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:

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:

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!