Globalisation and Insecurity in the Twenty-First Century

NATO and the Management of Risk

Christopher Coker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781136050329
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Discusses the impact of globalisation on security in the West and in particular the way it has changed the nature of NATO as well as its security agenda.

Chapter 1 What is Globalisation?

DOI: 10.4324/9781315000633-2

As we have begun to use the term more frequently, the definition of globalisation has been increasingly contested. So too, according to one’s perspective, its origins have been pushed back in time. The cultural historian, for example, who agrees with Geoffrey Barraclough that contemporary history begins when the problems that are actual in the world today first took visible shape, may want to trace the process back to the turn of the twentieth century. After all, the first book to talk of the ‘Americanisation of the world’ was published in 1902.

The economist, by comparison, may prefer to look back to the excess liquidity from consistent US balance-of-payments deficits in the 1960s and the subsequent collapse of the Bretton Woods fixed-rate regime, with its capital controls. Or he may choose to go back no further than the 1970s and the recycling of petrodollars, which resulted in an astonishingly high volume of foreign-exchange trading and speculative investment that dwarfed the currency reserves of governments and threatened to swamp the financial markets of individual nations. Today’s annual foreign-exchange turnover is $300 trillion. ¹

As for the political scientist, he may detect real novelties in the increasing democratisation of the world. Since 1975, when Spain and Portugal rid themselves of their old dictatorships, the first ripple in a wave of democratisation has gathered momentum, spreading first to Latin America, then to Asia, and finally to Africa. Samuel Huntington has dubbed this ‘the third wave’ of global democratisation, comparing it with the first wave that swept Europe in the nineteenth century, and the second that appeared after the Second World War in much of the post-colonial world. The proportion of countries with some form of democratic government rose from 20% in 1974 to 61% in 1998. ² And majority governments worldwide have now made legally binding commitments to respect the civil and political rights of their citizens. As people’s participation in society has grown, so have the number of organisations that give it voice. And civic movements are forcing governments to engage and negotiate with society, field claims and pressures from diverse quarters and seek legitimacy by winning public approval for their performance.

The security community came to globalisation quite late in the day. In the 1990s it was confirmed in its belief that the world was getting safer for those who counted most: the countries that did well out of globalisation, largely because of the developments I have just sketched. The ‘third wave of democratisation’ comforted a community that believed that democracies do not go to war against each other. The increased complexity of financial transactions across the globe seemed to render war increasingly remote from power-policy concerns. ‘Geo-economics’ had allegedly displaced geopolitics, while economic wealth and ‘soft’ power were replacing violence and coercion as the ultimate currency of the ‘global village’. And, culturally, the increased homogenisation of the world promised a future in which cultural identity (often the stimulus for conflict in the past) would matter less than before. Just because the world was riven by internecine conflicts in ‘peripheral’ areas, including the Balkans, seemed no reason to suspect that war, the predominant political theme of the twentieth century, would be even a major sub-theme of the twenty-first. Once the weapon of the strong, war now seemed to be the weapon of the weak.

It was not until twenty-two days into the Kosovo war that a major Western leader acknowledged that globalisation had a security dimension. Tony Blair’s doctrine of ‘international community’, first adumbrated then in a speech in Chicago, acknowledged that all societies (whatever their different cultures) had to work together to sustain peace. ‘We are all internationalists now,’ he declared. It was a message that was given even greater urgency by the events of 11 September 2001. Both the Kosovo war and the attack on the World Trade Center appeared to reveal a unique dialectic at the heart of globalisation, between the global and the local. In many ways the dialectic is positive; it creates a synergistic tension between communities that brings them together, rather than forces them apart. It is also part of our post-modern discourse of ‘difference’. ‘Cultural borrowing’, ‘exchange’, ‘transfer’, ‘negotiation’, ‘acculturation’, ‘transculturation’, ‘hybridisation’ – these are all part of the language of the hour, and they reveal the fragmentation of identity, especially national identity, under the impact of globalisation.

But in much of the world, claim some analysts, ethnic identities have given rise to ethnic wars, and the ‘new’ wars of the 1990s were different in character from the old. Our post-modern play with a variety of identities, writes Mary Kaldor, holds no sway over believers in a very narrowly prescriptive notion of group identity. Identity in many modern countries – and even more so in pre-modern countries – is still a matter of group identification. Many people around the world claim membership of a group or are claimed by a group, and often the encounter is a triumph of local particularism over the universalist message at the heart of the globalisation debate.

A second dialectic, which aroused even more interest and criticism, was Samuel Huntington’s claim that identities based on different values and norms were likely to be the chief characteristic of our globalised age. Globalisation exacerbates societal and ethnic consciousness. The global religious revival, ‘the return of the sacred’, is a response to peoples’ perceptions of the world as ‘a single space’. In such a world, writes Huntington, the most urgent task is ‘to prevent the escalation of major inter-civilisational conflicts into major inter-civilisational wars’. Though largely discredited when it was first advanced, Huntington’s thesis has come back into play with Al-Qaeda’s attack on the United States.

For Pierre Hassner, a third dialectic is that between the ‘bourgeois’ and the ‘barbarian’, the latter being defined as movements or groups that, far from sparing civilians, now target them directly through genocide (Rwanda), ethnic cleansing (Kosovo) or terrorism (World Trade Center). War no longer revolves primarily around the rivalry between states; it revolves around conflicts between societies that globalisation brings into closer contact than ever before. The old idea of war – of soldier fighting soldier and state competing with state – has largely been discredited; in its place the state finds itself fighting barbarians in many shapes: bandits, militiamen, mafiosi, mercenaries, and warlords. ³ And crime and terrorism are fuelled by other global challenges that are shaping the Western security agenda, such as inequalities of wealth and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

What all three dialectics appear to suggest is that the ‘local’ is the main source of conflict in a globalised era. Although distant geographically, the local and global – the two worlds of ‘peace’ and ‘war’ – are in constant interaction through organised crime and global terrorist networks, and through patterns of migration, as millions of people are forced to leave their countries of origin to escape failing states, and even failing regions of the globe. From the purely technical point of view, the worlds of the Tomahawk cruise missile and the AK-47 (the non-state actor’s weapon of choice) are increasingly converging. In our global age cultures encounter each other and interpenetrate more than ever before.

But, while it is plausible to argue that all three dialectics produce conflict, this is not necessarily so. The debate is not helped by the fact that many of the leading analysts of conflict have an imperfect understanding of globalisation itself. We need a more complex understanding of its main features if we are to understand the nature of contemporary conflict, as well as the security challenges to which it gives rise. The dialectic between the global and local is merely one dialectic among many – globalisation itself is a dialectical process. Ethnicity does not always define nationality, any more than race or class. Ethnicity may fuel conflicts, but rarely does it cause them to break out. Cultural differences, though important, are more fluid than ever before as cultures are more interpenetrated. And the barbarians are often within the gates, waiting to break out rather than to break in.

Global, Globalism, Globalisation

Sociologists have used different criteria to describe globalisation, and it is they who have tended to determine the terms of the debate, because they have written at length about our own times: the way we ourselves think about the events and processes which are shaping and reshaping our lives. Yet even among sociologists, who have invoked the term globalisation the most, ‘global’ was still being used primarily in the sense of ‘total’ as recently as the late 1970s. Indeed, as an accepted term it only entered their vocabulary in the early 1990s. By then it had come to convey a widespread sense of the transformation of the world.

And yet, even between sociologists, there is still no general agreement on what is being transformed. We need, therefore, to distinguish globalisation from globalism, and both from the global world in which we have lived for so long.

The global contrasts with the national. It evokes the global environment or habitat in which humanity lives. It involves the idea of holism_ namely that the habitat, social or environmental, constitutes a unity. In the nineteenth century the world went global for the first time. Compound nouns with ‘world’ first began to appear in the lexicons of the time: ‘world politics’, ‘world economy’, ‘world trade’, ‘world power’, ‘world empire’, ‘world protection’, ‘world order’ and most ambitious of all, ‘world history’.

As Marx tells us in Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy (1857) ‘world history did not always exist; history as world history [wa]s a result’ of the international division of labour which the industrial revolution introduced. ⁴ Business activity, in particular, broadened individual activity into ‘world-historical activity’. And the ‘global’, of course, involved more than economics. The ‘Contemporary Politics’ course offered at the University of Wisconsin by Paul Reinsch in the academic year 1899–1900 was the first course of its kind anywhere in the United States to deal specifically with the subject matter of world politics. ⁵ The subject matter expanded in the period 1870–1920 as a result of the inclusion of some non-European societies (Japan) in the international system; a sharp increase in the number and forms of global communication; the rise of ecumenical movements; the development of global competitions (the Olympics); and the League of Nations. But it was the world wars, of course, and the Cold War that followed, that established in the minds of many strategists the fact that they lived in a global age.

The ‘global’, therefore, is not a project but a process. If it is always threatening to transcend the nation state as a focus of analysis, the nation state still remains one of the principal units of account. No single global system has emerged. We are likely to witness many global experiences or encounters. There are likely to be many local situations responsive to global pressures or conflicts, and many encounters between particular peoples prompted by global events.

This was another of Marx’s insights, for he was the first writer to note how a new technological development in Britain could destroy entire livelihoods in China or India in a single year. These actions were not intended, and his insight was that the growth of the world market exposed an increasing percentage of the world population to unintended, long-distance harm. A double revolution was taking place. Old types of deliberate harm, caused by warring states and expanding empires, were gradually being replaced by diffuse forms of harm transmitted across frontiers by the forces of global capitalism. The market, and not only war or politics, was reshaping the world. The market differed from the imperial orders of the past; and the market mechanism differed from war. As a result, an extended sense of moral responsibility to the human race (or globalism) began to emerge. ⁶

Globalism contrasts with nationalism, just as the global contrasts with the national. Just as nationalism preached the virtues of the nation state, so globalism preaches the virtues of the global. The twentieth century saw the rise of three globalist philosophies: Marxism, liberalism and radical (or political) Islam (or Islamicism). All three promised to liberate humanity (or their own followers) from oppression or social alienation. All three tried to engage in what Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘history by design’. ⁷ Globalism will continue as a force despite the collapse of Marxism – which, in retrospect, can be seen as merely a failed form of it. With its demise, of course, only two movements are now left.

Islamicist movements were active in the Middle East as early as the 1930s and 1940s, even if they spread a little more slowly than is the case today. Their members were as consciously global then as they are now, fixing on the West as their main target and attempting to promote a universal message against Western dominance. ⁸ Yet many of these movements divided the Islamic community as well. For the encounter between Islam and modernity pitted those who saw democracy as a universal ideal – to be achieved through the Muslim idea of shura (consultation) and ijma (consensus) – against those who saw democracy and the faith as incompatible – because in a democracy sovereignty lies with the people, whereas in Islam it lies with God.

This tension increased as the twentieth century unfolded. Indeed, back in 1991 some writers predicted that the North-South struggle would displace the old conflict between East and West. Ali Mazrui argued that Islam had potent weapons in that conflict: the petrodollar against the West; demographic growth against Russia; and today perhaps a third factor can be added, terrorism. ⁹ Only fifteen years later this crude analysis looks rather unconvincing. Mazrui’s mistake was to see conflict in inter-state terms. For non-state actors are in the van of radical Islam.

The majority, of course, are not transnational, despite links with similar movements in neighbouring countries. But some, like Al-Qaeda, are truly global in their reach. The movement’s cells were to be found at one time in 60 countries, part of a complex of connections embedded in countries but linked between and across societies. The assassins responsible for the death of the Afghan warlord Ahmed Shah Masood before the 11 September attack on the United States were Algerians with Belgian passports, whose visas to enter Pakistan had been issued in London. Masood’s death shows how radical Islam does not reject the means of globalisation, only its message. Islamism indeed thrives on globalisation: on Saudi and Gulf-state funding for mosque-building programmes and the rapid spread of information and communications technology. Both empower the ummah (the world-wide Muslim community). But, for radical Islam (as opposed to the mainstream Muslim world), the message is different; its followers wish to construct, not a Kantian cosmopolitan order, but a world order (al nizam al-islami) based on fundamentalist values and the duty of jihad (religious war).

The spectacle of Islamic radicals wrestling with the past may be more arresting than that of humanitarians engaging with the future, but for the moment humanitarianism is the stronger of the two globalist forces. The nineteenth century was the first to invent the concept of human rights, and with these came the concept of a collective crime: a crime against humanity. The Enlightenment taught that all men were equal, so to avoid the charge of criminality states had to dehumanise their enemies, to exclude them from the human race (Jews, class enemies). In 1945 that strategy was made illegitimate by the Allied powers at Nuremberg and by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), which was signed by all the victors including the Soviet Union. As Michael Ignatieff contends, writing of the famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s:

If we take it for granted now that the Ethiopians are our responsibility it is because a century of total destruction has made us ashamed of that cantonment of moral responsibilities by nation, religion or region, which resulted in the abandonment of the Jews. Modern universalism is built upon the emergence of a new kind of crime: the crime against humanity. ¹⁰

Humanitarianism is the most appealing globalist force today. Yet its belief in universal values and norms sits uneasily with radical Islam’s particularist message, which insists on the norms and values of the ulaama or Muslim brotherhood. As Ignatieff concludes, ‘We in the West start from a universalist ethics based on ideas of human rights; they start from particularist ethics that define the tribe, the nation or ethnicity as the limit of legitimate concern’. It was that Wes...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Glossary
• Note
• Chapter 1 What is Globalisation?
• Chapter 2 War, Globalisation and Global Civil Society
• Chapter 3 Globalisation and the New Security Agenda
• Chapter 4 The Risk Community
• Chapter 5 NATO and the Challenge of Globalisation
• Conclusion
• Notes