Understanding global security - Peter Hough

SOCIAL IDENTITY AS A THREAT TO SECURITY
is ever more prominent and cultures increasingly intersect surely the notion of
relativism unravels.
It is right to be concerned about ideologies that oppress other cultural values,
whether blatantly through nationalist hatred or more subtly through economic
domination, but this itself is a moral judgement. You cannot properly respect another
culture if you cannot also criticize another culture. Instead of reducing ethnocentricism,
relativism, in this way, can actually encourage its proliferation by reinforcing
in all cultures the sanctity of their own values. In the face of centuries of imperialism
and neo-imperialism swamping the global South, it is understandable that there has
been a clamour to protect their values and beliefs but relativism does not offer a
means of doing this. Ethical relativism promotes moral isolationism and the notion
that your own culture is always right and another’s wrong if it differs from yours.
This has been the basis of the various forms of social discrimination which have so
blighted recent history and which humankind surely must at least try to eradicate.
• The security of individual people is frequently threatened by their own
governments and other groups in their society because of their social identity.
• The chief forms of social identity subject to life-threatening discrimination are
nationality, religion, sex, sexual orientation, disability and ideology.
• Global political action to protect individuals against discrimination on national
or religious grounds has evolved significantly since 1945 but has been patchily
implemented. Global policy relating to discrimination on the grounds of the
other forms of social identity is far more limited.
• Sovereignty and the belief that rights are culture-bound, and hence not
appropriate for global policy, remain significant obstacles to the further
development of global policy in this area.
Key points
1 It is generally accepted that national identity evolved from the late eighteenth century
when ordinary people, through greater communication, began to be more aware of
people from other countries and were hence able to perceive of their own societies as
having certain distinguishing characteristics.
2 Ironically, as the site of Abraham’s offer to sacrifice his son to God, Temple Mount unites
the three great monotheistic faiths. It is also, however, the site of Soloman’s temple in
Judaism and of Mohammed’s ascent to heaven in Islam (marked by the Dome of the
Rock Mosque).
3 The numbers killed are unclear. See Grau (1995) for a detailed account of this, often
neglected, episode in history.
4 UK Government (1986) Foreign Policy Document No. 148, British Yearbook of
International Law 56, Section 2, para. 22.
5 Individuals rallied to these causes, such as the English poet Byron who died in Greece
preparing to fight in their independence struggle.
6 The famous phrase used by British Prime Minister Chamberlain in reference to
Czechoslovakia and Britain’s reluctance to act in response to the German invasion of
1938.
Notes
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