Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen

The Risk Society at War: Terror, Technology and Strategy in the Twenty-First Century

In the globalised world of the twenty-first century, security policy in Western societies is driven by a wish to prevent future threats from becoming reality. Applying theories of risk society to the study of strategy, this book analyses the creation of a new approach to strategy. The author demonstrates that this approach creates new choices for policy-makers and challenges well-established truths within the study of security and strategy. He argues that since the seventeenth century the concept of strategy has served to rationalise new technologies, doctrines and agents. By outlining the history of the concept of strategy in terms of rationality, Rasmussen presents a framework for studying strategy in a time of risk and uses this framework to analyse how new technologies of war, pre-emptive doctrines, globalisation and the rise of the terrorist approach to warfare can formulate a new theory of strategy.

‘What's the Use of It?’: Danish Strategic Culture and the Utility of Armed Force

The article uses theories of strategic culture to show why Denmark has come to regard the use of armed force in new ways following the end of the Cold War. It is argued that Danish strategic culture is constituted by a debate between ‘cosmopolitans’ and ‘defencists’ about the utility of armed force. The debate shows that a minor power possesses a certain ability to choose how to act on the world stage, and what means to use in doing so, and illustrates that the prevalent structural explanations of why Danish foreign policy has been ‘militarized’ since the end of the Cold War are insufficient. In Denmark, a new focus on European integration and globalization has meant that military power is being understood in a new way. A practice of ‘activism’ has transcended the cosmopolitan–defencist debate that paralysed Danish security discourse in the late 1970s and 1980s.

`It Sounds Like a Riddle': Security Studies, the War on Terror and Risk

A research programme on `reflexive security is emerging, as a number of students of international security are applying sociological insights of `risk society to understand new discourses and practices of security. This research note maps the current achievements and future challenges of this emerging research programme on risk arguing that it offers a way to overcome the debate about whether to apply a `broad or `narrow concept of security; a debate which is stifling the disciplines ability to appreciate the `war on terrorism as an example of a new security practice. Discussing the nature of strategy in a risk environment, the paper outlines the consequences for applying the concept of reflexive rationality to strategy. Doing so, I address some of the concerns on how to study `reflexive security previously raised by Shlomo Griner in Millennium.A research programme on `reflexive security is emerging, as a number of students of international security are applying sociological insights of `risk society to understand new discourses and practices of security. This research note maps the current achievements and future challenges of this emerging research programme on risk arguing that it offers a way to overcome the debate about whether to apply a `broad or `narrow concept of security; a debate which is stifling the disciplines ability to appreciate the `war on terrorism as an example of a new security practice. Discussing the nature of strategy in a risk environment, the paper outlines the consequences for applying the concept of reflexive rationality to strategy. Doing so, I address some of the concerns on how to study `reflexive security previously raised by Shlomo Griner in Millennium.

Reflexive Security: NATO and International Risk Society:

How is one to understand the West’s security policy in Europe after the end of the Cold War? The best way to gain such an understanding is, perhaps, to inquire how the West defines the threats of the times and how it imagines achieving security in those circumstances. If one consults the documents of NATO and other Western security institutions, one finds that the security environment is being consistently defined in terms of ‘security challenges and risks’. The notion of ‘security challenges and risks’ serves primarily as NATO’s reminder that threats to security persist in the post-Cold War world. The nature of these challenges is defined by risk. Risk is becoming the operative concept of Western security. Ulrich Beck’s theory of reflexive modernity and risk society offers a means to conceptualise and understand the transformation of Western security policies. This article thus explores how a theory new to International Relations can illuminate NATO’s redefinition of both the concept of security and its identity following the end of the Cold War. Beck’s concept of risk is used as an analytical tool, as I change the original focus of his analysis while keeping his theory (mostly) intact. I seek neither to set out ‘Beck’s theory of International Relations’ (IR), nor to establish a reflexive theory of IR in general or of security in particular.

`A Parallel Globalization of Terror': 9-11, Security and Globalization

Little research exists on how the conception of world order in terms of globalization defines security policy. The way the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, on 11 September 2001 were understood highlights how globalization defines threats, and the policies adopted to deal with them, in the post-Cold War international order. This article utilizes three elements of the globalization discourse (globality, globalization and globalism) identified by Ulrich Beck in analysing the Western reaction to the events of 11 September 2001. It is argued that the attacks reflected a new `strategic globality in which the new civilian infrastructure of globalization enabled Third World groups to intervene in the West. In terms of globalization, the events of 11 September were seen as the realization of scenarios for post-Cold War insecurity that dominated the late 1990s. The terrorist attacks actualized the `ontological insecurity which followed from the notion that globalization enabled threats to proliferate with the same force as trade. Focusing on `globalism, the article analyses the strategies for creating safety in a globalized world that presented themselves immediately after the events. The author presents three globalisms: particularism, imperialism and cosmopolitanism.

The history of a lesson: Versailles, Munich and the social construction of the past

The article investigates the concept of lessons in IR. By means of a constructivist critique of the lessons literature, the article analyses one of the most important of IR lessons: that of Munich. Examining how the Munich lesson came about, the article shows the praxeological nature of lessons and emphasises the need to study the history of lessons rather than the lessons of history. This approach shows that Munich is the end point of a constitutive history that begins in the failure of the Versailles treaty to create a durable European order following the First World War. The Munich lesson is thus one element of the lesson of Versailles, which is a praxeology that defines how the West is to make peace, and against whom peace must be defended. The lesson of Versailles has been, at least in part, constitutive of the outbreak of the Cold War, and it continues to define the Western conception of what defines peace and security even in the war against terrorism. When a president faces a decision involving war or peace, he draws back and thinks of the past and of the future in the widest possible terms Lyndon Baines Johnson In the spring of 1999 Western officials met in London to determine a strategy for how to deal with Yugoslav repression in Kosovo. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright argued that military force was the only alternative if the Milosevic government did not give in to Western demands at the upcoming conference at Rambouillet. Not everybody agreed. In the end the Czech-born secretary of state felt she had to remind her colleagues what was at stake. This is London, remember, not Munich, she told them.1 Shortly after, NATO started bombing Yugoslavia. * Previous versions of this article have been presented at the 2001 annual conference of the British International Studies Association in Edinburgh and at research seminars at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and the Danish Institute of International Affairs. I would like to thank those who discussed the arguments with me at these occasions, especially Caroline Kennedy-Pipe and Iver Neumann. Furthermore, I would like to thank Ole Waever, Jens Erik Bartelson and Christopher Coker for their comments on previous incarnations of the argument presented here. I very much appreciate the patient and constructive comments by the anonymous reviewers and the editors of RIS. Needless to say, the responsibility for the argument as it stands is all mine. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge financial assistance from the Danish Social Science Research Council and the Security and Defence Studies at the Danish Institute of International Affairs. 1 Quoted in Timothy Garton Ash, Kosovo: Was It Worth It?, New York Review of Books, 21 September (2000), p. 6.

Turbulent Neighbourhoods: How to Deploy the EU's Rapid Reaction Force

How is the European Union (EU) to deploy its rapid reaction force? At the Laeken summit in December 2001 the rapid reaction force was declared partly operational. Although the declaration served as a collective commitment to further military integration rather than the completion of that particular process of integration, it does signal that the phase in which the European governments have focused exclusively on developing capabilities is coming to an end. Developing capabilities is by no means off the European agenda. On the contrary, the ‘war on terrorism’ has renewed the transatlantic debate on the ‘capabilities gap’, and the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) will be one of the fora in which ‘the gap’ will be addressed. As the European rapid reaction force begins to take shape and the Union develops political and military infrastructure to guide it, however, the question of what strategic purposes the force is to serve looms ever larger. Furthermore, the question of what the European force is to be used for goes to the heart of the debate on the ESDP’s relationship with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Most of the big questions on the ESDP to come will ultimately be concerning the situations in which the Union will use the force. ‘“How” to manage armed force can only be the first step’, Paul Cornish and Geoffrey Edwards argue in their analysis of the ESDP: ‘What is also

The Ideology of Peace: Peacebuilding and the War in Iraq

There is a tendency to reduce peacebuilding, in theory as well as in practice, to a technocratic question. Academics and policymakers in Western capitals, as well as military officers and aid workers from Liberia to Afghanistan, ask themselves how to make a durable peace. The question of ‘how to make peace?’ is the subject of endless number of books and articles, as well as manuals and consultancy reports, that try to describe the best techniques for making peace. However, this focus on how to make peace might have turned our attention away from what kind of peace is actually being made. Perhaps, and this is more troubling, this inattention to the nature of the peace which one strives to achieve is the reason why peace all too often remains unattainable, as well as the reason why the price other people pay for the schemes of the academics, policymakers, officers and aid workers is at times so terribly high.

Punching above Its Weight: Denmark’s Legitimate Peripheral Participation in NATO’s Wars

‘In the Libya operation, Norway and Denmark, have provided 12 per cent of allied strike aircraft yet have struck about one third of the targets’, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates noted in June 2011, ‘These countries have, with their constrained resources, found ways to do the training, buy the equipment, and field the platforms necessary to make a credible military contribution’ (Gates, 2011). Along with Belgium, Canada and Norway the outgoing US Secretary of Defence mentioned Denmark as an example for the rest of the Alliance to follow. For 10–20 years Denmark has increasingly become a more willing and able NATO-partner committing troops to NATO operations in Afghanistan and fighter planes to Unified Protector over Libya. The Danish government and its armed forces have prided themselves in being able to commit troops that were able to get the job done without caveats and, in Afghanistan at least, able to tolerate considerable casualties while doing so. When Secretary Gates described Denmark as a country that punched above its weight, it confirmed the new-found Danish self-image of being among the most willing and able NATO-partners.

War is never civilised

‘War is never civilised’, British Prime Minister Tony Blair declared on 10 June 1999, ‘but war can be necessary to uphold civilisation.’ On that day, seventy-eight days of war were brought to an end by the assertion that they had secured the principles on which the post-Cold War European order was founded. For that reason the Kosovo war provides an opportunity to study what the West believes to be the foundation of a new European order. This opportunity should be used because the reflexive confusion which followed the end of the Cold War finally seems to have settled into a new kind of political order. To appreciate how the West is constructing this order should be of concern to anyone who wants to understand what the twenty-first century has to offer European politics. In the context of the debate on the futures of European order, Blair’s construction of the Kosovo war may be seen as an illustration of Samuel Huntington’s scenario of some forthcoming ‘clash of civilisations’. Was Blair not arguing that, while war has ceased to be a means of politics in the relations between Western states, the West’s relations with other civilisations do – at least occasionally – involve war? However, the construction of the Kosovo war as a defence of civilisation does not seem to vindicate such a reading of the emerging post-Cold War world. On the contrary, Huntington’s conception of civilisation is merely the culmination of a long tradition of conceiving government – as well as relations between governments – in terms of civilisation. This tradition began with the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment (particularly Adam Ferguson), and culminated in Immanuel Kant’s conception of the pacific federation of liberal governments as the cosmopolitan purpose of history. The centrepiece of this tradition is the construction of government in terms of civil society. In order to understand how the West came to see the Kosovo war as necessary for the upkeep of civilisation, both the concept of civilisation