Necessary Virtues:The Legitimate Place of the State in the Production of Security

To be a friend of the state has been made to seem an index either of stupidity or of corrupt purpose. To be a dependant or client of the state has been made to seem odious and degrading. By contrast, the state’s enemies have vindicated their enmity as a direct expression of their own practical insight and purity of intention. (Dunn 2000: 246)

Scratch below the surface of many a text in policing and security studies and one tends to encounter the signs of a more or less powerfully felt scepticism towards the state. On occasions this scepticism is explicitly stated, sometimes passionately and loudly so. But more often it lies buried, unarticulated or defended, an implicit assumption that quietly guides enquiry and analysis. Generally what is being assumed is that sovereign state power is a baleful presence in social and political life (an evil), or at best a presence whose force is only to be prevailed upon at moments of last resort (a necessary evil). In either case, the state is postulated as a standing threat to the liberty and security of citizens, an entity that requires eternal vigilance, oversight and control. Much less is it assumed that the state may play a positive role in producing the forms of trust and abstract solidarity between strangers that are a prerequisite of secure, democratic political communities. We lack the space here to make good these bold claims. Still less can we engage in the kind of ‘sociology of the sociology of policing’ (Ferret 2004: 50) that might tell us why the intellectual field is structured in these ways. But we do want to consider in some detail the concerns about the state that figure in different variants of state-scepticism, as well as the intersections that are posited between the state, security and liberty, and the alternatives that are projected to the alleged dangers of state-centric conceptions of security. With these matters in mind, we have assembled four ‘ideal-typical’ forms of state-scepticism that we believe can be located in the social analysis of policing and security (and in political studies more broadly). These overlap in significant respects, not least in the assumption that it is the state’s monopoly of legitimate violence - its capacity, as it were, to act as a bully - that lies at the core of the ‘problem of the state’. Each, however, coalesces around a specific elaboration of this problem and an attendant set of worries about the operation and effects of state power. They are thus worth considering in turn.

The state as meddler

This variant of scepticism towards the state has at its focus the capacity of the state to violate or undermine the liberty and security of individuals. Though this represents a widespread concern about the nature of state - and more especially police - power (one, it should be noted, that we share), it is pressed with particular clarity and force within neo-liberal and libertarian writings on the state. Here it takes two closely connected forms which in different ways highlight the propensity of states to meddle illegitimately with the entitlements and voluntary market exchanges of sovereign individuals.

The first of these takes as its axiomatic starting point the arresting proposition with which Robert Nozick begins Anarchy, State and Utopia: ‘Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights)’ (Nozick 1974: ix). On this view, the only justification for the state and its monopoly of the authorization of legitimate coercion is as a necessary bulwark against the (greater) threats to individual liberty and security that would ensue in ‘the state of nature’. The state is theoretically reconstructed as the outcome of a notional social contract in which individuals agree to trade a quotient of their liberty in exchange for the state’s guardianship of their person and property, or else, as in Nozick’s (1974: Part 1) account, viewed as emerging via an ‘invisible hand’ from the contest between ‘protective associations’ that the state of nature is assumed to generate. The resultant entity is only however legitimate in its minimal form, enforcing criminal law, punishing transgressors and prohibiting acts of ‘self-exemption’ (Holmes 1995: 27), as well as providing the stable legal framework necessary for market exchange. Any further extension of the redistributive functions of the state involves immoral acts of coercion - the forcible removal of one individual’s legitimate holdings in order to improve the lot of another (Nozick 1974: Part II). But even in its minimal form the state remains a dangerous thing, a power whose capacity to monitor, arrest, detain, interrogate and inflict pain upon individuals has to be subject to eternal suspicion, vigilance and control. The state on this view provides the minimum necessary conditions of security for the exercise of individual freedom. But it is an evil nonetheless.

A second line of scepticism arises from the attempt to apply economic theory (and its axiomatic presumption that individuals are rational utility maximizers) to government known as ‘public choice economics’ (Buchanan 1978). Four charges are from this standpoint levelled at the state as a mechanism for producing and distributing social goods, including security. First, that as public bureaucracies (especially those of a monopoly kind such as the police) have no price signals to which they are required to respond, they have no incentive to be efficient and keep costs down. Second, that state provision tends to be colonized by vested bureaucratic interests, thereby subordinating consumer interests to those of producers. Third, that state forms privilege the interests of the articulate, active or merely noisy over and above those of people who do not wish to make political participation central to their conception of the good (Seldon 1990: 99). Fourth, that public bodies offer consumers only the ’cumbrous political channels’ (Friedman 1962: 91) associated with what Hirschman (1970) calls ’voice’, channels whose efficacy is hindered by the inability of consumers to ’exit’. This style of thought does, it should be noted, recognize a sphere of ‘public goods’ whose non-excludability (and the associated problem of free-riding) makes it necessary for such goods to be collectively financed and provided, and policing is generally held to be among these. But the necessary involvement of the state in security stands as but a pathological - and still dangerous and inefficient - exception to the liberty-respecting purity of the free market (Hayek 1979: 46). [2]

Both these forms of state-scepticism consequently tend to couple a grudging acceptance of the necessary, albeit constricted place of the state in the production of security with a disposition towards the extension of private security practices that is relaxed, if not positively welcoming (e.g., Forst 1999). In part, this amounts to the belief that state policing (or at least the non-coercive aspects of it) should be exposed to the full blast of competition from the private sector. But it also means that sovereign individuals should be able to break free from their undignified dependence on the state and pursue their own self-determined security interests. They should not, in other words, be prevented from clubbing together with others to realise their freely chosen security goals (by, for example, forming private residential associations or gated communities) or seeking through voluntary market exchanges to purchase the hardware and services they believe will make them secure, whether they be burglar alarms, gates, CCTV systems or commercial security patrols. Indeed, one of the fears neo-liberals and libertarians have about the state is that its actors may seek to discourage, control or even prohibit (in short, meddle in) these voluntary acts of security seeking (Hayek 1979: 47). Hence the efforts made by neo-liberal governments across the world in recent years to encourage their citizens to take more personal responsibility for the security of their person and property (e.g., Home Office 1994). Hence also the attempts of some neo-liberal economists to urge that governments act to stimulate security markets by, for instance, offering tax incentives to individuals who ‘improve the security of their own property and purchase private policing services’ (Pyle 1995: 54; see also Elliot 1989).

Several - if by no means all - of these claims and concerns about the state have a resonance beyond the parameters of neo-liberal/libertarian thought. This form of state-scepticism quite properly, in our view, emphasises that security is a basic good that serves as a precondition for the meaningful exercise of liberty, even if it holds security to possess no non-instrumental value beyond that. And it rightly concedes the necessary place of the state in offering guarantees of security to all, even if it sees no legitimate security-enhancing place for the state beyond that. Indeed, many liberals worry that it may be injurious to liberty to expand the idea of security, and the state’s place in its production, any further than this.

The neo-liberal/libertarian variant of state-scepticism is, moreover, quite properly alert to the paradoxes that arise from concentrating the capacity to exercise legitimate force within a given territory to a single entity - the paradox being that the very monopoly of violence that exists to guarantee the security and basic liberties of individuals stands as an ever-present threat to that security and liberty (Walker 2000: 4-6). It highlights, in other words, the inherently ‘double-edged’ character of police institutions (Walker 2000: 6), even in their capacity as upholders of what Marenin (1982) calls ‘general order’ - the maintenance of public tranquillity and safety that is the indispensable basis for social routines and the pursuit of individual purposes in which all sections of a society have a stake. In so doing, it pinpoints the propensity of state police forces to exceed or abuse their power in ways that directly impinge on the very individual rights and entitlements they are ‘contracted’ to protect - a tendency most glaringly apparent in weak, failed or authoritarian states (Goldsmith 2003), but which remains a feature of state policing even in more sustainably democratic settings. At the very least, this scepticism about state power - a scepticism apparent in the long-standing preoccupation of police studies with the (arbitrary, violent) operation of police powers and discretion (e.g., Westley 1970; Dixon 1997) - indicates the importance of forms of constitutional and political regulation within any schema that seeks to defend the proper place of the state in the just and democratic production of internal security. [3]

Yet the more expansive conception of the state-security nexus we want to defend in this chapter must also address certain shortcomings exhibited in neo-liberal/libertarian scepticism towards the state. Let us briefly highlight three. The first concerns the preconditions that are required to create and sustain limited, constitutional, rights-regarding states. There is, as Margaret Canovan (1996: 38) points out, a tendency in classical liberal theory to assume ‘that any fool can establish a nightwatchman state’ and a corresponding disregard for the forms of trust and abstract solidarity between strangers (of the kind supplied by secure membership of a political community) that provide the cultural conditions of possibility for the minimal, rule-governed state that libertarians find acceptable. But surely such states require citizens to care, and be prepared to do something about, abuses of police power or, more broadly, to identify with belonging to a polity in which the police are held to account and the rights of all equally guaranteed? This, of course, raises some thorny matters pertaining to the affective dimensions of social and political life (to which we return in Part II), issues that neo-liberal/libertarian writers have tended to steer well clear of. They have remained too preoccupied with the (problem of the) state and the threat it poses to individual freedom, and insufficiently attentive to the trust-building functions of political community upon which the liberty and security of citizens depend.

A second issues concerns the forms of individual security seeking that neo-liberalism is eager to promote (or at least prevent the state from preventing), and the conception of security upon which these rely. This conception is both atomistic and unrelational. It takes the form of individual security-seeking practices that are self-defeating and in a profound sense oxymoronic (Loader 1997b), an ‘expression of the desire for sovereign agency’ (Markell 2003: 22) that depends upon and projects a semblance of security produced by lifting oneself out of co-existence with others in order to render one’s own existence less contingently vulnerable and the future more predictable. These practices are often at the same time exercises of private power. They eschew democratic political life in order to achieve ‘distributive outcomes according to one’s assets, skills and preferences’ (Offe 2003: 450) in a manner corrosive of the forms of trust and solidarity upon which any sustainable notion of the public good of security draws and, in its turn, replenishes. Neo-liberalism remains committed, in other words, to forms of security that ‘organize the world in ways that make it possible for certain people to enjoy an imperfect simulation of the invulnerability they desire, leaving others to bear a disproportionate share of the costs and burdens involved in social life’ (Markell 2003: 22).

The current proliferation of these private - anti-social - security practices raises the question, thirdly, of whether - as neo-liberals maintain - the state’s always potentially intrusive and counter-productive attempts to ‘insert some logic into the messy human predicament’ (Bauman and Tester 2003: 137) is the source of misery in the world today. Might it not be suggested, instead, that the fragmentation and weakness of public political authority lies at the heart of the contemporary security constellation, whether in respect of weak states whose repression of their citizens serves so often to mask their lack of effective infrastructural power, or in liberal democracies faced with growing market-induced disparities in the security resources available to their citizens. Against this backdrop, neo-liberal/libertarian forms of state-scepticism seem simply to be ‘barking up the wrong tree’ (ibid.). As Bauman (ibid.) says: ‘Too much of the state is a catastrophe, but so is too little’.

The state as partisan

This form of state-scepticism is associated more with the political left than the neo-liberal/libertarian right. It shares with the latter a concern about state violence and the paradoxes inherent in concentrating the power of legitimate coercion in the container of the state. But it argues that this violence is not merely a necessary precondition for the maintenance of a consensual general order. The police are, rather, a vehicle for upholding what Marenin (1982) calls ‘specific order’, a means of fortifying the interests of those constituencies favoured by the present unjust pattern of economic and social relations. The state is, on this view, a partisan actor in social and political life, as are its agents the police. It is as such an evil, an unwanted and unwelcome force that needs to be monitored, exposed, struggled against and - depending on the particular variant of leftist politics - radically reformed or transcended.

We cannot in the space available here detail either the range of radical perspectives on the state, or their application to questions of policing and security. [4] Let us instead, using two now rather unfashionable categories borrowed from the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, indicate some of the ways in which it is claimed policing institutions act to sustain relations of domination. It can be said first that the police function as part - arguably, the sharpest part - of what Althusser (1971) calls the repressive state apparatus. Under this heading, one might pinpoint several salient dimensions of policing practice. Firstly, the ways in which routine police deployments focus disproportionately on the economically and socially excluded so as to reproduce patterns of domination organized around class (Cohen 1979), race and ethnicity (Keith 1993), gender (Brown and Heidensohn 2000) and age (Loader 1996). This becomes most nakedly apparent in respect of those social groups (such as vagrants) whose disconnection from economic and social institutions renders their social control almost exclusively a matter of policing - groups evocatively referred to by Lee (1981) as ‘police property’. Secondly, the manner in which police force is called upon at moments of socio-economic and political crisis to quell acts of violence and dissent and uphold the status quo. This itself is most glaringly apparent in authoritarian or colonial settings, where the police frequently operate as regime tools propping up discredited, unpopular governments through the surveillance and suppression of political opposition and protest (e.g., Ahire 1991; Huggins 1998). But this remains a feature of policing in ‘democratic’ political systems governed by the rule of law. Here policing has repeatedly in recent decades been mobilised to handle the presenting symptoms of economic and social divisions - whether in respect of urban unrest, industrial strife, or political protest - often in ways injurious to the liberty and security of already marginalised populations (e.g., Cowell et al., 1982; McCabe et al. 1988; della Porta and Reiter 1998).

But policing and security institutions also function as part of what Althusser calls the ideological state apparatus, as one of a range of bodies - the media, churches, the family, education systems - whose practices seek to manufacture and sustain the consent of the ruled by masking the unjust or oppressive ‘realities’ of prevailing economic and social arrangements. Part of this involves finessing the coercive character of the state itself. Radical critiques have, in this vein, sought to expose how the formal protections associated with the rule of law are undone by the practical application of substantive categories of inequality (McConville et al. 1991). Such critiques have similarly contended that various ‘soft’ policing strategies - notably community policing - aim principally to win the consent of routinely policed populations by obscuring the ‘hard’ realities of the ‘coercive state’ - the velvet glove covering and cushioning the iron fist (Bernstein et al. 1982; Gordon 1984). But policing institutions also serve as an ideological unifier in a more general sense. Through their socially authorized power of ‘legitimate naming’, they are able to diagnose, classify and represent the world in ways that apply forms of social glue at moments of political crisis; articulating the crisis as one of ‘law and order’ and highlighting and censuring assorted ‘folk devils’ as the cause of moral breakdown and social malaise (Hall et al. 1978; Loader and Mulcahy 2003: ch. 7). As this dimension of state rule segues closely with its capacity to act as a ‘cultural monolith’ we consider it further under that heading below.

This radical variant of state-scepticism is valuable in highlighting the intersection between policing and security and various axes of social stratification; in pinpointing how in structurally divided societies the security of some groups is secured at the expense of others; and in its suggestion that the state is no mere neutral umpire holding the ring in conflicts between different societal interests. As such, it poses a number of distinct challenges to the position we want to defend in this chapter. When confronted with the suggestion that security can be conceptualised as a public good it asks: whose security? which public? what good? It stands quizzically aghast at the idea that forms of trust and solidarity can (or indeed should) be fostered between constituencies with such structurally divergent interests. It asks what is the point of democratizing security if the rules of the political game are stacked in such a way that certain groups find themselves losing time and again. And it questions the value of a perspective that places such a partisan entity as the state at the heart of a project to produce more equitable distributions of policing and security resources.

These are far from trivial objections. But they arise from a standpoint that is not itself without shortcomings, as we hope to show in meeting them. This radical variant of state-scepticism tends, first of all, towards a structural fatalism that overlooks the overlap between the production of specific and general order such that disadvantaged groups and communities have a considerable stake not only in controlling state power, but also in using public resources (including policing resources) as a means of generating more secure forms of economic and social existence. In a cognate vein, it remains insufficiently attentive to how the mix between general and specific order (the extent, in other words, to which policing is shaped by public as well as sectional interests) is conditioned by political struggle and the varieties of institutional settlement this gives rise to, thus varying over time and between polities. This disposition tends, secondly, towards a politics that privileges the monitoring, exposure and critique of the operation and effects of state power (as, for instance, in the indefatigable efforts of the British-based NGO Statewatch), while radically under-specifying the feasible or desirable alternatives to current institutional configurations and practices. [5] Finally, one might suggest that this radical anti-statist sensibility rests (in ways that curiously parallel neo-liberalism) on a one-sided appraisal of the sources of inequality and insecurity in the world today, forms of social injustice that are much more the outcome of state impotence and neglect than they are of its malign coercions. These, we shall argue, demand not the wholesale critique and transcendence of state forms, but more robust regulatory interventions by democratized state institutions.

The state as idiot

Let us take as the exemplar of this form of state-scepticism the recent work of Clifford Shearing, Les Johnston, Jennifer Wood and their collaborators in the ‘Security 21’ project based at the Australian National University (e.g., Johnston and Shearing 2003; Shearing and Wood 2003 a and b; Shearing this volume). Unlike many of those who view the state as partisan, Shearing et al. take security seriously as a valued human good (Johnston and Shearing 2003: ch. 1). They refuse, however, to privilege the state - in either their explanatory framework or normative register - among the multiplicity of bodies that may contribute to its realisation, whether as sponsor/regulator or provider. Foremost among the reasons for this is the Hayekian claim that the state lacks the knowledge and capacity to deliver security to diverse local communities and, moreover, that its attempts to acquire such knowledge and capacity evince a strong tendency towards authoritarian outcomes. The state is in this as in other domains of public policy an idiot, an entity whose bureaucratic remoteness renders it at best unable to make good on its well-intentioned promises, at worst a clumsy, homogenizing force riding roughshod over the possibilities created by more locally responsive, ‘bottom-up’ security institutions.

According to Johnston and Shearing (2003) the state has become but one ‘node’ among several now engaged in the ‘governance of security’. Whether as ‘auspices’ (sponsor) or ‘provider’ (Bayley and Shearing 2001), the state co-exists with, competes against, or supports a range of security actors from the private sector or civil society. This, it is contended, has contributed to the chronic security inequalities - or ‘governance deficits’ - one encounters across the globe today, with poor communities being unable to tap the kinds of policing and security resources that more economically advantaged groups have ready access to. But Shearing and his collaborators refuse, in seeking remedies for this, to resort to what they term the ‘nostalgic, hopeful’ path of ‘turn[ing] our back on this trend and seek[ing] to reinstate strong state governance’ (Shearing and Wood 2003a: 217), not least because the legacies of oppressive state violence form part of the security problem across many of the sites - notably South Africa and Argentina - in which the ‘Security 21’ team have intervened. Thus, instead of depending on ‘familiar and comfortable’ ‘mental schemata’ associated with the state (Dupont et al. n.d.: 16), and the blanket dismissals of neo-liberalism that such thinking tends to invoke, Shearing et al. urge that we recognise the force of the Hayekian critique of state forms and seek to harness local knowledge and capacity in ways that expand and enhance ‘community governance’ (Shearing and Wood 2003a: 217).

‘Bottom-up’, non-state based security programmes are, on this basis, promulgated as alternative solutions to problems that the state is institutionally incapable of tackling successfully. Remedying ‘governance deficits’ means creating security markets that poor communities can effectively participate in such that security is identified, promoted and regulated as a ‘common’ - rather than ‘public’ or ‘private’ - good. In their most recent theorisation of this strategy, Shearing and Wood (2003a) argue that this entails effort along the following three lines. First, to enhance ‘community self-direction’. This means communities defining and pursuing their common interests in respect of security, thereby functioning as autonomous security auspices and ‘not simply providers in the game plan of other nodes’ (Shearing and Wood 2003a: 213). Second, creating and sustaining different forms of ‘community capital’, not only the social capital (or strong social networks) with which Shearing and Wood argue poor communities are replete, but also the economic capital that reinforces it, as well as knowledge and capacities (cultural capital) and recognition (symbolic capital) (see also Dupont 2004). Thirdly, strategies aimed at improving ‘community regulation’ or ‘accountability’ (Shearing and Wood 2003a: 218), whereby local people - in determining, for instance, how to allocate security budgets - regulate the provision of their own security.

What Shearing and Wood offer here is a theoretical elaboration of the community peace-making and peace-building programmes that ‘Security 21’ has helped to develop in South Africa and Argentina, and are currently promoting elsewhere - notably the ‘Zwelethemba model’ of local capacity governance (Johnston and Shearing 2003: 151-60; Shearing and Wood 2003a: 218-21; cf. Roche 2002). As such, it is a conceptualisation of security that actively seeks to relegate the state as a (potential) player in the production of local security. This move is Hayekian in that it rests upon the economist’s claim that the state necessarily lacks the knowledge to respond effectively to - in this case - demands for order. [6] But it is ‘left-Hayekian’ in that in seeks to supplement or supplant the state, not in the name of the sovereign individual and untrammelled market forces, but through deliberative local capacity-building practices informed by the values of equity and human rights. It offers in this sense a provocative challenge to state-centric thinking about security issued in the name of experimental local democracy; one that that works through the ‘window of security’ (Shearing and Wood 2003b: 417) in an effort to forge common interests and collective problem-solving mechanisms within dispossessed communities. It offers, at the same time, a radically decentred account of belonging and political authority whose project is oriented more towards securing ‘denizenship’ for poor people across a range of communal spaces than with the - old statist - project of connecting people as citizens of national political communities (Shearing and Wood 2003b). [7]

Matters however are more complex than they at first appear. A close reading of Shearing et al’s work reveals that the state in fact continues to assume a far from insignificant role in their preferred conception of security. At least three such roles can be discerned. First, Shearing and Wood concede that, as well as fostering community security institutions, one must continue to ‘explore regulatory strategies designed to retain state control over non-state providers where their actions affect public interests’ (2003a: 217). Second, Shearing et al. envisage a role for the state in generating and (re)distributing the collective resources that are needed to place local community capacity building projects on a firmer footing (Johnston and Shearing 2003: 155). Third, state police forces are clearly intended to remain as the site of ‘last resort’ coercive intervention, albeit as reformed entities acting in ways that are sensitive to the ordering mechanisms of local communities (Wood 2004: 39-40).

This is hardly a trifling set of competences. Yet in each case we find in the work of Shearing and his collaborators a relatively undeveloped account - both sociologically and normatively - of how the state may be reconfigured in these ways, and of the relationships that can be expected (or ought) to obtain between the state and the local security programmes that Shearing et al. ultimately privilege. This gap invites a series of difficult but unavoidable questions. First, there is the question of what constitutes the ‘public interest’ and how the ‘public interest’ gets constituted. This remains deeply under-specified. So too does the related issue of what the purposes and limits of the state might be in acting as (meta) regulator of the security practices of both rich and poor. How are we to discover or construct the kinds of common regulatory norms (Hirst 2000) that may prevent community security practices becoming an (often) emotionally-charged ‘medium of injustice’ (Markell 2003: 158), and on what basis and on what terms does the state, as opposed to any other putative holistic regulator, get to play such a central role in the refinement and monitoring of what is in the public (as opposed to private or communal) interest. [8]

Secondly, the far from trivial question of how the state can obtain for itself the authority and legitimacy required both to do this basic ordering work and to raise and distribute funds to ensure the longer-term viability of ‘bottom-up’ local security programmes is glossed over, as is the wider matter of how levels of economic, cultural and symbolic capital inside communities can be enhanced without the resource-allocating and recognition-granting functions provided by the state. [9] At the very least this would appear to require the existence/cultivation of a sense of belonging to a wider political community sufficient to persuade, in this case, South Africans or Argentineans to identify to with the plight of their co-citizens and support, for non-instrumental reasons, both a framework of common regulatory cause and acts of solidarity towards them. Shearing et al.’s locally-oriented, state-sceptical politics - with its tendency to treat community, democracy and security as unmediated, face-to-face relationships - has little to say either about the necessary virtues of these mediated forms of political community, or about the institutional ‘architecture of sympathy’ (Sennett 2003: 200) that may give practical effect to them.

Thirdly, in what is otherwise a potentially promising rearticulation of Kinsey et al.’s (1986) theory of ‘minimal policing’, relatively scant attention is given to the question of how - historically violent, deeply partisan - states are to be democratised, constrained and reoriented along the lines suggested, such that they come to respect local security practices and intervene only when called upon to do so. [10] In this context, we are led to repose the question that neo-liberal advocates of the minimal state have not in our view adequately answered, and which contemporary theorists of nodal governance have scarcely began to address - namely, how can one create the kind of rights-regarding constitutional state that is needed to encourage and facilitate local security practices that are consistent with democratic values such as ‘equity and human rights’ (Shearing and Wood 2003a: 212)?

In our judgement these various lacunae are the symptoms of a single underlying problematic. It is a problematic that at each of these turns gestures towards the positive ordering and cultural work that the state performs in the production of security. But it is also one where the will to promote non-state experiments in local security, and the cognate sense that the state - for all its indispensability - remains a problem, prevents a full appreciation and exploration of the crucial role of the state as a conduit for the realisation of democratic and just forms of security. Ultimately, the state remains a necessary evil - wanted, but not welcome.

The state as cultural monolith

That part of Shearing et al.’s critique concerned with the state’s propensity to trample over local diversity is broadened and deepened in a further strand of state-scepticism that explicitly addresses the relationship between the state, security and national culture. Several closely connected claims permeate this position, each of which speaks to some aspect of the state’s capacity to act as a cultural monolith creating and sustaining what Jim Tully (1995: ch. 3) calls an ‘empire of uniformity’.

This account of the state addresses its role as a mediator of belonging in ways that bring to the fore the affective dimensions of social and political life. It does so however in a critical spirit, pointing out that the state tends to foster forms of ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1991) that are unitary and homogenous, that rest on an unreflexive conception of political membership, and which ‘admit only one - although largely abstract - identity, in relation to which struggles among all other identities are expected to take their proper place’ (Walker 1997: 73). This, it is argued, has two deleterious effects. First, an illiberal posture towards minority groups whose practices and values do not (or are deemed not to) accord with the dominant articulation of national culture. The consequent failures of cultural and political recognition, and the attendant calls for assimilation of those who do not share ‘our way of life’, foster multiple forms of symbolic - and on occasions physical - violence against the minority cultures concerned. Second, the elevation of national boundaries (and associated distinctions between inside/outside, us/them, here/there) in ways that, at best, limit or undermine forms of solidarity and moral concern towards others and efface or refuse the mutual interdependencies that obtain under conditions of globalization and, at worst, generate forms of xenophobic hostility towards those marked out by territorial frontiers as ‘foreigners’. These two claims form the basis for a deep-seated scepticism towards the state as an appropriate mediator of political community issued in the name of cosmopolitanism - one profoundly suspicious of a nationalist politics that ‘substitutes a colorful idol for the substantive universal values of justice and right’ (Nussbaum 2002: 5).

The field of policing and security is a prime site for the articulation and reinforcement of these monolithic, anti-pluralist predilections, as recent work in ‘critical security studies’ has emphasised (e.g., Krause and Williams 1997). The tendency of security to ‘saturate the language of modern politics’ (Dillon 1996: 12), and set the limits of our political imagination, functions in this regard to do two things - both of which are fuelled by security being ‘more within us as a yearning, than without us as a fact’ (Ericson and Haggerty 1997: 85), a condition beyond our grasp that appears endlessly to require more ‘security measures’. First, it privileges and cements the state itself as the subject of security in ways that naturalize its ‘tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly presence’ in the life of modern societies and, with it, the institutional violence that underpins ‘democratic’ politics (Benjamin 1920/1985: 141-2; see also Taussig 1997; Neocleous 2000). By invoking ‘security’, the state activates what Carl Schmitt (1922/1985: 5) called its sovereign right to ‘decide on the exception’. Security thus operates as an anti-political political practice wherein state actors declare the problem at hand (be it terrorism, or drugs, or asylum, or . . . ) to involve imperatives not value trade-offs and political choices, to call for authoritative decision rather than democratic deliberation (or in Schmitt’s view, indecision), and to warrant the restriction of basic liberties as the price to be paid for the maintenance of public security.

Secondly, ‘securitizing’ practices (Waever 1995) serve in particular ways to rally and reify a ‘unitary people’ whose social existence is threatened and whom the state seeks to protect. [11] The generation of political community around the idea of danger tends to foster forms of solidarity that cohere around common enemies, such that national life is re/constituted through an antipathy towards those outsiders (whether within or beyond territorial borders) represented as hostile to ‘our’ freedom and ‘our’ security - something that has been discernible in Britain and the US in the aftermath of September 11th. But it also generates an affectively-charged, close to unconditional identification with those institutions (notably policing institutions) that come both to embody the ‘way of life’ under threat and be tasked with keeping the dangerous other at bay. The resulting investment in a policing solution to the security question (and often within that to particular repressive police strategies) can all too easily coexist with a tendency to overlook or condone abuses of power committed by ‘our’ police and turn a blind eye to practices that undermine the liberty and security of unpopular minority groups (see Loader and Mulcahy 2003: chs. 5 & 9; and, more generally, Cohen 2001). Security, accordingly, becomes not a precondition for the exercise of critical freedom, but a standing threat to it. And when it is coupled in these ways with a politics of belonging, the illiberal, anti-pluralist consequences are plain for all to see.

This variant of state - and security - scepticism teaches a number of salutary lessons. It is highly attentive to the emotive dimensions of security and community and possesses a razor-sharp sensitivity to their pathological consequences. In so doing, it warns those, such as ourselves, who wish to draw democratic virtues from the inescapable presence of political affect that they are ‘playing with fire’. It supplies, further, a cogent account of the dangers of placing security at the ideological heart of government, of the capacity of security politics to colonize public policy and social life in ways that are injurious of democratic values, and of its propensity to foster and sustain fear-laden, other-disregarding forms of political subjectivity and collective identity. In all these ways, it reminds us that security ‘cannot be dissociated from even more basic claims about who we think we are and how we might act together’ (Walker 1997: 66; see also Dillon 1996: 34).

Yet ‘critical security studies’ remains, in our view, skewed in its account of these associations. It concludes too easily from the above that there can be no progressive democratic politics aimed at civilizing security, that security is so stained by its uncivil association with the (military and police) state that the only radical strategy left open is to deconstruct and move beyond it (e.g., Dillon 1996: ch. 1). [12] In so doing, this strand of state-scepticism commits two mistakes. It forgets, first of all, that while the affective connections between the security, state and nation are deeply entrenched and largely inescapable, they take no necessary or essential substantive form. They can, in other words, be remade and reimagined in ways that connect policing and security to other more inclusive, cosmopolitan forms of belonging - to political communities that ‘do not necessarily equate difference with threat’ (Dalby 1997: 9). It tends, secondly, to forget that the ‘pursuit of security’ not only grounds forms of technocratic, authoritarian government and impoverishes our sense of the political (Dillon 1996: 15). Security is also a valuable human good, one that is a key ingredient of the good societyas well as being axiomatic to the production of other individual goods (most directly, liberty). It is our contention that security can be rethought along these lines, and that the state possesses a central place in the production of security thus conceived, that we develop in Part II.

Part II - The state, political community and the public good of security

The cumulative critique of the role of the state in policing laid out in Part I cannot easily be gainsaid. The state can be and often has been a physical and psychological bully. It is prone to meddling, to interfering where it is not wanted. It does take sides, and in so doing packs the hardest punch. It will tend towards stupidity. Not only does it lack the means to answer all the key questions about individual and collective security, it often seems unable or unwilling to recognize this deficiency. Finally, it undoubtedly does seek, and in some measure is successful, in setting the cultural climate, and in making life difficult or impossible for those who do not conform to the norms it encourages and defends.

Yet, as our scepticism about state-scepticism has sought to make clear, in concentrating on its dangers and limitations, the state-sceptics have tended to be inattentive towards the continuing positive contribution of the state. In particular, they have paid insufficient regard to the possibility that the state, or its functional equivalent, remains indispensable to any project concerned with optimizing the human good of security, or at least, to the full implications of that possibility. To remedy that defect, and indeed to move beyond mere scepticism about state scepticism, demands a closer specification of the role of the state both in the generation of social meaning and in the ordering of social practice pertaining to security. It is with these two closely inter-related questions that Part II is concerned. For the most part, and for reasons of restricted space, we treat this inquiry at its most fundamental sociological level, through an argument about what the very fabric of social relations implies about the state’s role in the generation of common security. But in conclusion we also begin to indicate the type of regulatory matrix which would be most conducive to the state’s promotion of common security, while at the same time checking its bullying tendencies and retaining and releasing the potential of communities of practice or attachment other than the state to find their own security solutions.

Security as a ‘thick’ public good

The key to this revised conception of the role of the state lies in a more rounded exploration of what is meant by security conceived of as a valuable collective or common good or, for reasons which will become obvious, as what might still best be characterized as a public good, albeit in a different and deeper sense than applied by economists. This involves introducing two dimensions of the contribution of security to any conception of the good society which are often neglected, and arguing that these two ‘thicker’ social dimensions are inextricable from and necessary to the effective realization of a third dimension of security - one which is accepted as an irreducible component of a well-functioning society across the whole range of perspectives considered above. The dimension which is generally, indeed universally accepted as necessary we may call the instrumentaldimension. The other two dimensions which we argue to be symbiotically related to the instrumental dimension we call the socialand the constitutivedimensions of security respectively. Only if we can appreciate the close clustering of these three dimensions of security, we argue, can we appreciate the full extent of the state’s necessary implication in the production of security.

The instrumental dimension of security concerns the sense in which security is seen as prerequisite to the effective liberty of individuals, which in turn is seen as prerequisite to the ‘good life’, however conceived. As we have seen, it is axiomatic even to theories of the minimalstate that without measures put in place to protect the person and property of individuals through some framework of coercive self-organisation, those individuals will be unable to pursue their ends free of interference or the pervasive threat of interference. In turn, this basic liberty of the person and property may be seen as instrumental to all sorts of other collective goods that are necessary to a more expansive conception of human freedom, and, perhaps too, that are predicated upon a basic or expansive conception of human freedom. For example, it is impossible to envisage stable and reasonably inclusive and responsive democratic decision-making - an important collective good in itself and one that may also be conducive to other individual and collective goods - without the prior and continuing guarantee of private freedom. [13] Equally, the various infrastructural goods which we may associate with the production of a more positive conception of freedom, such as widespread distribution of education, health provision, and social security, cannot be conceived of without the baseline of security - of negative freedom - and the stability of democratic politics and public administration which flows from this. Further, to the extent that we might want to treat some collective goods such as solidarity as valuable components of the good life in themselves quite apart from their contribution to a more active conception of individual freedom - a deeply complex and controversial issue between liberal and communitarians - then again the security baseline is indispensable. In sum, however modest or expansive our conception of freedom, and irrespective of whether freedom and other individual centred-values are the only relevant entries in our index of the good life or whether other collective goods have an independent value - both matters of profound disagreement - security is a constant foundational presence as the most basic instrument to the realization of that particular conception of freedom.

The social dimension of security concerns the sense in which the value of security for human society cannot, in Waldron’s words, ‘be adequately characterizable in terms of its worth to any or all of the members of that society considered one by one’ (Waldron 1993: 358). This social dimension, it must be emphasized from the outset, neednotinvolve any kind of collective metaphysics - any idea that the valueof security is anything other than reducible to its value to the aggregation of individuals who benefit from security. What it does imply is that the security of any individual depends in some significant fashion upon the security of others, and thus that the very idea of ‘private security’ is oxymoronic (Loader 1997b).

To begin to unpack this idea, we need to identify two separate but connected senses in which the security of any individual is dependent upon the action and attitudes of others. First, and most obviously, there is what we might call the inter-subjective dimension. When we think of the objective or inter-subjective ‘security situation’ of any individual, we have in mind the relationship between the catalogue of person and property-securing measures put in place to protect that individual on the one hand and the propensity of third parties to threaten the individual’s security interests notwithstanding this catalogue of protection on the other. Both sides of the situational equation depend crucially upon the actions and attitudes of others. The positive side - the catalogue of protective measures - depends in large part upon the commitment and co-operation of official security providers as well as that of others - commercial security agents, neighbours, friends or concerned fellow-citizens - who are strategically located such that they are able to contribute to an individual’s security measures. The negative side - the propensity of third parties to avoid or overcome the security measures in place and threaten or harm our security - is also of course dependent upon the actions and attitudes of others, in this case these putatively threatening others. But the individual’s sense of security does not just depend upon the person and property-securing measures objectively - or, rather, inter-subjectively - put in place and sustained by others, but also upon a second factor; namely how these objectively or inter-subjectively constituted measures are subjectively interpreted and experienced by the individual. The individual, in order to feel confident in his or her ability to pursue his or her ends without interference, must feel reasonably secure that the conditions for the effective and ongoing realization of his or her objective security are themselves reasonably secure. In turn, this is a function both of that individual’s perceptionof the attitudes and commitments of official security-providers and other individuals whose behaviour may be capable of having a bearing upon his or her security, and of how this impression fits in terms of the individual’s personal threshold of manageable fear - of vulnerability to intimations of insecurity. In other words, the overall measure of an individual’s sense of security is the extent to which that individual feels free of anxietyabout the existence, extent and stable reproduction of the objective or inter-subjective conditions of his or her security. Clearly, the objective ‘security situation’ of the individual is an influential factor in his or her level of anxiety, but, just as clearly, it is not the only factor. [14]

Even if we accept the intrinsically socially dependent character of our security, the specification of the optimal conditions for the provision of a low-risk and anxiety-free security environment are contingent, complex and far from uncontroversial. There may be a temptation, having produced the social card and revealed something of the intensity of our reliance on others for our security, to start the bidding high by claiming that the optimal fulfilment of our sense of freedom from anxiety about security depends upon the equal fulfilment of the sense of freedom of anxiety about security of all others to whom we are socially ‘connected’ inasmuch as they can affect the objective conditions of our security. Or, at the very least, we may be tempted to offer this as a kind of ideal to which our understanding of the social dimension of security might reasonably approximate. Yet this temptation should be resisted, as such a proposition would have to rest on one of three assumptions, none of which can be convincingly sustained. First, the proposition would hold if ‘security’ had the properties of those kinds of communal goods such as ‘fraternity’ or ‘solidarity’ where the production of the sentiment in each person is directly and reciprocally dependent upon its production in certain others (Waldron 1993: 358-9). But security is not a constitutively other-regarding sentiment in the sense of these other goods. It is meaningless to talk about enjoyment of a sense of fraternity or conviviality other than withsome other person or persons. Security is not of that character. Its relationship of mutual dependence is not, unlike these others, one of mutual constitution. Secondly, the proposition would hold in conditions of precise equality of vulnerability and of strategic deployment of harm-capacity between all individuals in a community. Where each were as able and willing as each of his or her significant others to affect the security of each of his or her significant others (full symmetry of vulnerability), and if this were mutually acknowledged (full consciousness of that symmetry), we would be able to conceive of mutual security in terms of a self-reinforcing social equilibrium. But absent a Robinson Crusoe type scenario, this does not describe the conditions of any actual human society. Thirdly, short of these conditions of equality of harm inflicting capacity, if we could nevertheless envisage conditions of full mutual empathy and altruism as regards the security concerns of significant others (however widely defined), then again we might be able to sustain the strong mutual dependence thesis. If our anxiety about security could not be assuaged unless and until we were sure of the security of others, just because we defined security as a good which was meaningless unless enjoyed by all and were thus unable or unprepared to take comfort in our own security unless and until it was equally guaranteed to these others, then our very moral orientation would be such as to guarantee security as a collective virtue. Again, however, beyond the scale and scope of extremely small ‘immediate’ social units such as families or otherwise tightly-knit groups where the affective ties of friendship or loyalty are particularly strong, this is an implausible assumption to make about actual human societies.

The last two scenarios, those of strategic reciprocity and altruistic concern, do however offer a clue as to how we can cash out the social dimension of security. Our threshold of anxiety isaffected by our appreciation of the capacity of others, officials and laypersons, to affect our security, and by our appreciation of how our capacity and propensity to affect their security influences their attitude towards our security. So in the day-to-day monitoring of our levels of anxiety about security and evaluation of the conditions of such anxiety, we do take account of the relationship between the threat posed to us by others and the threat posed to them by us, even if there is no equality of mutual influence and even if we understand others’ propensity to affect out security as being of a different order than our propensity to affect theirs. Moreover, since, as noted, our security has an irreducibly subjective dimension - since anxiety about security is itself a form of insecurity - to the extent that our monitoring of our levels of anxiety preoccupies us and our evaluation of our conditions of security requires sustained vigilance, then this itself is an indication that our existential state of security is sub-optimal, that we are too vulnerable to our perceptions of insecurity. [15] Thus we aspire to a situation where our monitoring of our security environment may be a highly tacit and routine affair, an activity which takes place largely at the level of ‘practical’ rather than ‘discursive consciousness’ (Giddens 1984); one where we rarely feel it necessary to peep round the veil of our security cover, and our checks when we do so need only be cursory. So, ideally, our level of trust in our security environment should be very high, the reminders of our vulnerability few and routine, neither palpable in our physical environment, intrusive in our daily routines, nor prominent in our discursive consciousness.

As well as reinforcing our appreciation of the importance of the strategic nexus connecting our security to others, this sense of the exacting condition of optimal security also helps to explain how more altruistic considerations enter the security equation. We need make no assumptions about altruism being a natural human condition to conclude that in our techniques for monitoring and reducing anxiety about security, concern for the security of others finds many prompts, many contexts in which it can come to appear to us as a necessary virtue. For our strategic monitoring of our own security concerns inevitably raises our awareness of the security concerns of others, and our desire to lower the anxiety ‘transaction costs’ of taking care of our own security anxiety may lead us to conclude that the best guarantee - the most transaction-free insurance policy - of our own security is the equal guarantee of the security of others to whom we are connected. And in this complex and iterative calculation, the security of others may come to be appreciated as a good in its own right. That is to say the very circumstances of security anxiety are such that we may become educated in the virtues of security altruism and come contingently to endorse the very proposition whose pretensions to innateness and universalisability were criticized earlier - namely, that the enjoyment of security by others isindeed a defining condition of our enjoyment of our own security, rather than simply a strategic prerequisite. And even if there are limits to that altruism, the practical coincidence between prudent self-interest and independent concern for the security of others may often be so strong, sustained, and mutually reinforcing, that these limits are rarely put to the test.

Let us turn, finally, to the constitutive dimension of security. What we are concerned with here is how security as a social or collective good of the sort we have begun to describe is implicated in the very process of constituting the ‘social’ or the ‘public’. Often, and not only in the economics literature on ‘public goods’ discussed earlier, the emphasis in discussion of goods which are in some sense collectively enjoyable is upon the social or public quality of the process of delivering the good or of the beneficial consequencesof the good, or upon the nexus between process and consequences. Indeed, we can see just this emphasis on process and consequences in our discussion of the social dimension of security above. However, there are some goods, and arguably security is one of these, which are also deeply implicated in the constitution of the very sense of what the ‘social’ is and who the ‘public’ are. On one view, the very distinction between the emergent and consequential dimensions of ‘publicness’ on the one hand and its constitutive dimension on the other may seem a dubious one. Is our sense of the ‘social’ or the ‘public’ not merely the fluid, context-dependent and diversely manifest outcome of the multifarious situations in which individuals put or find things in common? Clearly our understanding of who ‘our’ relevant public is and what is the nature of the social tie is constantly mediated through new experiences, new strategic and affective contexts of coming together. But this does not do justice to the independent and constitutive role of the public in the social imaginary. Our most basic anthropological understanding of human sociability tells us that the institutional and symbolic organisation of ‘publics’ and of the ‘public domain’ is more profound than that. Our sense of group organisation and identity, rather, is deeply embedded and continuous across different situations and over long periods of time. This is not the place to investigate all the reasons for such a relative stability of group identity, suffice to say that they concern the significance of stable group organisation in meeting two sets of aspirations. First, there is their instrumental significance for resolving collective action problems, for allowing us to achieve under conditions of relatively stable agreement what we cannot do in the absence of these conditions. Secondly, there is their significance for consolidating a social sense of self - in providing an identity whose self-affirming traits, the way it speaks to positive conceptions of self generally such as personal dignity and a sense of personal authenticity (Smith 2001: 25-33) - recognizes and resonates with the irreducibly social character of our experience.

Now, it is clear that in any actual context of social development these two sets of factors - instrumental and affective - will often be closely linked, indeed mutually interdependent. For their part, as we suggested earlier, the instrumental reasons for getting or staying together to resolve collective action problems are often deemed insufficient in themselves for reasons of short-term self-interest, poor information and low trust. Something additional is needed that allows individuals to overcome their ambivalence about collective commitment. If that additional factor is not, should not and cannot be (or, at least cannot onlybe, certainly in the long-term) the persuasive force attendant upon the coercive potential and display of some already powerful group, then the glue must be supplied by some prior and continuing investment in a sense of social identity and aspiration. The affective factors, conversely, need to be grounded in the many particular lessons of social experience, in the varied contexts of practical reason from which the very idea of social identity derives meaning. They must, in other words, be predicated upon a set of actual or projected ends which vindicate the very value of conceiving and pursuing ends as common ends and which as such provide ongoing corroboration of our self-understanding as social animals. They demand, in short, a sense and an experience of collective projects that could be justified in instrumental terms.

In saying that for communities of purpose to stabilize and to enjoy sustained success they must also be affective communities, and that affectivity is itself generated through a commitment to common purpose, we are not pointing to some abstract ontological puzzle of first causes, but to countless self-reinforcing historical dynamics of mutual cause and effect. And in the operation of these dynamics, it is inevitable that the sense of social identity that is cultivated in the generation of stable communities is itself heavily infused with the content of the instrumental purposes that both ground and are abetted by that sense of social identity - as well as with the practical means and conditions conducive to the pursuit of such instrumental purposes, most notably common language and common territory. The wish for common security is one of these instrumental purposes - indeed, perhaps, for the very reasons we have already given in discussing security’s foundational role in the group project that is the constitution of liberty - themost important such instrumental purpose. Accordingly, it is no surprise that the celebration of or yearning for common security against internal and external threats often loom so large in the materials - the mentalities, metaphors and iconography - through which stable communities register and articulate their identities as stable communities, as indeed do the sense of common language and common territory. This, then, is the sense in which we can talk of security, just as we can of language and territory as a constitutive public good - one whose actualization or aspiration is so pivotal to the very purpose of community that at the level of self-identification it helps to construct and sustain our ‘we feeling’ - our very felt sense of ‘common publicness’.

As a preliminary to the re-introduction of the state into our analysis, let us now say something about how our three dimensions of security - instrumental, social and constitutive - hang together. First, and most importantly, as already intimated, it is impossible to conceive of the effective realization of security as instrumental to individual liberty - the value of security on which all are agreed - without also attending to is social and its constitutive dimensions. As we saw, the social dimension of security is internal to our very conceptual understanding of what security is. If security has a subjective as well as an objective dimension, if it is as much about freedom from anxiety about safety as it is about the objective conditions of safety, then confidence in ones security environment becomes an indispensable feature of security. Further, in conceiving of security as a constitutive public good, we are making an even deeper claim about the social face of security. For what is being contended here is that in establishing the very frameworks of stable community which make the provision of objective security measures possible there must already be present and must continuously be sustained some common sense of social identity. Given that given the inextricability of collective purpose and social sense of self in this process of ongoing construction and reconstruction, the idea of common security becomes one of the central structures of meaning through which the development and sustenance of that sense of community is experienced and articulated.

In the second place, if we look more closely at the relationship between the social and constitutive dimensions of security, both of which are independently necessary to the provision of security as instrumental to individual liberty, we can discern an intimate and mutually supportive set of connections between them which further reinforces their role in the constitution of individual liberty. At least three such links can be traced. First, the constitutive framework helps generate and sustain the sense of common purpose and instrumental commitment necessary to provide the stable material and regulatory wherewithal that a general scheme of security provision demands - something that theorists of the minimal state and nodal governance have both neglected. We cannot fund and we cannot order the mix of steering and rowing mechanisms required for collective security provision, whatever form that mix might take, in the absence of a constitutive commitment to put things in common.

Secondly, given that, as argued, the objective or inter-subjective security situation of the individual depends not only upon the commitment to public provision, but also upon the propensity of some to aid or co-operate in the provision of one’s personal security cover and on the disinclination of others to threaten one’s personal security, again the constitutive achievement of relatively stable political community becomes crucial - in two senses. On the one hand, and most directly, to the extent that the sense of common social identity presupposed by and nurtured within stable political community can encourage a sense of confident and committed membership of that community of attachment, this can lead to more active support for and co-operation with official and unofficial security arrangements, or at least to less intense threats towards these arrangements. On the other hand, more indirectly, and focusing on the instrumental capacity of collective political community, such a community can use the ‘battery of power’ (Canovan: 1996: 72-5) it derives from its common affective commitment to put things in common to provide through distributive measures the spread of resources and associated forms of social status likely to minimize the mutual resentments, antipathies and indifferences which lead to non-co-operative or hostile behaviour. This combination of direct and indirect influences can, in short, help to trigger a ‘virtuous circle of crime control’ (Audit Commission 1993: 49) - the optimal use and effective supplementation of the scarce resources of security provision and minimization of the pressures on these resources, necessary for achieving effective levels of inter-subjective security.

Thirdly, and finally, we should note that the relationship between the constitution of political community and the social dimension of security is not just causal, in the complex ways suggested above, but also conceptual. Freedom of anxiety about security, as we have argued, is a function not just of ones objective or inter-subjective security situation, but also of ones perception of the adequacy of one security coverage, which is also in some part derived from ones ongoing general threshold of psychic vulnerability, or manageable fear in the face of ones social environment. This, in turn, depends upon a more general sense of ‘ontological security’ - of ‘confidence or trust that the natural and social worlds are as they appear to be, including the basic existential parameters of self and social identity’ (Giddens 1984: 375). Where this sense of ‘ontological security’ comes from is of course a deeply complex and multi-levelled question, but as Giddens himself intimates, one crucial level is that of social identity. A sense of dignity and authenticity, of ease with one’s social environment, are crucial to ontological security, and as we have seen, it is these very aspects of social identity which are implicated in the process of constitution of political community. In other words, to be a member of a stable political community and to feel oneself confident in that sense of membership is already to raise ones threshold of vulnerability - to possess crucial resources in the management of fear and avoidance of security anxiety.

The necessary virtue of the state

We have, thus far, made an argument for the indispensability of the social in the provision of individual security, and for the indispensability of some constitutive idea of ‘publicness’ and of political community to the full flowering of the social - conditions required even if we want the provision of individual security to be tailored to strictly liberal ends. But a further argument still has to be made before we can allocate the state a primary role in the constitution of security. In particular, we must face two further challenges and answer two further questions. First, why the state rather than some other idea of political community? Secondly, even if we can make a persuasive case for the centrality of the state, we still have to deal with its propensity towards meddling, favouritism, stupidity and monoculturalism.

As regards the first question, if it is the case that for the effective supply of security as a social good there must be some level of constitutive political community which is involved not only as a last resort of coercive authority, but also - since the two activities are inextricable - both in instrumental ordering work and in the work of cultural production of social identity, then we need to locate somespecies of political community which combines all of these functions. We need not call that entity the state, but, whatever our squeamishness about labels, we do need to accept the indispensability of a form of political community that is preponderant to the extent thatit can perform all of these functions. In other words, if, as we have argued, necessary virtue in terms of security production inheres in the state or its functional equivalent, then we have no choice but to accept that necessity and ensure that it is as virtuous as possible.

In so doing, we must try to recover what is virtuous about the state tradition while seeking to eradicate or minimize its vices. We must recognize that states have indeed historically been involved as ordering devices, as sources of the rules, resources and administrative capacity necessary to the production of collective security. We must acknowledge that through the development of a sense of belonging, dignity and authenticity in the form of national identity, they have also been engaged in crafting social identities which provide the motivational force both for providing and maintaining the ordering infrastructure and for nurturing a social environment in which civility is relatively high, security risks are relatively low, and thus the ordering infrastructure is reasonably sufficient for its task. We must, finally, concede that the identity construction work of the state, quite apart from its complex instrumental benefits, is also importantly continuous with the very sense of social rootedness which makes the self-management of unease and anxiety a manageable task. And in accepting that the state can succeed and in some cases and to varying degrees has succeeded in performing these tasks, we must also accept that notions of security, just because of their deep inscription in the kind of purpose and practices for which political community are formed and through which they are sustained, provide an important part of the vernacular of collective identity formation at the state level. In particular, in many well-documented cases, policing institutions have been active symbolic agents in the forging and mutual reinforcement of the nation-state nexus (Walden 1982; Emsley 2000; Loader and Mulcahy 2003) while in mature state forms ideas about policing and the public guarantee of security remain deeply sedimented within the ‘mundane culture’ of everyday life (Loader and Mulcahy 2003: ch. 2).

Of course, the flipside of this historical record of instrumental and cultural work is another historical record which documents the propensity of the state to meddle, to reflect and enact the bias of the most powerful, to decide without sufficient knowledge or foresight, and to mobilize and celebrate an intolerant idea of cultural uniformity? Could not, then, the state sceptics respond to our invocation of the necessity of the state with a necessity clause of their own? Namely, that the vices are the unavoidable downside of the virtues, and that any attempt to mobilize the virtues is fated, in the long run at least, to mobilize the vices? The only answer to that question, and the note on which we will finish, is to argue and legislate for, first, as much openness as possible and many checks as can be incorporated against undue meddling, bias, uninformed decision-making and cultural imperialism in the ordering and cultural work of the state and, second, as much recognition as possible of the ordering and cultural work of other sites of collective security as is consistent with the elements of state preponderance set out above.

This argument clearly requires further elaboration. Suffice it for now, by way of conclusion, to say that it translates into what we would call an anchored pluralism. The state, in the sense set out above, should remain the anchor of collective security provision, but there should be as much pluralism as possible both, internally, in terms of the constitutional inclusiveness, representativeness and minority protection mechanisms of the democratic and administrative processes through which the aspiration of collective security is reflected upon and pursued (Loader 2000), and, externally, in terms of the recognition of the appropriate place of other sites of regulatory and cultural production (Walker 2002). In this second and external dimension - the prospects of the flourishing of which are of course intimately associated with and dependent upon the openness of the first or internal dimension - the role of the state in the ordering field should be as a meta-regulator and in the cultural field as a wide boundary of social and security identity within which other sorts of social and security identities may be nested. [16] In both cases, the aim of the state is both positive and negative. Positively, it is to ensure the widest possible community consistent with the minimum affective ties necessary to deliver the regulatory and cultural infrastructure of a single security space, with all the risk-reducing and fear-abating benefits that such a common security environment can bring. Negatively, it is to ensure that other ordering and cultural sites, for all that they can contribute in more knowledgeable, responsive and intimate ways to the production of more localized or more practice-specific security spaces, do so in a way which does not frustrate the attainment of a more inclusive regulation of security and security of regulation, either through regulatory norms which contradict the wider regulatory field or through forms of parochial solidarity which may be inconsistent with membership of the wider security community, or indeed, with the equal security of their own members. The challenge remains one of finding the necessary commitment and institutional imagination to strike the optimal balance. It is a challenge, in our view, that can only be effectively addressed by remaining rigorously open-minded about the dynamics of transformation and by avoiding the temptation of assuming that the state is either any more or any less in need of justification for prominent inclusion within the matrix of security provision than any other institutional and cultural site.

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the volume editors, Benoit Dupont and Jennifer Wood, together with Lucia Zedner, for providing constructive written comments on an earlier version of this chapter. The usual disclaimer applies.

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