3 - Broadening the concept of security

Summary

A discipline ‘born and raised in America’, to cite Stanley Hoffman, and nourished by American foundations and policy-makers, was poorly equipped to build the theoretical and philosophical base which its subject matter requires. National security was a political decision in search of a theoretical foundation.

However, there were some scholars offering different answers to the security problem during the Cold War period of realist dominance of the subject. They saw the ‘national security’ solution as the problem and sought to widen the concept and shift the burden of security from the individual state to the international level. Five approaches may be distinguished, all contributing towards broadening the concept of security, and all owing their family resemblance to the idea of interdependence and the break with realist autarky which this implies. For this reason, they can be grouped under the general perspective of ‘political economy’ – though they fit uncomfortably within any precise definition of this term.

I shall discuss briefly here the ideas of ‘security community’, ‘security regime’, ‘neofunctionalist integration’, and ‘common security’, before addressing at greater length a fifth approach – the idea of ‘international security’ as developed in the work of Buzan. In some part, each represents a new look at an old aspiration: that states can modify the negative condition of anarchy and can in some measure integrate their interests even at the level of security.