Understanding global security - Peter Hough

SECURITY AND SECURITIZATION
interests which sometimes redefined or contradicted ‘national’ interests. INGOs,
such as pressure groups and Multi-National Corporations (MNCs), were becoming
significant players on the world stage in their own right and were not necessarily
acting in accord with their ‘home’ government. In addition, Pluralists built on the
political philosophy of liberalism to argue that the amorality of the national interest
was not an appropriate guide to foreign policy. Individual people prosper from the
mutual benefits inherent in cooperation and would find their interests better served
in a world in which states and their interests, as defined by their governments, ceased
to dictate their lives.
For Pluralists these developments were making the interactions of politics in
the world more complex and varied. ‘Low’ politics issues, such as environmental
change or economic development, were becoming international as well as domestic
political issues. International Relations could no longer assume all that happens in
the world was related to a military balance of power between states. This aspect of
international affairs was important but not all-subsuming and an issue-based approach
was necessary. This approach accepts that many non-military issues are legitimate
concerns of International Relations and that they might be contended over without
reference to military power on an increasingly busy world stage.
For Pluralists then, Security Studies was but a small sub-set of the broad subject
that is International Relations.
For proponents of the Marxist paradigm of International Relations (who are usually
also ideological Marxists, but not necessarily so) the Neo-realist and Pluralist conversion
to appreciating the importance of economic factors in the conduct of politics
in the world was both belated and insufficient. Economic concerns, rather than
military or issue-specific power, determine the fate of the world’s peoples and always
have done. In this view globalization is nothing new, it is merely the latest phase of
the world’s ‘haves’ exploiting the ‘have nots’. Imperialism is not a relic of a bygone
age but a persistent feature of a global system built on the capitalist logic of everincreasing
profit. From a Marxist (or Structuralist) perspective inter-state competition
is a side show to the ‘competition’ between the wealthy peoples of the world (most
of the developed world and a small fraction of elites in the less-developed world) and
the poor, in which there is consistently only one winner.
Marxists thus see International Relations as largely synonymous with IPE.
Security Studies, as it has evolved, is superfluous since human and global security
can only ever come through global, structural change. Military strategy serves
global economic interests rather than national security interests. Wars are fought
to preserve or maintain exploitative economic systems (i.e. over colonies or over
economic mastery of the whole system, like the Cold War). In this view the fates of
individuals are determined not so much in their states but in the wider global system
and only world socialist revolution could improve their prospects.
Marxism
5