Understanding global security - Peter Hough

SOCIAL IDENTITY AS A THREAT TO SECURITY
Karadzic’s claims that Bosnian Serb security depends on the creation of an ethnically
pure territory’ (Wyn-Jones 1999).
In spite of these reservations about societal security, the Copenhagen School
did a service to International Relations in further releasing the discipline from its
statecentric straitjacket. Surely one of the clearest limitations of the traditional notion
of ‘national security’ (where the referent object is the state) comes from the fact that
it excludes from consideration the political killing of people by their own government
or other sections of their society. Individuals die because of social constructions,
however abstract and subjective they may be.
Forms of violent discrimination
National identity
Nations, certainly, are abstract and subjective social constructions. Famously
described by Benedict Anderson as ‘imagined communities’(Anderson 1991), nations
defy simple, objective definition yet have been for the last 200 years the most significant
referent object of security in international politics. What is taken to constitute
a nation varies considerably from case to case. The ‘we feeling’ that distinguishes
one’s own nation from the rest of humanity is determined by various different factors.
Ethnicity is linked to nationality in some states, such as Germany and Japan, but
is less significant in countries with a tradition of multi-cultural citizenship, such as
France, the UK and USA.
Where ethnicity does define the nation, minority ethnic groups are not likely
to be accommodated by or assimilated into the dominant, indigenous national group
and risk becoming marginalized. At the lesser end of the scale this might be in the
form of being denied the rights of citizenship in their country of residence (as with
most ethnic Turks in Germany today) and in the extreme manifest itself in the horrors
of genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’. ‘Ethnic cleansing’ entered the language in the
1990s to denote a policy less extreme than an outright attempt to annihilate a national
group but which aims to remove them from a given territory. The term was widely
applied in relation to the Yugoslav war over the secession of Croatia and Bosnia-
Herzegovina but was, in fact, a wholly inappropriate description. Croats, Serbs and
Bosnian Moslems were/are not ethnically distinct since they are all Slavs. National
hatred seemed to appear from nowhere with archaic historical and religious distinctions
suddenly acquiring great significance. The deadly vagueness of national
identity and its propensity towards promoting ‘ethnocentricism’, by stressing the
difference between ‘self’ and ‘other’ became all too apparent to a horrified world.
Table 5.1 attempts to rank the worst genocides in history but it should be borne
in mind that, due to difficulty in verifying wildly fluctuating figures, some historical
massacres are probably denied their rightful place in this list. In addition, the
distinction between genocide and war in the age of total war is not always clear cut.
However, since national identity is very much a phenomenon of modern history, 1 it
is safe to assume that the desire to exterminate ‘the other’ must also reside principally
in the modern era. Pre-modern imperial conquests sometimes claimed millions of
lives but, in most cases, the aim was the conversion or subjugation of the conquered
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