Mary Kaldor Part 3

You’ve been involved in the reflection upon the European human security doctrine. Does a European emphasis on human security not inhibit its development as an independent international actor (that could reinforce its political position with military might), and thus actually reflect its dependency on external interests through the NATO?

I think exactly the opposite. I think the only way that Europe can become an international actor is if it has a human security agenda. I think so for several reasons. First of all, as we know from the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, you can’t actually any longer defend your interest through conventional military forces. Secondly, the EU is a new kind of actor. It’s not a traditional nation-state, but rather a new kind of polity, and its security policy has to reflect the nature of that distinctiveness. The EU started of course as a peace project, as a way of bringing together the countries of Europe, and its way of acting independently in our world has to be to try and extend the peace project. And the way you extend the peace project is through human security – which might well mean that you need military forces, because sometimes there are cases when protecting individuals requires repelling aggression. But it means you are using military forces in a completely different way: not to defend European interests, except insofar as European interests are in global security, but rather to defend ordinary people on the ground. And normally those military forces would be used together with policemen and other civilians. We call that a human security force in our doctrine rather than a military force. And then there’s a third argument, which is that I think the European project will never be popular if it is seen as a new military superpower. That’s what we saw in the French ‘no’: the French Left combined with the xenophobic Right to defeat the European project because they thought it was neoliberal and militaristic, and I think the same was the case with the Irish, and I think that only if you can convince them that what Europe is doing is human security and not militaristic, will you get the Left on board.

But then one could argue that ‘human security’ linked to intervention is a new way of playing the governance game, in which the world is to conform to our European conception of security, as for instance Mark Duffield (external pageTheory Talk #41call_made) does.

While I really enjoyed Mark Duffield’s book Security, Development and Unending War, I think it is too negative. There is something very seductive about his argument that we have human rights at home and human (in)security abroad, in which human security approaches are viewed as a way of mitigating the terrible consequences of our exclusive consumerism and social insurance policies. But then you ask: what is the alternative, and I think the real problem is that for him there’s no middle position between imperial intervention and global revolution. When you look at his alternative, he talks vaguely about solidarity and I think there just has to be a middle position, or at least we have to believe in the existence of a middle position, which for me is reflected in a human security agenda, which I would argue is not imperialist because it has to be executed within a multilateralist framework based on the equality of human beings. And we simply can’t use conventional warfare, our actions have to be different, and that’s how I understand the middle position.

But then there’s the incapacity of the ‘international community’ to intervene when it’s necessary, or, as you call it in your book Reflections on Globalization and Human Security, the ‘security gap’ flowing from our conception of human security and the daily fear of violence of millions worldwide. And one way to close this gap is the way Mark Duffield criticizes, namely, by letting the invisible hand of the aid ‘market’ tackle the gap. How do you see role of the increasing non-state aid, development and security ‘industry’?

I think it is quite worrying, actually. Perhaps I’m simply somewhat old-fashioned, but I think there are certain things you just can’t leave to be governed by the market, and especially security is one of them. I think there are huge problems with private security companies and with NGOs: there is this terrible contracting culture that is built around international missions, which wastes enormous amounts of money through layer upon layer upon layer of contracts. If somebody is contracted to build a school, and they subcontract it, and each subcontractor takes their part, and by the time we get to the school, there’s no money left. The NGOs, furthermore, are often more worried about their donors than about the ones they’re building the school for. So there are all kinds of problems that are related to the privatization culture. On the other hand, I don’t think that at this point you can do without these entities, because there simply isn’t the capacity on a national or global scale to engage in those projects, as you point out. I mean, even parts of the UN, such as UNDP, are forced to get their money not from states but from foundations and other donors, which makes them just as worried as NGOs about their donors, and inhibits effective problem-solving. But I think hard security issues, anything to do with war fighting, anything related to using guns, should be kept out of the private sphere, which the Americans didn’t do in Iraq and Afghanistan, as Peter Singer shows in external pageTheory Talk # 29call_made.

Mary Kaldor is Professor and Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Governance, London School of Economics and Political Science.