Journal of Human Security | 2014 | Volume 10 | Issue 1 | Pages 76–88

DOI: 10.12924/johs2014.10010076

ISSN: 1835-3800

Research Article

Can the Pragmatic East Asian Approach to Human Security

Offer a Way for the Deepening of the Long Peace of East Asia?

Timo Kivimäki

Department of Political and Economic Studies, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 54, 00014 Helsinki, Finland;

progress, authoritarian violence is still a reality in East Asia. At the same time, certain other

dimensions of human security—most distinctively those elements related to "freedom from

want"—have developed very well during the long peace of East Asia.

This article will study whether the concept of human security constructs realities that are useful

for peace in East Asia. For this, the article will look at how the way in which "human" and

"security" are linked, serve and deepen the existing social realities of peace in the region.

Furthermore, the article will look inside the concepts of "human" and "security" to see how

human security is constructed and whether the construction serves to deepen the long peace of

East Asia. The article will argue that the East Asian human security debate could be an

intellectual adaptation strategy useful for the promotion of the long peace of East Asia in a

during the past 30 years. If we compare the period

from the end of World War II until the end of the

1970s with the period after that, we can see a virtual

conflicts (decline of over 99%), a drastic reduction in

Furthermore, violent repression has decreased and

governments have become more constrained in the

use of power on their citizens. As a result, one-sided

© 2014 by the authors; licensee Librello, Switzerland. This open access article was published

under a Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).

violence by armed groups or the state against un-

armed people is also on the decline. Even violent

crime seems to be on the decline [1].

East Asia should move from negative to positive

peace [2] by establishing institutions that could

ensure a lasting peace and the formation of an East

Asian security community. This prospect is under

investigation in this article. At the same time, certain

other dimensions of human security—most distinc-

tively those elements related to "freedom from

want"—have developed very well during the long

peace of East Asia. Peace in the sense of an absence

of wars (negative peace) has been built upon a eco-

should be sustainable—which it has not always been

in East Asia—it is important to acknowledge this side

of human security: economic development has been a

huge contribution to human welfare in East Asia, even

if the region should now aim at making economic

development more ecologically sustainable.

The aim of this article is to review the East Asianist

human security debate and see if the concept of hu-

man security could reconcile some of the weaknesses

of the long peace of East Asia. For this the article will

East Asia, this article will not claim or study the causal

connection between the concept and the long peace.

By East Asianist debate I mean, first, the author-

itative public documents on human security, mainly

authored by the Japanese government and the ASEAN

secretariat; second, the East Asian debate consisting of

writings by Japanese scholars, especially those facil-

itated by the Tokai University, such as Yusuke Dan,

Kazuo Tase, Keizo Takemi, Tatsuro Matsumae, Akira

Enoki and Akiko Fukushima; and third, the East

2. How Should the Human Security Concept Be

Assessed?

has also been theoretically innovative and interesting.

However, the East Asian debate has not been very

explicit or reflective about the use of theoretical con-

cepts. The debate has not gone back to the foun-

dations that could legitimize a concept. This is why I

think it could be interesting to make an interpretation

of the explicit foundations that could justify the East

Asian usage of the concept of human security.

If we look at what was defined as the East Asian

debate on human security at the beginning of this

commitment, motivate policy action, and assess policy

outcomes." Thus Peou sees the truth of human se-

curity as crucially dependent on the pragmatic con-

sequences of it as an adaptation strategy to reality, or

even as a conceptual construct of social reality.

Furthermore, Peou [4] also assesses the concept of

human security from the point of view of whether or

not it can be "sold" to the policy community: "My hope

is that the concept … can be better accepted and

applied if we succeed in building a concept that is

UN, EU and other political organizations—the practice

of human security is always dependent on how much it

has been socialized in societies and how high priority it

gets in policy-making [5].

In addition, the merits of considering something as

a security issue area are thought of in the East

Asianist debate as a matter of practicality. The original

ideas of the securitization theory [6] have been

criticized in the East Asian debate for their lack of

empirical focus, for the disinterest in real policy conse-

ries as explanations of reality, and truths as mirror

images of reality. Instead, they saw knowledge as a

pragmatic strategy of adaptation to and manipulation

production, such as the introduction of the concept of

human security, as strategic symbolic creation of

social realities in interaction between articulators of

interpretations and their audiences. Symbolic inter-

actionalism [14] that studies this interaction does not

just analyse which constructs, created by symbolic

interaction, exist; it is also interested in studying the

actual "symboling", the manipulation of symbols by

active persons, defining and redefining their social

realities [15]. Thus the articulation of "human

of view of an intellectual, the question is also whether

it is realistic to expect that the concept will be

accepted among the policy community.

According to Chaim Perelman, Olbrechts-Tyteca

[16] and the theorists of the new rhetoric [17],

political argumentation is based on the effort to

associate the policies one tries to promote with some

policies about which one's audience already feels

generally positive, and to dissociate one's projects

from those of which one's audience disapproves. Enos

are creating a rhetorical association between human

well-being (survival in tolerable conditions in absence

of want and fear [19,20]), and security, often the

dominant security concept; that of national security.

This is done in order to associate human well-being

(something that one wants to promote) with national

security, which, in our pre-agreements of argumen-

tation (something that the audience already accepts

as truth or as a norm), is undeniably regarded as

something crucially valuable. Thus, the priority on the

introduction of human welfare into the security realm

affect the way in which traditional security is con-

structed or does it just change the way in which hu-

man welfare is seen. Since human security concept is

a discursive/argumentative strategy, what kind of

conceptualization East Asian human security is in-

Asian concept of human security is articulated. Thus I

will now move on to the examination of the pragmatic

value for the long peace of East Asia by investigating

the implications of the content of "human" and "secu-

rity," the role of the East Asian concept as a substitute

of the European idea of human security, and the

implications of the way in which the two concepts are

linked.

3. The Content of East Asian Concept of Human

Human Development Report of 1994. The concept was

first introduced in an extensive, development-empha-

sizing form that now is seen as "the Asian version" of

the concept. The concept presents five new commonly

accepted elements to security thinking.

First, all human security thinking is based on the

concerns of human beings; either as individuals or as

a humanity. As the Japanese government puts it, any

policy guided by a concern for human security "puts

people at the center of concerns" (the "human" part)

accepted by all proponents of human security, the

East Asian debate often also defines a wide variety of

values related to human well-being and freedom as

security concerns [24,25]. Instead of going into the

debate on whether the concept loses its normative

relevance if it distances itself too much from its

survivalist core, I will simply focus on those definitions

that do indeed stay close to this core.

Second, threats to and the aim for human security

are not only national, as is the case with national

security means, on the one hand, that the source of a

threat is not always an intentional, national agent.

While national security challenges are posed by

intentional actors—mostly nation-states, but some-

times also alliances of several nations—human secu-

rity challenges can be posed by non-actors, such as

sume bargaining between the sender and the target of

a security threat. Security actors never negotiate with

viruses or the ozone layer, and rarely with criminals or

terrorists.

Furthermore, the transnational nature of human

security means that while national security in its clas-

sical form means the absence of a threat to one nation

from another (and is therefore inter-national), human

security challenges such as environmental degradation,

hunger or authoritarian violence can be local ones

viously seen. While traditional security thinking has

focused on military threats, human security thinking

complements this thought by pointing out non-

military, soft threats, such as the problems of nation-

building, famine, antagonistic feelings between ethnic

entities, etc. Chung-in Moon and Edward Azar gave

form to theories based on this difference, linking it to

the realities of the third world. They criticize the

traditional military view for its overexposure to the

realities of the developed world [27]. According to

ontological premise on which human security thinking

rests.

Fourth, some theorists also say that the logic of

human security is fundamentally different from that of

national security. In the latter, self-help is the main

mode of action, while the former is concerned with

helping others "other-help", [4]. The need to go

beyond the partisan principles of self-help is the first

common praxiological premise of the human security

concept. A focus on the well-being of the weakest

human security as humanity's self-help.

Finally, while traditional security threats can be

seen as being tackled by military response (however,

many traditional security threats nowadays are tackled

by what is now being called civilian crisis man-

agement), the remedy for human security threats

a central role in putting human security into effect in

the Japanese government's evaluation of the UN Trust

Fund for Human Security. According to the eval-

uation’s definition, the Trust Fund "promotes main-

streaming the human security concept in UN agencies,

and it stimulates multi-sector and multi-agency activ-

ities of the UN agencies based on issues beyond the

mandate of each agency. This leads to mainstreaming

the concept of human security not only in the UN

agencies, but also in the member countries and civil

places the focus on national security while for others

(mostly East Asian scholars), national security is

instrumental to human security. The role of the state

as a threat to or an instrument of human security is a

fundamental alternative ontological premise of human

security.

Many Western approaches to the enlargement of

the security concept—such as critical security studies

and human security—are contrasted with the narrow

national security view. Booth, , Krause, Williams and

six times as many of their own citizens as do intra-

state and interstate wars put together [34]. According

to Andrew Mack "the realist paradigm is incapable of

dealing with the threat states pose to their own

citizens. This is the primary reason why proponents of

human security argue that the individual should be

the referent object of security." [35].

On the level of policy debate, Canada represents

the extreme end of the spectrum at which the human

security concept is mainly reserved for intrusive inter-

[36], the two main proofs of the effects on policy of

the concept of human security are the banning of

landmines and the establishment of the International

Criminal Court, both acts that went against states'

sovereignty.

In the East Asian debate on human security, the

This is why in the East Asian debate human se-

curity is seen as threatened especially in the context

of state collapse [37,38]. The Japanese sponsored UN

Council for Human Security reveals its pro-state

orientation by placing a special focus on people on

the move, that is, people who cannot attain security

via the protection of their own states. With the con-

cept of human security, national security also receives

new justifications: "when we focus on the security of

the human persons, of the individuals, we're making

of the relationship between sovereignty and the

principle of non-interference on the one hand, and

human security on the other. If states, especially

authoritarian ones, present threats to human security,

most Western approaches claim that sovereignty

should not be allowed to restrict activity (especially by

democracies) to guarantee human security. However,

if states are a crucial instrument of human security as

is often believed in East Asia, sovereignty should not

be compromised. These two views are the first main

foreign minister and former ASEAN Secretary General,

Dr. Surin Pitsuwan, accepting the concept of human

security, it has not been easy for East Asian intel-

lectuals, let alone for governments [40]. According to

Paul Evans, "East Asia is resistant to concepts of

security that, in normative terms, have the potential

to erode traditional concepts of sovereignty" [41].

The human security concept that East Asia sym-

pathizes with the most is one where sovereignty

cannot be compromised, as it is an instrument of

meaningful" [40]. This deviation from the Western

discourse is understandable taken the differences in

historical experiences of East Asia and the West.

While the last big war in Europe was diagnosed as a

result of extreme nationalism and thus security was

associated with lowering state borders, in East Asia,

Asian prescription is to the opposite [42]. If we go

further back in history, we also encounter the impact

of colonialism on the East Asian interest in the pro-

tection of sovereignty. The hesitance of East Asian

countries to accept Western concepts that could

legitimize Western interference in the domestic affairs

of East Asian nations is understandable against this

historical background. To some extent also Japan has

in some countries been perceived as a "semi-colonial"

power due to the history of colonialism and expan-

question of human rights, it is a relevant divide also in

questions related to economic human security.

However the divide between supporters and

opponents of income-distribution-sensitive develop-

ment strategies does not cut across the divide

between the West and East Asia. East Asian capitalist

as well as socialist discourse often criticizes Western

approaches that are not interested in the economic

security of the state or individual poor people, but

instead, are driven by individual greed. A good ex-

but in the entire Southeast Asia, as an emphasis of

the interests of the class of capital owners. The

emphasis on the interests of the "national economy",

rather than economic human security of the poor,

simply shows the class foundation of the Southeast

Asian states [45]. Radical [46] and developmental

[47] socialist critique of the Western economic pol-

icies, again, criticizes both the class-based capitalist

economic prioritization as well as the neglect of the

economic human security of the poor in the West.

to economic human security has made it easy for the

East Asian states occasionally also to neglect their

poor.

Another important divide between East Asian and

Western concepts of human security is the greater

focus of East Asian (and, actually, Northern European)

closely tied to development. The Unit for Human Se-

curity at the UN Office for the Coordination of Human-

itarian Affairs takes a middle road including both

political and developmental means in the menu of

strategic choices for human security. "Human security

threats cannot be tackled through conventional mech-

anisms alone. Instead, they require a new consensus

that acknowledges the linkages and the interde-

pendencies between development, human rights and