and his select group of clients. The majority of the population was excluded from
the system and faced a state that was sooner an enemy and a mortal threat than a
source of protection and a champion of development.
The peculiar security dilemma in weak postcolonial states emerges from the
paradoxical situation that weak states are relatively free from external threat, while
simultaneously the weak state itself poses a serious security threat to major parts of
its own population. In a basic sense, anarchy is domesticized: there is an international
system of relative order with fairly secure protection of the borders and territories
of weak states; and there is a domestic realm with a high degree of insecurity and
conflict. The government’s primary task ideally should be to provide security for its
population, but instead it makes up the greatest potential threat to people within its
boundaries.
Violent conflict in the world today is no longer mainly interstate war; it is
intrastate conflict in weak states (sometimes with external participation). Since the
end of the Cold War there have been a large number of such conflicts, while there
have been extremely few interstate wars.^54 The distinctive security dilemma
connected to weak statehood does not sit well with structural realist analysis because
according to that analysis the state is the ‘hard shell’ which provides security in a
self-help world. For people in weak states the shell is more frequently an insecurity
container exposing them to lethal domestic danger. The dynamics of domestic
insecurity and state failure in context of an international system which underwrites
the continued right to sovereign independence of weak states is not easily analysed
with the concepts and assumptions offered by structural realism.^55
Let me turn to the issues of anarchy and security dilemma in relation to post-
modern states. The relations between postmodern states amount to a liberal peace
based on dense interdependence in economic and other areas, common institutions
and common basic values. The EU community cannot be grasped with a notion of
‘anarchy’ because the community is densely framed by legitimate international and
supranational authority. In such a framework, the use of violence to solve conflicts
is no longer an option. The members have become a security community;^56 where
states no longer resort to violence as a means of conflict resolution. It was indicated
above that there is a transatlantic security community as well; in some areas the
transatlantic relationship was cooled down after 9/11. President Bush’s notions of
‘preventive war’ and ‘regime change by force’ were ‘not considered legitimate means
of international politics in Europe’;^57 and there were other disputes over arms
control, international human rights, and the environment.
But the transatlantic security community was not seriously harmed by these
disagreements; it remained in place. Should the rift opened by such quarrels begin
to grow, the security community may start to deteriorate. Such major deterioration
would be indicated by changes on several levels, for example by institutional
breakdown or crisis (in NATO and other transatlantic institutions) and by renewed
economic competition and rivalry. There is little likelihood of that happening,
because the security community is itself a structure that imposes pressures and con-
straints. It induces multilateralism rather than unilateralism. A continued outspoken
118 Structural realism and changes in statehood