This article was published by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) on 16 February 2017.
The five forces that are ‘liquidising’ global security.
As the liberal order frays and geopolitical competition returns it is natural that people turn to Henry Kissinger. No one has a more finely-grained understanding of power politics, and his treatise on World Order sits on the bed side tables of many global leaders (even if few have actually read it).
But Kissinger’s ideas of order represent an impossible aspiration in the world of ISIS and fake news. They are designed for a slower world and powerful states, rather than our age of permanent uncertainty, rapid change and disruption.
Many traditional concepts – even well-tested ones – have been overtaken by events. Deterrence, alliances, even diplomacy seem out of fashion; old certainties are gone. Kissinger’s order was based on two pillars: legitimacy and balance of power. The defining moment of his world view was the Peace of Westphalia. He laments the disappearance of the split between domestic and foreign policy. But, in spite of the return of power politics, the world is not Kissingerian any more.
Ironically, the person best placed to explain the new world died in early January this year: Zygmunt Bauman. Few people did more to help us make sense of the world we live in today than the Polish-British sociologist who developed the concept of liquid modernity. In Bauman’s liquid modernity, many previously solid things have become fluid – jobs, sexual orientation, relationships, places of residence. Society is no longer held together by a collective project that offers the individual a sense of cohesion and direction.
Bauman was mostly interested in the liquid modern man and the individual’s role in society. But the new man has also given shape to a world and a nation of security that is defined by liquidity rather than order. There are five forces that are leading to ‘liquid security’:
- Distinctions between foreign and domestic policy are no longer valid. Challenges like terrorism, cyber warfare, climate change, and refugee flows have removed the distinction between internal and external, between domestic and foreign. This also changes our ideas of legitimacy, as foreign policy is no longer a a prerogative of the state but a central realm of domestic politics – one which is ripe for manipulation by outside powers.
- There is no longer a clear divide between war and peace. It is many years since countries formally declared war on each other. In the physical realm, many are trying out new kinds of coercion that fall short of conventional warfare through little green men, coast-guards impinging on international waters, or proxy wars through rebel groups. This is supplemented by a perpetual conflict between countries in the online world that spans hacking and leaking to the destruction of nuclear facilities. The era of mutually assured destruction has given way to one of mutually assured disruption.
- What brought the world together is tearing it apart. Connectivity, heralded as the way to peace among nations – trade partners don’t wage war against countries they have supply chains in – is now being weaponized. Dispersed networks used to be a safeguard against volatility, and international links a way to ensure good relations if not cooperation with everyone. Today, whether it is with sanctions or migration flows, countries are like spiders caught in their own net, constantly threatened by enemies that are cutting away at the ends.
- The time of firm security alliances is over. NATO has been declared obsolete by the new US President, a statement that follows years of debates about the institution’s usefulness. The EU is losing a member and weakened by internal disputes. In the age of Trump and Erdogan, alliances will need to be built in different ways around domestic politics on every single issue rather than being taken for granted because of treaties and institutions. But unlike coalitions of the willing we’ve already seen in the past, they will rely much less on values and way more on narrow and short-term interests.
- The world is no longer mainly defined by great power balances. A teenager in her bedroom can bring down companies and plunge societies into chaos by hacking into their systems. Whistleblowers and leaks pose disproportionate risks. A terrorist group can draw a state into open-ended wars. A tech company can determine what people see and thus what they believe. A reality TV star can entice the electorate and end up commanding the most powerful armed forces in the world. Players that we don’t know yet may soon be deciding the fate of nations.
If security has become liquid, Europe’s response must become more fluid as well. Traditional military analysis must be supplemented with an understanding of the domestic context of policing, anti-corruption efforts, intelligence, cyber defence and sanctions. It must have a deep wealth of regional expertise, but have a wide enough lens to incorporate the newer dangers of connectivity and new technologies. It must understand the business models of the private sector actors that control the connections of the global economy.
In Kissinger’s old framework, legitimacy was defined by great powers. Today’s legitimacy stems from deliberation and national politics, so we need to find ways of knitting alliances together by framing issues in ways that appeal to citizens in the new environment.
The ideal of international order has become an impossible aspiration. But flexibility, speed, and resilience will not be enough to live in a disorderly world without risking Armageddon. As frightening as Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was during the Cold War, it helped to take a particularly deadly option off the table. In today’s world, we need to develop norms around the internet, economic warfare and new technologies – if not to achieve order, then at least to create some boundaries to chaos that can save the world from implosion.
For the EU specifically, new mechanisms of collaboration and alliances are needed. In this dangerous world 500 million Europeans can no longer rely for their security on 300 million Americans. They will need both to invest in their security – and to transform their thinking. The EU needs to break out of the compartmentalised frameworks of the past, in which criminal, terrorist, economic and military threats are viewed as separate challenges to be dealt with by separate and often competing agencies, each drawing on separate expertise.
The rationale for EU action must be grounded in the diverse domestic politics of its key member states rather than in the complex decision-making machinery of the European Union. EU institutions must find ways of empowering and bolstering member states and their ministers and governments. And new, more flexible arrangements are necessary to engage with post-Brexit Britain, with Turkey, Norway and other neighbours. To make its citizens feel more in control in an era of uncertainty, the EU needs to liquefy rather than seeking impossible ideals of order. To hold this delicate balance will be the task of today’s statesmen and stateswomen.
About the Author
Mark Leonard is co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).
This piece first appeared in the Munich Security Conference’s Security Times in February 2017.
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One reply on “The Era of Mutual Assured Disruption”
Thank you for the article Mark, this concept of liquid security is very interesting. However, while I concur with your analysis, and that new norms and laws are needed to control emerging or unconventional threats, I want to just draw on one line of which I am not quite convinced – your prescription that ‘the EU needs to liquefy rather than seeking impossible ideals of order.’
It strikes me that a lot of the recent problems experienced by the world have come from too much unsettling liquification, and that an express policy that demonstrates a lack of confidence in that order will only cause them to disintegrate further. Yes, the EU needs to adapt and explore many new responses, but to me, to liquify implies a more radical dissolution of structures. Yet, just as there are enormous problems with conservative bureaucracies and stove-piping, there are also surely limits on how much liquidity is desirable. This may be a semantic point, so I hope you’ll forgive me, but I wouldn’t want an overenthusiastic policymaker to run with the idea too far and too fast.
I have just come from a fascinating talk in which the speaker referenced Paul Ricoeur’s ‘Oneself as Another’, which speaks of the need for self-constancy. For Ricoeur, ‘self-constancy is for each person that manner of conducting himself or herself so that others can count on that person’ – in other words, the reason I am today the person I was yesterday and will be tomorrow – and Ricoeur argues that it is self-constancy between individuals (and to this you might add states/blocs/continents) that allows us to build trusting and ethical relationships. Self-constancy is, however, opposed to liquidity, which would encourage us to strip away our constants and be more reactive.
I would argue that Europe must ensure that it retains its self-constancy, even as it makes systemic changes, such as creating some of the norms you describe and creating a new form of relationship with Russia and others. It will be self-constancy that allows it to maintain a trustworthy partner in a whirlwind world – a USP, even.