Liberalism, Liberty and International Security

Liberalism, Liberty and International Security
Liberalism, liberty and the implementation of a global security system to ensure that each individual within the global community maintains their right to self-determination is easy to define in theory but difficult to apply in practice. Individual interests are presented as an appeasement of all State and their associated national interests by such an international governing body that is able to effectively and legitimately implement policy and employ regulatory tools to ensure that individual rights to security and safety are facilitated. This is also a challenge to a State’s right to sovereignty, but a necessity to ensure that civil liberties are maintained.

Barry Buzan and Ole Waever in their paper Liberalism and Security: The contradictions of the liberal leviathan outlined ‘security as being a special type of politics that applies to military, economic, political, societal and environmental issues. They identify that the need may call for the permission to break with normal rules of politics by either using force, taking executive powers or imposing secrecy.’ (refer footnote 1) The advancing requirement for an increase in security within the international system is in conflict with the desires of liberal thought. There is an increasing awareness and desire for an increase in wider human contact and interactions free of or with minimum governmental regulation or intervention.

For security measures to be effective, certain levels of controls need to be implemented that regulate this human contact and interaction. For security to be effective internationally, States need to address their foreign and security policy formulation and decision making process to allow for the nuclear issue to be adequately addressed. The nuclear issue crosses into both the realm of foreign and security policy formulation for a state and requires the implementation of conventional statecraft (refer footnote 2) between sovereign States. Security applies to not just military advancements or interaction but inclusive of economic, political, societal and environmental issues, a constructivist view. The politics that applies and the responses decided upon for the security agenda are dependent on the threats, whether they are traditional, military or contemporary, migration, crime, pollution, flooding or competing cultures and identities.

The traditional threats dictate a States security agenda. Specifically, where contemporary threats in a liberal context can be either internal or external. The application of liberalism within contemporary society has facilitated the widening consideration of threats to both internal and external. The need to re-evaluate the current procedures in place to regulate, police and legally process these threats, is especially pertinent when dealing with nuclear strategic assets.

Footnotes
1. arry Buzan & Ole Waever, Liberalism and Security: The contradictions of the Liberal Leviathan, Copenhagen, 1998, p2
2. Reuben Wong in Christopher Hill & Michael Smith, International Relations and the European Union, Oxford, 2005, p143 Reuben Wong refers to Moravcsik’s interpretation of conventional statecraft. He refers to the Harvard approach for liberal intergovernmentalism when addressing the European Union’s state-to-state interaction. Moravcsik identifies that through interstate bargaining by member states the common interest can be raised even though liberal intergovernmentalism can be interpreted as materialistic or rationalistically bias. It is by the application of conventional statecraft, interstate bargaining to gain a common agreement that materialism and rationally based biases can be overcome to gain a converging preference for the common good when negotiating the nuclear issue.