National Security Cultures

Patterns of Global Governance

Emil J. Kirchner, James Sperling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136963582
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This edited collection examines changes in national security culture in the wake of international events that have threatened regional or global order, and analyses the effects of these divergent responses on international security.

Tracing the links between national security cultures and preferred forms of security governance the work provides a systematic account of perceived security threats and the preferred methods of response with individual chapters on Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, UK and USA. Each chapter is written to a common template exploring the role of national security cultures in shaping national responses to the four domains of security governance: prevention, assurance, protection and compellence. The volume provides an analytically coherent framework evaluating whether cooperation in security governance is likely to increase among major states, and if so, the extent to which this will follow either regional or global arrangements.

By combining a theoretical framework with strong comparative case studies this volume contributes to the ongoing reconceptualization of security and definition of threat and provides a basis for reaching tentative conclusions about the prospects for global and regional security governance in the early 21st century. This makes it ideal reading for all students and policymakers with an interest in global security and comparative foreign and security policy.

1
National security cultures, technologies of public goods supply and security governance

James Sperling

National Security Cultures has two primary goals. The first is to understand the impact of national security cultures on four categories of national security governance policies: assurance (post-conflict interventions), prevention (pre-conflict interventions), protection (internal security) and compellence (military intervention). The second is to assess the barriers and opportunities for collective action among the major powers in the provision of global and regional security governance. The study is predicated upon two assumptions: first, states can no longer be treated as homogeneous actors; and second, regional and global security governance is an (impure) collective good. The first assumption brings forward the problem of reconciling state structure and the agency of national elites in the definition and execution of security policies, particularly within a comparative framework. The second recognizes that security governance represents a bundle of policies which may individually or jointly exacerbate or mitigate the problem of collective action.

This Introduction seeks to answer four major questions: does the coexistence of states ranging from the Westphalian to post-Westphalian necessarily complicate global or regional security cooperation? What implications does that coexistence have for the process of securitization regionally or globally? Are the security governance tasks of post-Westphalian states fundamentally different from those of Westphalian states or do they merely engender different forms of security cooperation? Do national security cultures shape national security policy choices and is the technology of public goods supply relevant to understanding the challenges of effective security governance in the contemporary international system?

Security governance and the emergence of the post-Westphalian state

The importance of domestic constitutional orders as the determinant of international order has long been factored into the study of international relations as a causal variable across the theoretical spectrum (e.g. Thucydides 1954; Machiavelli 1998; Kant 1939; Hilferding 2006; Carr 1964; Rosecrance 1963). Philip Bobbitt (2002), for example, has linked the historical evolution of the European state system to changes in domestic constitutional form. The democratic peace hypothesis similarly maintains that a specific form of constitutional order, a liberal democracy, guarantees global or regional peace and stability (Owen 1994; Oneal and Russet 1997; Ward and Gleditsch 1998; Lipson 2003; Barnett 2008).¹ More recently, a group of scholars has made an effort to develop and elaborate a ‘capitalist’ peace hypothesis as an alternative to the democratic peace hypothesis. Stochastic analyses generally support the hypothesis, but the data supporting it are largely drawn from the European and Anglophone worlds.

The empirical support for these hypotheses rests on the circumscribed empirical base of the European system (broadly conceived), thereby precluding from consideration the more fundamental change that is taking place – the rise of the post-Westphalian state in a largely Westphalian world (Caporaso 1996 and 2000; Falk 2002). The post-Westphalian hypothesis better explains the emergence of a European (and perhaps transatlantic) security community, than does reliance upon an evolutionary form of constitutional or economic order in constant historical flux. Conversely, the persistence of the Westphalian state elsewhere better explains the continuing force of anarchy and the persistence of the balance of power, concerts and impermanent alliances as regulators of interstate conflict.

Westphalian sovereignty forms a significant barrier to cooperation generally, and security governance specifically (Jervis 2002; Keohane 1984, 2001). John Herz (1957) identified territoriality as the key characteristic of the Westphalian state and characterized it as the ‘hard shell’ protecting states and societies from the external environment. Territoriality is increasingly irrelevant, particularly in Europe. States no longer enjoy the ‘wall of defensibility’ that leaves them relatively immune to external penetration. The changed salience and meaning of territoriality has not only expanded the number and categories of security threat, but changed the assessment of instrumental rationality of the ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ elements of power, as well as the normative assessment of both.

Westphalian states remain chiefly preoccupied with protecting autonomy and independence, retaining the historic gate-keeping role between internal and external transactions, and avoiding external interference in domestic constitutional arrangements. The Westphalian state may be distinguished from the post-Westphalian state by reference to three separate but interrelated changes engendering the emergence of the latter. The first points to the qualitative erosion of the state’s ability and desire to act as a gate-keeper between internal and external flows of people, goods and ideas. In the post-Westphalian state, there has been a qualitative change in the nature and volume of flows across national boundaries, as well as a change in the nature and height of the technical and normative barriers to controlling those flows contrary to the preferences of individual or corporate agents. The second acknowledges that in post-Westphalian states there has been a voluntary acceptance of mutual governance between states and the attending loss of autonomy in order to maximize the welfare benefits of those cross-border flows and to meet common challenges or threats to national welfare. Similarly, for the Westphalian state, encroachments on national territoriality and autonomy are involuntary, the barrier to intervention is technically and normatively sur-mountable, and unwanted external encroachments reflect disparities in relative power. The third dimension of difference derives from the asymmetrical status of international law for Westphalian and post-Westphalian states. For the post-Westphalian state, international law qualifies sovereignty in novel and meaningful ways: first, international law defines the (il)legitimacy of a government’s sovereign prerogatives against their own citizenry (and a corresponding ‘duty to intervene’ when international law governing human rights is grossly violated); and second, states acknowledge the existence and legitimacy of extra-national adjudication of disputes and voluntarily comply with decisions of international or supranational courts and other institutionalized dispute resolution mechanisms. These developments fundamentally separate Westphalian from post-Westphalian states; the latter accept the circumscribed legal autonomy of the state vis-à -vis the citizen as natural and legitimate. The evolution of the European state system, particularly the trajectory of the European Union (EU), provides the empirical evidence supporting the post-Westphalian hypothesis and its relevance for understanding the limits and possibilities of security governance cooperation in the twenty-first century.

The post-Westphalian hypothesis challenges the assumptions that states can be treated as homogenous actors; that there is a single, homogeneous international society of states; and that states confront the same structural constraint, namely the distribution and concentration of power. The Westphalian and post-Westphalian states face an alternative set of objective security vulnerabilities, and are compelled to practise an alternative form of statecraft, instrumentally and substantively. Post-Westphalian states, while not indifferent to territorial integrity, have largely abandoned their gate-keeper role owing to the network of interdependencies formed by economic openness, the political imperative of welfare maximization, and democratic political principles. Autonomy and independence have been devalued as sovereign imperatives in order to meet the welfare demands made on the state and the expectations of individual agents. Post-Westphalian states are more vulnerable to the influence of non-state actors – malevolent, benevolent, or benign – in international politics. Non-state actors fill or exploit the gaps left by the (in) voluntary loss or evaporation of sovereignty attending the transformation of the state, while others are purposeful repositories for sovereignty ceded, lent, pooled or forfeited. The changing nature of the security agenda, particularly its functional expansion and the changing agency of threat, necessitates a shift from coercive to persuasive security strategies (Kirchner and Sperling 2007).

European states have progressively stripped away the prerogatives of sovereignty and eliminated the autonomy once afforded powerful states by exclusive territorial jurisdiction. A specific constellation of events led to the emergence of the post-Westphalian state within Europe: the growing irrelevance of geography and borders, technological innovations, particularly the revolution in information technologies and the digital linking of national economies and societies, a convergence around transnational meta-norms of inalienable civil liberties, democratic governance and an irreversible economic openness. The ease with which domestic disturbances are transmitted across national boundaries and the difficulty of deflecting those disturbances underline the strength and vulnerability of the post-Westphalian state: the ever expanding spectrum and depth of interstate and inter-societal interactions provide greater levels of collective welfare than would otherwise be possible. Yet the very transmission belts facilitating those welfare gains also serve as diffusion mechanisms (Hanrieder 1978; Most and Starr 1980; Ruggie 1986; Siverson and Starr 1990), which in turn hinder the state’s ability to inoculate itself against exogenous shocks or malevolent actors. Those actors, in turn, are largely immune to sovereign jurisdiction as well as strategies of dissuasion, defence or deterrence. Consequently, broad and collective milieu goals have been substituted for particularistic national security goals, conventionally conceived. Perforated sovereignty has rendered post-Westphalian states incapable of meeting their national security requirements alone; security has become a structurally conditioned (impure) collective good. These developments, in conjunction with the emergence of failed states and the growing autonomy of non-state actors, have produced a changed threat environment that initiated and pushed forward the securitization of policy arenas heretofore exclusively defined in terms of domestic welfare or law and order.

Thus, Westphalian and post-Westphalian states differ along four dimensions: the degree of penetration by state and non-state actors and the consequences of that penetration for national authorities; the nature and extent of the securitization process; the level of sovereign control, de facto and de jure; and the referent for calculating security interests (see Table 1.1). The existence of two general categories of states with fundamentally dissimilar structural characteristics suggests the need for the analysis of regional security systems as the appropriate unit of analysis, although it poses a significant barrier to a unified system-level of theory

Table 1.1 Key characteristics of (post- )Westphalian states

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Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 National security cultures, technologies of public goods supply and security governance
• Part I Europe
• Part II North America
• Part III Eurasia
• Index