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Interpreting Global Security

This edited collection explores the fruitfulness of applying an interpretive

approach to the study of global security. The interpretive approach concentrates
on unpacking the meanings and beliefs of various policy actors, and, crucially,
explains those beliefs by locating them in historical traditions and as respon-
ses to dilemmas. Interpretivists thereby seek to highlight the contingency, diversity
and contestability of the narratives, expertise and beliefs that inform political
action. The interpretive approach is widespread in the study of governance and
public policy, but arguably it has not yet had much impact on security studies.
The book therefore deploys the interpretive approach to explore con-
temporary issues in international security, combining theoretical engagement
with good empirical coverage through a novel set of case studies.
Bringing together a fresh mix of senior and junior scholars from across the
fields of security studies, political theory and international relations, the chapters
explore the beliefs, traditions and dilemmas that have informed security
practice on the one hand, and the academic study of security on the other, as
well as the connections between them. All contributors look to situate their
work against a broader historical background and long-standing traditions,
allowing them to take a critical yet historically informed approach to the
material.

Mark Bevir is a Professor in the Department of Political Science, University

of California, Berkeley.

Oliver Daddow is a Reader in International Politics at the University of

Leicester.

Ian Hall is a Senior Fellow in the Department of International Relations,

Australian National University.
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74 The Securitization of Humanitarian 84 Federalism in Asia

Migration India, Pakistan and Malaysia
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Scott D. Watson
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97 Anglo-American Relations 105 International Politics of

Contemporary perspectives the Arctic
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since 1945 Serena Simoni
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and Democracy in an Age of policy from Nehru to the BJP
Globalization Sinderpal Singh
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Transnationalization 110 Politics and the Bomb
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The cases of Bosnia and Herzegovina Mark Bevir, Oliver Daddow and
and Kosovo Ian Hall
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Getting from rights to justice
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Interpreting Global Security

Edited by
Mark Bevir, Oliver Daddow
and Ian Hall
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First published 2014

by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2014 Mark Bevir, Oliver Daddow and Ian Hall for selection and editorial
matter, contributors their contributions
The right of Mark Bevir, Oliver Daddow and Ian Hall to be identified as
editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Interpreting global security / edited by Mark Bevir, Oliver Daddow and Ian
Hall.
p. cm. – (Routledge advances in international relations and global
politics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. National security. 2. World politics–21st century. I. Bevir, Mark.
UA10.5.I575 2013
355'.03–dc23
2013006671

ISBN: 978-0-415-82537-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-203-71346-4 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Taylor & Francis Books
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Contents

List of illustrations xi
List of contributors xii
Acknowledgements xiii

1 Interpreting global security 1

MARK BEVIR, OLIVER DADDOW AND IAN HALL

2 The rise of security governance 17

MARK BEVIR AND IAN HALL

3 An interplay of traditions: The ‘return of uncertainty’ and its

taming in post-9/11 US security thinking 35
SABINE SELCHOW

4 Interpreting George W. Bush’s foreign policy 53

DANIEL ZOUGHBIE

5 From value protection to value promotion: Interpreting British

security policy 73
OLIVER DADDOW AND JAMIE GASKARTH

6 Negotiating the global security dilemma: Interpreting Russia’s

security agenda 92
AGLAYA SNETKOV

7 Interpreting missile defence: A comparative study of European

reactions 107
JOCELYN MAWDSLEY

8 Framing the sovereignty intervention dilemma: The strange

omission of the Genocide Convention 125
ADRIAN GALLAGHER
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x Contents
9 Writing the threat of terrorism in Western Europe and the
European Union: An interpretive analysis 142
CHRISTOPHER BAKER-BEALL

10 Security politics and public discourse: A Morgenthauian

approach 160
HARTMUT BEHR

Index 177
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Illustrations

Figures
4.1 Religious beliefs concerning Israel 58
4.2 Religious beliefs and attitudes towards Israel 59

Tables
4.1 Select persons interviewed 68
5.1 Dilemmas in British foreign and security policy, 1945–73 79
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Contributors

Christopher Baker-Beall is a Teaching Fellow in Political Science and

International Studies at the University of Birmingham
Hartmut Behr is a Professor of International Politics at Newcastle University
Mark Bevir is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California,
Berkeley
Oliver Daddow is a Reader in International Politics at the University of
Leicester
Adrian Gallagher is a Lecturer in Security Studies and Research Methods at
the University of Leeds
Jamie Gaskarth is an Associate Professor in International Relations at the
University of Plymouth
Ian Hall is a Senior Fellow in International Relations at the Australian
National University
Jocelyn Mawdsley is a Senior Lecturer in EU/European Politics at
Newcastle University
Sabine Selchow is a Fellow in the Civil Society and Human Security Research
Unit, Department of International Development, London School of
Economics
Aglaya Snetkov is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies at
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich
Daniel Zoughbie is a Research Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and
International Affairs, Harvard University
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Acknowledgements

This book is the product of a workshop held at the University of Leicester

in November 2011 under the auspices of the British International Studies
Association working group on Interpretivism in International Relations.
The editors are grateful to the Department of Politics and International
Relations at Leicester for its support and to all those who attended for their
contributions to the discussion.
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1 Interpreting global security

Mark Bevir, Oliver Daddow and Ian Hall

This book aims to make sense of the transformations that our theories
and practices of global security have undergone in the past quarter century.
Global security could once be described in terms of the actions and inter-
actions of sovereign states with hierarchical and authoritative political
institutions directing police forces and organized militaries to deal with
internal and external threats (Buzan and Hanson 2009: 66–100). The security
of the state was assumed to imply the security of citizens and communities.
The state was presumed to act in the ‘national interest’ and to seek to max-
imize its economic and military power to secure that interest (Morgenthau
1951). Global security was often understood in terms of the ‘balance of
power’ between states and alliances of states (Waltz 1979). International
organizations and international law were sometimes thought to restrain political
and military elites, but only within limits (Claude 1962). The world of global
security, in other words, was one of power-seeking states keeping the peace at
home and fighting wars – or threatening to fight – abroad.
This understanding of global security is now widely seen as obsolete by
both theorists and practitioners. Most now believe that all states are now
subject to new transnational challenges – human and environmental – that
are not easily addressed by old, statist responses. Established, Western states
now address security challenges in new ways, employing new modes of gov-
ernance and even engaging private actors to deal with particular problems
(Krahmann 2003). We now recognize that many non-Western states lack
authoritative political institutions, police forces or organized militaries. Most
theorists and practitioners now acknowledge that the security of the state
does not always imply the security of citizens and communities (Buzan 1991).
States are often predators rather than protectors, acting not in the ‘national
interest’, but in that of sectional interests. Strengthening the power of the state
can – and frequently does – mean increasing the insecurity of individuals and
groups. In this context, global security can no longer be understood just in
terms of states, balances or institutions, but requires new frameworks of analysis
and new political practices (Buzan et al. 1998).
This book is one response to that demand for new frameworks of analysis.
Collectively the essays engage with the various theories of global security that
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2 Mark Bevir, Oliver Daddow and Ian Hall

have emerged since the end of the Cold War and the practices with which
they are associated. To introduce this account of global security, we must first
describe the interpretive approach to social science, for the account of global
security found in this book arose out of an experiment with interpretive
theory (see Bevir et al. 2013). Next we consider the way this interpretive theory
transforms our understanding of global security and the complex picture
of global security that emerges from the essays in this book. Finally, we con-
clude by considering the lessons learnt for the future of an interpretive theory
of international relations, especially in the study of global security.

Interpretive theory
Although the essays in this book cover a range of cases of global security, they
all adopt an interpretive approach. Following interpretive theory, they ask these
questions:

1 What elite beliefs informed security policies and practices? How did
national and local elites conceive, for example, of the balance of power, the
national interest, economic development and global security?
2 What traditions underpinned these beliefs? Are there rival traditions
inspiring competing policies and conflicting actions?
3 Did the relevant beliefs, policies and practices change over time? If so,
what dilemmas led people to change their beliefs and how did the relevant
actors conceive those dilemmas?

Our interpretive theory can thus be introduced through its use of the three key
concepts found in these questions: beliefs, traditions and dilemmas.

Why beliefs?
As early as the 1950s, philosophers were forcefully criticizing positivism and
its concept of pure experience (Quine 1961: 20–46). Yet international relations
scholars have often failed to take seriously the consequences of rejecting a
positivist notion of pure experience. Many cling tenaciously to the positivist
idea that we can understand or explain human behaviour by objective social
facts about people rather than by reference to their beliefs. They thus exclude
the interpretation of beliefs from the ambit of the discipline on positivist
grounds. Other international relations scholars reject positivism, distancing
themselves from the idea of pure experience, but still abstain from interpreting
beliefs. Often, they try to avoid direct appeals to beliefs by reducing beliefs
to intervening variables between actions and social facts (see especially
Goldstein and Keohane 1993).
Interpretive theorists argue, however, that once we accept that there are no
pure experiences, we undermine the positivist case against interpreting beliefs.
A rejection of pure experience implies that we cannot reduce beliefs to
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Interpreting global security 3

intervening variables. When we say that a state has particular interests for
which it will go to war, we rely on a particular theory to derive its interests
from its global role and position. Someone with a different set of theories might
believe that the state is in a different global position or that it has different
interests. The important point here is that how the people we study see their
position and interests inevitably depends on their theories, which might differ
significantly from our theories.
To explain people’s actions, we implicitly or explicitly invoke their beliefs and
desires. When we reject positivism, we cannot identify their beliefs by appealing
to the allegedly objective social facts about them. Instead, we must explore
the beliefs through which they construct their world, including the ways they
understand their position, the norms affecting them, and their interests.
Because people cannot have pure experiences, their beliefs and desires are
inextricably enmeshed with theories. Thus, international relations scholars
cannot ‘read-off’ beliefs and desires from objective social facts about people.
Instead they have to interpret beliefs by relating them to other beliefs, traditions
and dilemmas.
Of course, international relations scholars have grappled with the issues arising
from a rejection of positivism (see, for example, Booth et al. 1996). Today the
leading theories of global security are realism, institutionalism (in which
category we include most forms of constructivism) and rational choice. However,
even advocates of these theories have begun to question their positivist
inheritance – and as they have disentangled themselves from positivism, so
they have placed greater stress on interpreting beliefs. New theories, including
critical, feminist and postmodern theories, have also emphasized beliefs but
commonly tend to appeal to material or ideational structures to explain
actions (Buzan and Hanson 2009: 187–225). Although we welcome this semi-
interpretive turn, we think it is still worthwhile drawing on interpretive theory
to highlight the ambiguities that thus characterize these theories.
Realists are generally the most steadfast in rejecting beliefs as explanations.
Classical realists commonly argue that theorists and policy makers must look
to material capabilities to assess threat and set aside any consideration of the
declared intentions of others (Morgenthau 1948). Structural realists seek to
explain actions by reference to the distribution of power between states in
international systems (Waltz 1979). Although so-called neo-classical realists
depart from both of these positions, looking to the perceptions of state elites
about their relative power in order to explain state behaviour, they still treat
beliefs as intervening variables (Rose 1998). Realism can thus only take us
part way towards an interpretive account of contemporary global security.
Institutionalists are often unclear about the nature of institutions. On
the one hand, institutions are said to take a concrete and fixed form. They are
often defined, for example, as operating rules or procedures that govern
the actions of the individuals who fall under them (Barnett and Finnemore
2004). If institutionalists think of institutions in this way, they lapse back into
positivism. They do not interpret what institutions mean to the people who
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4 Mark Bevir, Oliver Daddow and Ian Hall

work within them. They elide the contingency, inner conflicts and several
constructions of actors in an institution. They assume that allegedly objective
rules prescribe or cause behaviour. Yet, as we have just argued, international
relations scholars cannot legitimately ‘read off’ people’s beliefs from their
social location. Rules are always open to interpretation.
On the other hand, institutions are sometimes said to include cultural factors
or beliefs, which may seem to suggest that institutions do not fix the beliefs or
actions of the subjects within them. If international relations scholars open
institutions in this way, however, they cannot treat institutions as given.
Rather they must ask how beliefs, and so actions, are created, recreated, and
changed in ways that constantly reproduce and modify institutions. Although
we would welcome this decentring of institutions, we would suggest that the
theory would no longer be institutionalist in any significant sense. Explanations
would no longer cast as if behaviour were the result of rules but, rather, in a
way that presented actions and outcomes as the contingent and contested
results of the varying way in which people understood and reacted to
conventions. Appeals to institutions would thus be misleading shorthand.
This commentary on institutionalism suggests that if we reject positivism,
our notion of an institution desperately needs a micro-theory. Institutionalists
could avoid engaging with beliefs and preferences only when they believed
that they could reduce actions to social facts. However, positivism undermines
just that belief, making a theory of individual action necessary. It thus seems
plausible to suggest that rational choice theory has had a significant impact
on the new institutionalism precisely because it is a theory about individual
preferences and rational action.
Because rational choice theory views actions as rational strategies for realizing
the preferences of the actor, it has sometimes reduced the motives of political
actors to self-interest (Downs 1957). Yet, as most rational choice theorists
now recognize, there are no valid grounds for privileging self-interest as a
motive. Rational choice theorists have thus enlarged their notion of preference;
moving toward a ‘thin’ analysis of that requires only that motives be con-
sistent. The problem for rational choice theorists has thus become how to fill
out this ‘thin’ notion of preference on specific occasions. At times, they do so
by suggesting that preferences are more or less self-evident or that preferences
can be assumed from the positions people occupy. Obviously, however, this
way of filling out the idea of preference falls prey to our earlier criticism of
positivism. At other times, therefore, rational choice theorists have suggested
conceiving of people’s actions as products of their beliefs and desires without
saying anything substantive about what these beliefs and desires might
be (Vicchaeri 1993: 221–24). Here too, although we would welcome this
decentring gesture, we would suggest that the theory would no longer be
rational choice theory in any significant sense. Explanations would be
based not on deductions drawn from assumptions of self-interest and utility
maximization, but on appeals to people’s multiple, varying and diverse beliefs
and desires.
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The purpose of our theoretical reflections is not to undermine all appeals to
institutions and rules as explanations of action. Our arguments do not prevent
appeals to self-interest or the use of deductive models. We do not deny that
quantitative techniques have a role in the study of global security. To reject any
of these concepts or tools outright would be hasty and ill-considered. Our
theoretical reflections imply only that international relations scholars need to
tailor their appeals to institutions, rationality, models and statistics to recog-
nize that their discipline is an interpretative one focused on the beliefs of
relevant actors.

Why traditions?
The forms of explanation we should adopt for beliefs, actions and practices
revolve around two sets of concepts (Bevir 1999: 187–218, 223–51). The first
set includes concepts such as tradition, structure and paradigm. These con-
cepts explore the social context in which individuals think and act. They vary
in how much weight they suggest should be given to the social context in
explanations of thought and action. The second set includes concepts such
as dilemma, anomaly and agency. These concepts explore how beliefs and
practices change and the role individual agency plays in such change.
We define a tradition as a set of understandings someone receives during
socialization. Although tradition is unavoidable, it is so as a starting point,
not as something that governs later performances. We should be cautious,
therefore, of representing tradition as an unavoidable presence in everything
people do in case we leave too slight a role for agency. In particular, we
should not imply that tradition is constitutive of the beliefs people later come
to hold or the actions they then perform. Instead, we should see tradition
mainly as a first influence on people. The content of the tradition will appear
in their later actions only if their agency has led them not to change it, where
every part of it is in principle open to change.
Positivists sometimes hold that individuals are autonomous and avoid the
influence of tradition. They argue that people can arrive at beliefs through
pure experiences, so we can explain why people held their beliefs by referring
to those experiences. However, once we reject positivism, we need a concept
such as tradition to explain why people come to believe what they do. Because
people cannot have pure experiences, they necessarily construe their experiences
using theories they inherited. Their experiences can lead them to beliefs only
because they already have access to the traditions of their community.
A social heritage is the necessary background to the beliefs people adopt
and the actions they perform. Some international relations scholars, including
some critical theorists and postmodernists, adopt a strong version of this
conclusion. They argue that a social structure, paradigm, episteme, identity or
discourse governs not only the actions people can perform successfully but
also people’s beliefs and desires. Strong structuralists argue that meanings and
beliefs are the products of the internal relations of self-sufficient languages or
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6 Mark Bevir, Oliver Daddow and Ian Hall

paradigms. They thus leave little, if any, room for human agency. They suggest
that traditions, structures or paradigms determine or limit the beliefs people
might adopt and so the actions they might attempt.
Surely, however, social contexts only ever influence – as distinct from
define – the nature of individuals. Traditions are products of individual
agency. This insistence on agency may seem incompatible with our earlier
insistence on the unavoidable nature of tradition. However, our reasons for
appealing to tradition allow for individuals to change the beliefs and practices
they inherit. Just because individuals start out from an inherited tradition
does not imply that they cannot adjust it. On the contrary, the ability to
develop traditions is an essential part of people’s being in the world. People
constantly confront at least slightly novel circumstances that require them to
apply inherited traditions anew, and a tradition cannot fix the nature of its
application. Again, when people confront the unfamiliar, they have to extend
or change their heritage to encompass it, and as they do so, they develop that
heritage. Every time they try to apply a tradition, they reflect on it (whether
consciously or not) to bring it to bear on their circumstances, and by reflect-
ing on it, they open it to innovation. Thus, human agency can produce
change even when people think they are sticking fast to a tradition they
regard as sacrosanct.
As humans, people necessarily arrive at their beliefs, and perform
their actions, against the background of a tradition that influences those
beliefs and actions, but they are also creative agents who have the capacity to
reason and act innovatively against the background of that tradition. We are
here discussing something like the familiar problem of structure and agency. Like
the structuralists, interpretive theory rejects the idea of the self-constituting
person, but unlike many structuralists, interpretive theory does not deny the
possibility of agency. It is this commitment to the possibility of agency that
makes tradition a more satisfactory concept than rivals such as structure,
paradigm and episteme. These later ideas suggest the presence of a social
force that determines or at least limits the beliefs and actions of individuals.
Tradition, in contrast, suggests that a social heritage comes to individuals who,
through their agency, can adjust and transform this heritage even as they pass it
on to others.
Recognition of agency requires international relations scholars to be wary
of essentialists who equate traditions with fixed essences to which they credit
variations. Interpretive theory here presents tradition as a starting point, not a
destination. It thus implies that instances cannot be identified with a tradition
based on a comparison of their apparently key features.
A particular relationship must exist between beliefs and practices if they are
to make up a tradition. For a start, the relevant beliefs and practices must
have passed from generation to generation. Traditions must be made up of
beliefs and practices relayed from teacher to pupil to pupil’s pupil and so on.
Such socialization may be intentional or unintentional. The continuity lies in
the themes developed and passed on over time. As beliefs pass from teacher
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Interpreting global security 7

to pupil, so the pupil adapts and extends the themes linking the beliefs.
Although there must be an historical line from the start of a tradition to its
current finish, the developments introduced by successive generations might
result in beginning and end having nothing in common apart from the links
over time. Nonetheless, an abstract set of beliefs and practices that were not
passed on would be a summary at one point in time, not a tradition. It would
not relate moments in time to one another by showing their historical con-
tinuity. A tradition must consist of a series of instances that resemble one
another because they exercised a formative influence on one another.
In addition to suitable connections through time, traditions must embody
suitable conceptual links. The beliefs and practices a teacher passes on to a pupil
must display a minimal level of consistency. A tradition could not have pro-
vided someone with an initial starting point unless its parts formed a minimally
coherent set. Traditions cannot be made up of purely random beliefs and
actions that successive individuals happen to have held in common.
Although the beliefs in a tradition must be related to one another
both temporally and conceptually, their substantive content is unimportant.
As tradition is unavoidable, all beliefs and practices must have their roots in
tradition, whether they are aesthetic or practical, sacred or secular, legendary
or factual, pre-modern or scientific. Our idea of tradition differs, therefore,
from that of people who associate the term with customary, unquestioned
ways of behaving (Oakeshott 1962: 123, 128–29). At the heart of our notion of
tradition are individuals using local reasoning consciously and subconsciously
to reflect on and modify their contingent heritage.

Why dilemmas?
Dilemmas provide one way of thinking about the role of individual agency in
changing traditions. People’s capacity for agency implies that change originates
in the responses or decisions of individuals. Whenever someone adopts a new
belief or action they have to adjust their existing beliefs and practices to make
way for the newcomer. To accept a new belief is thus to pose a dilemma that
asks questions of one’s existing beliefs. A dilemma here arises for an individual
or institution when a new idea stands in opposition to existing beliefs or pra-
ctices and so forces a reconsideration of these existing beliefs and associated
tradition. Scholars of international relations can explain change in traditions,
therefore, by referring to the relevant dilemmas. Traditions change as individuals
make a series of variations to them in response to any number of specific
dilemmas.
It is important to recognize that scholars cannot straightforwardly identify
dilemmas with allegedly objective pressures in the world. People vary their
beliefs or actions in response to any new idea they come to hold as true. They do
so irrespective of whether the new idea reflects real pressures, or, to be precise,
irrespective of whether it reflects pressures that scholars of international relations
believe to be real. In explaining change, we cannot privilege our academic
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8 Mark Bevir, Oliver Daddow and Ian Hall

accounts of the world. What matters is the subjective, or more usually inter-
subjective, understandings of political actors, not our scholarly accounts of real
pressures in the world. The task of the social scientist is to recover the shared
intersubjective dilemmas of the relevant actors. The task is not to privilege
scholarly accounts, although, of course, the pressures social scientists believe
to be real may closely resemble the actors’ views of the relevant dilemmas.
Dilemmas often arise from people’s experiences. However, we must add
immediately that this need not be the case. Dilemmas can arise from theoretical
and moral reflection as well as experiences of worldly pressures. The new
belief that poses a dilemma can lie anywhere on a spectrum from views with little
theoretical content to complex theoretical constructs only remotely linked to
views about the real world. A good example is the notion of globalization.
Globalization is one dilemma that admits of many interpretations. Hay (2002)
distinguishes between the economic outcomes of globalization and the effects
of the discourse of globalization. The economic effects include the straight-
forward theory that high taxation drives capital away, a view for which there
is little evidence. Nonetheless, politicians act as if there is a link between
taxation and capital mobility, and reduce taxes. The social construction of
globalization thus becomes crucial to explaining political actions.
A related point to make here is that dilemmas do not have given, nor even
correct, solutions. Because no set of beliefs can fix its own criteria of application,
when people confront a new event or belief they necessarily change traditions
creatively. It might look as if a tradition can tell people how to act – how to
respond to dilemmas. At most, however, the tradition provides a guide
to what they might do. It does not provide rules fixing what they must do.
A tradition can provide hints on how its adherents might respond to a
dilemma, but the only way to check if an individual’s actions are consistent
with the beliefs of a tradition is to ask whether the individual and other
adherents of the tradition are happy with the relevant actions. Because indi-
viduals respond creatively to dilemmas, it follows that change is ubiquitous.
Even when people think they are merely continuing a settled tradition or
practice, they are typically developing, adjusting and changing it. Change can
occur when people think they are sticking fast to a tradition. Traditions
and practices could be fixed and static only if people never met and faced
novel circumstances. However, of course, people are always meeting new
circumstances. International relations are in perpetual motion.
Although dilemmas do not determine solutions, the scholar of international
relations can explain the solutions at which people arrive by appealing to
the character of both the dilemma and their existing beliefs. Consider first the
influence of the character of the dilemma. To hold onto a new idea, people
must develop their existing beliefs to make room for it. The new idea will open
some ways of adjusting and close down others. People have to hook it onto
their existing beliefs, and their existing beliefs will present some opportunities
and not others. People can integrate a new belief into their existing beliefs
only by relating themes in it to themes already present in their beliefs. Change
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thus involves a pushing and pulling of a dilemma and a tradition to bring
them together.

Interpretive theory and global security

Interpretive theory has led us to concentrate on the meanings and beliefs of
various policy actors and, crucially, to explain these beliefs by locating them
in historical traditions and as responses to dilemmas. The chapters that follow
examine how shifts in beliefs and traditions, as well as new dilemmas, explain
changes in the ways problems of global security have been addressed by the
representatives of states and non-state actors. They generally highlight, therefore,
the contingency, diversity and contestability of the narratives, expertise and
beliefs informing global security practices. For, following interpretive theory,
they suggest that practices embody beliefs and these beliefs are laden with the
inheritances of various traditions. This emphasis on contingency, diversity
and contestability distinguishes the picture of global security provided by this
book from its rivals. In what follows, we suggest that this book thereby chal-
lenges the aspiration to comprehensive and formal explanations that often
lurks within accounts of global security. In particular, although the chapters
in this book echo themes from the literature on global governance, they also
transform those themes, providing examples of the decentring of a governance
account of global security. Finally, this book thereby opens novel research
topics, including the study of ruling narratives, rationalities and resistance.

Challenging comprehensive theories

Most existing pictures of global security typically aspire to a kind of
comprehensiveness that is associated with more formal modes of explanation.
That is to say, they tend to obscure the variety and contingency of present-day
global security precisely because they reduce it to a formal pattern or cause
that defines or explains its other leading features.
Structural realism, for example, aims to provide a general explanation for
why certain outcomes occur in international relations. It appeals to the nature
of the units (sovereign states) to account for the structure of the system
(anarchical) and then to the structure of the system to account for the actions
of the units (power-seeking) (Waltz 1979). Structural realists thus account for
contemporary practices of global security by referring theorists and practi-
tioners to the distribution of power in the present international system and
the ‘unipolar’ order that it supposedly generates (Ikenberry et al. 2009).
Similarly, institutionalism and constructivism appeal to rules or norms within
institutions to account for the actions of individual agents, non-state actors or
states (Barnett and Finnemore 2004; Wendt 1992). Establishing the key relevant
rules or norms provides a general explanation for particular actions.
Finally, the literature on global governance generally characterizes the new
governance in terms of being a response to globalization (Rosenau 1987). It
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10 Mark Bevir, Oliver Daddow and Ian Hall

suggests that globalization has caused a decline in the importance and capacity
of state actors as they confront new transnational challenges and become
increasingly dependent on one another and on non-state actors. The result
has allegedly been the spread of networks involving civil society actors at the
expense of both states and international institutions. Likewise, the spread of
networks allegedly explains the greater reliance of states and international
institutions on ‘trust’ and ‘cooperative’ styles of management. From this
perspective, global security under the new governance is more or less inher-
ently about growing fragmentation, specialization, transnationalism and the
involvement of civil society.
It is only because all these existing accounts of global security aspire to
comprehensiveness based on formal explanations that they appear to be in tension
with one another. If present-day global security is entirely about unipolarity,
it cannot be about rule-following or new transnational challenges. Likewise, if it
is about norms or globalization, it cannot be about American ‘hegemony’.
Interpretive theory does away with formal explanations and thus the
aspiration to comprehensive accounts of global security. Here the aspiration
to a comprehensive account of global security implies that we can define it by
reference to one or more of its essential properties. The implications are that
these properties are general ones that characterize all present-day security
arrangements. Several international relations scholars also imply that these
essential properties can explain at least the most significant other features of
contemporary global security. In contrast, our interpretive theory makes all
these implications seem implausible. From an interpretive perspective, security
practices are products of people’s actions. People’s actions are not fully
determined by anarchical structures, institutional rules or some logic of glo-
balization, but rather reflect their agency and intentionality. Global security is
thus constructed differently by numerous actors grappling with different issues
in different contexts against the background of different traditions. A better
grasp of present-day global security might arise, therefore, from accepting
that it does not have any essential properties.
In this book, we treat ‘global security’ as a loose phrase that refers to a
number of theories and practices with overlapping features, none of which
need always be present. These can include theories and practices associated
with realism, institutionalism and constructivism, and global governance, since
all of these can be located in the beliefs and actions of agents in the field. We
can find them directing state ministries and militaries to try to fulfil certain
tasks and we can find them working through international organizations or
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to try to establish patterns of rule or
to steer other actors. Equally, however, accounts of the new global governance
can reveal the myriad ways in which these actors are thwarted and their
aspirations and policies subverted by other actors utilizing other theories and
practices. It is important to remember, in particular, that states and international
institutions meet other policy actors who challenge, ignore or simply mis-
understand them. Below them they meet voluntary and private-sector actors
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in civil society and transnational networks. Level with them or above them,
they confront other states and transnational organizations. Global security
involves contestation at the levels of both theory and practice.

Decentring global governance

There are obvious overlaps between our interpretive theory and its emphasis
on a variegated picture of security and the account of security associated with
the literature on global governance and security governance in particular
(Krahmann 2003; Kirchner and Sperling 2007; Adler and Greve 2009). Both
highlight the limited role, power and effectiveness of states and international
institutions. Both also draw attention to the role of transnational actors and
networks. Despite these overlaps, however, interpretive theory transforms the
concept of global governance. In particular, interpretive theory decentres
global governance in a way that creates a new perspective on the topics that
dominate much of the relevant literature.
Most discussions of ‘global governance’ combine attention to new topics with
a formal theory that presents these topics as interlinked features of a new world
order (e.g. Rosenau 1987). In the first place, the literature on global govern-
ance suggests that this new world has come about as a result of globalization and
its more or less inexorable systemic effects. In the second place, global gov-
ernance draws attention to the diverse processes and domains of global security.
Global governance is often defined in terms of any activity that contributes to
transnational and international patterns of rule (Rosenau 1995). Global gov-
ernance includes not only the actions of states and international institutions,
but also the actions of NGOs. Global governance thus shifts attention from
sovereign states in an anarchic international society to the creation, enforce-
ment and change of global patterns of activity. Similarly, global governance
and security governance broaden the research agenda from attempts to prevent
and limit war to also encompass attempts to manage failed states, civil wars,
terrorism and the global environment.
Interpretive theory promotes many of the same topics as does the literature
on global governance, but it presents these topics less as arising from a new
world of globalization and more as arising out of its theoretical break with
the kind of formal theories that have come to dominate so much of the study
of international relations. From the perspective of this interpretive theory,
global security under global governance does not fit into a neat formal and
monolithic pattern. On the contrary, the point of the term ‘governance’ is in
part to provide a more diverse view of authority, political action and ruling.
The notion of states alone interacting in an anarchic international system was
always a formal myth. The myth obscured the reality of diverse international
practices that escaped the control of states and international institutions
because they arose from the contingent actions of diverse actors at the
boundaries of states and civil societies. The alleged ‘new’ features of global
governance may have spread, but they have always been there. International
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12 Mark Bevir, Oliver Daddow and Ian Hall

regimes arise variously from the interactions of international institutions,
states and other policy actors in networks of organizations. Transnational
flows and international links have always disrupted borders. Patterns of rule
have always crossed the public, private and voluntary sectors. The boundaries
between states and civil societies have always been blurred. Global governance is
(and always has been) a complex policy environment in which an increasing
number of actors are forging various practices by deploying a growing range
of strategies and instruments across multiple jurisdictions, territories and
levels of government.
To understand today’s global governance and global security, international
relations scholars might appeal not to systemic logics of anarchy or globali-
zation but to new forms of knowledge and the traditions on which theorists
and practitioners draw. In so far as security practices have changed, it is
because policy actors have adopted new ideas that have led them to remake
the world (Bevir and Hall 2011). Perhaps the most important of these ideas
have been neoliberal economics, which inspired a greater use of markets and
market mechanisms, and the planning and network theories that inspired the
spread of ‘whole-of-government’ and ‘joined-up’ approaches to governance in
many sectors, including that of security. In Chapter 2, Mark Bevir and Ian
Hall analyse the post-Cold War emergence of these ideas and associated
practices in response to a series of dilemmas that provoked theorists and
policy makers to question inherited traditions of thought and practice. As
interpretive theory rejects appeals to a systemic logic inherent arising from
anarchy or globalization, so it decentres the topics associated with global
governance as a paradigm for thinking about global security. That is to say,
the security practices associated with terrorism, failed states and civil wars all
appear now as products of contingent patterns of activity infused by beliefs
that arose against the background of clashing traditions.

New research topics

To decentre global governance is to challenge any straightforward dichotomy
between it as a ‘new’ mode of thinking about and practising international
relations and a supposedly older, anarchical international system dominated
by states. As we suggested earlier, many ‘new’ features of global governance
may have spread to new actors and new areas, but many have longer histories
than commonly acknowledged. Contemporary global governance, in the field
of global security as in other fields, mixes the old and the new. Elite actors
may be addressing new dilemmas with new practices using new forms of
knowledge, but they may continue to do so in the belief that states remain the
dominant actors on the international stage. Any account of global security
must surely include an account of various states and their fumbling efforts to
realize their policy goals. In Chapters 2 to 7, the authors explore a series of these
attempts by actors in particular states to achieve their objectives, sometimes
utilizing old theories and practices, and sometimes utilizing new ones.
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In this way, interpretive theory decentres states and regional institutions. States
no longer appear as black boxes – formal entities that necessarily act in ways
defined by their place in a system or their apparently fixed interests. State
policies are, rather, products of struggles among actors inspired by different
beliefs rooted in different traditions. Interpretive theory thus foregrounds a set
of distinctive research topics, including ruling narratives, rationalities and
resistance. All these topics reflect a shift from formal and systemic modes of
explanation to the recovery of the contingent and contested beliefs of policy
actors, whether these actors are linked to civil associations, states, transnational
organizations or international institutions.
Ruling narratives are the beliefs and stories by which elite actors make
sense of their world. These narratives provide a background against which elites
construct their worldviews, including their views of their own interests. Ruling
narratives thus inform the policy choices that elites and states make. So, when
international relations scholars study ruling narratives, they might ask, for
example: what elite beliefs inform national security policy making? How and
why have realist narratives been modified or replaced by other traditions?
What changes in elite beliefs generated these new ruling narratives? What
dilemmas prompted these changes in elite beliefs?
Rationalities are expert strategies – the technical forms of knowledge – on which
policy actors rely to design policies to realize their goals. These rationalities often
arise from the formal explanations associated with present-day social science.
They purport to tell policy makers what effects markets, laws, networks and
specific policies will have. So, international relations scholars might explore
the forms of expertise, especially from the social sciences, that have influenced
national security policy making and other practices in global security. They might
ask: how do these rationalities aim to address perceived dilemmas? What
effects have been produced by the growth of civilian and military funding to
academic disciplines like social anthropology and social network analysis? What
influence have other rationalities had on policy making and implementation,
especially those generated in disciplines such as International Relations?
Finally, resistance occurs because other actors can thwart the intentions of
elites. Subordinate actors can resist elites and transform policies by reacting to
them in ways that draw on their local traditions and their local reasoning. They
can react to policies in ways that are contrary to the models and predictions
of social scientists with their social rationalities. Here, therefore, international
relations scholars might pose questions such as: what beliefs and traditions
have shaped changed modes of resistance to the ruling narratives and ration-
alities? How have realists thwarted newer traditions of thinking about
national security? What other beliefs and traditions have driven movements
within national security bureaucracies, universities, think-tanks and other
locations that have tried to block the rise of new narratives and rationalities?
In the next chapter, Mark Bevir and Ian Hall show how new policy agen-
das arose from new security challenges in the post-Cold War period, as well
as how policy makers in Western states generated new practices of ‘security
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14 Mark Bevir, Oliver Daddow and Ian Hall

governance’ from new theories of international relations and new theories of
public administration. They examine the emergence of new narratives and new
rationalities in security governance. In Chapters 3 and 4, Sabine Selchow and
Daniel Zoughbie explore other ruling narratives. They examine the different
ways in which elite American practitioners confronted 9/11 and its aftermath
by drawing upon inherited beliefs and practices, as well as applying new
thinking to the problem of radical Islamist terrorism. Selchow concentrates
on the ‘newness’ of radical Islamist terrorism and the challenge that it poses
to the ‘New World’, as well as the return, as she puts it, of ‘uncertainty’ to
American narratives about global security. Zoughbie, for his part, analyses
the ways in which President George W. Bush drew upon his religious beliefs
and his understanding of the Christian tradition to underpin his foreign and
security policies during his terms in office.
Chapters 5 to 7 examine the changing nature of ruling narratives in a series
of European states. Oliver Daddow and Jamie Gaskarth chart the shift from
what they call ‘value protection’ to ‘value promotion’ in British foreign and
security policy, emphasizing the ways in which post-Cold War practitioners
have re-interpreted Britain’s role as a ‘global power’. Aglaya Snetkov explores
the re-casting of Russia’s security policy under Vladimir Putin, arguing that
his government’s approach to contemporary security architecture was grounded
not simply in a critical assessment of the 1990s, but also in a new narrative
about Russian history and the imperative to be an anti-Western power. Jocelyn
Mawdsley, in her chapter, compares the approaches of Britain, France and
Germany to the dilemmas posed by missile defence, tracing their differing
responses to contrary narratives of national roles and national histories.
In Chapter 8, Adrian Gallagher analyses post-Cold War responses to the
dilemmas generated by genocides and ethnic violence after 1991. He argues
that both scholars and practitioners tended to couch these responses in terms of
the United Nations Charter, curiously neglecting other possible starting points,
including the Genocide Convention. His chapter both points to the ways in
which ruling narratives emerge and the ways in which possible alternatives to
those narratives are sidelined within elite debate. Christopher Baker-Beall
explores similar themes in Chapter 9, examining the emergence and development
of different narratives about terrorism in the European context.
In the final chapter, Hartmut Behr turns to a past interpretivist approach – that
of Hans J. Morgenthau. Behr argues that Morgenthau’s insistence on the
inescapability of ‘standortgebunden’ (standpoints) for social and political theorists.
Like other interpretivists, Behr suggests, Morgenthau appreciated the con-
tingency of social and political knowledge, also emphasizing the need for what
he calls ‘epistemological anti-hubris’.

Conclusion
This book aims to address the need for new frameworks of analysis for con-
temporary practices of global security that go beyond inherited theories. It
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Interpreting global security 15

also aims to move beyond the positivist rejection of beliefs and the tendency
of post-positivists, in International Relations at least, to neglect beliefs as a
way of explaining actions. International theorists from E.H. Carr and Hans
J. Morgenthau onwards have been very sceptical about explaining practices
by reference to the beliefs of agents, arguing that we have few or no means of
knowing what they believe and why (Carr 1939; Morgenthau 1948). This book
suggests that this scepticism is unwarranted. We can gain reliable knowledge
of the beliefs of others and we can assume that at least some professions of
belief are sincere. Moreover, we have means of assessing the sincerity or
otherwise of professed beliefs by subjecting them to well-worn means of analysis.
With all of this in mind, this book argues that beliefs are central to explanation
in social science and that international theorists should not be so wary of
interpreting beliefs and explaining actions by reference to beliefs. It opens up
new topics for research and new approaches to those topics that cannot be
utilized within conventional positivist and post-positivist modes of analysis
prevalent in international relations. It aims to move the field beyond theories
that aspire to comprehensiveness and thus fail to account for old and new
practices that fall outside their purview. It aims to demonstrate that global
security is best understood as a set of decentred practices responding to multiple
dilemmas and grounded in overlapping theories derived from different traditions.

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Bevir, M. (1999) The Logic of the History of Ideas, Cambridge: Cambridge University
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Bevir, M., Daddow, O. and Hall, I. (2013) ‘Interpreting British Foreign Policy’, British
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16 Mark Bevir, Oliver Daddow and Ian Hall

Goldstein, J. and Keohane, R.O. (1993) Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions
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2 The rise of security governance

Mark Bevir and Ian Hall

‘Security governance’ is a post-Cold War phenomenon. It breaks with realist

and liberal ways of managing security in international politics. Indeed, security
governance is predicated on the belief that the new security threats of the
post-Cold War era cannot be effectively addressed by inherited realist and
liberal practices. It shifts the management of security from state-centric
approaches and formal institutions towards more diverse actors and more
flexible ways of working. Within states, security governance entails new roles
for foreign and defence ministries as well new cross-government and interna-
tional linkages for other ministries. Within the international sphere, security
governance relies on networks of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs),
international institutions and agencies, transnational corporations, activists,
epistemic communities, and a range of other new and old actors. Throughout,
security governance involves individual actors working in new ways and using
new techniques to gather and analyse information, and to communicate,
negotiate, implement and evaluate policy responses to security threats.
The phrase ‘security governance’ first emerged in Europe in the 2000s to explain
new practices by which European states addressed transnational security
threats (Bossong 2008, 2012; Christou et al. 2010; Erikson 2011; Friesendorf
2007; Hollis 2010; Kirchner 2006; Kirchner and Dominquez 2011; Kirchner
and Sperling 2007; Webber 2000; Webber et al. 2004). This chapter argues that
security governance arose from new theories that responded to new dilemmas
in both international relations and public administration. New theories in
international relations challenged realist and liberal understandings of the
causes of insecurity and gave rise to new policy agendas. In the pursuit of
those agendas, practitioners adopted new techniques and technologies of
public administration grounded in new social scientific theories. The chapter
is divided into three sections. The first looks at the new theories in interna-
tional relations and how they changed the content of security from the 1980s
onwards. The second part looks at the new theories in public administration
and how they influenced new practices of governance. The third and con-
cluding section looks at the ways in which these new theories of international
relations and these new practices of governance combined to produce ‘security
governance’.
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18 Mark Bevir and Ian Hall

International relations
The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union generated
acute anxiety amongst analysts and practitioners of international relations for
two principal reasons. First, these events had not been predicted by the realist
and liberal theories that had dominated Cold War international relations.
Many observers concluded that neorealism and neoliberalism, in particular,
were defunct, having demonstrably failed to identify the actual causes of the
USSR’s demise (Gaddis 1992/93; Baldwin 1995; Betts 1997; Lebow and
Risse-Kappen 1995). Second, these inherited theories seemed not to be able to
explain the new security threats that rapidly emerged in the aftermath of the
Cold War, let alone to prescribe adequate policy responses to these threats.
These threats were perceived to lie at the levels of the state, society and individual,
rather than within the structure of the international system. They included a
resurgence of ethno-nationalist political violence in the post-communist world
and in the global South (von Hippel 1994) and an apparent shift to new
forms of conflict, fought not by disciplined state militaries, but by irregular
forces unrestrained by international humanitarian law or basic norms of war
(Kaldor 1999). Yet more threats were perceived to be arising from environmental
degradation and climate change on the one hand (Homer-Dixon 1991), and
poor governance on the other (Duffield 2001).
These threats posed dilemmas for analysts and policy makers because they
seemed, in the minds of many, inexplicable in terms of the inherited realist and
liberal theories of global security. The resurgence of ethno-nationalist violence
undermined the core realist and liberal claims that modern politics and
international relations were driven by instrumental rationality or by ideological
rivalries, and thus could be explained and remedied by power politics or by
ideational and institutional change. The apparent failure of realist and liberal
theories thus created spaces for new accounts of global security. Some scholars
argued that ‘ancient hatreds’ or even primordial ‘clashes of civilizations’ were
to blame for contemporary conflict (Kaldor 1993; Huntington 1993). Many
theorists moved to explain international relations in terms of socially con-
structed identities rather than interests or institutions (Wendt 1992; Katzenstein
1996). Others scholars agreed that materialist explanations of the causes of
political violence were inadequate, but concentrated their attention less on
identities than on the ‘discourses’ that they argued constructed threats and
convinced polities to act in certain ways to address those threats (Jones 1999).
These new theories responded to the post-Cold War era, but some of them
derived from ideas with longer pedigrees. Since the 1960s some scholars had been
arguing that realists and liberals took too narrow a view of what constituted a
security threat and, as a consequence, failed to identify optimal policy
responses (Buzan and Hansen 2009: 101–55). Peace researchers, in particular,
argued that concentrating on military and political threats neglected the
‘structural violence’ of social injustice and economic inequality (Galtung
1969). Others concentrated on different threats and different responses. In
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The rise of security governance 19

This Endangered Planet (1971), for example, Richard Falk urged that pollution
and resource depletion were generating threats to human well-being just as
serious as major war – even nuclear war – between states. By the 1980s, these
various arguments had generated extensive debate about what was meant by
the concept of ‘security’, the proper obligations of scholars in the field, and
the practical implications – debate dominated by Barry Buzan’s iconic People,
States and Fear (1983).
In the aftermath of the Cold War, security analysts drew on these ideas and
debates to develop new theories of global security that responded to the new
threats of the age (Smith 1999). These theories shared two important features.
First, they were less statist than were realist and liberal theories. Most were
sceptical about the realist and liberal claim that the pursuit of national
security implied greater security for individuals and communities. They
recognized that the state was sometimes the principal threat to the security of
citizens. Second, they were less focused on military threats, expanding ‘security
studies’ to focus in addition on political, economic, social and environmental
threats. In practical terms, they suggested that building security required more
than simply improving the capacities of police forces and militaries.
Despite their similarities, the new theories divided into different schools.
Constructivists concentrated on identities and the social meanings of security
practices, with the Copenhagen school working especially on ‘securitization’
(Williams 2003). Critical theorists and postmodernists looked in particular at
the ways in which political discourses generated security threats and pointed
to political responses (Campbell 1998; Jones 1999; Booth 2005, 2007). Feminists
drew upon constructivism and critical theory to advance research agendas
focused upon gender and war (Enloe 1990; Tickner 1992).
All these new theories helped to inspire new policy agendas including human
security, state building and humanitarian intervention. These policy agendas
responded to the new security threats that scholars had identified from the
1960s onwards, and they did so by self-consciously breaking with realist and
some liberal modes of thought and practice. All these agendas were driven by
Western states, and some were resisted by some non-Western states, although
not all of the resistance came from outside the West.
The concept of ‘human security’ was made famous by the United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP) report of 1994, but it built upon earlier
work from the 1960s onwards by peace researchers, environmentalists and
theorists like Buzan (1983). It involved a self-conscious act of ‘securitization’ –
the act of rendering something not conventionally considered a security issue
into a security issue to give it greater political salience (Williams 2003). Like
earlier radical security theorists, advocates of ‘human security’ argued that
properly to address the range of threats facing many people, especially in the
developing world, it was necessary to shift the ‘referent object’ of security
away from the state and to individuals and communities. The UNDP report
argued: ‘[t]he world can never be at peace unless people have security in their
daily lives’ (UNDP 1994: 1). At the 1995 World Summit, the UNDP and
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20 Mark Bevir and Ian Hall

other actors sympathetic to the cause pushed for a new global socio-economic
order that addressed ‘human security’ by channelling resources hitherto devoted
to national security and economic growth towards sustainable development in
the global South.
In one form or another, all Western states adopted the human security
agenda. Some states – most notably Canada, led by its activist Foreign Minister
Lloyd Axworthy – took up the cause enthusiastically and actively sought to
advance it. Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and other states reorganized
their aid and development efforts and boosted their funding in the relevant
areas. In Britain the Department for International Development (DFID),
founded in 1997 in the immediate aftermath of New Labour’s election victory,
grew rapidly in both size and responsibility so that by 2009 its budget dwarfed
that of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and its international
‘footprint’ was substantial (Hall 2013). Australia’s AusAID underwent a
similar phase of growth over a similar period. Even in the United States,
the argument that human security and development in the global South
was essential to the security of the global North had an impact. Successive
US National Security Strategies throughout the post-Cold War period
have emphasized the need for development assistance to address human
security.
As human security aimed to improve standards of governance and thereby
tackle sources of insecurity, so did state building, whether it involved demo-
cratization, institutional reform or economic development. These practices
were ‘securitized’. They were no longer just goods in themselves, but also means
to improve national and global security. They were to remove autocratic
regimes that threatened both the West and their own citizens, and they were
to remove the socio-economic root causes of dissatisfaction and discontent
that enabled autocrats to come to power in non-Western societies (Duffield
2001). In the 1990s, these security considerations led the West to aid states in
transition from various forms of authoritarianism to liberal democracy by
encouraging – or even imposing – certain standards of institutional design
and economic management upon them. In the 2000s, the focus of the West
shifted from transitional states to so-called ‘failed’ or ‘failing states’ such as
Afghanistan or the Solomon Islands. Democratization and good governance
were then merged into broader projects of ‘state building’ in places where
even the rudiments of government had broken down (Wesley 2008).
The human security and good governance agendas were intended by their
proponents to divert resources conventionally spent on military power towards
what might best be seen as prophylactic measures to prevent the emergence of
non-traditional, mostly non-state-based, security threats. However, Western
states also showed growing concern in the post-Cold War period with using
military force for ‘humanitarian intervention’. Humanitarian intervention
tackled immediate state-based and non-state-based threats to the security of
individuals and communities. As a policy agenda, it has few historical pre-
cedents (see Wheeler 2001). Indeed, it challenged entrenched international
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norms of state sovereignty and non-intervention, forcing a prolonged (and
still ongoing) debate about their extent and value.
Humanitarian intervention was primarily a response both to the conviction
that human rights abuses in conflicts ought not to be tolerated, regardless
of whether a sovereign state was the abuser, and to the level of popular
concern in Western states about those abuses, which were covered extensively
in the media. The enabling factor, however, was the so-called ‘Revolution
in Military Affairs’ (RMA), which began in the 1970s, and especially the
development of so-called ‘smart’ weapons like laser-guided bombs, which
minimized the risks to both the pilots using them and non-combatants who
might be in the area under attack. RMA allowed Western militaries to use
force without suffering the combat casualties or inflicting the degree of death
and injury on innocent civilians that would likely turn public opinion against
military action.
Six major humanitarian interventions were conducted by Western states in
the 20 years after 1991. These interventions were in Bosnia (1991–95), Somalia
(1992–94), Haiti (1994), East Timor (1999), Kosovo (1999) and Libya (2011).
Each provoked substantial debate about its justification and legality. The
justifications generally turned on two sets of issues: moral considerations and
security concerns. As the moral considerations have been discussed at great
length elsewhere, and are not in any case the focus here, they can be set aside.
The security concerns are more relevant.
What humanitarian intervention demonstrated was the extent to which
traditional statist modes of thought about security had been displaced by
new thinking. This new thinking was partly the result of the sheer weight of
argument about the apparent effects on international relations of ‘globalization’.
It was also partly due to the widespread belief that the pursuit of national
security in the past had not generally led to improvements in the security of
individuals and communities. Both of these sources of the new thinking are
apparent in one of the clearest statements in favour of humanitarian inter-
ventionism: Tony Blair’s Chicago speech on the ‘Doctrine of International
Community’ (1999), delivered during the Kosovo conflict. In that address,
Blair argued that what he called ‘isolationism’, the practice of standing aside
from the conflicts of others, had been made impossible by globalization and
‘global interdependence’. He went on:

We are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not. We cannot refuse

to participate in global markets if we want to prosper. We cannot ignore
new political ideas in other counties if we want to innovate. We cannot
turn our backs on conflicts and the violation of human rights within
other countries if we want still to be secure.
(Blair 1999)

Clearly humanitarian intervention was not driven solely by moral imperatives.

‘[I]n the end’, Blair argued, ‘values and interests merge’ (Blair 1999).
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22 Mark Bevir and Ian Hall

Although humanitarian intervention remained highly controversial, it led to
a partial renegotiation of international norms and practices. The challenge it
posed to the traditional norms of sovereignty and non-interference, combined
with the patent disregard some states continued to have for the security of
their citizens, convinced many that a re-evaluation was required. At Canada’s
behest, an International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty
was created in 2000 and presented a report to the UN the following year.
Called ‘The Responsibility to Protect’ (sometimes abbreviated R2P or RtoP),
this report argued that sovereignty should be conceived as a trust embodying
a duty to safeguard the security of citizens, not as an inalienable right. In
broad terms, this new concept of sovereignty was endorsed by the members of
the UN General Assembly at the 2005 World Summit. All states were then
reminded that they had a responsibility to protect against war crimes, crimes
against humanity and genocide. The UN was recognized to have a right to
take appropriate measures to ensure that states upheld this responsibility.
Although the 2005 World Summit did not settle the issue of whether armed
humanitarian intervention was justifiable, it made some progress towards
consensus about the meaning and extent of sovereignty in international relations
(Bellamy 2009).
Human security, state building and humanitarian intervention were policy
agendas that derived in part from the new theories about international relations
that came to the fore in the post-Cold War period. These policy agendas served,
in turn, as new challenges for theorists and practitioners. They posed
moral challenges about who should act for whom, why, when and how – moral
challenges that generated extensive literatures. They posed practical challenges
of implementation. Security governance, as a set of practices, emerged as theor-
ists and practitioners responded to the moral and practical challenges using
the new techniques and technologies of governance.

Public administration
Governance arose out of new modernist theories and public-sector reforms
that emerged first in the 1970s in response to the crisis of the bureaucratic
state (Bevir 2010). The bureaucratic state was an amalgam of a party political
system and a bureaucracy comprising professional administrators, generalist
civil servants and experts, who were to devise and implement rational policies.
Classic texts of progressive public administration argued for a clear separa-
tion between party politics and bureaucracy. They presented the bureaucracy
as a stronghold of impartial knowledge and so as a check on the factionalism,
populism and other excesses of party politics. The bureaucracy was to initiate
and guide intelligent action in response to solve social problems. The electoral
process and politicians would dictate values and goals. The bureaucracy
would then use its expertise to define the means to these. Bureaucracy repre-
sented an ideal hierarchic structure of administrative and professional expertise.
Public bureaucracies acquired broad remits: they intervened in economies,
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The rise of security governance 23

brokering dispute resolution between organized interests, and they took
responsibility for significant elements of the lives of individual citizens, in
education, health, pensions and employment.
Governance arose out of a crisis in the bureaucratic state. Over-simplifications
will abound in any attempt to differentiate the plethora of ideas that fed into
the crisis of the state in the late twentieth century. Nonetheless, one way of
approaching these narratives is as the products of different traditions of social
science. Some narratives of the crisis of the state challenged bureaucracy,
corporatism and social welfare using the tradition of neoclassical economics.
Neoclassical micro-level assumptions informed, for example, narratives that
tried to show fiscal crises were a pathology built into the welfare state. These
narratives went as follows (King 1975). Citizens, being rational actors, try to
maximize their short-term interests, privileging welfare policies that are of
benefit to them as individuals over the long-term, cumulative and shared
effects of rising state expenditure. Politicians, being rational actors, try to
maximize their short-term electoral interests, promoting policies that will gain
the votes of these rational citizens rather than pursuing fiscal responsibility.
Narrow political considerations thereby trump economic imperatives. Groups
of voters demand more and more welfare benefits, and politicians constantly
pass welfare legislation on behalf of these voters. A growing proportion of the
national product goes on welfare, making fiscal crises inevitable. These narratives
of state overload and state crisis pointed to a clear solution: fiscal austerity,
monetary control and a rolling back of the state.
Other narratives of the crisis of the state drew on more sociological traditions
and their analyses of changes in the world (Bevir 2005; Finlayson 1999). These
narratives implied that the state had to change in response to international
and domestic pressures. Internationally, the increased mobility of capital
made it more difficult for states to direct economic activity. The state could
not go it alone, but rather had to pursue coordination and regulation across
borders. Industries that had operated in the domain of the state became
increasingly transnational in their activities. The increasing number and pro-
minence of transnational corporations raised problems of coordination and
questions of jurisdiction. There was a gap between the national operation of
regulatory structures and an increasingly international economy. Domestically,
the state confronted the rising demands of its citizens. These demands arose
from popular discontent with the state’s handling of the economy and
its apparent unresponsiveness. Many states were saddled with large debts.
Globalization provoked anxieties about competitiveness and wages. Sections
of the public worried that the state had lost control. Equally, state actors often
found that they were subject to varied and even contradictory demands from
the public. Voters wanted better services and lower taxes. They wanted a
more effective state but also a more transparent and accountable one. They
wanted decisive leaders and yet more popular participation.
Governance emerged, therefore, from two analytically distinct waves of public-
sector reform. The first wave of reforms drew on neoclassical economics and
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24 Mark Bevir and Ian Hall

rational choice theory. The relevant reforms included the new public manage-
ment and contracting out. Neoliberals turned away from what was now derided
as big government, bloated bureaucracy and uniform solutions, and toward a
private sector that was now lauded as competitive, efficient and flexible. This
paradigm shift was also one from institutional definitions of good government,
which emphasized clear-cut divisions of responsibility within hierarchical
relationships, toward new definitions of efficient processes defined in terms of
service delivery and outputs with an attendant emphasis on transparency, user
friendliness and incentive structures.
Before long, however, neoliberalism gave way to a second wave of reforms
including joining up governance, networks and partnerships. These reforms were
inspired not by neoclassical economics but by mid-level social theories such
as institutionalism, planning theory and communitarianism. When social sci-
entists inspired by sociological traditions of thinking studied the neoliberal
reforms of the public sector, they were often highly critical. They argued that
those reforms exacerbated problems of coordination and steering, and their
reforms promoted networks and joined up government as solutions to these
problems (Rhodes 1997). Crucially, advocates of networks distinguish them
from hierarchies as well as markets. They accepted that old institutionalists
had believed that hierarchies made it easier to tackle many social problems by
dividing them into smaller tasks, each of which could then be performed by a
specialized unit. However, they defined themselves as new institutionalists,
arguing that this hierarchic approach to problem solving no longer suits today’s
world, and claiming that policy makers confront ‘wicked problems’ that are
not amenable to division and specialization; to solve today’s problems requires
networks. So, new institutionalists often accept neoliberal arguments about
the inflexible and unresponsive nature of hierarchies, but instead of promoting
markets, they appeal to networks as a suitably flexible and responsive alter-
native based on recognition that social actors operate in structured relationships.
They argue that efficiency and effectiveness derive from stable relationships
characterized by trust, social participation and voluntary associations. In their
view, while hierarchies can provide a context for trust and stability, the time
for hierarchies has passed. Hierarchies do not suit the new knowledge-driven
global economy. This new world increasingly throws up wicked problems that
require partnerships, networks and whole-of-government approaches (for a
detailed argument and supporting references see Bevir 2010).
In short, the shift from government to governance means that states moved
away from trying to determine public policy and deliver public services through
hierarchical bureaucracies. They increasingly drew instead on networking with
experts outside governments, engaging interest groups from various sectors of
the community, ‘contracting out’, ‘outsourcing’ and creating public-private
partnerships. States increasingly engage other stakeholders in the processes of
formulating policies, setting rules and regulating activities. The result was
governance that was hybrid and multi-jurisdictional, linking plural stakeholders
in complex networks.
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The rise of security governance 25

Controversy still rumbles on about what these changes in practices imply
for the state – some scholars argue that the state is losing power and authority
relative to other actors (Rhodes 1997; Stoker 1998); others argue that the state
is just as strong as ever it was and merely adopting new policy instruments
(Bell and Hindmoor 2009). Most scholars agree, however, that governance
amounts to a substantively different form of governing to what has gone
before. Policy is now made and implemented, and services delivered, in a
range of different ways. Bell and Hindmoor, for example, identify the following
modes of governing:

 hierarchy – where state governments or other authoritative agents (inter-

national institutions, for example) ‘directly allocate resources through taxing
and spending, or they attempt to impose order, rule or outcomes via direct
regulatory, legal or enforcement measures’;
 persuasion – where governments or other agents seek to persuade a
target audience to change their behaviour rather than using ‘laws, taxes or
regulation’;
 markets – where governments or other agents utilize market mechanisms,
including contracting out to private companies, to deliver services or
modify behaviour;
 community engagement – where groups of citizens are brought into policy-
making and implementation processes through citizens’ juries or focus
groups;
 associations – where business or other associations are engaged in policy-
making or service delivery, or indeed in the regulation of particular sectors
of the society.
(Bell and Hindmoor 2009: 16–18)

Not all of these modes of governing are new. What are new are the ways in
which scholars and practitioners perceive the challenges they face and what
they conceive to be the best policy responses.
As the global governance literature makes clear, what is also new is the
‘spill-over’ of governance from domestic politics to international relations. In
part, this has occurred because of the emergence of new actors alongside
sovereign states (and state-created international institutions and functional
agencies), and the concomitant need to find means to manage the interactions
of all these players. These new actors range from NGOs to private security
and military companies (PSCs and PMCs). Although these actors have not
necessarily displaced states as the most important or powerful actors (Drezner
2007), they play significant roles in international relations, sometimes at the behest
of states and sometimes in opposition to states. Some of them are contracted
by states to provide services to others, such as aid agencies or PSCs (Duffield
1997; Abrahamsen and Williams 2011). Some now set regulatory standards
or regulate certain practices (Sassen 2002). Others have joined transnational
networks of state and non-state actors to pursue particular objectives (Steets
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26 Mark Bevir and Ian Hall

2009). Transgovernmental networks link agents within states with their coun-
terparts in other states, one example being the Financial Action Task Force
(FATF) that addresses money laundering and the funding of terrorism
(Slaughter and Hale 2011: 345).
The new governance thus consists of new theories about how best to govern
contemporary societies and new practices being employed by politicians and
bureaucrats in both domestic and international politics. As the next section makes
clear, the rise of security governance involved the linking of new theories and
new policy agendas in international relations with these new theories, techniques
and technologies of governance. Governance came to be perceived as the means
by which theorists and practitioners could respond to new dilemmas in global
security and to new theories about the causes of conflict in international relations.

Security governance
Although the new governance first arose in domestic policy – especially health,
social security and local government services – and then in the ‘softer’ sectors
of international relations, it soon spilled over into ‘harder’ areas of international
relations, including defence and security policy. In many cases, this spill-over
was deliberate, with practitioners transferring into the security-sector approaches
to policy making and implementation they had used elsewhere (Webber et al.
2004: 4). Practitioners transferred these approaches for various reasons. Many
did so in response to what they perceived to be new non-state-based security
challenges, such as transnational crime, terrorism and illegal migration. As
these threats appeared across policy sectors and across national borders, it
was argued, so they required transnational and joined-up responses. As a
result, from the 1990s onwards, states and international organizations began
increasingly to engage other actors on security issues, including NGOs,
environmental organizations, think-tanks and private firms.
In the mid-2000s, security governance thus emerged as both a concept and a
set of ‘heterarchical’ practices. Security governance here involves ‘the interaction
of a large number of actors, both public and private; institutionalization that
is both formal and informal; relations between actors that are ideational in
character, structured by norms and understandings as much as by formal
regulations; and, finally, collective purpose’ (Webber et al. 2004: 8). Security
governance utilizes administrative practices developed elsewhere in domestic
and global governance, including markets, networks, joined-up or whole-of-
government strategies and public-private partnerships, as well as old-fashioned,
top-down rule by states and international organizations.
Although sovereign states usually remain at the core of these new
‘heterarchical’ arrangements, states are ‘increasingly willing to rely’, as Krahmann
argues, ‘on the cooperation and resources of non-state actors, such as private
security companies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and international
organizations’ (Krahmann 2003: 6). In so doing, states have moved away
from their historic adherence to practices based on the idea of a balance of
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The rise of security governance 27

power, security regime or security community. They have instead begun to
craft new practices characterized by the proliferation of new security agencies,
the functional specialization of these agencies, especially in non-traditional
security issues, and the partial fragmentation of alliances and regimes into
‘coalitions of the willing’, as well as an increasing use of private-sector
security providers. Again as Krahmann argues, they are changing ‘the way in
which security is defined … , by whom security policies are made and how
they are implemented’ (Krahmann 2003: 9). ‘Decision-making’ now ‘proceeds
through negotiation … ’, while ‘policies are implemented in a decentralized
fashion’, some even ‘self-enforced’ (Krahmann 2003: 13).
In Europe, the new security governance is apparent in a number of key areas.
It is evident, first, in significant changes to the roles and functions of regional
institutions, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and
the European Union (EU). NATO has developed into an extra-regional crisis
manager and security provider rather than merely an institutional instrument
for collective security. It has thus displaced other institutions, including the
Western European Union (WEU) and the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) (Webber et al. 2004: 9–14). Within the EU,
responsibility for regional and extra-regional conflict prevention has now
been divided among a number of different authorities at different levels,
sometimes with state governments in the lead, and sometimes with EU
institutions and agencies taking the initiative (Kirchner 2006: 954–57). The
European Commission, for instance, runs the European Neighbourhood
Policy (ENP), which aims to promote peace and prosperity among the states
immediately bordering the EU, as well as things like the European Initiative
for Democracy and Human Rights (EISDR). The EU’s High Representative
engages in conflict mediation within Europe and outside it, as well as conducting
traditional diplomacy through the EU’s 50-odd embassies across the world.
In parallel, some EU member states have worked not merely to coordinate
their policies through the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and
European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) processes, but to build
institutions around them, some of which replicate or challenge existing
arrangements (Webber et al. 2004: 16; Weiss and Dalferth 2009).
The new security governance appears, second, in the proliferation across
Europe of networks and partnerships tackling particular security issues. Many
of these networks give substantial roles to private-sector actors. Often these
networks exist alongside extensive efforts to build policy coordination
through persuasion and norm setting. The nature and rise of these networks
reflect the ‘human security’ agenda, the securitization of development, and
the widespread belief that only ‘joined-up’ approaches can tackle the ‘wicked
problems’ of the developing world. To that end, government agencies, such as
the British DFID, have built networks that not just use NGOs to deliver aid
or development assistance, but involve and co-opt private-sector actors into
policy making. Sometimes they do this by community engagement – talking
to, funding and advising groups within a given society – and sometimes by
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28 Mark Bevir and Ian Hall

contracting out the provision of services using market-based mechanisms.
In sum, even in the difficult area of security, European governments have
turned away from the hierarchical provision of services by authoritative
bureaucracies (Christou et al. 2010).
However, security governance is not merely a European phenomenon. Although
most of the scholarly literature focuses on Europe, the relevant practices have
spread into non-Western contexts. In the Asia-Pacific, for example, a region
that is notorious for its weak and shaky ‘security architecture’ (Bisley 2009),
security governance may be replacing efforts at managing security challenges
by older realist and liberal means. Examples of security governance in the
Asia-Pacific area include the proliferation of ‘strategic partnerships’, the develop-
ment of new transnational security networks, the growing use of ‘mini-
lateralism’ as opposed to multilateralism, the utilization of public diplomacy
to cultivate ‘soft power’, and the privatization of security.
Since 1991, and especially since 9/11, Asia-Pacific states have forged a series
of new ‘strategic partnerships’ that now sit alongside old alliances (Nadkarni
2010). These flexible arrangements vary in nature and in content, but generally
they avoid tying strategic partners into the treaty-based formal commitments
that characterized traditional alliances, while leaving open the possibility
of closer cooperation if certain contingencies arise. There are four main kinds of
strategic partnership. The first looks very much like an alliance in all but
name, involving substantive mutual commitments between like-minded states.
A prominent example is NATO’s projected ‘global partnerships’ with Australia
and Japan (Noetzel and Schreer 2009: 215–16). These alliances in all but
name are rare in the Asia-Pacific. The second kind of partnership is more
common: the strategic partnership as stepping stone is one that may evolve
into a tacit alliance. The US-India, Israel-India and Japan-India arrangements
are examples of this form of partnership (Burns 2007; Carter 2006; Ganguly
and Scobell 2005; Kumaraswamy 1998; Ghosh 2008). China and Russia,
together with the other members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization
(SCO) might take their relations in this direction (Lo 2004; Ferdinand 2009;
Bolt and Cross 2010), as might India and Indonesia (Mohan 2011), India and
Australia (Brewster 2010) and India and Vietnam (Brewster 2009). The third
kind of partnership is a partnership for mutual management. The best example
is the US-China strategic partnership, while other examples include the part-
nerships between China and India, and between the EU and China (see
Shambaugh 2011; Gottwald 2010). In such partnerships, the objective is to
generate, sustain and build connections across a range of areas of mutual
concern, from trade to security, rather than to coordinate or harmonize policy
on these areas. Finally, there are ‘unequal’ partnerships. China has a number
of these, but normally with states outside the Asia-Pacific. It has multiple
strategic partnership agreements with African and Latin American states that
are designed principally to ensure the flow of raw materials to fuel China’s
economy, but also to leverage its economic power to greater geopolitical
consequence (Campbell 2009; Konings 2007; Jenkins 2010).
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The rise of security governance 29

Alongside the formal and institutionalized networks generated between
state governments by strategic partnerships, informal networks of state security
practitioners and non-state independent analysts have also developed in the
Asia-Pacific. Some are of long standing, such as the networks created by scholar-
ships and student exchange programmes, such as the Australian contribution to
the Colombo Plan, which ran from 1950 to 1957, and which brought Asian
students to Australian universities. Others are more recent, like Australian
training programmes for foreign military personnel from states like Indonesia
and Pakistan. Also important are Track II initiatives, which are proliferating
in the region (Taylor et al. 2006). Some Track II initiatives are quite venerable
bodies like the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific (CSCAP),
which was created in 1993, and which draws together representatives from
regional think-tanks and institutes of international affairs to facilitate dialogue
between practitioners and scholars (Evans 1994; Simon 2002). Other Track II
initiatives are newer, including the Shangri-La Dialogue, which has been run
annually in Singapore since 2002 by the London-based International Institute
for Strategic Studies (IISS) (Capie and Taylor 2010).
The rise of strategic partnerships and new networks has been accompanied
by a shift away from heavily institutionalized multilateralism towards more
flexible ‘minilateral’ engagements across a range of issues, including new
security challenges (see especially Mulgan 2008; Eckersley 2012). This minilateral
approach draws pragmatically on traditional bilateralism and multilateralism
to build temporary or lasting coalitions rather than to forge fixed alliances or
longer-term institutions. The resulting coalitions may generate wider multilateral
agreements in due course or they may not. They have been used especially in
climate negotiations, but also, increasingly in the ‘hard’ security realm.
Whereas during the Cold War states in the Asia-Pacific were wary of trying
to speak to and engage foreign publics in the region, they now make sub-
stantial investments in public diplomacy (Hall and Smith 2013). Asia-Pacific
states have varying motives for pursuing public diplomacy. Sometimes their
public diplomacy is both a response to the democratization of foreign policy
and an invaluable aide in pushing for further public engagement in the pro-
cesses of making policy and implementing it (Hall 2010). This motive informs
some of the Indian and Indonesian investment in public diplomacy (see Hall
2012; Sukma 2011), but at other times public diplomacy is just a means of
building ‘soft power’ for strategic ends. Many Chinese analysts and policy
makers, for example, view ‘soft power’ as essential to the ‘comprehensive
national power’ that China needs to secure its objectives in international
relations and to ensure its security in the Asia-Pacific region (Hall and Smith
2013). For that reason, China is investing billions of dollars in an upgraded
regional media presence, research centres, student exchange programmes,
Confucius Institutes and other instruments. Other states across the Asia-Pacific
have responded with their own public diplomacy initiatives. This general
expansion of public diplomacy, like the rise of partnerships and networks,
signals a shift away from state-oriented hard security practices to new forms
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30 Mark Bevir and Ian Hall

of security governance. Public diplomacy is, by definition, multi-layered –
different forms of public diplomacy aim to gain and build influence at different
levels of target societies. TV stations might aim at the masses. Language
programmes and student exchanges might aim at business communities and
‘emerging leaders’. Art and cultural exchanges aim at both mass and elite.
Academic linkages aim to shape scholarly opinion. All aim to change the
dynamics of a debate about a given state and to try to shift public policy in
that state’s favour with regard to economic and security issues.
Finally, the Asia-Pacific region is witnessing rapid growth in the private
security industry. By 1995, the Asia-Pacific region had already emerged as the
third largest market for private security, after North America and Western
Europe, valued at US$5.4bn (O’Brien 2000: 64). By 2009, when the global
market was valued at over $150bn, the Asia-Pacific was estimated by some to
account for 10%–15% of the total, or some $15bn–$25bn. Double-digit
growth in the private security industry is predicted in China and India, as in
other emerging markets, in the next few years (Abrahamsen and Williams
2011: 20–21). Much of this growth is in ‘private policing’ as well as the pro-
vision of guards for corporations and private citizens. Singapore is perhaps
the most significant regional hub for PSCs, some drawing on the substantial
number of former Ghurkha soldiers and police personnel, but other states are
rapidly developing their own industries. Since the mid-2000s, Chinese firms
have reportedly entered the market, offering the services of former People’s
Liberation Army (PLA) and People’s Armed Police (PAP) members at
cheaper rates than Western firms like G4S (Erickson and Collins 2012). Further,
in the past decade, Asia-Pacific private security contractors have begun to
operate in less conventional areas. Many are involved in protecting large-scale
mining and industrial operations, sometimes leading to considerable con-
troversy. The extensive private security business in Papua New Guinea, for
example, has come under serious scrutiny for alleged abuses, particularly in
connection to mining projects (Human Rights Watch 2011). Other con-
tractors have been involved in anti-piracy operations in the Malacca Straits
(Hohenstein 2007; Liss 2007). The Singaporean government has even mooted
the idea of employing private contractors to help deal with civil contingencies,
such as natural disasters and terrorist attacks (Tan 2008).

Conclusion
This chapter has charted the rise of security governance in the post-Cold War
period. Security governance arose as new dilemmas undermined belief in realism
and liberalism. The rise of new security threats arising from environmental
concerns, the resurgence of ethno-nationalist violence, and the negative effects
of globalization drove new agendas of human security, state-building and
humanitarian intervention. Further, these new agendas were addressed not by old
statist and hierarchical modes of governing, but by new market- and network-
based approaches to governing. Changes in international relations and public
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administration thus combined to inspire a novel security governance initially in
Europe but more recently also in other regions such as the Asia-Pacific.

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3 An interplay of traditions
The ‘return of uncertainty’ and its
taming in post-9/11 US security thinking
Sabine Selchow

The terrorist attack on 11 September 2001 (hereafter, 9/11) was an extraordinary

event in many respects. One dimension of its extraordinariness was its surprise
nature. Most obviously, 9/11 was a surprise in the sense that it happened
beyond the knowledge of US intelligence (e.g. Porch and Wirtz 2002), but it
was also a surprise in the sense that there was something ‘impossible’ about
two hijacked planes flying into the two towers of the World Trade Center in
New York City. The event appeared ‘unimaginable’, standing beyond everything
for which there were already words. As Jenny Edkins observes:

[o]ne of the most striking images of September 11 was that of people on the
sidewalks in New York, their hands clasped over their mouths, transfixed
in horror as they watched the impossible turning into the real in front of
their eyes … No cry was heard. Just the silent horror … People sat in silence,
absorbed, thinking yet unable to think, overwhelmed … What happened
could be spoken about, of course. But, at junctures like this, words in an
important sense fail.
(Edkins 2002: 243)

It was this ‘unimaginability’ that made many feel that 9/11 constituted something
different in kind. This sentiment was already apparent in the first public
reactions of President George W. Bush to it, in which he suggested that the attack
was conducted by ‘a different type of enemy’ (Bush 2001b: emphasis added),
‘a different enemy than we have ever faced’ (Bush 2001a: emphasis added).
In their elaboration of how ‘traditions’ – understood as the ‘social context
in which individuals exercise their reason and act’ – change, Bevir, Rhodes and
Weller highlight the importance of dilemmas (Bevir et al. 2003: 6, 10pp.; see
also Chapter 1 in this collection). In the face of dilemmas traditions are ques-
tioned and change is possible and facilitated. They argue that ‘a dilemma …
arises for an individual or institution when a new idea stands in opposition to
existing beliefs or practices and so forces a reconsideration of these existing
beliefs and associated tradition’ (Bevir et al. 2003: 10). This chapter suggests
that we can think about surprises (of the kind of 9/11) in a similar way to
‘dilemmas’, namely as symbolic openers that provoke reinterpretations of
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36 Sabine Selchow
traditional beliefs. This suggestion opens up a number of interesting questions
concerning 9/11: How was the space filled that was opened up by the violent
‘surprise’ of 9/11? Which worldviews challenged, transformed or replaced
existing ones in the face of 9/11? More precisely, is there something significant
about the post-9/11 US interpretation of the global security environment that
might indicate significant future shifts in US security policy making?
Existing commentary on this last question usually highlights one of two
interpretations as dominating the US security discourse. On the one side,
commentators point to the revival of Cold War thinking, which is characterized
by the underlying idea of a bipolar world implicated in a ‘war’ of ‘good’ against
‘evil’ (see e.g. Ivie 2003; Kellner 2004; Ó Tuathail 2003). On the other side,
commentators stress that the US interpretation of the post-9/11 global security
environment was shaped by the idea that it is full of elusive dangers and
enemies, full of ‘risks’ rather than ‘threats’ (see e.g. Williams 2008; Heng 2006).
This chapter argues that there is more to the US interpretation of the
post-9/11 world than these two broad narratives. Grounded in an analysis of
the Public Papers of President George W. Bush, this chapter shows that there
is an interpretation of the post-9/11 global security environment held within
the Bush Administration that has been overlooked to date, but which is
highly significant. This interpretation is manifest in the explicit expression
that the United States had entered a ‘new’ world after 9/11. In other words, it
is manifest in the express and explicit rhetoric of the ‘new’ that entered the
security context after 9/11. What makes this hitherto overlooked interpretation
of the post-9/11 global security environment particularly interesting and analy-
tically valuable is that on the one side, it indicates nothing less than a turning
away from a modern frame, or – adopting the conceptual language suggested
for this edited collection – a modern tradition for understanding empirical
reality towards an understanding of the world as ‘reflexive’ (e.g. Beck 1994),
while on the other side, symbolically ‘taming’ the imperative to fundamentally
rethink the parameters of contemporary modern (security) policy making that
this new tradition implies.
The chapter is divided into three parts. The first part provides evidence
for the hitherto overlooked interpretation of the post-9/11 global security
environment as a ‘new’ world that is held within the Bush Administration.
The second part advocates that there are two dimensions to this interpretation.
First, it is suggested that the interpretation of the security environment as a
‘new’ world can be seen as a manifestation of the fact that there is an under-
standing on the part of the Bush Administration that the world is being
re-shaped by what scholars have labelled the ‘return of uncertainty’ (Beck
1994: 8). Second, the two particularly American notions of the ‘new’ that are
encapsulated in the interpretation of the global security environment as a
‘new’ world are stressed: these are the idea of America as the ‘New World’
and the notion of collective renewal that is captured in the American myth of
the frontier. The third part of this chapter brings the key findings of the pre-
vious parts together by embedding the notion of the ‘return of uncertainty’ in
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An interplay of traditions 37
the broader theory of reflexive modernity. On the one side, it argues that the
interpretation of the post-9/11 global security environment as a ‘new’ world
indicates a change from a modern tradition towards a ‘reflexive’ one, and
demonstrates that the profundity of this interpretation flows from the fact that
this change in tradition implies the imperative fundamentally to rethink
modern policy making and thinking. On the other side, it suggests that this
imperative is ‘tamed’, in the sense of ‘Americanized’, through the specific
American notion or, in line with the conceptual language suggested for this
edited collection, specific American tradition of the ‘new’. More precisely, it
suggests that this ‘uncertainty’ about the ‘new’ world was ‘familiarized’
through the traditional American narrative of the ‘New World’ and the
notion of renewal, as captured in the American myth of the frontier. Hence,
the chapter argues that the interpretation of the post-9/11 global security
environment as a ‘new’ world, i.e. the shift towards a ‘reflexive’ tradition,
implies nothing less than the potentiality of an opening-up towards a radical
rethinking of the foundations of the United States’ (modern) self while,
simultaneously, due to its specific American dimension, symbolically cementing
the United States in its existing (modern) position and symbolically re-enforcing
the idea that what is required is a simple recourse to the ‘strengths’ of
America as the quintessential product of the confrontation with the ‘new’.

‘There’s a new world here’: revisiting the US interpretation of the

global security environment after 9/11
The public and scholarly debate about US foreign and security policy in the
years after 9/11 was in large part taken up with the question: ‘What impact
did the terrorist attack have on US foreign and security policy making and
thinking?’ In particular, this debate was shaped by the black and white, either/
or question of whether 9/11 really ‘change[d] everything’, as Vice-President
Dick Cheney (2003) stated, or if, by contrast, post-9/11 US foreign and
security policy making was simply a continuation of pre-9/11 and post-Cold
War currents. It was the dichotomized nature of the question about impact,
combined with the fact that the Bush Administration used the ‘everything
changed’ narrative strategically as a ‘legitimating device’ (Dunmire 2009: 196)
for its ‘War on Terror’ policies, that made this debate a peculiar one, in which
positions and ‘findings’ frequently seemed to be motivated by political concerns.
Given that the very claim ‘9/11 changed everything’ was perceived by critics
as a strategic move by the Bush Administration, critical voices were largely
locked into the other, opposing position that ‘nothing had changed’. This
dichotomized question not only shaped public debates but also scholarship.
Here, too, the arguments and findings were overly determined by scholars’
express aim of finding either continuity or change. While this generated some
interesting, mainly policy-focused insights, which show that in most respects
9/11 merely ‘tipped the balance’ (Feffer 2003: 16) within the Bush Administration
between what Thomas Risse (2003: 13) called ‘the Pentagon party’ (namely
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38 Sabine Selchow
hardliners such as Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz), and the
‘State Department party’ (namely moderates such as Colin Powell, and Senators
Richard Luger and Joe Biden), the dichotomy that was inscribed into the
motivating question (has it changed everything or not?) almost automatically
restricted answers to the general and broad (either/or, all or nothing).
Even if analysts might be able to argue that a broad-brush, either/or approach
might be suitable for the analysis of post-9/11 US policies, it has obvious limits
when it comes to issues that are less tangible than policies, such as symbolic
systems, belief systems and their underlying traditions, and, more precisely, issues
such as the interpretation of the security environment post 9/11. Here, the
question whether 9/11 ‘changed everything’ seems (even) less clear cut, hence an
either/or approach seems (even) less suitable than with regard to policy changes.
On the one hand, 9/11 significantly changed the US interpretation of the
global security environment in reviving a pre-1990 Cold War tradition. As many
commentators point out, 9/11 triggered an interpretation of the global security
environment based on the revival of the Cold War tradition characterized by
an underlying idea of a bipolar world implicated in a ‘war’ of ‘good’ against
‘evil’ (e.g. Ivie 2003; Kellner 2004; Ó Tuathail 2003). Although this inter-
pretation is easily (mis)read as proof that not much had changed after 9/11, it
was actually a ‘new’ post-9/11 turn, albeit a turn to an ‘old’ tradition. It was a
new turn because after the disappearance of the USSR as the Great Power
that posed an ‘existential threat’, the US security discourse had shifted away
from the Cold War tradition, with its underlying idea of a clear enemy and
easily quantifiable ‘threats’ (e.g. Williams 2008).
On the other hand, the post-9/11 global security environment was interpreted
as a world full of elusive dangers and enemies – a world of ‘risks’ rather than
‘threats’. Post-9/11 ‘War on Terror’ policies relied heavily on the technology of
‘risk’ (Amoore and de Goede 2008). So, while the recourse to Cold War
thinking can be seen as a new post-9/11 turn to an ‘old’ tradition, the inter-
pretation of the global security environment through the concept of ‘risk’
constitutes a continuation of post-1990 and pre-9/11 times. Thus, as Yee-Kuang
Heng (2006: 2) argues in comparing the strategic thinking employed by the
Clinton and Bush Administrations, in this respect, post-9/11 security thinking
‘implied continuity in strategic thinking where one might expect discontinuity
given the different Administrations and strategic contexts involved’.
As this brief reflection on relevant findings suggests, when it comes to issues
that are less tangible than security policies, such as symbolic systems, belief
systems and their underlying traditions, more precisely, issues such as the
interpretation of the global security environment post 9/11, a more complex
picture unfolds. Hence, approaches that look through a frame that focuses
them on the question of either ‘continuity’ or ‘radical change’ do not seem to
be able to capture the subtlety of the issue to hand. A broader analytical
frame is needed to produce meaningful insights in this respect.
Once we revisit the interpretation of the global security environment in the
United States after 9/11 through a broader analytical frame, leave behind the
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An interplay of traditions 39
distinct preoccupation with the question of whether or not 9/11 ‘changed
everything’ and, instead, ask the more open-ended question of how the space
that 9/11 opened was filled, the picture becomes more complex. A corpus-
driven approach to the Public Papers of President George W. Bush enables us
to see that alongside the (return to the) Cold War narrative and the rise of a(n
accelerating, post-1990) ‘risk’ discourse, another, as yet overlooked, inter-
pretation filled the space that the ‘surprise’ of 9/11 had opened. This other
interpretation is the interpretation of the post-9/11 global security environ-
ment as a ‘new’ world. It is manifest in the striking use of the term ‘new’ in
Bush’s post-9/11 rhetoric:

On the morning of September the 11th, 2001, our Nation awoke to a

nightmare attack. Nineteen men armed with box cutters took control of
airplanes and turned them into missiles. They used them to kill nearly
3,000 innocent people. We watched the Twin Towers collapse before our
eyes, and it became instantly clear that we’d entered a new world and a
dangerous new war.
(Bush 2006: emphasis added)

The last choice of any President ought to be to commit troops into

combat. We ought to try everything possible before we commit one soul
into combat, and that’s why I went to the United Nations. I said, ‘We see
a threat. How about you?’ You’ve passed resolutions before – resolution
after resolution after resolution. And I said – so I said, ‘There’s a new
world here.’ After September the 11th, we must take threats seriously.
(Bush 2004: emphasis added)

The attacks of September the 11th, 2001 … revealed the outlines of a new
world.
(Bush 2005: emphasis added)

In the new world we have entered, the only path to peace and security is
the path of action.
(Bush in the ‘Introduction’ to the US National Security
Strategy 2002: emphasis added)

As these extracts show, there was explicit use of the phrase ‘new world’.
In addition, the adjective ‘new’ got attached to all sorts of security-related
phenomena – from ‘struggle’, ‘terrorism’ and ‘threats’, to ‘war’, ‘dangers’ and
‘enemies’. What makes this rhetoric of the ‘new’ intriguing is that it indicates
an understanding of the global security environment as different in kind rather
than just different in degree. ‘We stand shoulder to shoulder in a new kind of
struggle’, suggested George W. Bush (2001c) to NATO Secretary-General Lord
Robertson, fighting a ‘new kind of war’ (Bush 2001d), and, as he reminded
addressees in other contexts, this war was fought against a ‘new kind of
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40 Sabine Selchow
enemy’ (Bush 2001e), facing a ‘new kind of threat’, as he explained to High
School students in Wisconsin:

You’re graduating in a time of war, right here in America, but a war that
your textbooks really haven’t been able to describe before. It’s a new kind
of threat to our country.
(Bush 2002b: emphasis added)

To be clear, this interpretation of the post-9/11 security environment as a

‘new’ world, which is evident in the Public Papers of President George
W. Bush, was not the interpretation that dominated all others. Indeed, it is subtle
enough as to have been overlooked by scholars so far. Yet, it is a particularly
noteworthy, since loaded, interpretation. This is because of what is implied in
the notion of the ‘new’ world.

The two dimensions of the notion of the ‘new’ world

First of all, the notion of the ‘new’ world implies the idea of a world different
in kind, which can be read as an understanding on the part of the Bush
Administration that the world is being (re)shaped by a broad development
that scholars have labelled the ‘return of uncertainty’ (Beck 1994: 8). How-
ever, it also implies something else: a notion of the ‘new’ that is constitutive of
US culture. This idea is itself two-fold: it incorporates the notion of America
as the ‘New World’ and the notion of collective renewal that is captured in
the American myth of the frontier.

The ‘new’ world and the idea of the ‘return of uncertainty’

The first notion implied in the interpretation of the post-9/11 global security
environment as a ‘new’ world is the idea of a world that is different in kind.
This, in turn, can be read as an understanding on the part of the Bush
Administration that the world is being (re)shaped by a broad development
that scholars have labelled the ‘return of uncertainty’ (Beck 1994: 8).
To commence a discussion of this first dimension of the notion of the ‘new’, it
is worth drawing a comparison between the idea of the ‘new’ implied in instances
such as Bush’s exclamation, ‘[t]here is a new world here’ (Bush 2004), and
another notion of the ‘new’ (cf. Selchow 2011). This other notion of the ‘new’
is manifest in the various instances in which a speaker envisages and promises a
‘new’ future. The inaugural addresses of various US presidents provide ample
examples of this other notion of the ‘new’. In his 2009 address, for example,
Barack Obama (2009: emphasis added) promises ‘a new way forward’. Earlier,
Jimmy Carter (1977: emphasis added) made clear that ‘[t]his inauguration
ceremony marks a new beginning, a new dedication within our Government,
and a new spirit among us all’. Ronald Reagan (1985: emphasis added) sug-
gested that ‘[w]e must think anew and move with a new boldness … The time
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An interplay of traditions 41
has come for a new American emancipation … From new freedom will spring
new opportunities’. Likewise, George Bush (1989: emphasis added) introduced
his presidential term by stating that ‘[t]here is new ground to be broken and
new action to be taken’, and Bill Clinton stressed:

We need a new Government for a new century … With a new vision of

Government, a new sense of responsibility, a new spirit of community, we will
sustain America’s journey … The promise we sought in a new land, we
will find again in a land of new promise. In this new land, education will
be every citizen’s most prized possession … Yes, let us build our bridge, a
bridge wide enough and strong enough for every American to cross over
to a blessed land of new promise.
(Clinton 1997: emphasis added)

The kind of notion of ‘new’ that is implied in these examples is about an

active, forward-looking idea; it is about a vision for the future. Something
‘new’ is promised that is already envisaged by the speaker, a person who
seems to have the future in their hands. This is a modern ‘new’ that encapsulates
the idea of agency, progress and development.
By contrast with this familiar (modern) idea of the ‘new’, the notion of the
‘new’ that is implied in the idea of the ‘new’ world that is evident in Bush’s
interpretation of the post-9/11 global security environment does not refer to a
‘new’ future, envisaged by those who promise it. Rather, it is about the now –
about how the world is (perceived to be). It is apparent that those who perceive
the world as being ‘new’ take a very different position towards this ‘new’
world when compared with those who promise a ‘new’ world. The former is a
less active position since they are observers of a world that is ‘out there’,
rather than shapers and active innovators of it. The task and challenge that
this (supposed) ‘new’ world (due to its ‘newness’) poses is not so much to
shape it but to understand it accurately and to adapt to it. Most significantly,
the notion of the ‘new’ that is implied in the idea of the ‘new’ world as evi-
dent in the interpretation of the post-9/11 global security environment carries
with it an idea of the ‘unknown’ and the ‘uncertain’. The perception that
‘[t]here’s a new world here’ (Bush 2004) implies the idea of a terra incognita.
It is the sense of an ontological uncertainty that is implied in the perception of
the world that is (perceived to be) ‘new’. Importantly, this ontological uncer-
tainty is interlinked with a state of epistemological uncertainty; it implies a
state, in which – given the supposed ‘newness’ of the world – we have lost the
ability to understand the now. It implies that we might not have the ‘right’
experience to build on in responding to our environment, and we might not
have the appropriate conceptual tools to use in order to understand it. As
George W. Bush explained in the earlier quoted comment to high school stu-
dents, the Bush Administration saw itself in a ‘new kind of war’ for which
there is no historical precedent – in Bush’s words, a kind of war ‘textbooks
really haven’t been able to describe before’ (Bush 2002b). As such, the idea
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42 Sabine Selchow
that it is a ‘new’ world, in which the United States found itself after 9/11, also
implies an historical caesura. It implies a clear divide into a ‘before’ and
‘after’. This perceived radical break with the past could not be more readily
apparent than in Jonathan Schell’s post-9/11 comment in The Nation, in
which he speaks of the ‘new’ world as a ‘slide in a projector’ that has been
‘rammed into’ the place of the old, ‘known’ world:

In an instant and without warning on a fine fall morning, the known

world had been jerked aside like a mere slide in a projector, and a new
world had been rammed into its place.
(Schell 2001)

It is the ontological and epistemological uncertainty implied in this use of the

adjective ‘new’ that makes the interpretation of the post-9/11 global security
environment as a ‘new’ world intriguing. This is because it can be taken as a
manifestation of the fact that there is an understanding held within the Bush
Administration that the world is being (re)shaped by a broad development
that scholars have labelled the ‘return of uncertainty’ (Beck 1994: 8).
The expression ‘return of uncertainty’ refers to a development that numerous
scholars have detected in modern societies over the past decades (e.g. Beck
1994; Giddens 1994; Wehling 2010; Boeschen et al. 2010). As we know,
notions of uncertainty and the unknown are crucial components in socio-
political life. The way a society perceives and deals with uncertainty and the
unknown, and, more broadly, how that society understands and deals with
the future determines its (political) action in the present. Although approaches to
uncertainty and the unknown are culturally specific, all modern societies
share an approach to them that is ‘active’ and ‘optimistic’. The modern
approach to uncertainty and the unknown is ‘active’ in that this approach
arises from an understanding that humans have their future in their hands.
Indeed, this is one of the significant characteristics of modernity; it is aptly
captured in the understanding of modernity as being about the ‘colonization
of the future’ (Giddens 1994: 7). As well as being ‘active’, the modern
approach to uncertainty and the unknown is ‘optimistic’ in the sense that this
approach takes the unknown as something that could be known, either by
overcoming (lay) ignorance or through further scientific exploration and
advanced/advancing knowledge production (Wehling 2010: 265). Hence, the
modern approach to the unknown is an ‘optimistic’ one in the sense that it
takes it as something that is not yet known.
The development that is captured in the concept of the ‘return of uncer-
tainty’ refers to this ‘optimistic’ nature of the modern approach to uncertainty
and the unknown. As many argue, today non-knowledge can no longer be
simply understood as something that could be unlocked through scientific
knowledge production (Wehling 2010: 260–62). It is no longer to be taken
simply as ‘the given “primitive or native state” … from which the scientific
endeavor departs to replace it, sooner or later, with complete and reliable
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An interplay of traditions 43
knowledge’, as Boeschen, Kastenhofer, Rust, Soentgen and Wehling (2010: 785)
explain. Rather, there has been an acknowledgement that the increase of
scientific knowledge leads to an increase of non-knowledge. This does not
simply refer to the common insight that the more we know, the more we
realize we don’t know – that is, the more we are aware of known unknowns –
but it means that increasing scientific knowledge production leads to an
increase in unknown unknowns – that is, things that we do not know we do
not know. Furthermore, increasing scientific knowledge production leads
to things that we are actually not able to know. In other words, there is a
widespread acknowledgement that scientific knowledge actually produces non-
knowledge and uncertainty that would not exist without scientific knowledge
production and that is even likely to remain beyond human grasp (see Wehling
2010: 266–67; also Beck 1992, 1994, 2006, 2009) – hence, ‘uncertainty’ has
‘returned’ to modern societies.
Having said the above, the idea that there is something ‘new’ – in the sense
of different in kind – about the post-9/11 global security environment can be
interpreted by us as a manifestation of the fact that there is an understanding
on the part of the Bush Administration that the world is being re-shaped
by this broad development, by the ‘return of uncertainty’. As we will see shortly,
this is a significant insight precisely because understanding that the world is
being re-shaped by a ‘return of uncertainty’ entails nothing less than a turning
away from the modern ‘tradition’ that constitutes the context for contemporary
(security) policy making.

The American ‘new’

The second dimension of the interpretation of the post-9/11 global security
environment as a ‘new’ world is, arguably, less obvious than the first one. This
second dimension is about the idea of the ‘new’ that is particular for and
constitutive of US culture and tradition. There are two aspects to it: the
traditional notion of America as the ‘New World’, and the notion of collective
renewal that is captured in the American myth of the frontier. In the following,
each of these aspects of the ‘new’ in US culture will be introduced in turn.
The first aspect of the notion of the ‘new’ in US culture is inscribed in the
founding narrative of the United States as the ‘New World’. This founding
narrative is enshrined in US culture in fundamental ways. We just need to call
to mind names such as New York, New Orleans, New Haven and New
Canaan – i.e. the ‘New World’s markers dotted across the American landscape –
to realize how constitutive it is. It is further kept alive and is constantly
reproduced in the omnipresent metaphor of ‘Columbia’, through which the
country’s ‘discovery’ (that is, Christopher Columbus’s 1492 landing in the
Caribbean) is captured. It was in 1792 that the ‘discovery’ of America was
officially commemorated for the first time and glorified as ‘the greatest event
in the history of mankind since the death of our Savior’ (de Lancey, quoted in
Schuman et al. 2005: 6). In this way, the ‘discovery’ of the ‘New World’
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44 Sabine Selchow
became inscribed into the history of the new, ‘history-less’ United States of
America and their evolving nation. As Cynthia Koch (1996: 32) explains,
‘representing the new land, the exotic wilderness of North America’, its feminized
form ‘Columbia’ then served as the ‘symbolic counterpart to George Washington,
who was seen as imposing order and reason upon the land through republican
government’. Hence, the name of the new nation’s capital: Washington, Dis-
trict of Columbia, in which the ‘exotic’ and ‘wild’ feminine and the ‘rational’
and ‘reasonable’ masculine are juxtaposed and at the same time symbolically
united. Through the countless references to Columbus the idea of the ‘New
World’ is omnipresent in US culture; it represents the key to US collective
identity, while also serving constantly to distinguish it from ‘old Europe’.
However, the ‘new’ in the ‘New World’ does of course not refer to something
ontologically ‘new’. Rather, it implies the idea of hope and opportunities. It
refers to the idea of a future that is open to being shaped by those reaching
the ‘New World’s shores, looking to make the American dream come true. As
US President Franklin D. Roosevelt put it:

America has been the New World in all tongues, and to all peoples, not
because this continent was a new-found land, but because all those who
came here believed they could create upon this continent a new life – a
life that should be new in freedom.
(Roosevelt 1941)

Further, mystified as the ‘new nation’s Moses’ (Koch 1996: 33), the reference
to Columbus and the ‘New World’ metaphor can be seen to play a significant
role in the formation of the Christian spirit that runs through US culture. As
a ‘city upon a hill’ (Winthrop 1630), it not only has the ‘eyes of all people’
upon it, but it also ‘spreads the light’ out into the world and serves as a light
on the horizon, visible from afar to those (referring back to Roosevelt, above)
who seek ‘a new life’, ‘new in freedom’.
The second aspect of the notion of the ‘new’ in US culture and tradition is
the idea of collective renewal that is captured in the American myth of the
frontier. As Richard Slotkin suggests in his seminal study, Gunfighter Nation,
the myth of the frontier is the ‘oldest and most characteristic myth’ that informs
US culture (Slotkin 1998: 10; see also Slotkin 1973). The frontier refers to the
(imagined) line between the westwards-moving settlers and the ‘unknown’,
‘wild’ land of the Native Americans, the Wild West, which was immortalized
in the dime novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the
films of the Western genre. In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented
his influential ‘frontier thesis’ as a way of explaining the social development in the
United States or, rather, what he argued was the lack of it, due to the ‘closing’
of the ‘old’ frontier in 1890. In ‘The Significance of the Frontier for American
History’, Turner (1920 [1893]) described the frontier as the central component,
the driving force for the social development in America. For Turner, the
development of American society is shaped by a:
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An interplay of traditions 45
… recurrence of the process of evolution in each western area reached in
the process of expansion. Thus American development has exhibited not
merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions
on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that
area. American social development has been continually beginning over
again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life,
this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch
with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating
American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is
not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West.
(Turner 1920)

Turner (1920) understood the frontier as ‘the line of most rapid and effective
Americanization’ because, as he suggested, it is in the confrontation with
the American wilderness, at the ‘meeting point between savagery and
civilization’, that the specific and unique American identity – ‘a new product
that is American’, as he puts it (ibid.) – is born. So, it is at the frontier that the
American becomes American, and at the frontier that the American society
renews itself in a constant, evolutionary process.
As a central myth in US tradition, the frontier and its complex symbolism
has found its way not only into popular culture but also into political discourses
in various respects. Most prominently, it was taken up by John F. Kennedy
(1960) in his Democratic Party presidential nomination acceptance speech.
Here, the metaphor of the ‘new frontier’ that Kennedy adjures sets the tone
for his following mandate as US president; importantly, it sets ‘the terms in
which the administration would seek public consent to and participation in its
counterinsurgency “mission” in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean’ (Slotkin
1998: 3). As Slotkin (1998: 2–3) demonstrates, the immense cultural power of
the metaphor of the frontier and its symbolism, together with its huge reso-
nance across the American population, made it the ideal language through
which political actions could be explained and justified.
The ‘new’ is thus particular to and constitutive of US culture and tradition
in two respects: first, through the nation’s founding narrative – as the ‘New
World’; and second, through the idea of (collective) renewal, which is captured
in the frontier myth. Significantly, each of these aspects of the ‘new’ plays a role
in the construction of the United States as ‘exceptional’. The (constructed)
‘exceptional’ nature of the United States itself has two facets. On the one
hand, there is the idea of the United States as exceptional in its nature as the
‘New World’ – the land of hope and freedom (which may be contrasted with
‘old Europe’) – and as the country that constitutes ‘a city upon a hill’. As a
‘city upon a hill’ it is watched by the ‘eyes of all people’, engendering both an
imperative to do right and a kind of moral supremacy entailed in knowing
what is right. As Lyndon B. Johnson (1964) put it (speaking for the American
people), the legacy of the ‘city upon a hill’ ‘is at once our bequest, our
burden, and our brightest expectation’. On the other hand, there is the
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46 Sabine Selchow
perception of the United States as exceptional in its very nature – in that it is
understood as the product of the distinct process of ‘Americanization’ at the
frontier, the place at which the American becomes American.
The above elaborations highlighted the two dimensions of the notion of the
‘new’ (world). First, it was highlighted that the post-9/11 interpretation of the
global security environment as a ‘new’ world can be seen as a manifestation
of an understanding on the part of the Bush Administration that the world is
being re-shaped by the ‘return of uncertainty’. Second, the two implied and
particularly American notions of the ‘new’ were stressed: the idea of the ‘New
World’ and the notion of collective renewal captured in the myth of the
frontier. As the next part of this chapter argues, it is the profundity of the first
dimension of the notion of the ‘new’ that accounts for the significance of the
interpretation of the post-9/11 global security environment as a ‘new’ world,
and it is the interplay of the first with the second one that accounts for its
particular complexity and that makes it intriguing.

The return of ‘uncertainty’ and its taming

In order to be able to see that the significance of the interpretation of the
post-9/11 security environment as a ‘new’ world flows from the fact that it is a
manifestation of the fact that there is an understanding held within the Bush
Administration for the ‘return of uncertainty’, it is necessary to understand
the profound implications that the ‘return of uncertainty’ has for existing
(modern) conceptions of how politics is practised and, indeed, how the social
world is to be understood. It is necessary to see that the ‘return of uncertainty’
brings into question foundational conceptions of modern social and political
being, or, going a step further and stressing its implied structural consequences,
that it produces fundamentally different conditions of being and acting. Given
that the ‘return of uncertainty’ means that future consequences of (scientific)
knowledge production are not only not knowable now, but (might) always
remain beyond knowledge, a ‘reinvention of politics’ (Beck 1994) is required.
On the one hand, the ‘return of uncertainty’ means that actors and actions
that had not been perceived or treated as ‘political’ in the past, need to be
treated as such because they might have a fundamental – in the sense of
‘unknowable’ and ‘infinite’ (Beck 2009) – impact on others, in the present
and/or in the future. Importantly, this impact may go beyond the established
nets of uncertainty absorption established by and inscribed within the nature
of the nation-state as we know it. Ulrich Beck (1992, 2009, for example)
speaks of global risks and uses the concept of (global) ‘risk society’ to capture
the contemporary society that is shaped by the ‘return of uncertainty’, more
precisely, by the knowledge that is produced with the aim of ‘transform[ing]
unpredictable risks into calculable risks’ but which, instead, ‘gives rise to new
unpredictabilities, forcing us to reflect upon risks’ (Beck 2009: 15). As Beck
argues, these unpredictabilities force us to reflect on risk – and with that pro-
duce ‘risk societies’ – because they ‘can no longer be socially delimited in
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An interplay of traditions 47
space and time’ (Beck and Grande 2010: 418). Hence, the ‘return of uncertainty’
requires a rethinking of traditional conceptions of what constitutes political
action and who is a political actor.
On the other hand, the ‘return of uncertainty’ means that the normative
parameters, on which actions undertaken by ‘traditional’ political actors are
made and assessed, must be rethought. Issues such as accountability, responsi-
bility and legitimacy of these actions need to be re-conceptualized in order to
adopt the ‘new’, ‘uncertain’ nature of the contemporary age. This is because
their consequences are ‘unknowable’ and ‘infinite’, or, more precisely, because
their consequences can no longer be thought of as ‘knowable’ and ‘finite’.
More fundamentally, the ‘return of uncertainty’ requires a reconceptualization
of our age as an age beyond modernity. Beck (1992, 1994, 2006, 2009, for
example) employs the concept of ‘reflexive modernity’ in order to capture this
‘new’ age, where ‘reflexive’ refers to the process by which progress and (scientific)
knowledge production backfire. In Beck’s words, this is a ‘self-confrontation’
(Beck 2009: 5), by which he means a confrontation of modern society with
(the consequences of) its modern self – that is, a ‘confrontation of the bases of
modernization with the consequences of modernization’ (ibid.: 6). A rethinking
of the very age in which we live is required because its ‘reflexive’ nature
produces a new kind of global existence, in that it produces a new kind of
interconnectedness. This new kind of global existence, this new kind of inter-
connectedness is the product of the new kind of risks (i.e. ‘global’ risks), in
other words, of the ‘infinite’ unpredictabilities that are the product of
(modern) knowledge production. As Beck and Grande (2010: 417) explain,
due to their ‘reflexive’ nature, global risks mean that ‘the “global other” is in
our midst’, i.e. they ‘mix the “native” with the “foreign”’. This, however, does
not automatically or necessarily lead to a ‘normative cosmopolitanism of a world
without borders’ (as many political thinkers suggest and/or hope), but needs
to be understood as a process that creates ‘new cosmopolitan responsibilities,
cosmopolitan imperatives, which no one can escape’ (ibid.: 417). As such, and
continuing to follow Beck (also ibid.), ‘global’ risks pave the way for the
‘universal possibility’ of new kinds of communities, namely ‘cosmopolitan
risk communities’, ‘which spring up, establish themselves and become aware
of their cosmopolitan composition’ (ibid.; see also Beck 2011) – that is, of their
composition as products of the ‘reflexivity’ of (societies in) the contemporary age.
It is this profundity of the consequences of the ‘return of uncertainty’ for
the composition of contemporary societies and, simultaneously, for the way in
which political action is thought of and practised that accounts for the sig-
nificance of the interpretation of the post-9/11 global security environment as
a ‘new’ world that is evident in the Public Papers of President George W.
Bush. Given that the interpretation of the post-9/11 global security environ-
ment as a ‘new’ world (i.e. a world different in kind) implies an understanding
on the part of the Bush Administration for the ‘return of uncertainty’, and given
that the ‘return of uncertainty’ stands for a profound shift in the constitution
of modern (national) societies towards ‘reflexive’ ones, the interpretation of
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48 Sabine Selchow
the post-9/11 global security environment as a ‘new’ world can be read as a
manifestation of nothing less but the fact that there is a reflection on, and
awareness of, this ‘reflexivity’ of contemporary times within the Bush Administra-
tion. It stands for an acknowledgment on the part of the Bush Administration
of a ‘new’, ‘reflexive’ age. This is a significant insight because this awareness
of the ‘reflexivity’ of the contemporary world can be understood as a mani-
festation of nothing less than an awareness of a change in the tradition that
underlies US security thinking. The interpretation of the post-9/11 global
security environment as a ‘new’ world can be read as a manifestation of the
fact that there is awareness that the tradition – understood as the ‘social
context in which individuals exercise their reason and act’ (Bevir et al. 2003: 6) –
that shapes US security thinking and practices has shifted from a modern to a
‘reflexive’ one. In this sense, discovering the interpretation of the post-9/11
security environment as a ‘new’ world entails discovering awareness on the
part of the Bush Administration of a change in nothing short of the guiding
tradition, namely the tradition of modernity. This is significant and analytically
valuable because, as we saw above, this (reflectiveness on the) ‘reflexivity’ of
the world carries with it an imperative to rethink fundamentally (US security)
policy making and practices – that is, to rethink policy making and practices
beyond modernity and against the background of a ‘reflexive’, in Beck’s
words, ‘cosmopolitan’ reality.
However, were post-9/11 US security practices really shaped by a ‘cosmo-
politan vision’ (Beck 2006), as the discovered reflectiveness on the ‘reflexivity’
of the contemporary age would lead us to expect? The reality of post-9/11
security policy making does not really look as though the imperative to rethink
modern security policy making was taken up by the Bush Administration.
This brings us to the aspect that accounts for the complexity of the inter-
pretation of the post-9/11 global security environment as a ‘new’ world, and
to what makes it so intriguing. As this chapter argues, it is the second, parti-
cularly American dimension, which is inscribed in the notion of the ‘new’,
that ‘tames’ the (potentially) fundamental implications of the understanding
of the ‘reflexivity’ of the contemporary age. More precisely, what we see is
that the ‘uncertain’ world, in which the Bush Administration evidently saw
the United States after 9/11, is ‘familiarized’ and ‘Americanized’ through the
profoundly American narrative of the New World and the notion of renewal,
both of which are implied in the traditional American idea of the ‘new’. The
idea that the United States was facing a ‘new’ world after 9/11 – that is, that
‘[t]here’s a new world here’, as George W. Bush (2004) explained to the
United Nations – is symbolically balanced or ‘tamed’ by the idea of a (new)
frontier, which as we have seen is one of the central, and (referring back to
Slotkin’s analysis of John F. Kennedy’s utilization of the frontier metaphor in
1961) most powerful and all-pervasive myths in American culture. It is this
myth of the frontier that symbolically ‘stabilizes’ the idea of the ‘uncertain’,
‘reflexive’ age and that symbolically ‘tames’ the implied imperative of a fun-
damental rethinking of the modern tradition. On the one side, through the
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An interplay of traditions 49
reference to the myth of the frontier this implied imperative of a fundamental
rethinking is symbolically turned into an evolutionary step in the process of US
renewal. While the ‘new’ world might be ‘new’, in the sense of different in
kind, the fact that the United States is confronted with it is not only not ‘new’,
but even represents a chance for a (new) American moment. Consequently,
the confrontation with the post-9/11 global security environment, understood
as a ‘reflexive’ (i.e. ‘new’) reality, turns into a quintessentially American pro-
ject. It becomes a truly American project, through which US society gets the
chance to being renewed and, at the same time, through which the myth of
American exceptionalism is fostered. On the other hand, the reference to the
constitutional idea of America as the New World builds the symbolic foundation
that justifies that the United States (i.e. the Bush Administration) can con-
front the ‘new’ world on its own terms because the confrontation with the
‘new’ is part of its cultural foundation, its tradition, in fact its very nature.
Although the world might be profoundly ‘new’, the very existence of a ‘new’
world is not ‘new’ for America as constituting the New World. Consequently,
instead of a radical rethinking of the foundations of its (modern) self, it can
simply fall back on building on its strengths as America, the New World and
quintessential product of the confrontation with the ‘new’.
Given the above, we see something intriguing in the interpretation of the
post-9/11 global security environment held by the Bush Administration. On
the one side, it implies a change of tradition from a modern towards a
‘reflexive’ one and, with that, nothing less than the potentiality of an opening-
up towards a radical rethinking of the foundations of the United States’
(modern) self. On the other side, due to its specific American dimension and
the traditional American idea of the ‘new’, it symbolically cements the United
States in its existing (modern) position.

Conclusion
Following Bevir, Rhodes and Weller (2003: 6), traditions constitute the ‘social
context in which individuals exercise their reason and act’, thus shaping
policy decisions and actions. This chapter revisited the interpretation of the
global security environment after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001.
Based on a corpus-driven analysis of the Public Papers of President George
W. Bush the chapter unveiled an interpretation held by the Bush Administra-
tion that has been overlooked by scholars: the interpretation of the post-9/11
global security environment as a ‘new’ world. The chapter unveiled that this
interpretation signals an understanding on the part of the Bush Administration
of the ‘return of uncertainty’, which stands for a profound shift in the con-
stitution of modern (national) societies towards ‘reflexive’ ones. Hence, the
interpretation of the post-9/11 global security environment as a ‘new’ world
can be read as a manifestation of nothing less than the fact that there is a
reflection within the Bush Administration on and awareness of the ‘reflexivity’
of contemporary times. This is highly significant because this awareness of the
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50 Sabine Selchow
‘reflexivity’ of the contemporary world can be understood as a manifestation
of nothing less than an awareness of a change in the tradition that underlies
US security thinking and practices. While, due to its profundity, this traditional
change, or more precisely the awareness of it, leads us to expect significant
changes in the Bush Administration’s (security) policy making and thinking,
the chapter showed that the potentiality of a profound rethinking to adapt to
a ‘reflexive’ reality is ‘tamed’ by a specific American tradition, namely the US
notion of the New World and the idea of collective renewal that is captured in
the American myth of the frontier. As such, this chapter not only revealed a
significant post-9/11 change in tradition in US security thinking (from a
modern to a ‘reflexive’ one), but also revealed how its implicit imperative
fundamentally to rethink the United States’ (modern) self is ‘tamed’ by an
interplay with another, profoundly American tradition.

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Society’, Cooperation and Conflict: Journal of the Nordic International Studies
Association 43(1): 57–79.
Winthrop, J. (1630) ‘A Model of Christian Charity’, www.winthropsociety.com/
doc_charity.php (accessed 16 August 2011).
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4 Interpreting George W. Bush’s

foreign policy
Daniel Zoughbie

Few discoveries are more irritating than those which expose the pedigree
of ideas.
(Lord Acton 1907: 62)

The 43rd president of the United States was profoundly and penetratingly
influenced by religious traditions, but not as the conventional accounts might
suggest. Owing to his frequent scriptural references and declaration that Jesus
Christ was his favourite philosopher, it is often assumed that President
George W. Bush was de facto leader of the political movement known as the
Religious Right. This chapter unpacks some fundamental assumptions sur-
rounding both the nature and importance of religious ‘beliefs’ in shaping
Bush’s presidency and, specifically, the conduct of the US Middle East policy
during a defining moment in American history. I argue that President Bush
was a true believer, that his story of conversion and redemption was an
important part of his outreach to right-wing evangelical voters, and that
US foreign policy is shaped not merely by abstract national interests, but by
culturally and religiously constructed conceptions of the ‘national interest’.
Yet as I show, even within American religious culture, there are starkly different,
one might even say ‘clashing’ theological traditions within a tradition. For
example, President Bush’s Christian beliefs belong to a prominent optimistic
theological tradition that is diametrically opposed to the pessimistic theolo-
gical tradition espoused by much of his base, the Religious Right. As I also
show, when faced with national security dilemmas like the Israeli–Palestinian
conflict, the president exercised individual agency and wavered indecisively in
his beliefs. Contrary to the argument presented in Bush’s autobiography
Decision Points (2010), I argue that by virtue of rank and duty, the president
was undoubtedly the ‘decider-in-chief ’; however, his Middle East security
policy was decisively indecisive.
The use of George W. Bush’s Middle East policy as a case study is justified
in several ways. First, the Israeli–Palestinian–Arab conflict has been at the heart
of major regional and international security dilemmas and debates throughout
much of the Cold War, post-Cold War and post-9/11 periods. Second, George W.
Bush explicitly made the Middle East – notably Iraq and Palestine – the
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54 Daniel Zoughbie
testing ground for his flagship ‘Freedom Agenda’. Third, with the rise of
Islamic and Jewish fundamentalisms in the Middle East and the Religious
Right in America, there have been few other moments in modern history where
the management and organization of political decisions, not the least of
which concern matters of peace and security in the Middle East, have been
shaped more deliberately by religious traditions.
The category ‘tradition’ employed here in the broader sense of a theological
tradition may seem unconventional to security studies, yet my conception
of ‘tradition’ is analytically consistent with the other chapters in this volume.
As Bevir and Rhodes (1999: 2–6) argue, ‘To explain the beliefs of a particular
individual, we have to appeal to an aggregate concept, such as tradition, that
evokes this social context’. In order to understand why policy makers might
be held by certain ‘webs of belief’, one must look further into the ‘background of
an inherited tradition’ (Bevir 2002: 199). In moving beyond ‘security tradi-
tions’, one finds a backdrop of broader theo-philosophical traditions against
which matters of war and peace are reasoned. ‘Traditions’ are therefore not
static and unchanging analytical objects. Even within a specific culture, they
can be broad, decentred, fiercely contested and inconsistently structured.
In arguing that US foreign policy has developed against the backdrop of
divergent theological traditions, I do not, of course, mean that policy makers
are themselves necessarily religious or consult theological or even philosophical
texts. Quite the opposite. In many cases, as Löwith (1949), Tuveson (1949),
Bury (1932), Gray (2007) and Cohn (1957) established, it would seem that
Christian theology has been secularized and injected into Western political
traditions unknowingly because some theological concepts are so pervasive
and have been so culturally entrenched as they are passed from generation to
generation, that they are simply taken as axiomatic. For example, the revo-
lutionary idea expressed in the New Testament that the movement of history
is linear, not cyclical as the Greeks would have it, and that it contains a
beginning, midpoint and end, is an idea of no small significance for the study
of Western politics.
Francis Fukuyama demonstrated the relevance of such theological
assumptions for his major work The End of History and the Last Man:

As the Christian account of history makes clear, an ‘end of history’ is

implicit in the writing of all Universal Histories. The particular events
of history can become meaningful only with respect to some larger end or
goal, the achievement of which necessarily brings the historical process to
a close. The final end of man is what makes all particular events potentially
intelligible.
(Fukuyama 1992: 56)

There is perhaps no theological assumption that is more deeply enmeshed in

America’s DNA than this belief in the ‘end of history’, i.e. that human nature
is defective, that there is a solution for this defectiveness, and that Universal
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Interpreting George W. Bush’s foreign policy 55

History is progressing towards that solution, its ultimate goal of social
redemption. In Christian theology, there are three competing eschatological
traditions that map out this process.

Optimism
The first tradition is post-millennial and casts human nature and destiny in an
‘optimistic’ light. Its focus is on the ‘original righteousness’ of humankind, and
its potential to be liberated from oppressive institutions. According to this
interpretation, as espoused by President Bush and Administration neoconserva-
tives, history’s ‘end’ is its telos and its progressive fulfilment culminates in the
victory of Western democratic values over evil (Frum and Perle 2003).
Because human nature is inherently malleable and good, social redemption is
achieved through the forceful replacement of terrorist and tyrannical regimes
with more rational forms of human government. It follows that eventually
humanity will reach a period of perpetual peace, within which the soul’s dee-
pest longing for freedom will be satisfied. As Bush stated, ‘[w]e go forward
with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom … [w]hen our
Founders declared a new order of the ages … they were acting on an ancient
hope that is meant to be fulfilled. History has an ebb and flow of justice, but
history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty’
(Bush 2005).
Bush’s utopian plans were big and, as he put it, ‘There is nothing bigger
than to achieve world peace’ (Woodward 2002: 282). Guided by theological
presuppositions, Bush discerned ‘the progress of liberty’ to be ‘the design of
nature’, indeed the ‘direction of history’ as established by ‘the author of freedom’.
If there was any doubt as to the telos of history, Bush asserted that ‘Liberty is
both the plan of Heaven for humanity, and the best hope for progress here on
Earth’. Because the spread of freedom inexorably ‘leads to peace’, it is ‘worth
fighting for, dying for, and standing for’ (Bush 2005). Before Bush, neo-
conservative political theorist Francis Fukuyama put forward a similarly
optimistic thesis that the conclusion of the Cold War – the end of the ‘evil
empire’ – constituted ‘the end of history … that is the end point of mankind’s
ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as
the final form of human government’ (Fukuyama 1989). Thus, according to
this optimistic view, the ‘end’ or purpose of history is to move beyond it.
After 9/11, Bush and the neoconservatives understood the security dilemma
of terrorism to be rooted in an endemic pathology of ‘unfreedom’ sweeping
the lands of Islam. Borrowing from the Christian idea that history is a linear
process directed at an absolute goal of social redemption, they discerned that
history was inevitably moving towards its ultimate end or telos, the spread
of liberal democracy. Just as Marx conceived of the end of history in terms of
a classless utopia and the Nazis conceived of their millennial Reich in terms
of a racially pure society, administration neoconservatives conceived of the
end of history as the universalization of Western democratic values. For these
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56 Daniel Zoughbie
optimists, humanity would enter into a more perfect epoch of liberty once the
Middle East was forcefully brought under the ‘rational’ sovereignty of modernity.
The ‘War on Terror’ was thus conceived by one apologetic historian as a fight
‘for the very notion of the Enlightenment’ (Hanson 2006).
This eschatologically optimistic tradition manifested itself both in the secu-
larized form of neoconservative Middle East policies and especially in the
president’s theologically charged rhetoric. As Condoleezza Rice recalls, though
it’s impossible to run an experiment and see how a statesman would have
acted as a non-believer, faith was clearly very important to President Bush
and informed his view of ‘God as an agent’ (interview with Rice, 2009).
Contrary to Machiavellian explanations, religion was not simply a pretence
for Bush. As another one of Bush’s closest advisers Michael Gerson affirmed,
the president is ‘a person of genuine faith’ (interview with Gerson, 2009).
Former White House aide Ryan Streeter recalls that Bush even used to extend his
own experience of personal redemption to contemporary political problems:

… President Bush was saying that many of the nation’s problems could
be solved by a change of heart, even his use of religious language, you
know people redeeming their lives … I was with him at meetings where
he would talk with black pastors and say, you know, ‘You can’t help a
drunk when he’s drunk. Like when I used to be a drunk, you know you
couldn’t talk sense into me’.
(Interview with Streeter, 2009)

Elliott Abrams, the former deputy national security advisor for global
democracy strategy, asserted that President Bush’s faith did not have much
‘operational influence’ except in ‘one important way’: his religious beliefs
shaped the Administration’s hallmark foreign policy doctrine, the ‘Freedom
Agenda’. As Abrams noted, Bush believed that:

Rights do not come from the state. Rights do not even come from the
democratic collectivity, from the polity. Rights come from God. Rights
inhere in the individual and inhere in his or her relationship with God. And
I think that did inform his view that democracy should be universal …
They are truly human rights, that are in the nature of being human.
Because of the human’s relationship with the Creator. And I do think
that that mattered. And that was a deeply held view on his part.
(Phone interview with Abrams, 2009)

The former National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley confirmed that the
Freedom Agenda is the essence of ‘who [Bush] is’. As Hadley summed up,
Bush believed:

People have a God-given right to be free. It’s the same principle as this
radical belief in the individual and the right of individuals to be free that
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is the essence of this man. And it’s why he thought we had terrorism
coming out of the Middle East, because of the freedom deficit in the
Middle East … And for him then, the antidote to terrorism and the basis
for permanent peace in the Middle East was freedom and democracy.
(Interview with Hadley, 2010)

George W. Bush’s concept of liberty was not simply limited to the traditional
American belief that ‘all men are created equal’; it was missiological in
nature. Adapting Leviticus 15:10, KJV, his stated foreign policy objective
was global evangelism: ‘America, in this young century, proclaims liberty
throughout all the world and to all the inhabitants thereof ’ (Bush 2005:
emphasis added).
Former Senior Director at the National Security Council William Inboden
expands on how this religious worldview shaped national security policy in
profound ways: As a ‘committed Christian’, the president argued that ‘all
people were created by the same God … And because of that dignity that
inheres in each individual, it’s wrong if a political system or ruler oppresses
that person or takes away those rights’ (interview with Inboden, 2009). It was
from this religious worldview that a specific set of policies emerged, including
‘the effort to promote democratic governance and respect for human rights
around the world’. It was partly due to his ‘theologically informed worldview
that he soured on Arafat’ and ushered in a major change in US Middle East
policy by delivering his 24 June 2002 Rose Garden speech (interview with
Inboden, 2009). In his remarks, Bush introduced sequentialism into this
speech, which branded Arafat as an irrelevant dictator and rejected a ‘peace
process’, negotiations and US engagement until the Palestinians democratized
and elected ‘entirely new’ Palestinian leaders ‘untainted by terror’ (Bush 2002;
and interview with Inboden, 2005). As the American lieutenant general
overseeing this process later remarked, his mission was charged with creating
‘new men’ (Dayton 2009).
In the president’s mind, the liberation of Palestine was linked to the
liberation of Iraq, with the former serving as a ‘nice little laboratory’ for the
broader Middle East (Hughes 2004). In conversations with his National
Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Bush expressed his belief that democracy
would be introduced to the Middle East upon the rocky hills of the West
Bank and in the deserts of Iraq. According to Rice, the three pillars of a ‘new
Middle East’ created a ‘package’. Once everybody turned against terrorism,
Iraq would emerge as an ‘integrated’ and ‘responsible member of the Arab
world’, the conflict in Palestine would be solved outside of the use of force,
and the Arab world would engage in ‘reconciling with its own people through
democratic reform … [and in] reconciling [with] Israel’ (interview with Rice,
2009). According to more hawkish adherents of this view, while the Palestinians
were transforming themselves, dictatorships in Iraq, Syria and Iran should be
removed from power by the United States (interviews with Wurmser, 2010,
and former senior US official).
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58 Daniel Zoughbie
Pessimism
Like the first tradition, the second is also millennial-utopian, but diverges
from optimism in its decisively pessimistic view of human nature and destiny.
Its focus is on the ‘original sin’ of humankind and the deterioration of social
and moral order. As espoused by millions of religious conservatives who
constituted President Bush’s political base and occupied senior leadership
positions within the US Congress, the end of history is not mankind’s com-
plete ideological evolution. Rather than predicting the future triumph of
reason in the here and now, it sees human nature as totally corrupted by
secular rationalism. Consequently, pessimism predicts the degeneration of
social and moral order into global catastrophe at which point Christ will
intervene and ‘make all things new’ (Revelation 21:5, KJV). This view is
espoused by millions of religious conservatives who constituted President
Bush’s political base and occupied senior leadership positions in the US
Congress (see Figure 4.1 and Figure 4.2 for statistics concerning religious and
political views towards the Middle East).
As popularized by the Oxford University Press publication of The Scofield
Reference Bible, this pessimistic theology of history, more technically known
as (dispensational) pre-millennialism, emerged as a response to the intellectual
crisis brought about by the Enlightenment’s doctrine of Progress. In the view
of pre-millennialists, the foundations of faith were eroded by Higher Criticism
(Robertson Smith 1907), which undermined the divine authority of the Bible,
and by Kant’s devastating Critique of Pure Reason (1787), which dismissed any
rational basis for Christianity. The French Revolution decapitated Christianity
with its guillotines (Rousseau 1968 [1762]) and On the Origin of the Species
(1859) demoted man from his privileged status of imago dei. When Marx

Figure 4.1 Religious beliefs concerning Israel

Source: (Data from the Pew Forum on Religious Life, 24 August 2006; and a Time/
CNN poll, 2002)
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Interpreting George W. Bush’s foreign policy 59

Figure 4.2 Religious beliefs and attitudes towards Israel

Source: (Data from the Pew Forum on Religious Life, 24 August 2006)

(1848) prophesied that modernity would profane all that is holy, three decades
later, the Christian God was not only profaned, but proclaimed dead by
Nietzsche (1882).
For American pre-millennialists, the supposed superiority of modernity’s
rational social order yielded totalitarian genocides, atomic world war and global
terrorism. In the twenty-first century, more advanced forms of technology,
climate change, economic integration, terrorism and Israel’s 1948 establishment
all seemed to confirm ‘Biblical prophesies’ imaginatively transposed into
popular works of fiction (LaHaye and Jenkins 1995).
Like the prophecies of Marx and Hitler, pessimistic pre-millennialism
divided up history into successive historical ages or ‘dispensations’, only this
time with Jews and Christians as the chosen peoples moving together towards
total societal redemption (for an early example see Darby 1864). However,
pessimists looked for redemption in revelation, not reason. They anticipated
the imminent return of Christ and the secret ‘rapture’ of his Church, in a
moment, in a ‘twinkling of an eye’ to redeem the human condition (Matthew
24:37–41; and Thessalonians 4:15–18, KJV). This secret rapture would rescue
those who placed their faith in Christ from a seven-year Great Tribulation
period of unparalleled human destruction (John 19:37, KJV). Pessimists argued
that during this period, two-thirds of the Jewish people would experience
another Holocaust under the direction of the anti-Christ, but this moment
would be a time of opportunity, for the Jews will look to the ‘One they have
pierced’ (Matthew 24:21, KJV). Because of the great significance of this mass
conversion, pessimists argue that one should ‘watch the Jew’ to understand
the course of future events (Wilkinson 2007). When the third temple is rebuilt
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60 Daniel Zoughbie
on the Temple Mount, where the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque
presently stand, the Battle of Armageddon will commence. Ultimately, Christ
will return to Israel with the children of light to defeat Satan and the millennial
rule of Christ will be established (Revelation 20:7, KJV).
Supporters of the Religious Right movement have powerfully expressed
such pre-millennial ideals at the voting booth. It is likely that President Ronald
Reagan referred to biblical prophecies on seven different occasions and con-
sulted with pre-millennialist theologians on matters concerning the Cold War
and the end of days to appeal to this theoconservative constituency (Halsell
1986; Weber 2004). Because religious pessimists like Pat Robertson and Jerry
Falwell founded the theoconservative movement, it remains heavily influenced
by the pre-millennial focus on Israel, even if its members are not necessarily
united on discrete matters of theology (Marsden 2006: 43; Ammerman 1994:
233–35). For example, when the political plan of action was announced in
1979 for the ecumenical Moral Majority, a top priority for its founders was
‘support for Israel and the Jewish people’ (Falwell 2008). Because 30 million
plus theoconservative voters and activists were indispensable to George W.
Bush’s dual election victories, their religious leaders, while considered ‘nutty’ and
‘crazy’ by elite policy makers within the Administration, were nevertheless
invited to meet with top US officials (former senior US official).
While White House election strategists sought to pacify conservative religious
voters, President Bush sought to pacify conservative religious leaders in Congress
because they held the ‘purse strings’ of the US government. House Majority
Leader Dick Armey cited a biblical justification for supporting Israel and
suggested relocating the Palestinians to neighbouring countries. As his successor
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay estimated, of the numerous pro-Israel
Democrats and Republicans serving in the House of Representatives, up to
100 of them held to the theology that God would bless those who bless Israel
and curse those who curse it. Importantly, the powerful Speaker of the House
Dennis Hastert was influenced by this theology and had several discussions
with Leader DeLay on the subject (phone interview with DeLay, 2010).
Additionally, prominent members of the US Senate, including Sam Brownback,
Tom Coburn, Jim Inhofe, Zell Miller and John Kyle, publicly advocated such
views.
As DeLay recalls, religious conservatives in Congress were very supportive
of his friend Vice President Dick Cheney, and on several occasions he helped
Cheney to push President Bush in the conservative direction by vocally
denouncing the moderate Road Map policy and by withholding money to the
Palestinian Authority (phone interview with DeLay, 2010). For example,
Bush’s inability to deliver aid to the Palestinian Authority in a timely manner
was as a major factor leading to the rise of Hamas and Fateh’s 2006 defeat in
Gaza (interview with Fayyad, 2009; correspondence with Dahlan, 2010;
interview with Tarawneh, 2009).
In practical terms, religious conservatives translated their theological
assumptions into concrete policy recommendations. Though their motivations
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Interpreting George W. Bush’s foreign policy 61

were different from their neoconservative allies in the Administration, their
policy recommendations were closely aligned with the 24 June 2002 Rose
Garden speech’s policy of sequentialism. As religious conservatives argued,
the United States should oppose efforts to restart peace negotiations between
the Israelis and Yasser Arafat’s corrupt Palestinian Authority. In short, peace
would happen only after Christ returns, and in that sequence. Until that day,
they predicted that Israeli sovereignty was destined to expand throughout
Judea and Samaria, and the temple would be rebuilt atop the current site of
the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa mosque. Therefore, they argued that the
United States should recognize Jerusalem as the eternal undivided capital of
Israel, and encourage, not restrain, provocative Israeli actions on the Temple
Mount (phone interview with DeLay, 2010, and Hagel, 2009).
While Israel was left to battle the Palestinians, religious conservatives, working
in tandem with their neoconservative allies, strongly urged Bush to go after
Saddam Hussein in Iraq, because he was supporting terrorism against Israel.
As DeLay envisioned, once the United States invaded Iraq, it should support
‘regime change’ in Iran, the major geo-strategic threat to Israel. The United
States could topple Iranian leadership by providing financial and military
assistance to the opposition and, ultimately, by strategically bombing the
country. Syria was also considered a potential target because of its support for
Hezbollah’s activities against Israel. The goal of the religious conservatives’
policy was to change regimes throughout the region so that pro-Western
democratic leaders would emerge, leaving Israel to rebuild the temple in
Jerusalem (phone interview with DeLay, 2010). As Leader DeLay argued:

Christ cannot return until the temple in Jerusalem is rebuilt. And then the
temple in Jerusalem is not going to be rebuilt unless it’s a Jewish state. So,
I don’t know. I mean, I’m not a biblical scholar, but it is quite obvious to
me that, over time, and who knows what that time is, you have a Jewish
state that – and the prophesies can come true, because they have come
true. And ultimately, Christ will return … there’s one thing for certain, that
the prophesies will be fulfilled.
(Phone interview with DeLay, 2010)

At the Israeli Knesset he went further: ‘One day, Israel – with the United States
by her side – will live in freedom, security, and peace. And terrorism will perish
from the earth.’ For Tom DeLay, that would be the preordained day of
Christ’s triumphant return, the end of history (DeLay 2003; phone interview
with DeLay, 2010).

Augustinian realism
The third tradition, as espoused by Administration moderates, purports to cast
human nature and destiny in a ‘realistic’ light. Unlike the overly optimistic
and overly pessimistic views, realism neither discerns a ‘visible direction’ of
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62 Daniel Zoughbie
social progress in history, nor anticipates social deterioration into Armageddon
(Niebuhr 1960: viii; Niebuhr 1953, 1940: 35–36). According to this view, the
‘end’ of history represents a constant tension between good and evil, between
‘fulfilment and dissolution’. The ‘end’ has a dual meaning that denotes the
telos or purpose of human life and its terminus, when ‘that which exists ceases
to be’ (Niebuhr 1943: 297).
Elaborating upon this Augustinian a-millennial tradition, Reinhold Niebuhr’s
‘Christian realism’ laments that the ‘Christian idea of the ambiguity of human
virtue’ has been supplanted by prideful attempts to assert humanity’s power
over historical destiny (Niebuhr 1952: 4). Because of the moral ambiguity of
human nature, there is no such thing as discernible ‘law’ of history. While
man is a ‘creature’ bound by nature’s law of survival, man is also a spiritual being
made in God’s image. As such, he is a ‘creator’ with the potential to embrace
a higher law of love. As long as freedom of will exists, the world of good can
never fully overcome the world of evil. In fact, the sin of pride is introduced
into the historical process by the very attempt to manage the movement of
humanity beyond it (Niebuhr 1949: 18; Niebuhr 1943: 297; Niebuhr 1932:
xvi, xxi, xxiii).
Unlike optimistic and pessimistic millennialists, Niebuhr viewed the whole
of history as a redemptive drama, with a telos and terminus not fully disclosed
to the human mind. In his estimation, the optimistic goal of reordering his-
tory through reason or revelation neglects the fact ‘that the whole drama of
history is enacted in a frame of meaning too large for human comprehension
or management’. Though man sees himself as the manager of history, he is
utterly incapable of predicting the hidden ironies within its plot, much less its
ending (Niebuhr 1952: 88). Niebuhr writes, ‘no society, not even a democratic
one, is great enough or good enough to make itself the final end of human
existence’ (Niebuhr 1960: 133).
Instead, Niebuhr’s Augustinian realism proposes that America abandon its
efforts to transform the world into its image. While there are conditions in
which nations and individuals must use power as ‘an instrument of justice and a
servant of interests broader than their own’, one must not be deluded into
thinking that power can ever be removed from selfish interests. Instead of
devising grand utopian schemes, be they pessimistic or optimistic in nature,
the appropriate aim of American foreign policy should be a balance of power
in which national and global interests reach an equilibrium. This requires
sustained attention and skilful diplomacy. This is not a science but an art, ‘the
art of statecraft’ (Niebuhr 1952: xvii). The ‘spiritual pride’ of American foreign
policy is found in its belief that America was divinely chosen to tutor ‘man-
kind in its pilgrimage to perfection’. Such ‘harmful illusions of human nature’,
he warns, can be turned into a ‘totally noxious one’ (Niebuhr 1952: 14, 24–25, 71).
In international relations, Niebuhr’s devastating critique of the doctrine of
Progress was highly influential. For example, Hans Morgenthau and George
Kennan followed Niebuhr’s example, albeit selectively, in looking to Augustine
rather than Machiavelli for an adequate view of human nature and historical
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destiny. Morgenthau ranked Niebuhr as the ‘greatest American political phi-
losopher of his time’, and George Kennan is said to have called him the ‘father
of us all’ (Morgenthau 1962; Bevir 2010: 98–99; Brown 2002: 304; Lieven and
Hulsman 2006: 55). Throughout his life Kennan echoed Niebuhr’s cautions
about the toxicity of national pride:

[T]his whole tendency to see ourselves as the center of political enlight-

enment and as teachers to a great part of the rest of the world strikes me
as unthought-through, vainglorious, and undesirable. If you think that our
life here at home has meritorious aspects worthy of emulation by peoples
elsewhere, the best way to recommend them is, as John Quincy Adams
maintained, not by preaching at others but by the force of example.
I could not agree more.
(Kennan 1999)

As one of the most influential statesmen of the twentieth century, Kennan’s

doctrine of political containment enjoyed extensive influence, notably in the
formulation of the Marshall Plan; however, it was also used in ways of which
he vehemently disapproved, notably in the attempted military containment of
Soviet influence in Vietnam. Though many modern realists may not have
studied Kennan’s memoirs in great depth, as Colin Powell publicly admitted,
US foreign policy traditions are heavily indebted to him. As Colin Powell also
noted, Kennan understood the balance between interests and ideals and
offered a realistic view of human nature (Powell 2004). This view, as Kennan
later disclosed in his writings on personal faith and politics, is one that
recognizes both the animal-like instincts of humankind, along with those
higher instincts endowed by God. In Augustinian-Niebuhrian terms, this is
the distinction between the law of love and the law of nature (Kennan 1993).
Through an inherited intellectual framework, influential realists like Colin
Powell translated realism’s principles into practical policy recommendations.
They viewed the Middle East as being vital to the national interest, defined in
terms of power. Though democracy was viewed as a virtue, and though
America’s Arab allies in the region were often terribly unscrupulous in their
dealings with their own citizens, realists did not regard it as the duty of the
United States to sacrifice its own interests in pursuit of abstract moral prin-
ciples. Instead of trying to impose democracy on the region by force, which
they believed would do more harm than good, moderate realists argued for
sustained diplomacy that would contain the violence and restore a balance
of power (interviews with Powell, 2010, and senior US official, 2010). This
containment policy also extended to Iran and Iraq, where Powell sought to
use sanctions and diplomacy, rather than regime change, to modify state
behaviour.
Moderates argued that 11 September presented the United States with a
unique opportunity once again to assert its position in the region. According
to them, Arab and Muslim antipathy towards America was rooted in deeply
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64 Daniel Zoughbie
held feelings of injustice and dishonour. Perhaps the most powerful expression
of Arab and Muslim grievances was the festering Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
Indirectly backed by American taxpayers, heavy-handed Israeli military
operations coupled with unrelenting settlement expansion conjured up
powerful images of Arab and Muslim humiliation. This ignited rage against
Israel, the United States and Western-backed Arab leaders throughout the
region.
Though American allies like Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia lacked
transparent democratic institutions, moderates believed that the United States’
post-9/11 anti-terrorism efforts should shore up relations with authoritarian
allies, while containing Iraq and Iran. As part of this effort to stabilize the
Middle East, realists sought to pacify Arab rage by supporting reformers and
by restarting a negotiated political process between Sharon and Arafat that
would ultimately result in the exchange of land for peace and the creation of
a Palestinian state. Only with the gradual stabilization of the Middle East
would America be able to protect its economic and security interests. In the
Israeli–Palestinian arena, the realists shunned sequentialism and translated
their general policy of containment into extracting parallel concessions
from both Israelis and Palestinians – as adumbrated in the 2003 Road Map
policy.

Containment and sequence

At first glance, it might appear that the optimistic and pessimistic concepts
of history are inherently incommensurable. Optimists look to the ‘end’ of
history as the redemptive spread of democratic values, while pessimists look
to the ‘end’ of history as redemption through its total destruction. However,
both have much in common to distinguish them from realists (interview with
Williams, 2009). As Malcolm Bull has noted, there are ‘close parallels’
between the modern view of post-history and the fundamentalist visions of
the end of the world (Bull 1995: 6). During the Bush Administration, opti-
mistic conservatives and pessimistic religious conservatives forged a post-11
September ‘conservative alliance’, which was unified by several major
assumptions:

 Both articulated theories of post history brought about by the forceful spread of
Western values. Neoconservatives believed that America and Israel were
destined to fulfil the goal of history by exporting Western democracy and
free markets to the Middle East, if necessary through the use of force.
Similarly, religious conservatives believed that force would be used to
facilitate Christian evangelization before the return of Christ and the ter-
mination of history. By contrast, realists dismissed such utopian visions as
fantasies.
 Both opposed a political process and supported Israel’s ‘right’ to expand its
frontiers. Neoconservatives believed that Israel should not divide Jerusalem,
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Interpreting George W. Bush’s foreign policy 65

that ‘Judea and Samaria’ (the West Bank) should not be relinquished, and
that the Palestinians should not be engaged until they had transformed
their society into a liberal democracy. Similarly, religious conservatives
believed that Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria were given to the Jews by God
and that all attempts at peace making were futile until God ends history.
By contrast, realists rejected the notion of a Greater Israel and sought to
restart peace negotiations.
 Both conceived of a new world war in which the world of good would
overcome the world of evil. Neoconservatives believed that the United
States was on the verge of an epic victory in a war between the powers of
freedom and unfreedom, between good and evil. Similarly, religious con-
servatives believed that the United States was on the verge of ushering in
the victorious return of Christ, along with a decisive victory over evil. By
contrast, realists were far more nuanced in their moral categories, and far
less optimistic about the total triumph of good over evil.
 Finally, both despised Europe and regarded America and Israel as chosen
nations with interconnected destinies, values and interests. Neoconservatives
despised Europe for the Holocaust and looked to America and Israel as
exceptional nations to defeat evil unilaterally. Similarly, religious con-
servatives despised Europe for alleged demonic theories of evolution and
godless totalitarian philosophies, and looked to America and Israel as
chosen nations to usher in the millennial kingdom of God. By contrast,
realists sought to engage European allies and clearly distinguished between
the US national interests and Israeli policies.

Caught in the middle of these foreign policy traditions, the president’s closest
foreign policy adviser, Condoleezza Rice, unsuccessfully sought to resolve the
inherent tensions between realist and utopian positions and their corollary
policies of sequence and containment. More importantly, it was not always
clear that President Bush fully understood the distinction between the two
incommensurable views, and consequently, he wavered schizophrenically as
he sought to reconcile his lofty view of liberty with the reality of political
life (interviews with Armitage, 2010, and Wurmser, 2010). Thus, at times, one
could be forgiven for asking whether President Bush was a devoted Palestinian
nationalist or more Likud than Likud. Upon assuming office, he instinctively
disliked Yasser Arafat, Ariel Sharon and the very idea of intervening in the
conflict (interviews with Meyer and Zinni, 2009). On several occasions he
directed these ill feelings towards Sharon in what were considered highly
embarrassing episodes in the American-Israeli special relationship. Yet under
the counsel of sober-minded moderates like Colin Powell, he became the first
American president to recognize the Palestinian right to self-determination in
unambiguous terms and at no less conspicuous a forum than the United
Nations (interview with Rice, 2009).
Then everything changed. With the traumatic events of 11 September,
President Bush appeared to have assumed a messianic complex as the
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66 Daniel Zoughbie
leader of the free world with a theologically informed mandate to spread
liberty (interview with Meyer, 2009). In yet another bold move that con-
tradicted previous policies, Bush undertook a bold project to free Palestine,
not from its occupiers, but from its democratically elected President Yasser
Arafat. Embracing the principle of sequence as proposed by conservative
utopians, Bush sought to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict by creating
‘new men’ in Palestine, uncorrupted democrats untainted by terrorism,
who would be accountable to their people, to democratic institutions and
to their democratic neighbours in Israel. As he stated in his 24 June
2002 Rose Garden speech, only once this dramatic socio-political transfor-
mation was complete would he support a political process between Israelis
and Palestinians (interviews with Abrams and Feith, 2009, and Wurmser,
2010).
However, as the Iraq war loomed on the horizon, Bush once again lacked
decisiveness and moved back in the direction of moderates. Ignoring the principle
of sequence, he embraced the Quartet Road Map’s vision of containment
and its stated principle of parallelism that sought reciprocal concessions
from Palestinians and Israelis within the context of an established political
process. Endorsed by the international community, the plan was dismissed
out of hand by Prime Minister Sharon. Lacking a deep understanding of
what was at stake, Bush reversed course, shelved the Road Map, and instead
accepted Sharon’s version of sequence as defined by his disengagement plan
for Gaza.
After winning a solid re-election victory, President Bush renewed his
commitment to the neoconservative and ‘theoconservative’ vision of sequence
and the ‘freedom agenda’, but his record of indecisiveness persisted into the
second term. Under the guidance of his trusted aide Condoleezza Rice, ‘realism’
and ‘idealism’ were being comingled in a new approach to statecraft, one in
which interests and values were viewed as being ‘one and the same’. The aim
of this freedom agenda was not simply stability, nor was it Averell Harriman’s
‘balance of power preponderantly in favor of the free countries’, i.e. the
United States and its allies (Leffler 1992: 277). As summarized in that
contradictory phrase (contradictory because power balances are inherently
constricting), the goal of US foreign policy was somehow to design a ‘balance
of power that favors freedom’ (Rice 2002).
Declaring liberty to be the means and ends of Middle East policy,
Bush continued to move indecisively as he mixed and matched conservative
and moderate policy prescriptions. He resolved to transform the Middle
East into something new, but also hinted that he might move forward with
a political process in Palestine. With successful elections being undertaken
in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine, it seemed as if the progress of liberty
would create peace and stability in a new Middle East after all. Instead, as
Bush soon learned, the freedom agenda unleashed a destabilizing wave of
fundamentalism that fed the fires of religious extremism and challenged
American values and interests perhaps more than ever before. Notably, with
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Interpreting George W. Bush’s foreign policy 67

the election of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, Iran solidified
its regional influence through proxy militias and accelerated its nuclear
programme.
After the shattering Palestinian elections of 2006, Bush all but abandoned
the democracy component of the sequence principle and instead turned
to military force. However, it was only after US-backed Israeli forces failed to
defeat Hezbollah and after US-backed Fateh forces failed to defeat Hamas
that Bush once again turned away from sequence and moved towards the
Road Map’s vision of containment and parallel concessions. Consequently, he
launched the Annapolis Conference, empowering his able secretary of state to
pursue serious negotiations. With a remarkable show of 11th-hour diplomacy,
Rice shuttled back and forth to the region, but alas, her efforts were torpedoed
by the criminal corruption and political incompetence of Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert (interviews with Rice, 2009, and Hadley, 2010). In a last-ditch attempt
to topple Hamas, Olmert broke his truce with the militant organization and
launched a devastating war in which both Israel and Hamas perpetrated war
crimes. Rather than supporting his secretary of state’s efforts to bring about a
ceasefire, Bush once again moved back to a policy of sequence and backed
Olmert’s devastating war.

Conclusion
The primary aim of this chapter was to demonstrate the relevance of
religious traditions in shaping the contemporary theory and conduct of world
affairs. As John Gray summarizes, ‘The belief that history has an underlying
plot is central’ to the secular and religious millenarian movements that have
shaped the modern world. ‘In versions of apocalyptic belief that are avowedly
religious, the author of the script is God … In secular apocalyptic, the author
is that equally elusive figure humanity, battling the forces of ignorance and
superstition. Either way, the demand for meaning is met by narratives
in which each individual life is part of an all-encompassing story’ (Gray
2007: 289).
From the Rose Garden to the Road Map to the Annapolis Summit,
the Bush Administration was influenced by underlying theological views
about human nature and destiny. This chapter flagged three that bitterly
divided the president and key US policy makers into utopian and realist
camps, which in turn yielded two opposing Middle East policies. As defined
by the principle of sequence, conservatives endorsed the democratic transfor-
mation of the Middle East prior to a peace process, while the moderates
endorsed immediate negotiations, containment and balancing power.
Though the president’s ‘Freedom Agenda’ for the Middle East was funda-
mentally shaped by a millennial-utopian worldview and a millenarian voter
base, he nonetheless exhibited an indecisive will and temperament and
vacillated between utopian and realist policies throughout his eight years in
office.
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Table 4.1 Select persons interviewed

Interviewee Principal posts Location Date

Richard Armitage Deputy Secretary Arlington, VA 2 February 2010

of State
Kofi Annan UN Secretary Telephone interview 18 November 2010
General
Elliott Abrams Deputy National Security Telephone interview 6 November 2009
Advisor for Global
Democracy Strategy
Hussein Agha Advisor to Yasser Arafat London 14 September 2009
Sir Mark Allen British Foreign Office London 8 September 2009
Jawad Annani Jordanian Foreign Minister Amman, Jordan 16 September 2009
Hrair Balian Director, Carter Center Telephone interview 4 February 2010
Conflict Resolution Program
John Bellinger III Legal Advisor to the State Telephone interview 12 February 2010
Department and Legal
Advisor to the National
Security Council
Shlomo Ben Ami Israeli Foreign Minister Telephone interview 9 December 2009,
11 December 2009
William J. Burns Undersecretary of State for Telephone interview 15 September 2010
Political Affairs
Scott Carpenter Deputy Assistant Secretary Washington, DC 11 November 2009
of State for Near Eastern
Affairs
Mohammad Palestinian National Security Written 12 January 2010
Dahlan Advisor correspondence
Tom DeLay House Majority Leader Telephone interview 11 May 2010
Michael Doran Senior Director for Near New York 4 November 2009
East and North African
Affairs, National Security
Council
Salam Fayyad Palestinian Prime Minister Ramallah, West Bank 23 December 2009
Douglas Feith Undersecretary of Defense Washington, DC and 12 November 2009
for Policy written correspondence
Larry Garber Director of USAID, West Jerusalem 16 July 2007
Bank/Gaza Mission
Jean Geran Director for Democracy and London 3 September 2009
Human Rights, National
Security Council
Michael Gerson Assistant to the President for Arlington, VA 10 December 2009
Speechwriting and Policy
Advisor
Tim Goeglein Special Assistant to the Washington, DC 13 November 2009
President and Deputy
Director of the White House
Office of Public Liaison
Richard Haass Director of Policy and New York 2 November 2009
Planning, State Department
Stephen Hadley Assistant to the President for Washington, DC 28 January 2010
National Security Affairs
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Table 4.1 (continued)

Interviewee Principal posts Location Date

Chuck Hagel Senator and Chairman of the Washington, DC 25 November 2009

President’s National
Intelligence Council
William Inboden Senior Director for Strategic London 2 September 2009
Planning, National Security
Council
Stephen Krasner Director of Policy Stanford, CA 2 November 2009
and Planning, State
Department
Daniel Kurtzer Ambassador to Israel Telephone interview and 7 December 2009
written correspondence
Abdelsalam Majali Jordanian Prime Minister Amman 16 September 2009
Sir Christopher British Ambassador London 14 September 2009
Meyer to the United States
Amr Moussa Former Secretary General Cambridge, MA 11 November 2011
Arab League
Marwan Muasher Jordanian Deputy Washington, DC 26 February 2010
Prime Minister
Lord Patten EU Commissioner Telephone interview 1 September 2009
for External Affairs
Richard Perle Chairman of the Defense Chevy Chase, MD 18 November 2009
Policy Board
Colin Powell Secretary of State Telephone interview 7 January 2010
Jonathan Powell Chief of Staff to Prime London 7 September 2009
Minister Tony Blair
Condoleezza Rice Secretary of State Stanford, CA 3 December 2009
Ayman Safadi Advisor to His Amman 16 September 2009
Majesty King Abduallah II
Ryan Streeter Special Assistant to President London 3 September 2009
Bush for Domestic Policy
Fayaz Tarawneh Jordanian Prime Minister Amman 23 September 2009
David Welch Assistant Secretary London, written 20 November 2009,
of State for Near Eastern correspondence, and 30 November 2009,
Affairs telephone interviews 15 December 2009
Rowan Williams Archbishop of Canterbury London 7 September 2009
James Wolfensohn President of the New York 2 November 2009
World Bank and Quartet
Middle East Envoy
Paul Wolfowitz President of the World Bank Washington, DC 19 February 2010
and Deputy Secretary of
Defense
David Wurmser Principal Deputy National Telephone interviews 3 March 2010,
Security Advisor to Vice 4 March 2010
President Cheney
Elias Zananiri Advisor to Jerusalem and 24 December 2009
Mohammad Dahlan written correspondence
Anthony Zinni US Special Envoy (Israel/PA) Reston, VA 1 December 2009
Phillip Zelikow State Department Counselor Telephone interview 5 January 2010
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70 Daniel Zoughbie
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5 From value protection to value

promotion
Interpreting British security policy
Oliver Daddow and Jamie Gaskarth

Security policy lends itself to interpretivist analysis as security is an ‘essentially

contested concept’ (Buzan 1991: 7–11). This is because neither security theorists
nor practitioners can agree on the referent object of security, what actions
would render something secure, and what that security might look like. At
times, the referent object is ideological (liberty, equality, religious purity), or
institutional (democracy, the rule of law, sovereignty, the state), but it can also
be material (stability of borders, physical safety of individuals, group integrity).
Sometimes bringing about security might require change, whilst at other
times, change itself is presented as threatening to the security of the existing
order. Security practitioners continually have to interpret the world around
them, deciding what needs to be secured, what might threaten the referent
object’s security, and how these threats might be addressed.
Since 1945, British policy makers have been compelled to deal with the
ramifications of this fluid interpretation of security. In one lifetime, Britain
has declined from being an imperial power with global interests, to the island
of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and 14 small overseas territories. In
managing this decline, policy makers had to redefine what ‘essence’ of Britain
the nation’s security policy was trying to preserve as its material make-up
underwent major change. As a result, questions of identity have never been
far from the surface. Debates about what core elements of ‘Britain’ needed to
be secured were bound up with arguments over which elements of British
identity need to be defended. A number of excellent studies have analysed
how Britain has forged its domestic security policy (Bonner 2007; Donohue
2008; Hewitt 2007). This chapter argues that the manner in which British
elites have positioned Britain in the wider world tells us a great deal about
how they have come to perceive its global identity, and what aspects of this
it values and wishes to secure. For reasons of space we concentrate on the most
influential and readily accessible sources of thinking about Britishness – elite
opinion – whilst acknowledging that they are reflected by and within wider
cultural currents of opinion, for example in the media, the academy and civil
society at large.
To achieve this goal, we start from the assumption that policy makers
interpret and make sense of security policy in relation to inherited traditions
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74 Oliver Daddow and Jamie Gaskarth

that shape decision making. Some of these traditions have proven pervasive.
Such themes as continuity and bipartisanship have long been prominent and
arguably militated against radical reconsideration of Britain’s position in
world affairs (Gaskarth 2006). Despite such structural upheavals as world
wars, the end of Empire and the end of the Cold War, British foreign, defence
and security policies are seen as remarkably impervious to change over time
(Kennedy 1985; Clarke 1988; Theakston 2004). In foreign policy ‘marginal
rather than decisive’ breaks have been the order of the day (Vickers 2011: 127)
and ‘disagreement on foreign policy has tended to be on emphasis, timing and
detail, and has not extended to the main principles’ (Shlaim 1977: 26).
Lacking much in the way of ideological fervour, the British have usually fallen
back on their supposedly unique qualities such as practicality and pragmatism
to define the national ‘style’ of managing foreign policy (Hurd 1998; Coles
2000). ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’, the saying goes, and this has held for British
decision making on foreign policy with the pragmatists ‘usually’ proven right
(Meyer 2010: 200).
Yet, we argue, material changes in Britain’s relative global power have
compelled policy makers to reinterpret and alter important aspects of British
identity and culture. Ideas of racial superiority, Christian proselytizing, and
‘splendid isolation’ have been marginalized. Pluralism, multiculturalism and
interdependence are now privileged, although the idea of the British ‘island race’
retains rhetorical purchase on the libertarian right, particularly on the vexed
question of European integration (well covered in Brown 2013).
Interpretivism deals with constructions, but – and here we echo John Searle
(1995) – the acceptance of a constructivist sensibility does not necessarily
entail the suggestion that the world is only an ideational construct for the agents
involved. Nor does it see the production of meaning as structurally determined
by contextual forces. Rather, interpretivism explores how individual agents
interact with the social and the material worlds, in the process illuminating
the traditions that shape the beliefs and practices of policy makers and are
shaped by them. These traditions are often leaned upon and reinterpreted in
response to policy dilemmas. Challenges to prevailing social, political or
economic assumptions occur regularly in the dynamic environment of inter-
national politics. As policy makers grapple to understand and respond to
these developments, they often make overt references to traditions as a way of
endowing their actions with meaning and rendering them intelligible and
legitimate in the eyes of others.
In this chapter, we explore one particularly important tradition of British
external policy making: the desire to maintain Britain’s great power status.
This has arguably shaped all aspects of Britain’s strategic security policy
thinking and national security practices from the Second World War to the
present. The prolonged build-up to European Economic Community (EEC)
entry in 1973 and the aftermath of the Cold War represent two distinct periods
within which we identify dilemmas being recognized, interpreted and acted
upon by British decision makers. The first section brings into dialogue the
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literatures on British foreign policy and security culture as a way of illustrating
what is often taken to be a remarkably persistent tradition of thought about
Britain in the world going back to Winston Churchill in 1948. In the second
section we explain how we have set about using this book’s analytical framework
of traditions and dilemmas by surveying a previous dilemma for the British
political establishment: the recognition that Britain was no longer a globally
dominant actor which grew to prominence over the period of the Suez crisis
in 1956 to defence retrenchment from east of Suez in 1967. The third section
considers how Britain coped when existential security threats – such a potent
force in identity creation and reinforcement – no longer pertained after the
Cold War. We examine the beliefs on which policy makers drew to inform
their appreciation of the meaning for British security of the collapse of the
Soviet threat, and try to gauge how those beliefs altered in response to new
knowledge about the global security environment as it emerged and was
processed through an engagement with changing security thinking and practice
after 1989.
We argue through the chapter that the years after 1989 witnessed British
decision makers facing a radical dilemma over security policy, a much more
radical one than the earlier reorientation to an Europeanist approach in the
1970s. How could security be defined and guaranteed when the Soviet threat
to the integrity of the state had collapsed and ‘new’ or what came to be
known as ‘asymmetric’ threats (see King 2008: 649) were neither as visible
nor as manageable using armed force as during the supposed heyday of Cold
War and Empire? Defence reviews over this period have reinforced the
impression that Britain no longer faces physical threats to its security but is
confronted by a series of diffuse challenges that are not national but global.
National elites have, more by luck than judgement, been able to reinvigorate
the decades old Churchillian idea that Britain can enact a ‘great’ global role,
but they have constantly had to recalibrate how to achieve this elusive goal.
In particular, accepting that global interdependence has compelled a redefinition
of the national interest, politicians have switched from security conceived as
the protection of territory and liberal values, to security as the promotion of
liberal ethics and, where necessary, expeditionary intervention into other states’
territories. ‘Making the world safe for democracy’ has become coterminous
with ‘making the world safe for Britain’. In short, since the end of the Cold
War, Britain’s tactics might have altered, but the overall strategy of main-
taining a global leadership role remains undimmed. Core remnants of the
‘great power’ tradition have thus been reshaped to account for the promotion
of values alongside the protection of interests.

Interpreting security traditions: from foreign policy to strategic

culture
The structure and patterns can only be discerned by standing back from the
immediate battles with a long-term rather than a short-term perspective,
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76 Oliver Daddow and Jamie Gaskarth

examining those things that the participants take for granted: the shared
images, assumptions and beliefs and the ‘rules of the game’.
(Freedman 1976: 449)

At first sight British security policy might not seem to offer much in the way
of fertile ground for an interpretivist approach. Conceptions of Britain’s role
in the world have, the consensus goes, been relatively impervious to change
over time, with the hazy notion of playing the part of a ‘global power’ producing
little in the way of explicit discussion of the purpose of foreign policy. Writing
in 2000, former Permanent Under Secretary (PUS) at the Foreign and Com-
monwealth Office John Coles noted that the last prime minister to attempt to
explain Britain’s long-term strategic objectives was Winston Churchill with
his ‘three circles’ model in 1948. Churchill argued that Britain occupied a
unique position in global affairs because it was positioned at the epicentre of
the ‘three great circles among the free nations and democracies’: the British
Commonwealth and Empire; the ‘English-speaking world’, particularly the
United States, Canada and Australia; and, very much last on the list, ‘United
Europe’ (Churchill 1948: 153). Since Churchill’s time, Coles (2000: 4) con-
tends, not much has altered because ‘there has been a failure or an inability to
define an overall purpose for Britain overseas’.
Commentators from within the academic community have generally found
Coles to be correct, suggesting that if we appreciate Churchill’s worldview we can
understand the practice of British foreign policy since 1945 (see Deighton
2005; Hill 2010). William Wallace (1992: 424) suggests that Churchill mana-
ged to create a ‘consensus’ about the national interest in 1940 which saw
Britain through arguably the most serious challenge to its national security in
living memory. His ‘idealised and inspirational “toughness”’ as well as his
resoluteness to stand firm against tyranny are regularly invoked by politicians
in Britain, the United States and, ironically in some cases, by leaders well
outside of and opposed to ideas that resonate in the transatlantic policy
community such as Saddam Hussein (Toye 2008: 365, 374). Churchill’s view
of a peace-loving ‘sceptred isle set in a silver sea’ powerfully supported by the
English-speaking peoples around the globe ‘set the context for British foreign
policy in the decades after the war’ (Wallace 1992: 432).
When Churchill’s successors have tried to find a form of words to update the
three circles model they have fallen on deaf ears. Either they have been ‘largely
ignored by the media’ (Coles 2000: 4), or, we suggest, they have been so
heavily indebted to the Churchill model that such novel elements as they
contained were subsumed into stilted linguistic rendering around notions of
pivots and hubs (Daddow 2011: 222–24; Daddow and Gaskarth 2011). Douglas
Hurd’s 1992 suggestion that through the 1980s and early 1990s ‘Britain
has punched above her weight in the world’ (quoted Wallace 1992: 438) is
perhaps the nearest we have to a successor to the Churchill cliché, yet it is
getting at the same idea. In other words, regardless of the obvious domestic
and international upheavals Britain has encountered in the second half of the
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twentieth century and beyond, a tradition of thought that sees Britain at the
centre of global decision making, with an influential role in the world, has
persisted. The imaginative horizons of how Britain can, and should, act in
the global arena remain extensive despite the decline in its relative material
capabilities.
Furthermore, even though identifying ‘national’ or broader ‘Western’
approaches to security is problematic following the onset of the Revolution in
Military Affairs and the move to transnational organizational frameworks
and networked war (Gautam 2009: 415–16), we would argue that it is possible
to discern national strategic cultures linked to underlying foreign policy tra-
ditions. The traditions are significant because policy makers believed them to
exist and acted on those beliefs accordingly. For instance, Øivind Bratberg
(2011) points out that British foreign policy since 1945 has been driven by five
interlocking concerns:

… a privilege for Anglo-American relations, with NATO [the North

Atlantic Treaty Organization] as corollary; insular reserve towards the
European continent; a maintained global presence with special preference
for the Commonwealth; a policy based on pragmatism rather than
principle; and, finally, a liberal belief in international trade.
(Bratberg 2011: 331)

Bratberg identifies that the British tradition is founded on both substance (the
geostrategic content of the relationships the country has sought to put in
place to safeguard its security) and a certain pragmatic style that is essentially
reactive and forecloses the need for much in the way of theoretical reflection
or what could pejoratively be deemed the ‘intellectualization’ of British
foreign policy. Bratberg’s ‘insular reserve’ point is perhaps the emblematic one
to take away from what is a standard account of Britain’s foreign policy
priorities. It is certainly echoed in the literature on strategic culture and
national ways of war (defined and surveyed in Uz Zaman 2009), which takes
seriously ideas as they affect the practice of the use of force at state and
increasingly transnational levels.
We conclude this section by noting, therefore, that the Churchill ‘tradition’
has been a powerful force in British foreign policy rhetoric since 1945. Alastair
Miskimmon (2004) argues that Churchill’s ordering of the three circles, with
Europe at the bottom, even holds for periods, such as post-1997, when sup-
posedly Europeanist prime ministers have been resident in Downing Street.
Even under Tony Blair, he suggests, Britain remained torn between engaging
wholeheartedly in European initiatives which might lead to tighter political
integration and enacting an Atlanticist vision of pre-emptive security which
came to a head with the Iraq invasion of 2003. In a similar vein, Sten
Rynning (2003) suggests that the EU’s persistent inability to undertake a
coherent supranationally managed defence policy has suited the British (as
well as French and German policy makers), in part because it defers the
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78 Oliver Daddow and Jamie Gaskarth

question of duplication with NATO structures and in part because it frees
the bigger European powers to involve themselves in flexible coalitions of the
willing to deal with security threats. Whilst the strategic environment may
have altered quite dramatically since Churchill’s time, it would appear that
British policy makers have been able to proceed relatively untroubled through
choppy waters by falling back on their tried and trusted pragmatism. The
extant literature certainly implies that a straight line can be drawn from
Churchill to the present, whether this be articulations of foreign policy
‘vision’ (such as they are) or the practical expression of ideas in security
practices, which continue to privilege the Atlanticist over European or other
possible ideational inspirations for action.

Post-war dilemmas
We argue that using the framework of traditions and dilemmas helps us to
appreciate that such apparent ‘givens’ in Britain’s global outlook have not
been given for all time. Two examples illustrate why this is significant. First,
the ‘special relationship’ is an historically contingent and still emerging entity,
not the natural ‘order of things’ because ‘relations between Britain and the
United States during the 150 years before 1940 were marked by suspicion and
rivalry as much as mutual understanding’ (Wallace 1992: 440). The reputation
it has been accorded is not necessarily in line with what is a contested historical
record, either before Churchill’s time or, in fact, during it, with a succession of
US presidents evidently rather bored by the prime minister’s constant references
to it (Toye 2008: 367).
Second, Margaret Thatcher cited Churchill as a visionary of European
integration in the run-up to the 1984 European Parliament elections. Given
her now iconic status as a staunch critic of European integration and the
renowned apathy about European integration on the part of the British
public, we might have expected Thatcher to have ignored Churchill’s zeal for
a united Europe in favour of a more pragmatic line that accepted his view
that Britain’s European relations were, at best, a necessary evil in the pursuit
of British interests. That she went so far to rebalance the historical memory of
Churchill shows the power of circumstances at the time and the ‘multiple
uses’ to which Churchill’s memory can be put (Toye 2008: 370). There is
nothing inbuilt into the structure of the Churchill ‘consensus’ that determines
the composite beliefs of agents facing electoral or other pressing political
pressures. The interpretivist perspective allows us to dig down into the
lifeworld of the individual agent as they form their beliefs in a wider collective
dialogue with the past and the present; it reminds us that the history of
the reception and popularization of a narrative tradition is never quite as
simple as it may appear in hindsight when it becomes sedimented as a
collective social and institutional ‘fact’ (Searle 1995: 113–26).
We agree therefore that foreign and security policy thought has remained
heavily dependent on Churchillian imagery and rhetoric, but suggest that the
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From value protection to value promotion 79

beliefs that sustain this tradition have not been fixed. In fact, the tradition
itself has undergone some subtle but perceptible and important shifts over
time. In foreign policy we would not expect dilemmas, however acute, to prompt
overnight alterations to thinking or practice, yet tectonic shifts are detectable
beneath the surface. We illustrate how we can track these medium- and long-
term alterations to foreign and security policy beliefs using the period 1945–73
as a case study in geostrategic upheaval creating a series of dilemmas which
were only slowly and reluctantly recognized as dilemmas by elite decision makers.
Ultimately, they came to appreciate that Britain faced an existential crisis
of national identity. Decolonization and relative economic decline meant that
global troop deployments – the embodiment of Britain’s national identity as a
world power – were unsustainable. As policies altered in response to this new
knowledge, the web of beliefs that sustained the Churchillian tradition had to
be reconfigured.
Table 5.1 illustrates how we have enacted the traditions and dilemmas
framework for understanding the interaction between beliefs and traditions in
British foreign and security policy at a time of upheaval in the international
system. In the left-hand column we identify the pre-1973 tradition of thought
about Britain’s identity, role in the world and the concomitant foreign and
security posture which was encapsulated by Churchill and widely accepted
by politicians across the political spectrum. This was the vision of Britain

Table 5.1 Dilemmas in British foreign and security policy, 1945–73

Pre-1973 tradition Web of beliefs Dilemmas Post-1973 tradition
Britain an ‘Special relationship’ Suez crisis Britain a global actor
internationally with United States working from a regional
focused global Imperial power Decolonization base ‘inside’ Europe
actor (traditional (post-traditional outlook)
outlook) European balancer from Blue Streak
outside missile crisis
UN Security Economic decline
Council and NATO key
memberships
Capitalist not communist
power
Liberal free trade
Key security threats: Soviet
Union and imperial
insurgencies
Develop independent
nuclear technology and
sustain conventional forces
in Europe and east of Suez
Security as protection of
territory and values

Note: Italicized beliefs are those that were reconfigured as decision makers began to realize
the scale of the foreign and security dilemmas they faced.
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80 Oliver Daddow and Jamie Gaskarth

operating at the intersection of its three circles of power and influence to shape
global developments. It fed through into, for instance, Harold Macmillan’s
conviction that Britain could play Greece to America’s Rome by helping
Washington learn how to execute responsibly its newfound global great power
status, and simultaneously turn that power in Machiavellian fashion to
serve British interests. Flawed though it was, according to Nigel Ashton, the
Greek-Roman rendering of the ‘special relationship’ lasted well into Macmillan’s
time as prime minister, 1957–63 (Ashton 2005: 697–98). In the other circles,
the Commonwealth provided Britain with diplomatic connections and economic
resources, and London looked to encourage European integration but very
much from the outside.
In the second column above we identify the web of beliefs that sustained
the Churchillian tradition. This is the tradition that informed the British
establishment’s interpretation of Britain as a global actor in the early post-war
years. The first three beliefs were those associated with Britain’s geopolitical
position. First, the newly discovered wartime ‘special relationship’ with the
United States was built on the shared history of recent military endeavour
against the Axis powers, intelligence sharing, cultural connections and
common language. Second, the Commonwealth was important because it was
‘considered to be the source of [Britain’s] structural power at the time’ (Váška
2009: 121). Continental Europe remained the most problematic of the three
circles and certainly in the first 15 years after 1945 British policy makers
could not quite let go of the idea that Britain should act as a balancer outside
rather than inside Europe. London stood aloof from the creation of the Eur-
opean Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1950–52, the European Defence
Community (EDC) in 1950–54, of which Churchill was extremely critical,
and then the Rome Treaty that led to the establishment of the EEC in 1957.
The remaining beliefs that informed and were informed by this tradition
flowed from how British policy makers viewed Britain’s identity as a global
actor in these circles of influence, and how they constructed global develop-
ments in the emerging Cold War as threats to British security and interests.
Fourth, then, alliance building in NATO led by its trusted partner of choice,
the United States, trumped anything the Europeans might have hoped to
build in the form of the EDC. A seat at the United Nations (UN) Security
Council five permanent members’ (P-5) table reinforced Britain’s self-perception
as a great global power. Fifth and sixth, policy makers saw Britain’s identity
firmly within the ‘Western’ camp as a capitalist power pursuing liberal free
trade abroad combined with nationalization of key industries such as coal and
steel at home, particularly under the reforming Clement Attlee governments
of 1945–51. They were combined uneasily with elements of an imperial pos-
ture in short-lived Franco-British designs in 1946–48 to recolonize parts of
the Belgian Congo to build a European ‘Third Force’ distinct from both
Soviet-style communism and US-style capitalism (Kent and Young 1989).
Thus, policies inspired by the ‘socialist’ tradition could be said to have been
one of the mitigating factors against Britain’s closer entanglement in what
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was seen as a Christian Democratic and capitalist continental Europe in the
early years of the integration project. Meanwhile, collaborative ventures as
the doomed Third Force seemed to teach London elites that its European
neighbours would not provide Britain with the requisite stability or resources
to pursue its security interests in the emerging Cold War, hence the
much-vaunted turn to NATO in 1949.
Seventh, the core security challenge facing Britain was no longer from
Germany (although it was not ruled out, even in its divided and externally
managed state) but from the Soviet Union. In addition to fears about the
Soviet threat to UK territory, colonial insurgencies such as in Malaya kept
London’s focus on the global picture and in a state of tension about commu-
nist incursions into ‘Western-friendly’ territories. Eighth, combining great
power pretensions with basic security concerns there was a belief that Britain
should develop the ‘ultimate’ deterrent of nuclear weapons, and that its
‘bomb’ should be independent of US input. Research and development that
began under the Attlee Labour governments continued unabated through the
Conservative years 1951–55 when Churchill was back in power (see Mawdsley,
in this collection). This was a source of broad but not total cross-party
agreement from the leaderships. For example, the ‘Keep Left’ wing of the
Labour Party questioned the ethics of nuclear weapons research and testing
and was suspicious of what it saw as Britain’s slavish adherence to US security
practices. The final belief is a touch harder to pin down but it can be
summarized as the assumption that security at this time was about national
survival and the protection of national interests. This belief consisted of a
‘hard’ security agenda emphasizing the protection of national territory, colonial
territories and the territorial integrity of liberal democratic states against a
potentially revanchist Germany and/or Communist Soviet Union.
The web of beliefs that sustained this traditional approach to British
foreign and security policy sat in a dynamic relationship with each other, so
that as new knowledge came to light that caused individuals to reconsider
their faith in one belief, so other beliefs became destabilized and subject to
reassessment. The italicized beliefs in Table 5.1 are those that changed, as
policy makers perceived that the Churchillian conception of British foreign
and security policy was no longer sustainable in the first two decades after the
Second World War.
Four dilemmas were most apparent in bringing about this reassessment.
First, the Suez crisis of 1956 taught British leaders the lesson that it was
dangerous to act contrary to the wishes, and/or without the support of, the
Washington government. It further damaged relations with France after the
failure of the Third Force, and was widely vilified as the desperate actions of a
colonial power in decline. Suez therefore bolstered the US circle, disrupted
Britain’s leadership of the Commonwealth circle and left the Europe circle
as indecipherable to London as before. The second dilemma came from
decolonization. The Suez affair confirmed in the Commonwealth circle that
Britain could no longer exert the global leadership it once did as countries
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formerly administered by the Empire called for independence to make their
own way in the world. This process began with India and Pakistan in 1947,
and the pace rapidly picked up in the 1960s as the ‘winds of change’ blew
through the British territories in Africa.
The third dilemma struck at the heart of Britain’s security concerns and
great power pretensions – the Blue Streak missile crisis leading to the Nassau
Agreement of December 1960–62. The John F. Kennedy Administration’s
planned cancellation of the Skybolt missile system announced in late 1962
would have singlehandedly destroyed the opportunity for a UK nuclear
deterrent in the 1960s themed around the Blue Streak Intermediate Range
Ballistic Missile system. The Nassau Agreement that Kennedy negotiated
with Prime Minister Macmillan enabled Britain to buy the replacement
Polaris system for use with British warheads. Nassau showed that the British
were fundamentally reliant on the United States for the ultimate security
guarantee; that the defence of Europe against a conventional or Soviet threat
needed more in the way of a British and/or European effort in case the United
States could not or chose not to be involved in a hot war; and it emphasized
the fragility of the economic basis on which Britain’s great power pretensions
were being maintained.
This links to the final dilemma, which was new knowledge about Britain’s
ailing economy and changing trade patterns away from the Commonwealth
and towards Europe, both of which impinged on the relative balance that
London elites accorded the three circles in their foreign and security policy
thinking. The British economy suffered low rates of growth compared to its
European counterparts in the first three decades after the Second World War;
its share of global markets plummeted from 25% in 1950, such that by 2000 it
was just 5% (Váška 2009: 123). It was only when the Treasury took a firm
and what became a ‘critical’ grip through the Lee Report of 1961, however,
that the message started to hit home to Macmillan and his Cabinet (Toomey
2003: 229) that Europe might be a solution. It was underscored by the dis-
covery that the Commonwealth had been replaced at the beginning of the
1960s by the EEC as Britain’s main trading partner (Váška 2009: 123).
Together, this series of dilemmas added up to a period within which new
knowledge about Britain’s reduced standing in the world as the country at
large prompted decision-making elites to fear for the nation’s future health,
and they added up to one big dilemma: the dilemma of decline. The first
application to join the EEC was launched by Macmillan’s Conservative gov-
ernment in 1961–63 on the basis of economic calculations about the British
interest, not any sudden conversion to the European ideal. It offered ‘a
potentially valuable solution to a period of economic and political difficulty’
(Kavanagh and Morris 1994: 106). Labour’s Harold Wilson launched a
second and similarly unsuccessful application in 1967 on the same calculation
of costs and benefits to Britain’s ability to play out a great power role without
getting its economy in order (see Daddow 2003). In particular, the stabiliza-
tion loan of £850 million from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in
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1964–65 could not stave off the devaluation of sterling in November 1967 nor
the need for a further IMF loan in 1968 (Váška 2009: 126–27). Defence cuts
and retrenchment to bases east of the Suez Canal exposed as a sham Britain’s
ability to maintain a global presence because it meant the ‘end of Britain’s
global military role’ and confirmed its reduced status compared to the United
States and Soviet Union. As Toye (2008: 369) notes, ‘The [Lyndon] Johnson
administration saw this as weakening the fight against communism in South-East
Asia, and the State Department determined that it would no longer make
favourable comparisons between Wilson and Churchill as it had previously’.
Britain finally joined the EEC under Edward Heath in 1973, marking what
Váška (2009) calls the onset of a post-traditional foreign and security policy.
It was not ‘modern’ because memories of the past still haunted policy makers
who had been schooled on Empire and – largely – global military successes,
memories that resonate to this day (Daddow 2011; Gaskarth 2013). In this
section we discussed the interaction between traditions and beliefs about
British foreign and security policy in the period 1945–73, and saw how these
altered in response to dilemmas. The next section will use this framework to assess
the traditions, beliefs and dilemmas that altered British security thought and
practice after the Cold War.

Reconfiguring the tradition: from post-war to post-Cold War

In the post-Cold war era, a new dilemma for policy makers emerged: how could
they plan for Britain’s security in the apparent absence of existential threats?
When the Soviet Union collapsed, it left the UK operating in a security envir-
onment that was less threatening than at any time since perhaps the 1830s.
The downfall of communist regimes across the European continent meant that
social democracies such as Britain no longer had to be wary of internal or
external ideological challenges. As Malcolm Chalmers puts it, Europe had
‘evolved into a deeply rooted “peace community”’, in which war between
European states was no longer ‘a factor in defence planning’ (Chalmers 2011: 25).
So many of the trappings of great power status are bound up with military
capability – whether possession of an independent nuclear deterrent (Allen
2011; Wallace and Phillips 2009: 270), or the capacity to deploy a division-sized
force into combat within a matter of months (King 2011) – that an absence of
threat might have posed problems for Britain’s great power identity. However,
in a famous speech to the Conservative Party conference in 1995, the then
Defence Secretary Michael Portillo declared: ‘we are not ashamed to celebrate
Britain’s military prowess … to remind the world that this great nation will
not be put upon, before evoking the motto of the SAS, “Who Dares Wins” as
a rallying cry of national purpose’ (Portillo 1995). Yet the sentiments that
Portillo evoked were already anachronistic. No other state was trying to ‘put
upon’ the UK in the decade after the Cold War ended. Nor, even 18 years
later, has any state emerged to pose an existential threat to Britain’s survival
as a territory or political community.
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The first serious effort to strategize Britain’s defence planning after the Cold
War, the 1998 Strategic Defence Review (SDR), began with the declaration
that: ‘there is today no direct military threat to the United Kingdom or Western
Europe. Nor do we foresee the re-emergence of such a threat’ (MOD 1998: 8).
Although it went on to suggest that instability in Bosnia and Kosovo threatened
British security, and instability in Africa might do so indirectly, it did not
discuss existential threats to the UK itself, but possible threats to individual
citizens or British interests abroad. Such threats were far more diffuse and
open to interpretive dispute compared to the overwhelming danger of invasion
or, later, nuclear annihilation, that the UK had faced for much of the twentieth
century.
In the aftermath of the Cold War, Britain reduced its forces by a third and
its defence budget declined by 23% in real terms between 1990 and 1998
(MOD 1998: 9). In the absence of existential security threats, and facing
recession at home, the UK adopted a circumspect approach to military
commitments abroad. When ethnic conflict broke out in the Balkans with
the break-up of Yugoslavia, the UK deliberately limited the mandate of UN
forces on the ground – of which British forces were a significant part – to
avoid becoming embroiled in offensive operations (Kampfner 2003: 37). It also
actively resisted efforts to involve the Security Council in the ethnic conflict in
Rwanda (Curtis 2004: 281–82).
However, the human cost of these policies and the responsibility Britain
held for blocking attempts to confront human rights abuses in Bosnia and
Rwanda with force meant that Britain’s identity as an effective military and
political actor was tarnished. When ethnic conflict broke out in Kosovo in 1998,
it is possible to see a desire to reaffirm British leadership in the region and
thereby reassert Britain’s great power status. Tim Garden notes that ‘From
the start the UK Government saw itself in a leading role in Europe, in NATO
and in the UN’, citing Robin Cook’s statement to the house that ‘No nation
has done more to seek a peaceful settlement for Kosovo than Britain. It was
Britain that convened and chaired the Heathrow meeting of the Contact
Group … It was Britain which then made a leading contribution to the ver-
ification mission to police the supposed cease-fire. It was Britain and France
that jointly chaired the peace talks at Rambouillet and in Paris’ (Garden
2000). Cook favourably contrasted the restoration of Britain’s identity as a
leading power with the previous administration’s more cautious approach to
the use of force during the Bosnian war: ‘Milosevic was beaten in Kosovo. If
our predecessors in Government had acted as decisively to stop him in the past
decade then we would never have seen the tragedy of Kosovo’ (Cook 1999).
The human rights abuses committed in Kosovo by Serbian forces were on a
far smaller scale than those that had occurred in Bosnia. What was arguably
different was, in part, the desire to reaffirm British leadership by adopting a
more active approach to confronting ethnic conflict. Doing so allowed Britain
to express its status as a great power, demonstrated its capacity for military
action, and in the process justified the continuation of high levels of defence
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From value protection to value promotion 85

spending despite the lack of a significant threat to the mainland. As such, it
served a number of political ends. To gain international support for military action
in what was a civil conflict, a number of overlapping traditions were evoked.
Most prominently, neoliberal beliefs about the globalizing character of world
politics and the increasing interconnections between communities, both economic
and political, contributed to the sense that previous assumptions about sover-
eignty no longer applied. Westphalian categories of foreign and domestic,
inside and outside the state, standing in the way of intervention, were dismissed
in favour of a belief that globalization had made them redundant. Inter-
dependence, it was argued, exaggerated the susceptibility of states to security
threats, while global media technologies brought an immediacy and urgency to
the pictures and stories of human suffering from far-flung parts of the world.
Importantly, this belief about political transformation was directly linked
with the tradition of neoliberalism by policy makers. For instance, Tony Blair
asserted in his Chicago speech in 1999 that:

Globalisation has transformed our economies and our working practices …

We are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not. We cannot refuse
to participate in global markets if we want to prosper. We cannot ignore
new political ideas in other counties if we want to innovate. We cannot turn
our backs on conflicts and the violation of human rights within other
countries if we want still to be secure.
(Blair 1999b)

Underpinning this argument was the globalizing and universalizing tradition

of neoliberalism. Neoliberal economics, opening up markets and creating social
links across borders were seen as feeding into a process of spreading universal
political values. Robin Cook argued the following year that:

the age of globalisation is creating more progressive pressures. Regimes

which govern their citizens by fear and repression cannot expect the same
people to display the creativity and innovation in the workplace which are
essential for a knowledge-based economy.
(Cook 2000)

The result of this interdependence was, for New Labour policy makers, a
pressure to converge around a common set of global beliefs, a ‘global alliance
for global values’, as Blair described it (Blair 2006b).
Importantly for security, this led to a belief that challenges to these values
abroad constituted a threat to Britain, via this sense of global interconnectedness.
At the regional level, geographical proximity lent weight to the sense of direct
British interests under threat. In his statement to the House of Commons on
23 March 1999, Blair argued for action on the basis that, ‘If Kosovo was left
to the mercy of Serbian repression, there is not merely a risk but a probability
of re-igniting unrest in Albania; Macedonia de-stabilised; almost certain
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86 Oliver Daddow and Jamie Gaskarth

knock-on effects in Bosnia; and further tension between Greece and Turkey’
(Blair 1999a). Putting Britain in the position of regional spokesman, he
asserted that ‘There are strategic interests for the whole of Europe at stake’
(Blair 1999a). However, the same processes would, for Blair, also have global
ramifications. In a reflective speech towards the end of his premiership, Blair
argued that the lesson of Kosovo was that ‘the rule book of international
politics has been torn up. Interdependence – the fact of a crisis somewhere
becoming a crisis everywhere – makes a mockery of traditional views of
national interest’ (Blair 2006c). In response to Kosovo, Robin Cook called for a
‘new internationalism’, transposing a term from the socialist tradition onto a
narrative accepting of the neoliberal forces of globalization (Cook 1999).
The same logics of regional risks becoming globalized, increasing need for
intervention, and Britain’s role as a leading power, were all evident in the
UK’s response to the dilemma of how to deal with the global phenomenon of
Islamist terrorism. Although it was common for security policy makers to
emphasize the extent to which 9/11 represented a major change in the security
environment, Blair argued that ‘At another level, it made sense of develop-
ments’ he had ‘seen growing in the world these past years’ (Blair 2010: 345).
In particular, he depicted Britain as embroiled in ‘a battle that was ideological …
about the force and consequence of globalisation’ (Blair 2010: 346). In
response to the growth in Islamist terrorism, Blair argued elsewhere that ‘we have
to act, not react; we have to do so on the basis of prediction not certainty;
and such action will often, usually indeed, be outside of our own territory’
(Blair 2006c). In other words, actions in the name of British security would be
based on the looser basis of probability and prediction rather than material
evidence. To gain international support for them, Blair argued for ‘an agreed
basis of principle, of values that are shared and fair. Common action only
works when founded on common values’ (Blair 2006c).
From an interpretivist perspective, the agreed basis Blair evoked is perhaps
as revealing by its omissions as by what it included. In conjuring up supposedly
‘global values’, largely derived from a liberal democratic tradition of ‘liberty,
democracy, tolerance, justice’, it is striking that there is no mention of human
rights in the entire speech, and only one mention of the rule of law, centred
on events in Iraq. Neither are human rights mentioned at all in the second of
his three valedictory speeches on foreign policy in 2006, specifically dedicated
to outlining the basis of these ‘global’ values. To the fore then, in fact, was the
neoliberal emphasis on free markets and democratic governance, rather than
other possible aspects of this tradition like individual rights. Blair’s char-
acteristic framework for discussing security challenges was themed around a
series of binary oppositions, such as the ‘the age-old battle between progress
and reaction’, progressives versus conservatives, engagement versus isolation,
modernity versus a ‘pre-feudal’ ideology, extremism versus ‘the true voice of
Islam’, and the ‘reactionary and regressive’ in opposition to those who believe
in democracy and liberty (Blair 2006a). In doing so, it is apparent that Blair
offers a polarized, Manichaean world in which neoliberal economics and
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From value protection to value promotion 87

politics were privileged as ‘progressive’ and enlightened, with intervention in
notionally sovereign states justified as part of a civilizing process.
On the face of it, the Conservative-Liberal coalition government from 2010
has questioned this appraisal of British security, certainly as far as New
Labour’s commitment of troops around the globe is concerned. David
Cameron asserted in his first Mansion House speech in November 2010 that
New Labour had, militarily, ‘made too many commitments without the
resources to back them up’ (Cameron 2010). Although he did commit British
forces to action in Libya five months later, it is notable that he emphasized: ‘It
is not about choosing the Government of Libya; that is an issue for the
Libyan people’ (Cameron 2011). In light of controversy over the legal basis to
the 2003 Iraq war, Cameron introduced three key criteria to intervention:
‘demonstrable need, regional support, and a clear legal basis’ (Cameron
2011). The last two of these were absent from Blair’s six criteria for action set
out in his Chicago speech and suggested a greater emphasis on multi-
lateralism and international law (see Daddow and Schnapper 2013). Yet, in
security terms, it is arguable that Cameron was still committing Britain to a
‘war of choice’ rather than necessity. Just as Blair had attempted to link Kosovo
to Europe’s regional security, so Cameron also defended action on Libya in the
same manner: ‘We simply cannot have a situation where a failed pariah state
festers on Europe’s southern border’ (Cameron 2011). The assumption that
security threats required a response even if they were distant, and that Britain
should play a leading role in international action, were accepted unchallenged.
In short, the tradition of neoliberalism at the ‘end of history’ has been a
potent force in British security thinking in the post-Cold War era. Underlying
beliefs about globalization, interconnectedness and the universalizing pressure
for ‘global values’ has encouraged policy makers to see indirect threats as of
major importance. In the process, Britain has been able to continue, and
reinforce, the performance of its self-identity as a global leader via the use of
military force. As a result, it has largely avoided making difficult choices
about demilitarization and has made little effort radically to redesign its
security forces to confront non-military threats from transnational crime, the
environment, health risks and insecurities in the structure of the neoliberal
economic system.

Conclusion
This chapter explored the traditions and dilemmas that have informed British
security thought and practice since 1945. Going back to the end of the Second
World War we interpreted the composition of the underlying traditions that
have been brought to bear in this realm, whilst illustrating how a series of
dilemmas compelled policy elites, incrementally and reluctantly, to confront
new knowledge and reconfigure their web of beliefs about how to secure and
advance British security interests as a result. In the period 1945–73 policy
makers cleaved to a Realist understanding of security as an extension of foreign
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88 Oliver Daddow and Jamie Gaskarth

policy, all framed by the Churchillian tradition of seeing Britain as a ‘great’
global power positioned at the intersection of global diplomacy and military
might. This was security achieved via the influence that came from Britain
being a founder member of the P-5 of the UN and the NATO alliance, glossed
rhetorically with enthusiastic talk of the vitality of the Anglo-American ‘special
relationship’. The Commonwealth remnants of Empire helped Britain to
support its global troop commitments physically in the form of forward military
bases and access to naval ports, and in the initial post-war years by providing
a relatively secure economic foundation. Europe was the poor relation of the
three circles: British decision makers in both main political parties were
interested in Europe but preferred not to be associated too closely with nascent
moves to integration as they developed through the 1950s.
The end of the Cold War saw the ‘Western’ understanding of the ‘end of
history’ give real impetus to the idea that the ‘Cold War was won’, with the
neoliberal economic model itself becoming part of the security narrative that
British policy makers defended and promoted. The tradition of claiming
‘great’ power pretensions for Britain never left the rhetoric, as we have seen
through our study of Blair’s and Cameron’s speeches and writings on security.
Policy making elites bolted their new knowledge about the impact of globa-
lization onto the Churchill tradition. Significantly, they did not wish or seek
to overturn it, so much as rework Churchill for the modern era, in light of their
understanding of ‘new’ realities after 1989. Their belief in the power of the
‘special relationship’ to advance British security continued to go hand in hand
with a suspicion of the European dimension of British security (Liddle 2005),
even as Britain was playing a leading role in redesigning and modernizing
European defence to cope with the challenges of ethnic cleansing and huma-
nitarian crises in and around Europe’s borders. As demands grow for a
referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union (EU), the sense we
have is that Britain may be about to enter a new phase of introspection in its
security interests which may, should withdrawal from the EU be sought, lead
to another upheaval to rival both 1973 and 1989.

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6 Negotiating the global security dilemma

Interpreting Russia’s security agenda
Aglaya Snetkov

With the proliferation of discussion about global order change in recent years,
and accompanying predictions about a greater role for non-Western great
powers, or the so-called rising powers, in questions of global governance and
security (Alexandroff and Cooper 2010; Ikenberry and Wright 2008; Young
2010; Schweller 2011; Gu et al. 2008; Drezner 2007; Ikenberry 2008), the field
of Security Studies is increasingly acknowledging that it is no longer sufficient
to examine questions of global security primarily or exclusively through the
experience of the West. There is growing recognition that it is empirically
necessary to take into account the positions, views and interests of these non-
Western powers in study of international affairs (Zakaria 2008; Glosny 2009;
Kappell 2011; Layne 2009; Whitman 2010; Flemes 2011). In turn, theoretical
models and concepts should also take into account the contexts and actors
within non-Western contexts (Bilgin 2010).
The aim of this chapter is to shed light on the way in which one such
non-Western power, Russia, has sought to conceptualize and make sense of
the global security agenda in the post-Cold War era. Within the extensive body
of literature assessing the directions, interests and priorities of contemporary
Russian security policy, a bias for positivist realist perspectives continues
to exist (see Wegren 2003; Kanet 2005). Indeed, many scholars have sought to
characterize the Putin regime as ideologically promoting a more aggressive
and largely anti-Western position in global security matters (Blank 2002).
However, the interpretivist framework adopted here departs from existing
constructivist literature on Russia’s foreign and security policy, which tends to
focus primarily on Russia’s identity politics as the driving factor behind the
evolution of Russia’s view of itself and the world (see Neumann 2008; Morozov
2008; Tsygankov 2005, 2007; Lomagin 2007; Kassianova 2001; Hopf 2005;
Clunan 2009). Instead, as already outlined in Chapter 1 of the book, rather
than focusing primarily on concepts such as language, identity, culture or
ideas, the interpretivist perspective used here centres primarily on recapturing
actors’ beliefs and meanings within their own contexts, and on investigating
the process by which ideas and beliefs evolve across time, through the notion
of traditions and dilemmas and the principle of ‘situated agency’ (Bevir and
Rhodes 2006; Bevir et al. 2013).
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Thus, rather than focusing on identity politics, this chapter instead examines
the way in which Russia’s security policy developed and was structured by the
beliefs and traditions adopted by the Putin regime, which in turn fed into and
drove the conceptualization of its main security dilemma. The chapter argues
that the evolution of Russia’s security policy should be viewed as an attempt
by Russian policy makers to deal with what they perceived to be the primary
dilemma for post-Soviet Russia: how to fit in and normalize its position
within the global security landscape. The more assertive, and at times
anti-Western, positions of the Putin regime adopted in the second half of the
2000s were a by-product of this negotiated process and their reading of
subsequent external developments, rather than a fixed ideological position.
The interpretivist framework adopted here is of particular value for studying
non-Western contexts, not just because of its emphasis on the importance of
local contexts, but also because it remains agnostic regarding the distinction
between internal and external security spheres, or in other words, about from
which locale changes to existing traditions and beliefs should come. Unlike
in realist approaches, which prioritize or at least have a tendency to draw a
distinction between these two security spheres, the interpretivist inductive
approach developed primarily from the study of history and British govern-
ance (Bevir and Rhodes 2006; Bevir et al. 2013), and thus does not follow any
predetermined assumptions about the nature of security concerns in the
external or internal spheres. Nor does this approach prioritize one security
sphere or context over the other. It is therefore well suited for investigating the
way in which Russia’s perceptions of global security concerns were localized
within its national context and the interrelationship between its global and
local security concerns.
This chapter now turns to examine the beliefs and traditions adopted by
the Putin regime upon coming to power in 2000; the way in which these
beliefs in turn structured the Putin regime’s reading of its primary security
dilemma for Russia; and finally the two-stage process advocated by the Russian
policy makers for dealing with this security dilemma – the rebuilding of Russia
from within (2000–02), and subsequent repositioning of Russia as a more
confident and independent actor within the global security architecture (2002–08).

Beliefs and traditions of the Putin regime

As soon as it came to power in 2000, the ideological and ideational principles
of the Putin regime were under close scrutiny, with commentators trying to
assess Vladimir Putin’s particular personality traits and attempting to make
sense of his past career decisions in order to shed light on this ‘new’ political
actor in Russian politics (Dyson 2001). Some highlighted his KGB past and
FSB credentials (Herspring 2003: 3–5), some his involvement with liberal
groups in St Petersburg in the 1990s (Charap 2004), and others questioned
the extent to which the ideas brought in by this regime amounted to a full
ideological programme (Evans 2005: 900).
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94 Aglaya Snetkov
Nonetheless, a close reading of Russia’s public discourse in this period
suggests that the Putin regime sought to put together a multifaceted programme
for Russia based on a series of ‘old’ Russian traditions intertwined with a set
of ‘new’ beliefs drawn out of the Putin regime’s reading of Russia’s position
and situation in the late 1990s, and their perception about the failures of the
previous Yeltsin administration. As noted by Putin himself in 1999, ‘the new
Russian idea will come about as a mixture or as an organic combination of
universal general humanitarian values with the traditional Russian values that
have stood the test of time’ (Putin 1999). Hence, rather than rejecting national
traditions, as many analysts have argued the previous administration had
done, Putin advocated reconciliation between Russia’s historical legacy and
current circumstances (Sakwa, in Ross 2004: 21). In this way, the 2000
National Security, Defence and Foreign Policy Concepts papers all reiterated
the principle that global and domestic threats must be dealt with in line with
Russia’s traditions.1

Traditional Russian beliefs and the Putin regime

Drawing on Russia’s traditions, the Putin regime promoted the importance of
a strong state, and the principles of statism and state sovereignty. As noted by
Putin, ‘the key to Russia’s recovery and growth today lies in the state-political
sphere. Russia needs strong state power and must have it’ (Putin 1999). It was
therefore suggested that the lack of a strong state would result in the disin-
tegration of the country from within and an inability to promote its foreign
policy abroad, which harked back to the traditional fear of Russia’s collapse
either from within or from without.
Alongside the importance of a strong state for the establishment of a strong
Russia, this political regime also drew on traditional narratives about Russia’s
unique position and voice in the world, relating this to Russia’s historical
image of itself as a great power. Therefore, alongside the principle of Russia’s
uniqueness within the international context, patriotism became yet another
central principle at the heart of this regime’s web of beliefs. Putin argued that
‘for the majority of Russians it [patriotism] retains its original and positive
meaning’ (Putin 1999), whilst the sense of pride in Russia’s heritage was said
to support the idea that ‘Russia was and will remain a great power’ (Putin
1999). In this respect, the uniqueness of Russia’s values and traditions was
said to be operating alongside the notion of universal principles that impacted
on all international actors, whereby ‘our people have begun to understand
and accept supranational universal values which are above social, group or
ethnic interests’. However, it was suggested that state policy, and Russia’s
revival in particular, should be based on the ‘foundation for the consolidation
of Russian society is what can be called the primordial, traditional values of
Russians’ (Putin 1999). As noted by Evans, the universal values of democracy,
for example, were accepted, but situated and therefore combined with Russia’s
traditional values and context to produce a more state-led notion of
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Negotiating the global security dilemma 95

‘sovereign democracy’ as publicized by Vladislav Surkov, a key ideologist of
the Putin regime (Evans 2005: 905).2 Russia’s uniqueness, the importance of
its national interests and position as a great power, were in turn the principles
enshrined in the Russian Foreign Policy Concept 2000, where it was argued
that the aim of Russian foreign security policy should be:

To ensure reliable security of the country, to preserve and strengthen its

sovereignty and territorial integrity, to achieve firm and prestigious positions
in the world community, most fully consistent with the interests of the
Russian Federation as a Great Power …
To influence general world processes with the aim of forming a stable,
just and democratic world order.3

To bind together this sense of uniqueness, the Putin regime also drew on
Russia’s cultural heritage and political symbols of the past, in order to con-
struct a positive image for Russia. The regime therefore revived the old Soviet
national anthem music in 2000, made increased references to Soviet victories
in the Second World War and promoted the role and place of the Orthodox
Church in the Russian cultural context.
However, in relation to its civilizational and international position, the
Putin regime put forward a rather more ambivalent image of the international
system and the West in particular, here too drawing on Russia’s traditional
heritage and historically ambivalent relationship with what has traditionally
been perceived as Russia’s main ‘Other’ in foreign policy (Evans 2005: 900).
Whilst the regime suggested that Russia should be part of the wider, often
read as Western-centric, international community, it should do so in line with
its national interests and by ensuring its independent position in international
affairs (Tsygankov 2007: 380).

Contemporary beliefs: fear of the 1990s chaos and the Putin regime
Aside from drawing on the set of Russian traditional beliefs outlined above,
the Putin regime also sought to re-articulate and draw lessons from the
situation in which Russia had found itself in the 1990s, particularly linked to
the fear of the chaos of the 1990s, the weakness of Russia’s international
position by the late 1990s and the perceived ongoing failure to normalize
Russia’s position within the global security architecture. In turn, these ‘newer’
sets of beliefs, particularly with regard to the global security dilemma, centred
on the fear of a weak state, the rise of non-traditional security threats, con-
cerns about the development of a Western-led unipolar world system and
concern about Russia’s isolation in global security affairs.
Upon ascending to power in 2000, the Putin regime therefore suggested that
Russia had found itself in a major crisis in the late 1990s whereby ‘morale was
exceptionally low. It was suggested that the state was fundamentally weak.
The mood was one of humiliation’ (Hill 2008: 475). As noted by Sakwa, in
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96 Aglaya Snetkov
response to this crisis the principle of normalcy in all spheres of political life
became a major belief adopted by this administration as President Putin drew
a line under the upheavals of the previous decade (Sakwa 2008a). It was argued
that Russia must move away from the ‘social experiments’ of the Soviet period,
but also from the adaptation of ‘abstract models and schemes taken from for-
eign textbooks. The mechanical copying of other nations’ experience will not
guarantee success, either’ (Putin 1999). In this way, the older belief in Russia’s
uniqueness was further reinforced, in light of its experiences in the 1990s, as
Putin reiterated that ‘Russia … has to find its own path of renewal’ (Putin 1999).
The post-Soviet experiment of moving Russia towards a more pro-liberal,
pro-Western power, as seen under Yeltsin in the 1990s, was said to have failed
and had left Russia suffering from a mass political, economic and societal
dislocation, with a failing political leadership and system (Treisman 2002: 58–59),
a country suffering from a weak state, rampant corruption, powerful oligarchs,
federal breakdown; mass terrorist and separatist problem in Chechnya; and
critically an actor isolated externally from the global security architecture. In
their political project for Russia, the Putin regime placed a lot of emphasis on
the importance of internal cohesion and the need to follow Russia’s national
principles in conjunction with global developments and the need to re-engage
internationally (Putin 2000).
In addition, and particularly in view of the problems of the late 1990s and
in conjunction with more traditional Russian traditional beliefs, the Russian
leadership continued to promote the principle of multipolarity (as developed
by Foreign Minister Primakov in the late 1990s) in international affairs. This
was presented as the best policy tool for guaranteeing both Russia’s unique
international position and as a mechanism for counteracting the unipolar
model of global security championed by the West. As noted by the Russian
Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Sredina, Russia would stand against any
encroachment of its national interests and would not support any models of
European security centred on the principles of ‘NATO [North Atlantic Treaty
Organization]-centrism’ (Sredina 1999). Instead, Russia continued to believe
in the central role of the United Nations (UN – and particularly the UN
Security Council) in the global security architecture, for as noted by Vladimir
Sredina in October 1999:

One of the central places in our foreign policy has been allocated to efforts
to strengthen the United Nations, it is a unique and in many ways without
alternatives mechanism for regulating the whole system of international
relations.
(Sredina 1999)

The embrace of the principles of multipolarity and the centrality of the UN in

global security was meant to alleviate Russia’s sense of isolation in global
security affairs and fear of being left out of future developments in global
security and international affairs more generally.
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Negotiating the global security dilemma 97

Furthermore, and in relation to the image of Russia as a great power, it was
suggested that in the future Russia should seek to work in harmony, rather
than disunity, with other great powers and the international community in
general (Putin 2000). Cooperation between Russia and the outside world was
said to be not only possible, but mutually beneficial. As noted by the Russian
Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, during his speech to the French Senate on 27
October 1999, ‘we are proposing building a world where there would be no
wars or conflicts’ (Ivanov 1999). The Russian leadership believed that Russia
should preserve its state sovereignty, function as a normal great power, and
have its voice in the international system.

Russia’s security dilemma: how to normalize its position as a great

power in the contemporary global security architecture
Drawing on these two sets of ‘older’ and ‘newer’ beliefs and traditions,
Russian policy makers read Russia’s position in the global security archi-
tecture in the early 2000s as a major security dilemma. The dilemma of how
to normalize Russia within the global security architecture in the post-Cold
War era was not a ‘new’ issue for Russia. However, as noted above, the failure
of the previous administration to achieve this aim in the 1990s meant that this
major question had returned to the top of Russia’s official foreign security
agenda in the early 2000s. Whilst the Putin regime continued to advocate
Russia’s return to the international stage as a normal great power, they iden-
tified a series of reasons why it was unable to do so at that time, which were
centred on Russia’s post-Soviet legacy and shifting international realities that
were said to have made Russia weak and internationally sidelined.
It was suggested that the extent of this dilemma was so grave that Russia was
facing a series of key existential issues and questions that had to be resolved
before it could begin to rebuild its strength. Putin outlined that ‘the question for
Russia today is what to do next … How can we overcome the still deep
ideological and political divisions within society? … What place can Russia
occupy in the international community in the twenty first century?’ (Putin 1999).
Russia’s inability to engage fully or to have its voice heard in major global
security questions, such as the increasingly interventionist policies of the West as
witnessed in Kosovo in 1999, the ongoing disagreements between Russia and
the West over traditional global security concerns, including the renegotiation
of arms treaties, limitation on nuclear proliferation and the possibility of a
NATO expansion were all interpreted as major failures. In this respect, Russia
was presented as a fallen ‘great power’, although a ‘great power’ nonetheless.
As Russia’s National Security Concept argued:

Despite the complicated international situation and difficulties of a domestic

nature, Russia objectively continues to play an important role in global
processes by virtue of its great economic, science-technological and military
potential and its unique strategic location on the Eurasian continent.4
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98 Aglaya Snetkov
In line with the Putin regime’s wider set of beliefs, for Russia to function as a
strong global actor and participate fully in the global security agenda, it
would have to become a strong state. As a result, the internal weaknesses of
the late 1990s were identified as a major reason for Russia’s failure successfully
to integrate itself into the global security agenda. As outlined in the 2000
National Security Concept:

The state of the economy, an imperfect system of government and civil

society, the social and political polarization of Russian society and the
criminalization of social relations, the growth of organized crime and
increase in the scale of terrorism, the exacerbation of interethnic relations.5

Having characterized Russia as a ‘weak’ state, Putin argued that it had only
two choices: to stay weak and be left behind, or to deal with its domestic
problems and rebuild itself in order to re-emerge as a ‘strong’ sovereign state
once more (Putin 2000). In this way, ‘a central theme running through Putin’s
policy’ was ‘recognizing Russia’s weakness and diminishing its impact on
domestic and foreign policy’ (Lynch 2005: 143).
As well as blaming Russia’s internal weakness, this dilemma was also said
to have re-emerged as a result of ongoing shifts in the international system. It
was considered that Russia was having to grapple with a changing global
system, following the end of the Cold War, both in terms of what this inter-
national system would look like in the future, and what its role would be
within it in the future (Legvold 2001).
The potential global trends towards a unipolar world system (a model that
was said to be promoted by the West) were interpreted as a threat to Russia’s
principle of multipolarity and overarching ambition to reintegrate itself into the
global security architecture. As noted in Russia’s Foreign Policy Concept 2000,
the world, and Russia in particular, were experiencing a situation in which:

new challenges and threats to the national interests of Russia are emer-
ging in the international sphere. There is a growing trend towards the
establishment of a unipolar structure of the world with the economic and
power domination of the United States. In solving principal questions of
international security, the stakes are being placed on western institutions
and forums of limited composition, and on weakening the role of the
U.N. Security Council.6

The need to overcome this trend and to ensure that the international system
would remain a space in which Russia was able to promote its own interests
and act as a significant player was therefore identified as a critical, although
at this stage secondary issue for Russian policy makers in the early 2000s.
Whilst concerns were raised that other countries may not automatically wel-
come back a ‘strong’ Russia and that some foreign governments had a vested
interest in keeping Russia down, the belief in the possibility of successfully
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Negotiating the global security dilemma 99

and peacefully reintegrating Russia into the global security architecture
remained, as optimism about Russia’s potential to become of ‘great power’
once more prevailed (Putin 2000).

Stage 1: internal rebuilding and Russia’s attempts to fit into existing global

architecture, 2000–02
Having identified and interpreted the key dilemma of how to normalize Russia’s
position in the global security landscape, the Putin regime proceeded to move
towards rectifying this problem by prioritizing the need to rebuild Russia’s
internal sphere first, and from this base of domestic strength it was then,
though, that it would be possible for Russia to regain its position as a ‘great power’
in international security. Hence, the need to deal with the mass economic
collapse, societal and political turmoil and the lack of effective state governance
were prioritized over the global security agenda in the early 2000s.
The project of ‘rebuilding’ Russia was carried out on all fronts, and parti-
cularly centred on the four pillars of reconstruction, identified in 1999/2000–01
as: economic growth, state making, nation building, and dealing with the
terrorist activity threatening Russia’s stability in Chechnya. On the economic
front, despite structural weaknesses and institutional problems (Hanson 2003:
380), the reform proposals of Economics Minister German Gref led to a
restructuring of the Russian economic space. These changes included tax
reform, deregulation, land and judicial reform (Åslund 2004: 398), devaluation
of the rouble and prudent monetary and fiscal policy (Hanson 2003: 380).
Furthermore, Russia’s state building centred on three key principles: state
integrity (Chechnya), state capacity (federal reforms) and state autonomy
(attacks on oligarchs) (Taylor 2003: 1). All of these reforms sought to deal
with the state failures inherited from Yeltsin’s administration, which were
blamed for Russia’s weaknesses in 2000.
Externally, and in view of the idea that Russia must first become strong
internally, in order then to regain its position globally, the Russian authorities
moved towards a conciliatory international position, showing both goodwill
and intention to work within existing global structures. As identified earlier,
Russia’s three key foreign policy goals became economic modernization,
global competitiveness and regaining its status as a modern great power
(Trenin 2004). To this end, rather than a unipolar approach,7 the Putin regime
adopted a flexible, multifaceted and pragmatic foreign policy (Lavrov 2005).
The Russian leadership also proposed that Russia should reconcile itself with
the West, despite its earlier disillusionment in the late 1990s, in view of its
internal problems and desire to reintegrate itself back into the international fold.
Thus, particularly following 9/11 and the subsequent launch of the US-led
‘war on terror’, Russia presented itself as a much more accommodating and
conciliatory global security actor than in the late 1990s. As noted in the 2000
Foreign Policy Concept, ‘today our foreign policy resources are relatively
limited’, and as a result Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov noted that
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100 Aglaya Snetkov

Russia’s foreign policy should be pragmatic to help the country resolve its inter-
nal problems (Herspring 2003: 231). It was hoped that this new cooperation with
the West would create a more favourable global security environment for
Russia, enable it to deal with its domestic problems, and to facilitate its return
to the global stage as a much strengthened international actor. Russia there-
fore moved to seek a compromise on the Start 2 Treaty between Russia and
the United States in 2000, gave support to the US campaign in Afghanistan
in 2001, moved towards the establishment of the Russia-NATO Council in
2002, and launched a much more active policy to revitalize Russia’s fledgling
relations with its European partners (Herspring 2003: 238–44). Therefore, in
this period its international partners, and particularly the West, acquired a
much more positive image and role in Russia’s official foreign policy.

Stage 2: Russia’s reassertion of its position in the global security

architecture, 2002–08
Following the rebuilding process, particularly in the internal sphere, by the
mid-2000s, Russia was no longer presented as an existential security threat
to itself, and the overall message from the Russian authorities was one of
self-confidence. As noted by the Duma Banking and Finance Committee
Chairman Valerii Zubov, from United Russia, on 3 January 2005: ‘The
country is not in crisis, not in the political, nor in a crisis of federal relations,
nor in economic crisis, there is not a single crisis.’8
Within the official foreign policy strategy Russia was therefore increasingly
presented as a great power in the international system, capable of defending
its position and interests and no longer prepared to be sidelined in major
international developments. According to the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei
Lavrov, this signalled the ‘new status’ of Russia, which was ‘on the upgrade’
internationally (Lavrov 2007a). Accordingly, Russia seemed ready to take its
rightful place in the international arena among other great powers, a pre-
paredness linked to its internal stability. This was outlined in the 2008 Russian
Foreign Policy Concept, which laid out the parameters and principles of
Russia’s understanding of its security position, alongside state perceptions of
the external environment and Russia’s place within it:

Under these conditions, the role and responsibility of Russia in international

affairs have qualitatively grown. The chief achievement of recent years is
the newly acquired foreign policy independence of Russia. The time is ripe
for conceptualization of the new situation, particularly at the doctrinal level.9

Furthermore, as suggested by Lavrov in 2006, ‘the most important thing that

we ourselves sensed is that the role of the Russian factor in international
affairs has considerably grown’ (Lavrov 2006).
However, Russia’s ongoing failure to be fully integrated and accepted
into the global security landscape continued to be presented as a major
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Negotiating the global security dilemma 101

security dilemma; however, this was no longer linked to Russia’s internal
position (which had been resolved), but to Western unilateralism, its failure to
acknowledge Russia’s national interests and position as a normal great
power.10 For Russian officials, the Iraq crisis in 2003 signalled the West’s
readiness to use unilateral force, by-passing international law, disregarding
the principles of sovereignty, cooperation, multipolarity, respect for national
interests and the apparent hollowness of the norms expounded by the West.11
As noted by the Deputy Foreign Minister Aleksander Safonov:

The Iraq crisis has become a major test of strength and readiness of the
international community to mount real opposition to the global threat of
terrorism. Because of the thorough and flexible position of Russia it was
possible to resolve the biggest task – to prevent the division of interna-
tional anti-terrorist coalition, to preserve the mechanisms to return it to
its original principles such as adherence to cooperation, the unquestioned
legitimacy and central role of the UN.
(Ministry for Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation 2004)

Furthermore, as suggested by Trenin, crises such as ‘Iraq and Chechnya, YUKOS

and Ukraine have brought the [Russia-West] relationship to even lower depths
at the close of 2004 than Kosovo five years earlier’ (Trenin 2004). This sentiment
was compounded further by a plethora of new global security tensions between
Russia and the West in 2005–08, including energy geopolitics, oil and gas dis-
putes with Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia and Moldova in 2006–08; the potential
future NATO expansion towards Georgia and Ukraine; the positioning of US
Missile Defence in Poland and the Czech Republic; bilateral friction between
Russia and the United States/European Union (EU), together with the friction
over the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) space, which resulted in the
Russian leadership arguing that the key actor preventing Russia from resolving
the dilemma of Russia’s return to ‘great power’ status was in fact the West and
its role in domestic, regional and global affairs in relation to Russia. This point
was exemplified by Putin in 2007: ‘today we are witnessing an almost uncon-
tained hyper use of force – military force – in international relations, force
that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts’ (Putin 2007).
In response, the Russian leadership also increasingly suggested that the West
failed to acknowledge that its actions violated key Russian national interests, and
used double standards, between its own behaviour and norms imposed upon
Russia. Aleksandr Aksenyonok, an ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary
of the Russian Federation, for example, suggested in December 2008 that:

no one can ignore Russia’s natural state interests; there are lines that
cannot be crossed. None of these warnings have been taken seriously; and
in general Moscow’s arguments have long been running across a wall of
more or less polite indifference.
(Aksenyonok 2008)
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102 Aglaya Snetkov

With the initial ambivalent image of the West in Russia’s foreign policy agenda,
the perceived failure of this actor to take into account Russia’s wider set of
beliefs and traditions, and its ongoing attempts to derail Russia’s ambitions to
normalize its position in the global security architecture, the West was now
presented as Russia’s main ‘Other’, or threat. The Russian official position
therefore betrayed disillusionment, disappointment and to some extent resig-
nation with regards to the West. This was the sense in Lavrov’s article in the
journal Global Affairs in April–June 2007, in which the West appeared to be
securitized:

The novelty of the situation is that the West is losing its monopoly on the
globalization process. This explains, perhaps, attempts to present the current
developments as a threat to the West, its values, and very way of life …
Russia is against attempts to divide the world into the so-called ‘civilized
mankind,’ and all the others. This is a way to global catastrophe.
(Lavrov 2007b)

As a result, the Russian authorities hardened their position and defence of

national interests vis-à-vis Western powers. As Sakwa notes, alongside political,
strategic and security questions, tensions with the West also became a debate
over ‘intellectual’ and ‘cultural’ principles of organizing both nation-states
and the global world order (Sakwa 2008b: 264). By the end of this period ‘all
sides entered into a deeply negative spiral of mutual suspicion that gradually
hardened into abuse which in turn gave way to threats and counter threat.
Indeed, the scholar Dmitry Furman argued that “there is only one opposition
to Putin at present – other countries”’ (Sakwa 2008b: 253).
Russia, by the end of Putin’s second term in power, had grown much more
confrontational and negative towards its previous Western partners. The crises
experienced in the external sphere were often blamed on the West’s refusal to
take Russia seriously, and it was felt that it was the West that had lost Russia,
and not the other way around.
In this way, the Russian authorities had shifted from arguing that it was
Russia’s internal failure that was holding it back from normalizing its position as
a great power in the global security architecture, towards the suggestion that it
was the West that was preventing Russia from successfully resolving its main
dilemma in the post-Cold War global environment.

Conclusion
The key driver of Russia’s security policy under Putin during the 2000s was the
ongoing attempt by Russian policy makers to make sense of and negotiate the
main dilemma for Russia at the turn of the twenty-first century – how to
normalize its position within the global security architecture. In this respect,
the Putin regime drew on a set of Russian traditional beliefs, such as the
importance of a strong state, Russia’s national culture and unique perspective
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on global affairs, and its position as a great power internationally. Alongside
these ‘older’ sets of beliefs, the regime also sought to draw a series of lessons
from more contemporary developments, particularly characterized by the failure
of the previous administration to resolve Russia’s position internationally,
which were in turn read and interpreted through the same set of traditional
beliefs adopted by the Putin regime.
Therefore, Russia’s reading of its failure to normalize its position in the
global security architecture did not derive from external and objective cir-
cumstances, but from the beliefs and traditions that were at the heart of
Putin’s political project for Russia. The initial prioritization of the internal
space, later followed by a greater engagement in the global security sphere,
also emerged out of this particular reading of Russia’s position internationally
and domestically. Taking this into account, rather than adopting an anti-
Western position outright, the antagonistic relationship with the West that
developed in the second half of the 2000s was the result of the Putin regime’s
attempts to negotiate the original security dilemma identified in 2000.
An interpretivist reading of the evolution of Russia’s security policy therefore
emphasizes the importance of the role played by beliefs and traditions adop-
ted by the key policy makers in the Putin regime and the political project that
they espoused, and the way in which these beliefs structured their reading of
global security dilemmas and the solutions and practices they put in place to
overcome these dilemmas.

Notes
1 ‘Kontseptsiya vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii’, Diplomaticheskii vestnik,
2000: 8.
2 ‘Surkov, Rossiya i demokratiya’, Ekspert, 3 July 2006, www.expert.ru/printissues/
expert/2006/25/news_surkov_rossiya_i_demokratiya/; Gromov.
3 ‘Kontseptsiya vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii’, Diplomaticheskii vestnik,
2000: 8.
4 ‘Kontseptsiya natsional’noi bezopasnosti Rossiiskoi Federatsii’, Diplomaticheskii
vestnik, 2000: 2.
5 ‘Kontseptsiya natsional’noi bezopasnosti Rossiiskoi Federatsii’, Diplomaticheskii
vestnik, 2000: 2.
6 ‘Kontseptsiya vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii’, Diplomaticheskii vestnik,
2000: 8.
7 Within this framework, debates emerged as to where Russia’s strength and great-
ness should come from: from its energy and economic power; greater engagement
with the post-Soviet space; through a more active role on the international stage;
or from its historical heritage, national norms and identity (Trenin 2004: 63); or
greater links with other emerging and developing great powers, particularly in the
East, such as the other BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries.
8 ‘Interview with First Deputy Secretary of the Duma Committee on Banks, Finan-
cial and Credit Markets, Conducted by Valerii Zubov’, Litsom k Litsu, Radio
Svoboda, 3 January 2005, archive.svoboda.org/programs/ftf/2005/ftf.010305.asp
(accessed 18 September 2010).
9 Ministry for Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation (2008), Russian Foreign Policy
Concept, 12 July, www.mid.ru/ns-osndoc.nsf/1e5f0de
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104 Aglaya Snetkov

28fe77fdcc32575d900298676/869c9d2b87ad8014c32575d9002b1c38?OpenDocument
(accessed 3 May 2009).
10 Transcript of Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Igor Ivanov interview with TVTs
Television Company, Moscow, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 25 January 2003, www.
ln.mid.ru/Brp_4.nsf/arh/1D1C016B1F8D675943256CBC0053750A?OpenDocument
(accessed 10 September 2010).
11 Transcript of Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Igor Ivanov interview with TVTs
Television Company, Moscow, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 25 January 2003, www.
ln.mid.ru/Brp_4.nsf/arh/1D1C016B1F8D675943256CBC0053750A?OpenDocument
(accessed 10 September 2010).

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7 Interpreting missile defence

A comparative study of European reactions
Jocelyn Mawdsley

Given their history, for twenty years after the Cold War discussions on
nuclear politics within Europe were remarkably muted, and were largely
reactions to successive US nuclear posture reviews in 1994, 2002 and 2010.
Contentious debate was limited to national decisions on whether to allow
elements of the US missile defence programmes to be sited on their territory.
From 2009 to 2011, however, three decisions were made that have the potential
for significant change in European nuclear politics. First, the German
CDU-FDP (Christian Democratic Union-Free Democratic Party) coalition
government, elected in September 2009, agreed as part of their coalition
agreement that they would enter into talks with their North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) allies and the United States about the removal of US
nuclear weapons from German territory. Second, in November 2010, Britain
and France announced unprecedented bilateral cooperation on nuclear
weapons testing facilities, signalling their commitment to their deterrents.1
Finally, also in November 2010, agreement between the NATO member
states was reached on the acquisition of territorial missile defence capabilities
at the Lisbon summit. These three announcements encapsulate a period of
reassessment of nuclear politics in Britain, France and Germany, predominantly
in response to the territorial missile defence issue raised by the United States,
which has led to differing outcomes, and thus to an unusual level of tension
on nuclear defence issues between France and Germany, which came close to
preventing agreement in Lisbon and continued to fester at time of writing
(FRS 2011).
Missile defence has caused more disruption to the established nuclear politics
in Europe than even the end of the Cold War did. It is therefore of interest
because of what it reveals about the strength of nuclear traditions in Britain,
France and Germany. This chapter starts from the premise that while much of
the literature on nuclear politics in both the strategic studies and peace studies
traditions has had a focus on either technical issues or strategic calculations,
scholars have also correctly argued that nuclear weapons have a symbolic
presence in domestic and international politics and culture beyond their sup-
posed strategic importance.2 This chapter argues that nuclear weapons, be
they in the form of independent nuclear deterrents (Britain and France) or US
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108 Jocelyn Mawdsley

weapons sited on domestic territory (West Germany and Britain) can best be
understood as representing a complex web of beliefs about the state, its existence
and its role, which might not be discussed openly but underpinned initial
choices on nuclear weapons. Alongside this representational quality of the
weapons, the chapter will argue that narratives and practices (some contra-
dictory), which can be understood as traditions, have developed around the
supposed strategic rationale for nuclear weapons, their development and their
place in wider defence policy. It also argues that an examination of the
peculiarly closed nature of defence policy making in each country shows how
these traditions and the underpinning representational nature of the weapons
are sustained by suppressing dissent and mediating challenges or dilemmas.
The chapter will start by unpacking the concepts used in the analysis and then
will look at the construction of nuclear beliefs and traditions in Britain, France
and Germany. It will then briefly explain why missile defence as a concept has
the power to disrupt this and then re-examine the three states to see how they
have reconstructed nuclear weapons narratives to deal with this dilemma.

Symbolism, tradition, narrative and socialization in domestic

nuclear politics
Let us start with the relatively uncontested point that national security is
more than just a label – it is a powerful political symbol even in times of
comparative peace (Baldwin 1996). The status of nuclear weapons as the
ultimate weapon to be deployed in the cause of national security lends them
almost inevitably a stature of particular importance beyond their strategic use.
However, their acquisition, for those interested in looking beyond the nominal
strategic rationale, is often associated with national prestige and existential
questions of national identity. As Sagan (1996/97: 74) has argued that ‘military
organizations and their weapons can therefore be envisioned as serving func-
tions similar to those of flags, airlines, and Olympic teams; they are part of
what modern states believe they have to possess to be legitimate, modern
states’. However, nuclear weapons are also a powerful portrayal of national
insecurity and the emotions associated with this. This chapter argues therefore
that nuclear weapons, be they in the form of independent nuclear deterrents
(Britain and France) or US weapons sited on domestic territory (West Germany
and Britain) can best be understood as what Edelman (1985: 6) described as
condensation symbols, which ‘evoke emotions associated with the situation.
They condense into one symbolic event, sign, or act patriotic pride, anxieties,
remembrances of past glories or humiliations, promises of future greatness … ’
In other words, they function as representations of webs of beliefs about the
state, its security dilemmas, its past military glories and humiliations, and its
sense of its place in the world.
The continued presence of nuclear weapons also encapsulates the essence of
the domestic political negotiation and compromise involved in the initial
decision to accept them as a crucial part of defence. Moreover, the supporting
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Interpreting missile defence 109

lobby coalition remains almost inevitably ‘locked in’ to the continuing devel-
opment and reaffirmation of the nuclear choice as further decisions become
necessary. Their different motivations, justifications, practice and ideas around
the nuclear question, over time, can perhaps best be understood as nuclear
traditions. Traditions might be usefully thought of as ‘a set of understandings
someone receives during socialisation’ (Bevir et al. 2003: 11; cf. Bevir et al.
2013). Nuclear traditions therefore might be understood as inherited beliefs
(sometimes contradictory) about security institutions, strategic history and
practice. As Berger suggests, assimilation and socialization into these tradi-
tions takes place, ‘they [cultures] are transmitted through the often imperfect
mechanisms of primary and secondary socialisation and are under pressure
from both external developments and internal contradictions’ (Berger 1996: 326).
Looking at attitudes through the prism of tradition does not necessarily rule
out change though:

Although tradition is unavoidable, it is so as a starting point, not as some-

thing that governs later performances. We should be cautious, therefore, of
representing tradition as an unavoidable presence in everything people do
in case we leave too slight a role for agency. In particular, we should not
imply that tradition is constitutive of the beliefs people later come to hold
or the actions they then perform. Instead, we should see tradition mainly
as a first influence on people. The content of the tradition will appear in
their later actions only if their agency has led them not to change it,
where every part of it is in principle open to change.
(Bevir et al. 2003: 11)

This chapter wishes to argue, however, that the strategic traditions or rationales
that have developed to rationalize nuclear policy are particularly change
resistant, precisely because they have been largely shielded from internal and
often external criticism. It takes therefore a fundamental challenge, in this case
missile defence, to force reconsideration.
The chapter also argues that the stability of nuclear traditions (with the
partial exception of Germany) is partly due to the way in which nuclear politics
are made by small elite groupings, and party politics have not traditionally
played a major role. As Frey has argued, their power can be almost absolute:

Frequently, the common interest of these actors leads to the formation of

a coalition, a ‘strategic elite’, which seeks administrative as well as com-
municative power by controlling public opinion. By controlling public
opinion, the strategic elite is able to create a positive public disposition
towards nuclear weapons by building up threat perceptions, and, more
significantly, by attaching symbolic values to nuclear devices: national
pride, collective dignity, or their negative counter-values such as collective
defiance and insult.
(Frey 2006: 14)
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110 Jocelyn Mawdsley

This links back to the powerful representational nature of nuclear weapons
and shows how the beliefs, traditions, narratives and elite nature of nuclear
politics can be mutually reinforcing.

The construction of nuclear politics in Britain, France and

(West) Germany

British beliefs
In 1952, Britain became the third country in the world to test an independently
developed nuclear weapon. Although British scientists had made important
contributions to the Manhattan Project, in 1946 the Americans passed the
McMahon Act severing the British and American nuclear weapons pro-
grammes. This was seen as a major snub and a blow to the British self-image
of being a major global power. The importance of tradition and historical
thinking in the formulation of British external policies is noticeable. For Hill,
for example, in Britain, ‘“historical thinking” in the sense of attitudes, which
are rooted in images of the country and its interests as they were in preceding
generations has been particularly marked’ (Hill 1988: 27). In many ways the
British nuclear deterrent is rooted in just such a vision of continuing global
power. The initial commitment to gain an atomic bomb certainly did not
involve particular strategic calculations but rather was seen as necessary for
the preservation of global standing. As Bevin famously put it:

I don’t want any other foreign secretary of this country to be talked to or

at by a secretary of state in the United States as I have just had in my
discussions with Mr Byrnes. We’ve got to have this thing [a nuclear
bomb] over here whatever it costs. We’ve got to have the bloody Union
Jack on top of it.
(Bevin, cited in Phythian 2007: 29)

Even in the official history of British nuclear weapons, Arnold (2001) argues that
the 1954 decision to move to develop thermonuclear devices was primarily ratio-
nalized by fears of losing global standing and influence with the United States,
rather than the potential need to contribute to the NATO nuclear deterrent.
It was Duncan Sandys’s 1957 Defence White Paper that solidified the
position of the nuclear deterrent in British defence policy. The White Paper
recognized that Britain’s role as a global policeman east of Suez was no
longer affordable, made massive cuts in conventional armed forces, including
the ending of conscription, and crucially decided that the nuclear deterrent
was the way Britain could replace the ensuing hole in its defences. Although the
1958 UK-United States Mutual Defence Agreement rapidly changed Britain’s
nuclear deterrent from independent to interdependent and then dependent
on the United States by the end of the 1960s, the symbolism of the nuclear
deterrent for British politicians remained the maintenance of great power
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Interpreting missile defence 111

status (Freedman 1999). For Alec Douglas-Home, for example, the bomb was
a ticket of admission giving Britain ‘a place at the peace talks as of right’
(Pierre 1972: 178). In general, British post-war defence policy has been a
matter of compromise or, as Carver described it, tightrope walking:

Why tightrope walking? Because British defence policy is a perpetual

balancing act: between commitments and resources; between Europe and
the wider world; between Europe and the Commonwealth; between links
with Western Europe and North America; between in simplified terms, a
continental and a maritime strategy.
(Carver 1992: vii–viii)

Nuclear weapons throughout the Cold War were viewed as Britain’s best
insurance policy given it could not afford to challenge the USSR’s conventional
armed strength. Unlike France, little patriotic symbolism was attached to the
bomb and few outrageous claims were made about its military value (Freedman
1999). It represented simply the cheapest way to maintain international status
in defence terms, even if by the 1980s, the spiralling costs had a negative
impact on British conventional defences.

British strategic narratives and traditions

From the 1957 White Paper onwards, British strategic narratives have had to
disguise some fairly basic contradictions in its nuclear strategy. As Deweerd
(1963) argued, Britain was opposed to nuclear proliferation but contributed to
it in three ways: first, by insisting on its separate nuclear deterrent; second, by
acknowledging the indivisibility of the Western deterrent but insisting that its
own weapons remained independent; and third, by recognizing that Britain
could not be defended from Soviet nuclear attack but proposing to meet a
major Soviet ground attack in Europe with early, and if necessary full use of
nuclear weapons. Freedman (1999) suggests that British nuclear doctrine from
the 1960s onwards was consistently based on a theory about multiple decision
centres. The official argument was that while Britain had complete confidence
in the US guarantee, it recognized that adversaries might be less impressed.
A second centre of nuclear decision making (i.e. the UK), particularly as it was
closer to the likely conflict area, would add extra uncertainty to the adversary’s
calculations. Underlying this, as Freedman (1999) points out, there was a
private justification of insurance in case the United States withdrew its guar-
antee, but the official rationale, despite not standing up to critical analysis,
persisted, because ministers could avoid critical debate easily, as few in Britain
were interested in challenging the purported strategic rationale for an indepen-
dent nuclear deterrent. Similarly as Freedman (1981a) argues, the narrative of
independence was left mainly unchallenged, despite it being obvious that
Britain was dependent on the United States for delivery vehicles from the
1960s onwards, after the cancellation of the Blue Streak programme.
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112 Jocelyn Mawdsley

A crucial explanation for how British politicians and officials were able to
cling onto contradictory strategic narratives about the nuclear deterrent was
the closed nature of defence policy making. Freedman points out that:

It is not unusual in Britain to ignore the wider context in discussions of

nuclear policy, because the formulation of the policy itself has normally been
held highly within the executive branch. This has tended to encourage ratio-
nales that reflect the interests of senior officials and ministers in the exercise
of international influence and in the virtues of continuity for its own sake.
(Freedman 1999: 134)

Both main political parties also supported the lack of disclosure and critical
debate because it prevented political embarrassment vis-à-vis their doubts about
the US nuclear guarantee. For the Labour Party, which had many supporters
of nuclear disarmament in its ranks and in opposition tended to be critical of
the nuclear deterrent,3 the lack of debate also enabled it largely to avoid criticism
that while in government, Labour tended to follow the same pro-nuclear
policies as the Conservatives (Freedman 1999). Moreover, as Arnold (2001)
points out in the official history, the decision to develop a thermonuclear
weapon met with little dissent either in the House of Commons or in the press
then or thereafter. Even though Britain was the site of large-scale and well-
organized protests by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in both the
1960s and 1980s, popular protest never really interrupted the closed circle of
nuclear policy making.

French beliefs
France was the fourth state to develop and test successfully an independent
nuclear weapon, in 1960. Diplomatic tensions with the United States post-
Suez and discomfort at the development of the British nuclear deterrent have
been suggested as reasons for the French decision (Schwarz 1991). However,
the key decisions were taken following de Gaulle’s return to power in the midst
of the May 1958 crisis. It is this crisis that needs to be understood to see how
the nuclear deterrent became such a powerful political symbol in France
underpinning the web of beliefs about what constituted France under the
Fifth Republic. The May 1958 crisis came about when the French army
declared that it had lost confidence in the Fourth Republic and had taken
responsibility for the future destiny of French Algeria itself. It was, in short, a
military coup. The army successfully insisted that de Gaulle be called upon to
lead a national unity government. De Gaulle’s return to power led to the
establishment of the Fifth Republic with its strong presidential powers and to
the stabilization of France. For French politicians therefore:

… the successful stabilisation of the state under the Fifth Republic – and the
complex intergenerational process of ‘legitimation’ which was initiated in
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Interpreting missile defence 113

its first decade – has resulted in the sacralisation of the nuclear deterrent
as the tangible symbol of national unity, democratic consensus, political
efficacy and a significant and independent role for France on the world stage.
(Cerny 1984: 62)

The deterrent was a linking mechanism for the revival of the state, as it
helped to harness military reorganization to high-tech dirigisme across the
state economy. As Hecht (1998) points out, the French policy-making elite
based their recovery from this post-Second World War identity crisis, with its
anxieties about their wartime losses, American dominance, decolonization and
the demands of reconstruction, by fostering visions of a new technological
France, based on industrial development and engineering prowess.
The nuclear deterrent also solved various longstanding disagreements over
defence policy between the political left and the right. From the French
Revolution onwards the left had favoured mass conscription as the only way for
the citizen to defend the state, whereas the right favoured a professional army.
The role of the army in the French Fourth Republic remained problematic, as
the repeated coup attempts in Algeria showed, but the new nuclear role for the
armed forces reintegrated them into the state, while keeping nuclear weapons
under strict civilian control and so both removed a serious source of potential
instability and consolidated presidential authority (Cerny 1984). There was
cross-party political support for the deterrent and this enabled a degree of
national unity on defence during the Cold War even when there was little
agreement elsewhere. Moreover, as Chilton and Howorth argued in the 1980s:

The bomb has come to appear, in popular political culture, as one potential
answer to France’s perennial problems. Nuclear weapons avoid over-
dependence on allies, without excluding the value of Alliance membership.
They can be seen as a form of geographic fortification, an atomic Maginot
line, which ‘sanctuarizes’ French territory at very little cost. The weapons
have always been seen as ‘war-preventing’, and that, for a nation which
has suffered constant defeat since 1815, also means ‘defeat-preventing’.
(Howorth and Chilton 1984: 12)

The belief that possession of nuclear weapons turned the French state into a
sanctuary also ties into a powerful element of the nuclear web of beliefs – namely,
strategic independence. A constant in French security politics is that even
prior to de Gaulle, and the development of Gaullism in foreign and security policy,
France’s search for grandeur on the world stage required autonomous military
strategy and armed forces that were under national control (Kolodziej 1987).

French strategic narratives and traditions

The key elements of French nuclear strategy were developed predominantly
by two Generals, Ailleret and Gallois, between 1958 and 1968. The first
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114 Jocelyn Mawdsley

element was ‘dissuasion du faible au fort’ – namely the belief that the equalizing
power of the nuclear bomb meant that a smaller, weaker state could effectively
dissuade a larger and stronger state. The second element was proportionality
or the idea of graduated deterrence. This meant that the potential damage
caused to the strong by the weak through a nuclear attack had to outweigh an
adversary’s potential gains in a conflict. Third, France did not have the
resources for a flexible response and so had to remain committed to massive
retaliation. Finally, the French argued that you could not know who in 20 years
might be an adversary, so their weapons were not targeted at any state in
particular but instead were ‘tous azimuts’ – aimed at all points of the compass.
Just as in the British case, this doctrine did not stand up to critical inter-
rogation. As Freedman (1981b) pointed out, there were three major problems:
first, that France helped to create greater international instability by leaving
the NATO-integrated military command; second, that although the claim was
‘tous azimuts’ the reality was that France only had the resources for a regional
not a global deterrent; and third, it was never clear how France intended to
reconcile its NATO obligations with the idea of France as a rather aloof
nuclear ‘sanctuary’. Similarly, in leaving the NATO-integrated command
France lost influence over NATO nuclear weapons deployments and dis-
armament talks, as there were no longer any US weapons on French territory.
A final objection might be that the claims of independence proved to
be rather overstated, as France received covert nuclear weapons assistance
from the United States, which continued throughout the Cold War (Ullman
1989).
To trace the development of French nuclear narratives, it is also important
to look at the Livres Blancs or White Books on defence policy during and
after the Cold War to see the continuity of policy. The 1972 Livre Blanc
rejected the NATO stance of flexible response in favour of strictly national
deterrence to preserve French vital interests, because of their belief that
nuclear risks could not be shared and effectively put nuclear deterrence at the
heart of French defence (Ministère de la Défence 1972). The 1994 Livre Blanc
was primarily about post-Cold War force projection, but continued to justify
the role of nuclear weapons for some threat scenarios, along much the same
lines. Nuclear strategy remained broadly the same in both documents. Between
1994 and 2006 there were some adaptations to French nuclear doctrine: a
decoupling of deterrence and conventional action; a reduction in the size of
French nuclear forces leading to their reorganization; the acceptance that the
nuclear deterrent has to enable France to protect its vital interests in future
against regional powers possessing nuclear, biological or chemical weapons;
and the 1998 ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (Tertrais
2000). However, it was not until 2006 when Chirac announced an extension in
the role of French nuclear weapons to new mission areas (such as being used
against terrorist attack) and towards more flexible nuclear forces, and revived
an idea from 1995 of a concerted European nuclear deterrent, that major
changes to French nuclear strategic narratives were made (Butler 2006). This
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Interpreting missile defence 115

length of time testifies to the strength and rigidity of the original doctrine and
the difficulties in making changes.
The stability in French nuclear narratives was also partially produced by a
closed system of defence policy making around the president. Defence policy
making in France is centred on the corps of administrators and officers, with
the addition of some academics who have enjoyed a similar training in one of
the elite schools such as ENA or École Polytechnique. These schools, as well
as offering advanced administrative or technical training, also teach their
students to serve the state and their training has a unifying effect on the stu-
dents (Kempin and Mawdsley 2005). Successive presidents have surrounded
themselves with representatives from these networks and as Treacher (2003)
points out, even the Ministry of Defence itself has not played a large role in
the formulation of strategic defence policy. Nuclear weapons have cross-party
unconditional political support and so there is no real sense of intellectual
challenge to existing nuclear doctrines. Even the French peace movement
traditionally concentrates on protesting about American security policy and is
rarely seen to attack the French nuclear deterrent (Howorth and Chilton 1984).

West German beliefs

For West Germany, just as in France and Britain, nuclear weapons carried a
symbolic value but it was not one of independence but rather one of reluctant
dependence. There are two contradictory elements to this. First, and most
obviously, West Germany had a strong domestic anti-militarist tendency in
the aftermath of the Second World War. Directly after the Second World War
Germany was disarmed, and it was not until 1954 with the signing of the
Paris Treaties, and West Germany’s 1955 accession to NATO, that a West
German army was formed, because NATO needed more troops to mount an
adequate conventional defence against the Warsaw Pact states. This was a
measure that was difficult for other Western European countries that had
suffered earlier German aggression, most notably for France. Rearmament
was also domestically unpopular with many industrial leaders, who feared
that it would divert resources from the economic recovery. Efforts were made
to avoid any taint of militarism in the new forces: in contrast to traditional
models of civil-military relations such as those in Britain, France or the
United States, the primacy of politics, or civilian rule, was made an integral
part of the setting up of armed forces in the Federal Republic, along with
extensive measures to ensure that the armed forces were integrated into wider
society. However, nothing could disguise the reality that West German
citizens were on the probable front line of any East–West conflict and that,
despite the addition of West German forces, NATO was conventionally out-
numbered and so reliant on the US nuclear deterrent for a credible defence.
The 1955 Exercise Carte Blanche, which assumed the detonation of 355
nuclear weapons on French and German soil, calculated that 1.7 million
people would die immediately and 3.5 million would be seriously injured.
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This was widely reported in the West German press. This crystallized the West
German nuclear dilemma: dependent on the US nuclear deterrent for its
security against conventional attack but acutely vulnerable in the event of a
nuclear war (Kamp 1995).
Second, nuclear weapons came symbolically to represent West Germany’s
dependence on the United States and to serve as a humiliating reminder that
it was not a fully sovereign state. From 1953 onwards some of the United
States’ nuclear weapons were based on West German soil. As part of the
negotiations on joining NATO, however, a commitment was made in 1954 that
West Germany would not produce atomic, biological or chemical weapons on
its territory (Kamp 1995); however, despite this commitment to non-production,
possession of nuclear weapons was not ruled out by some politicians. In 1957
Adenauer horrified the general public, scientists and the Social Democrats by
appearing to suggest that German troops should have ‘small’ nuclear weapons
(Schwarz 1991: 266–69). He had hoped that France, West Germany and Italy
could use Euratom to develop a nuclear weapons programme, but de Gaulle
blocked this idea when he returned to power in 1958. Although the United
States had repeatedly assured both the Soviet Union and nervous NATO
allies that West Germany would never become a nuclear weapons power,4 in
fact the picture was less clear cut from a US perspective. The question of West
German nuclear participation was raised again in 1963 with an American
proposal for a multinational NATO fleet armed with Polaris nuclear missiles.
The West Germans were enthusiastic, seeing the proposal as an opportunity
to gain more say over NATO nuclear strategy, but their European allies were
much less keen on the prospect of West Germany entering the nuclear club by
the back door, even though the United States had proposed the multilateral
force (MLF) precisely to stop West Germany demanding its own nuclear
posture (Kamp 1995). The final West German acceptance of non-nuclear status
came as late as 1969, after parts of the West German political elite campaigned
hard but ultimately unsuccessfully against the signing of the Non-Proliferation
Treaty, which they argued confined Germany forever to the inferior status of
a nuclear ‘have-not’. Nuclear weapons therefore were symbolic of a web of
beliefs comprising West German dependence on the United States, its inferior
status within NATO and having to accept NATO strategic doctrines that left
West Germany vulnerable to nuclear war, in order to have its territorial
security ensured against conventional attack.

West German strategic narratives and traditions

The Federal Republic of Germany’s nuclear policy making confined itself to
modest forms of nuclear involvement, namely the possession by the Bundeswehr
of nuclear weapons-capable carriers which, following a decision on use by
NATO and the American president, would deliver American warheads, and
participation in the decision making about doctrine, target setting and pro-
curement within the framework of NATO’s Nuclear Planning Group,
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established in 1967 (Kelleher 1975). However, West Germany was often made
to feel uncertain about the extent of the US guarantee of West European
security. As Garaud (1985) points out, during the years of détente the Kennedy
Administration took measures designed to contain the risks to US grounds in
defence of their European allies; there were proposals to limit numbers of US
ground forces in Europe, and statesmen like Kennan and McNamara urged
that the United States repudiate nuclear first use on Europe’s behalf. For West
Germany there was a general sense, until President Reagan came to office,
that NATO defences were no longer credible. This highlighted the West
German nuclear dilemma in ever-starker terms.
Perhaps the best example of the strategic ambivalence that successive West
German administrations had to manage was the 1979 double track decision,
and the subsequent intermediate nuclear forces disarmament negotiations.
The decision to link deployments of US long-range theatre nuclear forces
(LRTNF) to proposals for negotiations with Moscow over those and Soviet
forces – with the caveat that if these failed the missiles would be deployed four
years later – was in part an American response to German fears over Soviet
deployments of SS-20s and Backfire bombers and the need to offer them
reassurance over the continuation of the US guarantee. West Germany agreed
to host modernized Pershing II ballistic missiles and cruise missiles (Zadra
1990). Despite considerable reservations about the utility of these weapons
and massive demonstrations against the decision, the Bundestag voted for
their deployment in 1983. Proceeding with the decision to deploy Pershing
and Cruise missiles in West Germany, given the opposition, was politically
brave, but also shows how the West German political elite had bought into
the absolute necessity of the nuclear deterrent. They were then almost imme-
diately pushed into disarmament negotiations, which forced West Germany to
agree to compromises that undermined precisely the rationale on which
the politicians had agreed in deploying the weapons (Zadra 1990). It was
impossible for West German politicians to construct a comforting strategic
rationale for their nuclear weapons decisions like Britain and France had;
rather, they had to live with dependence on a United States that seemed at
times capricious, and the knowledge that despite the risk being greatest
for West Germany, it was not able to make truly sovereign decisions on
security.
West Germany always struggled to reconcile a powerful anti-militarist
sentiment in civil society, and indeed its own political elite’s preference for a
normalization of relations with Eastern Europe, with its unwavering support
for US nuclear weapons being sited in West Germany to ensure its security.
The West German politicians were always aware that there were enough
nuclear weapons stationed in Europe to destroy it many times over, and that
their policies on deterrence were at odds with much of public opinion. The
Pershing and Cruise missile deployment above all led to years of demonstra-
tions against the weapons attracting up to 1 million people (Zadra 1990). Just
as in France and Britain, these decisions were taken by a relatively small
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118 Jocelyn Mawdsley

group of politicians, who could then generally rely on the Bundestag to vote
in favour, because the fear of isolation from its NATO allies was still a major
motivating factor for West German politicians of the Cold War era. What
was different in West Germany is that throughout the Cold War there was a
constant critical debate about security policy, both in society at large and
amongst the political elite. This, coupled with the fact that the Bundestag had
much more power on security matters than either the French or British
parliaments, meant that insofar as German politicians and officials were
socialized into acceptance of nuclear deterrence, it was in the open knowledge
that the situation was a far from desirable one.

Missile defence as a nuclear politics dilemma

US missile defence plans have made successive generations of British, French
and German politicians uneasy. Ballistic missile defence had long been seen
as a potential destabilizing development in the Cold War, and it was to pre-
vent this that the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty was signed by the
United States and USSR in 1972. It limited both sides to first two sites, and
then after 1974 one site, for a strategic defence system. The agreement aimed
to protect the nuclear balance by ensuring that neither side could limit the
deterrent effect of nuclear weapons by reducing the damage of a nuclear strike
to politically or militarily acceptable levels. US President Reagan’s 1983
Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), which aimed to use ground- and space-
based systems to protect the United States from attack from ballistic nuclear
missiles, was viewed therefore with concern by Europeans. As Garaud (1985)
points out, the concerns for the Western Europeans at that time were that if
the United States and USSR were able to establish defensive systems, this
would simultaneously undermine the British and French deterrents, as the
concept of the weak deterring the strong would be unworkable, and Western
Europe would find itself no longer protected by deterrence, and so would
be more vulnerable to both conventional attacks and short-range nuclear
weapons that were difficult to intercept.
Even after the end of the Cold War the US decision to pursue a national
missile defence (NMD) programme, which led to them withdrawing from the
ABM Treaty in 2002, posed a general security dilemma for the Europeans.
First, the security aspects of the collapse of what was regarded as a corner-
stone of arms control treaties were worrying – would the entire arms control
structure disintegrate? Second, would it prompt Russia to return to a nuclear
arms race rather than continuing on the economic reform path favoured by the
Europeans? It also posed specific national questions for the three countries. For
Britain:

Formulating a policy on this issue impacts on several key areas of foreign

and defence policy, some of which are in conflict with each other, some of
which go to the heart of Britain’s understanding of its international role
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Interpreting missile defence 119

and some of which compel the government to make choices it would
perhaps prefer to put off.
(Smith 2005: 447)

Smith (2005) suggested that it posed various questions for Britain. First, the
US radar base at Fylingdales was crucial for US plans and so there was a
decision to be made on whether to allow its use. Given that the British
government has always regarded nuclear matters as Anglo-American in
nature, a refusal was never likely. Second, it posed a quandary of balancing
traditional transatlanticism with a growing European sensibility (particularly
given British opinions on NMD were closer to European ones than American
ones) and with defence industrial interests. Third, just as SDI had, NMD
challenged Britain’s self-understanding as a nuclear power.
For France, too, immediate reactions were about its own understanding of
itself as a nuclear power. France’s negative reactions were twofold. First, it felt
that NMD undermined the deterrence concept and thus threatened France’s
own nuclear posture, and second, there was great scepticism about whether
NMD was technically feasible (Kempin and Mawdsley 2005). Moreover, they
did not entirely share the extent of the US threat assessment on ballistic
missiles even though it was agreed that there was a potential threat (Lellouche
et al. 2000). However, scepticism needed to be balanced by the acceptance
that this technology could prove vital for the politically important French
defence industrial base (Kempin and Mawdsley 2005).
For Germany, NMD also posed a difficult challenge. First, the Germans were
reluctant to take a clear national stance on the issue, particularly if it was against
the United States, and so tried to move the discussion to NATO (with British
support). Second, it was an issue on which the political parties were split – the
CDU was broadly in favour of NMD while the SPD (Social Democratic
Party) and the Greens were opposed, claiming it would start a new arms
race. Missile defence was also a difficult issue for Germany as, while like both
Britain and France, politicians from all sides tended to believe that the
American threat assessment was exaggerated, they felt obliged to support the
extension of missile defence to Europe because peripheral NATO members
were within the range of existing ballistic weapons, and Germany was thus
reminded of its own difficult Cold War position (Bitter 2007).

Reconstructing the nuclear narratives

Although NMD was not initially particularly welcomed by any of the three
states, it has now been accepted. All three are in favour of NATO developing
territorial missile defence capabilities to protect Europe. This does not
mean that they entirely accept US threat assessments or that they are con-
vinced that the technology will be completely feasible, but as the worries
about the destabilizing effects of the end of the ABM treaty have lessened,
acceptance of missile defence as a legitimate defence strategy for NATO have
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120 Jocelyn Mawdsley

grown, particularly as the NATO moves include some cooperation with
Russia on the issue. However, what does this mean for national nuclear traditions
after the first real challenge of the post-Cold War era?
For both Britain and France, the main strategy for dealing with the dilemma
of NMD was to incorporate it into their own existing nuclear traditions. For
France the enabling mechanism was the importance of a high-tech defence
industrial base to underpin its nuclear deterrent (Kempin and Mawdsley
2005). Their 2009–13 military programming law earmarked an increasing
amount of procurement money for missile defence-related projects. France
appears to have made the calculation that unless it makes a meaningful con-
tribution to the NATO plan, it will lose military status and risk the strategic
autonomy that the nuclear deterrent was intended to provide in the first place.
In July 2011 the French Senate committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and
the Armed Forces argued that while the actual risk of a missile reaching
France was small, France risked being outdistanced by the United States on
missile technology if it did not take a leading role in the NATO project
(de Selding 2011). For the British, the NATO decision allows it to continue
balancing Atlanticism and Europeanism without conflict. Like France, it too
has defence industrial ambitions in the area and still considers possession of
nuclear weapons to contribute to its global power. While the recent debate on
the replacement of Trident saw more criticism than usual of the rationale for
the British nuclear deterrent, the supporting coalition remained intact. Similarly,
in France although a 2012 book by former Defence Minister Paul Quilès,
questioning the purpose of French nuclear weapons, caused some debate, in
January 2013 President Hollande reaffirmed the state’s commitment to
nuclear weapons, even at a time when large defence budget cuts were needed
in France (Quilès 2012; Keaten 2013). For both states, nuclear weapons
remain a symbol of national status and strength. The main ongoing problem
for both the British and the French is continuing to fund their extensive defence
ambitions. The decision to begin bilateral cooperation on nuclear weapons is
taken against this backdrop. While the independence of each deterrent was
emphasized in the 2010 Teutates agreement, this cooperation offers both
states a chance to maintain their national nuclear narratives and cut costs.
Germany, on the other hand, has abandoned its national nuclear traditions
in response to the dilemma of missile defence. For the last decade Germany
has been increasingly involved in calls for complete nuclear disarmament,
something that is hard to reconcile with the continued existence of US nuclear
weapons on German soil. Initially this was a campaign led by peace activists,
but calls for the removal of these weapons have now become government policy
and are supported by all parties (if only rather half-heartedly by the CDU)
(Mättig 2008). This change of policy represents a major shift in opinion among
the political elite from the keen cross-party support for nuclear weapons
during the Cold War. For the Germans, the supporting coalition in favour of
nuclear weapons has disintegrated in direct contrast to the situation in Britain
and France. For the French at least, this call for disarmament is closely linked
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Interpreting missile defence 121

to German support for missile defence as they view NMD as negating the need to
have nuclear deterrence. This has led to an unusual level of friction between the
two states, usually regarded as close allies. As de Durand bluntly argued:

This translates again for the French side into fundamental differences with
Germany on defence issues. The Germans have chosen missile defence in
NATO, and have been the most tedious on the issue of nuclear deterrence …
For Germany today, there are no real security problems, as it gets along
well with Russia at the moment.
(FRS 2011: 11)

Why has Germany reacted so differently to France and Britain, when the core
of its defence policy had been based for so many years on maintaining
nuclear deterrence? It would seem that British and French nuclear beliefs and
traditions are based on positive emotions – prestige, status, autonomy, stability –
and this made them more resilient and adaptable in the face of the missile
defence dilemma. Germany, on the other hand, associated its nuclear beliefs
and traditions with negative emotions – dependence, uncertainty, danger and
inferiority – so making it much easier to take a completely new path. Similarly,
while the nuclear support coalitions remain largely intact and insulated from
criticism in Britain and France, in Germany it has dispersed and the under-
lying pacifist critique of the nuclear deterrent has been given free rein, result-
ing in policy change.
The chapter argued that nuclear weapons represented a complex web of
beliefs about each state, its existence and its role at the time that the original
decisions on nuclear weapons were made. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising
that the rupture in German politics caused by reunification and the gaining of
full sovereignty after the end of the Cold War has meant that those initial
choices now seem less valid than in France or Britain – states that have not
gone through the same degree of political change. Similarly, while the narratives
and practices developed to justify nuclear weapons policy, defined as nuclear
traditions in this chapter, do not stand up to critical scrutiny in any of the
three states, it is only in Germany where the insulated nature of nuclear policy
making has been successfully challenged. While at first glance the divergence
in contemporary nuclear weapons policy choices between Britain and France
on the one hand, and Germany on the other hand, might seem puzzling, an
interpretive approach casts light on why this might be the case. The dilemma
posed by missile defence forced the policy actors in the three states to recon-
sider their national nuclear traditions. For British and French policy makers,
despite some criticism, these traditions were sufficiently convincing not to
require major change; for Germany the reverse was true.

Notes
1 In a groundbreaking treaty, which was drawn up in close consultation with the
United States, they agreed to work closely together on the simulated testing of the
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122 Jocelyn Mawdsley

performance of their nuclear warheads and associated materials. To that end,
British experts would be able to access a French research centre in Valduc, where
virtual testing of the viability and safety of the warheads could be carried out.
Moreover, a new joint technology and development centre based at Aldermaston
would develop radiographic and diagnostic technology to support hydrodynamic
testing of nuclear weapons (Kempin et al. 2010).
2 For a full discussion of this point see, among others, Chilton (1985) or Buzan and
Herring (1998: chapter 11).
3 In 1960, and again in 1982, the Labour party conference voted in favour of
unilateral nuclear disarmament.
4 Interestingly, contrary to US assurances on this point to the USSR, the Joint
Committee on Atomic Energy of the US Congress discovered by accident on a
1960 visit to a NATO airbase that German-manned fighter bombers were equipped
with nuclear warheads with no discernible US control (Steinbrunner 1974).

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Kolodziej, E. (1987) Making and Marketing Arms: The French Experience and its
Implications for the International System, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Lellouche, P., Chauveau, G.-M. and Warhouver, A. (2000) ‘La France et les bombes: les
défis de la prolifération des armes de destruction massive’, Commission de la Défense
Nationale et des Forces Armées Rapport No. 2788, Paris: Assemblée Nationale.
Mättig, T. (2008) Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Germany: Time for Withdrawal?, Nuclear
Threat Initiative, Washington, DC, www.nti.org/analysis/articles/tactical-nuclear-weap-
ons-germany/ (accessed 26 March 2013).
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Phythian, M. (2007) The Labour Party, War and International Relations: 1945–2006,
London and New York: Routledge.
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Force 1939–1970, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Quilès, P. (2012) Nucléaire, un mensonge français: Réflexions sur le désarmement
nucléaire, Paris: Éditions Charles Léopold Mayer.
Sagan, S. (1996/97) ‘Why Do States Build Nuclear Weapons? Three Models in Search
of a Bomb’, International Security 21(3): 54–86.
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Schwarz, H.-P. (1991) Adenauer: Der Staatsmann: 1952–1967, Stuttgart: Deutsche
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8 Framing the sovereignty

intervention dilemma
The strange omission of the Genocide
Convention
Adrian Gallagher1

In discussing the language of human rights Ken Booth stated, ‘[w]e inherit
scripts, but we have scope – more or less depending on who, when and where
we are – to revise them’ (Booth 1999: 33). This chapter argues that in the
post-Cold War era, scholars turned to the post-Second World War script in
order to resolve the sovereignty-intervention dilemma: what to do about the
apparent inconsistency between the problem of mass human rights violations
within states and the ordering principle of state sovereignty.2 It suggests that
scholars framed this dilemma within the parameters of the UN Charter and in
so doing, failed to recognize the implications of extremely important alternative
legal frameworks for understanding the sovereignty-intervention dilemma. In
particular, they failed to make reference to the 1948 United Nations (UN)
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.3
Despite the vast literature produced on the humanitarian intervention debate,
one is struck by how little has been written on the role that the scholars
involved played in constructing the very foundations of the debate in which
they engaged. When one considers that the fate of potentially millions of
lives, as in Rwanda, can rest on how such dilemmas are interpreted and
understood, this is a profoundly important issue that calls for reflection and
further research.
It is the issue of framing, therefore, that is of particular interest from an
interpretivist perspective. To be clear, by framing, I mean an intentional or
unintentional process of emphasis and exclusion as actors construct a frame
within which issues and events are subsequently analysed. The role of framing
has been analysed elsewhere but further research is needed on how the issue
of framing relates to the interpretivist focus on traditions and narratives
(Bevir and Rhodes 1999, 2003, 2005; Bevir et al. 2013). I see framing as an
attempt to put forward a static ‘snapshot’ of a narrative, therefore a frame
should be understood as ‘thin’ as opposed to a narrative that is ‘thick’.
Although frames may appear to be self-evident and value free, they are in fact
neither. For example, in a post-9/11 world, it has been claimed that the media
‘framed terrorism’ in a certain light (Norris et al. 2003: 3–26). This frame
acted to ‘simplify, prioritize and structure the narrative flow of events’ (Norris
et al. 2003: 10).
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126 Adrian Gallagher

This chapter argues that in the post-Cold War era the sovereignty-intervention
dilemma was framed by: i) simplifying the post-Second World War script; ii)
prioritizing the UN Charter to the point that it structured the narrative of the
humanitarian intervention debate; and iii) excluding key alternative legal fra-
meworks such as the 1948 Genocide Convention. These moves are important,
because the UN Charter frame is used as an enabler in order to support
contrasting and competing arguments. This singular frame served multiple
purposes for: i) those that wanted to radically overhaul the UN Charter; ii)
those that advocated a broader spectrum of intervention; and iii) those that
rejected all forms of intervention. All appeal to the UN Charter frame. This is
not to suggest that scholars intentionally ignore the Genocide Convention,
but instead it draws attention to the idea that authors may be ‘unaware of the
influence of their unconscious designs on the utterances they make’ (Bevir
1999: 33).
The chapter is in two parts. First, it looks at the significance and implications
of the Genocide Convention for the sovereignty-intervention dilemma. Second,
it reflects on the way that the sovereignty-intervention dilemma was interpreted
exclusively within the context of the UN Charter in the post-Cold War era.

Why focus on the Genocide Convention?

The supremacy of international law had been proclaimed and a significant
advance had been made in the development of international law.
(President of the General Assembly, Mr H.V. Evatt,
cited in Lippman 2002: 179)

The post-Second World War script embodies a series of extremely important

legal and political developments such as the 1948 Universal Declaration on
Human Rights, the 1949 Geneva Conventions, and the 1951 Convention
relating to the Status of Refugees. Accordingly, the question of why focus on
the Genocide Convention naturally arises. While the parameters of this
analysis dictate that not all these agreements can be included, this section sets
out to demonstrate that the Genocide Convention should not be seen as just
another legal development. To draw on the above sentiment expressed by
Mr Evatt on the endorsement of the Genocide Convention in 1948, the aim
here is to explain why the Convention represented a significant advance in
international law and shed light on the implications that this has for the
sovereignty-intervention debate.
The Genocide Convention consists of 19 articles which put forward the
collective responsibility of states, the definition of genocide, the acts that are
punishable, as well as a host of bureaucratic necessities. Most importantly,
Article one states: ‘[t]he Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether
committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law
which they undertake to prevent and to punish.’ In so doing, the Convention
drew attention to the idea that states have a responsibility to protect (R2P)
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Framing the sovereignty intervention dilemma 127

‘national, ethnical, racial, and religious’ groups from any intent to destroy the
group ‘in whole or in part’ (as defined in Article two). Whilst much ink has
been spilt on the definition of genocide, the focus here is on the obligations
that stem from this commitment (Schabas 2000: 491–502). Responding to a
genocide, Article eight stipulates: ‘[a]ny Contracting Party may call upon the
competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter
of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and
suppression of acts of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article 3.’
Accordingly, the statement provides us with some insight into understanding
the relationship between the Genocide Convention and the UN Charter
which, it is argued here, needs to be factored into how we frame and indeed
understand the sovereignty-intervention dilemma.
To be clear, none of the 19 articles that make up the Genocide Convention
mentions ‘sovereignty’ or ‘humanitarian intervention’. Because of this, scholars
remain divided over whether an implicit or explicit interpretation of the
Convention should be upheld (Hurd 2011: 299–300). In other words, whereas
the latter appeal to the letter, the former appeal to the spirit of the law (see
also, Franck 2003: 204–5; and Farer 2003: 61). An implicit interpretation
suggests that one has to ‘read between the lines’ in order to see that the
Convention advocates conditional sovereignty and humanitarian intervention
in order to prevent or stop genocide. In sharp contrast, those that uphold an
explicit interpretation claim that since the drafters did not choose to include
terms such as ‘the right to intervene’, it is inaccurate to suggest that the
Genocide Convention permits such action. However, if one follows this latter
logic then why, if the drafters rejected the ideas of humanitarian intervention
outright, did they not explicitly express this in the final document either?
Ultimately, the outcome is that we are left with a legal framework that serves
neither the advocate nor the critic of humanitarian intervention – at least on a
literal reading of the text. Notably, within international criminal law, even
those that uphold what is referred to as a ‘strict interpretation’ still accept that
the historical context of a treaty or convention should be used as one of many
interpretivist methods.4 With this in mind, this section locates the Genocide
Convention within its historical setting and draws on the views expressed at
the time by its drafters to demonstrate how the implications of the Genocide
Convention for the sovereignty-intervention dilemma were discussed explicitly
in the drafting process.5
The Genocide Convention was the first international human rights treaty
adopted by the UN and as a result laid much of the groundwork for subsequent
developments in international humanitarian law (Schabas 2000: 1–13). More
importantly, it represented a significant legal development as it set forth the
understanding that what went on within states was a matter of international
rather than domestic jurisdiction. As Richard Edwards explains:

Prior to the Genocide Convention, the concept of universal interests as a

basis for the exercise of jurisdiction was a limited one and was primarily
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128 Adrian Gallagher

directed to piracy, the slave trade, and acts on the high seas. The Genocide
Convention articulated a universal interest in preventing and punishing
genocide. That has in turn over time led to a broader recognition of
human rights as an area of universal concern. Other human rights conven-
tions have carried this concept forward. How human beings are treated in
the territories of their nationality, as well as when aliens in another state,
is a matter of international concern.
(Edwards 1981: 306)

This statement articulates the significance of the Genocide Convention as it

acted to extend the idea of international jurisdiction beyond that of issues
between states in order to protect ‘national, ethnical, racial or religious’
groups within states (A/Res/3/260, 1948, Article II). The impact of the Nazi
genocide looms large here. As Gareth Evans explains, until this event, the
Westphalian ordering principles acted to ‘institutionalise indifference’ as
political leaders were both immune to external accountability and largely
indifferent toward the suffering of others within states (Evans 2008: 15–19).
This is not to suggest that political elites never voiced concerns over human
rights violations within other states (Luard 1967: 7–21; Schabas 2000: 14–50),
but to highlight that for nearly 300 years a pattern of indifference toward the
suffering of ‘others’ became the norm. Any international concern, such as
that over the Armenian massacres at the time, was rare or, in statistical terms,
an ‘outlier’. This changed in the aftermath of the Nazi genocide. As Richard
Falk explains, the Holocaust (as it came to be known6) had a critical impact
on ‘the origins of the movement for the international protection of human
rights’, which remains an overlooked point in International Relations (IR)
(Falk 2009: 83 – 96). In short, the Holocaust acted as the catalyst that altered
the legal, moral and political expectations of international society to the point
that genocide was deemed to be a matter of international jurisdiction.
While Article 2(7) of the UN Charter states that ‘[n]othing contained in the
present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters
which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state’, it is clear that
the drafters of the Genocide Convention never viewed genocide as a matter of
‘domestic jurisdiction’. This can be traced back to the 1946 General Assembly
Resolution: ‘[t]he punishment of the crime of genocide is of international
concern … [t]he General Assembly, therefore affirms that genocide is a crime
under international law which the civilized world condemns’ (A/RES/96(I):
1946). The statement clearly embodies a universal ethic which explicitly informs
us that the drafters viewed genocide as a matter of international rather than
domestic jurisdiction.
This sentiment was restated throughout the drafting process. The Mexican
representative Mr Villa Michael stated that genocide poses a ‘direct and serious
threat to the welfare of the human race’, while the Dominican Republic
representative stated that even if the Convention was not ratified, its moral and
legal weight was needed because ‘the moral tribunal of the world demanded
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the denunciation of genocide as a “crime against humanity”’ (cited in Lippman
2002: 178). This latter statement is important because it begins to highlight
that many representatives at the time believed that even if endorsed, the
Genocide Convention would not be ratified by states precisely because of its
implications for state sovereignty and the issue of military intervention (to be
discussed below). Yet there remained a general agreement that the Genocide
Convention should be endorsed. For example, in 1949, the American Bar
Association urged the United States not to ratify the Convention, but at the
same time its delegates stated: ‘it is the sense of the American Bar Association
that the conscience of America like that of the civilized world revolts against
Genocide’, and ‘that such acts are contrary to the moral law and are abhorrent
to all’ (McDougal and Arends 1950: 688).
These statements demonstrate that state sovereignty was not deemed to
pose an obstacle to the prevention of genocide as the actors at the time did
not uphold the idea of sovereign immunity. Of course, the idea of conditional
sovereignty does not, in itself, justify the right of military intervention. This
remains the most controversial aspect of the sovereignty-intervention
dilemma and again it is worth noting that it is not mentioned in the final
wording of the Genocide Convention. However, it was discussed explicitly in
both the drafting and ratification process. In 1947, the UK representative and
former British prosecutor at Nuremberg Sir Hartley Shawcross raised con-
cerns which stemmed from the fact that ‘under article XII of the convention
[as it was then] the high contracting parties agree to call upon the competent
organs of the United Nations to take measures for the suppression or prevention
of the crime committed in any part of the world’ (United Nations 1947). The
fear, therefore, was one of implementation as Shawcross perceived that the
International Court of Justice would act as the necessary organ (rather than
the Security Council as is often interpreted by contemporaries7), yet since
genocide is committed by state officials, it is impractical to think that the
same state officials would give themselves up to any international judicial
process. This led Shawcross to conclude that ‘the only real sanction against
genocide was war’ (ibid.). The point here is not to uphold this view (as the
R2P rightly focuses on non-military and military means of prevention); how-
ever, it does highlight the fact that even though the phrases ‘humanitarian
intervention’ and ‘military intervention’ cannot be found in the Genocide
Convention, it was discussed explicitly. This led Shawcross to claim that the
Convention was unrealistic in that the majority of states would not accept it,
yet as history tells us, states unanimously endorsed the Genocide Convention
and as of 2012, 142 states had ratified it.
It took nearly 40 years for the United States to ratify the Genocide Convention
and, notably, it was the debate over military intervention that remained a
central obstacle that hindered ratification. In a fascinating piece written in 1949,
George A. Finch (then Editor-in-Chief and Vice-President of The American
Journal of International Law), reflects on the American Bar Association’s
recommendation that the Genocide Convention (as submitted) should not be
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130 Adrian Gallagher

ratified by the United States. Restating the exact same sentiment expressed by
Shawcross above, Finch (1949: 734) explains that ‘[i]n the debate at St. Louis the
question remained unanswered: How is an international tribunal or foreign
national court to obtain custody in time of peace of an accused genocidist?’
This line of questioning makes perfect sense and remains an all too familiar
problem. For example, on 4 March 2009, the International Criminal Court
issued an arrest warrant for the Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir, who has
since been charged with genocide but refuses to give himself up to the Inter-
national Criminal Court. Quite simply, when perpetrators of genocide refuse
to give themselves up to prosecution then how – without intervening militarily –
can the accused be put on trial? As Finch stated in 1949, ‘[t]o take the accused by
force would mean an act of war’ (Finch 1949: 734). Again, the statement
highlights that the issue of military intervention was discussed explicitly at the
time. In fact, it was this very issue that led actors such as the American Bar
Association and Shawcross to urge their respective states not to ratify the
Convention, yet the simple truth is that both states did (even if it did take the
United States nearly 40 years).
Because the issue of military intervention is, understandably, so controversial,
one can see why scholars reject any attempt to advocate it through an inter-
pretation of a Convention or Treaty that does not explicitly state this word by
word. However, it is hoped that by returning to the views expressed at the time,
one can begin to see that the norms of state sovereignty and non-intervention
were never actually viewed to be an obstacle. This is why in 1950 – amidst
concerns that states would not ratify the Convention – the International
Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that the Convention was binding on states even if
they did not ratify it (Fournet 2009: 139). In so doing, the ICJ set forth the
idea that genocide is a violation of jus cogens, which has since been upheld in
a series of judicial rulings including those made by the International Criminal
Tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia (Fournet 2009: 137–41). Yet the fact
is that the Convention did come into force in 1951, which led Professor
Hersch Lauterpacht, who was a member of the United Nations International
Law Commission from 1952 to 1954 before being elected as a judge on the
International Court of Justice, to conclude:

[a]cts of commission or omission in respect of genocide are no longer, in

any interpretation of the Charter, considered to be a matter of exclusively
within the domestic jurisdiction of the States concerned. For the Parties
expressly conceded to the United Nations, the right of intervention in this
sphere.
(Lauterpacht, cited in Schabas 2000: 498)

The statement, which is made by one of the twentieth century’s most influential
international lawyers, underlines the twofold idea that first, the UN Charter
and the idea of state sovereignty should not be viewed as an obstacle to the
prevention of genocide, and second, the Convention grants the UN the right
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to intervene in order to prevent or stop a genocide as defined in Article II of
the Genocide Convention. As William Schabas (2000: 491–502) goes on to
explain, the right to intervene does not overcome the complexities that surround
rights, obligations, and duties but at present this remains unresolved.
In sum, the drafters of the Genocide Convention explicitly discussed the
sovereignty-intervention dilemma and proceeded to endorse it. As a result, it
seems that the Genocide Convention represents something of an Achilles heel
for those that uphold sovereign immunity and non-intervention. This may help
to explain why some scholars simply ignore it. While the Convention remains
dependent upon the political will of state elites, it seems absurd to suggest
that the understanding of state sovereignty as set out in the UN Charter can
act as a barrier to the prevention of genocide. This is precisely the point made
by Henry Shue’s seminal analysis Limiting Sovereignty, in which the author
uses the crime of genocide to claim that certain rights are universal and that
the Genocide Convention places clear limitations on the right of sovereignty
(Shue 2006: 11–29). Accordingly, Shue’s analysis could be used to refute this
chapter’s claim – that the humanitarian intervention debate was framed in a way
that ignored the Genocide Convention – as it could be argued that Shue used
the crime of genocide to put forward an alternative interpretation of the
sovereignty-intervention dilemma. Yet before one accepts such criticism, one
needs to consider that Shue’s analysis was published twelve years after the
Rwandan genocide occurred. This raises the question: why was such under-
standing not at the very core of every humanitarian debate being held in, and
immediately after, 1994. This leads us onto the issue of framing.

The UN Charter frame

The enormity of the sovereignty-intervention dilemma would lead one to
expect that an array of interpretations were put forward by IR scholars in the
post-Cold War era. Yet with hindsight it appears that a UN Charter inter-
pretation was put forward instead. By this I mean that the UN Charter was
emphasized to the point that alternative frameworks, most importantly the
Genocide Convention, were excluded from the frame constructed. This is not
to suggest that every scholar ignored the Genocide Convention (Wheeler
2000: 208–41; Dunne and Kroslak 2001: 27–46; and Shue 2006: 11–29), but
that there is a clear divide in the post-Cold War literature between those that
tend to discuss the prevention of genocide in terms of the Genocide Convention,
and the much larger group that discusses it in terms of the UN Charter.8
To gain an understanding of how the UN Charter became the dominant
frame for assessing the sovereignty-intervention dilemma, let us consider James
Mayall’s edited volume entitled The New Interventionism. Published in 1994
this work provides an insight into the debates at the time and illustrates how
scholars were attempting to address the post-Cold War problem of human
rights violations within states on the one hand and a highly ambiguous
United States-led ‘new world order’ on the other. In an attempt to provide
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132 Adrian Gallagher

answers to the crises of Cambodia, former Yugoslavia and Somalia, Mayall turns
to the ‘old world order’ principles set out in the UN Charter. Thus, the reader
is informed that the UN Charter’s commitment to collective action and state
sovereignty (Chapter VII and Articles 2 (4) and (7)) and human rights (Articles
55, 56 and the Preamble) represent an attempt to bridge ‘two conceptions of
international society’ – the pluralist conception upheld by the rules of state
sovereignty and non-intervention as opposed to the solidarist conception upheld
by the rules of conditional sovereignty and humanitarian intervention (Mayall
1994: 4–5). For anyone familiar with the humanitarian intervention debate, this
frame will be a familiar one as the sovereignty-intervention dilemma was said
to expose the tensions found in the UN Charter. From an interpretivist
perspective, therefore, this method of interpretation helps explain how
the post-Cold War discourse came to emerge as it did as the sovereignty-
intervention dilemma became framed within a narrow set of parameters that
predominantly focused on the UN Charter.
This UN Charter frame became so entrenched in the post-Cold War era
that scholars failed to factor the Genocide Convention into their analysis of
genocide. For example, in Thomas Pogge’s Politics as Usual, the author
spends a chapter on ‘Moralizing Humanitarian Intervention’ (Pogge 2010:
165–82). From the outset, Pogge rejects Thomas M. Franck’s claim that the
UN Charter needs to be amended because its legal framework is morally
deficient when faced with empirical developments such as the end of coloni-
alism, the invention of the hydrogen bomb and the threat of international
terrorism.9 In order to illustrate his point, Franck makes what Pogge refers to
as an ‘[a]mazing appeal to the Rwandan genocide’ (ibid.: 166). For Franck it
is the hypothetical potential of ‘another Rwanda’ that illustrates the moral
deficiency of the UN Charter more than any other crime.10 Yet critically,
Pogge questions whether an intervention to stop the Rwandan genocide
would have in fact been illegal on the grounds that the Genocide Convention
identifies genocide as a crime under ‘international law’, which implies that
Article 2 (7) of the UN Charter does not apply to genocide precisely because
genocide is not a matter of ‘domestic jurisdiction’. Accordingly, Pogge draws
light to the somewhat strange fact that Franck analyses the problem of gen-
ocide but fails to factor the Genocide Convention into his understanding of
the sovereignty-intervention debate.
The premise of this paper is that Franck viewed the problem of genocide
through the prism of the UN Charter because this frame had become so
ingrained in the post-Cold War discourse that alternative legal frameworks
were excluded. This process of emphasis and exclusion leads to the somewhat
bizarre situation in which the Rwandan genocide is analysed without reference
to the Genocide Convention. This is, as the title of this chapter suggests, quite
simply strange. This peculiarity raises the question of why scholars such as
Franck would chose to ignore the Genocide Convention when analysing
genocide. Franck raises a series of empirical developments from colonialism
through to international terrorism in order to put forward his central claim
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Framing the sovereignty intervention dilemma 133

that the UN Charter should be overhauled in order to make it more morally
compatible with the needs of the twenty-first century. This in itself seems
quite reasonable and straightforward. However, Franck specifically uses gen-
ocide, rather than any of the other problems he lists, in order to highlight the moral
deficiencies of the UN Charter, which in turn opens the door for a broader
remit of UN Charter reform to be put forward. It is important, therefore, to
consider that the exclusion of the Genocide Convention does serve a purpose
as one could not use genocide to highlight the moral deficiencies of the UN
Charter if one included the Genocide Convention. Thus, one begins to see
that the process of emphasis and exclusion that underpinned the construction
of the UN Charter frame had a functional utility.
To consider the marginalization of the Genocide Convention further, let us
turn to a more complex example. J.L. Holzgrefe and Robert O. Keohane’s
(2003) edited volume, Humanitarian Intervention: Ethical, Legal, and Political
Dilemmas, is one of the leading texts in the humanitarian intervention debate.
It brings together a wide range of authors. Fernando Tesón and Allen Buchanan
contribute separate chapters on the ethics of humanitarian intervention, while
Thomas Franck, Jane Stromseth, Michael Byers and Simon Chesterman (as
co-authors) provide three chapters on law and humanitarian intervention,
leaving Robert Keohane and Michael Ignatieff to add a chapter each on the
politics of humanitarian intervention. However, despite the diversity and
expertise of the scholars involved, many of whom analyse the Rwandan gen-
ocide, the Genocide Convention is mentioned just once in the entire volume.
This sole citation (Holzgrefe and Keohane 2003: 44) does allude to the
potential magnitude of the Genocide Convention: Holzgrefe acknowledges
that the Convention may open the door to non-UN-authorized intervention
in order to prevent genocide. This is a profoundly important issue that goes
right to the very heart of the sovereignty-intervention authority dilemma, but
is given fleeting reference and not even mentioned by any other author. The
outcome of this is that if the reader does not pay close attention to this single
citation, they could read one of the leading texts in the humanitarian inter-
vention debate and not even know that the Genocide Convention exists.
Notably, Byers and Chesterman (2003: 177–203) analyse the legality of
humanitarian intervention and conclude that the principle of non-intervention is
firmly established in both the UN Charter and customary international law,
which leads them to claim that any moral justification for genuine humanitarian
intervention should be understood as ‘exceptional illegality’ (ibid.: 195–201).
Yet quite bizarrely the authors analyse the rules set out in the UN Charter
and go on to analyse subsequent treaty interpretations, but never mention the
Genocide Convention despite the fact that they raise the Rwandan genocide.
Thus, we are left with an analysis that suggests that all forms of intervention
are illegal but at no point do the authors even acknowledge that the Genocide
Convention exists. If one introduces the Convention into their frame of analysis,
the picture presented becomes somewhat muddied. For instance, are we to
conclude that an intervention to prevent genocide that was in accordance
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134 Adrian Gallagher

with the Genocide Convention would constitute an ‘exceptional illegality’?
If so, on what grounds would this intervention be illegal? If not, then the
authors have to accept that this form of intervention is legal, which brings
their whole argument into question. In other words, the conclusion put for-
ward is built upon skewed foundations which emphasize the UN Charter and
exclude alternative legal frameworks that may in fact challenge the norm of
non-intervention. As Franck’s (2003: 204–31) chapter in this same volume
rightly notes, such approaches attempt to ‘freeze-frame’ the UN Charter and
in so doing, claim that Article 2 (4) should be interpreted through a commit-
ment to the letter, rather than the spirit, of the law (204). In sharp contrast,
Franck claims that international law should be understood as an evolving
process which is not captured accurately by such freeze-frame approaches. Yet
despite upholding a commitment to international law and claiming that it is
important to acknowledge how it changes over time, Franck never mentions
the Genocide Convention despite raising the Rwandan genocide.
The strange nature of this omission raises the question of why the Geno-
cide Convention failed to be considered within the frame of analysis. I argue
that the marginalization of the Genocide Convention serves the needs of both
critics and advocates of humanitarian intervention. For critics, the omission
helps distance the sovereignty-intervention debate from the understanding of
conditional sovereignty and pro-interventionism embodied in the Genocide
Convention. This allows scholars such as Byers and Chesterman to load the
dice in favour of an anti-interventionist position as they frame the dilemma by
emphasising the UN Charter and excluding the Genocide Convention. The
very same method also serves pro-interventionists because although they
favour humanitarian intervention, they support a broader spectrum of
intervention than just genocide prevention. Jack Donnelly (2003: 241) is one
of very few scholars to actually engage with this issue, as he weighs up the
legal, moral and political controversy that surrounds humanitarian intervention
to conclude that the ‘least indefensible’ option may be to advocate humani-
tarian intervention only to stop or prevent genocide. At present it seems that
advocates do not want even to engage with this issue as they try to expand
the remit of humanitarian intervention. Thus, the fact that the margin-
alization of the Genocide Convention served the needs of both advocates and
critics of humanitarian intervention in the post-Cold War era further explains
why the UN Charter frame became so entrenched
Let us turn to the final example, which notably excludes both genocide and
the Genocide Convention while upholding the UN Charter frame in its analysis
of post-Cold War humanitarian crises within states. In Thierry Tardy’s (2007:
49–70) analysis on ‘The UN and the Use of Force’, the author interprets the
dilemma as Mayall did, arguing that the sovereignty-intervention dilemma
exposes fundamental contradictions in the UN Charter. Whereas Mayall
describes this as a clash between pluralism and solidarism, Tardy categorizes
this in terms of realism versus liberalism. Tardy uses the examples of Iraq,
Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Srebrenica, the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
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Framing the sovereignty intervention dilemma 135

Cambodia, El Salvador and Mozambique, but at no point does the author
mention the Rwandan genocide or the Genocide Convention.11 With regard
to emphasis and exclusion, why emphasize the numerous examples above in a
discussion on post-Cold War humanitarian crises within states and exclude
the Rwandan genocide? This, again, just seems strange. The outcome of this
is that Tardy frames the entire sovereignty-intervention dilemma in a way that
not only emphasizes the UN Charter, but excludes the problem of genocide
altogether.
There is a second and more important point raised in Tardy’s analysis,
however, which notably helps to tie the different examples outlined in this
section together. Intriguingly, Tardy states:

In a way, the liberal-realist dichotomy is overcome by the fact that the

various interpretations justify putting the UN aside when dealing with
the legalization of the use of force: the realist approach – because the
Security Council should not hinder state action when such action is con-
sidered necessary; the liberal and constructivist approaches – because the
protection of civilian populations, whose rights are massively scoffed at,
should justify the provisional and exceptional bypassing of the Security
Council.
(Tardy 2007: 61)

Tardy’s analysis is important because it highlights that mainstream IR theor-

ists frame the sovereignty-intervention dilemma against the backdrop of the
UN Charter – just as Tardy does – yet at the same time claim that the UN
Charter is morally deficient (whether from a realist or liberal perspective), in
order to justify putting the UN Charter to one side. With regard to the issue of
framing, it seems that the UN Charter serves a crucial purpose as it provides a
common reference point that enables scholars to make a case in favour of
fundamentally opposing positions as they attempt to put the UN Charter to
one side. Again, this helps, at least in part, to explain why the Genocide
Convention found itself marginalized as the introduction of the Convention
into the discourse substantially alters the very frame that suits both the
advocate and critic of humanitarian intervention. Whether intentional or
unintentional, the exclusion of the Genocide Convention helps critics to
oppose all forms of humanitarian intervention, but at the same time enables
advocates to expand the remit of humanitarian intervention to more than just
genocide alone. It is the process of emphasis and exclusion, therefore, that is key.
Having provided a series of examples that all uphold the UN frame I am
conscious that the idea that the Genocide Convention was marginalized in the
humanitarian intervention debate needs more elaboration and illustration
than can be given here. With this in mind I offer some general examples. For
example, this can be seen in Stanley Hoffmann (ed.), The Ethics and Politics
of Humanitarian Intervention, published in 1996, which makes reference to the
Rwandan genocide but not the Genocide Convention. At a time when political
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136 Adrian Gallagher

elites were distancing themselves from even using the word genocide, one would
have hoped that scholars could have drawn attention to the legal obligation
set out in the Genocide Convention. Second, Robert Jackson’s The Global
Covenant: Human Conduct in a World of States (2000), which is widely
regarded as the leading contemporary defence of English School pluralism
(state sovereignty and non-intervention), fails to index the Genocide Convention
altogether. Again, this omission supports the argument that the non-intervention
position is aided by the marginalization of the Genocide Convention. This is
part of a broader problem within pluralism, for as Richard Shapcott claims,
‘[b]ecause of their assumptions of limited interaction, pluralists are at best
silent and at worst indifferent to the extent of transnational ethical problems
that face modern communities’ (Shapcott 2008: 192). Third, Ronald Tinnevelt
and Gert Verschraegan’s (2006) edited volume, Between Cosmopolitan Ideals
and State Sovereignty, is a widely cited cosmopolitan take on the meaning of
sovereignty and the debate over humanitarian intervention (as well as many
other things), but this, too, fails to index any mention of the Genocide Con-
vention. This is despite the fact that leading cosmopolitan thinkers such as Andrew
Linklater (Linklater and Suganami (2006: 181) and Richard Shapcott (2008:
198) recognize the Genocide Convention as a cosmopolitan harm convention.
Finally, from a ‘genocide studies perspective’, Amitai Etzioni’s (2005) Genocide
Prevention in the New Global Architecture, does not mention the Genocide
Convention once, despite looking at the global architecture that surrounds
genocide prevention. Again, one struggles to conclude anything but that such
omissions within the discourse are quite simply strange.
To bring this section to a close, I return to the issue of framing and raise
the idea that ‘[f]rames serve multiple functions for different actors’ (Norris
et al. 2003: 11). Having surveyed the above examples, what is striking is that
through a process of emphasis and exclusion, scholars constructed a UN
Charter frame which serves a range of objectives and arguments despite the
fact that these are not always compatible with one another. Consider the
following three perspectives that have been raised above: i) those that want
radically to overhaul the UN Charter; ii) those that advocate a broader spec-
trum of intervention; and iii) those that reject all forms of intervention. All
appeal to the UN Charter as their central reference point. In essence, this
single frame serves multiple purposes. It also allowed scholars to load their
belief system, by which I mean in this context their IR tradition, into their
interpretation of the frame. Thus, as demonstrated, realists, liberals and
English School scholars all appeal to the same frame in order to put forward
radically different arguments. The utility of the UN Charter frame helps to
explain why scholars, whether intentionally or unintentionally, excluded the
Genocide Convention from their analysis. Essentially, the R2P discourse over
the last decade has attempted to alter the humanitarian intervention frame.
While this is understandable considering the divisive nature of the humanitarian
intervention debate, one cannot help but think that ideas such as prevention,
protection and conditional sovereignty that lie at the heart of the R2P were
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Framing the sovereignty intervention dilemma 137

evident in 1948. For example, Bruce Cronin (Cronin and Hurd 2008), who
specializes in the UN Security Council, interpreted the Genocide Convention
in the following manner: ‘[t]he conclusion of the 1948 UN Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UNCG) created a
legal framework for states to override the rights of sovereignty whenever
genocide was committed’ (Cronin 2008: 147). Although one can understand
why the Genocide Convention was marginalized within the extremity of the
Cold War, further research and reflection is needed on how and why it was
marginalized within the post-Cold War humanitarian intervention debate as
scholars and policy makers tried to resolve the sovereignty-intervention
dilemma.

Conclusion
Using an interpretivist approach, this chapter argues that scholars framed the
post-Cold War sovereignty-intervention dilemma through a process of
emphasis and exclusion which emphasized the UN Charter frame to the point
that the Genocide Convention was excluded – even when the issue of genocide
was being discussed. The strange nature of this omission raises questions over
the intentional and unintentional exclusion of the Genocide Convention, with
the latter asking us to consider how scholars unconsciously construct and
reproduce the frames that underpin their search for meaning in international
relations. This, of course, is not to suggest that including the Genocide Con-
vention in the humanitarian intervention debate will suddenly resolve the
sovereignty-intervention dilemma. After all, there were many humanitarian
crises in the post-Cold War era that had nothing to do with genocide. Fur-
thermore, there are many issues at stake (other than whether the Genocide
Convention gets mentioned) that impact on international society’s willingness
and ability to prevent genocide. Obviously, debates over sovereignty, inter-
vention, abuses of power, rightful authority, to name just a few, are all
important factors involved in resolving the sovereignty-intervention dilemma.
However, this chapter has also highlighted that reflecting on how scholars
interpret this dilemma is another important factor that needs to be given
further consideration. When one considers that the lives of potentially
millions of people remain dependent on how political elites interpret the
sovereignty-intervention dilemma on a case-by-case basis, it is extremely
important that scholars begin to reflect on this issue. With this in mind, the
hope here is that through further research scholars may begin to get to grips
with how the UN Charter frame may or may not have shaped political deci-
sion making. For example, a senior peace-keeping official at the UN admitted
that it was only after the Rwandan genocide had taken place that he found
out that the Genocide Convention existed (cited in Jones 2001: 121). At first,
this statement seems unbelievable, yet one can begin to understand this tragic
reality when one considers how the Genocide Convention found itself banished
to the periphery of the post-Cold War discourse. It is the interpretivist approach,
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138 Adrian Gallagher

therefore, that helps us to make sense of the strange omission that lies at the
heart of this chapter. This is beneficial in that it helps us to address the
skewed foundations of the humanitarian intervention debate, but also illustrates
the significant value of the interpretivist method.

Notes
1 I would like to take this opportunity to thank Ian Hall, Mark Bevir, Oliver
Daddow, Paul Behrens, Chris Kitchen, Emma Anderson and Matthew Lipmann
for their comments on earlier versions of this chapter and valuable help in the
research process.
2 I am drawing here on the idea of an ‘Intervention Dilemma’ as set by the
International Commission for Intervention and State Sovereignty (2001: part one).
3 This chapter uses the phrase the Genocide Convention as this is a common
shorthand.
4 I would like to thank Paul Behrens for this insightful point. It seems that this is
part of an ongoing debate in international law; see Shaw (2008) and Werle (2005:
esp. part 1d).
5 This author carried out primary research on the drafting of the Genocide
Convention at the United Nations Archive (8–11 June 2009).
6 For a discussion on the complexities here, see Moses (2004).
7 There remains an unresolved ambiguity regarding Article VIII of the Genocide
Convention, which stipulates: ‘Any Contracting Party may call upon the com-
petent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of
the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and sup-
pression of genocide or any other acts enumerated in Article III’; see Quigley
(2006: 85–87).
8 In the contemporary debate on the Responsibility to Protect it is clear that the
humanitarian intervention frame has been re-cast in broader terms with a focus on
prevention, reaction and rebuilding. As part of this process some scholars, though
still not many, have included the Genocide Convention in their analysis: see
Arbour (2008), Bellamy and Reike (2010), Glanville (2010) and Hehir (2011).
Accordingly, this chapter calls for further analysis on the relationship between the
R2P and the Genocide Convention.
9 The piece in question is T.M. Franck, ‘Legality and Legitimacy in Humanitar-
ian Intervention’, in Terry Nardin and Melissa S. Williams (eds) NOMOS
XLVII Humanitarian Intervention, vol. 47, New York: New York University
Press, 2005.
10 As Pogge points out, despite Franck’s long list of empirical developments, it is the
crime of genocide that Franck uses to illustrate the moral failings of the UN Charter.
11 One is reminded of the fact that in 1999, the Review of International Studies
published a special edition journal on the post-Cold War decade which failed to
provide any analysis on the Rwandan genocide or, for that matter, any analysis on
genocide at all (see Shaw 2003: 269).

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9 Writing the threat of terrorism in

Western Europe and the
European Union
An interpretive analysis
Christopher Baker-Beall

Since the events of 11 September 2001, Western liberal democratic states have
come to view terrorism as one of the most prescient threats to their security.
This chapter focuses on the threat of terrorism as it has been perceived in
Europe, drawing attention to its relationship to the establishment of new
practices of governance designed to address terrorism and other ‘interrelated’
security issues since the 1970s. The chapter builds on the idea that there is a
linkage between the new practices of governance utilized by Western liberal
democratic states, the associated narratives that provide the justification for
the development of those practices of governance and the advent of a new
‘joined-up’ approach to global security that relies on new institutions and
transnational networks of scholars and practitioners (see Chapter 2, this
volume). In particular, the chapter focuses on the European interpretation of
and response to two dilemmas involving terrorism. First, it investigates the ways
in which the European Community (EC) interpreted and responded to a wave
of ‘international terrorism’ that afflicted Western Europe during the 1970s.
Second, it turns to the European Union’s (EU) response to the dilemma
posed by the events of 11 September 2001 and the so-called rise of the ‘new
terrorism’, which was thought to be confirmed by the events in Madrid on
11 March 2004, and in London on 7 July 2005.
The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section provides an
historical analysis of the emergence and evolution of the concept of terrorism.
The purpose of this is to help reveal how certain beliefs about terrorism (what
terrorism is and who the terrorists are) have come to dominate how terrorism
is understood. In turn, it is argued that these beliefs about terrorism have
helped to shape or influence the types of policies that have been formulated in
response to the perceived threat of terrorism. The second section extends the
interpretive analysis of the concept of terrorism to its emergence and func-
tioning in Western European and EC/EU security discourses from the 1970s
until the events of 11 September 2001. It is argued that the dilemma posed by
the threat of ‘international terrorism’ helped to change the way in which
European governments responded to certain security issues; terrorism came to
be understood by European governments as a specific type of threat, one that
would require a particular type of response. It is argued that beliefs about the
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Terrorism in Western Europe and the EU 143

potential threat of terrorism provided the basis for a response that would first
require the development of a transnational framework for cooperation on
matters of cross-border law enforcement (Trevi), and later the formulation of
a holistic system of governance for the provision of internal security under
the auspices of the EU’s Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ). The
analysis conducted here contends that this framework has come to represent
the established governmental tradition through which counter-terrorism
policy is formulated at the EC/EU level.
The third section explores the impact of the events of 11 September 2001
on the EU’s policy response to terrorism, focusing on the ways in which the
EU’s counter-terrorism meta-narrative, the ‘fight against terrorism’, has
shaped the formulation of policy. It is argued that the dilemma posed by
terrorism in the post-9/11 world can only be understood with regard to the
wider narrative of ‘new terrorism’, which provides the context within which
responses to terrorism are being developed in the early twenty-first century.
However, this analysis also contends that EU counter-terrorism responses
(and its more general internal security policies) are still largely guided by the
role of the interior ministers of the member states; this, it is argued, can in
large part be attributed to the governmental tradition established during the
1970s. The chapter concludes by arguing that the EU’s ‘fight against terror-
ism’ functions primarily as a legitimizing narrative in support of the new
practices of internal security governance at the European level that have been
developed since the 1970s. Throughout the chapter, due attention will be paid
to the three theoretical concepts that inform the interpretive theory that
underpins the research conducted in this book: beliefs, traditions and dilemmas
(see Chapter 1, this volume).

Interpreting terror: dominant beliefs about terrorism

The purpose of this section on interpreting terrorism is not to provide a con-
clusive definition of the concept. The definitional question is one that has
preoccupied scholars of terrorism studies for many years without resolution.
Indeed, in his 1984 monograph Political Terrorism, Alex Schmid documented
over 100 different definitions of terrorism, yet still reached the conclusion that
‘the search for an adequate definition of terrorism is still on’ (Schmid and
Jongman 1988: 1). Bruce Hoffman (2006: 3) has argued that perhaps the most
compelling reason for this difficulty in reaching an acceptable definition ‘is
because the meaning of the term has changed so frequently over the past two
hundred years’. With this in mind, the purpose of this analysis is instead to
chart the emergence and evolution of the concept of terrorism, demonstrating
how its meaning has changed across different historical periods and how the
term has been applied in different contexts. This is done for a particular
reason. Although it is recognized that our understanding of terrorism should
always be considered contingent and contextual, charting the evolution of the
concept of terrorism allows us to trace the emergence of certain beliefs about
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144 Christopher Baker-Beall

terrorism, which it is argued have come to dominate how terrorism is
understood. The three most dominant beliefs identified in this analysis
are: first, that terrorism represents an extreme threat to either an individual
or a community; second, that terrorism should be viewed as an intrinsically
immoral activity; and third, that terrorism is an act perpetrated predominantly
by non-state actors. It is argued that in order to explain how politicians and
policy makers interpret terrorism, ‘we must explore the beliefs and meanings
through which they construct their world’ (Bevir et al. 2003: 4). In order to do
this, the analysis in this chapter seeks to draw out these dominant beliefs
about terrorism and demonstrate how they help to guide policy makers in the
formulation of counter-terrorism responses.
This section will begin by charting the emergence and evolution of the political
terrorism discourse. The terms ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ first emerged during the
French Revolution. However, according to Michael Blain (2009), an analysis
of the etymology of the term ‘terror’ reveals that its conceptualization as a
political act was predated by its association with religion and the Divine
Right of the Sovereign to take life. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
notes that the term ‘terror’ is derived from the Anglo-Norman term ‘terrour’,
the Middle French term ‘terreur’ and the Latin noun ‘terror’. The earliest
concept of terror referred to an individual’s state of being: a ‘state or quality
of causing intense fear or dread’ (c.1400). Early examples of the use of the
term terror revealed certain religious connotations, as in The Bible (Geneva):
‘the terrors of death have fallen upon me’ (c.1560). Significant to this pre-
revolutionary conceptualization of terror was the phrase ‘king of terrors’,
which according to the OED literally meant ‘death personified’. It came from
the Bible, Job 18:14, in which it stated: ‘His confidence … shall bring him to the
king of terrours’ (c.1611). At this point, terror was understood as something
imposed by God and the Sovereign. As such, it can be argued that in the
period before the French Revolution, terror was understood as a sovereign right
of death or a Monarch’s right to take or give life in defence of sovereignty:
‘terror’ was considered to be the personification of death. Blain has argued
that this ‘pre-revolutionary’ concept of ‘terror’ had a different meaning to the
political connotations that it carries in the early twenty-first century: it was
associated with a politics of death, ‘the right to take or give life, dramatized in
the spectacular victimage rituals of public torture and pre-modern forms of
warfare’ (Blain 2009: 108).
A new political concept of ‘terror’ entered the English language during the
period of the French Revolution (1789–94). As Igor Primoratz (2004: 113)
explains, when terrorism first entered political discourse ‘it was to describe a
case of state terrorism’. The imposition of terror was an instrument of gov-
ernance wielded by the newly established Jacobin regime that sought to secure
the revolutionary state against its enemies.1 The OED contains two references to
terror and its association with the French Revolution. The first reference con-
textualizes the concept of terror in an historical sense: ‘the period of the
French Revolution from about March 1793 to July 1794, marked by extreme
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repression and bloodshed; a similar period of violent repression occurring in
other countries, esp. the former Soviet Union during the first half of the 20th
cent.’ The second reference defines the concept of a ‘Reign of Terror’, specifically
associated with the French Revolution, as ‘a period of remorseless repression
or bloodshed during which the general community live in constant fear of
death or violence … the period of the First Revolution from about March
1793 to July 1794’ (OED, 2012: emphasis added). There are several points
that need to be highlighted in relation to this discursive shift in the con-
ceptualization of terror that followed the French Revolution. First, there was
a broadening of the term in that it was now used to refer to the state of the
‘general community’ rather than the individual. Second, a political dimension
to terrorism was constructed because this ‘general community’ was thought to
live in ‘constant fear of death or violence’ or ‘repression’, as delivered through
or by the agents of the political system, and occurring at other points in his-
tory (France during the Revolution, Russia during tsarist rule). Finally, as
Blain (2009) has pointed out, the earlier associations to the word did not
disappear, but rather accumulated. It can be argued, therefore, that the term
terrorism, as a suffix of the term terror, has remained wedded to the earlier
association with a state or quality that can cause ‘intense fear or dread’. In
this sense, the belief that terrorism can represent an extreme threat to the
individual or to a community has remained constant throughout its history.
Although the term terrorism was originally used to give meaning to acts of
repression carried out by the state, since its emergence during the French
Revolution terrorism has been used as a label with which to describe political
violence in a wide range of differing historical contexts. In the middle-to-late
nineteenth century the term terrorism shifted from its original revolutionary
conceptualization, as a form of state terrorism, and was instead used to
describe the activities of groups of Russian anarchists, such as the Narodnaya
Volya and its various successor organizations, which emerged to challenge
tsarist rule in Russia (Hoffman 2006). Likewise, the challenge to British rule
in Ireland by ethno-nationalist, separatist organizations such as the Fenian
Brotherhood (which incidentally also began towards the end of the nineteenth
century), has also been described as an instance of terrorism (Richardson 2006:
50–52). Following the Second World War, the meaning of terrorism changed
once more. As Bruce Hoffman (2006: 16) explains, terrorism ‘regained the
revolutionary connotations with which it is most commonly associated’, in
that it was used to describe ‘the various indigenous nationalist/anticolonialist
groups that emerged in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East during the late
1940s and 1950s to oppose continued European rule’.2 By the 1970s the
meaning of terrorism had undertaken another discursive shift, with numerous
terrorism studies scholars crediting 1968 as the advent of the modern era of
‘international terrorism’ (Hoffman 2002, 2006; Cronin 2003). According to
David Rapoport (2002), the modern era of ‘international terrorism’ was char-
acterized by the emergence of a wave of ‘New Left’ terrorist organizations,
which took their inspiration from the activities of the Palestinian Liberation
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146 Christopher Baker-Beall

Organization (PLO), including groups in Europe such as the Red Brigades
(Italy) and the Red Army Faction (Germany). Thomas J. Badey (1998: 92)
contends that what differentiated ‘international terrorism’ from earlier forms
of terrorism was its transnational nature, noting that it can be best under-
stood as ‘the repeated use of politically motivated violence with coercive
intent, by non-state actors, that affects more than one state’.
By the mid-1990s, beliefs about what constitutes terrorism had evolved
once more. Debates about terrorism began to focus on the idea that the
phenomenon had somehow changed – it was now thought to be ‘new’ and
different from ‘old’ forms of terrorism (Laqueur 1999; Lesser et al. 1999). It
has been argued that the idea of ‘new’ terrorism is characterized by three
main beliefs (Crenshaw 2008). First, that the goals of terrorist organizations
have changed: they are thought to derive from religious doctrine and contain
millenarian objectives. Second, the methods of ‘new’ terrorism have been
transformed: whereas the ‘old’ terrorists groups engaged in targeting their
enemies for strategic purposes, it is argued that the ‘new’ terrorists are
committed to causing the largest possible number of casualties amongst their
enemies. Third, the structures of terrorist organizations are now considered to
be different. Whereas the ‘old’ terrorist groups of the past were thought to be
hierarchical, the ‘new’ terrorism of the early twenty-first century is thought to
resemble more closely a ‘network’. The rise of terrorist organizations such as
Al-Qaida and the events of 11 September 2001 have reinforced this perception
that terrorism in the early twenty-first century is qualitatively different from
the terrorism of the past. Having charted this evolution in how terrorism has
been conceptualized, it can be argued that what unites all of these examples is
that terrorism has primarily been thought of as an activity carried out by
non-state actors against the state. It will be argued in the following section
that this belief helped to shape European responses to terrorism in the 1970s
and later influenced EU counter-terrorism policy after 9/11. Although there
has been work done to challenge this belief (see George 1991), it remains the
case that one of the dominant beliefs about terrorism, which influences policy
makers, is that the state cannot be thought of as an actor that engages in
activities that could otherwise be defined as terrorist. This can in part be
explained by the important role that terrorism plays as a normative label.
Linked to the notion that terrorism is an activity carried out primarily by
non-state actors is the belief that terrorism is in some way an inherently immoral
activity. Indeed, Louise Richardson has argued that the only certainty about
terrorism is the pejorative nature with which the word is used (cited in
Horgan 2005: 1). ‘Terrorist’ is a description that has almost never been
voluntarily adopted by an individual or group. It is a label that is applied to
an individual or a group by others – first and foremost by the governments of
the states they attack (Townshend 2002). Indeed, for governments the label
of terrorist serves a particular function, by branding violent opponents with
this title, with its clear implications of inhumanity and criminality, it can help
to convey ‘a lack of real political support’ (ibid.: 3). However, as was
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explained at the start, terror is a description of a particular kind of fear.
Therefore it must follow that terrorism refers to the creation, or attempted
creation, of that sense of fear. Semantically speaking, then, the term is
descriptive rather than constitutive. Yet this belief that terrorism is inherently
immoral has endowed it with constitutive properties. As Peter R. Neumann
and M.L.R. Smith explain, the belief that terrorism is an inherently immoral
activity has come at a price: it has meant that ‘the word terrorism has become
infused with negative moral connotations that undermine its descriptive uti-
lity’ (Neumann and Smith 2008: 2). It is argued here that accompanying this
descriptive price is also a practical one, because terrorism has come to be
understood as something inherently immoral; when the threat of terrorism is
invoked the potential for a rational response is undermined. Furthermore, the
belief that terrorism is immoral has played a significant role in legitimizing or
justifying responses to terrorism.
This first section has sought to chart the evolution of the concept of terrorism
since it first emerged as a label for a particular type of political violence during
the French Revolution. It has been argued that the meaning of terrorism has
changed dramatically in the past 200 years. As such, the meaning of terrorism
should always be considered contingent and contextual. Although the way
terrorism is understood has changed, it was also argued that three dominant
beliefs about terrorism can be identified that have remained constant since the
emergence of the term. These three beliefs are: that terrorism represents an
extreme threat to either an individual or a community; that terrorism is an act
perpetrated predominantly by non-state actors; and that terrorism should be
viewed as an intrinsically immoral activity. The next section will highlight
how these beliefs about terrorism shaped European responses to terrorism
during the 1970s.

The dilemma of terrorism in Western Europe and the establishment

of new structures of security governance
This section analyses the establishment of new practices of internal security
governance at the European level, since the 1970s, which it is argued were cre-
ated primarily as a response to the threat of terrorism. Three main arguments are
put forward here. First, the dilemma posed by the threat of ‘international
terrorism’ helped to change the way in which European governments responded
to certain security threats. Terrorism alongside organized crime and immi-
gration had until this point traditionally been perceived as threats to the
security of individual states. From the 1970s onwards, European governments
began to develop intergovernmental structures to coordinate and cooperate
on matters of internal security – a development that was initiated as a
response to a wave of ‘international terrorism’ that afflicted European states
during this period. Second, this transnational framework for cooperation on
matters of cross-border law enforcement (Trevi) that was developed during the
1970s, which has since evolved into a holistic system of governance for the
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148 Christopher Baker-Beall

provision of internal security under the auspices of the EU’s AFSJ, represents
a particular governmental tradition that has also influenced the type of
counter-terrorism policy response that has been formulated by the EU.3
Third, although initially the threat of terrorism was invoked to legitimize a
much wider range of internal security measures than solely counter-terrorism
policies, as the EC/EU’s internal security governance structure has evolved the
threat of terrorism was thought to have reduced in importance.
At the outset of this analysis it is important to note that one of the defining
features of the EU response to terrorism, the ‘fight against terrorism’, has
been to treat it as primarily (although not exclusively) an internal security threat.
This reflects the experience of Western European governments who since the
1970s have dealt with instances of terrorism as predominantly a domestic
security issue, albeit with certain transnational dimensions. Traditionally, at
both national and European level, it has been interior ministers who have
taken the lead in the formulation of counter-terrorism policy. This helps to
explain why the EU has developed a deeply embedded perception of terror-
ism as crime, or as a form of criminal activity (Jackson 2007; Edwards and
Meyer 2008). Initially, cooperation between European states in matters of
internal security governance was limited to the strictly intergovernmental
framework of the Council of Europe. There are a number of Council of
Europe conventions that the EC/EU considered so important to the development
of its internal security sphere that they have been defined as part of the acquis
communautaire. These include the European Convention on Extradition
(1957) and the European Convention on the Suppression of Terrorism (1977).
Valsamis Mitsilegas et al. (2003: 20) note that these conventions have ‘become
points of departure for the more comprehensive measures adopted by the
EC member states or (later) by the EU’. However, greater incentives for
cooperation on internal security policy were needed.
These incentives arrived in the 1970s with Western Europe plagued by a
significant degree of ‘international terrorism’, carried out by transnational
terrorist organizations, effectively ‘catapulting it to the top of all world
regions in incidence of terrorist activity’ (Corrado and Evans 1988: 373). The
murder of 11 Israeli athletes by terrorists at the Olympic Games in Munich in
1972, combined with heightening tensions in the Middle East, drastically
increased the perceived threat from transnational terrorist networks in
Europe. For example, during this period groups such as the Irish Republican
Army (IRA), the West German Red Army Faction (the Baader-Meinhof
group), the Italian Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse) and the Basque separatists
ETA, intensified their activities. Thus it was a dilemma involving terrorism,
and more specifically the threat of further incidents of terrorism, that pro-
vided the motivation for greater cooperation amongst European states on
matters of internal security. At a Council of Ministers meeting in December
1975, a proposal by the UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson ‘that Community
Ministers for the Interior (or Ministers with similar responsibilities) should
meet to discuss matters coming within their competence, in particular with
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Terrorism in Western Europe and the EU 149

regard to law and order’, was adopted (European Council 1975). Tony
Bunyan (1993) notes that at the same meeting a proposal for the establish-
ment of a specific working group to combat terrorism was also agreed. This
led to the formal establishment of the Trevi Group by the nine members of
the EC in June 1976, with the aim of countering transnational terrorist
activity and improving coordination between police forces of EC member
states.4 The establishment of these new intergovernmental practices of European
internal security cooperation was accompanied by a justificatory narrative
emphasizing the threat of terrorism, reflected in a series of statements made at
the time by both the European Council and by European politicians.
In his opening address to the European Parliament, in January 1975, the
President Cornelius Berkhouwer (European Parliament 1975) commented that
‘the Western world is afflicted with a number of diseases that are a serious threat
to its continued existence’, of which he identified a ‘constant increase in terror
and aggressiveness’ as one of the most prevalent concerns that ‘threaten to
destroy the structures of Western society’. He warned that all EC member
states could potentially ‘fall victim to this terrorism’, precipitating a need for
EC member states to work together to ‘jointly protect ourselves, put a stop to
this terror and destroy it root and branch’. The perceived threat of terrorism
led the European Council, at a meeting in July 1976, to issue a declaration on
combating terrorism that was unequivocal in its condemnation of terrorists,
and which emphasized the need for cooperation to counter the threat
(European Council 1976). The statement declared that the taking of hostages,
for the purpose of putting political pressure on whichever state or government
had been targeted, to be an ‘inhuman practice’ that was ‘completely unac-
ceptable’. It further noted that it was ‘in the interests of all governments to
cooperate in combating the evil of terrorism’.
In a speech to the United Nations (UN) in September 1976, addressing the
General Assembly in his role as the President of European Political Coop-
eration, the Dutch Foreign Minister Max van der Stoel made reference to the
threat of ‘international terrorism’ as a matter of deep concern for the nine
members of the EC. Van der Stoel (1976) echoed many of the claims made in
the earlier European Council (1976) declaration on terrorism, arguing that
Europe had begun to witness an ‘increasing frequency of acts of violence
which endanger or take innocent human life’, noting that what was particular
about these incidents was their ‘international dimension’. Acts of ‘international
terrorism’, such as hostage taking, were described as ‘one of the most heinous
crimes against human life’ and a form of ‘insidious violence against the
innocent’, whilst the actors who engaged in this type of activity were thought to
be ‘evil’ or ‘inhuman’. This narrative on the dilemma posed by terrorism was
accompanied by a belief amongst EC politicians that there were ‘serious
indications that … [they were] confronted with a growing danger of a world-
wide network of professional criminal terrorism ready to strike at any moment
against any state and its citizens’ (van der Stoel 1976). This perception of the
threat of terrorism, as ‘international’ in dimension, shaped the counter-terrorism
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150 Christopher Baker-Beall

response of European governments and necessitated the creation of inter-
governmental structures designed to facilitate cooperation in this policy area.
The murder of Aldo Moro by terrorists in 1978 led the nine members of the
EC to argue once more for ‘intensification of cooperation’ in order to combat
terrorism, agreeing that ‘the relevant Ministers will increase their mutual
cooperation and will as soon as possible submit their conclusions on the
proposals before them for a European judicial area’ (European Council 1978).
It is quite clear that the threat of terrorism, as interpreted by the EC/EU
and EC politicians, provided the rationality for increased cooperation
amongst EC member states through the formation of a new (informal) inter-
nal security framework designed to counter that threat. The creation of new
modes of security governance at the EC/EU level was to a certain degree
contingent on and driven by instances of terrorism across Europe during the
1970s. Likewise, it can be argued that the creation of these new security
practices was inextricably linked to the accompanying narrative on terrorism.
Indeed, the comments of the EC politicians highlighted above demonstrate
the way in which they rearticulated and drew upon the dominant beliefs
about terrorism that were identified in the first section. For the representatives
of the EC, terrorism was identified as the activity of ‘criminals’, with the use
of the terms ‘evil’ and ‘inhuman’ demonstrating a belief that terrorism should
be seen as a morally repugnant activity. Likewise, the argument that terrorism
should be viewed as a threat to ‘any state and its citizens’, can be interpreted
as a re-articulation of the belief that terrorism is an act perpetrated pre-
dominantly, if not solely, by non-state actors. Importantly, running through-
out this narrative on terrorism, was the belief that terrorism should be viewed
as a massive and potentially existential threat to the security of the EC and its
member states, thereby providing purpose for the establishment of a new
transnational, intergovernmental security framework.
It has been argued thus far that beliefs about terrorism played a key role in
the creation of new modes of security governance at the European level; it has
also been argued that these structures have played a key role in the formation
of a particular governmental tradition of how best to respond to the perceived
threat of terrorism (through internal security measures). This chapter will now
briefly consider the way in which the threat of terrorism has been invoked
to legitimize the expansion of this security framework to include a much
greater range of internal security issues. Although initially it was the threat of
terrorism that provided the sole justification for the establishment of these
new security practices, a transformation in the accompanying narrative
occurred as the security structures became more entrenched. Terrorism was
no longer referred to as a single, identifiable threat but was invoked as one of
a number of interlinked threats, alongside ‘organized crime’, ‘drug trafficking’
and ‘illegal immigration’. In successive policy documents released after
1987, when terrorism was referred to, it was as one of these interlinked
threats. Meetings in this area were conducted in secrecy between 1976
and 1986.5
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As such, it was not until 1987 with the Declaration of the Belgian Presidency
that the work of the opaque framework of intergovernmental cooperation that
had been created up until this point, particularly in response to terrorism,
became slightly clearer. A number of policy documents outlining the work of
the Trevi Group, including the work to be done in the future, were released.
These included: the ‘Palma Document’ (Madrid, June 1989); the ‘Declaration
of Trevi Group Ministers’ (Paris, 15 December 1989); and the ‘Programme of
Action’ (Dublin, June 1990).6 In particular, the release of the Palma docu-
ment in June 1989 marked the beginning of a transformation from ad hoc
structures of cooperation, to the more permanent structure of intergovern-
mental cooperation created with the establishment of the EU in 1993. The
document highlighted the progressive development of policies designed to
combat terrorism, organized crime and drug trafficking, establishing their
association with policing and immigration control. The repetitive and fre-
quent reference to the series of interlinked threats (terrorism, crime, drug
trafficking and illegal immigration) and the perceived need for coordination
and cooperation of policy responses, demonstrated the constitutive relation-
ship between the articulation of security threats and the development of new
security practices.
In late 1993 the Trevi Group was subsumed into the K4 committee,
established under Title VI of the Treaty on European Union (TEU), giving
it for the first time an institutional basis (Benyon 1994). In the TEU, where it
made reference to terrorism, it did so as part of one ‘area of common interest’,
below asylum and immigration policy, control of external borders and judicial
cooperation in civil and criminal matters, and as part of ‘police cooperation
for the purposes of preventing and combating terrorism, unlawful drug traf-
ficking and other serious forms of international crime’ (TEU, 1992: Article K. 1).
Having provided the rationality for the development of these new internal
security practices from the mid-1970s through until the late 1980s, references
to the threat of terrorism became less frequent in the period thereafter. In the
1990s the focus of the EU turned to other problems such as ‘organized crime’
and ‘immigration’. As part of its goal of ‘ever closer union’ (European
Council 1995), the EU continued to advocate increased cooperation in the
internal sphere of security policy.
The Amsterdam Treaty (1997) was particularly important with regard to
this aim. It included an objective to ‘facilitate the free movement of persons
[between member states], while ensuring the safety and security of their peo-
ples’, through the establishment of an ‘area of freedom, security and justice’
(AFSJ). As part of the process of implementing this objective, the European
Council at Vienna (European Council 1998) set out a ‘plan of action’ to ensure
the successful development of the AFSJ; this plan contained no references to
terrorism as an aspect of this policy. It did, however, establish ‘judicial coop-
eration’, ‘immigration policy’, ‘police cooperation’ and ‘the fight against all
important forms of organised crime’ as important issues in this area. Similarly,
the EU’s first multi-annual internal security programme, the Tampere Programme
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152 Christopher Baker-Beall

(European Council 1999), which established a whole raft of policy proposals
and initiatives in this area, contained only a passing reference to terrorism.
Monica den Boer’s (2003a: 1) assessment that the EU, in the period before
11 September 2001 and in relation to the development of internal security
governance at the EU level, was primarily focused on other security problems
seems particularly apt. She notes that terrorism was ‘demoted to a position
amidst other internal security concerns’, alongside ‘illegal immigration and
organised crime’, with the EU rarely making reference to the threat of terrorism
during this period – thereby creating the impression that ‘the issue of terrorism
had temporarily disappeared from the stage’ (den Boer 2003a: 1).
This second section has put forward three main arguments. First, the dilemma
of ‘international terrorism’ that afflicted Western European states during the
1970s facilitated a change in the way in which European governments
responded to terrorism. Second, beliefs about terrorism, including the type of
threat it was thought to represent, shaped beliefs about how best to respond
to terrorism, playing a key role in not only the formulation of transnational
counter-terrorism responses but also the creation of an intergovernmental
framework for cooperation on a range of issues related to cross-border law
enforcement. Third, as the EC/EU’s internal security governance structure has
evolved, the threat of terrorism, although initially invoked to justify or legit-
imize a much wider range of internal security measures, was during the 1980s
and 1990s thought to have reduced in importance.

The ‘fight against terrorism’ and the strengthening of new modes of

security governance in the EU
This section investigates the way in which the threat of terrorism has, since
the events of 11 September 2001, re-emerged as a serious concern for the EU.
Importantly, it is argued that the threat of terrorism has been invoked by
the EU to justify or legitimize the continued strengthening of new modes
of internal security governance within the EU area. The section aims to
demonstrate how the EU’s ‘fight against terrorism’ is constituted through the
re-articulation of a number of dominant beliefs about terrorism identified in
the previous two sections, including the belief that terrorism represents an
extreme threat to the EU and its member states. In particular, it is argued that
the dilemma posed by terrorism in the post-9/11 world has led policy makers
to interpret the threat as somehow ‘new’ or different to the terrorism of the
past. However, although the threat is thought to have changed, it remains
the case that the EU counter-terrorism response is still largely guided by the
role of the interior ministers and this, it is argued, can in large part be
attributed to the governmental tradition established during the 1970s.
The events of 11 September 2001 pushed terrorism back to the top of the
political agenda for most Western states. This was especially the case in the EU,
where ‘terrorism was resurrected with all its political salience after this date’
(den Boer 2003a: 1). However, whereas the United States chose to frame its
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response to the events of 9/11 as a ‘war on terror’, the EU advocated a quite
different approach. This response was revealed in the ‘joint declaration’ by
the heads of state, the European Parliament, the Commission and the
high representative on 14 September 2001, which reintroduced the idea of
a ‘fight against terrorism’ (European Union 2001). Like the ‘war on terror’, the
‘fight against terrorism’ can be understood as a meta-narrative through which
particular security practices are constituted and counter-terrorism responses
formulated. With striking similarity to the way in which the threat of terror-
ism had been interpreted in Western European security discourse(s) during
the 1970s and 1980s, the EU meta-narrative on terrorism tapped into and
rearticulated the ideas of (non-state) terrorism as both a major threat to its
member states and to its citizens, as well as an inherently immoral activity.
The language of the ‘joint declaration’ was particularly revealing in this
respect, in that it spoke of the 9/11 terrorist acts as ‘acts of savagery’, an
‘assault on humanity’, an attack ‘against us all, against open, democratic,
multicultural and tolerant societies’, as well as a threat to ‘global solidarity’
(European Union 2001). This condemnatory moral narrative could also be
detected in the Conclusions and Plan of Action of the Extraordinary European
Council Meeting, released on 21 September by the European Council (2001),
which stated that the attacks on 11 September were ‘barbaric acts’ that
represented a threat to ‘our common values’, and which emphasized that the
threat of terrorism, in the early twenty-first century, would provide a ‘challenge
to the conscience of each human being’.
Whereas in the 1970s the dilemma posed by terrorism was interpreted as
being ‘international’ in dimension, in the post 9/11 era the dilemma posed by
terrorism was interpreted as being somehow ‘new’ and different from the ‘old’
forms of terrorism. What has underpinned this idea that terrorism should be
seen as ‘new’, in the context of EU counter-terrorism policy, is the belief that
the main threat to the EU comes from terrorist organizations such as
Al-Qaida, including groups that are inspired by Al-Qaida. This belief was
thought to have been confirmed by the events in Madrid on 11 March 2004,
and in London on 7 July 2005. Indeed, the first time the EU explicitly revealed
that its response to terrorism was influenced by the idea of ‘new’ terrorism was
in the European Security Strategy (European Council 2003). The document
stated that ‘increasingly, terrorist movements are well resourced, connected
by electronic networks, and are willing to use unlimited violence to cause
massive casualties’. The threat of the ‘new’ terrorism was argued to be ‘global
in scope’, to pose ‘a growing strategic threat’ and having links to ‘violent
religious extremism’. The ‘new’ terrorism was described as ‘dynamic’; it was
argued that ‘left alone, terrorist networks will become ever more dangerous’.
The document also linked this ‘new’ form of terrorism to the threat posed by
weapons of mass destruction (WMD), stating that ‘we [the EU] are now …
entering a new and dangerous period in which a proliferation of these weapons
may occur’, and furthermore ‘the most frightening scenario is one in which
terrorist groups acquire weapons of mass destruction’. Since its re-emergence
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154 Christopher Baker-Beall

after 9/11, the ‘fight against terrorism’ meta-narrative has continued to emphasize
the idea that terrorism should be perceived as a ‘new’ and ‘constantly evolving’
threat (Council of the European Union 2009: 50).
Importantly, the perceived threat of the ‘new’ terrorism was utilized in
order to provide the justification and rationality for increased cooperation
between member states in this policy area, as well as agreement on a whole
raft of policy initiatives. The Extraordinary European Council Meeting
(European Council 2001) outlined a five-step plan to combat terrorism, which
included: enhancing police and judicial cooperation; developing international
legal instruments; putting an end to the funding of terrorism; strengthening
air security; and coordinating the EU’s global action. Possibly the most sig-
nificant of these steps was the objective of ‘enhancing police and judicial
cooperation’, which highlighted an intention on the part of the EU to reach
agreement over the introduction of the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) and
adoption of a common definition of terrorism. It also included a recommendation
to the JHA Council that member states be encouraged to ‘implement as
quickly as possible the entire package of measures decided on at the European
Council meeting in Tampere’ (European Council 2001). Given that terrorism
had barely featured in any of the policy discussions in the run up to the
completion of the AFSJ, this assertion that the measures contained within the
Tampere policy document would need to be implemented ‘as quickly as
possible’, in response to just one terrorist attack (albeit a particularly devas-
tating one), reflected what can be interpreted as an EU predilection towards
‘matching pre-existing policy proposals to new problems’ (Bossong 2008: 36).
Indeed, Raphael Bossong (2008) has outlined how the ‘window of opportunity’
(see den Boer 2003b) provided by the attacks in New York and on the
Pentagon, allowed for an acceleration of agreement over the Framework
Decisions on the EAW (2002) and on Combating Terrorism, establishing
them as central elements of the ‘fight against terrorism’.7 Significantly, the
European Commission (2001) also took the opportunity to extend its influence
over the development of EU counter-terrorism policy by presenting an inter-
nal strategy paper that was released three days prior to the Extraordinary
European Council Meeting. As well as placing agreement on the two frame-
work decisions at the heart of the plan – the internal strategy, entitled
‘Increasing the Capacity of the EU to Fight International Terrorism’, listed
18 proposals designed to maximize the role of the EU in relation to the
member states. This included an expanded role for agencies such as Europol
and Eurojust, development of cooperation in other international forums (UN,
G8, etc.) and increased border control, with Bossong (2008: 35), arguing that
‘at least 14 of the 18 proposals went clearly beyond, or had rather tenuous
links to, counter-terrorism, such as the review of EU visa or sanctions policy’.
This subtle expansion of the counter-terrorism policy agenda gives credence to
Geoffrey Edwards and Christoph O. Meyer’s (2008: 15) observation that the
Commission was ‘able to use its expertise and strategic role in the policy
process during a short period of uncertainty and intense pressure for political
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action to advance a range of long-standing but stalled legislative initiatives in
the area of JHA’. Instead of being a stand-alone policy, den Boer (2003a: 1)
contends that actually EU counter-terrorism policy represents a conflation of
policy agendas, with concern about terrorism providing the catalyst for ‘the
Europeanisation of crime control policies’.
The framing of the EU response to terrorism post-9/11, as predominantly
an internal security issue, can in part be explained by the dominance of a
particular policy community. Whilst the US response, the ‘war on terror’,
reflected the strength of the foreign and defence policy community in the
policy process, the EU’s response, the ‘fight against terrorism’, reflected the
strength of the justice and home affairs (JHA) policy community. The pre-
vious experience of EC/EU member states in dealing with terrorism through
cooperation between interior ministries during the 1970s had played a key
role in the establishment of this position of strength. As Edwards and Meyer
(2008: 14–15) have explained, in national and European security cultures,
situational threat analysis has been influenced by traditions of past strategic
action on the part of self-interested political actors and institutions. These
actors mould, instrumentalize and securitize threat perceptions for unrelated
motives that involve an increase in general influence (over the policy area) or
an increase in allocation of resources. As they confirm in relation to EU
counter-terrorism policy:

Pre-existing superior expertise, administrative capability and strategic inter-

ests also explain why the EU’s counter-terrorism efforts were subsequently
led by JHA ministers and related working groups/committees, not foreign
ministers as originally envisaged. JHA ministers were able to position
themselves as competent interpreters and actors in counter-terrorism.
From that position they were able to link the terrorist threat with other issues
on their agenda, including illegal migration and transnational crime.
(Edwards and Meyer 2008: 15)

This point is of particular importance in that it helps to reveal one of the key
functions of the ‘fight against terrorism’ meta-narrative, which until this point
in this analysis has remained understated. The primary function of the ‘fight
against terrorism’ has not necessarily been about developing an effective
counter-terrorism response per se; rather, its primary function has been as a
narrative drawn upon by the EU, its institutions and its agencies, as well as by
politicians and policy makers, as a way of legitimizing the expansion and
further coordination of a whole raft of JHA and more general crime-control
policies, many with tenuous links actually to combating terrorism.

Conclusion
This chapter has sought to support one of the main premises of this book,
most notably the idea that ‘beliefs are central to explanation in social science
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156 Christopher Baker-Beall

and that international theorists should not be so wary of interpreting beliefs
and explaining actions by reference to beliefs’ (from Bevir, Daddow and
Hall’s conclusion to Chapter 1, this volume). It has done this by engaging
with a case study of terrorism and responses to terrorism in Europe during
the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The analysis conducted
in this chapter highlighted the importance of two dilemmas involving terror-
ism, a wave of ‘international terrorism’ during the 1970s and the rise of
the ‘new terrorism’ during the 2000s, upon which EC/EU politicians and
policy makers have drawn to support and provide legitimacy for the creation
of new modes of transnational security governance at the European level,
at first developed in order to respond to terrorism. The chapter began
by arguing that since its emergence, the meaning of terrorism has shifted
many times, and as such its meaning remains contextual and contingent.
However, although the meaning of terrorism was demonstrated to be highly
contingent, it was argued that understandings of terrorism are characterized
by a number of dominant beliefs about what terrorism is and who the terrorists
are. These ideas about terrorism include the beliefs that: terrorism represents
an extreme threat to either an individual or a community; terrorism is an act
perpetrated predominantly by non-state actors; and terrorism should be
viewed as an intrinsically immoral activity. In turn, it was argued that these
beliefs about terrorism are inextricably linked to, and help to shape, responses
to terrorism.
Having established the importance of beliefs about terrorism in the context
of emerging forms of ‘joined-up’ security governance, the chapter focused
specifically on the EC/EU as a case study in support of this idea. First, it was
argued that the wave of terrorism that afflicted Europe during the 1970s
provided the basis for the creation of intergovernmental structures designed
to facilitate cooperation in this policy area. This framework became the
established governmental tradition through which future responses to terror-
ism and other internal security issues would be interpreted and organized.
Importantly, although the threat of terrorism provided the sole justification
for the establishment of these new security practices, a transformation in the
accompanying narrative occurred as the security structures became more
entrenched. Terrorism was no longer identified as a specific threat, but instead
was identified as one of a number of ‘new’ security issues, alongside ‘illegal
immigration’ and ‘organized crime’. Second, it was argued that in the after-
math of the 11 September 2001 attacks, the threat of terrorism was once
again identified as the most prescient threat to the EU, leading to the devel-
opment of the EU counter-terrorism response: the ‘fight against terrorism’.
However, as it has been demonstrated, although the EU put forward a
number of measures designed to combat the threat, the primary function of
the ‘fight against terrorism’ meta-narrative, in much the same way as when
the threat of terrorism was invoked during the 1970s, has been to legitimize
or justify the formulation of a holistic system of governance for the provision
of internal security.
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Notes
1 About 17,000 legal executions occurred under the ‘Reign of Terror’, and around
23,000 occurred illegally (Greer 1935, cited in Tilly 2004: 9).
2 Hoffman (2006) notes that countries as diverse as Algeria, Cyprus, Kenya and
Israel owe their independence at least in part to nationalist political movements
that employed terrorism as a tactic against the ruling colonial powers.
3 In essence, then, it is argued that counter-terrorism responses are shaped by two
key factors: first, a belief about what terrorism is, as well as who the terrorists are;
second, the established governmental tradition through which the response has
been coordinated.
4 The Trevi group was the first of a number of informal, ad hoc groups covering
terrorism, immigration, asylum, policing and law that were formed under the
umbrella of intergovernmental cooperation between 1976 and 1993, before the
creation of the EU.
5 Incidentally, it should be noted that the first time the EC mentioned the phrase
‘fight against terrorism’ in an official policy document was in the conclusions of the
London European Council meeting of 5–6 December 1986 (European Council 1986).
6 These documents can be found in Tony Bunyan’s (1997) book, Key Texts on
Justice and Home Affairs in the European Union.
7 According to Hans G. Nilsson (2002), the Framework Decisions on the EAW and
on Combating Terrorism had been prepared, within the Commission, for two years
prior to 9/11.

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den Boer, M. (2003a) ‘9/11 and the Europeanisation of Anti-Terrorism Policy: A
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Primoratz, I. (2004) Terrorism: The Philosophical Issues, Basingstoke: Palgrave
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10 Security politics and public discourse

A Morgenthauian approach
Hartmut Behr

Deconstructing the narrative about ‘realism’ is not about rehabilitating

Morgenthau. Rather, this chapter argues that we find in Morgenthau’s work
valuable epistemes for a critical analysis of international and global security and
foreign politics, and an avenue to interpretative political science. This tradition
is sensitive to spatial and temporal contingencies of political order and knowl-
edge, a position that he has in common with traditions of Continental European
philosophy. In this sense, the following discussions refer to all three questions
raised by the editors of this volume about beliefs and traditions of security policy
as well as about dilemmas that might have changed respective beliefs and
traditions. Two points are with regard to Morgenthau and the conclusions we
can draw from his approach for our analysis of global security are of great
importance – as it is hoped will become clear during the following discussions.
First, Morgenthau’s beliefs about foreign and security policies find their
background in a tradition that has been critical, for epistemological and
practical reasons, of the nation-state and its role in European (and later on
world) history. As he explained, he saw himself not as an advocate of national
and power politics, but as an analyst (this certainly has been confused in his
appropriation in wide circles of the discipline of International Relations –
IR). Second, this belief has been confirmed in his writings in the wake of the
global dilemma of nuclear weapons from the 1950s onwards and the nucle-
arization of the Cold War conflict. In this regard, there is more continuity
than change in his thinking.
Morgenthau understood ‘realism’ (and likewise the adjective ‘realist’) as the
characterization of an epistemological position which entails his well-known
criticisms of ‘idealism’ and his anti-positivist dismissal of ‘empiricism’ and
‘rationalism’ (as in Morgenthau 1962a, 1962b, 1946, 1944). This understanding
communicates most clearly from a lecture he gave on Aristotle in the winter
term of 1947 at the University of Chicago, when he described ‘realism’, but
also ‘rationalism’, ‘empiricism’ and ‘idealism’ as epistemologies. ‘Realism’
means for him primarily the social, political and historical contextualization
of theory and human agency and, at the same time, the acknowledgment of
mind-independent patterns of politics,1 instead of analysing, and acting in,
‘reality’ due to abstract principles, due to some, as he argues insignificant,
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Security politics and public discourse 161

knowledge claims gained through the collection of data bruta, or due to idealized
wishful thinking. His understanding of ‘realism’ as epistemology entails five
commitments which are: the ‘Standortgebundenheit’ of political theory, knowledge
and agency; the question of objectivity; the human condition of politics; a
twofold concept of power; and finally an epistemological ethics of anti-hubris.
I will discuss those commitments in the remainder of the chapter and then ask
how they inform our understanding and interpretation of global security.

The ‘Standortgebundenheit’ of political theory, knowledge

and political agency
Throughout his oeuvre Morgenthau argues that all theory and theoretical
analysis are contingent upon factors the occurrence of which we had no
knowledge and the consequences of which we could not foresee. However, it
was not until a talk at the University of Maryland in 1961, with the title ‘The
Intellectual and Political Functions of a Theory of International Relations’
(Morgenthau 1962b), that he used the precise term ‘standortgebunden’ to describe
the spatial and temporal contingency of political and social theory and
knowledge. The term ‘standortgebunden’, or ‘Standortgebundenheit’, is from
sociologist Karl Mannheim (1936, 1984) and is a key concept of his sociology
of knowledge. It describes the circumstance that social theory always depends
upon the social and political environment in which it has been formulated and
in which it is supposed to operate. This term endorses a relationist and per-
spectivist understanding of objectivity (more on that below in the next section).
Accordingly, all social and political knowledge is historical and spatial in its
essence. In Morgenthau’s third of his ‘Six Principles of Political Realism’ from his
Politics Among Nations, we find no fewer than three paragraphs that explicitly
explain this position in relation to the concepts of power and interest:2

[The] kind of interest determining political action in a particular period

of history depends upon the political and cultural context within which
foreign policy is formulated. The goals that might be pursued by nations
in their foreign policy can run the whole gamut of objectives any nation
has ever pursued or might possibly pursue.
The same observations apply to the concept of power. Its content and
the manner of its use are determined by the political and cultural envir-
onment … Power covers all social relationships which serve that end,
from physical violence to the most subtle psychological ties by which one
mind controls another.
What is true of the general character of international relations is also
true of the nation state as the ultimate point of reference of contemporary
foreign policy … [The] contemporary connection between interest and the
nation state is a product of history, and is therefore bound to disappear in
the course of history.
(Morgenthau 1978)
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162 Hartmut Behr

Morgenthau’s epistemological position of ‘Standortgebundenheit’ thus coincides
with his criticism of the rationalist and positivist ideas of historical progress,
techniques of social engineering and the rationality of the ‘Age of Reason’,
which all require a universal standpoint of knowledge from which to derive those
ideas and respective political strategies for their realization. Such a standpoint,
however, does not and cannot exist according to the notion of ‘Standortge-
bundenheit’. Further to his publicized oeuvre, we have additional evidence
from his lectures of 1949 and 1952, called ‘Philosophy of International Relations’
(particularly that of 31 January 1952) as well as most from letters between
Morgenthau and Gottfried Karl Kindermann, a PhD student of Morgenthau
at the University of Chicago and later Professor of International Relations at the
University of Munich. In a letter from June 1961 Kindermann suggests and
Morgenthau agrees on a large chapter of a German edition of Morgenthau
papers with the title Realismus als Revolte gegen den historischen Optimismus
(Realism as revolt against historical optimism).

The question of objectivity

A second philosophical commitment resonating with realist epistemology is
to be learned from Morgenthau’s very first of his ‘Six Principles … ’, which
contains a terminologically difficult, because most mistakable sentence:

Political realism believes that politics, like society in general, is governed

by objective laws that have their roots in human nature.
(Morgenthau 1978)

What could open the door to a mistaken positivist interpretation of Morgenthau

more than this sentence, especially in an intellectual climate of US Political
Science in the 1950s and 1960s that was obsessed with finding objective social
laws, their representation in theory, and the predictability of politics according
to such laws? However, when we contextualize this statement, we decipher a
thoroughly hermeneutic position. Our attention has to be placed here on
Morgenthau’s use of ‘objective’ and ‘objectivity’ when he states that politics
were governed by ‘objective laws’. It is helpful to consult here another
quotation, now from the third of his ‘Six Principles … ’:

Realism assumes that its key concept of interest defined as power is an

objective category which is universally valid, but it does not endow that
concept with a meaning that is fixed once and for all.
(Morgenthau 1978)

As we can see here, objectivity does not refer to an eternal sameness of reality,
i.e. to a reality of never-changing characteristics which would be knowable and
describable on the basis of ever-valid, truthful sentences; rather, objectivity is
understood by Morgenthau in the philosophical tradition of Friedrich
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Security politics and public discourse 163

Nietzsche, Max Weber and Heinrich Rickert as an analysis based upon
explicitly formulated conceptual distinctions in order to identify, recognize
and analyse qualities of an object in question; thus of qualities which form
part of the object studied itself and which reveal themselves from the object
(i.e. ex re, emanating from the object/thing). They become cognizable only by
clear and elaborated concepts applied to our attempts to understand and
analyse the object in question. This is a very different understanding of
objectivity than the understanding promoted by positivist science and every-
day language; it is an understanding of objectivity that Nietzsche describes as
‘our concept of this thing’, which would be more complete the more ‘different
eyes we can use to observe the thing’ (Nietzsche 1969: 19; also Nietzsche
1990; for the influence of Nietzsche on Morgenthau, see Frei 2001).3
Finally, we see that Morgenthau describes ‘interest defined as power’ as
such an epistemological concept that would deliver an ‘objective [in the sense
explained above] category’, and which would be ‘universally valid’, but only
as an epistemological tool to identify, recognize and analyse reality and not as
an empirical or ontological statement about, or a representation of, reality.4

The human condition of politics

If we reconsidered the fundamental realist epistemological view of the existence
of a mind-independent reality – or mind-independent aspects of reality – the
question arises of what this exactly means in relation to political realism.
A metaphor used by Morgenthau points to political anthropology as he writes in
the second of his ‘Six Principles’:

The difference between international politics as it actually is and a

rational theory derived from it is like the difference between a photograph and
a painted portrait. The photograph shows everything that can be seen by
the naked eye; the painted portrait does not show everything … , but it
shows, or at least seeks to show, one thing that the naked eye cannot see: the
human essence of the person portrayed.
(Morgenthau 1978)

This metaphor suggests that a photograph would show political reality as it

were, whereas a painting would lose out against the photograph in terms of
the resolution of the object portrayed, but would add a new aspect that the
photo would not (be able to) show: he calls it ‘the human essence’, also
‘human nature’, and we can translate this into human imagination and
agency and their impact on, and constitution of, political reality. It is about
political theory and the conceptual perspectives applied to decipher this
component and impact, both of which neither representation, nor description,
nor (a priori) rationalizations or idealist visions of reality, could identify or
portray. However, how is human agency to be construed in its relation to
Morgenthau’s main analytical concepts, i.e. those of interest and power?
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164 Hartmut Behr

We here have to understand Morgenthau’s threefold conceptualization of the
relations between power, interest and morality (as discussed in ‘Commitments
of a Theory of International Relations’, 1959; here Morgenthau 1962c: 59):
First, morality can limit ‘the interests that power seeks and the means that
power employs to that end’; second, ‘morality puts the stamp of its approval
upon certain ends and means’; and third, ‘morality serves interests and power
as their ideological justification’. In conclusion, Morgenthau argues that all
manifestations of politics and their multiple empirical forms (as political
institutions; systems of representation, decision making, diplomacy and
negotiation; war and peace; international organizations; the international
system of states; etc.), which are to be seen as expressions and creations of
human agency, could best be made visible, cognizable and studied through
the application of the concepts of power, interest and morality, and their
interrelation.
It is of great interest here to see (and to correct) the confusion which
Morgenthau’s concepts of power, interest and morality could, and did, cause
in the discipline of IR when taken as ontological statements about reality,
rather than as epistemological concepts. A striking example, which tells a
whole story about the mistaken image of Morgenthau as a defender and
promoter of the nation-state, ‘its’ raison d’état and power politics can be
learned from a correspondence with Henry Kissinger during the 1950s. In
1949, Morgenthau published an article called ‘The Primacy of National
Interest’, in which he describes ‘national interest’ as a heuristic device, criti-
cizing all attempts to essentialize, reify or define national interest, what it is or
of what it may consist. He writes that national interest is ‘the standard of
evaluation of foreign policies planned and pursued’ (Morgenthau 1949a: 208),
and thus would operate as a critical device for reflecting upon foreign policy.
‘National interest’ is hence not to be seen as some sort of statement on what
the interest of the nation is, rather than as a synonym for critical reflection
upon foreign politics. This synonym is called ‘national interest’ not for any
substantive or substantializable reasons, but in opposition to universal moral
standards according to Morgenthau’s anti-idealist criticism and his warning
of moral crusade(r)s.5 Insofar, national interest comprises and ‘solders’ interest,
power and morality into one concept; however, not in an ontological sense as
raison d’état6or in a normative sense as a claim for power politics, but as an
historically contextualized epistemological concept and heuristic tool for the
analysis and critique of a distinct, contingent political environment, namely
that of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century world of nation-states and its
fragmentation into particularistic actors.7
Linking this back to the question of what Morgenthau’s talk of political
‘facts’ precisely means, we now see that all kinds of different political con-
stellations and their spatio-temporally divergent forms are – and exactly this
represents the perennial ‘fact’ of politics – created through human agency. This
circumstance remains the same throughout human history in that man is ‘not
simply a product of nature, but both the creature and creator of history and
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politics in and through which his individuality and freedom of choice manifest
themselves’ (Morgenthau 1962a: 16); in brief, man is an Aristotelian ‘zoon
politikon’,8 the creator of political order.
With regard to this perennial factor, Morgenthau speaks quite ineptly of a ‘law’.
Even if his actual writings are very concise and clear, he appears quite often
to have used terminology, as in this case, that was prone to become mistaken
and which sounded occasionally even positivist. Regarding his use of ‘law’, we
find, however, more clarification in his 1944 article ‘The Limitations of Science
and the Problem of Social Planning’, where he writes that social laws were on
a level that is not ‘the mythological level of absolute certainty and predictability,
but that of statistical averages and probability’ at best (Morgenthau 1944: 79).
Morgenthau’s philosophical commitment of men being the creator of political
order and this being a perennial factor of politics consists of a political
anthropology that construes men as constituted by a natural desire of sociability,
power and love.9 Most revealing in this case is his short article ‘Love and Power’
(1962d) and his argument that both grow from the basic anthropological
condition of loneliness. In the effort and struggle to overcome loneliness,
humans engage in three activities, or better forms of agency: religion, love
and power, since the condition of loneliness would be unbearable. Religion,
love and the desire for sociability and power in their role to transcend lone-
liness hence become the forces and faculties for creation of community and
political order – and remain this role as creative sometimes also destructive,
however perennial forces of politics.10 According to these views, power
appears not as social and political domination or a materialist capacity, but
rather as humans’ puissance and potency to act in order to transcend their
own natural limitations.11 In his lectures from the winter terms of 1949 and
1952 we read the very instructive formulation of power as ‘a pluralism of
antagonisms’. Ultimately, the emphasis on power in Morgenthau and his
philosophical commitment to a political anthropology of human beings as
creators and creatures of politics is the attempt to bring man and the human
factor back into politics and is thus to be seen as intertwined with his criti-
cism of rationalism, empiricism and idealism, and all attempts to rationalize,
measure and fabricate political order. As such, power itself is neither good
nor bad: it can be both productive and destructive; what is more or less justified,
thus judgeable in a moral sense, are the means to accomplish and exert power.

A twofold concept of power12

In his early European works Morgenthau distinguished meticulously between
two concepts of power – an empirical and a normative concept – while he
missed out to make this important distinction explicit in his English, post-
emigration writings even though it is still visible to an informed reader. We
have no concrete evidence as to why Morgenthau did not define his concept
of power in his English writings as sharply as he did in his German and
French ones.13
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166 Hartmut Behr

Generally, Morgenthau understood power not in terms of material capabilities.
Power was for him a psychogenic (i.e. mentally and intellectually originated,
but materially manifesting) condition which rested on inter-subjective relations.
It could not be acquired through an endogenous accumulation of financial
means and/or weaponry; rather power was for Morgenthau created through
the interaction of people: as a result and quality of human action. The dis-
tinction he made in his European writings between ‘Macht’ and ‘Kraft’
(Morgenthau 1930a: 9; 1934b: 33), and ‘pouvoir’ and ‘puissance’ (i.e. between
‘power’ and ‘puissance’, the latter being understood as the faculty and capability
to act, to express oneself and to be creative) rested, therefore, not on power
being the means to some kind of end, but on power being an end in itself. In
Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, Morgenthau put the distinction between
power more figuratively: ‘(man) is the victim of political power by necessity;
he is a political master by aspiration’ (Morgenthau 1946: 153).

‘Pouvoir’: the empirical concept of power

In modern societies, Morgenthau argued, power, evoked through the drive to
prove oneself, was predominantly empirically traceable in the form of the animus
dominandi, ‘the desire for power’ (1946: 165), which literally means the lust for
domination among people. Morgenthau was aware of the necessity to deal with
this concept analytically as socio-political developments in modern societies
had reduced power to a political tool of domination. Ideologies had gained
momentum in the nineteenth century with nationalism, liberalism, conservatism
and socialism, and climaxed in the early twentieth century with fascism and
communism. The rise of ideologies concerned Morgenthau as they restricted
human drives and deprived people of their capacities. Nationalism was parti-
cularly at the centre of Morgenthau’s attention as the principle of sovereignty
provided nation-states with the means to enforce homogeneity domestically
through the institutionalization of education, a re-interpretation of history through
which history was narrated as a teleological process, and the standardization
of language (Snyder 2011: 58).
Further, ideologies promoted mediocrity as humans were not able fully
to utilize their creative abilities within an ideological framework such as the
nation-state. Ideologies are established to create a discourse of legitimacy for
the current political order, but they also provide ‘ontological security’ (Giddens
1984: 375). Retaining the social structures is, therefore, a vital expression of
this legitimacy and security. An alteration of these structures through the
creative abilities of humans ultimately means that people are threatened with
losing their creative abilities which would only be used to support the ideologized
reality by constraining them into bureaucratic order. For Morgenthau, in this
ideologized environment, the drive to prove oneself had to exhaust itself in
the form of the animus dominandi. Morgenthau’s use of terminology reveals
that this empirical concept of power rested on Weber’s well-known definition
of power. He defined power as ‘the probability that one actor within a social
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relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance,
regardless of the basis on which this probability rests’ (Weber 1978: 53).
Indeed, in Politics Among Nations we find a similar definition by Morgenthau.
He remarked that ‘[p]olitical power is a psychological relation between those
who exercise it and those over whom it is exercised. It gives the former con-
trol over certain actions of the latter through the impact which the former
exerts on the latter’s minds’ (Morgenthau 1985: 32).
This understanding of empirical power led numerous IR scholars across
otherwise divergent fields of disciplinary thinking such as from neo-realism,
neo-liberalism, but also post-structuralism (e.g. George 1994, 1995; Tickner
1991, 1992, 2005), to see in Morgenthau the supporter of power politics while
they nearly exclusively referred to Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations. Yet,
Politics Among Nations cannot be read as a theory, let alone a grand theory
as some argue (such as Jervis; see critical of this understanding Behr 2010:
215). The concept of power he presented here was understood by Morgenthau
as the empirically dominant version in an ideologized world, but equally we
see that he was fundamentally opposed to such an understanding of power,
which reduced power to an unhindered lust for domination.14

‘Puissance’: the normative concept of power

Normatively, Morgenthau aspired to a different kind of power than the
‘pouvoir’ that prevailed in the ideologized world of the early and mid-twentieth
century. This is the case because ‘[to] say that a political action has no moral
purpose is absurd’, as ‘political action can be defined as an attempt to realize
moral values through the medium of politics’ (Morgenthau 1962d: 110).
Puissance as normative power ought to be the defining factor in politics, i.e.
people are empowered to act together through the alignment of their antag-
onism of interests in order to create their life-worlds in self-determination.
Puissance was for Morgenthau also the self-capability to create identity
because it is not achieved through the distinction from ‘otherness’, but in
togetherness. With reference to Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch as the
one who is able to create his/her own identity without invoking ideologies and
homogenizing morale (Nietzsche 1969: 111), politics was for Morgenthau a
social realm in which people would not have to succumb to structural obli-
gations manifested in ideological dichotomies of good and bad, right and
wrong, or friend and foe, but puissance enabled people to follow their interests
and participate in the collective and public creation of their own life-worlds and
political orders.
To sum up: on his way to establishing a positive connotation of power Mor-
genthau relied primarily on Nietzsche. It was he who showed Morgenthau that
the will to power rested on the ability to discern. The will to power finds its
expression in the ability to understand nihilism and to overcome it by attaching
value to initially insignificant moments. Morgenthau picked up this ‘facteur
psychologique, la volonté de puissance’ (Morgenthau 1933: 43) already in the
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168 Hartmut Behr

1930s and even as late as the 1970s, when he acknowledged – referring to
Hannah Arendt’s distinction – that being a homo faber rather than an animal
laborans enables the human to imbed ‘his biological existence within technologi-
cal and social artefacts that survive that existence. His imagination creates new
worlds of religion, art, and reason that live after their creator’ (Morgenthau
1972: 146).
The ‘thinking partnership’ (Young-Bruehl 1982: xv) between Morgenthau
and Arendt offered Morgenthau the opportunity to consider the effects of
power on a society at large. For Arendt ‘[power] corresponds to the human
ability not just to act, but act in concert. Power is never the property of an
individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the
group keeps together’ (Arendt 1970: 44). Hence, power signifies the consent of
people to come together in discourse and action by creating institutions, laws
and norms (Arendt 1970: 41). Power then became for Morgenthau a collec-
tive affair which enabled people to strive for the constant construction of their
life-worlds and political order by forming societies as temporal manifestations
of the common good in relation to which the integrity and dignity of human
life were considered.

An epistemic ethics of anti-hubris

Finally, we can conclude an epistemologically based realist epistemic ethics of
anti-hubris. This ethics speaks out strongly against definite knowledge claims
about, and representational reifications of, the political à la, for example,
‘neo’-’realism’. This ethics is aware of the limits of the know-ability of the
political; it is careful with explaining causes and effects of political occur-
rences; with presuming rationalist relations between cause and effects; with
concluding predictions of political events; with essentialist statements about
the nature and identity of events and actors (and as such is anti-essentialist);
and finally with definite policy conclusions deduced from such claims and/or
statements. Claiming knowledge of the political, which would allow all this,
appears from a Morgenthauian perspective as hubris.
It is an important part of Morgenthau’s realism, which culminates in this
epistemic ethics of anti-hubris, not only to have elaborated philosophical
commitments discussed for a critical political analysis, but further to have
emphasized the circumstance – which is inherent most explicitly in his reference
to Mannheim’s concept of ‘Standortgebundenheit’ – that theoretical explication,
analysis and understanding depend on spatio-historical constellations and
their contingencies that bear on how one frames the problems, concepts and
perspectives of analysis, and how one creates the field in which knowledge
and interpretation even take place. Consequently, also the concept of
‘national interest’ in Morgenthau is ‘standortgebunden’ itself, thus historically
contingent, ephemeral and transient, as are his ‘Six Principles of Political
Realism’ themselves.15 Nevertheless, they both establish and provide a regime
of knowledge (production) and critical analysis of international politics.
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Each of the five epistemological commitments discussed translates into one
interpretative theorem when applying to questions of international and global
security.

‘Standortgebundenheit’ and the dynamics of security

The ‘Standortgebundenheit’ of political theory and agency leads to a perception
of security which emphasizes its dynamics, transformations, shifts –
perspectivism, in short. On this view, security can neither be defined, nor
conceptualized, nor accomplished as one fixed, determined and definite
situation, but is different and transformative in different social, political, cul-
tural, historical, etc., contexts. This insight is akin to the constructivist belief
as communicated by Alexander Wendt that, for example, during the Cold
War Soviet missiles had a different threat potential and perception to people
in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) than in the Federal German
Republic (FRG), and that one would need to explore security cultures and
respective perceptions of security; however, we can share, or could have
shared, this insight not only with Wendt in the 1990s (see Wendt 1992), but
already with Morgenthau since the 1960s, or even, given interdisciplinary
openness, from the constructivist writings from sociologists Georg Simmel,
Alfred Schütz or Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann (Morgenthau 1965).
Without this openness, however, Wendt comes indeed as a surprise and inno-
vation to IR, although he admits himself in the ‘Preface’ to his Social Theory
of International Politics (Wendt 1999) that his theory would have become
more elaborate if he had only known Simmel’s and Schütz’s writings.

Security as an ‘objective’, i.e. perennial concern of politics

As changing and transforming as security may appear, be conceived of and
defined in relation to cultural, historical, political, etc. perceptions, it is
nevertheless to be acknowledged as a perennial factor in international poli-
tics; i.e. security is something with which people and politics will always be
concerned. This appears to be the case the more security is dynamic, trans-
formative and perception-dependent. This fact that security is of perennial
concern to people and politics may be highlighted by the simple fact that it is
a major topic, though very divergently constructed, from Thucydides, over
Hobbes to Kant, up to present-day international and global politics and IR.
The topic of interpreting global security importantly acknowledges this
inherently constructivist, but ‘factual’ character of security.

Humans as subjects and objects of security

In relation to the constructivist and anti-essentialist character of security,
humans appear as subject and objects of security. Thus security and insecurity,
are – irrespective of their perceptual character – a product of human will and
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170 Hartmut Behr

political agency. According to a Morgenthauian understanding, there are no
references possible to some kind of parochial ‘national interest’ or raison
d’état according to which security and security politics would abide by a certain,
determined rationale and according to which security and security policies
could be essentialized. This means, however, that not only security changes over
time and in relation to political, social, etc. circumstances and perceptions, but,
too, security frameworks and institutions – or what is perceived as such –
change and can be changed with regard to their members, focus, policies
and context (such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – NATO – after
the Cold War).
According to the above-discussed interpretative theorems of security –
the constructivist nature of security as well as security being of perennial
importance to international and global politics – we can now formulate two
of the most distinct Morgenthauian approaches to security: how to define
what security ‘is’ for a society; and how to act upon it.

The question of security as public discourse about political order

The development of perceptions of security and of security politics is,
according to Morgenthauian thinking, a matter of public debate, rather
an undertaking of so-called foreign policy elites. We need here to refer to
Morgenthau’s concept of normative power as discussed above, according to
which the development of each political order should be a question of the
peaceful contestation of the antagonism of interests which is elementary of
politics (see further on this Schou Tjalve 2008). This position may be some-
what puzzling since, on the other hand, we know of Morgenthau’s criticism of
mass politics and of the mediocrities of democratic politics, especially when
he emphasizes politics and particularly international politics as an art rather
than a simple technique, including the art of diplomacy and negotiation.
However, we have to contextualize this criticism in his wider criticism of
modernity, modern rationality and ideologies. In this wider context we indeed
need to admit a certain quandary of Morgenthau’s position which on the one
hand, promotes an open and wide public discourse about political order,
including security, and on the other hand, the existence of certain disqualifying
attitudes towards the public and the public’s foreign politics judgement
leading such a discourse. A close look into his writings, however, does not
disqualify the public per se to engage such a discourse and people being
competent political actors, but does so ‘only’ under the conditions of moder-
nity and bureaucratic politics which would have subjected the general public
to ideologies, indoctrination and domination through modern rationalities of
the state and nationalism.
We thus run into the problem in Morgenthau which seems to be char-
acteristic of a wide spectrum of critical theories – from Herbert Marcuse and
the Frankfurt School, to Arendt, to Michel Foucault to Michael Shapiro and
post-structuralism more generally – and which consists of the following,
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widely unresolved questions: when the political subject is conditioned and
indoctrinated by ideologies, discourses, narratives, rationalities, etc., what then is
to be seen as the source of criticism of exactly those ideologies, discourses,
etc? Is there a space for criticism and what is called ‘resistance’ beyond those
ideologies, narratives, etc. accessible to the subject? What if ‘the’ subject is
abolished? Who is becoming aware and critical of the conditioning and
indoctrinating character of ideologies, discourses, narratives, etc. and their
dominating influences when, at the same time, the individual appears to be
determined by those ideologies, discourses, etc? Who has the intellectual and
material abilities and capabilities to resist and to create alternatives? It
appears that in most oeuvres we encounter the idea, even if hidden, that it is
the intellectual, the academic, maybe the sophisticated literate, art director or
journalist – the intelligentsia – who are thought of as having those abilities
and capabilities. This may be so, but it has some dissatisfying taste to it,
I would think. Following the idea of the public creation of interpreting,
developing and acting upon security, the question of how to emancipate and
educate a critical public would be of primary concern, as well as the conceptual
elaboration of such ‘spaces of criticality’ beyond ideologies, indoctrination
and domination.

The avoidance of irreversible risks

Finally, the practical implications of a Morgenthauian epistemological ethics of
anti-hubris result in the avoidance of irreversible risks produced by (ostensible)
‘security’ policies. This means that security policies have to avoid that their
consequences may be worse than the initial insecurity they were supposed to
counter.
In this theorem, we find Morgenthau’s discharge of all kinds of ‘security’
strategies built upon nuclear weapons deployed by the United States during
the Cold War, such as nuclear deterrence. Rather than taking the risk of the
complete annihilation of humanity through the deployment of nuclear weapons,
Morgenthau favoured a Kennanian version of Western economic containment
against the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. For the same argument and
theorem, he dismissed US backyard politics towards Latin and South America
as well as international alliance building invoking Truman’s ‘domino theory’.
For Morgenthau, such policies would essentialize some kind of ‘national
interest’ and develop strategies in functional linearity from this ideological
belief and often hypocrisies (allying with dictatorships, for instance), instead
of carefully contextualized analyses of distinct constellations and judicious
and prudent action.16

Notes
1 This position is informed by the hermeneutic axiom of the mutual constitution
between observer and the thing being observed, and was evident for Morgenthau
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172 Hartmut Behr

through his early readings of Continental European philosophy, most importantly
here of Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel, Alfred Schuetz
and Karl Mannheim. Most pronounced here may be Schütz and his differentiation
between two levels of social ‘reality’ and respective constructions (see Schütz
1962).
2 I quote here from his ‘Six Principles … ’ although there would be many other
references to his oeuvre. I have chosen to interpret his ‘Six Principles … ’ for the
following reason: these few pages from Politics Among Nations are often misread
as his most ‘realist’ remarks and as the canon of ‘realism’ in the sense of ‘Realpo-
litik’. Quoting here and in the following from this source will demonstrate that this
understanding is clearly mistaken and that we find (even) in his ‘Six principles’ very
clear hermeneutic and interpretative epistemological commitments.
3 See also very instructive here the entry ‘Max Weber’, Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, 2007; also Ringer (1997) on Weber’s epistemology.
4 Interesting here is Morgenthau’s discussion of objectivity in an unpublished
manuscript – written in German (from the late 1920/early 1930s) – on Metaphysik
and ethics where he distinguishes between three types of objectivity: scientific,
normative and empirical. All three forms are to be understood as categories of
knowledge (‘Eigenschaft der Erkenntnis’), thus objectivity depends upon which
concepts we use to recognize and analyse qualities of an object, which are, how-
ever, inherent in and emerging from the object and which are made visible (only) in
relation to the concepts analytically applied.
5 This critique of Morgenthau is similar to Max Weber’s critique of ‘ethics of
conviction’ (‘Gesinnungsethik’) opposite an ‘ethics of responsibility’; however,
Morgenthau does not refer to Weber as his references to Weber are generally very rare.
6 Herein consists my critique of Ashley’s epistemologically oriented discussion of
realism and Morgenthau’s as ‘technical realism’; see Ashley 1981.
7 Despite these very clear statements, Morgenthau’s article on the ‘Primacy of
National Interest’ (1949) contributed heavily to Morgenthau’s (mis)reception as
Realpolitiker by policy makers and academic colleagues alike. Thence this paper
became embraced last but not least by Henry Kissinger. As we know from many
letters between Morgenthau and Kissinger during the 1950s, Morgenthau dis-
tanced himself from Kissinger’s embrace, emphasized his actual understanding
of ‘national interest’ and criticized Kissinger for a lack of political judgement.
Morgenthau’s opposition against his reception of realism as Realpolitik and
respective ontological assumptions communicates further from his correspondence
with Gottfried-Karl Kindermann from the early 1960s regarding a German trans-
lation of Politics Among Nations. We learn from respective letters the attempt to
dispel all eventualities that this book might be received as Realpolitik (as it had
occurred in a German review of the Politics Among Nations by Werner Link).
Morgenthau notes in a letter from 5 April 1961, regarding an imputed proximity
between his book and Heinrich Treitschke: ‘This is a complete misunderstanding
of my position. Treitschke was the ideologue of the nation state … and of power.
I am an analyst of the nation state and of power and have emphasized time and
again their negative moral connotations. More particularly, I have emphasized the
obsolesce [sic] of the nation state as a principle of political order.’
8 See here also Morgenthau’s (2004) lectures on Aristotle, given in 1970–73 at the
New School; also his unpublished Aristotle lectures at the University of Chicago
already from winter 1947.
9 He explicitly argues against the Hobbesian picture of ‘homo homini lupus’; see
Morgenthau 1945, and an unpublished manuscript in German (1930a) on
Die Herkunft des Politischen aus der Natur des Menschen (i.e. The derivation of
the political from human nature; translation by Morgenthau himself noted on the
manuscript in handwriting).
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10 The modern mind in its attempts to rationalize, measure and fabricate human
agency and politics would have become blind to those perennial forces and their
significance for human life and politics. Morgenthau refers metaphorically to figures
like Shakespeare’s Richard III or Don Juan, and narrations such as Aristophanes’s
Symposium, which would represent men’s struggle for love and power and the tragedy
of failure. He writes: ‘Of all creatures, only man is capable of loneliness because
only he is in need of not being alone … It is that striving to escape his loneliness
which gives the impetus to both the lust for power and the longing for love … ’
(Morgenthau 1962d: 247).
11 In manuscripts written in German, such as Der Selbstmord aus gutem Gewissen
(1930b; Suicide with good consciousness) or Die Herkunft des Politischen aus der
Natur des Menschen (1930a), Morgenthau speaks of ‘Kraft’ and ‘Tatkraft’ when
referring to men’s longings regards religion, love and power.
12 I owe much insight in the following to intense and fruitful discussions with Felix
Rösch.
13 One reason might be related to the unfavourable climate towards Germany during
and shortly after the Second World War, which is certainly why Morgenthau
attempted to separate himself from his past, including from his intellectual legacies.
As we know from his former student Richard Ned Lebow, ‘questions about his
German past were taboo’ (2003: 219). A second reason was presumably the shift of
interest from purely theoretical towards works with a higher focus on con-
temporary policy issues (Guzzini 1998: 24), such as ‘The Problem of German
Reunification’ (1960) or Vietnam and the United States (1965). Still, this does not
settle the question why Morgenthau did not attempt to improve the clarity of his
concepts after his emigration to the United States, especially since he seemed to
have realized this problem very clearly. To Michael Oakeshott, Morgenthau wrote
in 1948: ‘I can now see clearly that my attempts to make clear the distinctions
between rationalism and rational inquiry, scientism and science, were in vain.
I think I was fully aware of the importance and difficulty of these distinctions
when I wrote the book, and it is now obvious to me that I have failed in the task to
make my meaning clear’ (Morgenthau 1948, HJM-Archive Box 44).
14 In the aforementioned letter to Oakeshott, Morgenthau (1948) argued that this
ideologization had reduced the creative abilities of humans because they were
unaware of their capacity to create their life-world (HJM-Archive Box 44).
15 As I have also argued elsewhere; see Behr 2005, 2010; Behr and Heath 2009.
16 We find those criticisms by Morgenthau in his 1949 article ‘The Primacy of National
Interest’ (Morgenthau 1949a, discussed above), throughout his several editions of
Politics Among Nations, and his argumentation in favour of international law and
the United Nations, as well as most explicitly in his contributions to the Salzburger
Humanistengespräch throughout the 1970s (Morgenthau 1970).

References
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——(1970) On Violence, Orlando: Harcourt.
Ashley, R. (1981) ‘Political Realism and Human Interest’, International Studies Quarterly
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Behr, H. (2005) ‘“Misreadings” in IR Theory: Ideologiekritische Anmerkungen zum
Realismus und Neo-Realismus’, Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft ZPol/Journal of
Political Science 1: 61–90.
——(2010) A History of International Political Theory: Ontologies of the International,
Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
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174 Hartmut Behr

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Index

9/11 14, 35–52, 65–66, 142, 152 China 28, 29, 30

classical realism 3
Afghanistan 20 climate change 18
al-Qaida 146, 153 Clinton, B. 41
Arafat, Y. 57, 61, 64, 65, 66 Common Foreign and Defence Policy
Aksenyonok, A. 101 (EU) 27, see also European Security
Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and Defence Policy
118, 119 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament,
Arendt, H. 168, 170 112
Attlee, C. 80, 81 Chirac, J. 114
Augustine of Hippo 62 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty 114
AusAID 20 Conservative Party (UK) 83, 87, 112
Australia 20, 28, 29, 76 constructivism 3, 9, 10, 19
Axworthy, L. 20 Cook, R. 84, 85, 86
Copenhagen school 19
balance of power 1, 66 Council of Europe 148
beliefs 2–5 critical theory 3, 5, 19
Bevin, E. 110
Biden, J. 38 Darwin, C. 58
Blair, T. 21, 77, 85, 86, 87, 88 Decolonization 79
Blue Streak missile 82, 111 Department for International
Bosnia 21, 84, 85 Development (UK) 20, 27
Britain, see United Kingdom dilemmas 2, 7–9, 35–36
British Commonwealth 76, 80, 81, 88, Douglas-Home, A. 111
111
Bush, G. W. 14, 35, 36, 40, 41, 47, 49, East Timor 21
53–72, 65–66 Enlightenment 56
Bush. G. H. W. 41 epistemic communities 17
Buzan, B. 19 epistemology 160–61
European Coal and Steel Community 80
Cambodia 132 European Commission 27, 154
Cameron, D. 87, 88 European Defence Community 80
Canada 20, 76 European Economic Community 74, 80,
Carr, E. H. 15 82, 83
Carter, J. 40 European Neighbourhood Policy 27
Chechnya 99, 101 European Parliament 78, 149, 152
Cheney, Dick 37, 38, 60 European Security and Defence Policy
Churchill, W. S. 75, 77, 78, 79, 81, 83, 27, see also Common Foreign and
88 Security Policy
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178 Index
European Union (EU) 27, 28, 88, Japan 28
142–59, see also European Economic Johnson, L. B. 45
Community (EEC)
Evans, G. 128 Kant, I. 58
Evatt, H. V. 126 Kennan, G. 62–63, 117, 171
Kennedy, J. F. 45, 48, 82, 117
Falk, R. 19 Kissinger, H. 164, 172
feminist theory 3, 19 Kosovo 21, 84, 85–86, 87, 97
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
(UK) 20, 76 Labour Party (UK), 112, see also New
France 14, 77, 81, 107, 108, 111, Labour
112–15, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120–21, 145 Lauterpacht, H. 130
Freedom Agenda 54, 56, 66 Lavrov, S. 100, 102
French Revolution 58, 144–45, 147 Lebanon 66, 67
Fukuyama, F. 54, 55 liberalism 17, 18, 19, 135, 136
Liberal Democrats (UK) 87
de Gaulle, C. 112, 113 see also Gaullism Libya 21, 87
Gaullism 113 Lisbon Summit, 107
genocide 125–41 Lugar, R. 38
Genocide Convention 14, 125–41
Germany 14, 77, 81, 107, 108, 109, McMahon Act 110
115–18, 119, 120–21, 169 Macmillan, H. 80, 82
global governance 9, 11, 92 Manhattan Project 110
globalization 8, 9, 21, 23, 84, 86, 87 Mannheim, K. 161, 168
Gref, G. 99 Marx, K. 55, 58–59
Mayall, J. 131
Haiti 21 Middle East 53, 56, 57, 58, 63, 64, 67
Heath, E. 83 Milosevic, S. 84
Hitler, A. 59 missile defence 14, 107–24
Hollande, F. 120 money-laundering 26
Holocaust 59, 65, 128 Morgenthau, H. J. 1, 14, 15, 62–63,
humanitarian intervention 20–21, 22, 160–76
125–41 McNamara, R. 117
human security 19–20, 22
narratives 9, 13
India 28, 29, 30, 81 Nassau Agreement 82
Indonesia 28, 29 national interest 1
interpretive theory 2–14 Nazism 55
institutionalism 3–4, 9, 10, 24 see also neoclassical economics 23
liberalism neoliberalism 24, 84, 86, 87
International Criminal Court 130 New Labour 10, 87, see also Labour
International Commission on Party
Intervention and State Sovereignty 22, Niebuhr, R. 62
see also Responsibility to Protect Nietzsche, F. 59, 167
International Court of Justice 129, 130 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)
international humanitarian law 127 10, 11, 17, 25, 26, 27
International Monetary Fund (IMF) North Atlantic Treaty Organization
82–83 (NATO) 27, 28, 78, 80, 81, 88, 96, 97,
Iraq 53, 57, 64, 66, 77, 86, 87, 101 100, 107, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120,
Iran 57, 64 170
Islamist terrorism, 86, see also terrorism nuclear weapons, 107–24, 160
Israel 28, 59, 60, 61, 65 Nuremberg Trials 129
Israel-Palestine conflict 53, 64, 66
Ivanov, I. 97, 99 Obama, B. 40
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Index 179
Pakistan 29, 81 Sredina, V. 96
Palestine 53, 57, 60, 61, 66, 67 standortgebunden 14, 161, 168, 169
Papua New Guinea 30 state terrorism 145
peace research 18 statism 19
Portillo, M. 83 Strategic Defence Initiative 118, 119
positivism 2–3, 4, 5 structural realism 3, 9
postmodern theory 3, 5, 19 structural violence 18
Powell, C. 38, 63, 65 Suez crisis 75, 81, 83
power 165–68 Syria 57
Primakov, E. 96
private military and security companies terrorism 14, 26, 125, 142–59, see also
25, 30 Islamist terrorism
public diplomacy 28, 29–30 Thatcher, M. 78
Putin, V. 14, 93, 94, 95, 102–3 traditions 2, 5–7, 35–52, 108–10
Truman, H. S. 171
rational choice theory 3, 4, 24
rationalities 9, 13
Reagan, R. 40, 50, 117, 118 Universal Declaration of Human Rights
realism 3; 10, 17, 18, 19, 61–64, 87, 135, 126
136, 160 see also classical realism; United Kingdom 14, 19, 73–91, 107,
structural realism 108, 110–12, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120,
resistance 9, 13 121
Responsibility to Protect 22, 129 United Nations 65, 96, 127, 149
Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) United Nations Charter 14, 125–41
21, 77 United Nations Development
Rice, C. 56, 57, 66 Programme 19
Robertson, Lord 39 United Nations General Assembly 22,
Rousseau, J.-J. 58 128, 149
Rumsfeld, D. 38 United Nations Security Council 80, 84,
Russia 14, 28, 92–106, 145 see also 88, 97, 129
Soviet Union United States 20, 35–53, 53–72, 76, 78,
Rwandan genocide 84, 125, 130, 132, 80, 82, 83, 97, 100, 101, 107, 110,
133, 134, 136, 137 111, 112, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119,
129, 152
Sandys, D. 110
Safonov, A. 101 Vietnam 28, 63
Second World War 74, 82, 87, 115
securitization 19 War on Terror 37, 56, 99, 152
security governance 10, 17–34 Weber, M. 166, 172
Shanghai Cooperation Organization 28 Wendt, A. 169
Shawcross, Sir Hartley 129 Wilson, H. 82, 83, 148
Shue, H. 131 Wolfowitz, P. 38
Singapore 29, 30
Skybolt missile 82
Solomon Islands 20 Yeltsin, B. 94, 96, 99
Somalia 21, 132 Yugoslavia 130, 132
Soviet Union 18, 63, 81, 83, 95, 111,
118, 145, 171 Zubov, V. 100

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