Living in a world of phantom insecurity

IN PERSPECTIVE

Not long ago the people on this planet lived without the anguish of insecurity. This is because they assumed that insecurity was the natural state of things, for everyone, rich and poor, powerful and weak, for the colonised and the imperialist occupiers. Life seemed comparatively more normal, and people were more fatalistic and resigned. The world was, you might say, predominantly conservative. Only a minority of bold visionaries, idealists, and renegades took the risk of seeking change, frequently at a high cost to themselves.

Now, and especially since the end of the Cold War and September 11, the landscape is different. The world lives in a state of tension, afraid to go to bed, take the steering wheel of a car, open the door to one’s home, take a test, cross a street, or board a plane. The world today is more insecure (or so it seems). And yet the facts indicate that the majority of the planet lives better than their ancestors.

The reason for this contradiction lies in the fact that whereas in the past the threats were fully identified, today they are difficult to detect and thus to address. Frequently what are initially seen as superficial and passing symptoms hide an endemic and perennial disease. In certain notorious cases, once the existence of a concrete threat is verified, the remedies are elusive, erratic, and inefficient. In different continents and ages this experience has varied.

In Europe, from the times of the Roman Empire the challenge lay in the necessity of controlling territory and natural resources to feed a population that would fight for kings and emperors and guarantee the precarious but palpable ‘security’. Paradoxically when the people stopped fighting for the deified king in favour of the recently-discovered ‘nation’, they became an internal threat.

Captured by ideologies, nationalism generated the near destruction of European civilisation in the prolonged World War of 1914-1945. With Europe divided in two, under the attentive gaze of Moscow, two security systems emerged to the west of the Iron Curtain: the European Union, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). The end of the Cold War and the rise of Islamist terrorism revived the sense of insecurity while nationalism was reawakened by waves of uncontrolled immigration.

On the other side of the Atlantic, for the first decades of its existence the US were worn down by the uncertainty of the return of British control, which continued in Canada and the Caribbean. Later an internal danger emerged: the threat of secession, which President Abraham Lincoln decisively quashed. But the victory of the North left intact both economic and social racial discrimination. The country sought to soothe the troublesome variety of the waves of new immigrants with the myth of the melting pot. When the US broadened its Manifest Destiny to claim world hegemony, the threat then shifted to the Soviet Union.

With the threat of Moscow vanished, the US now sees itself menaced by unstoppable immigration, the spread of discrimination by both race and social class, drug use, and most recently international terrorism. The messianism driving the war in Iraq, just as it fuelled the Vietnam War decades ago, has split the conscience of Americans, who are wearied by another foreign war. The current domestic threat, however, is the grave economic crisis, not because it is new and universal but because it strikes the very heart of capitalism and the market, the unquestioned cement of the national identity.

In Latin America, perennially contaminated by the comings and goings of the US and Europe, the initial threat, since colonial ties were broken with Spain, was the absence of the option of a nation-state not based on ethnicity, along the US model. The state, which had to respond to the expectations of the initial inhabitants and settlers and the waves of immigration, was reduced to its role as repressor. Curiously the army did not dedicate themselves like the Europeans to mutual annihilation. Faced with revolutionary struggle and upheaval, the armed forces operated as the axis of authoritarianism. The threat they cited was Marxist expansion which, except in the case of Cuba, was never sublimated. The true threat to Latin America, however, is the consequence of the collapse not only of the state but the nation as well. The sense of non-belonging to the elusive nation tilts to ‘no’ the daily plebiscite that Latin Americans take home everyday, to use the metaphor of Ernest Renan. (IPS)