The Security of the State and the Security of Life, Person and Properties of Its Nationals

Abstract

One can conceptually distinguish the security of the state from the security of its nationals by defining the security of an entity as the absence of threats to the values it upholds. There is no doubt that the former is in serious tension with the latter. Would not this tension undermine not only the expectation of defense behavior but also the security of the state and that of its nationals? This article aims at theoretically examining the conditions under which these two conflicting securities can be reconciled with each other from the viewpoint of expected defense behavior.

The first section provides an overview of competing reasoning, seemingly in tension, between the protection of the life, person, and properties of the nationals as in “the national security strategy” and the endurance of the sacrifice to the life, person, and properties of the nationals as in “the theory of endurance” articulated by the court. The second section shows that Japan’s exclusively defense-oriented policy, a declaratory policy under which Japan pledges not to use force except in the phase of expelling armed attack, is not free from the problem of trade-off between credible threat and credible promise. It follows that internal legal-institutional arrangements (compensation for the sacrifice to the life, person, and properties of the nationals, as a result of use of force in deviation from exclusively defense-oriented policy, in particular) would contribute to avoiding irrational war by making it impossible to arbitrarily deviate from the external commitment. And the third section discusses the remaining limits of expected defense behavior.