Writing in the very month of the famous “guns of August”, when the nations of Europe blundered into the First World War, is to realise how much things have changed in our times. Today we must take a much broader view of the very idea of security, whether national or global. We cannot meaningfully speak of security today in purely military terms.

Connected concerns

Indeed, informed knowledge about external threats to the nation, the fight against terrorism, a country’s strategic outreach, its geopolitically-derived sense of its national interest, and the way in which it articulates and projects its presence on the international stage, are all intertwined, and are also conjoined with a country’s internal dynamics. There can no longer be a foolproof separation of intelligence from policy-making, of external intelligence and internal reality, of foreign policy and domestic society. Indeed even the very image of our intelligence apparatus contributes to the perception of a country, especially in its own neighbourhood.

But, can there be national security without a sense of “global security”? National security is easily understood — keeping a country and its people safe behind defensible borders. What is global security?

A broader notion

As a former United Nations official, it is clear to me that, in an era of rapid technological advances, increasing economic interdependence, globalisation and dramatic geopolitical change, there is no choice but to see security in all-encompassing terms across our globe. The assault on the World Trade Center in New York on 9/11 has already made clear the old cliché about our global village — for, it showed that a fire that starts in a remote thatched hut or dusty tent in one corner of that village can melt the steel girders of the tallest skyscrapers at the other end of our global village. Yet that is not all. Some 2,600 people died in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. But some 26,000 people also died on that same day around the world — from starvation, unclean water and preventable disease. We cannot afford to exclude them from our idea of global security.

While poverty and human insecurity may not be said to “cause” civil war, terrorism or organised crime, they all greatly increase the risk of instability and violence. As former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has written, “catastrophic terrorism on one side of the globe, for example an attack against a major financial centre in a rich country, could affect the development prospects of millions on the other side of our globe by causing a major economic downturn that plunges millions into poverty.” Equally, “countries which are well governed and respect the human rights of their citizens are better placed to avoid the horrors of conflict and to overcome obstacles to development.” So global security can be said to rest in the creation of a kind of global order that responds to both hard and soft threats, and that does so through a network of States sharing common values and compatible approaches to governance. In this sense, to speak of India in the context of global security is to recognise the obvious fact that India has a stake in such a world order, and that it also seeks to be the kind of society that ensures the safety and well-bring of its citizens with full respect for their human rights, their basic needs and their physical security.

Across the globe, the threats to peace and security in the 21st century include not just international war and conflict but also civil war and internal violence, the insidious depredations of organised crime, the virulent menace of terrorism and the risks posed by weapons of mass destruction. And the threats facing the globe also include the scourges of poverty, of famine, of illiteracy, of deadly disease, of the lack of clean drinking water, of environmental degradation, of injustice, and of human insecurity. All of these threats make human beings less secure; they also undermine States and make them less secure.

Insular no more

Both within countries and across our globalised world, the threats we face are interconnected. The rich are vulnerable to the threats that attack the poor and, paradoxical as it may sound, the strong are vulnerable to the sufferings of the weak. Kofi Annan famously called for a new global security consensus based on the interconnectedness of such threats. “A nuclear terrorist attack on the United States or Europe would have devastating

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