2011: THE YEAR OF GLOBAL INSECURITY
By Max Brandt
Georgia Today
May 17 2012
Georgia
The year 2011 revealed two worrying trends in global security. First
of all, the world saw a year filled with wars and violent conflict.
Second, a selective rise in global military expenditures (especially in
crisis regions) seems to have laid the groundwork for future conflicts.
In 2011, the Germanã~@~@Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict
Researchã~@~@identified more violent conflicts than in all other years
since it began keeping record in 1945. Among these conflicts were 20
full-scale wars in 2011, while records revealed only six full-scale
wars and 18 limited wars in 2010. Taking into account cases with the
use of less violence and those without violent methods, the researchers
observed a total number of 388 conflicts in total last year.
The high number of newly emerging and escalating conflicts can mainly
be attributed to the shockwave emanating from the Arab Spring in the
Middle East and Northern Africa. The fall of authoritarian regimes
in many cases goes hand in hand with armed conflict: not only the
anti-regime struggle itself, but also the subsequent political
instabilities and disputes that result over the sharing of power
after the regime has fallen. The developments one can observe now
are comparable to the political disorders that occurred after the
collapse of the Soviet Union, which led to several violent uprisings
and wars in the 1990s.
>From the Drug War being fought between the Mexican government and the
lethal drug cartels in Central America, the struggles for national
power in Cote dÒ’Ivoire, to the confrontations between states, like
the border clashes between Thailand and Cambodia- the reasons behind
todayÒ’s many violent crises vary widely.
A closer look at Europe shows that the Caucasus remains the continent’s
hot spot with regard to conflicts and political crises.
Besides the internal power-struggles that exist, it is the separatist
regimes in South-Ossetia, Abkhazia and the situation between Armenia
and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh which produces the sporadic
violence. As noted by various experts, the situation between Yerevan
and Baku has reached a critical level in the last year and the risk
of it becoming more and more explosive is high.
Worse yet is the situation in the Russian North Caucasus, where
nearly every political dispute is embedded in heavy violence, while
the situation in Ingushetia is even classified by the researchers
from Heidelberg as a limited war.
To the south the picture of the neighborhood is no better. The
escalation of the internal conflict between Turkish government forces
and Kurdish insurgents in the course of 2011 has been identified as
a full-scale war.
A report published by the Stockholm International Peace Research
Institute (SIPRI) shows the trends of global armament on an annual
basis. For the first time in many years, 2011 marked a period where
military expenditures grew slowly. The fact is explained by the cuts in
defense budgets by powers who have traditionally contributed to global
arms-spending before. The large NATO powers: the US, Great Britain,
France and Germany, have been cutting back their budgets as a measure
of tackling national debts. The same is true for the countries of
southern Europe, who are also facing serious financial instabilities.
Besides these cuts, Washington is still responsible for more than
40% of the worldÒ’s military expenditures, with a breathtaking
overall budget of $711 billion. However, the shortcomings due to the
unwillingness to invest in defense-capabilities are much more visible
in Europe. A vivid example was the decision by Italy to withdraw its
aircraft-carrier from an ongoing mission in NATO’s Libya intervention.
The reason was simply that the government in Rome wanted to save money
due to its domestic financial chaos. The case is of course just the
tip of the iceberg and might provide insight on European defense in
times of decreasing military budgets.
It should be noted that the capabilities we are talking about are
not necessarily offensive-systems and arms, but also personnel and
communication. So from a peace-oriented point of view, the cuts are
alarming since the EU and NATO limit their peacekeeping options.
That this is not driven by the will to contribute to global
disarmament is shown by the fact that many European states keep their
top-positions as exporters of military goods into other regions of the
world. In Germany for example, to talk about the de-militarization of
international politics as an asset to disarmament holds considerable
political cache from a public relations perspective, yet at the same
time, Germany takes third place in the ranking of the worldÒ’s biggest
global arms suppliers.
As a reaction to the decrease in military expenditures, NATO and the
EU are discussing measures of further cooperation intensively. The
so-called policy of pooling and sharing equipment will be discussed at
the NATO Summit in Chicago, and ideas like the Smart Defense concept
should finally make a breakthrough towards an effective cooperative
agreement- not only on the ground, but also in acquisition.
While the West is saving, increased spending can be seen in the East.
China added an extra of 6.7% to its defense-budget, which is the
second largest in the world standing at $143 billion. The country
especially seeks to further modernize its equipment for its more than
two million soldiers.
In total budgetary numbers, China is followed by Russia, taking
third place in global arms spending at around $72 billion. Moscow
increased its budget in 2011 by 9.3%. The newly re-elected Vladimir
Putin already announced that further investments in the country’s huge,
but partly outdated forces will be made during his presidency.
The military expenditures in other crisis regions have also been
growing; this is true in the case of Africa (Algeria) and the Middle
East. This is not only worrying due to the high risk of war in these
regions, but also because less consolidated statehoods tend to produce
a higher risk that weapons might fall into the hands of irregular
forces and terrorists.
The Southern Caucasus as EuropeÒ’s most volatile crisis region also
shows a trend towards steady armament. Georgia passed a bill outlining
its defense-spending budget for 2011 by $460 million, while already
forecasting increases up to roughly $740 by 2014.
Out of the three countries in South Caucasus Azerbaijan, shows clearly
the highest military budget, which reached $ 3.1 billion in 2011 –
an increase of more than 56%. Thus, Baku matched its informal goal
to outstrip the complete state budget of its neighbor Armenia. The
government in Yerevan on the other side spent roughly $400 million
for its armed forces.
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