Review: The Security Problematic of the Third World
Reviewed Work(s): National Security in the Third World: The Management of Internal and
External Threats by Edward E. Azar and Chung-in Moon; Security and Economy in the
Third World by Nicole Ball; Superpower Competition and Security in the Third World by
Robert S. Litwak, Samuel F. Wells and ; In Search of Security: The Third World in
International Relations by Caroline Thomas
Review by: Mohammed Ayoob
Source: World Politics, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Jan., 1991), pp. 257-283
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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Review Articles
THE SECURITY PROBLEMATIC OF
THE THIRD WORLD
By MOHAMMED AYOOB
Edward E. Azar and Chung-in Moon, eds., National Security in the Third
World: The Management of Internal and External Threats. College Park,
Md.: Center for International Development and Conflict Management,
University of Maryland, i988, 308 pp.
Nicole Ball, Security and Economy in the Third World. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, i988, 432 pp.
Robert S. Litwak and Samuel F. Wells, Jr., eds., Superpower Competition
and Security in the Third World. Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, i988, 295
PP.
Caroline Thomas, In Search of Security: The Third World in International
Relations. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, i987, 228 pp.
I
TWO major events have shaped the political contours of the postwar
world. The first is the awesome destructive capability of nuclear
weaponry, which, as institutionalized in the doctrine of mutual assured
destruction (MAD), has prevented the outbreak of major war between the
two dominant powers in the international system and, until recently, had
frozen the strategic situation in Europe in a bipolar mold. The second is
the entrance of unprecedented numbers of new members into the system
of states as a result of the decolonization process-such that the newcomers
now constitute a majority among the membership of that system.
Although the latter event has had as far-reaching effects as the former
on the workings of the international system, it has unfortunately not
received attention in the literature on international relations commensurate
with its actual and potential impact on international affairs.
Despite the moral dilemma related to the capacity of nuclear weapons
for mass destruction, the existence of superpower nuclear arsenals with
second strike capacities helped during the last four and a half decades to
stabilize the global balance of power and make it relatively immune to
transient shifts in the capabilities of the great powers. By contrast, the
influx of the weak, intruder majority of Third World states into the
World Politics 43 (January 1991), 257-83
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258 WORLD POLITICS
international system' introduced a great deal of fluidity, and therefore
instability, into that system. In strategic terms, this resulted primarily
from the fact that there existed a large group of "floating" states with no
alliance commitments, a group that was, in a sense, "up for grabs" by the
highest bidder or the great power with the largest capability to help or
harm it. Consequently, Third World regions became gray areas of the
globe to which cold war energies, frustrated in Europe by the existence
of MAD, were diverted. They became the primary site of the new "great
game" played out by the United States and the Soviet Union.
As a result of the superpowers' involvement in the Third World, particularly
in conflictual situations, a great deal of the international relations
literature on the Third World has been written from the perspective
of superpower competition for power and influence in the strategic
regions of the developing world. And it followed that the security of
Third World states and regions has been analyzed primarily from the
point of view of American and/or Soviet interests and concerns.2 Other
than individual country studies, little has been written in a systematic
fashion about the interaction of Third World states with the international
system,3 in particular, about their overriding concern with security
in terms of reducing the vulnerabilities of their structures, institutions,
and regimes.4
The books under review attempt to fill this gap in the existing literature
on the subject. The volumes by Azar and Moon and by Thomas
address the issue of the interaction of the Third World states with the
international system in the light of these states' demonstrated weaknesses
and vulnerabilities. Both books emphasize the search for security on the
part of these states as the major determinant of their external and internal
behavior. In their own contribution, Azar and Moon (chap. 4) emFor
a discussion of this phenomenon, see Mohammed Ayoob, "The Third World in the
System of States: Acute Schizophrenia or Growing Pains?" International Studies Quarterly 33
(March i989), 67-79.
2 For example, see Michael Nacht, "Toward an American Conception of Regional Security,"
Daedalus i Io (Winter i98i), I-22; and S. Neil MacFatiane, "The Soviet Conception of
Regional Security," World Politics 37 (April i985), 295-3 i6.
3 There are, however, significant exceptions to this rule and they include Robert I. Rothstein,
The Weak in the World of the Strong: The Developing Countries in the International System
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1977); Stephen D. Krasner, Structural Conflict: The
Third World against Global Liberalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, i985); Robert
A. Mortimer, The Third World Coalition in International Politics, 2d ed. (Boulder, Colo.:
Westview Press, i984); and Jacqueline A. Braveboy-Wagner, Interpreting the Third World:
Politics, Economics, and Social Issues (New York: Praeger, i986).
4For a commendable effort at bringing together analyses of the security problems and
policies of important Third World countries within some sort of a common framework, see
Edward A. Kolodziej and Robert E. Harkavy, eds., Security Policies of Developing Countries
(Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, i982). See also Abdul-Monem M. Al-Mashat, National
Security in the Third World (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, i985).
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THIRD WORLD SECURITY PROBLEMATIC 259
phasize what they call the "software" side of the security problematic in
the Third World as opposed to the traditional Western analyses of security,
which tend to concentrate on the "hardware" side of the problem.
They operationalize the concept of "security software" by disaggregating
it into three primary components legitimacy, integration, and policy
capacity-and attempting, in the light of these variables, to formulate a
typology of Third World states based upon eight clusters. These in turn
are dependent upon the different ways in which the three dimensions of
state security, namely, threats (security environment), hardware (capabilities),
and software, interact in the case of particular states.
Thomas also attempts to broaden the scope of the discussion of Third
World security but in directions somewhat different from those chosen
by Azar and Moon. In her own words:
A basic theme running through the book is that security in the context of
the Third World states does not simply refer to the military dimension, as
is often assumed in Western discussions of the concept, but to the whole
range of dimensions of a state's existence which are already taken care of
in the more-developed states, especially those of the West.... [F]or example,
the search for the internal security of the state through nation-building,
the search for secure systems of food, health, money and trade, as well
as the search for security through nuclear weapons. (p. i)
This all-inclusive definition of security, while valuable as an antidote to
the traditional military-oriented definition of the term, nevertheless runs
the risk of making the concept so elastic as to detract seriously from its
utility as an analytical tool.
For this reason it is preferable to define security in relation to vulnerabilities
that threaten, or have the potential, to bring down or significantly
weaken state structures, both territorial and institutional, as well
as the regimes that preside over these structures and profess to represent
them internationally. According to this definition, the more a state or
regime falls toward the invulnerable end of the vulnerable-invulnerable
continuum, the more secure it is. This is a definition that assumes the
basic primacy of political variables in determining the degree of security
that states and regimes enjoy. Different types of vulnerability, including
those of the economic and ecological varieties, become integral components
of this definition of security only if and when they become acute
enough to take on overtly political dimensions and threaten state boundaries,
state institutions, or regime survival. In other words, debt burdens,
or even famines, do not become part of the security calculus for the purpose
of this definition unless they threaten to have political outcomes that
affect the survivability of states (in either the territorial or the institutional
sense or both) or of governing elites within those states.
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260 WORLD POLITICS
The volume edited by Litwak and Wells is in its orientation the most
traditional of the four books under review, in that it emphasizes the
East-West dimension of security problems in the Third World. Nevertheless,
it also acknowledges the "turbulent nature of the target environment
itself' and the fact that "regional conflict[s] create the preconditions
for outside power intervention and involvement" (p. xi).
Furthermore, the editors do not hesitate to criticize the superpowers,
who, they charge, "proclaim their sensitivities to the nuances of regional
politics" but tend "to view Third World developments as a function of
East-West competition" (p. xii). Overall, the volume attempts to juxtapose
the geopolitical (East-West) and regionalist approaches to the study
of security in the Third World. The two-part organization of the book
reflects this approach. The first part, consisting of four chapters, is devoted
to the perceptions and policies of the developed states, and the
second, comprising seven chapters, deals with issues of superpower competition
in the Third World on a region-by-region basis.
The fourth and last book under review, Ball's study of security and
economy in the Third World, takes a rather different approach by trying
to explore the relationship between what appear to be the two most important
concerns of Third World policymakers security and development.
Ball poses and attempts to answer the query: "Does expenditure
in the security sector of Third World countries hinder their development,
or does it, as some analysts have suggested, promote the development
process?" (p. xiii). More specifically, according to Ball, the volume
"seeks to incorporate the security sector into the debate on the development
process in the Third World" (p. xxv). This very important, though
relatively neglected, field of inquiry has a great bearing upon the question
of how Third World governments perceive and prioritize their objectives
and in what fashion they allocate resources to the two sectors
that impinge directly on the legitimacy of both states and regimes in the
Third World.
Together the four volumes-by attempting to broaden the definition
of security, by opening up relatively new and neglected areas of enquiry,
and by pointing toward fresh directions for research raise some very
important issues in the field of Third World security studies. These are
issues that, in turn, need to be addressed from both historical and comparative
perspectives, as follows: (i) How does the concept of security as
applied to the Third World context differ from its traditional use in the
international relations literature? (2) What are the factors that inhere
within Third World states that can help explain this difference? (3) In
what ways does the interaction of Third World states with the internaThis
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THIRD WORLD SECURITY PROBLEMATIC 261
tional system affect the security of the fo
factors related to technology in the late twentieth century that affect the
security of Third World states in ways that are unique to the developing
countries? (5) What is the relationship between the security and developmental
concerns of Third World states, and how does the interaction
between these two preoccupations of Third World state elites affect the
levels of legitimacy enjoyed by Third World states and regimes?
II
The term security as it has been traditionally used in international relations
literature is based on two major assumptions: one, that threats to a
state's security principally arise from outside its borders, and two, that
these threats are primarily, if not exclusively, military in nature and usually
need a military response if the security of the target state is to be
preserved. These assumptions were best summed up in Walter
Lippmann's celebrated statement that "a nation is secure to the extent to
which it is not in danger of having to sacrifice core values, if it wishes to
avoid war, and is able, if challenged, to maintain them by victory in such
a war."5 Lippmann's definition, according to Arnold Wolfers, "implies
that security rises and falls with the ability of a nation to deter an attack,
or to defeat it. This is in accord with the common usage of the term."6
Even those scholars who have differed from this starkly state-centered
realist perspective and focused on international rather than national security
have been primarily concerned with reconciling national security
(in terms of reducing external threats to the security of a state, especially
of a major power) with systemic security concerns. They have taken their
philosophical cue from authors like Martin Wight and Hedley Bull, who
have argued, to quote Wight, that
if there is an international society, then there is an order of some kind to
be maintained, or even developed. It is not fallacious to speak of a collective
interest, and security acquires a broad meaning: it can be enjoyed or
pursued in common.7
Indeed, the earliest of the twentieth-century proponents of international
security-the "idealists" of the first three decades8-refused to distin-
5 Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (Boston: Little Brown, I943), 5I.
6 Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics (Baltimore, Md.: Johns
Hopkins University Press, i962), I50.
7 Wight, "Western Values in International Relations," in Herbert Butterfield and Martin
Wight, eds., Diplomatic Investigations (London: Allen and Unwin, i966), I03.
8 For a representative sample of idealist thought, see Norman Angell, The Great Illusion
4th ed. (i909; New York: Putnam's, I9I3).
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262 WORLD POLITICS
guish the security of the parts from that of the system as a whole. The
post-Second World War breed of system-centered scholars has been
more discriminating than its predecessors. They have argued from the
assumption that the various segments of the international system are interlinked
to such an extent that their security and welfare are dependent
upon each other. While much of the initial impetus for this line of argument
came from the awesome concentration of nuclear weaponry in
the hands of the two superpowers and the periodic crises in their relations
from the Berlin blockade of 1948 to the Cuban missile crisis of i962,
the economic problems that the leading Western industrialized states
faced from the early 1970s, including the two oil shocks of 1973-74 and
1978-79, led to the crystallization of the "interdependence" argument.9
What is most interesting for our purpose is that both these dominant
strands of security thinking (in their many variations) defined the concept
of security in external or outward-directed terms, that is, as external
to the commonly accepted unit of analysis in international relations: the
state. This definition and the process by which it was reached were understandable
because both reflected a particular trajectory of historical
development that could be traced back at least to the Peace of Westphalia
if not earlier. Between i648 (to use it as a symbolic date) and 1945 the
evolution of the European system of states and its interaction with the
domestic political processes of state building and national consolidation
within the major European powers led to the legitimation both of the
system and of the individual participants (at least of those twenty-five or
so that survived the processes of war and change in the European system
and emerged as modern states by i900). These two trends-of interaction
among sovereign states and of greater identification of individuals
with their respective states strengthened each other and in doing so
firmly laid the foundations of the intellectual tradition in which, at least
in terms of the literature on diplomatic history and international relations,
security became synonymous with the protection of a state's vital
interests and core values from external threats.
Developments since I945 strengthened the traditional Western notions
about security. In dividing the Western world (that is, Europe and
its offshoots) into two halves and in stabilizing that division until recently
by means of a mutual balance of terror, the cold war (and its later manifestation,
detente) froze the predominant Western connotation of security
in a bipolar mold. The concept of alliance security was, therefore,
superimposed on the concept of state security, while its essential, exter-
9 For example, see Robert 0. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Power and Interdependence (Boston:
Little Brown, I977).
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THIRD WORLD SECURITY PROBLEMATIC 263
nally directed thrust remained unchanged. Moreover, by making the security
of major industrial states of Europe and North America the central
concern of the security of the international system as a whole, the
dominant strand in Western strategic thinking increasingly obliterated
even the distinction between the realist (state-centric) and idealist (system-centric)
approaches to the study of international security.
The application of this historically conditioned definition of the concept
of security to the analysis of Third World situations has, however,
created major conceptual problems. This is so because the three major
characteristics of the concept of state security as developed in the Western
literature on international relations namely, its external orientation,
its strong linkage with systemic security, and its binding ties with
the security of the two major alliance blocs are, if not totally absent, at
lest thoroughly diluted in the Third World. Thus, the explanatory power
of the concept, as traditionally defined, is vastly reduced when applied to
Third World contexts.
The first and, in a sense, the fundamental attribute of the Western
concept of security (in that it is a corollary of the doctrine of state sovereignty
in its pure and pristine form) is external directedness. But it is
clear that in the Third World, despite the rhetoric of many of its leaders,
the sense of insecurity from which states suffer emanates to a substantial
degree from within their boundaries rather than from outside. This is
borne out by, among other studies, the findings of a recent project on the
security perceptions of leaders of Southeast Asian states. That study presents
the conclusion that "most Southeast Asian leaderships, like their
counterparts in the rest of the Third World, are preoccupied primarily
with internal threats to the security of their state structures and to the
regimes themselves."Io While this does not mean that external threats are
nonexistent, it does imply that where external threats do exist they often
attain saliency primarily because of the insecurities and conflicts that
abound within Third World states. Furthermore, it can be argued that
these internal conflicts and insecurities frequently get transformed into
interstate conflicts because of their spillover effects into neighboring
states that often suffer from similar domestic insecurities. Several contributions
to the Azar-Moon volume, particularly those by Barry Buzan
(chap. 2) and by the editors (chaps. i and 4), as well as the second chapter
of Thomas's book, which deals with nation building and the search for
security, highlight this internal dimension of the Third World states'
10 Mohammed Ayoob and Chai-Anan Samudavanija, "Leadership and Security in Southeast
Asia: Exploring General Propositions," in Ayoob and Samudavanija, eds., Leadership
Perceptions and National Security: The Southeast Asian Experience (Singapore: Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies, i989), 256.
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264 WORLD POLITICS
security problems and its capacity to become enmeshed in and, not infrequently,
to generate interstate conflict.
The Third World's weak linkage with the systemic security agenda
further circumscribes the utility of the traditional concept of security in
explaining the problem (or problems) of security that Third World states
face. This reflects the remarkable difference between the respective relationships
of the security concerns of the Third World states, on the one
hand, and those of the developed countries, on the other, to the security
and stability of the international system as a whole. The Third World's
relative unimportance to the central strategic balance is, paradoxically,
borne out by the fact that
during the postwar era, the Third World has been a principal arena of
East-West rivalry. From Southeast Asia to the Middle East to Southern
Africa to Central America, the superpowers have found themselves on
opposing sides of regional conflicts, locked in a global competition for influence.
(Litwak and Wells, ix)
The very fact that the superpowers chose the Third World as the arena
in which they could afford to be "locked in a global competition for
influence" in the thermonuclear age demonstrates the low priority they
attached to gains and losses in the Third World and the vast distance
that separated their Third World concerns from their vital interests,
which were, and are, protected by the nuclear balance of terror. It is no
wonder then that conflicts have proliferated in the Third World, while
the industrial and strategic heartland of the globe has been free of major
interstate conflict since the end of the Second World War. Systemic security
has therefore often contributed to insecurity in the Third World.
The close linkage between alliance security and state security that has
been such a prominent feature of the postwar political landscape in Europe
has been conspicuous by its absence in the Third World. While
several Third World states have been allied with one or the other superpower,
such alliances have been either fluid and temporary (as in the case
of Egypt and Somalia) or inadequate deterrents to regional conflicts involving
superpower allies (for example, Vietnam and Iraq) or incapable
of preventing the dismemberment of at least one aligned state (Pakistan).
The nature of alliances and of superpower commitments to their allies
in the Third World are therefore vastly different from the character of
alliances and of alliance commitments in the developed world. Alliance
security, in contrast to the postwar situation in Europe, is not synonymous
with, or even inextricably tied to, the security of even the most
overtly aligned states in the Third World."
-- Israel is the only exception to this rule because of the intensity of one superpower's
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THIRD WORLD SECURITY PROBLEMATIC 265
For all the three dimensions of the traditional definition of securityits
external orientation, links with systemic security, and the correspondence
with alliance security-the situation in the Third World is radically
different from that prevailing at the heart of the global strategic
system, which includes the two superpowers, Europe and its offshoots,
and Japan. The security of Third World states therefore needs to be
looked at from a perspective that differs somewhat from the one that is
prevalent in the Western literature on international relations.
III
This leads us to our next question: Are there any factors that inhere
within Third World states that can help explain this difference in the
Third World state's security problematic as compared with the paradigm
of security that is dominant in the international relations and strategic
studies literature?12 The principal problem that seems to distort a
great deal of Western analysis of the security of Third World states is
the tendency to compare states (that is, industrialized states with developing
ones) that are unlike each other in many respects. This is especially
so in relation to the crucial variable of state making, where the commonality
is simply that both are in formal possession of juridical statehood.
This, however, does not preclude the possibility of Third World states
eventually approximating more closely the ideal type of the modern industrialized
state (which is the reference point of most security analysts),
given adequate time to complete the prerequisite twin processes of state
making and nation building.
Time is, therefore, the crucial variable in explaining the difference in
the security concerns of the two sets of states. Most security analysts tend
to gloss over the fact that today's modern states-which are internally
relatively cohesive, possess rational bureaucratic structures as well as a
good deal of "infrastructural power,"'3 and are responsible to their peocommitment
to its security, as defined largely by Israel itself. This, in turn, is related to the
fact that Israel is a domestic political issue in the United States and not merely a foreign
policy concern. Moreover, Israel, in terms of its ideological origins, the organization of its
society and polity, the composition of its elite, and its links with strong and important European
and American constituencies is not a Third World state. In other words, Israel may
be physically located in the Third World but, in terms of the defining characteristics of the
Israeli state, is not of the Third World. For details of the nature and evolution of the special
relationship between the United States and Israel, see Nadav Safran, Israel: The Embattled
Ally (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 198I).
12 For a critique of the application (or misapplication) of the strategic studies paradigm to
the Third World, see Bahgat Korany, "Strategic Studies and the Third World: A Critical
Evaluation," International Social Science Journal, no. I IO (i986), 547-62.
13 Michael Mann has used the term infrastructural power to denote "the capacity of the state
actually to penetrate civil society, and to implement logistically political decisions throughout
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266 WORLD POLITICS
ple as well as responsive to the demands of their populations-were not
created overnight. They went through a long period of gestation (during
which most embryonic and also some not-so-embryonic states were
aborted) before they acquired the functional capacities as well as the legitimacy
they have today in the eyes of the populace that they encompass
territorially and over which they preside institutionally.
It is worth noting in this context the testimony of two leading scholars
of state making in Europe. According to Joseph Strayer:
While the sovereign state of 1300 was stronger than any competing political
form, it was still not very strong. ... It took four to five centuries for
European states to remedy their administrative deficiencies, and to bring
lukewarm loyalty to the white heat of nationalism.'4
Charles Tilly makes the same point even more forcefully:
The seventeenth and eighteenth century focus [of his edited volume] has
us dealing with periods in which, for most of Europe, both the primacy
and the ultimate form of the state were much in doubt. Perhaps that is the
most important historical insight the book has to offer: as seen from i6oo
or so, the development of the state was very contingent; many aspiring
states crumpled and fell along the way.'5
Most European political entities had to endure the precarious balance
between success and failure for centuries before their statehood was assured;
during that time their state makers were constantly preoccupied
with the problem of consolidating their power and control within the
territories they aspired to dominate. Seen in light of the European historical
experience, then, the magnitude of the internal security problems
faced by the new states of the Third World today is not all that astounding.
These problems assume inflated dimensions only when compared
with the "finished" products in Western Europe and North America.
And, indeed, some of those, despite the centuries available to them, have
yet to establish their unconditional legitimacy with some, and sometimes
significant, segments of their populations. (Witness Northern Ireland,
Quebec, and the Basque country, to mention only a few.)
Recent events have clearly demonstrated that the Soviet Union, despite
its claim to be the successor state to tsarist Russia with its long
history of statehood, does not even come close to the model of the cohethe
realm"; Mann, "The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and
Results," in John A. Hall, ed., States in History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, i986), I I3.
'4 Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, I970), 23, 57-
15 Tilly, "Reflections on the History of European State-Making," in Tilly, ed., The Formation
of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, I975), 7.
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THIRD WORLD SECURITY PROBLEMATIC 267
sive nation-state or even of a multinational federation whose institutional
and territorial legitimacy is accepted by the overwhelming majority of
its diverse ethnic and national groups. The same applies to the states in
the Balkans, created out of the debris of the Habsburg and Ottoman
empires, which generally fall midway between the model of the relatively
cohesive nation-states of Western Europe and the postcolonial
multiethnic, polyglot states of Asia and Africa. Yugoslavia, the most extreme
example in the Balkans, betrays a classic Third World syndrome
in terms of interethnic antagonism and intrastate insecurity. One suspects
that here, again, the time factor, coupled with the way these states
were brought into being as a result of decisions largely taken by major
external powers, provides the most fruitful explanation for the predicament
faced by the Balkan states.'6
Barry Buzan's distinction between "strong" and "weak" states, which
accords primary explanatory power to what he calls "the variable of sociopolitical
cohesiveness" (Azar and Moon, i8), is related in important
ways to this difference in the time available to different categories of
states to complete the twin processes of state making and nation building.
This comes through clearly in his conclusion: "Building stronger states
is virtually the only way in which the vicious circle of unstable states and
an unstable security environment can be broken" (Azar and Moon, 40).
Similarly, the emphasis placed by Azar and Moon (chap. 4) on the "software"
side of national security in the Third World is an acknowledgment
on their part that not enough time has been available to state makers
in these countries to develop the intangible ingredients of security,
including the identification of the people with the state (legitimacy) and
of people with each other (integration). It is also an acknowledgment of
the fact that in the absence of these intangibles, the state elites in the
i6 For an insightful analysis of state making and nation building in the Balkans, see Najdan
Pasic, "Varieties of Nation-Building in the Balkans and among the Southern Slavs," in S. N.
Eisenstadt and Stein Rokkan, eds., Building States and Nations (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage,
I973), 2:II7-4I. Pasic refers to the Balkan experience as the "missing link" and "a transition
between the way nations were formed in Europe at the beginning of the present era and the
nation-building now going on in the developing countries" (p. i i8). Pasic also makes another
interesting comparison between the way the Balkan states were carved out and spheres of
influence established among them and the way many Third World states were formed as a
result of intraimperial understandings:
From the Holy Alliance and the Congress of Berlin to the Yalta Conference, where
spheres of influence in the Balkans were calculated in percentages, the Balkan peoples
had their destinies carved out by others. The parceling out of political and national
structures in the Balkans was in a substantial part the product of such external forces.
In this respect, the historical circumstances surrounding nation-building in the Balkans
bear a close resemblance to those in which nations and independent national states have
taken shape in other parts of the economically underdeveloped world. (p. I30)
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268 WORLD POLITICS
Third World are bound to take frequent recourse to the "hardware"
instruments of security, namely, military force, to meet what are essentially
political challenges from disaffected groups within their popula-
tions.
It should be noted here that the Latin American case in terms of the
availability of time for purposes of state building appears to be somewhat
different from that of the rest of the Third World because the former
colonies of Spain and Portugal in South America acquired political independence
over a hundred years before the process of decolonization
began in earnest in Asia. For a number of reasons, however, their processes
of state making and nation building remained retarded. Prominent
among these was the importation, along with Spanish and Portuguese
colonists, of the economic and political culture of preindustrial
Iberia, which led to the fossilization of Latin American political development.
As Skidmore and Smith have pointed out, "However much
Latin America struggled, it was to remain an extension ... of the Europe
that had sailed west in the fifteenth century."' 7
The era of industrial society (in terms of its demonstration effect
rather than its realization) caught up with Latin America about the same
time that it did with much of Asia, if not Africa. (It needs to be pointed
out here that the model of the industrial society includes as its essential
elements a socially mobile population, forming part of a society that is
culturally relatively homogeneous, that is encompassed within a legitimate
state structure with adequate "infrastructural power," and that is
presided over by a representative government.) While the intervening
century may have provided Latin America the time to consolidate state
boundaries, its social and political structures retarded other aspects of
state making, above all those of societal penetration and the achievement
of political legitimacy both for state institutions and for ruling elites.
Thus, the acquisition of formal political independence relatively early in
the game gave Latin American states only marginal advantages over
their Asian counterparts. In any case, a head start of a little over a century,
especially in the absence of other elements conducive to state and
nation building, was not much in relation to the length of time it took
Western European states to complete their process of state making.'8 It
' Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith, Modern Latin America, 2d ed. (New York:
Oxford University Press, i989), i6.
,8 For interesting analyses of the Latin American case, see Robert E. Scott, "Nation-Building
in Latin America," in Karl W. Deutsch and William J. Foltz, eds., Nation-Building (New
York: Atherton Press, i966), 73-83; and Howard J. Wiarda, "Social Change, Political Development
and the Latin American Tradition," in Wiarda, ed., Politics and Social Change in
Latin America, 2d rev. ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, i982), 3-25.
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THIRD WORLD SECURITY PROBLEMATIC 269
is no wonder, therefore, that state elites in Latin America continue to put
as much emphasis on the "hardware" instruments of internal security as
do their counterparts in other parts of the Third World.'9
Overall, the Azar-Moon analysis cooroborates the thesis that the study
of the European experience of state making is very relevant to the explanation
of the current security predicament of states in the Third World.
This European experience, in Tilly's words,
cost tremendously in death, suffering, loss of rights, and unwilling surrender
of land, goods, or labor.... The fundamental reason for the high cost
of European state-building was its beginning in the midst of a decentralized,
largely peasant social structure. Building differentiated, autonomous,
centralized organizations with effective control of territories entailed eliminating
or subordinating thousands of semiautonomous authorities....
Most of the European population resisted each phase of the creation of
strong states.20
The applicability of this description to the present reality within most
Third World states is too uncanny to be purely coincidental.
While this similarity between the early European and current Third
World experiences of state making provides part of the explanation for
the internal security problems faced by Third World states, the difference
in the pace of state making and nation building and the telescoping
of these two processes into a combined and drastically shortened process
in the case of the Third World provides the rest of the explanation. This
is the result of the fact that unlike the centuries available to most European
(especially West European) state makers to complete their process
of state making, today's Third World state makers are under tremendous
pressure to complete this extremely complicated and costly process
in only three or four decades rather than three or four centuries. As a
result, the process of "primitive central state power accumulation" has
to be speeded up tremendously. The various phases of state and nation
19 Alain Rouquie comes close to tackling this question while attempting to provide explanations
for the military's involvement in Latin American politics, but he inexplicably shies
away from addressing it directly in his otherwise knowledgeable treatise The Military and the
State in Latin America, trans. Paul E. Sigmund (Berkeley: University of California Press,
i987).
20 Tilly (fn. I5), 7I. This conclusion is also borne out by the historical evidence pr
by Youssef Cohen, Brian R. Brown, and A. F. K. Organski in their article "The Paradoxical
Nature of State Making: The Violent Creation of Order," American Political Science Review
75, no. 4 (i98i), 90i-i0. They argue that "instead of indicating political decay, violence in
these [new] states is an integral part of the process of the accumulation of power by the
national state apparatus" (p. 9og).
21 "Many of the new states of today are engaged in struggles whose logic is similar to that
of the European period of primitive central state power accumulation"; Cohen, Brown, and
Organski (fn. 20), 902.
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270 WORLD POLITICS
building, which were undertaken and completed by and large sequentially
(although with significant degrees of overlap between the phases)22
and without any significant amount of premeditation in the case of early
modern Europe, have to be undertaken and completed deliberately and
simultaneously within a time-bound framework of ridiculously short du-
ration.
This drastic shortening of the time frame and the telescoping of the
various phases of state making, combined with the initially low level of
state power from which state making takes place,23 provide the primary
explanation for the sharp internal challenges to the centralizing state
structures in the developing countries and for the high level of violence
endemic in the current phase of state making in the Third World. These
challenges-whether posed in the garb of ethnicity or class or a combination
of the two-and the violent responses to them are functions of
the low level of legitimacy enjoyed by most Third World states within
their societies; they form the core of the security problems facing these
states and their regimes. Several contributions to the Azar-Moon volume
as well as the second chapter of Thomas's book refer to the connection
between low level of legitimacy and internal security problems in Third
World states. But they do not adequately probe these linkages and do
not delve into root causes that are embedded in the process of state making
in the Third World. This is an area that can prove to be very fruitful
in terms of further research on the interconnections between the factor
of time, the process of state making, and the problem of insecurity in the
countries and regions of the Third World.
IV
The security problems of Third World states are exacerbated by the fact
that state making in the Third World does not take place in an interna-
22 Stein Rokkan, in a very incisive essay in which he attempted to construct a paradigm
explaining the various dimensions of state formation and nation building in Europe, provided
four sequential phases over which these twin processes took place and termed them
penetration, standardization, participation, and redistribution. For details, see Rokkan, "Dimensions
of State Formation and Nation-Building: A Possible Paradigm for Research on
Variations within Europe," in Tilly (fn. I5), esp. 572-74. Rokkan analyzed the internal variations
in the patterns of nation-state building in Europe and concluded that, despite these
differences within the European experience, "what is important is that the Western nationstates
were given a chance to solve some of the worst problems of state-building before they
had to face the ordeal of mass politics" (p. 598).
23 This point is made by Cohen, Brown, and Organski (fn. 20), who argue that "the extent
to which an expansion of state power will generate collective violence depends on the level
of state power prior to that expansion ... the lower the initial level of state power, the
stronger the relationship between the rate of state expansion and collective violence" (p. 905).
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THIRD WORLD SECURITY PROBLEMATIC 271
tional vacuum. While the internal or intrastate dimension of state making
may be the primary preoccupation of state elites in the Third World,
the impact of international forces, whether military, political, economic,
or technological, makes a substantial and substantive difference to the
fortunes of the state-making enterprise and to the larger security problematic
of Third World states. This is particularly so in the contemporary
era when the technologies of communication and destruction link
the various parts of the world in a way that is qualitatively different from
the situation prevailing in any previous historical epoch.
Moreover, as a result of the colonial experience of most Third World
societies, external factors have traditionally had a predominant influence
in shaping their polities and, therefore, their security environments. In
fact, it would not be wrong to say that many Third World states, particularly
in Africa and the Middle East but also elsewhere in Asia, emerged
into the postcolonial era as sovereign entities with recognized boundaries
only because they had been consolidated into separate colonial protostates
by the European imperial powers in the nineteenth century.24
This has had two major consequences for both the internal and the
external security of Third World states. First, decisions taken by colonial
powers for reasons of administrative convenience or intraimperial tradeoff
have been largely responsible for the ethnic mix inherited by many
postcolonial states as well as for the creation of new communal identities
in some instances. The colonial inheritance thus fundamentally determined
the internal cohesiveness of most Third World states during their
initial and crucial stages of state building and, therefore, the intensity of
internal challenges to their boundaries and institutions.25 Second, decisions
taken by colonial powers have also been responsible for creating
24 There is a growing literature on this subject, particularly in relation to Africa. A recent
perceptive article on the creation of colonial protostates in Africa is Jeffrey Herbst, "T
Creation and Maintenance of National Boundaries in Africa," International Organization 43
(Autumn i989), 673-92. For the creation of protostates in the guise of mandates in the Middle
East, see Elizabeth Monroe, Britain's Moment in the Middle East, I9I4-I956 (Baltimore, Md.:
Johns Hopkins University Press, i963); and for the impact of the European division of Arab
lands of the Ottoman Empire on international and regional security, see David Fromkin, A
Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East (New York: Henry Holt, i989).
25 For an insightful analysis of the colonial inheritance and its impact on Third World
"stateness," see Joel S. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and
State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, i988). See also
Crawford Young, "The African Colonial State and Its Political Legacy," in Donald Rothchild
and Naomi Chazan, The Precarious Balance: State and Society in Africa (Boulder, Colo.:
Westview Press, i988); and Sheldon Gellar, "State-Building and Nation-Building in West
Africa," in Eisenstadt and Rokkan (fn. i6), 2:384-426. For examples of the creation of "traditional"
authority structures as well as the evolution of new communal identities during
colonial rule, see Migdal (pp. 97-I4i); and Ulf Himmelstrand, "'Tribalism,' Regionalism,
Nationalism, and Secession in Nigeria," in Eisenstadt and Rokkan (pp. 427-67).
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272 WORLD POLITICS
many postcolonial interstate conflicts: (i) by dividing ethnic groups into
more than one state and thereby igniting the embers of irredentism, as
in the Horn of Africa; (2) by denying self-determination to certain ethnic
groups like the Kurds, who possibly qualified for statehood better than
many that were granted that status; and (3) by leaving behind extremely
messy situations, as in Palestine and in Kashmir, that have contributed
tremendously to regional tensions and conflicts in the Middle East and
South Asia, respectively, during the last four decades.
Equally important, in terms of the feelings of insecurity that are very
widespread among Third World state elites, is the legacy of the colonial
entities' individual and collective weakness and vulnerability in relation
to the metropolitan centers. This sense of insecurity has been transferred
after decolonization to the sphere of the Third World's relationship with
the industrialized states in general and with the superpowers in particular
and has largely become a function of the glaring disparities in economic,
technological, and military power between the developed states
on the one hand and the Third World on the other.26 It has been further
exacerbated by the division of the globe into a relatively secure and
conflict-free zone, populated by European and North American states
plus Japan, and the Third World, where conflict is endemic. As Ball has
pointed out, "All interstate wars since the end of World War II have
taken place in the Third World, although there have been industrialized
country participants in some of these conflicts" (p. 33).27 In fact, some
analysts have argued that conflict in the Third World has until recently
been encouraged by superpower policies largely aimed at testing each
other's political will and power projection capabilities in those areas of
the globe that are not of vital concern to either superpower and, therefore,
do not threaten the maintenance of the central strategic balance.28
This de facto division of the globe, roughly corresponding to the core-
26 It is worth pointing out in this context that Krasner's (fn. 3) assumption that "political
weakness and vulnerability are fundamental sources of Third World behavior" (p. 3) is substantially
correct. However, his characterization of the consequent North-South relationship
as "structural conflict" is, like its obverse, dependency theory, too extreme, simplistic, and
one-dimensional in nature; it does not do justice to the much more complex reality of that
relationship.
27 The high incidence of violent conflict in the Third World is borne out by a number of
studies, including Mark Zacker, International Conflicts and Collective Security (New York:
Praeger, I979); and Nazli Choucri, Population and Conflict: New Dimensions of Population
Dynamics, Policy Development Studies No. 8 (United Nations Fund for Population Activities,
i983). For an earlier, pioneering study of the subject, see Istvan Kende, "Twenty-five
Years of Local Wars," Journal of Peace Research 8, no. I (197 ), 5-22.
28 This point was best made by Sisir Gupta two decades ago; Gupta, "Great Power Relations
and the Third World," in Carsten Holbraad, ed., Super Powers and World Order (Canberra:
Australian National University Press, I971), I05-39.
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THIRD WORLD SECURITY PROBLEMATIC 273
periphery dichotomy of the world system theorists,29 allows for the exportation
of the developed world's conflicts to the Third World, while
effectively insulating the "core" of the international system from the conflicts
and instabilities prevalent in the Third World. As a result, it enhances
the insecurity of Third World state elites who suffer from a feeling
of dual impotence. First, they are unable to prevent superpower
rivalries and conflicts from penetrating their polities and regions, and
second, they are equally unable to affect, except marginally and in selected
cases, the global political and military equation between the two
superpowers and their respective alliances. This conclusion is borne out
by even a casual reading of the Litwak-Wells volume and is corroborated
by Thomas's statement that "the outlook for the Third World remains
bleak. While it is very far from true to suggest that everything that happens
to them is a result of external factors, it is fallacious to believe that
indigeneous factors play the most influential role most of the time"
(p. I 99).
All this does not mean, however, that external threats of conflict and
intervention in relation to Third World states do not also arise from
within their regions, that is, from other Third World states. Obviously,
Third World regions do possess autonomous dynamics of conflict and
cooperation. In fact, the predominant reality of these regional dynamics
is the great propensity for conflict that inheres within them. As the various
contributions to the Litwak-Wells volume demonstrate, there are
reasons intrinsic to Third World regions, for example, historical mistrust,
territorial disputes, ethnic overlap, and hegemonic ambitions, that
provide much of the raw material for interstate conflict in the Third
World. Two points are worth noting in this context, however. First,
many of these intrinsic reasons for intra-Third World conflict are related
to, if not the products of, external domination during the colonial era.
Second, the permissive attitude on the part of the dominant global powers
toward conflict in the Third World promotes and exacerbates interstate
violence in the gray areas of the globe.
V
One major factor that has increased the level of violence in the developing
world as well as the propensity of Third World states to indulge in
29 For details of the core-periphery dichotomy, see Johan Galtung, "A Structural Theory
of Imperialism," Journal of Peace Research 8, no. 2 (0970), 8i-i I7; and the various works of
Immanuel Wallerstein.
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274 WORLD POLITICS
interstate conflict is the transfer of modern weapons and weapons technology
from the industrialized countries to various parts of the Third
World. According to one specialist on the arms trade, "These transfers
have resulted in a significant shift in military resources from the industrialised
'North' to the underdeveloped 'South,' producing new configurations
of power and contributing to the intensity and duration of regional
conflicts."30 Certainly, weapons are mainly of instrumental value
and are not in themselves the primary cause of war; but relatively sophisticated
weapon systems that provide a Third World state with temporary
technological superiority over a regional rival are very often a
crucial factor in the calculation of decision makers to escalate disputes to
a point where war becomes a distinct possibility. To cite just one instance:
Pakistan's decision to go to war against India in I965 with the
objective of changing the status quo in Kashmir was based in part on the
assessment that the former's edge in sophisticated weapons over the latter
was likely to be eroded over the next few years.31
Sophisticated weapons acquired at great cost to provide greater security
can often increase prospects of conflict and, therefore, add to the
insecurity of Third World states.32 Andrew Ross's contribution to the
Azar-Moon volume (chap. 7) concentrates on "the various forms of arms
acquisition options available to Third World countries and the impact of
alternative acquisition strategies upon national security" (p. 154) and
makes the point sharply that "the acquisition of military power may itself
erode rather than enhance security" (p. 153). As a result of the combination
of various factors (including the escalation in military technology,
the superpowers' strategy to use arms transfers as political instruments
to buy the loyalties of Third World clients, the leading arms exporters'
interest in using arms sales as a major booster for their economies, and
the inability of even the most technologically advanced Third World
states independently to manufacture more than a fraction of the sophisticated
weapons they need or desire to possess), "the Third World's de-
3? Michael T. Klare, "The Arms Trade: Changing Patterns in the i980os," Third World
Quarterly 9 (October i987), I257.
31 Gowher Rizvi, "The Rivalry between India and Pakistan," in Barry Buzan et al., South
Asian Insecurity and the Great Powers (Basingstoke: Macmillan, i986), i07-8.
32 The availability of large surplus stocks of modern weaponry combined with cold war
motivations on the part of superpower suppliers has contributed to regional arms races and
to the instability of regional balances, which must constantly be restabilized at higher levels
of technological sophistication. As Raju Thomas has pointed out in the case of South Asia,
"The net result was that both India and Pakistan acquired substantially more arms than they
otherwise would have thus producing less regional security for both states at a much higher
price"; Thomas, "Strategies of Recipient Autonomy: The Case of India," in Kwang-Il Baek,
Ronald D. McLaurin, and Chung-in Moon, eds., The Dilemma of Third World Defense Industries:
Supplier Control or Recepient Autonomy? (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, i989), i88.
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THIRD WORLD SECURITY PROBLEMATIC 275
pendence upon arms imports from the advanced industrial countries"
has become "the defining characteristic of post-colonial North-South
military relations" (Ross, in Azar and Moon, 156).
The i980s saw an appreciable increase in the capacity of certain Third
World states, like India and Brazil, to produce, and even export, indigenous
arms. There was also a perceptible decline in the value of arms
deliveries to the Third World during most of the i98os as a result of the
fall in the price of oil, which drastically reduced the purchasing capacity
of major oil-exporting countries that had been among the leading acquirers
of sophisticated weaponry, and of the saturation of many Third
World markets. However, these two phenomena mask a different, and
growing, form of weapons transfer from developed to developing countries:
the transfer of sophisticated arms production technology, now an
integral part of the international arms trade.33 The transfer of such technology
has two major consequences. On the one hand, as conventional
wisdom holds, given both the high rate at which weapons and weapons
technologies become obsolete in the late twentieth century and the inability
of Third World countries to keep up with the latest technologies,
the transfer of weapons technology amounts to nothing more than the
substitution of one form of dependence for another. Indeed, it might
even increase the level of dependency. On the other hand, as Ross has
argued in the Azar-Moon volume,
The nature of military dependence undergoes a subtle but potentially profound
transformation as developing countries turn from arms imports to
arms production.... A static dependence relationship is inevitable when a
country relies upon foreign arms suppliers. But when arms production
programmes are initiated, and military production technology rather than
arms are imported, a more dynamic relationship is established, one that
has an inherent potential for the reduction, if not elimination, of military
dependence. (pp. i69-70)34
The political autonomy of Third World arms recipients was further
enhanced during the i98os by the appreciable increase in the number of
arms suppliers and the increasingly intense competition among them, the
decline in the market share of the superpower suppliers, and the increasing
transformation of the nature of the arms market from a seller's to a
33 For a detailed discussion of this issue, see Michael T. Klare, "The Unnoticed Arms
Trade: Exports of Conventional Arms-Making Technology," International Security 8 (Fall
i983), 68-90.
34 Ross's contention is borne out by Raju Thomas's study (fn. 32) of Indian weapons procurement
and production policy, which, according to its author, attempts "to strike an optimum
balance among the three basic strategies of indigeneous production, licensed production
and overseas purchases" (p. i99).
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276 WORLD POLITICS
buyer's market. However, this should not lead us to conclude that commercial
calculations alone dictate the flow of arms supply or of weapons
technology from the industrialized countries to the Third World. There
are a number of political and strategic considerations, many of them connected
with superpower global rivalries and with the myriad of political
and strategic links between the superpowers on the one hand and the
leading nonsuperpower arms suppliers on the other, that have a major
bearing on the pattern of arms trade and even more on the transfer of
sophisticated weapons technology to Third World recipients.35
Either way, the net effect on the overall security of the Third World
can turn out to be negative. If the transfer of weapons technology increases
the dependence of Third World states on major industrial powers,
then the feeling of vulnerability and insecurity among the elites of
Third World states is intensified. However, any reduction in such dependence,
consequent upon the transfer of technology and the diversification
of sources of arms supply, increases the autonomy of decision
making in relation to war and peace as far as the more developed Third
World countries are concerned, and it removes important international
constraints on their conflictual behavior. Transfer of weapons technology
also strengthens their war-fighting capacity by making them relatively
independent of the original suppliers for spare parts and ammunition
and by increasing the sophistication of the technology that their war machines
can command indigenously, at least in the short run. As a result,
wars in the Third World, especially among major regional actors, can
now be started without the protagonists being overly concerned about
supplier reactions, can be sustained for longer periods of time, and can
be far more costly in human and material terms than they were in the
past decades.
Nuclear proliferation in the Third World is a subset of the problems
connected with the transfer of sophisticated weapons technology. It is,
however, the most dramatic among this set of problems. As the only
Third World security issue that ties Third World security concerns directly
to those of global security, it is the only one in which the great
powers have taken direct and immediate interest. They have attempted
to institutionalize international controls on Third World behavior
through the medium of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
However, as Thomas has pointed out, "From the point of view of Third
World states (even those that have joined the NPT), the nuclear non-proliferation
regime in its present form institutionalises inequality between
3 For details of the latter argument, see Stephanie G. Neuman, "Arms, Aid, and the
Superpowers," Foreign Affairs 66 (Summer I988), I044-66.
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THIRD WORLD SECURITY PROBLEMATIC 277
nuclear-weapon states and non-nuclear-weapon states" (p. 14i). This has
led to a certain amount of tension between the members of the nuclear
club, especially the superpowers, and the have-nots in the nuclear arena.
Such leading members of the latter group as India, Pakistan, Israel, and
South Africa have, in fact, attempted to circumvent the controls imposed
by the nuclear club in order to expand their actual or potential nuclear
capabilities. These capabilities, all shrouded in policies of deliberate ambiguity,
include a substantial arsenal of small nuclear weapons (Israel), a
"peaceful" underground nuclear explosion coupled with an increasingly
sophisticated delivery capability (India), a dual-track effort to manufacture
nuclear warheads by uranium enrichment and/or plutonium reprocessing
(Pakistan), and an atmospheric explosion that seemed suspiciously
akin to an atomic test (South Africa).36
Such unacknowledged but nonetheless credible instances of nuclear
proliferation pose problems not merely for the security of Third World
states and regions but for the security of the international system as a
whole. Moreover, the problems are not confined to the largely abstract
ones of managing a world with a dozen or so nuclear powers. The practical
problems of proliferation are far more acute because the four de
facto nuclear powers mentioned above are all involved in regional conflicts
and confrontations that could become overtly nuclear37 and consequently
lead to the direct involvement of one or both of the superpowers
in the disputes.
It is, however, impossible to put the genie of nuclear proliferation back
into the bottle, especially because possession of nuclear weapons has become
the hallmark of enhanced status within the international system.
The Chinese example has very sharply driven home this lesson to Third
World ruling elites, in particular those of the larger and regionally powerful
states. In light of the Chinese experience, no Third World leadership
aspiring to graduate to the status of a major, or even moderately
influential, actor in the international system can feel comfortable about
giving up its nuclear option. This factor of prestige, combined with genuine
security concerns on the part of several Third World states facing
36 For overviews of the four countries' nuclear capabilities, see, for Israel, Peter Pry, Israel's
Nuclear Arsenal (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, i984); for India and Pakistan, Carnegie
Task Force on Non-Proliferation and South Asian Security, Nuclear Weapons and South Asian
Security (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, i988); and for
South Africa, Michele A. Flournoy and Kurt M. Campbell, "South Africa's Bomb: A Military
Option?" Orbis 32 (Summer i988), 385-40I.
37 For a prospective scenario on the Indian subcontinent, see Leonard S. Spector, "IndiaPakistan
War: It Could Be Nuclear," New York Times, June 7, i990, p. A23. For the Middle
East, where a situation of de facto nuclear monopoly prevails, see Helena Cobban, "Israel's
Nuclear Game: The U.S. Stake," World Policy Journal 5 (Summer i988), 4 I5-33.
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278 WORLD POLITICS
potential anatagonists that are nuclear or near-nuclear powers, has created
a situation in which the security of a number of leading Third
World states has become intertwined with the issue of nuclear proliferation.
While all major Third World states on the nuclear threshold continue
to abide by a policy of deliberate ambiguity for the moment, external
or domestic stimuli could change this situation with dramatic
suddenness in individual countries, thereby setting off chain reactions
that may be difficult to control.
VI
As security cannot be bought cheaply in the late twentieth century, many
Third World states spend substantial proportions of their relatively meager
resources on the security sector.38 While expenditure on costly
weapon systems and military technologies is a part of security expenditure,
Ball has demonstrated that it is not the major part in the case of the
overwhelming number of Third World states, which "appear to spend a
very high proportion of their security budgets on operating costs, particularly
salaries and emoluments for the troops" (p. 393). Appendix i of
Ball's book (pp. 396-402) examines the evolution of operating costs as a
percentage of total security expenditure of twenty selected Third World
countries for the years 1951-79 and finds that in all cases except one (Iran
,under the Shah) operating costs have clearly dominated in the mix of
security expenditures for these countries. Ball concludes therefore that
while "in the public mind, security expenditure in the Third World is
firmly linked with the arms trade" (p. 107), "for most of the Third
World, the arms trade and security expenditure are not synonymous:
Operating costs, particularly personnel-related outlays, form a large and
permanent portion of most developing countries' security budgets" (p.
i i i). This, Ball suggests, is connected to the fact that "the internal security
role of the armed forces is considerable throughout the Third World
and, in many cases, is their primary function" (p. 393).
Ball's sample leaves out such oil-rich and population-poor countries as
Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, for which capital costs, including expenditure
on defense infrastructure and weapons procurement, would be appreciably
higher than is reflected in her data. Nevertheless, her basic point
regarding high operating costs and their relationship to internal regime
38 Ball has correctly pointed out that it is preferable in this context to refer to the "security"
sector rather than the "military" sector, "in order to indicate the inclusion of paramilitary
forces" and to reflect "the fact that Third World governments frequently use their armed
forces to maintain themselves in power, that is, to promote regime security" (p. xvi n. 2).
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THIRD WORLD SECURITY PROBLEMATIC 279
and state security is valid for most Third World countries. This reflects
not merely the relatively low level of technology and the high level of
manpower required by Third World states for the maintenance of internal
control; it is also indicative of where they are along the continuum
of the state-making enterprise. As the European experience has demonstrated,
three areas-taxation (extraction of resources under the protection
of coercive state agencies), policing (maintaining domestic order
where it has already been imposed), and warfare aimed at the primitive
accumulation of state power (extending and consolidating a particular
political order by the use of force against potential as well as dissident
subjects and fending off rival claimants to the same territorial and demographic
space)-comprise the bulk of the activities undertaken by
early state makers.39 These are all labor-intensive tasks that engage relatively
large numbers of persons in the security arena and thereby raise
the ratio of operating (including personnel) costs relative to the total expenditure
on security. Security sector costs in the Third World are understandably
linked to the performance of these essential functions in
their current early stage of state making.
In this context, Ball's central question regarding the relationship between
security expenditure and development seems to be of secondary
concern, if not misplaced. Despite the declared commitment of Third
World state elites to the goal of development (defined as economic
growth plus some degree of distributive justice), as far as most of them
are concerned this is an instrumental value that helps them achieve their
primary objectives of political legitimacy and state and regime security.
Therefore, Ball's conclusion that "available evidence does suggest that
expenditure in the security sector is more likely to hinder than to promote
economic growth and development in the Third World" (p. 388)
misses the essential motivation behind such expenditure, even though the
point may be valid.
This motivation has to do primarily with the "primitive central state
power accumulation" mentioned above and secondarily with meeting
threats from the regional environment. As a result, development, measured
as a serious objective and not merely on the basis of the rhetoric of
Third World leaders, comes a poor third in the policy priorities of most
Third World elites and is hardly ever considered an autonomous goal
that deserves to be fulfilled independently of security considerations. It
39 For details, see the following essays in Tilly (fn. 15): Samuel E. Finer, "State- and Nation-Building
in Europe: The Role of the Military" (chap. 2); Rudolf Braun, "Taxation,
Sociopolitical Structure, and State-Building: Great Britain and Brandenburg-Prussia" (chap.
4); and David H. Bayley, "The Police and Political Development in Europe" (chap. 5).
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280 WORLD POLITICS
is not surprising, therefore, that, as Ethan Kapstein has argued in chapter
6 of the Azar-Moon volume, "Third World states have allocated scarce
resources to meet national security threats, and in so doing have influenced
the timing and/or trajectory of economic development" (p. 138).
Furthermore, given the fragility of many Third World polities, it is
no wonder that "one negative effect of security expenditure," as Ball
terms it, has been "the strengthening of the armed forces at the expense
of civilian groups within society" (p. 390). There is no other institution
that is more important as far as the interface between issues of state making
and those of internal and external security are concerned than the
military. While Ball devotes the whole of chapter i to the discussion of
the military's role in development and offers a critical evaluation of various
theories that profess to explain this role, none of the four volumes
under review has attempted to relate the role of the military to the process
of state and nation building in the Third World. The closest one
comes to it is in the last few pages of Ball's volume:
By relying on the armed forces to remain in power or by producing political
and economic conditions that provide the military with the justification
for intervention, many governments have facilitated the entry of the
armed forces into the political arena." (p. 391)
This generalization glosses over the fact that Third World polities are
currently caught in a vicious circle that is a product of their historical
circumstances. As the early modern European experience has demonstrated,
the role of the coercive apparatuses of state-meaning primarily
military and paramilitary institutions-in the early phase of state making
is considerable. In the case of most Third World states the problem
has been compounded by the existence and combination of two additional
factors. The first is the weakness of civil society and of other political
institutions, which precludes the emergence of strong checks on the
natural proclivity of the security apparatuses to usurp as much of the
power and resources at the command of the state as possible. Second, the
encapsulation of the various phases of state and nation building into one
all-encompassing phase and the drastic curtailment of the time available
to Third World states for the completion of these twin processes enhance
the political importance of the coercive functions of the state and, therefore,
of the agencies that perform such functions. Even in India, where
a democratic political system has operated more successfully than elsewhere
in the Third World, the important and increasingly dominant
role of the security apparatuses is clearly visible in states like Punjab and
Kashmir, which pose major overt challenges to the Indian state in the
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THIRD WORLD SECURITY PROBLEMATIC 281
arena of state and nation building. It should therefore come as no surprise
that the security sector in most Third World states hogs a large
share of the state's disposable resources irrespective of the impact this
may have on the process of economic development.
Furthermore, in terms of the allocation of scarce resources to the security
sector, there seems to be very little difference between those Third
World polities that are overtly dominated by the military and those that
are under civilian control. This is demonstrated by Ball's own data (Figure
io-i, p. 387), which include several states under civilian rule within
the category of the heaviest spenders on security. It is also corroborated
by a recent study of defense spending by the member states of the Association
of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which, notwithstanding several
caveats and qualifications, came to the conclusion that "the countries
[in ASEAN] in which the military has the largest political role (Thailand
and Indonesia) are the ones in which defence spending has grown more
slowly than the ASEAN average."40 State making and the violence that
accompanies it obviously make no distinction between military-dominated
and civilian-ruled polities in the Third World.
VII
Despite their divergent treatments of the subject and some of their shortfalls
noted above, the four volumes reviewed in this article taken together
make a substantial contribution to the study of Third World security
problems by highlighting areas of analysis that have remained
relatively neglected so far. These problems will remain with us for the
foreseeable future in spite of the changes that seem to be underway in
the superpowers' relations with each other and with the rest of the world.
In fact, recent and projected changes may even contribute to the accentuation
of some of the security problems faced by Third World countries
and regions. The anticipated withdrawal of one superpower from the
Third World arena may not turn out to be an unmixed blessing. The
other superpower may feel free to act more cavalierly as far as the security
and the vital interests of Third World states are concerned; it may
be tempted to intervene militarily if developments in what it considers
to be "strategic regions" of the Third World are not to its liking. Important
Third World state elites, deprived of the presence of a balancing
40 David B. H. Denoon, "Defence Spending in ASEAN: An Overview," in Chin Kin Wah,
ed., Defence Spending in Southeast Asia (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, i987),
49.
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282 WORLD POLITICS
power that could in some measure neutralize the dominant superpower's
interventionist proclivities, may therefore begin to feel more vulnerable
and insecure. If this happens, such an escalation of insecurity will be
reflected in their internal and external behavior patterns.
It could also happen that a genuine disentanglement on the part of
both superpowers from arenas of tension and conflict in the Third
World may remove some of the restraints on the conflictual behavior of
important Third World states. The aggressive potential of those states
has been constrained by the apprehension that it could draw negative
reactions from one or both of the superpowers and thereby end up tipping
the regional balance against them. But were the superpowers to pull
back, it might lead to greater assertiveness on the part of regionally preeminent
powers interested in translating their preeminence into hegemony
or at least into a managerial role within their respective regions.
Resistance by other countries in a particular region to such hegemonic
behavior might in turn, lead to situations of violent interstate conflict
relatively unhindered by concerns regarding superpower intervention.
Furthermore, the prospects of conventional arms control pacts and
troop reduction agreements between the superpowers, which are expected
to lead to major redundancies in their arsenals, are already spurring
both Washington and Moscow to increase arms sales abroad.4' This
trend can be expected to accelerate once these pacts become realities and
force both superpowers to remove various categories of conventional
weaponry, including tanks, artillery, aircraft, and helicopters, from their
inventories. Much of this surplus hardware is expected to be sold to
Third World countries to fulfill hard currency needs (a particularly important
consideration for Moscow), to shore up friends and allies by
making them more "self-reliant" in terms of hardware, and to find alternative
sources of profitable returns for domestic arms industries. This
projected escalation in the transfer of sophisticated weaponry to the
Third World in the 199Os will almost certainly reverse the trend of decreasing
arms transfers to the developing countries that had been visible
for most of the i98oS42 and will further enhance the destructive potential
of Third World conflicts.
In the final analysis, however, most of the deep-seated sources of conflict
and violence in the Third World-sources that inhere within Third
4' For details, see Robert Pear, "Prospects of Arms Pacts Spurring Arms Sales," New York
Times, March 25, 1990, p. I2.
42 For the latest analysis of this trend, see Richard F. Grimmett, Trends in Conventional
Arms Transfers to the Third World by Major Suppliers, 1982-1989 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional
Research Service, Library of Congress, i990), esp. I-3.
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THIRD WORLD SECURITY PROBLEMATIC 283
World societies and are related to their simultaneously ongoing processes
of state making and nation building-cannot and will not be fundamentally
determined by superpower actions and interactions, even if the latter
has had the capacity to exacerbate many of them in the postwar era.43
Therefore, although changes in superpower relations may continue to
affect some of these sources of conflict and insecurity in the Third
World, these changes alone are not capable of transforming the basic
nature of the security predicament of the Third World states. As it
stands, the existing parameters of the security problematic of the Third
World can be altered only if Third World states have adequate time to
complete the twin tasks of the state making and nation building, plus
enough political sagacity on their leaderships' part to attempt to accomplish
these tasks in as humane a manner as possible. At such time the
security concerns of developing states will approximate more closely
those of the developed states, which in the traditional literature on international
relations have constituted the model for state behavior in the
security arena.
43Notwithstanding the fact that the most highly visible facet of the latest Gulf crisis has
been its global dimension involving the United States projection of power in the Gulf, this
crisis has its origins in the internal dynamics of the region. These, in turn, are closely intertwined
with issues regarding the establishment and legitimization of state boundaries, institutions,
and regimes in the Middle East in general and the Persian Gulf in particular. Iraqi
ambitions regarding Kuwait date back to the founding of the Iraqi state under British tutelage
in the aftermath of the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire following World War I.
Iraq's claims on Kuwait rest both upon Ottoman assertions of sovereignty over Kuwait and
upon the widespread feeling in the Arab world that post-Ottoman borders in the Fertile
Crescent and the Gulf were arbitrarily drawn by Western colonial powers to suit their own
selfish requirements and are therefore less than fully legitimate. In recent times Baghdad
made two abortive attempts, in i96i and 1973, to enforce its territorial claims on Kuwait.
Viewed in its proper historical perspective, the latest crisis is therefore not exclusively an
Iraqi attempt to control Kuwait's huge oil resources and dictate oil production and pricing
policies within OPEC. While the American reaction to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August
i990 globalized the crisis, it was basically just that-a reaction to a crisis that was fundamentally
grounded in regional realities and intimately related to rival claims over both
territorial and demographic space (and, of course, over the only major resource of the region),
as well as linked to issues of state and regime legitimacy in the Arab littoral of the Persian
Gulf.
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