J. Peter Burgess

What's So European About the European Union? Legitimacy Between Institution and Identity

This article explores the tension between an understanding of Europe as purveyor of a certain kind of cultural, spiritual or religious identity and the more or less bureaucratic project of European construction undertaken in its name. The central axis of this tension is the theoretical relationship between identity and legitimacy. The classical modern problem of nation-state building involves integrating the legitimating force of collective identity into the institutions of the state. How does the project of European construction respond to an analogous challenge? This article develops this theoretical question by turning to two canonical positions concerning the relation between institutional legitimacy and its cultural, spiritual or religious under-pinnings - Montesquieu and Weber. It then returns to the founding documents of the EU in order to interrogate the legitimacy of the EU in light of the concept of European identity.

There is No European Security, Only European Securities

In this article, I explore the relationship between ‘value’ and ‘security’ in the conceptualization of European construction and its transformation in recent years through the anti-terror effort. I suggest that the landscape of human values, and the way it is correlated with security, is discontinuous and fragmented. In the post-Madrid/London era, variations in cultures of law enforcement, border control, intelligence and diplomacy, and, not least, new cultures of fear and prudence, render this landscape increasingly complex. The value-laden nature of security and insecurity has contributed to a fragmented evolution in European approaches to the challenge of security. The politics of harmonization and standardization of European security reveals not a singularity in security, but the contrary, namely multiple securities. I thus develop a counter-argument to both realist and social constructivist understandings of values and the role these play in security thinking. I affirm, in a typical constructivist vein, that values matter in the formation of security policy. However, I reverse the typical constructivist position that sees security as the embodiment of ideas, arguing instead that the European self-understanding is itself the product of its own constellation of security and insecurity.

The Politics of the South China Sea: Territoriality and International Law

THE SEMI-ENCLOSED SOUTH CHINA SEA (SCS) occupies a 648,000square-mile portion of the Pacific Ocean stretching roughly from the Strait of Malacca in the southwest to the Strait of Taiwan in the northeast. It is thus bordered by China and Taiwan to the north, Vietnam to the west, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia, and Singapore to the south and southwest, and the Philippines to the east. The region encompasses hundreds of small islands and reefs, the majority located in the Paracel and Spratly island groups. The actual number of islands, like the question of rights associated with those islands, is contested. Historically, these uninhabited islands have for the most part constituted only hazards for the region’s sea traffic, but they are also often claimed to have considerable strategic and economic value. The SCS continues to possess rich fishery resources, and it is widely said to hold enormous potential as a source of oil and natural gas. Most importantly, however, it is a vital sea-lane, by far the shortest route from the North Pacific Ocean to the Indian Ocean. It is the world’s second busiest international sea-lane, and well over half of the world’s petroleum-bearing traffic passes through its waters. Over half of the tonnage shipped through the sea is crude oil from the Gulf, destined for East Asia. Ten states border the sea (including the Gulf of Thailand): Brunei, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam. Though vastly different from one another, many of these share the situation of being rapidly industrializing countries. Despite some economic recession during the past decade, the coastal regions of these countries continue to develop through processes of urbanization and population growth. The region’s energy needs have thus increased significantly, putting pressure on imports and encouraging petroleum exploration. Over the next 20 years, oil consumption is expected to rise by 3.9% annually on average, with nearly half of that increase coming from China. Exploding energy needs have marked recent political and strategic priorities (World Bank, 1998). Accompanying this unprecedented economic growth, much political attention has been focused on the potential for exploitation of oil and gas Special Section: The Politics of the South China Sea

Ethics of Humanitarian Intervention: The Circle Closes

T HE CONCEPT OF ‘HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION’ first appeared in the literature of international law in the mid-19th century, following in the wake of interventions by European nations in the Ottoman Empire. Here, interventions were sought justified in terms of a state’s international liability for acts committed within its own borders. In 1945, the UN Charter fundamentally altered the notion of humanitarian intervention by setting out the conditions under which intervention might take place and, consequently, specifying what types of intervention might not be allowed. Twentieth-century military interventions can be classed into two groups: those preceding the end of the Cold War (roughly 1990) and those following it. The degree to which the military interventions of the Cold War may be considered to have resulted in humanitarian consequences is contested. In conformity with the rise of the rhetoric of humanitarian intervention, those following the Cold War have been more explicitly humanitarian in purpose. To the first group belong the Belgian and US interventions in Congo (1960, 1964), the intervention by the USA in the Dominican Republic (1965), by India in East Pakistan (1971), France and Belgium in the Shaba province of Zaire (1978), Vietnam in Cambodia (1978), Tanzania in Uganda (1979), France in Central Africa (1979), and the USA in Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989). Post-Cold War humanitarian interventions include Liberia (1990–97), northern Iraq (1991– ), former Yugoslavia (1992– ), Somalia (1992–93), Rwanda (1994–96), Haiti (1994–97), Sierra Leone (1997– ), Kosovo (1999– ), and East Timor (1999– ).1 While the degree of intervention and of humanitarian purpose can be disputed in virtually all of these cases, they share one common criterion: they constitute non-consensual military intervention conducted for alleged humanitarian purposes. The difference between preand post-Cold War intervention revolves around the grounds on which intervention was considered justified, in other words, the source of the legitimacy of the intervention. In the pre-1990 cases, the right to intervene on humanitarian grounds was claimed and exercised by one and the same agent, the intervener. The post-1990 cases distinguish themselves by the fact that they are legitimated either by a United Nations no

The New Nomos of Europe

According to Carl Schmitt, in his late work The Nomos of the Earth, published in 1950, the long evolution in the relation between humans and the earth has been decisive for the nature of traditional legal order. The historical links to European international jurisprudence (ius publicum Europaeum) have decayed with the old world order that supported them. Territoriality, once the foundation of the nation-state has evolved, causing a parallel change in the nation-state paradigm of sovereignty and the fabric of international law which has its basis in that paradigm. If Schmitt is correct in his prognoses about the end of a global era and the rise of a new yet uncharted world order in the mid-1940s, then the architects of the nascent European Coal and Steel Community face the same conditions, and must carry out their work with the same cultural, social and juridical raw materials, against the backdrop of the same concrete historical experience. This article will attempt to continue the trajectory of Schmitts historical analysis of the ius publicum Europeaum, suggesting how its central concepts and theses map onto the grand geopolitical and civilisational project of European construction from 1950 to 2004 and beyond. It will explore the applicability of the concept of nomos for the nature of EU evolution, and interpret general elements of the European legal system in terms of the concept of nomos.

Human securitization of water? A case study of the Indus Waters Basin

In the large and growing literature on hydropolitics, insecurity generated through water-related conflicts is most often conceptualized under a model of economic resource scarcity. Conflict is generally reduced to the question of who has water, who needs water and thus what cost, in economic, political or military terms, is appropriate to acquiring access to water. This article argues that while such analyses effectively chart the central resource-strategic relations involved in the geopolitics of water, they nonetheless disregard the deeper biological and cultural (that is social, ethnic, religious) significance of water in any water conflict. Such analyses, it claims, are too strongly linked to the traditional (as opposed to human) security discourse and therefore run the risk of misdiagnosing the complexity of the water resource challenge. To respond to this challenge the article will develop a human security ‘metrics’ for analysing water-based conflicts in human security terms. It will then compare an analysis of the Indus Waters Treaty based upon the human security approach with an analysis based on a ‘traditional’ security assessment of the treaty in order to assess the viability of the two approaches. Finally, the article will link the comparative assessments back to the water wars literature, drawing conclusions about its strengths and weaknesses and the possibility of a synthesis of traditional and human security in the analysis of water conflict.

Commentary: Security Dialogue

ed from the relationship to immediate combatants on both sides. This is the only imaginable war in a media age in which visibility is an essential part of the war scenario. In his penetrating 1984 book War and Cinema, 132 Security Dialogue vol. 34, no. 2, June 2003 01_Security Dialogue 34/2 8/5/03 4:40 pm Page 132

Commensurability and methods in critical security studies

The recent publication of Salter and Mutlu’s (2013) Research Methods in Critical Security Studies has opened an evocative set of questions about what those who engage in the research practice called ‘critical security studies’ are in fact doing when they are doing critical security studies. The ground-breaking volume gathers a range of research experiences from a variety of researchers who identify with a more or less unified approach to studying security. As a consequence of describing what researchers doing critical research on security do, the book simultaneously generates a set of norms about how such a research practice should be carried out. By virtue of gathering a relatively wide range of contributions between the covers of one book, the Research Methods project makes the powerful assumption that the contributions belong together, that they (1) describe methodological positions and research experiences based on those positions that have the same, similar, or at least compatible premises, that they (2) adhere to or recognize a certain set of scientific (but also social, cultural, or political) values, that (3) the empirical material that led to the collection and treatment of is recognized as valid, that (4) the interpretations they make of that material is understandable and coherent to the community of contributors to the volume, and that (5) the theoretical advances generated by the research carried out by the members of the community are valid, or even directly applicable, for neighboring research projects. In other words, the rationality of the volume assumes that these ideas are commensurable. Commensurability is a term that grew out of debates in the twentieth-century philosophy of science. Appropriately for the questions surrounding critical methods, it becomes visible as a form of critique. The notion of scientific method, comprising principles of what we today call research design (hypothesis testing, falsifiability, etc.), emerged only in the late nineteenth century. One of its most powerful tacit assumptions was that knowledge in a given field accumulated, that is, the results of one scientific finding coherently formed the basis for adjacent scientific findings. This principle remained dogma until around the 1960s when philosophers like Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend popularized a quite radical criticism of the idea of continuity between adjacent or successive research premises and findings. Such findings and the theories that stemmed from them, they argued (from somewhat different perspectives), were more or less, but always, incommensurable. In the most general terms, methodological incommensurability refers to the absence of objective standards of scientific assessment (cf. Kuhn [1962] 1996, 94–103; Feyerabend 1975, 23–32). Commensurability and incommensurability can be expressed in several ways, but the basic implication is that two or several units of meaning ‘communicate’ with each other, are compatible with each other, and can be measured or calibrated against each

The Discourse of Justice in Political, Legal and Moral Community

This chapter investigates the hypothesis of a correlation between two distinct crises in the human and social sciences. The one involves recent attempts to articulate the set of conditions adequate and necessary to the constitution of a just society; the other attempts to account for the rise and expansion of the notion of community. It argues that the evolution of these two discourses have always been intertwined, if not co-determinate, and that attention to this interrelation will cast light on our particular understanding of justice. Communities emerge, multiply and overlap. They produce criss-crossing identities and loyalties. By the same token, the predicates that determine communities are not stable and the political bodies that represent them to both community members and non-members are not fixed. This sense of crisis which emerges from the variability of the political community corresponds to the rise of the idea of ‘multiculturalism’ and the notion of a multi-layered amalgamation of cultural and social identities known as ‘glocalization’. By virtue of a variety of global factors, cultural identity becomes more intermingled, making community boundaries more porous. Global awareness has given force to local legitimacy and cultural sovereignty. The local is legitimated against a wider global by virtue of it being local. In order to reconstruct the relationship between community and justice, the chapter begins by carrying out brief analyses of three sub-discourses of community: political, legal and moral. It then turns to the recent debate around the concept of justice in order to map out its relation to the concept of community.

Special Section: The Report of the High-level Panel on Threats,Challenges and Change Editors' Introduction

Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change presented its report A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility (United Nations, 2004) to UN Secretary-General Kofi A. Annan. The report stemmed from a mandate issued by the Secretary-General one year earlier and provoked debate in academic and operational sectors even before its release. The report’s broad approach is twofold. First, it sketches a picture of global security in which the classical modern nation-state security categories are challenged by a new constellation of global threats. Second, in an effort to address these new challenges, it reformulates the notions of responsibility and obligation in the international system in terms of the nationstate and the international community, and most concretely the United Nations itself. Debate is thus articulated across two axes, both concerning the character of new security threats and the tools and normative aims implied in addressing them. Through its 101 recommendations, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility unites a wide range of perspectives and presuppositions. These can be summarized into four distinct areas: First, it assesses the new global security landscape and attempts to correlate this with present collective security systems. Poverty, health epidemics, environmental risk, nuclear proliferation, transnational organized crime and, not least, the threat of international terrorism have combined to create a composite image of insecurity that stretches beyond national borders. The report makes the case for the ‘indivisibility of security, economic development and human freedom’ (United Nations, 2004: 1) and calls for a ‘new consensus’ around these principles. But, how accurate is this picture? To what degree is it real, and to what degree imagined? In what sense is there one common security picture across national cultures, from north to south, east to west? Second, the report reopens the question of the relation between the nation-state, sovereignty and responsibility. The prospect of a transnational security landscape naturally engenders a new role for the nation-state built, more than ever before, on shared responsibilities. On the one hand, how one state manages the new security challenges of our time domestically has far-reaching consequences for other states. On the other hand, individual nation-states are no longer able to confront these challenges alone, without international cooperation. The report also explicitly endorses an ‘emerging norm’ on the right – even obligation – of the international community to intervene where sovereign states have proven either unable or unwilling to protect their citizens from ‘avoidable catastrophe’ (United Nations, 2004: 65). What are the implicaSpecial Section: Report of the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change