Content area
Full Text
"We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow."
- Lord Palmerston, 1848
"Individual countries must gradually abandon a foreign policy category that, so far, has usually been critical to their thinking: the category of `national interests.' `National interests' are more likely to divide us than bring us together."1
- Czech President Vaclav Havel, 1999
What represents a national interest? If one were to follow the conflicting counsel (separated by almost a century and a half) of the two leaders in the above epigraphs, it might seem that national interests both define the identity and purpose of a nation and threaten the stability and order of the international system. To some extent, both views are correct.
Lord Palmerston, though a firm believer in constitutional liberalism, was a reckless and domineering figure who assured the stability of 19th-century Europe, yet would be considered nothing less than a tyrant in today's world order. Vaclav Havel, a dissident playwright who spent much of the Cold War working in a beer factory in what was once Czechoslovakia, helped bring down the Berlin Wall and became president of his nation during the difficult decade that followed 1989. Both Palmerston and Havel represent the tensions between the classical realist and liberal perspectives; such perspectives have helped define the contending views that shape the debate over national interest in the 21st century. Understanding and appreciating these alternate perspectives is crucial.
The purpose of this essay is not simply to challenge the narrow focus of realist-based conceptions of national interest. Nor is my purpose solely to imply that traditional national interests are completely irrelevant. The bottom line, after all, remains unchanged: what a nation wants and what its citizens are willing to go to war over-and to die for-remain unchanged as fundamental interests. But what may well be changing is the notion that of all the issues of security, issues of military security matter most.
Security is about more than protecting the country from external threats; security includes economic security, environmental security, and human security.2 (Indeed, human security-viewed as emerging from the conditions of daily life and accounting for the basic necessities of food, shelter, employment,...