State Transformation and New Security Dilemmas

State Transformation and
New Security Dilemmas
Georg Sørensen
The entire discipline of International Relations (IR) is predicated on the idea
that sovereign states are valuable places. They are precious because they provide—
or are at least expected to provide—basic social values for their citizens:
security, freedom, order, justice and welfare. Historically, other types of social
organizations have catered to these values, for example, bands, tribes, clans, or
ethnic and religious organizations. After all, sovereign states have only been
around for a comparatively short period of time (some hundreds or thousands
of years, depending on definition), whereas people have been around for about
half a million years, since homo sapiens evolved from homo erectus.
Yet, ever since sovereign states became the universally dominant form of
political organization, the major responsibility for provision of basic social
values has come to rest with them. Political theory reflects the unique importance
awarded to the state. Hobbes taught that security—and ultimately other
essential social values—derives from the state. The state must be able to provide
a sufficient level of protection of the population from external as well as
from internal threats. Without the state, there can be no protection; people
will live in the state of nature, where anarchy will reign because egoistic
humans will get at each other’s throats. Law and order, not to mention welfare,
are absent: life is “solitary, nasty, brutish and short.” Under the protection of
the state, by contrast, people can enjoy relative safety and thus pursue happiness
and well-being—“felicity” in Hobbes’s term.
With the creation of states, the domestic anarchy of the state of nature is
moved to the international level: “In all times, kings and persons of sovereign
authority, because of their independency, are in continual jealousies, and in the
state and posture of gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their eyes
fixed on one another” (Hobbes 1946: 101). Using that starting point, John
Herz could, in 1950, formulate what we may call the classical security
dilemma. Sovereign states taking measures to make themselves more secure
may well increase their level of protection, but, given the existence of international
anarchy—the absence of centralized authority—that very activity will lead to greater insecurity of other states. In a self-help system, the creation of
more security for one state is inevitably the creation of more insecurity for
other states. “Striving to attain security from attack, [states] are driven to
acquire more and more power in order to escape the power of others. This, in
turn, renders the others more insecure and compels them to prepare for the
worst. Since none can ever feel entirely secure in such a world of competing
units, power competition ensues, and the vicious circle of security and power
accumulation is on” (Herz, 1950: 157).
This classical understanding of the security dilemma has been the guiding
light of the profession for more than half a century. It’s not entirely wrong
of course; anarchy has led to security dilemmas in accordance with Herz’s view
many times. Still, the classical view is highly misleading because it is based on
erroneous assumptions and because it leaves security problems of fundamental
importance in the dark. It was misleading historically, but it is perhaps especially
misleading today because states have been transformed in ways that have
significant implications for their security dilemmas.
That is the argument this chapter aims to develop.1 I review the problematic
assumptions first. That leads to an emphasis on how the Herz–Hobbesian
security dilemma is merely the most important one under certain, specific
conditions (i.e., in a world of modern states). The next step in the argument is
the claim that ours is no longer (and never was) a world of modern states.
Today’s world is inhabited by different main types of state. Postmodern states
and postcolonial states are among the most important of these types. The distinctive
security dilemmas pertaining to these states are then identified.
PROBLEMS WITH THE CLASSICAL SECURITY DILEMMA
I focus on three problems: (1) the omission of not looking inside the state, but
only at relations between states; (2) the assumption that the state provides a
framework for ‘felicity’; and (3) the assumption that violent conflict always
lurks between states in anarchy.
The first point—not looking inside the state—is emphasized by Herz
when he speaks of the hard shell of the modern state that protects it from foreign
penetration.When this hard shell is in place, the state is “defensible and,
at least to some extent, secure in its relation with other units” (Herz, 1959: 40).
Security has to do with protection from outside threat, from the armed might
of competing states. In this context, what goes on inside the state is not terribly
interesting. Given protection from outside threat, the ‘good life’ is free to
unfold in the domestic realm.
Hobbes reasoned along the same lines as we saw earlier. Protection by the
state leads to security, order, and the good life. But why should there be protection
with the state? Why would the state elite not be as self-interested and power-loving as anyone else? Herz actually hinted, in an earlier analysis, that
domestic power relationships might be a serious security problem (Herz,
1951: 28), but he does not pursue the issue. As with Hobbes, he assumes away
the problem of bad and self-seeking state elites through a strict specification
of demands on the sovereign for protection of people and property. That is, a
Leviathan in Hobbes’s terms by definition honors the social contract in creating
the basis for the good life of the citizens. The difficulty is, of course, that
this is not a valid assumption; we cannot simply assume that security is taken
care of when the hard shell is in order.We know that many of the most serious
security problems for people have domestic rather than international
roots. In most cases the security dilemma emerges from a peculiar interrelationship
between domestic and international elements. The analysis of this
whole relationship has been cut off by much of IR theory because it has omitted
to look inside the individual state and, instead, focused exclusively on
interstate relations.
Another argument in favor of purely systemic analysis comes from Kenneth
Waltz. His neorealism builds its systemic analysis of the balance of power
on the idea that domestic structures of states can be disregarded because they
can be considered basically homogenous ‘like units’. The argument is this:
given that they want to survive, states are driven, under conditions of anarchy,
to emulate the more successful states in the system, the theory says simply that
as some do relatively well, others will emulate them or “fall by the wayside”
(Waltz, 1979: 118). Socialization and competition are the two principal ways
in which the anarchic structure affects states. They lead to the creation of like
units. Therefore, we need not look inside the states; they are like units anyway.
Waltz’s view is clearly wrong. Anarchy need not lead to like units through
competition. Innovation can lead in entirely new directions. Moreover, the
international society of states can suspend competition and accept the persistence
of weak entities, as in the case of decolonization. In sum, the arguments
for avoiding an analysis of domestic conditions when it comes to security
dilemmas are not valid.
That leads to the second problematic point, the assumption that the state
provides a framework for felicity. This assumption is only valid if the state in
question has certain characteristic structures; in their absence there is no
framework for felicity. It would appear that the modern state—the type of
state that had emerged in the industrialized countries of Western Europe and
North America by the mid-twentieth century and then spread to Japan and a
few other places—provides the framework for felicity, that is, the good life. But
in the early days of the Westphalian state—say, from the fifteenth through the
nineteenth centuries—these modern domestic structures were not in place
and, consequently, security and the good for citizens were not in place either.
Charles Tilly and others’ description of state formation does not provide
evidence to support that states in those days were places of security and the good life for the citizens (Tilly, 1990). Nor were citizens secure in such states
as Stalin’s Soviet Union; Stalin’s obsession with domestic enemies sent 10 million
people to the labor camps. Other millions died in his regime of terror and
torture. The point bears repetition: the arguments for avoiding an analysis of
domestic conditions when it comes to security dilemmas are not valid.
The final point concerns the assumption that violent conflict always lurks
between states in anarchy. The critique that anarchy need not be as ‘raw’ as
indicated by realists and neorealists has appeared in many different versions.
The most important of these are probably the International Society, the liberal,
and the constructivist views. All agree that cooperation and common rules
are possible in the absence of a centralized authority above the states. Not all
would go as far as the constructivist claim that “anarchy is what states make of
it” (Wendt, 1992), but it is not necessary to go into these details here. The
major general point is this: security dilemmas are connected not only to international
relations between states but also to domestic structures inside states.
Both in the domestic and the international realm, a variety of security dilemmas
are possible. A much more nuanced analysis of security dilemmas than the
discipline has been able to offer so far is called for. Especially, the domestic
basis of the security dilemma has not been much addressed by IR theory, with
a few notable exceptions (Berki, 1986; Buzan, 1991).
The interplay between domestic and international calls for much more
concrete analysis that can be offered here. I propose to look at some major
developments of sovereign statehood during the last half of the twentieth century.
Recall that the classical Herz–Hobbesian security dilemma is relevant for
the modern state. But, in ideal-typical terms, there are at least two other main
types of state in the present international system: the postmodern and the
postcolonial state. They are identified as follows and their peculiar security
dilemmas are briefly discussed.
MODERN, POSTMODERN AND POSTCOLONIAL STATES
States always change. There was no modern state in the seventeenth, eighteenth,
and nineteenth centuries. There were developments—political, economic,
social, and other changes—that would eventually lead to the modern
state. Transformation is therefore the rule and not the exception. States have
always undergone development and change; the present period of transformation
merely adds a new chapter to that story.
It was demonstrated earlier that specific security dilemmas are tied in with
particular structures of statehood. I have indicated that the classical
Herz–Hobbesian security dilemma is relevant for the modern state. The basic
structure of the modern state is set forth in Figure 5.1.

The modern state provides the context for the good life; the centralized
system of democratic rule creates the basis for domestic peace and order as well
as protection from external threat.Nationhood provides community that binds
nation and state together; the national economy provides the basis for welfare
as well as for resources to defend the realm. The existence of government,
nationhood, and the national economy are the cohesion parameters that combine
to forge the link between national security and the security of individual
citizens. Modern states are characterized by a high level of social cohesion; in
that sense they are strong states (Buzan, 1991: 97). But strong states in this
sense emerged relatively late. The security dilemma in previous forms of state,
as well as in contemporary postcolonial and postmodern states, is different
because their domestic structures are different.
So Herz was right in connecting his security dilemma with the modern
state (although he was wrong in implying that the security dilemma in the
Soviet Union looked the same). But we know that the modern state has not
stood still. The modern state of the mid-twentieth century has been transformed.
We cannot be entirely sure about what has taken its place because the
changes that are transpiring are still in process. Major developments are easier
to identify in retrospect; the development of the modern state, for example,
was under way for many decades, even hundreds of years. We now know, in
retrospect, that the modern state came to full maturity by the mid-twentieth
century. But we are much less sure where the current process of state change
will take us, because that process has only lasted a few decades and is still
unfolding.
That is why I suggest the label of “the postmodern state” as a way of summarizing
those changes still under way. The post- prefix is an indicator that we are not quite clear about what shape and form the postmodern state will eventually
take. But at the same time we are quite certain that it is different from
the modern state. Our present situation can be compared with the observers of
the modern state during the first part of the nineteenth century: they knew that
big political, economic, and other changes were taking place, but they were not
quite sure where they were going to lead in the end because the modern state
came to full maturity only many years later.We also know that today big political,
economic, and other changes are taking place, but we are not quite sure
where they are going to lead. Still, we want to make sense of what is going on.
The ideal type of the postmodern state is an attempt to do just that.
So what are the changes from modern to postmodern? The economy first.
There has been a transformation of the economy, from a national economy
toward a globalized economy. A globalized economy means deep integration,
especially among the advanced economies. Transnational corporations organize
production chains across borders, on a regional and global basis. Production
by transnationals outside their home countries exceeds world trade.Trade,
in turn, is typically intra-industry and intrafirm. Instead of purely national
financial systems, a globally integrated financial market is emerging. So we
must conclude that the economies of the advanced states are no longer aptly
described as “segregated national economies.” They have been transformed to
globalized economies, where the major part of economic activity is embedded
in cross-border networks. As a result, the “national” economy is much less selfsustained
than it used to be.
What about politics? Governance is changing from an activity conducted
by national administrations over well-defined territorial realms to an international,
transgovernmental, and transnational activity that includes not only
governments and traditional international organizations, but also nongovernmental
organizations and other nonstate actors. There is great variation across
countries and regions; clearly, regional cooperation has developed the most in
Western Europe. But the general trend is away from governance in the context
of national government, toward multilevel governance in several interlocked
arenas overlapping each other. Some of that governance reflects a more
intense conventional cooperation between independent states; some of it
reflects a more profound transformation toward supranational governance in a
context of highly interconnected societies.
The last item is nationhood. The nation is both a community of citizens
(i.e., political, social, and economic rights and obligations) and a community
of sentiment (people with a common linguistic, cultural, and historical identity).
The community of citizens is being transformed by three factors: (1) the
emergence of citizenship rights granted from other instances than the sovereign
state and rights given to nonnationals; (2) the growth of regional movements;
and (3) a reduced ability of states to deliver on social and welfare rights.
The community of sentiment is challenged because the creation of identity is becoming individualized; that gives increased salience to collective identity
‘above’ the nation. In addition, various resistance identities (e.g., religious,
ethnic, or narrow nationalistic identities) are of growing importance. In other
words, nationhood is being transformed to incorporate new aspects. A major
element of that transformation is that nationhood increasingly includes supranational
elements, both with respect to the community of citizens and the
community of sentiment. A further development is that collective loyalties are
projected away from the state, toward other entities.
Taken together, as an ideal type, the postmodern state contains the features
shown in Figure 5.2.
The transformation from modern to postmodern statehood discussed earlier
is focused on the advanced states in the triad. This transformation does not
accurately portray the states in the Third World, particularly the weakest
states, primarily concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, it is
clear that the weakest states are qualitatively different from the modern states.
So how do we characterize these weak states?
Before answering that question, a few words about terminology. “Weak”
is not an optimal term, because many will think of states that are weak with
regard to military power and that is not the meaning here. Sometimes the term
“weak” is used in another way, to designate states that have “strong” societies
and “weak” states (such as the United States) in contrast to states that have
“weak” societies and “strong” states (such as France), but that is not what is
meant here either. As the term is used here, the weak state is weak in terms of
all three core aspects of statehood: government, nationhood, and economy.
The typical weak state in this sense has a colonial past: it is a postcolonial state
(states can be weak without having a colonial past, but that is not the typical
pattern).
So the state we are looking to characterize is the weak, postcolonial state
(see Figure 5.3). It has not undergone a transformation from modern to postcolonial because it was never modern in the first place. It is a state with a
radically different type of background than the modern states of the triad.We
need to know about it because there are several such states in the world today.
The next sections will discuss the peculiar security dilemmas pertaining to
postmodern and weak postcolonial states, respectively. I am not claiming that
an analysis of these ideal types will exhaust all empirical cases of sovereign
statehood in the world today. There are some major states, including China,
India, Russia, and Brazil, that are different mixtures of modern, postmodern,
and postcolonial. They will not be treated in what follows. However, I hope to
demonstrate how the security dilemma varies in conjunction with qualitatively
different structures of statehood. The reader is also referred to the other contributions
to this volume, several of which demonstrate variations in the security
dilemma in different contexts.
THE SECURITY DILEMMA OF POSTMODERN STATES
Relations between postmodern states do not correspond to a Hobbesian picture
of anarchy in the sense of anarchy as “the state of nature.” It does not even
correspond to a more moderate realist picture of sovereign states in an anarchy
with rules and institutions, where the balance of power is one significant institution.
Among postmodern states there is legitimate authority. States continue
to be formally independent, but they are increasingly tied to each other
through networks of multilevel governance. Even if much of that cooperation
falls short of the supranational governance especially developed in some areas
of EU cooperation, the general trend is for more rather than less legitimate
authority between postmodern states.
Peace between postmodern states is overdetermined because several different
items each help produce a situation in which violent conflict is out of the question. These countries are liberal democracies, their level of cooperation
through international institutions is very high, and they are highly interdependent,
both in economic and other areas. In addition, they have developed
a common Western civic identity at the core of which is “a consensus around
a set of norms and principles, most importantly political democracy, constitutional
government, individual rights, private property-based economic systems,
and toleration of diversity in non-civic areas of ethnicity and religion”
(Deudney & Ikenberry, 1999: 193).
So it is easy to understand why commentators believe that war between
such states has become “subrationally unthinkable” (Mueller, 1989) and that
the classical basis for violent conflict (i.e., aggrandizement through the conquest
of territory) is historically obsolete (Rosecrance, 1995). The traditional
security dilemma, based on anarchy as a state of nature, has been eliminated.
Yet these countries still perceive possible traditional threats from modern or
modernizing states, or even from weak postcolonial states, so the traditional
security dilemma is not completely eradicated.
At the same time, postmodern states face new challenges. The first set of
problems concerns the identification of the objects of security. Take the economy.
For the modern state, it was easy to define economic security. It had to
do with safeguarding the national economy and securing access to necessary
resources, finance, and markets (cf. Buzan, 1991: 19). But when economies are
deeply integrated across borders and different ‘national’ economies depend
very significantly on each other for their reproduction, what then is the object
of economic security: the larger economic space or merely the ‘national’ segment
of it (to the extent that that segment can be singled out)? Insofar as
national economic autonomy is no longer a viable option because the level of
economic welfare and economic strength depends on continued successful
economic integration across borders, there must be a corresponding shift in the
object of economic security, away from the purely national economy, toward
the regional/global economic framework in which this economy is now irrevocably
embedded. Furthermore, political control over the economy becomes
much more difficult because territorially limited regulations cannot effectively
cover the relevant, larger economic space. So political measures to produce
such core values as growth and welfare, as well as securing the economic basis
for state power, must be increasingly challenged.
What about the political level? Again, there would appear to be a shift in
the object of security.When the national political systems are parts of a complex
of multilevel governance, the object of security is the entire structure of
that governance including the supranational level, not merely the national and
lower levels. This calls for a redefinition of political security. At the same time,
the provision of other core values in addition to the economic ones previously
mentioned faces new problems; this is the core message in Susan Strange’s
analysis of the Westfailure system, where she focuses on problems concerning environmental damage, financial infrastructure, and social inequality (Strange,
1999: 346).
There are also challenges to democracy in the postmodern context, and
therefore challenges to the social value of freedom. So far, democracy has only
developed within the context of independent states. Many theorists of
democracy argue that the sovereign nation-state (i.e., the modern state) is a
necessary precondition for democracy. There are obvious problems with
democracy outside of that framework. First, there is no evident demos, that is,
there is no well-defined political community external to that context. No
demos, no democracy. Second, multilevel governance is not based on a welldefined
constitutional framework; therefore, core decision makers are not
subject to sufficient democratic accountability and control (Dahl, 1999: 31).
In sum, the democratic link between rulers and ruled is challenged in the new
context of postmodern statehood.
Nationhood is at the core of what Buzan calls “the idea of the state” (1991:
69). In the modern state, the identity of the nation was strong; a major aspect
of national security was therefore the security of the nation. Strengthening collective
identity with reference to the nation meant strengthening (the idea of )
the state. Under postmodern conditions, by contrast, collective identities are
projected away from the nation; they are much more differentiated and they
develop in ways that may weaken rather than strengthen the idea of the state.
The definition of national security in identity terms is much more difficult
under postmodern conditions because the dynamics of change in identities
turn them into a moving and more complex target. Collective identities are
therefore no longer linked to the sociopolitical cohesion and thus to the
strength of the state in any well-defined way. Postmodern statehood puts the
component of the state that concerns the idea of the state on the agenda in
ways that are not at all foreseen in most of the current analyses of national
security. Some commentators find that the events of September 11 will reverse
the new trend and create a return of the state; I comment on the consequences
of September 11 later.
I have briefly discussed what the changes from modern to postmodern
might mean in security terms for the economic, political, and nationhood
level of the state. But there are other aspects of the new security agenda for
postmodern states. One additional major aspect is the emergence of what
sociologists call a risk society; another concerns the security agenda after September
11.
The idea of a risk society is linked to that fact that postmodern societies
are densely interconnected, not merely with each other, but also with other
countries. That is, postmodern countries are embedded in a globalized social
context. Such a context is also a globalized risk environment in which risks are
“largely without boundaries, not limited in space, and because they are also likely to affect future generations, not limitable in time either” (Lash, 1993). It
is the influential analysis by Ulrich Beck (1992) that has termed this state of
affairs “risk society,” indicating that sovereign borders provide little in terms of
effective protection in the postmodern context. A large number of different
problems and risks emerging from single societies can therefore be quickly
transmitted to other societies. Beck’s focus is on environmental problems, but
there are others, such as disease, crime, drugs, migration, and economic crises.
The challenge to effective governance under these conditions is to continue to
be able to provide the basic social values of security, order, justice, freedom, and
welfare.
The most serious new challenge to security has emerged in full after September
11. The world was familiar with terrorism, of course. It was never confined
to specific areas, such as the Middle East. There had been a number of
serious attacks, also in the Western world. But we had not realized that terrorists
were ready to commit mass murder of innocent civilians. Nor had we
thought that it could be done so relatively easy; no need to be able to start or
land an aircraft, merely to fly it straight. Bring a plastic knife on board—hardly
a recipe for sophisticated, resource-demanding, technology-intensive operations.
Moreover, there appear to be variants of chemical or biological terror
that are not too hard to initiate either.
September 11 revealed how vulnerable open societies are to ruthless terrorism.
There is a peculiar security dilemma here: how to create sufficient
protection of the open societies without violating their major, defining quality—
namely, their openness. Sufficient protection will require surveillance,
undercover intelligence, and control of the behavior and movements of civilians,
the citizens. Openness requires freedom of movement, speech, organization,
and behavior in general, within constitutional limits. This dilemma is not
entirely new, of course; it was present during the Cold War also. But it has
become much more pertinent after September 11.
The dilemma has another dimension, related to the struggle against terrorism.
How far are open, democratic societies allowed to go in the name of
combating terrorism? Are they allowed to produce as many or more civilian
casualties in the campaign against terrorism than the terrorists themselves
murdered in the first place? Are they allowed to disregard international law in
the name of fighting terrorism? The immediate answer to these questions
would appear to be no, of course not. But the events in Afghanistan and Iraq
have demonstrated the acute relevance of the dilemma.
The final major difficulty with mass-murder terrorism is that—unlike conventional
war—one does not probably defeat it once and for all. It is, rather, an
ongoing struggle in which one successful campaign risks producing new adversaries.
At the same time, there is a complex set of causal layers behind this kind
of terrorism. They include: (a) traditional Muslim elites in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere unable to accommodate processes of modernization and Westernization;
(b) the Middle East conflict, especially the continuing clashes between
Palestinians and Israelis; (c) the existence of weak states such as Afghanistan
(more on this later); and (d) socioeconomic inequalities pushed by uneven economic
globalization—more than one billion people exist on a dollar a day or
less; another two billion on two dollars or less. That’s half of the world’s population.
Yet there is no simple relationship between these underlying causes and
the emergence of mass-murder terrorism; they are structural conditions, not the
triggers, the concrete actors. In short, we don’t really know how much more terrorism
these underlying factors will actually help create.
September 11 has produced another result with at least potentially positive
consequences for the security of consolidated states: it has presented us
with a common enemy. Recall the comment of Colin Powell in 1991, when he
was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “I’m running out of demons. I’m
running out of enemies. I’m down to Castro and Kim Il Sung” (Cover Story,
1991: 28). Mass-murder terrorism is a new common enemy. It will surely add
another dimension to cooperation between postmodern states. But it will also
increase the debate among friends about who is to pay for what and how each
can best make the appropriate contributions; this is the issue on the table in
current discussions in NATO between the United States and Europe. The
expansion of NATO will not make the subject easier to handle. The prospect
of a common enemy raises an additional set of problems: how far could or
should that lead to tolerance of, for example, Russian abuses in Chechnya, or
to cordial relationships with dictators in Pakistan and elsewhere?
In sum, the security dilemma of postmodern states is qualitatively different
from the classical Herz–Hobbesian security dilemma. The latter is relevant
for modern states, but it does not sufficiently incorporate the security consequences
of the transition from modern to postmodern statehood. Postmodern
states have developed legitimate authority between them, based on a set of
common values and principles.War between them is out of the question.
At the same time, it has become much more difficult to define the substantial
content of national security in economic, political, and nationhood
terms. That is because under postmodern conditions the economies, the polities,
and the collective identities of citizens are no longer neatly confined
behind sovereign, territorial borders. Therefore, the standard way of protecting
the state—by strengthening the hard shell behind which the good life can be
pursued—is no longer a feasible security strategy. Because postmodern statehood
does not simply involve the amalgamation of states to larger units, the
hard shell cannot be established at any higher level either. The objects of security
therefore remain suspended in a space that is not easily territorially demarcated
and confined. That is a challenge to all conventional security strategies,
because they are predicated on such demarcated and confined spaces as their
objects of security.
Furthermore, there are new challenges to the postmodern state’s provision
of basic social values. This includes the emergence of a risk society and the new
security challenge to open societies defined by September 11. Whatever the
future trajectories of these challenges may be, there can be no doubt that postmodern
societies face a security dilemma very different from the classical
Herz–Hobbesian dilemma.
THE SECURITY DILEMMA OF THE
WEAK, POSTCOLONIAL STATE
The weak, postcolonial state also faces a distinct security dilemma, different
from both the classical and the postmodern dilemma. Seen from the
Herz–Hobbesian viewpoint, the mere existence of the weak states in the international
system is a paradox: these entities are so unable to defend themselves
against any serious external threat that they could most easily be swallowed by
the much stronger states of the North. Yet this has not happened and there is
no indication whatsoever that it will happen. The weak states are not involved
in any kind of serious competition for survival in the international system. The
Waltzian maxim of the weak needing to emulate the strong or “fall by the wayside”
(1979: 118) is not valid for them.
They don’t face any serious external threat because they are protected by
the norms of the international system, norms that are backed by great powers
and other substantial states. These norms were created in the context of decolonization.
First, colonies were given the right to independence in a 1960 U.N.
declaration that explicitly rejected demands for any kind of political or economic
substance as a necessary precondition. Status as a colony became a fully
sufficient ticket to sovereignty.What emerged from decolonization was a new
type of very weak player in the international system.
Second, according to the new norms, borders are sacrosanct. As the main
rule, they can only be changed with the consent of the affected parties. That
new norm amounts to a kind of life insurance for weak states: no matter how
weak, they will never be gulped up by stronger states. Yet this can also be a pass
for predatory state elites to run ‘their’ states into the ground: no matter what
the extent of misery and dissolution, a judicially sovereign state does not cease
to exist; it continues to possess formal, juridical sovereignty. Even at the peak
of violent disintegration, for example, the international society has continued
to pretend that there was such a thing as a Somalian state. The weak are not
taken over by the strong—they are merely allowed to disintegrate.
How did postcolonial state elites become predatory in the first place?
Because of the overall domestic situation in the newly independent states. As
already indicated, there was a lack of substantial statehood upon independence.
The most important element appears to be the lack of cultural and political community. Independence meant independence for colonial territories, defined
by colonial borders. The people inside those borders were communities only in
the sense that they shared a border drawn by others. Their idea of nationalism
was a negative one: get rid of the colonizers. When that project succeeded,
there was no positive notion of community left over. The attempt by some
elites to create community was quickly abandoned. What emerged instead
were monopoly states: “Confronted by weak administrative structures, fragile
economies, and in some cases dangerous sources of domestic opposition, political
leaders sought to entrench themselves in power by using the machinery of
the state to suppress or coopt any rival organization. . . . Rather than acknowledging
the weakness of their position, and accepting the limitations on their
power which this imposed, they chose to up the stakes and went for broke”
(Clapham, 1996: 59).
Political community was thus not created; the communities that prevailed
were the different ethnic subgroups that competed for access to state power
and resources. State elites based themselves on patron–client relationships
involving a select minority of such groups, shutting off the others from influence
and resources. The predatory state was in place.
A predatory state is obviously no source of protection for the people: no
hard shell and no basis for the good life. It is exactly the opposite: such states
are sources of danger, including mortal danger for their populations. By no
means do they provide security, order, or welfare. In weak, postcolonial states,
the Herz–Hobbesian security dilemma has been turned on its head: because of
the state, life for citizens can be solitary, nasty, brutish, and short. Meanwhile,
the international community, staunchly supported by domestic state elites,
agrees on one crucial point: let the weak state persist, no matter what.
The human cost of this peculiar kind of weak statehood has been
extremely high. The three conflicts in Sudan, Ethiopia, and Mozambique each
cost the lives of 500,000 to one million people (Copson, 1994: 29); casualties
in Angola, Somalia, Uganda, and the Congo have also been very high.
How could it come to that? Who is responsible for the creation of weak
states in the first place? One school puts most of the blame on external interests.
The early colonizers were set on making a profit, not on creating good
conditions for development of the colonies. After independence, dependency
theorists claimed that postcolonial states were more or less doomed to underdevelopment
as a consequence of their inferior status in the global capitalist
system. It is certainly true that globalization is uneven and that there have been
losers in the periphery of the system. But is it not true that postcolonial status
or even a low initial position in the global capitalist hierarchy in itself means
condemnation to underdevelopment.When it comes to the poorest countries
in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, they have not been underdeveloped by
global capital because global capital has not invested there; markets and production
facilities have simply not been sufficiently attractive.
By contrast, the successes of Taiwan, South Korea, and others demonstrate
how it was possible for newly independent countries to exploit the
opportunities of the world market. At the same time, world market integration
in itself is no guarantee for development success. Appropriate domestic conditions
are critical, so both domestic and international circumstances are always
in the picture.
Another tack on the question about the emergence of weak states is to
focus directly on the worst cases in sub-Saharan Africa. For example, how
could Mobutu’s terrible rule in Zaire persist for so long? As a head of a desperately
poor country, he was highly dependent on external interests. The book
by Sean Kelly, America’s Tyrant (1993), records how Mobutu relied on the CIA
to save him from coup attempts by rival military factions on more than one
occasion. One explanation for Mobutu then, is that he could conduct his dirty
deals under CIA protection—he was a puppet on a string. This is not all
wrong, but it is misleading in a basic sense because it stipulates that Mobutu
was completely in the pocket of the CIA. He was not, for the simple reason
that he was the leader of a sovereign state. Formal independence is not unimportant.
At the moment of independence a new political, economic, social, and
cultural sphere is created that has some substantial amount of autonomy. The
new ‘inside’ can still be influenced by external forces, of course, but the conditions
of operation are very different from before. On the one hand, there is a
new need for the outsider to find domestic allies; that implies some sort of bargaining
situation between insiders and outsiders. Mobutu was not merely in
the pocket of the CIA; he bargained with them: you do this for me, I do this
for you. At the same time, external intervention in weak states cannot be conducted
in complete ignorance of the rules of international society. After all, the
basic norm of judicial sovereignty is non-intervention, which means that acts
of intervention have to be justified. So both in the domestic and the international
sphere the rules of the game change in ways that provide increased
autonomy to domestic actors. And, in the final analysis, the perpetrators are
overwhelmingly local, that is, the violent conflicts are between domestic
groups mostly fighting for the control of the state.
What can be done about the peculiar security dilemma of weak, postcolonial
states? Overall economic and political development is of course preferable.
The last four decades have not seen much of that in these countries, for reasons
that cannot be explored here. Short of that, some elements of order and
a more responsive state would help: such processes of democratization have
not fared very well either (Sørensen, 1998a). Some commentators recommend
secession as a way forward because that would separate conflicting ethnic
groups from each other, but this also opens a whole new set of problems
(Bartkus, 1999). In sum, there are no easy ways out, so the security dilemma
of weak, postcolonial states will most probably be around for some considerable
time. In a few cases, such as the current Musharref regime in Pakistan, the United States will provide support in order to avoid a complete state failure
that will let Pakistan fall prey to uncontrollable terrorism, but that is no
general solution to the problems of weak statehood.
CONCLUSION
States always change. When they do, it has implications for their security
dilemmas. Specific security dilemmas are connected to particular structures of
statehood. The classical Herz–Hobbesian security dilemma is relevant for the
modern state. But the classical security dilemma is by no means an appropriate
tool for a comprehensive understanding of security in earlier forms of state.
Nor does it accurately depict security dilemmas in postmodern and weak, postcolonial
states. Behind these problems is the one-sided fixation of the classical
security dilemma on relations between states. The classical security dilemma
does not make sense unless the increased power of states that is the driving
force of the dilemma is meaningfully connected to the protection and safety of
people inside the state. That premise is true for the modern state, but not for
many other types of state.
Against this background, a further examination of security dilemmas in
relation to different types of state is called for. Every state is of course unique,
and in that sense every security dilemma has its peculiar features. I have suggested
that in order to identify more general patterns, we look for major (ideal)
types of states in the present international system. I zoomed in on two such
types, the postmodern and the weak, postcolonial state.
Each of these types is characterized by particular security dilemmas.
Between postmodern states, war is out of the question. But national security is
much more difficult to define because in basic ways these states are no longer
precisely defined in territorial terms. Furthermore, the notion of a risk society
as well as the vulnerabilities exposed by September 11 constitute new serious
challenges to security for the populations of postmodern states. Weak postcolonial
states turn Hobbes on its head: the state, dominated by self-seeking
elites, is the most serious threat to the security of the population. In addition,
there is no external threat of extermination; to the contrary: the persistence of
weak statehood is guaranteed by the international system.
States will keep changing, so new security dilemmas are bound to emerge.
There are many and varied sources of changes in statehood: processes of economic
and political modernization may be successful or may fail. Groups in
society may be mobilized in new ways. When states change in major ways,
their security dilemmas also change. Postmodern and weak postcolonial states
are unstable types almost by definition because they contain various problematic
features. But postmodern states are not about to amalgamate into some kind of federation, and weak postcolonial states will not swiftly become developed.
Therefore, these states and their security dilemmas will be major elements
of the international system for several decades of the twenty-first
century.
NOTES
1. I have discussed the subject of this chapter at length in Sørensen, G. (2001).
Some formulations in what follows draw on that work.