Global Security in the 21^st Century

The Concerns of Governments - listen to Podcast

Today security has become the foremost item on any government’s agenda.  Governments are increasingly working together to build a better cross-territorial shared resource where information and data can be accessed almost instantaneously, in order to counter any terrorist acts.

National Defense is no longer restricted to the borders of any one country, as opposed to another.  What concerns governments across the globe is the ability to counter and pre-empt acts of terrorism.

National Security has therefore become a cross-cultural issue.  Defense spending is increasingly more devoted to supplying, or acquiring the capability to protect and use information. Intelligence is now a nation’s front-line defense.

In one sense terrorism worries politicians more than the people they govern.  The reasons for this are that politicians, unlike the public, are in danger of being directly attacked, as was Margaret Thatcher by the IRA.  Secondly terrorism warns governments because it undermines the illusion of control and authority that they carefully foster, something that is normally only exposed to view when a major natural disaster, or an economic crisis affects their countries.  Such a perception can undermine a government at home and also weaken its reputation abroad.

When a population has reason to doubt their government’s control over events this weakens the respect and loyalty which its citizens have for the administration.  Ultimately governments retain their authority to the extent that they can govern effectively, that is that they have control over events in their country.  The failure of a government to exercise authority can even call into question its legitimacy, which happened in the thirteen colonies when the British Government lost effective control of most of their territory to the American forces in the 1770s. Terrorist, guerrilla and insurgent groups, who can rarely marshal sufficient forces to fight in open conflict against a regular army, have as their primary objective the undermining of the authority of government.  This has been the policy of terrorists groups, like the IRA, who attempted to engineer the succession of Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom, and of Al-Qaeda whose primary aim is to replace the existing regime in Saudi Arabia.  Such irregular forces may have the backing of a foreign power, in the way that Iran sought to undermine British authority in Southern Iraq in 2005, by support for local terrorists.

Relevantly small acts of terrorism, which kill and injury citizens, can therefore have an influence which is totally disproportionate to the actual damage caused. The real danger in the eyes of governments is that is an unexpected event which they failed to stop, which their citizens believe that the government affected should have been able to prevent.  A terrorist attack is similar in its effects to a major air crash where it is believed that the authorities were responsible, because of their failure to provide adequate air traffic control, or because government safety inspectors failed to do their job properly.  Governments are not blamed for accidents as such, but for their failures of administration, and security failures are laid clearly at the feet of government.  In the United States, although Al-Qaeda were understood to be the perpetrators of the 9/11 attack, the U.S. Government was also heavily criticized for its failure to anticipate that terrorist would make a second attack on the World Trade Center (the first attack was in 1993), and for the inability of the Air Force to intercept the second and third aircraft to be crashed on New York and then Washington.

The need for international cooperation to fight terrorism has been made increasingly obvious by the ability of terrorist groups, like Al-Qaeda, to act globally, moving their members from country to country and striking at targets around the world.  However the meeting of Heads of State at the UN in September 2005 highlighted the difficulties in agreeing who is a terrorist, and who is exercising a legitimate right to armed opposition. They failed to agree on a definition of terrorism[1], but there was agreement on the need to combat terrorism and the Security Council said that there was “every chance that Al-Qaida would continue to menace the world for a time to come.  The international community must stand strong against the threat and maintain a system that put pressure on Al-Qaida, by creating a hostile environment through the global and effective implementation of sanctions.”