Sacrifice and the Categorical Imperative of Human Security

Lieutenant-Colonel, Canadian Forces, currently employed at the Directorate of Army Doctrine, Kingston, Ontario. The author has completed two peacekeeping tours (UNPROFOR, Bosnia, 1994, and S-For, Bosnia, 2000). The views expressed are those of the author and not those of the Canadian government or of the Canadian Forces.AS PART OF ITS RUN-UP to the new millennium, Maclean's magazine published a number of articles on a host of important social, technological, political, and economic issues. In one article, Ralph Peters, a retired United States Army lieutenant-colonel, suggested that if Western governments wanted to be prepared for war in the new millennium, especially after a decade of not so glorious interventions in Kosovo, Rwanda, Somalia and elsewhere, they had to take steps to address the core problem confronting them all: what is worth fighting for?(1) This, indeed, is a fundamental foreign and defence policy question with which Western governments will need to grapple in the opening years of the new millennium, but it is not the core problem.Before that problem can be addressed, some understanding of the concept of human security, which dominated foreign policy debates in the 1990s, is necessary. Internationally, there is no single accepted definition of the concept, although it has been described as 'defence to all against all perils.' Lloyd Axworthy, who until recently served as Canada's minister of foregin affairs, was a great champion of the human security agenda on the international diplomatic stage during the 1990s. He has argued that 'human security is much more than the absence of military threat. It includes security against economic privation, an acceptable quality of life, and a guarantee of fundamental human rights.'(2) Indeed, the concept of human security links the security of persons from both military and non-military threats to the achievement of global peace and security and assumes that issues of public safety can no longer be addressed solely within the confines of national domestic policy. In other words, for most advocates of the concept, there is a connection between national/international security and human security.(3)Under the banner of human security, then, Western nations demonstrated throughout the 1990s (the 1999 Kosovo campaign being the most obvious example) that they were willing and able to fight and kill for the protection and proliferation of human rights and freedoms. In other words, their actions demonstrated what they were willing to fight for. In essence, the protection and proliferation of human rights and freedoms have become the West's post-cold war categorical imperative.(4) However, through their involvement in regional conflicts throughout the 1990s, Western nations also demonstrated that they suffer from what could be called a morality-resolution gap in the way they chose to pursue risk-free and casualty-free military interventions. Although they justified their campaigns in Kosovo, Rwanda, Somalia, and elsewhere in the name of high moral principles, they lacked the moral resolve to accept the necessary sacrifices in national blood and treasure that upholding these principles might require. In preparing for war in the 21st century, the core problem for Western governments is not what they are willing to fight for but what they are willing to die for.The end of the cold war altered the very structure and dynamics of the international system that had existed for half a century. The passing away of communism in most of the second and third worlds, and the melting away of the accompanying bipolar, ideological paradigm, has revealed a world in which competing sentiments of nationality, ethnicity, religion, and culture have become the casus belli for so many regional conflicts in central and eastern Europe, Africa, and central Asia. The character of these conflicts is radically different from the West's understanding of war. They are not between recognized nationstates, fought by conventional armies using traditional means. …

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