Independent Diplomat by CARNE ROSS

Author:CARNE ROSS
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press

Security “Interests”

Let us now look at the second great set of “interests” which states are commonly assumed to represent. This set is usually presented as a responsibility: to provide for the security of a state’s citizens. This is such a widely-accepted norm of what states are meant to do that it has become an axiom, if not to say a tautology, of how we think about states and the world system: states exist to provide security for their citizens, ergo states must provide security for their citizens.

However, there is room to suppose that within this tautology there lies a self-perpetuating cycle. States exist to provide security. Therefore, in order for states to exist, they must ceaselessly prove that there are threats to their existence, thereby reaffirming their indispensability. The original reason why states exist, one is taught at most universities in the west, is to provide security for their citizens. Without the state, there is chaos. You will find this assumption everywhere in the core academic texts on foreign policy. In his essay “Perpetual Peace”, Immanuel Kant repeats the assumption, routinely believed even in his day, that the state of nature — i.e. what the world would be like without states — is a perpetual one of war and lawlessness. Therefore the state is indispensable, and those who arbitrate what it wants are indispensable too.

One does not have to think too hard to realise that state élites have an interest (to use their terms) in making themselves indispensable, and to do so they must endlessly prove that the state is under threat. More dangerously still, they may actually behave in a way that encourages threats against the state. One way they do so is by emphasising the competitive or realist model of international affairs, a world of interacting and inevitably competing “interests”. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, they say. Eat or be eaten.

There are many examples of how government élites have exaggerated the threats against the state. During the Cold War the CIA overestimated the size of the Soviet economy and thus the resources that could be devoted to military production by at least a factor of two. More recently both the US and British governments exaggerated the extent of the threat posed by Iraq to the peoples of Britain and the US in order to fight a war that can only have been motivated by other reasons.6 In this latter case, unable to prove an existential threat to their states themselves (even Saddam didn’t have weapons capable of harming the US or British territories), both governments claimed that Iraq was a threat to their “interests”. These were never clearly defined.

The exaggeration of threats is very much a function of the competitive, “realist” model of foreign policy thinking that is so pervasive today. To think in any other way — to claim, for instance, that economic and security “interests” may not be primary among a country’s policy concerns — is instantly to exile oneself to the wildernesses outside policymaking circles.

If instead

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