Canada & the UN >  Canada on the Security Council (1999-2000)

Engagement, Abdication, or Muddling Through? The Changing Emphasis in Conflict Prevention

David Haglund, Queen's University

Introduction
A paper that proposes to address the “changing emphasis in conflict prevention” should specify a few important conditions at the outset. Accordingly, when we ask whose “emphasis” is changing, it will be that of what is sometimes labelled the “international community,” but which really is the cohort of developed (“Western”) states and their security and economic partners. Some parts of the world are under the control of groups that have not apparently registered much if any change in the manner in which they would seek or even desire to prevent conflict; indeed, in these precincts, the age-old practice of preventing conflict by violently suppressing it seems to be as popular as ever. This is not to say such groups located there — which might include states — are necessarily bent upon war. But it is to say that their principal response to the prospect of armed challenge to their own interests is to beat their real or imagined adversaries to the draw, and establish a peace (of sorts) by crushing them, usually through the unilateral application of force.

By contrast, as I shall explain more fully below, the Western response to conflict is increasingly conditioned by a preference to resort to multilateral and diplomatic solutions that put a premium upon nonmilitary tools of statecraft, even if the latter continue to be the ultima ratio regum. And when the military option is exercised, as it sometimes will be, it is through formal or ad hoc institutional arrangements, with the latter (“coalitions of the willing”) gaining in popularity over the former.

The second point to make at the outset concerns the evolving nature of threats to security in the 1990s, for this surely has had much to do with the changing emphasis in conflict prevention.

Not everything is new under the security sun in this post-Cold War era, but enough is novel to permit the observation that we have a security agenda that now features a more diverse set of concerns than had heretofore been the case. Matters have become much more confusing, not only due to the proliferation of new challenges and challengers, but also as a result of the very reconceptualization of “security” itself.

The third and last preliminary point concerns that reconceptualization. It is possible, and in some quarters well-nigh obligatory, to argue that the referent for security must be the individual human being, hence the recent emphasis upon something known as “human security.” In some senses security has always been about individuals; nevertheless, for security analysts (whether employed by states or other organizations) the referent for security had typically been the “state” or the “nation,” hence the frequency with which use has been made of the concept “national security.” At the risk of seeming archaic if not perverse, I am going to frame my remarks in this presentation with the “state” as the primary referent of security.

In doing so I am going to try to ask what is the “essence” of conflict as perceived by states today, and why is it that the Western states have developed a preference of late for somewhat different means of preventing conflict from the ones they used to espouse. I start with the first set of concerns, namely those related to the changing face of conflict.

The Changing Nature of Conflict
Just as it would be idle to deny the major transformations that have attended the ending of the Cold War insofar as concerns conflict prevention, so too would it be incorrect to argue that everything has altered. If in many respects much today is different, in one important respect little has changed. During the Cold War, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were never far from the minds of those tasked with thinking about national security. Then the concern was to prevent nuclear weapons from ever being used, although the means of achieving this prevention differed, with some expressing a preference for deterrence mediated by arms control, while others advocated nothing short of nuclear disarmament.

Today, at or near the top of any list of “hard” security issues would still be weapons of mass destruction. Within that category, emphasis may be shifting away from nuclear and toward chemical and — especially — biological weapons, but overall the focus on WMD remains a constant reminder of the danger posed by this category of weaponry. Where change has occurred is in the downgrading of the danger from one of global to “merely” regional catastrophe. This may not seem like much of an alteration (or a comfort!), but coupled with the disappearance of the Soviet Cold War adversary, it has led the West toward a posture of less relative disquiet at the contemplation of the worst-case scenario. To put it differently, today’s nightmare is not as horrifying as yesterday’s: and this explains a good deal about the apparent lack of earnestness, despite much rhetoric, of many Western states to assume significant burdens in behalf of the cause of conflict prevention. Because the costs of not preventing conflict in many regions are much lower today than they were thought to be in the Cold War, the appetite for preventing conflict has, not surprisingly, diminished. To be sure, few if any leaders of Western states would publicly acknowledge this loss of appetite; quite the opposite. But as I seek to explain in the following section, the reality is different from the rhetoric.

National security policy now has a greater “discretionary” content than it has had for much of the past half century. Illustrative of this enhanced discretion is the current status of “peacekeeping.” The radical downsizing of peacekeeping, especially that directly under UN supervision, can only be somewhat explained by the lack of resources at the disposal of the world body — a lack that could be partially remedied fairly quickly were the United States to pay its dues in full. Partly the decline of peacekeeping must be explicable in terms of the increasing complexity of the undertaking. But in some important measure peacekeeping in the post-Cold War era has been strategically neutralized, by which I mean that the former link between it and the global strategic balance has been sundered.

Countries such as Canada that used to participate in an outsized manner in classical peacekeeping operations did take justifiable pride in their accomplishments. No less deniable, however, is the linkage that once existed between peacekeeping and global security. That linkage rested on a logic, itself a reflection of the inability of the Cold War UN to fulfil the “collective security” promise of the Charter, that identified conflict in the so-called “periphery” as presenting a danger of superpower involvement and, even worse, superpower armed struggle, with all that this implied for the global strategic balance.

Today, in the “periphery” there is little that can upset the global strategic balance, for that balance has itself disappeared. This, coupled with the growing propensity of what conflict exists to take the form of intra- rather than inter-state strife, has meant peacekeeping has become horribly complex, and extremely costly. Thus we see at the end of the 1990s a marked retreat from the vision of the start of the decade, in which UN peacekeeping was to have pride of place among the forces working to prevent conflict. The peacekeeping that continues does, to be sure, carry the UN seal of approval, but it takes place under the operational auspices and control of alliances or regional coalitions, such as NATO in Bosnia or ECOMOG in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

A second aspect of post-Cold War conflict prevention has been the elevation of “new” concerns as a prime focus of security activity. Although the list of such concerns is long, and even contains some genuinely novel items, at or near the top (and reflected in the fact that it will animate discussion when the leaders of the industrialized world get together for their next annual economic [sic] summit) is the rather familiar issue of crime. Criminal activity, as old as recorded history, has become a leading contemporary security issue because of its impact both upon individuals (hence its urgency to those who profess a belief that “human security” warrants the principal call upon our attention) and upon states and the state system. As indicated above, my concern in this brief paper is with the latter.

Criminal activity poses two significant challenges to those who would seek to prevent conflict. First, because of the “globalization” of crime pari passu with other forms of economic activity, we are now witnessing the phenomenon of another transnational actor, international crime, with pretensions (stated or otherwise) to be a factor in the “governance” of international society. Crime has always been, to some degree, transnational (as the decades-old links between crime groups in southern Italy and the United States testifies). What has changed has been the scale of crime’s international outreach, which betokens an appropriately internationalized response.

The second, perhaps more significant, effect of crime upon states and the states-system has been its challenge to the prospects of democratic development. As I explain below, the West relies heavily upon democratic transformation to hold the key to future global security. Thus that which frustrates democratic governance jeopardizes security, in the short term on the national level in countries such as Colombia, but in the longer term at the systemic level. One particular criminal activity, the producing and marketing of illicit drugs, is highlighted as a particularly corrosive undertaking, in part because of the toll drug-use inflicts upon consumers, but mainly because of the high levels of corruption associated with the drug trade. Corruption, unless checked by vigorous anti-drug efforts, is said to be endangering democracy and development and therefore, ultimately, peace. Hence fighting corruption becomes, by definition, a security imperative.

Without wishing to argue that corruption is a social good, I would draw attention to the ability of states to overcome, or at least to live with, the effects of corruption no matter how well entrenched it may seem to be. The past is never a reliable guide to the future, but there is at least a modicum of hope that can be derived from the historical experience of the one country that seems in the forefront of the current campaign for a vigorous international (at times militarized) “war” against narco-corruption. A century ago the United States was said to have one of the most corrupt systems of governance upon the planet: in the apt words of America’s greatest contemporary historian, Henry Adams, democratic governance during the Gilded Age of the last quarter of the last century was so compromised by criminal activity that “one might search the whole list of Congress, Judiciary, and Executive during the twenty-five years 1870-1895 and find little but damaged reputations.”¹ Yet progress proved possible to make, through internal, not international, meliorative efforts.

The Changing Response to Conflict
Most symbolic, perhaps, of the changing nature of conflict prevention has been the changing vocabulary with which Western states and their leaders express their volition. Nothing reflects this better than the current emphasis upon “peacebuilding.” As I understand this term, it conveys the aspiration that conflict can be prevented if (and to some, only if) states and their societies can be won over to the twin virtues of the liberal polity (democracy) and the liberal market (capitalism). The aspiration has a lengthy historical and philosophical pedigree, one to which Immanuel Kant was a distinguished contributor, and it is said by some students of international relations that the relationship between democracy and peace is the closest thing the discipline has to an “iron law.”

If there is much unanimity in Western capitals about the merits of expanding democracy, there is also much disagreement about the means by which peacebuilding can and should be attained. For peacebuilding is fated to proceed, if at all, in lockstep with the phenomenon of globalization; yet the latter, it is held (not without reason) erodes the power of the state over civil society. Thus it follows, to some critics, that the current emphasis upon peacebuilding is merely a verbal cloak with which Western leaders hope to disguise their policy nakedness. If conflict prevention is said to rely upon tangible foreign policy tools, then it can hardly be overlooked that all Western states — Canada among them — have rapidly been divesting themselves of such tools, whether they be military assets or official developmental-assistance transfers. Foreign policy (including defence policy) commands an ever-decreasing share of the West’s economic pie in the post-Cold War world.

To the defenders of peacebuilding, the critics miss the point: they fail to understand that precisely because of globalization and other manifestations of a “post-modern” diplomacy, it is imperative to engage the energies, resources, and leadership potential of “civil society” in order to foster a more prosperous and peaceful world. For the defenders, “privatization” of foreign policy, far from representing a retreat from responsibility, is the very essence of creative policymaking in the 1990s. Nor, to the defenders, does it much matter that traditionally “hard” assets such as military capability are being allowed to be eroded; for the future, it is said, will belong to those with the power to attract others to their example. In the current terminology, “soft power” will be the currency of one’s ability to do good abroad.

The critics respond in two ways. First, they deny the utility of soft power. Secondly, they decry the desire of Western states and their publics to shun real responsibilities for global security. To the critics, among whose ranks is Pascal Boniface, the current era is marked by a “will to powerlessness” on the part of a Western world that seeks only material gratification and the pleasures attending the pursuit of post-modern happiness. Western leaders and their publics want nothing so much as to live like the Swiss, happily isolated from the cares of the world in their peaceful, somnolent valleys. If a label is needed to characterize the post-Cold War condition, then it is “strategic anorexia.”²

Conclusion
Without wishing to deny that “strategic anorexia” might apply at least to part of the West, it is hardly the word that best captures the mood of policymakers everywhere in the developed world. Were it the case, one would not have expected to see emerge the recent crisis with Iraq, which really did hold out the prospect of a resort to armed force on the part of at least a few Western states. Nevertheless, and that crisis to the contrary notwithstanding, the current mood in conflict prevention is dominated by a preference for different means of enshrining peace, namely through the expansion of liberal political and economic dispensations — and this surely represents a major change from the first four decades of the post-1945 era. But if political and economic democratization is the mechanism upon which much hope is currently pinned, it is also, ironically, the factor that will limit the willingness of Western publics to embark on costly efforts at conflict prevention in an age when “post-modernism” seems to connote an unwillingness to pay much of a price in pursuit of foreign policy ends.

In this new era, it is not surprising to find a military correlate to the “revolution in diplomatic affairs.” That is, of course, the postulated “revolution in military affairs,” holding out the ultimate in “post-heroic” warfare, the prospect of the “victimless, virtual war ... in which casualties on all sides, but especially our own, are kept to a minimum.”³ As with all revolutions, those mooted to be occurring in both the diplomatic and the military sphere will be sorely tried when it comes to the indispensable question of leadership. Where, if at all, that might come from must remain anyone’s guess at the moment; that it will come from the Security Council looks to be less and less likely as we enter the 21st century. Once again, the recent crisis with Iraq illustrates the familiar problem that had (temporarily) been thought to have been solved with the ending of the Cold War — the problem of disunity among the veto-wielders.

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† David Haglund is Director of the Centre for International Relations and Professor in the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University, Kingston Ontario. His research focuses on Transatlantic security, and on Canadian international security policy.

1 Quoted in Sean Dennis Cashman, America in the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to tthe Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, 2nd ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1988), p. 194. [back]

2 Pascal Boniface, The Will to Powerlessness (Kingston: Queen’s Quarterly Press, 1998). [back]

3 Lawrence Freedman, “International Security: Changing Targets”, Foreign Policy, no. 110 (Spring 1998), pp. 59-60. [back]