Understanding global security - Peter Hough

NATURAL THREATS TO SECURITY
Conclusions
As with the global politics of health, the horizontal approach to securing the lives of
those most prone to natural disasters has steadily gained credibility in epistemic
communities and in the global polity, but struggles to win the hearts and minds of
governments and the general public of countries moved to help those people. Driven
by greater media exposure, The European Community Humanitarian Office (ECHO)
has increased its expenditure on LDC assistance but it allocates less than 1 per cent
of its disasters budget to preparedness rather than relief (Twigg 2001: 3). The long
game of promoting education, economic development and local empowerment
is less sexy than sending in relief workers and raising charitable donations. ‘It is hard
to gain votes by pointing out that a disaster did not happen’ (Christopolos et al. 2001:
195). When Gerhard Schroeder regained the Chancellorship of Germany in the
2002 elections it was widely felt that his crisis management during recent devastating
floods had secured victory in a tight election. To put it another way, Schroeder
won because German flood defences failed. Had they succeeded he would have been
denied the opportunity to don his waders and demonstrate compassion and
leadership in the media spotlight.
Although democracy can skew decision-making in the direction of mediadriven
responses above the mundanity of quiet preventative prescriptions, there is
good evidence that democratic citizenship provides some measure of security from
natural disaster. Civil society in Turkey was jolted into life by the 1999 earthquakes
and a major pressure group campaign critical of the government, and existing legislation
of a kind not seen before emerged. The failings of nineteenth-century colonial
rule in mitigating against famines, described in Chapter 4, find some parallels (albeit
on a far less graphic scale) in late twentieth-century natural disaster politics. The UK
government did not have contingency planning in place to deal with the 1995 onset
of volcanic activity on the Caribbean overseas territory of Montserrat (Twigg 2001:
4) and appeared reluctant to finance relief to the islanders following the most
devastating eruption in 1997. 2
Similarly, the democratic peace thesis holds for this realm of security politics.
A special edition of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs in 2000 dedicated
to ‘disaster diplomacy’ demonstrated how security communities can emerge between
neighbouring states facing a common threat, in which information is shared to
minimize a common risk. The warming of relations between Greece and Turkey after
earthquakes ravaged both countries in 1999 is a classic case of two governments and
societies overcoming cultural and political differences when faced with a common
threat. At the one level this was a case of basic human empathy at the societal level
triumphing over realpolitik and then being reciprocated but Ker-Lindsay demonstrates
that it is more revealing than that. The level of cooperation between the two
governments, which surprised the rest of the world, was a result of an agreement
reached at a meeting of foreign ministers a few months before the earthquake (Ker-
Lindsay 2000). Turkish Foreign Minister Cem and his Greek counterpart Papandreou
had met principally to discuss the regional military security implications of the crisis
going on at that time in Kosovo. Sharing a common concern about the possible spread
of conflict to other parts of the Balkans and the flow of refugees from Yugoslavia
which was already happening, the two traditional foes engaged in uncharacteristically
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