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International Relations Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), Vol 18(1): 9–23 [DOI: 10.1177/0047117804041738]

‘We the Peoples’: Contending Discourses of Security in Human Rights Theory and Practice

Tim Dunne, University of Exeter, UK

Nicholas J. Wheeler, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK

Abstract

This article develops a critical conception of security by showing the limits of tradit- ional realist and pluralist discourses. It does this by exploring the deficiencies of realist and pluralist approaches when it comes to thinking about the promotion of human rights. Realism leads to moral indifference and a myopic approach to security and pluralism is complacent about how the rules and norms of international society exclude humanitarian concerns. The article argues for a critical approach to security that places human rights at the centre of theory and praxis, reflecting the fundamental indivisibility of security and human rights. The article concludes by reflecting on the implications for agency of this position.

Keywords: human rights, human security, international society, pluralism, realism, security.

‘Security is the first word which occurs to me if I look back on my youth – security not only in family relations, but in a sense scarcely imaginable since 1914.’ This autobiographical reflection, by one of the greatest thinkers in the history of academic International Relations, is revealing for the way in which E.H. Carr attached significance to security in a very personal sense as well as the more traditional notion of security ‘out there’ in world politics. It also concentrates the reader’s mind on the fact that there has been so much insecurity produced in the intervening years. And contrary to the hopes of the earliest professors of International Relations the discipline has for the most part been muted in its response to the culture of violence that conditions the lives of the majority of the earth’s inhabitants. The fact that the study of International Relations all too often sided with the status quo was one of the reasons why Carr abandoned the discipline in preference for the study of the Soviet Union which at least, in his view, promised a new and more equal society.

It is regrettable that Carr did not see the emergence of a ‘critical’ approach to International Relations that first began to stir around the time of his death in 1982.1 Critical theory makes the familiar seem strange, asks how our ideas about common sense are constructed, and recognizes an imperative to change the world. In place of the traditional ontology of soldiers and diplomats, one view of critical theory ‘places the victims at the centre of its enquiries’.2 As this special issue demonstrates, when applied to security, critical theory provides a radically different theoretical account of the meaning and production of security. A key

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claim of critical security theorists is that the rules, norms and institutions of the society of states are a permissive cause of political violence because they provide a protected space in which individuals can be subjected to inhuman treatment with virtual impunity.

The crucial contribution of critical conceptions of security is to shift the referent object from the state to individuals who constitute humanity as a whole. Rather than taking for granted the traditional assumption that the state has a monopoly over our loyalty and identity, critical security perspectives extend our moral horizons beyond national-based conceptions of citizenship. This shift in ontology from an exclusivist ‘us and them’ identity relationship to an inter- nationalist or cosmopolitan ‘we the peoples’ is embodied in the Preamble to the United Nations Charter and has subsequently been echoed by various voices in global civil society. ‘We the peoples’ not only represented a significant advance in the normative vocabulary of international relations; it also permeated the framing of the human rights regime that developed after 1945.3 In the various documents which constitute the regime an explicit link is made between human rights and security. This is clear from Article 3 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) that proclaims ‘the right to life, liberty and security of person’ to all human beings.

The creation of law-making international institutions committed to the pro- tection of human rights was predicated upon the assumption that sovereign states would stand guard over the security of their citizens and promote human rights internationally. The experience of the post-1945 world has shown this to be naive at best, morally complacent at worst. Realist thinking on security has proved to be more resilient than defenders of human rights had hoped. After 11 September 2001, and crucially the American response in the form of the ‘war on terror’, realism seems once again to be in the ascendancy. The ensuing cycle of terror attacks and attacks on terror prompted the usually optimistic liberal writer, Michael Ignatieff, to ask if the human rights era had come to an end.4 We argue that such a judgement is premature: even states engaged in the war against global terrorism recognize that human rights remain an important objective.5 Rather than seeing one discourse triumph over another, a more sophisticated account of security after 9/11 would show how national security and humanitarianism uneasily coexist in practice, and that critical theory offers a possibility of over- coming such a tension.

This article begins by showing how the sovereign prerogatives of the society of states have frustrated the promise of solidarity implicit in ‘we the peoples’. Having used critical theory to expose such flaws in traditional conceptions of security, the second half of the article will reflect on the immanent possibilities for constituting a new discourse of human security. We argue that the project of unifying human rights and security requires a multidimensional approach to agency. It is not a matter of humanity versus statism, as Richard Falk once put it, but instead requires an alliance of states and transnational civil society cooper- ating to achieve security for common humanity.

10 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 18(1)

Discourses of security

In this section we examine the two dominant discourses of security and the practices they have legitimated. By discourse, we mean an authoritative narrative mobilized by political elites to justify a particular set of prescriptions for action (or inaction).6

Realism and the discourse of national security

All forms of critical theory purport to ‘think against’ the prevailing current. Critical security studies is no exception. What it wants to resist, transcend and defeat, are theories of security which take for granted who is to be secured (the state), how security is to be achieved (by defending core ‘national’ values, forcibly if neces- sary) and from whom security is needed (the enemy). This understanding of security was neatly encapsulated by Walter Lippmann writing in 1943: ‘A nation is secure to which it is not in danger of having to sacrifice core values, if it wishes to avoid war, and is able, if challenged, to maintain them in a victory in such a war’.7

There is no better example of traditional thinking than the discourse of ‘national security’ which framed US thinking on defence and foreign policy during the Cold War. Promoting national security implied a desire to prevail over enemies who threatened the values of the ‘nation’. Security, in this sense, was the protective shield of American society. The values of that society were thought to be self-evident, and were subject to minimal reflection by realist theorists. It was assumed by the realist strategists, that the Cold War was a permanent condition of international relations, one in which self-help and power politics were the only games in town. All means were acceptable to attain national security, including strategies of nuclear war-fighting which were justified on the highly dubious grounds that the Soviet Union was developing the capabilities to fight and win a nuclear war. The logic of this was that western deterrence required fashioning a theory and strategy of nuclear victory for the USA and its allies.

Realists got it wrong. The Cold War was not a permanent condition. Nor was it a structural necessity; rather, it was a confrontation that they had played a signif- icant part in creating and reproducing. But the discourse of ‘national security’ has not died despite the revisioning of East–West relations: the who of security has remained stable. The state is still the condition for the survival of ‘national’ core values. The how has become the subject of some debate, however. Not of course the assumption that the US needs a strong defence, and has to be prepared to use force. But there has been a debate among realists as to whether the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction strengthens or undermines national security. On the side of the former there is the ‘more is better’ brigade which believes that the benefits of nuclear deterrence should be extended to stabilize relations between enemy states. In the opposite camp stand realists in the Pentagon who worry about the spread of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) – and their means of ballistic missile delivery – to ‘rogue’ states like Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

‘WE THE PEOPLES’ 11

After 9/11 this threat assessment is reinforced by the very real concern that such weapons could find their way – either through deliberate intention or inadvertence – into the hands of terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. For realists like US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, the only means of addressing the threat posed by rogue states and terrorist groups armed with WMDs is to ensure that such capabilities are never developed in the first place. This is the logic that drives the current US strategy of preventive war – first set out by President George W. Bush in his West Point speech of June 2002, and subsequently elaborated in the National Security Strategy of September 2002.8 By naming the threat posed by states like Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an ‘axis of evil’, the Bush Administration has sought to legitimate the spending of billions of dollars on developing a defence posture that is capable of supporting the President’s declared goal of regime change in these states. This demonstrates how the Cold War discourse of national security is being reinvented as a struggle between an America that represents a force for good in the world and the evil enemy represented by global terrorism and its state sponsors.

Where do human rights fit into this realist picture of security? Realist pro- ponents of national security do not deny the existence of human rights norms such as those embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But crucially, realism argues that they are norms which are not binding on states when they collide with other interests (such as trade or national security). Hans J. Morgenthau, the godfather of realism, argued that ‘the principle of the defense of human rights cannot be consistently applied in foreign policy because it can and must come in conflict with other interests that may be more important than the defense of human rights in a particular circumstance’.9 Realists also point to the centrality of states in implementing human rights standards and the weak or non- existent enforcement machinery. As a leading representative of the US delegation at San Francisco made clear, “‘We the peoples” means that the peoples of the world were speaking through their governments’.10 Amnesty International’s annual report is a constant reminder that realist thinking on human rights is part of the fabric of contemporary international society. A recent report summarized its findings against the backdrop of the war on terror as follows: ‘Governments have spent billions to strengthen national security and the “war on terror”. Yet for millions of people, the real sources of insecurity are corruption, repression, dis- crimination, extreme poverty and preventable diseases’.11 This is nothing new. Driven by expediency and self-interest, governments have long trampled on their citizens’ rights in order to maintain the power and privilege of an elite few. In the language of International Relations theory, what Amnesty is describing is the problem of statism, by which is meant the idea that the state should be the sole source of loyalty and values for its citizens.12 Amnesty claims that the majority of states routinely fail to deliver even basic rights to their citizens. Governments or agencies acting on their behalf routinely imprison without trial, torture and/or kill individuals who challenge the regime.

The Westphalian practice of statism infects international bodies such as the

12 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 18(1)

United Nations. Amnesty International points to the ‘realpolitik’ in the General Assembly and the UN Commission on Human Rights that it charges as being ‘almost irrelevant to the protection of victims in Burundi, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo’.13 It is not unusual to find that no state has tabled a condemnatory resolution at the UN General Assembly even after it has been presented with evidence of gross human rights violations. Consistent with the charge of statism is the argument that the UN is merely an arena for raison d’état, a kind of global Westphalian system where the language for the conduct of inter- national relations has changed but the interests remain the same. Human rights in this context have represented, in the words of Norman Lewis, ‘nothing more than an empty abstraction whose function was the legitimation and perpetuation of the given system of power relations, domestically and internationally’.14

Pluralism and the discourse of international security

Although realism was undoubtedly the dominant discourse of international politics in the post-1945 period, it was not, as the realists believed, the only theory to have purchase on reality. There was an alternative, other than the radical discourses; this was the so-called pluralist or legalist theory which maintains that security should be provided by international rules and norms. From this perspective, narrowly defined self-help was not a descriptively or normatively accurate depiction of international politics. States, according to Hedley Bull, form an international society because they are ‘conscious of certain common interests and common values’ and believe themselves to be ‘bound by a common set of rules and institutions’.15 The social fact of this society is the source of states’ obligations to one another; primary among these is a responsibility to maintain international order which theorists of international society take to be synonymous with the provision of international security.

The discourse of security for theorists of international society makes the who of security – the referent object – the security of the society of states. With respect to human rights, we have already encountered the standard critique mobilized against this view by critical security theorists, namely, that the rules of sovereignty and non-intervention issue a licence for statist elites to abuse human rights from behind the walls of sovereignty. In response, pluralists would argue that while the rules are inhospitable to the protection of human rights, making the latter the referent object for security would place in jeopardy the foundations of international order. They would further argue that it is too easy to interpret their privileging of order over human rights as an ethically bankrupt position since the moral justification for pluralist practices is their contribution to individual security. Thus, Bull believed that international order is only to be valued to the extent to which it delivers world order which he defined as the provision of the primary goals of social life to all individuals such as ‘security from violence’.16

Bull was elusive about the relationship between international order and world order, but there is no doubt that he made the latter the normative test in judging the

‘WE THE PEOPLES’ 13

success of the institutions of international society such as diplomacy, law and the balance of power in providing the how of security.

Advocates of a pluralist view of security would further argue that in the post- 1945 period an important linkage has been established between the provision of human rights and wider international security. Reflecting on the terrible domestic and international consequences of the rise of fascism in Europe, the framers of the UN Charter believed that there was a clear link between good governance at home and peace abroad. Although practice has tragically turned out very differently, it is clear from reading the UN Charter that there is no necessary or automatic conflict between the cardinal rules of sovereignty and non-intervention in Article 2 and the human rights standards set out in Articles 55 and 56. For the first time in history governments committed themselves to protect human rights, a significant retreat from the Westphalian conception of unlimited sovereignty. This was marked by the Preamble to the Charter which signalled a declaratory shift in legal thinking in favour of ‘we the peoples’. As Jack Donnelly has argued, the post-1945 human rights regime represented a significant shift in the normative language of inter- national politics. Three years after the signing of the UN Charter, the UDHR was accepted by the UN General Assembly on 10 December 1948. Although this was declaratory and non-binding, the document provided further hope to people living under governments that denied them their dignity. According to Article 28, ‘Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth on this Declaration can be fully realised’.17

The manifesto for human rights and international security contained within the Charter and the Declaration represented, therefore, a considerable challenge to the traditional realist paradigm. As a consequence of these standard-setting instru- ments, and the UN human rights regime which developed in the years after 1945 to monitor compliance with them, the way in which a state behaved towards its own citizens became in R.J. Vincent’s words ‘a legitimate subject of international scrutiny and censure’.18 While the regime can monitor and report on human rights violations, pluralists emphasize that the capacity of the society of states to ‘do something’ depends ultimately on interests and morality coinciding.

The failure of international society to prevent or halt the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 demonstrated the limits of this conception of the relationship between human rights and security. The mass exodus of refugees across the Rwandan border into neighbouring states clearly affected regional security, but no govern- ment in Africa was either capable or willing to intervene to end the atrocities. However, can it really be argued that the genocide in Rwanda posed a threat to western security interests that justified sacrificing soldiers’ lives and scarce resources? Western governments answered this question with a resounding no, and this is why no action was taken to stop the third genocide of the 20th century (the other two being the extermination of the Armenians and the Jews).

Whereas Rwanda highlights the ethical limitations of international society’s framing of human rights and security, there have been some important successes in conjoining human rights and security. One of the most notable is the Helsinki

14 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 18(1)

process in the 1970s and 1980s. This was justified on the grounds that a critical relationship existed between respect for human rights in the eastern bloc and improved interstate relations between East and West. The Soviet Union accepted that the price for western legitimation of the postwar status quo in Central and Eastern Europe was its signing of the human rights provisions in the 1975 Helsinki Final Act. However, what the Soviet Union and its allies interpreted as rhetorical commitments became important weapons in the struggle of human rights activists in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and the German Democratic Republic. Their courageous struggle to hold eastern governments accountable for their human rights abuses was supported by western governments who used human rights as an instrument of Cold War diplomacy. These efforts on the inside and the outside played a key role in robbing the Communist regimes of their legitimacy which led to the revolutions of 1989.19

The limits of traditional discourses of security

One entry point for critical security thinkers with respect to human rights is to reveal the limitations of the morality of states discourse by showing how the UN Charter system systematically fails to deliver on its promise to provide both international security and human rights. Whereas outright rejection is an appro- priate critical security response to realism for normative reasons, pluralism needs to be engaged because of its immanent universalism. The fact is that if all states followed the principles and rules of the ‘international bill of rights’, then there would be no individuals without food, democratic governance, legal protection, education, national identity, property and an adequate standard of living. How- ever, one major reason why this does not happen, according to proponents of critical security studies, is because states only obey the rules of international society when power and interest make it prudent for them to do so. Thus, Britain and the US carried the banner of civil and political rights against the Soviet Union because it served their power political interests, but both felt more than justified in supporting the apartheid regime in South Africa which practised racial hatred and massively violated the economic and social rights of the majority, as well as conducting campaigns against neighbours that resulted in massive casualties. The lesson is when human rights collide with the goals of either national or inter- national security, these interests win out every time.

Western governments are particularly (although not exclusively) guilty of inconsistently complying with the human rights standards they trumpet with missionary-like enthusiasm at the various multilateral social gatherings. This argument is frequently and eloquently made by the public intellectual Noam Chomsky. From Vietnam to the Vienna Declaration on Human Rights, he casti- gates the US for its hypocritical approach to human rights in foreign policy. He attacked the decision of President George Bush Sr to forcibly return Haitian people seeking asylum (in contravention of Article 14 of the UDHR). Presidential candidate Bill Clinton fiercely condemned this policy, but according to Chomsky,

‘WE THE PEOPLES’ 15

‘his first act as President was to make the illegal blockade still harsher’.20 Or, take the US government’s persistent suspicion of economic and social rights, which UN Ambassador Jean Kirkpatrick once described as ‘a letter to Santa Claus’.21

The US vetoed the right to development in 1992 despite Article 25 of the UDHR’s commitment to ‘a right to a standard of living’ adequate for ‘health and well- being’. Only the US and Somalia have not ratified the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child. For Chomsky, these practices illustrate Washington’s largely rhetorical commitment to ‘the universality of human rights’, except as a weapon used selectively against others.22

The most fundamental weakness of the pluralist discourse on security and human rights relates to what it excludes from consideration as security problems. What issues get named as ‘security’ ones is crucial to whether individuals survive or perish. Pluralism is silent on the politics that produces the following litany of global human wrongs:

• Every day more than 30,000 children around the world die of preventable diseases, a total of over 11 million a year.

• The richest 5 percent of the world’s people have incomes 114 times those of the poorest 5 percent. The richest 1 percent receive as much income as the poorest 57 percent.

• 2.8 billion people live on less than $2 a day, with 1.2 billion of them subsisting on less than $1 a day.

• In 1997–9 an estimated 815 million people were undernourished. • During the 1990s the number of people in extreme poverty in Sub-Saharan

Africa rose from 242 million to 300 million. • By the end of 2000 almost 22 million people (now updated by the UNDP to

24.8 million) had died of AIDS, 13 million children had lost their mother or both parents to the disease and more than 40 million people were living with HIV. Of these, 90 percent were in developing countries and 75 percent were in Sub-Saharan Africa.

• There are 100 million ‘missing’ women who would be alive but for infant- icide, neglect and sex-selective abortion.

• Every year there are 300 million cases of malaria, 90 percent of them in Sub- Saharan Africa.

• More than 500,000 women die a year as a result of pregnancy and childbirth.23

Even for the survivors, life can be nasty, brutish and short. What causes this production and reproduction of gross and systematic human rights abuses is strongly disputed by liberals and Marxists. But what is clear is that the massive structural inequalities generated by global capitalism have not been given sufficient attention by theorists of international society. For the last two decades, leading states in the system such as Britain and the US have promoted a neoliberal economic ideology that centres upon the following principles that have governed

16 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 18(1)

the debt and aid policies of the IMF and World Bank in the 1980s and 1990s: free trade, deregulation, reduction of public spending and freedom of choice for individual consumers. International institutions and regimes, such as the G8 and the various International Financial Institutions (IFIs) have internalized these neoliberal norms. From a global humanitarian perspective, the consequence of these policies has been twofold: first, a redistribution of wealth from the underdeveloped to the developed world (the ‘trickle-up’ effect); and second, a decline in the ability of states to provide economic and welfare rights to their population. In short, the scope for a state to deliver a system of justice which would be acceptable to the least advantaged has diminished considerably. The consequences of both these factors have been to undermine the provision of economic and social rights.

The critical theory of security advanced here opposes the pluralist conception of security on three main grounds: first, it argues that states conform to the internationalist and humanitarian rules of the UN Charter only when it is in their selfish interests; second, it argues that pluralism in its focus on the rules and norms of international society ignores most deaths by political violence; and third, the normative practices of the society of states leave untouched the structural causes of the economic and social injustice rooted in the deregulated capitalist world system.

The last two factors converge in the case of the trade in weapons, which arms the aggressors, authoritarian regimes and torturers of the world. Writing in the early 1980s, Bull described the superpowers as the ‘great irresponsibles’. In the context of the post-Cold War period, there is probably no better illustration of this apt description than the arms trade. The permanent members of the Security Council, responsible for maintaining ‘international peace and security’, account for approximately 90 percent of the world’s arms exports, the US with a share of 49 percent.24

When discussing the arms trade, it is important to bear in mind that arms sales can be justified on the grounds that all states have a legitimate right of self- defence. This right is enshrined in customary international law and codified in the UN Charter. This principle is acknowledged by human rights organizations like Amnesty International, and their opposition is to arms sales that bolster govern- ments that repress human rights inside their borders. One of the most worrying aspects of the arms trade is the lack of concerted control exercised by exporters to ensure that weapons are used for legitimate defensive purposes. Once again, the pluralist rules regulating the trade in weapons are either weak, non-existent or ignored altogether. The wider issue raised by the arms trade concerns the degree of m

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