Individual Democratic Institutions Research Fellowships 1994-1996

The research reports reproduced here are the responsibility of the individual authors. Their reproduction does not imply any form of official or unofficial endorsement by NATO. The reports are offered in unedited form, as presented by their authors, with a view to make their findings available to a wide audience. Ukraine And European Security - International Mechanisms As Non-Military Options For National Security Of Ukraine. Bohdan Lupiy [Back to Index] Chapter 1. National Security Of Ukraine Section 1 Understanding the Issues: Theoretical Background. It has always been difficult for analysts to define the actual dimension of national security of a particular state. In other words, "security inevitably means different things at different times and in different places, depending on what people have to protect and the nature of the threat."(1) Such complexity caused a long period of elaboration of the theory of national security and during the decades the formation of this concept was promoted mainly, by case studies based on disputes around the Realist concept of Power and Idealist concept of Peace. When observing the evolution of the concept of state security, one can easily assume some changes in the approach to this issue. At the beginning, the national security was considered as "the ability to preserve the nation's physical integrity and territory; to maintain its economic relations with the rest of the world on reasonable terms; to protect its nature, institutions and governance from disruption from outside; and to control its borders"(2). Consequently, the essence of national security was to be considered solely in narrow military-defence terms. Later, the so-called 'utilitarian' approach regarded national security as much broader and more complex. This method expanded the scale of scientific overlook and improved the comprehension of the object of the study. In other words, "Security is no longer seen simply as a matter of defending a state from its enemies from within and without, but of ensuring that its citizens do not suffer undue hardship when they are sick or unemployed "(3) and it was growing assume that national security is nothing else but the "interest" of every nation in self-preservation.(4) The formation of the present concept of national security appears to be marked as the 1980's phenomenon and theoretical elaboration of it was indeed, considerably undeveloped until the appearance of studies of Barry Buzan, Peter Mangold and Stanley Hoffman.(5) As far as this essay concerns the problem of national security of Ukraine, it would be effective to specify the constituent elements of the state security complex and refer to the definitional approach of Barry Buzan. Thus: "Military security concerns the two-level interplay of the armed offensive and defensive capabilities of states and states' perceptions of each other's intentions. Political security concerns the organizational stability of states systems of government and the ideologies that give them legitimacy. Economic security concerns access to the resources, finance and markets necessary to sustain acceptable levels of welfare and state power. Societal security concerns the sustainability within acceptable conditions for evolution of traditional patterns of language, culture and religious and national identity and custom. Environmental security concerns the maintenance of the local and the planetary biosphere as the essential support system on which all other human enterprises depend."(6) These five components constitute one inseparable and consolidated model, which also comprises three interdependent and mutually damageable levels: national, regional and global. Accordingly, esteem of any component in this model should be taken into account in one complex with other sectors, while considering the influence of the destruction of one sector to others. In addition, any action or event influences all levels of the state's security complex rather than only one separate part. For instance, the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident influenced directly upon environmental, societal and political securities, and to a lesser degree and indirectly to economic and military sectors. Accordingly, the three former sectors are challenged in a short-term setting, and the later two - in more longer duration. What kind of influence upon national security of Ukraine presents each sector, is one of the most essential objective of the next section of this chapter.