Understanding global security - Peter Hough

SOCIAL IDENTITY AS A THREAT TO SECURITY
repressive policies in the name of ‘nation building’. Women, the disabled, homosexuals
and people linked by any other form of collective identity stand little chance
of having their ‘cultural differences’ respected when they overlap with far more
influential ‘cultures’. Entrusting states to be the arbiters of human rights frequently
leads to the imposition of dominant cultural norms on minority cultures in precisely
the fashion that relativism purports to prevent. Rhoda Howard has referred to this
as ‘cultural absolutism’, as a counter to the relativist claim that human rights are a
form of absolutism (Howard 1995).
Even if a more optimistic view of the relationship between states and individuals
than that encouraged by recent history is taken, they still offer a limited guarantee
of future human security since their own position is far from secure. The life span of
many states over the last century has been much the same as that of their citizens.
The economic rights afforded to its people by the USSR and its allies, such as
employment, disappeared with the fall of Communism as quickly as the civil and
political rights of Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians had been snuffed out by their
annexation by the USSR.
It can further be argued that relativism in regard to ethics and rights is not only
unhelpful but ontologically flawed. The temptation to want to protect the weak from
the strong in international affairs is obvious but think for a moment about the
implications of applying cultural relativism in other situations. If cultural relativism
should apply at the global level, should it not also be applied at the domestic level
to recognize the impunity of criminal culture from the imposition of state values? If
it is wrong to universally apply values then why is it not wrong to universally apply
cultural relativism? If all cultural moralities are equally valid does this mean that
contradictory moral opinions can each be valid?
The (strong) relativists’ answer to the final of these three questions is to adopt
the position of ‘methodological relativism’ or ‘truth relativism’ and suggest that the
idea of validity has no bearing in ethics, or indeed in any social scientific context.
This position, associated in Sociology with Bloor (1976) and in Philosophy with
Davson-Galle (1998), posits that moral judgements have no rational basis and are,
in effect, no more than matters of taste. This position, however, can lead only to a
nihilistic abandonment of reason and the tolerance of intolerance. Abandoning reason
and any notion of right and wrong in ethics is not only unhelpful in terms of giving
the green light to genocide and any other form of human abuse, it can also be argued
to be logically flawed. Proving truths in a social context is more difficult than in
natural science but some philosophical methods have been advanced to show that
moral judgements can be rationalized. Apel, for example, demonstrates that people
necessarily accept certain fundamental ethical norms as binding in the process
of making everyday communication possible. In any form of communication the
idea of truth and lies must implicitly be accepted by someone communicating or
communication would have no meaning. Even habitual liars could not consistently
lie to themselves (Apel 1990). The strict observance of truth relativism would mean
that you could not participate in any discussion on ethics. Those philosophers,
anthropologists and others who deny the universality of rights do so by making
arguments grounded in reason. Zemin in upholding the relativity of human rights on
his 1996 visit to the USA did so by justifying China’s different interpretation of the
concept to that favoured in the West. In a world in which transnational communication
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