At a time when the French government is endeavouring to determine appropriate defence and security policies for the next few years to meet current challenges (involving a White Paper and a working party on the bringing together of the INHES and the IHEDN—respectively, the national institutes for higher security and defence studies), it is appropriate for everyone to reach agreement on the sense of the concept of security; that of defence is generally understood. How should one address this concept in the full meaning of the word? What conclusions can be drawn for our nation’s missions and structures as well as for better governance at a global level? These are the issues that this article addresses.

Security:  a New, Real, Planet-Wide Challenge

A World That is Felt to be Increasingly Fragile

It has become a cliché, but still merits restating here, that the 9/11 attacks in the United States were seen as ushering in a new geopolitical era and that, ever since, our world has seemed more fragile and vulnerable.

In fact, this sense of fragility was already widespread amongst experts faced with the information revolution that had been developing throughout the 1990s. US authorities had been preoccupied with this since 1997. The alert was also sounded amongst the general public in 2000 when it was feared that the Y2K bug would surface at the beginning of the new millennium. After 2001, other sectors were also affected: electrical distribution networks, with major outages occurring in the United States, Italy, Switzerland and Germany; health, with the SARS epidemic; environmental, with the tsunami that struck South-East Asia or the hurricane that devastated New Orleans. International terrorism has of course continued to have a severe impact, as everyone knows.