Tournament: Voices | Round: 1 | Opponent: Lynbrook NA | Judge: Adam Bistagne
The aff’s threat construction shores up an exclusionary and violent identity for the US as a national security state in opposition to threatening Others and justifies mass violence
Grondin 04 (David, Associate Professor in the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa) “(Re)Writing the “National Security State” Raoul Dandurand Chair of Strategic and Diplomatic Studies AT
It is difficult to trace the exact origins of the concept of “national security”. It seems however that its currency in policymaking circles corresponds to the American experience of the Second World War and of the early years of what came to be known as the “Cold War”. In this light, it is fair to say that the meaning of the American national security state is bound up with the Cold War context. If one is engaged in deciphering the meaning of the Cold War prism for American leaders, what matters is not uncovering the “reality” of the Cold War as such, but how, it conferred meaning and led people to act upon it as “reality”. The Cold War can thus be seen as a rhetorical construction, in which its rhetorical dimensions gave meaning to its material manifestations, such as the national security state apparatus. This is not to say that the Cold War never existed per se, nor does it “make it any less real or less significant for being rhetorical” (Medhurst, 2000: 6). As Lynn Boyd Hinds and Theodore Otto Windt, Jr. stress, “political rhetoric creates political reality, structures belief systems, and provides the fundamental bases for decisions” (Hinds and Windt, cited in Medhurst, 2000: 6). In this sense, the Cold War ceases to be a historical period which meaning can be written permanently and becomes instead a struggle that is not context-specific and not geared towards one specific enemy. It is “an orientation towards difference in which those acting on behalf of an assumed but never fixed identity are tempted by the lure of otherness to interpret all dangers as fundamental threats which require the mobilization of a population” (Campbell, 2000: 227). Indeed, if the meaning of the Cold War is not context-specific, the concept of national security cannot be disconnected from what is known as the Cold War, since its very meaning(s) emerged within it (Rosenberg, 1993 : 277).11 If the American national security state is a given for realist analysts,12 it is important to ask whether we can conceive the United States during the Cold War as anything other than a national security state.13 To be clear, I am not suggesting that there is any such essentialized entity as a “national security state”.14 When I refer to the American national security state, I mean the representation of the American state in the early years of the Cold War, the spirit of which is embodied in the National Security Act of 1947 (Der Derian, 1992: 76). The term “national security state” designates both an institutionalization of a new governmental architecture designed to prepare the United States politically and militarily to face any foreign threat and the ideology – the discourse – that gave rise to as well as symbolized it. In other words, to understand the idea of a national security state, one needs to grasp the discursive power of national security in shaping the reality of the Cold War in both language and institutions (Rosenberg, 1993 : 281). A national security state feeds on threats as it channels all its efforts into meeting current and future military or security threats. The creation of the CIA, the Department of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Security Council at the onset of the Cold War gave impetus to a state mentality geared to permanent preparedness for war. The construction of threats is thus essential to its well-being, making intelligence agencies privileged tools in accomplishing this task. As American historian of U.S. foreign relations Michael Hogan observes in his study on the rise of the national security state during the Truman administration, “the national security ideology framed the Cold War discourse in a system of symbolic representation that defined America’s national identity by reference to the un-American ‘other,’ usually the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, or some other totalitarian power” (Hogan, 1998: 17). Such a binary system made it difficult for any domestic dissent from U.S. policy to emerge – it would have “amounted to an act of disloyalty” (Hogan, 1998: 18).15 While Hogan distinguishes advocates from critics of the American national security state, his view takes for granted that there is a given and fixed American political culture that differs from the “new” national security ideology. It posits an “American way”, produced by its cultural, political, and historical experience. Although he stresses that differences between the two sides of the discourse are superficial, pertaining solely to the means, rather than the ends of the national security state, Hogan sees the national security state as a finished and legitimate state: an American state suited to the Cold War context of permanent war, while stopping short of a garrison state: Although government would grow larger, taxes would go up, and budget deficits would become a matter of routine, none of these and other transformations would add up to the crushing regime symbolized in the metaphor of the garrison state. The outcome instead would be an American national security state that was shaped as much by the country’s democratic political culture as it was by the perceived military imperatives of the Cold War (Hogan, 1998: 22). I disagree with this essentialist view of the state identity of the United States. The United States does not need to be a national security state. If it was and is still constructed as such by many realist discourses, it is because these discourses serve some political purpose. Moreover, in keeping with my poststructuralist inclinations, I maintain that identity need not be, and indeed never is, fixed. In a scheme in which “to say is to do”, that is, from a perspective that accepts the performativity of language, culture becomes a relational site where identity politics happens rather than being a substantive phenomenon. In this sense, culture is not simply a social context framing foreign policy decision-making. Culture is “a signifying part of the conditions of possibility for social being, ... the way in which culturalist arguments themselves secure the identity of subjects in whose name they speak” (Campbell, 1998: 221). The Cold War national security culture represented in realist discourses was constitutive of the American national security state. There was certainly a conflation of theory and policy in the Cold War military-intellectual complex, which “were observers of, and active participants in, defining the meaning of the Cold War. They contributed to portray the enemy that both reflected and fueled predominant ideological strains within the American body politic. As scholarly partners in the national security state, they were instrumental in defining and disseminating a Cold War culture” (Rubin, 2001: 15). This national security culture was “a complex space where various representations and representatives of the national security state compete to draw the boundaries and dominate the murkier margins of international relations” (Der Derian, 1992: 41). The same Cold War security culture has been maintained by political practice (on the part of realist analysts and political leaders) through realist discourses in the post-9/11 era and once again reproduces the idea of a national security state. This (implicit) state identification is neither accidental nor inconsequential. From a poststructuralist vantage point, the identification process of the state and the nation is always a negative process for it is achieved by exclusion, violence, and marginalization. Thus, a deconstruction of practices that constitute and consolidate state identity is necessary: the writing of the state must be revealed through the analysis of the discourses that constitute it. The state and the discourses that (re)constitute it thus frame its very identity and impose a fictitious “national unity” on society; it is from this fictive and arbitrary creation of the modernist dichotomous discourses of inside/outside that the discourses (re)constructing the state emerge. It is in the creation of a Self and an Other in which the state uses it monopolistic power of legitimate violence – a power socially constructed, following Max Weber’s work on the ethic of responsibility – to construct a threatening Other differentiated from the “unified” Self, the national society (the nation).16 It is through this very practice of normative statecraft,17 which produces threatening Others, that the international sphere comes into being. David Campbell adds that it is by constantly articulating danger through foreign policy that the state’s very conditions of existence are generated18. If realists are now easily caricatured, they have only themselves to blame. They had become caricatures by their own self-description. Realism, and particularly its offshoot, strategic studies, helped make and was made by the Cold War (Booth, 1997: 92). Much of the Cold War state apparatus and military infrastructure remained in place to meet the challenges and threats of the post-Cold War era. If the attack on Pearl Harbor was the driving force of the postwar national security state apparatus (Stuart, 2003: 303), the 9/11 events have been used as a motive for resurrecting the national security discourse as a justification against a new ‘infamy’, global terrorism.19 Although in this study I am calling into question the political practices that legitimized the very idea of a national security state during the Cold War era, I find even more problematic the reproduction of a similar logic in the post-9/11 era – a rather different historical and socio-political context. As Simon Dalby highlights, Coupling fears of Soviet ambitions, of a repeat of Pearl Harbor, and of nuclear war, these institutions formed the heart of a semipermanent military mobilization to support the policies of containment militarism. If this context is no longer applicable, the case that the national security state is not an appropriate mode for social organization in the future is in many ways compelling. If security is premised on violence, as security-dilemma and national-security literatures suggest (albeit often reluctantly), perhaps the necessity of rethinking global politics requires abandoning the term and the conceptual strictures that go with it (Dalby, 1997: 21). A recent article by David Jablonsky in the U.S. Army War College’s journal Para- meters illustrates such an un-problematized view of a Cold War-like attitude of casting for new enemies and threats, such as global terrorism, that can justify a state of permanent war (Luke, 2002: 10): In those early years of the Cold War, American leaders fashioned a grand strategic vision of the US role in the world, which while innovative in terms of changing concept of national security, did not outrun the experiences of the American people as the Soviet threat unfolded. US leaders face a similar challenge today as they seek to educate the public that the domestic terrorist threat to physical security should not be allowed to skew the American grand strategy of global engagement designed to further that core interest as well as those of economic prosperity and value promotion. ... The new threat assures the continued existence if not growth of the national security state and will certainly cause increased centralization and intrusiveness of the US government. Nevertheless, the Cold War demonstrates that all this need not cause the rise of a garrison state or the diminishment of civil liberties (Jablonsky, 2003: 18). What puzzles me is that this viewpoint reflects an unquestioned normative statecraft practice that might be seen not only as possible but “wise”, since “we” all know that, in the end, the Cold War led to an “American triumph”... From a critical standpoint, national security discourse is constitutive of “social reality”: it is not neutral and it often serves to outfit state actions as objective responses to socio-political problems. U.S. state leaders now use this same discourse – the national security discourse – to wage a global war on terrorism. As Keith Shimko aptly points out, Times of war are no normal times. In addition to being periods of focused effort and all-out expenditure, ‘wartime’ might also be viewed as a period when some of the normal luxuries of life (e.g., material comfort or political liberties) are ‘sacrificed’ to the war effort. As a result, framing an issue as a war could lead to calls for restrictions on behavior and rights that are typically protected but come to be viewed as unaffordable luxuries during wartime (Shimko, 1995:79). The U.S. response to 9/11 is encapsulated as an armed struggle against a phantom enemy who replicates the tactics used in guerrilla wars in its capacity to strike any time, anywhere. The enemy is thus constructed as being both everywhere and nowhere, which allows state leaders to enact a security discourse of an Other against whom the U.S. must be protected as a legitimate and necessary one at the expense of some civil rights (e.g., colour tags for travellers and fingerprint biometric sensors in passports). A “state of war” is indeed incorporated into American political life: “For a society committed to armed struggle, there is little distinction between military and civilian life. ‘The cause’ becomes everything, justifying extraordinary measures, demanding larger-than-life sacrifices. Ordinary life is recruited into the ruthless binary that frames the struggle .... There is no room for a loyal opposition; to question is to betray” (Milner, Krishna, and Ferguson, 2001). In the context of a global war on terrorism, every citizen may become a “terrorist”. As Ronnie Lipschutz argues in After Authority: War, Peace, and Global Politics in the 21st Century, “all individuals, whether citizen or permanent resident, whether legal or illegal, become potential threats to state security” (Lipschtuz, 2000: 51). Surprisingly, not many American citizens contested or protested such undemocratic limitations on civil liberties. Why is that so? One possible answer is that a great many are convinced that such measures will not be applied to them and that their own rights and freedoms will not be threatened. They seem to believe that since they are not doing anything wrong, they are protected. Accordingly, they think that those whose privacy and rights are being violated have done something wrong and that they deserve it. As Iris Marion Young explains, this is where they err, for “the move from a relatively free society to one over which the state exercises authoritarian domination often occurs by means of just this logic: citizens do not realize how easily they may find themselves under suspicion by authorities over whose decisions there is no public scrutiny” (Young, 2003: 12). When societal and individual security is considered, the national security discourse produces more insecurity than security.20 We must therefore question state practices that threaten individuals, rendering the state a source of insecurity for its citizens : “Insecurity, rather than being external to the object to which it presents a threat is both implicated in and an effect of the very process of establishing and re-establishing the object’s identity” (Jutta Weldes, cited in Willey, 2002 : 29). National insecurity is thus revealed as the clear antonym of national security (Rosenberg, 1993 : 281 ; Der Derian, 1992: 75). Linguistically, “national insecurity” corresponds to the female and weak side of Cold War discourses (Tickner, 2001: 52 ; Peterson, 1992: 32). In effect, as Emily Rosenberg correctly observes, the power of national security linguistically comes from this binary opposition, where national security is empowered as representing a “strong emotive and symbolic power” inscribed in the male national security statist discourse (Rosenberg, 1993: 281). The national security state thus functions as a protection racket. Consequently, whether looking inward or outward, it must be rejected for its very discourse necessarily entails the unequal logic of protector-protected (Young, 2003: 14-15, 21). To understand American hegemonic power then is to understand how the theoretical foundations of U.S. hegemony influence the way U.S. leaders think about international politics generally and U.S. foreign policy in particular. As Marysia Zalewski points out, “... events in the world, issues in international politics, are not ontologically prior to our theories about them. This does not mean that people read about, say realism, and act accordingly, but that our (and by ‘our’ I mean theoriser/ global actors) dominant ways of thinking and acting in the world will be (re)produced as ‘reality’” (Zalewski, 1996: 350-51). The 9/11 attacks and the presence of a diffuse and transnational terrorist threat has convinced American state leaders that threats may come from within as well as from abroad. In a Cold War-like national security mindset, separating domestic from international politics was “business as usual”: it required paying attention to foreign and external threats. With a homeland security focus, the “boundaries” of the national security state are exploding inwardly. The “enemy” is not a foreign Other anymore; he may be American or he may strike on American soil. As Donald Pease puts it, “Overall, 9/11 brought to the light of day the Other to the normative representation of the United States. It positioned unheimlich dislocatees within the Homeland in place of the citizens who exercised rights and liberties on the basis of these normalizations. When the signifier of the Homeland substituted for the Virgin Land, the national security state was supplanted by the global state of emergency” (Pease, 2003: 17). The Other has become an undefined terrorist, with no specific territorial base. Just as Soviet communists were represented as barbaric, amoral, and inhuman, so is today’s terrorist. Conclusion Because invoking security is a political act and the discourses that construct dangers and endan- gered subjects are far from natural or neutral reflections of an independent reality, the larger social and political contexts within such discourses are invoked should also be given analytical attention (Dalby, 2002: XXI). In this piece, I have sought to explain how (American) realist theoretical discourses are mainly representative of the American experience of the Cold War. I have treated these historically-based discourses as political practices that frame and reproduce a national security state identity for the United States in the post-9/11 era. It is not the “reality” of the United States as a state that is cast in question by poststructuralists, but rather the way it is written as an unchanging and essentialized entity, as a national security state identity. Indeed, a state is always in the process of (re)construction; its identity is never fixed, nor is its legitimacy uncontested. As Campbell puts it, “with no ontological status apart from the many and varied practices that constitute their reality, states are (and have to be) always in a process of becoming” (Campbell, 1998: 12). The poststructuralist approach adopted here made it possible to reveal the normative issues arising in such discourses. In sum, to understand how American or American-based realist discourses facilitated the social construction of a Cold War with the USSR after World War II, one must understand the security culture that allowed for the development of political practices that ushered in the institutionalization of a national security state. On a more metatheoretical level, in International Relations, the poststructuralist/ postmodernist turn has made mainstream positivist scholars fear a lapse into complete relativism. As Christopher Butler points out, “Postmodernist relativism needn’t meant that anything goes. ... What it does mean is that we should be more sceptically aware, more relativist about, more attentive to, the theoretical assumptions which support the narratives produced by all scholars (in the original quote, Butler wrote “historians” for he was addressing historians), whether they see themselves as empiricists or deconstructors or as postmodernist ‘new historicists’” (Butler, 2002: 35). It is increasingly clear that realists of all guises in International Relations are more and more reluctant to take an inflexible position with respect to the ontological and epistemological assumptions underpinning the discipline. However, in viewing theory as practice, we recognize that our choices have a normative and political value which allows us to distinguish the important from the incidental. As a result, what people see as the “real world” is implicitly bound up with the epistemological, methodological and ontological stance they take in theoretical discourse. If the national security discourse that made the Cold War possible – in American realist discourses at least – is (re)applied to our own era, then a similar pattern of legitimizing and constituting a national security state will be reproduced.
Securitization causes mass death and makes their impacts more likely
Neocleous 8 (Mark, Prof. of Government @ Brunel) Critique of Security 2008 AT
Not only could bourgeois Europe be recast around the regime of capital, but so too could the whole international order as capital not only nestled, settled and established connections, but also ‘secured’ everywhere. Security politics thereby became the basis of a distinctly liberal philosophy of global ‘intervention’, fusing global issues of economic management with domestic policy formations in an ambitious and frequently violent strategy. Here lies the Janus-faced character of American foreign policy.103 One face is the ‘good liberal cop’: friendly, prosperous and democratic, sending money and help around the globe when problems emerge, so that the world’s nations are shown how they can alleviate their misery and perhaps even enjoy some prosperity. The other face is the ‘bad liberal cop’: should one of these nations decide, either through parliamentary procedure, demands for self-determination or violent revolution to address its own social problems in ways that conflict with the interests of capital and the bourgeois concept of liberty, then the authoritarian dimension of liberalism shows its face; the ‘liberal moment’ becomes the moment of violence. This Janus-faced character has meant that through the mandate of security the US, as the national security state par excellence, has seen fit to either overtly or covertly re-order the affairs of myriads of nations – those ‘rogue’ or ‘outlaw’ states on the ‘wrong side of history’.104 ‘Extrapolating the figures as best we can’, one CIA agent commented in 1991,‘there have been about 3,000 major covert operations and over 10,000 minor operations – all illegal, and all designed to disrupt, destabilize, or modify the activities of other countries’, adding that ‘every covert operation has been rationalized in terms of U.S. national security’.105 These would include ‘interventions’ in Greece, Italy, France, Turkey, Macedonia, the Ukraine, Cambodia, Indonesia, China, Korea, Burma, Vietnam, Thailand, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Bolivia, Grenada, Paraguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Philippines, Honduras, Haiti, Venezuela, Panama, Angola, Ghana, Congo, South Africa, Albania, Lebanon, Grenada, Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and many more, and many of these more than once. Next up are the ‘60 or more’ countries identified as the bases of ‘terror cells’ by Bush in a speech on 1 June 2002.106 The methods used have varied: most popular has been the favoured technique of liberal security – ‘making the economy scream’ via controls, interventions and the imposition of neo-liberal regulations. But a wide range of other techniques have been used: terror bombing; subversion; rigging elections; the use of the CIA’s ‘Health Alteration Committee’ whose mandate was to ‘incapacitate’ foreign officials; drug-trafficking;107 and the sponsorship of terror groups, counterinsurgency agencies, death squads. Unsurprisingly, some plain old fascist groups and parties have been co-opted into the project, from the attempt at reviving the remnants of the Nazi collaborationist Vlasov Army for use against the USSR to the use of fascist forces to undermine democratically elected governments, such as in Chile; indeed, one of the reasons fascism flowed into Latin America was because of the ideology of national security.108 Concomitantly, ‘national security’ has meant a policy of non-intervention where satisfactory ‘security partnerships’ could be established with certain authoritarian and military regimes: Spain under Franco, the Greek junta, Chile, Iraq, Iran, Korea, Indonesia, Cambodia, Taiwan, South Vietnam, the Philippines, Turkey, the five Central Asian republics that emerged with the break-up of the USSR, and China. Either way, the whole world was to be included in the new ‘secure’ global liberal order. The result has been the slaughter of untold numbers. John Stock well, who was part of a CIA project in Angola which led to the deaths of over 20,000 people, puts it like this: Coming to grips with these U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best we can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed – and this is a minimum figure. Included are: one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola – the operation I was part of – and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua.109 Note that the six million is a minimum figure, that he omits to mention rather a lot of other interventions, and that he was writing in 1991. This is security as the slaughter bench of history. All of this has been more than confirmed by events in the twenty first century: in a speech on 1 June 2002, which became the basis of the official National Security Strategy of the United States in September of that year, President Bush reiterated that the US has a unilateral right to overthrow any government in the world, and launched a new round of slaughtering to prove it. While much has been made about the supposedly ‘new’ doctrine of preemption in the early twenty-first century, the policy of preemption has a long history as part of national security doctrine. The United States has long maintained the option of pre-emptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction – and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves . . . To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act pre emptively.110 In other words, the security policy of the world’s only superpower in its current ‘war on terror’ is still underpinned by a notion of liberal order-building based on a certain vision of ‘economic order’. The National Security Strategy concerns itself with a ‘single sustainable model for national success’ based on ‘political and economic liberty’, with whole sections devoted to the security benefits of ‘economic liberty’, and the benefits to liberty of the security strategy proposed.111 Economic security (that is, ‘capitalist accumulation’) in the guise of ‘national security’ is now used as the justification for all kinds of ‘intervention’, still conducted where necessary in alliance with fascists, gangsters and drug cartels, and the proliferation of ‘national security’ type regimes has been the result. So while the national security state was in one sense a structural bi-product of the US’s place in global capitalism, it was also vital to the fabrication of an international order founded on the power of capital. National security, in effect, became the perfect strategic tool for landscaping the human garden.112 This was to also have huge domestic consequences, as the idea of containment would also come to reshape the American social order, helping fabricate a security apparatus intimately bound up with national identity and thus the politics of loyalty.
Vote negative to reject the 1AC’s enframing and reevaluate problematisation
Cheeseman and Bruce 96 (Graeme Cheeseman, Snr. Lecturer @ New South Wales, and Robert Bruce, 1996, Discourses of Danger and Dread Frontiers, p. 5-9)
This goal is pursued in ways which are still unconventional in the intellectual milieu of international relations in Australia, even though they are gaining influence worldwide as traditional modes of theory and practice are rendered inadequate by global trends that defy comprehension, let alone policy. The inability to give meaning to global changes reflects partly the enclosed, elitist world of profession security analysts and bureaucratic experts, where entry is gained by learning and accepting to speak a particular, exclusionary language. The contributors to this book are familiar with the discourse, but accord no privileged place to its ‘knowledge form as reality’ in debates on defense and security. Indeed, they believe that debate will be furthered only through a long overdue critical re-evaluating of elite perspectives. Pluralistic, democratically-oriented perspectives on Australia’s’ identity are both required and essential if Australia’s thinking on defense and security is to be invigorated. This is not a conventional policy book; nor should it be, in the sense of offering policy-makers and their academic counterparts sets of neat alternative solutions, in familiar language and format, to problems they pose. This expectation is itself a considerable part of the problem to be analyzed. It is, however, a book about policy, one that questions how problems are framed by policy-makers. It challenges the proposition that irreducible bodies of real knowledge on defense and security exist independently of their ‘context in the world’, and it demonstrates how security policy is articulated authoritatively by the elite keepers of that knowledge, experts trained to recognize enduring, universal wisdom. All others, from this perspective, must accept such wisdom to remain outside of the expert domain, tainted by their inability to comply with the ‘rightness’ of the official line. But it is precisely the official line, or at the least its image of the world, that needs to be problematised. If the critic responds directly to the demand for policy alternatives, without addressing this image, he or she is tacitly endorsing it. Before engaging in the policy debate the critics need to reframe the basic terms of reference tradition of democratic dialogue. More immediately, it ignores post-seventeenth century democratic traditions which insist that a good society must have within it some way of critically assessing its knowledge and the decisions based upon that knowledge which impact upon citizens of such a society. This is a tradition with a slightly different connotation in contemporary liberal democracies, which during the Cold War, were proclaimed different and superior to the totalitarian enemy precisely because they were institutional checks and balances upon power. In short, one of the major differences between ‘open societies’ and their (closed) counterparts behind the Iron Curtain was that the former encouraged the critical testing of the knowledge and decisions of the powerful and assessing them against liberal democratic principles. The latter tolerated criticism only on rare and limited occasions. For some, this represented the triumph of rational-scientific methods of inquiry and techniques of falsification. For others, especially since positivism and rationalism have lost much of their allure, it means that for society to become open and liberal, sectors of the population must be independent of the state and free to question its knowledge and power. One must be able to say ‘why’ to power and proclaim ‘no’ to power. Though we do not expect this position to be accepted by every reader, contributors to this book believe that critical dialogue is long overdue in Australia and needs to be listened to. For all its liberal democratic trappings, Australia’s security community continues to invoke closed monological narratives on defense and security. This book also questions the distinctions between policy practice and academic theory that informs conventional accounts of Australian security. One of its major concerns, particularly in chapters 1 and 2, is to illustrate how theory is integral to the practice of security analysis and policy prescription. The book also calls on policy-makers, academics and students of defense and security to think critically about what they are reading, writing and saying; to begin to ask, of their work and study, difficult and searching questions raised in other disciplines; to recognize, no matter how uncomfortable it feels, that what is involved in theory and practice is not the ability to identify a replacement for failed models, but a realization that terms and concepts – state sovereignty, balance of power, security, and so on – are contested and problematic, and that the world is indeterminate, always becoming what is written about it. Critical analysis which shows how particular kinds of theoretical presumptions can effectively exclude vital areas of political life from analysis has direct practical implications for policymakers, academics and citizens who face the daunting task of steering Australia through some potentially choppy international waters over the next few years. There is also much interest in the chapters for those struggling to give meaning to a world where so much that has long been taken for granted now demands imaginative, incisive reappraisal. The contributors, too, have struggled to find meaning, often despairing at the terrible human costs of international violence. This is why readers will find no single, fully formed panacea for the world’s ills in general, or Australia’s security in particular. There are none. Ever chapter, however in its own way, offers something more than is found in orthodox literature, often by exposing ritualistic Cold War defense and security mind-sets that are dressed up as new thinking. Chapters 7 and 9, for example, present alternative ways of engaging in security and defense practice. Others (chapters 3, 4, 5, 6, and 8) seek to alert policymakers, academics and students to alternative theoretical possibilities that might better serve an Australian community pursuing security and prosperity in an uncertain world. All chapters confront the policy community and its counterparts in the academy with a deep awareness of the intellectual and material constraints imposed by dominant traditions of realism, but they avoid dismissive and exclusionary terms which often in the past characterized exchanges between policy-makers and their critics. This is because, as noted earlier, attention needs to be paid to the words and the thought process of those being criticized. A close reading of this kind draws attention to underlying assumptions, showing they need to be recognized and questioned. A sense of doubt (in place of confident certainty) is a necessary prelude to a genuine search for alternative policies. First comes an awareness of the need for new perspectives, then specific polices may follow. As Jim George argues in the following chapter, we need to look not as much at contending policies as they are made for us but challenging ‘the discursive process which gives favored interpretations of “reality” their meaning and which direct Australia’s policy/analytical/ military responses’. This process is not restricted to the small, official defense and security establishment huddled around the US-Australian War Memorial in Canberra. It also encompasses much of Australia’s academic defense and security community located primarily though not exclusively within the Australian National University and the University College of the University of New South Wales. These discursive processes are examined in detail in subsequent chapters as authors attempt to make sense of a politics of exclusion and closure which exercises disciplinary power over Australia’s security community. They also question the discourse of ‘regional security’, ‘security cooperation’, ‘peacekeeping’ and ‘alliance politics’ that are central to Australia’s official and academic security agenda in the 1990s. This is seen as an important task especially when, as it revealed, the disciplines of International Relations and Strategic Studies are under challenge from critical and theoretical debates ranging across the social sciences and humanities; debates that are nowhere to be found in Australian defense and security studies. The chapters graphically illustrate how Australia’s public policies on defense and security are informed, underpinned, and. This book, then, reflects and underlines the importance of Antonio Gramsci and Edward Said’s ‘critical intellectuals’. The demand, tacit or otherwise, that the policy maker’s frame of reference be accepted as the only basis for discussion and analysis ignores a three thousand year old tradition commonly associated with Socrates and purportedly integral to the Western legitimized by a narrowly-based intellectual enterprise which draws strength from contested concepts of realism and liberalism, which in turn seek legitimacy through policy-making processes. Contributors ask whether Australia’s policy-makers and their academic advisers are unaware of broader intellectual debates. Or resistant to them, or choose not to understand them, and why? To summarize: a central concern of this book is to democratize the defense and security theory/practice process in Australia so that restrictions on debate can be understood and resisted. This is a crucial enterprise in an analytical/ policy environment dominated by particularly rigid variants of realism which have become so powerful and unreflective that they are no longer recognized simply as particular ways of constituting the world, but as descriptions of the real-as reality itself. The consequences of this (silenced) theory-as-practice may be viewed every day in the poignant, distressing monuments to analytical/policy metooism at the Australian (Imperial) War Memorial in Canberra and the many other monuments to young Australians in towns and cities around the country. These are the flesh and blood installments of an insurance policy strategy which, tragically, remains integral to Australian realism, despite claims of a new mature independent identity in the 1990s. This is what unfortunately, continues to be at stake in the potentially deadly debates over defense and security revealed in this book. For this reason alone, it should be regarded as a positive and constructive contribution to debate by those who are the targets of its criticisms.
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The critique is prior—proliferation discourse undercuts aff solvency by prioritizing supply-side solutions at the expense of addressing legitimate demand-side concerns
Mutimer 94—David Mutimer is Deputy Director of YCISS and Associate Professor of Political Science at York University August 1994, “Reimagining Security: The Metaphors of Proliferation,” Centre for International and Strategic Studies, York University, http://pi.library.yorku.ca/dspace/bitstream/handle/10315/1415/YCI0074.pdf?sequence=1
The Assembled Image
The image of PROLIFERATION knits together the metaphors of 'proliferation', 'stability' and 'balance' to shape the policy responses of the international community. The metaphors have certain entailments, which serve to highlight, downplay and hide aspects of the security environment. Thus, the policy responses which are being developed address primarily those aspects highlighted, while ignoring those downplayed and hidden. The image is of an autonomously driven process of spread, outward from a particular source or sources. It is an apolitical image, which strongly highlights technology, capability and gross accounts of number. As such, it is an image that masks the political interests of those supporting the present structure of proliferation control—a structure which strongly reflects this image and its entailments. To begin with, the control efforts are classified by the technology of concern. Thus there are global instruments for controlling the spread of nuclear weapons, of chemical and biological weapons, and a register of conventional arms. There is no global instrument for the control of the spread of missile technology, but the MTCR addresses this technology as a discrete problem, and is considering evolving into a global regime. There is thus little or no recognition in the practical response to PROLIFERATION that the spread of these technologies might all be part of a common 'security' problem. The security concerns which might drive states to acquire one or more of these technologies are hidden by the PROLIFERATION image. This division of the problem into discrete technologies persists, despite the fact that the connection among the various technologies of concern manifests itself in a number of ways. I will mention only two by way of illustration. The first is the common reference to biological weapons as "the poor man's atomic bomb". The implication of this phrase is that a state prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons—in this case for reasons of cost—could turn to biological weapons to serve the same purposes. The second example is of the links being drawn in the Middle East between Arab states' potential chemical arms, and Israel's nuclear arsenal. The Arab states are balking at ratifying the CWC until the Israeli nuclear arms are at least placed on the negotiating table. Conversely, supporters of the Israeli position can cite the Arab states' overwhelming conventional superiority as a justification for Israel's nuclear arms. The common approach to 'controlling' proliferation across the technologies of concern is the limitation and even denial of the supply of technology. Each of the technologies of concern is addressed by at least one suppliers group, and the major Western suppliers maintain export controls to implement the groups' lists. Such an approach is clearly informed by the entailments of the PROLIFERATION image. Supplier controls respond to the 'spread outward from a source' entailment of 'proliferation'. They also reflect the ways in which both the metaphors of 'proliferation' and 'stability' highlight technology, by focussing solely on its nature and movement. In addition, these groups reflect the various entailments of 'stability' and 'balance' outlined above. They seek to prevent "excessive and destabilizing accumulations" of technologies through the application of their controls. Lost entirely in these practices are considerations of the political and economic underpinnings of security. These aspects are hidden by the image, and so are not addressed by the policy responses. The relationship between these political interests, the policy responses and the metaphors of the PROLIFERATION image would form the subject of another paper, at the very least. However, it is not responsible to ignore entirely this relationship, and so I will provide an example by way of illustration. India stands as a leading opponent of the present approach to proliferation control, with its roots in technological denial. India represents a different set of interests from those of the northern states most concerned with PROLIFERATION as presently understood and practiced. For India, access to technology is vital, and the principle of discrimination between the have and have not states—enshrined most notably in the NPT, but seen throughout the non-proliferation measures for denying technologies' spread—is absolutely unacceptable. As such, the Indians reject the image of PROLIFERATION, and call rather for DISARMAMENT. This view is reflected in the following passage, quoted from a paper by the Indian Ambassador to Japan, who was previously the Indian representative on the Conference on Disarmament: It would be futile to pretend that 1995 is 1970, that nothing has changed and nothing requires to be changed in the 1995 NPT. It would be a cruel joke on the coming generation to say that they will be safer with an indefinite extension of the 1970 NPT. 1995 presents an opportunity; there is great scope for non governmental agencies, intellectuals and academics, who believe in nuclear disarmament to work towards changing this mindset and spur governments in nuclear weapon countries to look at reality, to accept that there are shortcomings in the NPT and that nations, both within and outside the NPT have genuine concerns which need to be addressed in order to make the NPT universal, non discriminatory and a true instrument for nuclear disarmament. Emphasis added.66 There are three noteworthy elements of this plea for change. The first is that Ambassador Shah recognises the importance of changing the mindset toward the problem in order to effect change in the policy responses to that problem. This feature of his remarks relates to the second. Ambassador Shah casts his justification for alterations in the NPT as reflecting a changed reality—thereby attacking the naturalisation of the features of the world which are highlighted by the PROLIFERATION image, as reflected in the NPT. Finally, Ambassador Shah calls for the new NPT to be an instrument of 'nuclear disarmament', not non-proliferation. In other words, he recognises that there is a policy problem to be addressed, but it is not a PROLIFERATION problem—that is, a spread of weapons technology from those who have to those who do not presently have. Rather, the problem needs to be imagined as a (DIS)ARMAMENT problem—the possession of nuclear and other arms, regardless of who has them. For the countries of the north, the indefinite extension of an unamended NPT is considered essential. The NPT is seen as the linchpin of the proliferation control effort, without which the entire edifice might fall. What Ambassador Shah's comments demonstrate, reflecting the position taken in India, is the way in which that effort, tied so closely to the entailments of the PROLIFERATION image, serves only a particular set of interests by highlighting only specific features of 'reality'. From where he sits, 'reality' provides Ambassador Shah with a different approach to the problem of nuclear (and other mass destruction) weapons, an approach better captured through an image of (DIS)ARMAMENT than one of PROLIFERATION.
