Gidsland and Human Security

Abstract

The contemporary world is labelled by many as being posf-Westphalian. Economic globalization, patterns of immigration and emigration, international crime and terrorism, and worldwide environmental degradation make states not only highly interdependent, but highly permeable to the world outside their borders, including in ideational and value terms.States have long been quite permeable. Hoerder and Macklin underline the role of immigration and emigration, which have contributed to the spread of ideas, cultures, and technologies not only across borders, but also across continents.1 What is however notable is that this notion of state permeability sits uneasily with the standard conception of state as a sovereign entity. Nationalism is the ruling paradigm; its highlighting of territorial and cultural-communal contiguity has further entrenched such a view of the state. The homogeneous nation-state has for centuries been held up as the appropriate standard of modern communal existence.The present era exhibits an increased degree of state permeability. This stems from heightened interconnectedness due to globalization, as well as from the development of international/regional institutions and international/cosmopolitan law. The present situation is quite unique in its confluence of factors and processes.2 These are factors and processes that the dominant nation-state paradigm is unable to properly capture: A nation state outlook on society and politics, law and justice and history governs the sociological imagination. To some extent, much of social science is a prisoner of the nation state.1Cosmopolitanism, with its stress on universal history, cosmopolitan right, and world citizenship, stands in sharp contrast to nationalism and state sovereignty. This has implications for how we understand the field of international relations. Robert Fine notes thatThe cosmopolitan paradigm breaks down the categorical distinction within International Relations between the domestic field in which individuals freely submit to the state as to their own rational will, and the international field that is taken to be devoid of all ethical values. It rejects the temporal matrix which declares that inside the state progress can be accomplished over time but that outside there can only be an eternal repetition of power and interest.4Fine no doubt downplays the intellectual breadth of the field. Nevertheless, his statement is a useful reminder to the effect that the sovereign state and the state system are historical fixtures. The state system that emerged at a given point in time can therefore also be transformed or even transcended. The notion that states have become more permeable in their relations to the outside world is shorthand for the breakdown of the distinction between the domestic and the international realms.But in today's world there are great variations in states' degree of permeability in a cosmopolitan direction. It is an assumption with roots in Kantian thought that heightened permeability is particularly pronounced in democracies, which are highly sensitive to normative developments beyond their borders. Democracies have permitted and/or fostered their own incorporation into a comprehensive multilateral/supranational system of organizations and legal rules, which is set up to entrench human rights. Democracies incorporate the norm-sets into their own politico-legal systems, with different degrees and magnitudes of compliance. The notion of human security is a case in point. Initially espoused by the UN, this doctrine has subsequently been adopted by a number of states.We should be careful however not to equate heightened state permeability with dramatic state systemic transformation. While this may come about, recent events-the post 9/11 reactions being a case in point-also reveal the resilience of the state and the state system. States still exert considerable discretion in how they define their relations to others, which shows up in their foreign policy doctrines, traditions, and-more loosely speaking-foreign policy orientations. …