Understanding global security - Peter Hough

TOWARDS GLOBAL SECURITY
liberalism’ into a more socially oriented set of institutions, is the clearest example of
such normative change. The World Bank now routinely considers the environmental
or social cost of any development project, as well as its economic viability, before
granting it its seal of approval. This metamorphosis occurred through the development
of a different epistemic community working within the system of organizations
making up the ‘Bank’ in response to pressure group criticism and necessitated by
having to deal with the difficult socio-economic transition of former communist
countries in East Europe (Deacon et al. 1997: 198). Similar change has occurred
in the UNDP as the normative shift from advocating ‘pure’ economic growth to more
human-centred development has occurred among experts in the field. At the same
time, international organizations clearly dedicated to welfare and social reform, such
as the ILO, UNICEF and the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR), continue to propagate the ethos of co-responsibility in their work.
Global values of justice and co-responsibility are also evident in global discourse
outside the mainstream political sphere. Global sports bodies, for example, did more
than inter-state politics to ostracize apartheid-era South Africa by banning them from
prestigious competitions such as the Olympic games. Football’s ruling body, the
Federation of International Football Authorities (FIFA), has intervened in cases
where minority nationals appear to have been discriminated against in the selection
of ‘national’ sides. The spirit of ‘fair play’ underpinning these stances represents
a good gauge of global morality since no hegemon or self-interest is behind the
development of such rules. Where unrestrained human dialogue occurs a code of
ethics follows. Global political dialogue has, however, become somewhat skewed
of late and the resultant ethics have become distorted as a consequence.
Universal values
Showing that universal values are ‘out there’ is something that UNESCO has worked
on since the 1980s when the organization’s Universal Ethics Project initiated a
process of identifying core universal values and principles. This process has seen
the employment of both empirical and ‘reflective’ methodologies to find the ethics
already out there, in addition to those which have as yet been unable to inform global
policy and discourse. The culmination of this work was the 1999 Declaration of
Human Duties and Responsibilities, whose drafters included the academic Richard
Falk and prominent statesmen Bernard Kouchner 1 and Ruud Lubbers. 2 The reflective
method permits one to ‘derive ethical values and principles considered necessary
in relation to the problems to be solved’ (Kim 1999). Hence from the core empirical
ethic of human survival, other values can be deduced, since they contribute to the
satisfaction of this. Examples include reciprocity, the prohibition of violence, truthtelling,
justice and social responsibility. Thus the 1999 declaration reads as a charter
for the advancement of human security. Among many articles, Articles 1 and 2 deal
with the ‘Right to Life and Human Security’ and Articles 3 to 9 with ‘Human Security
and an Equitable International Order’ (Kim 1999).
Similarly, attempts have been made to distill core values from the array of the
world’s religions, frequently cited as evidence of the relativism of human morality.
The ‘Parliament of the World’s Religions’ in 1993 brought together representatives
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