2000 or the dawn of the Police State --worldwide....
Human Security and Mutual Vulnerability
The Global Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment (2nd edition)
by Jorge Nef
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Excerpted from Chapter 5:
The second security threat is the way in which criminality is being handled, chiefly through the dramatic expansion in enforcement and containment measures, including authoritarian controls to protect property and maintain law and order. As with terrorism, there is a dysfunctional dialectical relationship between the problem of crime and the "technical" solutions to deal with it. Almost as fast as military demobilization is taking place and public expenditures in social services are shrinking everywhere, internal-security allotments have soared. So has the institutional empowerment of enforcement agencies, both public and private, and vigilantism. In increasingly polarized and fragmented societies, enforcement agencies end up taking sides and becoming politicized. The nature of intervention becomes more and more focused on specific classes or groups of individuals who are labelled as potential lawbreakers (the poor, minorities, the young, people with unconventional lifestyles). The expansion of internal-security establishments worldwide has more to do with the bureaucratization of social dysfunctions than with their effective solutions. Nor does such growth correlate with a reduction of crime. Without denying the seriousness of the problem and the need for crime prevention in all societies, it is possible to remark that this trend is a wide-ranging threat to democracies. It raises questions of public scrutiny, accountability, uncontrolled red tape, goal displacement, moral entrepreneurship, the emergence of a professionalized siege mentality, corruption, and control by antidemocratic forces.
The above is particularly disturbing, given the worldwide resurgence of racist, ethnic irredentist, and neofascist movements, rising precisely from the present crisis and finding themselves in a position to influence enforcement functions (Golov 1993). Moreover, "law-and-order" issues have become synonymous with an extremist political stand. This raises the possibility of police states. Important as they are, policing issues are hardly debated at any level of government. Enforcement agencies are sacred cows in contemporary society, with their roles and modus operandi often obscured by secrecy and media manipulation. The case of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) under J. Edgar Hoover is a telling example of this breach of public trust, one from which Western democracies are not inherently protected. The action of special agents and paramilitary forces within the FBI and other bureaus in the bloody Waco and Ruby Ridge incidents raise significant questions about procedure, cover-ups, accountability, and public safety. The dialectic of crime and countercrime creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: most social or political activity becomes in one way or another "criminal." When this begins to happen, the very legitimacy of the enforcement agencies and of the law they attempt to enforce is brought into question. The consequences are increased personal insecurity, the devaluation of authority, and the perpetuation of corruption, addiction, alienation, and all the other social scourges that crime prevention is purported to address.
Neoliberalism
A related and potentially antidemocratic trend throughout the globe is the effort by socioeconomic elites and their institutional intellectuals to circumvent established democratic traditions and make politics "governable." The trend of creating "limited" democracies to respond to "market" (that is elite) forces constitutes an attempt to reduce participation and depoliticize politics. The challenge presented by the 1975 report, The Crisis of Democracy (Huntington et al. 1975), was how to reconcile market politics, built on the premise of equality, with market economics, centred precisely on the opposite: the idea of unrestricted private accumulation, leading to monopoly. The neoliberal solution has been to limit the role of the state to stronger enforcement and to facilitate private accumulation while reducing the scope and salience of popular participation -- all in the name of freedom. Elite politics offers very few real options and transforms the state's populist and welfare functions into mere symbolism. Without the legitimizing trappings of welfarism, a strong connection develops among neoliberal policies, the above-discussed deepening of law-and-order concerns, and the possible emergence of police states.
The implementation of this project essentially involves the redrafting of the implicit social contract among the various actors that regulates the pattern of labour relations (and income distribution) in society. It also relates to the definition of which social actors, especially nonelite actors, are considered legitimate. The neoliberal project is distinctively exclusionary and heavily biased in favour of business elites. The so-called leaner but meaner state resulting from structural-adjustment and debt-reduction policies has built-in limitations to prevent possible redistributive policies resulting from "irresponsible" majority demands and "overparticipation." The choices of citizenship are stripped of substance. Monetarist economic policies and those referred to as macroeconomic equilibrium are effectively taken away from public debate. They remain confined within "acceptable" limits by means of transnationalized regional trading agreements, central banking mechanisms, and bureaucratic expertise. This elitist tendency to facilitate the "governability" of democracies reduces the government's capacities for governance as an expression of sovereign national constituencies. It also produces an effective loss of citizenship.
In the last analysis, from such a restrictive perspective, the only possible outcome is the creation or maintenance of an inequitable socioeconomic status quo. Attempts to resist the "inevitability" of this regressive order bring in the "seamy side of democracy": the application of "authorized" force and intimidation as an insurance policy against dissent. Critics and dissidents end up being labelled "subversives" and are subjected to numerous security regulations. As John Sheahan (1987) commented,
the neoliberal policy package is inconsistent with democracy because an informed majority would reject it. The main reason it cannot win popular support is that it neither assures employment opportunities nor provides any other way to ensure that lower income groups can participate in economic growth.
In fact, the economic policies charted under this economic doctrine have been best suited for authoritarian political regimes -- such as Brazil under the generals, Pinochet's Chile, or some of the Asian "miracles" in Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan -- than for Western-style democracy. [snip]
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