The idea of Geopolitics is that the world is a giant chessboard, with the West maneuvering on one side and its enemies on the other. The problem with this quintessentially twentieth-century view of the world is that the board itself has now become a player: climate change, the collapse of world fish stocks, and pollution together comprise an active antagonist. Environmental damage doesn't respect borders but all our attempts to mitigate it do--as long as we use the government-to-government model of foreign relations.
There's a different foreign-policy model that might help us deal with this new antagonist. It's called human security and it's already been adopted by a number of western countries, including Canada.
Traditionally, national security has been about defending the nation against external threats. Its purpose is to protect the State. Human security, on the other hand, is all about protecting individuals. The traditional security model has only two categories of threats: internal (insurrection and other forms of unrest) and external (war, trade embargoes etc.). Human security recognizes a spectrum of security threats that include threats to personal health, political autonomy--and the environment.
The idea of human security is that the nation state should shift its focus away from protecting the integrity of the state, towards protecting the lives of its individual citizens. Doing this will have the collateral effect of increasing national security. It's like this: protecting your army and border while allowing massive slums to sprawl around your major cities is a recipe for disaster. The end result of such policies is what we euphemistically call "endocolonization"--where a nation declares war on, conquers and occupies its own territory (for an example, see Argentina under the generals). Making your people healthy and wealthy is the best way to keep your country strong.
Canada has adopted one brand of the human security model for its foreign policy, the "Freedom from Fear" brand. There's tons of information about it if you're interested--starting with the Human Security website. Kofi Annan's book Human Security and the New Diplomacy is another place to start; and the essential Canadian champion of the philosophy, Lloyd Axworthy, has published a fine book entitled Navigating a New World. Axworthy was instrumental in engineering the global ban on land mines, which can be seen as an early triumph of the "freedom from fear" brand.
Growing out of an original agreement between Canada and Norway, the Human Security Network of nations now comprises Austria, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Greece, Ireland, Jordan, Mali, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Switzerland, and Thailand. So while the biggest players on the world stage haven't signed on yet, it's a significant and growing movement.
From the standpoint of issues such as global climate change, the "freedom from fear" brand may not go far enough. This branch of the human security movement restricts itself to limiting threats to individuals that stem from violent conflict. This narrow focus is useful for two reasons: it makes the policy framework more palatable to nations that are reluctant to abandon the traditional security model; secondly, it allows resources to be brought against winnable issues, such as land mines. These features of the "freedom from fear" framework have resulted in it being highly successful. It has a lot of promise.
The other school of thought in human security is often called the "freedom from want" school. This model sees famine, water shortages, infrastructure decay, economic decline, and environmental shocks as equally important to individual security as violence. So far, only Japan has adopted a "freedom from want" foreign policy, but it seems a no-brainer that the whole human security movement is likely to skew increasingly in this direction. Climate change is exactly the wedge issue that is likely to force such a shift.
The "freedom from want" approach is much more likely to be tied to radicalism in people's minds because it smacks of external meddling in a nation's internal affairs, including its economy and society; it's a harder sell. But if the Earth itself has come to the board as a new player, it's going to get increasingly hard to justify going our own way on issues that we share with our neighbours.
