Comparative Regional Security Governance

Shaun Breslin, Stuart Croft, Shaun Breslin, Stuart Croft

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136454103
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book seeks to understand the role of regions in the provision of security (and insecurity) practices across the globe. Specialists with expertise in the regions they examine present eight case studies and analyses of the Americas, Africa and the Middle East, South and East Asia, and Europe.

Discussing both The State and people in the context of security, this book examines four categories; inter-state security, transnational criminal practices (the drugs trade, human trafficking migration), proliferation issues (both nuclear and non-nuclear), and issues of domestic/state collapse. The book uses an inclusive definition of security to include traditional and non-traditional conceptions, and incorporates the use of force and the threat of the use of force, as well as issues related to the integrity of peoples. The chapters weave theory and case studies to provide a rich description of a variety of regional governance forms; and, where applicable, the absence of them to move beyond regionalism to consider the key determining features of regional governance.

Comparative Regional Security Governance will be of interest to students and scholars of international security, international relations and governance.

1 Researching regional security governance

Dimensions, debates and discourses

Shaun Breslin and Stuart Croft

This volume seeks to set out how we might understand the role of regions in the provision of security and, indeed, of insecurity practices across the globe. Of course, there has long been an interest in this form of thinking in security studies. For over fifty years now, various authors have sought to develop notions of ‘security community’, and have sought to set out where and how such communities might develop. This has been matched by a focus in particular schools of thought on the role of regions and security, thinking here in particular of regional security complex theory, associated with the Copenhagen School. In one of the key contemporary texts on security communities, Adler and Barnett (1998) set out an evolution of such a community through three stages – nascent, ascendant and mature. While nascent security communities meet expectations of peaceful change, a region’s evolution might go as far as a mature security community, one that would be characterized by some collective security mechanisms and supranational or transnational elements. Such a mature security community – which evokes most closely what Karl Deutsch originally wrote about – could also be seen as either ‘tight’ or ‘loosely coupled’, depending, of course, on the relevant level of their integration. Such a framework has allowed for much debate by authors such as Acharya, Khoo and Ba about the relevant status of institutions such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) (see, for example, Ba, 2005). In Regions and Security, Buzan and Waever take the Copenhagen School’s focus on regional security complex theory (RSCT) and apply the concept globally. Their starting point is that ‘the regional level of security has become both more autonomous and more prominent in international politics’ (Buzan and Waever, 2003: 3). There is also an acceleration of the process from the period of decolonization through to the end of the Cold War. ‘Security complexes may well be extensively penetrated by the global powers, but their regional dynamics nonetheless have a substantial degree of autonomy from the patterns set by the global powers’ (Buzan and Waever, 2003: 4). RSCT enables the authors to divide the world into regional security complexes, and to understand the role of the regional and the global, and the interaction between them.

Theorizing and studying regional security has thus had a significant role to play in the study of security, certainly in the last fifteen years. However, what has been far less normal is to add the term ‘governance’. While there is an extensive literature on regional economic governance, and an emerging one on regional environmental governance, there is little on regional security governance. Of course, there is a literature on security governance in Europe (for example, Webber et al., 2004; Kirchner, 2006; Christou et al., 2010) – and some efforts have been made to consider the implications for other regions (for example, on South America, Oelsner, 2009). Where there have been wider conceptual studies, the focus has been on security governance, rather than on regions; an excellent example is Rethinking Security Governance (Daase and Friesendorf, 2010), with the focus perfectly set out in the book’s subtitle: ‘The Problem of Unintended Consequences’. Rather than focus on regions (although there is some sub-regional work – for instance, on the Balkans), the studies examine ways in which, for example, the World Bank has come to strengthen autocracy.

This volume, then, seeks to fill a space between the theoretically driven work on regions and security of Adler and Barnett (1998) and of Buzan and Waever (2003) with the security focus work of Webber et al. (2004), Kirchner (2006), Christou et al. (2010) and Daase and Friesendorf (2010). The book is not dominated by a single theoretical frame but seeks to use a common frame for understanding ‘region’, ‘security’ and ‘governance’ to map the modes in which security governance can be seen to operate in a variety of sites around the world.

Contextualizing regional security governance

This volume forms part of a wider study of types of regional governance that has sought to separate out key issue areas corresponding to different arenas of policy action and academic discourse in three related fields: security; the environment; and economics. One rationale underpinning this project was to understand the myriad different variables that influence regional projects and thereby to isolate the drivers towards regional level activity (as well as the obstacles to effective regional governance) in specific issue areas. However, a related purpose was also to revisit some of the most basic questions in the study of regions – to interrogate the very basic understanding of the nature (and definition) of different regions.

One working assumption behind this project was that the study of regions and regionalism has been primarily dominated by economic considerations and definitions. Or put another way, while there is a long tradition of studying regional issues (and attempts at collective solutions to this issues) in the security literature, the comparative regionalism/regional integration literature has tended to focus on economic issues. To be sure, post-Second World War European regional integration was driven by a desire to prevent another war in Europe – for the dominant theorists and practitioners of the early European project, economic integration was not just an end in itself, but a means to the creation of what Mitrany (1943) called ‘a working peace system’. Economic interaction over initially coal and steel would ensure that ‘war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible’ (Schuman, 1950). The integration of former communist party states into the European Union (EU) can also be read as a process of socialization to the European way of doing things as a means of establishing a European ‘liberal peace’ (Higashino, 2004). Yet despite this, in much of the literature and the political discourse it has so often been the economic considerations and their political ‘spillovers’ that have come to dominate, and security has been less spoken of – as has also been the case in the majority of regional integration projects around the globe.

Of course, partly this is a reflection of the need to speak less about security while building integration – it is less than helpful to try to develop integration while talking of the security risks attached to relations with neighbours. There is a strong focus on cognitive issues and the importance of regional identities in the literature on comparative regionalism and regional integration. It is true that some of this work considers the extent to which identities are formed and helped regions cohere after the region has been established for other (often economic) reasons, but the importance of identity in providing a basis for constructing regional projects is a well established field. Indeed, in ‘security studies’, the importance of ‘shared knowledge, ideational forces, and a dense normative environment’ (Adler and Barnett, 1998: 8) have been the focus of a strand of security studies since the 1950s often using the language of (regional) ‘security communities’, which became popular on several occasions after it was first popularized by Deutsch in 1957.

It is also true that a number of studies have tried to move attention away from economic issues to consider other drivers of regional processes and projects. These include considerations of environmental regions – the partner volume to this collection by Elliott and Breslin (2011) is an example – and attempts to move the focus away from ‘elites’, be that the political elites engaged in the formal process of region building or those business elites that drive informal regional economic integration. These ‘people centred approaches’ tend either to consider the role that civil societies play in promoting or obstructing regional projects – a relatively strong strand of scholarship on regional integration (and its failings) in Latin America – or to broadly define transnational developmental issues such as intra-regional migration, and the role of diasporas in promoting intra- (and inter-) regional integration (Kleinschmidt, 2006).

Even here, while these are ‘bottom-up’ people-centred studies, economic considerations still loom very large. Where security is on the agenda, it is typically in ‘human security’ or ‘non-traditional security’ arenas rather than in security defined in terms of the use of force and/or the threat of the use of force (Hentz and Boas, 2003).¹ The point of making the distinction here is not to deny the importance of these human security agendas – as will be discussed shortly, our definition of security in this volume includes both traditional and people-centred understandings. Rather, the intention is to suggest that in large part the study of regional integration/comparative regionalisms on the one hand and security studies on the other have largely developed as separate fields of academic inquiry.

Once more, this statement needs to be qualified. People who study the international politics of individual regions frequently blur the lines between economics, security and other considerations as they search for the power dynamics behind regional relations. And scholars such as Amitav Acharya have explicitly set out to reconcile the two fields (or sub-fields) in their work. But with these qualifications in mind, we suggest that the grand narratives and theories of regional integration have been predominantly concerned with how processes of regional economic integration emerge, and how states seek ways of dealing with shared economic concerns. This claim seems to hold true for proponents of functionalism, neofunctionalism, intergovernmentalism and liberal/neoliberal institutionalism. And despite the rejection of many of the basic ontological starting points and the Eurocentric basis of these theoretical positions, much of what is often grouped together as ‘new regionalism’ scholarship also starts from a focus on regional economic processes (Breslin, 2010).

Identifying region

It should be clear from the above that a basic objective for this project was to contribute to the development of an interconnected research agenda between research on regionalism and regional integration, on the one hand, and research on security studies on the other. And a key question that underpins this endeavour – borrowing from the introduction from the partner project on the environment – is the question of the right regional ‘fit’ (Young, 2002). If we think that regional governance is important, then this suggests that the region can do things ‘better’ than collective action at the global level or through non-regional international partnerships, or through unilateral means. ‘Better’ here might refer to regional level activity being more effective in attaining stated objectives or being perceived to be more legitimate – or both. Or perhaps in some cases, the region can do things that simply cannot be done at all through (and at) other sites of governance.

Yet identifying what the region actually is – or what it should be in order to maximize effectiveness and legitimacy – is a far from easy task. In a great deal of work, it is geography that is taken as the starting point for identifying a region; despite some suggestions that regions do not need to share a common geographical space (Breslin, Higgott and Rosamond, 2002), it is widely accepted that propinquity, if not contiguity, is what distinguishes regions from other forms of transnational organization of politics and space. But geography and cartography provide only a start, and what is (and what is not) part of any given region is deeply socially constructed. Regions rise, fall, expand, contract, move, overlap and disappear (Hettne, 2005). Identifying, for example, where Latin America or Asia starts and finishes – which countries form part of either of these regions and which are extra-regional – is inevitably a contested task.

Perhaps there is an added problem in identifying regions in the security realm given the dominance of the Cold War in shaping many of the security alliances that persist to this day. Bipolarity did not draw neat lines dividing geographic entities in the way the Treaty of Tordesillas had done in 1494 in separating the ‘new world’ into Spanish and Portuguese control. Although straight lines divided Korea and Vietnam (and physical barriers divided Germany), the cartography of Cold War alliances was messy and fragmented. It might be possible to think of what Cottey in this collection refers to as a ‘Western (Euro– Atlantic) political, economic and security system’, but it is rather tenuous to think of this system as fitting with understandings of what is meant by the use of the term ‘region’. It is, if anything, even more tenuous to think of the Singapore–USA Strategic Framework Agreement as representing a ‘regional’ relationship in any meaningful way, other than that the US, while not being in the region, is still very much of the political configuration of power in the region.

Moreover, these Cold War alliances and fractures have not simply withered away as the reason for their existence did. What becomes very clear in the discussions of North America and Europe in this collection is the residual importance of the transatlantic security community as a major source of security governance in both regions. At a stretch, we could think of this as a form of meta-regionalism, or perhaps interregionalism, between North America and Europe. But perhaps in reality it suggests that regional security governance in the West at least remains subservient to (or part of) a broader non-regional configuration of power and alliances.

One way of managing this is to try to fix what we mean by ‘region’ through geography. A whole continent could be taken as a reference point. However, this runs up against the difficulty that the entire American or African continents, for example, are not obviously understood as single regions, and may be seen as regions that contain numerous sub-regions, or as too big to be viewed through regional prisms at all. Does Asia stop at the Bosporus, the Urals, or somewhere else? Is central Asia a region in itself, or a sub-region? Is Russia part of Europe, Asia, both or none? Are seas natural dividers between one region and the next or essential communications routes that bind a region together? Indeed, perhaps focusing on countries is the wrong level of analysis in the first place, with real regional integration taking place between sub-national entities across national borders (Breslin and Hook, 2002).

The solution is often to take organizational forms as the basis of region. Thus, for example, we know where Southeast Asia is because the Association of Southeast Asian Nations exists and has ten clearly identifiable members. But even this organizational focus creates problems for regional analyses for four key reasons.

First, regions change. If Europe, for example, is defined as the members of the EU (and its forerunners) then what Europe is today is very different from what was Europe in the 1980s.

Second, it’s not always clear when a region is a region or a sub-region – for example, as Svensson points out, is South Asia – defined as the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) – a region in itself or a sub-region of a wider Asia? If it is the former, then the major power cleavage in the region is between India and Pakistan. If it is the latter, then it is arguably India and China that are the major powers, and the relationship between them a key determinant of the region’s (future) security. A non-EU definition of Europe might make Russia a dominant player, and while Brazil is the dominant state actor in MERCOSUR/UNASUR (Mercado Común del Sur/Union of South American States), there is no doubting the supremacy of the USA in the Americas as a whole.

Third, in large parts of the world, regional formation remains fluid and the parameters of the region are not agreed. The problem in Asia, for example, is not the lack of regional organizations that define the parameters of the region but the number of different conceptions of region: ASEAN, ASEAN plus three, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and the East Asia Summit, to name but five.

Finally, it would be strange to think of Switzerland or Norway as not being part of Europe, or of North Korea not being part of Asia/Northeast Asia/East Asia, but none is part of their respective dominant regional organizations. And as Cottey notes in this collection, there are large parts of what he calls the ‘European supercomplex’ that are not part of either NATO or the EU, including Russia. And when it comes to security issues, North Korea is arguably the single biggest threat to regional security in Asia, while the consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the communist bloc still create potential instability both within the EU and in a wider definition of what might be called Europe.

Identifying regional governance

In the initial discussions that took place to establish the framework for the tripartite studies of which this book represents one set of analyses, the single biggest challenge was identifying the appropriate geographical foci of attention. What seemed to work as ‘region’ for economic purposes did not always match the region defined by environmental concerns, which also often differed from the understanding of the security region. Our solution was purely pragmatic. We divided the world into four major areas – Europe, the Americas, Africa and the Middle East, and Asia – and asked specialists on each of these areas to undertake a ‘mapping’ exercise. Or put more simply, we asked them to tell us what the region (or regions) for investigation within those broad areas should be.

For this volume, we defined security in a broad sense to include the use of force and the threat of the use of force, as well as issues related to the integrity of peoples. The latter allowed us to discuss not only state collapse but insecurities faced by peoples on non-national lines – ethnicity, race, tribe, class and so on. This allowed for a discussion of both statist and people centred understandings of security built round a four-fold focus on inter-state security, transnational criminal practices (including the drugs trade, and human traffickingmigration connections), proliferation issues (not just nuclear but all forms of weaponry) and domestic/state collapse issues.

The task for each contributor was then to identify what level or levels of analysis were appropriate in each geographic area – be it the macro-regional level, the meso (or sub-regional) level, the bilateral level or the sub-state (micro) level – or any combination of the four. Our starting assumption was that effective regional security governance will typically require and entail multiple sites of authority across a range of often interlinked and overlapping regional security arrangements. The task, then, was to identify where the density of such arrangements was thicker and thinner, both in terms of the four fields of security identified above and also at the potentially different levels (or sites) of regional governance.

While bilateral relations might appear to fall numerically short of the basic requirements for a ‘regional level’ analysis, they are included here for two main reasons. First – borrowing from approaches largely devised to explain processes of regional economic inte...