Understanding global security - Peter Hough

ECONOMIC THREATS TO SECURITY
paradigms for conceptualizing the economic world, can be understood as ideologies
for enhancing economic security.
Marxists
Marxists (or Structuralists), consider the chief source of human insecurity, economic
or otherwise, to be the global economy itself. Hence, as referred to earlier in the
chapter, Dependency theorists advocate that LDCs are best advised to concentrate
on their own economies rather than integrate themselves more into an exploitative
global trading system. From this perspective global economic security can only be
achieved by radical global change, with the LIEO making way for international
socialism in which the inequalities inherent in the class structures that underpin
capitalism are swept away.
Economic liberals
Economic liberals contend that more rather than less liberalization of the global
economic order is needed for human security to be better safeguarded. The LIEO
has allowed the people of the world to get richer by restraining the capacity of their
governments to buck the market in claiming the money for themselves in tariffs.
Free from meddling governments, international trade can increase in volume and
serve the interest of humanity though the logic of ‘comparative advantage’. Rather
than having states pursue self-sufficiency, freer global trade allows countries
or regions to produce what they are best suited to rather than ‘a bit of everything’.
Hence, in the logic of liberalism, more is produced and more is traded. The pioneer
of this perspective was eighteenth-century Scottish economist Adam Smith who
greatly influenced British international policy in the following century.
Some of Smith’s contemporary protégés put the world’s economic failings down
to the LIEO not being sufficiently liberal and are concerned at recent shifts towards
more socially minded ‘compensatory liberalism’ in global bodies like the World Bank.
Peter Bauer, an exponent of true global free market economics once said of foreign
aid that it is: ‘an excellent method for transferring money from poor people in rich
countries to rich people in poor countries’ (The Economist 2002b). This view that
charity from the North tends to be squandered by elites in the South and produces
dependency provides a case of right and left reaching the same conclusions about
the world.
Mercantilists
Mercantilism, the economic sibling to political Realism, views the world through
a lens in which the state is the referent object of security. This is mainly for the
ontological reason that ‘that is how it is’, but also through the normative belief
that people’s lives and livelihoods are best safeguarded by the policies of their
governments. At the extreme level mercantilism has manifested itself in the foreign
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