solution to national self-determination has been sensitive to national differences, yet more broadly and consensually based. Whereas both the Soviet and Western solutions may be compared along anarchical structures, there is a world of difference between the mature anarchy of the Western model and its immature and self-destructive Soviet counterpart. Explaining those differences and also identifying the policies that produced them is a challenge to security analysts. We want to know why cooperation under one anarchical form was based primarily on coercion and why under another on consent. Reducing them both to anarchies explains too much and too little, and is potentially mischievous as a guide for policymakers if both are seen to reside exclusively on coercion. Pineapples and lemons are both fruits, but - both cannot equally satisfy a craving for something sweet, and the consuming public and policymakers should be well aware of the difference before they choose.
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If Walt's favored security analysts are unable to adequately explain the contrasting Western and Soviet responses to national rivalries in constructing the Cold War regime, they are rendered impotent when the scope of the security problematic is enlarged. Excluded are the welfare and democratic regime dimensions of security that were acutely understood by those who were Present at the Creation (Acheson, 1969). The statesmen who fashioned the Marshall Plan for Europe and imposed a generous peace on a vanquished Germany and Japan were also of a mind that an international system relying solely on threats would repeat the dismal cycle of defiance, counter armament, and war unless counterbalancing forces to the nation-state struggle could be set in motion. Many of the architects of the postwar system trusted to the positive incentives of economic growth and to the psychological and political assurances of open institutions to promote peace and security (Baldwin, 1985), partly to meet the anticipated demands of Western populations for greater welfare and partly to overcome the destructive tendencies o f the geo-political system within which they were compelled to act. Security analysts, if limited to the guidelines and assumptions of the survey, would then be able to make little sense of Marshall's argument that "it is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace" (quoted in Dennett and Turner, 1949). They are placed in the awkward position of dismissing what Marshall has to say as either self-deceiving or disingenuous - he could not have meant what he said and was really animated by macht considerations to fight the Cold War - or they must assume the uncomfortable position, if they concede his point but still wish to remain true to their realist loyalties, that his argument might have the force of a theory of peace, but not of war. No state or government can resist or ignore the relentless and widening demands of populations everywhere, throughout the international community, for material progress, based on self-sustaining economic growth and techno-scientific development any more than it can neglect the imperatives for a say in the governance of the geo-political global system resting on a universalized nation-state as the principal unit of organization. On the other hand, as the failed Soviet experiment has abundantly revealed, state ownership of the means of production, centralized direction of the economy, and an administrative price and marketing system - let alone crushing expenditures for arms and empire - were prescriptions for chronic and irremedial economic underdevelopment. The power of the Soviet state had to yield to societal pressures for "more now" and for a fundamental reform of the welfare system. The logical and material exigencies of reform consigned the Soviet empire to the dustbin of history. Swept along also has been the bipolar interstate structure and its protruding and unsustainable extensions around the globe. International security problems inevitably arise over wealth and welfare because the state is indispensable as an institutional mechanism for the creation of a preexisting order within which economic development can be pursued (Gilpin, 1987). The state's use of its coercive power to promote particular
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economic interests (eg., empires or global competitiveness) or its defense of established patterns and levels of wealth are security issues. Embedded, therefore, in any national or global economic system is a supporting security framework, resting on force, violence, and threats to encourage and ensure conformity to proscribed and prescribed economic aims and interests. But state destructive power cannot itself produce the wealth and welfare on which the survival and legitimacy of the state depend. It must rely on global markets as well as on the initiative and freedom of economic actors independent of the state to furnish the resources and services needed to discharge its welfare functions. This problematic condition introduces civil economic society into security studies as a unit of analysis. Tensions arise between the state and international civil economic society as a consequence of the need and demand of individuals and groups, including multinational corporations, to be free from state control either to pursue their own material interests or to possess and dispose of the property and factors of production under their control in open, global markets. The security threat associated with this welfare function is material deprivation, or, more generally, economic and techno-scientific underdevelopment. The capabilities needed to cope with this security threat are economic resources and technoscientific knowledge as factors of production. The tensions and the struggles for power that these international economic networks engender are repeated and amplified at the domestic level between the state and its civil economic society. Domestic economic structures are increasingly permeable and susceptible to exterior influence and direction. These transnational networks inevitably set limits to state coercive power and authority in the pursuit of its welfare imperative. They also widen the range of a state's security concerns. As a consequence of growing economic global interdependence, domestic conflicts over welfare and the economic and coercive structure of the internal welfare system can no longer be isolated from the struggle between states and the imperatives of global market competition that work to redistribute wealth and material capabilities among states. These imperatives are insistent enough in developed economies where an uneasy stability has been achieved between the state and civil economic society. These pressures can reach crisis levels when, as in the case of the Soviet Union, the breakdown of the state-societal relation promises rapidly sliding standards of living unless wholesale reforms are undertaken. The coercive power of the Soviet state had to be dismantled and the distribution of power between the state and civil society fundamentally altered in favor of private and group initiative, external and internal, in shaping national investment decisions, in allocating the factors of production, and in relying on the market to determine the production and distribution of wealth. Unable to cope either with the geo-political pressures exerted by selfdetermination or with welfare demands generated throughout its empire, the Soviet state was equally incapable of responding to insistent aspirations for greater personal and group ~oliticalfreedom, limits on the regime's power,
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and the assurance of civil liberties and human rights. The security analyst might well have anticipated the long-term disabling effect of this freedom virus on the immune system of the Soviet state if George Kennan's early diagnosis of the Soviet state as a n znternational threat had been incorporated into the Cold War thinking of security analysts. Kennan argued that the Soviet state, as functions of ideological values and of political necessity, posited an external threat to justify its foreign empire abroad and its totalitarian rule at home (Kennan, 1947). Kennan's containment strategy to meet the Soviet threat rested not on military might (although a defensive glacis would be necessary), but on the preservation and promotion of Western internal strengths, founded on free governments and markets. The Western example and restraint would eventually "mellow" the Soviet state as future generations would neither believe its claim of encirclement nor tolerate policy controls and its failure to meet their material needs. A West growing stronger and more prosperous and freer - would undermine and delegitimate the Kremlin's self-serving security policies and power structures. If Kennan's analysis is admitted as a plausible, if partial, explanation for the implosion of the Soviet state - and nothing succeeds like success - then an explanation for the sources, consequences, and resolution of the Cold War must be left to non-security theorists by default. Rather than trumpet success, those security analysts who insist on a nearsighted view of security might well admit, instead, their embarrassing failure to foresee the end of the Cold War about which they claimed special expertise. Are we in a renaissance or merely emerging from the dark ages?
Flaws in Definition: Implications for Normative Theory
The shaky analytic pillars on which the essay supports its security edifice also reveal a shallow normative foundation on which these pillars rest. The problems posed by the use, threat, and control of organized violence risk being severed from their moral and legal determinants. Except on instrumental grounds - i.e., deciding whether force will work - the issue of the utility of force is isolated from the central question of its legitimation. The essay's philosophically restrictive notion of the social sciences would confine the security scholar to testing propositions largely specified by the state power brokers, policymakers, and managers of violence. The latter decide what is real, relevant, and controllable; the security scholar, using scientific methods and rigorous empirical procedures, is then relegated to the subservient task of assessing the feasibility of policy proposals generated elsewhere. He serves best who evaluates which parcels and passels of organized violence, proposed for use by the state and its agents, will achieve their stated aims. Social science is transformed into the handmaiden of Grand Strategy. What works pragmatically for using and controlling force - selected scientific tools and an insistence on verifiability - is enlisted in the strategic enterprise, but not so the uncompromising protocols and unfettered sweep of true scientific inquiry.
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The contesting claims of rival normative theories of human behavior are no less dismissed in the proclamation of a dubious realism, congenial to the rationalization of violence and coercive threats. Once strapped illto the essay's normative straightjacket, the security analyst is exempt from the personal and professional responsibility of questioning the limits of the theory except to perfect his or her expectations of state behavior based on realist norms. If he or she examines what the essay characterizes as peace theory, it is from the directed perspective of realist theory and practice. Analysts are advised that "[gliven their belief that war is always a possibility, realists should be especially interested in devising ways to ensure that it does not occur. In short, well-informed research on peace is a realistic response to anarchy and should be part of security ~ t u d i e s . "This ~ commendable ecumenism is, however, conditional. The security analyst is permitted to use the findings of social and life scientists regarding the conditions and factors prompting human cooperation or armed conflict, provided that the impurities of alternative behavioral paradigms on which they rest have been filtered out to ensure that realist theory will not be contaminated. By using so fine a filter to distill pure security studies, the survey, quite logically if misguidedly, identifies the golden age and renaissance of security studies with two different phases of the Cold War. Many of the works cited as seminal are efforts at rationalizing (not always successfully, as the Vietnam War suggests) the projections of American force abroad. Ruled out of order are Cold War critics who charged that the U.S.-Soviet struggle and the bipolarity that it induced were unstable in their tendency to incite and fuel regional conflicts (leading, potentially, to a global conflagration) and fundamentally illegitimate in arrogating national and global security to the superpowers (Nehru, 1961). Time-serving is to be conditioned, as the essay admonishes, by the norms of "collaborative," "diverse," and "democratic" d i ~ c o u r s e These .~ are certainly estimable norms, but they are not enough to extricate us from the moral quandary into which the essay's circumscribed conception of security studies leads us. In providing a particular philosophical answer to a question yet to be definitively decided with respect to the moral basis for the use or threat of force, the essay unwittingly frustrates the normative quest to address fully the profound moral dimensions of this problem; prematurely calls closure to the debate over the legitimacy of relying on violence or alternative means to ameliorate or avoid conflicts; and narrows the exploration of the object to be studied as well as the range of scientific methods and philosophical approaches that might help to relax, if not resolve, the dilemmas that arise when politics and violence are joined. In raising these objections, let us also be clear about what is not at issue. Certainly most of the works cited merit serious attention. Nor are the scientific method and its application to security problems on trial. More, not less, rigor is advised. Nor is realism on trial. It stands, in principle, as an equal to other moral positions before the bars of scientific inquiry, human experience, and philosophical insight. It should also be clear that the author is not accused of
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any moral failing. The thrust of the argument here, rather, is to insist that empirical and normative inquiry on security problems be kept open, and not led unwittingly down a moral cul-de-sac.If the true Renaissance was anything, it was a moral revolution that freed the human mind to explore without limit the possibilities of transcending the political constraints to which men are born and of escaping the tyranny of force and change in designing their fates. If Machiavelli wrote The Prince, the quintessential realist handbook of rule by the few, he also explored how the consensual base of governance might be broadened in The Discourses. For the sake of brevity and clarity, let's deploy Quincy Wright's A Study of War - surely among the first systematic and rigorous social science efforts to understand and explain war - to make the argument we would like to advance if we had enough time and space. Even a casual reading of this magisterial work, dispatched in a footnote,' suggests that it is a better guide for scientific discovery, interdisciplinary study, and moral guidance than the essay's partial view of security studies. Wright defines "war" as "the legal condition which equally permits two o r more hostile groups to carry on a conflict by armed force .... This suggests that in spite of their hostility they are 'members of a higher group which originates this law"' (Wright, 1942: 8-9, emphasis in the original). Note the breadth of Wright's understanding of war, which includes more than a focus on interstate war. For Wright, war follows regular patterns that could be submitted to scientific inquiry and to normative exegesis. The potentially legitimate agents of armed force may be any group, not just the state. Moreover, first, second, and third-image levels of analysis are comfortably accommodated within Wright's inclusive schema. Strategic thinking is squarely centered in the humanistic and social sciences, and not left to the halls of governments. If all groups provisionally stand on a level legal and moral playing field until their rival claims can be evaluated as "members of a higher group which originates this law," then a moral and legal framework is at least coterminous, arguably precedential, to the solutions that communities render in their search for a viable security order. Wright expects students and practitioners of war to explicate higher laws - behavioral and normative - that can potentially discriminate between the rival claims of contesting groups and the efficacy of their reliance on violence and coercion. Wright opens the sack marked war and in sorting out its components discovers for our edification (although he wrote a half century ago) that an explanation of war requires a bigger sack to hold its contents than the survey will allow. What is compelling about Wright's approach t o war is that it includes, not excludes, all forms of human behavior associated with violence in the study of war and, by extension, of security; that it is both scientific and normative in its claims; and that it provides the widest possible berth for human and behavioral disciplines and the hard sciences to participate in understanding and explaining war and in preventing its occurrence. Inquiry is enlarged, not diminished; the search for relevant normative and empirical theories of war and peace is widened, not narrowed to the nation-state. So singular a
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focus can only act as a prophylaxis to theory. Wright also invokes a broader range of disciplines and knowledge to solve security problems. The debate is extended, not crimped or closed. Yet, security studies need not be expanded, as Professor Walt prudently counsels, "to pollution, disease, child abuse, or economic recessions."* Wright, no less than Walt, addresses violence, force, and coercion in shaping human behavior but his search for their causes, consequences, and control is conducted on a vaster scale, appropriate to the vision and responsibilities of the academy, and with greater sensitivity and responsiveness to the breadth and depth of the policy problems that have to be addressed.
Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary S c o p e of Security Studies
As the preceding discussion and citations suggest, the essay's partial grasp of the analytic, normative, and methodological dimensions of security studies occasions serious oversights in the survey of the relevant disciplines and works that have advanced the field. Ethical, moral, and legal discourse is barred entry at the frontier of security studies (e.g., Walzer, 1977). As the Walt essay makes abundantly clear, the broad normative concerns of traditional realist thinking of such writers as Hans J. Morgenthau (1952) and Robert E. Osgood (1953) were de-emphasized as Cold War thinking evolved to place the realist perspective on a purported scientific foundation. Since then, and by conscious design, security studies were directed away from a normative evaluation of the behavior of states to an explanation for their behavior that claimed to be rigorously applicable across time and historical circumstance. The rich and historically informed realism of Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Hobbes was cast in proto-scientific propositional form. A parsimonious set of assumptions now defined the security dilemma: the distribution of military capabilities defined an anarchical structure that drove state security behavior (Waltz, 1979). The theorist was exempt from the responsibility of explaining - or even expecting - systemic change. Stability was a function of conceptual fiat rather than the product of observation. What was really a passing snapshot of the Cold War was portrayed as an explanation of the structure of the global security system. We know in retrospect that the Cold War regime was a dependent, not an independent variable, subject to the demands and pressures of national self-determination and of elite and mass demands for material welfare and of personal freedom. A theory of state behavior based exclusively on threats and coercion was also inherently demonstrable since its assumptions could always be confirmed by selective observations that mapped with its coercive expectations. Deviations from expected norms - explained, say, by democratic constraints restricting state power maximization or by the consensual incentives of economic interdependence - were simply dismissed as of negligible or irrelevant theoretical interest. The delicate causal and sequential relation between theory and observation was subtly transformed. Theory validated observation
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rather than the reverse; empirical observation was subordinated to a presumptive normative interpretation of the state whose behavior was exclusively identified with the exercise of coercion and threats. In truncating their normative concerns, the security analysts covered in Walt's review have also closed themselves off from what social scientists and historians have to say about past security behavior and how it might inform our knowledge of the present. If security analysts are unable to explain the Cold War, it should then not be too surprising that they will be of little help in explaining the past either, unless they broaden their notions of security to fit the understanding of security of the actors whose behavior they are purportedly explaining and to include the work and insight of other disciplines into security studies. Serious historical and social science works that view security studies in units of centuries and millennia, not just decades, are dismissed as of limited relevance or ignored, although they have won international recognition for originality as advances in using case analyses in crisis behavior (Lebow, 1981) or in employing systems theory and long-cycle analyses to identify trends in war and peace (Modelski, 1987; Goldstein, 1988; Thompson and Rasler, 1988; Levy, 1991; Midlarsky, 1991). Curiously enough, even if one were to adopt the essay's short time horizon for systematic historical analysis, there would still apparently be no place for informed journalism (Halberstam, 1973; Talbott, 1985; Sheehan, 1988; Weiner, 1990). Perhaps a concrete example may help to suggest the damaging theoretical and policy implications of historical myopia. One of the most exciting developments in historiography today is the emerging finding that post-Napoleonic statesmen, contrary to contemporary realist assumptions, sought to create a political equilibrium in Europe, and not just a balance of power. Europe's "long peace" was not undone simply because the balance of power broke down, occasioned by the rise of German and Italian nationalism and by the accompanying weakening of Austria. The unravelling of the balance of "satisfaction" among the small and great powers of Europe reduced Europe's governance by the close of the century to a raw struggle for ascendancy (Schroeder, 1986, 1989, 1992). The implication of this new line of historical analysis for security analysts is that balances of power, which must necessarily underlie any system of governance among states, must first be informed and strengthened - and surmounted by concert if not by collective security - to avoid war as a solution to conflict. The concert itself critically hinges on the active participation of its members in its maintenance. It also requires the consensual extension of the concert to new problems as they arise. A viable international security order depends finally on members' perceptions of the legitimate and authoritative distribution of power and on the resulting equilibrium of satisfactions that that order affords. "In objective terms," as Schroeder explains, "political equilibrium [in post-Napoleonic Europe] required that (1) the rights, influence and vital interests claimed by individual states in the international system be somehow balanced against the rights, influence and vital interests claimed by other states and the general community, and (2) that a balance
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or harmony exists between the goals pursued by individual states, the requirements of the system, and the means used to promote one's interests. Oversimplified, political equilibrium meant a balance of satisfactions, a balance of rights and obligations and a balance of payoffs, rather than a balance of power" (1989: 143). The findings of new historiography conspire with the expectations of cooperation theorists to suggest that the evolution of international society cannot be reduced to realist assumptions about the balance of power. The human search for security simply cannot be reconstructed exclusively on realist assumptions, as individuals, groups, states, and communities, including international society today, pursue more complex strategies and fashion more varied social mechanisms to cope with their uncertainty and angst over security than is conveyed by the analytic and normative depiction of security in the survey. States and people balance when faced by coercive threats, as realists would expect, but they also bandwagon, hide, and strive, as Hobbes, T h e Federalist, and Axelrod suggest, for consensual, not coercive, solutions to political conflict, war, and security. If satisfactions are a precondition of peace, then security analysts might also have to reexamine deterrence theory or at least broaden their analysis, as Patrick Morgan suggests, beyond crisis management to explore the requirements of general, not just immediate, deterrence (Morgan, 1983). Psychological theory reinforces historiographic findings that more than force and violence is needed to maintain a deterrence regime. Cognitive and affect processes fundamentally determine the kinds of deterrence regimes that will be constructed, but they are also subject no less decisively to the flaws of information processing that resist conformity to the heroic assumptions of rational actor behavior (Jervis, 1976; Simon, 1976; Kahneman and Tversky, 1979). Rivals learn to circumvent deterrence systems in ways that their opponents are often incapable of imagining because of psychological barriers in perceiving and responding to threats. Moreover, unless the deterrence regime itself serves and assures the differential needs of its members, defeat of the deterrence may well be preferred over system maintenance. Value estimation cannot be assumed by the security analyst, but requires investigation of the political and psychological conditions that support a particular deterrence regime. The Israelis convinced themselves not only that Egypt would not attack unless it had air superiority but that Egypt's presumed inability to vault that hurdle was equated with a stable deterrence regime. Israeli intelligence was thus blinded by its own test for deterrence and what it wanted to see. It was neither able to detect Egyptian efforts to design around Israeli air superiority nor sensitive to President Anwar Sadat's internal political and security needs that made the defeat of deterrence, despite its risks and even certain loss in battle, a preferred choice (Stein, 1985).Failing to adequately assess the importance of psychological theory to deterrence merely illustrates the disciplinary shortsightedness of the survey. It is therefore no accident that the contributions of many other psychologists are slighted (e.g., Osgood, 1963), as are the important research findings funnelled through
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the Journal of Conflict Resolution (e.g., Plous, 1988) or the Journal of Social Issues (Levinger, 1987). Economics, which is especially important today in explaining the postCold War world environment, is relegated to a secondary role even though its disciplinary concerns are increasingly central to national and international security (Reppy, 1989; Intriligator, 1990). Curiously, there is no reference to Defence Economics, the key journal in the field. The essay's sparse citations to the literature of arms production and transfers, as modest concessions to the economic dimensions of security, suggest that the survey of the economic literature does not comfortably fit with the essay's bounded definition of security, an unfortunate limitation given the need to re-think the rationale for national arms industries in the post-Cold War environment, partly to adjust to the end of the East-West confrontation but more importantly to respond to welfare demands pressing on national governments throughout the global system. The implicit mercantilist assumptions underlying the survey inhibit, moreover, the exploration of alternative explanations of armed conflict and war, such as those offered by liberal and Marxist theorists (Gilpin, 1987). Similarly, anthropologists and sociologists are expected to take a back seat in the security bus. Morris Janowitz's The Professional Soldier (1971), translated into several languages and widely read by military professionals around the globe, is not cited, nor is the principal journal Armed Forces and Society, which Janowitz founded while a distinguished professor at the University of Chicago, even noted. (He is cited as a contributor to the golden age, but the uninformed reader is left to guess why.) Game theory loses out, too, because it appears to Walt to be of limited relevance, although that judgment hardly squares with the international interest, in academic and policy circles, in the works of Robert Axelrod (1984) or Steven Brams (e.g., 1985). N o less disconcerting is the amazing ethnocentrism of the survey, alluded to earlier in its omission of European and Third World theorists and in its survey of the Cold War literature. Security studies become American security studies. It would require an article at least as long as the survey to explore just some of the important thinking and works of foreign scholars and practitioners who are disregarded (and denigrated) by their absence. Those concerned with comparative security studies or with regional conflict - and with the end of the Cold War the latter is what we will have in abundance dismiss the thinking and behavior of non-Americans only at the peril of both their scholarly credentials and policy relevance. Trees fall even if American security analysts are deaf to the event. It is not enough, as the essay commendably allows, to be "committed to democratic discourse." Security theory extends, arguably, to the causal analysis of the conditions that prompt, preserve, and promote democracies on which, presumably, "democratic discourse" critically depends. This widening of the security analyst's scope of vision is advised, as Sam~ielP. Huntington suggests, because democracies, grosso modo, protect the liberty of individuals and groups from governmental and societal coercion better than other regimes, provide for long-term stability as a critical element of global order,
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and inhibit incentives to resort to threats or war, especially in settling differences with other democracies (Huntington, 1991). Contrasting Walt's and Huntington's brands of realism is instructive. Whereas Walt cites Huntington for his contributions to civil-military relations (1957) and American defense policymaking (1961), he ignores Huntington's other important works on the first and second-image dimensions of global security, encompassing the determinants of political development and order (1968), the implications of American values for creating stable and legitimate national and international regimes (1981), and, more recently, the conditions prescribing the transition from nondemocratic to democratic governments (1991). These oversights are not accidental, but the consequence of using conceptual filters that test only for a limited set of security questions related largely to armed interstate conflict. For the security scholar, the theoretical issue begins, not ends, with the questions of what, how, and why individuals, groups, and communities get what they want through force, threats, or other coercive means. To confine security analysts to force and violence and to insulate security analysis from other disciplines and their tested findings about nonviolent human behavior is akin to asking the physicist to confine himself to classical mechanics when he knows quantum mechanics is more suitable. Similarly, if the security analyst must begin with perceived threats of coercion, it does not follow that threats can be distinguished finally from the values that are at risk what people value and care about. If in the final analysis threats are the obverse of values and interests (one has to care before one is threatened), then threats can be understood, as Boulding and others persuasively argue, in ways other than counterthreats and violence as the guarantee of their realization and security (Boulding, 1963, 1989). Positive sanctions may work to overcome threat perceptions and relax tensions (Baldwin, 1979), or rewards and inducements may be alternative ways to foster cooperation or diminish conflict in getting one's way (Milburn and Christie, 1989). From this wider perspective, it would appear problematic in the extreme to equate "Grand Strategy" to the study of "military and diplomatic mean^."^ What statesmen today would risk office and the discharge of security responsibilities by confining attention and political resources purely to macht politics? Lagging economic and techno-scientific development and domestic political oppression, as some Russian and Chinese leaders have yet to learn, are prescriptions for weakness at home and impotence abroad. Other things also matter if national and international security is to be assured, including economic growth and welfare, international competition, and scientific development. What many cherish most - scientific knowledge - is also the source of our discontent since it is the indispensable condition for the creation of new and more ~owerfulhostile technologies that pose entirely new, unprecedented problems that must be resolved if security planners and citizens are to cope with the potentially self-destructive violence at their disposal. So-called high politics (theorizing about the nation-state and war) simply can no longer be subordinated to these purported elements of "low politics" without damage
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to theory building and problem solving. Indeed, social science is obliged not only to help the soldier and diplomat but to explain their behavior, too. Delegating or discounting the importance of this latter responsibility, as the analysis below suggests, risks the scientific pursuit of security studies itself.
A g e n d a f o r t h e Future: Guidelines
This cursory critique brings us finally to the essay's agenda for the future. Rather than list additional lines of analysis ad nauseam, a more fruitful approach might be to identify several guidelines to facilitate the cooperative construction of a research and teaching agenda for the field. First, the security analyst, as scholar, should neither delegate the decision about what is "real," "relevant," and "controllable7' nor claim a monopoly over this question. Neither should the analyst expect nor strive for comfortable relations with policymakers; nor, conversely, should he or she strain to pick fights to gratify professional or personal conceits. The proper aims should be the promotion of mutual respect and understanding in the discharge of their various and sometimes competing responsibilities and roles. The cultivation of a shared sense of self-limitation would also help the security enterprise and discourage the personalization of policy issues. A wide and wide-ranging net should be constantly cast to test "reality." Security and security studies are too important to be left entirely either to scholars or to policymakers - or to both - or to any single survey of the field. Second, the behavioral and normative assumptions on which research is conducted should be explicitly stated to associate a work with others of a similar kind, in the interests of scientific and normative discovery as well as to expose hidden, deeply embedded valuational biases that might distort or corrupt the objectivity of this creative effort. On this score, the essay's unabashed championing of realism deserves praise for rare candor, although security studies are likely to be advanced more by multidisciplinary cooperation than by philosophical declamations. Third, broaden the disciplinary and interdisciplinary scope of what we mean by security studies rather than risk the field being captured by "a clique of like-minded cronies," as Professor Walt sensibly warns.I0 Neither scientific inquiry nor human self-knowledge is promoted by blind commitment to a singular philosophical view, or to group-think canons that substitute assertion for reflection and discerning judgment in deciding what security is, what security problems are, and how they should be studied and resolved. Fourth, broaden the historical and empirical bases for generalization to include not only the Western experience but also that of other cultures. Above all, do not confine the search for disconfirming evidence -the proper scientific test - to a selected number of case studies occurring within a limited time frame and confined almost exclusively to a Western, much less to an American, frame of reference of purported policy relevance. Area study scholars have much to offer on this score, especially in the context of regional
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security studies. In a fundamental analytic and philosophical sense, anarchy may, indeed, underlie the human condition, but that insight does not get one very far unless one closely examines the special circumstances and particular historical evolution of regional security systems to identify how they work. Anarchy and order are not the same thing, nor are they necessarily counterpoised. What is important to recognize is that anarchy may be ordered in many ways. What forms it assumes as security systems may perhaps be neither obvious nor logical, but still coherent and compelling in driving behavior (Bull, 1977; Buzan, 1991). Fifth, let the limits of the problem to be solved determine the scope and parameters of empirical and normative theory rather than impose a particular theory of politics and security that defines what has to be described, explained, and rationalized. The latter approach is tantamount to looking for house keys under a street lamp because the light is better there rather than in the dark of where they were lost. We simplify to progress especially in scientific analysis, which demands that we ask questions in ways that can be tested by discontinuing evidence and data. In meeting these stringent requirements, we are provided with powerful illumination to find our way. Nevertheless, the limitations of our tools and our value systems need also to be recognized. International relations theorists are acutely aware of the new forces that now simultaneously bind and repel the world's populations, yet many security theorists and policymakers still flinch from exploring the implications of these revolutionary conditions for the survival and well-being of the human species. These include the ability of states and groups to project powerful means of destruction anywhere on the globe; the exposure of all particularistic politics - national, communal, and ideological - to almost instantaneous scrutiny and therefore to doubt and challenge, thanks to global communications and transportation; and the mutual dependency of states and peoples within a global eco-economic system. In the extreme, the emergence of a truly global politics - overlaying the legacy of diffuse and decentralized centers of decision that command formidable arrays of organized violence to get their way, when their assertions of authority no longer command automatic allegiance - urges the perspective of a truly universal and integrated notion of security. To suggest so broad a scope for the problem does not imply that we know what the beast is or what its dimensions are. Critical to the task of the security scholar and practitioner is the challenge of defining those dimensions as inclusively as possible. Posing the issue this way does not immediately make us Kantians or Grotians or advocates of collective security and world government. Our knowledge of the complex ways in which the biological and historical evolutionary processes proceed is insufficient to admit to easy simplification. What is clear, however, is that the security problem is greater than the sum of the parts of first, second, and third-image analysis. It potentially encompasses, for the first time in history, all humans inhabiting the earth. It should not be hard for security analysts to follow Clausewitz a little further and posit the notions of "pure and real security" as helpmates to the
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concepts of pure and real war. As a practical matter, and as the Iraq-Kuwait crisis (not to mention two world wars and the Cold War) suggests, the security problematic is truly global and inescapable. Correspondingly, real security regimes - say, for Europe or the Middle East - are fundamentally provisional approximations of defining and solving this problem. Finally, and following from the preceding guidelines, resist the temptation to consign security studies to a ghetto within the academy. Since prehistoric time, as man emerged from the slime of the sea, getting one's way and using violence to achieve it have been coterminous and causally contingent throughout human experience. We need all the tools as well as all the scientific and interpretive knowledge we can muster to understand and master the ever more powerful instruments of violence at our disposal if we are to persist, prosper, and progress as a species. Whereas there can be no doubt that we have security problems, it is presumptuous to allege that we have a theory of security. Rather, we have a problem. The survey's blurred vision merges the study of security with its armed pursuit; it confounds the question of security with provisional answers for its realization, which crystallize as the structures and assertions of power that we daily observe. On these scores, Wright is right when he appeals to the marketplace of ideas to explain war and what's real rather than rely primarily on policymakers for answers. Paradoxically, what progress has been made in security studies, somewhat hastily acclaimed as a renaissance in the survey, would not have been possible without generous foundation support, which broadened and deepened the interdisciplinary base of the field at many colleges and universities in the United States and abroad. It was now quite proper and, indeed, urgent to study war, violence, and threats with the same dispassionate care and rigor with which we study molecular biology and child development. The future of that success would be rendered problematic if we relied on the essay's tenuous and tendentious rationalization for the incorporation of security studies within or outside the academy. Security studies can thrive only if they are integrated into the professional concerns and canons of as inclusive a spectrum of disciplinary units as possible within the academy. If we approach security problems in this catholic and questioning spirit, we can do better, and more and have - than this useful but survey of security studies admits.
References Acheson, D. ( 1 969) Present at the Creation. New York: Norton. Axelrod, K. (1984) The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books. Baldwin, D.A. (1979) Power Analysis and World Politics: New Trends vs. Old Tendencies. World Politics 31: 161-1 91. Baldwin, D.A. ( 1 985) Econonnc Statecraft. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univers~tyPress. Boulding, K. (1963) Towards a Pure Theory o f Threat Systems. American Economic Review 5 3 : 424-434. Bould~ng,K. (1989) Three Faces of Power. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Rrams, S. ( 1985) Superpower Gamcs: Applying G a n ~ e'Theory to Superpotucr Conflict. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
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Bull, H. (1977) The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics. London: Macmillan. Buzan, B. (1991) People, States, & Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era. Rev. ed. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. De Gaulle, C. (1970) Discours et Messages. 6 vols. Paris: Plon. Dennett, R., and R. Turner, eds. (1949) Documents on American Foreign Relations, January 1-December 31, 1947, 11. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gilpin, R. (1987) The Political Economy of International Relations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Goldstein, J.S. (1988) Long Cycles: Prosperity and War in the Modern Age. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Haas, E.B. (1968) The Uniting of Europe. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Halberstam, D. (1973) The Best and the Brightest. New York: Fawcett. Huntington, S.P. (1957) The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Practice of Civil-Military Relations. Cambridge, M A : Harvard University Press. Huntington. S.P. (1961) The Common Defense: Strategic Programs and National Politics. New York: Columbia University Press. Huntington, S.P. (1968) Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Huntington, S.P. (1981) American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Huntington, S.P. (1991) The Third Wave. Norman: Oklahoma University Press. Intriligator, M.D. (1990) On the Nature and Scope of Defence Economics. Defence Economics 1: 3-12. Janowitz, M. (1971) The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait. Rev. ed. New York: Free Press. Jervis, R. (1976) Perception and Misperception in International Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kahneman, D., and A. Tversky (1979) Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk. Econometrica 47: 263-291. Kennan, G.F., "Mr. X." (1947) The Sources of Soviet Conduct. Foreign Affairs 25: 566-582. Kolodziej, E.A. (1992) What Is Security and Security Studies?: Lessons from the Cold War. Arms Control 13: 1-32. Kothari, R. (1974) Footsteps into the Future: Diagnosis of the Present World and a Design for an Alternative. New Delhi: Orient Longman. Lebow, R.N. (1981) Between War and Peace: The Nature of International Crisis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Levinger, G., ed. (1987) Beyond Deterrence. Journal of Social Issues. Levy, J . (1991) Long Cycles, Hegemonic Transitions, and the Long Peace. In The Long Postwar Peace, edited by C.W. Kegley, Jr., pp. 147-176. New York: HarperCollins. Lindgren, K., ed. (1991) States in Armed Conflict 1989. Report No. 32. Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University, Sweden. Midlarsky, M. (1991) The Onset of War. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Milburn, T.W., and D.H. Christie (1989) Rewarding in International Politics. Political Psychology 10: 625-645. Mitrany, D. (1966) A Working Peace System. Chicago: Quadrangle. Modelski, G. (1987) Long Cycles in World Politics. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Morgan, P.M. (1983) Deterrence: A Conceptual Analysis. Rev. ed. Berkeley, CA: Sage. Morgenthau, H.J. (1952) In Defense of the National Interest. New York: Knopf. Morgenthau, H.J. (1985) Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 6th ed. New York: Knopf. Nehru, J. (1961) India's Foreign Policy. Bombay: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Osgood, C.E. (1963) An Alternative to War or Surrender. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Osgood, R.E. (1953) Ideals and Self-Interest in American Foreign Policy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Plous, S. (1988) Perceptual Illusions and Military Realities: Results from a Computer-Generated Perceptual Dilemma. Journal of Conflict Resolution 31: 5-33.
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Reppy, J. (1989) "On the Economics of National Security." In Securrty and Arms Control: A Guide t o National Policymaking, edited by E.A. Kolodziej and P.M. Morgan, pp. 73-96. New York: Greenwood Press. Schroeder, P. (1986) The 19th Century International System: Changes 111 Structure. World Politics 39: 1-25. Schroeder, P. (1989) The Nineteenth Century System: Balance of Power or International Equilibr~um.Review of International Affairs, 135-153. Schroeder, P. (1992) Did the Vienna Settlement Rest on a Balance of Power? American History Review 97: 635-735. Sheehan, N. (1988) A Bright Shinmg Lie:]ohn Paul Vann and America in Vzetnam. New York: Vintage. Simon, H. (1976) Administratrue Behauzor, 3rd ed. New York: Free Press. Stein, J.G. (1985) "Calculation, Miscalculation, and Conventional Deterrence I and 11: The View from Cairo and from Jerusalem." In Psychology and Deterrence, edited hy K.Jervis, R.N. Lebow, and J.G. Stein, pp. 24-88. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Talbott, S. (1985) Deadly Gambits. New York: Vintage. Thompson, W.R., and K.A. Rasler (1988) War and Systemic Capability Reconcentration. lournal of Conflrct Resolution 32: 335-366. Valkenier, E.F. (1983) T h e Soviet Union and the Third World: A n Economic Bind. New York: Praeger. Valkenier, E.F. (1986) Revolutionary Change in the Third World: Recent Sov~etAssessments. World Politics 38: 415-434. Waltz, K.N. (1979) Theory of International Relations. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Walrer, M. ( 1 9 7 7 ) l u s t and Unjust Wars. New York: Basic Books. Weiner, T. (1990) Blank Check: T h e Pentagonk Black Budget. New York: Warner Books. Wight, M. (1966) "Why There Is N o International Theory." In Diplomatrc Investigations, edmd by H. Butterfield and M. Wight, pp. 17-34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wright, Q. (1942) A Study of War. 2 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Author's N o t e I should like to thank several individuals for comments and criticisms: Francis Beer, Stephen Cohen, Paul Diehl, Betty Glad, Roger Kanet, Richard Ned Lebow, Thomas Milburn, Patrick Morgan, Sam Sarkesian, Paul Schroeder, David Tarr, Jeremiah Sullivan, graduate students in m y international relations theory seminar, and the anonymous reviewers of ISQ. None is responsible for errors of fact o r opinion.
Notes 1. Stephen M . Walt, "The Renaissance of Security Studies," International Studies Quarterly 35 (1991):211-239. 2. Ibid., p. 212. Emphasis in the original. 3. Ibid., p. 224. 4. This line of analysis is developed more extensively than space permits here in Kolodziej, 1992. 5. Walt, "The Renaissance of Security Studies," p. 225. 6. lbid., p. 231. 7 . Ibid., p. 213. 8. lbid. 9. Ibzd., p. 218. 10. Ibid., p. 231.
A Tale of Two Worlds: Core and Periphery in the Post-Cold War Era James M. Goldgeier and Michael McFaul
A
s the world moves away from the familiar bipolar cold war era, many international relations theorists have renewed an old debate about which is more stable: a world with two great powers or a world with many great powers.' Based on the chief assumptions of structural realism namely, that the international system is characterized by anarchy and that states are unitary actors seeking to survive in this anarchic system - some security analysts are predicting that a world of several great powers will lead to a return to the shifting alliances and instabilities of the multipolar era that existed prior to World War II.2 For instance, John Mearsheimer argues that "prediction[s] of peace in a multipolar Europe [are] f l a ~ e d . "Thomas ~ Christensen and Jack Snyder argue that states in a multipolar world can follow either the pre-World War I or the pre-World War I1 alliance pattern, thus implying that a third course is improbable. They further assert that "the fundamental, invariant structural feature, international anarchy, generally selects and socializes states to form balancing alignments in order to survive in the face of threats from aggressive competitor^."^ The realist argument predicts that great powers in a self-help international system will balance one another through arms races and alliance formations. We challenge both the structural realist predictions and the fundamental assumptions upon which they are based. We argue that balance-of-power politics will not be the defining feature of interactions among great powers in the coming decades, since the nature of states and the nature of the international system differ fundamentally from those described by structural realists. Because the great powers of the future will be nonunitary actors focusing primarily on maximizing wealth and acting not simply within a system of states but instead within a "great power ~ociety,"~ they will no longer engage in balancing alliances but will settle conflicts and enhance their security through negotiation and compromise rather than through the use or threat of force. Source: International Organization, 46(2) ( 1992): 467-91.
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In this great power society, the major powers will gravitate toward one set of shared norms - namely, economic liberalism and political democracy. These norms will enhance the incentives to avoid the use of military means to settle disputes between the great powers. In direct contrast to the predictions about the effects of multipolarity offered by many realists, our prediction is that the collapse of communism will continue to move the world closer to an international order governed politically by collective action among the great powers rather than by balance-of-power politics. Conflicts between the great powers will still be common, but they will be played out in boardrooms and courtrooms, not on battlefields or in command and control centers. We do not agree that "history has ended" and that liberalism or neoliberalism is the ideology to end all ideologie~.~ First, the trend toward ideological and systemic homogenization is not a unilinear trajectory toward some static utopian end. Rather, it is a contingent and dynamic phenomenon catalyzed by the collapse of communism. Second, revolutionary upheaval in any of the major powers could create another ideologically heterogeneous system, as occurred after the French and Russian revolutions. Third, the sharing of norms about economics and government is not yet global but confined primarily to the core of great powers. While the increasing homogeneity of norms within the core will lessen the ability of realism to explain the behavior of the great powers, realism will still be helpful in explaining the behavior of states within regional systems outside of the economic and political core.' In making this argument, we challenge the conclusion that the presence or absence of war is a function of the number of great powers in the system. Much of the concern about the new world order stems from a belief that bipolarity is more stable than multipolarity. We argue that the distribution of power is not as relevant to the stability of the system as structural realists have suggested; nuclear weapons, not bipolarity, were chiefly responsible for preventing armed conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war. Clashes between the two superpowers in Korea or Cuba might easily have erupted into major wars if nuclear weapons had not existed. Our focus is on the various combinations of markets, democracy, and technology that affect the likelihood of war. When the great powers did not share norms about economics and politics, as was the case during the cold war, only the balance of terror provided by nuclear weapons deterred superpower war. As great powers come to share norms about markets and democracy, however, maintaining nuclear balances among the great powers will be less necessary in preventing war between them. We thus tell the tale of two worlds of international politics in the postcold war era. In the core, economic interdependence, political democracy, and nuclear weapons lessen the security dilemma; the major powers have no pressures for expansion. The result is a relationship consistent with a liberal model of international politics.8 Conflicts do not disappear, but they are not resolved militarily. In the periphery, however, absolute deterrents that might induce caution do not exist. A variety of political systems ranging from democracies
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to monarchies coexist side by side, and interdependence between peripheral states is subordinate to dependence on core states. Pressures for expansion are still present, stemming from goals of wealth, population, and protection as well as from internal instabilities. Under these conditions, we argue, structural realism is inadequate to explain the behavior of states in the core but is relevant for understanding regional security systems in the periphery. Our argument proceeds in three sections. First, we briefly describe the tenets of structural realism. Second, we explore why realism offered a compelling explanation for many aspects of international power politics in the multipolar international system that existed prior to World War 11. Third, we demonstrate why the theory no longer applies to politics in the core and argue that a new model is thus needed to predict the behavior of great powers. In comparing the past and present worlds, we focus on the nature of states and the international system, the goals of states, and, finally, the predicted behavior that follows from the nature and goals of states. We conclude by exploring two scenarios that might return great power politics to balance-ofpower behavior, the first involving a change from democracy to dictatorship in one of the current core states and the other involving the rise of a military dictatorship to great power status.
The Tenets of Structural Realism The appeal of structural realism is that it makes only a few critical assumptions about the nature of states and the international system to derive .~ assumptions are well known to stupredictions about state b e h a ~ i o rThese dents of international politics. First, all states are functionally alike; that is, they are unitary actors whose minimum objective is to survive.'O Second, the central feature of the international system is anarchy, defined as the absence of a central authority. Because the system is anarchic, each state must provide for its own security. A state can help itself in two ways: it can enhance its strength by increasing its armaments or economic wealth (internal efforts), and it can offset its weakness by forming alliances with other states (external efforts). Based on the simple assumption that states seek to survive in an anarchic environment either by internal or external balancing, structural realists argue that the distribution of capabilities among states has profound consequences for the degree of stability within the international system. According to Kenneth Waltz, the existence of two great superpowers constitutes the most stable environment, since their superiority of power is so great that alliances become fairly irrelevant.12 In a bipolar system, there are few uncertainties about how the great powers stand in relation to one another, because each superpower needs only to gauge the power of the other. In contrast, in a multipolar system, the relative equality of more than two powers means that some states can gang up against another. Consequently, states must seek alliances to preserve the "balance." In such an inherently unstable system, states have no
'
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permanent friends or enemies, only temporary allies. This fluidity of power drives states constantly to shore up their alliances while they try to weaken those alliances opposed to them. Dependency (or at least perceived dependency) on their allies leads states to take drastic measures to preserve their partners whenever they. appear to be weakening.'"tates will even go to war to - preserve the alliances upon which their security depends. The presence of anarchy and the concern for survival in the state system trap the actors in the well-known security dilemma.I4 As realists continue to emphasize, in a world dominated by the security dilemma, relative gains are more important than absolute gains. A state may increase its wealth and power, but it is only secure if other states are not increasing their wealth and power at a comparable rate. This highly constrains the ability of states to cooperate.I5 A belief that relations among the great powers are a zero-sum contest leads to beggar-thy-neighbor policies, arms races, strengthening of alliances, and even war as the ultimate means of weakening one's enemy. While realists have debated among themselves the virtues of multipolar or bipolar systems, they have also recently looked at how the nature of power (as expressed in nuclear weapons) as well as the distribution of power can affect stability in the system, given state interests in survival. On the one hand, many realists have come to rely increasingly on nuclear weapons (which, according to Waltz, are a unit-level featureI6j as a prescription to overcome instabilities caused by power balancing in a new multipolar system, arguing that new great powers should develop secure second-strike nuclear capabilities to preserve stability.I7 We, on the other hand, argue that polarity itself is not the relevant factor in understanding war and peaceI8 and that while nuclear weapons may have mattered during the cold war, democracy and interdependence can reduce the reliance on these dangerous weapons to preserve peace. In contrast to the realists who examine interests by studying power, we focus on interests created by new relationships deriving from political and economic changes.
The International System of the Old World
In explaining the nature of the multipolar international system that existed from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, many of the assumptions of structural realism seem valid. The actors could be considered unitary for the purpose of developing theory, since the policies of a France, Russia, Prussia, Austria, or Germany were largely made by individual leaders or their foreign ministers even if pressures existed for one policy or another from small groups of elites. Britain was the only democracy among the great powers throughout this period, and thus great power politics was primarily the domain of kings, queens, and their diplomats. Even in democratic Great Britain, the public was hardly involved in the making of foreign policy prior to World War I, and policy there was the product of elite debate, not public opinion."
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The security dilemma in the international system during this period was quite strong, as states could be attacked, defeated, and even destroyed by others. Since leaders could develop the means to defend their land while devastating that of others, everyone feared everyone else.20 Great powers could seek to conquer the world (and at various times tried), so leaders were concerned with the relative wealth and power they p~ssessed.~' Because a state could translate wealth and population directly into greater military power, any relative gains in the former could lead to a relative gain in the latter. Leaders could never rejoice in the gains made by another country, even if all were prospering together, since ensuring survival was a constant concern. The Coals a n d Behavior of States
In previous centuries, the ultimate state objective - survival - was obtained by accruing military power. Military power was closely intertwined with wealth, population, and territory. Leaders sought to augment their economic wealth to pay for arms, increase their population to provide troops and a greater economic base, and increase their territory to provide for more secure borders.22 States devoted tremendous resources to developing their military power. The nation-states that arose in the centuries after Columbus's voyage across the ocean developed a centralized authority, a system of state taxation, and a bureaucracy primarily designed for preparing for war. As Paul Kennedy indicates, "Military power permitted many of Europe's dynasties to keep above the great magnates of their land, and to secure political uniformity and authority.. .. In the last few years of Elizabeth's England, or in Philip II's Spain, as much as three-quarters of all government expenditures was devoted to war or to debt repayments for previous wars."23 To supplement their individual military expenditures, states sought external methods of balancing against perceived threats. England and France were die-hard enemies from the time of Louis XIV through the Napoleonic Wars, and yet by the 1830s they were allies. Russian armies marched into Paris in 1814, but by the end of the century, Russia had formed an alliance with France as German power grew. Maintaining balances of power was not merely a systemic reality; it was an explicit foreign policy norm for the great powers, particularly after the Congress of Vienna in 1815.24 In this multipolar system, the acquisition of territory played an important role. First, as already noted, leaders believed that acquiring more territory meant more secure borders and greater wealth and population for nurturing military power. Second, territory not incorporated by the great powers could be used as buffer zones. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the great powers agreed on guaranteeing the neutrality of Switzerland, Belgium, and Luxembourg in order to lessen competition among the great powers in those territories between them.2Third, leaders perceived that territorial acquisition was useful for preserving the balance of power, as befitted a world of relative gains. Describing the situation after the war of
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Polish succession in 1735, Gordon Craig and Alexander George noted the following: In the interests of the balance of power, everybody, except the Poles over whom the war had started, received some compensation. [Stanislaus] Leszczynski gave up the throne of Poland but kept the courtesy title king and was given the Duchy of Bar. Later, in 1740, when Duke Francis of Lorraine, the husband of Maria Theresia, became emperor of Austria and gave up Lorraine in order to acquire Tuscany, Leszczynski got Lorraine too. It was agreed, however, that when he died both Bar and Lorraine would pass to his daughter, the wife of the French king, and would thus become part of France. The Hapsburgs, through Duke Francis, acquired not only Tuscany in Italy but also Parma and Piacenza. The Spanish got Naples, and the king of Sardinia was fobbed off with some minor frontier rectifications. It was a big pie, and everybody got a piece.2h The great powers also sought territorial acquisitions throughout the globe because they believed colonies increased their wealth and power; in the nineteenth century, European rulers valued colonies for their populations, resources, and markets." As J.A. Hobson argued, there was a "popular delusion that the use of national force to secure new markets by annexing fresh tracts of territory [was] a sound and a necessary policy for an advanced industrial country like Great Britain."28 Whether it was a delusion or not (and empirical data seem to support Hobson's argument), major powers did seek empires as part of their game of balancing their competitor^.^^ In the nineteenth century, the leading powers formed the Concert of Europe to mitigate the effects of anarchy in the international system. Shared norms regarding the nature of international politics helped the great powers manage the system. Perhaps most important, all great powers, be they authoritarian or democratic, opposed revolutionary upheaval, and they worked together to intervene to prevent such upheavals in peripheral states.30However, the Concert of Europe was not as homogeneous as the currently emerging system. The member states did not share norms about democracy and capitalism. Nor were there absolute deterrents to ensure security. Thus, to achieve wealth and power and to ensure security, states ultimately relied on the use of force. Although no total war erupted between the great powers from 1815 to 1914, limited and proxy wars were considered and used as legitimate methods of maintaining and enhancing state goals. In addition to wars with the smaller powers, the great powers fought several limited wars among themselves during the nineteenth century." The growing security dilemma faced by the great powers and the changes in perceptions about the nature of military force ended the long peace that had existed for a century after the Congress of Vienna and led to World War I.z2It is primarily the memory of World War I and World War 11 that leads many structural realists to fear the rise of multipolarity at the end of the twentieth century. For fundamental reasons, however, the future will not take us back to the past.
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The International System Today: A Tale of Two Worlds T h e N a t u r e of t h e State a n d t h e S y s t e m
Assuming that states are unitary actors is counterproductive for developing theories about the behavior of great powers today; the growth of transnational economic interests and the rising constraints of public opinion on foreign policy have diminished the freedom of leaders to conduct foreign policy. A state's ability to conduct a "national" economic policy, for example, is weakened by the international behavior of its firms and by the growing importance of other states' investments in the "national" economy. Expanding trade flows and the accepted "rationality" of an open international market punish state interven~ become more tions, autarkic systems, or import-substitution s t r a t e g i e ~It. ~has and more difficult for individual states to regulate the fluidity of capital and the flow of technology transfers, which have both i n ~ r e a s e dTransnational .~~ links and institutions limit the leaders' abilities to conduct mercantilist strategies and weaken the state's control over the domestic economy.35 Furthermore, with the collapse of communism - or, more accurately, the collapse of autocratic governments and command economies that followed the Soviet model - leaders are under increasing pressure to adopt international norms about economic liberalism and political democracy. Authoritarian governments face the specter of exclusion from international political regimes such as the European Community if they do not adopt democratic principle^.^^ Likewise, state-centered or protectionist economies forfeit access to International Monetary Fund (IMF) credits, World Bank loans, the European Common Market, and U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) assistance if they fail to push the state out of the domestic market and open the economy to the international market. From within, the state as a unitary actor in foreign policymaking is challenged by both democracy and free markets. Just as American foreign policymakers have had to cope with public constraints on foreign policy since the Vietnam War, Soviet and Russian policymakers in recent years have had to contend with domestic publics that opposed the use of military force at home and abroad.37Similarly, state actions that damage individual and corporate gains from an international free market risk domestic resistance and refusal. The "national" interest must now compete with the interests of the "nationals." Not only are states less unitary, but the effects of international anarchy are less pronounced than in earlier periods.38First, the existence of nuclear weapons means that the great powers cannot use war to solve the conflicts that arise between them, and this lessens potential security dilemmas.39 Disputes between great powers must be settled in more ordered fashions to ensure state survival. Second, the multilateral institutions and international regimes created after World War I1 to regulate and stimulate a world capitalist economy have served to temper the effects of international economic anarchy by decreasing transaction costs, providing information, and
thereby reducing uncertainty.40 Third, the rise of democratic principles within great powers has contributed to more regular and predictable behavior between the great power^.^' The growing homogeneity of norms and ideas about the domestic and international nature of politics and economics among today's major states is giving rise to a great power society in the international system. However difficult to quantify, the level of order and the acceptance of norms about legitimate international behavior in relations between core states are rising. Even when serious conflicts erupt over perceived national interests, such as those in the recent Uruguay Round negotiations of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), great powers are not using military means to solve these conflicts.42 We are not arguing that relations between the great powers are harmonious; we are merely arguing that conflict is bounded by the norms that have arisen.4i Economic liberalism has given rise to GATT and other international regimes that provide an institutional framework for settling disputes through agreed upon norms, rules, and procedures. While the recent difficulties in the Uruguay Round and elsewhere signal a temporary setback of international economic cooperation, a consideration of longer-term trends suggests a significant and continual growth of international economic integration over the past few decades.44 Furthermore, greater democracy leads to greater openness of societies, and this in turn reduces uncertainties about the motivations behind state behavior while at the same time providing constraints on the actions of the leaders.4s While many of the changes affecting the state and the system in the core have similar effects in the periphery, the degree of transformation has been less pronounced for three key reasons. First, as nations in the periphery have not been engaged in massive nuclear arms races, absolute deterrents for military aggression d o not exist. O n the contrary, military force is still a valued means for influencing outcomes and increasing state power.46 Second, because sovereignty for many countries in the periphery is newly acquired and often challenged both from within and without, leaders actively (though not necessarily successfully) resist challenges to their control over policy, particularly in the economic sphere.47Foreign investment, foreign ownership, and, ultimately, foreign intervention are seen by many in the periphery as tools of the core states to exploit the peripheral states' resources. Different attitudes regarding the relationship of the state to international capitalism have created a multitude of different economic systems in the periphery. With respect to economic principles and practices, while the differences between those of Japan and the United States are large, they pale in comparison with the differences between those of Cuba and Singapore or between those of North Korea and Argentina. Third, predictability based on a set of shared norms does not exist in the periphery, since many regional security systems consist of states with radically different governments, economies, cultures, ethnic groups, and religions. In the Middle East, fundamentalist Muslim states share a regional security system with Israel. In southern Africa, democratic
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Botswana is surrounded by authoritarian states, both capitalist and socialist. In Southeast Asia, communist-controlled Vietnam and Cambodia share a regional security system with right-wing military regimes. While there are differences between the French and American models of democracy, they are minor in comparison with the differences between political systems in the periphery. The Coals of States
The core. In the new international system, preserving existence will still be the ultimate objective of the state.48For the great powers, however, ensuring survival will be a relatively easy task; core states need not remain "essentially war making machines."49 A realist would expect that if Germany and Japan grow as great powers and challenge the United States, uncertainties will grow about the threat each poses to the other, and they therefore will be compelled to take internal or external measures to balance one another in the international system. We, however, argue that state survival within the core system of states will be relegated to a perfunctory national objective, and hence the security dilemma will not dominate relations between the great powers. Beyond mere existence, wealth and power will remain the two overriding goals of all states, but the preference ordering between the two has changed fundamentally in the post-cold war era. Aircraft carriers and nuclear warheads do not generate gold for the national treasury. On the contrary, the experience of the Soviet Union and, to a lesser extent, the United States underscores that military power does not necessarily create economic wealth. Economists in Moscow i d abroad concur that soviet defense spending over the past forty years has stifled efficient resource allocations and stunted nonmilitary growth.50 The United States has channeled major research and development funds into pursuing military applications of sophisticated technologies, while others - most notably Japan - have nurtured commercial applications of American scientific achievements to generate tremendous economic growth. Two big winners of the cold war were nonparticipants. Japan spent 1 percent of its gross national product on military defense and turned its war-devastated state into the world's second-wealthiest country.s1 Germany followed a similar postwar trajectory. The end game of the cold war should not lead to the conclusion that military power is not important for the construction and preservation of the core's economic system. American economic hegemony after World War I1 laid the groundwork for liberal internationalism among capitalist states, while American military prowess contained antisystemic challenges to this order.s2 But in the new order within the core states, the norms, rules, and procedures brought into the system by American hegemony have been institutionalized by multilateral regimes, while antisystemic threats are in retreat. The great powers will continue to collide about farm subsidies and import quotas, but no core state or group of leading actors within the core has an interest in
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undoing the liberal international capitalist system. Even if quibbles between great powers become conflicts, the utility of military power for influencing the outcome of these disputes is rapidly declining. The periphery. In many parts of the developing world, power and wealth are still linked in ways recognizable to the realists, and the security dilemma is paramount. Military threats from neighbors and internal threats from insurgents continue to threaten the existence of states5' Although in historical perspective the conflict in the periphery has been minimal in comparison with that in Europe," interstate conflicts (such as those between Armenia and Azerbaijan, India and Pakistan, Iraq and Kuwait, and Israel and the Arab world) and intrastate wars (such as those in Afghanistan, Angola, Liberia, Peru, and Yugoslavia) will continue to compel leaders in the periphery to seek military power to ensure their rule and preserve the state. Not only can conquering new lands lead to more secure borders, but the addition of population and resources can increase the wealth that supports military power. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait demonstrated that Saddam Hussein discerned a direct relationship between military power and economic gain. Adding the resources of new oil fields would have added to his wealth and thus to his power both in the region and globally.ss The convergence of norms among the core states about wealth and power has an effect on the definition of goals in the periphery. Since the world economy is organized and regulated by the core states, peripheral states must accept their rules to participate. Peripheral states that have prospered in the world economy have learned about the capital drains of extensive military budgets and the capital gains of export-led growth.c" Consequently, a region's military hegemon will not necessarily be the region's economic hegemon. Yet, as long as a regional military hegemon continues to exercise force on occasion, its economically successful neighbors are compelled to expand their military potentials, as Saudi Arabia recently learned. In many regions of the periphery, a relationship, or at least the perception of a relationship, between military power and economic wealth still exists. T h e Behavior of States
The core. If the nature of the state and the system as well as the definition of state goals has changed, then the logic of state behavior predicted by realist balance-of-power theory no longer applies. Rather than balancing, core states are seeking to bandwagon, not around a power pole but around a shared set of liberal beliefs, institutions, and practices. Unlike the last multipolar system, the current system offers few incentives for the great powers to engage either in internal or external balancing. Structural realists would predict that Germany and Japan have incentives to build their own nuclear capabilities to respond to the security dilemma created by the possession of these weapons by other major powers in their regions, yet neither state has nor has demonstrated such an interest. States respond to threats, not to
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power, and neither state perceives rising threat^."^ Precedents do exist for great powers not building military capabilities reflective of their economic capabilities. Great Britain, for example, during much of the nineteenth century spent only 2 to 3 percent of its gross national product on its armed services because the country was not directly threatened by any of the other major powers.s8 While Japan and Germany might conceivably seek nuclear weapons either to enhance their status or to counter the nuclear forces of other powers in the core or periphery, the political and diplomatic costs associated with their development of nuclear capabilities would be extremely high. A German nuclear weapons program might destroy European integration, an integration from which Germany has the most to gain. Similarly, Japanese acquisition of nuclear weapons would heighten fears in China and, eventually, in the United States, at a time when Pacific tranquility ensures Japanese prosperity. In both Germany and Japan, powerful public opposition constrains any potential development of nuclear weapons capabilities. Furthermore, as already stated, the lesson from the cold war is that domestic military spending can pose a greater threat to a state's well-being than can any external power. By virtue of their preeminence in civilian technologies, Japan and Germany will have the potential for first-rate military systems, but they do not inevitably have to develop large militaries.sy There is also no reason for shifting military alliances. On the contrary, the only major military alliance is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO),and Britain, France, Germany, and the United States already belong. The leading power, the United States, already has a security relationship with Japan, while NATO's former adversaries in the Warsaw Pact are seeking closer ties to the Atlantic alliance. While in the long run NATO will likely decompose if no external threat to its members justifies its existence, its successor will not be a set of threatening regional alliances.60Nuclear weapons still play a role in reducing the relevance of balancing power among the core states. The dilemma of nuclear weapons - you cannot fight with them and you cannot fight against them - makes them largely irrelevant to relations between great powers because the deterrent capacity of nuclear weapons makes war unlikely no matter what the polarity of the system.61The nuclear balance could well remain an essentially Russian-American issue, irrelevant and inconsequential to other sorts of political and economic competition among the core powers.62 Standing in fundamental opposition to our argument is the simple observation that a nation's security is always paramount and that the objective of creating more wealth therefore takes a back seat to security. As Mearsheimer argues, "States are surely concerned about prosperity, and thus economic calculations are hardly trivial for them. However, states operate in both an international political environment and an international economic environment, and the former dominates the latter in cases where the two systems come into conflict. The reason is straightforward: the international political system is anarchic, which means that each state must always be concerned
to ensure its own survival. Since a state can have no higher goal than survival, when push comes to shove, international political considerations will be paramount in the minds of decision-makers."h3 If, however, economic issues are security issues for the great powers today and if the great powers cannot use war to solve the problems between them, then the security environment and the economic environment are not as separable as Mearsheimer's quote suggests. Moreover, in his otherwise systemic approach to arguing his case, Mearsheimer introduces one destabilizing subsystemic factor - hypernationalism - and thus opens the door to a consideration of other economic and political factors that favor peace and stability. Security is much more easily achieved in an age in which several powers have nuclear weapons than it was in the days when great powers could be conquered. Concerns stemming from international anarchy are therefore less severe now than in the past. A war between great powers simply would be impossible to wage today. Even if Japan and Germany do not build their own nuclear arsenals, they can share the "benefits" of the nuclear world. They cannot contemplate attacks on the five major nuclear powers, but the lack of utility of nuclear weapons (except for deterrence) means that the five nuclear powers will not use nuclear weapons against them either. Mearsheimer argues that "when push comes to shove," traditional security politics rule. But what if push does not come to shove? In that case, a focus on military balancing and alliance formations explains little about the nature of state i n t e r a ~ t i o n . ~ ~ The liberal capitalist system constructed by the United States after the conclusion of World War I1 has created several international regimes that still serve the liberal international economic order." Continued maintenance of the world economy will require that rising states, such as Japan and Germany, play more active roles in guiding and redefining these regimes and in supplementing existing structures with new, more functional multilateral institution^.^^ But these new powers will have no interest in eradicating the basic structures of the open capitalist system. On the contrary, they are the very states that have the most t o gain from strengthening (with modification) these norms, rules, and procedures.h7 Contrary, then, to the predictions of realist theory, a world of several great powers will not lead to greater protectionism.68 Despite media blitzes on Japan-bashing in the United States and America-bashing in Japan, both countries rely on a stable and functioning, albeit regulated, free trade international system for continued growth. Moreover, the intertwined economies of the United States, Japan, and the West European countries inhibit the belligerent use of economic power. Like the effect of interdependence caused by nuclear weapons, the net result of economic warfare would be the destruction of aggressor as well as victim.h9 Cognizant of the poverty of economic protectionism, the major powers have continued to coordinate their interdependent futures, despite the collapse of a common military enemy.'O The 1985 Plaza Accord and the 1989 "structural impediments talks" aimed at
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correcting trade imbalances between Japan and the United States suggest that multilateral coordination can even intervene in domestic policy to mitigate interstate economic disputes." Important indicators portend greater movement toward free trade, not increasing protectionism. Yet even if multilateral coordination among Japan, the United States, and the West European countries deteriorates, economic conflicts will not precipitate a war involving the great powers. As already stated, conflicts between the great powers will be played out in GATT rounds, Group of 7 summit meetings, and Super 301 negotiations, not in military engagement. The absence of war as a means of settling disputes between the great powers fundamentally distinguishes this era from previous ones. Another major difference between the new and old worlds of state behavior is the role of territory in great power politics. The great powers gain neither more secure borders nor increased wealth by adding more territory. Even during the cold war, leaders considered territory important for security, but now "buffer zones" are no longer necessary. Whereas Stalin, for example, sought control over Eastern Europe for security against German power and for his state's wealth, today's leaders in the Soviet Union are facing internal, not external, threats to their state's survival. Furthermore, the leaders learned that the external empire was a drain on state wealth. While Stalin sought more territory as part of a traditional conception of security, Gorbachev understood that his state's security was not compromised by the "loss" of Eastern Europe. If it was not clear to the great powers at the end of the nineteenth century, it is quite obvious now that the wealth of great powers is not created in the periphery today. Over the last two decades, foreign investment flows and trade figures indicate a greater integration of core economies coupled with a commensurate disengagement of core-periphery economic relations. In the 1980s, foreign investment in the United States grew se~enfold.'~ In the latter half of the 1980s, Japan invested roughly $60 billion annually in the United States, matching a similar level of Japanese investment in Europe during this same period.73Likewise, 80 percent of world trade was conducted between the core states, not between core and peripheral states. Contrary to nineteenth-century models of imperialism, core states are reinvesting in the core. Moreover, products in the core states, especially the United States, are increasingly constituted by financial and other services as opposed to manufactured goods. During the 1980s, Ford, a former industrial giant, restructured to become one of the largest saving and loan institutions in the United States, while Sears was reorganized to become a major financial services firm.74Growth areas in manufacturing in the core states consist almost entirely of high-technology products: computers, semiconductors, aerospace products, and telecommunications equipment. Principal markets both for services and for high-technology goods will be in other core states, not in the periphery. If these trends continue, the economic gap between the core and the periphery will widen. Neither neoimperialist conquest nor the pursuit of allies in the periphery will be necessary for the great power^.^'
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Some would argue that this increasing economic interdependence between the core states makes conflict more likely rather than less likely. Indeed, Waltz asserts the following: "The fiercest civil wars and the bloodiest international ones have been fought within arenas populated by highly similar people whose affairs had become quite closely knit together. It is hard to get a war going unless the potential participants are somehow closely linked. Interdependent states whose relations remain unregulated must experience conflict and will occasionally fall into violence. If regulation is hard to come by, as it is in the relations of states, then it would seem to follow that a lessening of interdependence is de~irable."'~ An empirical justification for this argument stems from the interdependence that existed among the great powers prior to World War I, in contrast to the independence between the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war. The interdependence existing among the advanced industrial nations today, however, differs from that existing in 1913, and the economic costs of war between countries is now much more drastic. As Richard Rosecrance has noted in comparing the two eras, "States have not until recently had to depend upon one another for the necessities of daily existence. In the past, trade was a tactical endeavor, a method used between wars, and one that could easily be sacrificed when military determinants so decreed."" Trade and investment flows were vertical in the nineteenth century. While British foreign trade in 1913, for example, was 43.5 percent of the gross national product, if Britain and its colonies were counted as a single unit, Britain was less dependent on Europe at that time than it is as a member of the European Community today. British investment in 1913 went disproportionately to the colonies, with 66 percent going to the Americas and Australia, 28 percent to the Middle East, and only 6 percent to Europe. Direct investment in foreign ownership of firms is also much higher today.7xAs Rosecrance adds, "Because it was not the business of government in 1914 to prevent economic disruption and dislocation, little effort was made to minimize the effect of a prolonged war upon society, and no effort to prevent war altogether. Between Western industrial countries and Japan today, war is virtually ~nthinkable."~' Finally, history suggests that war between democracies is highly unlikely. Michael Doyle notes that the forty-nine democracies that have existed since 1945 have not gone to war with one another and that five of these democracies - Britain, France, Japan, West Germany, and the United States were major powers.x0 Drawing on Kant, Doyle suggests that those republics which rest on just rule by the consent of the governed assume that other republics are also governed by consent, and hence they are more willing to accommodate these other republics.81In his major review article on the causes of war, Jack Levy even posits that "this absence of war between democratic states comes as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relation^."^^ If all the major powers become democratic, these principles would suggest that war between them will be highly unlikely.
Some argue that there is no inherent reason why democracies should not fight one another. Certainly, the evidence is still sketchy on the role of democracy, particularly given that the major democracies after World War I1 were all allied against the Soviet threat and that the circumstances have recently changed. With this threat gone, skeptics about democracy making a difference might expect the major democratic powers to confront one another. In addition to the arguments of Kant and Doyle about why democracies might not fight one another, we also suggest that democratic countries are less uncertain about one another's motives than about the motives of authoritarian state^.^" When a small group or a single individual with tight control over information acts in the international arena as, for example, Stalin did after World War 11, uncertainties mount and the security dilemma heightens. When actors are more open and are constrained by a more visible public opinion, the greater transparency lessens the security dilemma.84 Hence, a continued trend toward democracy in the core does contribute to a lessening of the likelihood of war between great powers. The periphery. The core-periphery divorce accelerated by the end of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry has dramatic military and economic implications. Regarding military matters, the great powers will neither intervene to preserve the security of peripheral states nor constrain the peripheral states from undertaking belligerent actions unless core economic interests are threatened. If there is no balancing in the core, there will be no engaging of core states in balancing in the periphery. With the cold war straitjacket removed, wars in the developing world will not be deterred or promoted by the possibility of core state military actions.85Rather, core state military engagement in the periphery will be determined primarily by vital interests such as access to oil and strategic mineral supplies86and to a lesser extent by special interests of domestic constituents. As in the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the absence of true polarity within the core states has removed those international structural constraints which may have inhibited military actions by great powers in the past. But while the great powers will move to protect vital interests, they will not show the same resolve when called upon to protect an African country from invasion or an Asian country from revolution. The relative absence of concern for the civil wars in Liberia, Sudan, and even Ethiopia - the same type of events that only a decade earlier attracted major intervention by great powers - portends a new relationship between the great powers and the regional security ~ystems.~' This decoupling of the core state security structure from the peripheral security structures suggests that states in the developing world will have to seek means for enhancing security within their own states or regions. Classic structural realist balance-of-~owertheory delineates the options available. First, states can devote greater resources both to purchasing weapons and to developing domestic arms production ~ a p a b i l i t i e sThe . ~ ~ Indian-Pakistani, Israeli-Syrian, and North Korean-South Korean arms races are clear examples of regional balancing by building up domestic arsenals. Not all states, however, have the ability to follow this first course. As a consequence, acquisition
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of military firepower has not been evenly distributed, and regional hegemons have emerged.8YTo ensure security in these situations, the less militarized states throughout the Third World face the choice of policy options offered by realist theory - that of balancing or bandwagoning. Saddam Hussein's quest for regional hegemony, for example, forced the other Middle Eastern states to act, with Jordan choosing to bandwagon and Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria choosing to balance against the rising threat. Regarding economic matters, capital and trade flows will circulate within the core, while the periphery will continue to get relatively poorer.y0Likewise, economic assistance coming from the core will dwindle. The United States has already reduced its foreign assistance expenditures, while Japan, now the largest aid donor in the world, spends only 0.3 percent of its gross national product on foreign as~istance.~' The assistance that remains available is increasingly devoted to macroeconomic structural adjustment policies and tied to core state export promotion.92 If peripheral states want to remain linked to the core economies, they will be compelled to accept the terms of North-South trade and investment proposed by the industrialized states and the major international lending institutions.'" Caveats: Throwbacks to the Past Our argument rests heavily on the belief that the trend among the great powers is toward economic liberalism and political democracy and that these two factors are the key to a change in great power politics. If any of the current or potential great powers reverts from democracy to authoritarianism or if a nondemocratic nation becomes a great power, our argument will be considerably weakened. We now consider various possibilities. One potential great power, China, has already quashed the trend toward democracy and freedom that was blossoming in the 1980s. Despite its size, China is not yet a great power and does not have the capability to disrupt the great power society that we have described. It is a powerful regional actor, but it has neither the economic strength nor the military power projection capabilities to play much of a global role to date, despite its nuclear weapons. Its ability to disrupt the scenario we have outlined lies primarily in the military threat it can pose to Japan. If it does threaten Japan militarily and if Japan seeks the military means to respond, the resulting spiral of hostilities could trigger a larger security dilemma between the great powers. A more serious problem would be a return of communist rule in the Soviet Union or fascist rule in Russia, which might lead the United States to engage in balancing this country once again. The trend toward both democracy and markets in the former Soviet Union is still tenuous. If Gorbachev or his successor tries to hold the union together by force, then the development of new norms in the Soviet Union will be slowed. But strong forces that seek to move the country closer to Western norms of politics and economics exist both in the central Soviet government and in the Russian republic - and a new Russia could play the role of a great power. Institutionalizing democratic governance
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in Russia will remain a long-term process, but leaders are already constrained by new political forces that have emerged in both the state and society and are opposed to authoritarian rule. Even Russian right-wing revanchism might not be as disruptive as some might imagine. Reactionaries in Russia may not favor democracy and markets, but they may also seek to isolate the country in such a way that it no longer acts as a great power in world politic^.'^ Russia and the Soviet Union face such severe internal problems that an isolationist foreign policy is a real While the former Soviet Union still possibility for this former s~perpower.~" possesses the nuclear weapons and conventional capabilities that it once used to extend its reach throughout the globe, losses in Afghanistan and the difficulty of acting abroad when faced with civil war at home have combined to make the return of the Soviet Union as a superpower antagonistic to the rest of the international system quite unlikely. Another potential cause for concern is the alleged fragility of democracy in Germany and Japan. Some argue that a political culture imported from the United States is not firmly implanted in these two countries and that they might revert to their pre-World War I1 past, with dictators seeking imperialist expansion in their respective regions. The possibility of this scenario, however, seems remote. While there are right-wing elements in Germany and Japan (as there are in all liberal democracies), the political costs of returning to a dictatorial past would be extremely high for either of these countries. The return of authoritarian regimes would frighten neighbors, antagonize the United States, and risk collapse of the present international order from which Germany and Japan profit. A final caveat is that a new great power which is neither economically nor politically liberal could emerge. A large country in the periphery that developed nuclear weapons and was led by a dictator like Stalin or Saddam Hussein could trigger balance-of-power politics among the remaining great powers. The emergence of a new power that could challenge the existing order in a fundamental way, however, does not seem on the horizon at the moment.
Conclusion Pessimists about a future multipolar world rely heavily on the notion that the postwar world has been stable because of bipolarity. A closer examination belies this contention. It is particularly problematic to describe the U.S.-Soviet relationship between 1947 and 1962 as "stable."96 There was no superpower war, to be sure, but each side wanted to destroy the other's system. To that end, the superpowers confronted each other around the globe. The clarification of interests so important to the neorealists simply meant that each superpower knew that the other was the enemy; it did not mean that each was content with the other's existence. The dramatic events in Berlin, the war in Korea, and the missile crisis in Cuba involved real
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threats of war between great powers. H a d there been no nuclear weapons, a US-Soviet war or at least armed conflict over any of those issues could have easily e r ~ p t e d . ~ ' Without nuclear weapons, the existence of bipolarity may not have prevented war in a world in which the great powers shared few norms. It is misleading for structural realists to argue that with no need to depend on allies, the two superpowers could easily maintain a balance between them by internal means. The security dilemma still existed, as evidenced by the tremendous arms race in which the two powers engaged. They each feared a technological breakthrough that would enable the other to impose its norms on the world. But the nature of nuclear weapons meant that no breakthrough existed (or yet exists) to overcome the fact that the two powers could not go to war with one another. These weapons still exist, and their existence continues to make a war between great powers impossible even in a world of several great powers. In addition to nuclear weapons, the clear trend in the core of current and future great powers is toward economic liberalism and political democracy. The former, by tying the welfare of each of the powers with the others, lowers the incentives and raises the costs of military conflict, and the latter, by reducing uncertainties between the major powers, mitigates potential security dilemmas. Economic and political changes for great powers have made nuclear weapons less important in preventing war. When the great powers shared few norms (as in the U.S.-Soviet rivalry), nuclear weapons were important in inducing caution. With the growth of economic interdependence and the rise of democracy, the security dilemma lessens and the absolute deterrent may not be as important in preventing the eruption of war between great powers as it was during the cold war era. More important, economic interdependence and political democracy make balance-of-power politics less likely. Nuclear weapons may have induced caution, but they did not stop the United States and Soviet Union from engaging in classic balance-of-power politics. The two superpowers built tremendous arsenals to oppose one another, and they sought allies throughout the globe. They balanced one another - or at least tried to - in places such as Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Angola, and Afghanistan. Each power feared its ultimate defeat to the other; the United States feared the specter of world communism, while the Soviet Union feared capitalist encirclement. As the great powers come to share norms about economics and politics, the rationale for building arms and seeking allies among these major states is weakened, and the cost of pursuing these activities is increased. While power may be redistributed among more than just two countries, threats will not be. Unitary actors seeking to survive in an anarchic environment engage in arms races and alliance formation. Nonunitary actors seeking to maximize wealth in a great power society d o not. Technological, political, and economic factors have not changed traditional state relationships in the periphery. The desire of many of the poorer
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states to move closer to the core in order to reap the economic benefits may induce cooperation rather than conflict. But the traditional linkages between wealth and military power in the periphery, the concern with achieving state sovereignty against internal and external military threats, and the continued disputes over territorial boundaries will all be forces for old-style power politics among the smaller regional powers. In the periphery, as in the core, the likelihood of war will be lower in those regions which enjoy both greater economic interdependence and more political democracy. We need to expand our research agenda to the study of the linkages both within the liberal and realist worlds and between them. No longer will international relations scholars study as distinct fields the economic relationships between the U.S., Japanese, and European governments and the military relationship between the U.S. and Soviet governments. The fields of international political economy and international security will not be as separable as they were in the past, and new analyses of security politics will need to examine the nature of a liberal core and a realist periphery that will interact in new ways. It is the role of nuclear weapons, economic interdependence, and political democracy which needs to be explored to understand state interaction, not some greater specification of "multi-" or "bi-polarity."
Acknowledgements We thank Marc Bennett, Lynn Eden, Matthew Evangelists, Ernst Haas. David Holloway, Peter Katzenstein, Stephen Krasner, Sarah Mendelson, Scott Parrish, Jack Snyder, Paul Stockton, Joe Wood, Takahiro Yamada, anonymous referees, and the participants at seminars held at Stanford's Center for International Security and Arms Control (CISAC) and Cornelk Peace Studies Program for their comments o n earlier drafts of this article. We are also grateful t o CISAC for its generous support during the initial stages of the writing of this article.
Notes 1. We define a "great power" as a country possessing the will and the capability to alter events throughout the international system. For more on the debate about whether a bipolar o r multipolar world is more stable, see Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979); Richard Rosecrance, "Bipolarity, Multipolarity and the Future," Journal of Conflict Resolution 10 (September 1966), pp. 314-27; Karl Deutsch and J. David Singer, "Multipolar Power Systems and International Stability," World Politics 1 6 (April 1964), pp. 390-406; and John Lewis Gaddis, "The Long Peace: Elements of Stability in the Postwar International System," International Security 1 0 (Spring 1986), pp. 99-142. 2. See, for example, Thomas J. Christensen and Jack Snyder, "Chain Gangs and Passed Bucks: Predicting Alliance Patterns in Multipolarity," International Organization 44 (Spring 1990), pp. 137-68; and John J. Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future: Instability in Europe After the Cold War," International Security 15 (Summer 1990), pp. 5-56. In other articles, Snyder focuses more heavily on domestic institutions and the internal and external factors that influence them. See, for example, Jack Snyder, "Averting Anarchy in the New Europe," International Security 14 (Spring 1990), pp. 5 4 1 . 3. Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future," p. 8.
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4. Christensen and Snyder, "Chain Gangs and Passed Bucks," p. 140. 5. The term "great power society" is derived from the conception of "international soc~ety" in Hedley Bull's The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order rn World Politics (London: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 12-14. In an international society, state interaction is influenced by a set of shared norms about permissible and impermissible behawor. These norms provide a b a s s for order that is absent in an anarchical environment. Our modification simply stresses that the conditions of an international society outlined by Bull are present within the core states but are not extended throughout the world, as we discuss in detail later in our article. 6. See Francis Fukuyama, "The End of H~story?"T!J~ Nution~zlInterest 16 (Summer 1989), pp. 3-18; and Samuel Huntington, "No Exit: The Errors of Endism," The National Interest 17 (Fall 1989), pp. 3-1 1. See also the responses that follow in these issues of The National Interest. 7. With the disappearance of the "Second World," the terms "First World" and "Third World" need to be reworked. We find the terms "core" and "periphery" more analyt~cally useful because they denote and demarcate two different kinds of space. First, In economic terms, "core" refers to the industrialized states of Western Europe, North America, and Japan, whereas "periphery" refers to the agriculturally based, industrializing states of the developing world. See Johan Galtung, "A Structural Theory of Imperialism," /ournal of Peace Research 13 (May 1971), pp. 81-1 17; and Immanuel Wallerstem, "The Rise and Future Demise o f the World Cap~talistSystem: Concepts for Comparative Analysis," Comparative Studies in Soci~ty a n d Hrstory 16 (September 1974), pp. 387-415. Second, in reference to power, periphery denotes those states which are "weak" relative to the core of great powers dommating the international system. See Martin Wight, Power Politics (New York: Holmes LY( Meier, 1978), pp. 61-68. "Middle powers" and "semiperipheral states" also form a useful third set for some analyses, hut this grouping is not important to our article. 8. For examples of the liberal model, see Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace (1796; reprint, Los Angeles: U.S. Library Association, 1932); Michael Doyle, "Liheralism and World Politics," American Polrtrcal Scrence Review 80 (December 1986), pp. 11.5-69; Michael Doyle, "Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs" ( 2 parts), Philosophy and Puhlrc Affairs, vol. 12, 1983, pp. 204-35 and 323-53; and Richard Rosecrance, The Rise of the Trading State (New York: Basic Rooks, 1986). 9. See Waltz, Theory of International Polrtics. For a detailed discussion and cr~tiqueof Waltz's book, see Robert 0. Keohane, ed., Neorealism a n d Its Crrtics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 10. Waltz recognizes that states are not In fact unitary actors, but he argues that if he can assume so and can create a theory that explains behavior without looking at internal state characteristics, the assumption is justifiable. See Kenneth N. Waltz, "Response to My Critics," in Keohane, Neorealism and Its Crrtics, pp. 338-39. Waltz himself does not assume that a11 states wdl act rationally, although formal theories about states as rational actors derive quite logically from his realist approach. See Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, The War Trap (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 198 1); and Duncan Snidal, "The Game Theory of International Politics," World Polirrcs 38 (October 1985), pp. 25-57, 1I. See Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 118. Stephen Walt later refined the theory by focusing on how states balance threats rather than power; see Stephen M . Walt, The, Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987). 12. Waltz, Theory of lnternutional Politics. 13. Ibid., pp. 161ft. For a similar view, see John Lewis Gaddis, "The Long Peace"; and Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future." 14. See John H. Herz, "Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma," World Politrcs 2 (January 1950), pp. 157-80; and Robert Jervis, "Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma," World Politics 30 (January 1978), pp. 167-214. 15. See Joseph M. Grieco, "Anarchy and the Limits of Cooperat~on:A Realist Critque of the Newest Liberal Institutionalism," Internatronal Organization 42 (Summer 1988), pp. 485-507. See also the debate between Robert Keohane and John Mearsheimer in "Back to the Future, Part 11: International Relations Theory and Post-Cold War Europe," International Security 15 (Fall 1990), pp. 191-99.
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16. See Waltz, Theory of lnternatconal Politics, p. 202. See also Kenneth N. Waltz, "Nuclear Myths and Political Realities," American Political Science Review 84 (September 1990), pp. 7 3 1 4 5 . Nye, however, distinguishes between structure and process at the level of the international system and argues that nuclear weapons belong t o the latter category. See Joseph S. Nye, Jr., "Neorealism and Neoliberalism," World Politics 4 0 (January 1988), pp. 235-51. 17. See, for example, Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future." For arguments that proliferation in Germany could be a stabilizing factor, see Stephen Van Evera, "Primed for Peace: Europe After the Cold War," International Security 15 (Winter 1990-91), pp. 7-57; and Christensen and Snyder, "Chain Gangs and Passed Bucks," p. 168. 18. On this point, see Rosecrance, "Bipolarity, Multipolarity and the Future"; and Van Evera, "Primed for Peace," pp. 34-40. 19. See Gordon A. Craig and Alexander L. George, Force and Statecraft: Diplomatic Problems of O u r Time, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford Un~versityPress, 1990), pp. 60-61. 20. For excellent discussions about the security dilemma, see Herz, "Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma"; Robert Jervis, "Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma"; and Jack Snyder, "Perceptions of the Security Dilemma in 1914," in Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein, eds., Psychology and Deterrence (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 153-79. 21. See Paul Kennedy, The Rise a n d Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987). 22. As most wars were fought on the g o u n d (some at sea and none in the air), states sought more territory not only for offensive reasons, such as glory and gold, but also for defensive reasons, such as protecting access to resources or simply making their borders more secure. The history of the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries is a history of territorial expansion by the great powers: the Europeans expanding throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America; the Americans establishing colonies and then states across the continent; and the Russians moving toward Siberia and the Pacific. 23. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, pp. 70-71. 24. See Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored: Mettemich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812-22 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957); and Edward Vose Gulick, Europe's Classical Balance of Power (New York: Norton, 1967). 25. Paul Gordon Lauren, "Crisis Prevention in Nineteenth-Century Diplomacy," in Alexander L. George, Managing US-Soviet Rivalry (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1983), pp. 31-64. 26. Craig and George, Force a n d Statecraft, p. 24. 27. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 1990), pp. 178 and 189. 28. J.A. Hobson, "The Economic Taproot of Imperialism," in Kenneth E. Boulding and Tapan Mukerjee, eds., Economic Imperialism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), pp. 1-2. 29. See Kenneth E. Boulding, "Introduction," in Boulding and Mukerjee, Economic Imperialism, pp. ix-xviii. Sometimes the division of territory abroad among the colonial powers was amicable, as it was in Africa under the Treaty of Berlin of 1885, when the term "spheres of influence" was first used. See David Thornson, Europe Since Napoleon, rev. ed. (New York: Knopf, 1981), pp. 465-66. 30. Kissinger, A World Restored. 31. Britain, France, and Russia fought in the Crimea in 1854-55. Bismarck went to war first with Austria and then with France to unify the German states in 2870-71. 32. On the role of the nature of military force in the outbreak of World War I, see Jack Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984). 33. See Robert 0 . Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation a n d Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 253. 34. See Raymond Vernon, "Japan, the United States, and the Global Economy," The Washington Quarterly 13 (Summer 1990), pp. 57-68; and Donald Puchala, "The Pangs of Atlantic Interdependence," in H. M. Belien, ed., The United States a n d the European Community: Convergence or Conflict? (The Hague: Nijgh & Van Ditmar Universitair, 1989), pp. 131-46. For an alternative argument examining how states can regulate foreign investment and do have the
Coldiylicr ~ n M d c F ~ u I Core
and periphery
305
power to conduct a national economic strategy, see Simon Keich, "Roads to Follow: Regulating Direct Foreign Investment," International Organization 43 (Autumn 19891, pp. 543-84. 3.5. For recent brief reports, see "The Myth of Economic Sovereignty," The Economist, 2 3 June 1990, p. 67; and "Business Without Borders," U.S. News and World Report, 16 July 1990, pp. 29-31 For a scholarly analysis, see Helen Milner, "Trading Places: lndustries for Free Trade," World Politics 40 (April 19881, pp. 350-76. 36. Western leaders have made this pomt very clear regarding the applications of East European countries to join the European Community. Moreover, the series of binding Un~ted N a t ~ o n sresolutions regarding the use of force against Iraq suggest that "defectors" from world norms may face not only exclusion but also military mvasion. 37. See Harry Gelman, Gorbachev and the Future of the Soviet Militaty Institutron ([.ondon: Institute for International Strategic Studies, Spring 1991), p. 34. 38. On the problems of defining anarchy and its effects, see Robert Axelrod and Robert 0. Keohane, "Achieving Cooperation Under Anarchy: Strategies and Institutions," in Kenneth Oye, ed., Cooperation Under Anarchy (Prmceton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 19861, pp. 226-54. 39. For an analysis of how nuclear weapons affect the structure of the mternational system, see Steve Weber, "Realism, Detente, and Nuclear Weapons," International Organization 44 (Winter 199O), pp. 55-82, 40. See Stephen Krasner, ed., Internatzonal Regimes (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983); Keohane, After Hegemony; and Keohane and Nye's discussion of "processes" in Robert 0. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., "Power and Interdependence Revisited," International Organization 4 1 (Autumn 19871, pp. 725-53. 41. See Doyle, "Liheral~smand World Politics"; Doyle, "Kant, 1.1beralLegacies, and Foreign Affairs"; Bull, The Anarchical Society, pp. 243-48 Stanley Kober, "Idealpolitik," Foreign Policy 79 (Summer 19901, pp. 13-3 8; and Kant, Perpetual Peace. 42. On this issue, see, for example, Robert 0. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., "Internat~onal Interdependence and Integration," in Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby, eds., International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 19751, pp. 3 6 3 4 1 4 . 43. O n the distinctions between harmony, cooperation, and discord, see Keohane, After Hegemony, pp. 51-52. 44. Clyde H. Farnsworth, "Busmess Groups Urge New Farm Trade Talks," The New York Trnzes, 2 7 January 1991, p. 6. 45. On domestic constraints, see, for example, Alexander I,. George, "Domestic Constraints on Regime Change in U.S. Foreign Policy: The Need for Policy Legitimacy," in Ole K. Holsti, Randolph M. Silverson, and Alexander I.. George, eds., Change in the International System (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1980), pp. 233-62. 46. Although interstate wars in the develop~ngworld have been surprisingly fewer than those in Eurone before the construction of the balance of nuclear terror there. interstate wars still occur in every region, and preparations tor future wars are still rising. For instance, w h ~ l e the developing world accounted for 8 percent of global military expenditures in 1960, it accounted for 20 percent by 1985. See Ruth I.eger Sivard, World Military and Social Expmditurrs, 1986 (Washington, D.C.: World Priorities, 19861, p. 27. 47. On sovereignty in the Third World, see Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg, "Why Africa's Weak States Persist: The Empirical and the Juridical in Statehood," World Polrtics 35 (October 19821, pp. 1-24; Stephen Krasner, Structural Conflict: The Third World Against Global Liberalrsm (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); and Jeffrey Herbst, "War and the State in Africa," International Security 14 (Spring 19901, pp. 117-39. 48. Even this fundamental assumption IS now circumspect. Among the states of the European Community, it is not clear what the "existence of the state" will mean in the years after 1992. 49. This definition 1s in Rohert Gilp~n'sWar and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 198 I), p. 131. Similarly, Carr asserted that "every act of the state, in its power aspects, is directed to war." See F..H. Carr, The Twenty Years Crisis, 191 9-19.39 (London: Macmillan, 1940), p. 139. 50. See, for example, Arthur J. Alexander, Perestrorka and Change in Soviet Weapons Acquisitron (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, June 19901, pp. 3-8; and Anders
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T h e Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security A g e n d a
Aslund, Gorbachev's Struggle for Economzc Reform (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989). 51. Daniel I. Okimoto, "The Economics of National Defense," in Daniel I. Okimoto, ed., Japan's Economy: Coping with Change in the International Environment (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1982), pp. 231-83. 52. Regarding economic hegemony, see Keohane, After Hegemony, pp. 135-81; Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of lnternational Relations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987);and Stephen Krasner, "State Power and the Structure of International Trade," World Politics 28 (April 1976), pp. 317-47. Regarding military prowess, see John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). 53. Nonmilitary threats such as starvation, flooding, or global warming can also challenge the existence of Third World states, but usually these nonmilitary variables must be translated into military mobilization to destroy a given regime. For a different kind of argument examining the effect of internal and external threats on the behavior of states in the periphery, see Steven R. David, "Explaining Third World Alignment," World Politics 43 (January 1991), pp. 233-56. 54. See Herbst, "War and the State in Africa." 55. Force has been used in other ways in the periphery to provide for greater security, a stronger state, or both. Hanlon described South Africa's policy of destabilizing its neighbors in the early 1980s as a policy designed to ensure South Africa's economic hegemony and t o prevent its neighbors from carrying out attacks against its apartheid system. Napper argued that Somalia's 1977 intervention in the Ogaden was designed to add the Somalian population there to the existing Somalian state. See Joseph Hanlon, Beggar Your Neighbours (London: Catholic Institute for International Relations, 1986); and Larry C. Napper, "The Ogaden War," in George, Managing US.-Soviet Rivalry, pp. 225-53. 56. Some states, such as South Korea, have prospered even while maintaining large military budgets, but these states are the exception rather than the rule in the periphery. 57. Walt, The Origins of Alliances. 58. Kennedy, The Rise a n d Fall of the Great Powers, p. 153. 59. We are grateful to Peter Katzenstein for reminding us that a leader in civilian technologies is in a position t o become a leader in military technologies. 60. For a discussion of what might replace NATO, see Malcolm Chalmers, "Beyond the Alliance System," World Policy Journal 7 (Spring 1990), pp. 215-50. For a skeptical view, see "Organisation of European Unity," The Economist, 1 4 July 1990, p. 13. 61. See Nye, "Neorealism and Neoliberalism," p. 250; and F. H. Hinsley, The Fall a n d Rise of the Modern lnternational System (Canberra: Australian National University, 1981). 62. See Steve Weber's concept of "joint custodianship" in Weber, "Realism, Detente, and Nuclear Weapons." 63. Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future," p. 44. 64. Certainly, not all realists focus exclusively on security politics. For a good discussion about the interplay of economics and securlty politics in realist thought, see Robert Gilpin, "The Richness of the Tradition of Political Realism," in Keohane, Neorealrsm and Its Critics, pp. 301-21. 65. Lags and feedbacks allow regimes to gain some degree of autonomy from the original constellation of power that instituted them. See Stephen Krasner, "Regimes and the Limits of Realism: Regimes as Autonomous Variables," in Krasner, lnternational Regimes, pp. 355-68. 66. One suggestion is the creation of an "international trade organization." See C. Fred Bergsten, "The World Economy," Foreign Affairs 6 9 (Summer 1990), pp. 96-112; and Gary Hufbauer, "Beyond GATT," Foreign Polrcy 7 7 (Winter 1989-90), pp. 64-76. Another possible new international regime might be an international environmental regulatory commission. 67. According to Raymond Vernon, "Today, it would be hard t o find a country with a greater stake than Japan's in furthering the central objective of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). That objective is to mamtain in the world
(;oic/qc~i~r and
M ~ F ~ UCore I and Periphery
'307
a system of open and stable markets." See Vernon, "Japan, the Un~tedStates, and the Global Economy," p. 59. 68. For a presentation of the tradit~onalvlew about the relationship between free trade m d polarity, see Joanne Gowa, "Bipolarity, Multipolarity, and Free Trade," American Political Science Revrew 8 3 (December 19891, pp. 1245-56. 69. As Shafiqul Islam points out, "In an increasingly interdependent world dominated by market forces, an open economy with two-way capital flows (whether In deflcit or surplus) is vulnerable to the actions of foreign and domestic investors alike." See Shafiqul Islam, "Capitalism in Conflict," Foreign Affaivs, vol. 69, 1989-90, pp. 172-73. See also "America's Multinational Blues," The Eronomrst, 2 1 July 1990, p. 12. 70. The opposite was predicted in Gilpin's War a n d Change in World Politics, p. 129. 71. The imbalances have been corrected, in large part, by the devaluation of the dollar. See Youn-Suk Kim, "Prospects for Japanese4.S. Trade and Industrial Competitio~i,"Asun Survey 30 (May 1990), pp. 493-504. 72. See Clyde H. Farnsworth, "Proposals on Foreign Investment," The New York Tirnes, 23 July 1990, p. C1. In 1980 prices, the United States took in $252 billion in foreign investments between 1980 and 1988. Yet 311 of the industrial countries, ~ncludingJapan, experienced higher levels of direct foreign investment during the 1980s than during any previous decade. See "The Myth of Economic Sovereignty," The Economist, 2 3 June 1990, p. 67. 73. See Vernon, "Japan, the United States, and the Global Economy," p. 58. 74. See Chr~stoperJ. Niggle, "F~nancialInnovation and the Distinction Between t'inanclal and Industrial Capital,"]ournal of Economic Issues 20 (June 19861, pp. 37.5-82. 75. In direct contradiction to this supposition, Mearshe~merargues that "minor powers m such a lmultipolarl system have cons~derableflexibility regarding military alliances." See Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future," p. 14. 76. Kenneth N. Waltz, "The Myth of Nar~onalInterdependence," in Charles P. Kindleberger, ed., The ltzternational Corporation (Cambridge, h4ass.: MIT Press, 1970), p. 20.5. 77. Rosecrance, The Rise of the Trading State, p. 14. 78. Ibid., pp. 145 ff. 79. Ibid., p. 150. 80. Dovle. , , "Liberalism and World Politics." 81. Other arguments are that citizens are slow to vote for a war which they pay for with their lives and that the frequent turnover of leaders makes it more d~fficultfor personal hatreds between rulers to develop. See Doyle, "Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs," pp. 21 1-12 and 22-5-30, 82. Jack Levy, "The Causes of Wdr: A Review o f Theories and Ev~dence,"in Philip Tetlock et al., eds., Behavior, Society, and Nuclear War, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 19891, p. 270. 83. Doyle hints at this point in "Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs," p. 325. 84. Another means of overcoming the security dilemma is through international integration. See, for example, Karl W. Deutsch, "Security Communities," In James Kosenau, ed., International Politics and Foreign Policy (New York: Free Press, 19611, pp. 98-105. 85. Jose Thiago Cintra, Regional Conflicts: Trends in /I Period of Tr~znsittoir(London: Institute for International Strategic Studies, Spring 19891, pp. 94-108. 86. The narrowing of core state interests In the periphery 1s paralleled by a consensus about these interests. While the first tendency mitigates against intervention by the great powers, the second heightens the opportunities for such intervention. In sum, the great powers have fewer motives to intervene, but when they do find reason, they will act with less hesitation, as they did in Iraq. 87. One potential new form of continual engagement is through international peacekeeping forces. For a review of possibilities, see the conference papers on "United Nations Peace-Keeping" as published in Survey, vol. 32, May-June 1990. A more probable form of engagement IS through the creation of a diplomatic peace corps by the core states. Great powers such as the United States could be called upon to provide arbitrators and negotiators for crisis situations. Chester Crocker's role in the Angolan-Namibian peace accords could serve as a model for future engagements.
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
88. For a discussion of these capabilities, see Andrew L. Ross, "World Order and Third World Arms Product~on," in James Everett Katz, ed., The Implications of Third World Military Industrializatzon: Sowing the Serpents' Teeth (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1986), pp. 277-92. 89. Analysts have shown that 7 5 percent of weapons acquired in the Third World ended up in fourteen countries. See Michael Klare, "Wars in the 1990s: Growing Firepower in the Third World," The Bulletin of the Atomrc Scientists 46 (May 1990), pp. 9-13; and Rodney Jones and Steven Hildreth, Modern Weapons and Third World Powers (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1984). 90. O n Africa's declining wealth, for example, see World Bank, Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, November 1989). 91. Mera Koichi, "Problems in the Aid Program,"]apan Echo 26 (Spring 1989), pp. 13-18. 92. Regarding macroeconomic structural adjustment, see Robert L. Ayres, Banking on the Poor: The World Bank and World Poverty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985). The Japanese foreign assistance budget includes one of the smallest allocations for grants of any aid-giving country. Rather than giving grants, Japan prefers to give loans that are tied to the export o r import o f some Japanese product or investment. Under the Reagan administration, the United States also movcd toward tying more of its foreign assistance projects to American commercial interests. Even the middle powers that have been renowned for giving aid based on "humane internationalism" are increasingly tying assistance to commercial projects. See Olav Stokke, ed., Western Middle Powers: The Determinants of the Aid Policies of Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1989. 93. See Krasner, Structural Conflict; and Keohane, After Hegemony, p. 253. 94. There are some conservative organizations (such as "Edintsvo" [unity] and the United Workers' Front) that seek to revive the Soviet Union as the center of world socialism, but these organizations are small and have no real power. 95. By isolationist, we do not mean autarkic. O n the contrary, both Gorbachev and Yeltsin seek t o integrate the Soviet Union and Russia with the rest of the international system as much as possible. What we are emphasizing is that neither the Soviet Union nor Russia is capable of influencing international issues that do not deal directly with the Soviet Union, as was evident during the Gulf War. 96. O n this point, see also Rosecrance, "Bipolarity, Multipolarity and the Future," pp. 315-1 6. 97. In "Back to the Future, Part 11," pp. 191-92, Stanley Hoffmann notes that the bipolar world of Thucydides was certainly not stable. In "The Essential Irrelevance of Nuclear Weapons: Stability in the Postwar World," International Securrty 1 3 (Fall 1988), pp. 55-79, John Mueller emphasizes neither bipolarity nor nuclear weapons but instead argues that the major states learned from the destruction of World War 11 that war is not a viable option.
Japan's National Security: Structure, Norms, and Policies Peter J. Katzenstein and Nobuo Okawara
apan's national security policy has two distinctive aspects that deserve analysis. First, Japan's definition of national security goes far beyond traditional military notions. National security is viewed in comprehensive terms that also include economic and political dimensions. The second feature of Japan's security policy worth explanation is a distinctive mixture of flexibility and rigidity in the process of policy adaptation to change: flexibility on issues of economic security, rigidity on issues of military security, and flexibility combined with rigidity on issues of political security.' With the end of the Cold War and changes in the structure of the international system, it is only natural that we ask whether and how Japan's national security policy will change as well. Optimists insist that the Asian balance of power and the U S - J a p a n relationship will make Japan aspire to be a competitive, noninterventionist trading state that heeds the universal interest of peace and profit rather than narrow aspirations for national power.' Pessimists warn us instead that the new international system will finally confirm Herman Kahn's prediction of 1970: Japan will quickly change to the status of a nuclear superpower, spurred perhaps by what some see as a dangerous rise of Japanese militarism in the 1970s and 1980s.' Both optimists and pessimists, we argue, are mistaken. The notion that Japan is destined to be the first example in history of a state wielding huge economic and technological power without corresponding military might is as implausible as the case for the inevitability of a nuclear-armed Japan. Both notions are profoundly ahistorical. Optimists overlook a long historical record that makes their strong claim problematic. Pessimists subscribe to a notion of disembodied structure without historical content. As variants of realist political thought, both seek causal primacy in the structure of the international state system and the putative effects of that structure on rational state actors seeking to maximize their relative gains in the international system. Since they arrive at opposite conclusions, each places in question the claim of the other. Taken together, both underline the-fact that international structures d o not determine Japan's foreign policy choices.
J
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Source: lnternatronal Securrty, 17(4)(1993):84-118.
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
This article seeks to explain these choices by turning instead to two different areas of scholarship. First, we draw on insights from the field of foreign economic policy which point to the domestic structure of the state as a major determinant of policy ~ h o i c e Secondly, .~ we rely on a growing literature in international political economy and comparative politics dealing with the role of norms and ideas in politics.5 For an analysis of foreign policy choice, rather than systemic outcomes, what matters are not international but domestic structures. Yet domestic structures do not alone determine the conception of interests that inform actors. These conceptions are shaped also by the normative context that defines standards of appropriate behavior. Analyzing how such standards gradually change makes it possible to unravel the process by which the interests that inform foreign policy are formulated in the first place. Because domestic structures and norms are shaped by history, so, indirectly, is the process of foreign policy choice. In short, Japan's security policy, we argue here, is influenced both by the structure of the state broadly conceived and the incentives it provides for policy on the one hand, and on the other by the context of social and legal norms that help define policy interests and the standards of appropriateness for specific policy choices. The structure of the Japanese state has made it virtually impossible, short of a domestic political revolution, for an autonomous and powerful military establishment to emerge in Japan. Inside the government, the military is fenced in by a number of institutional procedures that severely circumscribe the access of military professionals to the centers of political power. The civilians' control over the military is firmly entrenched in Japan. The structure of state-society relations in Japan isolates the military from a public which musters at best no more than passive tolerance for the armed forces. This effect is countered, however, by the trans-national relations between the Japanese and the American militaries that have grown increasingly close during the 1980s and have thus enhanced the professional standing of the Japanese m i l i t a r ~ . ~ The second main determinant of Japan's security policy is the normative context, both social and legal, in which the government develops its security policies. There is a far-reaching consensus on economic security issues: to most Japanese it is self-evident that, where possible, the country's very substantial economic vulnerability, as shown by its reliance on the import of raw materials, should be reduced. Similarly uncontroversial is the idea that Japan should strive for technological autonomy, both for its intrinsic merits and as a useful mechanism for reducing Japan's dependence on raw materials. This consensus on issues of Japan's economic security contrasts starkly with the continued contest over the norms that should inform Japan's military security policy. An anti-militarist public climate continues to mark debates on military issues, reinforced by the provisions of Japan's Peace Constitution. At the same time it is also true that Japan's public has gradually come to accept the necessity of a small national defense and has quietly assented in the 1980s to a substantial build-up of the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) and an increasingly close defense cooperation with the United States. Finally, issues which touch
K,il/er~iteitiJapan'sNational Security
31 1
on Japan's political security - most prominently Japan's relation with the United States in all of its economic, military and diplomatic dimensions - fall between these two extremes. They show neither full consensus nor deep contestation, but rather political disagreements and debate. The structure of the Japanese state and the interaction between legal and social norms, we argue, explain the comprehensiveness of Japan's national security policy as well as its mixture of policy flexibility and rigidity in the face of change. The structure of the Japanese state creates incentives for a broad definition of security favoring economic and political dimensions over strictly military ones. O n questions of economic security, prevailing norms facilitate flexibility, for example in Japan's energy and technology policies, while on military issues, such as the deployment of the SDF overseas, they encourage policy rigidity. Political issues of security show a variable pattern mixing elements of flexibility on questions of military cooperation with the United States and rigidity in the area of transferring militarily relevant technologies to the United States7 The article surveys existing explanations of Japan's security policy, and proceeds to analyze the governmental structures, the normative context, and Japan's policy choices. Finally, we conclude that what matters most for how Japanese foreign policy adjusts to changes in U.S.-Japan relations is the normative context, rather than the economic or military subject matter of particular foreign policy issues.
Existing Explanations
Analytical perspectives that focus attention exclusively or predominantly at the level of the international system suffer from serious weaknesses if we wish to understand Japan's security policy. We are reminded of these limitations by the fact that different authors, relying on different variants of systemic explanations, arrive at fundamentally different predictions about Japan's security policy. Systemic analyses that focus on Asia's regional balance of power suggest that the international system creates few incentives for change in policy; some authors who analyze the U.S.-Japan relationship suggest that there will be dramatic change in policy; and those examining the swing from a pacifist Japanese foreign policy in the 1920s to a militarist one in the 1930s suggest that Japan's security policy will be incoherent. Therefore, we turn our attention to the effects of Japan's domestic structures and norms. They may help us in circumventing these difficulties. Conventional Wisdom
The conventional wisdom among both American and Japanese foreign policy experts focuses on the effect the international system has on Japan's security policy. The consequences of the end of the Cold War, according to this line of argument, are much less evident in Asia than in Europe. While the Cold War in Europe defined the balance of power along clear lines of division between
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The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
East and West, in Asia this split was only one among many. The collapse of Communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union have created much less compelling incentives for a change in Japan's security policy than is true for European states such as Germany. Therefore, in focusing on the regional balance of power, the conventional explanation seeks to account for the conservative and incremental responses of Japan's security policy to the international changes that have occurred since the late 1 9 8 0 ~ ~ Hobbesian Vision
A second explanation also focuses on the effects of international structure but emphasizes a different aspect of the balance of power in U.S.-Japan relations. It comes to dramatically different conclusions. George Friedman's and Meredith Lebard's recent book argues that war between the United States and Japan is inevitable. "The struggle between Japan and the United States, punctuated by truces, friendships, and brutality, will shape the Pacific for generations. It will be the endless game about which the philosophers have written, the game of nations - the war of all against all."9 For Friedman and Lebard, geography is destiny.'(' Both the United States and Japan are naval powers. The United States needs to control the sealanes because of its expansive notion of self-defense. Japan needs to control the sealanes because of its dependence on the import of virtually all important raw materials. Japanese vulnerability and American assertiveness will make a break between the two countries inevitable. A showdown is unavoidable since Japan cannot permanently subordinate itself to America's political demands and since America, trapped by its empire, is unable to revitalize its competitiveness and thus cannot forgo naval supremacy as its most important military asset." From this perspective, therefore, dramatic changes in Japanese security policy are in the offing. International Regimes
Better than the first two structural perspectives, an analysis that includes the effects of different international regimes can explain the difference between the unforgiving power politics that characterized Western imperialism before 1945 and the beneficial effects of American hegemony after 1945.12 International regimes are shaped not only by the distribution of international capabilities but also by international institutions, international processes, and trans-national politics, which help define the normative basis of international order. Such an analysis suggests a variety of alternate futures for Japan's security policy, depending on the international regimes that will prevail: a reassertion of American leadership based on the existing system of multilateral institutions; a new Pax Nipponica that might link First and Third World institutions; Japan's continued playing of its familiar role of supporter state in the U.S.-Japan relationship; and a new "bi-gemony" uniting the United States and Japan in the exercise of joint leadership of an emerging Pacific Community, in institutions such as ASEAN.13 In stressing the importance of international institutions, this perspective offers Japan the prospect of
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assuming gradually a position of leadership on particular issues, thus smoothing the period of transition in global politics. But applied to the foreign policy of states this modified realism suffers from a potentially serious flaw. A focus on international institutions and processes is often insufficient for explaining foreign policy choices unless the domestic structures and norms that help establish and support international orders are included explicitly in the analysis. Japanese security policy, for example, was relatively peaceful in the 1920s. And it was militarist in the 1930s and 1940s. These dramatically different security policies occurred, however, in the same international order, marked by the preeminence of Western imperialism in a multipolar international system. Applied to the analysis of Japan's contemporary national security policy, a focus on international institutions must therefore pay close attention to the domestic structures and normative contexts that shape Japan's foreign policy choices. Domestic Factors
Hisahiko Okazaki draws our attention to some of these domestic factors in his sobering historical analogy between the Japan-U.S. relationship today and the naval rivalry between the Netherlands and England in the seventeenth century.14 At the root of that conflict was England's jealousy of Dutch prosperity. "England may not have had the economic and technical prowess needed to out-trade the Dutch, but it could use its geographical and strategic advantages to control their trade routes and fishing grounds and so cut them off from the source of their wealth and power."" A pacifist trading nation, Holland believed that a common enemy (Spain), a shared ideology (Protestantism), and similar political institutions (republicanism),would make war between the two countries impossible. It was wrong. With the vanishing of the Spanish threat England, and in particular Parliament, increasingly came to view Dutch economic power as England's most serious threat. English protectionism in form of the Navigation Act of 1651 was so ruinous to foreign competition that the Dutch were drawn reluctantly into a war which, without friends, they could not win. Based on this analogy, Okazaki argues that Japan's interests are best served not by confrontation with the Americans or a turn to Asia but by strong links to the Anglo-American world. "Was there some way," he asks, "for the Netherlands to avoid conflict with England even while preserving its own security and maintaining its status as a major economic power? If so, where did the Dutch go wrong?"" These are important current questions. They direct our attention to a more detailed examination of the state structures and normative context that are shaping Japan's security policy in recent years, within the broad options and constraints provided by the international system.
The Structure of Government
Japan's security policy is formulated within institutional structures that bias policy strongly against a forceful articulation of military security objectives
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and accord pride of place instead to a comprehensive definition of security that centers on economic and political dimensions of national security. Existing mechanisms of policy coordination do not encourage the articulation of military objectives by either Japan's Defense Agency (JDA) or the Prime Minister. And the structure of government creates a set of controls which constrain sharply the institutional autonomy of the JDA, thus further weakening the political articulation of military objectives. Mechanisms of Coordination
Japanese security policy is formulated and implemented largely by the Ministries of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), Finance (MOF), and International Trade and Industry (MITI), as well as the JDA. These ministries and government agencies operate along two different dimensions. O n questions of economic security MITI, the MOF and the MOFA constitute the core in which Japanese policy is articulated. On questions of military security the central bureaucratic organizations are the MOF, MOFA, and the JDA. Because of the prominence of legal issues in the postwar defense debate, the Cabinet Legislation Bureau, an elite unit that oversees all legal aspects of government policy, has also played an important role." For example, the Bureau has been primarily responsible for the government's interpretation of Article 9 of the Con~titution.'~ Typically the two dimensions and two sets of issues - economic and military - are separated. This separation rests on the premise that the use or threat of military force to ensure Japan's economic security is simply not a viable political option. While an informal process of interministerial coordination routinely takes place on the various issues of security policy, distinctive institutional arrangements affecting issues of military security assure that political and economic perspectives retain paramount importance in Japan's national security policymaking. First, major defense decisions (involving, for example, weapon systems, defense build-up plans, and annual budgets) which require the approval of the Cabinet need to be cleared first by the Security Council. While limited to ratifying decisions that are made elsewhere, the Council is an institutional expression of the notion that any important defense policy proposal must go through an especially cautious consensus-building process in which virtually all relevant ministries participate. When the Security Council was created in 1986, the Cabinet Secretariat was also reorganized and a Security Office was set up to replace the Secretariat of the National Defense Council. It serves as the staff for the Council and coordinates government policy on all security matters. The Office has been headed by JDA officials with prior service at the bureau director level.I9 Officials from various ministries are delegated on temporary assignments to the Security Office. Generally speaking the different offices in the Cabinet Secretariat have failed to transcend the interests of individual m i n i ~ t r i e s .The ~ ~ Security Office has been no exception to this tendency. It is simply one arena for
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interministerial coordination, which involves the JDA as one participant among severaL2' The prime minister has little control over the Cabinet Secretariat. The different offices in the Cabinet Secretariat tend to be arenas for interministerial coordination that impede the exercise of strong prime-ministerial leadership. In fact the institutional infrastructure for leadership by the prime minister is simply inadequate for transcending the interests of strong ministries such as the MOF or MITI. A prime minister's inner circle is penetrated by the major ministries. In each of the major ministries there are only two posts that can be filled by political appointees, the minister and the parliamentary vice-minister. And since the latter post has not been important in policymaking, it has been nicknamed "appendix."22 Because of intra-party dynamics, appointing loyal supporters to ministerial positions and keeping them in these positions is an exceedingly difficult task for any prime minister. Prime ministers have also suffered from the fact that they do not have the option of relying either on groups inside the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), such as the "defense tribe," or on the factions they lead. The "defense tribe" is a group of LDP Diet members routinely involved in the JDA's decision making. However, like other groups in the LDP, it cannot afford to be associated too closely with a prime minister, who is usually a faction leader. Tribes act across factional boundaries, and the maintenance of their cohesion necessitates distancing themselves from factional politics.'"~ a certain degree LDP factions are loyal to their leaders. However, party factions are not policy-oriented groups.24 "Factions as such do not take positions on policy issues, nor do they exhibit any ideological coheren~e."~" In the absence of a secure foundation of political leadership either in government or in the LDP, prime ministers have resorted to making use of ad hoc groups. In negotiating the normalization of Japan's relations with the Soviet Union in 1955-56, Ichiro Hatoyama formed a core decisionmaking group which was composed of LDP influential and former MOFA officials. Current MOFA officials were excluded.26 Takeo Miki relied on his personal advisors in handling foreign policy, much to the chagrin of the MOFA.27Yasuhiro Nakasone created an advisory commission on security policy, the "Peace Issue Study Group," which recommended in 1984 the dismantling of the one percent ceiling on defense spending2" On occasion prime ministers have been able to lead, even to the point of overriding the interests of important ministries. But the institutional infrastructure for supporting them remains underdeveloped. In brief, what has been institutionalized are arenas of interministerial coordination such as the Offices in the Cabinet Secretariat. They constrict prime ministerial leadership, and they shape the policy process dealing with security affairs. Mechanisms of Control
The embedding of the JDA in interministerial coordination processes is complemented by its lack of institutional autonomy. Important ministries
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such as MOF, MITI and MOFA have placed their officials inside the JDA, thus "colonizing" the process of defense policy making at its inner core. Officials on temporary assignment from these ministries constitute a significant part of the agency's personnel. The JDA has eleven top bureaucratic posts: the administrative viceminister, chief of the secretariat, five bureau chiefs, and four councillors. Of these eleven positions, at least four are always reserved for officials from other ministries. One bureau chief position (Equipment) is always held by a MITI official, another one (Finance) is almost always occupied by an official from the MOF. Two councillor posts (one in charge of international relations, the other in charge of health) are reserved for the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and of Health and Welfare. In such cases officials typically have had no prior working experience in the JDA. This makes it virtually impossible for them to be inculcated with the perspectives of the professional military.29 In the lower echelons of the JDA, this pattern of outside penetration recurs. Additional positions are also staffed by officials from other ministries who serve in the JDA for the first time in their careers. There exists a great asymmetry in the flow of personnel between the JDA and the major ministries. JDA officials are usually dispatched to other ministries for educational purposes, that is, to experience work in non-military areas and to widen their horizons. They are expected neither to participate in important decisions nor to utilize their military expertise in their host ministries or agencies.30 Inside the JDA the uniformed officers of the SDF are subordinate to a layer of civilian personnel. The administrative hierarchy for military operation is under the control of the civilian administration, which in turn answers to the director of the JDA, who has consistently been an elected official with cabinet rank.31 The Occupation introduced a system of strict supervision of the professional military by a civilian bureaucracy that lacks all military ethos and perspective. This arrangement has been endorsed wholeheartedly by Japan's postwar political and economic elite which, on the basis of its prewar experience, retains a profound distrust of the professional military.32 Military professionals have chafed under this system of civilian control, without being able to dislodge or seriously undermine it. In the eyes of the professional military the principle of "civilian control" implies that it should be the exclusive responsibility of the professional military to advise the political leadership on matters requiring professional military expertise.33Indeed, Article 9 of the Self-Defense Forces Law stipulates that the chiefs of the three services are the highest professional advisors to the JDA director on all matters concerning Japan's ground, air, and sea forces. The article implies that there are two parallel hierarchies, one civilian and the other military, serving under the director.34In the late 1970s the chairman of the Joint Staff Council, General Kurisu, argued in his stormy and brief tenure that the highest ranking uniformed officer under the law establishing the JDA was equal in rank to an administrative vice-minister and should, under the correct interpretation
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of the true meaning of the concept of "civilian control," take his orders from the director but not from civilian bureaucrat^.^' In the eyes of the SDF, the time-consuming chain of command from various civilian bodies to the military might nullify Japan's capacity to repel a surprise attack.36 Kurisu was in fact advocating a reorganization of the JDA along the lines of the U.S. Department of Defense, where two hierarchies, made up of armed services and civilian administrators, come together in the office of the Secretary of Defense." The uniformed officers' possession of military expertise and the principle of consensual decision-making suggest that it would be a mistake to underestimate all military influence in p o l i ~ ~ m a k i n Uniformed g.~~ officers can also provide inputs to the policy process on security issues through their links with the U.S. military. These links can influence communications between the two governments and thus help shape the policy process.i9 But inherent in the civilian-military arrangements inside the JDA is a strong bias against any military interpretation of Japan's national security requirements. It has frequently been pointed out that the JDA's civilian bureaucracy lacks cohesion because it draws its members from v a r i o ~ sministries. The heterogeneity of the civilian bureaucracy, however, is closely linked to the prominence of a political and economic definition of security. This bias has been reinforced by embedding the JDA in a variety of interministerial arrangements. Such arrangements are deeply entrenched. One observer pointed out in 1975 that ,Japan's military defense lacked a mobilization plan, a military court system, emergency legislation, and a civil defense ~ystem.~"It still lacks all of these elements today. Even after a decade of rising military tension in the Far East, with the exception of the Air SelfDefense Forces (ASDF), the SDF lacks rules for engaging the enemy.41It is thus particularly noteworthy that the Second Cold War in the early 1980s did n i t affect measurably the political arrangements either within the JDA or within the government; neither did the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Normative Context
National security policy is deeply affected by the social and legal norms that help shape the interests which inform Japanese security policy. These norms are, on questions of economic security, largely consensual, and on questions of military security deeply contested; issues of Japan's political security, and in particular its relation to the United States, fall between the two extremes. Uncontested Norms of Economic Security
For over 100 years economic security has been a powerful idea that has galvanized the Japanese people to collective action. The purpose of action was to "catch up and surpass the West" (oitsukz, oikose). Military industries designed
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to enhance national security directly were the spearhead of Japan's industrialization after the Meiji Restoration. Eventually the normative consensus on the imperative of economic security led a militarist regime down the path to imperialism and war. Since 1945, however, the ideology of economic security has focused largely on the development of technology as the most plausible way for reducing Japan's dependence on the import of critical raw materials, such as oil, and as a potent force for gaining growing shares in the markets for commercial products. The lack of debate about the desirability of reducing Japan's economic vulnerability is not surprising. Japanese policy makers welcomed the free trade of the Pax Americana as the only way to reduce their economic vulnerability, after the failure of military expansion to control foreign markets. "Although the concept of free trade requires globalism, the immediate concern of Japanese economic planners was whether Japan would be allowed access to markets and raw materials in Asia."42 Karel Van Wolferen puts the point more sharply when he writes that the Japanese have a strong "fear of being victimized by circumstances they cannot control. A common Japanese term, higaisha ishiki (victimhood consciousness), reflects a diffuse but fairly strong sense that the world cannot be trusted and that Japan will always be a potential victim of capricious external f ~ r c e s . " ~ ~ u Pharr s a n agrees when she writes that Japan's foreign policy choices "emerged out of debate, discussion, and the collective mood among successive generations of policymakers faced by pressures inside and outside Japan who shared a perception that the world was a dangerous place."44 Japan's extreme dependence on foreign sources of energy and other raw materials is one illustration for virtually all Japanese. Indeed the idea of Japan as a small and isolated island nation, easily held hostage in a hostile international environment, still retains a very powerful hold over Japanese thinking. This is not to say that Japanese elites do not, at times, mobilize this idea to achieve particular political objectives by appealing to the need for the Japanese to counter international vulnerability through collective effort and hard work. Japan's economic vulnerability, it is agreed by all, requires defense, and characteristically the means are relatively uncontested. Japan's commitment to increasing its technological autonomy is similarly uncontroversial. Technology is desirable because it opens up the prospect for sustained, long-term growth. It may also help to reduce Japan's economic vulnerability by leading to sustained economic growth that is less dependent on importing raw materials. As Friedman and Samuels have recently shown, the norm of enhancing Japan's technological autonomy prescribes gaining access to foreign technologies which can then be appropriated and diffused throughout society and economy. The distinction between military and civilian technology is not essential in the enhancing of such autonomy. What matters instead is that acquired know-how is "diffused aggressively throughout the Japanese economy as a matter of security ideology, national policy and private practice. In the process, defense technology is valued as much for its ability to elevate the fundamental capacities of the economy than as [sic]
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a means for actually producing military hardware ... Indigenization, diffusion and nurturing combine the belief that Japan is more secure when it achieves independent scientific and technological capabilities to design, manufacture and innovate. Each is derived from a pervasive sense that Japan must Friedman compensate for its special vulnerabilities in a Hobbesian and Samuels argue that this normative consensus about the value of technological autonomy leads to a view of industry totally different from that which can be found in the United States. Industries are valued for the knowledge they generate as much as the products they produce. This national consensus is now so basic that it is virtually u n q ~ e s t i o n e d . ~ ~ Ideological unanimity on the desirability of defending Japan's economic security through a reduction of its dependence on raw materials and the enhancement of indigenous technology has not permeated the military security debate. The closely related concern with macro-economic management, however, is to some extent reflected in the economic language in which security issues are at times discussed in Japan. Furthermore, the concept of comprehensive security that informs that discussion is very attuned to economic and political considerations. Talking about national security only in military terms is simply not legitimate for the mainstream of Japanese politics; the conceptual base of public discourse thus does not rest on a narrow notion of military strategy. Deeply Contested Norms of Military Sec
Public attitudes reflect the depth of social learning which came with the disastrous loss of World War I1 and the American occupation. Many, although by no means all, studies of Japanese foreign policy credit public opinion with a substantial impact on national security policy. In the 1950s and 1960s this impact resulted from the combined weight of popular and Diet opposition to any policy that suggested a return to Japan's militarist past; the vehement criticism which most of the mass media reserved for any attempt to enhance the status of the military and to develop a more active defense policy; and the possibility of popular demonstrations in the street. The conservatives who held power in the 1950s, in particular Prime Minister Kishi, chose to advance their political agenda by seeking to contest the pacifist social norms that the Constitution embodied by advocating constitutional reform and, in a broader sense, a return to the substance of prewar politic^.^' In the 1970s and 1980s, however, the fronts have been reversed. Increasingly the government has sought both to exploit and to mold the gradual change in a public opinion that has come to accept grudgingly the existence of the SDF and the necessity of a modest national defense. Without relinquishing its efforts, particularly in the media, to counter the government's policy, the opposition has relied, among other instruments, on a strategy of litigation SO as to contest the normative context in which Japan's national security policy is formulated. It did so even when legal redress did not promise a reversal in policy. Litigation itself was a powerful political signal to the public
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that government policy lacked full legitimacy and thus should not and could not be pursued vigorously. The preoccupation of the political elite with public opinion has resulted in literally dozens of public opinion polls. The results of these polls have been unambiguous over the years. In a recent article David Bobrow has taken stock of a voluminous literature about Japanese public opinion on international affairs.48His conclusions support established assumptions about the views of the Japanese public on security policy. Public attitudes favor a passive over an active stance, alignment with the United States over a policy of equidistance between the United States and the Soviet Union, political dependence over autonomy, and minimal over extensive military spending. Furthermore, generational effects have been relatively small in the last two decades. The overwhelming majority of Japanese have been skeptical about .~~ any dramatic departure from the status quo throughout the 1 9 8 0 ~The public favors economic strength, peaceful diplomacy, and a low-key consensus approach; it does not feel seriously threatened by the Soviet Union or Russia; it does not think very highly of the Self-Defense Forces; and it overwhelmingly supports Article 9 of the Constitution. The military is viewed as marginal, and the public shows a marked lack of willingness to resort to armed defense even if Japan were to be attacked. "Fewer than one in five respondents would resort to force to resist i n v a s i ~ n . "The ~ ~ evidence available suggests that to date the end of the Cold War has not led to great changes in this profile. The evolution in the social norms affecting Japan's military security policy is not simply a spontaneous social process. Public opinion has been the target of deliberate policies, by both the SDF and the civilian government. Public officials have tried to stem the powerful influence that the media have had on maintaining or reinforcing public skepticism about all issues dealing with Japan's military security. The SDF have worked very hard trying to win public acceptance. Disaster relief in particular provided a natural way for winning public confidence. "In the minds of many Japanese, the SDF became not a force created to defend the country but an organization devoted to relief and welfare."51 Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, about three-quarters of the poll respondents indicated that emergency relief in fact was the major function of the SDF, with an increasing share of the public also recognizing the defense functions of the SDF in the 1 9 7 0 ~In. ~the~ public image that the SDF is trying to project, the fight against nature has replaced in many ways the fight against other states. In the late 1970s, according to one public opinion poll, less than 40 percent of the respondents thought that in the future the primary mission of the SDF would be related to national security. Over time the outright hostility of the Japanese public has moderated to an abiding skepticism toward the SDF. The proportion of the Japanese public that supports a minimal defense posture has increased considerably, in line with the government's reinterpretation of the meaning of Article 9. In the mid-1950s only half of the Japanese public supported such a posture; two decades later that proportion had risen to 80 percent.s3 But despite
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these shifts, in 1987 the public ranked questions of national security at the very bottom of its list of priorities, in contrast to questions of law and order which it ranked at the very topes4 Deliberate political attempts to shape the public climate, as well as the fading of historical memories and the waxing and waning of international tensions, have left their mark on Japan's slowly changing defense consensus. Proponents of unarmed neutrality and autonomous defense define the two ends of a spectrum; but the consensus on defense policy has been altered because "the weight of the conservative mainstream has shifted."s5 With the end of the Cold War the debate is shifting away from the traditional issue of the legitimacy of Japanese rearmament toward a concern over the role of the SDF in relation to Japan's growing international responsibilities in areas such as regional security, international peace-keeping, and disaster relief? The social norms expressed in Japan's changing public opinion interact with the legal norms that help define Japan's military security policy. Japan's "linkage between internal constitutionalism and foreign policy is admittedly unique among the world's democracies.""' And it is equally unique that the opponents to Japan's rearmament have since 1955 frequently challenged the constitutionality of Japan's armed forces in the court^."^ The courts have given indirect support to the government's defense policy. But what matters politically is not only the result of litigation but the fact that legal disputes remain unresolved. This signals to all that the normative basis of Japan's security policy remains contested. Japan's Constitution renounces war as an instrument of national security policy. The core of this distinctive aspect of Japan's policy is the famous Article 9 of the Constitution, which imposes severe restraints on the conduct of Japan's security policy. In it, Japan renounces war as a sovereign right of the nation; repudiates the use of force as means for settling international disputes; and does not recognize the right of belligerency of the state." "Article IX is to the Japanese constitution what the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is to the American constitution: more than mere written words on a piece of document, it has become the very essence of the Japanese regime or polity."h0 AS Chalmers Johnson notes, "Most Japanese equate Article 9 of the Constitution with democracy itself; to alter one is to alter the other."61 Attempts to revise the Constitution in line with a gradually changing government policy failed. With the hope of rewording Article 9, Prime Minister Kishi set up in 1957 the Investigation Committee for the Constitution. But a commission report finally issued in 1967 failed to settle the controversial issue of revision. Over the years, support for a possible revision to legalize full-scale rearmament has decreased. Since the early 1960s the opponents of constitutional revision have outnumbered supporters by a margin varying between two- and three-to-~ne.~' The prolonged process of litigation that the opposition has waged in order to keep a firm policy consensus around Japan's enlarged defense role from emerging has given the government its share of victories. Some legal cases, such as the Mito District Court ruling in the Hyakuri case of February 1977, have strengthened the position of the SDF. These decisions indicate in
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essence that Article 9 forbids only armed forces that have the capacity for making war. At what point the strength of the SDF would exceed the capacity for self-defense "is a matter for political de~ision."~"n fact over the years court interpretations have backed the view of successiveJapanese cabinets that "legal arguments have ... reached a point at which the right of self-defense and the existence of the SDF are accepted as ~ o n s t i t u t i o n a l . " ~ ~ The normative consensus that embraces Japanese security policy is shaped by the historical lessons of World War I1 and the reemergence of Japan as a peaceful and prosperous actor in world politics since 1945. Characteristic of Japan's political culture is the fact that a pacifism deeply ingrained in a substantial segment of the Japanese public has a very complex relation to the constitutional mandate imposed by Article 9. The Constitution has been reinterpreted over time to fit an evolving public consensus on what were judged to be the requirements of Japanese security policy in a changing world. This accounts perhaps for the fact that the overwhelming majority of the Japanese public now has come to accept the SDF while at the same time refusing adamantly to amend Article 9.65This process of reinterpretation is grounded in a deep public resentment and fear of any experimentation with a policy that might rely on the threat or use of military force. The normative constraints have made it impossible to revise Article 9 of the Constitution; to build nuclear weapons or to agree to their deployment on Japanese soil; to dispatch Japanese troops abroad in combatant roles even as part of an international peacekeeping force; to sell weapons abroad; or to raise the JDA to ministerial status. Any or all of these measures connote the strengthening of the military, and thus raise fears of a return to political conditions and practices that prevailed before 1945. That the complex interplay between social and legal norms that helps define Japan's national security policy is likely to persist is indicated by the striking difference between public opinion and legal opinion on the issue of military security. A 1981 poll, for example, indicated that 61 percent of the public favored the SDF at its present level of strength and 22 percent wanted to see the SDF grow stronger. At the same time a survey of legal scholars showed that 45 percent wanted to see the SDF abolished and another 1 5 percent wanted it weakened. "83 percent of the public favored preserving or increasing the SDF while 60 percent of legal experts favored abolition or reduction of the forces. ... while 17 percent of the public felt the SDF were unconstitutional 4 7 percent felt that they were not unconstitutional. By contrast, 71 percent of the legal experts believed that the forces were unconstitutional and only 2 7 percent found they were not uncon~titutional."~~
Japan'sSecurity Policy How do the structures and norms described in the two preceding sections affect Japan's security policy? Japan's national security policy has two distinguishing features. It is comprehensive: besides military issues it also includes
economic and political security concerns. And it is characterized by a variable mix of policy flexibility and rigidity. The comprehensiveness of policy is shaped by the structures of Japanese politics. The organizational structure of the Japanese state strengthens the economic and political dimensions of security policy. The normative context in which Japan's security policy is defined helps explain the mix of flexibility and rigidity in policy change. O n economic issues uncontested norms of security facilitate policy flexibility. O n military issues deeply contested security norms lead to policy rigidity. Finally, on political security issues the normative context has at some times favored policy adjustment and at others worked against it. In short, the interaction of structures and norms explain the comprehensive definition of security as well as the pattern of policy adjustment.
The history of Japan's policy of economic security shows that structures and norms have favored flexible adjustment to changing international conditions. The oil crisis of 1973 was a dramatic event for most industrial countries. Their responses revealed starkly different visions of how to manage their affairs in a world of high-priced energy. The United States, for example, responded to the energy crisis of 1973 with "Project Independence" and the creation of a military Rapid Deployment Force for times of crisis. The instinctive reaction of American policymakers and the American public was to restore a situation of energy independence and self-reliance. p his was not the reaction of Japan. Central to the conception informing the energy policy of the Japanese government was the notion that Japan's dependence on foreign energy supplies was inescapable." If nuclear energy generated by imported uranium is included, Japan's dependence on foreign energy resources was still an astounding 91 percent in 1985.hXVulnerability is a fact of life that Japan had no choice but to accept. Within that general context, "the policies that have been selected have followed a coherent line and have been more or less responsive to the country's need ... Japan succeeded in implementing its plans to a degree that other governments found difficult to a~hieve."~' Japan has attempted to ameliorate its vulnerability through diplomatic initiatives of the government. But diplomacy was coupled with the technological innovativeness of Japanese industry responding to the cues of market prices. An adaptable private sector response has led to greater national security. What could be ameliorated through the government's policy was not international vulnerability but an excessive dependence on Mideast oil as the primary source of energy. Put differently, the government's role did not eliminate dependence but sought to provide more stable energy supplies in an unstable world. O n the other hand in lowering its dependence on foreign sources of energy, private business enhanced Japan's national security over time through the application of energy-efficient technologies. After 1973 Japan's raw materials policy became tightly integrated with a general economic policy that had recognized the rise of high-technology
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industries as the most promising avenue for reducing Japan's dependence on resource-intensive industries in the long term.'O The government adopted a two-pronged policy of reducing dependence on oil and increasing the efforts of private industry to develop new energy-saving technologies. Japan's policy did not change after the second energy crisis of 1979. The government trusted the country's general economic strength and flexibility to cope with adjustments and to maintain or forge additional links with oil-producing countries in the Third World. The Japanese government made the point explicitly when it released, soon after the second oil shock, a MITI report which showed that in the 1970s Japan had been more flexible in adjusting to energy constraints than had been its industrial competitors, in part through greater gains in labor productivity and overall economic growth.71 Market trends thus were as important in changing Japan's energy policy as was direct government intervention in energy market^.'^ This is an element of Japan's search for "comprehensive security" that is frequently overlooked. The government expected that the private sector, heeding market signals, would realize gains in rationalizing its energy costs and thus remain, at a minimum, on par with Japan's major competitors. Resisting Military E n t a n g l e m e n t s
The deeply contested and therefore rigid nature of Japan's military security policy is illustrated well by the longstanding controversy over Japan's participation in collective security measures which has, in the eyes of its advocates, immobilized Japan's security policy. Policy rigidity has been very noticeable in Japan's steadfast refusal to send members of the SDF abroad in combat roles, even as members of UN peacekeeping operations. The dispatch of SDF engineers to Cambodia in the fall of 1992 did not break with Japan's longstanding policy of avoiding any potential for entanglement in any armed conflict. This is the result of a deliberate policy of caution and restraint rooted in the traumatic experience of losing a disastrous war. Sending Minesweepers to the Gulf. In response to the crisis following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the United States suggested in August 1990 that Japan send minesweepers and tankers to the The Japanese government refused on the grounds that minesweepers might get drawn into hostilities. SDF ships were finally sent to the Gulf in April 1991, after the end of the war. The Maritime Self-Defense Forces (MSDF) had carefully prepared for this eventuality since August 1990. And after the end of the war MOFA's Security Division also had begun serious consideration of this policy option. Various factors favored deployment. Germany's decision to send minesweepers prodded the MOFA into stronger advocacy for Japan to take a similar stance. MITI recognized the need for sending minesweepers so that the Japanese-owned Arabian Oil Company could again begin exporting oil from Saudi Arabian ports. Yet MITI apparently refrained from taking a public stance, preferring instead that business organizations press for the dispatch of SDF ships. Public opinion supported this move. According to one
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poll conducted in March 1991, 63 percent of the respondents backed the deployment while 29 percent were opposed. Some of the opposition parties were not strongly opposed either. Komeito did not formally approve the dispatch of the minesweepers. But the government's decision enjoyed the support of a substantial number of Komeito's Diet member^.'^ This episode indicated that the categorical opposition to the overseas deployment of the SDF had lost some of its persuasiveness in Japanese domestic politics." The First P K O Bill.The United Nations Peace Cooperation Bill that Prime Minister Kaifu introduced in the Diet in October 1990 revealed the political constraints under which the government was operating. The UN Peace Cooperation Corps that the government was proposing to form for participation in UN peacekeeping operations (PKO)was to be composed of volunteers on loan from government agencies including the SDF and the Maritime Safety Agency (part of the Ministry of Transportation). Its task was to include a variety of noncombatant functions including the monitoring of a truce, administrative consultations with governments after the cessation of hostilities, the monitoring of elections, the provision of medical, transportation and communication services, and the rendering of assistance to refugees and reconstruction activities. Under no circumstances was the Corps to be allowed to engage in the "use of force" or the "threat of the use of force." Like a police force, members of the Corps would only carry small arms to be used exclusively for self-protection. But according to the bill the Corps would be permitted to cooperate with nations acting to put UN resolutions into effect. Diet deliberations made clear that the government intended to have the SDF operate in the area of logistics and support for multi-national forces deployed in the Gulf at the time. Critics contended that cooperation with the multinational forces, even if restricted to logistics and support, would constitute a use of force. Thus only 20 to 30 percent of the public backed the bill.76All opposition parties were against it, and even inside the LDP less than half of the Lower House members supported the bill." The bill died in November 1990 in the Diet without having been put to a vote. The Second P K O Bill. In September 1991, the government submitted the United Nations Peacekeeping Operations Cooperation Bill to the Diet. The writing of the new bill evidently took into account the low level of support the 1990 version had generated. The bill restricts itself to authorizing the SDF's participation in UN peacekeeping operations and humanitarian international rescue operations. The 1980 Cabinet decision that interpreted Article 9 of the Constitution to prohibit sending the SDF overseas with any mission involving the use of force remained a major obstacle for the government in preparing the 1991 bill. Whether the use of arms by the dispatched SDF personnel in the face of organized attack constitutes legitimate self-defense or instead is a use of force banned by the constitution was a major issue debated inside the go~ernment.'~ The final version of the government bill reflects an apparent decision in favor of the latter interpretation. It made overseas deployment of the SDF as part of a peacekeeping operation conditional on the opposing sides' agreement to a ceasefire, their
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acceptance of the deployment of the peacekeeping force, and the neutrality of that force.79Furthermore, in order to prevent the use of force by Japanese personnel abroad, the government claimed that the SDF would not be placed under the operational command of the United Nations. SDF personnel would be permitted to use arms only for individual self-defense, not as part of any organized military action.80 This attenuated version of the original legislation passed the Lower House in 1991 and was sent to the Upper House. The government's interpretation of Article 9 appears to have made compliance with Japan's Constitution incompatible with United Nations norms on peacekeeping operations. Whether it would be feasible to maintain a national command over SDF personnel deployed abroad on peacekeeping operations was one of the major points of contention in the Diet debates.81 Placement of SDF personnel under UN command would require a major change in the government's interpretation of Article 9. Thus the government faced a difficult dilemma. The bill, amended in the Upper House, passed both Houses in June 1992. The final version of the bill did not resolve the dilemma. But it prohibited, until authorization by a future law, SDF participation in peacekeeping operations that might involve a combat role. Furthermore, the three-party coalition supporting the final bill informally agreed not to implement SDF participation in logistical operations such as the transporting of weapons.82 SDF units sent abroad under the new law e compromise is consistwill "stay far from the sound of g ~ n f i r e . " ~ T hfinal ent with the public's response to the bill. In a public opinion poll taken in November 1991,33 percent of the respondents were in favor of and 58 percent were against SDF participation in lightly armed peacekeeping forces whose mission it was to separate corn bat ant^.^^ These figures are consistent also with the result of an opinion poll taken in September 1992, when, under the new law, the dispatch of the SDF had begun. Fifty-two percent favored, and 36 percent opposed, the SDF's Cambodia mission. In the same poll 71 percent supported, and 20 percent were against, limiting Japan's "international contribution" to the area of nonmilitary affair^.^' The issue of sending military personnel abroad illustrates with great clarity the rigidity of Japan's security policy even though the pressure from the United States and rapidly changing conditions in the international system made policy flexibility appear advantageous to many. But the constraints of Japan's domestic structures and the normative context in which its security policy was defined appeared to prevent major changes in Japan's security policy in the early 1990s. In its organizational structure the Japanese government is severely hampered in pursuing policies aiming at collective defense measures in bilateral or regional alliances. And as long as Japan has not been the target of direct aggression, public opinion appears to support the domestic laws that make it unconstitutional for Japan to come to the assistance of an allied country that has been attacked by a hostile third country.86Because of Japan's disastrous defeat in World War 11, that is, for essentially historical reasons, the domestic norms that circumscribe Japan's security policy make
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formal collective defense arrangements a highly implausible policy option for Japan's political leaders. Political Security and the U.S.-japan Relationship
The security relationship between Japan and the United States which has been central to Japan's security policy since World War I1 subordinates politically both military and economic dimensions. Despite the restraints imposed on the overseas deployment of the SDF, Japan has served at times de facto as a forward base of the U.S. military in A ~ i a . ~At' no time was this clearer than during the Vietnam War. Logistically Okinawa handled about three-quarters of the 400,000 tons of goods that the American forces consumed in Vietnam each month. The Kadena air base on Okinawa averaged a takeoff or landing every three minutes around the clock, for a total of more than a million flights between 1965 and 1973." Tokyo's civilian airport at Haneda processed almost 100,000 American service personnel during the first year of major troop commitments as well as over 2,000 military charter flights in 1967.8YA 1966 report for the Military Preparedness Subcommittee of the U.S. Senate noted that "it would be difficult to fight the war in Southeast Asia without Yokosuka and Sasebo."" The government took the position that the U.S. forces stationed in Japan could, under Article 6 of the Security Treaty, operate in Vietnam, which is not a part of the Far East. Indeed, the Foreign Minister acknowledged that Japan was not neutral in the Vietnam War.9' The broad interpretation of Article 6 was also quite evident in the aftermath of the Gulf War. Japan did not object to the fact that U.S. troops stationed in Japan were sent off to military engagements outside of Asia. The meaning of the concept of "Far East," defense of which justifies the stationing of U.S. troops in Japan, was never a central point of discussion. The regional security aspects which were controversial during the Vietnam war have now been redefined, as the Security Treaty apparently has acquired a global function. In the government's view, legally speaking U.S. troops are free to leave Japan without consent of the Japanese government, since they are starting their military "operations" only when approaching the area of engagement, in this case the Mideast. This avoids the necessity of reaching explicit agreements between the U.S. and Japanese governments on the objectives of particular troop movements, and thus sidesteps the controversial issue of "prior consultations" under the provisions of the Security Treaty, arguably the umbrella under which all of Japan's security policy is conducted.92 Accompanying the broad interpretation of the Security Treaty has been a stretching of the concept of individual self-defense. Japan's de facto support for the U.S. military role in Asia was extended in the 1970s and 1980s. The 1978 "Guidelines for Defense Cooperation" stipulated greater cooperation on military matters, including the sharing of information and joint planning of military exercises.'"his set the stage for more far-reaching agreements that were reached in the 1980s. The established constitutional interpretation
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of Article 9 permitting individual self-defense thus has gradually been relaxed. Successive conservative governments have broadened the concept of "individual self-defense." Prime Minister Nakasone, for example, argued after he took office that it would be constitutional for Japanese naval forces to help protect U.S. naval forces outside of Japan's territorial waters in wartime, if those forces were on their way to defend Japan. This new interpretation widens the permitted scope of joint operations between American and Japanese naval forces and moves Japan closer to the role of a typical military ally of the United States.94An additional example of how the government has reinterpreted prior practice to meet new demands occurred in June 1991, when the JDA approved for the first time the refueling of U.S. ships by Japanese ships in the Gulf. Refueling of U.S. ships by the SDF had previously been permitted only in joint exercises.'" The notions of individual and collective self-defense have shifted over time, thus permitting incremental policy change. Instead of being confined to a narrowly conceived definition of the Japanese home territories, the SDF have extended their mission to defend the sea and air spaces surrounding Japan, as articulated in the joint communiqui signed after a meeting of Prime Minister Suzuki and President Reagan in May 1981.96The original, narrow conception of defending only the Japanese home territories thus has been replaced without any explicit change in constitutional interpretation, by a politically restrained defense posture which aims at both a strengthening of the U.S.-Japan "alliance" and a "stabilization" of Asian affairs.97In the words of Masashi Nishihara, a well-known defense analyst who welcomes such a change, "the concept of self-defense is basically stretchable. Japan can be a regional power" by coordinating its individual self-defense measures with security measures of other c o u n t r i e ~ . ~ ~ In contrast, Japan's tight control over the export of military technologies has been loosened explicitly for the benefit of the United States in the 1980s without producing any significant reverse flow of technology. This issue remains a source of considerable friction between the two countries. Policy adjustment has been difficult and slow. Efforts to increase the flow of technology from Japan to the United States failed for a variety of reasons. As a result the United States applied for only three technology transfers in the 1980s. Japan transferred technology related to surface-to-air missiles, the construction of naval vessels, and the modification of U.S. naval vessels.99 This is a paltry figure considering the 40,000 separate contracts that Japanese firms signed between 1951 and 1984 to acquire foreign technology, the more than 100 military co-production agreements in which Japanese manufacturers were using U.S. technologies in the 1980s, and the 10:l ratio in the flow of Japanese researchers sent to the United States as contrasted with American researchers sent to Japan in the second half of the 1 9 8 0 ~ . ' ~ ~ When President Reagan invited Japan to join Britain, West Germany, and France to participate in searching for what he described as an alternative to the system of nuclear deterrence, Prime Minister Nakasone took considerable time before signing in 1987 an agreement laying out the conditions of
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Japan's participation in the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).'O1 The delay was due not only to slow decisionmaking in Tokyo but also to some serious political hesitations about the ambiguity of the technological and strategic implications of the SDI program.'02 Furthermore, the economic incentives that Japanese business initially saw in participating in the development of potentially revolutionary military technologies with direct implications for commercial products was soon tempered. For it became quickly apparent that West German businessmen failed to gain substantial research funding from the SDI program. In addition Japanese businessmen worried increasingly over a drain of Japanese technology to the United States.lo"n the end the Japanese decision was made not on military or economic but on political grounds. On this issue, as on many others, Japan simply had to play the role of loyal ally. Recognizing persisting problems in the field of technology transfer from Japan to the United States, Secretary of Defense Cheney's visit to Tokyo in February 1990 became the occasion for singling out six technology areas of particular interest for the U.S. military.'o4 U.S.-Japanese working groups have been set up since September 1990 to lay the groundwork for a broadening flow of dual-use technology from Japan to the United States.loi With technology flow-back quickly becoming "a buzz word for the 1990s," ' O h other organizations of the United States government, such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO), regularly send delegations to Tokyo on factfinding missions. Japanese governmental units such as TRDI (Technical Research and Development Institute) and MITI help establish the necessary contacts with Japanese firms.'o7 It is too early to judge the effectiveness of these recent attempts at creating new links in the vital area of technological cooperation between Japan's firms and government agencies and their American counterparts.
Conclusion
Since the Meiji Restoration a wealthy nation and a strong military have been the traditional objectives of Japanese security policy. With the end of the Pacific War this maxim has been modified rather than abandoned. Since 1945 military security has been embedded in a broader definition of national secutity. Both state structure and social and legal norms explain why Japan's security policy has eschewed the traditional trappings of military status and power. Only a small fringe of Japanese society currently views the possession of nuclear weapons as a symbol of international stature that Japan should aspire to. Economic factors reinforce the strong political preferences against building up a powerful military. A rough estimate of the costs Japan would incur if it were to build a conventional military force commensurate with its economic strength and the size of its population suggests annual expenditures of 150 to 200 billion dollars for a decade - considerably more, that is, than current
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estimates of the economic costs of German unification in the 1 9 9 0 ~ . These '~~ are very large sums even for an economy of Japan's size. Most Japanese are convinced that nuclear weapons and a strong military would generate neither wealth nor strength but, at great economic cost, immense political and military risks instead. What are the political and theoretical implications of this argument? One of the core tenets of the realist study of international relations holds that rational state actors seek to maximize relative gains in the international system and in doing so adjust their behavior to the dictates of a changing international situation. Since the mid-1970s Japan has experienced great changes in the international system which affect its security. The weakening of the American position in East Asia and the growth of a Soviet military presence in the late 1970s, the second Cold War in Europe in the early 1980s, dramatic changes in Soviet defense and foreign policy since the mid1980s, and the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 have, however, elicited no sharp changes in Japan's security policy. There exists then no close relation between the transformations that have affected the international system during the past two decades and the gradual evolution of Japan's security policy along economic, military and political dimensions. Rather than following the logic of realist doctrine, Japanese policy makers have responded instead to the incentives provided by the structure of the Japanese state and the normative context in which security policy is formulated and implemented. Domestic structures account for the comprehensive character of Japan's security policy, which embeds military security concerns in broader economic and political notions. The organization of power in Japanese politics, especially within the government's bureaucracy as well as the party system, and more broadly in state-society relations, tends to suppress military concerns and interests. Because the interests that we can derive from structures are plastic and can be conceived in different ways, depending on the normative context, both social and legal, in which they are placed, the normative context helps us understand how and where the adaptation of Japan's security policy to a changing world will be flexible or rigid. When international structures change as rapidly as they have in the late 1980s, Japanese policy makers have defined the objectives and modalities of their political strategies partly in response to the cues that domestic structures provide and in part to accord with the standards of appropriateness that the normative context of thought and action suggests to them. An understanding of the politics by which norms are, and are not, contested is thus particularly important. Domestic structure and normative context do not closely track the rapid changes in the international system. It is ~ossiblethat dramatic future change in the structure of the international system might pose security threats much greater for Japan than it has experienced since 1945. And such upheaval might fundamentally alter Japan's state structure and norms and thus transform its security policy. But we should not forget that a number of basic changes have had a profound effect on Japan's international position since
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the end of the Pacific War, without leading to fundamental changes in its security policy. For example, Japan has risen to the rank of the second most important industrial power in the world, while America's economic influence has diminished, especially in Asia. And Japan has witnessed the breakup of the Soviet U n i ~ n . ' ~Discontinuities ' in the international system thus make it possible that Japan will choose to change its security policy in dramatic fashion. But the record of the last forty years makes such change highly improbable, for Japan's security policy is shaped largely by domestic rather than international determinants. Japan's social and legal norms account for the flexibility and rigidity with which its security policy adapts to a changing world. We have distinguished three dimensions of Japan's security policy: economic, military and political. Normative agreement makes for flexible policy adjustment (such as that of reducing economic vulnerability) while contested norms create rigid policies (such as that of resisting military entanglement). The political dimensions of Japan's security policy reveal a variable pattern of flexible and rigid policy adjustment. Military aspects like the changing role of the SDF in the growing defense cooperation with the United States have not been deeply contested and have been handled relatively flexibly. By contrast, economic issues like the transfer of militarily relevant technology from Japan to the United States have been quite controversial and thus have proven to be very difficult to manage politically. From this we can conclude that in U.S.-Japan relations it is the normative context rather than the military or economic content of policy that is decisive for shaping Japan's pattern of policy adjustment. We have argued here that recent changes in world politics will not translate into sharp breaks in Japan's security policy. The comprehensive definition of Japan's security interests is unlikely to change quickly in the foreseeable future. And in its gradual change Japan's security policy will exhibit a mixture of flexibility and rigidity that will be shaped by the degree of consensus over the normative basis for policy. American foreign policy makers should be mindful of the fact that in the past it was domestic structures and norms, rather than the external balance of power, that has shaped Japan's security policy. There is little reason to believe that this fact has been altered by the end of the Cold War. The domestic structures and norms that shape Japan's security policy suggest at the end of the Cold War a simultaneous choice of a growing economic involvement with Asia on the one hand and a continued, close, if altered security relationship with the United States on the other. The future role of Japan in the international system is likely to be shaped by the intersection of these two spheres of policy and politics.
Authors' N o t e This article summarizes some of the findings of our monograph lapan's National Security: Structures, Norms and Policy Responses in a Changing World (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University,
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East Asia Program, Cornell East Asia Series, 1993). For their helpful comments on an earlier version o f this paper the authors are grateful to James Goldgeier, David Laitin and Robert Smith, as well as five anonymous reviewers o f this journal. Peter J . Katzenstein received financial support for research and writing from a grant awarded by the German Marshall Fund o f the United States (No. 3-53597).
Notes 1. The comprehensive character o f Japan's security policy has been noted by most scholars and policy analysts. The characterization o f policy adaptation in terms o f its flexibility and rigidity has emerged from our research. In contrast to common usage in Japanese politics, our use o f the terms flexibility and rigidity do not reflect any particular policy orientation. 2. Davis B. Bobrow, "Playing for Safety,"]apan Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 1 (January-March, 1984), pp. 33-43; Kenneth B. Pyle, The Japanese Question: Power and Purpose in a New Era (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1992). 3. Edwin P. Hoyt, The Militarists: The Rise o f Japanese Militarism since W W l l (New York: Fine,1985); Herman Kahn, The Emerging Japanese Superstate: Challenge and Response (Englewood Cliffs,N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970). 4. G. John Ikenberry, David A. Lake, and Michael Mastanduno, eds., The Stateand American Foreign Economic Policy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988); Peter J . Katzenstein, Small States rn World Markets (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1985);Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., Between Power and Plenty: Foreign Economrc Policies of Advanced Industrial States (Madison: University o f Wisconsin Press, 1978). See also Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991);Matthew Evangelista, "Issue-Area and Foreign Policy Revisited," International Organization, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Winter 1989),pp. 147-171; Matthew Evangelista, Innovation and the Arms Race: How the United States and the Soviet Union Develop their New Military Technologies (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988);Athanassios Platias, "High Politics in Small Countries," Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1986. 5. Friedrich Kratochwil, Rules, Norms, and Decisions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988);Friedrich Kratochwil and John G. Ruggie, "International Organization: A State o f the Art, an Art o f the State," lnternational Organization, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Fall 1986), pp. 753-775; Alexander Wendt, "Anarchy is What States Make o f It: The Social Construction o f Power Politics," lnternational Organizatzon, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Spring 1992),pp. 391425; Ann Swidler, "Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies," Amerrcan Sociological Revrew, Vol. 51, No. 2 (1986),pp. 273-286; George M . Thomas, John W . Meyer, Francisco 0. Ramirez, and John Boli, Institutional Structure: Constituting State, Society, and the Individual (Beverly Hills: SAGE Publications, 1987); Walter W . Powell and Paul J . DiMaggio, eds., The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1991); Stephan Haggard and Beth A. Simmons, "Theories o f International Regimes," International Organization, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Summer 1987),p p . 491-517; Ernst B. Haas, When Knowledge is Power: Three Models of Change in lnternational Organizations (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1990);Emanuel Adler, "Cognitive Revolution," in Adler and Beverly Crawford, eds., Progress in Postwar lnternational Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 43-88; Judith Goldstein and Robert 0. Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions and Political Change (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, forthcoming);Judith Goldstein, Ideas, Interests and American Trade Policy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993);Henry R. Nau, The Myth of America's Decline: Leading the World Economy into the 1990s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990);Kathryn A. Sikkink, Ideas and Institutions: Developmentalism in Brazil and Argentina (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991); Peter A. Hall, ed., The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism Across Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Emanuel Adler, The Power of Ideology: The Quest for Technological Autonomy in Argentina and Brazil (Berkeley:University o f California Press, 1987).
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6. We address only one of the three dimensions of state structure, the effect of the organization of the government on Japan's security policy; for reasons of space, we do not take up the other two, state-society relations and transnational relations. For a more complete analysis o f all three, see Peter J. Katzenstein and Nobuo Okawara,Japan's National Security: Structures, Norms and Policy Responses in a Changing World (Ithaca: Cornell University, East Asia Program, 1993). 7. The distinctiveness of Japan's securlty policy along two dimensions of comprehensiveness and flexibilitylrigidity is particularly striking when compared t o Germany's. Since 1949 Germany's definition of national security has focused almost exclusively on political and m ~ l i tary issues. Between the early 1950s and the mid-1960s, for example, West Germany used its foreign policy of rearmament as a lever to reestablish its place in the Western alliance. And since the mid-1960s West Germany's Eastern policy sought to combine political detente with military deterrence. In contrast to Japan, the notion of economic security did not figure prominently in either period. In the face of change German security policy has, like Japan's, been flex~bleat some times and rigid at others. But the difference between flexibility and rigidity has been much less marked. The reason for this difference between Japanese and German security policy lies in different state structures and different legal and social norms. Germany's armed forces are not isolated domestically but internationalized fully under NATO command. And Germany's constitution and public opinion have been less firmly opposed to the threat or use of military force than have Japan's. There exist then significant differences between these two trading states that, after the end of the Cold War, have emerged as major powers. Recent comparative studies include Jeffrey T. Rergner, The New Superpowers: Germany, lapan, the U.S. a n d the New World Order (New York: St. Martin's, 1991); Jeffrey E. Garten, A Cold Peace: America, Japan, Germany, and the Struggle for Supremacy (New York: Times Books, 1992); and Hanns W. Maull, "Germany and Japan: The New Civilian Powers," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 69, No. 5 (Winter 1990/91), pp. 91-106. 8. This argument appears in a number of recent writings, among others, in Fred C. lkle and Terumasa Nakanishi, "Japan's Grand Strategy," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 69, No. 3 (Summer 1990), pp. 81-95; Richard Holbrooke, "Japan and the Un~tedStates: Ending the Unequal Partnership," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 70, No. 5 (Winter 1991-92), pp. 41-57; Yoichi Funabashi, "Japan and the New World Order," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 70, No. 5 (Winter 1991-92), pp. 58-74; Howard H. Baker, Jr., and Ellen Frost, "Rescuing the U.S.-Japan Alliance," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Spring 1992), pp. 97-1 13. See also Takashi Inoguchi, "Japan's Global Respons~bihties and Its Role in the New World Order,' paper presented at the JIIA-IISS Joint Symposium on Japan's Strategic Priorities in the 1990s, Keidanren Guest House, November 18-20, 1991; David P. Kapkin, "Japan and World Leadership?" in D a v ~ dP. Rapkin, ed., World 1,eadership and Hegemon?) (Boulder: 1,ynne Kienner, 1990), pp. 191-212; Masataka Kosaka, Japan's Choices: New Glohalzsm and Cultural Orientations in an Industrial State (London: Pinter, 1989); Mike M. Mochizuki, "Japan after the Cold War," SAlS Revfew, Vol. 10 (Summer-Fall 1990), pp. 121-137; Mochizuki, "U.S.-Japan Security Relations in a New Era," in Chae-Jin Lee, ed., U.S.-japan Relations in the Post-Cold War Era (in press); Mochizuki, "Japanese Security Policy beyond the Cold War: Domestic Politics and International Change," in Miles Kahler, ed., Beyond the Cold War in the Pacific (La Jolla: University of California, lnstiture on Global Conflict and Cooperatron [IGCC], Studies in Conflict and Cooperation, Volume 2, 1991 ), pp. 57-70. 9. George Friedman and Meredith LeBard, The C o m ~ n gWar with lapan (New York: St. Martin's, 1991), p. 40.3. 10. Ibid., p. 259. 1 1. Ibid. 12. Akira Iriye, "Japan's Defense Strategy," in Solomon B. 1.evine and Koji Taira, eds., "Japan's External Economic Relations: Japanese Perspectives," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 513 (January 1 9 9 l ) , pp. 38-47. 13. ASEAN is the Association of South-East Asian Nations. See Takashi Inoguchi, "Japan's Images and Optwns: Not a Challenger but a Supporter," Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 12, No. I ( W ~ n t e r1986), pp. 95-1 19; Inoguchi, Japan's International Relations (London: Pinter, 199 1 ), 155-177. 14. Hisahiko Okazak~,Hanei to Suitor to: Oranda-shi nr Nihon g~7 Mierti (Prosperity and decline: Japan In the light of Dutch historical experience) (Tokyo: Bungel Shunju, 1991); Okazaki.
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T h e Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security Agenda
"The Anglo-Dutch Conflict: A Lesson for Japan," Japan Echo, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Spring 1990), pp. 13-1 6. 15. Okazaki, "The Anglo-Dutch Conflict," p. 14. 16. Okazaki, "The Anglo-Dutch Conflict," p. 16. 17. B.C. Koch, Japan's Administrative Elite (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 197-198. 18. Hiromitsu Kataoka, Naikaku no Kino to Hosakiko - Daitoryosei to Giin Naikakusei no Hikaku Kenkyu (The cabinet's functions and staff system: A conlparative study of presidential and parliamentary systems) (Tokyo: Seibundo, 1982), p. 257. 19. Paul S. Kim, Japan's Civil Service System: Its Structure, Personnel, and Politics (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), p. 104. 20. Hiromitsu Kataoka, "Naikaku to Gyosei: 'Koshiki Seifu' to 'Hikoshiki Seifu' no Yakuwari" (Cabinet and admmistration: Roles of 'formal government' and 'informal government'), in Nihon Gyosei Gakkai, ed., Naikaku Seido no Kenkyu (A study of the cabinet system), Nempo Gyosei Kenkyu, Vol. 21 (Tokyo: Gyosei, 1987), p. 25; Hiromitsu Kataoka, "Naikaku Kanbo" (Cabinet secretariat), Gyosei Kanri Kenkyu, No. 51 (September, 1990), pp. 3-16; Seizaburo Sato and Tetsuhisa Matsuzaki, Jiminto Serken (LDP government) (Tokyo: Chuo Koron-sha, 1986), pp. 159-160; A k ~ oWatanabe, "Nihon no Taigai Seisaku Keisei no Kiko to Katei" (Structures and Processes in Japanese Foreign Policymaking), in Chihiro Hosoya and Joji Watanuki, eds., Taigai Seisaku Kettei Katei no Nkhibe~Htkaku (A comparison of Japanese and U.S. foreign policy decision processes) (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1977), p. 46. 21. Katsuya Hirose, Kanryo to Gunjin: Bunmin Tosei no Genkai (Bureaucrats and soldiers: The limits of civilian control) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1989), p. 56. 22. Tetsuhisa Matsuzaki, N~hongataDemokurashii no Gyakusetsu - Nisei Giin wa Naze Umarerunoka (The paradox of Japanese democracy: Why are second-generation Diet members born?) (Tokyo: Toju-sha, 1991), p. 71. 23. Sato and Matsuzaki,Jiminto Seiken (LDP government), p. 93. 24. Sato and Matsuzaki, Jrminto Seiken (LDP government), pp. 54-55, 79. 25. Gerald L. Curtis, TheJapanese Way of Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 88. 26. Watanabe, "Nihon no Taigai Seisaku Keisei n o Kiko to Katei" (Structures and processes in Japanese foreign policymaking), pp. 34-35. 27. Ibid., pp. 52-53. 28. Robert C. Angel, "Prime Ministerial Leadership in Japan: Recent Changes in Personal Style and Administrative Organization," Pacific Affairs, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Winter 1988-89), p. 595; Reinhard Drifte, Japan's Foreign Policy (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 17. 29. Hirose, Kanryo to Gunjin (Bureaucrats and soldiers), pp. 85-89, Appendix 1, 2. 30. Authors' interviews, Nos. 3, 15, Tokyo, June 11, 17, 1991. 31. Hirose, Kanryo to Gunjin (Bureaucrats and soldiers), pp. 60-72; Tetsuya Kataoka and Ramon H. Myers, Defending an Economic Superpower: Reassessmg the US.-Japan Security Alliance (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), p. 72. 32. Hideo Otake, Nikon no Boei to Kokunai Seiji: Detanto kara Gunkaku e (Japan's defense and domestic ~olitics:From dCtente to military buildup) (Tokyo: Sanichi Shobo, 1983), p. 192. 33. Hirose, Kanryo to Gunjin (Bureaucrats and soldiers), p. 5. 34. Hirose, Kanryo to Gunjin (Bureaucrats and soldiers), p. 63. 35. Otake, Nihon no Boei to Kokunai Seiji (Japan's defense and domestic politics), p. 185. 36. Taketsugu Tsurutani, "Japan's Security, Defense Responsibilities, and Capabilities," Orbis, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Spring 1981), p. 100. 37. Kataoka and Myers, Defending an Economic Superpower, pp. 72, 74. 38. Daniel I. Okimoto, "Ideas, Intellectuals, and Institutions: National Security and the Question of Nuclear Armament in Japan," Ph.d. dissertation, The University of Michigan, 1978, p. 396. 39. Hirose, Kanryo to Gunlin (Bureaucrats and soldiers), pp. 227-229; Ichiro Miyake, Yasushi Yamaguchi, Michio Muramatsu, and Eiichi Shindo, Nihon Seiji no Zahyo: Sengo 40
Nen no Ayumi (The coordinates of Japanese politics: The course of forty postwar years) (Tokyo: Yuhikaku, 1985), pp. 4 8 4 9 ; Otake, Nihon no Boei to Kokunai Serli (Japan's defense and domestic pol~tics),p. 194. 40. Gaston J. Sigur, "Power, Politics and Defense," in James H. Buck, ed., The Modern Japanese Military System (Beverly Hills: SAGE, 1975), p. 193. 41. Interview No. 3, Tokyo, December 9, 1991; Masashi Nlshihara, "Expanding Japan's Credible Defense Role," lnternational Security, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Winter 1983/84), p. 200. 42. Akio Watanabe, "Southeast Asia in U S J a p a n e s e Relations," in Akira lriye and Warren I. Cohen, eds., The United States and lapan rn the Postwar World (Lexington: Un~versityof Kentucky Press, 1989), p. 86. 43. Karel Van Wolferen, "No Brakes, N o Compass," The National Interest, Vol. 26 (Fall 19911, p. 26. 44. Susan Pharr, "Japan's Defensive Foreign Policy and the Politics of Burden Sharing," In Gerald I . Curtis, ed., Japanese Foreign Polrcy (forthcoming). 45. David Friedman and Richard J. Samuels, How to Succeed without Really Flying: Thc Japanese Arrcraft Industry a n d Japan's Technology Ideology (Cambridge: Japan Program, Center for International Affairs, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1992), pp. 4-5. 46. Friedman and Samuels, H o w to Succeed without Really Flying, p. 55. 47. Hideo Otake, "Defense Controversies and One-Party Dominance: The Opposition in Japan and West Germany," in T.J. Pempel, ed., Uncommon Democracies: The One-Party Dominant Regimes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 19901, pp. 128-61. 48. Davis B. Bobrow, "Japan in the World: Opinion from Defeat to Success," Journnl of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 33, No. 4 (December 1989), p. 597. 49. Thomas Risse-Kappen, "Public Opinion, Domestic Structure, and Foreign P o k y 111 Liberal Democracies," World Politics, Vol. 43, No. 4 (July 1991), p. 495. 50. Davis B. Bohrow, "Japan in the World," p. 597. 51. John K. Emmerson, Arms, Yen and Power: The Japanese Dilemma (New York: Dunellen, 19731, p. 117. 52. Douglas H. Mendel, Jr., "Public Views of the Japanese Defense System," ,n James H. Buck, ed., The Modern Japanese Military System (Beverly Hills: SAGE, 197.51, p. 163; Jim Marshall, "Japanese Public Opinion on Defense and Security Issues," unpubl~shed paper, Washington, D.C., U.S. lnternational Communications Agency, Office of Research, Charts 7 and 8. 53. Mendel, "Public Views of the Japanese Defense System," p. 161. John E. Endlcott, "The Defense Policy of Japan," in Douglas J. Murray and Paul R. Viotti, eds., The Defense Policies of Nations: A Comparative Study (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 4 4 7 4 4 8 ; Thomas U. Berger, "America's Reluctant Allies: The Genesis of the PoliticalMilltary Cultures of Japan and West Germany," Ph.d. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1992, pp. 364-367, 503-508. 54. Takashi Inoguchi, Japan's lnternational Relations, pp. 158-160. See also Peter J. Katzenstein and Yutaka Tsujinaka, Defending the Japanese State: Structures, Norms, and the Political Response to Terrorism a n d Violent Social Protest in the 1970s and 1980s (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, Cornell East Asia Series, 1991). 55. Steven K. Vogel, Japanese High Technology, Politics, and Power (Berkeley Roundtable on the lnternational Economy, Research Paper No. 2, University of California, Berkeley, March 1989), p. 66. 56. Interview Nos. 19, 2 0 and 21, Tokyo, June 18 and 19, 1991. 57. Lawrence W. Beer, "Law and Liberty," in Takeshi Ishida and Ellis Krauss, eds., Democracy in Japan (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), p. 69. 58. Isao Sato, 'Debate o n Constitutional Amendment: Origins and Status,' Law in Japizn, Vol. 12 (1979), pp. 1-22; Tomosuke Kasuya, "Constitutional Transformation and the Ninth Article of the Japanese Constitution," Law inJapan, Vol. 18 (1985), pp. 1-26; Osalnu N i s h ~ , The Constitution and the National Defense Law System in Japan (Tokyo: Seibundo, 1987). 59. Kyoko Inoue, MacArthur's Japanese Constitution: A Linguistrc a n d Cultural Study of Its Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
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60. Tetsuya Kataoka, Waiting for a "Pearl Harbor": Japan Debates Defense (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1980) p. 5. 61. Chalmers Johnson,]apan in Search of a "Normal" Role, Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, University of California, Policy Paper No. 3 (July 1992), p. 24. 62. Bobrow, "Japan in the World," pp. 598-599. 63. Isao Sato, "Debate on Constitutional Amendment: Origins and Status," Law in Japan, Vol. 12 (1979), p. 17. 64. Hisahiko Okazaki, "The Political Framework of Japan's Defense," in Murray and Viotti, eds., The Defense Policies of Nations, p. 470. 65. Shinkichi Eto, "Japanese Perceptions of National Threats," in Charles E. Morrison, ed., Threats to Security in East Asia-Pacific: Natronal and Regional Perspectives (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1983), pp. 56-57. 66. Theodore McNelly, "Disarmament and Civilian Control in Japan: A Constitutional Dilemma," Bulletin of Peace Proposals, Vol. 13, No. 4 (December 1982), p. 357. 67. Nobutoshi Akao, ed., Japan's Economic Security (New York: St. Martin's, 1983); J.W.M. Chapman, Reinhard Drifte, and I.T.M. GowJapan's Quest for Comprehensive Security (New York: St. Martin's, 1982); Makoto Momoi, "Basic Trends in Japanese Security Policies," in Robert A. Scalapino, The Foreign Policy of Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 341-364; Shoko Tanaka, Post- War Japanese Resource Policies and Strategies: The Case of Southeast Asia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University China-Japan Program, East Asian Papers Series No. 43); Richard J. Samuels, The Business of the Japanese State: Energy Markets in Comparative and Historical Perspective (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); Davis B. Bobrow and Robert T. Kudrle, "How Middle Powers Can Manage Resource Weakness: Japan and Energy," World Polrtrcs, Vol. 39, No. 4 (July 1987), pp. 536-565. 68. Hiroaki Fukami, Shigen Enerugi Korekara Konaru (Predicting the future of natural resources and energy) (Tokyo: PHP Kenkyujo, 1988), p. 157. 69. Raymond Vernon, Two Hungry Giants: The United States and Japan in the Quest for Oil and Ores (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 82, 97. 70. Laura Hein, Fueling Growth: The Energy Revolution and Economrc Policy in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Council on East Asian Studies and Harvard University Press, 1990). 71. Far Eastern Economic Review, December 14, 1979, pp. 47-48. 72. Ronald A. Morse, "Japanese Energy Policy," in Wilfred Kohl, ed., After the Second Oil Crisis (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1982), p. 255. 73. Courtney Purrington and A.K., "Tokyo's Policy Responses during the Gulf Crisis," Asian Survey, Vol. 31, No. 4 (April 1991), pp. 307-323; Manfred Pohl, "Die japanischen Streitkrafte in die Golfregion? Diskussion urn den 'japanischen Ernstfal'," in Heinz Eberhard Maul, ed., Militarmacht Japan? Sicherheitspolitik und Streitkrafte (Munich: Iudidum, 1991), pp. 338-362; Ian Buruma, "The Pax Axis," New York Review of Books, Vol. 38, No. 8 (April 25, 1991), pp. 25-28, 38-39; Takashi Inoguchi, "Japan's Response to the Gulf Crisis: An Analytic Overview," Journal ofJapanese Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2 (1991), pp. 257-273; Eiichi Katahara, Japan's Changing Political and Security Role (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1991); Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Japan's Post Gulf International Initiatives (Tokyo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs); Masaru Tamamoto, "Trial of an Ideal: Japan's Debate over the Gulf Crisis," World Policy Journal, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Winter 1990-91), pp. 89-106; Japan Echo, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring 1992). 74. Asahi Shimhun, May 4, 6, 9, 10 ,IS, 16, and 18, 1991, 13th ed. 75. Interview Nos. 1,4, 5 and 18, Tokyo, June 11, 12 and 18, 1991; Sadako Ogata, "Japan's United Nations Policy in the 1980s," Asian Survey, Vol. 27, No. 9 (September 1987), pp. 957-972. 76. Akihiko Tanaka, "Japan's Security Policy in the 1990s," paper prepared for delivery a t the Eighth Shimoda Conference, November 16-17, 1990, p. 19. 77. Asahi Shimbun, November 9, 10, 1990, 13th ed. 78. Interview No. 19, Tokyo, June 18, 1991. 79. Asahi Shimbun, September 19, 1991, 1 l t h ed.
Katrenster and tlkaiiara Japan'sNational Security 337 80. Tadashi Tanaka, "Kokuren Heiwa Iji Katsudo to Nihon no Sanka-Kyoryoku" (UN peacekeeping operations and Japan's part~cipation and cooperation), Hogaku Seminar, No. 443 (November 1991), pp. 40-41. 81. Yoshitaka Sasaki, "Abunai Garasu Zaiku" (Dangerous glass artitact), Sekai (November 1991), p. 201. 82. Asahi Shimhun, June 16, 1992, 13th ed. 83. David E. Sanger, "Japan's Troops May Sail, and the Fear is Mutual," New York Tinies, June 21, 1992, p. E4. 84. Asahi Shimbun, May 1, 1992, 13th ed. 85. Asahz Shimbun, September 28, 1992, 13th ed. 86. Okazaki, "The Political Framework of Japan's Defense," p. 471. 87. Emmerson, Arms, Yen and Power, pp. 89-97. 88. Thomas R.H. Havens, Fire Across the Sea: The Vietnam War and Japan, 1965-1971 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 87-88. 89. Havens, Fire Across the Sea, p. 159. 90. Havens, Fire Across the Sea, p. 87. 9 1. Emmerson, Arms, Yen and Power, p. 84. 92. Interview Nos. 15 and 22, Tokyo, December 14 and 18, 1991. 93. James R. Van de Velde, "Japan's Emergence into Western Security Doctrine: U.S.-Japan Defense Cooperation 1976-1986," Ph.d. dissertation, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, 1988, pp. 177-82. 94. Masashi Nishihara, "The Security of East Asia: Part I," in Robert O'Neill, ed., East Asm, The West and lnternational Security: Prospects for Peace, Adelphi Paper No. 21 8 (London: International lnstitute for Strategic Studles, 1987), p. 8. 95. Asahi Sbimhzin, June 21, 1991, 13th ed. 96. Nishihara, "Expanding Japan's Credlble Defense Role," p. 183. 97. Interview No. 21, Tokyo, June 19, 1991. 98. Daniel Sneider, "In the Name of 'Self-Defence'," The Daily Yomiuri, July 13, 1986, p. 5 . 99. lnterview No. 14, Tokyo, June 17, 1991; U S . Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Arming our Allies: Cooperation and Competition in Defense Technology, OTAISC-449 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, May 1990), p. 69. 100. lnterview No. 11, Tokyo, June 14, 1991; Ellen Frost, "Realizing U.S.-Japan Defense Cooperation," Asian Wall Street Journal, September 1 , 1985; Jacob M . Schlesinger and Andy Pas~tor,"US., Japan Neglect Defence-Trade Issue," Asian Wall Street Journal, August 7, 1990; Richard J. Samuels, "Reinventing Security: Japan since Meiji," Daedalus, Vol. 120, No. 4 (Fall 1 W l ) , p. 54. 101. Peggy L. Falkenheim, Japan and Arnzs Control: Tokyo's Response to SDI and INF, Aurora Papers No. 6 (Ottawa: The Canadian Centre for Arms Control and Disarmament, 1988); Glenn D. Hook, "The Erosion of Anti-Militaristic Principles in Contemporary Japan," Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 25, No. 4 (December 1988), p. 388; Vogel, Japanese High Technology, pp. 37-39. 102. Wayne Decker, "Japanese Dec~sionCriteria on the Strategic Defense In~tiative," in Richard B. Finn, ed., US.-Japan Relations: A Surprising Relationshtp (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1987), pp. 163-73. 103. Decker, "Japanese Decision Criteria," p. 169. 104. Udai Fulishima, Gunii-ka suru Nichrhei Gijutsu Kyoryoku (Militarization technology cooperation between Japan and the United States) (Tokyo: Mirai-sha, 1992), p. 144. 105. Interview No. 3, Tokyo, June 11, 1991. 106. lnterview No. 20, Tokyo, December 18, 1991. 107. Interview No. 20, Tokyo, December 18, 1991. 108. Richard Halloran, Chrysanthemum and Sword Revrsited: Is Japanese Militarism Resurgent? (Honolulu, Hawaii: The East-West Center, 1991), pp. 18-19, 109. Gilbert Rozman, Japan's Response to the Gorbachev Era, 2985-1991: A Rising Superpower Views a Declrning One (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton IJnivers~tyPress, 1992).
The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict Barry R. Posen
T
he end of the Cold War has been accompanied by the emergence of nationalist, ethnic and religious conflict in Eurasia. However, the risks and intensity of these conflicts have varied from region to region: Ukrainians and Russians are still getting along relatively well; Serbs and Slovenians had a short, sharp clash; Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims have waged open warfare; and Armenians and Azeris seem destined to fight a slow-motion attrition war. The claim that newly released, age-old antipathies account for this violence fails to explain the considerable variance in observable intergroup relations. The purpose of this article is to apply a basic concept from the realist tradition of international relations theory, 'the security dilemma', to the special conditions that arise when proximate groups of people suddenly find themselves newly responsible for their own security. A group suddenly compelled to provide its own protection must ask the following questions about any neighbouring group: is it a threat? How much of a threat? Will the threat grow or diminish over time? Is there anything that must be done immediately? The answers to these questions strongly influence the chances for war. This article assesses the factors that could produce an intense security dilemma when imperial order breaks down, thus producing an early resort to violence. The security dilemma is then employed to analyse two cases the break-up of Yugoslavia and relations between Russia and Ukraine - to illustrate its utility. Finally, some actions are suggested to ameliorate the tendency towards violence.
The Security Dilemma
The collapse of imperial regimes can be profitably viewed as a problem of 'emerging anarchy'. The longest standing and most useful school of international relations theory - realism - explicitly addresses the consequences Source: Survival,35(1) (1993):27-47.
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of anarchy - the absence of a sovereign - for political relations among states.' In areas such as the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, 'sovereigns' have disappeared. They leave in their wake a host of groups - ethnic, religious, cultural - of greater or lesser cohesion. These groups must pay attention to the first thing that states have historically addressed - the problem of security - even though many of these groups still lack many of the attributes of statehood. Realist theory contends that the condition of anarchy makes security the first concern of states. It can be otherwise only if these political organizations do not care about their survival as independent entities. As long as some do care, there will be competition for the key to security - power. The competition will often continue to a point at which the competing entities have amassed more power than needed for security and, thus, consequently begin to threaten others. Those threatened will respond in turn. Relative power is difficult to measure and is often subjectively appraised; what seems sufficient to one state's defence will seem, and will often be, offensive to its neighbours. Because neighbours wish to remain autonomous and secure, they will react by trying to strengthen their own positions. States can trigger these reactions even if they have no expansionist inclinations. This is the security dilemma: what one does to enhance one's own security causes reactions that, in the end, can make one less secure. Cooperation among states to mute these competitions can be difficult because someone else's 'cheating' may leave one in a militarily weakened position. All fear betrayal. Often statesmen do not recognize that this problem exists: they do not empathize with their neighbours; they are unaware that their own actions can seem threatening. Often it does not matter if they know of this problem. The nature of their situation compels them to take the steps they do. The security dilemma is particularly intense when two conditions hold. First, when offensive and defensive military forces are more or less identical, states cannot signal their defensive intent - that is, their limited objectives by the kinds of military forces they choose to deploy. Any forces on hand are suitable for offensive campaigns. For example, many believe that armoured forces are the best means of defence against an attack by armoured forces. However, because armour has a great deal of offensive potential, states so outfitted cannot distinguish one another's intentions. They must assume the worst because the worst is possible. A second condition arises from the effectiveness of the offence versus the defence. If offensive operations are more effective than defensive operations, states will choose the offensive if they wish to survive. This may encourage preemptive war in the event of a political crisis because the perceived superiority of the offensive creates incentives to strike first whenever war appears likely. In addition, in the situation in which offensive capability is strong, a modest superiority in numbers will appear to provide greatly increased prospects for military success. Thus, the offensive advantage can cause preventive war if a state achieves a military advantage, however fleeting.
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The barriers to cooperation inherent in international politics provide clues to the problems that arise as central authority collapses in multi-ethnic empires. The security dilemma affects relations among these groups, just as it affects relations among states. Indeed, because these groups have the added problem of building new state structures from the wreckage of old empires, they are doubly vulnerable. Here it is argued that the process of imperial collapse produces conditions that make offensive and defensive capabilities indistinguishable and make the offence superior to the defence. In addition, uneven progress in the formation of state structures will create windows of opportunity and vulnerability. These factors have a powerful influence on the prospects for conflict, regardless of the internal politics of the groups emerging from old empires. Analysts inclined to the view that most of the trouble lies elsewhere, either in the specific nature of group identities or in the short-term incentives for new leaders to 'play the nationalist card' to secure their power, need to understand the security dilemma and its consequences. Across the board, these strategic problems show that very little nationalist rabble-rousing or nationalistic combativeness is required to generate very dangerous situations.
The Indistinguishability of Offence and Defence Newly independent groups must first determine whether neighbouring groups are a threat. They will examine one another's military capabilities to do so. Because the weaponry available to these groups will often be quite rudimentary, their offensive military capabilities will be as much a function of the quantity and commitment of the soldiers they can mobilize as the particular characteristics of the weapons they control. Thus, each group will have to assess the other's offensive military potential in terms of its cohesion and its past military record. The nature of military technology and organization is usually taken to be the main factor affecting the distinguishability of offence and defence. Yet, clear distinctions between offensive and defensive capabilities are historically rare, and they are particularly difficult to make in the realm of land warfare. For example, the force structures of armed neutrals such as Finland, Sweden and Switzerland are often categorized as defensive. These countries rely more heavily on infantry, which is thought to have weak offensive potential, than on tanks and other mechanized weaponry, which are thought to have strong offensive potential. However, their weak offensive capabilities have also been a function of the massive military power of what used to be their most plausible adversary, the former Soviet Union. Against states of similar size, similarly armed, all three countries would have considerable offensive capabilities particularly if their infantries were extraordinarily motivated - as German and French infantry were at the outset of World War I, as Chinese and North Vietnamese infantry were against the Americans and as Iran's infantry was against the Iraqis.
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Ever since the French Revolution put the first politically motivated mass armies into the field, strong national identity has been understood by both scholars and practitioners to be a key ingredient of the combat power of armies2 A group identity helps the individual members cooperate to achieve their purposes. When humans can readily cooperate, the whole exceeds the sum of the parts, creating a unit stronger relative to those groups with a weaker identity. Thus, the 'groupness' of the ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic collectivities that emerge from collapsed empires gives each of them an inherent offensive military power. The military capabilities available to newly independent groups will often be less sophisticated; infantry-based armies will be easy to organize, augmented by whatever heavier equipment is inherited or seized from the old regime. Their offensive potential will be stronger the more cohesive their sponsoring group appears to be. Particularly in the close quarters in which these groups often find themselves, the combination of infantry-based, or quasi-mechanized, ground forces with strong group solidarity is likely to encourage groups to fear each other. Their capabilities will appear offensive. The solidarity of the opposing group will strongly influence how each group assesses the magnitude of the military threat of the others. In general, however, it is quite difficult to perform such assessments. One expects these groups to be 'exclusive' and, hence, defensive. Frenchmen generally do not want to turn Germans into Frenchmen, or the reverse. Nevertheless, the drive for security in one group can be so great that it produces near-genocidal behaviour towards neighbouring groups. Because so much conflict has been identified with 'group' identity throughout history, those who emerge as the leaders of any group and who confront the task of self-defence for the first time will be sceptical that the strong group identity of others is benign. What methods are available to a newly independent group to assess the offensive implications of another's sense of id en tit^?^ The main mechanism that they will use is history: how did other groups behave the last time they were unconstrained? Is there a record of offensive military activity by the other? Unfortunately, the conditions under which this assessment occurs suggest that these groups are more likely to assume that their neighbours are dangerous than not. The reason is that the historical reviews that new groups undertake rarely meet the scholarly standards that modern history and social science hold as norms (or at least as ideals) in the West. First, the recently departed multiethnic empires probably suppressed or manipulated the facts of previous rivalries to reinforce their own rule; the previous regimes in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia lacked any systemic commitment to truth in historical scholarship. Second, the members of these various groups no doubt did not forget the record of their old rivalries; it was preserved in oral history. This history was undoubtedly magnified in the telling and was seldom subjected to critical appraisal. Third, because their history is mostly oral, each group has a difficult time divining another's view of the past. Fourth, as central authority begins to collapse and local politicians begin to struggle for power,
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The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
they will begin to write down their versions of history in political speeches. Yet, because the purpose of speeches is domestic political mobilization, these stories are likely to be emotionally charged. The result is a worst-case analysis. Unless proven otherwise, one group is likely to assume that another group's sense of identity, and the cohesion that it produces, is a danger. Proving it to be otherwise is likely to be very difficult. Because the cohesion of one's own group is an essential means of defence against the possible depredations of neighbours, efforts to reinforce cohesion are likely to be undertaken. Propagandists are put to work writing a politicized history of the group, and the mass media are directed to disseminate that history. The media may either willingly, or under compulsion, report unfolding events in terms that magnify the threat to the group. As neighbouring groups observe this, they do the same. In sum, the military capability of groups will often be dependent on their cohesion, rather than their meagre military assets. This cohesion is a threat in its own right because it can provide the emotional power for infantry armies to take the offensive. An historical record of large-scale armed clashes, much less wholesale mistreatment of unarmed civilians, however subjective, will further the tendency for groups to see other groups as threats. They will all simultaneously 'arm' - militarily and ideologically - against each other.
The Superiority of Offensive Over Defensive Action
Two factors have generally been seen as affecting the superiority of offensive over defensive action - technology and geography. Technology is usually treated as a universal variable, which affects the military capabilities of all the states in a given competition. Geography is a situational variable, which makes offence particularly appealing to specific states for specific reasons. This is what matters most when empires collapse. In the rare historical cases in which technology has clearly determined the offence-defence balance, such as World War I, soldiers and statesmen have often failed to appreciate its impact. Thus, technology -. need not be examined further, with one exception: nuclear weapons. If a group inherits a nuclear deterrent, and its neighbours do as well, 'groupness' is not likely to affect the security dilemma with as much intensity as would be the case in non-nuclear cases. Because group solidarity would not contribute to the ability of either side to mount a counterforce nuclear attack, nationalism is less important from a military standpoint in a nuclear relationship. Political geography will frequently create an 'offence-dominant world' when empires collapse. Some groups will have greater offensive capabilities because they will effectively surround some or all of the other groups. These other groups may be forced to adopt offensive strategies to break the ring of encirclement. Islands of one group's population are often stranded in a sea of another. Where one territorially concentrated group has 'islands' of settlement of its members distributed across the nominal territory of another group - -
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(irredenta), the protection of these islands in the event of hostile action can seem extremely difficult. These islands may not be able to help one another; they may be subject to blockade and siege, and by virtue of their numbers relative to the surrounding population and because of topography, they may be militarily indefensible. Thus, the brethren of the stranded group may come to believe that only rapid offensive military action can save their irredenta from a horrible fate.4 The geographic factor is a variable, not a constant. Islands of population can be quite large, economically autonomous and militarily defensible. Alternatively, they can have large numbers of nearby brethren who form a powerful state, which could rescue them in the event of trouble. Potentially, hostile groups could have islands of another group's people within their states; these islands could serve as hostages. Alternatively, the brethren of the 'island' group could deploy nuclear weapons and thus punish the surrounding group if they misbehave. In short, it might be possible to defend irredenta without attacking or to deter would-be aggressors by threatening to retaliate in one way or another. Isolated ethnic groups - ethnic islands - can produce incentives for preventive war. Theorists argue that perceived offensive advantages make preventive war more attractive: if one side has an advantage that will not be present later and if security can best be achieved by offensive military action in any case, then leaders will be inclined to attack during this 'window of opportunity'.' For example, if a surrounding population will ultimately be able to fend off relief attacks from the home territory of an island group's brethren, but is currently weak, then the brethren will be inclined to attack sooner rather than later. In disputes among groups interspersed in the same territory, another kind of offensive advantage exists - a tactical offensive advantage. Often the goal of the disputants is to create ever-growing areas of homogeneous population for their brethren. Therefore, the other group's population must be induced to leave. The Serbs have introduced the term 'ethnic cleansing' to describe this objective, a term redolent with the horrors of 50 years earlier. The offence has tremendous tactical military advantages in operations such as these. Small military forces directed against unarmed or poorly armed civilians can generate tremendous terror. This has always been true, of course, but even simple modern weapons, such as machine guns and mortars, increase the havoc that small bands of fanatics can wreak against the defenceless. Consequently, small bands of each group have an incentive to attack the towns of the other in the hopes of driving the people away.6 This is often quite successful, as the vast populations of war refugees in the world today attest. The vulnerability of civilians makes it possible for small bands of fanatics to initiate conflict. Because they are small and fanatical, these bands are hard to control. (This allows the political leadership of the group to deny responsibility for the actions those bands take.) These activities produce disproportionate political results among the opposing group - magnifying initial fears by confirming them. The presence or absence of small gangs of
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fanatics is thus itself a key determinant of the ability of groups to avoid war as central political authority erodes. Although almost every society produces small numbers of people willing to engage in violence at any given moment, the rapid emergence of organized bands of particularly violent individuals is a sure sign of trouble. The characteristic behaviour of international organizations, especially the United Nations (UN), reinforces the incentives for offensive action. Thus far, the UN has proven itself unable to anticipate conflict and provide the credible security guarantees that would mitigate the security dilemma. Once there is politically salient trouble in an area, the UN may try to intervene to 'keep the peace'. However, the conditions under which peacekeeping is attempted are favourable to the party that has had the most military success. As a general rule, the UN does not make peace: it negotiates cease-fires. Two parties in dispute generally agree to a cease-fire only because one is successful and happy with its gains, while the other has lost, but fears even worse to come. Alternatively, the two sides have fought to a bloody stalemate and would like to rest. The UN thus protects, and to some extent legitimates, the military gains of the winning side, or gives both a respite to recover. This approach by the international community to intervention in ethnic conflict, helps create an incentive for offensive military operations.
Windows o f Vulnerability a n d Opportunity
Where central authority has recently collapsed, the groups emerging from an old empire must calculate their power relative to each other at the time of collapse and make a guess about their relative power in the future. Such calculations must account for a variety of factors. Objectively, only one side can be better off. However, the complexity of these situations makes it possible for many competing groups to believe that their prospects in a war would be better earlier, rather than later. In addition, if the geographic situation creates incentives of the kind discussed earlier, the temptation to capitalize on these windows of opportunity may be great. These windows may also prove tempting to those who wish to expand for other reasons. The relative rate of state formation strongly influences the incentives for preventive war. When central authority has collapsed or is collapsing, the groups emerging from the political rubble will try to form their own states. These groups must choose leaders, set up bureaucracies to collect taxes and provide services, organize police forces for internal security and organize military forces for external security. The material remnants of the old state (especially weaponry, foreign currency reserves, raw material stocks and industrial capabilities) will be unevenly distributed across the territories of the old empire. Some groups may have had a privileged position in the old system. Others will be less well placed. The states formed by these groups will thus vary greatly in their strength. This will provide immediate military advantages to those who are farther
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along in the process of state formation. If those with greater advantages expect to remain in that position by virtue of their superior numbers, then they may see no window of opportunity. However, if they expect their advantage to wane or disappear, then they will have an incentive to solve outstanding issues while they are much stronger than the opposition. This power differential may create incentives for preventive expropriation, which can generate a spiral of action and reaction. With military resources unevenly distributed and perhaps artificially scarce for some due to arms embargoes, cash shortages or constrained access to the outside world, small caches of armaments assume large importance. Any military depot will be a tempting target, especially for the poorly armed. Better armed groups also have a strong incentive to seize these weapons because this would increase their margin of superiority. In addition, it matters whether or not the old regime imposed military conscription on all groups in society. Conscription makes arms theft quite easy because hijackers know what to look for and how to move it. Gains are highly cumulative because each side can quickly integrate whatever it steals into its existing forces. High cumulativity of conquered resources has often motivated states in the past to initiate preventive military actions. Expectations about outside intervention will also affect preventive war calculations. Historically, this usually meant expectations about the intervention of allies on one side or the other, and the value of such allies. Allies may be explicit or tacit. A group may expect itself or another to find friends abroad. It may calculate that the other group's natural allies are temporarily preoccupied, or a group may calculate that it or its adversary has many other adversaries who will attack in the event of conflict. The greater the number of potential allies for all groups, the more complex this calculation will be and the greater the chance for error. Thus, two opposing groups could both think that the expected behaviour of others makes them stronger in the short term. A broader window-of-opportunity problem has been created by the large number of crises and conflicts that have been precipitated by the end of the Cold War. The electronic media provide free global strategic intelligence about these problems to anyone for the price of a short-wave radio, much less a satellite dish. Middle and great powers, and international organizations, are able to deal with only a small number of crises simultaneously. States that wish to initiate offensive military actions, but fear outside opposition, may move quickly if they learn that international organizations and great powers are preoccupied momentarily with other problems. - -
Croats a n d Serbs
Viewed through the lens of the security dilemma, the early stages of Yugoslavia's disintegration were strongly influenced by the following factors. First, the parties identified the re-emerging identities of the others as
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offensive threats. The last time these groups were free of constraint, during World War 11, they slaughtered one another with abandon. In addition, the Yugoslav military system trained most men for war and distributed infantry armament widely across the country. Second, the offensive appeared to have the advantage, particularly against Serbs 'marooned' in Croatian and Muslim territory. Third, the new republics were not equally powerful. Their power assets varied in terms of people and economic resources; access to the wealth and military assets of the previous regime; access to external allies; and possible outside enemies. Preventive war incentives were consequently high. Fourth, small bands of fanatics soon appeared on the scene. Indeed, the political and military history of the region stressed the role of small, violent, committed groups; the resistance to the Turks; the Ustashe in the 1930s; and the Ustashe state and Serbian Chetniks during World War 11. Serbs and Croats both have a terrifying oral history of each other's behaviour. This history goes back hundreds of years, although the intense Croat-Serb conflict is only about 125 years old. The history of the region is quite warlike: the area was the frontier of the Hapsburg and Turkish empires, and Croatia had been an integral part of the military apparatus of the Hapsburg empire. The imposition of harsh Hungarian rule in Croatia in 1868; the Hungarian divide-and-conquer strategy that pitted Croats and Serbs in Croatia against each other; the rise of the independent Serbian nation-state out of the Ottoman empire, formally recognized in Europe in 1878; and Serbian pretensions to speak for all south Slavs were the main origins of the Croat-Serb conflict. When Yugoslavia was formed after World War I, the Croats had a very different vision of the new state than the Serbs. They hoped for a confederal system, while the Serbs planned to develop a centralized nation-state.7 The Croats did not perceive themselves to be treated fairly under this arrangement, and this helped stimulate the development of a violent resistance movement, the Ustashe, which collaborated with the Fascist powers during the 1930s. The Serbs had some reasons for assuming the worst about the existence of an independent Croatian state, given Croatian behaviour during World War 11. Ustashe leadership was established in Croatia by Nazi Germany. The Serbs, both communist and non-communist, fought the Axis forces, including the Croats, and each other. (Some Croats also fought in Josef Tito's communist partisan movement against the Nazis.) Roughly a million people died in the fighting - some 5.9% of Yugoslavia's pre-war populat i ~ n The . ~ Croats behaved with extraordinary brutality towards the Serbs, who suffered nearly 500,000 dead, more than twice as many dead as the Croats9 (Obviously, the Germans were responsible for many Serbian deaths as well.) Most of these were not killed in battle; they were civilians murdered in large-scale terrorist raids. The Croats themselves suffered some 200,000 dead in World War 11, which suggests that depredations were inflicted on many sides. (The noncommunist, 'nationalist' Chetniks were among the most aggressive killers of Croats, which helps explain why the new Croatian republic is worried by the
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nationalist rhetoric of the new Serbian republic.) Having lived in a pre- and post-war Yugoslavia largely dominated by Serbs, the Croats had reason to suspect that the demise of the Yugoslavian Communist Party would be followed by a Serbian bid for hegemony. In 1971, the Croatian Communist Party had been purged of leaders who had favoured greater autonomy. In addition, the historical record of the Serbs during the past 200 years is one of regular efforts to establish an ever larger centralized Serbian national state on the Balkan Peninsula. Thus, Croats had sufficient reason to fear the Serbs. Serbs in Croatia were scattered in a number of vulnerable islands; they could only be 'rescued' by offensive action from Serbia. Such a rescue, of course, would have been enormously complicated by an independent Bosnia, which in part explains the Serbian war there. In addition, Serbia could not count on maintaining absolute military superiority over the Croats forever: almost twice as many Serbs as Croats inhabit the territory of what was once Yugoslavia, but Croatia is slightly wealthier than Serbia."' Croatia also has some natural allies within former Yugoslavia, especially Bosnian Muslims, and seemed somewhat more adept at winning allies abroad. As Croatia adopted the trappings of statehood and achieved international recognition, its military power was expected to grow. From the Serbian point of view, Serbs in Croatia were insecure and expected to become more so as time went by. From a military point of view, the Croats probably would have been better off postponing their secession until after they had made additional military preparations. However, their experience in 1971, more recent political developments and the military preparations of the Yugoslav army probably convinced them that the Serbs were about to strike and that the Croatian leadership would be rounded up and imprisoned or killed if they did not act quickly. Each side not only had to assess the other's capabilities, but also its intentions, and there were plenty of signals of malign intent. Between 1987 and 1990, Slobodan Milosevic ended the administrative autonomy within Serbia that had been granted to Kosovo and Vojvodina in the 1974 constitution." In August 1990, Serbs in the Dalmatia region of Croatia held a cultural autonomy referendum, which they defended with armed roadblocks against expected Croatian interference.12 By October, the Yugoslav army began to impound all of the heavy weapons stored in Croatia for the use of the territorial defence forces, thus securing a vast military advantage over the nascent armed forces of the republic.'"he Serbian window of opportunity, already large, grew larger. The Croats accelerated their own military preparations. It is difficult to tell just how much interference the Croats planned, if any, in the referendum in Dalmatia. However, Croatia had stoked the fires of Serbian secessionism with a series of ominous rulings. In the spring of 1990, Serbs in Croatia were redefined as a minority, rather than a constituent nation, and were asked to take a loyalty oath. Serbian police were to be replaced with Croats, as were some local Serbian officials. No offer of
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cultural autonomy was made at the time. These Croatian policies undoubtedly intensified Serbian fears about the future and further tempted them to exploit their military superiority. It appears that the Croats overestimated the reliability and influence of the Federal Republic of Germany as an ally due to some combination of World War I1 history, the widespread misperception created by the European media and by Western political leaders of Germany's near-superpower status, the presumed influence of the large Croatian CmigrC community in Germany and Germany's own diplomacy, which was quite favourable to Croatia even before its June 1991 declaration of independence.14 These considerations may have encouraged Croatia to secede. Conversely, Serbian propaganda was quick to stress the German-Croatian connection and to speculate on future German ambitions in the balk an^.'^ Fair or not, this prospect would have had an impact on Serbia's preventive war calculus.
Russia and Ukraine Through the lens of the security dilemma, several important factors in Russian-Ukrainian relations can be identified that suggest that the potential for conflict is not as great as for Yugoslavia. First, the propensity of Russians and Ukrainians to view one another's cohesion as an offensive military threat is slight. A principal stabilizing factor here is the presence of former Soviet nuclear forces in both Russia and Ukraine, which provides each republic with a powerful deterrent. Second, each side's perception of the other's 'identity' is comparatively benign. Third, settlement patterns create comparatively less pressure for offensive action. These three factors reduce the pressure for preventive war.16 The nuclear forces of the former Soviet Union - both those clearly under Commonwealth (effectivelyRussian) control and those with a more ambiguous status in Ukraine - have probably helped stabilize Russian-Ukrainian relations. This is because nuclear weapons make it dangerous for either to launch a campaign of violence against the other. Mutual deterrence prevails. In a clash of wills between two nuclear-armed states about attacks on minority populations, the state representing the interests of the victims would have more credibility; it would be the defender of the status quo. The potential military consequences of each side's 'groupness' is thus muted. Most of the Soviet nuclear forces came under the control of the Russian Republic, thereby rendering large-scale anti-Russian violence in Ukraine very risky. The presence of large numbers of nuclear weapons on Ukrainian soil gives Ukraine a nuclear 'threat that leaves something to chance'. Although these weapons are believed to remain under the technical control of the Commonwealth (Russian) command structure, military action by Russians against Ukraine could precipitate a Ukrainian attempt to seize these weapons. Given the significant representation of Ukrainians in the Soviet officer and noncommissioned officer corps, it is quite likely that there are many Ukrainians
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who know a lot about nuclear weapons, making their seizure quite plausible. This would be a novel kind of nuclear crisis, but it would probably be enough of a crisis to produce the prudent behaviour among nuclear powers that existed during the Cold War. An overt nationalist political campaign in Russia for action against Ukraine could also provoke Ukrainian seizure of these weapons. Russian and Ukrainian histories of each other, as well as their past relations, are less terrifying than those found among groups within the former Yugoslavia. There is no record of large-scale Russian-Ukrainian military rivalry and no clear, salient incident of nationalist bloodletting. However, one dangerous historical episode could play a significant role in the development of an anti-Russian, Ukrainian history: the communist war on independent farmers and its concomitant famine in 1930-32 killed millions.17If Ukrainians begin to blame the famine on Russians, this would be quite dangerous politically. If, instead, the famine continues to be blamed on a Communist Party headed by a renegade Georgian psychopath, then this experience will cause less trouble. Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk, in his public utterances, tends to portray the Bolsheviks, not the Russians, as the c ~ l p r i t . ' ~ That the famine has not played a large role in Ukrainian nationalist rhetoric is a good sign, but this event provides potential tinder. Russian nationalists should therefore be very careful how they portray future Russian-Ukrainian relations. If they project a subordinate status for Ukraine, then Ukrainian nationalists will have a strong incentive to portray the famine as a Russian crime in their effort to build cohesion to resist Russian domination. Izvestia reports that Sergei Baburin, leader of the Russian Unity bloc in the Russian parliament, informed the Ukrainian ambassador that 'either Ukraine reunites again with Russia or there will be war'." Such statements will be heard and acted upon in Ukraine. It is difficult for Ukrainian nationalists to argue convincingly that they were exploited by Russia.20 Ukrainians seem to have achieved at least proportional representation in the Soviet governing and military a p p a r a t ~ s . ~ ' They produced a share of Soviet gross national product (GNP)more than proportional to their share of population, and the kinds of goods they produced .~~ suggest that Ukraine enjoyed a fair share of industrial i n v e ~ t m e n tUkrainian nationalists assert, however, that the Soviet Union extracted substantial economic resources from Ukraine - perhaps as much as half of Ukrainian GNP.13 Of greater importance, Ukrainian nationalists believe and many scholars agree that both the Russian empire and the later Soviet Union did everything possible to retard the growth of an independent Ukrainian identity and to Russify Ukraine. This experience led to the reassertion of Ukraine's cultural and political identity.24Alarmingly, Rukh, the main pro-independence party in Ukraine, has apparently drifted towards a more virulent nationalism, one that portrays Russia and Russians as the enemy.2s These worrisome signs must be put in context, however. In general, ethnic hatred has not played a great role in Ukrainian efforts to define their state. Initially, both of the large political parties in Ukraine tried to accommodate all
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groups in the country. There is no record of Ukrainian persecution of resident Russians. The Ukrainians and the Russians living in the eastern part of the country have had amicable relations for a great many years. A majority of Russians voted for Ukrainian independence. There are no reports of Ukrainian nationalist gangs operating against R ~ s s i a n s . ~ ~ The history of relations between Russians and Ukrainians is thus conducive to peace. Neither has strong reasons to assume that the other's 'groupness' constitutes a strong offensive threat to its survival. That said, RussianUkrainian political history is conducive to Ukrainian mistrust, and the famine is a singular historical episode that could prove problematic. The security situation between the two republics is favourable from a stability standpoint. The 12 million Russians in the Ukraine (who constitute 21% of the population) are not settled in small vulnerable islands; many of the areas of settlement are proximate to each other and to the Russian border. Others are proximate to the Black Sea coast, which may help explain the intensity of the dispute about the ultimate disposition of the Black Sea Fleet. Large numbers of Russians are still to be found in the armed forces of the newly independent Ukraine, complicating any Ukrainian state action against resident Russians. The expulsion of Russians from eastern Ukraine would thus be a tough job for the Ukrainians. Russia is also a nuclear power and thus in a position to make credible threats to protect the safety of its own. In addition, the proximity of many Ukrainian Russians to the border of the Russian Republic would facilitate a conventional rescue operation, should that prove necessary. The fact that Russia has at least three times the population, wealth and probable conventional combat power of Ukraine would favour such a rescue. In sum, Russia is not being forced to take offensive conventional action to protect its nationals in Ukraine. Because Russians can probably protect their brethren in the Ukraine later, they have only limited incentives to solve the problem now. To say that the Russians can protect their brethren, however, is not to say that military intervention in Ukraine would be cheap or safe. The Ukrainians inherited ample stocks of armaments from the Soviet Union; the Ukrainian presence in the Soviet military made fatuous any Russian thoughts of spiriting away this vast quantity of military equipment and guarantees that the Ukrainian military will know how to use the weaponry in its posse~sion.~' Efforts to coerce Ukraine would likely precipitate Ukrainian efforts to seize the nuclear weapons now within its territory. Thus, although Russia clearly has the power to protect Ukrainian Russians in the event of oppression, lacking such a provocation, Russian nationalists would have great difficulty convincing their compatriots that Ukraine is ripe for the picking. Finally, unlike Yugoslavia, external factors reinforce restraint in RussianUkrainian relations. Because they are quite close to Western Europe and heavily armed, it is reasonable for Russians and Ukrainians to assume that conflict between the two republics would be condemned by outside powers. Each side has reason to fear being branded the aggressor in such a conflict because the United States and the Europeans lack any deep organic ties
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to either Russia or Ukraine. Thus, Western diplomacy should encourage even-handedness towards the two parties. Thus far, the West has shown a tendency to patronize the Ukrainians and dote o n the Russians; this is a mistake. It would be better for both to believe that whoever was labelled the aggressor in a Russian-Ukrainian conflict could end up earning the enmity of the wealthiest and most powerful coalition of powers in the history of the world. In sum, although there are some danger signs in Russian-Ukrainian relations, the security dilemma is not particularly intense in this case. To the extent that Western powers have an interest in peace between these two powers, efforts should be made to preserve this favourable state of affairs.
Comparison Summary A brief review of these two cases highlights the factors that favoured war in Yugoslavia and that still favour peace in Russian-Ukrainian relations. This comparison also identifies some early warning indicators that should be monitored regarding Russia and Ukraine. In Yugoslavia, Croats and Serbs found each other's identity a threat because of the primitive military capabilities they could field and the terrible record of their historical relationship. In the Russia-Ukraine case, nuclear weapons mute the conventional competition, making group cohesion less of a military asset. If Ukraine eliminates its nuclear arsenal, as it has pledged to do, it will increasingly come to rely on nationalism to strengthen an army that will only be able to stand against Russia through superior motivation. Eliminating Ukraine's nuclear arsenal will therefore make Russia stronger and Ukraine more nationalistic. This could prove dangerous. In Yugoslavia, Serbs in Croatia were militarily vulnerable, and Serbs in Serbia had only one way to defend them - a speedy, powerful offensive. Russians in Ukraine are less geographically isolated and can be protected in several ways: Russians in Ukraine may be able to defend themselves by virtue of their numbers and their presence in the Ukrainian army; Russia itself could make nuclear threats; and the Russian army will probably maintain a marked quantitative superiority over Ukraine, which would facilitate a counter-offensive rescue operation, should one be needed. Systematic deRussification of the Ukrainian armed forces, accompanied by a precipitate decline in Russia's military capabilities, would therefore be a sign of trouble in Russian-Ukrainian relations. Although Ukrainians and Russians in the eastern Ukraine d o live together, no violent bands have emerged and begun to engage in intercommunal terror. In Yugoslavia, such bands emerged early in the dissolution process. It may be that the Russian presence in the Ukrainian army has helped discourage such developments, or it may be that there are enough lawless places in the former Soviet Union to absorb those prone to violence. Aspiring Croatian and Serbian thugs had no other outlet for their violent -
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inclinations. The appearance of small Russian or Ukrainian terrorist groups could have a powerful incendiary effect on relations between the two republics and would thus indicate trouble. In Yugoslavia, the Serbs had many incentives for preventive war. They outnumbered the Croats by only two to one and enjoyed no economic advantage. The Croats were likely to find allies within the former Yugoslavia. They were also likely to find allies abroad. Serbia was less well placed. Serbia enjoyed privileged access to the spoils of Yugoslavia, so it was initially much more powerful militarily than Croatia. The combination of dependence on an offensive to protect brethren in Croatia, and a temporary but wide military advantage, proved to be too large a temptation to resist. The Russians have few incentives for preventive war. With three times the human and material resources of Ukraine, it is unlikely that the balance of military power will soon shift against them, nor does it seem likely that Ukraine will be better than Russia at finding allies abroad. Ukrainian pledges to become a non-nuclear state make it attractive even for nationalist Russians to postpone aggression until later; making war now would be a risky proposition. If Ukraine's economy recovers much more quickly than Russia's, or if Ukraine finds powerful allies abroad while Russia finds itself isolated, or if Russia begins to fear that endless border wars will tie down many of its forces in the future, Russians might begin to think more about preventive action against Ukraine. Even if many of the factors that currently favour peace change, Russia's possession of nuclear weapons should continue to mute its incentives for defensively motivated, preventive conventional war. It should be noted, however, that nuclear powers had a tendency to solve security problems conventionally - when they could - during the Cold War.
Conclusion Three main conclusions follow from the preceding analysis. First, the security dilemma and realist international relations theory more generally have considerable ability to explain and predict the probability and intensity of military conflict among groups emerging from the wreckage of empires. Second, the security dilemma suggests that the risks associated with these conflicts are quite high. Several of the causes of conflict and war highlighted by the security dilemma operate with considerable intensity among the groups emerging from empires. The kind of military power that these groups can initially develop and their competing versions of history will often produce mutual fear and competition. Settlement patterns, in conjunction with unequal and shifting power, will often produce incentives for preventive war. The cumulative effect of conquered resources will encourage preventive grabs of military equipment and other assets. Finally, if outsiders wish to understand and perhaps reduce the odds of conflict, they must assess the local groups' strategic view of their situation.
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Which groups fear for their physical security and why? What military options are open to them? By making these groups feel less threatened and by reducing the salience of windows of opportunity, the odds of conflict may be reduced. Because the international political system as a whole remains a self-help system, it will be difficult to act on such calculations. Outsiders rarely have major material or security interests at stake in regional disputes. It is difficult for international institutions to threaten credibly in advance to intervene, on humanitarian grounds, to protect groups that fear for the future. Vague humanitarian commitments will not make vulnerable groups feel safe and will probably not deter those who wish to repress them. In some cases, however, such commitments may be credible because the conflict has real security implications for powerful outside actors. Groups drifting into conflict should be encouraged to discuss their individual histories of mutual relations. Competing versions of history should be reconciled if possible. Domestic policies that raise bitter memories of perceived past injustices or depredations should be examined. This exercise need not be managed by an international political institution; non-governmental organizations could play a role. Discussions about regional history would be an intelligent use of the resources of many foundations. A few conferences will not, of course, easily undo generations of hateful, politicized history, bolstered by reams of more recent propaganda. The exercise would cost little and, therefore, should be tried.2x In some cases, outside powers could threaten not to act; this would discourage some kinds of aggressive behaviour. For example, outside powers could make clear that if a new state abuses a minority and then gets itself into a war with that minority and its allies, the abuser will find little sympathy abroad if it begins to lose. To accomplish this, however, outside powers must have a way of detecting mistreatment of minorities. In other cases, it may be reasonable for outside powers to provide material resources, including armaments, to help groups protect themselves. However, this kind of hard-bitten policy is politically difficult for liberal democratic governments now dominating world politics to pursue, even on humanitarian grounds. In addition, it is an admittedly complicated game in its own right because it is difficult to determine the amount and type of military assistance needed to produce effective defensive forces, but not offensive capabilities. Nevertheless, considerable diplomatic leverage may be attained by the threat to supply armaments to one side or the other. Non-proliferation policy also has a role to play. In some cases, nuclear weaponry may be an effective way of protecting the weak from the strong. Russia may behave with considerable restraint towards Ukraine as long as some nuclear weapons remain on Ukrainian territory, vulnerable to Ukrainian seizure. However, once the last weapon is gone, Russian nationalists may become much more assertive. The future balance of power between Ukraine and Russia is less conducive to good relations than the current one, which is the reason Ukrainians have
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sought Western security guarantees as a quid pro quo for ratifying the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) Treaty, for adhering to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and for ridding themselves of nuclear weapons. Absent such guarantees and the measures needed to render them credible, Ukrainians can be expected to prolong the 'transition' phase to the non-nuclear status that they have promised.29 It would be politically difficult for the United States to reverse the arms control initiatives already launched, but it is reasonable to stretch out their implementation. Recent suggestions to accelerate the denuclearization of Ukraine (and Belarus and Kazakhstan), therefore, have it exactly backward.30 The West should hold Ukraine to a steady, proportional withdrawal schedule over the longest period consistent with the prescribed outline of the START I agreement. Some of the benefits of nuclear deterrence could thus be secured during the coming difficult political and economic transition in Russia and Ukraine. It will frequently prove impossible, however, to arrange military assets, external political commitments and political expectations so that all neighbouring groups are relatively secure and perceive themselves as such. War is then likely. These wars will confirm and intensify all the fears that led to their initiation. Their brutality will tempt outsiders to intervene, but peace efforts originating from the outside will be unsuccessful if they do not realistically address the fears that triggered the conflicts initially. In most cases, this will require a willingness to commit large numbers of troops and substantial amounts of military equipment to troubled areas for a very long time.
Acknowledgements I would like t o thank Robert Art, John Mearsheimer, Steve Meyer, Harvey Sapolsky, Jack Snyder and Steve Van Evera for comments. Daryl Press served ably as my research assistant. The 1992 annual summer conference of Harvard University's Olin Center for Strategic Studies provided the first opportunity to present these ideas. The Carnegie Corporation of New York funded release time.
Notes 1. The following realist literature is essential for those interested in the analysis of ethnic conflict: Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1979), Chapters 6 and 8; Robert Jervis, 'Cooperation under the security dilemma', World Politics, no. 2, January 1978, pp. 167-213; Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), Chapter 3; Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and lnflctence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966, 1976), Chapters 1 and 6. 2. See Carl Von Clausewitz, O n War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 591-92; Robert Gilpin, 'The Richness of the Tradition of Political Realism', in Robert E. Keohane, Neorealism and its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 300-21, especially pp. 304-308. 3. This problem shades into an assessment of 'intentions', another very difficult problem for states in international politics. This issue is treated as a capabilities problem because the emergence of anarchy forces leaders to focus on military potential, rather than on intentions.
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Under these conditions, every group will ask whether neighbouring groups have the cohesion, morale and martial spirit to take the offensive if their leaders call on them to do so. 4. It is plausible that the surrounding population will view irredenta in their midst as an offensive threat by the outside group. They may be perceived as a 'fifth column', that must be controlled, repressed o r even expelled. 5. See Stephen Van Evera, 'The cult of the offensive and the origins of the First World War', international Security, vol. 9, no. 1, Summer 1984, pp. 58-107. 6. Why do they not go to the defence of their own, rather than attack the other? Here, it is hypothesized that such groups are scarce relative to the number of target towns and villages, so they cannot 'defend' their own with any great confidence. 7. James Gow, 'Deconstructing Yugoslavia', Survival, vol. 33, no. 4, July/August 1991, p. 292; J.B. Hoptner, Yugoslavia in Crisis 19.34-1941 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), pp. 1-9. 8. Ivo Banac, 'Political change and national diversity', Daedalus, vol. 119, no. 1, Winter 1990, pp. 145-150, estimates that 487,000 Serbs, 207,000 Croats, 86,000 Bosnian Muslims and 60,000 Jews died in Yugoslavia during the war. 9. Aleksa Djilas, The Contested Country (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 103-28. See especially, Chapter 4, 'The National State and Genocide: The Ustasha Movement, 1929-1945', especially pp. 120-27, which vividly describes large-scale Croatian murders of Serbs, as well as Jews and Gypsies; however, Djilas does not explain how 200,000 Croats also died. 10. See Sabrina Ramet, Natronalism and Federalism zn Yugoslauia 1962-1 991 (Bloomingron, IN: Indiana University Press, 2nd ed., 1992), Appendix 2, p. 286. 11. Gow, op. cit. in note 6, p. 294. Vojvodina contains the only petroleum and gas in Yugoslavia proximate to Serbia, so this act probably had a strategic motive; see Central Intelligence Agency, Atlas of Eastern Europe (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, August 1990), p. 10. 12. International Institute for Strategic Stud~es,Strategic Survey 1990-1991 (London: Brassey's for the IISS, 1991), p. 167. 13. Gow, op. cit. in note 6, p. 299. 14. See John Newhouse, 'The diplomatic round', The New Yorker, 24 August 1992, especially p. 63. See also John Zametica, The Yugoslav Conflict, Adelphi Paper 270 (London: Brassey's for the IISS, 1992), pp. 63-65. 15. Ramet, op. cit. in note 10, p. 265. 16. Untangling the strategic from the purely nationalist aspects of the dispute about the Crimea is difficult. It is doubtful that Russian nationalists fear for the safety of Russians in Crimea because they are the clear majority there, and the Crimea is quite defensible. Russian nationalists want it because the conquest of the Crimea from the Turks is seen as a major Russian national achievement. It is likely that Ukrainians want to keep the Crimea because they fear that concessions on this point will lead to new Russian demands for territorial adjustments. Strategic elements are likely salient in both sides' calculus. Control of Crimea and the Black Sea Fleet would give Russia military dominance of the Ukraine's seaborne trade from Odessa. 17. Norman Stone, 'The mark of history', The National Interest, vol. 27, Spring 1992, p. 37 gives a figure of eight million dead in the famine. 18. See interviews with Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk in Le Figaro, 2 3 January 1992 as quoted in Foreign Broadcast Information Service (hereafter FBIS), 2 7 January 1992 and in Der Spiegel, 3 February 1992, as quoted in FBIS, 2 April 1992. 19. Quoted in Roman Solchanyk, 'The Crimean imbroglio: Kiev and Moscow', Radio Free EuropelRadio Library Research Report, vol. 1, no. 40, 9 October 1992. 20. Abraham Brumberg, 'Not so free at last', New York Review of Books, 22 October 1992, p. 62, suggests that many Ukrainians believe that Moscow always views Ukraine as '... a colony to be explo~ted'. 21. Ukrainians made up roughly one-quarter of the Soviet officer corps and were also well represented in the Communist Party. See Brian Taylor, 'Red Army blues: the future o f military
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power in the former Soviet Union', Breakthroughs, vol. 2, no. 1, Spring 1992, pp. 1-8; Adrian Karatnycky, The Ukrainian factor', Foreign Affairs, vol. 71, no. 3, Summer 1992, p. 107. 22. Ukraine had about 1 8 % of Soviet population and is said t o have produced, '33 percent of televisions, 25 percent of computation and automation equipment, 2 2 percent of tractors, 3 1 percent of harvesters'. See Karatnycky, op. cit. in note 20, pp. 96-97. Julian Cooper suggests that some 17.5% of defence workers in the USSR were to be found in the Ukraine in the mid-1980s, and some 13.7% of defence firms. See Tables 5 and 7 in 'Reconversion industrielle', La Dtcompositron de I'Armte Sovittique, Dossier No. 4 5 (Paris: FEDN, April 1992), pp. 151, 153. 23. Valeriy Semivolos, 'An army for Ukraine', Vecherniye novosti, 20 July 1991 p. 3 (as translated in Commonwealth of Independent States, A Journal of Selected Press Translations, vol. 2, no. 2, Spring 1992, pp. 33-34). Semivolos suggests that 100 billion rubles out of a Ukrainian GNP of 218.5bn went t o Moscow. 24. Brumberg, op. cit. in note 20, p. 60. 25. lbid., pp. 59-60. 26. The appearance of self-styled Cossacks, however, is a cause for concern, but so far they have not revealed specific anti-Russian tendencies. 27. Taylor, op. cit. in note 21, p. 3, suggests there were 20 divisions based in Ukraine and 4,000 nuclear warheads. There were 28 air bases and 2-4 naval bases. Ostensibly, the groundand air-launched tactical nuclear weapons are gone, leaving somewhat more than 1,200 strategic nuclear warheads associated with ballistic missiles and strategic bombers. The status of the Black Sea Fleet's nuclear weapons is unclear. 28. See Stephen Van Evera, Managing the Eastern Crisis: Preventing War in the Former Soviet Empire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Defense and Arms Control Studies Program, 6 January 1992), p. 12. 29. Security guarantees are an unlikely substitute for an independent Ukrainian deterrent. Recall the endless arguments about the credibility of the US nuclear guarantee to Germany, in which the United States stationed more than 300,000 troops and thousands of tactical nuclear warheads. The US guarantee to Germany was credible, but mainly due to the elaborate measures taken to make it so. 30. See Steven Miller, 'Western diplomacy and the Soviet nuclear legacy', Survival, vol. 34,
The Clash o f Civilizations? Samuel P. Huntington
The Next Pattern of Conflict
W
orld politics is entering a new phase, and intellectuals have not hesitated to proliferate visions of what it will be - the end of history, the return of traditional rivalries between nation states, and the decline of the nation state from the conflicting pulls of tribalism and globalism, among others. Each of these visions catches aspects of the emerging reality. Yet they all miss a crucial, indeed a central, aspect of what global politics is likely to be in the coming years. It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future. Conflict between civilizations will be the latest phase in the evolution of conflict in the modern world. For a century and a half after the emergence of the modern international system with the Peace of Westphalia, the conflicts of the Western world were largely among princes - emperors, absolute monarchs and constitutional monarchs attempting to expand their bureaucracies, their armies, their mercantilist economic strength and, most important, the territory they ruled. In the process they created nation states, and beginning with the French Revolution the principal lines of conflict were between nations rather than princes. In 1793, as R.R. Palmer put it, "The wars of kings were over; the wars of peoples had begun." This nineteenth-century pattern lasted until the end of World War I. Then, as a result of the Russian Revolution and the reaction against it, the conflict of nations yielded to the conflict of Source: Foreign Affairs, 7 2 ( 3 )(1993): 22-49.
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ideologies, first among communism, fascism-Nazism and liberal democracy, and then between communism and liberal democracy. During the Cold War, this latter conflict became embodied in the struggle between the two superpowers, neither of which was a nation state in the classical European sense and each of which defined its identity in terms of its ideology. These conflicts between princes, nation states and ideologies were primarily conflicts within Western civilization, "Western civil wars," as William Lind has labeled them. This was as true of the Cold War as it was of the world wars and the earlier wars of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the end of the Cold War, international politics moves out of its Western phase, and its centerpiece becomes the interaction between the West and non-Western civilizations and among non-Western civilizations. In the politics of civilizations, the peoples and governments of non-Western civilizations no longer remain the objects of history as targets of Western colonialism but join the West as movers and shapers of history.
The Nature of Civilizations
During the Cold War the world was divided into the First, Second and Third Worlds. Those divisions are no longer relevant. It is far more meaningful now to group countries not in terms of their political or economic systems or in terms of their level of economic development but rather in terms of their culture and civilization. What do we mean when we talk of a civilization? A civilization is a cultural entity. Villages, regions, ethnic groups, nationalities, religious groups, all have distinct cultures at different levels of cultural heterogeneity. The culture of a village in southern Italy may be different from that of a village in northern Italy, but both will share in a common Italian culture that distinguishes them from German villages. European communities, in turn, will share cultural features that distinguish them from Arab or Chinese communities. Arabs, Chinese and Westerners, however, are not part of any broader cultural entity. They constitute civilizations. A civilization is thus the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species. It is defined both by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people. People have levels of identity: a resident of Rome may define himself with varying degrees of intensity as a Roman, an Italian, a Catholic, a Christian, a European, a Westerner. The civilization to which he belongs is the broadest level of identification with which he intensely identifies. People can and do redefine their identities and, as a result, the composition and boundaries of civilizations change. Civilizations may involve a large number of people, as with China ("a civilization pretending to be a state," as Lucian Pye put it), or a very small number of people, such as the Anglophone Caribbean. A civilization may include
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several nation states, as is the case with Western, Latin American and Arab civilizations, or only one, as is the case with Japanese civilization. Civilizations obviously blend and overlap, and may include subcivilizations. Western civilization has two major variants, European and North American, and Islam has its Arab, Turkic and Malay subdivisions. Civilizations are nonetheless meaningful entities, and while the lines between them are seldom sharp, they are real. Civilizations are dynamic; they rise and fall; they divide and merge. And, as any student of history knows, civilizations disappear and are buried in the sands of time. Westerners tend to think of nation states as the principal actors in global affairs. They have been that, however, for only a few centuries. The broader reaches of human history have been the history of civilizations. In A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee identified 21 major civilizations; only six of them exist in the contemporary world.
Why Civilizations will Clash Civilization identity will be increasingly important in the future, and the world will be shaped in large measure by the interactions among seven or eight major civilizations. These include Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African civilization. The most important conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines separating these civilizations from one another. Why will this be the case? First, differences among civilizations are not only real; they are basic. Civilizations are differentiated from each other by history, language, culture, tradition and, most important, religion. The people of different civilizations have different views on the relations between God and man, the individual and the group, the citizen and the state, parents and children, husband and wife, as well as differing views of the relative importance of rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and hierarchy. These differences are the product of centuries. They will not soon disappear. They are far more fundamental than differences among political ideologies and political regimes. Differences d o not necessarily mean conflict, and conflict does not necessarily mean violence. Over the centuries, however, differences among- civilizations have generated the most prolonged and the most violent conflicts. Second, the world is becoming a smaller place. The interactions between peoples of different civilizations are increasing; these increasing interactions intensify civilization consciousness and awareness of differences between civilizations and commonalities within civilizations. North African immigration to France generates hostility among Frenchmen and at the same time increased receptivity to immigration by "good" European Catholic Poles. Americans react far more negatively to Japanese investment than t o larger investments from Canada and European countries. Similarly, as
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Donald Horowitz has pointed out, "An Ibo may be ... an Owerri Ibo or an Onitsha Ibo in what was the Eastern region of Nigeria. In Lagos, he is simply an Ibo. In London, he is a Nigerian. In New York, he is an African." The interactions among peoples of different civilizations enhance the civilizationconsciousness of people that, in turn, invigorates differences and animosities stretching or thought to stretch back deep into history. Third, the processes of economic modernization and social change throughout the world are separating people from longstanding local identities. They also weaken the nation state as a source of identity. In much of the world religion has moved in to fill this gap, often in the form of movements that are labeled "fundamentalist." Such movements are found in Western Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as in Islam. In most countries and most religions the people active in fundamentalist movements are young, college-educated, middle-class technicians, professionals and business persons. The "unsecularization of the world," George Weigel has remarked, "is one of the dominant social facts of life in the late twentieth century." The revival of religion, "la revanche de Dieu," as Gilles Kepel labeled it, provides a basis for identity and commitment that transcends national boundaries and unites civilizations. Fourth, the growth of civilization-consciousness is enhanced by the dual role of the West. On the one hand, the West is at a peak of power. At the same time, however, and perhaps as a result, a return to the roots phenomenon is occurring among non-Western civilizations. Increasingly one hears references to trends toward a turning inward and "Asianization" in Japan, the end of the Nehru legacy and the "Hinduization" of India, the failure of Western ideas of socialism and nationalism and hence "re-Islamization" of the Middle East, and now a debate over Westernization versus Russianization in Boris Yeltsin's country. A West at the peak of its power confronts non-Wests that increasingly have the desire, the will and the resources to shape the world in non-Western ways. In the past, the elites of non-Western societies were usually the people who were most involved with the West, had been educated at Oxford, the Sorbonne or Sandhurst, and had absorbed Western attitudes and values. At the same time, the populace in non-Western countries often remained deeply imbued with the indigenous culture. Now, however, these relationships are being reversed. A de-Westernization and indigenization of elites is occurring in many non-Western countries at the same time that Western, usually American, cultures, styles and habits become more popular among the mass of the people. Fifth, cultural characteristics and differences are less mutable and hence less easily compromised and resolved than political and economic ones. In the former Soviet Union, communists can become democrats, the rich can become poor and the poor rich, but Russians cannot become Estonians and Azeris cannot become Armenians. In class and ideological conflicts, the key question was "Which side are you on?" and people could and did choose sides and change sides. In conflicts between civilizations, the question is "What are you?"
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That is a given that cannot be changed. And as we know, from Bosnia to the Caucasus to the Sudan, the wrong answer to that question can mean a bullet in the head. Even more than ethnicity, religion discriminates sharply and exclusively among people. A person can be half-French and half-Arab and simultaneously even a citizen of two countries. It is more difficult to be halfCatholic and half-Muslim. Finally, economic regionalism is increasing. The proportions of total trade that were intraregional rose between 1980 and 1989 from 51 percent to 59 percent in Europe, 33 percent to 37 percent in East Asia, and 32 percent to 36 percent in North America. The importance of regional economic blocs is likely to continue to increase in the future. O n the one hand, successful economic regionalism will reinforce civilization-consciousness. On the other hand, economic regionalism may succeed only when it is rooted in a common civilization. The European Community rests on the shared foundation of European culture and Western Christianity The success of the North American Free Trade Area depends on the convergence now underway of Mexican, Canadian and American cultures. Japan, in contrast, faces difficulties in creating a comparable economic entity in East Asia because Japan is a society and civilization unique to itself. However strong the trade and investment links Japan may develop with other East Asian countries, its cultural differences with those countries inhibit and perhaps preclude its promoting regional economic integration like that in Europe and North America. Common culture, in contrast, is clearly facilitating the rapid expansion of the economic relations between the People's Republic of China and Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and the overseas Chinese communities in other Asian countries. With the Cold War over, cultural commonalities increasingly overcome ideological differences, and mainland China and Taiwan move closer together. If cultural commonality is a prerequisite for economic integration, the principal East Asian economic bloc of the future is likely to be centered on China. This bloc is, in fact, already coming into existence. As Murray Weidenbaum has observed, Despite the current Japanese dominance of the region, the Chinese-based economy of Asia is rapidly emerging as a new epicenter for industry, commerce and finance. This strategic area contains substantial amounts of technology and manufacturing capability (Taiwan), outstanding entrepreneurial, marketing and services acumen (Hong Kong), a fine communications network (Singapore), a tremendous pool of financial capital (all three), and very large endowments of land, resources and labor (mainland China). ... From Guangzhou to Singapore, from Kuala Lumpur to Manila, this influential network - often based on extensions of the traditional clans - has been described as the backbone of the East Asian economy.' Culture and religion also form the basis of the Economic Cooperation Organization, which brings together ten non-Arab Muslim countries: Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan,
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Tadjikistan, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. One impetus to the revival and expansion of this organization, founded originally in the 1960s by Turkey, Pakistan and Iran, is the realization by the leaders of several of these countries that they had no chance of admission to the European Community. Similarly, Caricom, the Central American Common Market and Mercosur rest on common cultural foundations. Efforts to build a broader CaribbeanCentral American economic entity bridging the Anglo-Latin divide, however, have to date failed. As people define their identity in ethnic and religious terms, they are likely to see an "us" versus "them" relation existing between themselves and people of different ethnicity or religion. The end of ideologically defined states in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union permits traditional ethnic identities and animosities to come to the fore. Differences in culture and religion create differences over policy issues, ranging from human rights to immigration to trade and commerce to the environment. Geographical propinquity gives rise to conflicting territorial claims from Bosnia to Mindanao. Most important, the efforts of the West to promote its values of democracy and liberalism as universal values, to maintain its military predominance and to advance its economic interests engender countering responses from other civilizations. Decreasingly able to mobilize support and form coalitions on the basis of ideology, governments and groups will increasingly attempt to mobilize support by appealing to common religion and civilization identity. The clash of civilizations thus occurs at two levels. At the micro-level, adjacent groups along the fault lines between civilizations struggle, often violently, over the control of territory and each other. At the macro-level, states from different civilizations compete for relative military and economic power, struggle over the control of international institutions and third parties, and competitively promote their particular political and religious values.
The Fault Lines b e t w e e n Civilizations The fault lines between civilizations are replacing the political and ideological boundaries of the Cold War as the flash points for crisis and bloodshed. The Cold War began when the Iron Curtain divided Europe politically and ideologically. The Cold War ended with the end of the Iron Curtain. As the ideological division of Europe has disappeared, the cultural division of Europe between Western Christianity, on the one hand, and Orthodox Christianity and Islam, on the other, has reemerged. The most significant dividing line in Europe, as William Wallace has suggested, may well be the eastern boundary of Western Christianity in the year 1500. This line runs along what are now the boundaries between Finland and Russia and between the Baltic states and Russia, cuts through Belarus and Ukraine separating the more Catholic western Ukraine from Orthodox eastern Ukraine, swings westward separating Transylvania from the rest of Romania, and then goes
i-lunlirigtor~ The Clash of Civilizations?
Christianity circa 1500
1-10
200
MILES
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Christianity
c5P
Source: W. Wallace, The Transformation of Western Europe. London: Pinter, 1990. M a p hy Ib Ohlsson for Foreign Affairs.
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through Yugoslavia almost exactly along the line now separating Croatia and Slovenia from the rest of Yugoslavia. In the Balkans this line, of course, coincides with the historic boundary between the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. The peoples to the north and west of this line are Protestant or Catholic; they shared the common experiences of European history feudalism, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution; they are generally economically better off than the peoples to the east; and they may now look forward to increasing involvement in a common European economy and to the consolidation of democratic political systems. The peoples to the east and south of this line are Orthodox or Muslim; they historically belonged to the Ottoman or Tsarist empires and were only lightly touched by the shaping events in the rest of Europe; they are generally less advanced economically; they seem much less likely to develop stable democratic political systems. The Velvet Curtain of culture has replaced the Iron Curtain of ideology as the most significant dividing line in Europe. As the events in Yugoslavia show, it is not only a line of difference; it is also at times a line of bloody conflict. Conflict along the fault line between Western and Islamic civilizations has been going on for 1,300 years. After the founding of Islam, the Arab and Moorish surge west and north only ended at Tours in 732. From the eleventh to the thirteenth century the Crusaders attempted with temporary success to bring Christianity and Christian rule to the Holy Land. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Turks reversed the balance, extended their sway over the Middle East and the Balkans, captured Constantinople, and twice laid siege to Vienna. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as Ottoman power declined Britain, France, and Italy established Western control over most of North Africa and the Middle East. After World War 11, the West, in turn, began to retreat; the colonial empires disappeared; first Arab nationalism and then Islamic fundamentalism manifested themselves; the West became heavily dependent on the Persian Gulf countries for its energy; the oil-rich Muslim countries became moneyrich and, when they wished to, weapons-rich. Several wars occurred between Arabs and Israel (created by the West). France fought a bloody and ruthless war in Algeria for most of the 1950s; British and French forces invaded Egypt in 1956; American forces went into Lebanon in 1958; subsequently American forces returned to Lebanon, attacked Libya, and engaged in various military encounters with Iran; Arab and Islamic terrorists, supported by at least three Middle Eastern governments, employed the weapon of the weak and bombed Western planes and installations and seized Western hostages. This warfare between Arabs and the West culminated in 1990, when the United States sent a massive army to the Persian Gulf to defend some Arab countries against aggression by another. In its aftermath NATO planning is increasingly directed to potential threats and instability along its "southern tier." This centuries-old military interaction between the West and Islam is unlikely to decline. It could become more virulent. The Gulf War left some
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Arabs feeling ~ r o u dthat Saddam Hussein had attacked Israel and stood up to the West. It also left many feeling humiliated and resentful of the West's military presence in the Persian Gulf, the West's overwhelming military dominance, and their apparent inability to shape their own destiny. Many Arab countries, in addition t o the oil exporters, are reaching levels of economic and social development where autocratic forms of government become inappropriate and efforts to introduce democracy become stronger. Some openings in Arab political systems have already occurred. The principal beneficiaries of these openings have been Islamist movements. In the Arab world, in short, Western democracy strengthens anti-Western political forces. This may be a passing phenomenon, but it surely complicates relations between Islamic countries and the West. Those relations are also complicated by demography. The spectacular population growth in Arab countries, particularly in North Africa, has led to increased migration to Western Europe. The movement within Western Europe toward minimizing internal boundaries has sharpened political sensitivities with respect to this development. In Italy, France and Germany, racism is increasingly open, and political reactions and violence against Arab and Turkish migrants have become more intense and more widespread since 1990. O n both sides the interaction between Islam and the West is seen as a clash of civilizations. The West's "next confrontation," observes M.J. Akbar, an Indian Muslim author, "is definitely going to come from the Muslim world. It is in the sweep of the Islamic nations from the Maghreb to Pakistan that the struggle for a new world order will begin." Bernard Lewis comes to a similar conclusion: We are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations - the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both.2 Historically, the other great antagonistic interaction of Arab Islamic civilization has been with the pagan, animist, and now increasingly Christian black peoples to the south. In the past, this antagonism was epitomized in the image of Arab slave dealers and black slaves. It has been reflected in the on-going civil war in the Sudan between Arabs and blacks, the fighting in Chad between Libyan-supported insurgents and the government, the tensions between Orthodox Christians and Muslims in the Horn of Africa, and the political conflicts, recurring riots and communal violence between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria. The modernization of Africa and the spread of Christianity are likely to enhance the probability of violence along this fault line. Symptomatic of the intensification of this conflict was the Pope John Paul 11's speech in Khartoum in February 1993 attacking the actions of the Sudan's Islamist government against the Christian minority there.
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On the northern border of Islam, conflict has increasingly erupted between Orthodox and Muslim peoples, including the carnage of Bosnia and Sarajevo, the simmering violence between Serb and Albanian, the tenuous relations between Bulgarians and their Turkish minority, the violence between Ossetians and Ingush, the unremitting slaughter of each other by Armenians and Azeris, the tense relations between Russians and Muslims in Central Asia, and the deployment of Russian troops to protect Russian interests in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Religion reinforces the revival of ethnic identities and restimulates Russian fears about the security of their southern borders. This concern is well captured by Archie Roosevelt: Much of Russian history concerns the struggle between the Slavs and the Turkic peoples on their borders, which dates back to the foundation of the Russian state more than a thousand years ago. In the Slavs' millenniumlong confrontation with their eastern neighbors lies the key to an understanding not only of Russian history, but Russian character. To understand Russian realities today one has to have a concept of the great Turkic ethnic group that has preoccupied Russians through the ~ e n t u r i e s . ~ The conflict of civilizations is deeply rooted elsewhere in Asia. The historic clash between Muslim and Hindu in the subcontinent manifests itself now not only in the rivalry between Pakistan and India but also in intensifying religious strife within India between increasingly militant Hindu groups and India's substantial Muslim minority. The destruction of the Ayodhya mosque in December 1992 brought to the fore the issue of whether India will remain a secular democratic state or become a Hindu one. In East Asia, China has outstanding territorial disputes with most of its neighbors. It has pursued a ruthless policy toward the Buddhist people of Tibet, and it is pursuing an increasingly ruthless policy toward its Turkic-Muslim minority. With the Cold War over, the underlying differences between China and the United States have reasserted themselves in areas such as human rights, trade and weapons proliferation. These differences are unlikely to moderate. A "new cold war," Deng Xaioping reportedly asserted in 1991, is under way between China and America. The same phrase has been applied to the increasingly difficult relations between Japan and the United States. Here cultural difference exacerbates economic conflict. People on each side allege racism on the other, but at least on the American side the antipathies are not racial but cultural. The basic values, attitudes, behavioral patterns of the two societies could hardly be more different. The economic issues between the United States and Europe are no less serious than those between the United States and Japan, but they do not have the same political salience and emotional intensity because the differences between American culture and European culture are so much less than those between American civilization and Japanese civilization. The interactions between civilizations vary greatly in the extent to which they are likely to be characterized by violence. Economic competition clearly
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predominates between the American and European subcivilizations of the West and between both of them and Japan. On the Eurasian continent, however, the proliferation of ethnic conflict, epitomized at the extreme in "ethnic cleansing," has not been totally random. It has been most frequent and most violent between groups belonging to different civilizations. In Eurasia the great historic fault lines between civilizations are once more aflame. This is particularly true along the boundaries of the crescent-shaped Islamic bloc of nations from the bulge of Africa to Central Asia. Violence also occurs between Muslims, on the one hand, and Orthodox Serbs in the Balkans, Jews in Israel, Hindus in India, Buddhists in Burma and Catholics in the Philippines. Islam has bloody borders.
Civilization Rallying: T h e Kin-Country Syndrome
Groups or states belonging to one civilization that become involved in war with people from a different civilization naturally try to rally support from other members of their own civilization. As the post-Cold War world evolves, civilization commonality, what H.D.S. Greenway has termed the "kin-country" syndrome, is replacing political ideology and traditional balance of power considerations as the principal basis for cooperation and coalitions. It can be seen gradually emerging in the post-Cold War conflicts in the Persian Gulf, the Caucasus and Bosnia. None of these was a full-scale war between civilizations, but each involved some elements of civilizational rallying, which seemed to become more important as the conflict continued and which may provide a foretaste of the future. First, in the Gulf War one Arab state invaded another and then fought a coalition of Arab, Western and other states. While only a few Muslim governments overtly supported Saddam Hussein, many Arab elites privately cheered him on, and he was highly popular among large sections of the Arab publics. Islamic fundamentalist movements universally supported Iraq rather than the Western-backed governments of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Forswearing Arab nationalism, Saddam Hussein explicitly invoked an Islamic appeal. He and his supporters attempted to define the war as a war between civilizations. "It is not the world against Iraq," as Safar Al-Hawali, dean of Islamic Studies at the Umm Al-Qura University in Mecca, put it in a widely circulated tape. "It is the West against Islam." Ignoring the rivalry between Iran and Iraq, the chief Iranian religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called for a holy war against the West: "The struggle against American aggression, greed, plans and policies will be counted as a jihad, and anybody who is killed on that path is a martyr." "This is a war," King Hussein of Jordan argued, "against all Arabs and all Muslims and not against Iraq alone." The rallying of substantial sections of Arab elites and publics behind Saddam Hussein caused those Arab governments in the anti-Iraq coalition to moderate their activities and temper their public statements. Arab governments opposed or distanced themselves from subsequent Western efforts
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to apply pressure on Iraq, including enforcement of a no-fly zone in the summer of 1992 and the bombing of Iraq in January 1993. The Western-SovietTurkish-Arab anti-Iraq coalition of 1990 had by 1993 become a coalition of almost only the West and Kuwait against Iraq. Muslims contrasted Western actions against Iraq with the West's failure to protect Bosnians against Serbs and to impose sanctions on Israel for violating U.N. resolutions. The West, they alleged, was using a double standard. A world of clashing civilizations, however, is inevitably a world of double standards: people apply one standard to their kin-countries and a different standard to others. Second, the kin-country syndrome also appeared in conflicts in the former Soviet Union. Armenian military successes in 1992 and 1993 stimulated Turkey to become increasingly supportive of its religious, ethnic and linguistic brethren in Azerbaijan. "We have a Turkish nation feeling the same sentiments as the Azerbaijanis," said one Turkish official in 1992. "We are under pressure. Our newspapers are full of the photos of atrocities and are asking us if we are still serious about pursuing our neutral policy. Maybe we should show Armenia that there's a big Turkey in the region." President Turgut Ozal agreed, remarking that Turkey should at least "scare the Armenians a little bit." Turkey, Ozal threatened again in 1993, would "show its fangs." Turkish Air Force jets flew reconnaissance flights along the Armenian border; Turkey suspended food shipments and air flights to Armenia; and Turkey and Iran announced they would not accept dismemberment of Azerbaijan. In the last years of its existence, the Soviet government supported Azerbaijan because its government was dominated by former communists. With the end of the Soviet Union, however, political considerations gave way to religious ones. Russian troops fought on the side of the Armenians, and Azerbaijan accused the "Russian government of turning 180 degrees" toward support for Christian Armenia. Third, with respect to the fighting in the former Yugoslavia, Western publics manifested sympathy and support for the Bosnian Muslims and the horrors they suffered at the hands of the Serbs. Relatively little concern was expressed, however, over Croatian attacks on Muslims and participation in the dismemberment of Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the early stages of the Yugoslav breakup, Germany, in an unusual display of diplomatic initiative and muscle, induced the other I1 members of the European Community to follow its lead in recognizing Slovenia and Croatia. As a result of the pope's determination to provide strong backing to the two Catholic countries, the Vatican extended recognition even before the Community did. The United States followed the European lead. Thus the leading actors in Western civilization rallied behind their coreligionists. Subsequently Croatia was reported to be receiving substantial quantities of arms from Central European and other Western countries. Boris Yeltsin's government, on the other hand, attempted to pursue a middle course that would be sympathetic to the Orthodox Serbs but not alienate Russia from the West. Russian conservative and nationalist groups, however, including many legislators, attacked the government for
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not being more forthcoming in its support for the Serbs. By early 1993 several hundred Russians apparently were serving with the Serbian forces, and reports circulated of Russian arms being supplied to Serbia. Islamic governments and groups, on the other hand, castigated the West for not coming to the defense of the Bosnians. Iranian leaders urged Muslilns from all countries to provide help to Bosnia; in violation of the U.N. arms embargo, Iran supplied weapons and men for the Bosnians; Iranian-supported Lebanese groups sent guerrillas to train and organize the Bosnian forces. In 1993 up to 4,000 Muslims from over two dozen Islamic countries were reported to be fighting in Bosnia. The governments of Saudi Arabia and other countries felt under increasing pressure from fundamentalist groups in their own societies to provide more vigorous support for the Bosnians. By the end of 1992, Saudi Arabia had reportedly supplied substantial funding for weapons and supplies for the Bosnians, which significantly increased their military capabilities vis-a-vis the Serbs. In the 1930s the Spanish Civil War provoked intervention from countries that politically were fascist, communist and democratic. In the 1990s the Yugoslav conflict is provoking intervention from countries that are Muslim, Orthodox and Western Christian. The parallel has not gone unnoticed. "The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina has become the emotional equivalent of the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War," one Saudi editor observed. "Those who died there are regarded as martyrs who tried to save their fellow Muslims." Conflicts and violence will also occur between states and groups within the same civilization. Such conflicts, however, are likely to be less intense and less likely to expand than conflicts between civilizations. Common membership in a civilization reduces the probability of violence in situations where it might otherwise occur. In 1991 and 1992 many people were alarmed by the possibility of violent conflict between Russia and Ukraine over territory, particularly Crimea, the Black Sea fleet, nuclear weapons and economic issues. If civilization is what counts, however, the likelihood of violence between Ukrainians and Russians should be low. They are two Slavic, primarily Orthodox peoples who have had close relationships with each other for centuries. As of early 1993, despite all the reasons for conflict, the leaders of the two countries were effectively negotiating and defusing the issues between the two countries. While there has been serious fighting between Muslims and Christians elsewhere in the former Soviet Union and much tension and some fighting between Western and Orthodox Christians in the Baltic states, there has been virtually no violence between Russians and Ukrainians. Civilization rallying to date has been limited, but it has been growing, and it clearly has the potential to spread much further. As the conflicts in the Persian Gulf, the Caucasus and Bosnia continued, the positions of nations and the cleavages between them increasingly were along civilizational lines. Populist politicians, religious leaders and the media have found it a potent means of arousing mass support and of pressuring hesitant governments. In the coming years, the local conflicts most likely to escalate into major
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wars will be those, as in Bosnia and the Caucasus, along the fault lines between civilizations. The next world war, if there is one, will be a war between civilizations.
T h e West versus t h e R e s t
The West is now at an extraordinary peak of power in relation to other civilizations. Its superpower opponent has disappeared from the map. Military conflict among Western states is unthinkable, and Western military power is unrivaled. Apart from Japan, the West faces no economic challenge. It dominates international political and security institutions and with Japan international economic institutions. Global political and security issues are effectively settled by a directorate of the United States, Britain and France, world economic issues by a directorate of the United States, Germany and Japan, all of which maintain extraordinarily close relations with each other to the exclusion of lesser and largely non-Western countries. Decisions made at the U.N. Security Council or in the International Monetary Fund that reflect the interests of the West are presented to the world as reflecting the desires of the world community. The very phrase "the world community" has become the euphemistic collective noun (replacing "the Free World") to give global legitimacy to actions reflecting the interests of the United States and other Western power^.^ Through the IMF and other international economic institutions, the West promotes its economic interests and imposes on other nations the economic policies it thinks appropriate. In any poll of nonWestern peoples, the IMF undoubtedly would win the support of finance ministers and a few others, but get an overwhelmingly unfavorable rating from just about everyone else, who would agree with Georgy Arbatov's characterization of IMF officials as "neo-Bolsheviks who love expropriating other people's money, imposing undemocratic and alien rules of economic and political conduct and stifling economic freedom." Western domination of the U.N. Security Council and its decisions, tempered only by occasional abstention by China, produced U.N. legitimation of the West's use of force to drive Iraq out of Kuwait and its elimination of Iraq's sophisticated weapons and capacity to produce such weapons. It also produced the quite unprecedented action by the United States, Britain and France in getting the Security Council to demand that Libya hand over the Pan Am 103 bombing suspects and then to impose sanctions when Libya refused. After defeating the largest Arab army, the West did not hesitate to throw its weight around in the Arab world. The West in effect is using international institutions, military power and economic resources to run the world in ways that will maintain Western predominance, protect Western interests and promote Western political and economic values. That at least is the way in which non-Westerners see the new world, and there is a significant element of truth in their view. Differences in power and struggles for military, economic and institutional power are thus one source
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of conflict between the West and other civilizations. Differences in culture, that is basic values and beliefs, are a second source of conflict. V.S. Naipaul has argued that Western civilization is the "universal civilization" that "fits all men." At a superficial level much of Western culture has indeed permeated the rest of the world. At a more basic level, however, Western concepts differ fundamentally from those prevalent in other civilizations. Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, coAstitutionalisrn, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state, often have little resonance in Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist or Orthodox cultures. Western efforts to propagate such ideas produce instead a reaction against "human rights imperialism" and a reaffirmation of indigenous values, as can be seen in the support for religious fundamentalism by the younger generation in non-Western cultures. The very notion that there could be a "universal civilization" is a Western idea, directly at odds with the particularism of most Asian societies and their emphasis on what distinguishes one people from another. Indeed, the author of a review of 100 comparative studies of values in different societies concluded that "the values that are most important in the West are least important worldwide."" In the political realm, of course, these differences are most manifest in the efforts of the United States and other Western powers to induce other peoples to adopt Western ideas concerning democracy and human rights. Modern democratic government originated in the West. When it has developed in non-Western societies it has usually been the product of Western colonialism or imposition. The central axis of world politics in the future is likely to be, in Kishore Mahbubani's phrase, the conflict between "the West and the Rest" and the responses of non-Western civilizations to Western power and values."hose responses generally take one or a combination of three forms. At one extreme, non-Western states can, like Burma and North Korea, attempt to pursue a course of isolation, to insulate their societies from penetration or "corruption" by the West, and, in effect, to opt out of participation in the Western-dominated global community. The costs of this course, however, are high, and few states have pursued it exclusively. A second alternative, the equivalent of "band-wagoning" in international relations theory, is to attempt to join the West and accept its values and institutions. The third alternative is to attempt to "balance" the West by developing economic and military power and cooperating with other non-Western societies against the West, while preserving indigenous values and institutions; in short, to modernize but not to Westernize.
T h e Torn Countries
In the future, as people differentiate themselves by civilization, countries with large numbers of peoples of different civilizations, such as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, are candidates for dismemberment. Some other countries
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have a fair degree of cultural homogeneity but are divided over whether their society belongs to one civilization or another. These are torn countries. Their leaders typically wish to pursue a bandwagoning strategy and to make their countries members of the West, but the history, culture and traditions of their countries are non-Western. The most obvious and prototypical torn country is Turkey. The late twentieth-century leaders of Turkey have followed in the Attatiirk tradition and defined Turkey as a modern, secular, Western nation state. They allied Turkey with the West in NATO and in the Gulf War; they applied for membership in the European Community. At the same time, however, elements in Turkish society have supported an Islamic revival and have argued that Turkey is basically a Middle Eastern Muslim society. In addition, while the elite of Turkey has defined Turkey as a Western society, the elite of the West refuses to accept Turkey as such. Turkey will not become a member of the European Community, and the real reason, as President Ozal said, "is that we are Muslim and they are Christian and they don't say that." Having rejected Mecca, and then being rejected by Brussels, where does Turkey look? Tashkent may be the answer. The end of the Soviet Union gives Turkey the opportunity to become the leader of a revived Turkic civilization involving seven countries from the borders of Greece to those of China. Encouraged by the West, Turkey is making strenuous efforts to carve out this new identity for itself. During the past decade Mexico has assumed a position somewhat similar to that of Turkey. Just as Turkey abandoned its historic opposition to Europe and attempted to join Europe, Mexico has stopped defining itself by its opposition to the United States and is instead attempting to imitate the United States and to join it in the North American Free Trade Area. Mexican leaders are engaged in the great task of redefining Mexican identity and have introduced fundamental economic reforms that eventually will lead to fundamental political change. In 1991 a top adviser to President Carlos Salinas de Gortari described at length to me all the changes the Salinas government was making. When he finished, I remarked: "That's most impressive. It seems to me that basically you want to change Mexico from a Latin American country into a North American country." He looked at me with surprise and exclaimed: "Exactly! That's precisely what we are trying to do, but of course we could never say so publicly." As his remark indicates, in Mexico as in Turkey, significant elements in society resist the redefinition of their country's identity. In Turkey, European-oriented leaders have to make gestures to Islam (Ozal's pilgrimage to Mecca); so also Mexico's North Americanoriented leaders have to make gestures to those who hold Mexico to be a Latin American country (Salinas' Ibero-American Guadalajara summit). Historically Turkey has been the most profoundly torn country. For the United States, Mexico is the most immediate torn country. Globally the most important torn country is Russia. The question of whether Russia is part of the West or the leader of a distinct Slavic-Orthodox civilization has been a recurring one in Russian history. That issue was obscured by the communist victory in Russia, which imported a Western ideology, adapted
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it to Russian conditions and then challenged the West in the name of that ideology. The dominance of communism shut off the historic debate over Westernization versus Russification. With communism discredited Russians once again face that question. President Yeltsin is adopting Western principles and goals and seeking to make Russia a "normal" country and a part of the West. Yet both the Russian elite and the Russian public are divided on this issue. Among the more moderate dissenters, Sergei Stankevich argues that Russia should reject the "Atlanticist" course, which would lead it "to become European, to become a part of the world economy in rapid and organized fashion, to become the eighth member of the Seven, and to put particular emphasis on Germany and the United States as the two dominant members of the Atlantic alliance." While also rejecting an exclusively Eurasian policy, Stankevich nonetheless argues that Russia should give priority to the protection of Russians in other countries, emphasize its Turkic and Muslim connections, and promote "an appreciable redistribution of our resources, our options, our ties, and our interests in favor of Asia, of the eastern direction." People of this persuasion criticize Yeltsin for subordinating Russia's interests to those of the West, for reducing Russian military strength, for failing to support traditional friends such as Serbia, and for pushing economic and political reform in ways injurious to the Russian people. Indicative of this trend is the new popularity of the ideas of Petr Savitsky, who in the 1920s argued that Russia was a unique Eurasian civilization.' More extreme dissidents voice much more blatantly nationalist, anti-Western and anti-Semitic views, and urge Russia to redevelop its military strength and to establish closer ties with China and Muslim countries. The people of Russia are as divided as the elite. An opinion survey in European Russia in the spring of 1992 revealed that 40 percent of the public had positive attitudes toward the West and 36 percent had negative attitudes. As it has been for much of its history, Russia in the early 1990s is truly a torn country. To redefine its civilization identity, a torn country must meet three requirements. First, its political and economic elite has to be generally supportive of and enthusiastic about this move. Second, its public has to be willing to acquiesce in the redefinition. Third, the dominant groups in the recipient civilization have to be willing to embrace the convert. All three requirements in large part exist with respect to Mexico. The first two in large part exist with respect to Turkey. It is not clear that any of them exist with respect to Russia's joining the West. The conflict between liberal democracy and Marxism-Leninism was between ideologies which, despite their major differences, ostensibly shared ultimate goals of freedom, equality and prosperity. A traditional, authoritarian, nationalist Russia could have quite different goals. A Western democrat could carry on an intellectual debate with a Soviet Marxist. It would be virtually impossible for him to do that with a Russian traditionalist. If, as the Russians stop behaving like Marxists, they reject liberal democracy and begin behaving like Russians but not like Westerners, the relations between Russia and the West could again become distant and conflictuaLx
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda The Confucian-Islamic Connection
The obstacles to non-western countries joining the West vary considerably. They are least for Latin American and East European countries. They are greater for the Orthodox countries of the former Soviet Union. They are still greater for Muslim, Confucian, Hindu and Buddhist societies. Japan has established a unique position for itself as an associate member of the West: it is in the West in some respects but clearly not of the West in important dimensions. Those countries that for reason of culture and power do not wish to, or cannot, join the West compete with the West by developing their own economic, military and political power. They d o this by promoting their internal development and by cooperating with other non-Western countries. The most prominent form of this cooperation is the Confucian-Islamic connection that has emerged to challenge Western interests, values and power. Almost without exception, Western countries are reducing their military power; under Yeltsin's leadership so also is Russia. China, North Korea and several Middle Eastern states, however, are significantly expanding their military capabilities. They are doing this by the import of arms from Western and non-Western sources and by the development of indigenous arms industries. One result is the emergence of what Charles Krauthammer has called "Weapon States," and the Weapon States are not Western states. Another result is the redefinition of arms control, which is a Western concept and a Western goal. During the Cold War the primary purpose of arms control was to establish a stable military balance between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies. In the post-Cold War world the primary objective of arms control is to prevent the development by non-Western societies of military capabilities that could threaten Western interests. The West attempts to do this through international agreements, economic pressure and controls on the transfer of arms and weapons technologies. The conflict between the West and the Confucian-Islamic states focuses largely, although not exclusively, on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, ballistic missiles and other sophisticated means for delivering them, and the guidance, intelligence and other electronic capabilities for achieving that goal. The West promotes non-proliferation as a universal norm and nonproliferation treaties and inspections as means of realizing that norm. It also threatens a variety of sanctions against those who promote the spread of sophisticated weapons and proposes some benefits for those who do not. The attention of the West focuses, naturally, on nations that are actually or potentially hostile to the West. The non-Western nations, on the other hand, assert their right to acquire and to deploy whatever weapons they think necessary for their security. They also have absorbed, to the full, the truth of the response of the Indian defense minister when asked what lesson he learned from the Gulf War: "Don't fight the United States unless you have nuclear weapons." Nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and missiles are viewed, probably erroneously, as the potential equalizer of superior Western conventional power. China,
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of course, already has nuclear weapons; Pakistan and India have the capability to deploy them. North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Algeria appear to be attempting to acquire them. A top Iranian official has declared that all Muslim states should acquire nuclear weapons, and in 1988 the president of Iran reportedly issued a directive calling for development of "offensive and defensive chemical, biological and radiological weapons." Centrally important to the development of counter-West military capabilities is the sustained expansion of China's military power and its means to create military power. Buoyed by spectacular economic development, China is rapidly increasing its military spending and vigorously moving forward with the modernization of its armed forces. It is purchasing weapons from the former Soviet states; it is developing long-range missiles; in 1992 it tested a one-megaton nuclear device. It is developing power-projection capabilities, acquiring aerial refueling technology, and trying to purchase an aircraft carrier. Its military buildup and assertion of sovereignty over the South China Sea are provoking a multilateral regional arms race in East Asia. China is also a major exporter of arms and weapons technology. It has exported materials to Libya and Iraq that could be used to manufacture nuclear weapons and nerve gas. It has helped Algeria build a reactor suitable for nuclear weapons research and production. China has sold to Iran nuclear technology that American officials believe could only be used to create weapons and apparently has shipped components of 300-mile-range missiles to Pakistan. North Korea has had a nuclear weapons program under way for some while and has sold advanced missiles and missile technology to Syria and Iran. The flow of weapons and weapons technology is generally from East Asia to the Middle East. There is, however, some movement in the reverse direction; China has received Stinger missiles from Pakistan. A Confucian-Islamic military connection has thus come into being, designed to promote acquisition by its members of the weapons and weapons technologies needed to counter the military power of the West. It may or may not last. At present, however, it is, as Dave McCurdy has said, "a renegades' mutual support pact, run by the proliferators and their backers." A new form of arms competition is thus occurring between Islamic-Confucian states and the West. In an old-fashioned arms race, each side developed its own arms to balance or to achieve superiority against the other side. In this new form of arms competition, one side is developing its arms and the other side is attempting not to balance but to limit and prevent that arms build-up while at the same time reducing its own military capabilities.
implications for the West
This article does not argue that civilization identities will replace all other identities, that nation states will disappear, that each civilization will become a single coherent political entity, that groups within a civilization will not conflict with and even fight each other. This paper does set forth the hypotheses
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that differences between civilizations are real and important; civilizationconsciousness is increasing; conflict between civilizations will supplant ideological and other forms of conflict as the dominant global form of conflict; international relations, historically a game played out within Western civilization, will increasingly be de-Westernized and become a game in which nonWestern civilizations are actors and not simply objects; successful political, security and economic international institutions are more likely to develop within civilizations than across civilizations; conflicts between groups in different civilizations will be more frequent, more sustained and more violent than conflicts between groups in the same civilization; violent conflicts between groups in different civilizations are the most likely and most dangerous source of escalation that could lead to global wars; the paramount axis of world politics will be the relations between "the West and the Rest"; the elites in some torn non-Western countries will try to make their countries part of the West, but in most cases face major obstacles to accomplishing this; a central focus of conflict for the immediate future will be between the West and several Islamic-Confucian states. This is not to advocate the desirability of conflicts between civilizations. It is to set forth descriptive hypotheses as to what the future may be like. If these are plausible hypotheses, however, it is necessary to consider their implications for Western policy. These implications should be divided between short-term advantage and long-term accommodation. In the short term it is clearly in the interest of the West to promote greater cooperation and unity within its own civilization, particularly between its European and North American components; to incorporate into the West societies in Eastern Europe and Latin America whose cultures are close to those of the West; to promote and maintain cooperative relations with Russia and Japan; to prevent escalation of local inter-civilization conflicts into major inter-civilization wars; to limit the expansion of the military strength of Confucian and Islamic states; to moderate the reduction of Western military capabilities and maintain military superiority in East and Southwest Asia; to exploit differences and conflicts among Confucian and Islamic states; to support in other civilizations groups sympathetic to Western values and interests; to strengthen international institutions that reflect and legitimate Western interests and values and to promote the involvement of non-Western states in those institutions. In the longer term other measures would be called for. Western civilization is both Western and modern. Non-Western civilizations have attempted to become modern without becoming Western. To date only Japan has fully succeeded in this quest. Non-Western civilizations will continue to attempt to acquire the wealth, technology, skills, machines and weapons that are part of being modern. They will also attempt to reconcile this modernity with their traditional culture and values. Their economic and military strength relative to the West will increase. Hence the West will increasingly have to accommodate these non-Western modern civilizations whose power approaches that of the West but whose values and interests differ significantly from those of
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the West. This will require the West to maintain the economic and military power necessary to protect its interests in relation to these civilizations. It will also, however, require the West to develop a more profound understanding of the basic religious and philosophical assumptions underlying other civilizations and the ways in which people in those civilizations see their interests. It will require an effort to identify elements of commonality between Western and other civilizations. For the relevant future, there will be no universal civilization, but instead a world of different civilizations, each of which will have to learn to coexist with the others.
Author's N o t e This article is the product of the Olin Institute's project on "The Changing Security Env~ronrnent and American National Interests."
Notes 1. Murray Weidenbaum, Greater China: The Next Economic Superpower?, St. Louis: Washington Un~versity Center for the Study of American Business, Contemporary Issues, S e r m 57, February 1993, pp. 2-3. 2. Bernard Lewis, "The Roots of Muslim Rage," The Atlantic Monthly, vol. 266, September 1990, p. 60; Time, June 15, 1992, pp. 24-28. 3. Archie Roosevelt, For Lust of Knowing, Boston: Little, Brown, 1988, pp. 332-333. 4. Almost invariably Western leaders claim they are acting on behalf of "the world community." One minor lapse occurred during the run-up to the Gulf War. In an interview on "Good Morning Amerm," Dec. 21, 1990, British Prime Minister J o h n Major referred to the actions "the West" was taking against Saddam Hussein. He quickly corrected himself and suhsequently referred to "the world commun~ty."He was, however, right when he erred. 5. Harry C. Triandis, The New York Times, Dec. 25, 1990, p. 41, and "Cross-Cultural Studies of Individualism and Collectivisni," Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, vol. 37, 1989, pp. 41-133. 6. Kishore Mahbubani, "The West and the Rest," The National Interest, Summer 1992, pp. 3-13. 7. Sergei Stankevich, "Russia in Search of Itself," The National Interest, Summer 1992, pp. 47-51; Lhniel Schneider, "A Russian Movement Rejects Western Tilt," Chrrstiun Scicwcc Monitor, Feh. 5, 1993, pp. 5-7. 8. Owen Harries has pointed out that Australia is trying (unwrsely In his view) to become a torn country in reverse. Although it has been a full member not only of the West but also of the ABCA military and intelligence core of the West, its current leaders are in effect proposing that it defect from the West. redefine itself as an Asian countrv and cultivate close ties with its neighbors. Australia's future, they argue, is with the dynamic econon~iesof East Asia. But, as I have suggested, close economic cooperation normally requires a common cultural base. In addition, none of the three conditions necessary for a torn country to join another civilization is likely to exist in Australla's case.
The Emerging Structure o f lnternational Politics Kenneth N.Waltz
F
or more than three hundred years, the drama of modern history has turned on the rise and fall of great powers. In the multipolar era, twelve great powers appeared on the scene at one time or another. At the beginning of World War 11, seven remained; at its conclusion, two. Always before, as some states sank, others rose to take their places. World War I1 broke the pattern; for the first time in a world of sovereign states, bipolarity prevailed. In a 1964 essay, I predicted that bipolarity would last through the century.' O n the brow of the next millennium, we must prepare to bid bipolarity adieu and begin to live without its stark simplicities and comforting symmetry. Already in the fall of 1989, Undersecretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger expressed nostalgia for the "remarkably stable and predictable atmosphere of the Cold War," and in the summer of 1990, John Mearsheimer gave strong reasons for expecting worse days to come.2 For almost half a century it seemed that World War I1 was truly "the war to end wars" among the great and major powers of the world. The longest peace yet known rested on two pillars: bipolarity and nuclear weapons. During the war, Nicholas Spykman foresaw a postwar international order no different "from the old," with international society continuing "to operate within the same fundamental power patterns.""ealists generally shared his expectation. The behaviors of states, the patterns of their interactions, and the outcomes their interactions produced had been repeated again and again through the centuries despite profound changes in the internal composition of states. Spykman's expectations were historically well grounded and in part borne out. States have continued to compete in economic, military, and other ways. The use of force has been threatened, and numerous wars have been fought on the peripheries. Yet, despite deep ideological and other differences, peace prevailed at the center of international politics. Changes in structure, and in the weaponry available to some of the states, have combined to perpetuate a troubled peace.4 As the bipolar era draws to a close, we must ask two questions: What structural changes are in prospect? What effects may they have? Source: lnternational Security, 18(2j (1993 j: 44-79.
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The End of Bipolarity - and of the Cold War The conflation of peace and stability is all too common. The occurrence of major wars is often identified with a system's instability.' Yet systems that survive major wars thereby demonstrate their stability. The multipolar world was highly stable, but all too war-prone. The bipolar world has been highly peaceful, but unfortunately less stable than its predecessor. Almost as soon as their wartime alliance ended, the United States and the Soviet Union found themselves locked in a cold war. In a world of two great powers, each is bound to focus its fears on the other, to distrust its intentions, and to impute offensive intentions even to defensive measures. The competition of states becomes keener when their number reduces to two. Neorealist, or structural, theory leads one to believe that the placement of states in the international system accounts for a good deal of their behavior." Through most of the years of the Cold War the United States and the Soviet Union were similarly placed by their power. Their external behaviors therefore should have shown striking similarities. Did they? Yes, more than has usually been realized. The behavior of states can be compared on many counts. Their armament policies and their interventions abroad are two of the most revealing. O n the former count, the United States in the early 1960s undertook the largest strategic and conventional peacetime military buildup the world had yet seen. We did so while Khrushchev tried at once to carry through a major reduction in conventional forces and to follow a strategy of minimum deterrence, even though the balance of strategic weapons greatly favored the United States. As one should have expected, the Soviet Union soon followed in America's footsteps, thus restoring the symmetry of greatpower behavior. And so it was through most of the years of the Cold War. Advances made by one were quickly followed by the other, with the United States almost always leading the way. Allowing for geographic differences, the overall similarity of their forces was apparent. The ground forces of the Soviet Union were stronger than those of the United States, but in naval forces the balance of advantage was reversed. The Soviet Union's largely coastal navy gradually became more of a blue-water fleet, but one of limited reach. Its navy never had more than half the tonnage of ours. Year after year, NATO countries spent more on defense than the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO) countries did, but their troops remained roughly equal in numbers. The military forces of the United States and the Soviet Union remained in rough balance, and their military doctrines tended to converge. We accused them of favoring war-fighting over deterrent doctrines, while we developed a war-fighting doctrine in the name of deterrence. From the 1960s onward, critics of military policy urged the United States to "reconstitute its usable warfighting capability." Before he became secretary of defense, Melvin R. Laird wrote that "American strategy must aim at fighting, winning, and recovering," a strategy that requires the ability to wage nuclear war and the willingness to strike first.7 One can find many military and civilian statements to similar effect over the decades. Especially in the 1970s and 1980s, the United
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States accused the Soviet Union of striving for military superiority. In turn, the Republican platform of 1980 pledged that a Republican administration would reestablish American strategic superiority. Ronald Reagan as president softened the aspiration, without eliminating it, by making it his goal to establish a "margin of safety" for the United States militarily. Military competition between the two countries produced its expected result: the similarity of forces and doctrines. Comparison on the second count, interventionist behavior, requires some discussion because our conviction that the United States was the status quo and the Soviet Union the interventionist power distorted our view of reality. The United States as well as the Soviet Union intervened widely in others' affairs and spent a fair amount of time fighting peripheral wars. Most Americans saw little need to explain our actions, assumed to be in pursuit of legitimate national interests and of international justice, and had little difficulty in explaining the Soviet Union's, assumed to be aimed at spreading Communism across the globe by any means available. Americans usually interpreted the Soviet Union's behavior in terms of its presumed intentions. Intentions aside, our and their actions were similar. The United States intervened militarily to defend client states in China, Korea, and Vietnam, and even supported their ambitions to expand. The Soviet Union acted in Afghanistan as the United States did in Vietnam, and intervened directly or indirectly in Angola, Mozambique, and Ethiopia. David Holloway quotes a Soviet work, War and the Army, published in 1977, as follows: "Before the Socialist state and its army stands the task of defending, together with other Socialist states and their armies, the whole Socialist system and not only its own country." Beyond that broad purpose, Soviet forces were to help liberated countries thwart counterre~olution.~ America assumed similar missions. Defending against or deterring attacks on the United States required only a fraction of the forces we maintained. We mounted such large forces because we extended defensive as well as deterrent forces to cover Western Europe, the Persian Gulf area, Northeast Asia, and other parts of the world from Central America to the Philippine Islands. We identified our security with the security of other democratic states and with the security of many undemocratic states as long as they were not Communist, and indeed even with some Communist ones. The interests we identified with our own were even more widely embracing than those of the Soviet Union. At the conclusion of the Second World War, the Soviet Union began edging outward. In response, one finds Clark Clifford advising President Harry S. Truman as early as 1946 that America's mission was to be not merely the tiresome one of containing the Soviet Union but also the ~ zestfully ennobling one of creating and maintaining "world ~ r d e r . "We accepted the task. Before World War 11, both the United States and the Soviet Union had developed ideologies that could easily propel them to unilateral action in the name of international duty: interventionist liberalism in the one country, international Communism in the other. Neither, however, widely exported
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its ideology earlier. The postwar foreign policies of neither country can be understood apart from the changed structure of international politics, exercising its pressures and providing its opportunities. More than the Soviet Union, the United States acted all over the globe in the name of its own security and the world's well-being. Thus Barry Blechman and Stephen Kaplan found that in the roughly thirty years following 1946, the United States used military means in one way or another to intervene in the affairs of other countries about twice as often as did the Soviet Union.lo The Soviet Union's aim was to export its ideology by planting and fostering Communist governments in more and more countries, and America's was to plant and foster democratic ones. President Reagan thought that we should worry about the Soviet Union's establishing a "military beachhead" in Nicaragua "inside our defense perimeters," thus threatening the safe passage of our ships through the Caribbean.'] Throwing the cloak of national security over our interventions in Central America hardly concealed our rage to rule or to dictate to others how to govern their countries. Vice President George Bush, in February of 1985, set forth what we expected of Nicaragua and the signs of progress we looked for. He mentioned these: "That the Sandinistas bring the Democratic leaders back into the political process; that they hold honest, free and fair elections; that they stop beating up on the church, the unions and the business community and stop censoring the press; that they sever control of the army from the Sandinista party; and that they remove that most insidious form of totalitarian control, the neighborhood spy system called the 'SDC (Sandinista Defense Committee)'." l 2 According to a senior official, the Reagan administration "debated whether we had the right to dictate the form of another country's government. The bottom line was yes, that some rights are more fundamental than the right of nations to nonintervention, like the rights of individual people. ... We don't have the right to subvert a democratic government but we do have the right against an undemocratic one."l"he difference between the United States and the Soviet Union has been less in their behaviors than in their ideologies. Each sought to make other countries over in its own image. Stalin said of World War 11: "This war is not as in the past. Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise."14 The effort to impose one's own social system continued into the Cold War, with the aim to be accomplished by peaceful means if possible. Rooted in the postwar structure of international politics, the Cold War for more than four decades stubbornly refused to evolve into a warm peace. The Cold War could not end until the structure that sustained it began to erode. Bipolarity worked against ditente in the 1970s. The changing structure of international politics worked for ditente in the 1980s. Structural change begins in a system's unit, and then unit-level and structural causes interact. We know from structural theory that states strive to maintain their positions in the system. Thus, in their twilight years great powers try to arrest or reverse their decline. We need to look only at the twentieth century for examples. In 1914, Austria-Hungary preferred to fight
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an unpromising war rather than risk the internal disintegration that a greater Serbia would threaten. Britain and France continued to act as though they were great powers, and struggled to bear the expense of doing so, well into the 1 9 5 0 ~ . At ' ~ the end of that decade, when many Americans thought that we were losing ground to the Soviet Union, John F. Kennedy appealed to the nation with the slogan, "Let's get the country moving again." And Defense Secretary Dick Cheney resisted a 50 percent cut in defense spending spread throughout the 1990s with the argument that this "would give us the defense budget for a second-class power, the budget of an America in decline. " l 6 The political and economic reconstruction attempted by the Soviet Union followed in part from external causes. Gorbachev's expressed wish to see the Soviet Union "enter the new millennium as a great and flourishing state" suggests this." Brezhnev's successors, notably Andropov and Gorbachev, realized that the Soviet Union could no longer support a first-rate military establishment on the basis of a third-rate economy. Economic reorganization, and the reduction of imperial burdens, became an externally imposed necessity, which in turn required internal reforms. For a combination of internal and external reasons, Soviet leaders tried to reverse their country's precipitous fall in international standing but did not succeed.
T h e Rise a n d Fall of Great P o w e r s
In the fairly near future, say ten to twenty years, three political units may rise to great-power rank: Germany or a West European state, Japan, and China. In a shorter time, the Soviet Union fell from the ranks, making the structure of international politics hard to define in the present and difficult to discern in the future. This section asks how the structure of international politics is likely to change. The Soviet Union had, and Russia continues to have, impressive military capabilities. But great powers do not gain and retain their rank by excelling in one way or another. Their rank depends on how they score on a combination of the following items: size of population and territory, resource endowment, economic capability, military strength, political stability and competence. The Soviet Union, like Tsarist Russia before it, was a lopsided great power, compensating for economic weakness with political discipline, military strength, and a rich territorial endowment. Nevertheless, greatpower status cannot be maintained without a certain economic capability. In a conventional world, one would simply say that the years during which Russia with its many weaknesses will count as a great power are numbered, and that the numbers are pretty small ones. Although Russia has more than enough military capability, technology advances rapidly, and Russia cannot keep pace. In a nuclear world, however, the connection between a country's economic and technological capability, on the one hand, and its military capability, on the other, is loosened.
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With conventional weapons, rapid technological change intensifies competition and makes estimating the military strengths of different countries difficult. In 1906, for example, the British Dyeadnought, with the greater range and firepower of its guns, made older battleships obsolete. With nuclear weapons, however, short of a breakthrough that would give the United States either a first-strike capability or an effective defense, Russia need not keep pace militarily with American technology. As Bernard Brodie put it: "Weapons that do not have to fight their like do not become useless because of the advent of newer and superior types."18 Since America's nuclear weapons are not able to fight Russia's, the strategies of the two countries are decoupled. Each country can safely follow a deterrent strategy no matter what the other may do.19 In contrast, the development of either a first-strike capability or an effective strategic defense would carry the world back to conventional times: weapons would once again be pitted against weapons. All of the parties to the strategic competition would again become concerned over, or obsessed with, the balance of advantage between offensive and defensive forces. Worry about the possibly uneven development of weapons would drive competition to high intensity. A country with a decisive but possibly fleeting offensive advantage would be tempted to strike before another country could find ways of safeguarding its forces. A country with an effective defense, fearing that an adversary might find ways to overcome it, would be tempted to launch a preventive blow. Fortunately, as far ahead as the imagination can reach, no offensive or defensive breakthrough that would negate deterrent forces is in sight. So long as a country can retaliate after being struck, or appears to be able to do so, its nuclear forces cannot be made obsolete by an adversary's technological advances. With deterrence dominant, a second-strike force need only be a small one, and it is easy to say how large the small force needs to be: large enough to sustain a first strike without losing the ability to retaliate with some tens of warheads. Both the United States and the Soviet Union have long had warheads and delivery systems that far exceed the requirement of deterrence. Moreover, deterrent strategies make large conventional forces irrelevant. They need only be big enough to require an adversary to attack on a scale that reveals the extent of its aggressive intentions. A trip-wire force is the only conventional component that a deterrent nuclear strategy requires.20 Nuclear weaponry favors status-quo countries by enabling them to concentrate attention on their economies rather than on their military forces. This is good news for a country in straitened circumstances. By relying on deterrence, Russia can concentrate on turning resources in the military sector of her economy - a favored and presumably rather efficient one - to civilian uses. Nuclear weaponry widens the range within which national economic capabilities may vary before the boundary between the great and the major powers is reached. Nuclear weapons alone do not make states into great powers. Britain and France did not become great powers when they became
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nuclear ones. Russia will not remain a great power unless it is able to use its resources effectively in the long run. While it is trying to do so, its large population, vast resources, and geographic presence in Europe and Asia compensate for its many weaknesses. Russia's vulnerabilities are low, as is its need for Third-World intervention forces. The ability of Russia to play a military role beyond its borders is low, yet nuclear weapons ensure that no state can challenge it. Short of disintegration, Russia will remain a great power - indeed a great defensive power, as the Russian and Soviet states were through most of their history. How does the weakened condition of Russia affect the structure of international politics? The answer is that bipolarity endures, but in an altered state. Bipolarity continues because militarily Russia can take care of itself and because no other great powers have yet emerged. Some of the implications of bipolarity, however, have changed. Throughout the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union held each other in check. With the waning of Soviet power, the United States is no longer held in check by any other country or combination of countries. According to Herbert Butterfield, Franqois FCnClon, a French theologian and political counselor who died in 1715, was the first person to understand balance of power as a recurring phenomenon rather than as a particular and ephemeral condition. He believed that a country wielding overwhelming power could not for long be expected to behave with m ~ d e r a t i o nBalance-of-power .~~ theory leads one to predict that other countries, alone or in concert, will try to bring American power into balance. What are the possibilities? Because nuclear weapons alter the relation between economic capability and military power, a country with well less than half of the economic capability of the leading producer can easily compete militarily if it adopts a status-quo policy and a deterrent strategy. Conversely, the leading country cannot use its economic superiority to establish military dominance, or to gain strategic advantage, over its great-power rivals. Can one then say that military force has lost its usefulness or simply become irrelevant? Hardly. Nuclear weapons do, however, narrow the purposes for which strategic power can be used. No longer is it useful for taking others' territory or for defending one's own. Nuclear weapons bend strategic forces to one end: deterring attacks on a country's vital interests. Partly because strategic weapons serve that end and no other, peace has held at the center of international politics through five postwar decades, while wars have often raged at the periphery. Nuclear weapons have at once secured the vital interests of states possessing them and upheld the international order. Nuclear countries can neither gain nor lose much in military conflicts with one another. Winning big, because it risks nuclear retaliation, becomes too dangerous to contemplate. George Ball has labelled the retaliatory threat a "cosmic bluff,"22 but who will call it? Nothing that might be gained by force is worth risking the destruction of one's cities even if the attacker somehow knew that the attacked would be unlikely to retaliate. Nuclear
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weaponry solves the credibility problem; put differently, nuclear weapons create their own credibility. The mere possibility of nuclear use causes extreme caution all around. Logic says that once the deterrent threat has failed, carrying it out at the risk of one's own destruction is irrational. But logic proves unpersuasive because a would-be attacker cannot be sure that logic will hold. an underlying stillness at the center of interNuclear weapons national politics that made the sometimes frenzied military preparations of the United States and the Soviet Union pointless, and efforts to devise scenarios for the use of their nuclear weapons bizarre. Representative Helen Delich Bentley remarked in the fall of 1989 that, "after having spent more than $1 trillion for defense in the last 10 years, we find ourselves not stronger but greatly ~ e a k e n e d . "She ~ ~ was right. Our most recent military buildup, beginning with the Carter administration and running through most of Reagan's, was worse than irrelevant because it burned up resources that could have safely been put to constructive use. If the leaders of a country understand the implications of nuclear weapons, they will see that with them they can enjoy a secure peace at reasonable cost. Because nuclear weapons widen the range of economic capabilities within which great powers and would-be great powers can effectively compete, the door to the great-power club will swing open if the European Community (EC), Germany, China, or Japan knock on it.24Whether or not they do so is partly a matter of decision: the decision by Japan and Germany to equip themselves as great powers or, in the case of Western Europe, the collective decision to become a single state. But in political as in other realms, choices are seldom entirely free. Late in the nineteenth century, the United States faced such a decision. Economically it qualified as a great power; militarily it chose not to become one. Some observers thought that the Spanish-American War marked America's coming of age as a great power. But no state lacking the military ability to compete with other great powers has ever been ranked among them. America's ability to do so remained latent. We entered World War I belatedly, and then we depended heavily on the matkriel of our allies. In his memoirs, Lloyd George remarked that in the great battles of April to June 1918, American aviators flew French planes. He added that the "light and medium artillery used up to the end of the War by the American Army was supplied by the French. The heaviest artillery was supplied by the British. No field guns of American pattern or manufacture fired a shot in the War. The same thing applies to tanksn2' At the end of World War 11, the United States dismantled its military machine with impressive - or alarming - rapidity, which seemed to portend a retreat from international affairs. Quickly, however, the world's woes pressed upon us, and our leaders saw that without our constructive efforts the world would not become one in which we could safely and comfortably live. Some countries may strive to become great powers; others may wish to avoid doing so. The choice, however, is a constrained one. Because of the extent of their interests, larger units existing in a contentious arena tend to
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take on system-wide tasks. As the largest powers in the system, the United States and the Soviet Union found that they had global tasks to perform and global interests to mind. In discussing the likely emergence of new great powers, I concentrate on Japan as being by population and product the next in line. When Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945, Homer Bigart of the New York Herald Tribune wrote that, "Japan, paying for her desperate throw of the dice at Pearl Harbor, passed from the ranks of the major powers at 9:05 a.m. today."26 In 1957, when Carter, Herz, and Ranney published the third edition of their Major Foreign power^,^' Japan was not among them. In 1964, projecting national economic growth rates to see what countries might become great powers by the end of the century, I failed even to consider Japan. Yet now Japan is ready to receive the mantle if only it will reach for it. Much in Japan's institutions and behavior supports the proposition that it will once again take its place among the great powers. In most of the century since winning its Chinese War of 1894-95, Japan has pressed for preeminence in Asia, if not beyond. From the 1970s onward, Japan's productivity and technology have extended its influence worldwide. Mercantilist policies enhance the role of the state, and Japan's policies have certainly been mercantilist. Miyohei Shinohara, former head of the economics section of the Japanese Economic Planning Agency, has succinctly explained Japan's policy: The problem of classical thinking undeniably lies in the fact that it is essentially "static" and does not take into account the possibility of a dynamic change in the comparative advantage or disadvantage of industries over a coming 10- or 20-year period. To take the place of such a traditional theory, a new policy concept needs to be developed to deal with the possibility of intertemporal dynamic d e v e l ~ p m e n t . ~ ~ The concept fits Japan's policy, but is not a new one. Friedrich List argued in the middle of the nineteenth century that a state's trade policy should vary with its stage of economic development. He drew sharp distinctions between exchange value and productive power, between individual and national interests, and between cosmopolitan and national principles. Free trade serves world interests by maximizing exchange value, but whether free trade serves a nation's interest depends on its situation.29 States with primitive economies should trade their primary products freely and use foreign earnings to begin to industrialize. At that stage, protective tariffs work against the development of manufactures. A state a t an intermediate level of development should protect only those infant industries that have a fair chance of achieving a comparative advantage. Such a state should aim not to maximize "value" but to develop its "productive power." Exposed to competition from states that are more advanced economically, a state's industries may die in infancy. Where potential productive power exists, a state should use tariffs to promote its development. List likens nations who
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slavishly follow "the School's" free-trade theory to "the patient who followed a printed prescription and died of a misprint."" To clinch the point that cheap imports work against the development of a nation's industries, he observed that "the worst of all things" would be for American farmers to be given their manufactured goods by England.31Exchange value would be maximized at the expense of America's future productive power.'2 At the final stage of development, attained in List's day only by England, free trade is again the sensible policy. "For such a country," he wrote, "the cosmopolitan and the national principle are one and the same thing."" With rapid technological change, one must wonder whether the final stage ever arrives. List, however, appeared to believe, as Smith did earlier and Keynes did later, that in a distant day nations would have accumulated all of the riches to which their resources entitled them.j4 The United States acquiesced in Japan's protectionist policies when Japan was in List's intermediate stage of development, but objected more and more strenuously as its economy became more fully developed. Some Japanese and American voices have joined in urging Japan to loosen its economic policies, although most of the Japanese voices have been muted. A policy report of The Japan Forum on International Relations suggested that the government modify its policies to overcome its mercantilist reputation, to divorce its overseas development assistance from commercial interests that appear self-serving, But will Japan do so? Major changes and to drop "infant industry p~licies."~' of policy would be required. Japan's imports of products that it manufactures have, according to Clyde Prestowitz, been "nearly nil." According to Lester Thurow, rather than allowing foreign companies to establish a Japanese market for products of superior technology, the Japanese have welcomed such products "only when they have lost the technological edge."j6 Japan might take effective steps toward opening her economy, but I doubt it. Shinohara accepts that as "a new major economic power" Japan has an obligation to work "for stable growth of the world economy." But doing so, he adds, does not require Japan to drop policies designed "to nourish infant industries over a span of 5-10 years." A "degree of protection may be justified." In a dynamic world, "competition tends to become brutal," and theories "framed in a surrealistic and hypothetical world when Adam Smith and David Ricardo were predominant are no longer applicable."" Whether culturally ingrained or rooted in the structure of government, Japan's economic policy is not likely to take a new direction. Why should more than marginal concessions be made, when the policies Japan has followed have been so successful? If a country has followed one road to success, why should it turn onto another one? The United States may accuse Japan of unfair trade practices, or the United States may instead, as Bruce Scott suggests, recognize that Japan has a strategy of "creating advantages rather than accepting the status quo." Simply put, its "approach may be more competitive than ours.".'8 The likelier course for Japan to follow is to extend its economic policies regionally. Thus the policy announced by Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI)Minister Tamura in Bangkok in January of 1987 called
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for integrating other Asian nations, especially the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), more closely with Japan's economy. The five-year economic plan, released by the Economic Planning Agency in May of 1988, calls, in the words of David Arase, "for the construction of an international division of labor through more imports, more FDI, and more ODA (Foreign Direct Investment and Official Development Assistance)." Japan now uses ODA, not simply to develop new sources of supply and to open new markets, but more broadly "to integrate the Asian-Pacific region under Japanese leadership." The "flying geese" pattern of development and the notion of an "Asian Brain" that manipulates "capital, technology, and trade to construct a regional division of labor tightly coordinated from Tokyo," are made explicit in a major Economic Planning Agency policy study.39 Japan's successful management of its economy is being followed by the building of a regional economic bastion. Quite a few Japanese talk and write as though this represents their future. Other leading states have taken notice. The United States made a defensive gesture of despair by putting the "Super-301" retaliation trade-sanction clause in the 1988 Omnibus Trade andcompetitive Act to be used as a lever for the opening of Japan's economy more widely to America's - and of course to others' - exports, and the EC strove to achieve economic unity in 1992 partly out of fear that a disunited Europe could not stand up to Japanese and American competition. Economic competition is often as keen as military competition, and since nuclear weapons limit the use of force among great powers at the strategic level, we may expect economic and technological competition among them to become more intense. Thus, as Gorbachev reminded the Central Committee in May of 1986, the Soviet Union is "surrounded not by invincible armies but by superior economies."40 One may wonder, however, why less concern for military security should be followed by more concern for the ability of one's country to compete economically. Should one not expect reduced concern for security to go hand-in-hand with reduced concern for one's competitive position? Among many negative answers that can be given to this question, I emphasize four strong ones.
1. Despite changes that constantly take place in the relations of nations, the basic structure of international politics continues to be anarchic. Each state fends for itself with or without the cooperation of others. The leaders of states and their followers are concerned with their standings, that is, with their positions vis-a-vis one another. Michael Mastanduno has related the results of Robert Reich's asking various groups whether they would prefer that over the next decade Japan's economy grow by 75 percent and America's by 25 percent, or that Japan's economy grow by 10.3 percent and America's by 10 percent. Of six different audiences, only the one made up of economists preferred the former, and they did so unanimously.41 (Clearly, Friedrich List and Bruce Scott were not present.)
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2. One may wonder why, with worries over military security reduced, and with the disappearance of the Soviet Union, concern for relative gains should take precedence over concern for absolute ones. With a 75 percent and 25 percent increase in production respectively, Japan and the United States would both be markedly better off at the end of a decade. With a 10.3 percent and 10 percent gain, both countries would be just about stagnant. On the face of it, the preference of five out of six groups for the latter condition appears to be irrational. But the "face" is merely a mask disguising international-political reality. Friedrich Engels's understanding that economic competition is ultimately more important than military competition is reflected in his remark that industrial espionage was in his day a more serious business, and a business more fiercely conducted, than military espionage. Technical and economic advances accumulate. One technological breakthrough may lead to others. Economic growth rates compound. By projecting adjusted national growth rates of gross domestic product (GDP) from the period 1950 to 1980 into the year 2010 using 1975 international dollars, William Baumol and his associates arrived at an expected GDP per capita of $19,000 for the United States and of $31,000 for Japan. That disparity will result if the United States grows at 1.90 percent yearly and Japan at 4.09 percent. Yet if the United States should raise its average annual rate from 1.90 to 3.05 percent, the two countries would be tied for first place among the sixteen countries for which calculations are shown.41 3. Prosperity and military power, although connected, cannot be equated. Yet with the use of military force for consequential advantage negated at least among nuclear powers, the more productive and the more technologically advanced countries have more ways of influencing international outcomes than do the laggards. America's use of economic means to promote its security and other interests throughout the past five decades is sufficient illustration. The reduction of military worries will focus the minds of national leaders on their technological and economic successes and failures. 4. Uncertainty is a synonym for life, and nowhere is uncertainty greater than in international politics. Anarchy places a premium on foresight. If one cannot know what is coming, developing a greater resource base for future use takes precedence over present prosperity. Reflecting Reich's informal finding, a Newsweek/Gallup poll of September 1989 showed that 52 percent of Americans thought the economic power of Japan was a greater threat to the United States than the military power of the Soviet U n i ~ n . Whatever ~' the limitations on the national use of force, the international political realm continues to be an intensely competitive one. Concern over relative gains continues to be the natural preoccupation of states.44 If Japan's methods continue to prove successful, other countries will emulate or counter them. Many have argued that, as Richard Barnet has put it, with the "globalization" of the economy, states have "lost the power to manage stable economies within their frontier^."^" Japan certainly has not and is not likely to
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do so. To manage "globalization," leading states are likely to strengthen their economic influence over states on which they depend or to which they are closely connected. Since incentives to compete are strong, the likely outcome is a set of great powers forming their own regional bases in Asia, Europe, and America, with Russia as a military power on the economic fringe.46 Japan will lead the east Asian bloc, now forming; questions about China's and northeast Asia's roles are as yet unresolved. Western Europe, including the EC, trades increasingly among the countries that the EC comprises, while its global imports and exports are gradually declining4' And if the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) succeeds, the United States will be at the center of the world's largest economic bloc with presently about six trillion dollars in annual trade. Countries and regions that lag in the race will become more and more dependent on others.
National Preferences a n d International Pressures Economically, Japan's power has grown and spread remarkably. But does that indicate a desire to play the role of a great power? Japan's concerted regional activity, its seeking and gaining prominence in such bodies as the IMF and the World Bank, and its obvious pride in economic and technological achievements all indicate that it does. Confidence in economic ability and technical skill leads a country to aspire to a larger political role. "Both Britain and the United States," Yojiro Eguchi of the Nomura Research Institute remarked in 1974, "created and ran international systems with themselves at the top when they were leading creditors." Noting that in ten years Japan's external assets would far exceed America's at their peak, he concluded that "now it is Japan's turn to come up with an international system suited to itself."48 No country has a better claim than Japan to being a larger partner in managing the world's economy. Like Japan, Germany has recently shown an inclination to play a more prominent role in the world. President Bush described the Houston meeting of heads of government held in July of 1990 as the first economic summit conference of the "post-postwar era." Chancellor Kohl emerged at the summit as a dominant leader, and Prime Minister Thatcher noted that, "there are three regional groups at this summit, one based on the dollar, one on ~ ~ terms of German unification, the yen, one on the D e u t ~ c h m a r k . "The which were to have been worked out by the four victors of World War I1 together with the two Germanies, were instead negotiated by Kohl and Gorbachev at a meeting in the Caucasus. West Germany is the leading state in Europe in both economic and conventional military power. East Germany added a gross domestic product only one sixth as large as West Germany's, but this is far short of its potential. For some years the eastern part of Germany will be a drain on its economy. For Germany's place in the world, how much does that matter? We often underestimate the economic disparities among great powers now, as we did in prenuclear days. To cite
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a striking example, Japan and the United States in 1940 had GNPs of $9 billion and $100 billion, respectively, and per capita incomes of $126 and $754." In the prenuclear era, a poor country aspiring to a place among the great ones had to discipline its people and harness its resources to its military aims. In the nuclear era, countries with smaller economic bases can more easily achieve great-power status. Although a united Germany's GDP is smaller than Japan's, in one sense Germany is already more of an economic presence globally than Japan, and even rivals the United States. In four of the seven years from 1986 through 1992, Germany's exports were larger than America's, and they were always larger than Japan's. (See Table 1.) Moreover, Germany is in the best position to play a leading role in eastern Europe, Ukraine, and Russia. Newsweek quoted a top adviser to Chancellor Kohl as saying, "We want to lead. Perhaps in time the United States will take care of places like Central America, and we will handle eastern Europe."" Ironically, Japan in Asia and Germany in eastern Europe are likely in the next century to replay roles in some ways similar to those they played earlier. Table 1: Exports in Billions of U.S. Dollars
U.S. Germany lawn
227.16 243.33 210.76
254.12 294.37 231.29
322.43 323.32 264.86
363.81 341.23 273.93
393.59 410.10 287.58
421.73 402.84 314.79
447.47 422.27 340.00
Source: These data are based on 1975 (Japan), 1980 (Germany),and 1987 (U.S.) prices as mdexed by the IMF, International Financial Statistics, Vol. XLV, N o . 1 (Washington, D.C.: International p. 72; and Vol. XLVI, No. 4 (April 1993), p. 5 8 . Monetary Fund, J a n ~ ~ a 1992), ry
The effect of national economic capability varies over the centuries. Earlier, enough national productivity to sustain a large military force, however much the people had to stint themselves, could make a state a great power. Now, without a considerable economic capability no state can hope to sustain a world role, as the fate of the Soviet Union has shown. In the mercantilist era, international economics was national politics. During the nineteenth century, the link was weakened, but no longer. Oligopolistic firms care about relative gains and market shares. Similarly, states in today's international politics are not merely trying to maximize value in the present but also to secure their future positions. As I have said before, the distinction between high and low politics, once popular among international political economists, is misplaced. In self-help systems, how one has to help oneself varies as circumstances change. The increased international activity of Japan and Germany reflects the changing structure of international politics. The increase of a country's economic capabilities to the great-power level places it at the center of regional and global affairs. It widens the range of a state's interests and increases their
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importance. The high volume of a country's external business thrusts it ever more deeply into world affairs. In a self-help system, the possession of most but not all of the capabilities of a great power leaves a state dependent on others and vulnerable to those who have the instruments that the lesser state lacks. Even though one may believe that fears of nuclear blackmail are misplaced, will Japan and Germany be immune to them? In March of 1988, Prime Minister Takeshita called for a defensive capability matching Japan's economic poweraS2Whether or not he intended to, he was saying that Japan should present itself in great-power panoply before the nations of the world. A great power's panoply includes nuclear weapons. Countries have always competed for wealth and security, and the competition has often led to conflict. Why should the future be different from the past? Given the expectation of conflict, and the necessity of taking care of one's interests, one may wonder how a state with the economic capability of a great power can refrain from arming itself with the weapons that have served so well as the great deterrent. Since the 1950s, West European countries have feared that the American deterrent would not cover their territories. Since the 1970s, Japan has at times expressed similar worries. The increase of Soviet Far Eastern Forces in the late 1970s led Japan to reexamine its view of the Soviet threat. It is made uneasy now by the near-doubling of China's military budget between 1988 and 1993. Its three-million-strong army, undergoing modernization, and the growth of its sea and air power-projection capabilities produce apprehension in all of China's neighbors and add to the sense of instability in a region where issues of sovereignty and territorial disputes abound. The Korean peninsula has more military forces per square kilometer than any other portion of the globe. Taiwan is an unending source of tension. Disputes exist between Japan and Russia over the Kurile Islands, and between Japan and China over the Senkaku Islands. China and Britain have had trouble agreeing on the future of Hong Kong. Cambodia is a troublesome problem for both Vietnam and China. Half a dozen countries lay claim to all or some of the Spratly Islands, strategically located and supposedly rich in oil. The presence of China's ample nuclear forces and the presumed development of North Korea's, combined with the drawdown of American military forces, can hardly be ignored by Japan, the less so since economic conflicts with the United States cast doubt on the reliability of American military guarantees. Reminders of Japan's dependence and vulnerability multiply in large and small ways. In February of 1992, Prime Minister Miyazawa derided America's labor force for its alleged lack of a "work ethic," even though productivity per man-hour is higher in America than it is in Japan. This aroused Senator Ernest F. Rollings, who responded by fliply referring to the atomic bomb as, "Made in America by lazy and illiterate Americans, and tested in Japan."" His remark made more Japanese wonder whether they indeed may require a nuclear military capability of their own. Instances in which Japan feels dependent and vulnerable will increase in number. For example, as rumors about North Korea's developing nuclear capabilities
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gained credence, Japan became acutely aware of its lack of observation satellites. Uncomfortable dependencies and perceived vulnerabilities will lead Japan to acquire greater military capabilities, even though many Japanese may prefer not to. In recent years, the desire of Japan's leaders to play a militarily more assertive role has become apparent, a natural response to Japan's enhanced economic standing. Again the comparison with America at the turn of the previous century is striking, when presidents wanted to develop America's military forces (and also to annex more countries). Congress served as a brake; s4 in Japan, public opinion now serves the same purpose. Yet the key question is not whether the Japanese people wish their country to become a great power. The key question is whether its people and its leaders will begin to feel that Japan needs the range of capabilities possessed by other countries in its region, and in the world, in order, as Andrew Hanami has put it, to cope defensively and preventively with present and possible future problems and threats." The many American voices that have urged Japan to carry a larger share of her security burden, and the increasing tilt of American public opinion against Japan, have led her leaders to wonder how far they can count on the United States for protection. In the emerging multipolar world, can Japan expect to continue to rent American military forces by paying about 60 percent of their cost, while relying on the American strategic deterrent? The great powers of the world must expect to take care of themselves. Yoichi Funahashi has praised Japan for fulfilling its international responsibilities in non-military ways. In his view, Japan is a "global civilian power," taking its place in a world in which humane internationalism is replacing the heavily military politics of the Cold War." One wonders. The United States put its security interests above its concern for economic competitiveness throughout the years of the Cold War. It no longer does so. As military worries fall, economic worries rise. Competition continues, and conflict turns increasingly on technological and economic issues. Conflict grows all the more easily out of economic competition because economic comparisons are easier to make than military ones. Militarily, one may wonder who is the stronger but, in a conventional world, will not find out until a war is fought. Economically, however, the consequences of price and quality differentials quickly become apparent. Decreased concern over security translates directly into increased concern over economic competitiveness because the United States is no longer so willing to subordinate the second concern to the first one. For a country to choose not to become a great power is a structural anomaly. For that reason, the choice is a difficult one to sustain. Sooner or later, usually sooner, the international status of countries has risen in step with their material resources. Countries with great-power economies have become great powers, whether or not reluctantly. Japanese and German reasons for hesitating to take the final step into the great-power arena are obvious and need not be rehearsed. Yet when a country receives less attention and respect and gets its way less often than it feels it should, internal inhibitions about becoming
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a great power are likely to turn into public criticisms of the government for not taking its proper place in the world. Pride knows no nationality. How long can Japan and Germany live alongside other nuclear states while denying themselves similar capabilities? Conflicts and crises are certain to make them aware of the disadvantages of being without the military instruments that other powers command. Japanese and German nuclear inhibitions arising from World War I1 will not last indefinitely; one might expect them to expire as generational memories fade. The probability of both countries' becoming nuclear powers in due course is all the higher because they can so easily do so. There is only one nuclear technology, and those who have harnessed the atom for peaceful purposes can quickly move into the nuclear military business. Allocating costs between nuclear and conventional armaments is difficult, the more so since some weapons systems have both conventional and nuclear uses. Everyone agrees, however, that nuclear weaponry accounts for the lesser part of a country's defense budget. For Germany and Japan the problems of becoming a nuclear power are not economic or technological; they are political. In time, internal inhibitions can be overcome, but other countries will be made uneasy if Germany or Japan become nuclear powers. We have been through this before. Americans treated the prospect of China's becoming a nuclear power as almost unthinkable. Yet China and other countries have become nuclear powers without making the world a more dangerous one. Why should nuclear weapons in German and Japanese hands be especially worrisome? Nuclear weapons have encouraged cautious behavior by their possessors and deterred any of them from threatening others' vital interests. What reasons can there be for expecting Germany and Japan to behave differently? Some countries will fear the effects that may follow if Germany or Japan go nuclear, but who will try to stop them? A preventive strike, launched before any warheads can possibly have been made, would be required. Israel's destruction of Iraq's nuclear facility in June of 1981 set the precedent. Would anyone want to follow it by striking at Germany or Japan? The question answers itself. Moreover, the internal and external problems of becoming a nuclear power are not as great as they once were. Israel for years denied the existence of its nuclear forces, but no longer bothers to lie about them. One may wonder whether Japan, now stockpiling plutonium, is already a nuclear power or is content to remain some months or moments from becoming one. Consistently since the mid-1950s, the Japanese government has defined all of the weapons of the Self-Defense Forces as conforming to constitutional requirements. Nuclear weapons purely for defense would be deemed con~titutional.~~ Japan has to worry about China, and China has to worry about Japan, while both are enmeshed in the many problems of their region. Yet one often hears this question asked: Why should Japan want nuclear weapons? To argue that it does not misses the point. Any country in Japan's position is bound to become increasingly worried about its security, the more so because China is rapidly becoming a great power in every dimension: internal economy, external trade, and military capability.
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From 1965 to 1980, China's annual economic growth rate averaged 6.8 percent and from 1980 to 1990, 9.5 percent. Western economists estimate that China can sustain growth rates between 6 and 9 percent without serious inflationary problems. An economy that grows at 8 percent yearly doubles in size every nine years. The World Bank estimated that China's GDP in 1990 was $364,900 million." Data on China are suspect, but to any periodic visitor the rapidity of its material progress is obvious. If it manages to maintain an effective government and a measure of economic freedom for its industrious people, within a decade it will be in the great-power ranks. Modernizing its three-million-strong army, buying ships and airplanes abroad and building its own as well, China will rapidly gain in power-projection capability. America, with the reduction of its forces, a Cold War-weary people, and numerous neglected problems at home, cannot hope to balance the growing economic and military might of a country of some 1.2 billion people while attending to other security interests. Unless Japan responds to the growing power of China, China will dominate its region and become increasingly influential beyond it. Although most Japanese now shy away from the thought that their country will once again be a world power, most Chinese do not. Balanceof-power politics in one way or another characterize all self-help systems. Nations have to make choices. They can always choose not to develop counterweights to the dominant power, presently the United States, or not to balance against a rapidly growing one, such as China. India, Pakistan, perhaps North Korea, and China all wield nuclear military force capable of deterring others from threatening their vital interests. Increasingly Japan will be pressed to follow suit and also to increase its conventional abilities to protect its interests abroad. Two points about nuclear weapons remain. First, some commentators have asserted that Japan and Germany cannot become nuclear powers because they have too little land and too great a concentration of targets on it. Roger Hilsman has claimed that "no nation with territory that is less than continental size can now play the nuclear game." He argues that Japan, ~ direct access Germany, and England have "come to understand t h i ~ . " 'But to the oceans solves the problem of force vulnerability for all three of the countries mentioned, and target concentration does not matter since it is easy to make enough warheads to cover the targets one cares to, no matter how dispersed they may be. Territorially small countries are no worse off than big ones. Invulnerability of delivery systems, not dispersal of targets, is the crucial consideration. Second, an argument of a different sort holds that by monopolizing certain technologies, Japan can manipulate the military balance to its advantage. It can substitute economic for military means. Diet member Shintaro Ishihara is one of the authors of The Japan That Can Say No, a work that became famous in the United States before it was published in Japan. He advanced the notion that if "Japan sold chips to the Soviet Union and stopped selling them to the United States, this would upset the entire military
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balance." But because nuclear weapons resist obsolescence, the act he imagines would not have the effects he foresees. Ishihara, nevertheless, asserts more broadly that "economic warfare is the basis for existence in the free world," and believes that in that kind of struggle there "is no hope for the U.S."60 Countries naturally play their strong suits up and play their weak ones down. Both Stalin and Mao belittled nuclear weaponry when only the United States had it. Neither superiority in the chip business nor a broader technological lead will enable Japan to secure the sources of its oil. Nor will conventional forces, along with economic superiority, substitute for nuclear deterrence. The case of Western Europe remains. Economically and militarily the possibilities are easily drawn. The achievement of unity would produce an instant great power, complete with second-strike nuclear forces. But politically the European case is complicated. Many believe that the EC has moved so far toward unity that it cannot pull back, at least not very far back. That is probably true, but it is also probably true that it has moved so far toward unity that it can go no farther. The easier steps toward unity come earlier, the harder ones later, and the hardest of all at the end. Economic unity is not easily achieved, but the final decision to form a single, effective political entity that controls foreign and military policies as well as economic ones is the most difficult, made more so because the number of states the EC comprises has now grown to twelve, and an additional four have candidate status. Especially in Britain and France, many believe that their states will never finally surrender their sovereignty. Indeed, the Maastricht Treaty on European Union had trouble securing the assent of Denmark and France, and its economic and social provisions remain controversial in Britain. Common foreign and defense policies are to be concluded only by heavily qualified majorities, and the defense policies "of certain member states" are The Community's external policy thereby becomes nearly to be re~pected.~' a cipher. Germans may ultimately find that reunification and the renewed life of a great power are more invigorating than the struggles, complications, and compromises that come during, and would come after, the uniting of Western Europe. Despite severe difficulties, three factors may enable Western Europe to achieve political unity. The first is Germany, the second is Japan, and the third is the United States. Uneasiness over the political and economic clout of Germany, intensified by the possibility of its becoming a nuclear power, may produce the final ~ u s hto unification. And West Europeans, including many Germans, doubt their abilities to compete on even terms with Japan and America unless they are able to act as a political as well as an economic unit. Indeed, without political unification, economic unity will always be as impaired as it is now. If the EC fails to become a single ~oliticalentity, the emerging world will nevertheless be one of four or five great powers, whether the European one is called Germany or the United States of Europe. The next section asks what differences this will make in the behavior and interaction of states.
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Balance of Power Politics: Old Style, New Style The many who write of America's decline seem to believe that its fall is imminent. What promised to be the American century will be halved by Japan's remarkable economic resurgence, or so they say. Yet the economic and technological superiority of Japan over the United States is not foreordained. Technologically, Japan and the United States are about on a par; but in economic growth and technological progress the trend favors Japan. We should notice, however, that, with a low birth rate, essentially no immigration, and an aging population, productivity is the only road to growth unless more women can be effectively used in the workforce. And to increase production becomes more difficult as Japan approaches the limit of what present technology offers. Under these circumstances, high growth rates threaten to bring inflation. And since aging populations consume more and save less, Japan and the United States are likelier to converge in their growth rates than to diverge, with Japan moving rapidly to a position of economic superiority. One may expect the economic gap between America and Japan to narrow further, but more slowly, given America's impressive resource base and the tendency of countries to respond energetically to intimations of decline. One must be careful: American voices of doom in the 1950s had little effect on our policies until Sputnik was lofted in 1957. In the 1970s, the Soviet Union did not move to check its declining fortunes but tried, only to fail, in the 1980s. The United States in the 1980s concentrated on competing militarily - and pointlessly - with a moribund Soviet Union. In the 1990s, it will surely heed the economic and technological challenges of Japan. The structure of international politics is changing not because the United States suffered a serious decline, but because the Soviet Union did so, while Japan, China, and Western Europe continued to progress impressively. For some years to come and for better or worse, the United States will be the leading country economically as well as militarily. What about Germany? If Germany should become a great power, it would be at the bottom of the list. Japan, with about 60 percent of America's gross domestic product, can easily compete militarily. But can Germany, with about half of Japan's, do so? I believe that it can for two reasons, easily adduced from the second part of this essay. First, offensive and defensive advantage has been transformed by nuclear weapons into deterrent strength easily achieved. Second, an adequate economic base together with the ability to develop an area of operations beyond one's borders is enough to enable a country to vault into the great-power category. Germany is better placed than a British-French combination would be to achieve the second. Many possibilities are open. Germany's beginning to act as a great power may, instead of goading Western Europe to unite, cause Britain and France to do so. But the second possibility is even less likely than the unlikely first one. Changes spawn uncertainties and create difficulties, especially when the changes are structural ones. Germany, Japan, and Russia will have to relearn
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their old great-power roles, and the United States will have to learn a role it has never played before: namely, to coexist and interact with other great powers. The United States, once reflexively isolationist, after 1945 became reflexively interventionist, which we like to call "internationalism." Whether isolationist or internationalist, however, our policies have been unilaterally made. The country's involvement became global, but most of the decisions to act abroad were made without much prior consultation with other countries. This was entirely natural: Who pays the piper calls the tune. Decisions are made collectively only among near-equals. Events have rent the veil of internationalism that cloaked America's postwar policies. Watching the Germans directing Western policy toward the Soviet Union in the summer of 1990, Representative Lee Hamilton remarked that "this is an example of the new multi-polar world that's going to make us learn a new meaning for the word 'consult.' These days it doesn't mean us going to Europe and telling them what to do."62 In the spring of the same year, the United States tried to shape the charter of a new Bank for Eastern Europe because we would not enjoy there the veto over policies that we had in such organizations as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. This prompted a New York Times correspondent to remark that for "the first time in the postwar period, Washington is participating in the establishment of a multilateral lending institution that it will not control reflecting the decline of this country's relative global ~eight."~"he old and the new great powers will have to relearn old roles, or learn new ones, and figure out how to enact them on a shifting stage. New roles are hard to learn, and actors may trip when playing on unfamiliar sets. Under the circumstances, predictions about the fates of states and their systems become harder to make. Units in a self-help system engage in balancing behavior. With two great powers, balancing is done mainly by internal means. Allies have been useful and have therefore been wanted, but they were not essential in the security relations of the big two. Because one of the foundations of the postwar peace nuclear weapons - will remain, and one - bipolarity - will disappear, we have to compare the problems of balancing in conventional and nuclear worlds. In a bipolar-conventional world, a state has to estimate its strength only in relation to one other. In a multipolar-conventional world, difficulties multiply because a state has to compare its strength with a number of others and also has to estimate the strength of actual and potential coalitions. Moreover, in a conventional world, no one category of weapons dominates. States have to weigh the effectiveness of present weapons, while wondering about the effects that technological change may bring, and they have to prepare to cope with different strategies. "To be sure," Georg Simmel remarked, "the most effective presupposition for preventing struggle, the exact knowledge of the comparative strength of the two parties, is very often only to be obtained by the actual fighting out of the conflict."64 In a conventional world, miscalculation is hard to avoid. In a nuclear world one category of weapons is dominant. Comparing the strategic strength of nations is automatically accomplished once all of them
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have second-strike forces. Even should some states have larger and more varied strategic forces than others, all would effectively be at parity. The only way to move beyond second-strike forces is to create a first-strike capability or to put up an effective strategic defense. Since no one will fail to notice another state's performing either of those near-miracles, war through miscalculation is practically ruled out. Since no one has been able to figure out how to use strategic nuclear weapons other than for deterrence, nuclear weapons eliminate the thorny problems of estimating the present and future strengths of competing states and of trying to anticipate their strategies. And since nuclear states easily generate second-strike forces, they do not need one another's help at the strategic level. Strategically, nuclear weapons make alliances obsolete, just as General de Gaulle used to claim.6s Nuclear weapons eliminate neither the use of force nor the importance of balancing behavior. They do limit force at the strategic level to a deterrent role, make estimating the strategic strength of nations a simple task, and make balancing easy to do. Multipolarity abolishes the stark symmetry and pleasing simplicity of bipolarity, but nuclear weapons restore both of those qualities to a considerable extent. Nuclear weapons have yet another beneficial effect on the relations of the nations that have them. Conventional states shy away from cooperating for the achievement of even large absolute gains if their uneven division would enable some to turn their disproportionate gain into a military advantage. Because states with second-strike forces cannot convert economic gain into strategic advantage, an important part of the relative-absolute gains problem is negated. And since nuclear countries cannot make important gains through military conquest without inviting retaliation, the importance of conventional forces is reduced. The elimination of one and the reduction of another military concern means that the relative-absolute gains problem will be rooted much more in worries about how the distribution of gains from joint ventures may affect the economic and technological progress of competing states. Economic competition will provide plentiful sources of conflict, but we should prefer them to military ones. Balance-of-power theory leads one to expect that states, if they are free to do so, will flock to the weaker side. The stronger, not the weaker side, threatens them, if only by pressing its preferred policies on other states. John Dryden gave the thought poetic expression: But when the chosen people grew more strong, The rightful cause at length became the ~ r o n g . ~ " Though this was written three centuries ago as a comment on Great Britain, according to Anthony Lewis, the Israeli government found that the couplet fit its case closely enough to merit proscription for Arab readers. Even if the powerful state's intentions are wholly benign, less powerful states will, from their different historical experiences, geographic locations, and economic interests, interpret events differently and often prefer different policies. Thus within NATO, Western European countries differed with American
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interpretations of the Soviet Union's behavior, the nature of the threats it entailed, and the best means of dealing with them. In a multipolar world, the United States as the strongest power will often find other states edging away from it: Germany moving toward Eastern Europe and Russia, and Russia moving toward Germany and Japan.67 Yet despite the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the WTO, American policy continues to bank on NATO's continued cohesion and influence. In the words of Secretary of State James Baker, NATO "provides one of the indispensable foundations for a stable European security e n v i r ~ n m e n t . " ~ ~ But we must wonder how long NATO will last as an effective organization. As is often said, organizations are created by their enemies. Alliances are organized against a perceived threat. We know from balance-of-power theory as well as from history that war-winning coalitions collapse on the morrow of victory, the more surely if it is a decisive one. Internal and external examples abound. In Britain, large parliamentary majorities make party discipline difficult to maintain. In Poland, Solidarity struggled to prevail; once it did so, it split into various factions. Coalitions formed to counter Napoleon defeated him twice and collapsed both times. Victory in World War I1 turned wartime allies into peacetime adversaries. As the Soviet Union began to unravel, Josef Joffe, an astute observer of American and European affairs, saw that the United States would soon be "set to go home." He asked, "who will play the role of protector and paci' and Russia may for a time look on fier once America is g ~ n e ? " ~Europe NATO, and on America's presence in Western Europe, as a stabilizing force in a time of rapid change. In an interim period, the continuation of NATO makes sense. In the long run, it does not. The presence of American forces at higher than token levels will become an irritant to European states, whose security is not threatened, and a burden to America acting in a world that is becoming more competitive politically and economically as it becomes less so militarily. How can an alliance endure in the absence of a worthy opponent? Ironically, the decline of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe entailed the decline of the United States in the West. Without the shared perception of a severe Soviet threat, NATO would never have been born. The Soviet Union created NATO, and the demise of the Soviet threat "freed" Europe, West as well as East. But freedom entails self-reliance. In this sense, both parts of Europe are now setting forth on the exhilarating but treacherous paths of freedom. In the not-very-long run, they will have to learn to take care of themselves or suffer the consequences. American withdrawal from Europe will be slower than the Soviet Union's. America, with its vast and varied capabilities, can still be useful to other NATO countries, and NATO is made up of willing members. NATO's days are not numbered, but its years are. Some hope that NATO will serve as an instrument for constraining a new Germany. But once the new Germany finds its feet, it will no more want to be constrained by the United States acting through NATO than by any other state.
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Conclusion A number of scholars have written suggestively about the relation between the standing of states and their propensity to fight. A.F.K. Organski and Robert Gilpin argue that peace prevails once one state establishes primacy. The hegemonic state lacks the need to fight, and other states lack the ability.'() Some states, however, may concert to challenge the superior one, and when leading states decline, other states rise to challenge them. Unrest at home may accompany the decline of states, tempting them to seek foreign wars in order to distract their people. O r they may take one last military fling hoping to recoup their fortunes. Japan, China, and Germany are now the rising states, and Russia the declining one. But even if they wished to, none could use military means for major political or economic purposes. In the presence of nuclear weapons, any challenge to a leading state, and any attempt to reverse a state's decline, has to rely on political and economic means. John Mueller believes that war among developed states became obsolescent after World War I1 for reasons that have little to do with nuclear weapons. War has lost its appeal, and "substantial agreement has risen around the twin propositions that prosperity and economic growth should be central national goals and that war is a particularly counterproductive device for achieving these goals."" Norman Angel1 was not wrong, but merely premature, when he concluded that wars would no longer be fought because they do not pay.72 John Mearsheimer, however, makes the telling point that, "if any war could have convinced Europeans to forswear conventional war, it should have been World War I, with its vast casualties." But then if Mearsheimer is right in believing that an "equality of power ... among the major powers" minimizes the likelihood of war, World War I should never have been fought." The opposing alliances were roughly equal in military strength, and their principal members understood this. Yet, as we well know, war is always possible among states armed only with conventional weapons. Some rulers will sooner or later convince themselves that subtle diplomacy will prevent opponents from uniting and that clever strategy will enable them to win a swift victory at an affordable price. Peace is sometimes linked to the presence of a hegemonic power, sometimes to a balance among powers. To ask which view is right misses the point. It does so for this reason: the response of other countries to one among them seeking or gaining preponderant power is to try to balance against it. Hegemony leads to balance, which is easy to see historically and to understand theoretically. That is now happening, but haltingly so because the United States still has benefits to offer and many other countries have become accustomed to their easy lives with the United States bearing many of their burdens. The preceding paragraph reflects international-political reality through all of the centuries we can contemplate. But what about the now-widespread
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and fewer authoritarian ones, the Wilsonian vision of a peaceful, stable, and just international order has become the appropriate one? Democratic states, like others, have interests and experience conflicts. The late Pierre BCrCgovoy, when he was prime minister of France, said in 1992 that a European power was needed "because it's unhealthy to have a single superpower in the He believed this not because the one superpower is undemocratic, but simply because it is super. The stronger get their way - not always, but more often than the weaker. Democratic countries, like others, are concerned with losing or gaining more in the competition among nations, a point richly illustrated by intra-EC politics. If democracies do not fight democracies, then one can say that conflict among them is at least benign. Unfortunately there are many problems with this view. Few cases in point have existed. When one notes that democracies have indeed sometimes fought other democracies, the proposition dissolves. The American-British War of 1812 was fought by the only two democratic states that existed, and conflict and bitterness between them persisted through the century and beyond. In the 1860s, the northern American democracy fought the southern one. Both parties to the Civil War set themselves up as distinct and democratic countries and the South's belligerence was recognized by other countries. An important part of the explanation for World War I is that Germany was a pluralistic democracy, unable to harness its warring internal interests to a coherent policy that would serve the national interest.75 One might even venture to say that if a JapaneseAmerican war had occurred in recent years, it would have been said that Japan was not a democracy but rather a one-party state. From Kant onward, it has been implied that democracies do not fight democracies, but only if they are democracies of the right sort. Propositions of this type are constants in the thinking of those who believe that what states are like determines how they behave. And there is the rub. A relative harmony can, and sometimes does, prevail among nations, but always precariously so. The thawing of the Cold War led to an expectation that the springtime buds of peace will blossom. Instead it has permitted latent conflicts to bloom in the Balkans and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, in parts of what was Greater Russia and later the Soviet Union, and in the Middle East. Unity in Western Europe has become more difficult to achieve partly because there is no real threat to unite against. Yet in placid times, and even in times that are not so placid, the belief that power politics is ending tends to break out. Brent Scowcroft has written recently that balancing "interests off each other" is a "peculiar conception that was appropriate for certain historical circumstances." He foresees instead a world in which all pursue "the same general goals."76 John Steinbruner envisions a world in which people accept a "configuration of cooperative forces" because militarily "they cannot manage anything else." He adds that an "arrangement that does this" must be open to all who wish to belong." These ideas are among the many versions of the domino theory, so long popular in A
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America. Once the bandwagon starts to roll, it collects the bystanders. Stephen Van Evera believes that if we get through the present difficult patch, meaning mainly that if democracies emerge in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, then "for the first time in history, the world's major countries would all share common political and economic systems and enjoy the absence of ideological conflict." The major causes of war would be "tamed," and "possibilities for wider great power cooperation to prevent war worldwide would be ~ p e n e d . " ' ~In contrast, this article has used structural theory to peer into the future, to ask what seem to be the strong likelihoods among the unknowns that abound. One of them is that, over time, unbalanced power will be checked by the responses of the weaker who will, rightly or not, feel put upon. This statement, however, implies another possibility. The forbearance of the strong would reduce the worries of the weak and permit them to relax. Fareed Zakaria has pointed out that two countries, when overwhelmingly strong, did not by their high-handed actions cause other powers to unite against them Great Britain and the United States in their heydays." Both exceptions to the expected balancing behavior of states can easily be explained. Britain could not threaten the major continental powers; its imperial burdens and demographic limitations did not permit it to do so. The United States was held in check by its only great-power rival. What is new in the proclaimed new world order is that the old limitations and restraints now apply weakly to the United States. Yet since foreign-policy behavior can be explained only by a conjunction of external and internal conditions, one may hope that America's internal preoccupations will produce not an isolationist policy, which has become impossible, but a forbearance that will give other countries at long last the chance to deal with their own problems and to make their own mistakes. But I would not bet on it.
Acknowledgements For their thoughtful comments, 1 should llke to thank Karen Adarns, David Arase, Jamais Cascio, James Fearon, Robert Gilpin, Robert Keohane, Sean Lynn-Jones, Robert Powell, and Steve Weber.
Notes 1. Kenneth N. Waltz, "The Stability of a Bipolar World," Daedalus, Vol. 93, No. 3 (Summer 1964). 2. Lawrence Eagleburger, quoted in Thomas Friedman, "U.S. Voicing Fears That Gorbachev Will Dlvide West," N e w York Times, September 16, 1989, pp. 1, 6; John J. Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future: Instability in Europe After the Cold War," International Security, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Summer 1990), pp. 5-56. 3. Nicholas J. Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics: T h e Unrted States and the Balance of Power (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1942), p. 461. 4. On the causes of multipolar-conventional war and of bipolar-nuclear peace, see esp. Waltz, "Stability," T h e Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better, Adelphi Paper No. 171 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies [IISS], 1981); and Waltz, Theory of
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International Polrtics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979). John Lewis Gaddis and Mearsheimer have offered similar explanations. See Gaddis, "The Long Peace," International Security, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Spring 1986), pp. 99-142. Since the reasoning is now familiar, I refrain from summarizing it here. 5. I made this mistake in "The Stability of a Bipolar World," but have since corrected the error. 6. Neorealist, or structural, theory is developed in Waltz, Theory of International Politics. 7. Melvin R. Laird, A House Divided: America's Strategy Gap (Chicago: Henry Regnery, l 9 6 2 ) , pp. 53, 78-79. 8. David Holloway, The Soviet Union a n d the Arms Race, second ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 8 1. 9. Arthur Krock, Memoirs (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1968), Appendix A, p. 480. 10. Barry Blechman and Stephen S. Kaplan, Force Without War: U.S. Armed Forces as a Political Instrument (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1978). 11. "Excerpts from Reagan's Speech o n Aid for Nicaragua Rebels," New York Times, June 25, 1986, p. A12. 12. "Excerpts from Remarks by Vice President George Bush," Press Release, Austin, Texas, February 28, 1985. 13. Quoted in Robert W. Tucker, Intervention and the Reagan Doctrine (New York: Council o n Religion and International Affairs, 1985), p. 5. 14. Quoted in Josef Joffe, "After Bipolarity: Eastern and Western Europe: Between Two Ages," in The Strategic Implications of Change in the Soviet Union, Adelphi Paper No. 247 (London: IISS, Winter 1989/90), p. 71. 15. The Economist apparently believes that Britain and France were great powers well into the 1950s, claiming that the Suez Crisis of 1956 "helped destroy Britain and France as great powers"; June 16, 1990, p. 101. 16. Michael R. Gordon, "Cheney Calls 5 0 % Military Cut a Risk to Superpower Status," New York Times, March 17, 1990, p. 4. 17. "Succession in Moscow: First Hours in Power, Gorbachev in His Own Words," New York Times, March 12, 1985, p. A16. 18. Bernard Brodie, War a n d Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1973), p. 321. 19. Some Soviet commentators understand this. See, especially, Andrei Kokoshin, "The Future of NATO and the Warsaw Pact Strategy: Paper 11," in The Strategic Implications of Change in the Soviet Union, Adelphi Paper No. 247 (London: IISS, Winter 1989/90), pp. 60-65. 20. For fuller treatment of this and other strategic questions, see Waltz, "Nuclear Myths and Political Realities," American Political Science Review, Vol. 84, No. 3 (September 1990). 21. Herbert Butterfield, "The Balance of Power," in Butterfield and Martin Wight, eds., Diplomatic Investigations (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1966), p. 140. FCnClon may have been first, but the idea was in the air. See Daniel Defoe, A True Collection of the Writings of the Author of the True Born Englishman, Corrected by himself (London, printed and to be sold by most booksellers in London, Westminster, 1703), p. 356. 22. Quoted by David Garnham, "Extending Deterrence with German Nuclear Weapons," International Security, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Summer 1985), p. 97. 23. Helen Delich Bentley, letter to the New York Times, November 20, 1989, p. A18. 24. Earlier I said the opposite, arguing that for would-be great powers the military barriers to entry were high. As nuclear technology became widely available, and warheads smaller and thus easier to deliver, second-strike forces came within the reach of many states. See Waltz, "The Stability of a Bipolar World," pp. 895-896. 25. David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, 1917-1918 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1936), pp. 452-453. 26. Quoted by Richard Severa, "Homer Bigart, Acclaimed Reporter, Dies," in New York Times, April 17, 1991, p. C23. 27. Gwendolyn M. Carter, John H. Herz, John C. Ranney, Major Foreign Powers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1957).
I
t The Emerging Structure of international ~ o l i t i c s 405
28. Miyohei Shinohara, Industr~alGrowth, Trade, and Dynamrc Patterns in the Japanese Economy (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press), 1982, p. 24. Shinohara says that List was the first to develop "the theory of infant industry protection," but thinks that he would be surprised by Japan's thorough application of it. List, however, did not invent the theory. Instead, he applied it to developing countries and used it to attack economists' belief that free trade serves the interests of all natlons. The belief that Japan invented what is son~etimescalled "strategic trade theory" is widespread. See Bruce R. Scott, "National Strategies: Key to International Competition," in Scott and George C. Lodge, eds., U.S. Compet~tivenessin the World Economy (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 198.5), pp. 95, 138. To give another example, P ~ u R. l Krugman describes as a "new trade theory" what in fact was anticipated by List in every particular. "Introduction: New Thinking about Trade Policy," in Krugman, ed., Strategic Trade Policy and the New lnternational Ec(1nomiCS (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986). 29. Frederick List, National System of I'olrtical Economy, trans. G.A. Matile (Ph~ladelphia: Lippincott, 1856), pp. 74, 79, 244, 253. 30. Margaret Hirst, Life of Friedrich List and Selections from his Writings, 1909 (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1965), p. 289. "The School" refers to Adam Smlth, David Ricardo, and their followers. 31. Ihid., p. S l n . 32. Cf. Shinohara: "The 'comparatlve techn~calprogress criterion' pays more attention to the poss~bilityo f placing a particular industry in a more advantageous position in the future.... The term could be called the 'dynaniized comparative cost doctrine'." Shinohara, lndustrial Growth, p. 25. C f . also Scott, who wrote that an interdependent world calls for "emphasis o n baking relative to distributing the pie"; Scott, "National Strategies," p. 137. 33. List, National System, p. 79. 34. On Smith and Keynes, see Robert Heilbroner, "Reflections, Economic Predictions," N E I LYorker, , July 8, 1991, pp. 70-77. 35. lapan Forum on lnternational Relations, "Japan, the United States and Global Responsihilities," April, 1990, pp. 18-24. 36. Clyde V. Prestowltz, Jr., Trading Places: H o w We Allowed lapan to Take the Lead (New York: Basic Books, 1988), p. 76; I.ester C. Thurow, "Global Trade: The Secret of Success" (review of Michael E. Porter's The Cornpetitwe Advantage of Nations), Netu York Times, Book Review Sect~on,May 27, 1990, p. 7. 37. Shinohara, lndustrial Growth, pp. 1 13, 11 8-1 19. 38. Scott, "National Strategies," p. 100; cf. p. 131. 39. David Arase, "U.S. and ASEAN Perceptions of Japan's Role in the Asian-Pac~fic Region," in Harry H . Kendall and Clara Joewono, eds., ASEAN, Japan, and the United Statcs (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studles, 199O), pp. 270-275. 40. Quoted by Dusko Doder and Imuise Rranson, Gorhachev: Heretic in the Krenzlrn (New York: Viking, 1990), p. 207. 41. Michael Mastanduno, "Do Relative Gains Matter? Amer~ca's Response to lnpanese Industrial Policy," International Security, Vol. 16, N o . 1 (Summer 199 I), pp. 73-74. 42. William J. Baumol, Sue Anne Batey Blackman, and Edward N. Wolff, Productivity and American Leadershil~:T j ~ e1,ong Vlew (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), Table 12.3, p. 259. 43. "The Perceived Threat: A Newsweek I'oll," Newsweek, October 9, 1989, p. 64. 44. For incisive analysis of the relative-gains problem, see Joseph M . Grieco, "Understanding the Problem of International Cooperation: The Limits of International or Neoliberal Institutionalism and the Future of Reallst Theory," in David Baldwin, ed., Neorealisnz and Neoliheralism: The Contemporary Debate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); and Robert Powell, "Absolute and Relative Gains in International Relat~ons Theory," American Political Science Review, Vol. 85, No. 4 (December 1991) pp. 1303-1320. 45. Richard J. Barnet, "Reflections, Defining the Moment," N e w Yorker, July 16, 1990, p. 56.
406
T h e Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security Agenda
46. Krugman among others has argued that the postwar free-trade system is giving way to regional trading blocs. This outcome, he believes, "is as good as we are going to get" and has the advantage that regional pacts "can exclude Japan." Louis Uchitelle, "Blocs Seen as Imperiling Free Trade," New York Times, August 26, 1991, p. Dl. Cf. Steve Weber and John Zysman, "The Risk That Mercantilism Will Define the New Security System," in Wayne Sandholtz, et al., The Higbest Stakes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 167-196. 47. Wayne Sandholtz and John Zysman, "1992: Recasting the European Bargain," World Politics, Vol. 42, No. 1 (October 1989), pp. 122-123. 48. Quoted by Richard Rosecrance and Jennifer Taw, "Japan and the Theory of International Leadership," World Politics, Vol. 42, No. 2 (January 1990), p. 207. 49. R.W. Apple, Jr., "A New Balance of Power," New York Times, July 12, 1990, p. Al. 50. Figures expressed in current prices. U.S. data from Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 2970, Part 1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1975), p. 224. Japanese data derived from B.K. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: Africa and Asia (New York: New York University Press, 1982), p. 732; National Income and Statistics of Various Countnes 1938-1 947 (Lake Success, N.Y.: Statistical Office of the United Nations, 1948), Appendix 111, pp. 246-247; Thelma Liesner, Economic Statistics 1900-1 983: United Kingdom, United States of Amerrca, E'yarrce, Germany, Italy, Japan (New York: Facts on File, 1985), p. 117. 51. "The New Superpower," Newsweek, February 26, 1970, p. 17. 52. Arase, "U.S. and ASEAN Perceptions of Japan's Role in the Asian-Pacific Region." 53. David E. Sanger, "Japan Premier Joins Critics of American's Work Habits," New York Times, February 4, 1992, p. Al; "Senator Jokes of Hiroshima Atrack," New York Times, March 4, 1992, p. A12. 54. Fareed Zakaria, "The Rise of a Great Power: National Strength, State Structure, and American Foreign Policy, 1865-1908" (Harvard University, PhD dissertation, forthcoming November 1993), ch. 3. 55. Andrew Hanami, "Japan's Strategy in Europe," unpublished conference paper, October 1992, p. 2. 56. "Japan's Better Example," Editorial, New York Times, April 20, 1992, p. A16. 57. Norman D. Levin, "Japan's Defense Policy: The Internal Debate," in Kendall and Joewono, ASEAN, japan, and the United States. 58. World Bank, World Development Report, 1992: Development and the Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 220, 222. Recalculating GDP according to the purchasing power of its currency at home, the IMF concluded that China's GDP in 1992 was $1.66 trillion. The World Bank, applying purchasing-power parity differently, arrived at a figure of $2.6 trillion, a bit higher than Japan's. But one must remember that China's GDP is shared by a huge population. Using the new method, the IMF estimates America's per-capita income a t $22,200, Japan's at $29,100, Germany's at $19,500, and China's at $1,450. Steven Greenhouse, "New Tally of World's Economies Catapults China Into Third Place," New York Times, May 20, 1993, Al. 59. Roger Hilsman, "How Dead Is It?" New York Newsday, March 18, 1990, p. 5. 60. Quoted in Flora Lewis, "Japan's Looking Glass," New York Times, November 8, 1989, p. A21. 61. Council of the European Communities, Commission of the European Communities, Treaty on European Union, as signed in Maastricht on February 7, 1992 (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 1992), Title V, Articles 5.8, No. 2; 5.3, No. 3; and 5.4, Nos. 3 and 4. 62. R.W. Apple, Jr., "As Bush Hails Decision Many See Bonn Gaining," New York Times, July 17, 1990, p. A9. 63. Clyde H. Farnsworth, "U.S. Threatens Not to Join Bank for East Europe If Soviets Benefit," New York Times, March 15, 1990, p. Al. 64. Georg Simmel, "The Sociology of Conflict," American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 9 (January 1904), p. 501. 65. Waltz, "Nuclear Myths and Political Realities."
\
I t J
The Emerging Structure of lnternational Politics
407
66. From John Dryden, "Absalom and Acitophel." 67. Karl-Heinz Hornhues, deputy majority leader of the Rundestag, reported that Russ~an leaders suggested that Germany and Russia form a counterweight to the United States. Marc Fisher, "Germany Says Russia Seeks a Policy Ally," International Herald Trrhune, February 3, 1993, p. 6. 68. James Baker, "Euro-Atlantic Architecture: From West to East," Address to the Aspen Institute, Berlin, Germany, June 18, 1991, U.S. Department of State Dispatch, June 24, 1991, p. 439. For an incisive analysis of the roles and relations of the United States, Western Europe, and the Soviet Union, see Christopher Laync, "Toward German Unification?" lournal o f Contemporary Studies, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Fall 1984), pp. 7-37. 69. Joffe, "After Bipolarity," pp. 75-76. 70. A.F.K. Organski, World Polrtics (New York: Knopf, 1958); Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 198 1). 71. John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: T h e Obsolescence of Malor War (New York: Basic Books, 1989), pp. 219, 222. 72. Norman Angell, T h e Great lllusion (London: Heinemann, 1914). 73. Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future," p. 18. 74. Quoted In Flora Lewis, "Europe's Last-Minute Jitters," N e w York Times, April 24, 1992, p. A35. 75. See Waltz, "America as a Model for the World? A Foreign Policy Perspective," PS, Vol. XXIV, No. 4 (December 1991), pp. 667-670. 76. Brent Scowcroft, in "Geopolitical Vertigo and the U.S. Role," N e w Perspectrues Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Summer 1992), pp. 6-9. 77. John Steinbruner, "Defense Budget Priorities," Institute of International Stud~es, Currents, Vol. 1 , No. 4 (Supplement), March 30, 1992, p. 3. 78. Stephen Van Evera, "Preserving Peace in the New Era," Boston Review, Vol. 17, No. 6 (NovemberIDecernber 1992), p. 4. 79. Fareed Zakaria, "Is Realism Finished?" T h e National Interest, No. 30 (Winter 1992/93), p. 24.
Common, Comprehensive, and Cooperative Security David Dewitt
I
nternational relations scholars since the Second World War have largely defined security in terms of the ability of states to defend against external military threats.' More recently, security studies was defined as 'the study of the threat, use and control of military f ~ r c e ' Abstract .~ security conceptions in academic and policymaking arenas have provided the basis for security strategies in the realm of policy and practice. The Realist conception of security was the basis of East-West security structures during the Cold War, and this was marked not only by an emphasis on military force but also particularly the strategy of nuclear deterrence. But outside of the East-West strategic community, such concepts have not been deemed entirely adequate. A broader notion of security has been preferred, of which the concept of comprehensive security developed by Japan and the ASEAN states is a good example.
A Broader Notion of Security
More recently, even in the traditional East-West context the classic thinking about security has been judged deficient. The danger of war in the nuclear age, the growing interdependence among nations imposing constraints on the use of force, and the ethical issues related to living as hostages of mutual assured destruction (MAD),has led to the exploration of alternative concepts. This process acquired momentum as the Cold War drew to a close and the extended CSCE process of the previous years gained credibility, in spite of the considerable strain being faced within Europe since the fall of the Berlin wall. The notion of common security was developed originally in a European context as a counter to deterrence. The substantial - albeit partial - success of CSCE led to calls for similar measures elsewhere based on similar conceptions of security. In Asia-Pacific, following unsuccessful calls for a CSCEtype process, indigenous concepts incorporating some features of common security and comprehensive security have been c o n ~ i d e r e d .The ~ notion of cooperative security developed by the Canadian-initiated North Pacific Cooperative Security Dialogue is broadly similar to the notion of common Source: The Pacific Review, 7(1) (1994): 1-15.
Dcwitt
Common, Comprehensive, and Cooperative Security
409
security in the European context, but for reasons to be explored later, promises to be more appropriate for Asia-Pacific4 But all three notions - comprehensive security, common security, and cooperative security - share many common features. Thus any attempt to differentiate between them runs the risk of drawing artificial boundaries. Comprehensive Security
Security Meant Total Well-being The juxtaposition of the terms 'comprehensive' and 'security' should be surprising only in the sense that they were not of one meaning in contemporary security discourse until the 1970s. It is evident, even from a cursory reading of both eastern and western histories, that in earlier ages security meant the total well-being of the elites and of the communities which they led. Elites thus organized themselves in ways which improved the likelihood of survival Table I : P r o p o s e d Asia-Pacific Security S y s t e m s '
Proposer
T y p e of Multilateralism
Soviet Union/ AustraliaL
'Common Security'; CSCE model
Canada
'Cooperat~ve Security'
ASEANIJapan
'Security D~alogue'
United States
'Flexlble Multilateralism'
Scope
Institution
Comprehensive; focus on CSBMs and nuclear arms control Comprehensive; with a strong focus o n nonmilitary threats3 Comprehensive hut with minimal focus o n EHD4 issues Conventional threats; focus o n some interstate conflicts
New; Asia-Pacific wide
Broad-brush; government-led
Process
New; Northeast A s ~ only i
Evolut~onary; two-track
Ex~sting;limited t o Enhanced PMC' members and special invitees N o new standing institution envisaged; maintam existing alliances
Intergovernmental
Case-by-case approach; intergovernmental
1 . This table is taken from Amitav Acharya, David Dewitt, and Paul Evans, 'Overv~ew:The
Agenda for Cooperative Security in the North Pacific', a briefing paper prepared for the conference, Cooperative Security in the North Pacific, 21-24 March 1993, Vancouver, and has been updated smce then by Acharya. 2. Australia subsequently distanced itself from the CSCA and called for both regional h~lateral and multilateral arrangements for an 'Asian Security System'. 3. Includes, economic underdevelopment, trade disputes, overpopulation, irregular rtziipratloiz and rcfugce movements, environmental degradation, political oppression, human rights ahusec, terrorlsln and the illicit trade in drugs. 4. Environment, Human Rights and Democracy. 5. Enhanced P M C refers t o the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) consist~ngof the six ASEAN members plus Japan, Canada, the United States, Australia, South Korea, the European C o m n i ~ l n ~ t New y , Zealand. Russia, China, V~etnarn,Laos and I'apud New Guinea.
4 10
The Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security Agenda
whether through conflict avoidance, conflict management, or the ability to defeat one's enemies in revolution or in war. In the development of comprehensive security as a defining leit-motif of Asia-Pacific security, one can detect the legacy of this past, albeit with the peculiarities of the post-imperial, postcolonial, and post-1945 experiences woven into the fabric of the overall presentation.
The term comprehensive or 'overall' security was coined in Japan during the 1970s, but it has also found adherents in other Asian countries, especially in Southeast Asia. Before 1945, national security in Japan was closely 'identified with military domination of decision-making and with the disas~ notion of comprehensive security was trous "quest for a u t o n ~ m y " ' .The put forward as an alternative to the concept of national security, reflecting a quest to move beyond Japan's wartime role and articulate its postwar place in the international system. Wider Basis for Japan's International Role The development of the notion of comprehensive security was meant to give a new and wider basis for Japan's international role and to rationalize its defence effort. The term also reflected Japan's pragmatic response to the problems of maintaining its renewed prosperity in an increasingly difficult international environment. The term gained currency in Japan as the result of a study group established by the then prime minister, Masayoshi Ohira, in 1978, who defined a policy of comprehensive security as 'a chain of tautly balanced national power, including various factors such as economy, diplomacy and politics ...'. In the Report on Comprehensive National Security, submitted to the prime minister, Zenko Suzuki, in July 1980, six objectives were identified+ closer military and general cooperation with the United States; increasing Japan's capacity to defend its own territory; improvement in relations with China and the Soviet Union; attainment of energy security; achievement of food security; and measures for coping with major earthquakes. Comprehensive security was not just a statement of goals, but also of a policy framework.' The doctrine of comprehensive security not only embraced different functional areas of security (for example, economic, military and political), but also defined security policy in terms of its various levels domestic, bilateral, regional, and globaL8 T h e Economic Component
The economic component of comprehensive security has been more salient than other concerns, including environmental and ecological, with the Comprehensive National Security Council established in 1980 dominated
DCLLii t
Common, Comprehensive, and Cooperative Security
411
by representatives of economic ministries.? Because of endorsements by two successive prime ministers, comprehensive security became more than a slogan; it had a direct and strong influence on policy. It also found broad and widespread support in Japanese society. But like the notion of security itself, the term 'comprehensive security' lacks precise definition. It is also marked by a certain degree of ambiguity which is reflected in radically differing interpretations of the concept within Japan. O n the one hand, it has been seen as 'a smoke-screen behind which the hawks can expand defence spending', while another group has viewed it as a policy toward lower defence expenditures and greater emphasis on diplomatic and economic instruments. Within the Japanese decision-making system, however, it found broad acceptance. It was seen by various government agencies as 'a welcome way to promote their goals of budgetary gains'.I0 The term also proved useful to the Japanese government in its efforts to increase the defence budget in the 1980s at a time when public opinion was less hostile to the need for defence and the United States-Japanese alliance, and more recently as a means to frame their ongoing internal debate concerning Japan's emerging place on the global peace and security stage.
While the Japanese conception of comprehensive security was limited in scope and deliberately ambiguous, the notion of comprehensive security in ASEAN found a broader yet less ambiguous meaning. At least three ASEAN members - Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore - have developed distinctive notions of security which go beyond military objectives and instruments, while the Philippines also has recently developed a similar doctrine to guide its approach to security. It is valuable to pay particular attention to the ideas developed over a similar period by Malaysian and Indonesian experts.
More Inward-Looking
The concept of comprehensive security held by various ASEAN countries is generally more inward-looking than the Japanese notion, which is concerned largely, if not exclusively, with external threats to Japanese well-being and, ultimately, security. The linkage between policy and doctrine is also different in the ASEAN context. Unlike Japan, a broader notion of security incorporating domestic as well as essentially non-military threats has been used by ASEAN governments to negate the utility of alliances with both regional and extra-regional states and to limit the scope for external intervention in the region." And unlike Japan, ASEAN states have not yet used comprehensive security doctrines to justify their higher defence spending. Indonesia's notion of national resilience emerged in the 1960s when Suharto assumed power, although it was officially proclaimed in 1973. According to one formulation, 'National resilience is an inward-looking concept, based on the proposition that national security lies not in military alliances or
4 12
The Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security Agenda
under the military umbrella of a great power, but in self-reliance deriving from domestic factors such as economic and social development, political stability and a sense of nationalism'.12 The political significance of such an inward-looking approach lies in the fact that it signalled the Suharto government's intention to focus on domestic problems and on economic development, in contrast to Sukarno's internationalist and interventionist outlook which had undermined Indonesia's economic health. The centrality of domestic stability in Indonesia's security thinking leads to a closely-related emphasis on non-military measures, especially economic development and social justice, to achieve overall national and regional security.
Regional Resilience Although the doctrine of national resilience limits itself substantially to the domestic level of security, it has indirect but serious implications for the external security and broader strategic environment: The doctrine of national resilience was reassuring to Indonesia's regional neighbours who saw in this commitment to internal stability and prosperity a signal of good neighbourliness and support for regional cooperation through ASEAN. Indeed, the Indonesian notion of resilience pays explicit attention to the link between national and regional security in the form of the doctrine of 'regional resilience'. In this view, 'if each member nation [of ASEAN] can accomplish overall national development and overcome internal threats, regional resilience can result much in the same way as a chain derives its overall strength from the strength of its constituent parts'.13 Malaysia's concept of comprehensive security places a similar emphasis on non-military threats and policy instruments. In the words of the prime minister. Mahathir Mohamad: National security is inseparable from political stability, economic success and social harmony. Without these all the guns in the world cannot prevent a country from being overcome by its enemies, whose ambitions can be fulfilled sometimes without firing a single shot. Malaysian leaders and analysts have identified a wide range of factors as constituting threats to national security.I4 These have included: communist insurgency, subversion, armed separatism, economic slowdown or recession, drug addiction, illegal immigration, and religious extremism and racial strife in a multi-ethnic society. In the words of the former prime minister, Datu Hussein bin Onn: 'These problems traverse political, socio-cultural, psychological and economic dimensions - thus emphasizing the total or comprehensive nature of Malaysia's national security'.ls Although Malaysia has acknowledged some external security concerns as well, including great power rivalry and the Cambodia conflict, in general these are considered to be less immediate and urgent. It is not surprising to note that Malaysian leaders have linked the realization of comprehensive security to stability in the region.
neuitt
Common. Comprehensive, and Cooperative Security
41 3
Common Security The concept of common security originated in Europe as a response to the overall East-West rivalry, and particularly t o strategic nuclear deterrence. The first major exposition of common security can be found in the report of the Palme Commission, entitled Common Security: A Blueprint for Survival. The report defined common security in the following terms: The avoidance of war, particularly nuclear war, is a common responsibility. The security - even the existence - of the nations of the world is interdependent. For both East and West, the avoidance of nuclear catastrophe depends on mutual recognition of the need for peaceful relations, national restraint, and amelioration of the armaments competition. ... For stability based on armaments cannot be sustained indefinitely. There is always the danger that the fragile stability of an international system based on armaments will suddenly crumble ... A more effective way to ensure security is to create positive processes that can lead to peace and disarmament. ... Acceptance of common security as the organizing principle for efforts to reduce the risk of war, limit arms, and move towards disarmament means, in principle, that cooperation will replace confrontation in resolving conflicts of interest. The Palme Commission report laid down six principles of common security: all nations have a legitimate right to security; military force is not a legitimate instrument for resolving disputes between nations; restraint is necessary in expression of national policy; security cannot be attained through military superiority; reduction and qualitative limitations of armaments are necessary for common security; 'linkages' between arms negotiations and political events should be avoided. l h
Management of the East-West Nuclear Rivalry Common security and comprehensive security also share a concern with both military and non-military threats, although in the immediate European context the chief aim of common security remained the management of the East-West nuclear rivalry. Thus, the essence of common security as outlined by the report is the notion of 'security with' as opposed to 'security against' the adversary. As such, common security militates against the principle and mind-set of deterrence. Strategic doctrines and alliance systems which are based on the idea of deterrence may engender greater insecurity by triggering the security dilemma and arms races." Proponents of common security
4 14
T h e Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security Agenda
also advocate the instrumental utility of such approaches as non-provocative defence and non-offensive defence.ls The military aspects of common security ultimately lean towards a system of collective security rather than either inflexible and confrontational alliances or bilateral arrangements which take precedence. In collective security systems, all members of the system - and, in theory, that means every state within the defined geo-political security network - agree that any aggression against a member of the collectivity will be automatically responded to by that collective. In such a system, the advantages are that 'threat' need not be defined pre-emptively but exists only when antagonistic action is taken and both the might and the legitimacy of the power of the collective should militate against any external aggression. The disadvantages are the underlying assumptions and prerequisites that: each individual state party to the collective security agreement must voluntarily relinquish its right to decline from committing its own resources to a collective security action; bilateral agreements become highly problematic and vulnerable to collective security politics; burden-sharing arrangements can be put into place which are seen as both equitable and operational; and there are no plausible situations in which internal cohesion among the collective will erode to the point of fragmentation. As we know, formal collective security systems - most recently the United Nations system'- have not weathered thk tksts of time, politics, gnd shifting interests or capabilities."
Towards a Limited Collective Security System The idea of common security evolved steadily and gained further legitimacy with the success of the CSCE in bridging the East-West gap. The CSCE represented the operationalization of the core principles of common security. The key objective was to reduce, if not eliminate, the likelihood of war by securing adherence to a set of norms and rules that constrain the conflictual behaviour of the regional actors in relation to one another. The CSCE aimed at achieving security cooperation among actors in the absence of a common external enemy; it instituted a European security regime in which the interests of the national actors 'are neither wholly compatible nor wholly competitive',2O and where it was possible to secure compliance with 'principles, rules and norms that permit nations to be restrained in their behaviour in the belief that others will re~iprocate'.~' In these ways, the CSCE was an effort to break through the rigid and inflexible post-1945 alliance systems and, since the latter part of the 1980s, it may be understood as trying to move, albeit hesitantly, towards a limited collective security system.
~ c \l it
Common, Comprehensive, and
Cooperative Security
4 15
The apparent success of the CSCE through the 1980s led to the call for similar approaches in Asia-Pacific. In 1986, the then Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in his now famous Vladivostok speech, called for a 'Pacific Ocean conference along [the lines of] the Helsinki [CSCE] conference'. The Australian foreign minister, Gareth Evans, followed in July 1990 by proposing a Conference on Security Cooperation in Asia (CSCA), 'a future Asian security architecture involving a wholly new institutional process that might be capable of evolving, in Asia just as in Europe, as a framework for addressing and resolving security problems'. Although initially these proposals seemed to envisage an Asia-Pacific version of the CSCE, the analogy was dropped on the grounds of acknowledged differences between Europe and Asia.l3 Nevertheless, the argument retained some currency that the essence of the CSCE process could be applied to the Asia-Pacific arena in the form of confidence- and security-building measures that had been so successful in reducing cold war tensions in Europe.24
'Solution in Search of a Problem'
Within ASEAN, these proposals initially were greeted with scepticism and ambivalence. While Malaysia appeared to endorse some of the Soviet proposals for regional confidence-building measures, in general the ASEAN response was broadly similar to the position of the Bush administration which had dubbed the Asian version of the CSCE as a 'solution in search of ' then viewed any such institution as a threat to its a p r ~ b l e m ' . ~Washington existing bilateral arrangements and alliance system which had proved its worth during the cold war period. In the words of a Bush administration official: 'While the United States would adjust the form of its security role in the region [in the post-cold war era], it intends to retain the substance of its role and the bilateral defence relationships which give it s t r u ~ t u r e ' . ~ ~
I m p o r t a n t Differences in T h e a t r e ConditiondASEAN Regional Forum
Caution is thus needed in evaluating the prospects for duplicating Europeanbased models of common security in the Asia-Pacific region. Important differences in theatre conditions as well as the historical and cultural roots of conflict and state-building could complicate the creation of Helsinki-type arrangements in regions outside of the North Atlantic and the European continent, although this does not argue for undervaluing the benefits accrued from exploring the degree of applicability and adaptiveness of the European experience - or any other for that matter - across regions2' For instance, even with the difficulties attendant with transposing ideas and instruments from one locale to another, the idea of CSBMs inherent to the CSCE process already has been proven valuable in a number of regional conflicts and points of tension, including within Asia-Pacific.18
4 16
The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
ASEAN members, while rejecting a formal CSCE-type institution, were more receptive to the use of looser and more consultative mechanisms for promoting an exchange of views within the sub-region as well as across the broader Asia-Pacific region on security issues.29 ASEAN already could boast of such fora: the annual meetings between ASEAN foreign ministers and their counterparts from countries which were given the status of official 'dialogue partners' - the ASEAN Post-Ministerial Conferences. The ASEAN-PMC, held since 1978, follows the annual meeting of ASEAN Foreign Ministers (AMM), hosted by each ASEAN member in rotation and which itself would be the forum for security consultations among the ASEAN members. As such, the ASEAN-PMC framework - transformed into the so-called 'enhanced' ASEANPMC and, significantly, including the increasingly inclusive and important high level SOM (senior officials meeting) preceding the ASEAN-PMC and now more recently transformed into the still more inclusive ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) of 1 8 member-states which includes the PMC dialogue partners plus China, Russia, Vietnam, Laos, and Papua New Guinea - offered several advantages as a forum for a dialogue on security within the Asia-Pacific region." First, ASEAN would have a controlling influence over the agenda of discussions, and would not risk being sidelined as might be the case with any new institution. Second, the ASEAN-PMC would enable ASEAN to pursue a more 'inclusive' approach to security in the context of the growing security interdependence between Southeast Asia and the wider Pacific theatre. Despite earlier concerns that its regional identity might be diluted by integration into a larger regional process, ASEAN as a grouping could no longer ignore the growing linkages between sub-regional security concerns and the developments in the North Pacific, in South Asia, as well as the role of major Asia-Pacific powers such as the United States, Russia, China and Japan. As a Thai scholar argued, ASEAN's 'efforts to establish region-wide order in Southeast Asia must be related to the larger Asia-Pacific framework of conflict-reduction and cooperation, not only because one needs to recognise the geographical and economic interdependence that exist in this area, but also because one needs to find ways and means of ensuring that extraregional, that is non-Southeast Asian powers' involvement in this region continue to be "constructive engagements"
A Proliferation of Proposals
Since Gorbachev's Vladivostok speech in 1986, there has been a proliferation of proposals to restructure Asia-Pacific security. While many of these are in the nature of 'trial balloons' or declaratory statements often aimed at gaining propaganda mileage (such as some of the early Soviet proposals, which were noticeably lacking in specifics), a few were seriously conceived. These proposals differ widely as to the type of security structure desired, the scope of security threats to be addressed, the nature of institutions to be developed, and the process of transition envisaged. Indeed, a notable aspect of the current thinking about Asia-Pacific security is the sheer diversity
De~kitt Common, Comprehensive, and Cooperative Security
41 7
of approaches t o multilateralism that have been proposed so far, which range from discussions among governmental officials with an informal and ad hoc agenda (ASEAN-PMC),to a transitional mechanism of CSCAP (as a security equivalent of PECC), to a CSCA with formal, standing institutions and summitry, or a concert system with the leading role in conflictmanagement assumed by the principal regional powers. There is also the notion of 'flexible multilateralism' and the 'building bloc' approach which may be viewed as attempts to seek a compromise between the extremes of maintaining the status quo (doing nothing) and jumping into an all new, one step and comprehensive security system (doing everything at once).j2
Cooperative Security An Alternative Aecurity Framework
A common objective runs through most of the proposals over the past five to seven years. The intent has been to replace the cold war security structure (an essentially bipolar balance of power framework underpinned by bilateral military alliances with the primary aim of nuclear deterrence) with a multilateral process and framework with the following attributes: it must be geared toward reassurance, rather than deterrence; it must at best replace or at least co-exist with bilateral alliances; and it must promote both military and nonmilitary security. These elements of an alternative security framework are encapsulated in the notion of 'cooperative security' which in turn lies at the heart of the NPCSD initiative launched by the former Canadian secretary of state for external affairs, Joe Clark, at the September 1990 meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. At first glance, cooperative security and common security may appear to be almost identical. Both are inclusive in their approach by seeking to engage adversaries and non-like-minded actors as well as putative friends. Both emphasize the need to move beyond the deterrence mind-set. Both doctrines emphasize security as a broad concept incorporating a range of non-military elements. But cooperative security envisages a more gradual approach to developing multilateral instituti~ns.~"t also is a more flexible concept as it recognizes the value of existing bilateral and balance-ofpower arrangements in contributing to regional security and for retaining them - indeed, for working with and through them - allowing multilateralism to develop from more ad hoc, informal, and flexible processes until the conditions for institutionalized multilateralism become more favo~rable."~
A Concert Based System
Cooperative security is partially a pragmatic response to those who might too quickly think of a restructured security architecture for Asia-Pacific in the shadow of the end of the Cold War in terms either of classic collective security or more specifically the CSCE.3' Although collective security is viewed
4 18
The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
as building upon pre-existing common interests, intensifying inter-state linkages, and thereby enhancing cooperation, the necessary preconditions are sufficiently stringent that few if any parts of the world can readily comply. Even a moderate variant of collective security - a concert based system - is a dubious proposition during this period of t r a n ~ i t i o n Unlike . ~ ~ the system of collective security, the concert system relies on major powers alone as the defining members; lesser states are involved through their relationships with one or more of the major concert leaders, with the concert effectively defining the parameters of the security system. Cooperative security, as initially envisaged by Joe Clark and, more recently, as it has evolved through the activities of the research programme which has focused on cooperative security in the North Pacific, is not Euro-centred in origin or focus; it is not based on assumptions of strategic global relations in a zero-sum world; it is not a priori restrictive in membership; it does not require leadership by a concert of dominant military powers nor acknowledge that hegemons alone are able to define either the agenda or the rules; it does not privilege the military as the repository of all wisdom related to security issues; it does not assume that military conflict or violence are the only challenges to security; it does presume that states are principal actors but it does not preclude, by definition or by intent, that non-state actors (whether institutional or more ad hoc trans-national actors and NGOs) have critical roles to play in managing and enhancing security relevant dynamics; and it neither requires nor indeed explicitly calls for the creation of formal institutions or mechanisms, though welcomes both if they emerge from the decisions of the parties. It is noteworthy that the term 'cooperative' indicates a greater diversity of security policies and predicaments or challenges than does the term 'common'; similarly, 'cooperative' both acknowledges the necessity to think 'comprehensively' in regards to state and trans-boundary interests and provides a process to engage issues and actors in a more cooperative fashion. Establishing Habits of Dialogue
A key operational focus of the cooperative security process has been 'to establish habits of dialogue' and to move towards inclusive participation. Out of this, and complemented by the burgeoning number of channels of trans-Pacific communications on a broad range of security-relevant issues, has been the emergence of what has become known as 'track two' diplomacy, whereby experts from the academic, governmental, official, nongovernmental, and private communities can meet, each in their individual While ' the track two capacity, to converse about issues of common ~ o n c e r n . ~ process is not unique to cooperative security, track two activities are facilitated by the lack of any requirement that formal institutional arrangements are a necessary precursor to progress on security questions. Further, the explicit call for an inclusive process regardless of a government's defining characteristics, its place in the international hierarchy of states, its allegiances to other multilateral fora or processes, its network of bilateral relationships, or its position on any one of a host of international issues provides built-in
i>euI: t
Common, Comprehensive, and Cooperative Security
4 19
constraints - reassurances if that language is preferred - against the rigidification of process, structure, or agenda. What cooperative security really provides is a means for challenging long-held or emergent fears, for overcoming the hesitancy that accompanies political risk taking, for lowering the walls which have been erected between societies, governments, and countries in the wake of the colonial, pre-independence and cold war periods, and for transcending the barriers of sectarian and national interests. The Primacy of State InterestsIA Diffuse International System
Because cooperative security acknowledges the primacy of state interests, the realities of territorial defence, the inevitability of competing and, at times, conflicting interests, and the increasing interpenetrability of states, other actors within the region, and of global politics, it also explicitly argues that the enhancement of security must not be seen in a zero-sum, security dilemma context. In order to facilitate this, there is a recognition that bilateral relations are likely to remain, at least for the short term, as a principal means by which states ensure their place in the international community and that, as with comprehensive security, states necessarily must attend to the betterment of their domestic situation. In an increasingly diffuse international system devoid of a well-defined bipolar dominant structure, so-called small and middle powers will have increasingly important roles to play in setting the agenda and constructing coalitions of intersecting interests. This will occur because of illdefined leadership, because of reduced bloc loyalties and a re-orientation of which blocs count, because of an increasingly dense set of transboundary networks of interests and capabilities, because of the need to share both responsibilities and burdens more equitably, and because of the desire to constrain possible unilateral actions being taken either by powers in decline or by those who wish to accede to positions of d ~ m i n a n c e . ' ~In such a diffuse international system, states a rung or two below the level of great powers will harness capabilities in pursuit of their interests, undertaking to establish extended bilateral relations while, simultaneously, seeking multilateral fora for the pursuit of wider, systemic concerns, most notably military security and economic stability, and in so doing enhance both their own and the coalition's stature and legitimacy. This process, if pursued in a fully consultative manner with sensitivity towards the range of interests and actors involved, will promote not only cooperative security but cooperative stability and a more resilient and adaptive regional system. A Time of Opportunity for Cooperative Action
In the immediate post-cold war period, this period of uncertain transition is a time of opportunity for responsible cooperative action, not against others but with them. Hence, within Asia-Pacific, both the United States and Russia remain important actors, but in a manner and style transformed from even a few years ago; similarly, but for other reasons, with China and Japan. Periods of transition are not appropriate for the creation of new institutions
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The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
if all that does is replicate the politics of the past. Yet it also is the case that one cannot presume too readily that animosity, distrust, and the will and capacity to employ military force in support of elite, regime, government, state, or sub-state interests will wither as quickly as Leninism. That was only a 70-year experiment; the presence and use of force in support of community interests, whatever those might be, is part of human history. Hence, the habit of dialogue accompanied by regular and informal undertakings facilitates a movement towards political transparency. This should stimulate the creation of modalities for focused and purposeful engagement on issues of common concern, including military hardware acquisition, border disputes, secure points of entry, exit, and transit, ecological matters, illicit movement ~ ~ tentative results of the May 1993 of drugs, people, or t e ~ h n o l o g y .The Senior Officials Meeting held in Singapore are indicative of the promise and opportunity held out by this process. For all these reasons, countries involved in Asia-Pacific security affairs have been articulating and discussing new concepts of inter-state security over the past few years. Cooperative security, common security, and comprehensive security are among the more widely used terms, complementing more traditional views such as collective security, collective defence, deterrence, and mutual assurance. These latter terms focus almost solely on the territorial state and highlight the military dimensions of (in)security and threat.40 The former concepts, however, acknowledge a more inclusive definition of security and challenges to security, encompassing but moving beyond the traditional notion of military threat and response. They recognize the continuing problems associated with military conflict, but argue that other factors also increasingly threaten the survivability and coherence of the state, but not only the state. There is an explicit identification of problems which place not only the nation-state but also subnational units as well as transnational or regional arenas in dire peril: demographic factors; large or distinct population movements; illicit or unregulated flow of drugs, technology, or information; equitable access to scarce resources, markets, and strategic minerals; air, land, and marine pollution and degradation; global ecological changes; and human rights abuses, for example. Further, there is a recognition that many of these new and profound problems are not amenable either to military intervention alone, to military action at all, or to unilateral action of any kind. Rather, if not addressed in a cooperative and constructive undertaking, they may well deteriorate into traditional modes of military violence, thereby threatening in the classic sense - the state, its governing regime, and its society.4'
The Regionalization of Security Politics in Asia-Pacific States will Organize on Functional and Regional Terms It is with such a backdrop that regional politics will now take centre stage.42 And it is because of the asynchronous tension between the globalization of
Dewitt
Common, Comprehensive, and Cooperative Security
42 1
economic forces and the localization of personal, community, regime, and state security that states will, of necessity, coalesce and organize on functional and regional terms. To borrow from Robert Scalapino's recent writing, 'the appropriate analogy is one of concentric arcs, situation-specific-arcs rather than circles so that there can be interaction among them' where the United States 'will be caused to serve with others in building collective approaches to specific problems'.43 I would take that still one step further and suggest that we are moving into an era of the regionalization of security politics and political security. The 'habit of dialogue' among all states party to the issues and to the location will form the foundation upon which a more positive sense of security will be built. In Asia-Pacific, multilateralism must complement productive bilateral relations. The degree of formalism involved can be enginkered, but with caution. Smaller states benefit by being at the table and, in coalition, having greater opportunity to constrain the unilateralism of the more powerful. These, on the other hand, can employ multilateral process and structure to achieve consensus and legitimacy of purpose. Cooperative security, as distinct from the European notion of security cooperation, provides some loose signposts and guidelines by which to ensure inclusiveness, promote means other than military to resolve differences, acknowledge divergence of interests, practices, and capabilities without presuming a zero-sum universe, and facilitate the modalities of a more secure and creative potential. In the midst of the uncertain transition from the bipolar dominant cold war politics of global competition and containment, what we are likely moving towards is the regionalization of security politics and economic security. The challenge is to prevent either the reduction of security to narrow sectarian and localized interests or the total aggregation of economic capacity to the point where governments lose control over their productive capabilities and consumptive capacities, while the free flow of goods, services, and finance are hindered by bloc politics.
Prevent the Reduction of Security to Sectarian Interests Future attempts to create a new security architecture for the Asia-Pacific region confront several organizing principles, among them: broad-brush versus building-bloc approach; comprehensive versus selective security; great power concert versus UNGAIequality of actors-type approach. These principles also highlight the potential for contradictions between various approaches to security. A broad-brush approach is more focused and specific as a guide of policy, but necessarily less flexible and evolutionary than a building-bloc approach. Comprehensive security is a desirable and in some respect unavoidable goal, albeit challenging and open to the vicissitudes of domestic affairs which are increasingly hostage to global and international economic forces. However, expanding the agenda of security cooperation so that it mirrors the diversity of locally-defined priorities also expands the scope for disagreement, especially as the number and variety of state actors also
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
expands. A security framework which recognizes the equality of actors is ideal and more acceptable to regional states who resent great power dominance, but it also ignores the reality of power disparities in the region. Cooperative security is thus broader than comprehensive security and more flexible than common security; it is also less ethnocentric and regionbound. If cooperative security, understood conceptually to incorporate aspects of both common security and comprehensive security (especially as it acknowledges the importance of national resilience if that is to mean the ability of the state to withstand shocks both from within and externally) offers an approach to security issues in the absence of a bipolar, geostrategic, deterrence-dominated structure, its applicability to regional security thinking, and particularly to the Asia-Pacific region, invites some speculation as to the form, the content, and the means. Cooperative Security Requires lnclusivity Most obviously, cooperative security requires inclusivity. Thus, to the extent possible, dialogue must involve as many relevant principal actors - particularly governments - across a full spectrum of issue areas normally considered within the prerogative of the state. Hence, if there is to be membership, then in principle44 the club must not impose criteria for participation or for the agenda other than acknowledged relevance to the defined region. For the cooperative security agenda, this means that the 'hard' side of security (by which I mean the full range of military issues) cannot be isolated from inclusiveness. It will not be good enough to dwell on trade, investment, and financial concerns with all, ecological, environmental, and demographic concerns with some, while reserving military security issues for a few more privileged and like-minded number.45 Arms transfers, indigenous arms developments, and relevant registries, military deployments, military exercises, defence white papers, confidence- and security-building measures, conventional and nonconventional non-proliferation must all be part of the cooperative security dialogue. In order to ensure that no participant's interests are uniquely jeopardized or unfairly threatened, groups of experts - probably officials at the outset, but preferred and hopefully of the 'track two' variety46- should be established with mandates, agendas, and time frames that are both reasonable in scope and manageable in expectation. Incrementalism (or 'gradualism' to use Geoffrey Wiseman's term) thereby will contribute to transparency in process, in structure, and in content through ensuring that all the parties are to some extent in control of their own pace and extent of engagement, thereby alleviating some of the risks and fears attendant with overly rapid moves towards full disclosure and complete transparency. 'Opaqueness' Rather Than 'Transparency' Initially, given the characteristics of the Asia-Pacific region, on some topics 'opaqueness' rather than 'transparency' may have to become the intermediate
nr\\ii t
Common, Comprehensive, and Cooperative Security
423
goal until sufficient trust is established through experience. The process could build on existing habits of dialogue, in some cases sub-regional, just as structures (e.g., a coordinating secretariat) could be grafted on to existing ones, though over time it is likely that the preferred outcome will be a wholly new institutionalized process reflecting the unique characteristics and mandate of a region-wide cooperative security framework. But, as I noted earlier, cooperative security per se does not depend on the establishment of formal organizations. Indeed, during this time of transition, that probably should be a ~ o i d e d . ~One ' would not want to create the means for inertia, inflexibility, and rigidity in membership, o n agendas, or in process, all of which have been experienced not only in many international institutions and in collective defence arrangements (such as alliances including the regional alliances established as part of the policy of containment), but also in the two collective security systems of this century. In other words, we should be thinking less about multilateral institutions which 'focus on the formal organizational elements of international life ...' and more about the institution of multilateralism which 'is grounded in appeals to the less formal, less codified habits, practices, ideas, and norms of international society'.48 Institutions may evolve; they may indeed be the desirable goal, but more immediately and for the mid-term, multilateralism as process, structure, and regularized activities on an agenda of common concern is more important than multilateral as institution.
A Blurring between Domestic and Foreign Policy
Today it is generally agreed that there is a blurring between domestic and foreign policy. The United Nations has become focused on the emergent challenges to the tradition of the inviolability of the nation-state and its borders. Inter-dependence, so fashionable a term in the 1970s and 1980s, no longer adequately captures the changing nature of global politics, the place of the national community, and the penetrability and complexity of the nexus of cross-cutting interests, intersecting influences, and challenges to state regimes both from below and above. Security policy might well be seen as a screen or prism through which domestic and foreign policy are filtered, out of which comes both traditional defence policy and our new range of policy initiatives which complement defence policy because they address issues which threaten the well-being of the country, the stability of the region, and the prosperity of the peoples, yet are not readily handed through the military instrument. However, we must go one step further, because in this uncertain world in transition, it also is evident that little can be managed unilaterally or through coercion alone. Cooperative security seeks to facilitate the ability of governments to advance positive security, to reduce the attendant fears of an (in)security dilemma, and to manage the increasingly diverse sets of demands and interests challenging each state. Importantly, unlike traditional conceptions of international security, while recognizing the disparities in military and economic power along with the diversities in
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
interests, cooperative security focuses on the benefits of inclusiveness and equivalence within a loose multilateral structure having a regularized multilateral process. Institutionalization is a secondary and derivative issue, neither necessary but not to be avoided if it is universally viewed as beneficial and self-regulating or adaptive.
'The Slaying of a Beautiful H y p o t h e s i s by a n Ugly Fact' 'Habits of dialogue' across a broad range of issues where management and negotiated resolution of differences are the guide, where instruments are put into place to reassure, where transparency is but a mid-point towards the normalization of security politics such that the much promised but yet unrealized peace dividend will occur to the benefit of all is evident in varying degrees in comprehensive security, in common security, and in cooperative security. Each of these approaches to security, both in principle and to the Asia-Pacific region in particular, are incomplete and flawed. The empirical world has a way of doing that to us. As the nineteenth-century scientist and philosopher, Thomas Aldous Huxley, commented about the negative side of doing research and working on theories: 'The slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact'. While I have not really done justice to the fullness of the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of comprehensive, common, and cooperative security, I trust that I have suggested some of the problems as well as strengths, providing some attractive targets to colleagues who will follow well armed with 'ugly facts' which challenge us to think somewhat more concretely about security - the concepts and their operationalization - in the Asia-Pacific region.
Author's N o t e I would like to acknowledge the substantial assistance provided t o me by Dr. Amitav Acharya in drafting an earlier version of the sections on comprehensive security and common security. I also wish to note the many helpful comments I received from those who read and heard the earlier and more extensive paper prepared for the Seventh Annual Asia Pacific Roundtable, Kuala Lumpur, 6-9 June 1993. That paper is forthcoming in a conference proceedings being prepared for publication by ISIS-Malaysia. My thanks to Dr. Noordin Sopiee, Director General, ISIS-Malaysia and to my colleague, Professor Paul Evans, Director, Joint Centre for Asia Pacific Studies, Toronto for their invitation to participate in the Roundtable and for their comments o n the earlier draft.
Notes 1. Subsequent generations of American strategic thinkers have more or less retained this definition. According to Wolfers, the 'common usage' of the term 'national security' 'implies that security rises and falls with the ability of a nation to deter an attack'. See, Arnold Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Deilvitt
Common, Comprehensive, and Cooperative Security
425
University Press, 1962), p. 150. In the 1970s, some scholars moved away from the war-centrlc view of security and allowed for the considerat~onof some categories of non-military (especially economic) threats. Thus, according t o Klaus Knorr, 'national security concerns arise when vital or core values are threatened by external actlons or events'. See Klaus Knorr and Frank N. Trager (eds.), Economic Issues and National Security (Kansas: Regents Press of Kansas for the National Security Education Program, 1977), p. 8. 2. Joseph S. Nye and Sean M. Lynn-Jones, 'International Security Studies: Report of a Conference on the State of the Field', International Security Vol. 12, No. 4, 1988, pp. 5-27. 3. Geoffrey Wiseman has written extensively on the genesis of security concepts. For one of his earlier pieces, see Geoffrey Wiseman, Common Security and Non-Provocative Defence: Altevnative approaches to the secu~itydilemma (Australian National University, Canberra: Peace Research Centre, Research School of Pacific Studies, 1989). 4. See the NPCSD Working Paper Series published by the Centre for International and Strategic Studies, York Un~versity,on behalf of the North Pacific Cooperative Security Research Program; for example, Stewart Henderson, 'Canada and Asla Pacific Security: The North Pacific Cooperative Security Dialogue - Recent Trends', No. 1; B r ~ a nL. Job, 'Canadian Interests and Perspectives Regarding the Emerging Pacific Security Order', No. 2; David Dewitt and Paul Evans, 'The Changing Dynam~csof Asia Pacific Security: A Canad~anPerspective', No. 3. 5. J.W.M. Chapman, R. Drifte and I.T.M. Grow, Japank Quest for C o m p r e h e n s i ~ Security (London: Frances Pinter, 1983), p. x i [ . 6 . Chapman et al., Japank Quest, pp. xvi-xviii. For an excellent overview of the evolut~on of Japanese security policy, see Umemoto Tetsuya, 'Comprehensive Security and the Evolution of the Japanese Security I'osture', in Robert A. Scalapino et a/. (eds.), Asian Security lssues: Regional m d Glohul (Berkeley: University of California, Inst~tuteof East Asian Studies, 1988). T h ~ Report s also was known as the I n o k ~report after its chair, the distmguished professor and chairman of Japan's Research Inst~tutefor Peace and Security. As Tetsuya d~scusses,this w ~ s hut one of three major studies undertaken hv the governments of the day. 7. S. Javed Maswood, Japanese Defence: The Seurch for Politic-ul Pouwv (Singapore: ISEAS, IYYO), p. 39. 8. Yukio Satoh, The Evolutron ofjapank Security Polrcy, Adelphi Paper No. 178 (London: llSS, 1982), p. 7. 9. Chapman et a/., Japan's Quest, p. 149. It should he noted that post-war Japanese political culture has discouraged public discussion and political activism in Issues directly related to milltary security. Given the prlmacy of the Japan-United States defence and security arrangements and the focus on promoting Japanese economic growth both at home and globally, it is not surprising that the economic aspects of comprehensive security have dominated. For an overview of related military security issues, see Masashi Nishihara, East Asian Security und the Trrlateval Countries (New York: New York Un~versityPress, 1985), a report to The Tr~lateralCommission; also David B. Ikwitt, 'Japan's Role In Regional and International Secur~ty',In Don J. Daly and Tom T. Sekine (eds.), Discovering Japan (Toronto: Captus University Publications, 1990). 10. Chapman et al., japan's Quest, p. xur. I I. The principal rationale here is that extra-regional alliances, and perhaps alliances in general, will be irrelevant in dealing with internal threats against the government. This may be less the case ~fthe region becomes a focus of coordinated insurgencies against more than one regime, say by Islamists or others, who wish to alter not only the characteristics of the governing regime and the very nature of the state, but to do so 111 the context of changing regional and inter-regional politics. 12. David Irvine, 'Making Haste Slowly: ASEAN from 1975', in Alison Bromowski (ed.), Understanding ASEAN (Imndon; Macmillan, 1982), p. 40. 13. Jusuf Wanandi, 'Security Issues In the ASEAN Region', in Karl Jackson and M. Hadi Soesastro (eds.), ASEAN Security and Economic Development (Berkeley CA: University of Califorma, Institute of East Asian Studies, 1984), p. 305. 14. Muthiah Alagappa's piece, 'Comprehensive Security: Interpretations In M E A N Countries', in Robert A. Scalapino et al. (eds.), Asian Security Issues: Regronill and G k ~ b f l l (Berkeley CA: Univers~tyof California, Institute of East A s ~ a nStudies, 1988) provides a superb
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The Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security Agenda
overview and analysis of this topic. In his essay he notes at least five factors behind the origin and development of the doctrine of national resilience with its focus on internal threats (pp. 58-62). For a very clear introduction to comprehensive security in che Malaysian context, in addition to Alagappa's overview, see Noordin Sopiee, 'Malaysia's Doctrine of Comprehensive Security', a paper prepared for the conference on East Asian Security: Perceptions and Realities, 25-27 May 1984, Seoul. 15. Cited in Alagappa, 'Comprehensive Security', pp. 63, 67-8. 16. Olaf Palme et al., Common Security: A Blueprint for Survival (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), pp. 7-11. 17. Within the last few years, critics of deterrence have not relied solely o n the 'end of the Cold War' thesis. Rather, there is emerging both a conceptually sophisticated and empirically rich research which challenges deterrence in both its nuclear and non-nuclear variants, including as well the issues related to extended deterrence and reassurance. See, for instance, the debates between Paul Huth and Bruce Russett versus Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein in the American journal, World Politics, in Vols. 4 1 and 42, 1988-1990. 18. Wiseman, Common Security a n d Non-Provocative Defence provides a superb discussion of these and related thinking on defence and common security. There is a substantial literature on these topics, most easily accessible through what might loosely be called the European (principally Scandinavian, German, and Dutch) peace research community. 19. An excellent synthesis of the literature and discussion concerning collective security, concerts, and evolving Europe is to be found in Charles A. Kupchan and Clifford A. Kupchan, 'Concerts, Collective Security, and the Future of Europe', lnternational Security, Vol. 16, No. 1, 1991, pp. 114-61. Some of my own concerns about the weaknesses of collect~vesecurity models are reflected in this piece. 20. Janice Gross Stein, 'Detection and Defection: Security "Regimes" and the Management of International Conflict', International Journal, Vol. XL, No. 4, 1985, p. 600. 21. Robert Jervis, 'Security Regimes', lnternational Organizations, Vol. 36, No. 2, p. 357. 22. The attempts by the CSCE, in conjunction with the UN, NATO, and the WEU to address the Yugoslavian and CIS issues, however unsuccessful to date, are indicative of a primitive collective security approach to conflict management. In this sense, it is an attempt to stabilize and resolve internal threats which risk the viability of the nascent security community rather than a collective response to externalities. 23. On the Australian proposal and related issues see Geoffrey Wiseman, 'Common Security in the Asia-Pacific Region', The Pacific Review, Vol. 5, No. 1, 1992, pp. 42-59; Patrick M. Cronin, 'Pacific Rim Security: Beyond Bilateralism?' The Pacific Review, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1992, pp. 209-20; and Gary Klintworth, 'Asia-Pacific: More Security, Less Uncertainty, New Opportunities', The Pacific Review, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1992, pp. 221-31. 24. The problems of applying European-style CSBMs to the Asia-Pacific region are discussed in Trevor Findlay, 'Confidence-building Measures for the Asia-Pacific: The Relevance of the European Experience', in Muthiah Alagappa (ed.), Building Confidence - Resolving Conflicts (Kuala Lumpur: Institute for International and Strategic Studies, 1989), pp. 55-74. For a survey of regional attitudes towards CSBMs at the time, see Trevor Findlay, Asia-Pacific CSBMs: A Prospectus (Canberra: Australian National University, Peace Research Centre, 1990). This issue of transferring knowledge from one political security arena to another is becoming increasingly relevant. CSBMs have been discussed and even pursued in Latin America, the Middle East, and recently in North Asia. The United Nations also has undertaken a number of special working groups t o explore these issues and for the last few years a substantially higher profile has been accorded regional multilateral meetings on security. 25. 'Asian Security in the 1990s: Integration in Economics: Diversity in Defense', a speech by Richard Solomon, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, at the University of San Diego, 30 October 1990, excerpts published in US Department of State Dispatch, 5 Novemher 1990. Solomon argued that 'East Asia is a region so vastly different from Europe in terms of its history, cultural diversity, levels of economic development and geopolitical architecture that imposing the logic of European security is simply inappropriate. The Cold War did not weld the region into two opposing blocs and there is n o single threat
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Common, Comprehensive, and Cooperative Security
427
commonly perceived across the region. Instead, there is a multiplicity of security concerns that vary from one sub-region to another ...' 26. The Strarts Times, 7 August 199 1. 27. See David B. Dewitt, 'Confidence- and Security-Building Measures In the Third World: Is There a Role?', Internutional]ournal, Vol. 52, No. 3, 1987, pp. 509-35; Masahiko Asada, 'Conf~dence-BuildingMeasures in East Asia: A Japanese Perspective', Asian Survey, Vol. 28, No. 5, 1988, pp. 489-508; Findlay, 'Confidence-Building Measures for the Asia-Pacific'. 28. A carefully formulated presentation on how one might construct through discrete incremental steps a limited operational regional security framework can be found in Desmond Ball, Building Blocks for Regronal Security: An Australian Perspectrue on Confidence and Security Building Measures (CSBMs) in the AsialPacific Region. Canberra Papers on Strategy and Defence No. 8 3 (Canberra: Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Research School of the Pacific, Australian National University, 199 1 ). 29. The Straits Times, 10 July 1991. 30. For an important new analysis on ASEAN, especially as it concerns regional security Issues, see Anutav Acharya, A New Regional Order in South-East Asra: ASEAN in t l ~ ePostCold War Era, Adelphi Paper 279 (London: The International Institute for Strategic Studies, August 1993). 31. Sukhumbhand Parihatra, 'Meeting the Challenge of the Post-Cold War World: Some Reflections on the Making of a New Southeast Asia', paper presented to the Fourth Southeast Asian Forum, organized by the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia, Kuala I.unipur, 15-18 January 1992, pp. 24-5. 32. In addition to Wiseman and Kl~ntworthnoted above, see also Desmond Ball, 'Tasks for Security Cooperation in Asia', paper prepared for the Third Conference on Security Cooperat~on in the Asia-Pacific, Seoul, 1-3 November 1992. Overall, there is a substantial amount of academic thinking and policy discuss~onoccurring on Asia-Pacific security after the Cold War. 33. See Wiseman, 'Common Security in the Asia Pacific Region' where he notes that both common security and cooperative security are gradualist in approach. 34. In all these ways, cooperative security in this context is not what three American scholars recently have written, confirming once again how diff~cultit is to transcend both academic tradition and political security culture. In this case, it is as much 'from where you come and where you sit' ( t o borrow from Graham Allison) as what you know that seems to make the difference. See Ashton B. Carter. William 3. Perry and John D. Steinbruner, A New Concept of Cooperatwe Security (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1992). They, in effect, build on the Idea of 'security cooperation' and focus solely on the challenges facing the postcold war world where horizontal proliferation, along with other m~litary-securitydynamics, 'have created some new problems [for the United States, especially] of managing international security in the longer term. ... For U.S. security policy in particular, the conceptual cr~sisis acute' (p. 4 ) . Their primary concern, not unreasonable but clearly coming from the position o f assumlng that the United States must be, if not the policeman then the fireman, is '[steerage] toward safe and stable outcomes'. In any case, their employment of the term 'cooperative security' with its focus on military threats does not embrace either the content or the intent of the use of this term within either the Asia-Pacific context as initially proposed within the North Paclfic arena, or as conceived by policymakers and academics in considering its more generalizable applicability across regions. 35. As the idea of cooperative security has been developed and discussed within Canada, it was not viewed as uniquely applicable for Asia-Pacific hut rather as a more generalized reconceptualization of the substance, process, and structure of security polltics in the post-cold war transition, and probably beyond. While Canadian officials and academics first applied it to the North Pacific for obvious reasons (absence of regional ~nstitutionsand habits of dialogue even among the like-m~nded, heavy concentration of strategic and tactical non-conventional weapons systems, exceptionally large standing armies, superpower naval and alr capabilities, etc. and a11 on Canada's western and northern approaches) other regions, notably Latin America and the Middle East, also are b a n g reassessed through this prlsm. One might even see traces of cooperative security thinking in post-Agenda for Peace United Nations activities.
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
36. See Kupchan and Kupchan, 'Concerts, Collective Security, and Europe' for a fine encapsulation of the underlying literature and arguments. While cooperation is an outcome of collective security, in order for it actually t o happen the necessary preconditions include an inclusive system in which n o state has the capacity effectively to challenge o r to nullify the combined power of the collective, where major powers of the system agree on those factors fundamental to ensuring a stable order and the defining characteristics of that order, and where each of the major states must be internally resilient and their elites sharing common views o n long-term natlonal and collective interests. 37. See Dewitt and Evans, NPCSD Working Paper No. 3, Appendix I. Evans has since undertaken a still more thorough assessment of the increasing number and variety of transPacific channels as well as the complementary initiatives being undertaken by a range of actors throughout the region. I purposefully used the term 'to converse' rather than 'to discuss' or 'to have a dialogue' since the former implies a real interest in both listening and in sharing understanding, not merely the exchange of information o r the presentation of positions which the latter t w o terms more readily connote. 38. Part of the rationale behind pushing for NATO being a political as well as military alliance (ie, the so-called Canadian article in the Charter) was to facilitate a more generalized ability of the members of the alliance to restrain thc United States from unilateral action and to contain the influence of the three UNSC permanent members -Britain, France, and the United States - within NATO corridors. O n the interesting auestion of Dowers in decline versus challengers, there is a fairly rich international relations literature (both theoretical and empirical), although there is little agreement on which of the competing theories and perspectives is 'correct'; ie, has greater explanatory power. See, for example, A.F.K. Organski and J. Kugler, The War Ledger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Robert Gilpin, War and Peace in World Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politrcs (Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1979); and, of course, more recently the 'United States in decline' debate with Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1.500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987) and a range of authors responding. 39. I hesitate to use the term 'cooperative engagement' since that has been developed rather creatively by Admiral Charles R. Larson, CINCPAC, and his colleagues. See, for example, the papers prepared for the conference, Cooperative Engagement and Economic Security in the Asia-Pacific Region, sponsored by National Defense University and United States Pacific Command, 3-4 March 1993, Honolulu. 40. See Brian L. Job (ed.), The Insecurity Dilemma: National Security of Third World States (Boulder & London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1992), especially his introductory chapter, 'The Insecurity Dilemma: National, Regime, and State Securities in the Third World', pp. 11-36. 41. Challenges to security and the shape of a new and preferred world order have been regular themes after major breakpoints in world affairs. Usually these have been cataclysmic and acute, such as world wars or major natural disasters. Currently lt is in the throes of the uncertainty of the post-cold war transformation and the debates around power, structure, and process, and whether there are universal norms - such as human rights and democracy - to which all peoples should aspire and by which all societies and governments will be judged. The literature on these themes is expanding daily. 42. This emerging focus on regions requires a much more careful examination of the complex relationships between economic capacity, military-security dynamics, and political culture than one normally finds in the literature. While economists long have been aware of issues of scale, comparative advantage, market penetration, and so forth, those of us who have focused our attention primarily on matters of military security have tended t o be overly constrained by the mid-twentieth century definition of strategic studies which, unlike its predecessors, focused on military power often to the exclusion of social, economic, and cultural forces. 43. Robert A. Scalapino, 'Historical Perceptions and Current Realities regarding Northeast Asian Regional Cooperation', NPCSD Working Paper No. 20 (York University, Centre for International and Strategic Studies, October 1992). 44. The principles of collective security are drawn from a thorough reading of the literature wrltten primarily during the first decade or so after the end of the Second World War. For
".
L)CM it t
Common. Comprehensive, and Cooperative Security
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a review and assessment, see Kupchan and Kupchan, 'Concerts, Collective Security, and Europe'. In practice, one could envisage an argument for exclusion if agreed basic norms which, when violated and therefore threaten the peace and security of the global community, are abrogated. Today one might note the issue of clandestine nuclear proliferation or being a non-signatory to the NPT. Thus, once the door is open to establishing such criteria, as sensible as they may seem they easily permit uneven application. A still more difficult example is human rights, which the UNGA and the UNSC clearly have noted as fundamental and universal, yet in practice acknowledging the need to be context sensitive, thus once again heading down that slippery slope. Of course, we all recognize the classic phdosophical debate between absolutes, relatives, and conditionals and that politics becomes the art of the possible in an effort to maximize the greatest good. Thus, at the end all one can expect is that reasonable people will pursue reasonable means to ach~cvegoals which, through negotiat~onand compromise, have been agreed to by all members of the collective. In the case of regional multilateral cooperative security, this means accepting a degree of elasticity in establishing criteria for entry and exit of both membership and agenda items, but always aiming for inclusiveness and breadth wherever possible. 45. The obverse is also true as regards human rights and development issues. 46. Having the 'track two' process operational not only broadens the type of expertise, but also can enhance confidence in the overall programme. While it is clear that in many areas officlals will have a privileged position, the ability to draw in experts from the academic, foundation, private economic, and other sectors as appropriate not only facilitates challenging conventional wisdom and standard operating procedures, but it broadens the domestic as well as trans-national basis of support upon which to move to a new way of doing things. If democratization or participation in the political, economic, and social life of the countries, along with a movement towards so-called liberal, free market economies are, together, becoming generally accepted, then it will be rather short-sighted if one were to retreat into the old thinking which assumes that security affairs and international polltics are the preserve of the privileged few. Increasingly, modern communications technologies the world over are empowering polities in ways never before seen. While the so-called masses may still be manipulated by elites, there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that leaders do so at rather substantial personal and regime risk. See, for example, the chapters by David V.J. Bell and Robert Cox in Dewitt, Haglund, and K~rton(eds.), Building a New Global Order. 47. In structural terms, therefore, one could think in terms of a security regime, although in both process and agenda it is likely to be broader than what is normally considered in the literature a security regime. See, for instance, the issue of the American journal, International Organizations, which focused on the notion of regimes; for example, Jervis, 'Security Regimes'. 48. Quoted from James A. Caporaso, 'International Relations Theory and Multilateralism: The Search for Foundations' International Organizations, Vol. 46, N o . 3, 1992, p. 602.
N e w Dimensions of Human Security Human Development Report 1994
F
ifty years ago, Albert Einstein summed up the discovery of atomic energy with characteristic simplicity: "Everything changed." He went on to predict: "We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive." Although nuclear explosions devastated Nagasaki and Hiroshima, humankind has survived its first critical test of preventing worldwide nuclear devastation. But five decades later, we need another profound transition in thinking - from nuclear security to human security. The concept of security has for too long been interpreted narrowly: as security of territory from external aggression, or as protection of national interests in foreign policy or as global security from the threat of a nuclear holocaust. It We need another has been related more to nation-states than profound transition to people. The superpowers were locked in in thinking - from an ideological struggle - fighting a cold war all over the world. The developnuclear security to ing nations, having won their independence human security only recently, were sensitive to any real or perceived threats to their fragile national identities. Forgotten were the legitimate concerns of ordinary people who sought security in their daily lives. For many of them, security symbolized protection from the threat of disease, hunger, unemployment, crime, social conflict, political repression and environmental hazards. With the dark shadows of the cold war receding, one can now see that many conflicts are within nations rather than between nations. For most people, a feeling of insecurity arises more from worries about daily life than from the dread of a cataclysmic world event. Will they and their families have enough to eat? Will they lose their jobs? Will their streets and neighbourhoods be safe from crime? Will they be tortured by a repressive state? Will they become a victim of violence because of their gender? Will their religion or ethnic origin target them for persecution (box I ) ? Source: Human Development Report 1994 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 22-40.
BOX 1 Human security
- a s people see it
How individuals regard security depends very much on their immediate circumstances. Here are some views of security gathered from around the world, through a special sample survey by UNDP field offices.
Primary school pupil in Kuwait " I feel secure because I am living with my family and I have friends. However, I did not feel secure during the Iraqi invasion. If a country is at war, how are people supposed to feel secure?" Woman in Nigeria " M y security is only in the name of the Lord who has made heaven and earth. I feel secure because I am at liberty to worship whom I like, how I like, and also because I can pray for all the people and for peace all over the country." Fourth-grade schoolgirl in Ghana "I shall feel secure when I know that I can walk the streets at night without being raped." Shoe-mender in Tbailand "When we have enough for the children to eat, we are happy and we feel secure." Man in Namibia "Robberies make me feel insecure. I sometimes feel as though even my life will be stolen." Woman in Iran " I believe that a girl cannot feel secure until she is married and has someone to depend on." Public administrator in Cameroon "Security for me means that my job and position are safe and I can continue to provide for the needs of my family and also have something for investment and friends." Woman in Kyrgyzstan "Human security indicates faith in tomorrow, not as much having to do with food and clothing, as with stability of the political and economic situation." Secondary school pupil in Mongolia "Before, education in this country was totally free, but from this year every student has to pay. Now I do not feel very secure about finishing my studies." (Continued)
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(Continued )
Woman in Paraguay " I feel secure because I feel fulfilled and have confidence in myself. I also feel secure because God is great and watches over me." Man in Ecuador
"What makes you feel insecure above all is violence and delinquency as well as insecurity with respect t o the police. Basic services are also an important part of security."
In the final analysis, human security is a child who did not die, a disease that did not spread, a job that was not cut, an ethnic tension that did not explode in violence, a dissident who was not silenced. Human security is not a concern with weapons - it is a concern with human life and dignity. The idea of human security, though simple, is likely to revolutionize society in the 21st century. A consideration of the basic concept of human security must focus on four of its essential characteristics:
0
0
Human security is a universal concern. It is relevant to people everywhere, in rich nations and poor. There are many threats that are common to all people - such as unemployment, drugs, crime, pollution and human rights violations. Their intensity may differ from one part of the world to another, but all these threats to human security are real and growing. The components of human security are interdependent. When the security of people is endangered anywhere in the world, all nations are likely to get involved. Famine, disease, pollution, drug trafficking, terrorism, ethnic disputes and social disintegration are no longer isolated events, confined within national borders. Their consequences travel the globe. Human security is easier to ensure through early prevention than later intervention. It is less costly to meet these threats upstream than downstream. For example, the direct and indirect cost of HIVIAIDS (human immunodeficiency viruslacquired immune deficiency syndrome) was roughly $240 billion during the 1980s. Even a few billion dollars invested in primary health care and family planning education could have helped contain the spread of this deadly disease. Human security is people-centred. It is concerned with how people live and breathe in a society, how freely they exercise their many choices, how much access they have to market and social opportunities - and whether they live in conflict or in peace.
Several analysts have attempted rigorous definitions of human security. But like other fundamental concepts, such as human freedom, human security
Humall L)eveIul~~riciit Report l i N 1
Human Security 413
is more easily identified through its absence than its presence. And most people instinctively understand what security means. Nevertheless, it may be useful to have a more explicit definition. Human security can be said to have two main aspects. It means, first, safety from such chronic threats as hunger, disease and repression. And second, it means protection from sudden and hurtful disruptions in the patterns of daily life whether in homes, in jobs or in communities. Such threats can exist at all levels of national income and development. The loss of human security can be a slow, silent process - or an abrupt, loud emergency. It can be human-made - due to wrong policy choices. It can stem from the forces of nature. O r it can be a combination of both - as is often the case when environmental degradation leads to a natural disaster, followed by human tragedy. In defining security, it is important that human security not be equated with human development. Human development is a broader concept - defined in previous Human Development Reports as a process of widening the range of people's choices. Human security means that people can exercise these choices safely and freely - and that they can be relatively confident that the opportunities they have today are not totally lost tomorrow. There is, of course, a link between human security and human development: progress in one area enhances the chances of progress in the other. But failure in one area also heightens the risk of failure in the other, and history is replete with examples. Failed or limited human development leads to a backlog of human deprivation - poverty, hunger, disease or persisting disparities between ethnic communities or between regions. This backlog in access to power and economic opportunities can lead to violence. When people perceive threats to their immediate security, they often become less tolerant, as the antiforeigner feelings and violence in Europe show. Or, where people see the basis of their livelihood erode - such as their access to water - political conflict can ensue, as in parts of Central Asia and the Arab States. Oppression and perceptions of injustice can also lead to violent protest against authoritarianism, as in Myanmar and Zaire, where people despair of gradual change. Ensuring human security does not The world will never be mean taking away from people the responsecure from war if men sibility and opportunity for mastering their and women have no lives. To the contrary, when people are insecure, they become a burden on society. The concept of human security stresses that people should be able to take care of themselves: all ~ e o d eshould have the opportunity to meet their most essential needs and to earn their own living. This will set them free and help ensure that they can make a full contribution to development - their own development and that of their communities, their countries and the world. Human security is a critical ingredient of participatory development. A
L
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The Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security Agenda
Human security is therefore not a defensive concept - the way territorial or military security is. Instead, human security is an integrative concept. It acknowledges the universalism of life claims. It is embedded in a notion of solidarity among people. It cannot be brought about through force, with armies standing against armies. It can happen only if we agree that development must involve all people. Human security thus has many components. To clarify them, it helps to examine them in detail.
Components of Human Security
There have always been two major components of human security: freedom from fear and freedom from want. This was recognized right from the beginning of the United Nations. But later the concept was tilted in favour of the first component rather than the second. The founders of the United Nations, when considering security, always gave equal weight to territories and to people. In 1945, the US secretary of state reported to his government on the results of the conference in San Francisco that set up the United Nations. He was quite specific on this point: The battle of peace has to be fought on two fronts. The first is the security front where victory spells freedom from fear. The second is the economic and social front where victory means freedom from want. Only victory on both fronts can assure the world of an enduring peace. ... N o provisions that can be written into the Charter will enable the Security Council to make the world secure from war if men and women have no security in their homes and their jobs. It is now time to make a transition from the narrow concept of national security to the all-encompassing concept of human security. People in rich nations seek security from the threat of crime and drug wars in their streets, the spread of deadly diseases like HIVIAIDS, soil degradation, rising levels of pollution, the fear of losing their jobs and many other anxieties that emerge as the social fabric disintegrates. People in poor nations demand liberation from the continuing threat of hunger, disease and poverty while also facing the same problems that threaten industrial countries. At the global level, human security no longer means carefully constructed safeguards against the threat of a nuclear holocaust - a likelihood greatly reduced by the end of the cold war. Instead, it means responding to the threat of global poverty travelling across international borders in the form of drugs, HIVIAIDS, climate change, illegal migration and terrorism. The prospect of collective suicide through an impulsive resort to nuclear weapons was always exaggerated. But the threat of global poverty affecting all human lives - in rich
nations and in poor -is real and persistent. And there are no global safeguards against these real threats to human security. The concept of security must thus change urgently in two basic ways: 0
r
From an exclusive stress on territorial security to a much greater stress on people's security. From security through armaments to security through sustainable human
development. The list of threats to human security is long, but most can be considered under seven main categories: 0
0 0
0 0
Economic security Food security Health security Environmental security Personal security Community security Political security. Economic Security
Economic security requires an assured basic income - usually from productive and remunerative work, or in the last resort from some publicly financed safety net. But only about a quarter of the world's people may at present be economically secure in this sense. Many people in the rich nations today feel insecure because jobs are increasingly difficult to find and keep. In the past two decades, the number of jobs in industrial countries has increased at only half the rate of GDP growth and failed to keep pace with the growth in the labour force. By 1993, more than 35 million people were seeking work, and a high proportion were women. Young people are more likely to be unemployed: in the United States in 1992, youth unemployment reached 14%, in the United Kingdom 15%, in Italy 33% and in Spain 34%. Often, the unemployment rate also varies with ethnic origin. In Canada, the unemployment rate among indigenous people is about 20% - twice that for other Canadians. And in the United States, the unemployment rate for blacks is twice that for whites. Even those with jobs may feel insecure if the work is only temporary. In 1991 in Finland, 13% of the employed were temporary workers, and the figures were even higher elsewhere - 15% in Greece, 17% in Portugal, 20% in Australia and 32% in Spain. Some people do, of course, choose to work on a temporary basis. But in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Belgium and the Netherlands, more than 60% of workers in temporary jobs accepted them because they could not find full-time employment. To have work for everybody, industrial countries are experimenting with job-sharing.
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T h e Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security Agenda
The problems are even greater in developing countries, where open registered unemployment is commonly above l o % , and total unemployment probably way beyond that. Again, this is a problem especially for young people: for youths in Africa in the 1980s, the open unemployment rate was above 20%. And it is one of the main factors underlying political tensions and ethnic violence in several countries. But unemployment figures understate the real scale of the crisis since many of those working are seriously underemployed. Without the assurance of a social safety net, the poorest cannot survive even a short period without an income. Many of them, however, can rely on family or community support. Yet that system is rapidly breaking down. So, the unemployed must often accept any work they can find, however I may at present be I unproductive or badly paid. The most insecure working condieconomically secure tions are usually in the informal sector, which has a high proportion of total employment. In 1991, it accounted for 30% of all jobs in Latin America and 60% of those in Africa. The global shift towards more "precarious" employment reflects changes in the structure of industry. Manufacturing jobs have been disappearing, while many of the new opportunities are in the service sector, where employment is much more likely to be temporary or part-time - and less protected by trade unions. For many people, the only option is self-employment. But this can be even less secure than wage employment, and those at the bottom of the ladder find it difficult to make ends meet. In the rural areas, the poorest farmers have little access to land, whose distribution can be gauged by the Gini coefficient a measure of inequality that ranges from 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (absolute inequality). In Kenya, the Gini coefficient for land is 0.77, in Saudi Arabia 0.83 and in Brazil 0.86. And even those who have some land or know of productive investment opportunities often find it difficult to farm and invest effectively because they have little access to credit. This, despite the mounting evidence that the poor are creditworthy. In many developing countries, 40% of the people receive less than 1% of total credit. The shift to more precarious work has been accompanied by increasing insecurity of incomes. Nominal wages have remained stagnant, or risen only slowly, but inflation has sharply eroded their value. Some of the worst examples of inflation in the 1980s: Nicaragua 584%, Argentina 417%, Brazil 328% and Uganda 107%; and in the 1990s: Ukraine 1,445%, Russian Federation 1,353% and Lithuania 1,194%. As a result, real wages in many parts of the world have declined. In Latin America in the 1980s, they fell by 20%, and in many African countries during the same period, the value of the minimum wage dropped sharply by 2 0 % in Togo, 40% in Kenya and 80% in Sierra Leone. Worse off are women - who typically receive wages 30-40% lower than those of men for
H u m a n Developnwnt Repoit 100 1 Human Security
437
doing the same jobs. In Japan and the Republic of Korea, women in manufacturing jobs earn only about half as much as men. Income insecurity has hit industrial countries as well. In the European Union, 44 million people (some 28% of the workforce) receive less than half the average income of their country. In the United States, real earnings fell by 3% through the 1980s. Minority ethnic groups are usually among the hardest hit: in Canada, nearly half the indigenous people living on reservations now rely on transfer payments for their basic needs. Some sections of the population face a particularly difficult situation. In 1994, about 65 million disabled people need training and job placement to attain economic security. Only 1% will receive meaningful services. The disabled are, by and large, found among the poorest quarter of the population. And their unemployment rate is as high as 8 4 % in Mauritius and 4 6 % in China. With incomes low and insecure, many people have to look for more support from their governments. But they often look in vain. Most developing countries lack even the most rudimentary forms of social security, and budgetary problems in industrial countries have unravelled social safety nets. In the United States between 1987 and 1990, the real benefits per pensioner declined by 40%, and in Austria by 50%. In Germany, where maternity compensation has already been cut to 25% of full pay, the government decided that over the next three years unemployment and welfare payments will be cut by some $45 billion - the largest cut in postwar German history. The result: increasing poverty. In both the United States and the European Union, nearly 1 5 % of the people live below the poverty line. The incidence of poverty varies with ethnic origin. In Germany, while the national average has been estimated at 11 %, the incidence of poverty among foreign-born residents is 24%. But the most acute problems are in the developing countries, where more than a third of the people live below the poverty line - and more than one billion people survive on a daily income of less than $1. One of economic insecurity's severest effects is homelessness. Nearly a quarter of a million New Yorkers - more than 3% of the city's population and more than 8 % of its black children - have stayed in shelters over the past five years. London has about 400,000 registered homeless people. France has more than 500,000 - nearly 10,000 in Paris. The situation is much worse in developing countries. In Calcutta, Dhaka and Mexico City, more than 25%) of the people constitute what is sometimes called a "floating population". Figures 1 and 2 on the following page give selected indicators of economic insecurity. For industrial countries, these indicators refer to job security. But for developing countries, because of data limitations, the data refer only to income security.
Food security means that all people at all times have both physical and economic access to basic food. This requires not just enough food to go
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The Transition to the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
round. It requires that people have ready access to food - that they have an "entitlement" to food, by growing it for themselves, by buying it or by taking advantage of a p h l i c food distribution system. The availability of food is thus a necessary condition of security - hut not a sufficient one. People can
Figure 1 : Falling Incomes Threaten Human Security 1991 C.NP p r capita as a pcrrcnrrge of 19RO'r
Ethiopia
Nicaragua C h dd'lvoire
Figure 2: High Unemployment in Industrial Countries Total unemployed
.............................................. Unemployed more than 12 mnnthr
Huin'in De~c~ic'.prrrc*nt lirp
,ti
)
1 Human Security
4'39
still starve even when enough food is available - as has happened during many famines (box 2).
BOX 2 Starvation amid plenty - the Bengal famine of 1943 Famines are commonly thought of as Nature's revenge on hapless humanity. Although Nature can certainly create local food shortages, human beings turn these shortages into widespread famines. People go hungry not because food is unavailable - but because they cannot afford it. The Bengal famine of 1943 shows why. Between two million and three million lives were lost, even though there was no overall shortage of food. In fact, the per capita supply of foodgrains in 1943 was 9% higher than in 1941. The famine was partly a product of an economic boom. Sudden increases in war-related activities exerted powerful inflationary pressures on the economy and caused food prices to rise. In the urban areas, those with work could pay these prices. But in the rural areas, agricultural labourers and other workers found they could no longer afford to eat, and thousands headed for the cities, particularly Calcutta, in the hope of survival. Prices were then driven even higher by speculation and panic buying. The famine could probably have been averted by timely government action. But the colonial government did nothing to stop hoarding by producers, traders and consumers. The general policy was "wait and see". Relief work was totally inadequate, and the distribution of foodgrains to the rural districts was inefficient. Even in October 1943, with 100,000 sick and destitute people on the streets of Calcutta, the government continued to deny the existence of a famine. The result was one of the largest man-made catastrophes of our time.
The overall availability of food in the world is not a problem. Even in developing countries, per capita food production increased by 18% on average in the 1980s. And there is enough food to offer everyone in the world around 2,500 calories a day - 200 calories more than the basic minimum. But this does not mean that everyone gets enough to eat. The problem often is the poor distribution of food and a lack of purchasing power. Some 800 million people around the world go hungry. In Sub-Saharan Africa, despite considerable increases in the availability of food in recent years, some
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T h e Transition t o t h e Post-Cold War Security Agenda
240 million people (about 30% of the total) are undernourished. And in South Asia, 30% of babies are born under- the highest ratio for any region in weight People go hungry not the world and a sad indication of inadequate because food is access to food, particularly for women, who unavailable - but are often the last to eat in the household. because they cannot Table 1 gives selected indicators of food securafford it ity in developing countries. T a b l e I : Indicators of Food Security in Selected Countries
Country
Food Production Per Capita Index ( 1979/81 = 100) 1991
Food Import Dependency Ratio Index ( 1969/71=100) 1988/90
Daily Per Capita Calorie Supply as % of Requirements 1988-90
Ethiopia Afghanistan Mozambique Angola Rwanda Somalia Sudan Burundi Haiti
Government and international agencies have tried many ways of increasing food security - at both national and global levels. But these schemes have had only a limited impact. Access to food comes from access to assets, work and an assured income. And unless the question of assets, employment and income security is tackled upstream, state interventions can do little for food insecurity downstream. Health Security
In developing countries, the major causes of death are infectious and parasitic diseases, which kill 17 million people annually, including 6.5 million from acute respiratory infections, 4.5 million from diarrhoea1 diseases and 3.5 million from tuberculosis. Most of these deaths are linked with poor nutrition and an unsafe environment - particularly polluted water, which contributes to the nearly one billion cases of diarrhoea a year. In industrial countries, the major killers are diseases of the circulatory system (5.5 million deaths a year), often linked with diet and life style. Next comes cancer, which in many cases has environmental causes. In the United States, there are considered to be 18 major cancer-causing environmental risks, with indoor pollution at the top of the list. In both developing and industrial countries, the threats to health security are usually greater for the poorest, people in the rural areas and particularly
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441
Figure 3: Children's Health Percentage of ch~ldrenunder 5 who are underweight
children (figure 3). In the developing countries in 1990, safe water was available to 85% of urban people but to only 62% of rural people. In industrial countries, the poor and the racial minorities are more exposed to disease. In the United States, one-third of whites live in areas polluted by carbon monoxide, but the figure for blacks is nearly 50%. In 1991, life expectancy was 72 years for Canada's indigenous people, compared with 77 years for all Canadians. The disparities between rich and poor are similar for access to health services. In the industrial countries on average, there is 1 doctor for every 400 people, but for the developing countries there is 1 for nearly 7,000 people (in Sub-Saharan Africa the figure is 1 per 36,000). There also are marked disparities in health spending among developing countries. The Republic of Korea spends $377 per capita annually on health care, but Bangladesh only $7. People in the industrial countries are much more likely to have access to health care, but even here the disparities in health security are sharp - and for many people getting worse. In the United States between 1989 and 1992, the number of people without health insurance increased from 35 million to 39 million. While poor people in general have less health security, the situation for wornen is particularly difficult. One of the most serious hazards they face is childbirth: more than three million women die each year from causes related to childbirth. Most of these deaths could be prevented by ensuring access to
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safe and affordable family planning and offering the most basic support at home during pregnancy and delivery, with the option of referrals to clinics or hospitals for women with evident complications. The widest gap between the North and the South in any human indicator is in maternal mortality - which is about 18 times greater in the South. Thus a miracle of life often turns into a nightmare of death just because a society cannot spare the loose change to provide a birth attendant at the time of the greatest vulnerability and anxiety in a woman's life. Another increasing source of health insecurity for both sexes is the spread of HIV and AIDS (box 3). Around 15 million people are believed to be HIV-positive - 80% of them in developing countries. By 2000, this figure may rise to 40 million (13 million of them women).
BOX 3 HIV and AIDS - a global epidemic The cumulative number of HIV-infected people worldwide is now around 1 5 million, with more than 12.5 million in developing countries - 9 million in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1.5 million in Latin America and 2 million in Asia. Most HIV-infected people live in urban areas, and 70% are in the prime productive ages of 2 0 4 0 years. One million are children. In the United States, AIDS is now the prime cause of death for men aged 2 5 4 4 , and the fourth most important for women in that age group. The cumulative direct and indirect costs of HIV and AIDS in the 1980s have been conservatively estimated at $240 billion. The social and psychological costs of the epidemic for individuals, families, communities and nations are also huge - but inestimable Future projections are alarming. By 2000, the number of HIVinfected people is expected to rise to between 3 0 and 40 million 13 million of them women. By that time, the epidemic would have left more than nine million African children as orphans. The geographical distribution of HIV and AIDS is changing. In the mid-1980s, the epidemic was well established in North America and Africa, but by 2000, most of the new infections will be in Asia. In Thailand today, there are a n estimated 500,000 HIV-infected people, and in India, more than a million. The global cost - direct and indirect - of HIV and AIDS by 2000 could be as high as $500 billion a year - equivalent to more than 2 % of global GDP.
Environmental Security Human beings rely on a healthy physical environment - curiously assuming that whatever damage they inflict on the earth, it will eventually recover. This
W umnn Detrlopm~ritRepo~tI S W
Human Security 443
clearly is not the case, for intensive industrialization and rapid population growth have put the planet under intolerable strain. The environmental threats countries are facing are a combination of the degradation of local ecosystems and that of the global system. The threats to the global environment are discussed later. Here the focus is environmental threats within countries. In developing countries, one of the greatest environmental threats is that to water. Today, the world's supply of water per capita is only one-third of what it was in 1970. Water scarcity is increasingly becoming a factor in ethnic strife and political tension. In 1990, about 1.3 billion people in the developing world lacked access to clean water (figure 4). And much water pollution is the result of poor sanitation: nearly two billion people lack access to safe sanitation. But people in developing countries have also been putting pressure on the land. Some eight to ten million acres of forest land are lost each year areas the size of Austria. And deforestation combined with overgrazing and poor conservation methods is accelerating desertification. In Sub-Saharan Africa alone in the past 50 years, 65 million hectares of productive land turned to desert. Even irrigated land is under threat - from salt residues. Salinization damage affects 25% of the irrigated land in Central Asia, and 20% in Pakistan. In industrial countries, one of the major environmental threats is air pollution. Los Angeles produces 3,400 tons of pollutants each year, and London 1,200 tons. Harmful to health, this pollution also damages the natural environment. The deterioration of Europe's forests from air pollution Figure 4: More t h a n a Billion P e o p l e in D e v e l o p i n g Countries Still Lack Safe Drinking Water
I'opulat~on with x c e s s to s ~ f water c
Population without access t u safe water
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causes economic losses of $35 billion a year. And the estimated annual loss of agricultural production due to air pollution is $1.5 billion in Sweden, $1.8 billion in Italy, $2.7 billion in Poland and $4.7 billion in Germany. Although the character of environmental damage differs between industrial and developing countries, the effects are similar almost everywhere. Salinization is also severe in the United States. And air pollution is also acute in cities in the developing world. Mexico City produces 5,000 tons of air pollutants a year, and in Bangkok, air pollution is so severe that more than 40% of the city's traffic police reportedly suffer from respiratory problems. Many environmental threats are chronic and long-lasting. Others take on a more sudden and violent character. Bhopal and Chernobyl are the more obvious sudden environmental catastrophes. Many chronic "natural" disasters in recent years have also been provoked by human beings. Deforestation has led to more intense droughts and floods. And population growth has moved people into areas prone to cyclones, earthquakes or floods - areas always considered dangerous and previously uninhabited (box 4). Poverty and land shortages are doing the same - driving people onto much more marginal territory and increasing their exposure to natural hazards. The result: disasters are more significant and more frequent. During 1967-91, disasters hit three billion people - 80% of them in Asia. More than seven million people died, and two million were injured Most developing countries have plans to cope with natural emergencies Bangladesh, for example, has an elaborate warning system for cyclones arriving in the Bay of Bengal. Sometimes the scale is beyond national resources and calls for international action. Responses, however, are often slow, inadequate and uncoordinated. Current humanitarian efforts, particularly in the UN system, are seriously underfunded. And many of the most vulnerable people perish before any international help arrives. Personal Security
Perhaps no other aspect of human security is so vital for people as their security from physical violence. In poor nations and rich, human life is increasingly threatened by sudden, unpredictable violence. The threats take several forms:
0
0
0
0
Threats from the state (physical torture) Threats from other states (war) Threats from other groups of people (ethnic tension) Threats from individuals or gangs against other individuals or gangs (crime, street violence) Threats directed against women (rape, domestic violence) Threats directed at children based on their vulnerability and dependence (child abuse) Threats to self (suicide, drug use)
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BOX 4 The rising tide of disasters
The frequency and severity of disasters have increased sharply over the past two decades. There were 16 major disasters in the 1960s, 29 in the 1970s and 70 in the 1980s. According to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the major causes of deaths from natural disasters during 1967-91 were droughts (1.3 million), cyclones (0.8 million), earthquakes (0.6 million) and floods (0.3 million). But accounting for the largest number of disaster incidents over the period were floods (1,358), followed by accidents (1,284). A disaster is defined as an event that has killed at least ten people, or affected at least 100. Probably the most significant cause of the rise in the number and impact of disasters is population growth, which is forcing people to live in more marginal and dangerous places - low-lying land liable to flooding or areas close to active volcanoes. And as more and more of the planet is settled, earthquakes are more likely to strike inhabited areas. Population increases and industrial development also lead to environmental degradation. Deforestation and overgrazing, for example, have increased the number and severity of droughts and floods. Poor people are much more exposed to disasters than are rich ones. It is they who occupy the steep hillsides vulnerable to landslides. It is they who occupy the fragile delta islands that lie in the paths of cyclones. And it is they who live in the crowded and poorly built slum buildings shaken to the ground by earthquakes. There also are international disparities. Droughts or floods in Africa do much more damage than those in North America. So, of the global disaster incidents between 1967 and 1991, 22% were in the Americas and 15% in Africa. But 60% of the resulting deaths were in Africa, and only 6% in the Americas. Poor nations obviously are less equipped to cope with natural disasters. Disasters also cause considerable economic damage, and here too the figures have been rising. Global losses for the 1960s were estimated at $10 billion, for the 1970s at $30 billion and for the 1980s at $93 billion. Most of these losses (over 60%) were in the industrial countries - though as a proportion of GNP, the economic costs were higher for the developing countries. Disasters in developing countries are an integral part of their poverty cycle. Poverty causes disasters. And disasters exacerbate poverty. Only sustainable human development -which increases the security of human beings and of the planet we inhabit - can reduce the frequency and impact of natural disasters.
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In many societies, human lives are at greater risk than ever before (figure 5). For many people, the greatest source of anxiety is crime, particularly violent crime. Many countries report disturbing trends. In 1992 in the United States, 14 million crimes were reported to the police. These crimes exact a serious economic toll - estimated at $425 billion a year. Reported crimes in Germany in the same year went up by 10%. In the second half of the 1980s, the murder rate in Italy and Portugal doubled, and in Germany it tripled. The increase in crime is often connected with drug trafficking. In Canada, 225 people in every 100,000 - and in Australia, 400 - suffer each year from drug-related crimes. In the second half of the 1980s, drug-related crimes roughly doubled in Denmark and in Norway - and increased more than thirtyfold in Japan. Crime and violence are also facts of life in developing countries. Four children are murdered every day in Brazil, where the killing of minors has increased by 40% in the past year. In Kenya in 1993, there were 3,300 reported car thefts - an increase of 200% over 1991. In China, violent crime and rape are on the increase. Industrial and traffic accidents also present great risks. In industrial countries, traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for people aged 15-30 - with some of the highest injury rates in Austria, Belgium, Canada and the United States. And in developing countries, traffic accidents account for at least 50% of total accidental deaths. The highway death toll in South Africa in 1993 was 10,000, three times the number of deaths from political violence. Violence in the workplace has also increased. In 1992, more than two million US workers were physically attacked at their workplace, nearly 6.5 million others were threatened with violence, and 16 million were harassed in some way. The cost of all this in lost work and legal expenses came to more than $4 billion. About a sixth of the deaths on the job in that year were homicides. Among the worst personal threats are those to women. In no society are women secure or treated equally to men. Personal insecurity shadows them from cradle to grave. In the household, they are the last to eat. At school, they are the last to be educated. At work, they are the last to be hired and the first to be fired. And from childhood through adulthood, they are abused because of their gender. True, women are getting better educated and entering employment, often as primary income-earners. Millions of women are now heads of households - one-third of households In no society are in the world as a whole, and up to one-half in some women secure or African countries, where women produce nearly 90% of the food. But there still are many shocking treated equally
El to men
lence. It was indicators of recently gender insecurity estimated and that physical one-thirdvioof wives in developing countries are physically battered. One woman in 2,000 in the world is reported to have been raped. In the
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Figure 5: Profile of Human Distress in Industrial Countries
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The Transition t o the Post-Cold War Security Agenda
United States, there were more than 150,000 reported rapes in 1993 alone. Sexual harassment on the job is common. In India, women's groups claim that there are about 9,000 dowry-related deaths each year. For 1992, the government estimates that the figure was 5,000. Children, who should be the most protected in any society, are subject to many abuses. In the United States, nearly three million children were recently reported to be victims of abuse and neglect, and in 1992, nearly 7,000 US children (20 a day) died from gunshot wounds. In developing countries, poverty compels many children to take on heavy work at too young an age often at great cost to their health. In Brazil, more than 200,000 children spend their lives on the streets. Even conservative estimates put the combined number of child prostitutes in Thailand, Sri Lanka and the Philippines at 500,000. Community Security
Most people derive security from their membership in a group - a family, a community, an organization, a racial or ethnic group that can provide a cultural identity and a reassuring set of values. Such groups also offer practical support. The extended family system, for example, offers protection to its weaker members, and many tribal societies work on the principle that heads of households are entitled to enough land to support their family - so land is distributed accordingly. But traditional communities can also perpetuate oppressive practices: employing bonded labour and slaves and treating women particularly harshly. In Africa, hundreds of thousands of girls suffer genital mutilation each year because of the traditional practice of female circumcision. Some of these traditional practices are breaking down under the steady process of modernization. The extended family is now less likely to offer support to a member in distress. Traditional languages and cultures are withering under the onslaught of mass media. On the other hand, many oppressive practices are being fought by people's organizations and through legal action. Traditional communities, particularly ethnic groups, can also come under much more direct attack -from each other. About 40% of the world's states have more than five sizable ethnic populations, one or more of which faces discrimination. In several nations, ethnic tensions are on the rise, often over limited access to opportunities -whether to social services from the state or to jobs from the market. Individual communities lose out, or believe they lose out, in the struggle for such opportunities. As a result, about half of the world's states have recently experienced some interethnic strife. And this has been especially serious where national conflict was exacerbated by cold war rivalry. Ethnic clashes often have brutal results (table 2). Since 1983 in Sri Lanka, more than 14,000 people have died in the conflict between the Tamils and the Sinhalese. Since 1981 in former Yugoslavia, more than 130,000 people have
Human ~ e v e l a ~ r n e Report nt 10111 Human Security
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been killed and more than 40,000 helpless women reportedly raped in what , shamelessly was named "ethnic cleansing", while most ~ ~ tensions h are ~ i of ~the world watched silently from the sidelines. In Somalia in 1993, there were up to on the rise, often 10,000 casualties - about two-thirds of them Over limited access women and children - from clashes between to opportunities rival factions or with UN peace-keepers.
1
1
Table 2: Ethnic a n d Religious Conflicts
Country Afghanistan Mozambique Iraq Somalia Ethiopia Liberia Angola Myanmar Sudan Sri Lanka
G r o u p Rebelliona 1980-89
Major A r m e d conflictsb 1989-92
Yes no Yes Yes Yes no Yes yes Yes Yes
yes Yes Yes Yes Yes yes Yes yes Yes Yes
R e f u g e e s from t h e Country (Thousands) 1992 4,720 1,730 1,310 870 840 670 400 330 270
180
a. Group rebellion occurs when non-state communal groups arm themselves and organize more than 1,000 fighters and engage in vlolent activities against other such groups. b. Major armed conflicts are defined as contested conflicts that concern government or territory, in which there IS use of armed force by the two parties, of which at least one is the government (or parts of government) of a state, and which has resulted in more than 1,000 battle-related deaths durlng the course of the conflict.
The United Nations declared 1993 the Year of Indigenous People to highlight the continuing vulnerability of the 300 million aboriginal people in 70 countries. In Venezuela in 1986, there were 10,000 Yanomami people - but now their survival is increasingly in danger. Indigenous groups often lose their traditional freedom of movement. During the drought of the 1970s, the one million Tuareg nomads in the Sahara found it much more difficult to move their herds to faraway water holes, and as many as 125,000 people starved to death. Indigenous people also face widening spirals of violence. In Canada, an indigenous person is six times more likely to be murdered than other Canadians. And symptoms of depression and despair are all too common: in 1988, there were a reported 40 suicides per 100,000 indigenous people, nearly three times the national rate. Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu gives her view of the importance of the International Decade of Indigenous People (special contribution, page 450).
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SPECIAL CONTRIBUTION
The International Decade of Indigenous People We believe in the wisdom of our ancestors and wise people who passed on to us their strength and taught us the art of language - enabling us to reaffirm the validity of our thousand-year-old history and the justice of our struggle. My cause was not born out of something good, it was born out of wretchedness and bitterness. It has been radicalized by the poverty in which my people live. It has been radicalized by the malnutrition which I, as an Indian, have seen and experienced. And by the exploitation and discrimination which I have felt in the flesh. And by the oppression which prevents us from performing our ceremonies, and shows no respect for our way of life, the way we are. At the same time, they've killed the people dearest to me. Therefore, my commitment to our struggle knows no boundaries or limits. That is why I have travelled to so many places where I have had the opportunity to talk about my people. The international struggle has been of vital importance, especially in the last decade. It has resulted in our achieving a world audience at the United Nations. Promoting the rights of indigenous people has been a tremendous challenge, both for the indigenous peoples themselves and for the member states of the United Nations. But in time and with determination, important successes have been achieved. These include the creation of the Task Force on Indigenous Peoples, the proposed Declaration of the United Nations on Indigenous People, the adoption of 1993 as the International Year of Indigenous People and recently the proclamation by the UN General Assembly of 1994 as the preparatory year for the International Decade of the World's Indigenous People. The marking of the fifth centenary of the arrival of Columbus in America was an opportunity not only to reiterate the justice of the historic claims of the indigenous people but also to demonstrate our readiness to continue the struggle to achieve them. At the same time, it helped stimulate awareness in international institutions and the communications media of the problems which indigenous people face - as well as explicitly emphasize the significance of our presence within countries and in the world in general. The International Year of Indigenous People enabled us to strengthen the unity within our organizations, to bring together our aspirations and plans and above all to bear witness to the emptiness and the painful situation of misery, marginalization and humiliation in which we continue to live. The International Year of Indigenous People enabled the
(Continued)
(Continued ) indigenous peoples themselves to carry out an enormous number of their own activities and initiatives, including the two summit meetings (Chimaltenango and Oaxtepec). These helped us to bring together our
demands and resolutions which we hope the international community will take into account. At the same time, it was possible to disseminate information about the current situation of our people - and start to overcome many of the old cultural and historic prejudices. I would like to pay my respects to all the organizations, communities, leaders and representatives of indigenous peoples who gave me the wonderful opportunity to bear witness to their aspirations, desires for justice and hopes for peace - in the world of uncertainty, of death and of difficult conditions in which the majority of people currently live. I would also like to reaffirm, together with my fellow indigenous people, our commitment to carry on our own struggle. The International Decade for Indigenous People is one more step towards building new relationships between states and indigenous peoples on the basis of mutual respect.
Rigoberta Menchu, winner of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize
One of the most important aspects of human security is that people should be able to live in a society that honours their basic human rights. In this respect, at least, there has been considerable progress. The 1980s were in many ways a decade of democratic transition - as many military dictatorships ceded power to civilian administrations and one-party states opened themselves up to multi-party elections. Yet there still is a long way to go in protecting people against state repression. According to a 1993 survey by Amnesty International, political repression, systematic torture, ill treatment or disappearance was still practised in 110 countries. Human rights violations are most frequent during periods of political unrest. In 1992, Amnesty International concluded that unrest resulted in human rights violations in 112 countries, and in 105 countries there were reports of political detention and imprisonment. Unrest commonly results in military intervention - as in 64 countries. But the police can also be used as agents of repression - they are commonly cited as the perpetrators of human rights violations in both Eastern and Western Europe.
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Along with repressing individuals and groups, governments commonly try to exercise control over ideas and information. UNESCO's index of press freedom finds the least free areas to be North Africa, Western Asia and South Asia. One of the most useful indicators of political insecurity in a country is the priority the government accords military strength - since governments sometimes use armies to repress their own people. If a government is more concerned about its military establishment than its people, this imbalance shows up in the ratio of military to social spending (table 3). The two nations with the highest ratios of military spending to education and health spending in 1980 were Iraq (8 to 1)and Somalia ( 5 to 1).Is it any surprise that these two nations ran into serious trouble during the 1980s and that the same powers that supplied them arms a decade ago are now struggling to disarm them? Among these seven elements of human security are considerable links and overlaps. A threat to one element of human security is likely to travel like an angry typhoon - to all forms of human security.
Global Human Security
Some global challenges to human security arise because threats within countries rapidly spill beyond national frontiers. Environmental threats are one of the clearest examples: land degradation, deforestation and the emission of greenhouse gases affect climatic conditions around the globe. The trade in drugs is also a transnational phenomenon - drawing millions of people, both producers and consumers, into a cycle of violence and dependency. Other threats take on a global character because of the disparities between countries - disparities that encourage millions of people to leave their homes in search of a better life, whether the receiving country wants them or not. And in some cases, frustration over inequality can take the form of religious fundamentalism - or even terrorism. So, when human security is under threat anywhere, it can affect people everywhere. Famines, ethnic conflicts, social disintegration, terrorism, Table 3: Ratios of Military to Social Spending, 1990/91 (Military Expenditure as % of Combined Education and Health Expenditure) Syrian Arab Rep. Oman Iraq Myanmar Angola Somalia Yemen Qatar Ethiopia Saudi Arabia Jordan
373 293 271 222 208 200 197 192 190 151 138
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pollution and drug trafficking can no longer be confined within national borders. And no nation can isolate its life from the rest of the world. This indivisibility of global human security extends to the consequences of both prosperity and poverty. International trade is widening people's range of choices. Instant global communication enables many more to participate in world events as they happen. Every minute, computer networks transfer billions of dollars across international frontiers at the touch of a keyboard. But if prosperity is becoming globalized, so is poverty, though with much less fanfare. Millions of people migrate to other countries in search of work. Drug traffickers now have one of the best-organized and best-financed international networks. Ethnic tensions can spill over national frontiers. And one person can carry an incurable disease - such as AIDS - to any corner of the world. Nor does pollution respect borders. And we may yet witness the scary sight of a small nuclear weapon in the hands of a determined international terrorist. The real threats to human security in the next century will arise more from the actions of millions of people than from aggression by a few nations threats that will take many forms: Unchecked population growth Disparities in economic opportunities Excessive international migration Environmental degradation Drug production and trafficking International terrorism. It is in the interest of all nations to discover fresh ways of cooperating to respond to these six emerging threats (and others, should they arise) that constitute the global framework of human insecurity. Unchecked Population Growth
The rapid rate of population growth - coupled with a lack of developmental opportunities - is overcrowding the planet, adding to the enormous pressures on diminishing non-renewable resources. This growth - at the root of global poverty, international migration and environmental degradation - is unprecedented in history. It took one million years to produce the first one billion people on earth. It will now take only ten years to add the next billion to today's 5.5 billion. The response has to be multifaceted. Certainly, family planning information and services must be available to all those who want them - particularly to the 100 to 200 million couples whose current demand is not being met. But it is folly to treat population growth as a clinical problem. It is a development problem. Indeed, in many societies, human development (especially the education of females) has proven the most powerful contraceptive. Any plan of action to slow population growth must receive both national and international support, and include both family planning services and
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targeted human development programmes. A major opportunity to design such a response is the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in September 1994. Despite the considerable international rhetoric on unchecked population growth, population programmes go underfinanced. The World Bank estimates that if cost-effective methods are adopted, it would take only an additional $2 billion a year to provide family planning services to the 120 million women in developing countries desiring such services. But this amount has yet to be pledged, just like the $2.5 billion a year of additional investment it would take to remove gender disparities in education. Disparities in Economic Opportunities During the past five decades, world income increased sevenfold (in real GDP) and income per person more than tripled (in per capita GDP). But this gain has been spread very unequally - nationally and internationally and the inequality is increasing. Between 1960 and 1991, the share of world income for the richest 20% of the global population rose from 70% to 85%. Over the same period, all but the richest quintile saw their share of world income fall - and the meagre share for the poorest 20% declined from 2.3% to 1.4% (figure 6). One-fifth of humankind, mostly in the industrial countries, thus has well over four-fifths of global income and other developmental opportunities. These disparities reflect many other disparities - in trade, investment, savings and commercial lending. Overall, they reflect unequal access to global market opportunities. Such disparities entail consequences for other aspects of human security. They encourage overconsumption and overproduction in the North, and they perpetuate the poverty-environment link in the South. Inevitably, they breed resentment and encourage migration from poor countries to rich. Migration Pressures One of the clearest consequences of population growth and deepening poverty in developing countries is the growth in international migration. At least 35 million people from the South have taken up residence in the North in the past three decades - around one million join them each year. Another million or so are working overseas on contracts for fixed periods. The number of illegal international migrants is estimated to be around 15 to 30 million. In addition, there are large numbers of refugees. In the developing countries today, there are nearly 20 million internally displaced people - and worldwide, probably, around 1 9 million refugees (figure 7). These pressures are likely to increase. Expanding populations, limited employment opportunities, closed international markets and continuing environmental degradation will force millions more to leave their own countries. But the affluent nations are closing their doors - since they face stagnating economies, high unemployment and the prospect of "jobless growth':
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Figure 6: T h e Widening G a p b e t w e e n t h e Rich and t h e Poor
Ratio ot income shares richest 20%: poorest 20% of world populatwn
SO: 1
Poorcst
Rlchesr Poorest
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Sometimes, the policies of the industrial countries intensify migration pressures. First, they restrict employment in developing countries by raising trade and tariff barriers that limit their export potential: if the job opportunities do not move towards the workers, the workers are likely to move towards the job opportunities. Second, the industrial countries do have a real demand for workers whether for highly educated scientists or for the unskilled labour to do the difficult manual jobs that their own workers reject. This demand leads to highly ambivalent attitudes towards immigration: official disapproval, with systems of enforcement less effective than they might be so that enough construction workers, fruit pickers or nannies can find their way in.
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Figure 7: Refugees of the Past Three Years could Populate a Major City or a Country Popularion in millions, 1992
Control of international migration is not just an administrative issue. It is primarily an economic issue - requiring a new framework of development cooperation that integrates foreign assistance with trade liberalization, technology transfers, foreign investments and labour flows. Environmental Degradation Most forms of environmental degradation have their most severe impact locally. But other effects tend to migrate. Polluted air drifts inexorably across national frontiers, with sulphur dioxide emissions in one country falling as acid rain in another. About 60% of Europe's commercial forests suffer damaging levels of sulphur deposition. In Sweden, about 20,000 of the country's 90,000 lakes are acidified to some degree; in Canada, 48,000 are acidic. And the source of the problem in these instances is not only within the country. The emission of chlorofluorocarbons also has an international, indeed a truly global, effect - as the gases released in individual countries attack the ozone layer. In 1989, research teams found that the ozone layer over Antarctica was reduced to only 50% of its 1979 level. And in 1993, satellite measurements over the heavily populated mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere showed the ozone layer to he at record lows, with serious implications for human health. Ozone filters out ultraviolet radiation, which can lead to various kinds of skin cancer. Between 1982 and 1989 in the United States, the incidence of the most dangerous form of skin cancer, melanoma, rose by more than 80%. The production of greenhouse gases in individual countries also has a global impact. Layers of these gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, accumulating in the upper atmosphere contribute to global warming because they reflect back infrared radiation that would otherwise escape into space. In 1989, the United States and the former Soviet Union were the largest
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producers of such gases - respectively responsible for 18% and 14% of total emissions. But the effects will be felt all over the globe - and could have their greatest impact on the poorest countries. With a one-metre rise in sea level partly due to global warming, Bangladesh (which produces only 0.3% of global emissions) could see its land area shrink by 17%. Biological diversity is more threatened now than at any time in the past. Tropical deforestation is the main culprit, but the destruction of wetlands, coral reefs and temperate forests also figures heavily. Germany and the Netherlands lost nearly 60% of their wetlands between 1950 and 1980. And a recent analysis of tropical forest habitats, which contain 50-90% of the world's species, concluded that, at current rates of loss, up to 15% of the earth's species could disappear over the next 25 years. Today, only 45% of the world's temperate rainforests remain. The trends of the past 20 years show an accelerated destruction of coastal marine habitats, increases in coastal pollution, and in many areas, a shrinking of the marine fish catch. In 1990, the global fish catch declined for the first time in 13 years - a result of overfishing, coastal habitat destruction and water pollution. Coral reefs will also come under greater pressure. Approximately one billion people will live in coastal cities by 2000, increasing the danger to reefs from overfishing, pollution and soil erosion. As habitats are fragmented, altered or destroyed, they lose their ability to provide ecosystem services - water purification, soil regeneration, watershed protection, temperature regulation, nutrient and waste recycling and atmospheric maintenance. All these changes threaten global human security. Drug Trafficking
The trade in narcotic drugs is one of the most corrosive threats to human society. During the past 20 years, the narcotics industry has progressed from a small cottage enterprise to a highly organized multinational business that employs hundreds of thousands of people and generates billions of dollars in profits (box 5). The retail value of drugs, as estimated in a recent study, now exceeds the international trade in oil - and is second only to the arms trade. The main producing countries are Afghanistan, Bolivia, Colombia, Iran, Pakistan, Peru and Thailand. And while consumption is rapidly spreading all over the world, the highest per capita use is reported to be in the United States and Canada. In the United States alone, consumer spending on narcotics is thought to exceed the combined GDPs of more than 80 developing countries. In recent times, the countries of Eastern Europe have also become prominent in drug trafficking - at least 25% of the heroin consumed in Western Europe now passes through Eastern Europe. Despite the magnitude of the threat, the international community has yet to produce a coherent response. But some individual countries have drawn up their own action plans. In Bolivia, coca producers have been paid to take coca out of production - $2,000 a hectare - and since 1989, they have annually converted more than 5,000 hectares of land to other crops.
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BOX 5 The international narcotics trade
Narcotic drugs have become one of the biggest items of international trade, with the total volume of drug trafficking estimated at around $500 billion a year. The OECD estimates that $85 billion in drug profits is laundered through financial markets each year, of which $32 billion passes through the United Kingdom. Since almost all the production and trade in these drugs is illegal, statistics are notoriously unreliable, The largest exporter of cocaine is probably Colombia, followed by Peru and Bolivia, while Myanmar seems to be the leading source of heroin. Pakistan is one of the major exporters of cannabis. One study of the nine major producing countries estimated their annual production of cocaine at around 300 tons, heroin at around 250 tons and cannabis at well over 25,000 tons. Drug addiction causes immense human distress. And the illegal production and distribution of drugs have spawned worldwide waves of crime and violence. International efforts to stamp out this noxious trade began more than 80 years ago, when opium was brought under international jurisdiction. Since then, there have been numerous conventions and conferences on drug abuse and illicit trafficking. In 1990, the General Assembly of the United Nations declared the 1990s the UN Decade against Drug Abuse. But thus far, efforts to eliminate the drug menace have prompted rather more righteous indignation than effective action - mainly because the costs of significantly reducing production or consumption are just too high. Successfully eradicating crops like opium or coca demands offering farmers equally valuable alternative crops. But given the high prices for drugs, this is almost impossible. In Bolivia, the coca-cocaine industry is thought to be worth as much as 20% of GNP. Most efforts at stifling drug production have brought limited benefits. Eradicating crops in one place tends to shift production elsewhere. When Mexico suppressed marijuana production, it sprang up in Colombia. When Thailand managed to reduce opium crops, producers moved to Myanmar and the Lao People's Democratic Republic. Reducing consumption is equally difficult. Many wealthy and educated people use small amounts of drugs much as they might use alcohol and tobacco - and are prepared to risk the consequences. But many of the heaviest drug users are poor and desperate - seeking some kind of an anaesthesia for the hopelessness of their lives. For them, drugs may be dangerous, but they have little left to lose. This underclass is not limited to the industrial countries. The United States is the largest single market for drugs, but developing countries, particularly (Continued)
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(Continued ) those that are drug producers, also have serious addiction problems. Pakistan, for example, is thought to have more than one million heroin users, and Thailand has around 500,000 addicts. One radical alternative is decriminalization. This would reduce the violence and crime associated with drugs and allow for production and consumption in less squalid and dangerous circumstances. The risk, however, is that it might increase overall consumption. In the end, probably the only solution will be to remove the kind of social distress that feeds drug addiction and to promote human development, which can strengthen families and communities and offer young people more productive outlets for their time and energies.
Trade in narcotic drugs is one of the most corrosive threats t o human society
But such lone efforts are not an effective, durable answer. As long as the demand persists, so will the supply. The real solution has to lie in addressing the causes of drug addiction - and in eradicating the poverty that tempts farmers into drug production.
International Terrorism Violence can travel from one country to another through conventional warfare - and through terrorism. Between 1975 and 1992, there were an average of 500 international terrorist attacks a year. Bombings are the most common type of incident (60%), followed by armed attacks, and in individual years there have also been large numbers of arson attacks or aircraft hijackings. The peak in recent decades was in 1987, with 672 incidents. In 1992, the number dropped to 362, the lowest since 1975. Between 1968 and 1992, the number of annual casualties was never less than 2,000, and 1985 was the worst year, with 3,016 casualties - 816 people killed and 2,200 wounded. Most of the victims have been the general public though in 1980-83 the majority were diplomats, and in the past two years most attacks have been made against businesses. While the number of their victims may not look high, the fear that these attacks spread among the world's population at large is immense. The focus of terrorist activity tends to move around the world. Until the early 1970s, most incidents were in Latin America. Then the focus switched to Europe. In the mid-1980s, most of the incidents were in the Middle East. And now, terrorist incidents take place all over the world. Terrorism, with no particular nationality, is a global phenomenon.
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Needed Policy Action This discouraging profile of human insecurity demands new policy responses, both nationally and internationally. Over the past five decades, humankind gradually built up an edifice of global security - an edifice of nuclear deterrents, power balances, strategic alliances, regional security pacts and international policing through the superpowers and the United Nations. Much of this global security framework now needs change. In its place or, at least, by its side - must be raised a new, more encompassing structure to ensure the security of all people the world over. Some global concerns require national actions - others, a coordinated international response. Early Warning I n d i c a t o r s
Experience shows that where there are multiple problems of personal, economic, political or environmental security, there is a risk of national breakdown (box 6). One question that preoccupies the international community is whether it is possible to get early warning signals of the risk of national breakdown. Such signals could help in agreeing on timely preventive action and avoiding conflict and war, rather than waiting until it is too late, as in Bosnia and Somalia. One might want to see which countries currently face similar multiple threats. Some indicators discussed earlier in this chapter can be useful for this purpose: deteriorating food consumption, for example, high unemployment and declining wages, human rights violations, incidents of ethnic violence, widening regional disparities and an overemphasis on military spending. Identifying potential crisis countries is not an indictment - it is an essential part of preventive diplomacy and an active peace policy. A clear set of indicators, and an early warning system based on them, could help countries avoid reaching the crisis point. Consider Afghanistan, Angola, Haiti, Iraq, Mozambique, Myanmar, Sudan and Zaire. As analyzed in annex 1, these countries are already in various stages of crisis. Determined national and international actions - including both preventive and curative development - are needed to support processes of social integration. There are several countries where current national and international efforts need to be reinforced to promote human security. The list of such countries extends to all world regions, and it ranges from countries in the midst of ongoing crises - such as Burundi, Georgia, Liberia, Rwanda and Tajikistan to other countries experiencing either severe internal tensions - such as Algeria or large regional disparities - such as Egypt, Mexico and Nigeria. Preventive action can also avoid larger costs for the world community at a later stage. Today's UN operations in Somalia, for example, cost more than
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BOX 6 Selected indicators of human security
Precise quantification of human security is impossible, but some useful indicators can provide an early warning of whether a country is facing problems of human insecurity and heading towards social disintegration and possible national breakdown. The following indicators are particularly revealing;
Food insecurity - measured by daily calorie supply as a percentage of basic human needs, the index of food production per capita and the trend of the food import dependency ratio. Job and income insecurity - measured by high and prolonged unemployment rates, a sudden drop in real national income or in real wages, extremely high rates of inflation and wide income disparities between the rich and the poor. Human rights violations - measured by political imprisonment, torture, disappearance, press censorship and other human rights violations. Ethnic or religious conflicts - measured by the percentage of population involved in such conflicts and by the number of casualties. Inequity - measured mainly by the difference between the HDI values of different population groups. Military spending - measured by the ratio of military spending to combined expenditure on education and health. This is only. a partial set of indicators. But even though it captures only a few dimensions, if several of the indicators point in thesame direction, the country may be heading for trouble. These indicators would sound an alarm if applied to such countries as Afghanistan, Angola, Haiti, Mozambique, Myanmar, Sudan and Zaire, countries included in the various tables of this chapter and the case studies. They might also sound an alarm if used to measure human security in some of the successor states of the former Soviet Union, notably those in Central Asia. Ideally, there should also be a set of indicators to identify global threats to human security. And combining national and global indicators would highlight the coincidence of national and global insecurities - as with high unemployment and heavy international migration. -
$2 billion in 1993 alone. A similar investment in the socio-economic development of Somalia ten years ago might have averted the current crisis. Soldiers in blue berets are no substitute for socio-economic reform. Nor can shortterm humanitarian assistance replace long-term development support.
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Policies for Social Integration Although the international community can help prevent future crises, the primary responsibility lies with the countries themselves. And often it lies with the people themselves. In Somalia today, where there is no central government, people and their local communities are doing more than government authorities may ever have done. But several countries also offer encouraging examples of what deliberate public policies of social integration can achieve. Malaysia, Mauritius and Zimbabwe, for example, are countries whose governments have taken courageous national actions to overcome potentially dangerous national schisms (annex 2). The policies pursued by these countries reconfirm many of the policy lessons set forth and explored in boxes 7 and 8. First is the importance of allowing everyone, of whatever race or ethnic group, the opportunity to develop his or her own capacities -particularly through effective health and education services. Second is the need to ensure that economic growth is broadly based - so that everyone has equal access to economic opportunities. Third is the importance of carefully crafted affirmative action programmes designed so that all sections of society gain - but that the weaker groups gain proportionally more. And the most important lesson conveyed by the country case studies on Malaysia and Mauritius is that where human security and social integration are ensured, economic growth and human development can progress too. Many countries have unfortunately chosen a different path - and allowed inequalities to rise to a disturbing extent. The data presented on Egypt, Mexico, Nigeria and South Africa show the dangers that this can bring. The World Summit for Social Development offers a fresh opportunity for the international community to shift its emphasis from the first pillar of territorial security in the past 50 years to the second pillar of human security in the next 50 years. In light of the analysis here, the Summit might wish to consider the following: Endorsing the concept of human security as the key challenge for the 21st century. Calling on people to make their full contribution to global human security and to bind together in solidarity. Requesting national governments in rich and poor countries to adopt policy measures for human security. They should ensure that all people have the basic capabilities and opportunities, especially in access to assets and to productive and remunerative work. They should also ensure that people enjoy basic human rights and have political choices. Recommending that all countries fully cooperate in this endeavour regionally and globally. To this end, a new framework of international cooperation for development should be devised, taking into account the indivisibility of global human security - that no one is secure as long as someone is insecure anywhere.
BOX 7
lob-sharing
Lavovare meno, lavovare tutti - work less and everybody works - a slogan that recently appeared in Italian workplaces. Indeed, throughout the industrial world, the idea of job-sharing is gathering momentum. The basic principle is simple. Rather than a five-day work week for some workers, with others remaining unemployed, the work week should be reduced to, say, four days with a corresponding pay cut, so that more people can share the available work. The German auto-maker BMW in 1990 introduced a four-day, 36-hour week at one of its plants, with an agreement for more flexible working. The productivity gains more than offset the cost of taking on more workers, so there was no need for a wage cut. A more recent deal at another German car-maker, Volkswagen, involves a four-day week along with a 10% pay cut. This has not created new jobs, but it saved 31,000 jobs that would otherwise have been eliminated. In France, a subsidiary of the computer company Hewlett-Packard has introduced a more flexible four-day week for workers. This has enabled the plant to be run seven days a week, round the clock, rather than five days on day shifts. Production has tripled, employment has risen 20%, and earnings have remained unchanged. In Japan, the large steel companies have been closing two days a month and offering workers 80-90% of their pay. Exactly how many jobs could be saved if countries were to adopt such schemes is difficult to say. But for France, it has been estimated that the universal adoption of a four-day 33-hour work week with an average 5% reduction in salary would create around two million new jobs - and save $28 billion in unemployment insurance. Job-sharing has its critics. Some companies may simply use reductions in work time as a way of cutting costs. And it may be harder to implement the plan in smaller companies that have less room for manoeuvre. Workers and trade unions are concerned, too, that this approach might in the long term concentrate work into a few high-paid, highproductivity jobs, leaving many more workers without jobs or incomes. Job-sharing could, nevertheless, be the germ of an idea that offers greater freedom for workers, along with an improved private life -while contributing much to reducing unemployment. Clearly, the question of work and employment needs a basic, fundamental review - nationally and globally. It will no doubt be a central issue for discussion at the 1995 World Summit for Social Development.
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BOX 8
Credit for all
Study after study on credit schemes for the poor confirm that the poor are creditworthy: The poor can save, even if only a little. The poor have profitable investment opportunities to choose from, and they invest their money wisely. The poor are very reliable borrowers and hence a very good risk. Repayment rates of 90% and more are not rare. The poor are able and willing to pay market interest rates, so that credit schemes for the poor stand a good chance of becoming viable, self-financing undertakings. The reason credit schemes for the poor work is that they significantly improve the incomes of the poor - typically by more than 20%, and at times even by more than 100%. Smaller loans are administratively more costly than larger ones. Yet the literature on credit schemes for the poor abounds with examples of how some organizations and programmes manage to keep their adrninistrative costs low. Among the successful measures: lending to peer groups, standardizing loan terms, collaborating with community-based and other developmental non-governmental organizations, eschewing traditional banking requirements and procedures and being located in the community and knowing local people and local investment opportunities. Many savings schemes for the poor today do mobilize the modest funds that poor communities have to spare. But rarely do they reinvest the money only in poor neighbourhoods. Just the opposite should be the case. Not only should the poor's savings be reinvested in poor neighbourhoods. The savings of the rich should also be encouraged to flow into these neighbourhoods. Governmental incentive policies can help in this. For example, governments could subsidize, for a defined interim period, the increased overhead costs that banks would incur in lending to the poor. If the aim were to serve about 120 million poor a year - every tenth poor person - this could cost some $10 billion. The poor know best their opportunities for productive and remunerative work. What they really need are modest amounts of start-up capital for their microenterprises. As one study put it, the old parable about feeding people for a day by giving them a fish, or feeding them for life by teaching them how to (Continued)
(Continued ) fish, needs a 20th-century postscript: what really matters is who owns the pond.
Small credit can make a difference Integrated Rural Development Programme, India Among beneficiaries, 64% increased their annual family income by 50% or more. Seventy percent of the assisted families belonged to the poorest group; however, their share in the benefits of IRDP was only 29%. In 71% of cases, the assets procured by the IRDP beneficiaries were found to be intact after two years. Metro Manila Livelihood Programme, Philippines Business for Social Progress, Philippines The average increase in income from an average loan of $94 was 41%. Women received 80% of loans. Borrowers had an average of 5.7 dependents. Revolving Loan Fund, Dominican Republic The average increase in income from 101 loans was 27% a year. The job creation rate among borrowers was more than 20 times that of the control group of non-borrowers. Revolving Loan Fund, Costa Rica The average increase in income from 450 small loans was more than 100% a year. A new job was created for every $1,000 lent.
Requesting that the United Nations step up its efforts in preventive diplomacy - and recognizing that the reasons for conflict and war today are often rooted in poverty, social injustice and environmental degradation and back these efforts up through preventive development initiatives. Recommending further that today's framework of global institutions be reviewed and redesigned to prepare those institutions fully for doing their part in tackling the urgent challenges of human security, all within the framework of a paradigm of longer-term sustainable human development. Chapter 4 will return to the question of a new framework for international development cooperation and new global institutions. But before that, chapter 3 addresses one critical source of insecurity that deserves more explicit treatment than it received here, one that arises from the world's previous preoccupation with deterrence and territorial security - excessive militarization and the international arms trade.
'Message in a Bottle'! Theory and Praxis in Critical Security Studies Richard Wyn Jones
Strategy is not a neutral pursuit and its only purpose is to strengthen one's own side in the contention of nations. Edward N.Luttwak'
I cast about, sometime here, sometime there, for traces of a reason that unites without effacing separation that binds without unnaming difference, that points out the common and the shared among strangers, without depriving the other of otherness. Jiirgen Habermas2
Introduction
F
or Critical Theorists, the question of the relationship between theory and praxis is of primary concern. One of the central claims of Critical Theory in all its many guises is that, in Robert Cox's neat summary, ~ Theory's claim 'all theory is for someone and for some p ~ r p o s e ' .Critical to superiority over what Horkheimer described as 'traditional theory', and Cox himself describes as 'problem solving theory', is that Critical Theory is aware of the intimate connections between the supposedly abstract realm of the theory and the social world.4 Furthermore, Critical Theory is committed to developing an understanding of the world that promotes emancipatory socio-cultural, economic and political change. But whilst all Critical Theorists take seriously Marx's injunction in his Thesis on Feuerbach that 'Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it hardly need be underscored how difficult it is to translate this deceptively simple formulation into practice. However, one important implication of this orientation towards praxis is that, in the words of Nancy Fraser, 'it is in the crucible of political practice that critical theories meet the Source: Contemporary Security Policy, 16(3) ( 1 995): 299-3 19.
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ultimate test of vitality'.This article will attempt to explore the vexed issue of the relationship between Critical Theory and emancipatory political praxis in more depth, paying particular attention to the role of intellectuals in general, and academics in particular. Such a discussion has obvious relevance to the whole project of Critical International Theory. However, the following discussion of theory and praxis will concentrate on the relationship between Critical Theory-inspired attempts to focus on issues of security (that is 'Critical Security Studies') and the practices of global security. There are two reasons for this. First the relationship between the meta-theory of Critical International Theory and any form of global politics is so mediated as to make any attempt to trace the relationship in anything but the most general terms very difficult. Therefore, by concentrating on a sub-field of Critical International Theory such as Critical Security Studies (which will be delineated and discussed later), our analysis will be more concrete and thus more amenable to critical engagement. The second, and main, reason relates to the general perception that the provision of security is still the primary raison $&re of the sovereign state and, as such, it remains its most jealously guarded preserve. As a result, any attempt to create an alternative discourse in the field of security, and in particular, any attempt to problematize the role of the state as the provider of security, is likely to be strongly resisted. This was clearly seen in Britain in the early 1980s when the state made determined efforts to combat the peace movement and marginalize those who were perceived as its supporters in academia: witness, for example, the Thatcher-inspired demonization of Peace Studies.' Another problem for those attempting to develop Critical Security Studies arises from the fact that, as Simon Dalby points out, security as it is traditionally conceived 'is inherently politically conservative precisely because it emphasises permanence, control, and predi~tability'.~ The political sensitivity of the security issue, as well as the innately conservative nature of the prevailing security discourse, means that the issue of the relationship between Critical Theory and emancipatory praxis is raised in a particularly acute way for proponents of Critical Security Studies.
Critical Theory and Emancipatory Politics
Merely to pose the issue of the relationship between Critical Theory and emancipatory political praxis is immediately to raise a whole host of other extremely problematic, even perhaps insoluble questions and puzzles. For example, one is forced to address the question of the social role of intellectuals and intellectual activity, and the role that they play in supporting, and/or promoting social change. This in turn raises the thorny issue of the audience to which Critical Theorists are addressing their ideas. Ultimately, of course, these questions lead us inexorably to one of the central issues of all social theory, that of the relationship between agents and structures: the agent-structure debate.
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Whilst recent discussions of this debate in International Relations have tended to concentrate on the perhaps rarefied issues of levels of analysis and ontology,9 any discussion of the social role of Critical Theory also has to consider the problematic relationship between agents and structure at the microlevel of academic life. Quite simply, how are Critical Theorists to pursue what must inevitably be their twin goals of academic respectability and political relevance? How much autonomy does the agent, in this case the Critical Theorist, enjoy within the largely hostile structures of Western academe? Can one successfully bridge the chasm between, on the one hand, the ghettoizing nature of academic language itself as well as the professional constraints created by tenure requirements, research selectivity exercises and the like, and on the other, the desire to disseminate and make accessible one's Critical theorizing? Jiirgen Habermas frames these issues well when he wonders, rather ruefully one feels, 'how theories that have wrapped themselves up in their own problems, and have retreated so far into the scientific system under the pull of the social division of labor - how such autistic undertakings are at all able to place themselves in relation to praxis and to develop a force for the direction of action'.'() Given the centrality of emancipatory political praxis to the claims of Critical Theory it is hardly surprising that Habermas is not the first thinker from this tradition to reflect upon the nature of the relationship between theory and practice. Rather, successive generations of Critical Theorists have agonized and argued over the question of whether their ideas can indeed 'develop a force for the direction of action', and if so, how to set about attaining this objective?" However, whilst proponents of Critical Theory in general have discussed the theory-practice nexus at some length, it has certainly not been dealt with in any systematic way in the work of those scholars attempting to develop Critical International Theory. Robert Cox, for example, has described the task of Critical Theorists as providing 'a guide to strategic action for bringing about an alternative order'.I2 Whilst he has also gone on to identify possible agents for change and has outlined the nature and structure of some feasible 'alternative orders', he has not explicitly indicated whom he regards as the addressee of Critical Theory (i.e. who is being 'guided'), and thus, how the theory can hope to become a part of the political process.I3 Similarly Andrew Linklater has argued that 'a critical theory of international relations must regard the practical project of extending community beyond the nation-state as its most important problem'.14 However, he has little to say about the relationship between theory and praxis of this 'practical project'. Indeed his main point is to suggest that the role of Critical Theory 'is not to offer instructions on how to act but to reveal the existence of unrealised po~sibilities'.'~ But the question still remains: 'reveal' to whom? Is the audience enlightened statesmen and women; particular social classes; particular social movements; or particular (and presumably ~articularized)communities? Given Linklater's primary concern with emancipation, we might expect more guidance as to who is to be emancipated, whom he expects might do the
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emancipating, and how Critical Theory can impinge upon the emancipatory process. There is, similarly, little help in Mark Hoffman's important contribution. He argues that Critical International Theory: seeks not simply to reproduce society via description, but to understand society and change it. It is both descriptive and constructive in its theoretical intent: it is both an intellectual and a social act. It is not merely an expression of the concrete realities of the historical situation, but also a force for change within those conditions.I6 However, once again, we are given no suggestion as to how this 'force for change' is to be operationalized and what role Critical Theory will play in changing society.
T h e Relationship b e t w e e n International Relations Theory a n d Global Politics
From our discussion thus far, it seems clear that proponents of Critical International Theory have, so far at least, been remarkably unreflective as to the relationship between their theories and emancipatory political praxis. This lack of reflectiveness as to the nature of the relationship between International Theory and international political practice is shared with other approaches to international relations. Indeed the issue provides a striking omission from the vast literature on international relations." However, any cursory survey will find that very different attitudes to the theory-practice nexus have been adopted by the differing approaches to academic study of international relations. During the pioneer years of the 1920s and 1930s the fledgling discipline reflected its origins in Welsh liberal internationalism and peace activism by concerning itself explicitly with political practice.lx Indeed it is clear that David Davies, who endowed the first chair, hoped that the discipline would become the academic arm of the League of Nations, providing the world body with both intellectual support and practical advice: in effect, he regarded theory and praxis as inextricably linked, with the whole point of the former being to inform and improve the latter." However, after the Second World War, the ruling Realist orthodoxy in international relations adopted an explicitly positivist approach to the subject which has attempted to disentangle theory from praxis by claiming to distinguish sharply between questions of 'fact' and 'value'. Questions of 'fact' have been seen as those pertaining to the nature of political reality, and regarded as the only valid subject for scientific inquiry. Furthermore, the knowledge accrued through such study has been claimed to be value-neutral; that is containing no implicit world-view, or indeed, policy prescriptions. Policy prescription has always been relegated to the realm of 'value' and thus
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seen as falling beyond the purview of objective social theory. While theorists may well have their own views as to correct or desirable political practice, the dominant forms of Realism - currently, of course, Neorealism - have tended to disregard these views as mere reflections of subjective personal opinion which, whilst they may well be theoretically informed, are seen as extrinsic to the theoretical activity itself. Of course, this form of positivist international relations theory has almost always proven willing to supplicate itself before the great god of 'policy relevance' as well as pursue research agendas which reflect the preoccupation's of policy-makers.20However, the point is that this concern with policy - with political practice - was seen by post-war Realists as an 'optional extra'. Furthermore, if scholars did attempt to feed their ideas into the political process, then they almost exclusively limited themselves to addressing policy-makers and elite 'opinion formers'. The aim was - and indeed is - to gain the ear of the powerful rather than engage with those who are presently powerless. As is well known, this quest has met with varying degrees of success. In the United States, for example, there has been a close, symbiotic relationship between academia and government, whilst in Britain, it is usually argued that relations have remained more distant. However, at this point it is as well to remind ourselves that appearances, in the British case at least, may be deceptive. Commenting on the apparent lack of contact between academics and what he terms 'practitioners', A.J.R. Groom claims that: 'little communication between them was necessary since their paradigmatic unity [by which he means, allegiance to the Realist model of power politics] was so strong that they could go their separate ways safe in the knowledge that their work was ~ompatible'.~' From which we can infer that, in the main, British International Relations specialists - by effect, if not, perhaps, by intention - have provided academic justification for the main thrust of British foreign policy. Here Groom's argument resonates with Critical Theory critiques of Positivist international relations theory which charge that the distinction between 'fact' and 'value', between 'is' and 'ought', is spurious: 'all theory is for someone and for some purpose'. Far from providing an objective view of political reality, Realist international relations theory has helped produce, reproduce and legitimate global realpolitik. Thus whilst on its own terms the relationship between theory and practice is unproblematic for Positivist International Theory, Critical Theory argues that this 'peace of mind' is a product of, at best, a certain naivete' as to the social role of theory. In contrast, Critical Theory claims that all theory is intimately and inescapably linked with political praxis and dedicates itself to furthering emancipation. But whilst these criticisms of Realism are well-taken, as we have already seen, Critical International Theory has thus-far failed to provide a convincing account of its own relationship to this emancipatory praxis. Given the centrality of praxis to Critical Theory it is arguable that without some plausible account of the mechanisms by which it hopes to aid
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in the achievement of its emancipatory goals, Critical International Theory resents the next stage in the development of International Relations theory'.22 Indeed, without an understanding of the theory-practice nexus, Critical International Theory will remain an atrophied and autistic enterprise. Having delineated the nature of the problem, we will now try to outline possible approaches to the relationship between theory and praxis which are consistent with Critical International Theory. This will be attempted via an exposition of the differing, and indeed, contradictory approaches to this issue that have been adopted by the various Critical theorists who have inspired writers like Cox, Linklater and Hoffman. This will lead us to a discussion of a possible model for social change based on Gramsci's revolutionary strategy of a 'war of position'. It will be argued that Gramsci's discussion of a 'war of position' provides important insights into the role of theory in supporting progressive social change. However, Gramsci's faith in the revolutionary potential of the working class and the guiding role of the 'modern prince' - the Communist Party - will be rejected as not only anachronistic but fundamentally misplaced. Rather it will be argued that the experience of the (so-called) new social movements suggests possible agents for change and addressees for theory.
Critical Theory o n t h e Role of Intellectuals Critical International Theory has drawn on two main intellectual strands in its development, which can be summarized under the headings of the 'Italian School' and the 'Frankfurt School'.23Writers like Cox and Gill have drawn heavily on the work of Antonio Gramsci, one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, in their attempt to develop critical approaches to international political economy. Other theorists, most notably Linklater and Hoffman, have drawn on the Critical Theory of the so-called Frankfurt School. Although there are many broad similarities between Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, there are also important differences.14One difference relates to the role of intellectuals. Of all the thinkers in the Western Marxist tradition, it is perhaps Gramsci who devoted most thought to the role of the intellectuals, and indeed of ideas in general, in society. This is hardly surprising given his consistent stress on eschewing the abstract in order to concentrate on the concrete: on theorizing with a practical, and revolutionary, intent. In his Prison Notebooks he referred to his reading of Marxism as 'the philosophy of praxis'. It is usually claimed that this was done in order to confuse the prison censors. However, as Cox points out, if this is true, then the censors 'must have been particularly slow-witted'.lFA more plausible explanation is provided by the English translators of the Notebooks who suggest that: "'philosophy of praxis" is both a euphemism for Marxism and an autonomous term used by Gramsci to define
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what he saw to be the central characteristic of the philosophy of Marxism, the inescapable link it establishes between theory and practice, thought and action'.26 It is this light that Gramsci developed his theory of the intelle~tual.~' Gramsci's first move is to broaden the concept of intellectuals by arguing that 'All men are intellectuals ... but not all men have in society the function of intellect~als.'~~ He then argues that those with the social function of intellectuals fall into two groups. On the one hand he refers to 'traditional intellectuals'. This concept represents the way in which most intellectuals view their own role in society. Traditional intellectuals, according to their self-image, have a relatively autonomous social role which lifts them above the class cleavages of society to the Mannheimian realm of universal, 'free-floating' thinkers. For Gramsci, this independence is a chimera. Rather, he ultimately regards 'traditional intellectuals' as playing a vital, if subconscious role, in producing and reproducing the hegemony which provides an indispensable buttress to the prevailing patterns of domination within society. These 'traditional intellectuals' are contrasted with 'organic intellectuals'. 'Organic intellectuals' play a crucial, and far more self-conscious role in articulating and organizing the interests and aspirations of a particular social class. Each class has its own 'organic intellectuals' - although, as we have seen, the intellectuals of the ruling strata can often see themselves in a different, 'traditional' light. However, due to its social position (rather than some mental deficiency a la the conservative American Charles Murray), it is the working class that has least intellectual resources at its disposal. Gramsci therefore stresses the need for that class to develop its own 'organic intellectuals' and argues that they have a crucial role to play in advancing proletarian, and thus human, emancipation. Discussing their role Gramsci argues: 'The mode of being of the new intellectuals can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organiser, "permanent persuades" and not just a simple orator.'29 Their central political task is to aid in the construction of a counterhegemony and thus undermine the prevailing patterns of discourse and interaction which make up the currently dominant hegemony. This task is accomplished through educational activity, for, as Gramsci argues, 'every relationship of "hegemony" is necessarily a pedagogic relationship'." Discussing the relationship of the 'philosophy of praxis' to the political practice, Gramsci claims that: The philosophy of praxis does not tend to leave the 'simple' in their primitive philosophy of common sense, but rather to lead them to a higher conception of life. If it affirms the need for contact between intellectuals and 'simple' it is not in order to restrict scientific activity and preserve unity at the low level of the masses, but precisely in order to construct an intellectual-moral bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small intellectual groups."
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This attempt to construct an alternative 'intellectual-moral bloc' will take place, according to Gramsci, under the auspices of the Communist Party, which he described as the 'modern prince'. Just as Machiavelli hoped to see a Prince unite Italy, rid the country of foreign 'barbarians', and create a virtu-ous state; Gramsci believed that the 'modern prince' could lead the working class on its journey towards its revolutionary destiny of an emancipated society.31 Gramsci's relative optimism about the possibility of progressive theorists playing a constructive role in emancipatory political practice is predicated on his belief in the existence of a 'universal class' with revolutionary potential. As is well known, it was a gradual loss of faith in this axiom that led the founders of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory to their extremely pessimistic prognosis about the possibilities of progressive social change.33 This in turn led them to a very different model of the role of the critical intellectual within society. For Theodor Adorno, in particular, the all-pervasiveness of structures of domination within society meant that the only role the critical intellectual could adopt was that of the metaphorical exile.z4Given his belief that 'Nothing complicitous with this world can have any truth'," the only legitimate stance for the intellectual was one of unrelenting negativity. Any attempt by the intellectual to suggest alternatives, or to engage in the pseudo-politics of the 'totally administered society', would immediately be reified and form yet another layer in the already over-determined structures of domination. The only honourable role for the intellectual was to remain an outsider, to observe, as it were, from the sidelines, and to refuse as far as humanly possible the blandishments of comforting conformity. In a contemporary world caught up in a dialectic between stultifying mundanity and inhuman cruelty, the duty of the intellectual was to provide a note of dissonance and dissent. For Theodor Adorno there was no hope or expectation of influencing political practice: in effect, in the modern world he believed that the relationship between theory and practice, or at least between Critical Theory and progressive praxis, had been severed. Rather, he regarded his philosophy in terms of a 'message in a bottle' to be cast on the waters of history with perhaps the hope, certainly not expectation, that it might be picked up at some point in the future by persons unknown. Even should this happen, Adorno did not expect his theory to influence praxis; rather his hope was, in the words of Edward Said, 'not that he will have an effect on the world, but that someday, somewhere, someone will read what he wrote exactly as he wrote it'.jh Thus we find in the Critical Theory tradition two very different models of the role of intellectuals. Gramsci, as we have seen, posits the possibility of politically engaged intellectuals playing a vital role in the struggle for emancipation. However Adorno regards this model as a chimera. Indeed even attempting to pursue this strategy will be worse than futile: it will probably be counter-productive. Adorno realizes that his understanding of society led him to an extraordinarily uncomfortable, even fatalistic position. Engagement is not an option, however he is aware that his peferred
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strategy of disengagement 'leads to destruction' and 'a loveless disregard for things which necessarily turns against people too'." The ultimate dilemma for Adorno is that, 'Wrong life cannot be lived rightly'.38 In a world characterized by warfare, extreme yet seemingly casual cruelty, obscene disparities of wealth, prejudice, famine and all kinds of unnecessary suffering, Adorno's position is an understandable one. In the world of Rwanda, Angola, Bosnia, Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Bhopal, deforestation, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, and Marlboro, one can easily succumb to despair or nihilistic rage. One can certainly understand why Adorno himself adopted a position of unrelenting negativity given his own life experience as a left-wing German Jew in the 1920s and 1930s: significantly, his masterpiece Minima Moralia is subtitled Reflections from damaged life. However, I regard his pessimism as ultimately unwarranted. In Raymond Williams' phrase, there are 'resources of hope' within all societies.39Progressive change is not only possible but it actually occurs. Even in the particularly intractable realm of security, change is occurring even if only very slowly. For example, interstate war is gradually being delegitimated.40 Of course, this change is occurring due to many factors. Many cite the growing destructiveness of modern weapons and others may cite changes in the global mode of production: internationalization of production and so on. Whilst there may be an element of truth in both suggestions, change is not simply determined by material factors; rather it is a product of the (dialectical) interaction between material reality and ideas. One clear, security-related example of the role of critical thinking and thinkers in aiding and abetting progressive social change can be seen in the experience of the peace movement of the 1980s. Then, the ideas of dissident defence intellectuals encouraged, as well as drew strength from peace activism. Together they had an effect not only on short-term policy but, far more importantly in the long run, on the dominant discourses of strategy and security. Witness, for example, the fate of 'common security'. In the early 1980s, mainstream defence intellectuals dismissed the concept as idealistic; it certainly had no place in their allegedly hard-headed and 'realist' view of the world. Since then the concept has gone on something of a rollercoaster ride. Initially taken up by Gorbachev, the concept has gradually become part of the adopted 'common sense' [sic] of Western security d i s c ~ u r s e .Although ~' a concept like 'common security', like 'collective security' before it, does tend to become debased in the usage of governments and military services, enough of the residual meaning survives to shift the parameters of the discourse in a potentially progressive direction. Its adoption by official circles most certainly provides critics with a useful tool for critiquing aspects of security p o k y . This example is highly instructive. First, it indicates that critical intellectuals can be politically engaged and lay a role, however small, in making the world a better and certainly safer place. Second, it points to potential future addressees for Critical Theory in general, and Critical Security Studies in particular. Third, it also hints at the role of ideas in the evolution of society.
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Critical Security Studies and the Theory-Practice Nexus Whilst proponents of Critical International Theory will certainly wish to reject aspects of Gramsci's theory of 'organic intellectuals', in particular his exclusive concentration on class and his stress on the guiding role of the party, the desire for engagement and relevance remains at the heart of their project. The example of the peace movement suggests that Critical Theorists can still play the role of 'organic intellectuals' and that this organic relationship need not confine itself to a single class but, rather, can involve alignment with different coalitions of social movements which campaign on an issue, or series of issues, pertinent to the struggle for emancipation. Said captures this broader orientation when he suggests that critical intellectuals 'are always tied to and ought to remain an organic part of an ongoing experience in society: of the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the p o w e r l e s ~ ' .In ~~ the specific case of Critical Security Studies this means placing the experience of those men and women and communities for whom the present world order is a cause of insecurity rather than security, at the centre of our agenda. Such an approach, placing common humanity rather than raison d'e'tat at the centre of our normative concerns, has given rise to an attempt by some Critical Theorists to rethink fundamentally the shibboleths of Strategic S t ~ d i e s . ~ ~ Critical Security Studies has begun to challenge the hegemonic security discourse and the prevailing practices of global (in)security by asking a series of fundamental questions. Despite their apparent simplicity, these questions are deeply subversive of the ruling orthodoxy on questions of strategy and security. They are, first, what is security? Second, who is being secured by the prevailing order, and who or what are they being secured against? Third, and directly connected to this, we have the fundamental issue of whose security we should be concerning ourselves, and by which agents and through which strategies should this security be attained?44 In recent years, calls to broaden our conception of 'what is security' have become almost c o m m ~ n p l a c eTraditionally, .~~ security was conceived in very narrow, almost exclusively military terms. The threat or reality of interstate war was regarded as the primary cause of insecurity and, certainly, the only one worthy of serious consideration by strategists. However, since the mid1980s, perhaps even since the oil-shocks of the 1970s, this limited, traditional conception of security has become increasingly untenable. Other issues, for example economic, environmental, human rights, have forced their way on to the security agenda.46 However, whilst erstwhile strategists may appear to have acknowledged these wider concerns by adopting the moniker 'security studies' to replace 'strategic studies', this re-baptism seems to have been a typically 1990s piece of repackaging. The name may have changed, but the substance remains the same.47 But if security studies is content to pay lip-service to broader conceptions of security even while carrying on with 'business as usual' by concentrating on the new 'threats' that have (so conveniently) arisen to take the place of the vanquished communist menace, Critical Security
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Studies insists on taking the broader security agenda seriously. This does not entail any attempt to deny or ignore the continuing salience or importance of military security. It does mean, however, that proponents of Critical Security Studies, by placing 'the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless' at the centre of its agenda, recognize that for most of the world's population, apparently 'marginal' or 'esoteric' concerns - such as environmental security, food security and economic security - are far more real and immediate threats to security than interstate war. Indeed in very many cases, and not only in the disadvantaged South, the arms purchased and the powers accrued by governments under the guise of protecting their citizens from interstate war are far more potent threats to the security of those citizens than any putative foreign enemy. Eschewing the statism of mainstream security discourse, proponents of Critical Security Studies recognize that, globally, the sovereign state is one of the main causes of insecurity: it is part of the problem rather than the solution. This leads us to consideration of who is being secured by the currently hegemonic discourses and practices of security. The 'referent' of the orthodox discourse on security was, and remains, the state.48 That is, the sovereign state, conceived of as a distinct territory and a particular form of government, is regarded as the entity which is to be 'secured'. The perceived threat to its security was, of course, other states who were regarded, in Hobbesian fashion, as eyeing their neighbours rapaciously, ready to pounce at any sign of weakness. The normative justification for privileging the state in this way is that states are, allegedly, the agents which provide their citizens with security at the domestic level. Thus by ensuring a stable international order, the ultimate result is prosperity for the state's citizens.49Critical Security Studies fundamentally challenges this dominant account. As we have seen, it argues, on empirical grounds, that any normative claims for privileging the state are untenable. The overwhelming majority of states create insecurity rather than foster an atmosphere within which stability can be attained, and prosperity created. Those relatively few states which can afford their citizens circumstances enabling them to enjoy a deal of security do so because of their position within a global economy which reinforces grotesque disparities of wealth, environmental degradation, and class and gender inequalities. Their citizens' security is brought at the price of insecurity for the vast majority of the inhabitants of those chronically insecure states. Furthermore, rather than viewing the orthodox discourses and practices of security as aimed at securing states from potential challenges from other states, a Critical approach suggests that those discourses and practices are primarily aimed at those within the states who deign to challenge the status quo. In the states which form the core of the global economy, these practices and discourses are also aimed at those in the periphery foolish enough to attempt to refuse their allotted role in the global division of labour. Rejecting the traditional fetishization of the state, Critical Security Studies proposes other referents for security discourse. Security should focus variously, or indeed interchangeably, on the individual, on society, on civil society,
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on community, on the continuing integrity of ethnic or cultural groups, on global society.50Furthermore, not only should the referent be different but so should the aim of the security. According to Ken Booth, the discourses and practices of security should be concerned with the struggle for human eman~ i ~ a t i o nHere . ~ ' the project stands full-square with the tradition of Critical Theory. If 'all theory is for someone and for some purpose', then Critical Security Studies is for those who are, in Said's words, '... the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless', and its purpose is their emancipation. This orientation is in stark contrast to traditional theories of security, which, Critical Theorists would argue, are for soldiers and statesmen [sic] and whose purpose is to maintain and strengthen these groups7already dominant position. In line with this rejection of the sovereign state as the referent for security and as the agent through which security is ultimately provided, Critical Security Studies stresses other agents which can effect emancipatory change. Eschewing the traditional stress on diplomacy and the military, it aligns itself with critical or 'new' social movements such as those engaged in peace activism, those engaged in the struggle for human rights and the survival of minority cultures, and so on.j2 It is through these movements that Critical Security Studies can hope to become 'a force for the direction of action'. At this point we return to the role of theory in effecting social change which, once again, leads us back to Gramsci. In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci advances a sophisticated analysis of how dominant discourses play a vital role in upholding particular political and economic orders:jZin Gramsci's terminology, paricular historic blocs. Gramsci adopted Machiavelli's view of power as a centaur, that is half man, half beast: a mixture of consent and c ~ e r c i o n . ' ~ Consent is produced and reproduced by a ruling hegemony which holds sway through civil society and through which ruling or dominant ideas become widely dispersed." In particular, Gramsci describes how ideology becomes sedimented in society and takes on the status of 'common sense', that is it becomes unconsciously accepted and even regarded as beyond question. Obviously, for Gramsci, there is nothing immutable about the values which permeate society; they can and do change. In the social realm, ideas and institutions which were once seen as natural and beyond question (i.e. commonsensical) in the west, such as feudalism and slavery, are now seen as anachronistic, unjust and unacceptable. In Marx's phrase, 'all that is solid melts into the air'. Gramsci's intention is to harness this potential for change and ensure that it moves in the direction of emancipation. To d o this he suggests a strategy of a 'war of p o s i t i ~ n ' In . ~ ~states with developed civil societies, such as those of the developed countries, Gramsci argued that any successful attempt at progressive social change requires a slow, incremental, even molecular, struggle to break down the prevailing hegemony and construct an alternative counterhegemony to take its place. Organic intellectuals have a crucial role to play in this process by helping to undermine the 'naturalness', the 'common sense', internalized nature of the status quo. This in turn helps to create political space within which alternative conceptions of politics can be developed and
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new historic blocs created. I would contend that Gramsci's strategy of a 'war of position' suggests an appropriate model for proponents of Critical Security Studies to adopt in relating their theorizing to praxis.
The Tasks of Critical Security Studies When the project of Critical Security Studies is conceived in terms of a 'war of position' then we can see that the main task of those intellectuals who align themselves with the enterprise is to attempt to undermine the prevailing hegemonic security discourse. This may be accomplished by utilizing specialist information and expertise to engage in an immanent critique of the prevailing security regimes: that is, comparing the justifications of those regimes with actual outcomes. As we have already seen, when this is attempted in relation to the security field then the prevailing structures and regimes are found to fail grievously on their own terms. Additionally, such an approach also involves challenging the pronouncements of those intellectuals, be they traditional or organic, whose views serve to legitimate, and hence reproduce, the prevailing world order.57 This entails teasing out the often unconscious, and certainly unexamined, assumptions which underlie their arguments,j8 whilst also drawing attention to the normative viewpoints which are smuggled into mainstream thinking about security behind its positivist falade. In this sense, if no other, proponents of Critical Security Studies approximate to Foucault's notion of 'specific intellectuals' who use their expert knowledge to challenge the prevailing 'regime of truth'.59 However, Critical Theorists might wish to reformulate this sentiment along more 'modernist' lines of 'speaking truth to power'.60 Of course, mainstream strategists like Colin S. Gray can, and indeed do aspire to a similar role.61 The difference between Gray and proponents of Critical Security Studies is that, while the former seeks to influence policymakers in particular directions without questioning the basis or effects of their power, the latter aim at a thorough-going critique of all that mainstream strategic studies has taken for granted. Furthermore, Critical Theorists base their critique on the presupposition, elegantly stated by Adorno, that 'The need to lend suffering a voice is the precondition of all truth'.62 The purpose of Critical Theorists' attempts to undermine the prevailing orthodoxy is ultimately educational, bearing in mind that, as we have seen, 'every relationship of "hegemony" is necessarily a pedagogic relation~hip'.~~ Thus by criticizing the hegemonic discourse and advancing alternative conceptions of security based on different understandings of human potentialities, one is simultaneously playing a part in eroding the legitimacy of the ruling historic bloc, and contributing to the development of a counter-hegemonic position. There are, of course, a number of avenues open to the Critical Security specialist in pursuing this educational strategy. As teachers we can try to foster and encourage scepticism towards 'accepted wisdom' and open minds towards other possibilities. We can also take advantage of the seemingly unquenchable thirst of the media for instant punditry to forward alternative
lones Theory and Praxis in Critical Security Studies 479 views onto a broader stage. These points are summarized by Nancy Fraser who argues that, 'As teachers, we try to foster an emergent pedagogical counterculture ... as critical public intellectuals we try to inject our perspectives into whatever cultural or political public spheres we have access to.'64 Perhaps significantly, we can find support for this type of emancipatory strategy even in the work of the ultra-pessimistic Adorno who argues that: 'In the history of civilization there have been not a few instances when delusions were healed not by focused propaganda, but, in the final analysis, because scholars, with their unobtrusive work habits, studied what lay at the root of the d e l ~ s i o n . " ~ However, this 'unobtrusive yet insistent work' does not of itself create the social change to which Adorno alludes. We must be wary of the conceptual as well as the practical dangers of collapsing praxis into theory. Rather, through their educational activities, proponents of Critical Theory must aim to provide support for those social movements who promote emanc i p a t o r ~social change. By providing a critique of the prevailing order and legitimating alternative views, Critical Theorists can perform a valuable role in opening political space for social movements. That said, it should be stressed that the role of theorists is not to 'direct' and 'instruct' those movements with which they are aligned. Rather, the relationship is reciprocal. Indeed, the experience of the European, North American and Antipodean peace movements of the 1980s shows how influential social movements can become when their efforts are harnessed to the intellectual and educational activity of critical thinkers.66 In Europe, North America and the Antipodes, the peace movements and the dissident defence intellectuals drew strength and succour from each other's efforts. If, however, such critical social movements do not exist then this creates obvious difficulties for the Critical Theorist. But even under these circumstances the theorist need not abandon all hope of an eventual orientation towards praxis. Once again, the peace movement of the 1980s provides the evidence. Then, the movement benefited from the intellectual work undertaken in the lean years (in peace movement terms) of the 1970s. Some of the theories and concepts developed then, such as 'common security' and 'nonoffensive defence', were even taken up by the Kremlin and played a crucial role in defusing the Second Cold War. In this case, those ideas developed in the 1970s can be seen in terms of a 'message in a bottle', but this time, contra Adorno, they were picked up and used to support a programme of emancipatory political praxis.67 Obviously one would be naive to understate the difficulties facing those attempting to develop alternative, critical approaches within academia. Some of these problems have been alluded to already and involve the structural constraints of academic life itself. Said argues that many problems are caused by what he describes as the growing 'professionalization' of academic life.6x Academics are now so constrained by the requirements of job security and marketability as to make most extremely risk-averse. It pays (in all senses) to stick with the crowd and avoid the 'exposed limb' by following the prevalent
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disciplinary preoccupations, publish in certain prescribed journals and so on. The result is, of course, the profoundly autistic and deeply tedious navelgazing so prevalent in the study of international relations and the seeming inability of security specialists to deal with the changes brought about by the end of the Cold War. These difficulties are arguably compounded for critical voices attempting to intervene in, and challenge the prevailing security discourse. As we have already argued, sensitivity here is heightened by the states' very real interest in marginalizing dissent. 'Gate-keeping' appears particularly strong - journals avoiding articles which are 'too heavily theoretical', i.e. those which attempt to challenge the prevailing 'common sense' assumptions. In addition the material lures which reward conformity are also very substantial. Defence consultancy on the part of academics involves large amounts of money, and governments and commercial concerns alike often wish to add a layer of academic respectability and legitimacy to their enterprises.
Conclusion Nevertheless, whilst not wishing to underestimate the practical difficulties engendered by these obstacles, Critical Security Studies is an idea whose time has come. The contemporary world 'order' exhibits all the morbid symptoms of the interregnum period foreseen by Gramsci 'when the old is dying and the new cannot be born'.69 The 'old' is certainly withering: not only have we seen the Warsaw Pact disintegrate following the collapse of the Soviet empire, and the NATO alliance paralysed by the Bosnian tragedy, but, far more fundamentally, the Westphalian system itself is losing its legiti m a ~ ~ .The ~ O main reason for this 'legitimation crisis'" is that those political structures whose justification rests on their ability to provide security namely sovereign states and the states system which they form - are patently failing in their task. When 'security' is considered in its widest, comprehensive sense, incorporating ecological concerns, economic questions, human rights both individual and communal - as well as military issues, those proffering traditional solutions to contemporary problems are engaging in a Canute-like attempt to ignore the rising tide of change. The nature of the 'new' is still, however, undecided. Barbarism is a strong possibility. Barbarism will become more of a probability if the mindset exhibited in the quotation by Edward N. Luttwak at the start of this article continues to be widely adopted by those engaged in the study of security. However, there is also the possibility of the development of a peaceful and rational world order: what Adorno foresaw as a 'landscape of benignly interacting particularities'." Such a development will undoubtedly be aided if those intellectuals concerned with issues of security attempt to emulate Habermas in seeking out 'traces of reason that unites without effacing separation, that binds without unnaming difference, that points out the common and the shared among
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and just world order. Whilst Critical Security Studies can assist those political practices which aim at providing real security through emancipation, it cannot be a substitute for them. Unfortunately Critical Theorists cannot hope to emulate those Australian aboriginal people so memorably portrayed by Bruce Chatwin in his book The Songlines, who, during their 'dreamtime', sang their world into e~istence.'~ However, Critical Security Studies can become an important voice informing and legitimating those political practices that could turn the dream of 'a world of benignly interacting particularities' into a reality.
Notes I would like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance and support of Ken Booth, Susie Carruthers, Steve Smith and Nicholas Wheeler. Earlier drafts of this paper were presented to the Cambrian Discussion Group in Aberystwyth, and to the Critical Security Studies panels at the 1994 annual conference of the British International Studies Association and the 1995 annual conference of the International Studies Association. A number of those who attended these sessions also contributed useful comments and suggestions for which I am most grateful. 1. Edward N. Luttwak, Strategy and History: Collected Essays, Volume Two (New Brunswick and Oxford: Transaction Books, 1985), p. xiii. 2. Jiirgen Habermas interviewed by Michael Haller, The Past as Future, trans. Max Pensky (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), pp. 119-20. 3. Robert W. Cox, 'Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory', Mzllennium: Journal of international Studies, Vol. 10 (Summer 1981), p. 128 [emphasis in original]. 4. Max Horkheimer, 'Traditional or Critical Theory', trans. Matthew J. O'Connell, in M a x Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York: Continuum, 1992), pp. 188-243, and Robert Cox, op. cit., pp. 128-9. 5. Karl Marx, 'Thesis o n Feuerbach', in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 5 (1845-47) (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), p. 5. 6. Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender m Contemporary Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 1989), p. 2. 7. The persecution of the Department of Peace Studies a t Bradford was dicussed in a lecture by the former head of department, James O'Connoll. See The Guardian, 16 October 1993, and The Times, 2 5 October 1993. 8. Simon Dalby, 'Security, Modernity, Ecology: The Dilemmas of Post-Cold War Security Discourse', Alternatives, Vol. 1 7 (Winter 1992), p. 98. 9. See, for example, the exchanges between Alexander Wendt and Martin Hollis and Steve Smith In Review of International Studies, Vol. 1 7 (October 1991), pp. 383-410 and 18 (April 1992), pp. 181-8, and also Walter Carlsneas, The Agency-Structure Problem in Foreign Policy Analysis', International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 36 (April 1992), pp. 245-70, and Martin Hollis and Steve Smith, 'Two stories about structure and agency', Review of lnternatronal Studies, Vol. 20 (July 1994), pp. 241-51. 10. Jurgen Habermas, p. 116. 11. For an extended discussion of the relationship between theory and praxis in the work of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, see Helmut Dubiel, Theory and Politics: Studies rn the Development of Critical Theory, trans. Benjamin Gregg (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1985). 12. Cox, p. 130. 13. See ibid., passim, and Robert W. Cox, 'Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay in Method', Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Vol. 12 (Summer 1983), pp. 162-75.
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14. Andrew Linklater, Beyond Realism and Marxism: Critical Theory and International Relations (London:Macmillan, 1990),p. 171. 15. Ibid.., D. 172. 16. Mark Hoffman,'Critical Theory and the Inter-paradigm Debate', Millennrum: Journal of International Studies, Vo1.16 (Summer 1987), p. 233 [emphasis in original]. 17. The literature on the relationship between the theory and practice o f international relations is sparse. The main studies, in chronological order, are: R. Tanter and R.H. Ullman (eds.), Theory and Policy in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); Coral Bell (ed.). Academic Studies and International Politics (Canberra: Department o f International Relations, ANU, 1982);A.J.R. Groom, 'Practitioners and Academics: Towards a Happier Relationship?', in Michael Banks (ed.),Conflict in World Society: A new perspective on international relatrons (New York: St Martin's Press, 1984); Christopher Hill and Pamela Beshoff (eds.), Two Worlds of International Relatrons: Academics, Practrtioners and the Trade in Ideas (London:Routledge, 1994). 18. Goronwy J . Jones, Wales and the Quest for Peace (Cardiff:University o f Wales Press, 1969) gives a flavour o f the activism o f which the foundation o f the world's first chair in International Politics at the University o f Wales, Aberystwyth in 1919, formed only a part. 19. See Brian Porter, 'David Davies: a hunter after peace', Review o f International Studies, Vol. 15 (January1989), pp. 27-36. 20. See Stanley Hoffman, 'An American Social Science: International Relations', Daedalus, Vol. 106, No. 3 (1977),pp. 41-60, and Ekkehart Krippendorf, 'The Dominance o f American Approaches in International Relations', Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 16 (Summer 1987), pp. 207-14. See also Christopher Hill, 'Academic International Relations: The siren song o f policy relevance', in C . Hill and P. Beshoff (eds.),in note 17, pp. 16-19. 21. A.J.R. Groom, p. 194. 22. M . Hoffman,p. 244. 23. See Stephen Gill, 'Epistemology, ontology, and the "Italian school"', in Stephen Gill (ed.), Gramsci, historical materialrsm and international relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993),pp. 2 1 4 8 . 24. For a discussion o f some broad themes see Renate Holub, Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism (London:Routledge, 1992), pp. 3-30. 25. Cox, 'Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations ...', p. 175ff. 26. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and GeoffreyNowell Smith (London:Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), p. xiii. 27. As is almost invariably the case with Gramsci, his theory o f intellectuals and the role o f intellectual activity is presented in a series o f fragmentary notes scattered throughout the Notebooks. Obviously, Gramsci can hardly be blamed for this given the conditions he was forced to endure during their writing. It does however mean that his theory has to be reconstructed from these fragments and it is not without its contradictions. The main fragments in the Notebooks dealing with intellectuals are 'The Intellectuals', pp. 5-23, and 'The Study o f Philosophy', pp. 323-77. 28. Ibid., p. 9. 29. Ibid., p. 10. 30. Ibid., p. 350. 31. Ibid., pp. 332-3. 32. See Ibid., pp. 125-205. 33. On the Frankfurt School see, for example, Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge:Polity, 1994) and Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research, 1923-1 950 (Boston:Little, Brown and Company, 1973). 34. Adorno's bleak assessment o f the pathologies o f contemporary society can be found in Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London:Verso, 1989).Adorno's conception o f the role o f the intellectual are discussed concisely in Edward W . Said, Representations of the Intellectual (London:Vintage, 1994),pp. 40-4. 35. Cited in Frederic Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic (London:Verso, 1992), pp. 177-8.
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36. Edward Said, p. 42. 37. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from damaged lzfe, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1991), p. 39. 38. Ibid. 39. Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism (London: Verso, 1989). 40. See, for example, John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Malor War (New York: Basic Books, 1990). 41. The term 'commom security' originated in the German security debate but was popularized by the Palme Commission report, see Independent Commission o n Disarmament and Security Issues, Common Security. A programme for drsarmament (London: Pan, 1982). O n the adoption of 'common security', as well the concept of 'non-offensive defence', by Gorbachev and some of hls advisors see, for example, Thomas Risse-Kappen, 'Ideas d o not float freely: transnational coalitions, domestic structures, and the end of the cold war', International Organisation, Vol. 48 (Spring 1994), pp. 185-214. 42. Said, p. 84. 43. For a classic summary of the fundamental assumptions of Strategic Studies see John Garnett, 'Strategic Studies and Its Assumptions', In John Baylis, Ken Booth, John Garnett and Phil Williams (eds.), Contemporary Strategy Vol. I: Theories and Concepts (2nd edition) (London: Croom Helm, 1987), pp. 3-29. 44. A more detailed series of such questions can be found in Ken Booth, 'A Security Regime in Southern Africa: Theoretical Consideration', South Afrzcan Perspectives, No. 30 (February 1994) (Centre for Southern African Studies, University of the Western Cape), pp. 26-7. An attempt to answer those questions in the Southern African context is made in Ken Booth and Peter Vale, 'Critical Security Studies and Regional Insecurity: The Case of Southern Africa', in Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams (eds.), Critical Security Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming). 45. For a more extended commentary on contemporary discussions regarding the concept o f security see Richard Wyn Jones, "'Travel without maps": Thinking about Security after the Cold War', in Jane Davis (ed.),Security Issues in the Post-Cold War World (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, forthcoming), pp. 232-55. 46. Perhaps the most influential statement of the case for expanding the concept of security is Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies zn the Post-Cold War Era, Second Edition (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991 ). 47. For an extended discussion see Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams, 'From Strategy to Security: Foundations of Critical Security Studies', in Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams (eds.), Critical Security Studies. 48. This is also ultimately the case for Barry Buzan despite his broader conception of security. For a discussion see Richard Wyn Jones, "'Travel without Maps"'. 49. O n this point see Christian Reus-Smit, 'Realist and Resistance Utopias: Community, Secur~ty and Political Action in the New Europe', Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1 (1992), pp. 14-18. 50. Ken Booth argues that the individual should be a central referent in any attempt to rethink security. See Ken Booth, 'Strategy and emancipation', Review of International Studies, Vol. 1 7 (October 1991), pp. 319-21. Martin Shaw argues that society should be the primary referent of security in 'There is no such t h q as society: beyond individualism and statism in international security studies', Revfew of lnternutional Studies, Vol. 1 9 (April 1993), pp. 159-75. Ole Wzver discusses the concept of societal security in a book which stresses the importance of ethno-national identity as the focus of the European security agenda in the postCold War era. See Ole Wzver, Barry Buzan, Morten Kelstrup and Pierre Lemailtre, ldentlty, Migration and the New Security Agenda in Europe (London: Pinter, 1993), esp. pp. 1 7 4 0 . Linklater's stress on the importance of community would seem to suggest another candidate for a successor to the state as the primary referent of the theory and practice of security. See Andrew Linklater, 'Community', in Alex Danchev (ed.), The Meaning of the Twentieth Century (London: Tauris Academic Press, 1995), and 'The Achievements of Critical Theory', in Ken Booth, Steve Smith and Marysia Zalewski (eds.), International Theory: Positivism and
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beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 1995). Ken Booth and Peter Vale suggest that it is appropriate for any Critical Security Studies approach to focus on different referents, at different times, in different locations. See Booth and Vale, op. cit. For a critical discussion of these various positions see Richard Wyn Jones, op. cit. 51. See Ken Booth, 'Security and Emancipation', passim. 52. For a discussion of social movements from a Critical Theory perspective see Larry J. Ray. Rethinking Critical Theory: Emancipation in the age of Global Social Movements (London: Sage, 1993), esp. pp. 57-77. 53. See, in part~cular,Gramsci, op. cit., pp. 323-77. 54. Cox, 'Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations ...', op. cit., p. 164. 55. For an attempt to apply some of Gramsci's concepts to the study of foreign policy see Enrico Augelli and Craig Murphy, America's Quest fur Supremacy and the Thzrd World (London: Pinter, 1988). 56. Gramsci, op. cit., pp. 229-39. 57. It could be argued that many strategists, for example Colin S. Gray and Edward N. Luttwak, are organic intellectuals in that they explicitly orientate their ideas towards the interests of a specific strata within society, in their case the ruling elites. See, for example, Gray, Strategic Studies and Public Policy: The American Experience (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), pp. 185-95. 58. For an attempt to interrogate the assumptions about the role of technology which underlie much nuclear strategy see Richard Wyn Jones, "The Nuclear Revolution', in Alex Danchev (ed.), op, cit. 59. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 19721977, edited by Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), p. 132. 60. This approach has recently been eloquently rearticulated by Edward W. Said, op. cit., pp. 63-75. 61. Gray, op. cit., p. 193. 62. Cited in Frederic Jameson, op. cit., p. 66. 63. See note 31. 64. Nancy Fraser, op. cit., p. 11. 65. Theodor W. Adorno, cited in Douglas Kellner, The Persian Gulf TV War (Boulder, CO and Oxford: Westview, 1992), p. vii. 66. See, for example, the discussion of the 'Nuclear Freeze Movement in the United States' in David Cortright, Peace Works: The Citizen's Role in Ending the Cold War (Boulder, CO and Oxford: Westview, 1993), pp. 5-13. Michael C. Pugh cites the importance of the visits of such figures as Helen Caldicott and Richard Falk in changing the political climate in New Zealand and aiding the growth of the country's anti-nuclear movement. Michael C. Pugh, The ANZUS crisis, nuclear visiting and deterrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 108. 67. See note 41. 68. Said, op. cit., pp. 49-62. 69. This is cited by one of the pioneers of Critical Security Studies, Ken Booth, following its use by the South African novelist Nadine Gordimer. See Ken Booth, 'Introduction The interregnum: world politics in transition', in Ken Booth (ed.), New Thinking about Strategy and International Security (London: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 1. The original source of this quotation is Gramsci, op. cit., p. 276. 70. See, for example, James R. Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 71. Jiirgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (London: Heinemann, 1976). 72. Martin Jay, Adorno (London: Fontana, 1984), p. 20. 73. See note 2. 74. Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987).