Minerva, Spring 2008 (Volume 32) - Citizens for Global Solutions

NOTES: Human Security ~
Connectivity and Responsibility
From the Center on International Cooperation
at New York University, Richard
Gowan writes (in the Stanley Foundation’s
): “One of the most worrying
trends in current American political
debate is a creeping isolationism. This is
not the isolationism of the 1930s — the
principled, if misguided, belief that the
US should cut itself off from European
power politics — but a weary sense that
international engagement just isn’t working.
… Yet this trend is balanced by a residual
sense that the US has global commitments
it cannot desert yet — and these
demand a better mix of American soft and
hard power. … [I]n the wake of the Iraqi
debacle, the country’s leading politicians
and policy intellectuals are turning toward
a concept that wouldn’t have got a hearing
in Washington in 2003. This is ‘human
security’—the idea that a country’s
foreign policy should not just be about
defending its national interests but also
protecting vulnerable people worldwide
from the risks of poverty, disease, natural
disasters, and mass slaughter. It’s a very
broad idea and one that’s too often dismissed
as naïve.” He attributes that to the
notion’s increasing popularity in Canada
and Europe — where in 2004 a high-level
panel proposed an EU “Human Security
Force” of 15,000 troops, police, and humanitarian
workers and where French
Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner is a
strong proponent of the “Responsibility
to Protect”.
But “the reality is that there is a hardheaded
case for the idea”, asserts Gowan,
“and it is one that may prove increasingly
urgent in the years ahead. International
risk analysts agree that some of the most
dangerous crises of the near future will
… involve … a mixture of unpredictable
threats … [that] demand a vast variety of
responses.” Even trickier, warns P.H. Liotta,
Executive Director of the Pell Center
for International Relations and Public
Policy, “not all security issues involve
‘threats’; rather, the notion of vulnerabilities
is as serious to some peoples, and
some regions, as the more familiar concept
of threat” (Pell conference, “The Future
of ‘Human Security’”, June 2005).
While arguing that these difficulties must
be faced without further delay, Gowan’s
opinion is that “it would be electoral suicide
to lay out frankly the litany of current
global challenges, the costs involved
in confronting them, and the difficulties
in predicting which risks will turn into
real crises”. Not to mention the traditional
toughness of making the case for developing
“a sense of mutual trust based on
effective diplomacy through the UN and
other international organizations” — crucial
“not least because the UN’s own assets
include essential agencies involved
in resolving human security issues, from
the World Food Programme to the World
Health Organization”.
Much discussion turns on questions of
ascendancy among polarities. For example,
Parag Khanna, author of The Second
World: Empires and Influence in the New
Global Order (March 2008), in his controversial
turn-of-the-year New York Times
essay “Waving Goodbye to Hegemony”,
commented on the American electoral
campaign’s retro weirdness of both parties
“bickering about where and how to intervene,
whether to do it alone or with allies
and what kind of world America should
lead. … But the distribution of power in
the world has fundamentally altered. …
The EU may uphold the principles of the
United Nations that America once dominated,
but how much longer will it do so
as its own social standards rise far above
this lowest common denominator? And
why should China or other Asian countries
become ‘responsible stakeholders’,
in former Deputy Secretary of State Robert
Zoellick’s words, in an American-led
international order when they had no seat
at the table when the rules were drafted?
Even as America stumbles back toward
multilateralism, others are walking away
from the American game and playing by
their own rules.” In this view, “America’s
standing in the world remains in steady
decline. Why? Weren’t we supposed to
reconnect with the United Nations and reaffirm
to the world that America can, and
should, lead it to collective security and
prosperity?”
Another example: “Is the balance of global
power slipping away from the United
States and its European allies?” asked a
7 • Minerva #32 • June 2008
forum held by the New America Foundation
in Washington DC on 17 April to
discuss ‘the future of American Leadership
in a ‘World Without the West’”, involving
Flyntt Leverett (Senior Fellow of
the foundation), Fred Kempe (President
& CEO, Atlantic Council), Steven Weber
(Director, Institute of International Studies,
University of California, Berkeley),
and others. Sameer Lalwani (Policy Analyst,
American Strategy Program) subsequently
blogged in The Washington Note
that they “discussed the ‘World Without
West’ thesis described in these lines:
The landscape of globalization
now looks like this: While connectivity
for the globe as a whole has increased in
the last twenty years, it is increasing at
a much faster rate among countries outside
the Western bloc. The World Without
the West is becoming preferentially and
densely interconnected. This creates the
foundation for the development of a new,
parallel international system, with its
own distinctive set of rules, institutions,
ways of doing things — and currencies of
power.
The World Without the West,
like any political order, is made up of two
ingredients: A set of ideas about governance
and a set of power resources that
enable, embed and occasionally enforce
those ideas. This alternative order rests
on wealth drawn from natural resources
and industrial production (along with the
management expertise applied to those
capabilities). And it proposes to manage
international politics through a neo-Westphalian
synthesis comprised of hard-shell
states that bargain with each other about
the terms of their external relationships,
but staunchly respect the rights of each to
order its own society, politics and culture
without external interference. Neither
of these elements by itself would make
for a concrete alternative to the Western
system, but together they synergistically
stabilize into a robust political-economic
order.”
“The implications are grave,” comments
Sameer Lalwani. “Weber suggested at minimum,
the degree of interaction amongst
the non-west orbit affords increased bargaining
power on geoeconomic and geopolitical
fronts when dealing with the US
and the West, but at maximum, it means