by highlighting the tensions between approaches
to justice which focus on
the rights of communities and those which focus on global concerns. A
generation or so ago the issue of global inequality was relatively easy to com-
prehend and the remedy for world poverty appeared equally unproblematic –
although, of course, action to relieve poverty was another matter. Poor
states were ‘underdeveloped’ and thus needed to ‘develop’; there were
intense debates as to whether development was possible under the current
world economic system but the goal itself was less at issue – the consensus
in favour of ‘development’ ranged from free-market liberals to dependency
theorists via old-style Marxists. The Washington Consensus was simply the
most recent expression of this developmentalist perspective. But it is clear
that in one crucial respect this consensus was fundamentally wrong: the one
thing we can be sure about the future is that it will
not involve a global
industrial civilization in which the developing nations become developed
and possess advanced industrial economies on
the model of the West in the
1950s and 1960s – or, at least, if such a future does come into existence the
price paid will be intolerable unless some quite extraordinary technological
advances change the calculations fundamentally. If the dream of develop-
ment has become a nightmare, where does this leave those countries whose
current situation is such that even the scenario of a raped and pillaged envi-
ronment might count as an improvement?
The contrast between the needs and interests of the world as a whole and
those of particular countries seems acute. On the one hand, it is clear that
industrial development on the Western model, if generalized to China, the
Indian
sub-continent, Africa and Latin America, would be a disaster for
everyone, including the peoples of those regions, but it is equally clear that
the governments of the South will wish to go down this route unless they are
presented with sufficient incentives to do otherwise. No such incentive
scheme is likely to work if the end result is a world in which the peoples and
governments of the North are allowed to preserve the undoubted benefits of
an industrial civilization denied to the South. On the other hand, it is equally
clear that something has to be done to cut carbon emissions in the United
States, which has refused to sign or ratify the Kyoto Accords, and which
persists in refusing to tax gasoline for power
generation and transport at
rates which would discourage waste – and indeed allows the ubiquitous
Sport Utility Vehicle (SUV) to flout those controls on waste materials from
auto exhausts that do exist. What is striking about both these cases is that
the problems are not created by special interests or political elites; it is ordi-
nary people who want cheap refrigeration in China, and cheap gasoline,
central heating and air-conditioning in the US – certainly in the latter case
some of the oil companies have lobbied against Kyoto, but the failure to
ratify that treaty is largely a function of the fact that no Senator wants to
face his or her electorate after endorsing major increases at the petrol pump.
176
Understanding International Relations
This is an issue which strikes at the heart
of the settled norms of the
current international order. The ruling assumption of this order is that indi-
vidual states have the right to pursue their own conception of the Good
without external interference; the norms of the system are designed to pro-
mote coexistence rather than problem-solving. The challenge posed by the
destruction of the environment is one of the ways in which this ruling
assumption is under threat, one example of the way in which the emergence
of a global industrial civilization has, apparently, outstripped the political
forms available to us, a classic example of ‘Westfailure’.
One response
to this situation has been, perhaps ironically, to widen the
scope of one of the key concepts of the old Westphalian system – security. As
concern over military security becomes less pressing in the post-Cold War
period, so a wider conception of security has come to the fore, promoted by
the ‘Copenhagen School’ whose leading members are Barry Buzan and Ole
Waever, and the Critical Security Studies movement, many of whose most
prominent members are to be found at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.
The basic thought for both groups is that, whether the referent object of
security be an individual, group,
state or nation, ‘security’ is an ontological
status, that of feeling secure, which at any one time may be under threat
from a number of different directions. Clearly one such is external military
threat, but it is also the case that depletion of the ozone layer, mass unem-
ployment, large-scale drug trafficking, crime and the arrival on its borders of
large numbers of refugees can each threaten the security of a state. Moreover,
the security of individuals is also bound up with these threats both in so far
as individuals are members of communities, but also, and perhaps more
importantly, in circumstances where the security
of the individual may actu-
ally be threatened by the state itself. Denial of human rights, ill-treatment
and persecution for reasons of gender or sexual orientation, the deprivations
of famine and poverty; these are all factors which threaten the security of
individuals and fall within the purview of the new security studies.
As both Copenhagen and Aberystwyth are aware, there is clearly an issue
here as to whether it is actually appropriate to ‘securitize’ these issues; it
might well be held that securitization induces highly inappropriate reactions
to some of these problems – for example, the way in which asylum-seekers
have been demonized as ‘bogus’ in a great deal of
recent political discourse
in Britain may reflect the view that these harmless individuals are repre-
sented as posing some kind of threat to the security of the nation. In the case
of the main subject matter of this section, it could well be argued that the
impact of securitizing the environment is actually to make the problem of
environmental degradation more difficult to solve – instead of treating this
as a common problem for humanity as a whole, the tendency might be to
regard other people’s behaviour as a threat to oneself, and thus, mentally
and perhaps physically, to throw the cost of change on others.
Globalization
177
It might also be argued that in our modern ‘risk society’ too much empha-
sis
on security is inappropriate; learning to live creatively with insecurity
may be more to the point than excessive concern with the kind of stable
identities that can no longer be sustained (Beck 1999). This is an interesting
potential starting-point for a discussion of the wider social impact of
globalization.
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