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People, States & Fear

An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era

ECPR Press

individual security and national security

The individual represents the irreducible basic unit to which the concept of security can be applied. This fact makes individual security a good starting point for a more wide-ranging analysis, in part because it provides a clear basis from which to demolish the reductionist illusion that national and international security are simply extensions to a concern with the fate of individual human beings. To pursue individual security as a subject in its own right would take one deeply into the realms of politics, psychology and sociology. Such a study is beyond the scope of this book, and has been done elsewhere. The relevance of individual security to this enquiry lies in the network of connections and contradictions between personal security and the security of the state. The state is a major source of both threats to and security for individuals. Individuals provide much of the reason for, and some of the limits to, the security-seeking activities of the state. Given that human beings are the prime source of each other's insecurity, the question of individual security quickly takes on broader societal and political dimensions. It leads directly to questions about the basic nature of the state, and this chapter consequently serves as a foundation for Chapter 2, in which the question of the state is the central focus.

INDIVIDUAL SECURITY AS A SOCIETAL PROBLEM

The idea of security is easier to apply to things than to people. The security of money in a bank, for example, is amenable to calculation in relation to specified threats of unauthorized removal or the likelihood of in situ deflation in value. Since material goods are often replaceable with like items, their security (that is, the owner's security in possession of them) can usually be enhanced further by insuring them against loss, the insurance itself being based on actuarial statistics of risk. Security for individuals cannot be defined so easily. The factors involved – life, health, status, wealth, freedom – are far more complicated, and many of them cannot be replaced if lost (life, limbs, status). Different aspects of individual security are frequently contradictory (protection from crime versus erosion of civil liberties), and plagued by the difficulty of distinguishing between objective and subjective evaluation (are threats real or imagined?). Cause-effect relationships with regard to threats are often obscure and controversial (individual versus social explanations for crime).

Dictionary definitions of security give the flavour of these difficulties with their reference to being protected from danger (objective security) feeling safe (subjective security), and being free from doubt (confidence in one's knowledge). The referent threats (danger and doubt) are very vague, and the subjective feeling of safety or confidence has no necessary connections with actually being safe or right. Even if one takes as an illustration a well-off individual in a well-off country, the resultant image of day-to-day life leaves no doubt that security in any comprehensive sense is beyond reasonable possibility of attainment. An enormous array of threats, dangers and doubts loom over everyone, and although the better-off can distance themselves from some of these (starvation, preventable/curable disease, physical exposure, criminal violence, economic exploitation, and such like), they share others equally with the poor (incurable disease, natural disasters, nuclear war), and create some new ones for themselves because of their advantages (air crashes, sporting accidents, kidnapping, diseases of excessive consumption). Security cannot be complete for any individual: few would relish for more than a short time the flatness and predictability of a life in which it was so.

The impossibility of general security drives analysis towards specific threats. Against some threats, such as preventable diseases or poverty, some individuals can achieve very high levels of security. Against others, especially where cause-effect relationships are obscure (cancer, crime, unemployment), security measures may be chancy at best. Given limits on resources, decisions have to be made as to where to allocate them in relation to a large number of possible threats. Efforts to achieve security can become self-defeating, even if objectively successful, if their effect is to raise awareness of threats to such a pitch that felt insecurity is greater than before the measures were undertaken. Urban householders' efforts to burglarproof their houses can have this effect. As locks, alarms and bars proliferate, their daily presence amplifies the magnitude of the threat by advertising to burglars the presence of valuable possessions, thereby leading to a net loss of tranquillity for the fortified householders. Paranoia is the logical endpoint of obsession with security. There is a cruel irony in that meaning of secure which is 'unable to escape'.

Most threats to individuals arise from the fact that people find themselves embedded in a human environment which generates unavoidable social, economic and political pressures. Societal threats come in a wide variety of forms, but there are four obvious basic types: physical threats (pain, injury, death), economic threats (seizure or destruction of property, denial of access to work or resources), threats to rights (imprisonment, denial of normal civil liberties) and threats to position or status (demotion, public humiliation). These types of threat are not mutually exclusive in that the application of one (injury) may well carry penalties in another (loss of job). The existence of these threats to individuals within society points to the great dilemma which lies at the root of much political philosophy: how to balance freedom of action for the individual against the potential and actual threats which such freedom poses to others. Put another way, this dilemma can be formulated as how to enhance the liberation of community without amplifying oppression by authority. The great potency of Hobbes's image of the state of nature derives precisely from the fact that it expresses this dilemma with such clarity. Individuals (or collective human behavioural units such as states and nations) existing with others of their kind in an anarchical relationship, find their freedom increased only at the expense of their security. As Waltz puts it: 'States, like people, are insecure in proportion to the extent of their freedom. If freedom is wanted, insecurity must be accepted.'

The state of nature image postulates a primal anarchy in which the living conditions for the individuals involved are marked by unacceptably high levels of societal threat, in a word, chaos. Unacceptable chaos becomes the motive for sacrificing some freedom in order to improve levels of security, and in this process, government and the state are born. In the words of Hobbes, people found states in order to 'defend them 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'. Similarly John Locke: 'The great and chief end ... of men's ... putting themselves under government is the preservation of their property' (meaning here their 'lives, liberties and estates') which in the state of nature is 'very unsafe, very unsecure'. The state becomes the mechanism by which people seek to achieve adequate levels of security against societal threats, a phenomenon that R. N. Berki sees as: 'the most important distinguishing mark of our modern Western civilization'.

The paradox, of course, is that as state power grows the state also becomes a source of threat against the individual. The stability of the state derives not only from its centralizing power, but also from the understanding by its citizens that it is the lesser of two evils (that is, that whatever threats come from the state will be of a lower order of magnitude than those which would arise in its absence). This assumption grows in force as society develops around the state, becoming increasingly dependent on it as a lynchpin for social and economic structures. As the symbiosis of society and state develops along more complex, sophisticated and economically productive lines, the state of nature image becomes more and more unappealing. The enormous costs of the reversion have to be added to the dubious benefits of existence in a state of nature. Examples of stateless anarchy, such as that in Lebanon since 1976, starkly underline the value of the state as the lesser evil. If the state of nature was unacceptable to thinly scattered and primitive peoples, how much more unacceptable would it be to the huge, densely-packed and interdependent populations of today?

On this logic, the state is irreversible. There is no real option of going back, and therefore the security of individuals is inseparably entangled with that of the state.

INDIVIDUAL SECURITY AND THE TWO FACES OF THE STATE

If the security of individuals is irreversibly connected to the state, so, as state and society become increasingly indistinguishable, is their insecurity. This is not only a question of the efficiency, or lack thereof, with which the state performs its internal (social order) and external (group defence) functions, but also a matter of the state itself becoming a source of controversy and threat. If the state becomes a major source of threat to its citizens, does it not thereby undermine the prime justification for its existence? How does one deal with the alleged quip of a Brazilian president that: 'Brazil's doing fine, but the people are doing badly.'? To deal with this paradox, it is necessary to consider the basic relationship between citizens state. One can divide views on this issue into two general models: the minimal and the maximal conceptions of the state.

The minimal state arises out of John Locke's concept of a social contract which provides a view of the state very much oriented towards the individuals who make it up. The foundations of the state rest on the consent of its citizens to be governed, and therefore the actions of the state can be judged according to their impact on the interests of its citizens. In this view, the state should not be much more than the sum of its parts, and serious clashes between citizens and state should be avoided. P. A. Reynolds argues explicitly that individual values are, or should be, the prime referent by which state behaviour is judged, and similar sentiments underlie Robert Tucker's thoughtful essay on this subject. Robert Nozick offers a deep and wide-ranging defence of the minimal state in which the acknowledged need for collective structures is subordinated to the prime value of individual rights. If one accepts this view, it necessarily leads to an interpretation of national security which places great emphasis on values derived directly from the interests of individual citizens. It also requires a form of government in which the consent of the governed plays such an active part that clashes of interest between state and citizens do not assume major proportions.

The maximal state view grows from the assumption that the state is, or should be, considerably more than the sum of its parts, and that it therefore has interests of its own. These interests might derive from a number of sources. Marxists interpret them as the interests of a dominant elite who use the state to advance their own cause. Realists construct the state as a necessary unit for the well-being and survival of any human group within the anarchic international environment. They thus have the makings of a transcendent state purpose in the imperative of the struggle for power and security. One extreme version of this is the position taken by Heinrich von Treitschke. Building on Hegel's 'deification' of the state, he argues forcefully that the state is 'primordial and necessary', that it exists as 'an independent force' and that 'it does not ask primarily for opinion, but demands obedience'. In his view, the state as a collective entity encompassing the nation stands above the individuals comprising it. The state cannot be seen as something created by individuals, as implied in notions of social contract.

One can, ironically, also reach the maximalist conclusion by extending the social contract view. Here the argument is that the state acquires independent standing above its citizens because of the essential role it plays in the realization of individual interests. In the state of nature, chaotic conditions prevent the effective pursuit of individual values, which therefore cannot be said to have meaning outside the framework of the state. Since the state has to be viewed either as the source of all value, or, at a minimum, as the necessary condition for the realization of any value, the preservation of the state, and the consequent pursuit of state interest, supersede the individual values from which they notionally derive. In either version, the maximal view results in a quite different interpretation of the relationship between individual security and national security from the minimal one. To the extent that the state is more than the sum of its parts, then it can be detached from, and legitimately unresponsive to, individual security needs.

The minimal view of the state tries to collapse the contradiction between individual and national security by arguing that the state is, or should be, merely the sum of its parts, and instrumental to their ends. It opens the way for a reductionist logic that interprets national and international security in terms of individual security. The maximal view blocks the possibility of reductionism by interposing the state as an independent variable. This theoretically clear distinction, however, is not so easy to make in practice. The difficulty arises from another traditional puzzle of political philosophy, the linked problems of how to determine the general will, and how to calculate what level of state intervention in the lives of the citizens will be necessary to fulfil even the minimal tasks of defending them from the 'invasion of foreigners and the injuries of one another'. If one assumes the citizens to be naturally fractious, and the international environment to be unremittingly hostile, then even a minimal state will be a large intervening force in the lives of its citizens. This uncertainty makes it impossible in practice to draw a clear empirical boundary between minimal and maximal states. How far can maintenance of civil order and provision for external defence go before the immensity of the task creates in the state an overriding purpose and momentum of its own?

Two factors suggest themselves as possible boundary-markers between minimal and maximal states. First is the existence of extensive civil disorder such as that in Russia in 1905, in Hungary in 1956, in Lebanon after 1976, in Nicaragua during the late 1970s, in Iran after 1979, in El Salvador and South Africa during the 1980s, in parts of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the late 1980s and in numerous other places where popular unrest has dominated the news over the years. Such disorder could indicate a degree of falling out between citizens and government arising where a maximal state has pursued its own interests to the excessive detriment of the mass of individual interests within it. Unfortunately, disorder could also indicate the failure of a minimal state to contain the contradictions among its citizens, and thus cannot reliably be used to distinguish the two types.

The second possible indicator is the existence of a disproportionate internal security apparatus, though again considerable difficulties occur in finding a measure for this. The argument is that a minimal state should not require a massive police force, and that the presence of one is symptomatic of the distance between a maximal state and its people. A minimal police state might just be possible in conditions of severe external threats of penetration, as in Israel, or even Korea. But the kind of police machinery associated with totalitarian states, or the kind of independent police powers exemplified by the apartheid regime in South Africa, might normally be taken to indicate a maximal state. One problem here is that opinions differ markedly on where normal policing ends and the police state begins. Britain would be far removed from most lists of police states, but many black citizens in Bristol, Brixton and Notting Hill cite excessive policing as a major grievance underlying riots there. Similar views could easily be found in many American cities. In both the United States and Britain there are, in addition, recurrent bouts of concern about the domestic activities of intelligence agencies.

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Excerpted from People, States & Fear by Barry Buzan. Copyright © 2007 Barry Buzan. Excerpted by permission of ECPR Press.
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