Understanding global security - Peter Hough

TOWARDS GLOBAL SECURITY
Human security has become both a new measure of global security and a new agenda for
global action. Safety is the hallmark of freedom from fear, while well-being is the target of
freedom from want. Human security and human development are thus two sides of the
same coin, mutually reinforcing and leading to a conducive environment for each other.
(Human Security Network 1999)
Thinking global: integration theories and
global politics
Understanding global security necessitates ridding oneself of the preconceptions
rooted in the dominant political culture that the security under consideration must
be that of states, as determined by states. In an age when people’s fates were
inextricably linked to that of their governments, and the only significant cross-border
interactions were military, diplomatic and economic exchanges between governments,
this preconception was largely appropriate. This age has now passed into
history, however, and the assumption that an individual’s life is solely determined by
their government is anachronistic. People in the twentieth century were dependent
on their governments like at no time before and like they will never be again. The
diplomatic manoeuvrings of elected or self-appointed leaders did much to dictate
the fate of a large proportion of the world’s population in the age of total war. Many
millions died, many millions of others were saved by their governments from death
at the hands of other governments. Many of those same people were more directly
still at the mercy of their governments, who could determine whether or not to
murder them in order to enhance their own security.
War and politicide persist and the fates of many of the world’s people continue
to be determined by politics ‘from above’, but this is far from the full picture. Strokes
of fate from outside the traditional political world, like plagues, pestilence and
disasters, determine, to a far greater extent, whether people live or die in today’s
world. They also determined the fate of most people in yesterday’s world, although
this was obscured by governmental preoccupation with human threats they knew
how to deal with. This is no longer so, on both counts. External human threats have
diminished and the capacity for governments to safeguard their people against nonhuman
foes is also in decline.
No life-threatening strokes of fate in today’s world are, in fact, from outside the
realm of politics, even if they are outside the control of individual governments.
Governments can imperil their own people without dragging them into wars against
their interest or victimizing them for their own interests by failing to address, in
concert with their fellow governments, global sources of human insecurity.
Environmental degradation, transnational crime and infectious disease simply cannot
be properly legislated against by a government acting in isolation. The September
11th 2001 al-Qa’ida strikes on the USA proved that military defence now comes into
this category as well. Life-threatening poverty and vulnerability to disease and
disaster can be insured against by some governments, but this can be to the detriment
of the security of other states’ citizens. Economic cushioning, such as agricultural
protectionism and exploitative market expansion, can come at the cost of the lives of
those squeezed out.
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