Something that is clear from the discussions behind any of the issues treated through human security is that a reconsideration of what is external and what is domestic is necessary. Some of today's challenges do not distinguish among borders, and thus solutions of individual nations would not be enough to face them. In a sense, what it is required to us, citizens of the third millennium, is to be able to take and enforce global domestic decisions.
This formulation may seem either paradoxical or trivial, but I want to remark is that human security urge us to think in a domestic way, even if it is at planetary scale, with the unavoidable problem of finding a way to make political units weaken their restraints. These two issues, taken separately, have different academic traditions behind, but to be faced together requires new approaches.
An interesting example we would see in the coming weeks is the Australian proposal for the design of a future agreement on CO2 emissions. International agreement are usually toothless, and those supposed to be binding take ages to be punished. So the delegation proposed that agreements should consist of regulations to be approved by each country congress, and thus to be designed globally but enforced locally.
A similar debate was going on around financial institutions during the peak of the crisis. Pundits were discussing whether it would be better to have a central regulation to prevent future devastating bubbles, or if it was better to trust on the different strategies design by each country. So far, the latter has been favored, not only for the difficulty of coordination, but also because, thinking in an evolutionary way, many strategies guarantee that someone would find the best answer when it becomes necessary.
Nevertheless, domestic decisions entail their own problems, which are easy to envision by following the internal debates of any country. That is why I found last Monday column of David Brooks in the NYT very appealing. In reviewing the discussion about the health system in the U.S., he emphasizes the dilemma between "vitality or security". He goes further to describe the situation as a "brutal choice", the choice of whether we prefer to care about the most vulnerable or economic progress. The domestic question is heavily influenced by values, which finally decide what we admit as a threat for us.
Those of us who work on security believe that such discussion will not affect us. In any case, we are by the side of threats, aren't we? But you can see that even with all the evidence, the question of value would have to be sorted - either at the local or the global scale. And certainly that is something human security experts have asked themselves less about.
Have you?