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 Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2010473 Accessed: 21-09-2018 07:14 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Cambridge University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to World Politics This content downloaded from 192.164.124.109 on Fri, 21 Sep 2018 07:14:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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 This content downloaded from 192.164.124.109 on Fri, 21 Sep 2018 07:14:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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). This content downloaded from 192.164.124.109 on Fri, 21 Sep 2018 07:14:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 192.164.124.109 on Fri, 21 Sep 2018 07:14:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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 content downloaded from 192.164.124.109 on Fri, 21 Sep 2018 07:14:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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). This content downloaded from 192.164.124.109 on Fri, 21 Sep 2018 07:14:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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). This content downloaded from 192.164.124.109 on Fri, 21 Sep 2018 07:14:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 192.164.124.109 on Fri, 21 Sep 2018 07:14:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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 This content downloaded from 192.164.124.109 on Fri, 21 Sep 2018 07:14:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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 This content downloaded from 192.164.124.109 on Fri, 21 Sep 2018 07:14:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 192.164.124.109 on Fri, 21 Sep 2018 07:14:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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) This content downloaded from 192.164.124.109 on Fri, 21 Sep 2018 07:14:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 192.164.124.109 on Fri, 21 Sep 2018 07:14:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 192.164.124.109 on Fri, 21 Sep 2018 07:14:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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). This content downloaded from 192.164.124.109 on Fri, 21 Sep 2018 07:14:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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). This content downloaded from 192.164.124.109 on Fri, 21 Sep 2018 07:14:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 192.164.124.109 on Fri, 21 Sep 2018 07:14:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 192.164.124.109 on Fri, 21 Sep 2018 07:14:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 192.164.124.109 on Fri, 21 Sep 2018 07:14:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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). This content downloaded from 192.164.124.109 on Fri, 21 Sep 2018 07:14:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 192.164.124.109 on Fri, 21 Sep 2018 07:14:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 192.164.124.109 on Fri, 21 Sep 2018 07:14:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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). This content downloaded from 192.164.124.109 on Fri, 21 Sep 2018 07:14:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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). This content downloaded from 192.164.124.109 on Fri, 21 Sep 2018 07:14:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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 This content downloaded from 192.164.124.109 on Fri, 21 Sep 2018 07:14:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 192.164.124.109 on Fri, 21 Sep 2018 07:14:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 192.164.124.109 on Fri, 21 Sep 2018 07:14:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 192.164.124.109 on Fri, 21 Sep 2018 07:14:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms