Environmental Security and Quality After Communism

Eastern Europe and the Soviet Successor States

Joan DeBardeleben

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429720444
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Infrastructure
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume, based on papers presented at a conference on Environmental Security after Communism at Carleton University, explores the linkages between environmental quality and security in Eastern Europe and the Soviet successor states.

Part One
The Environment as a Security Problem in the Post—Communist World

1
Environmental Security After Communism: The Debate

Leigh Sarty

The troubled course of world politics since the collapse of the Berlin Wall has long since affirmed John Mearsheimer's 1990 prediction that we would "soon miss" the Cold War.¹ Viewed against the backdrop of contemporary social, economic, and political upheaval East of the Elbe, the armed stand-off of the post-1945 era now conjures up alluring images of a simpler time, free of the paralyzing dilemmas that the West currently faces in Yugoslavia and the former territories of the Soviet empire. To be sure, nostalgia of this kind is somewhat misplaced. Whether the stability forged by the threat of nuclear holocaust and the forced subjugation of millions can be considered preferable to today's conflicts and uncertainties must remain an open question. Yet change, however welcome, can be a disquieting thing, especially for analysts and policy-makers who have been compelled to rethink long-held assumptions about international politics and East-West relations. The complex challenges of a post–Cold War world make it difficult not to look back with some fondness on the familiar trials of bipolarity. This urge must be resisted, however, if these new challenges are to be constructively engaged and successfully met.

In view of this, the theme of this volume – environmental quality and security after communism – merits close scrutiny. Coupling our study of the international dimensions of post-communist change with the term "security," however modified, evokes the thinking of a bygone era, when the communist "threat" to our values and well-being constituted the principal rationale for the West's concern with the USSR and its East European empire. Those who frame East-West relations after communism in terms of environmental security might be accused of engaging in a semantic sleight-of-hand in order to salvage the familiar analytical categories of the Cold War. This chapter seeks to anticipate and refute this charge by demonstrating how the concept of environmental security can be usefully applied to the post-Cold War agenda in East-West affairs.

The discussion is divided into three parts. The first part traces the recent evolution of scholarship on the nature and meaning of security in world politics and considers the ways in which environmental issues have been integrated into this work. The second part explores some of the hazards involved in linking the environment and security, focusing in particular on the problems that emerge when this linkage is introduced to the study of East-West relations. With these potential pitfalls established, this chapter concludes with identification of the merits of a properly qualified application of the concept of environmental security to a world transformed by the end of the Cold War.

Security in World Politics

In a field as topical as international relations, scholarship is invariably a product of the times, driven and shaped by the very events that it seeks to understand.² The emergence of environmental security as an issue for scholarly and policy debate is thus inextricably linked with the end of the Cold War, an event which liberated energies traditionally focused on the military/ideological competition between the superpowers to permit a reconsideration of basic concepts in the field.³ The roots of this development stretch well beyond the recent changes in East-West relations, however, and are worth reviewing briefly in order to place the contemporary discussion in proper perspective.

From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, when the Cold War was at its height, understanding international security was a comparatively simple affair. Given an armed and (presumably) implacable Soviet foe, the principal threat to the West's health and well-being was perceived to be clearly a military one, to be met by military means. In the academic world, this apparent fact of international life secured wide acceptance of the Realist approach to world politics, which emphasized the centrality of interstate conflict and the primacy of "high" politics (military and security affairs) over such "low" issues as trade and international organization.⁴ By the late 1960s and 1970s, as Cold War confrontation gave way to detente and the American debacle in Vietnam cast doubt on the efficacy of military power, "transnationalism" and "interdependence" emerged as the watchwords of an alternative "liberal" framework for understanding a world in which the clear-cut distinctions between high and low politics had become blurred.⁵ At the same time, a growing awareness of global concerns that transcended state borders, such as air pollution, poverty, resource scarcity, and the host of other issues conjured up by the image of a fragile and finite "Spaceship Earth," was further eroding the military/state-centric outlook of Realist analysis.⁶

The unravelling of detente and the "new Cold War" of the early 1980s introduced a new dimension to this story. On the one hand, the salience of military issues and interstate conflict in the souring of East-West relations breathed new life into the Realist canon, a development codified by Kenneth Waltz's "elegant restatement of realism" in 1979.⁷ The erosion of traditional concepts of power before the advance of global interdependence was a "myth," Waltz argued; the military and economic primacy of the two superpowers fundamentally shaped both the dynamics and the underlying stability of the international system.⁸ The $1.5 trillion defense build-up initiated by the Reagan Administration, coupled with relentless deployments on the Soviet side, seemed to affirm that the familiar Cold War approach to security was alive and well in the 1980s.⁹ In the meantime, however, the dramatic downturn in East-West relations injected fresh vigor into the quest for alternative approaches as well. In the fall of 1980, the Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues, chaired by Olof Palme of Sweden, began the work that would culminate in its 1982 report, Common Security: A Blueprint for Survival. Rejecting the policy of mutual deterrence as amoral and ultimately futile, the Commission called instead for the adoption of the principle of "common security," which held that in an interdependent world armed with nuclear weapons, "true security" could be achieved neither unilaterally nor by military means, but only in cooperation with others.¹⁰ Although the Palme Commission touched in passing on the opportunity costs of arms expenditures (in terms of foregone development) and the interconnections between human deprivation and international conflict, it fell to the World Commission on Environment and Development, which reported its findings in 1987, to spell out more fully the meaning and implications of a truly global, "common" approach to international security.¹¹ Its articulate identification of the close connections between "Peace, Security, Development, and the Environment" thrust the concept of environmental security into prominence in the contemporary discourse on global affairs.¹²

In the final analysis, however, it was the vicissitudes of world politics and public opinion that shifted these innovative approaches from the seminar room and the conference hall to the real world of international diplomacy. With the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev and "new thinking" in Soviet foreign policy after 1985, talk of interdependence, "mutual security," and the limits of military power entered the East-West mainstream. Levels of cooperation unthinkable in Brezhnev's time gradually entered the realm of the possible, casting the prospects for common security in a new light.¹³ At the same time, a combination of scientific insight – the revelation of potentially hazardous atmospheric ozone depletion in 1985 – and circumstances – the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986 and the hot, dry summer of 1988 – alerted policy-makers and the attentive public to the close connections between the state of the natural environment and their own well-being.¹⁴ When the Cold War drew to a close at the beginning of the new decade, the stage was set for the concept of environmental security to come into its own.

Environmental Quality and Security

But what exactly is meant by environmental security? Does the term contribute to understanding, or merely make a complex situation even murkier? In the abstract, the argument for linking the environment and security is straightforward and makes sense. It is at the operational level that problems arise, however, since the variables involved and the interconnections between them are extremely complex. The discussion here will present both sides of the debate on these questions, with special reference to East-West relations after communism.

The case for linking the environment and security typically proceeds as follows. Because the life and well-being of the individual are the necessary preconditions for all human activity, the primary function of the state is to protect its citizens from bodily harm. Since the principal external threat to a populace's physical well-being has historically taken the form of organized interstate violence, the study of international security has traditionally – and, one might add, not unreasonably – focused on "the threat, use, and control of military force."¹⁵ As a result of the political, technological, and physical transformations described above, however, non-traditional, non-military threats to individual and national well-being have proliferated, leading to demands that our conception of security be broadened to incorporate these new challenges.¹⁶

The environment enters into these deliberations in three respects. The first concerns the increased likelihood of interstate conflict over resources that are becoming scarce due to pollution and over-use. While the threat of resource wars is not new to international relations, this line of analysis points up the clear and growing connections between contemporary mismanagement of the environment and the security challenges of tomorrow.¹⁷ A more refined variant of this theme was identified by the World Commission on Environment and Development and its supporters, which emphasizes the interrelationship between a diminishing quality of life brought on by environmental degradation and the probability of violent civil or interstate conflict. The sense here is that unchecked environmental destruction will "'ratchet up' the level of stress within national and international society, increasing the likelihood of many different kinds of conflict and impeding the development of cooperative solutions."¹⁸ A newer potential threat, that posed by global warming, has been called "the major global security issue of the year 2000."¹⁹

What distinguishes this mode of analysis from traditional thinking is its sensitivity to the importance of "quality of life" in the security equation, and the role of the environment in determining it. The impact of this variable can be understood either in traditional terms, by singling out the connections between drastic changes in the quality of life and the prospects for violent conflict, or non-traditionally, by framing, for example, the effects of global warming on peoples' health and well-being as a threat to security in and of itself. There is a potential problem here, however. As one observer has put it, "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'."²⁰

For this reason, the concept of environmental security is best defined in terms of the probable linkages between environmental degradation and the outbreak of violent civil or interstate conflict. Thomas Homer-Dixon of the University of Toronto has done some very interesting pioneering work along these lines. Although his focus is on the particular vulnerabilities of Third World states, the linkages he identifies between environmentally sensitive variables such as agricultural production, economic decline, and displaced populations, on the one hand, and the disruption of legitimized institutions, growing relative deprivation, and the potential for violence, on the other, clearly have a bearing on the "Second World" as well.²¹

Yet for those who study the states of the former communist bloc, an approach to the region's environmental problems that emphasizes the connection between these issues and the outbreak of military conflict within the region carries potentially troublesome implications. The field of Soviet and East European studies blossomed in the postwar era due to government and private foundation largesse that was sought and justified on grounds of the need to "know thine enemy."²² By framing the environmental challenges of the postcommunist era in terms of "threats" and interstate conflict, post-Soviet studies might open itself to the charge of perpetuating the "us vs. them" mentality of bygone days as a means to maintain the distinctiveness and funding levels that this area of inquiry enjoyed during the Cold War. Perhaps more importantly, as one critic of the environment/security link has argued, the competitive, zerosum mindset that the terms "threat," "security" and "conflict" conjure up is antithetical to the sense of global interdependence and common destiny on which substantive solutions to the current environmental ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART ONE The Environment as a Security Problem in the Post-Communist World
• PART TWO The Environment and the Energy Sector
• PART THREE National and Regional Dimensions of Environmental Quality
• Glossary of Acronyms and Terms
• About the Contributors
• Index