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The West: a securitising community?

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Abstract

The primary objective of this article is to theorise transformations of Western order in a manner that does not presuppose a fixed understanding of ‘the West’ as a pre-constituted political space, ready-made and waiting for social scientific enquiry. We argue that the Copenhagen School's understanding of securitisation dynamics provides an adequate methodological starting point for such an endeavour. Rather than taking for granted the existence of a Western ‘security community’, we thus focus on the performative effects of a security semantics in which ‘the West’ figures as the threatened, yet notoriously vague referent object that has to be defended against alleged challenges. The empirical part of the article reconstructs such securitisation dynamics in three different fields: the implications of representing China's rise as a challenge to Western order, the effects of the transformation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) towards a global security actor, and the consequences of extraordinary renditions and practices of torture for the normative infrastructure of ‘the West’. We conclude that Western securitisation dynamics can be understood as a discursive shift away from a legally enshrined culture of restraint and towards more assertive forms of self-authorisation.

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Notes

  1. In order to characterise the diffused form of integration that may then ensue, Said (1978/2003: 54f) refers to Gaston Bachelard's analysis of the poetics of space. ‘The inside of a house, he said, acquires a sense of intimacy, secrecy, security, real or imagined, because of the experiences that come to seem appropriate for it. The objective space of a house — its corners, corridors, cellar, rooms — is far less important than what poetically it is endowed with, which is usually a quality with an imaginative or figurative value we can name and feel’.

  2. For a genealogy and conceptual history of the West, see O’Hagan (2002) and Bonnett (2004).

  3. Notably, the ‘judeo’ part of the heritage seems to have been discovered only retroactively — after Auschwitz.

  4. Wæver has stressed the ‘anti-democratic implications’ of securitisation (Wæver 2003: 12) it represents a failure of handling challenges politically within the normal procedures of democratic politics.

  5. The suggestion to regard these four countries as a group of ‘larger emerging market economies’ and to summarise them under the acronym BRICs first came from Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill (2001).

  6. This idea was more recently reaffirmed at the NATO summit in Strasbourg and Kehl in 2009, when the members stated that ‘NATO continues to be the essential transatlantic forum for security consultations among Allies. Article 5 of the Washington Treaty and collective defence, based on the indivisibility of Allied security, are, and will remain, the cornerstone of our Alliance’ (North Atlantic Council 2009).

  7. NATO's out-of-area debate was not new at all as the allies had already committed themselves in the 1950s to counter ‘hostile Soviet influence in non-NATO regions’. Kupchan (1988) argued that out-of-area had become more important already by the end of the 1980s because of specific policies by some allies, in particular the United States vis-à-vis the Middle East.

  8. The air strikes against Serbia in 1999 were justified by references to the ‘values for which NATO has stood since its foundation: democracy, human rights and the rule of law’ (North Atlantic Council 1999).

  9. The relative absence of the latter does seem surprising, though, given Weber's emphasis on the inherent links between occidental rationalisation and capitalist development.

  10. The question of whether war is an appropriate term here is an ambivalent and contested one. Subsuming new forms of violence under a concept that inevitably evokes connotations of 19th-century cabinet politics seems both analytically unhelpful and normatively problematic. On the other hand, refraining from references to the language of warfare does not by itself yield a more plausible alternative. If this is not a war, then the ius in bello limitations on the use of violence that have been achieved throughout centuries of warfare can more easily be discarded. The Hague or Geneva Conventions then can be said not to apply to the revived category of ‘enemy combatants’ (which has now been abandoned by the Barack Obama administration).

  11. Most prominently expressed in Richard Rorty's remark that he considered then US Attorney General John Ashcroft to be more of a threat to American liberals like himself than Osama bin Laden. See also, from a journalistic point of view, Hersh (2004), Mayer (2008), and Prantl (2008). For an affirmative view see Yoo (2006).

  12. The now infamous term ‘torture memos’ refers to four documents, which the Obama administration made accessible to the public in April 2009. The memos are publicly available on the website of the American Civil Liberties Union at http://www.aclu.org/accountability/olc.html.

  13. On the concept of risk as a technology of governance see Aradau et al. (2008) and the contributions to their special issue of Security Dialogue as well as Kessler (2008).

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Acknowledgements

We thank Dan Deudney, Dan Nexon, and the reviewers of JIRD for comments and Helena Esther Grass, Christoph Lunkenheimer, Fabian Raimann, Cara Röhner, and Oxana Nazarenko for research support.

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Hellmann, G., Herborth, B., Schlag, G. et al. The West: a securitising community?. J Int Relat Dev 20, 301–330 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/jird.2013.9

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