Liberalism and Security 

By the 1980s, the dominance of military-political issues as the centre of security concerns was being questioned in several ways. The technology of nuclear weapons was largely mature, and deterrence theory had reached a point of intellectual and emotional exhaustion.

Except for a last surge of energy during the early 1980s caused by Reagan's 'Strategic Defence Initiative' (SDI) and 'Cold War II', the technological driver sustaining the militarisation of security in the West was beginning to lose force. After the Vietnam war, there was an increasing tendency in the West to question whether war was a cost-effective method for achieving a wide-range of political and economic objectives.

The unfolding of Gorbachev's programme during the later 1980s dealt a series of ever stronger blows against the ideological driver of militarised security, culminating in the dismantling of the communist challenge to market economics, and then in the dismantling of the Soviet Union itself. There was a growing awareness that war was disappearing, or in some cases had disappeared, as an option in relations amongst a substantial group of states.

The core group of this emergent security community was Western Europe, Japan and North America. Once Gorbachev assumed power and embarked on an explicit desecuritising of East-West relations it became possible to think that the Soviet Union might also join this war-free sphere. During this process there were substantial moves towards arms reduction. If war itself was fading away as a possibility amongst many of the leading powers in the system, then realist assumptions about the inherent primacy of military security became questionable, and hard liberal ones about the temporary necessity for military containment became redundant.

>Securitisation

Alongside the declining salience of the military agenda was the increasing securitisation of two issues that had traditionally been thought of as low politics: the international economy and the environment. In the case of the environment, the growing impact of humankind was transforming the natural environment from being a background constant into a foreground variable. Starting from concerns in the 1960s about pesticides, this grew steadily into a wide range of interconnected issues including climate change, biodiversity, resource depletion, pollution, and the threat from meteorites.

In the case of the economy, the securitisation process arose in part from the relative economic decline of the United States, and in part from reactions to the increasing liberalisation of the world economy, first in trade, and from the 1970s also in finance. In general, national economies became progressively more exposed to competition from other producers in a global market, and to ever more powerful transnational corporations and financial markets. This development gave rise to specific concerns about the ability of states to maintain independent capability for military production (and therefore mobilisation), and about the possibility of economic dependencies within the global market (particularly oil) being exploited for political ends. There were fears that the global market would generate more losers than winners, and that it would heighten existing inequalities both within and between states (manifested at the top of the range by US fears of decline, and at the bottom by developing country fears of exploitation, debt crises and marginalisation).

During the turbulence surrounding the ending of the Cold War, the changing nature of the security agenda itself became a focus of controversy. The virtual collapse of Cold War military concerns by the late 1980s, and the proliferating attachment of 'security' to an ever wider range of issues, raised protests from the security studies establishment that the concept of security was becoming debased. Traditionalists fought back both by reasserting conventional arguments about the enduring primacy of military security, and by raising the charge that widening the meaning of security beyond the military sector invited intellectual incoherence. The key strategy was to allow widening only inasmuch as this could be linked to concerns about the threat or use of force between political actors. In a landmark statement of the traditionalist position, Walt argues that security studies is about the phenomenon of war, and that it can be defined as 'the study of the threat, use, and control of military force'. Against those who want to widen the agenda outside this strictly military domain, he argues that this

'runs the risk of expanding "Security Studies" excessively; by this logic, issues such as pollution, disease, child abuse, or economic recessions could all be viewed as threats to "security". Defining the field in this way would destroy its intellectual coherence and make it more difficult to devise solutions to any of these important problems'.

Walt does allow 'economics and security' into his picture, but only as it relates to military issues, and not as economic security per se.

As its main defence against the wideners, the mainstream security establishment thus focused on the charge of intellectual incoherence, and retreated into a dogmatic military definition of security. It is curious that they relied on this relatively superficial argument when a much more serious and powerful line is available. Widening threatens the whole liberal project by bringing back into the realm of security many issues that liberals have sought, with considerable success, to desecuritise. To the extent that liberalism is defined as a desecuritising project, the unrestrained widening of the security agenda threatens both its conceptual foundations and its accomplishments. It is more than a little surprising that such a line of attack has not been used against the wideners, except in a limited way by Deudney (and in our own previous reflections). The wider agenda certainly seems to be more vulnerable to excesses of securitisation than the traditional military one (which is vulnerable enough by itself if taken to extreme). In the immediate wake of the Cold War, the lesson from the Soviet Union about the massive drawbacks of excessively wide securitisation stand exposed for all to see. In this perspective, widening the security agenda can be cast as a seriously retrograde move. It threatens the hard won desecuritising achievements of liberalism, and perhaps even of the Hobbesian Leviathan, over the past three centuries, and is out of line with the strong liberal imperatives towards more openness in the post-Cold War world.

Seen not as a product of the Cold War, but as part of the liberal programme of desecuritisation, the retreat of traditional security studies into the military sector makes clear sense. The liberal project to limit the scope of securitisation argues in favour of the traditionalists, with their narrow agenda, and against the wideners. Reserving security for the military sector has a pleasing 'last resort' ring about it, and fits comfortably with the broadly liberal ideology that is now enjoying ascendance. Demilitarisation by sector has been the characteristic liberal approach to desecuritisation, and in that sense traditional security studies can be seen, surprisingly, as one of its products (and not just of realism, as is generally assumed). For what is the traditionalist style of security studies about if not the isolation of the military sector as embodying 'security'?

There is a deep contradiction in this situation. On the one hand, the core security ideas of classical liberalism about the benign effect of free trade and democratisation stand triumphant. Now freed from the securitising imperatives of the Cold War, they dominate many of the most powerful states and societies on the planet. Although far from universally successful, liberalism has seen the rolling back of force in the domestic politics and economies of many states, the spread of democratic norms and practices, and the widespread adoption of more open economic relations between states. Within the Western core, there is a degree of international institutionalisation and socialisation that has virtually ruled out war amongst the states. By almost any measure, the liberal desecuritisation project had by the late twentieth century achieved spectacular success. The ending of the Cold War, and the surrender of communism to the market, underlined this success as much as it contributed to it. And yet, on the other hand, this moment of triumph is accompanied by a durable and impressive movement to widen the security agenda across practically the whole range of human activity, seemingly bringing into question the very foundations of the classical liberal project. How is this apparent contradiction to be explained? Ironically, as we hope to show, it is the very success of the liberal project that now gives rise to the demand for a wider security agenda, for a reinvention of security in terms other than military.

To understand liberalism as the cause of the wider security agenda, one needs to focus on economic liberalism, and especially on the praxis of the global market economy. Along with democratisation, market economics played a big role in liberalism's apparent success in solving the problem of war for a substantial part of the international system. But now that liberalism, and especially economic liberalism, has become both the hegemonic ideology and the dominant mode of organisation, a new framework for (in)security unfolds that is quite unlike the Cold War one. With liberalism defining many of the most important political and economic spaces on the planet, it simultaneously spreads the classical version of the liberal peace, and opens up a new set of insecurities. The new agenda of insecurity arises in large part from the operation of the global market economy itself. It is not an aim of liberalism (quite the contrary), but an often unintended and unanticipated effect of liberal policy in practice. It is partly about economic insecurity directly, and partly about the spillover of effects from the operation of global markets into the military, political, societal and environmental sectors.

In addition, the rise of liberalism to hegemonic status increases the pressure that other liberal ideas, most notably individualism and human rights, put on societies that do not share them. The liberal peace is not universal, and in many respects it is imperial towards the remaining non-liberal societies. Finally, democratisation often adds to the widening of security because the new forms of insecurity will be felt and articulated by actors other than the traditional state representative. Because of the political and legal space opened up within and between states by liberal policies, these actors enjoy a higher degree of autonomy and freedom of action than before.

Barry Buzan is Professor of International Studies at the University of Westminster and a member of CSD. Ole Waever is Senior Research Fellow at the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute. This is an extract from a longer article also entitled 'Liberalism and Security'.