A Human Security Doctrine for Europe

Project, Principles, Practicalities

Marlies Glasius, Mary Kaldor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415479547
• eBook ISBN: 9781134209965
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Globalizzazione

A Human Security Doctrine for Europe explores the actual needs of individual people in conflict areas, rather than using a conventional institutional or geo-political perspectives.

This new volume proposes that Europe should develop a new kind of human security capability that involves the military, the police and civilians all working together to enforce law rather than to fight wars. It argues that threats such as weapons of mass destruction or terrorism can only be countered if we address the insecurity of people in all parts of the world.

Many people in the world lead intolerably insecure lives. In large parts of Africa, the Balkans, Central Asia and the Middle East, men and women live in daily fear of violent attacks, kidnapping, rape, extortion, robbery or trafficking. The existence of large military apparatuses does not create security; indeed, as in Iraq, the use of regular military forces may only make things worse. This stimulating study includes:

• two chapters setting out the changed global context and proposing new approaches to security
• five regional studies on the Balkans, the Great Lakes Region, the Middle East, the South Caucasus and West-Africa
• four studies on different aspects of EU security policy, including the legal setting, the role of women, operational principles and the role of the new member states
• four operational studies on capabilities, resources and institutional embedding

Written by a diverse team of international experts, this book will of be of strong interest to students and researchers of security studies, peace studies, human rights and international relations.

Part I

Introduction

1 A human security vision for Europe and beyond

Marlies Glasius and Mary Kaldor

Introduction

Since September 11, many commentators have noted the growing divergence of world view between Europe and the United States. One of the most widely quoted characterizations of this divergence is that of Robert Kagan (2002, 2003). Kagan contrasts what he sees as the American Hobbesian world view, in which military power is the key factor, with the European Kantian view, which places the emphasis on the extension of international law. The former view considers the Hobbesian idea of a state of nature, a ‘war of every man against every man’, as continuing to apply to the inter-state world. A superpower, asserting its military might whenever and however it deems necessary, is therefore the only possible way to keep order and keep anarchy at bay. The Kantian view favours a law-based approach to maintaining international peace and justice, believing that peaceful and rights-based states cannot exist in isolation in a world where ‘might is right’. ‘The problem of establishing a perfect civil constitution is subordinate to the problem of a law-governed external relationship with other states, and cannot be solved unless the latter is also solved’ (Kant [1784] 1991: 45, 47). According to Kagan, the Kantian approach is typical of weak states.

Our contention is that a European world view should indeed be based on Kantian principles. As we elaborate below, the European Union itself can be viewed as a ‘perpetual peace’ project, according to which nation-states continue to exist but agree not to go to war with each other and to adhere to certain standards, particularly standards of democracy and human rights. But we differ from Kagan in two important respects. First of all, we argue that, in an era of globalization, this approach is actually more realistic than a Hobbesian world view. Because societies are so interdependent at all levels, it is no longer possible to defend the interests of a particular nation or region unilaterally. A geo-political approach, which pursues national interest through top-down relations backed by military force, will turn out to be counter-productive, as is clearly evident in the ‘war on terror’ operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Second, we do think that the European approach needs to be underpinned by military force and that Europe needs to be ‘tougher’ than hitherto. But military forces need to be configured in quite new ways. They need to be able to prevent and contain violence in different parts of the world; but this is different, we argue, from being able to fight wars against other states or proto-states. They should address the real security needs of people in situations of severe insecurity; and, by addressing these, they will also make the world safer for Europeans. Indeed, in our view, there is a dangerous disjunction between traditional security instruments and actual security needs.

Naturally, internal security within the Union and within the member states remains of vital importance, and substantial resources of the member states and the EU will continue to be devoted to initiatives to enhance security internally. However, our point is that internal and external security are now inseparable, and that making a contribution to global security should be part of Europe's security policy. This introductory chapter, like the work of the Study Group, addresses only this external security dimension.

The approach to security we propose is not peculiar to Europe. We would make the same case for NATO or the United Nations. The advantage of thinking about European security capabilities is that European security policy is relatively recent and is not mired in the institutional legacy of past wars and past military traditions. This is not a competitive approach vis-à-vis the United States. Ideally we would hope that eventually the United States would adopt a similar approach.

In the next section, we elaborate why we think the changed global context calls for a radically different approach to security. Subsequently, we discuss the concept of human security, and why we think security outside the borders should concern Europe. The next section outlines our overall vision for European security policy. The penultimate section contains a reflection on the nature of the European polity in its relation to human security. The conclusion recapitulates the main elements of our vision.

The changed global context

Before the Second World War the agency dealing with military policy in most countries was called the ‘Ministry of War’. After the war, these departments changed their name to ‘Ministry of Defence’ in recognition of the emerging norm that aggressive war was no longer legitimate. We would like to propose the need for another shift, from considering ‘defence policy’ to ‘security policy’ and, more particularly, ‘human’ or ‘global’ security. The term ‘defence policy’ tends to mean a policy aimed at defending the state and its inhabitants from foreign aggression, more particularly from the aggression of foreign states. Of course, any security policy has to be concerned with threats to its own people. But our argument will be that it is no longer possible to defend a particular territory or group of people in isolation.

Since the inception of the United Nations, but more particularly since the 1990s, armies which were originally maintained for the defence of borders have been used for peacekeeping operations outside, and often far away from, those borders. Clearly, the governments in charge of these armies and the citizens who voted for these governments have long believed that these were somehow relevant and useful operations, whether to serve humanitarian goals or to keep the armed forces fit. However, the justification for such operations, and their relation to national defence, remained under-theorized for a long time. Only in the late 1990s did the changing nature of ‘defence’ and ‘security’ really become a matter of debate.

An important reason for the inadequacy of traditional state security approaches is the changing nature of military power. Clausewitz defined war as ‘an act of violence designed to compel an opponent to fulfil our will’ ([1832] 1968: 1). What has become known as ‘compellance’ (Schelling 1960) is much more difficult nowadays. Small arms, grenades and so forth have become much more accurate and easy to use, so the difference between those who possess advanced military technology and those who do not has been reduced. Hence the importance of what the Americans call ‘asymmetric threats’. The US advantage in military technology is much less than the difference in expenditure. The US has an advantage in the air and in information technology. It can be very destructive. But it is not very good at imposing order – at coping, for instance, with suicide bombers who have relatively unsophisticated technology.

Moreover, the means used in traditional warfare have themselves become considered increasingly illegitimate. The consequence of the barbaric wars of the twentieth century was not only the introduction of legal constraints on war but also growing public pressures against war. In a world where human rights norms have become an increasingly salient element of the global discourse, an intervention that uses traditional warfighting means, including in particular aerial bombardment, can itself be considered a violation of human rights. While contemporary Western governments do try to minimize civilian casualties, they cannot avoid such casualties altogether. The numbers of civilians killed in Afghanistan or Iraq exceed the numbers killed on September 11 and, for many people, the distinction between war as legitimate killing and violations of human rights is becoming harder to sustain. Related to the growing illegitimacy of traditional war-fighting is the lack of will to engage in wars and, in particular, to risk casualties. The decline in the utility of traditional military power means, on the one hand, less likelihood of external aggression by foreign states and, on the other hand, new sources of insecurity that are less amenable to traditional military methods.

These developments also have to be understood in the broader context of globalization – growing interconnectedness in all fields, deterritorialization of authority, and the erosion of the autonomy of states. All of these developments call into question the classic equation of the security of the state with the security of the citizen. Classic authoritarian closed states, which threaten the security of their own citizens, are increasingly of concern to other states and to global public opinion. At the same time, as the outside world cannot be kept out, formerly authoritarian states often degenerate into ‘failing states’, which are unable to protect their citizens. The ‘new wars’ that are taking place in many parts of the world call into question the distinctions between ‘human rights violations’ inflicted by the state on its own citizens and ‘conflict’ between armed combatants: battles are rare and most violence is inflicted on civilians. In particular, population displacement is a typical feature of such wars, as a result both of deliberate ethnic cleansing and of the difficulty of distinguishing between civilians and combatants. Such wars blur the distinction between the internal and the external because they spill over borders and involve both local and global actors. They also blur the distinctions between public and private, and between military and civilian, since they involve regular forces as well as paramilitary groups, warlords, mercenaries and organized crime groups. It is these conflicts that become the ‘black holes’ generating many of the new sources of insecurity – refugees and displaced persons, extremist ideologies, terror, and various forms of trafficking – that spread across borders and are increasingly difficult to contain.

While these developments may initially have appeared to apply primarily to developing and conflict states, the September 11 attacks have made it clear once and for all that no citizens of the world are any longer safely ensconced behind their national borders, and that sources of insecurity are no longer most likely to come in the form of border incursions by foreign armies. The new ‘threats’ to Europe (terrorism, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and organized crime, for example) have to be managed through a global strategy aimed at a people-centred concept of security rather than traditional territorial forms of defence.

Human security

The idea of human security is an attempt to conceptualize the changing nature of security. It recognizes that ‘the security of one person, one community, one nation rests on the decisions of many others – sometimes fortuitously, sometimes precariously’, and that ‘policies and institutions must find new ways to protect individuals and communities’ (Commission on Human Security 2003: 2–4). The Commission on Human Security uses a broad definition: ‘to protect the vital core of all human lives in ways that enhance human freedoms and human fulfilment’. It then goes on to say that what is considered vital differs across individuals and societies, and therefore ‘we refrain from proposing an itemized list of what makes up human security’.

Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights Bertrand Ramcharan takes a simpler but equally broad approach: ‘It is submitted that international human rights norms define the meaning of security’ (2002: 9). He then goes on to enumerate the international treaties that set out these norms. In Ramcharan's approach, human security becomes practically synonymous with human rights, that is, all internationally codified human rights. While these very broad and holistic notions of human security are quite intentionally juxtaposed to the much narrower national defence approach, it does in fact make it rather difficult to found a security policy on such concepts.

However, both the Commission on Human Security and the wider literature on human rights offer points of departure for a narrower concept. In the Commission's report, Amartya Sen conceptualizes human security as narrower than either human development or human rights. In relation to human development, he focuses on the ‘downside risks’: ‘the insecurities that threaten human survival or the safety of daily life, or imperil the natural dignity of men and women, or expose human beings to the uncertainty of disease and pestilence, or subject vulnerable people to abrupt penury’. In relation to human rights, he sees them as ‘a class of human rights’ that guarantee ‘freedom from basic insecurities – new and old’ (Commission on Human Security 2003: 8–9). However, here too he refuses to list the human rights or the insecurities involved. The human rights literature also tends to shy away from recognizing a hierarchy of norms, predicated on a similar fear of devaluing and trivializing some hard-fought rights by according them second-class status.

However, it is clear that certain rights, or certain violations, are singled out in international law by being put into categories like ‘ius cogens’ or ‘peremptory norms’, by being non-derogable in emergency situations, or by constituting international crimes under the Statute for an International Criminal Court. Examination of these categories could lead to the identification of a narrower core of human security threats. Genocide, large-scale torture, inhuman and degrading treatment, disappearances, slavery, crimes against humanity and war crimes as defined in the International Criminal Court (ICC) Statute are commonly agreed to warrant special status, while killings and arbitrary detentions may also come under this category (Seiderman 2001). Violations of the right to food, health and housing, even grave and massive ones, are not commonly recognized as belonging to this category, although some authors would make a case for them as ‘survival rights’ (Donnelly and Howard 1988; Seiderman 2001: 293–4). In practice, the distinction may not matter as massive violations usually entail more than one category of rights. In the case of Kosovo, for instance, the mass expulsions were grave violations of the right to housing, but were also accompanied by killings, torture, and inhuman and degrading treatment.

We propose that, while the holistic category of human security as proposed by the Commission or by Ramcharan might inform the common foreign, security and development policy of the European Union as a whole, a narrower category of situations that become intolerably insecure, as outlined above, could be one of the criteria for deciding to deploy operational capacities.¹

Why is human security of concern to the European Union?

The moral case

The moral case for Europe's interest in human security outside its borders is founded simply on our common humanity. It posits that human beings have a right to live with dignity and security, and a concomitant obligation to help each other when that security is threatened. It defends the idea that all human life is of equal worth, and does not accept that human lives become cheap in desperate situations. There is nothing distinctively European about such moral norms. On the contrary, they are by their nature universal. But they do appeal to the European public. Whenever European states have intervened abroad for humanitarian reasons, whether in Kosovo, East Timor or Sierra Leone, this has been based on very strong public support, even public pressure, from European citizens. Moreover, beyond state action, large numbers of Europeans have voluntarily gone to Yugoslavia to help with post-conflict reconstruction, to Guatemala to accompany returning refugees, or to Palestine to monitor human rights violations.

Morality also gives some guidance as to the way in which ‘concern’ for the human security of others should be expressed in policy decisions. A basic precept is ‘first, do no harm’. It makes no sense, therefore, to engage in actions that destroy the security or even the lives of those they are meant to protect. It may be necessary and should be acceptable, based on the equal worth of all human life, to risk lives in order to restore the security of others. Such willingness has recently been more evident within civil society initiatives than in state-sponsored military missions. Finally, as the Commission on Human Security makes clear, restoration of security must be coupled with empowerment. In the next major section, outlining our vision for a European security policy, we elaborate on the ramifications of these basic precepts.

The legal case

If human security is considered as a narrower category of protection of human rights, as proposed above, then it is now generally accepted that other states, and international institutions such as the EU, have not only a right but also a legal obligation to concern themselves with human security worldwide. Articles 55 and 56 of the United Nations ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• A Human Security Doctrine for Europe
• Routledge advances in international relations and global politics
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Preface
• Part I Introduction
• Part II A bottom-up approach
• Part III A framework for operations
• Part IV Capabilities, resources and institutions
• Annex
• Index