Understanding global security - Peter Hough

TOWARDS GLOBAL SECURITY
international politics from under the shell of the sometimes clumsy protection of the
state (Beitz 1979, Rawls 1971).
When, in the 1990s, the changed international political environment facilitated
the further advance of global justice and interdependence, it became apparent,
however, that this alone was not the solution to all of the world’s ills. Despite major
medical and technological advances in the second half of the twentieth century, which
had seen world life expectancy grow at unprecedented rates and the gap between
North and South reduce, it was clear by the end of the century that economic
globalization was not enough to continue this improvement, and was even part of
the remaining problems. What was needed, however, was not the abandonment of
globalization, increasingly advocated by a growing global social movement, so much
as ‘globalisation with a human spin’ (Lee et al. 2002: 279). Similarly it was not so much
globalization as partial globalization, the globalization of the value of economic gain
without the commensurate globalization of the value of human security, that was
at the root of other global ailments becoming more apparent at the end of the
millennium.
Frankman described the emerging global polity of the 1990s as ‘hard
democracy’, a limited form of democratic representation dished out by political elites
without properly empowering the stakeholders (Frankman 1997: 324). The term had
originally been coined to describe the semi-democratization of some South American
states in the 1980s by military dictatorships, driven by populist expediency rather
than a genuine desire to free their citizens. Delving further back into history in trying
to characterize the global political system at the start of the twenty-first century,
a number of writers have contended that Bull’s cautionary ‘new medievalism’ has
come to pass (Bull 1977: 254, Mathews 1997, Held et al. 1998: 85). This perspective
argues that the complex overlap of competing jurisdictions and multiple levels of
authority that increasingly mark the contemporary system resemble European
politics before Westphalian order was imposed.
A restoration of Westphalian order today, however, would not address the
problems of global security. A measure of good governance is that it enhances human
security, and it is clear that neither the state nor the partially globalized world order
can claim to be achieving this, or be able to achieve this. Falk claims that there are
three damnable indictments against ‘inhumane’ global governance: the ‘global
apartheid’ of poverty, the persistence of the ‘avoidable harm’ of discrimination and
‘eco-imperialism’ (Falk 1995: 47–78). Rawls’ widely applied test of justice for a political
system contends that inequality in the distribution of social goods can be considered
fair if the least advantaged nonetheless gain increased social goods over time (Rawls
1971). The onset of political globalization from the mid-twentieth century has broadly
been just according to this criteria since, in spite of the growing disparity between
rich and poor, quality of life has improved for nearly all the people of all countries.
Across the board increases in life expectancy, and more latterly and indicatively
increases in Human Development Index (HDI) scores, support this. A recent drop
off in HDI of some states however, largely due to chronic underdevelopment and
disease, suggests that global governance is beginning to fail the Rawls test. The 2003
UNDP Human Development Report revealed that 21 states, principally in Sub-
Saharan Africa and the successor states of the former USSR, had suffered a decline
in HDI through the 1990s. This is very much against the norm. Only four African
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