CCTS
Review 30

Diana’s diagram is about alternative – and maybe connected – attitudes to human security. We are dealing here with huge forces of government and international coalitions. She remarked in her notes on how soldiers see themselves when they are trying to engage in peacebuilding operations. Soldiers as human beings may well be decent people with good intentions. But, like us, they are embedded in highly structured forces which are much larger than themselves. These forces, which we feel we are partly working with and partly struggling against, are actually rather incoherent.

Underlying the different attitudes to human security are different conceptions of democracy. There is general agreement about the fundamentals of the paradigm, namely that it concerns human autonomy in one form or another. But is democracy to be understood as the same thing as collectively articulated control in different localities of the world which are relatively autonomous?
Ever since the Berlin Wall came down there has been a triumphant victor that regards itself as having the right to democratize the world. Soviet communism has disappeared, and certainly that was a very dangerous and anti-human system that exercised control in undemocratic ways and was responsible for the violent deaths of millions of people. Now there is a return to the notion of making the world safe for democracy, but with democracy defined in a semi-articulate way as having to do with world integration, globalisation, and markets. This conception of democracy is powerful, but also totally instrumental. There is an assumption that we, the powerful, know what democracy is, and that we are democratic because our governments have been elected. This, we feel, entitles us to do what we want to secure democracy where it exists, and to advance it where it is judged not to exist.
Where then does local autonomy fit into the paradigm of control? Local autonomy in much of the world means control by thugs and warlords. That fact feeds, pragmatically, the conception that international intervention – pacification – is legitimate. If a country is ruled by thugs, what else can one do but go in and put things right? Having done that, our declared intention is to withdraw – except that we then discover that there are all sorts of problems and dilemmas about doing so.

At the heart of the problem, then, is the assumption that we, the powerful countries, know what democracy is, and that this entitles us to intervene without ever re-examining the coherence of our own concept of democracy. A dialogue is needed about the content of democracy and how far control, or even coercion, may be legitimate in certain circumstances, without assuming that the powerful nations know best and are entitled to do whatever they think fit.

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