Examine the idea of a ‘balance’ between ‘security’ and ‘liberty’ in modern international politics. Do you think the liberal international order is more ‘security – friendly? (2012, 20 Marks)
Modern political thought set up the tension. Thomas Hobbes made security the precondition of every other good; John Locke made liberty the purpose for which security is sought. Benjamin Franklin’s warning (1755) that those who give up “essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety” deserve neither still frames the debate, which since 2001 has been conducted in the language of “balance”.
The idea of a balance
- The trade-off model holds that more of one means less of the other: surveillance, detention and emergency powers buy safety at the cost of rights, and policy must find the right point.
- Practice: the US PATRIOT Act (2001), indefinite detention at Guantanamo, Europe’s post-2015 emergency laws, and COVID-19 lockdowns.
- India: preventive detention written into Article 22 of the Constitution; the UAPA (individuals designable as terrorists since 2019, with bail made hard); AFSPA in disturbed areas.
Why the metaphor misleads
- Incommensurability. Jeremy Waldron (2003) argued that the image of a balance hides the absence of any common measure between privacy and safety.
- Distribution. The liberty lost falls on minorities, migrants and dissenters; the security gained accrues to the majority. A distribution is presented as an optimisation.
- Liberty as a security good. Courts, a free press and open information let a society detect state failure and correct error.
- The ratchet. Temporary powers become permanent; Giorgio Agamben (State of Exception, 2003) describes the state of exception becoming the normal technique of government. The Copenhagen School reads this as securitisation lifting issues out of normal politics.
- Judicial correction. India’s Supreme Court turned “balance” into a test of proportionality in K. S. Puttaswamy (2017), required review of internet shutdowns in Anuradha Bhasin (2020), and held in the Pegasus case (2021) that national security cannot be a “bugbear” that shuts out review. Yet shutdowns persist: a record 313 in 52 countries in 2025, India’s 65 the most of any democracy.
Is the liberal international order more security-friendly?
In its favour
- Democratic peace: liberal states rarely fight each other (Michael W. Doyle, 1983); Karl Deutsch‘s security communities make war unthinkable within the West.
- Institutions lengthen the shadow of the future (Robert O. Keohane); humanitarian law, human-rights treaties, the ICC and the human security agenda protect individuals, not only states.
- Self-correction: open courts and a free press let abuses be exposed and reversed, as when the US Supreme Court extended habeas corpus to Guantanamo detainees in Boumediene v. Bush (2008).
Against it
- Its leading states authored the exceptions: rendition, Guantanamo and the mass surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden (2013).
- Interventions in Iraq (2003) and Libya (2011) made much of the world sceptical of security claims in liberal language; John J. Mearsheimer (The Great Delusion, 2018) argues liberal hegemony itself breeds war. The US–Israeli war on Iran from February 2026 again put force before Charter restraint.
- Its guarantor is now retreating: a US memorandum of January 2026 announced withdrawal from 66 international bodies, and US exit from the Paris Agreement took effect the same month. China’s Global Security Initiative (2022) offers security without liberal conditions.
Conclusion
The “balance” is less a scale than a political choice about whose liberty is spent, best disciplined by proportionality and judicial review. The liberal order is more security-friendly than its alternatives because it secures both states and individuals and allows its abuses to be exposed and contested; but it is security-friendly in normal politics and suspends its own rules in securitised politics, where it has spent much of this century.