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1 Introduction
There are two positions that I confront in this book. The first derives from an assumption in International Relations (IR) theory that has been a target for critical security studies for some time – that nation-states are primarily concerned with their survival. This book seeks to expand upon those critical studies – problematizing that assumption by asking whether states desire something more than survival in international politics. By way of introduction, I should state that my decision to confront the survival assumption in IR theory was not made in a vacuum. I wrote the majority of this book during the post-9/11 era in a country where literally almost any policy can be legitimized if it can plausibly, even tangentially, be portrayed as securing the physical integrity of the United States and its citizens. Whether it be torture and all forms of prisoner abuse or the invasion of a sovereign state that posed no actual threat to the US, such policies have been enacted because they were perceived as necessary to protect the United States from some existential threat. The obvious costs to such policies were evident but not fully articulated and resulted in a counter-narrative that was less than effective and did not speak to my overwhelming concerns as an IR scholar and an American (in that order).
That counter-narrative asserts that the above policies, while supposedly shoring up American physical security, compromised America’s position as a leading member of the international community and violated America’s moral obligation to promote its security interests through legitimate, multilateral channels. The binary of ‘‘self’’ v. ‘‘collective’’ interest in this matter was hardly new, and operationally and theoretically it makes sense – either the US had an interest in unilaterally promoting its security, or it needed to formulate its individual security interests as a collective problem requiring collective action.1 The former ‘‘interest’’ implies a selfish action, the latter a ‘‘moral’’ commitment to uphold collective principles. Yet politically it has become unpopular in the United States to reference these ‘‘moral’’ commitments to international standards. And so Americans are left with a choice – either pursue policies that are selfish yet (they are informed) best ensure their physical survival, or continue to uphold international standards that are popular with the international community but (they are also informed) compromise American security. With such a choice, Americans are usually forced to hold their noses and prefer the former over the latter. It is unfortunate that no alternative meta-narrative exists which, frankly, represents a ‘‘third possibility’’ – that the US has an interest in protecting its vision of who it is, an appeal that recognizes what can be accomplished (both good and bad) through an internal reflection that tackles who and what the United States (or any nation-state) has been, has become, or will be; an account that recognizes the importance of physical existence and social needs, but places the driving force for both upon the securing of self-identity through time.
Introduction to ontological security
The central argument of the book is that states pursue social actions to serve self-identity needs, even when these actions compromise their physical existence. I use an ontological security approach to make intelligible three forms of social action that are sometimes referred to as ‘‘motives’’ of state behavior (moral, humanitarian, and honor-driven). While IR scholars have developed various interpretations of these actions they have done so by differentiating them into dualistic ‘‘forms.’’ Moral actions, we are told, are ‘‘costly,’’ honor is ‘‘dangerous,’’ and humanitarian actions compromise the ‘‘strategic’’ or ‘‘realist’’ interests that states must satisfy for their own physical existence.2 This dualism assumes that for states to pursue ‘‘non’’-strategic actions they must be pulled in a direction that they otherwise do not wish to go (either by domestic groups or by the international community). Yet why do states themselves feel compelled to pursue such actions? How do such actions serve the national interest? How are moral actions rational? The short answer to such questions is that these actions satisfy the selfidentity needs of states. Or, conversely, that if states avoided these actions their sense of self-identity would be radically disrupted, and such a disruption is just as important to states as threats to their physical integrity.
States pursue their needs through social action, yet not to impress an external society so much as to satisfy their internal self-identity needs, and this book explicates such actions as rational pursuits to fulfill the drive for ontological security, as developed from the structuration theory of sociologist Anthony Giddens.3 The traditional notion of security in International Relations theory assumes that nation-states have one driving goal in their relations with other states – their own survival. Thus they should calculate their foreign policy decisions with solely that goal in mind. The cases explored in this book directly contradict, to varying degrees, the survival assumption which pervades mainstream IR, and the ontological security approach elucidates the actions pursued in those cases.
While physical security is (obviously) important to states, ontological security is more important because its fulfillment affirms a state’s self-identity (i.e. it affirms not only its physical existence but primarily how a state sees itself and secondarily how it wants to be seen by others). Nation-states seek ontological security because they want to maintain consistent self-concepts, and the ‘‘Self’’ of states is constituted and maintained through a narrative which gives life to routinized foreign policy actions. Those routines can be disrupted when a state realizes that its narratived actions no longer reflect or are reflected by how it sees itself. When this sense of self-identity is dislocated an actor will seek to re-establish routines that can, once again, consistently maintain self-identity.
Ontological security reveals how crises that garner the attention of states challenge their identity. As the disparate behaviors of states illustrate, identity needs compel them to pursue actions that are seemingly irrational – yet such behavior must have made sense to the state agents who decided upon that course of action at the time. While the costs of ignoring physical security threats are obvious, such as ‘‘missile gaps,’’ world wars, eventual arms races, etc., little work has been done on the costs of ignoring threats to ontological security. Consistently ignored threats to ontological security produce what I refer to as ‘‘shame’’ for nation-state agents. Shame is used as a metaphor to understand how identity disconnects can compel states to pursue social actions which sacrifice physical security interests but strengthen ontological security. As developed in Chapter 3, shame is a problem in ontological security — nation-states seek to avoid it at all costs; however, its presence is needed if a state is going to confront its disrupted self-visions and therefore regain ontological security (although the former does not always guarantee the latter, as will also be demonstrated). Shame produces a deep feeling of insecurity – it is a temporary but radical severance of a state’s sense of Self. Its presence means that a state recognizes how its actions were (or could be) incongruent with its sense of self-identity. Ontological security-driven action, because it attempts to change behavior in relation to experienced shame, is thus self-help behavior.
Compared to the manner in which IR theorists have treated social action, using the need for ontological security in states leads to novel empirical findings. For example, humanitarian forms of social action presented a puzzle to mainstream IR theorists in the 1990s, who often understood such actions as a form of empathy that, in the following author’s view, contradicts the ‘‘self-help’’ behavior predicted by neorealist theory:
[Prosocial behavior] is derived from an assumption of other-regardingness – a sense of community or collective identity that fosters the well-being of others. Evidence that state behavior is motivated by this kind of empathetic identity would contradict neorealism, since such behavior would not be predicted by any neorealist theory.
(Elman 1996: 24, emphasis added)
Elman’s statement about ‘‘humanitarianess’’ being prosocial is still the basic assumption in IR theory, and the concomitant proposition in the above quotation is that such behavior contradicts the notion of ‘‘self-help.’’ And so IR scholars have attempted to explain these actions as the reconstitution of interests due to mitigating influences outside capability distributions. For instance, liberal scholars have argued that shifts in domestic coalitions explain ‘‘costly moral action.’’4 For constructivists, humanitarian action develops from changes in social or collective identities (as Elman posits above). And English School solidarists like Nicholas Wheeler would argue that the defense of individuals is a principle which states uphold through interventions because it establishes the order that members of international society value.5 Regardless of their differences, all of these non-materialist accounts commonly assume that humanitarian or moral action is socially determined by collective intersubjective understandings that can best be understood by looking at changes in international or domestic context. At the very least, this research has concluded that what drives states to intervene on behalf of others is empathy; therefore the strangers who are being saved are not really ‘‘strangers’’ after all because ‘‘we tend to help those we perceive as similar to ourselves’’ (Finnemore 2003: 157). The whole concept of empathy implies a connection with others. The source for the repetition of this affective pull, according to this view, can be found at the international level in institutions of international law, organizations, norms, or regimes.
There is thus an environmental focus in many mainstream approaches – and it is one whose import goes well beyond the issue area of humanitarian action. The biggest departure the ontological security account finds with all mainstream approaches is one of their shared core assumptions, according to Lebow that ‘‘identities and interests at the state level depend heavily on international society. ... Actors respond primarily to external stimuli. Realist, liberal and institutionalist approaches all focus on the constraints and opportunities created by the environment’’ (Lebow 2003: 336, 347, emphasis added).
Yet the same constructivists who place such an emphasis upon social environment, who thereby tacitly de-emphasize reflexive agency – when our needs are heavily intertwined with those of a community we have less control over what or who we are as individuals – also recognize ‘‘the need to adumbrate the mechanisms by which actors free themselves from dominant discourses and possibly transform the culture that is otherwise responsible for their identities’’ (Lebow 2003: 269, emphasis added). Furthermore, Finnemore states:
We lack good understandings of how law and institutions at the international level create these senses of felt obligation in individuals, much less states, that induce compliance and flow from some change in people’s understanding of their purpose or goals ... pursuing these issues will take us down a road we have lately avoided – toward understanding change.
(Finnemore 2003: 160–161, emphasis added)
One response to Lebow and Finnemore’s calls is to acknowledge that emancipation is much more difficult if we view that which must be transformed as the mountain of some embedded international ‘‘variable’’ (culture, identity, society, etc.). Furthermore, outside-in approaches, by focusing on international context, fail to conclude that social actions which appear to us to be driven by international context, such as ‘‘humanitarian’’ or ‘‘moral’’ actions, might instead be rational responses meant to fulfill a sense of self-identity. Actors might not be able to ‘‘free’’ themselves from international context, but they can free their Selves from routines which ultimately damage their self-identity. This does not mean that they will do so, however, but it does imply that the possibilities for ‘‘humanitarian’’ actions rest not upon a change in international context – nor even what to me seems like a Herculean effort to transform the discursive or ideational culture within which states operate – but upon a state interrogating its sense of Self.
Such an understanding of social action would address why states in similar structural contexts pursue different policy choices. Why would the United States fail to stop the genocide in Rwanda but feel compelled to do so in Kosovo (albeit in limited fashion in both cases). Are we to believe that the ‘‘social’’ context of world politics changed that remarkably in those five years? Why would the British fail to intervene (until 1995) in Bosnia but be so adamant about an intervention, through NATO, in Kosovo? These situations threatened the ability of states to effectively narrate their sense of selves and thus the context that did change was internal to each state’s sense of self-identity. In 1999, NATO leaders were influenced by the recall of past disasters in weighing whether to intervene in Kosovo. Beginning with the Holocaust prior to and during World War II and leading up through Rwanda and Bosnia, these crises were discursive resources used by state agents that resulted in national remorse and ontological insecurity. The source for each NATO member state’s particular insecurity differed – yet all equally wished to atone for past policy disasters that radically disrupted their sense of Selves. By looking at the British case of neutrality in the American Civil War, the Belgians in the First World War, and the case of the Kosovo intervention, we can better understand why states feel compelled to pursue (what appear to us) moral or ‘‘costly’’ actions and, most importantly, why such action is rational and in a state’s self-interest even if it contradicts our prevailing conception of state security.
This does not imply that ontological security ‘‘determines’’ the actions of states – nor, furthermore, that politics plays no role in such action. Like the realist who assumes that leaders use politics and rhetoric to satiate the masses and activate them to engage in unsavory ‘‘security’’ policies, ontological security scholars assume that state agents use politics to secure selfidentity commitments. Indeed, is there anything more political in social life than the struggle over identity?
Interpreting ontological security
How do I demonstrate my argument? Because I am interested in how actors create meanings for their actions and this book is a ‘‘motivational’’ or ‘‘intentional’’ account of action (see Kratochwil 1989: 23–25), and because I explicate the intentions of those actions where, instead of what necessarily ‘‘caused’’ them, my study is informed by the Verstehen approach to social scientific inquiry. Also known as the ‘‘interpretivist’’’ or ‘‘hermeneutic’’ approach, Verstehen assumes that facts and observations are not independent entities reducible to the law-like generalizations of the physical sciences. Rather, understanding the objects of inquiry means also understanding, in a holistic manner, what processes motivate those actions. This is made possible by
plac[ing] an action within an intersubjectively understood context, even if such imputations are problematic or even ‘‘wrong’’ in terms of their predictive capacity. To have ‘‘explained’’ an action often means to have made intelligible the goals for which it was undertaken.
(Kratochwil 1989: 24–25)
What does it mean to interpret action rather than explain it through causal analysis? The ontological security process – a process which deals with matters such as self-identity, the creation of meanings for actions through a ‘‘biographical narrative,’’ how actors decide upon certain actions to promote a healthy vision of the self to others, how the internal dialectic of a divided or severed Self overcomes (but not always) insecurity, and how all of this influences the place of the national self in an international context – lends itself to an interpretive approach. In short, one must properly evaluate the context in which the self-regarding behavior...
