Features
Human security increasingly at risk in rising global arms spending
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) gives us the ‘bleeding statistics’. The latter states in a recent report, quoted in the media, that in 2000, military spending in the Asia-Pacific accounted for 17.5 per cent of global defense expenditure. In 2021 this amounted to 27.7 per cent, which is a notable rise in such spending. China is reportedly a ‘major driver’ of this rise in military spending. SIPRI adds that China spends $300 billion a year on its military, ‘up from$22 billion in 2000.’ China is only second to the US, whose defense budget is $800 billion.
With Western-linked groupings, such as QUAD and AUKUS, for instance, coming into being in recent years in response to perceived military threats emanating from China, Russia and their allies, the global arms race could be said to be enveloping almost every region of the world. In fact, the view is widespread that the world is currently witnessing ‘the biggest arms race in Asia since World War Two.’
Curiously, global anti-war movements seem to have died out or are choosing to remain silent in the face of these disquieting trends. Time was when these movements were vibrantly active in the West and outside but currently their silence could be said to be ‘deafening’.
Anti-war movements must not only rejuvenate themselves but take on governments with ballooning defense budgets very visibly and vigorously. A continued silence on the part of publics in the face of such unwarranted arms spending could very likely be interpreted by governments as popular acceptance of their programs of uncontrollable power aggrandizement, that in no substantive way help publics.
It is not irrelevant to point out that excessive arms spending by Sri Lankan governments over the past few decades could very well have played a role, as well as other widely discussed factors, in dragging the country into its current state of bankruptcy. Hopefully, this aspect of Sri Lanka’s crisis too would come in for in-depth public discussion as we go along.
It ought to be plain to see that unaffordable military expenditure indeed pauperizes publics in the world’s South in particular. It is not by accident that the ‘Arab Spring’ movement erupted in 2010 in those regions of the world that had been witnessing chronic socio-economic instability, conflict and war over the decades.
Bourgeoning socio-economic grievances were the key backdrop to that groundswell of public discontentment that shook governments of Africa and the Middle East at the time and this is proving to be true of the unrest that is lingering in the same regions as well as outside those theatres in even the West.
For example, there has been unprecedented social and political unrest in Iran and Israel, for example. Viewed superficially, the crises affecting the latter countries may seem to have nothing or little to do with socio-economic issues, but the gender questions assailing Iran and the inflammatory problems relating to judicial reform currently rocking Israel should be seen as expressions of seething public discontent arising from deep-seated socio-economic grievances.
The ostensible reasons for the unrest in questions need to be seen as trigger factors for the convulsive explosions of public anger originating in keenly felt, unresolved socio-economic grievances. Policy and decision-makers of unrest-hit countries would need to penetrate below the surface in their search for answers to these bouts of turmoil in our times.
However, in Britain and France, for example, which are witnessing irate public protests of their own, the socio-economic roots of discontent are more clearly evident. In the former, young doctors articulated profession-related grievances, such as being over-worked and unfairly treated, quite unambiguously, while in France the main grievance is the extension of the retiring age of public servants from 62 to 64 years, which is being seen as irregular.
The danger in governments worldwide accelerating their arms spending and manufacture is that such lethal and expanding weaponry could be used with increasing ruthlessness by these authorities to suppress protesting publics. It is already happening in quite a few of these zones of unrest and the more socially-responsible media are not flinching from exposing such governmental brutality. We in Sri Lanka are quite familiar with this spectacle.
Accordingly, what is primarily at risk in these developments is Human Security. Needless to say, the latter is being flagrantly compromised in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where grievous harm is befalling unarmed civilians, and it will be only a matter of time before the trend catches on in those regions of the East as well as the West where public socio-economic grievances could be expected to aggravate in the current global economic downturn.
A connected and equally large issue is how the so-called ‘Asian Age’ could be expected to bloom amid these negative tendencies, among which the escalating inter-state arms race is prime. Rising arms spending has as its correlative drastically-shrinking social welfare budgets, the chief upshot of which will be increasing poverty. The latter development in turn means that governments would need to brace for rising social unrest even as they bolster their armouries. Human Security and development, then, could be a lost cause.
The prime cause that is in search of a vibrant espouser is the increasing marginalization of the poor of especially the global South. The adoption of a fatalistic mindset by what is left of progressive opinion the world over in the face of these questions would only have the effect of aggravating the issues and dilemmas in question. On the contrary, the opportunity is here for organizations of the poor, such as the Non-aligned Movement, to wake-up, stand up and be counted.
The moment is ‘now’ for actors such as NAM to provide dynamic leadership to the world’s vulnerable and distressed. In fact, the world could be said to be back in the fifties and sixties, in a vital sense, because the weaker states of the South cannot afford to be inveigled into the current increasingly ruthless tussles for armed supremacy among the world’s foremost powers. They need to be distant from these power struggles and independent, bearing in mind their priorities.