National Security and Society

For background on the following discussion, please refer to:

Robin, Corey. “The Language of Fear: National Security in Modern Politics.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Hyatt Regency Chicago and the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers, Chicago, IL. 30 Aug. 2007. <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/2/1/1/5/5/p211551_index.html> [15 October 2008].

What makes the term national security such an easy term to wield and manipulate is the perceived objectiveness behind it. As Robin notes in his article, there is an inherent controversy in something like morality, religion, and politics that makes it difficult for those in power to use these terms in such a way as to gain the consent of the general population. The term national security, or even security in general, has more of an objective nature to it. That is, it is difficult for one to argue against the protection of individuals and the sovereignty of a nation.

To this end, society in general chooses to hand this protective role over to the state. From this point, it is up to the state (those who are in power) to protect national security. It is here where the ideological nature of national security emerges. The first step in protecting a nation’s security begins with identifying what the threat is. From here, a lot of discretionary decision-making occurs and for the most part, who is determined to be a threat to national security is usually who the government can pander the most fear towards.

As Robin discusses, the state provides its’ population with a lens in which they look through. This lens gives the population a perspective in which they see things, with different lenses providing different perspectives. As history has demonstrated, the state often switches lenses and different groups of people are cast as threats to national security, depending on which lens is being applied.

Before this so-called terror threat to Western society, there was an alleged communist threat that would threaten to undermine the national security of these Western countries. Many parallels can be drawn from the "Red Scare" era and this post-9/11 era. One of them is the identification of the enemy, or more appropriately, the perceived identification of an enemy. It is important to look at how the House Committee on Un-American Activities distinguished between a communist and a non-communist. What factors were used in determining communist from non-communist? In present day, the question would be how to distinguish between a terrorist and a non-terrorist. How does one distinguish between the two? Consequently, how the threat is identified is determined by those in charge of protecting society from that threat.

Likewise, even if the criteria used in determining the type of person who is a threat is properly identified, one must ask whether these people are a legitimate threat to national security to begin with. That is to ask, was this so-called communist threat capable of subverting national order in much of the same way, as we would ask if this so-called terrorist threat is capable of subverting the national order?

In this sense, what I have illustrated to you is that the term national security is not as objective as the protection of Canadian safety, but rather it is a politically constructed term. If we look at the rhetoric surrounding national security today and replace the term “terrorism” with the word “communism,” we see an almost identical framing of perceived threats to national security. There are always groups on the outside who are deemed as threats to the well-being of those who are on the inside. These threats are capable of being embellished so as to justify certain preventative measures, which often involve surrendering some civil rights. Yet, this surrender is accepted because it is perceived to be a necessary sacrifice in protecting national security. As Robin notes on page 15 of the article, “Security is an ideal language for suppressing rights because it combines a universality and neutrality in rhetoric with a particularity and partiality in practice.”