Midterm

HUMAN SECURITY

MARY KALDOR

Professor of Global Governance, London School of Economics and Political Science1

E-mail: m.h.kaldor@lse.ac.uk

The essay poses the question whether the so-called Arab spring offers the potential to complete the

1989 revolutions. It first discusses what was hoped to be achieved in 1989, and it then argues that the

post-1989 arrangements failed to prevent new security challenges from emerging. The Islamist

threat came to play the role that the Communist threat had played to the West or the Western threat

had played to the East. The essay then turns to the question on what needs to happen if current events

are to lead to something better. It argues that there is a need to overcome the legacies of the past and

adapt institutions to the global present. The world must move away from nationalist and bloc think-

ing towards a concept of human security – a concept which came out of the Helsinki Agreements in

1975. The case of the recent intervention in Libya illustrates the need for a human security approach

in practice.

Keywords: Arab spring, Cold War, Helsinki Agreements, human security

JEL-codes: F52, F55

INTRODUCTION

It is a special honour to receive an honorary doctoral degree here in Budapest.

This is not only because of my family connections. It is also because my formative

political and intellectual experience was here in Hungary in the 1980s. It was here,

as well as in other Central European countries, that I learned the concept of civil

society – an idea that had become dormant in the West. And it was through my

1588-9726/$20.00 © 2011 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest

Society and Economy 33 (2011) 3, pp. 441–448 DOI: 10.1556/SocEc.33.2011.3.1

1 The author received an honorary doctoral degree from Corvinus University of Budapest on

April 18, 2011. This essay is based on the lecture delivered by the author on the occasion.

discussions with young people and with opposition intellectuals that I absorbed

the significance of the coming together of peace and human rights – something I

now describe as human security.

This is another turbulent moment in world history when the people power that

was experienced here in 1989 is sweeping across the Middle East. So the question

I would like to ask in this short lecture is whether the so-called Arab spring offers

the potential to complete the 1989 revolutions, to fulfil the aspirations of those

who longed for democracy and an end to political violence. The regimes in the

Middle East are capitalist and authoritarian, sometimes masked by a sham demo-

cratic process. They are not so very different from many post-Communist re-

gimes. So what do these revolutions betoken for the future of this type of regime

and for the world? I will start by talking about what we hoped to achieve in 1989

and then what went wrong. I will then ask what needs to happen if current events

are to lead to something better.

ASPIRATIONS IN 1989

I would like to begin by telling you my Sarajevo story. A fisherman fishes a mer-

maid. She says she will give him three wishes if he throws her back into the sea. So

he wishes to be young and handsome, he wishes to have a beautiful wife and he

wishes to be very important. He throws the mermaid back into the sea and he

wakes up in a grand ornate room. He looks in the mirror and he is young and hand-

some. A beautiful woman comes into the room and she says ‘Wake up Ferdinand!

We have to go to Sarajevo today!’ I told this story when I went to Sarajevo in 1991

just before the war there began. During the 1980s I had three wishes. I wished for

democracy in Eastern Europe. I wished to get rid of cruise missiles. And I wished

for the Cold War to end. And all my wishes came true and one day a Yugoslav

friend rang up and said ‘Wake up Mary! There’s nationalism and crime and ethnic

cleansing! You have to go to Sarajevo today!’ That’s what happened after 1989.

So what should we wish for now?

Actually one could argue that the Cold War ended 14 years before the revolu-

tions in Central and Eastern Europe when the Helsinki Agreement was signed in

1975. It was that agreement that first brought peace and human rights together. As

many of you will know, the Helsinki agreement comprised three baskets. The first

was the security or peace basket; it was an agreement about the territorial status

quo in Europe and about the non use of force on the European continent. The sec-

ond basket was about economic and scientific cooperation. And the third basket

was about respect for human rights. Both the democratic opposition in Central Eu-

rope and the peace movement in Western Europe could be viewed as offspring of

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442 MARY KALDOR

that agreement. For the former, the Helsinki agreement provided a legal instru-

ment to publicise their situation and the reduced international tension offered a

small but significant political opening. The growth of the peace movement in

Western Europe in the early 1980s was a reaction to the proposed new generation

of nuclear weapons, which raised fears of a return to pre-Helsinki hostility and

military confrontation. Through the mass mobilisation of that period and through

growing dialogue and communication across the East–West divide, many of us

came to understand and assimilate what the indivisibility of peace and human

rights really meant. Some like me in the peace movement came to realise that de-

mocracy in Central and Eastern Europe was the way to end the Cold War and the

arms race. And many (though not all) in the East European opposition came to un-

derstand that reducing the conflict between East and West created space for civil

society. We opposed the Cold War not simply because we were afraid of another

world war but because the existence of enemies and mutual threats sustained a war

mentality that provided a justification for suppressing freedom.

The end of the Cold War was a huge achievement. It meant an end to the Com-

munist regimes and to the kind of binary black–white thinking that inhibited polit-

ical creativity and social change in the West as well. And yet many are disap-

pointed. The holding of elections did not necessarily bring democracy in the sense

that ordinary people could influence the decisions that affect their lives. The intro-

duction of markets increased wealth for a few but also led to new inequalities and

social injustices. The re-emergence of nationalist and xenophobic ideologies, the

spread of transnational crime, and the growing privatisation of violence exploded

in some regions like the Balkans or Central Asia. Moreover, this combination of

weak but authoritarian states, social and economic injustice, and new or renewed

exclusivist political currents were not just a post-Communist phenomenon. They

affected the West as well as other parts of the world.

So what went wrong? Part of what went wrong was our failure to dismantle the

legacies of the past and, in particular to transform the thinking and the institutions

associated with the Cold War. To be sure, military budgets were cut but this was

not the same as disarmament and demobilisation. Soldiers who were unpaid sold

their services and their weapons in a newly expanded market in violence contrib-

uting to the toxic mixture of crime and insecurity in Africa, the Balkans or Af-

ghanistan. Intelligence and internal security services were less affected and con-

tinued to exist. And in the United States, the research and development budget

was protected and this laid the basis for new military technologies in the 21st cen-

tury. The Warsaw Pact was dismantled and a new institution, the Organisation of

Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was established on the basis of the

Helsinki Agreement. But NATO was not dismantled; indeed it expanded

eastwards. And in post-Soviet space a new organisation, the Commonwealth of

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HUMAN SECURITY 443

Independent States (CIS) was created. This proliferation of security organisations

with different philosophies prevented each other from providing security.

To some extent, security thinking did change as a consequence of the end of the

Cold War. A new humanitarian discourse characterised the OSCE as well as or-

ganisations like the European Union (EU) and the United Nations (UN). But that

discourse competed with deeply embedded geopolitical mentalities. New na-

tionalisms constructed new ‘we-them’ dichotomies. And the terrorist attacks on

New York on September 11 2001 led to a new ‘War on Terror’ that bore many of

the hallmarks of the Cold War. The Islamist threat came to play the role that the

Communist threat had played to the West or the Western threat had played to the

East. The War on Terror led to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It provided new

justifications for increasing military budgets again, a new lease of life for intelli-

gence services, and new arguments for cracking down on civil liberties. In the

Middle East, for example, where authoritarian regimes have lasted longest, the ar-

gument that Islam is unsuited to democracy and that any political space would be

filled by political Islam was used to defend the West’s continued support for those

regimes.

But what happened can not only be explained in terms of the legacies of the

past. We also have to understand what went wrong in terms of the present and, in

particular, our failure to adapt to the phenomenon that we ourselves created that

we call globalisation. Globalisation is an all encompassing term with many differ-

ent meanings. When I use the term I am referring to growing interconnectedness

as a result of the revolution in information and communications technologies and

air travel. I am also referring to the growth of a global market and the dominance

of a fundamentalist belief in deregulation and privatisation. And in addition I am

referring to the erosion of the nation-state and the fact that fewer and fewer deci-

sions that affect our lives are taken at the level of the nation-state. Democracy is

being effectively hollowed out at the very moment that people are demanding

more and more democracy. Terms like transition, convergence criteria, or struc-

tural adjustment offered a standard set of recipes to be adopted by all parties so

that decisions about the allocation of resources are no longer taken in national

capitals. Market reform often meant the dismantling of social safety nets. It was

the global market and not popular votes that, for example, has thrown out govern-

ments in Ireland and Portugal. The consequence is that democratic choices are

largely reduced to the manipulation of the media. Appeals to nationalist and xeno-

phobic prejudices are often ways to define political difference in a context where

meaningful policy differences are less and less possible. At the same time, the

weakness of global institutions permitted an unregulated global market to plant

the seeds of asset bubbles and financial crisis.

Society and Economy 33 (2011)

444 MARY KALDOR

Europe should have offered an alternative way out of this paradox. It is poten-

tially a mechanism for solving the global democratic deficit. For Central Euro-

pean countries, certainly, membership in the European Union mitigated some of

the consequences of the combination of past legacies and the global present. But

Europe is an unfinished project. It widened but did not deepen. It acquired more

members, a common currency, and a common visa policy, but did not fundamen-

tally democratise its institutions. It was used as a scapegoat by national politi-

cians. And in the competition between national and European rhetoric, the former

seems to be winning out, making Europe unfit to cope with the economic crisis

and unable to offer an alternative to the War on Terror. Indeed, there is a real risk

that the whole project will unravel.

So does the new wave of people power offer us the possibility for completing

the hopes and aspirations of `1989? Does it provide an opportunity to end the War

on Terror and the new divide between the so-called “West-secular semi-demo-

cratic capitalist regimes” and Islamism, the political Islamist ideology? Could it

democratise today’s authoritarian regime and bring social justice as well? What

do we learn from what went wrong after 1989 that could make things right now?

HUMAN SECURITY AND ITS DIMENSIONS

In what follows I emphasise the security dimension – the need to overcome the

legacies of the past and adapt our institutions to the global present. There is a need

to move away from nationalist and bloc thinking that permeates our institutions

towards a concept of human security – the concept that expresses what came out

of the Helsinki agreement. This means not only changing our thinking but dis-

mantling the security institutions of the past that sustain current authoritarian re-

gimes and creating new institutions that are better adapted to a globalised situa-

tion. Of course we need security institutions but they have to be very different –

this is why I propose to apply the concept of human security.

Human security has three dimensions.

First of all, human security is about the security of individuals and the commu-

nities in which they live. This is the third basket of Helsinki – the human dimen-

sion. By emphasising the security of individuals rather than states, human security

implies a commitment to human rights but it does not deny the importance of the

more traditional state centred threats. Indeed, the threat, for example, of an attack

by an enemy state can also be described as a humanitarian threat.

Second, human security is about the interrelationship between freedom from

fear and freedom from want and about physical as well as material insecurity. This

is the second basket of Helsinki; the emphasis on economic, scientific and cultural

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HUMAN SECURITY 445

co-operation. It means that human rights do not just cover political and civil rights

but economic and social and cultural rights too.

Thirdly, human security implies an extension of rule-governed security as op-

posed to war-based security. It implies that relations between states are governed

by a law paradigm rather than a war paradigm. It is about the non-use of force in

relations between states and the extension of law-governed security to the whole

Euro-Atlantic area – the first basket of Helsinki. Or to put it another way, it is

about the blurring of the internal and the external. We are used to thinking of inter-

nal security as the domain of law and policing and external security as war and di-

plomacy. A human security approach implies that something like what we take for

granted internally has to apply externally as well.

The term ‘human security’ has been widely used and it has been criticised for

meaning whatever anyone wants it to mean. For some, the term is too ‘soft’. It

treats economic and social development as security issues and neglects the real

dangers people face in the context of political and criminal violence. If we tie the

term to the Helsinki baskets, then it has to have a hard dimension. It has to be

about protecting people from foreign military aggression, genocide, ethnic

cleansing, sectarian warfare, terrorism, violent crime, or other human rights viola-

tions as well as from extreme poverty or disease.

For others, the problem is the opposite. It is a way the great powers legitimate

the use of military force. NATO justified the war over Kosovo in 1999 in terms of

humanitarian intervention and the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, used

the term ‘human security’ to justify the invasion of Georgia in August 2008. Nei-

ther the Kosovo war nor the Georgian war can be described as human security.

Whatever the goals, the means did not conform to human security.

In other words, human security is a means as well as a goal. It may involve the

use of force and thus can be regarded as a hard security policy but the use of force

has to be directed towards protection rather than fighting or revenge. It means us-

ing the military in a different way, more like policing than war fighting. To put hu-

man security into practice we need something like global emergency forces – po-

lice, health services, fire fighters, etc. These forces would also include the military

but the aim would be to dampen down violence and to protect civilians not to fight

enemies.

Let me give two examples. One is about how thinking could change our ac-

tions. The attack on New York on September 11 2001 was treated as an attack by a

foreign enemy on the United States; it was compared to Pearl Harbor in 1941 and

justified what was described as pre-emptive defence against Iraq and Afghanistan.

Suppose it had been described as a ‘crime against humanity?’ That would have re-

quired a global police effort to capture the perpetrators and bring them to justice

instead.

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446 MARY KALDOR

The second example is the current intervention in Libya and is about how we

need institutions to implement human security. Like Kosovo, the goal of the inter-

vention in Libya is to protect civilians – a human security goal. But the means are

the classic instruments of war – air strikes. It is very difficult to protect civilians

from the air. The danger of air strikes is that people get killed, mainly soldiers but

also the very people you are supposed to protect; already rebels and some civilians

have been killed by mistake. Air strikes are also very polarising, increasing the co-

hesion of Gadhafi supporters behind an anti-imperialist rhetoric. At best they will

help the rebels win but leaving a legacy of bitter division. At worst the stalemate

between the rebels and Gadhafi will degenerate into the kind of new war that we

have witnessed in Africa, Iraq or Afghanistan.

From a human security perspective, the appropriate course of action would

have been to protect civilians throughout Libya and guarantee their right to peace-

ful protest. In the end, the prospects for democracy depend on the extent to which

the rebels can mobilise politically; thus the aim of any human security approach is

to dampen down violence and not support one side or another militarily. The first

task should have been to declare Benghazi and the liberated areas a UN Protected

Area or safe haven. Human security forces including both military and civilians

would have had to be deployed to help protect the liberated areas, provide human-

itarian and reconstruction assistance and support for a democratic political pro-

cess so that the liberated areas could provide poles of attraction for other parts of

the country. These forces would defend the protected areas robustly; they would

not attack Gadhafi forces but where, given the opportunity, they would try to ar-

rest those indicted by the International Criminal Court. They would, of course,

have needed air protection and indeed what has happened already helps to provide

conditions for a safe haven. But this is different from relying on military attacks

from the air alone. Of course, this did not happen since the world has not yet con-

structed human security capabilities.

But security forces have to be accountable to democratic institutions. So as

well as dealing with the legacies of the Cold War, we have to address the global

present and we have to institutionalise greater access to decision-making for ordi-

nary people at both European and global levels. We need, for example, an elected

President of Europe. We also need new types of taxes at a European level – a car-

bon tax, for example, or a tax on speculation so that European institutions are in-

dependently funded and are able to respond to crisis and social injustice across

Europe. We need to think about how the newly emerging democracies of North

Africa and the Middle East could be linked to Europe and what kind of

redistributive economic and social policies at European and global levels can help

to meet popular aspirations. And of course, we need to think about sustainability,

how these European and global institutions can respond to the combined chal-

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lenges of climate change, economic and technological transformation as well as

the power shifts from Europe to Asia and Latin America.

CONCLUSIONS

In the 1980s, it was through dialogue and communication that we developed new

ideas about how to see the world. Our big ideas, I have suggested, were about civil

society and human security. Can the new people’s movements in Europe and the

Middle East come together and formulate a new way of thinking which could help

to make today’s wishes come true? The revolutions in the Middle East have dis-

proved the assumption of Arab exceptionalism. The people on the streets of the

Middle East are asking for dignity and freedom; extremist Islamist currents have

been marginalised. As in 1989, they are showing that the power of voice and con-

science has the potential to provide the kind of stability that weapons and money

have failed to provide. So can this moment reinvigorate the momentum towards

human security and the democratisation of the European and global projects? If

my analysis is correct, this is what is needed to bring about the kind of democracy

that we hoped for in 1989 and to which young people in Europe and the Middle

East still aspire.

Society and Economy 33 (2011)

448 MARY KALDOR

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