Constructing Public Consensus on the New Security Threats: Thoughts on Some

Difficulties at Hand

Vladimir Shopov^*

The emergence and handling of the new security threats is at the core of contemporary debates about the future of foreign policy and defense¹. There appears to be a declining will to engage in risk intensive action, apparent decreasing support for security expenditure, loss of focus as the plethora of international organizations and forums expands, to name just a few relevant processes. In such context activities relating to tackling new security threats will need to have as their basis a sense of legitimacy at the level of individual polities which is mostly wanting. Attaining public consensus on the structure, immediacy and expense of new security threats is a condition sine quo non for the emerging new era. Constructing such a consensus will be an immensely difficult task requiring the consideration of a multitude of variables and an open mind. Further, in some notions of management of risk the individual citizen is perceived as a first 'line of defense'. This issue attempts to give a small contribution to the better understanding of the tasks at hand.

The New Security Threats: A Bit Too Far?

The most obvious and most often emphasized feature of the new threats is their distance. This observation is a necessary and constant reminder as it is likely to have a disproportionate effect on the ways in which such threats are handled. Further, it is crucial in the context of this query on the manner in which the required public consensus may be built and then sustained. Distance, though, has numerous dimensions and physical distance of the sites of the new threats lead to cognitive distance, which is crucial in the current setting. This first point of the issue needs some clarifications. The key point here is that while the new threats may have very immediate and visible expressions, these are linked to a notion that their origin is distant. In other words, if transnational organized crime might find unfortunate expression in higher incidence of high-street shootings, its origin is seen as being located in territories and spaces other than the nation-state in question. Failed states and networked terrorism are further examples of threats whose vehemence is perceived as emerging from afar. What we have here is an attitude of new threats which are in sharp contrast to risks and dangers of the 'old days'. Where there was potential risk of land invasion by an expansive neighbor, there is today a somewhat abstract claim of a failing state further afield producing crime, illegal immigration, crime, terrorism, etc. This difficulty goes further as new threats require new indicators of danger which then in turn must be communicated to publics and through the political system to ensure adequate response and behaviour. Consequently, cognitive distance is created making these threats devoid of immediate reality. Rather, they acquire a significant dimension of potentiality which has to enter 'everyday mentality' through conscious effort rather than informed and historicized intuition (as was the case with the older generation of threats). In other words, locating threat 'out of area' and acting on it there is tantamount to the threats being 'out of history'. Societies are forced to come to terms with security and history spaces for which they have scant reference frameworks. It is one thing to have a living public memory of centuries of local wars, but quite another to ask for appreciation of security and political dynamics in areas thousands of miles away. This is a tall task even for highly specialized policy communities, let alone for the public at large.

Another point also bears some detailing. Distant threats have a peculiar reality, they are realized mainly by means of discrete incidents rather than large-scale, temporally prolonged affairs. This means that for most of their time, they lack an 'intermediate' reality with very little visible 'proof' between their analytical definition and their incidental occurrence. As far as the public is concerned, there is nothing in between. Citizens are made aware of the definitions of the new security threats (their listing, prioritizing, some media emphasis on particular features of particular threats, etc.) but before there is an incident directly linked to a cause, issues go 'off screen'. This is very important as it posits a temptation and a difficulty. The temptation is to force public consensus through an escalation of fear, the intense verbal and imagery creation of a sense of omnipresent, encompassing danger. Such a politics of fear are not acceptable for democratic polities. But herein is the difficulty of creating intelligently a consensus on the new security threats which leads to sufficient funding and adequate policy and political management. This task requires significant political craft as well as an effort by the academic, policy and media communities.

Evaluational Trust and Threat Perceptions

The 'non-everyday characteristic' of the new security threats brings another important dynamic. In essence, these threats possess a peculiar dual identity. On one hand, they exhibit omnipresence, they are 'around' through features such as climate change, personal security uncertainty, continuous terrorist threats, etc. These threats are 'the stuff' of everyday life as the sociology of risk is attempting to convince us. At the same time, the origin of these threats is distant. They may be omnipresent as potentiality but their origin and essential dynamic is distant. In this sense, the new threats possess a 'non-everyday' characteristic, which has numerous implications. One interesting implication is that such threats bring a particular institutional dimension. Being 'non-everyday' in this context means that the citizens lack a historical and evaluations matrix in which to place them. The previous generation of security threats had a historical immediacy available and useable by the collective social psyche. Moreover, the origin, evolution and resolution of previous security threats was internalized and personalized through the educational curricula in modern European societies, i.e. in the battles and the wars of the 20^th and previous centuries. Having a historical dimension also meant having an evaluational dimension, in other words, people knew and could recognize, relate to these threats and their potential realization. This is not the case with the new security threats. In practice, this then means that citizens have to rely extensively on external evaluations, be they expert or institutional. But relying on institutions for your threat assessment implies a relatively high degree of deference and trust in these. In other words, in order for citizens to accept and act on these assessments the institutions at hand must be trusted, perceived as legitimate and approved in terms of expertise. This implies that suddenly levels of general political and institutional legitimacy begin to play a crucial role in security governance. Being complex phenomenon by definition, these threats further presume institutional input and expertise, making perceptions more dependent on expertise than on social and historical memory and understanding of security threats. This context is important and not simply of academic significance. The incomplete and unconvincing account of the nuclear intentions of Saddam Hussein prior to the 2003 operation in Iraq needs to be perceived in such context. The public ambiguity towards this account serves to highlight this point and forms much of the context of institutional – public opinion dynamic for the future. What is truly peculiar here is that in practice the public resides in perpetual informational and evaluation scarcity in regard to the sites and dynamic of the new security threats. This heightens the importance of the linkage with trust in public and political institutions. If citizens are likely to rely extensively on official information and evaluation for their personal definitions of danger and risk, then the level of political legitimacy gains further prominence. The price of misrepresentation then grows higher.

National Military Memory vs. War as Profession

The ending of the practice of conscription has been regarded by many analysts and commentators as a crucial element of the democratic legitimacy of post-communist regimes. During the communist era conscription ended being a mechanism of national cohesion bringing together representatives of all social groups into the single institution of nation-state reproduction. Rather, it was transformed into a cruel, voluntaristic institutional tool for class warfare and forced egalitarianism dreaded by families across the Eastern part of the European continent. Since the inception of the nation-state, the system of conscription has been a central structure permitting social learning and cohesion as well as the reproduction of national military history. In ethical terms, conscription was perceived as a commitment to national defense, a gesture of belonging to the collective military history of the country, a contribution to the perpetuated standing of a country in a world of competition. This is a somewhat ahistorical take on conscription but it serves as a reminder of its numerous effects and functions. Still, in the last decades of communist rule, the institution had seized to perform these tasks and was rather seen as dreadful drudgery to be avoided at all costs. Consequently, the reform and eventual scrapping of conscription came to be an important policy item with significant symbolic weight in terms of change expectations. In the Bulgarian context, this expectation was at all times part of the military reform agenda and when it eventually occurred an important commitment had been fulfilled. But this shift from a conscription-based army to a professional one has numerous wider consequences, some of which have relevance here.

Most importantly, the conscription model 'brings security threats home', emotionally but also and importantly, cognitively. All sectors of society are exposed to the danger of war and the drama of security threats whatever their nature. The potential of danger to life has the side effect of internalizing and making these threats immediate, hence part of personal and social psychology. In other words and with some degree of exaggeration, the fate of the nations is linked to the fate of the individual in a most immediate manner. So, individuals and their families undergo a limited educational path, gaining some basic awareness of politics, security and war. Again, this means that war and military history are part of a larger, society-wide entity. The implementation of the professional army brings the potential of undermining, rather transforming this into a sector, group-specific endeavor. While a military dimension in national history and memory would persist, it is likely to decline in intensity and degree of awareness. This makes 'out-of-area' military endeavour more of a professional undertaking than an activity with national security meaning. This is not to say that security is internally delegated to a given profession or social stratum. Yet, the concentration of sacrifice and security effort does entail a thinning out of the breadth and depth of security concerns and, possibly, the readiness to engage in such activities. This is an observation based on informed intuition rather than hard data but including such an angle in sociological research related to security and defense will be important and potentially instructive.

Complexity and Its Relation to Democracy and Legitimacy

The standard approach to complexity is to treat it as an analytical phenomenon, i.e. to see it as a dense, inter-related, multivariate space with rich potential for variance. Taken in this way, most of our efforts go towards understanding, comprehension. Most of the devoted time goes into answering questions relating to essence and key characteristics of relevant phenomena, number of variables, their history and future, types and intensity of inter-linkages, etc. Hence, complexity is rarely linked to questions of democracy and legitimacy even though there are consequences stemming from these which relate to decision-making. Complexity is not really seen as impacting on democratic procedure and the legitimacy of the political system. Still, combined with distance, complexity does call for certain changes in the way things are done politically.

One aspect is institutional and requires further transparency and openness of the entire political system. As the external environment becomes more complex, more a product of fine analysis and cognitive construction, politics needs to become more open. To posit a somewhat crude linkage, decisions relating to complex realities make legitimacy more difficult as they make it harder to 'bring the public along'. Greater complexity is not reflected at the public level in greater devotion to observation and analysis. Thus, there is a case for making some democratizing changes resulting from increased complexity. However, there is another aspect which is even more important. Complexity as externality is increasingly handled by participation of polities in various types of international organizations. Inter-linkage brings a requirement for inter-national effort. This has consequences for democracy. The site of decision-making is more distanced, reasoning and information is hard to access, national media are less able to report and investigate well, national policy communities are much less likely to be 'on top of things', national parties are less able to fulfill their functions of information, analysis and scrutiny, national Parliaments are also not sufficiently able to perform their constitutional duties, etc. In these circumstances the executive is able to enlarge its powers further worsening an already existing trend of executive strengthening observed in modern liberal democracies. Cabinet and individual discretion expand, seemingly at the loss of legislative, judicial and public capacity to enforce accountability. There is little surprise that most legislatures in Europe have started to look into this dynamic. Some states have already elaborated relatively intensive scrutiny regimes, mainly dealing with the process of European integration. The linkage between the distance /complexity and democracy/ legitimacy is increasingly entering political debate. One last, extremely interesting example is the line of reasoning of the German constitutional court in its ruling on the EU Lisbon treaty affirming such linkage and its implications for further integration. A less noteworthy part of the ruling is that developing an already existing streak on constitutional thinking about the role of national Parliament in European integration. Much more notable is an emerging but prevalent in the ruling sense of a nearing threshold beyond which modern democracy structurally cannot absorb further delegation of decision-making on important issues, especially in the field of national security. The implications of such thinking will be significant as they begin to penetrate political culture in Europe, presently in the EU context but slowly expanding into other fields. Other linkages may begin to be attributed, most likely a financial one, particularly in the present context of the global crisis and renewed, intense interest in public finances. In any case, the issue of legitimacy in distanced decision-making in an era of pooled sovereignty will be increasingly part of politics and public debate. New security threats form an important segment of policy which is relevant in this context.

Reframing of Space

The emergence and increasing prevalence of the new security threats is changing one of the oldest and most established notions of international relations and security: the dichotomy between internal and external, home and abroad, near and far, interior and exterior. Such reframing of space is forced upon policy and political elites by globalizational change and has fundamental impact on perceptions of publics and elites alike. The world is becoming flat and less contoured as it 'expands', a perception produced by its capacity to threaten and change our immediate reality (networked terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, pandemics, etc.). This makes for yet another confusing factor disturbing all public patterns of political and social space. The observation may in fact be more valid for core states in Western Europe, rather than countries on the European periphery which have better habit of dealing with ambivalent and ‘grey’ spaces. Still, arriving at some well-established notion of frontier is a necessary precondition for greater public appreciation of the current complex security situation, in which our societies find themselves. Such notions are presently produced, possibly inadvertently, by the limits of NATO and EU enlargement. The idea of an ‘external border’ is to a large degree having this impact. Such a perception is further reinforced by the intensification of surveillance of all adjacent territory through an elaborate set of policies. This intensification, policy and rhetorical, is leading to a public notion of difference, i.e. allowing some sort of spacing by a bemused public. The degree to which this intensification of bordering is intended by the member states of these two organizations is a separate issue. Still, the application of higher order management approaches, for instance the ‘integrated border management system’ of the EU means that citizens are receiving persistent signals which they interpret as intending to create new geo-political and security spacing.   

Management of Economy of Effort and Budget Issues

The current global economic crisis has as an important side effect in a new attitude towards the public finances. The state has resurfaced as a key institution expected by citizens and businesses alike to respond to the dramatic upheaval. Political elites across the world have reached for the policy recipe book regardless of their ideological inclinations. Centre-right governments have endorsed huge public expenditure of a Keynesian type, while centre-left governments talk of the need for 'exit through restructuring', entailing better investment opportunities for 'green business'. Dealing with the huge expense of exiting from the global crisis is leading to the emergence of new war for public finances. The investment of every public penny is being scrutinized. At the same time, decades of tax reductions have created publics which are extremely wary of possible tax increases perceived as drawing back some important successes of consumer and citizen power. This resurgence in spending reluctance means that allotting necessary funding for the security sector will be increasingly difficult. Considerations of management of the impact of globalization are emerging as an extremely potent rallying call for public expenditure. Furthermore and beside being a budgeting issue, the financial response to the new security threats is made more difficult by necessity of a new economy of effort which again runs counter to established modes of thinking and behaving. The management of security complexity entails a new economy of effort, i.e. a new set and temporal frame of financial, institutional and cultural responses to the security problems facing the polity. It requires going beyond thinking about classic war and territory and structuring the state to respond to these. In a way, this new economy of security effort leads to a dispersed, multi-level, multi-institutional, targeted but flexible management allowing the simultaneous control over an expanding set of variables (be they policy, capital investment, human resources management, etc). Attaching a single, final figure to this process is extremely difficult from the point of view of political management but also from a public’s perspective. Finally, a complex reality makes it difficult to theorize and pace interjection, when and how do you 'strike' against these new threats? The new reality of complex security threats means that publics are not really able to 'imagine' the instances and circumstances of reaction, hence, making the understanding and acceptance of security management more problematic. Multivariate threats requiring multi-institutional, multi-policy and multi-level responses do not lend themselves to easy and immediate self-evident public budgeting. Tackling this difficulty and rendering this complex reality more comprehensible is very important for the construction of public consensus in the post-classical threats world.

The 'Material' Dividend

The fall of communism at the end of the 1980s marked the emergence of a perceived much less threatening geopolitical environment, one populated predominately by the success of liberal democracy and its claimed omnipresence across a quickly changing world. Later in the following decade, this self-assuredness and seemingly sustained lack of systemic alternative led to the unfolding of the first wave of globalization. With it went a presumption of largely effortless political and economic transformation which globalization was destined to bring with ease. While the bluntness of the idea of 'end of history', celebrated prematurely in many policy quarters, was politely discarded by knowledgeable academics, politicians and policy wonks of various stripes had already internalized it. If 'end of history' was a too impolite and self-satisfied manner of acknowledging the end of communism, then its quiet saturation in policy and political establishments was to be largely tolerated if often ignored. Indeed, one could insist that the idea of the end of history was easily refuted by academic argument, yet, it seemed to transform itself and find a new, less verbalized, home in the optimistic discourse on globalization and its feeble discontent. The optimism of the 'end of history' school was too disrespectful, the undue optimism of first-wave globalization provided a suitable site for its main conceptual off-shot. In this way, the end of history appeared to be clothed in an invisible engine of post-history, bringing market prosperity and democratization to the four corners of the world. It was not that discontent in its course was denigrated, it was quite simply marginalized conceptually and ridiculed symbolically. In any case, this sense of Zeitgeist led to the prevalence of a perception of smoothly proceeding market/democracy globalization characterized by its one-way nature. In a way, Western publics were exposed to a globalization narrative in which peripheries have also entered a material world, undercutting the social, psychological reason for war. Terrorism has made a big dent in this approach to globalized publics but an overall expectation of a 'material dividend' seems to be intact. If war is perceived as less likely, grand ideological debate has subsided, then a reduction in military spending is seen as due. The peace dividend of the 1990s appears to have been followed by a globalization material dividend with the same expected outcome. Here, as with other questions in the new security threats framework, public terms will need to be changed. Military spending of the old days was underpinned by the expectation of concentrated, immediate danger, war. Now we are in need of a descriptive tool, security spending seems appropriate as it captures the multi-dimensional, complex nature of security in the present world. The discarding of the ‘material dividend’ is not a present task easily assumed by politicians or policy masters. Yet, support for the emerging institutional architecture of tackling new threats will depend in no small measure on such a shift.

Diasporas As Site of ‘Delegated’ Security Threat / A Public Sociology of Difference

New security threats produce a dynamic which is having an impact on local communities of migrants, otherwise known as diasporas. The history of the terrorist attacks in the US in 2001, in Spain in 2004 and the United Kingdom in 2005 has contributed to a reconfiguring of perceptions towards these communities. Prior to these events, diasporas figured in public discourse predominantly through debates about multiculturalism, citizenship, migration, sometimes local crime. While this persists, we have witnessed the emergence of a new angle of perception and attention, local migrant communities as relevant for the new set of security threats, mainly in the context of terrorism. Most importantly, the persistent consensus on the generational evolution of migrants has been disrupted dramatically. In short, first-generation were extremely keen on integration as they sought to enter the established community and explore it to a maximum. Further generations enjoyed better social and economic capacity to 'integrate' but also preserve a degree of autonomy, internal cultural distance intended to preserve an original identity. While the rediscovery of original identity was always presumed to be part of the life of a third-generation migrant, there was always an implicit expectation that such an undertaking occurred firmly within the fold of the country of establishment, by them already 'home country'. This logic of analysis and public perception has now been disrupted and we are moving towards a period in which diasporas are seen as a site of 'delegated threat'. While new threats may be distant, abstract, complex, hard to 'grasp in a nutshell', local migrant communities are obvious, immediate and comprehensible units of threat, consisting of latent danger in an environment an incomplete cultural understanding and socialization. Such appears to be the emerging notion threatening to drive a serious wedge between majorities and minorities in democratic polities. Instead of sociology of growing community and individual interaction, we are witnessing a new public sociology of difference. In it, we are flooded with imagery and rhetoric of insurmountable difference, futile policy effort to overcome it and endless security projection of inter-community relations. This is unfortunate but requires a great deal of attention as publics seek to fill the void following the disappearance of the older generation of risk and security threat. We need to be aware of the potential of turning diasporas into the sole 'delegated threat'.

The enlisted considerations have sought to highlight some important dimensions and obstacles to the creation of a public consensus on the new security threats in the present century. There will always be temptation to circumvent something that is having a difficult offing and is far from maturity. Still, we have a democratic imperative to link security management to democratic awareness, approval and legitimacy. This will require efforts tackling the difficulties at hand. Shedding the notion that security talk is not sufficiently sexy or easy is a good starting point. Inclusion of study of globalization and its effects in civic education programmes is another possible measure. Inward public diplomacy on the changing landscape of security is a further must. Changes in party politics are also necessary making globalization comprehensible and manageable for a whole range of people beyond the highly specialized. Academic work and change in curricula is also an option in order to upgrade the notion of the individual polity as a self-sustained unit. Public consent will be a crucial component to any security policy and the fundamental change of nature of the threats if anything makes this more difficult to attain. History, habit and discretion are exiting the stage, ambivalence, consent by winning the argument, scrutiny are making their entry. Without sufficient public support, the security community will quite simply be unable to meet its constitutional obligation of protection. In this new terrain, it will need a great deal of imagination and determination to convince.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Constitutional Court of the Federal Republic of Germany, (2009), Ruling on the Constitutional Status of the Treaty of Lisbon, Karlsruhe, Germany;

Dufoix, S., (2008), Diasporas, publication of University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London;

Department of Homeland Security, (2008), Small Vessel Security Strategy, publication of the Department of Homeland Security, USA;

Gray, J., (2007), Black Mass. Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, publication of Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, London, England;

Keohane, R., (1998), International Relations, Old and New, in R. Goodin and H.-D. Klingemann, ‘A New Handbook of Political Science’, publication of Oxford University Press, Oxford, England;

Lake, D., (2003), The New Sovereignty in International Relations, International Studies Review (2003), issue 5, p. 303-323, published by Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA, USA and Oxford, England;

Loader, I. and Walker, N., (2007), Civilizing Security, publication of Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom;

Napolitano, J., (2009), Common Threat, Collective Response: Protecting Against Terrorist Attacks in a Networked World, presentation at the Council on Foreign Relations, Washington DC;

Wolin, S., (2008), Democracy Incorporated. Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, publication of Princeton University Press, Princeton, USA and Oxford, England;

¹

The list of these is ever expanding and there is persistent and sometimes disoriented debate on the precise list to be included. A reasonably accepted version would contain failed states, failure of development, weapons of mass destruction, climate change, terrorism, organized crime, energy security, cyber crime, etc. I do intend to take issue with the definition but simply take it for granted that these threats go beyond the classic, purely territory-based risks of previous generations.