Security through Cooperation

To the Same End

Walter A. Kemp

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000531169
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Categoría: Diplomacia y tratados

This book makes the case for why cooperation is the key to security within and between states, and for dealing with complex threats and challenges to international peace and security.

It argues that cooperation is not altruism or liberal internationalism, rather it is in the self-interest of states. Drawing on both theory and practice, it looks at how cooperation can be promoted within and between states as well as in the global community. It explains the concept of 'cooperative security' and its potential contribution to promoting integration against the current of fragmentation. Furthermore, the book explores the potential impact of technology on cooperation. It makes an urgent call for new ideas and approaches to encourage people and states to work together to deal with complex threats and challenges.

This book will be of particular interest to students of diplomacy studies, foreign policy and international relations, and to practitioners dealing with security issues.

1

Why cooperate?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214267-1

Selfishness versus altruism: a false dichotomy

Are people basically good or fundamentally bad? This debate has raged for centuries, particularly among philosophers, anthropologists, political scientists, and psychologists. Are we genetically hard-wired to compete (and fight), or is cooperation the key to our survival? This is usually posed as a binary question. But I would argue that selfishness versus altruism is a false dichotomy. People are governed by self-interest—which is also why they cooperate. In other words, cooperation is dictated by self-interest: the two are inter-related, not mutually exclusive.

Without delving too deep into the debate, let us nevertheless look at some of the main arguments.

Philosophers have weighed in on both sides of the selfishness versus altruism debate. Thomas Hobbes argued in Leviathan ([1651] 1985) that without central authority there is a war of “every man against every man” and life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on the other hand, believed that the “state of nature” is harmonious and it is man-made institutions that have caused enslavement. As we will see in chapter 3, political scientists later entered this debate to argue whether men, the state, or even the state system are the root cause of war (Waltz 1959).

So is nature harmonious or brutal? Scientists have made arguments on both sides of the debate. Richard Dawkins has argued that successful genes are ruthlessly selfish, whereas primatologist Frans de Waal (among others) has shown how some primates cooperate. And while some animals fight viciously, others (like bees and ants) get along, displaying characteristics of what is known as eusociality. Indeed, many animals seem to work best in groups to coordinate action and movement, collectively respond to danger, communicate about food and water, and assist those in need (2006, 25).

Cooperative behavior among animals is not the result of moral choices. Rather, the impulse to help seems to be based on reciprocity for the sake of self-interest. As de Waal (2006, 13) pointed out, “evolution favors animals that assist each other if by doing so they achieve long-term benefits of greater value than the benefits derived from going it alone and competing with others”.

Early man was probably driven by the same motivation: cooperation for the sake of survival. Or consider it another way: if we were all out to get each other and there was, as Hobbes argued, “war of every man against every man”, surely our species would have died out long ago. Could one of the secrets of our longevity therefore be an ability to cooperate?

Some Enlightenment thinkers certainly thought so. As Emerich de Vattel wrote in The Law of Nations ([1758] 1834, para. 10),

if each man wholly and immediately directs all his thoughts to his own interest, if he does nothing for the sake of other men, the whole human race together will be immersed in the deepest wretchedness. Let us therefore endeavour to promote the happiness of mankind: all mankind, in return, will endeavour to promote ours, and thus we shall establish our felicity on the most solid foundations.

Enlightened self-interest.

One theory is that in the same way that some animals (such as dogs, cats, and horses) have become domesticated, so too have humans. But whereas animals were tamed as a result of breeding based on selection against aggression, there was no master to domesticate mankind (Wrangham 2019, 71). Therefore, it is surmised that human beings domesticated themselves over tens of thousands of years.

Interestingly, it was not the biggest and strongest individuals who prevailed. As Yuval Noah Harari pointed out in Sapiens (2011, 173), “even among chimpanzees, the alpha male wins his position by building a stable coalition with other males and females, not through mindless violence”. Indeed, it seems that aggressive or selfish people risked exclusion from the group. Therefore punishment (or its threat) was a key element of maintaining cooperation (Bowles and Gintis 2011, 148). Richard Wrangham (2019, 128) went so far as to say that alpha male bullies were probably executed by the tribe if they became a threat to peace and order. Therefore, according to this theory, humans experienced selection against reactive aggression. We have, quite literally, been breeding peace (112). Anatomically, over time, this resulted in Homo sapiens developing smaller bodies, shorter faces, smaller brains, and reduced sexual dimorphism (male faces became more feminine) (119). As a result, we don’t look and act like Neanderthals.

Hunting together

Cooperation seems to have given Homo sapiens the edge over other species of Homo. Indeed, it has been argued that exceptional cooperation and social learning seem to have been unique to Homo sapiens (Wrangham 2019, 123). As Johan Galtung (1964, 1) has observed, one reason why mankind has avoided a Hobbesian world of general and complete war is that man identifies: “He is capable of empathy and solidarity. He sees himself as a member of groups where a norm of reciprocity is valid and cooperation a dominant mode of interaction.” This started out as cooperation within small kinship groups. People within extended families helped each other out on the basis of reciprocal altruism or enlightened self-interest (Bowles and Gintis 2011, 3). They depended on each other for help in times of need, for information, mates, and to trade goods (134). Following this theory, cooperation must have been beneficial more often than conflict, to the point that our brains and genes evolved in a way that makes us want to help others. Evolution favored those capable of forming strong social ties (Harari 2011, 11). In short, reciprocity has been a key element of human evolution and made us a cooperative species (Bowles and Gintis 2011).

These same characteristics served early man well as social groups grew bigger. Indeed, cooperation probably contributed to the possibility of interacting in ever-larger groups. As Tony Ord (2020, 12) pointed out, “each human’s ability to cooperate with the dozens of people in their band was unique among large animals. It allowed us to form something greater than ourselves.” Moreover, as Ord (13) observed, “we were able to cooperate across time as well as space”. One generation learned from the experiences of its predecessors, particularly after the invention of writing. As Julian Huxley (1947) observed in his essay “The Uniqueness of Man”, cumulative tradition enabled mankind to pass down knowledge and experience from one generation to the next. Inter-generational cultural transmission and social learning enabled the progressive improvement of tools and machinery and the passing on of lessons learned.

There was also a more violent side to evolution. Cooperation, tools, and weapons made us more deadly fighters. Indeed, one reason for cooperating seems to have been to fight. It stands to reason that groups that cooperated better would have had an advantage in war over groups with less in-group cooperation.

Kinship groups and tribes slowly developed institutions which helped to regulate behavior. According to Bowles and Gintis (2011, 4), such institutions proliferated “because the groups that adopted them secured high levels of within-group cooperation, which in turn favored the groups’ survival as a biological and cultural entity in the face of environmental, military, and other challenges”.

The way that the Inuit people of northern Canada have organized themselves for centuries demonstrates the necessity of cooperation for survival. In one of the world’s most inhospitable climates, the Inuit have survived for thousands of years. One of the main communal principles is Pilirqatigiingiq, namely developing collaborative relationships and working together for a common purpose. Tellingly, there is no word for war in the Inuktitut language (Irwin 2020, 220). Furthermore, decisions are taken by consensus through a consultative process known as Aajiiqatigiingniq. The logic is that since everyone has an interest in the outcome, everyone should be involved in the decision-making process. This consultative process also enables those (like elders) with traditional knowledge as well as people with particular expertise to combine their skills and experience to solve a problem that addresses a wide range of concerns and interests. Two Canadian provinces, Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, still use consensus-based decision-making in their legislatures.

Still, the conditions of the Canadian north are not indicative of most of the rest of our planet. Furthermore, we should not extrapolate too many theories from the practices of relatively small hunting communities. And yet, some well-respected political scientists have done exactly that: they have developed a whole theory on the basis of an analogy of a stag hunt in a primitive tribe.

In A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality ([1755] 2004), Rousseau wrote:

If a deer was to be taken, every one saw that, in order to succeed, he must abide faithfully by his post: but if a hare happened to come within reach of any one of them, it is not to be doubted that he pursued it without scruple, and, having seized his prey, cared very little, if by doing so he caused his companions to miss theirs.

That is all he wrote on the subject, so let’s try to imagine the backstory. A few hunters have tracked a large stag for hours and conclude that it follows a certain path. If the hunters work together, they can kill the stag and have meat for weeks. If they are discovered or do not cooperate, the stag will flee, and they will go hungry. The hunters hide and wait beside the path. An hour goes by with no sign of the stag. Two, three, four hours pass, with no trace. They have heard the stag in the distance and know that it usually comes along this path. But they are getting cold, hungry, and impatient. Suddenly the hunters see a hare hopping along the path. If one of the hunters kills the rabbit, he will have something to eat for himself (at least for dinner), but the stag will run off and there will be less meat for all. There are a number of dilemmas here. If one hunter waits, he risks one of his colleagues killing the hare for himself. Even if he hits the hare, the sound of the shot risks scaring off the stag. In short, an individual can get a hare by themself, but a hare is worth less than a stag. Should the immediate interest of one person prevail over consideration of his colleagues?

This one sentence by Rousseau has been blown up into a parable about greed and mistrust. In Man, the State and War, Kenneth Waltz (1959, 168) argued that this story shows how “in cooperative action, even where all agree on the goal and have an equal interest in the project, one cannot rely on others”. Brian Skyrms even wrote a book called The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure. Yet most of Rousseau’s Discourse talks about how people cooperate within the state of nature. And we know from anthropology that men hunted in groups to kill large animals—they could not do it on their own. Furthermore, as Rousseau wrote in the same paragraph about the deer and the hare, these hunters were simple men: “they were perfect strangers to foresight and were so far from troubling themselves about the distant future, that they hardly thought of the morrow”. Some politicians and political theorists seem to suffer from the same short-term thinking.

Let us imagine what happened after this incident. Surely the hunter who defected would have been roundly chastised by his colleagues (and their wives), he would have gained a bad reputation and would have had to hunt alone in the future. In the long term, is that really in his best interests? Therefore, it seems ridiculous to develop theories about international relations based on a throw-away line from an eighteenth-century tract that had very little to do with either cooperation or conflict. We need different stories that show the benefits rather than the possible drawbacks of cooperation.

While mankind may have learned that working together in a group brings better results for all, in-group cooperation can also create enmity and aggression towards outsiders (de Waal 2006, 53–54). Think of the example of wolves. They are highly social animals that hunt most efficiently in packs. And yet the very cooperation that they display towards each other can be a threat to outsiders. Therefore, the expression homo homini lupus cuts both ways. If “man is wolf to man” he may well be highly cooperative among his kin or trusted circle, but dangerous to others. This has been described as “parochial altruism” (Bowles and Gintis 2011, 134). Think of the power of nationalism, where people show solidarity and even sacrifice to those of the same ethnicity or nationality, but hostility to others. This suggests that cooperation is strong in groups based on kinship and that “groupism” has both positive and negative implications. This will be explored in greater detail in the next chapter when looking at inter-ethnic relations within states.

Still, at some point, as there was a growing number of tribes that interacted, kinship groups must have realized that a war of every tribe against every tribe (to paraphrase Hobbes) reduced rather than increased the chances of survival. Furthermore, our brains developed and enabled us to (sometimes) override our basic instincts. As Julian Huxley (1947, 22) observed, mankind, although not the strongest or fastest of mammals, had the advantage of conceptual thought: “By means of his conscious purpose and his set of values, man has the power of substituting new and higher standards for change than those of mere survival and adaptation to immediate circumstances, which alone are inherent in pre-...

Índice

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. Why cooperate?
• 2. Cooperation within multi-ethnic states
• 3. Cooperation between states
• 4. Learning to cooperate
• 5. Institutionalizing cooperation
• 6. Cooperation for the future
• 7. Epilogue
• Index