National Security and International Relations (Routledge Revivals)

Peter Mangold

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415830997
• eBook ISBN: 9781135046781
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Arms Control
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published in 1990, National Security and International Relations provides a concise analysis of the problem of national security in the twentieth century. It examines the criteria by which states decide what level of security they want to seek in an uncertain and essentially Hobbesian world, and why some states tend to underinsure, while obsessively insecure states overinsure, frequently making others more insecure in the process. In the wake of two world wars and the threat of nuclear destruction, Peter Mangold argues that war was becoming as much a source of insecurity as the intentions of other states. It then explores the different approaches attempted during the twentieth century to ameliorate or ideally escape from the security dilemma. These range from international regimes, to the restructuring of the international politics of Western Europe so as to substitute cooperation for conflict, and U.S. and Soviet attempts to render nuclear competition safer through arms control and confidence building measures. Of special value to students of International Relations and Strategic Studies, this book will also interest those keen to understand the challenges embodied in Gorbachev's 'new thinking' in foreign policy.

Chapter one

Problems and definitions

The Mutual Security Pact, signed by the major West European powers in Locarno in 1925, is today little more than a historical memory. Although hailed at the time as a breakthrough, a radical departure from the uncompromising spirit which had dominated European politics since the Versailles Treaty, it is now largely buried in the diplomatic histories of the interwar period.¹ Few recall the expectations it aroused at the time; even fewer remember that its eventual fate vindicated the criticisms of men like Ramsay Macdonald who set little store by paper agreements, or the spirit of good will they were believed to generate. Macdonald had a much harder-headed, more direct sense of what was at issue. ‘The problem of security’, he privately observed during the course of the negotiations, ‘is mainly psychological, and as a matter of fact, it is met only to a very small degree by coming to agreements of a military nature regarding it. It is in fact the dramatic form of a deep-seated suspicion that no country is really safe from the machinations of others.’²

The problem of security has obsessed a century which has experienced not one but two world wars, along with a revolution in the cost and destructive power of weaponry. Sixty years after Locarno, military spending world wide was estimated to be running at six hundred and sixty three billion dollars, with the United States spending nearly 7 per cent of its gross national product on defence, the Soviet Union perhaps twice that much.³ Small wonder, therefore, if the vocabulary of twentieth-century politics is littered with references to security at the international level — national, collective, common, co-operative, comprehensive, regional, legitimate, and equal. Few of these are easy to define. Many are of rhetorical rather than analytical value. All, however, are testimony to the fact that security is generally regarded as a precondition of ordered human existence. Its pursuit in a dangerous, potentially anarchical world is a matter of the highest priority, part of the raison d’êtreof the state. Hobbes, who is often regarded as one of the seminal theorists of the politics of fear,⁴ believed that states were founded to defend people ‘from the invasion of foreigners and the injuries of one another, and thereby to secure them in such sort as that by their own industry, and by the fruits of the earth, they may nourish themselves and live contentedly’.⁵ Most governments would still accept that the maintenance of national security is a fundamental duty, the satisfaction of which is directly linked to their claims to legitimacy and public loyalty. Their citizens in turn recognize that security must ultimately have a prior claim over national resources and that it permits governments a latitude of action which, in democratic societies at least, would not be tolerated for any other purpose.

The implications of this can hardly be overemphasized. If the security of the people is regarded as the supreme law, and defence and survival are the very core of external policy,⁶ then the search for security becomes one of the key determinants of international relations. The stability of the system is in significant degree a function of the extent to which states both are and feel themselves vulnerable to ‘the machinations of others’.⁷ Where states suffer from a particularly acute sense of insecurity they adopt ‘the posture of Gladiators; having their weapons pointing and their eyes fixed on one another’.⁸ Their behaviour, to use Bismarck’s analogy, resembles that of strangers in a carriage. Each continually watches the others so that when one puts his hand into his pocket, ‘his neighbour gets ready his own revolver in order to be able to fire the first shot’.⁹ By contrast, where states have no claims upon one another and the legitimacy of an order is generally accepted, as it was under the nineteenth-century Congress system and is today in Western Europe, then the resultant collaborative strategies will exercise a stabilizing effect across a wide range of regional or international activities.

Given these familiar if basic truths, it is somewhat puzzling that the concept has been subject to so little analytical scrutiny. True, national security is still very much an American term. Official British references to national security are normally concerned with intelligence matters, the specifically military notion of the ‘defence of the realm’ occupying a role in British parlance and analagous to that of national security in the United States. True, too, the term is of relatively recent origin. Although elements of it can be traced to the writings of Madison, the most frequently cited modern definition is to be found in Walter Lippmann’s US Foreign Policy, published in 1943. It was only after the Second World War that national security entered the strategic vocabulary in response to an awareness of a need for a new concept to replace older terms like military affairs, foreign policy, and foreign affairs. Thus the National Security Act of 1947 specifically talked of providing for ‘integrated policies and procedures for the departments, agencies, and functions of the government relating to national security’.¹⁰ But this hardly explains why, with such notable exceptions as Barry Buzan, Daniel Frei, or Robert Jervis, so few people have been willing to develop the ideas outlined in Arnold Wolfer’s aptly titled essay, ‘National security as an ambiguous symbol’.¹¹ Theory has been generally eschewed in favour of the analysis of specific problems and case studies. While there is now a vast library of books with reference to national security in their titles or subtitles, we still have no satisfactory framework within which to analyse policy or explain behaviour. We still do not really know how to account for the wide variation in security expectations and risk tolerance, let alone exactly what states are concerned to secure under the national rubric.

Such questions are unlikely to trouble the majority of policy-makers. From the practitioners‘ point of view national security is primarily a term of political convenience. It is more respectable to talk about national security than military power. Those invoking the call are normally more anxious to rally support than encourage detailed scrutiny of the measures they propose. They want votes or acquiesence rather than awkward questions. The tendency is as natural as it is unfortunate. It encourages abuse on the part of the unscrupulous, as well as discouraging debate in an area where emotive reasoning and unexamined premises are a particular hazard. It is very difficult to assess a need or requirement when it is automatically labelled as ‘vital’ to the national interest and when the distinction between the ends to be secured and the means by which this is to be achieved is not properly spelt out. Put more bluntly, sloppy thinking leads to sloppy policy, and, as will be argued in subsequent chapters, can all too easily gloss over potential conflicts between the national interest and those whose livelihood is bound up in serving it.

Academic analysts, by contrast, have no such interest in maintaining this rhetorical mystique which has allowed the concept to become what one critic describes as a ‘modern incantation’, a catch-all term which can be expanded to embrace whatever concerns happen to be fashionable.¹² Their neglect can partially be attributed to the limitations of security as the basis for any wider theory of international relations. Insecurity, after all, is a condition rather than an end. It is a product of the structure of the international system, a reflection as much as a cause of tension. Small wonder, therefore, that the realist school of thought so active during the Cold War was more preoccupied with power, or that security came to be seen as a derivative of the struggle for power.¹³ But one also detects a reluctance to grapple with an amorphous unquantifiable concept, the meaning of which is more readily sensed than defined. National security is in this respect akin to the related and equally vexed ‘national interests’. The more closely one looks at it, the more questions one raises, with the result that definitions are either so broad as to be virtually meaningless, or so narrow as to invite immediate challenge. Even Barry Buzan, who goes to considerable trouble to ‘unpack’ the state in order to determine the referent objects of national security, eschews a working definition:

The character of security as an essentially contested concept defies the pursuit of an agreed general definition. … Years of effort have failed to produce a generally accepted definition or measure for power, and the concept of justice is traditionally notorious for the way in which it divides opinion. There is no reason to think that security would be any easier to crack, and there is not much point in trying.¹⁴

This warning is worth heeding. The law of diminishing returns is as applicable to the search for definitions as it is for actual security. There comes a point at which a balance has to be struck between the siren call of intellectual precision and the untidy reality of a heterogeneous and rapidly changing world in which states differ substantially in what they are trying to secure. Security invevitably means different things at different times and in different places, depending on what people have to protect, and the nature of the threat. The best we can do, therefore, is point up the most obvious areas of misuse, and to suggest a working definition.

Most of the difficulties arise with two contrasting interpretations: the romantic and the utilitarian. The former features primarily in the definitions of Great Powers for whom prestige, rayonnement, and their world role, loom large. While this may have the virtue of underlining the connotations of high policy, with which the concept has traditionally been associated, it also risks stretching it close to breaking point. In a passage which balances uneasily between rhetoric and analysis, Robert Osgood ascribes part of what he calls the ‘protean’ quality of national security to

the broad and intangible character of the national self that is to be secured. The people of the nation personify the state and project upon it ideas of honor and prestige that become as much part of their vicarious collective personality as are the nation’s territory, allies, and vital interests. The national self, moreover, is a moral being — most markedly this is true in the United States — with principles and missions that gives security a dimension that transcends pure self-interest.¹⁵

Nor is this by any means an exclusively American perspective. Nearly fifty years earlier Jules Cambon had asserted that security meant more than

the maintenance of a people’s homeland or even their territories beyond the seas. It means the maintenance of the world’s respect for them, the maintenance of their economic interests, everything in a word which goes to make up the grandeur, the life itself, of the nation.¹⁶

Such ‘romantic’ interpretations contrast starkly with the more recent attempts at redefinition in line with the growing preoccupation with economic welfare and interdependence.¹⁷ This ‘utilitarian’ approach is not concerned with threats to defensive capabilities or political stability resulting from some major disruption in the international economic system, nor even the threat to life from environmental hazard. Its focus is rather the expansion in the range of protective services which the state is expected to provide for its citizens.¹⁸ Security is no longer seen simply as a matter of defending a state from its enemies from within and without, but of ensuring that its citizens do not suffer undue hardship when they are sick or unemployed. When, as in the case of welfare democracies, these objectives loom at least as large in national thinking as the more intangible factors suggested by Osgood and Cambon, there is an obvious temptation to include them within the commodious confines of national security.

It is a temptation which it would be well to resist. At a purely practical level there is really no comparison about the way we think about sickness benefits or unemployment pay on the one hand, and attack and subversion on the other. The former dangers are m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Problems and definitions
• 2 Risk-taking and underinsurance
• 3 Fear, default and overinsurance
• 4 The fear of war
• 5 Breaking out
• 6 Common security
• 7 The international dimension
• 8 Conclusions and implications
• Select bibliography
• Index