A glance at the daily headlines offers negative confirmation of the urgent need for long-term thinking about security. North Korea and Darfur do occasionally dislodge Iraq, Iran and the politics of the wider middle east from their pre-eminent position on the international security agenda - but not often, and not for long. Similarly, at the level of domestic debates on public safety in the post-9/11 west, few countries get beyond terrorism as the issue of number-one concern. While this is unsurprising and to an extent understandable, it also betrays a political and media tendency to address short-term pressures while neglecting strategic thinking that looks forward a generation and more.
Ian Kearns is deputy director of the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) and deputy chair of the IPPR’s Commission on National Security Also by Ian Kearns in openDemocracy: “How far can we regulate the online world?” (12 June 2002) “Voting as civic duty: a response to Adam Lent” (5 June 2006)
At its worst, this tendency manifests itself in the view, held by too many western policymakers, that if they could just extract themselves from Iraq, kick-start the middle-east peace process and get on top of al-Qaida, then it would be possible to return to business as usual in the post-cold-war, pre-9/11 world. This is a dangerous and misguided view that, if it is not addressed, will carry a heavy price.
Furthermore, current and more immediate security difficulties are obscuring two fundamental and long-term drivers of the security landscape: climate change and globalisation.
Behind the headlines
Climate change is real, man-made, and there is already sufficient understanding of its likely effects to know it is going to have serious security impacts. These will involve direct loss of life due to severe weather events, but also be the result of increased conflict brought about by large-scale population displacement from coastal areas, food scarcity brought about by loss of arable land, and increased pressure on scarce resources in several areas that are already conflict hotspots. Military establishments in most western countries are busy pointing this out to their political masters, not only for self-serving reasons to do with winning larger budgets but also because such a world is a genuinely frightening prospect.
Globalisation, though now debated much more in policy circles, has not often been framed as a security issue. Policymakers have focused their attention on changing patterns of investment and trade, and on the implications of these for jobs and growth on the one hand and for the future geo-economic landscape on the other. Relatively little attention has been paid to the serious security consequences of the global communications revolution, or to the impact of the greater ease and declining cost of transportation. This is no small omission since both have resulted in a globalised media, greater ease of knowledge acquisition and dissemination, and increased people movement. While these consequences will be familiar to openDemocracy readers, the point is that a new strategic and security landscape has emerged, and not enough is being done to acknowledge or respond to it.
Globalisation means power is undeniably shifting between the states and regions of the world. But just as importantly:
- Terrorist groups are now mounting an ideological challenge to western democracy by using improved global communications to expose and to highlight the apparent hypocrisy in western behaviour
- Organised crime networks, people traffickers and terrorists are organising across state borders, and on a scale not seen before, with serious consequences for public safety and social well-being
- Expanded people flows in the new global economy, whatever their economic and cultural benefits, are placing strains on social unity and are increasing the risk that disease outbreaks, when they occur, will spread quickly and globally with devastating consequences for public safety before our existing institutions have a chance to stop or manage them
- The knowledge, materials, and know-how required to make and use chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons is slipping beyond the control of states and may be falling into the hands of extremists with few reservations about using it
- Globalisation has produced more diverse domestic populations, in Britain and elsewhere, that now require a rewriting of the rulebook on what a politically viable foreign policy might be said to be
- Just as our understanding of climate change is alerting us to a future of possible resource scarcities and resource conflicts, the world of cheap transportation and global markets has meant that supply-chains have become more stretched, more complex and more vulnerable than ever before. Today's concern over energy security may well soon be joined by new vulnerabilities in relation to food, water, and other core resources.
Also in openDemocracy on new security thinking for the young century: Paul Rogers, “Global security: a vision for change” (12 April 2007) Chris Abbott, “Beyond terrorism: towards sustainable security” (17 April 2007)
A map of the future
These changes are structural and the challenges they present will not disappear post-Iraq or post-al-Qaida. Climate change and globalisation, particularly the latter's dark underside, have combined to expose a new series of western vulnerabilities and, at the same time, the limited utility of the traditional military approach to meeting them. Iraq and the al-Qaida phenomenon are in many respects the symptoms of this underlying reality, not its cause.
It is against this backdrop that the Institute for Public Policy Research has convened its Commission on National Security in the 21st Century. Chaired by two former leading British political figures, George Robertson and Paddy Ashdown, it will move beyond the security issues dominating the short-term media and political agenda and will take a long, hard look at the underlying challenges posed by the new strategic environment. Drawing upon the vast expertise of its members, the commission will cast its net wide in order to consider and prioritise what it believes to be the core challenges facing the United Kingdom in the period ahead, before going on to consider the strategic choices and institutional reforms that will be necessary to successfully face these challenges.
Some will say its terms of reference are too wide and its ambition - to publish a national security strategy for the United Kingdom that is capable of providing for public safety, social cohesion, and the protection of the country's democratic way of life - too great. But while the security establishment is in crisis-management mode both at home and abroad, there is surely space for an important strategic and non-partisan contribution from such a heavyweight and independent panel. The scale of today's challenges demands it.
