The British National Security Strategy: Security after Representation
| Author | Tara McCormack |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-856X.12052 |
| Published date | 01 August 2015 |
| Date | 01 August 2015 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
The British National Security Strategy:
Security after Representation
Tara McCormack
Research Highlights and Abstract
This article
• Contributes to the debate on British Foreign and Security Policy;
• Contributes to the literature on the British National Security Strategy;
• Links international relations literature with domestic policy formation literature;
• Introduces the concept of ‘legitimacy’ to foreign and security policy analysis.
The publication of the Britain’s first National Security Strategy (NSS) in 2008 marked a formal
shift away from the secret state of the Cold War to the highly public protective state of today. This
article is interested in the question of why the NSS and related framework have taken this
particular public and explicit form. Both mainstream and critically minded academics have argued
that contemporary security discourses and policies are techniques of power and governance and that
the public nature of the policies is vital to this function. In this article, I argue that there has been
a transformation in the nature of the British state from a representative state in which the state’s
authority was legitimated through a number of political mechanisms of representation, to one in
which state elites and institutions need to forge new kinds of relationships with the governed. This
is a key development that has been noticed in political, sociological and legal theoretical literature
but as yet hardly addressed in international relations and security studies. This transformation of
the state, I will argue, is intimately linked to the form and content of contemporary security policies.
The contemporary state is undergoing a process of an erosion of legitimacy, which has a direct
impact upon the capacity of the state to govern. In this context, policies take on the role of trying to
bridge the legitimacy gap. I will argue that this shift in the state leads to a different understanding
of contemporary security policies as representative of a decreasing ability to govern security, a state
that is losing legitimacy and authority; that is in effect, losing its sovereignty.This article argues that
British national security strategies and policies are representative of this.
Keywords: British National Security Strategy; New Labour; security policy
Introduction
In 2008 New Labour published Britain’s first National Security Strategy (NSS)
(Cabinet Office 2008b). This publication marked the culmination of a post cold war
transformation in the security apparatus. As Peter Hennessy has argued, during the
height of the Cold War the British Government denied that the Secret Intelligence
Service even existed, let alone discussed how it worked (Hennessy 2007, 8). The
threats facing the British state and the impact of a nuclear exchange were also kept
secret (Hennessy 2010). The security architecture of the British Cold War state was,
in Hennessy’s very evocative phrase, the secret state (Hennessy 2010).
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doi: 10.1111/1467-856X.12052 BJPIR: 2015 VOL 17, 494–511
© 2014 The Author.British Journal of Politics and International Relations © 2014
Political Studies Association
By way of stark contrast, we have the very public nature of the post cold war
security state. Peter Hennessy and David Omand have called this new open security
architecture the protective or protecting state (Omand 2003; Hennessy 2003, 2007).
Writing in response to these trends in 2003, several years before the publication of
the NSS, Omand pointed out:
Unlike the ‘Secret State’ that Peter has chronicled so well, you can read
about the ‘Protecting State’ on the Home Office and Cabinet Office web-
sites. The resilience of the ‘Protecting State’ is being built openly, in
partnerships both across local and central Government and reaching out
into the private sector, to provide an appropriate level of protection
against the threats we face (Omand 2003, 24).
Hennessy and Omand situate the public protective state in the context of a post
9/11 security environment. However, it is of note that these trends were emerging
pre 9/11. For example New Labour’s 1998 Strategic Defence Review was drawn up in
a very consultative and inclusive way (Vickers 2011, 170). It is also of note that
even before this in 1993, M15 came out of the shadows and into the full glare of
publicity, with Stella Rimmington the first named and public head of M15. The NSS
and related documents such as the National Risk Register (NRR) (Cabinet Office
2008a); the United Kingdom’s Strategy for Countering International Terrorism (Home
Office 2009); the National Security Update 2009 (NSS) (Cabinet Office 2009) all share
explicit stated principles of public engagement, participation and dialogue (Cabinet
Office 2008b, 59). These documents represent a continuation if not culmination of
the developing post Cold War protective state.1
This article asks two related questions. The first question is: how can we account for
the particular form of the protective state? The article will focus in particular on the
NSS as a significant development in the protective state. The form of the NSS will
be addressed in detail below, but the three key and fundamentally related aspects
are: its public nature; the expansive list of threats that are revealed to the public;
and the focus on the individual both in terms of engagement and as state security
ally. The second and related question is what does this account of the form of
contemporary security policies suggest about the role that security policies play in
the protective state?
The British political process is hardly an unexplored area of academic inquiry. In the
extensive work on British government and governance, debates have focused on
how to understand the policy making process, with a significant number of aca-
demics arguing that the old top down Westminster model of policy making is giving
way to a more diffuse, networked governance model (see Marsh 2008; Gaskarth
2013; this will be discussed in more detail below). Discussions on foreign and
security policies have, however, remained more descriptive, often by policy makers
themselves (Gaskarth 2013, 42). There has been some recent work on foreign and
security policy and New Labour but this has tended to focus on recent controversial
high-profile policies such as ethical foreign policy and/or the wars that New Labour
has fought, often looking at the personality of Blair or the infighting within New
Labour (Chandler 2003; Kampfner 2004; Daddow 2009; Vickers 2011).
THE BRITISH NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY 495
© 2014 The Author.British Journal of Politics and International Relations © 2014 Political Studies Association
BJPIR, 2015, 17(3)
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