Responsibility, politicians and bureaucratic ethics: Weber's Politics
as a Vocation in an era of national security as risk management
Draft paper prepared for CAST Workshop on ‘National Security, Risk Management,
and the Transformation of Bureaucratic Ethics’, 23-24 May, 2013
Please do not cite this draft version without permission.
Andrew Neal
University of Edinburgh
[email protected]
What does political responsibility mean in an era of national security as risk
management? The main ethical complaint about traditional national security was that
it concentrated too much political responsibility in too few hands. The emergency
decision exercised by the executive pinnacle of government in situations of perceived
security crisis subverted constitutional checks and balances, threatened civil liberties
and human rights, and potentially undermined the legitimacy of the liberal democratic
state itself. Too often, democratic institutions were supine in these situations,
acceding to draconian legislation with insufficient scrutiny (e.g. the Patriot Act), or
giving the executive the benefit of the doubt by holding back on oversight until an
anticipated future time of greater calm and reflection. National security meant an
imbalance of responsibility between an unbound executive and a yielding political
class.
Security as risk management presents an opposing set of ethical problems. Not too
much responsibility concentrated in the hands of too few, but too little responsibility
dispersed amongst too many. Risk management as a mode of security governance
disperses responsibilities across agencies and down governmental hierarchies. It
creates duties of emergency planning and preparedness in local and regional
government (Anderson and Adey, 2012), and encourages arms-length agencies
covering everything from borders to food safety to adopt risk-based models in which
full-scale security emergencies are only the most extreme possibility on a wide
spectrum. Furthermore, through practices of ‘responsibilization’ with a neo-liberal
bent, ‘risk’ disperses responsibilities amongst citizens themselves (O'Malley, 2008).
Revered English constitutional theorist Walter Bagehot would say that risk
management is not ‘come-at-able’; it is not an ‘available authority’ to serve as a locus
for the public’s ire (Bagehot, 1896: p. 137).
If Carl Schmitt is the symbolic exemplar of national security thinking with his famous
statement that ‘Sovereign is he who decides the exception’, then Max Weber is the
harbinger of risk management. Of course, Weber had nothing to say about risk
management itself, his life preceding the terminology by almost a century. But risk
management is, in Weberian terms, a form of rationalization. It is the extension of
rule by officials through a technocratic rationality that displaces political
responsibility. Weber’s concern was that in modern life, rationalization was
everywhere increasing its reach. Nowhere was off limits to its relentless march. ‘The
advance of bureaucratization is unstoppable’, he said (Weber, 1994: p. 159).
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Against the valueless extension of technocratic rule, the only limited hope Weber saw
was in politics. The profession of politics contained at least a few genuine individuals
capable of expressing value convictions through the responsibilities of political rule.
In contrast, the responsibility of the official is only to carry out instructions ‘as if it
corresponded to his own innermost conviction’ (Weber, 1994: p. 160). As Sheldon
Wolin puts it, ‘The bureaucratic ideal asserts, somewhat paradoxically, that the
bureaucrat can be both “neutral” and a staunch believer that the common good is
realizable through objective thinking based on expert knowledge’ (Wolin, 2005: p. 7).
Yet Weber saw that even politics was subject to rationalization. Political parties
increasingly resembled bureaucratic election machines, and most politicians were no
more than ‘yes men’ in thrall to their party managers (Weber, 1991: p. 106), or worse,
to officialdom. In the face of this, the individual with a genuine calling for politics
needed to overcome, ‘Embitterment or philistinism, sheer, dull acceptance of the
world and of your job’, and ‘withstand even the defeat of all hopes’ (Weber, 1994: pp.
368-69). For Weber, it was a special kind of individual who could continue to practice
politics under these modern conditions by saying, ‘“Nevertheless” in spite of
everything’ (Weber, 1994: p. 369). Asking how one could do this and ‘what kind of
human being one must be’ was for Weber an ethical question (Weber, 1994: p. 352).
Amongst the vast majority of today’s political class, there is an established ethical
response to national security that is very much Weberian. While ever taking the
‘threat’ seriously, they must defend constitutional values against an over mighty or
imprudent executive. This ethical response is not always followed of course,
especially in the aftermath of a major security event. The constitutional values to be
defended vary by small degree from left to right, but include correct parliamentary,
legislative and judicial process, human rights, and especially the historic civil liberties
tied up with national history.
This is not a matter of finding a ‘balance’ between liberty and security. Politicians
find it eminently possible to surmount any paradox involved in simultaneously taking
seriously their responsibility to the security threat and defending the constitution
against disproportionate and ill-judged government policies. In Weberian terms, the
ethical response to national security is not one of conviction versus responsibility
(which could be construed in either way: i.e. conviction for constitutional values
versus responsibility for security, or responsibility to defend the constitution versus
the conviction that something must be done about security). Rather, the ideal
politician with a genuine ‘vocation for politics’ combines conviction with the ‘sense
of judgment’ required by responsibility (Weber, 1994: p. 369). This means
accommodating the ethical paradoxes involved in defending constitutional values
through the ‘diabolical powers’ and ‘violence’ inevitably entailed by political rule
(Weber, 1994: p. 365).
Put simply, even though all agree that the first responsibility of government is to the
security of its people (Hobbes, 1996), this does not mean that the government is
infallible and incapable of acting disproportionately or counter-productively. The
politician has an ethical role to play in security politics by asserting, if able, the
decisive qualities of ‘passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion’
(Weber, 1991: p. 115).
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The ethical response to security as risk management is more difficult. Political
responsibility in the face of rationalization is not simply a matter of negotiating the
ethical dilemmas of rule through conviction and sound judgment. It is the possibility
of exercising meaningful political control at all. For Weber, finding a way to resist the
rationalization of bureaucratic rule was the intractable difficulty of modern times:
In view of the growing indispensability and hence increasing power of state
officialdom, how can there be any guarantee that forces exist which can
impose limits on the enormous, crushing power of this constantly growing
stratum of society and control it effectively? How is democracy even in this
restricted sense to be at all possible? (Weber, 1994: p. 159)
This is not simply a struggle within politics, but a struggle between politics and the
anti-politics of rationalization.
Risk management is a form of rationalization that subjects areas of life previously
characterised by uncertainty to forms of expert knowledge and control. For Schmitt,
the uncertainty created by the emergency situation created a vital and truly political
moment of unlimited freedom of action for the state (Schmitt, 1985: p. 12). Against
this, the rationalization entailed by risk management closes down this uncertainty and
subjects it to rational control. As Luis Lobo-Guerrero would put it via Francois
Ewald, it makes ‘uncertainty governable’ (Ewald, 1991, Lobo-Guerrero, 2010: p. 78).
Risk management follows the tenet described by Weber in Science as a Vocation:
‘that there are in principle no mysterious, incalculable powers at work, but rather one
could in principle master everything through calculation’ (Weber, 1989: p. 13).
Historically, Schmitt’s multifarious political theories that emphasise exception,
decision, and myth were a direct response to Weber’s paralysing account of the
‘irresistible, objectively rational structures of the “iron cage” of modernity’
(McCormick, 1997: pp. 34-35). For example, an implicit antithetical reference to
Weber is central to Schmitt’s idea of the exception: ‘In the exception the power of
real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by
repetition’” (Schmitt, 1985: p. 15); and later in the same text: ‘The rationalism of the
Enlightenment rejected the exception in every form’ (Schmitt, 1985: pp. 36-37).
McCormick describes Schmitt’s concept as ‘a miracle-like monkey wrench to be
thrown into the works of the liberal-positivist machine’ (McCormick, 1997: p. 75).
Schmitt offers a way out of the Weberian impasse, but it is not an ethical response. It
is not an account of what human beings should do. Rather it vaunts the inhuman
figure of the sovereign. For Schmitt, the sovereign, in the figure of Hobbes’s
Leviathan, is a ‘powerful monster that combined god, man, animal, and machine’
(Schmitt, 1996: p. 81). It is difficult to ascribe a single set of political implications to
Schmitt’s protean works, but McCormick puts it sharply when he explains that
Schmitt ‘takes far too literally Weber’s claim that politics involves the subjectively
personal choice between God and the devil, as well as the likelihood that one will
“contract with diabolical powers”’ (McCormick, 1997: pp. 76-77). We do not need to
dwell on the permanent tainting of Schmitt by his involvement with the Nazi party,
but suffice it to say that Schmitt’s existential concept of ‘the political’ - in which ‘the
enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy’ at ‘the high points of politics’
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(Schmitt, 1996: p. 67) - squarely aims to destroy the ethic of politics that is the final
destination of Weber’s oeuvre.
Weber’s ethic of politics is elitist in its extolling of heroic leaders (Weber, 1994: p.
369), and is only a limited form of democracy (much as we have today) (Weber,
1994: p. 159). Nevertheless it is an ethic that remains human. As Tamsin Shaw puts it,
‘Instead of surrendering political power altogether to impersonal processes,
submission to charismatic authority permits politics to be brought under human
control’ (Shaw, 2008: p. 38). For Weber, it is an ‘ethical question’ to ask what gives
‘human beings’ with a calling for politics ‘the right to seize the spokes of the wheel of
history’ (Weber, 1994: p. 352). This is human in a way that the inhuman sovereign of
national security or the grey march of bureaucratic risk management are not, even if
Weber’s ideal politicians are free spirits of a Nietzschean Human, All Too Human
elite, imbued with ‘a sense of rising above everyday existence’ (Nietzsche, 2011,
Weber, 1994: p. 352).
National Risk Registers and the UK National Security Strategy
The clearest expression of national security as risk management is the rise of the
‘national risk register’ (Hagmann and Cavelty, 2012). In turn, the clearest expression
of this is the ‘National Security Strategy’ (NSS) of the UK, which is built upon a risk
register (HM Government, 2010). The risk methodology of the UK NSS is called
‘national security risk assessment’ (HM Government, 2010: p. 37) represents a
‘bureaucratic innovation in Whitehall’ (Crowcroft, 2012: p. 172). Some
commentators argue that the NSS is not a strategy at all, but rather a ‘methodology for
a strategy’ (Crowcroft, 2012: p. 172), or a ‘framework’ that ‘does not fit the needs of
the task’ (Gearson and Gow, 2010: p. 407).
Hagmann and Cavelty explain that national risk registers are a form of expert
knowledge that score risks along two axes: likelihood and impact (Hagmann and
Cavelty, 2012: p. 84). They aim to be ‘comprehensive inventories of public dangers...
to provide secure foundations for public policymaking, security-related resource
allocation and policy planning’ (Hagmann and Cavelty, 2012: p. 80). Their
methodology derives from engineering, a discipline that has established empirical
methods to quantify these variables (Hagmann and Cavelty, 2012: p. 81). In the
security field, given the uncertainty and infrequency of ‘events’ and the sheer number
of contextual variables, national risk registers often depend on the less sound
methodology of soliciting estimates from intelligence agencies or ‘experts’ (Hagmann
and Cavelty, 2012: pp. 84-85). Indeed, it is not uncommon for security academics to
be asked to take part in ‘expert surveys’ about current and future security threats for
the purpose of creating just this kind of ‘knowledge’. Through an ‘expert-generated
knowledge that is actively used to mask non-knowledge’ (Hagmann and Cavelty,
2012: p. 81), national risk registers displace the spectre of the unknowable that haunts
insecurity.
Although not noted by Hagmann and Cavelty, the ‘national risk register’ is Weberian
in every sense. It is generated by the officialdom of government ministries and not by
political leaders taking personal responsibility; it replaces uncertainty with
rationalization; it supplants the human judgment and potential irrationality of political
decision with planned, predictable bureaucratic responses to posited dangers; it is
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presented as value neutral and for the common good; and is ‘cloaked in apolitical and
technocratic language’ (Hagmann and Cavelty, 2012: p. 87).
Although the risk register is scientistic, giving it an aura of truth, there is nothing
unique about this. Bureaucratic government is in general steeped in scientistic
methods, particularly statistics. In the UK for example, the Office for National
Statistics (ONS) is responsible, in classic Weberian terms, for the ‘collection,
compilation, analysis and dissemination of a range of economic, social and
demographic statistics relating to the United Kingdom that serve the public good’.
Politicians rarely, if ever, question the veracity of this official knowledge. Indeed,
opposition parties often deploy it to question the wisdom of government policies that
are not sufficiently based on it. In comparison with the refined statistical methods of
national statistics agencies, Hagmann and Cavelty show that the methodological
rigour of national risk registers is poor. It would not be beyond a critical politician to
point this out in public debate, but as we will see, the officialdom of government
guards its methods jealously. However, critiquing the methodology and scientism of
risk registers does not entirely capture their political sociology.
National security as risk management from the perspective of politics
Hagmann and Cavelty argue that national risk registers rearrange, ‘the relationship
between politics and security’ (Hagmann and Cavelty, 2012: p. 84). Because the
authority of risk registers is built upon seemingly incontestable scientific language
and hard facts, ‘political leaders feel constrained in their own articulation of public
danger narratives’ (Hagmann and Cavelty, 2012: p. 88). Risk registers hinder
sovereign decisionism (Hagmann and Cavelty, 2012: p. 88). At the same time,
through their scientism, they ‘downplay...crucial questions of a political, ethical and
normative nature’ (Hagmann and Cavelty, 2012: p. 91).
Hagmann and Cavelty present us with two unacceptable ethico-political alternatives:
sovereign decision on the one hand, depoliticized, value-free bureaucracy on the
other. They also offer an underspecified third option when they argue that security as
risk closes down the possibility of ‘more participatory or democratic...approaches to
security’, that might ‘poll the views and concerns of [a] population’ (Hagmann and
Cavelty, 2012: pp. 91-92). Although this idea is only speculative, it is difficult to
imagine how a security policy based on people’s (presumably irrational) subjective
fears and insecurities might lead to a more ethical approach to security.1 We should be
careful not to treat ‘democratic’ as a synonym for ethically good. These two poles,
plus the underspecified alternative, neglect the sociological question of how
politicians engage with national security as risk management. If we want to
understand how political responsibility plays out empirically, then this is where we
need to look.
The analytical absence of politicians is representative of much work in critical or
‘new’ security studies. The horizons of these approaches to security are often framed
1
One political response to popular subjective insecurity might be FD Roosevelt’s
notion that ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself’. This approach was adopted
by a recent think-tank report on security in an independent Scotland entitled, ‘No
Need To Be Afraid’ (Johnson, et al., 2012).
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by critiques of Schmittian sovereign politics on the one hand, and Foucault-inspired
accounts of novel forms of government, governance and governmentality on the other
(Neal, 2012). The result is that politicians become an excluded set of actors. Yet if we
want to understand security politics, this is problematic. Whatever the status or
influence of the political class in different societies, they represent a numerically large
group of actors close to the operation of governmental power. Especially in
parliamentary democracies where governments are drawn from the legislature,
politicians greatly outnumber members of the government. Most government office
holders are politicians, but most politicians are not government office holders. Of
course, number does not mean power. Political systems are characterised by multiple
overlapping power inequalities: between parties with different degrees of electoral
success and representation, between parties of government and parties of opposition,
between members of governments and their wider parliamentary parties, between the
legislature and the executive, and even within cabinet government itself. To this we
can add, in Weberian terms, the power relationship between politicians and officials,
although the distinction will not always be externally clear when the official voice of
‘the government’ is often the synthetic product of an internal dialogical process
between officials and ministers.
With all this in mind, national security as risk management looks different if we
consider the public and not-so-public interactions of parliamentary politics
surrounding the NSS. We should consider that risk registers implicitly take advantage
not only of the authority of scientific methods, but also of the one unquestioned,
foundational value that is immanent to the vocation of politics: that the first
responsibility of government is the security of its citizens (Neal, 2013). Perhaps
because of this, the content of the NSS has not prompted the kind of partisan struggle
that might take place over official knowledge in other policy areas. For example,
economic performance or lack of, as reported by the ONS, is intensely contested in
politics. In other words, while politicians question political responsibility for the
economy, they do not subject security to the same kind of politicization. Yet although
openly questioning and politicizing the seriousness of the threat is not part of
politicians’ discursive repertoire, we should not discount the importance of ‘informal
rules, procedures, and negotiations’ (Flinders, 2010: p. 126) that shape the way power
and influence are practiced in the field of security politics.
Although there is little partisan struggle over national security as risk management,
this is not the main political game on this issue. Rather, the key struggle is between
the legislature and the executive, or in British terminology, parliament and the
government. Yet this struggle is not of the form that we would expect, i.e. the
legislature constraining and over mighty executive. The political interactions around
the NSS represent an intriguing inversion of the established ethical response to
national security. Quite unexpectedly, the centre of government itself has become a
source of tacit or at least inadvertent resistance to the extension of national security to
an all-risks approach. And instead of the legislature acting as a check and balance, it
is urging the government to adopt a more extensive approach to security. More
specifically, three parliamentary committees are, in effect, taking security more
seriously than the government. They are acting as cheerleader for a closer adherence
to the long term vision of insecurity presented by the risk register in the National
Security Strategy, a ‘beefed up’ (p. 35) approach to security analysis in the National
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Security Council (NSC), and more powerful strategic security leadership reaching
across government departments.
This political sociology shows why we should be careful about taking the rationality
of risk management at face value. For example, Hagmann and Cavelty argue that
because of national risk registers, ‘a sense of pervasive insecurity emerges’:
The security agenda becomes marked by constant mobilization for emergency
response and object hardening, and security comes to be seen as requiring our
persistent, unwavering dedication, even if a state of security can never be
achieved. (Hagmann and Cavelty, 2012: p. 81)
As we will see, this has not quite been the case.
The endurance of traditional national security
Some empirical background is in order. On its first day in office in May 2010, the
new government led by prime minister David Cameron created a National Security
Council. This comprised a secretariat, a National Security Advisor from the civil
service, senior cabinet ministers and, when necessary, military and intelligence
service heads. The government also initiated work on a Strategic Defence Review and
an updated National Security Strategy. The previous government had published the
first two versions of the latter in 2008 and 2009. When the new NSS was published in
2010, the Foreword signed by Cameron and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg
declared that, ‘the National Security Council has overseen the development of a
proper National Security Strategy, for the first time in this country’s history’ (HM
Government, 2010: p. 5). It concluded boldly: ‘This National Security Strategy and
the Strategic Defence and Security Review mobilise the whole of Government behind
the protection of this country’s security interests’ (HM Government, 2010: p. 7). The
message was clear. This government would take security very seriously, more
seriously than the previous government. This declaration closely resembled the
‘constant mobilization’ and ‘persistent, unwavering dedication’ signalled by
Hagmann and Cavelty (p. 81).
However, it has not worked out like that. Rather than enacting the all-encompassing
rationalization of security envisaged by the NSS, the government approach to security
remains ‘traditional’ in at least seven ways. First, although the PM signalled that the
NSC and NSS would transcend the traditional division of the government into
discrete departments and policy areas to make security an overarching and unifying
priority, there has not been any significant organisational change. The Joint
Committee on the National Security Strategy (JCNSS) reported that it, ‘remains to be
convinced that [the NSC] is significantly different from, or more strategic than, the
Cabinet Committees which operated under previous governments.’ (Joint Committee
on the National Security Strategy, 2012: p. 4). Furthermore, the JCNSS concluded
that it found no evidence the NSS had actually influenced any strategic decisions
(Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy, 2012: p. 38).
Second, evidence suggests that the government has not used the NSC to pursue a
holistic or long-term strategic approach to national risks, but rather remains
preoccupied with short-term operational issues. After questioning ministers, the
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JCNSS criticised the government for continuing to take a traditional foreign and
defence approach to national security as opposed to the ‘all-risks’ approach set out by
the NSS. In particular, the JCNSS inferred that the weekly meetings of NSC seemed
to be taken up with the management of operations such as Afghanistan, the Libya
intervention or counter-terrorism. JCNSS chair Margaret Beckett said that,
The Government seems to see the National Security Council primarily as a
forum for discussing foreign policy and operations overseas, squeezing in a
few other topics if there is time (Beckett, 2013)
Similarly, in a report on ‘strategic thinking in government’, the House of Commons
Public Administration Select Committee said that, ‘the narrow view of the NSC
remained an area of concern’ (House of Commons Public Administration Select
Committee, 2012: p. 35). The committee called on the NSC to take a much wider
approach to national security ‘beyond simply military and terror issues’ (p. 36), to
include ‘issues such as skills, migration, drugs policy and energy’ (p. 35).
Third, the first two National Security Advisors that head the NSC secretariat have
been career officials drawn from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. This
suggests that the NSC priorities lean towards traditional foreign affairs issues and
away from the more domestic and holistic concerns outlined in the NSS. The JCNSS
reported that,
We have concerns too that the current and former NSA both have a FCO
background. The Government has assured us that this has not led to a lack of
focus on domestic issues, but this was not a view that all our witnesses shared.
(Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy, 2012: p. 40)
The witnesses before the committee, including the first NSA Sir Peter Rickets, did not
see any bar to future NSAs being appointed from domestic government departments.
However, the staffing hindrance to the realization of the NSS vision is more profound
than this. The kind of individual capable of embodying a holistic overview of ‘whole
national security spectrum’ does not exist within current governmental structures
(Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy, 2012: p. 29). Another witness,
Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones, argued that the government needed to ‘deliberately
develop’ a ‘pool’ of these kinds of people with cross-departmental experience (Joint
Committee on the National Security Strategy, 2012: p. 29). It seems that officialdom
cannot currently provide the kind of individual who could ‘mobilise the whole of
Government behind the protection of this country’s security interests’ (HM
Government, 2010: p. 7).
Fourth, because the NSA is an official who lacks the ability to transcend individual
government departments and lead an overarching strategic government approach to
security and risk, some parliamentary committees and witnesses argued that the NSA
should be a minister instead. Lord West, giving evidence to the JCNSS, argued that
‘someone with “political antennae”’ in the post, ‘would have much more ability to
make sure that departments worked together’ (Joint Committee on the National
Security Strategy, 2012: p. 31). The Defence Select Committee argued that, ‘we
believe that a dedicated, powerful and independent long-term voice for national
security should exist within Government and recommend that the Prime Minister
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appoint a National Security Minister’ (House of Commons Defence Committee, 2011:
p. 22). This person would embody the kind of charismatic leadership envisaged by
Weber.
Fifth, nevertheless, attempts to create a more specialised political role for security
leadership have stalled. For example, if a dedicated minister for national security were
to be created, there is some debate over where in government they would sit and what
the constitutional implications would be. On coming to power the current government
appointed Baroness Neville-Jones as Minister of State for Security and CounterTerrorism, situated in the Home Office with a seat on the NSC but not in the cabinet.
(Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy, 2012: p. 30). However, Baroness
Neville-Jones was more an official than a true ‘politician’ trained ‘through political
struggle’ (Weber, 1994: p. 204): she was a member of the House of Lords and so not
elected, and also a former diplomat and defence civil servant. She was not replaced
when she stood down in May 2011. The role is currently split between an
International Security Minister at the Ministry of Defence and a Counterterrorism
Minister at the Home Office (Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy,
2012: p. 30), neither of which are NSC or cabinet level posts. The result is a lack of
coordination and leadership. The JCNSS said that, ‘We are not convinced that all
involved in Government are clear on which Minister is accountable for which
elements of the NSS and NSC’ (Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy,
2012: p. 32). As Sir Peter Ricketts explained, if a true national security minister were
to be created at cabinet level to fulfil a cross-departmental leadership role, they would
not have their own governmental department and their remit would overlap with the
responsibilities of other ministers such as the Foreign and Defence secretaries,
causing constitutional problems (Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy,
2012: p. 31). One solution to the constitutional problems potentially produced by this
role would be to create a National Security Ministry, 'to break down the departmentalsilo attitude when dealing with national security issues' (House of Commons Defence
Committee, 2011: p. 21). One high level informant told me that s/he had lobbied for
this behind the scenes. However, because of the costs and upheaval that would be
involved, neither the government nor the parliamentary committees favour this
solution.
Sixth, the JCNSS concluded that the creation of such a ministerial role should be kept
under review, but was not currently necessary because of the security leadership of
the PM: ‘The current Prime Minister takes a keen interest in national security and
regularly chairs the NSC’ (Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy, 2012:
p. 31). In other words, very traditionally, the head of government remains the most
senior political lead on security matters. This is dependent on the personal interest of
David Cameron himself, and within government there remains no commitment to
creating an alternative political leadership role in the security field.
Seventh, the JCNSS requested information about ‘how each risk was scored and how
those scores were arrived at’, but were told it was classified (Joint Committee on the
National Security Strategy, 2012: pp. 10-11). The committee complained they were
therefore unable to make their own judgment about the scoring of risks and whether
the NSRA methodology was sound. Thus, despite the publicity given to the NSRA,
the traditional prerogative to decide upon security threats remains with the executive.
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In contrast to these seven ways in which traditional national security remains
operative in government, the three parliamentary committees discussed here have
become converts to the overarching strategic project of national security as risk
management. The questions and concerns of the JCNSS, Defence Committee and
Public Administration Committee all champion an expanded concept of security and
strengthened security leadership in government.
Let us remind ourselves what this expansive vision of security might mean in
practice. The NSS aims to protect ‘our people, economy, infrastructure, territory and
way of life from all major risks’ (HM Government, 2010: p. 10). Crowcroft argues
that this ‘full range of existing and potential risks to our national security’ (HM
Government, 2010: p. 25) in effect encompass ‘everything’: ‘the challenges are
sometimes so different from each other that literally all that connects them is that they
can be filed under the terminology of “threat” and “risk”’ (Crowcroft, 2012: p. 173).
For the three committees, the government and NSC do not pursue this risky
conception of everything closely enough. Even the specified NSS list of ‘priority
risks’ is not enough. The JCNSS are concerned that the NSC does not engage in
enough ‘blue skies thinking’ or ‘horizon-scanning’ (Joint Committee on the National
Security Strategy, 2012: p. 28), and does not have enough ‘exposure to advice from
outside experts’ (Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy, 2012: p. 35). It
has continually pressed for demonstrable assurances that the ‘national security risk
assessment’ methodology was being used with due rigour and due caution (Joint
Committee on the National Security Strategy, 2012: p. 11). For the committee, the list
of risks is ‘that which exists, but which does not yet exist enough’ (to misquote
Foucault)(Foucault, 2008: p. 4). The Defence Committee argued that the NSC needs
to better develop ‘a uniform vocabulary for strategic thinking’ because ‘Strategy is
understood in many different ways across Government and the military and too often
the message and intent becomes blurred’ (House of Commons Defence Committee,
2011: p. 78). The Public Administration Committee argued that the NSC
‘demonstrates unfulfilled potential for driving strategic thinking across Government’;
its members should be ‘better able to challenge orthodoxy and think outside their
departmental brief’ (House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee,
2012: p. 36). The JCNSS was ‘not yet convinced that the existence of the NSC is
making the contribution that it should: enabling Government to work as a coordinated whole’ (Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy, 2013: p. 4).
Most revealingly, the JCNSS was concerned that the use of ‘national security risk
assessment’ could lead to a ‘false sense of security’ (Joint Committee on the National
Security Strategy, 2012: p. 11). In other words, the task of providing security can
never be complete: national security as risk management must not bring sense of
security, which would be dangerous in itself, but rather continued insecurity. The
logical conclusion of the committees’ arguments is that security should become the
driving centre of government; not simply the underlying promise of protection that
forms the Hobbesian covenant between state and citizen, but an overarching national
project to steer the UK into an uncertain future by strategically coordinating all
aspects of social and economic life.
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The triumph of an ethic of politics over security?
We should now again ask, what does political responsibility mean in an era of
national security as risk management? The first answer that it is not clear who is
responsible for the security-as-risk-management project. In their investigations, the
three parliamentary committees discussed above found that risk management was in
effect not ‘come-at-able’ (Bagehot, 1896: p. 137). There is no minister with clear
responsibility for the NSC and NSS. The committees had to make do with speaking to
current and former national security advisors from officialdom, senior members of the
intelligence and security community (also officials), and ministers from the cabinet
office and other major departments with seats on the NSC but no clear responsibility
for it. Without a break from tradition, the prime minister remains the political lead on
security, but despite David Cameron’s ‘keen interest’, he has not invested significant
political capital in pursuing security as a policy priority, unlike Tony Blair for
example.
The reasons why are structural and political. To create overarching strategic security
responsibility and leadership at the heart of government along the lines of the US
Department for Homeland Security would be an enormous cost in terms of time,
money, resources and political capital. The current government is more occupied by
the economy, its austerity programme, holding its coalition together, and ameliorating
the dissatisfaction of the political right within and beyond its party. There is little
evidence that the security agenda has come, ‘to be seen as requiring our persistent,
unwavering dedication’ (Hagmann and Cavelty, 2012: p. 81).
There is no evidence to suggest that the government has deliberately forestalled the
national security as risk management project as represented by the NSS. However,
security has not been prioritized over other political and policy issues. As such,
Weber would presumably approve of the actions of David Cameron, because political
leadership is about reconciling irreconcilable values and demands. The fact that
security leadership remains with the PM demonstrates this. Gearson and Gow explain
that before the creation of the NSC,
Accountability for security policy and for the national security strategy lay
with the Prime Minister. Yet, the Prime Minister clearly always had a wide
range of other responsibilities that made national security strategy only one
item among many on the agenda. (Gearson and Gow, 2010: p. 413)
The politically divided attentions of the PM were one the main reasons for the
creation of a National Security Advisor and a National Security Council. But because
the NSA and NSC have failed to enact a fundamental constitutional shift in security
leadership in government, security has not come to play a central and overarching
strategic role in government. It remains merely one problem among many. The NSS
has indeed given credence to a rationalization of security through scientistic methods
and expert knowledge. Yet although the NSS represents national security as risk
management on paper and in practice, this has been tempered by the continuing
prevalence of cabinet government and leadership by politicians that forms the heart of
the British constitution.
11
By not creating a minister or ministry for national security, by keeping the NSA as an
official in the cabinet office subordinated to political leadership, and by remaining the
political lead on security with necessarily divided attentions, Cameron has, by design
or otherwise, prevented security from transcending and unifying government strategy.
Security governance remains divided across government, in the ministry of defence,
home office, foreign office, department for business and skills and so on. Security
strategy, as a result, is not being led by the rationalizing bent of National Security
Risk Assessment, but remains an extension of cabinet government and politics. As the
Public Administration Select Committee puts it: ‘We remain concerned that…the
NSC can only broker compromises between departmental views based on
incompatible principles’ (House of Commons Public Administration Select
Committee, 2011: p. 4).
For Weber’s genuine political leaders, no governmental task can ever be absolved of
its politics. Hence no true politician should allocate full governmental priority to a
single organisational or policy problem, even security. While security migAs a result,
st be the first rof government, or more correctly the state, it is not the first
responsibility of politics. To treat it as so would be to ditch politics in favour of
Schmitt’s existential notion of the political, or, if security were to become fully
rationalized, to abdicate political responsibility to officials. While the task of officials
is to ‘master organisational problems... and official tasks of a specialised nature’
(Weber, 1994: p. 177), the political leadership, ‘must…constantly solve political
problems, both of power-politics and of cultural politics’ (Weber, 1994: p. 178).
Maintaining a Weberian ethic of politics means steering a path of human leadership
between the inhuman monster of the Hobbesian/Schmittian sovereign on the one
hand, and depoliticized rule by officials on the other. This does not mean ethical as in
‘good’, but ethical as in human and political. In this sense, security has not emerged
as a ‘sacred value’ above the rest, even when scientistically rationalized (Weber,
1946: p. 152). Rather, we are left with the modern Weberian political condition of,
‘unceasing struggle of…gods with one another’: a value struggle negotiable only by
human politics, and not resolvable by science or the existential claims of security
(Weber, 1946: p. 152).
12
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