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Third World Quarterly

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Global poverty and orthodox security

Peter Wilkin

To cite this Article Wilkin, Peter(2002) 'Global poverty and orthodox security', Third World Quarterly, 23: 4, 633 645 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/0143659022000025498 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0143659022000025498

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Third World Quarterly, Vol 23, No 4, pp 633645, 2002

Global poverty and orthodox security

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PETER WILKIN
ABSTRACT This article examines the way in which the discourses of security and development have merged in the past decade as an important strand of global governance. It shows why this merging of discourses has occurred and assesses whether the newly embedded securitydevelopment discourse provides adequate conceptual tools for understanding the causes of global poverty. It concludes by setting out three paths that emerge from this securitydevelopment discourse and suggests that the ontological and epistemological claims at the heart of this understanding of International Relations and global poverty serve to reinforce global hierarchies of social power and privilege.
With six billion people on our planet, of whom three billion live on under $2 a day and a billion two hundred million people live on under $1 a day1

For orthodox security global poverty has traditionally been a fact of low politics, not the high politics of state security.2 Over the past decade the previously distinct security and mainstream development agendas have become merged in International Relations theory and geopolitical practice, largely under the rubric of global governance.3 As capital and states, in their diverse types, are restructured in an era of neoliberal global governance, it is not altogether surprising that the security and development agendas should become merged. Indeed, from the point of view of neoliberal global governance, it is a necessary fact that the nascent national, regional and global state security (NRGSS ) apparatus should turn its attentions to the social crises that currently devastate the world system. 4 The expansion of NATO into an out-of-area actor with an effectively global role reflects these concerns with the spread and deepening of social crises as a threat to state security. As these crises threaten to spill over into mass migration, mass outbreaks of infectious diseases and often xenophobic and reactionary political ideologies, the nrgss apparatus has to contend with new threats to neoliberal global governance.5 However, it is my contention that this security structure is inadequate as a mechanism for ending global poverty, that it can only really be a mechanism for attempting to contain and control its effects. Ultimately the orthodox security discourse runs into a series of contradictions which reside in the social relations underpinnin g the institutions and social structures that generate both global poverty and global governance. Perhaps the most prominent of these contraPeter W ilkin is in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YL, UK. E-mail: p.wilkin@lancaster.ac.uk. ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/02/040633-1 3 q DOI: 10.1080/014365902200002549 8 2002 Third World Quarterly

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dictions is that which obtains between the needs of human beings and the pursuit of profit by capitalist corporations. The question remains as to what extent these contradictions can be reconciled. Can existing global social relations, institution s and structures be reformed or must they be transformed? As this paper shows, the orthodox security approach cannot deal with these contradictions nor is it meant to. It is a policy of containment and quarantine of the effects of global poverty, a mechanism for protecting states from the worlds most impoverished people. By contrast it is the human security discourse that has emerged in recent years that potentially offers a way out of this geopolitical impasse. For human security the goal is that of general human well being, with institutions subordinate to this end.6 This paper begins by addressing the orthodox security approach and the manner in which it has sought to incorporate a concern with development into its framework for theory and practice. Having established this I will illustrate the ideological assumptions inherent in this new synthesis, reflective as they are of the state-centrism of mainstream International Relations discourse. In many respects the mainstream developmental discourse, reflecting variants of modernisation theory, shares a similar worldview to that of orthodox security. The synthesis of the two discourses is an important and coherent strand of neoliberal global governance. For the orthodox securitydevelopment agenda, there is a pervasive fear that impoverished people will threaten the institu tions of neoliberal global governance.7 By contrast, for human security a global governance project that does not adequately deal with the major normative concerns facing the world systemglobal poverty and its effectscan only succeed through increasingly coercive and draconian forms of governance against the poor and needy. I have written about the idea of human security in a number of places and it is not my concern in this paper to elaborate on this approach to security and development.8 The purpose of this paper is to provide a critique of the orthodox security discourse and its appropriation of development in the past decade. In conclusion I set out three alternative scenarios that can ensue from this debate, given its assumptions and limitations . Orthodox security and global povertya new synthesis? Conventionally, security as a concept in International Relations has been concerned with the nation-state and inter-state relations. In a critical commentary Booth defines the orthodox conception of security in theory and practice as follows: traditional security thinking, which has dominated the subject for half a century, has been associated with the intellectual hegemony of realism. This traditional approach has been characterised by three elements: it has emphasised military threats and the need for strong counters; it has been status quo oriented; and it has centred on states.9 Working from such a premise, the interpretation of International Relations is from its inception circumscribed and directed toward a narrow range of actors and their predetermined interests. In this sense it is the national interest that is primary and the concern with national security that is said to shape the behaviour of all state managers in the international system, regardless of their particular ideologies or beliefs.10 The demands of an anarchic 634

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international system compels socialists, communists and capitalists alike to follow predetermined patterns of behaviour. In contemporary International Relations (IR) theory these assumptions underpin the debates between neoliberals and neo-realists about security in the post-cold war era. In short, can a collective security structure be constructed in an anarchic system (neoliberals) or does the persistence of anarchy necessitate a balance of power system structured through what must ultimately be contingent alliances (neo-realists) ?11 The neoneo debate, as it has become known, reflects the geopolitical practices of contemporary statecraft and, despite their differences on the possibility of co-operation under anarchy and the meaning of power in the post-cold war era, both neoliberals and neo-realists alike share a similar ontology and epistemology of global politics. Ontologically, the world is composed of nation-states as discrete sovereign entities and is structured by the relations (varied and complex as they are) between them. Epistemologicall y, knowledge about global politics is gained through a hypothetico- deductive model of analysis that puts forward hypotheses to be tested against events in the real world. Such deductions are established on the basis of universalised assumptions about rationality, the function of states, the calculability and measurement of power and behaviour. This is the world of International Relations for neoliberals and neorealists alike and it provides a discourse that enables state managers to function and operate within it. Why then, does the merging of the security and development discourses take place in the 1990s? The end of the Cold War was not an entirely straightforward affair for proponents of the orthodox security discourse. In some respects the selfliquidation of the Soviet Union seemed to demolish several scientific assumptions underpinning the neoneo debate, however much its intellectual proponents attempted to explain it away. Within the context of NATO the demise of the Warsaw Pact was a particularly troubling experience. What justification was there for the continuation of NATO now that its raison dtre had gone? A familiar mantra in NATO at the time was out of area or out of business. 12 For NATO to continue it needed to establish a new and expanded role, despite the apparent promises made to Gorbachev that NATO would transform itself but not seek to incorporate Eastern European states into its alliance.13 However, the end of the Cold War and the ushering in of a new world order saw a number of crises develop in global politics that gave NATO the potential to develop a new strategy to justify its continued existence, extending the meaning of security into areas such as civil crises.14 At the same time the agenda for neoliberal global governance was developing, with the second Gulf War bringing about a new geopolitical structure in which the USA and its allies were able to keep China and Russia onside, if not part of the coalition, through a variety of mechanisms of financial reward and threatened financial sanction. 15 The new world order saw the extension of a variety of intergovernmental organisations , private actors and regional bodies, developing a global network that would help to bring about a general movement towards a world based around neoliberal economic reforms. 16 In effect neoliberalism and its key policies of free trade, deregulation and privatisation became the global credo for economic orthodoxy. This applied whether a governing party was ideologically conservative, socialist, 635

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nationalist or communist. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed a polarising of inequality and deepening of global poverty, unevenly spread, bringing with it a range of major social and political problems.17 Branko Milanovic has recently published work on global inequality that calculates inequality in the world as a totality rather than as being located within or between discrete nation-states. Milanovic shows that, among other things, the richest 1% of people in the world receive as much as the bottom 57%; in other words, less than 50 million richest people receive as much as 2.7 billion poor. More tellingly Milanovic notes that global inequality is rising: in a mere five-year period between 1988 and 1993, inequality increased by 5% with the real incomes of the poorest 5% of people in the world decreasing while the real incomes of the top 20% increased. World inequality rose at approximately the same speed at which UK inequality rose during the Thatcher years. And as the rich get richer and the poor poorer, the middle of the income distribution is disappearing. 18 As the economic institutions of neoliberal global governance, both private and public, sought to provide economic remedies for these crises, the opportunity also arose for a number of security apparatuses, including, importantly, the UN Security Council and NATO, to assume more practical and far-reaching roles. To illustrate, Rwanda and Somalia are claimed as examples of a new humanitarian intervention in the new world order. The meaning of state security and the perceived threats to it were being revised in the post-cold war era as the impact of global poverty was producing major social crises: famine, mass unemployment (even in the NATO heartland of Europe), environmental disasters, mass migration, the revival and spread of infectious diseases, the movement of populations from poor to rich areas and from country to city, all gathered apace. These developments brought about institutionalised responses from the core capitalist states and their security apparatus, embodied in the G7/G8 nexus and NATO.19 While the global political economy was being restructured in accord with neoliberal principles, it was equally clear that these principles could only be taken so far in practice. The free movement of peoples, for example, implicit in such regional free trade agreements as NAFTA , coincided with a massive expenditure in the USA on border patrols, surveillance equipment and antipersonnel devices to prevent the movement of poor Mexicans into the USA. 20 Free trade is the mantra but in practice this has to be selectively applied, controlled and mixed with a raft of coercive state policies. Likewise the breakdown of numerous states in the 1990s, failed states as they have become known, has brought with it not only the intensification of civil wars, humanitarian disasters and displaced populations but the rise of shadow economies and increasingly powerful non-state actors such as organised crime networks and a thriving global black market.21 The practice of global governance has potentially been threatened by these tendencies and the major institutions in the merging of the security and development discourses have increasingly focused their attention upon the issue of corruption as perhaps the major obstacle to good governance. The World Bank, NGOs, aid agencies and NATO have all produced a great deal of literature on the problems of corruption and the threat it poses to good governance. Consequently aid is being tied to a commitment to principles of transparency, accountability and the auditing of governments 636

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financial and political credentials.22 These mechanisms of discipline and self-discipline are key norms in the neoliberal global governance agenda, establishing what are universal goals for all states to adhere to. If states are to conform to the principles of neoliberal global governance, making the world a safe place for capitalist investors, it has become increasingly clear that a new form of security structure has to be established that can respond to social crises that occur anywhere. Hence the development of what I described earlier as the National, Regional, Global Security Structure (NRGSS ) that is able to act as a mechanism to contain and control such social crises wherever they occur. If the break-up of Yugoslavia was the first major opportunity for such a security structure to develop, it seems likely that the current war on terrorism will take this process further. These developments are not entirely new. For example, NATO established its committee on the Challenges of Modern Societies as long ago as 1969. What is new is the way in which the end of the Cold War has op en ed up th e oppo rtunity for a merging of the securitydevelopment discourses on the assumption that the ideological conflicts that have structured global politics since the Russian Revolution are now a thing of the past. There is a basic agreement on the form that economic and geopolitical order should take and the principles that must underpin it: those of neoliberal global governance. As a consequence of this, institutions from NATO to the World Bank have written of the way in which global poverty is now threatening this model of global governance. In its World Development Report 2000/2001 the World Bank sets out a framework for action in tackling global poverty that has five main themes: opportunit y, empowerment, interconnection s at local and national levels, international action and security.23 In a major speech in July 2001 entitled Empowerment, Security and Opportunity through Law and Justice, the World Bank President, James Wolfensohn, acknowledged that there are a set of globally accepted principles underpinning the global governance consensus which require political, economic and social reform in all states. A secure global order depends upon more than a consensus around the principles of neoliberal global governance; it needs practical actions on the part of states and their populations if they are to enjoy the benefits of a properly functioning market economy.24 This, then, serves as an introduction to the emerging securitydevelopment discourses of the past decade. It needs to be understood in the context of the end of the Cold War and the construction of a network of neoliberal global governance incorporating public and private institutions , NGO s, think-tanks , charities, aid agencies, intellectuals and corporations. The result of this process of global governance is a restructuring of the relationship between states, capital and citizens. The state is to provide capital with the conditions that it needs in order to thrive and citizens with the tools that they need in order to succeed in a market economy. It is to be an enabling state.25 One of its professed goals is the eradication of global poverty as a means to producing a secure global order. In practice, however, I would argue that it cannot achieve these aims. To understand why this is so I want to explore the ideological assumptions at the heart of the securitydevelopment discourse and their role in the production of global governance. 637

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The securitydevelopment discourse and global governance The merging of the orthodox security and developmental agendas is less a sign of radical rethinking among the security and developmental communities and practitioners than it is an attempt to merge two discourses that have always been compatible with and supportive of each other. Both orthodox security and mainstream developmental discourse share significant ontological and epistemological assumptions. A merging of the two discourses means that ontologicall y the world view remains the same: it is still a world of discrete sovereign nationstates, however interconnected their relations may be. It remains an atomistic world view in which problems of development, such as global poverty, are the problems of particular states, their political institutions and a lack of commitment to sound capitalist practices. On such a view the task of neoliberal global governance is to provide weak states, failed states and corrupt states with the skills they need in order to overcome their particular weaknesses. Such an ontology is unable to address the causes of global poverty, as can be seen in the World Banks World Development Report 2000/2001. The report aims to offer solutions to global poverty which overwhelmingly emphasise the need for states to reform themselves politically and economically. It also argues for the empowerment of ordinary people through education, skills training and investment in micro-projects at a local level. Quotes from the report and the President of the World Bank are useful here to clarify this point as they illustrate that for the World Bank the causes of poverty are: c c c lack of income and assets to attain basic necessities; a sense of voicelessness and powerlessness in the institutions of state and society; vulnerability to adverse shocks, linked to inability to cope with them.26

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In effect the report explains the causes of global poverty by referring to the symptoms. Tautologies are presented as explanations. For example, the report says that poor people are poor because they have no capital. This is an astonishing argument but an understandable one given the world view set out in the orthodox security and mainstream development literature. On this view the problem of poverty is one of discrete political communities in their particular state systems. The way out of it is for these discrete states and societies to reform themselves in accord with the principles of neoliberal global governance. After all, it can be observed that the world is made up of nation-states and that poverty is contained within them. This assumption, however, is at the heart of the problem of these analyses. Instead I argue that an adequate ontology of global politics has to be a relational one. By this I mean that it recognises that the world is fundamentally structured through the social relations that exist within the worlds population . Social relations are complex and multiple, reflecting divisions of class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and so on. But it is out of these relations that emerge the institutions that provide world order, institutions such as states and the network of publicprivate organisation s that underpin neoliberal global governance. As world systems analysis has long noted, social relations are not internal to discrete nation-states , 638

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but are part of a global system of capitalist production established through colonialism, imperialism and the expansion of the European state system from the late 15th century. It is an analytic error to abstract people out of these global social relations and argue that they exist simply within bounded nation-states and, in consequence, it can lead to serious mis-readings of the causes of social crises. For example, when a currency crisis hit East and Southeast Asia in 1997 it led, among other things, to a wave of privatisations and massive job redundancies in South Korea.27 Can this be adequately explained as an internal problem of South Korea? Surely not. The social conflict that took place in South Korea around these economic transformations can only be described and explained as part of an account of South Koreas relationship to the wider world system. The state barriers that nominally render South Korea a sovereign nation-state do not control or contain the global social relations that underpin capitalism as an economic system. In effect, the orthodox security model makes the analytic error of starting with the institutional outcome of enduring social relations, the institutions that help to order the world system. As a consequence this approach fails to take account of the social relations that produce these institutions .28 The inside/outside model of orthodox security discourse collapses on this reading. To clarify, the argument I am making is not that political and economic elites in South Korea have nothing to do with the fate of the South Korean state, economy and society. Rather, it is to situate them as actors within a world system framework against which their actions and choices are made. Hence, the World Bank report on the causes of poverty has absolutely nothing to say about the role that capitalism might play in causing poverty in the world system. On the contrary, for the developing world, it is the lack of capitalism that is a cause of poverty.29 At the very least this is something that has to be argued for and any rational analysis would expect a case to be made to this effect. In practice the ontological assumptions at the heart of the orthodox security model mean that it begins from an a priori assumption that it is the lack of capitalism that is the prime cause of the uneven development and deepening poverty that structures the world system. In principle there is nothing wrong with a priori assumptions provided that they are open to empirical scrutiny and potential revision. This is not the case in the merging of the securitydevelopment discourses, however. What is presented is an infallible assumption about the potentially linear and progressive impact of capitalism as a globalising force. It simply cannot be shown to be anything other than a plausible argument. If a transitional state such as Russia introduces neoliberal reforms and witnesses a massive increase in poverty, it is because they are not really adopting capitalist methods and because the people are not really committed to the reforms.30 The theory is fine; reality is the problem. It is the problems that this world view generates that lead to the question of ideology and International Relations. As a concept ideology is far from popular in contemporary political discourse unless it is simply to refer to political ideologies as coherent systems of belief. What this analysis reveals is that the ontological and epistemological assumptions underpinning the orthodox security approach and mainstream IR discourse (the neoneo debate) are ideological in a different sense. The model of global policies set out in this discourse enables actors and institutions to function within 639

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it. It has a practical adequacy. However, these discourses are not simply the scientific and value-free descriptions and explanations of global politics that they aspire to be. On the contrary, mainstream IR theory and the orthodox security discourse have emerged in a specific socio-historic context, shaped most importantly by: the Cold War, the spread of global capitalism, the ideological struggle between communism and capitalism, and by the various anti-systemic crises in the world system over gender, racism, nationalism and the environment. Questions of social power cannot be avoided when analysing the orthodox securitydevelopment discourse and the way in which it has become embedded against this socio-historic backdrop to become the commonsense understanding of global politics. This is not to argue that the proponents of this discourse are simply wrong or hold a distorted view of the world. On the contrary, from the perspective of these discourses the world no doubt is as it appears to be, composed of discrete, interacting sovereign nation-states. But such an approach fails to provide a satisfactory account of the social relations that generate both the institutions that structure the social world and the relationship between these social relations and the production of the orthodox security discourse itself. For world systems analysis the neoliberal global governance project and the securitydevelopment discourse that is a strand of it reflect attempts by the core to reinforce its power over the periphery and the semi-periphery of the world system. The central question here is: who really gains from the acceptance of this securitydevelopment discourse? Again, in theory this is a question open to argument and empirical study. In practice it is not an issue in the discourse. Adherence to the neoliberal global governance principles is a win-win strategy. There are no losers. Is this born out in empirical study? I would argue that this is clearly not the case and yet in a way this is not the real issue here. The theoretical argument is that in the long run everyone wins from these reforms. If in the short-term poverty appears to increase for many, that is the result of a lack of consistent application of the principles of neoliberal global governance. Once reality falls into line with the theory, all will be well. Despite their positivist claims to testability along the lines of hypotheses in the natural sciences, the neoliberal assumptions about the securitydevelopment nexus are in practice infallible. There is a built-in theoretical get-out clause that explains away any divorce between theory and practice as being the fault of the world rather than the theory. The world view offered in the orthodox securitymainstream development discourse is ideological in the sense that it provides us with a coherent framework for interpreting reality but it is a view that reflects the inequalities of social power in existing global social relations. As John Thompson argues, to study ideology is to study ways in which meaning serves to establish and sustain relations of domination.31 That is, it is not a false view of the world but one that serves to reinforce the social privilege of those social groups and institutions that have the power to establish and embed the rules of neoliberal global governance. As a coherent ontology and epistemology it does the following: c 640 It provides a description of the world that enables actors and institutions to operate within it.

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It directs the focus of study and constrains the kind of questions about global poverty that might reasonably be asked and answered.

The emergence of the securitydevelopment discourse as part of the process of neoliberal global governance reflects the concrete socio-historic circumstances of the time: the end of the Cold War, the collapse of socialism, the triumph of capitalism, and the embedding of capitalist social relations globally. The consequence of this is that in ideological terms orthodox security and mainstream development discourse treat the world as a given, and thus rule out certain questions from even being asked. For example, the World Bank cannot substantively consider the idea that capitalism might be a cause of global poverty rather than a cure for it. In practice, the merging of the orthodox security mainstream development discourses means that the debate about global poverty is structured within a discursive framework reflective of prevailing hierarchies of social power and privilege. In short, it provides a world view which frames the way in which security and development are to be interpreted, but it is a world view structured around the observation or appearance of the phenomena to be studied: a world of sovereign nation-states, many of which contain people in dire states of poverty. This assumption is ideological in the sense that it fails to reveal the deeper global social relations that serve to generate poverty. Poor people are indeed a problem for orthodox security and neoliberal global governance: they migrate, they riot, they demand resources, they suffer illnesses and help spread diseases, they are destructive of the environment as they farm marginal lands to the point of desertification, they attempt to seize the things that they need in order to survive. As a consequence states need an adequate response for dealing with them. Given the assumptions underpinning orthodox security these state responses are hardly surprising and are increasingly provided by private security agencies. 32 They comprise, for example, laws against immigration,33 laws against terrorism to control the movement of peoples,34 investment in New Information Technology (NIT) for defence and security forces (public and private) to survey and monitor populations ,35 and the building of more prisons and of detention centres for economic migrants.36 It is hard to see how the orthodox security agenda can deal with development in a way that that would challenge the social relations that underpin these institutions. If tackling poverty means the redistribution of wealth, basic land reform for example, then the states that orthodox security structures are there to protect are unable to do this without running directly into the contradictory global social relations that I have emphasised throughout this paper. Neoliberal global governance is the expansion of a programme of uneven capitalist development around the world in which states are increasingly subscribing to the neo-liberal policies of: free trade, privatisation and deregulation. There is a basic conflict between these principles that serve to enhance inequality and the power of the core and the worlds rich and the systematic attempt to end poverty. So where does this lead with regard to alternative frameworks of understanding of the relationship between global poverty and security? 641

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The limitations of the orthodox securitydevelopment discourse There are three main responses that have emerged to the securitydevelopment discourse. They are discussed below. Extending the securitydevelopment discourse
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As the process of neoliberal global governance deepens, the assumptions underpinning it will be more firmly embedded in the world system. The restructuring of states, capital and social orders will continue along the lines I have set out in the paper. The consequences of this are likely to be a deepening of social crises and the polarising of global social relations as power shifts more firmly into the hands of private actors supported by state institutions and away from popular, democratic control. This argument is one that reflects the human security concern with general human well-being and existing global social relations. The key question for proponents of the orthodox securitydevelopment discourse is: to what extent can this process be deepened and globalised if at the same time it is generating the seeds of opposition with the polarising of global social relations? Can such a world system hope for the stability that the orthodox security discourse desires? Reforming the securitydevelopment discourse Within the orthodox securitydevelopment community there are voices of dissent and discord that have criticised many of the major assumptions underpinning the neoliberal global governance project. Criticisms have emerged from significant establishment economists such as Jeffrey Sachs, who devised the idea of shock therapy as a model of reform for transitional states and economics. Sachs has argued that the manner in which economic reforms have been introduced into Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, for example, have been crude and damaging. 37 Similarly, Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist at the World Bank, resigned, in part, in protest at what he saw as the damage that World Bank policies were doing to the so-called developing world.38 Indeed, the World Bank has sought to censor critics from within its own organisation .39 Outside the mainstream there are reformist elements in a range of social movements and in the debates surrounding human security, including the anti-globalisation movement itself. Calls for such things as debt relief for the worlds most impoverished states are not in themselves arguments against the model of neoliberal global governance that the securitydevelopment discourse advocates. Rather, they are attempts to moderate and negate the worst excesses of a more predatory and brutal capitalist world system. The key question for proponents of reform of the orthodox securitydevelopment discourse is: to what extent can the worst effects of neoliberal global governance be ameliorated without fundamentally altering the structures of existing global social relations? To get to the heart of the matter, can global poverty be alleviated without dramatic changes to existing structures of wealth ownership and distribution ? 642

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Transforming the securitydevelopment discourse Finally, the position advocated by some within the human security framework and sections of the anti-globalisation movement argues that the orthodox securitydevelopment discourse is fundamentally flawed for reasons that I have addressed in this paper. As such it cannot be reformed or moderated and a deepening of the process of neoliberal global governance will only intensify the social crises that structure the world system. As a consequence the call is for an approach to the securitydevelopment issue that places the general satisfaction of human needs before the pursuit of profit, the extension of democratic control of governing institutions before the extension of private power that is central to neoliberal global governance. These are not simply rhetorical or idealist demands. The past decade has witnessed the growing anti-globalisation movement and it is clear that, within this sprawling and pluralist group of actors, there is some kind of consensus around key issues to do with global social justice.40 These actors have not emerged out of the ether; neither has the human security debate. Indeed, the concerns of human security are to a large extent the concerns of the anti-globalisation movement which embodies in practice and spirit the struggle for democratisation and global social justice. The key question for proponents of the transformation of the securitydevelopment debate is: what alternative do they have to offer to neoliberal global governance? How might this alternative be bought to bear without generating deeper social crises than those that already exist? These are the three positions that flow out of the orthodox securitydevelopment discourse and the structure of neoliberal global governance of which it is a significant part. The world system is currently undergoing a global social struggle over these contrasting agendas. Notes
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JD Wolfensohn, Empowerment, security and opportunity through law and justice, 9 July 2001, St Petersburg, Russia, at http://www.worldbank.org /html/extdr/extme/jdwsp070901.htm . P Sutcliffe, A geopolitical analysis of economic transition and its impact upon security in Europe, NATO Online , 27 July 2000, at http://www.nato.int/docu/colloq/1999/pdf/291-306.pdf. Sutcliffe makes this point elsewhere in his paper when he notes that in the Cold War era, economics and security were linked only to the extent that a strong economy provided the wherewithal to fund a strong military, which in turn provided physical securitybehind closed bordersagainst invasion or subjugation by a foreign power. If the two words economics and security were ever used in tandem, it was in relation to security of supply, especially of energy and raw materials. See M Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars, London: Zed Books, 2001. By mainstream developmental discourse I am referring to variants of modernisation theory that are reflected in the policies of institutions such as the World Bank. I am excluding critical approaches to developmen t such as dependency theory, world systems analysis, and so on. On global social crises, see YW Bradshaw & M Wallace, Global Inequalitie s, California: Pine Forge, 1996; or the UN Human Development Report series for a detailed quantitative and qualitativ e analysis. Oxfam International note that it is the fact that none of the poverty reduction targets to which the international community signed up in the 1990s are likely to be met by the target date of 2015, in their paper, Towards global equity: strategic plan summary 20012004, at http://www. oxfam.org/strategic_plan/humane.htm. See R Hall & C Fox, Rethinking security, NATO Review, 49(4), 2001, pp 911, at http://www.nato. int/docu/review/2001/0104-02.htm. On human security, see C Thomas, Global Governance, Development and Human Security, London: Pluto Press, 2000.

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Hall & Fox, Rethinking security. P Wilkin, The Political Economy of Global Communication , London: Pluto Press, 2001; and C Thomas & P Wilkin (eds), Globalisation, Human Security and the African Experience, London: Lynn Riener, 1999. K Booth, Security and emancipation , Review of International Studies, 17(4), 1991, p 318. See K Waltz, Theory of International Politics , Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1979; S Talbott, Democracy and the national interest, Foreign Affairs, 75(6), 1996, pp 4763; and G. Kennan, Our duty to ourselves , in G Stourzh et al, Readings in American Democracy, New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. On the neoneo debate, see C Kegley (ed), Controversies in International Relations Theory, New York: St Martins Press, 1995. This quote is often attributed to Manfred Woerner. See the article by D Acheson, The NATO summit as seen from Kosovo, Washington Times , 30 April 1999, at http://www.acus.org/publications / bulletins/Other%20Bulletins/NATOKosovo.html. On this see the debate between former Gorbachev spokesman Gennady Gerasimov and academic Andrew Kortunov, director of the Moscow Public Science Foundation , for the US magazine Newshour at http://www.pbs.org/newshour /bb/europe/jan-june97 /russia_2-7.html. Gerasimov said and NATO for us was, as was mentioned, always kind of a danger, and you promisedfor instance, President Bush in his letter to Gorbachev in July 1990to transform NATO , not to expand, to transform, and he talked also about collective security. For an account of the complexities of NATOs calculations as to whether or not to expand eastwards, see J Goldgeier, Not Whether But When, New York: Brookings Institution, 1999. P Sutcliffe, A geopolitical analysis of economic transition and its impact upon security in Europe, NATO Online , 27 July 2000, at http://www.nato.int/docu/colloq/1999/pdf/291-306.pdf. HH Ticktin, The political economy of SovietUS relations over the invasion of Kuwait in the period August 1990 to march 1991, in H. Bresheeth & N. Yuval-Davis (eds), The Gulf War and the New World Order, London: Zed Books, 1991, ch 2; C. Layne, Why the Gulf War was not in the national interest , Atlantic Monthly, 268(1), 1991, pp 6581. Layne says nevertheless, although Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and China backed Americas anti-Iraq coalition, each did so for nationalinterest reasons that had little, if anything, to do with Saddam Husseins invasion of Kuwait. See Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars, ch 3. Bradshaw & Wallace, Global Inequalitie s. See also the article by J Sachs, The strategic significanc e of global inequality , Washington Quarterly, 24(3), 2001, pp 187198. B Milanovic, True world income distribution, 1988 and 1993: first calculations based on househol d surveys alone, The Economic Journal, January 2002. A summary of his findings can be found at the media briefings website, http://www.res.org.uk/media/milanovic.htm. At a recent G7/8 summit the Bush White House made clear that poverty alleviation was the central issue facing the group. Poverty alleviation central theme of G8 summit in Genoa, Rice says, The US Mission to NATO, Washington, DC, 13 July 2001, at http://www.nato.int/usa/nsc/nsc20010713a.html . For an account of the new G7 agenda see G. Garavoglia & P. Padoan, The G-7 agenda: old and new issues, G8 Information Centre, at http://www.g7.utoronto.ca /. P Andreas, Borderless economy, barricaded border, NACLA, 33(3), 1999. With regard to the commitment to trade liberalisation, this too has been very limited. For example, in textile manufacturing, by June 2000, the US had lifted only 13 out of 750 restrictions acknowledged during Uruguay; the EU 14 out of 219; Canada 29 out of 295. See B Gunnell, A plan for the world: trade, New Statesman, 22 October 2001, pp. 2324. RT Naylor, Wages of Crime: Black Markets, Illegal Finance and the Underworld Economy, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. On corruption and money laundering see the IMF paper, Financial system abuse, financial crime and money laundering background paper, prepared by the Monetary and Exchange Affairs and Policy Development and Review Departments in consultatio n with legal and other departme nts, 12 February 2001, at http://www.imf.org/external/np/ml/ 2001/eng/021201.htm. A few examples include the World Banks anti-corruption website at http://www1.worldbank.org / publicsector /anticorrupt /; International Chamber of Commerce, Investors demand good corporate governance free of corruption , 29 February 2002, at http://www.iccwbo.org/home/news_archives / 2000/investor_demand.asp; and Baroness Symons, Foreign Office Minister of State, speech delivered at the Global business and anti-corrup tion conference , London, 29 January 2002, at http:// www.fco.gov.uk/news/speechtext.asp?5832. The OECD directorate on corruption can be found at http://www.oecd.org/EN/home/0,,EN-home-31-nodi rectorate- no-no--31, FF.html. World Bank President Wolfensohn identifies corruption as the most pernicious and destructive issue of all. World Bank, World Development Report 2000/2001 , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 3134.

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Wolfensohn, Empowerment, security and opportunity . N Gilbert & B Gilbert, The Enabling State, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989. World Bank, World Development Report 2000/2001, p 34. P Krugman, What happened to Asia?, at http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/DISINTER.html; and D Henwood, Asia melts, Left Business Observer, 81, January 1998, at http://www.panix.com/ ~dhenwood/AsiaMelts.html. J Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society, London: Verso, p 141, He notes that realism only maps the superficial mechanisms of domination in a crude balance of power. It tells us nothing about what underlies this. This is exactly my point. World Bank, World Development Report 2000/2001, ch 4. This is a common neoliberal refrain. See SE Landsburg, Afghanistan after the war: dont give them democracy. Give them Capitalism, Slate Magazine , 6 November 2001, at http://slate.msn.com / ?id=2058133. Another example, among countless others, can be found in the recent OECD report on Russia as a transition economy, Economic Survey Russia 2002 , at http://www.oecd.org/EN/ document/0,,EN-document-30-nodirectorate-no-3-25679-30,FF.html. J. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994, p 56. Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars , ch 3. See also the Adam Smith Internationa l Divi sion on the n ew p ublic p rivate pa rtne rsh ip in sec ur ity, fou nd at ht tp ://w ww. adamsmithinstitute.com/training/courses.asp?course_id=6. R Carroll, Italy considers state of emergency as 1000 immigrants land on Sicily, Guardian , 19 March 2002, at http://www.guardian.co.uk /Archive/Article/0,4273,437692 9,00.html; S Malik, Blunkett has kicked us in the teeth, Guardian , 20 March 2002, at http://www.guardian.co.uk / Archive/Article/0,4273,4377619,00.h tml; and G De Lusignan, Global migration and European Integration , Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, 2(1) 1994, at http://ijgls.indiana.edu /archive/ 02/01/delusignan.shtml. See also the UK based Joint Council for the Welfare Of Immigrants response to the recent UK White Paper on the reform of immigration policy, at http://www.jcwi.org.uk/ whitepaper/jcwiresponse.html. See the StateWatch paper, EU Presidency presents draft Council Decision to target protestors as terrorists , at http://www.statewatch.org/news/2002/feb/07protest2.htm; and J Achieng, Anti globalisation NGOs threatened by war on terror, Daily Mail and Guardian (Dakar), 29 October 2001, at http://www.mg.co.za/mg/za/archive/2001oct/features/29oct-ngos.html. C Hables-Gray, Postmodern War: The New Politics of Conflict, London: Routledge, 1997; Wilkin, The Political Economy of Global Communication , pp 112113; WG Staples, The Culture of Surveillance , New York: Worth Publishing, 1997; M Libicki, Rethinking war: the mouses new roar?, Foreign Policy , Winter 19992000, at http://www.findarticles.com/m1181/1999_Winter / 58517712 /p1/article.jhtml; M. Hewsen, Surveillance and the global political economy, in EA Comor (ed), The Global Political Economy of Communication, New York: St Martins Press, 1994. E Goldberg & L Evans, The prisonindustrial complex and the global economy, Centre for Research on Globalization , 18 Octo ber 2001 , at ht tp://www.g lobalresearch.ca/articles/ EVA110A.html. J Sachs, Russias tumultuous decade: an insider remembers, Washington Monthly, March 2000, at http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/books/2000/0003.sachs.html. Mark Atkinson, Poverty row author quits World Bank, Guardian , 15 June 2000, at http:// www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4029590,00.html. K Raja, World Bank move to censor its own critics, Third World Network, at http://www.twnside. org.sg/title/twe272h.htm. A Cockburn, A Sekula & J St Claire, Five Days that shook the World, London: Verso; and P Wilkin, Against global governance? Tracing the lineage of the anti globalisation movement, in R Duffy, J Selby & F Cochrane (eds), Global Governance: Conflict and Resistance, Basingstoke: Palgrave, forthcoming 2002.

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