The British National Security Strategy: Security after Representation

This article

• Contributes to the debate on British Foreign and Security Policy;
• Contributes to the literature on the British National Security Strategy;
• Links international relations literature with domestic policy formation literature;
• Introduces the concept of ‘legitimacy’ to foreign and security policy analysis.

The publication of the Britain's first National Security Strategy (NSS) in 2008 marked a formal shift away from the secret state of the Cold War to the highly public protective state of today. This article is interested in the question of why the NSS and related framework have taken this particular public and explicit form. Both mainstream and critically minded academics have argued that contemporary security discourses and policies are techniques of power and governance and that the public nature of the policies is vital to this function. In this article, I argue that there has been a transformation in the nature of the British state from a representative state in which the state's authority was legitimated through a number of political mechanisms of representation, to one in which state elites and institutions need to forge new kinds of relationships with the governed. This is a key development that has been noticed in political, sociological and legal theoretical literature but as yet hardly addressed in international relations and security studies. This transformation of the state, I will argue, is intimately linked to the form and content of contemporary security policies. The contemporary state is undergoing a process of an erosion of legitimacy, which has a direct impact upon the capacity of the state to govern. In this context, policies take on the role of trying to bridge the legitimacy gap. I will argue that this shift in the state leads to a different understanding of contemporary security policies as representative of a decreasing ability to govern security, a state that is losing legitimacy and authority; that is in effect, losing its sovereignty. This article argues that British national security strategies and policies are representative of this.