http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/01/mary.kaldor.interview
Interview: Mary Kaldor
'The international community makes a terrible mess wherever it goes'
The activist, academic and author Mary Kaldor tells Mark Tran why the security
of individuals should come before the security of the state
Mark Tran
guardian.co.uk,
Tuesday April 1 2008
Article history
About this article
Close
This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Tuesday April 01 2008. It
was last updated at 14:51 on April 01 2008.
The flag of Kosovo. Photograph: Vassil Donev/ EPA
Mary Kaldor admits that some of her ideas on international security sound
utopian a word that crops up several times in her latest book - but she
insists the world needs utopias.
"After the end of communism we rejected utopias, but not being utopian is
equally problematic," she says. "We need a set of beliefs to guide human
society."
Human Security distils Kaldor's thinking on global civil society, just war,
human rights and humanitarian intervention, subjects that have absorbed her in
an academic career stretching back to the 1970s.
Her first job was at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute,
where she compiled the first statistics on the arms trade, before moving to
Sussex University where she worked on the economics of the arms race and the
social aspects of military technology.
In the 1980s, Kaldor - who went on her first demonstration against nuclear
weapons when she was nine - became involved in the peace movement that opposed
the deployment of US cruise missiles by the Reagan administration in western
Europe. The movement was deeply influenced by the Marxist historian EP
Thompson, who introduced Kaldor to what she describes as "the idea of politics
from below and history from below".
Kaldor is now a professor and director of the Centre for the Study of Global
Governance at the London School of Economics. Her father, Nicholas Kaldor, was
also a distinguished academic, one of the foremost Cambridge economists in the
postwar period.
The subjects in Human Security may sound nebulous, but Kaldor is very much an
activist academic, keen to see her ideas put into practice. Policymakers take
her seriously. Javier Solana, the EU's foreign policy chief, asked her to
convene a study group on European security that produced a report called A
Human Security Doctrine for Europe and a follow-on report, the European Way of
Security.
When we meet at her office at the LSE, Kaldor has just returned from Kosovo,
which a few weeks earlier declared independence from Serbia. Kosovo, deeply
divided along ethnic lines with Serbs effectively partitioning the north and
isolating themselves in enclaves in the south, is shaping up to be a major
challenge for the EU.
In many ways Kosovo represents a laboratory for Kaldor's thinking on human
security, which she defines as the security of individuals and communities
rather than the security of states. This security of individuals is a
fundamental thread in Kaldor's work - its utopian aspect.
For Kaldor, humanitarian intervention and international peacekeeping involve "a
genuine belief in the equality of all human beings; and this entails a
readiness to risk lives of peacekeeping troops to save the lives of others
where this is necessary".
In Kosovo, the EU is replacing a UN mission that has alienated the majority
Albanian population. The thrust of the 1,800-strong EU mission on policing and
the rule of law bears the hallmarks of Kaldor's thinking. Making up the mission
will be police, judges, lawyers, and administrators.
But there is many a slip twixt cup and lip. What sounds good on paper, such as
the creation of a gender and human rights unit in Kosovo, can become just
another exercise in box-ticking, Kaldor laments.
"You have a concept like human security and it gets translated into
bureaucratic guidelines," she says. Kaldor is worried that the UN and the EU
are not working together to prevent de facto partition of this state of 2
million, as ethnic power-sharing was built into the plan drawn up by the UN
special envoy on Kosovo, Marti Ahtissari.
More generally, the gap between the ideal of human security and the facts on
the ground poses a conundrum of which Kaldor is all too aware.
"The international community makes a terrible mess wherever it goes," Kaldor
admits, a sentiment she spells out in stark terms early on in her book.
"It is hard to find a single example of humanitarian intervention during the
1990s that can be unequivocally declared a success. Especially after Kosovo,
the debate about whether human rights can be enforced through military means is
ever more intense. Moreover, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which have been
justified in humanitarian terms, have further called into question the case for
intervention."
A crucial and recurring problem for those who intervene, even those with the
best of intentions, says Kaldor, is the psychological distance and the cultural
barriers between the so-called internationals and the local population. Kaldor
remembers an instance in Iraq where she was appalled by the insensitivity and
arrogance of a young, uneducated American talking down to a highly qualified
Iraqi with a Phd. While this was an extreme example, she sees the same dynamics
in Kosovo and Afghanistan.
"Internationals are a breed apart," Kaldor says. "Wherever they go, they become
isolated from the local community. It's as if they are taking part in a movie
or are on holiday, recreating a lifestyle they bring with them. The interesting
thing about imperialism and why it lasted a very long time was that it had
local support. The imperialists were so few in number they had to rely heavily
on the local population."
In the final chapter of her book, Kaldor sets out her framework for a new
approach to security, encapsulated by the term human security, involving a big
shift in military strategy where the primary goal would be to protect civilians
rather than defeat an adversary.
"Of course sometimes it is necessary to try to capture or even defeat
insurgents but this has to be seen as a means to an end, civilian protection,
rather than the other way around," Kaldor writes. "So-called collateral damage
is unacceptable."
While some may dismiss this as designer warfare, Kaldor insists some in the
military get it, and says this view of warfare does require a big cognitive
shift.
Kaldor believes such changes are already taking place in American thinking, and
points to General David Petraeus, the top US military commander in Iraq. But in
an interview last year with the Democratyia journal, she said it was a tragedy
that he was pushing new ideas at a time when the US had been so discredited in
Iraq.
Actually, the new thinking is a case of going back to the future. The model for
the human security approach to war lies in Northern Ireland, which saw a "new
war" without clear battle lines in contrast to "old wars" such as the second
world war.
"The British developed a response that reflected the fact that the inhabitants
of Northern Ireland were British citizens (and voters) and that therefore their
protection had to come first. Bombing Belfast was not an option. In effect,
this principle implies that everyone is treated as a citizen."
Kaldor pins a lot of hope on the EU to pursue this notion of human security,
with its 1.8 million under arms, and with the capacity - notwithstanding its
divisions - to act more effectively than the unwieldy UN. Kaldor acknowledges
that the book is a normative project and that the world will not necessarily
move in the way she desires.
"But the more we move towards these trends," she says, "the more likely we are
to live in a better place."
· Human Security: Reflections on Globalisation and Intervention, by Mary
Kaldor, is published by Polity Press.
__________________________________________________________________
Connect with friends from any web browser - no download required. Try the new
Yahoo! Canada Messenger for the Web BETA at
http://ca.messenger.yahoo.com/webmessengerpromo.php
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
------------------------------------
===============
Group Moderator: [Е-ПОШТА
ЗАШТИЋЕНА]
page at http://magazine.sorabia.net
for more informations about current situation in Serbia http://www.sorabia.net
Slusajte GLAS SORABIJE nas talk internet-radio (Serbian Only)
http://radio.sorabia.net
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sorabia/
<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional
<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sorabia/join
(Yahoo! ID required)
<*> To change settings via email:
mailto:[Е-ПОШТА
ЗАШТИЋЕНА]
mailto:[Е-ПОШТА
ЗАШТИЋЕНА]
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[Е-ПОШТА
ЗАШТИЋЕНА]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
