Understanding global security - Peter Hough

TOWARDS GLOBAL SECURITY
selected deliberately to act as a catalyst for political ‘spillover’ into other sectors.
Mitrany had little time for the EC, seeing it as a ‘top-down’ plan which would simply
replace a number of states with one bigger one, rather than fundamentally changing
international relations.
Neo-functionalism was devised and embraced for the EC experiment for pragmatic
rather than idealistic reasons. It was a half-way house between functionalism
and federalism inspired by the fact that both theories appeared hopelessly utopian
by the 1950s. Federalism on a limited regional scale had failed to get off the ground
and the functional international organizations which inspired Functionalism remained
limited in influence and still controlled by governments. By the 1990s the continuation
of integration without any real likelihood of a United States of Europe emerging from
it, despite a revival of the direct approach to its achievement, prompted a new
theoretical approach to explain what was happening. The Consociationalist theory
of European integration contended that the states of the now restyled European
Union would continue to merge economically and politically, not inspired by any holy
grail of an idealized end-state but through pragmatic, economic necessity (Taylor
1991). Hence, from this perspective, the launch of a single EU currency did not
mark the beginning of the end of sovereign member states so much as the practical
realization by the governments that this would speed up business and that, apart
from the German mark, the national currencies were increasingly irrelevant.
Neo-functionalism and Consociationalism are theories very much designed to
fit the European experience but they have some currency when looking at the bigger
picture. The United Nations does not have an equivalent of the European Commission
to cultivate global integration from ‘above’, as neo-functionalists describe and
advocate, but some of its initiatives have served to push forward the natural progress
of spillover. The work of the International Law Commission and the International
Criminal Court in advancing human rights law , the promotion of human security by
the UNDP and Secretary Generals and the epistemic advocacy of universalist ethics
by UNESCO are cases in point. UN decision-making remains inter-governmental
but, there is no doubt that the myriad programmes and specialized agencies under
its umbrella are more than the sum of their formal governmental parts. The less
ambitious approach of Consociationalism has global application to the development
of the WTO and the numerous international regimes of common rules to which
governments increasingly voluntarily commit themselves in order to ease the
complications of dealing with modern economic interdependence.
Acting global: global solutions to global
problems
Although contemporary international political practice marks a recognition of the
fact that human and state security rest on more than the preservation of sovereignty
by force, it is clear from examining the issues of global security that this has not gone
far enough. The ‘cosmopolitan ethics’ of Pluralist International Relations scholars
like Beitz and Liberal philosophers like Rawls found satisfaction in the late twentiethcentury
codification of international human rights law and deepening economic
interdependence, as they confirmed that the individual was emerging as an entity in
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