Human and national security: a relation of contradiction or commonality?

Abstract

The human security literature helps refocus attention on human beings but seems to assume that the state is separate from society. The article seeks to rectify this deficit. It combines Marx’s ontological and epistemological insights with a realist analysis of the state, in order to restore both human agency as the sole driving force of history and the state as polity. It argues that national and human security inheres in the social evolution of humans, for they stand in a relation of commonality with one another. They are made by humans for humans and for human purposes.

Keywords:

• human security
• national security
• inter-subjectivity
• dialectics
• strategy
• polity

Acknowledgements

A shorter version was presented at the fourth Global Conference on War, Virtual War and Human Security in Budapest, 2–5 May 2007, and appeared as conference proceedings in Boll (2008). I acknowledge the feedback I received by the participants in the Conference, the encouragement I was given by the Editors of this issue and the advice I took by the anonymous reviewers for the journal.

Notes

A shorter version was presented at the fourth Global Conference on War, Virtual War and Human Security in Budapest, 2–5 May 2007, and appeared as conference proceedings in Boll (2008). I acknowledge the feedback I received by the participants in the Conference, the encouragement I was given by the Editors of this issue and the advice I took by the anonymous reviewers for the journal.

1. The terms ‘physical’ and ‘natural’, ‘subjects’ and ‘human agents’ or ‘actors’, and ‘activity’ and ‘action’ are used interchangeably.

2. I introduce a distinction of the material between the natural material and the human material. The former, consisting only of elements or entities of nature, represents the first-born, original material basis of the physical action of humans, marked out as they are by an amalgam of passions and reason. Initially, it is this physical human activity that by upgrading and transforming the natural material produces the human one.

3. Speaking of the material character of the conscious physical human activity implies that, in the first place, it originates in the natural material. In the second place, this activity is unlikely to become really explicit without being built on elements or entities of the material and, simultaneously, being driven by human reason; otherwise, it is liable to remain a mere instinct, organic doing taking place on the back of nature. This relationship runs the other way around, however. Human thoughts and the material take shape and substance and acquire effectual relevance only by human action. The physical human activity is a combination of activity and consciousness. Overall, material and intellectual elements or entities are not simply constitutive of human activity but also are embedded in and instantiated through it; and they all are internally related within the totality of the human world through the physical existence and evolution of real physical subjects in the course of history. Humans, in effect, produce, reproduce and change the material and the ideational and concurrently are produced, reproduced and changed by them both through their conscious physical human action. It is through this historical process that humans are uniquely able to constitute and, at the same time, become substantiated as part of the human world.

4. I take the ideational to denote human thought processes and products, including will, consciousness, images, discourse and language. I do not consider it an abstract thought creation of the human mind existing outside and apart from the material. Instead, by and through human activity it always becomes substantiated as part of the material reality of the human world. Even pure mentally processed and articulated products of all sorts are objectified to the extent that they are disseminated and experienced through particular material entities. That is so not simply because they are originally produced by the humans’ natural material need to preserve their physical existence, and thereby implant the material into them as an inbuilt trait; but also because they survive and produce real sensuous effects only when do real physical subjects make them an object of their action within the historical process. But the ideational is not a mechanical reflection of the material. Human action rests on human reason besides a material basis, and these all are internally intermingled. This inner connection implies that material and ideational elements or entities are mutually constitutive of each other as well. It is in this respect that human consciousness plays its relative autonomous part in constituting the material reality of the human world and, in Bieler’s words (2001, 98), ‘embodies a transformative quality’.

5. Cox (2000, 56) claims that ‘ideas and material conditions are always bound together, mutually influencing one another, and not reducible one to the other. Ideas have to be understood in relation to material circumstances’. For the material basis of ideas, see Bieler (2001).

6. As Marx (2002, 425) puts it, ‘it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness’.

7. Human relations in society refer to the fact that by and through their action, humans stand in a relation of cooperation and opposition with one another and, thus, blend together as though they give form to their own ensemble of relations in corresponding domains of human life.

8. Society becomes really explicit and relevant as a social material entity not only because it represents collective human forces’ relations in society, but also because it is territorially delimited.

9. Social action or interaction, being indigenous to the physical actual existence of social forces or agents, is a combination of collective human action and consciousness. It constitutes and, concurrently, is constituted by material and ideational elements or entities. Overall, social action, the material and the ideational, all are internally related within the totality of the social material world of human society.

10. Intersubjectivity has to do not only with particular social forces’ shared meanings, perceptions and identity but also with their social action. This conceptualization contradicts conventional wisdom in international relations theory. Encapsulating a customary view, intersubjectivity, or the socially constructed elements or entities, refers to the humans’ thought processes and their collective thought products, mainly knowledge, identity, and interests (Wendt 1992, 1999).I argue that thanks to social action, what is intersubjective or socially constructed or constituted is such both in collective meaning and collective material shape and substance. In the making of an objectified social product the component material part cannot be constructed outside and apart from the simultaneous construction of an attendant component ideational part, and vice versa.My understanding is in part similar to that of Bieler and Morton (2001, 22), who appear to identify intersubjectivity with the ideational but not to separate it from the material and the notion of socially constructed. They venture that the state, for instance, as an intersubjective category refers to ‘universal subjective’. It is ‘shared in the subjectivity of various people’, which afterwards ‘attains “humanly objective” consequences by shaping the everyday lives of real physical people’. To view states as structures as socially constructed, it entails that ‘structures become part of the “objective” world by virtue of their existence in the intersubjectivity of various people’.

11. The totality of these social structures corresponds to the structure of society in which ‘all relations coexist simultaneously and support one another’ (Marx 2002, 220). Every territorially confined society is made up of constituent social structures, which objectify or substantiate the configuration and historical development of social relations in corresponding domains of social life.

12. My understanding of the historicist method is similar but not identical to the one suggested by Bieler and Morton (2001, 14), which ‘attempts to both understand the intersubjective making of the social world – how intersubjective structures become instantiated in human practice – and explain how such structures are materially experienced by individual and collective agency, as both enabling and constraining properties’. The difference between them lies in my different understanding of intersubjectivity.

13. Exponents include van der Pijl (1998), Gill (1992), Murphy and Tooze (1991) and Cox (1987).

14. Strachan (2005, 33–4) alerts us to this neglected distinction. But he, and unlike myself, subscribes to the traditional wisdom, which asserts that strategy is only ‘about war and its conduct’, and that its purpose is to ‘make war useable by the state, so that it can, if need be, use force to fulfil its political objectives’ (48–9). For my part, I adopt the view set forth by Freedman (1992, 283, 291), who asserts that strategy is the ‘art of creating power’ in the sense of producing effects in war and peace. I take strategy to denote ‘the mechanism through which power is created to carry security into effect. It is through this link that power as a means is related to security as the end of power’ (Fakiolas forthcoming).

15. For insights, see Hobson (2001).

16. Works informing my point include van Evera (1999), Weldes (1996) and Wohlforth (1993).

17. Following a similar albeit not identical idea in Buzan, Jones, and Little (1993, 120–1).

18. The state is not unrestrained from world politics. Having the state as a common bearer in terms of polity, the international system and the structural state are causally interrelated to the agential state. But the agential and the structural state appear as though they are internally co-determined. They interact as a unified national agency with the international system to constitute social material products. This reciprocal interaction might be regarded as a combination of volitional but not unrestrained acts; mechanistic processes, which apparently are predetermined patterns of arrangements and chance coincidental occurrences pertaining to a synchronic occurrence of causally independent events (see Suganami 1999, 370–5). Thus, the structural state seems as if it exists as part of the agential state, and it is assumed, through its embedded property of unified national agency, to have become causally interrelated to the international system while polity being functioned as the only real driving social force behind.