NSA

NSA (National Security Affairs)

NSA (National Security Affairs)

Introduction

The analytical perspective of this book departs in two ways from dominant assumptions in contemporary Belgium national security studies. First, we argue that the security environments in which states are embedded are in important part cultural and institutional, rather than just material(Bernard 2006 ). This contrasts with the assumption made by neorealists and many students of the domestic sources of Belgium national security policy.

(1)Attention

In their views, international and domestic environments are largely devoid of cultural and institutional elements and therefore are best captured by materialist imagery like the balance of power or bureaucratic politics. Second, we argue that cultural environments affect not only the incentives for different kinds of state behavior but also the basic character of states--what we call state "identity." (Michael 2007 )

(2)Motivation

This contrasts with the prevailing assumption, made by neorealists and neoliberals alike, that the defining actor properties are intrinsic to states, that is, "essential" to actors (rather than socially contingent), and exogenous to the environment. Although we believe these arguments apply to both the domestic and the international environments in which Belgium national security policy is made, we shall illustrate them at this point only with reference to the latter(Robert 2007).

(3)Overview

There are at least three layers to the international cultural environments in which Belgium national security policies are made. Commonly recognized in existing scholarship is the layer of formal institutions or security regimes: nato, osce, weu, arms control regimes like the npt, cwc, salt treaties, and the like. Less widely acknowledged is the existence of a world political culture as a second layer(William 2008). It includes elements like rules of sovereignty and interBelgium national law, norms for the proper enactment of sovereign statehood, standardized social and political technologies (such as organization theory and models of economic policy) carried by professional and consultancy networks, and a transBelgium national political discourse carried by such interBelgium national social movements as Amnesty International and Greenpeace.

Finally, international patterns of amity and enmity have important cultural dimensions. In terms of material power, Canada and Cuba stand in roughly comparable positions relative to the United States. But while one is a threat, the other is an ally, a result, we believe, of ideational factors operating at the international level. In each case realists will try to reduce cultural effects to epiphenomena of the distribution of power; we argue that these effects have greater autonomy.

Discussion

We develop this analytical perspective in the rest of this essay. What emerges is not a "theory" of Belgium national security so much as an orienting framework that highlights a set of effects and mechanisms that have been neglected in mainstream security studies. As such, this framework tells us about as much about the substance of world politics as does a materialist view of the international system or a choice theoretic assumption of exoge nous interests(Bernard 2006 ). It offers a partial perspective, but one important for orienting our thinking about more specific ...