I nternal

I nternal By now you will have asked yourself: doesn’t security depend on internal peace and order? How can a society be secure if there is violence or the threat of violence inside its borders? And how can it prepare to face violence from outside its borders if it is not secure inside its borders? Traditional security must also, therefore, concern itself with internal security. The reason it is not given so much importance is that after the Second World War it seemed that, for the most powerful countries on earth, internal security was more or less assured. We said earlier that it is important to pay attention to contexts and situations. While internal security was certainly a part of the concerns of governments historically, after the Second World War there was a context and situation in which internal security did not seem to matter as much as it had in the past. After , the US and the Soviet Union appeared to be united and could expect peace within their borders. Most of the European countries, particularly the powerful Western European countries, faced no serious threats from groups or communities living within those borders. Therefore, these countries focused primarily on threats from outside their borders. What were the external threats facing these powerful countries? Again, we draw attention to contexts and situations. We know that the period after the Second World War was the Cold War in which the US-led Western alliance faced the Soviet-led Communist alliance. Above all, the two alliances feared a military attack from each other. Some European powers, in addition, continued to worry about violence in their colonies, from colonised people who wanted independence. We have only to remember the French fighting in Vietnam in the 1950s or the British fighting in Kenya in the 1950s and the early 1960s. As the colonies became free from the late 1940s onwards, their security concerns were often similar to that of the European powers. Some of the newly-independent countries, like the European powers, became members of the Cold War alliances. They, therefore, had to worry about the Cold War becoming a hot war and dragging them into hostilities — against neighbours who might have joined the other side in the Cold War, against the leaders of the alliances (the United States or Soviet Union), or against any of the other partners of the US and Soviet Union. The Cold War between the two superpowers was responsible for approximately one-third of all wars in the post-Second World War period. Most of these wars were fought in the Third World. Just as the European colonial powers feared violence in the colonies, some colonial people feared, after independence, that they might be attacked by their Browse through a week’s newspaper and list all the external and internal conflicts that are taking place around the globe.