'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Global security after Iraq, part 2

In part 1 of this series on JWN, and in my contribution to this follow-up post, I argued:

1. That the failure of the Bushists' 2003 project in Iraq will be more momentous-- both for the security system in the Middle East and, crucially, for the broader global security system-- than the retreat that Britain undertook from a lead "security role" east of Suez, in the years after the Suez aggression of 1956.
2. That even now, 18 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there has still not been enough clear thinking about what kind of global "security system/structure" should replace the "Cold War system" that prevailed for the preceding 40 years; and in the absence of such clear thinking the arguments of the "liberal hawks" in Western countries came to exercise undue sway.
3. That the liberal hawks had a notable influence, along with others, in making the Bushists' 2003 invasion of Iraq possible.  And now that the failure of the invasion project has become so evident, we should subject the arguments and assumptions of the liberal hawks to the same kind of rigorous interrogation which many of us have already applied to those whose pro-invasion advocacy sprang from less "liberal" motivations. Why did the liberal hawks' project in Iraq go so horribly wrong?  Those of us who were anti-war from the get-go, and who are also very serious about human rights, need to engage in a serious (though still friendly) way with the liberal hawks if we are to prevent a recurrence of the tragedy of Iraq.
   
4. That though we don't yet know the details, political/strategic modalities, or full extent of the diminution, post-Iraq, of the US's ability to pursue the kind of globally aggressive unilateralism described in Pres. Bush's 2002 National Security Strategy, still, the fluidity of the years ahead gives all of us who are serious about building a more egalitarian and peaceful world a distinctive new opportunity to advocate successfully for our ideas-- provided we can start getting our concepts sketched out and injected into the global public discourse pretty soon.
   

In the present post, I want to look at one very promising proposal for the kind of changes we "westerners" ("northerners"?) need to make in the way we think about and "do" global security.  This is the proposal that Paul Rogers and two of his colleagues at the Oxford Research Group-- Chris Abbott and John Sloboda-- have recently published in the form of a small book titled Beyond Terror: The Truth about the Real Threats to Our World.   (I wrote very briefly about Paul, and the main ideas of the "Beyond Terror" book, here.)

"Beyond Terror" is very clearly argued, readable, and short.  I urge as many of you as possible to read the authors' whole text.  It is written mainly for a UK audience, but that doesn't impact materially on any of the points made, except in the section that lists "Further Resources" for readers who want to engage in advocacy on these issues.

The nub of the book's argument is that "Beyond" the threat of international terrorism that leaders like Bush and Blair have been focusing on (playing up?) for the past 5.5 years, humankind today faces four other distinct challenges to its wellbeing, or perhaps even to its survival.

The authors talk about a total of five "threats".  Personally, I prefer to refrain from participating in the fearmongering discourse of "threats" and recast these as "challenges".  So here is the authors' list of the four additional (i.e., not "terrorist") challenges, taken in the order of the chapters in which they are described:

1. Climate change, regarding which they write (p.25) that it is likely to contribute to "increased human suffering, greater social unrest, revised patterns of living and the pressure of higher levels of migration... This has long-term security implications for all countries which are far more serious, lasting and destructive that those of international terrorism."
   
2. Competition over resources.  Here they focus mainly on the global competition for access to fossil fuels, and secondarily that for water.  They note (p.38) that the Persian Gulf has two-thirds of proven oil reserves in which the US "seeks to maintain control against opposition from regional state and sub-state para-military groups"; that China is will need to import increasing amounts of oil to fuel its economic growth; and that oil consumption should anyway be "rapidly reduced", because of the contribution carbon emissions make to climate change.
   
3. Marginalization of the majority world.  They write (p.57) that the benefits of the recent decades of global economic growth have been very unequally shared, "with a heavy concentration of growth in relatively few parts of the world;" that "These divisions are being exacerbated by increasing oppression and political exclusion;" and that by responding inappropriately to this trend current security policies "are actually causing an increase in support for radical and violent movements such as the al-Qaida network."
   
4. Global militarization:  "The current focus [of, I think, the US, though they might also be talking about other powers?] is on maintaining international security by the vigorous use of military force combined with the development of both nuclear and conventional weapons systems; the first five years of the 'war on terror' suggest that this is failing."(p.72)

The authors name the "paradigm" that western/northern powers have used until now as they have  fashioned their response to the challenges facing the global security system the "control paradigm", and they urge that it be replaced instead by what describe as a "sustainable security" paradigm. 

For my part, I suggest that this term "control paradigm" might be used to describe just about the totality of the way that governments of European-heritage countries have thought about global security issues ever since the birth of globe-girdling European empires in the 16th-18th centuries.  Back at the beginning of those global empires, the emphasis was on controling the sea-lanes (which were also routes for global trade and for hauling around imperial war-booty, including enslaved persons).  That involved numerous attempts-- ultimately successful-- to destroy the trade-routes the Arab-Islamic empires had earlier established in bodies of water including the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea, etc.  It also involved a number of huge sea-battles among the various contending European powers, from Sir Walter Drake's destruction of the Spanish Armada in 1587 through to Admiral Nelson's destruction of Napoleon's navy at Abu Kir, Egypt, 201 years later.  (Maybe I missed some at one end or another of that span?) 

But anyway, then as now-- and in all intervening periods including the two 'World Wars' of the 20th century, controlling the Sea Lines of Communication (SLOCs) has always been a prime concern.  Compared with the value of the SLOCs, control of the interior of land-masses was nearly always a secondary issue.  In Africa, for example, the European powers were quite content to ignore most of the interior until the late 19th century when the development of railways, telegraphs, and modern methods for constructing bridges, tunnels, etc, gave land-masses a new relevance to imperial communications and imperial resource-extraction projects alike.  Thus it was not until 1885 that the European powers saw the need to sit down together in Berlin and divide the African interior amongst themselves. 

Anyway, the point of that interjection is really just to note that the security of the international SLOCs-- and of the more recent international air-routes-- will continue to be a challenge that anyone proposing a new security system to replace the present US-hegemony model will need to address...

So back to the book.  As I said, Abbott, Rogers, and Sloboda propose as a replacement for the western/northern nations' present "control paradigm" a "sustainable security paradigm."  They describe the differences in the kinds of responses that these two paradigms would indicate, to the five global security challenges (threats) they have identified, as follows:

	Response from control paradigm (pp.81-82)	Response from sustainable security paradigm (pp.84-85)
Competition over resources	Control of the Persian Gulf: "An obsession with national energy security through taking control of, or gaining access to, key resources such as Persian Gulf oil, which leads to further conflict and tension in the region... "	Consumption reduction: "Comprehensive energy efficiency, recycling and resource conservation and management policies... [and] large-scale funding for alternatives to oil."
Climate change	Nuclear power: "An unshakable and unrealistic belief in the capacity of technological advances (including ... civil nuclear reactors) ... as the primary means of responding to what some still consider the 'myth' of climate change."	Renewable energy: "Introduction of a carbon tax and rapid replacement of carbon-based energy sources by diversified local renewable sources ... [for] energy generation."
Marginalization of the majority world	Societal control: "The usual response [beyond trying to ignore the problem] is heavy societal control in an attempt to 'keep the lid on' civil discontent... [and] a belief that the free market will enable people to work their way out of poverty."	Poverty reduction: "Reform of global systems of trade, aid and debt relief ... to make poverty reduction a world priority."
International terrorism	Counter-terrorism: "A series of counter-productive, controversial and often illegal counter-terrorism measures and attacks on civil liberties... "	Political dialogue: "Addressing the legitimate political grievances ... of marginalized groups, ... intelligence-led counter-terrorism police operations against violent revolutionary groups and dialogue with terrorist leaderships wherever possible."
Global militarizationn	"Counter-proliferation measures...  Where it is believed that actors already possess, or are close to acquiring WMDs, a strategy of pre-emptive military strikes has been initiated."	Non-proliferation/disarmament: "Alongside non-proliferation measures, states with nuclear weapons must take, bold, visible and substantial steps towards disarmament... [and halt] initiatives such as the development of new nuclear weapons and new bio-weapons."

I like many, many things about the "Sustainable security" paradigm.  It comes in the wake of a number of other attempts over the past 25 years or so, to construct new paradigms for global security.  Among the most notable there were the "Collective security" paradigm, an old idea that returned to prominence in the later decades of the Cold War and helped the "arms controllers" in the US policy elite to start figuring out ways to put a partial lid on the rampant arms-racing that marked earlier phases of the Cold War. 

Another, imho even more helpful, paradigm has been that of "Human security", which goes a good way towards making many of the points that Abbott, Rogers, and Sloboda make.  In that generally excellent Wikipedia page on human security, look in particular at the section that describes the concept in general, and under there at the table indicating HS's "Relationship with traditional security."  HS has been adopted as a key concept for organizing north-south interactions and global engagement in general by many parts of Norway's  and Canada's government bureaucracies and political/intellectual elites.  Good for them, I say!  (Too bad, though, that under the aegis of that very outdated old warriors' organization NATO both those countries' armies have recently gotten drawn into a very pugilistic situation in Afghanistan.)

So what I'll do now is, first, describe why I see see the "Sustainable Security" paradigm as stronger and more useful than the HS paradigm; and second, describe what I see as some continuing problems with the SSP, and start sketching out my own alternative.

Where the SSP is stronger than the HSP:

The iconic definition of the HSP was provided in the 1994 edition of the UN Development Program's Human Development Report.  It argued this (on pp.3-4 of that PDF file-- I have no idea who did the underlining and highlighting there, by the way):


I leave aside for now this text's participation in the discourse of "threats".  But I want to note a couple of other things.  First of all, it takes an extremely "north-centered" view of the world to argue that, prior to the end of the global Cold War, the only "threat" that people faced to their security was that of a nuclear holocaust.  That was the case in the US, Europe West and East, and the USSR.  But meanwhile, in far too many countries of the south actual wars continued to be waged during every year of the Cold War, and often enough fueled in good part by Cold War rivalry.  Those wars consumed the lives of millions and devastated many entire nations-- across, Africa, Asia, and much of Latin America.  For people in those countries, in those decades, human security never meant  primarily "constructed safeguards against the threat of a nuclear holocaust".  It meant, figuring out how to survive the holocausts that already existed, all around them.

Perhaps in line with that "original" mindset, or perhaps for other reasons, the HSP never really seemed adequately to engage with the vast challenges posed during the Cold War,  as well as since its ending, by the actual (even if, fortunately, non-nuclear) wars that have continued to occur, or with the hard political questions embedded within those wars, or with the hard politics of peacemaking.  In fact, war is not mentioned at all under that HDR text's rubric of "political security", all of which is devoted instead to items on the civil and political rights agenda.  It is mentioned, very briefly, as one of seven "threats" listed under the rubric of "personal security", though the text transitions almost immediately into a much lengthier examination of the problem that common-or-garden crimes poses in a number of high-income western countries.  (Like, we should consider those societies' problems before anyone else's?)  Then, under "community security", there is one short paragraph (p.11) that purports to be mostly about "ethnic conflicts" within state.

It strikes me, therefore, that what the HS people were trying to do was to to avoid addressing all the items on the "traditional" security agenda.  For all their insistence on calling all these things "food security", "health security", etc etc, it seems that what they were mostly trying to do was to gain attention (and funding) for their own existing agenda by attaching the "security" label to it, while not bothering at all to try to describe how their own agenda related to the traditional security agenda.  (See also this critique by Roland Paris, who concludes--p.17 there-- that "[A]s a new conceptualization of security, or a set of beliefs about the sources of conflict, human security is so vague that it verges on meaninglessness... ")

The authors of the SSP, by contrast,  do work hard to establish the relevance of their paradigm to the traditional concerns of the security agenda; and they propose actual, very concrete, and in my view very visionary solutions for challenges such as those posed by international terrorism and global militarization.

I like the fact that they have something concrete and in my view very constructive to propose regarding the challenge of international terrorism

I like the fact that they identify militarization as, in itself and on an evenhandedly global scale, a problem for the security of all of humankind; and that here, too, they have a concrete, constructive, and evenhanded proposal for how to deal with it.

I like the fact that those two challenges take up 40% of the "agenda" that they propose be addressed for the global security system going forward.  It strikes me that is about the right proportion of attention.

I like the way they name the other three challenges.  I think the rubric of "Competition over resources" is far more enlightening and substantial, as an item in an agenda dealing with security challenges, than a bland general rubric like "food security" or "economic security".  I think the authors' inclusion of climate change as a phenomenon that poses its own, distinctive set of challenges to the security of many or most human communities, as well as to the global security "system" as a whole, is important and helpful.   (I say this, even though I frequently get very frustrated with the way Tom Friedman and some other liberal hawks have recently tried to use a concern about global warming to distract everyone's attention from the ongoing tragedy in Iraq, an issue regarding which they had been proven quite definitively wrong; hence, I suspect, their desire to change the subject-- urgently!-- to that of global warming...)

And I really like Abbott, Rogers, and Sloboda's inclusion of "the marginalization of the majority world" as itself constituting a full 20% of the security challenges they identify.

Dimensions of marginalization

I was just doing a quick bit of online research into global income inequalities, and in particular into the trends regarding global income inequalities over recent decades.  I found this paper, titled WORLDS APART: INTER-NATIONAL AND WORLD INEQUALITY 1950-2000, by a World Bank economist called Branko Milanovic.  If you go to the tables from p.53 onwards, you'll see where, having divided the world's nations into the four categories of "Rich, Contenders, Third World, and Fourth World", he looked at the mobility of nations among these categories in the time periods 1960-1978 and then 1978-1998. 

 He describes the outcome of his analysis (p.57) as "A downwardly mobile world." In Table 15 (p.62) he summarizes the fact that, between 1960 and 1998, the number of "rich" nations had fallen from 41 to 29.  The number of "contender" countries and "third world" countries also fell in that period.  But meanwhile, the number of "fourth world" (i.e. very low-income) countries rose from 25 to78.

But that downward mobility doesn't apply to everyone.  If you go to Table 15, you'll see that whereas in 1960, only 22 of the 41  "rich" countries were "WENAO" (West Europe, North America, or Oceania), in 1998 there were still 22 WENAO countries described as rich (and overwhelming, I think, the same ones)-- but the number of other countries described as rich had fallen to just 7.   Only one WENAO country in both time-periods fell into any category other than "rich."

But look at the changes in the distribution of African countries over that same period:

	1960	1998
Rich	5	1
Contenders	3	1
Third World	13	5
Fourth World	19	36

Parenthetically, we might justifiably conclude that these figures constitute a gross indictment of the work the "World Bank" itself did over the four decades in question. We might also observe the "amazing coincidence" that the World Bank just happens to be governed quite disproportionately by representatives of the WENAO nations.

Lower down, in Table 24 (p.84), Milanovic makes a first stab at providing a "true" global measure of income inequality-- that is, among all the households of people on God's earth.  This is necessarily imperfect, because of the problems of data-collection and data definition.  He gives it in two ways: the Gigi coefficient, with which I am familiar, and the Theil coefficient, with which I'm not.  In Gini, you measure inequality on a scale between 0.0 and 1.0 (or, multiplying those numbers by 100, you get a number between 0 and 100) on the assumption that if you have perfect equality the Gini coefficient is 0, and if you have "perfect" inequality-- i.e. Bill Gates gets all the income there is in the world and the rest of us all get absolutely nothing-- then the Gini coefficient is 100.

Milanovic comes up with global Gini coefficients for income in PPP$ for two years: 1988 and 1993.  The result is shocking.  A figure of 62.8 for 1988 and 66.0 for 1993.

These are extremely high levels of inequality.  For example, if you look at this page that charts in-country Gini coefficients over time, you'll see that even in Brazil-- one of the most radically inegalitarian countries in the world-- the Gini only occasionally poked itself up above 60.  Plus, an increase of 3.2 points in the Gini coefficient in just five years indicates a rapid increase in global inequality.

... I realize I'm getting a little off-topic here.  But I do really want to be able to start describing the "marginalization" that the authors of "Beyond Terror" write about, in ways that are more concrete than they use.  Sadly, I found that the chapter of their book that purports to deal with "Marginalization of the majority world" didn't really present much solid data or analysis of the advertised topic.

Marginalization is also, imho very importantly, a matter of exclusion from access to the levers of real decision-making.  (See: the discussion of World Bank governance, above!)

I want to say first, upfront and quite explicitly that I think human equality in a central human value in itself.  (And I note that many important world manifestos or declarations of faith, including the American Declaration of Independence, are in agreement on this principle.)  If one person anywhere in the world goes to bed hungry, has to decide which of her children she should feed because she can't feed them all, or dies of an easily preventable or treatable disease, then we are all, as humanity, significantly diminished because in a world of plenty we have allowed that to happen.  And of course, hundreds of millions of our fellow humans are living in that situation day after day after day... for decades on end, or until they succumb to an avoidably early mortality.

The fact that so many people are "marginalized"-- in terms of both economics and access to the levers of power-- can also be seen, in an instrumental way, as posing a security "challenge" for the whole of humanity.  Including, first and foremost, themselves, I should note.  But also including, in a subsidiary and indirect way, that  minority of humanity who have a generally acceptable level of economic security, who have some access to the levers of power (and who virtually monopolize global access to the internet and thus to discussions like the present one.)

To me, the issue of access to, or exclusion from, the levers of global political power (and even, the global discourse over power) is a crucial one as we work to construct a new global security "paradigm" for the era that will follow (the evident failure of) Bush's bid to impose his model of unilateralist US militarism on Iraq, and thereafter, through 'Shock and Awe' extension, the rest of the world.

This is why I've ended up being a tiny bit dissatisfied with the "Sustainable Security" paradigm that Abbott, Rogers, and Sloboda produced.  I've noted above several aspects of their argument that I welcome.  But this question of "Who decides all this stuff, anyway?" has always been a hugely important one for me.  (Perhaps because, as a female, I've suffered my own non-trivial quota of social exclusion over the years.)

It is also something that I've taken, very keenly, from the study I've made of the whole apartheid system in South Africa.

Roughly speaking, I see the relationship that most Americans have until recently seen between their (our) own country and the rest of the world has been unthinkingly analogous to the way most "White" South Africans under apartheid saw their community's "natural" relationship with their non-"White" compatriots...    It just seemed "natural" to many or perhaps even most US citizens that their country should take decisions on behalf of the whole world community, including hugely momentous decisions regarding global war and peace...

Now, though, finally, and because of the situation we find ourselves in in Iraq, many US citizens are starting to reconsider that proposition.  But they still have fears.  I'd say that probably most US citizens really don't believe all the hype that our political leaders propagate to the effect that "international terrorists" are just poised to swoop down on our towns and communities here, armed with "dirty bombs" or worse.  But there are always multiple fears when people are contemplating relinquishing a bit of the control they may well have exercised for many generations already...

That's why what I'm planning to do as I continue writing this intermittent series on "Global security after Iraq" is to propose and explore a paradigm of "inclusive security" that will have many features of the "Sustainable security" paradigm discussed above, but will also, centrally, take on this issue of how "control" over the world's security system-- including over the Sea Lines of Communication, the world trading and financial system,  and everything elose-- can start to be effectively shared among the world's people, including those who have been most brutally disadvantaged by the "control paradigm" system that has dominated the global scene for the past 350 or more years.

Anyway, as you can see, the above is merely an additional set of notes toward my formulation of such a model.  So please do chip in with your own reactions or helpful suggestions regarding the above... In particular, I'd love any recommendations of people or organizations who are alrready engaged in this kind of enquiry... No point in reinventing the wheel!