UNESCO / Peter J. Burgess – Promoting human security in Western Europe
UNESCO Documents and Publications – UNESDOC/UNESBIB
Burgess, J. Peter
Promoting human security: ethical, normative and educational frameworks in Western Europe:
A new kind of precariousness is touching Europe. The robust structures of social support that had become a commonplace in the post-war European welfare state are being increasingly challenged in almost invisible ways. The societybased guarantees of industrial late modernity are gradually giving over to more economic, political, social, cultural and even moral vulnerability. Although Europeans still hold fast to the basic ideas of security in terms of classical principles of economic and social welfare, these principles map less and less on to the globalized reality that shapes European lives.
The purpose of this report is to chart the basic contours of this new vulnerability in terms of human security. The inspiration and genealogy of human security are by now well known. Human
security is an influential diagnostic concept that emerged from the remnants of the Cold War ideological battlefield. As the attention of the world was released from the logic of bipolar geopolitics, a vast world of development challenges revealed itself. Human security emerged not as a new empirical object, but as a new epistemology. In other words, human security is not so much a new discovery as a new kind of knowledge, a new way of organizing the constellation of facts, values, priorities, views and ideologies.
In this report one chapter is about the Netherlands (by Bartels, De Koning, Knibbe and Salemink):
Given the rapid and rather extreme transition of a public discourse of cultural relativism and tolerance to a discourse emphasizing integration and assimilation and the closing of state borders for migration, the Dutch case exemplifies tendencies towards insecurity present in several countries in Western Europe. This is illustrated by the 2005 riots in the French suburbs as well as the 2006 German discussion about the security of teachers and children in multi-ethnic public schools. These trans-European concerns for cultural security are not only comparable, but also mutually influencing through transnational networks, as events and developments in one country may affects the situation in other countries as well. The recent transnational and international controversy over cartoons published in Denmark is a case in point. Finally, the threat of terror attacks (Madrid, London, political murders in the Netherlands) and the corresponding public and political responses make clear that the present insecurity over identity issues have a deep impact on people’s sense of physical security, thus violating the ‘freedom from fear’ dimension of human security. In other words, the way that people define their cultural identity is part and parcel of their subjective sense of human security – first and foremost in terms of cultural security, but eventually in terms of their physical safety.