Understanding global security - Peter Hough

SECURITY AND SECURITIZATION
‘high’ and ‘low’ politics in their policy-making best serve the national interest.
Individual concerns with health, welfare and other ‘low politics’ issues are the stuff
of domestic politics and need to be kept separate from the ‘high politics’ of state
security. This approach was justified on the premise that failing to deter or losing a
war would undermine the satisfaction of low politics aspirations. Individual interests
were inextricably tied up in the national interest. Hence in the UK in the late 1940s
society tolerated food rationing while the government poured the country’s shrunken
exchequer into developing atomic weapons. Individual hardship was considered a
price worth paying to avert the potentially catastrophic hardship of failing to deter
aggression from the Soviet Union.
The conundrum that emerges from assuming that a state’s security is achieved
by it pursuing the maximization of its own power is that all states cannot simultaneously
follow this prescription. The security of one’s own state is likely to be
enhanced at the expense of another state in what has been termed the security
dilemma. For Realists the security dilemma is averted by their faith in the balance of
power. The balance of power keeps a sense of order to the ‘anarchical society’ (Bull
1977) of states through the mutual interest of the most powerful among them to work
together and preserve the status quo. The security of the most powerful states rests
on not allowing any one of them to tip the balance by becoming too powerful. For
classical realists, then, International Relations was pretty much synonymous with
Security Studies.
The rise in significance of economic interactions between states in the 1960s
and 1970s broadened the focus of International Relations beyond military power
politics to incorporate economic power issues. Realist thought metamorphosed into
‘Neo-realism’, which maintained the focus on states and the pursuit of power but
accepted that not everything that happens in the world is determined by military
might. States could become powerful by concentrating on their economies (such as
West Germany and Japan), being lucky enough to possess a key economic resource
(such as the oil producing states) or by exerting diplomatic influence in the world
without the resort to arms or threat of armed action. In light of this a new subdiscipline
of International Relations emerged considering such matters, International
Political Economy (IPE). For (Neo-)realists then, Security Studies became the military
arm of International Relations and IPE its economic sister.
Pluralism
Pluralism emerged as a paradigm of International Relations from the 1960s, made up
of scholars unconvinced that Neo-realism had evolved far enough from Realism to
take account of the changes that had occurred in the world since the 1940s. It began
to be argued that adding the pursuit of economic power to the pursuit of military
power by states was still too simplistic an understanding of politics in the world.
Pluralists, as the term implies, consider that a plurality of actors, rather than just
states, exert influence on the world stage. State dominance of international relations
was being eroded from above and below, the Pluralists contended. IGOs (such as the
European Community and organizations of the United Nations) had become more
than expedient alliances and come to mould state policies together in common
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