Discussing âcivilisationâ may seem archaic in 2018; and discussing civilisation in the context of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), a political and military alliance, may also seem little tangible in the present ever-connected globalised era, especially as the current form of the organisation has surpassed the original limits of a strictly north Atlantic territoriality. Still, civilisation is a powerful idea on the contemporary international scene, giving rise to many heated debates, in particular when issues of identity, culture, and security are at stake, for their frequent association with some degree of prejudice, stereotypes and domination. However, almost instinctively, when the leader of a nation, or international organisation, refers to a threat to civilisation, an alert is somehow sounded that echoes through the perception that something serious may be about to happen. With the reference to civilisation, our most inner individual dimension interconnects with a wider world of commonality, both in space and time, and questions arise about what it fundamentally means to be civilised.
Historically, alliances have been one of the most important manifestations of the balance of power (Morgenthau, 1948: 137), which may explain why the history of NATO has generally prevailed as a series of accounts on technical, organisational, diplomatic capabilities, and conjunctural politics. Evidently, NATO does not correspond to the traditional idea that alliances use to be temporary and last only as long there is a specific threat to combat (Wendt, 1994), as it has evolved from an alliance into a community, and from focusing on one specific threat to unspecific risks (Adler, 2008; Coker, 2002; Mozaffari, 2002: 30; NATO, 1991). In fact, it has managed to overcome its original compromise towards the safeguard of the civilisation of its people (NATO, 1949), up until the more contemporary policies committing to protecting individuals outside its original area of intervention (NATO, 2011). NATOâs referent objects of securityâwhat it aims at securing1âhave silently changed, but to what extent this seemingly natural evolution may be framed by unconscious processes?
The modern narrative on Western civilisation has been confined within a static linearity of time and progress, which has influenced the conscious knowledge we have of NATO as the product of a normal evolution of a pre-existing civilisational identity. In line with a Foucauldian archaeological perspective (2000), the spatial and temporal context of NATOâs emergence should be questioned in relation to how the past was appropriated, and through what kind of practices of domination and relations of power . To what extent may NATO benefit from the Westâs cumulated capital of domination in order to influence and control the field of international security? Yet, by uncovering what those practices of domination and power relations consist of, and how they have produced hegemonic knowledge, an essential unconscious dimension remains in the realm of what has been subjugated, i.e., of what has been dominated in order to naturalise the hegemonic content of knowledge. This phenomenon is in part illustrated by AndrĂ© Barrinha and Marcos Rosa (2013: 110), who show that security meanings in the context of NATO or the EU are appropriated by their members in such a way that they end up âtranslating a particular liberal understanding of security that is in many cases completely foreignâ to their own security context. Put in other words, the naturalisation of knowledge implies that unconscious meanings have to be conveyed and seized through the narratives on Western civilisation.
This book attempts to humanise the history of NATO by enhancing the unconscious entrenchment of the concept of civilisation within Western minds. By doing that, it also seeks to humanise the very idea of civilisation and expose the epistemological suppression composing Western civilisation. Moved by a fundamental concern over how unconscious forms of knowledge have shaped not only collective perceptions and representations of the world and its history, the book builds up on the impact those forms of knowledge may have on the prevailing readings and practices of contemporary international security. It takes NATO to look into, question, and bring into light the relationship between civilisation and individuals, ultimately enhancing the role of the unconscious dimension of international security. The overall objective is to understand in more depth the dynamics composing the still underexplored relationship within security studies, and more broadly within International Relations (IR), between the idea of civilisation and the place of individuality in it. It does so by making visible how the security of civilisation and the security of individuals have been (interrelatedly) conceptualised and practiced throughout NATOâs evolution.
1.1 The Unconscious Question
In Western thought, the âancientâ unconscious can be traced as far back as the fifth century BCE in Greece, broadly understood as the âinternal qualities of the mind that affect conscious thought and behaviorâ, without the subjects being conscious themselves (Uleman, 2005: 3). Much later, during the eighteenth century, Enlightenment thinkers and their âprojectâ of Modernity focused on developing human rationality through objective science, universal morality and law, with the ultimate goal of liberating individuals from the irrationalities of religion, myths, superstition, and from the arbitrary use of power (Habermas, 1998; Harvey, 1996: 12â13). This tradition assumes that individuals have a total control over their knowledge, and it has since then been very influential in Western thought, translating into an âexaggerated respect for the supposedly selfconscious rational individual, an idea we preserve by treating anything that is not part of consciousness as physical, an effect of the bodyâ (Easthope, 1999: 5).
In the late 1800s, early 1900s, psychoanalysis emerges as a field articulated around the psychology of what is unconscious, by the hands of Sigmund Freud , and new forms of knowledge begin to be considered that remit to new ways of perceiving, inseparable of the social practices that were changing at the time. As Roland Gori further explains, Freud decisively transformed how men and women perceive themselves, understand and interrelate with each other. By uncovering the importance of unconscious processes, Freud altered the relationship between the subjects and language. A new hermeneutics is produced by the sense that language does not say exactly what it is saying, because it conveys a deeper signification superseding its immediate meaning (2017: 129). Today, although the Freudian psychoanalytic unconscious is the most widespread conception of the unconscious, it is viewed as a failed scientific theory âbecause evidence of its major components cannot be observed, measured precisely, or manipulated easilyâ (Uleman, 2005: 5).
For the social sciences, inclusively, any psychological explanation of a social phenomenon is generally discarded, as âthe materialism of historical explanation and the metaphysical idea of the unconscious are mutually exclusiveâ (Easthope, 1999: 135). Yet, in the critical enterprise of bringing into visibility the internal contradictions, tensions, distortions of the categories of mind constitutive of knowledge (Hegel, 1977), it is fundamental to stand for the non-acceptance of the prevailing order, on the basis that the order we know is â[b]y no means natural, necessary or historically invariableâ (Devetak, 2005: 143). This calls for an interdisciplinary approach that is able to both bring forward the non-exempt relationship between knowledge and society, and transcend the materialism of historical approaches. This is why this book draws on a conception of the unconscious that is not limited to psychoanalytical formulations, but that is broadly conceived as including behavioural, cognitive, and social psychological elements related to the unconscious. In this sense, this book suggests, considering the role of the unconscious today allows individuals to understand, and possibly cope with, the apparent irrationality of their perceptions, or the apparent inexplicability of what they know, by acknowledging the role of reinforcement, memory, perceptual processes, affect, control and metacognition (Uleman, 2005: 5â6).
This book is very much inspired by historian Fernand Braudelâs (1958) conception of âunconscious historyâ (lâhistoire inconsciente), because it somehow reconciles historical materialism with the unconscious dimension of knowledge. Unconscious history, as Braudel defines it, passes on the sense of history that overcomes the duration of a single event in the most transcendent ways, and that carries with it some imperceptible meanings that travel across time, beyond the flashes of the greatest historical events: âEach one of us has the transcendent awareness of a mass history, whose force we recognise better than the laws or directionâ (Braudel, 1958: 740).2 There seem to be structures that are indeed â[s]o enduring that they remain for contemporaries part of the unconscious or the unknownâ and its â[t]ransformation is so slow that it escapes their awarenessâ (Koselleck, 2004: 108).
This invisible and latent form of history suggests that we have an unconscious perception of who we are, and of what we are doing, independently of our specific temporal location. However, this unconsciousness relates mainly to the perspective of short duration, i.e., of âmicro-timeâ (Braudel, 1958: 739), as short-term insights may veil our awareness in perceiving history more widely. This implies, on the contrary, that when we think of history in macro-time, or longer duration, the perception we have of it is rather conscious. There are indeed different complex layers composing the importance that history, as much as civilisation, conveys to the collective imaginary, and to the representations of international security. Each of these layers gives a critical and defining sense to the perception of who we are, where we come from, what we have done collectively as âHumanityâ, and where we would li...