Ontological Insecurity in the European Union

Catarina Kinnvall, Ian Manners, Jennifer Mitzen, Catarina Kinnvall, Ian Manners, Jennifer Mitzen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429559402
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

The European Union (EU) faces many crises and risks to its security and existence. While few of them threaten the lives of EU citizens, they all create a sense of anxiety and insecurity about the future for many ordinary Europeans. This comprehensive volume explores the concept of 'ontological security' which was introduced into international relations over a decade ago to better understand the 'security of being' found in feelings of fear, anxiety, crisis, and threat to wellbeing. The authors make use of this concept to explore how narratives of European integration have been part of public discourses in the post-war period and how reconciliation dynamics, national biographical narratives and memory politics have been enacted to create ontological security. Within this context, they also discuss the anxiety of the 'remainers' in the Brexit referendum and the consequences of its failure to address the ontological anxieties and insecurities of remain voters. The book also explores: how European security firms market ontological security and provide an ontological security-inspired reading of the EU's relations with post-communist states; the EU and NATO's engagement with hybrid threats; and the EU as an anxious community.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal European Security.

Introduction to 2018 special issue of European Security: “ontological (in)security in the European Union”

Catarina Kinnvall, Ian Manners and Jennifer Mitzen

ABSTRACT

The European Union (EU) faces many crises and risks to its security and existence. While few of them threaten the lives of EU citizens, they all create a sense of anxiety and insecurity about the future for many ordinary Europeans. Amongst these crises are the more obvious challenges of sovereign debt and fiscal austerity; refugees from conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria; and the rise of populist far-right parties across Europe. But behind these challenges lie less visible insecurities about economic prospects, social wellbeing, and a widespread expectation that the EU is unable to answer the challenges of twenty-first century global politics. In other words, the greatest security challenge facing people across Europe is not physical, despite the threats of Putin and ISIS, but is a sense of fear and anxiety over their daily lives.

The European Union (EU) faces many crises and risks to its security and existence. While few of them threaten the lives of EU citizens, they all create a sense of anxiety and insecurity about the future for many ordinary Europeans. Amongst these crises are the more obvious challenges of sovereign debt and fiscal austerity; refugees from conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria; the rise of populist far-right parties across Europe; as well as the uncertainty of a possibly disintegrating European Union (EU) as a result of the “Brexit” process. But behind these challenges lie less visible insecurities about economic prospects, social wellbeing, and a widespread expectation that the EU is unable to answer the challenges of twenty-first century global politics. In other words, the greatest security challenge facing people across Europe is not physical, despite the threats of Putin and ISIS, but a sense of fear and anxiety that seems to permeate everyday lives of many European citizens and denizens. Scholars of European security struggle to explain the linkages between the relatively low physical risks to contemporary EU citizens and the sky-high feelings of fear, anxiety, and threat felt by European populations. Similarly, scholars of the European Union have been largely unable to move beyond a focus on institutional, legal, and policy challenges to the Union to account for pressures from anxious and fearful individuals and groups in search of existential answers to their real and imagined predicaments as shown in recent opinion polls.

Taken together with other surveys of European fears and anxieties (Borger et al. 2015, Unisys 2017), the EU’s Eurobarometer public opinion polling demonstrates the extent to which Europeans have confirmed such quandaries over the past decade. Here we notice a shift in regards to personal insecurities and anxieties in which personal fears were primarily socio-economic following the global financial crisis in 2007 and the peak of the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis in 2012. Likewise, unemployment remained a primary fear at personal, member state, and EU levels during 2009–2014 while, in contrast, both member state and EU level fears were focused on immigration and terrorism from 2014 onwards. There are clear differences at the state level, with countries within the Eurozone, such as Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands having a central focus on economic fears, while those countries involved in international conflict and enduring terrorist threats, such as the UK and France, express greater fears over terrorism (see Eurobarometer 88, Autumn 2017, QA3-5).

Figures such as these can provide some indications of the current concerns that preoccupy many Europeans but they are less helpful for understanding the underlying motivations for such apprehensions. This is where research on ontological security, or perhaps more accurately, ontological insecurity, provides a much-needed account of the principal dynamics behind the emotional underpinnings of increased anxieties and fears among the European populace. An ontological security approach provides leverage for understanding how fears and anxieties at group, state, and EU level have psycho-socio-political effects that shape political movements, policy debates, and European security.

It is now more than a decade since the concept of “ontological security” was introduced into International Relations (IR) in order to better understand the “security of being” (a concept discussed below) found in feelings of fear, anxiety, crisis, and threat to wellbeing (Kinnvall 2004a, 2006, Steele 2005, 2008, Mitzen 2006a, 2006b, 2016, Kinnvall and Nesbitt-Larking 2009). However, a real question must be raised over why the study of ontological security has not been used collectively to understand the most profound challenges to security within the EU outlined above (for exceptions see: Manners 2002, 2013a).

With its origins in the psychoanalysis of Ronald Laing in Self and Others (Laing 1960) and the sociology of Anthony Giddens in Modernity and Self-Identity (Giddens 1991), an ontological security perspective highlights the need actors believe they have to feel as if they have stable identities. It draws analytic attention to biographical narratives, and to routinised and home-making practices as the modes for constructing and sustaining ontological security, helping us to see how those practices shape political possibilities and outcomes. A number of scholars have examined ontological security in Europe, including work on the EU (Manners 2002, 2013a), state diplomacy (Mitzen 2006a, 2006b, 2016) peace studies (Roe 2008), security communities (Adler and Greve 2009, Browning and Joenniemi 2013, Browning 2018a), and on political psychology and migration (Kinnvall and Nesbitt-Larking 2011). What all of these studies show is that the analytical prism an ontological security perspective provides sheds distinctive light on European security and insecurity.

However, more important from our perspective is that a focus on ontological security brings to the fore the many contentions involved in European insecurities, such as those between individuals and their respective states; between state leaders, their populations and the European Union; and between the European Union and the world. A focus on ontological security and insecurity is attentive first and foremost to the often-ignored affective relations between these loosely aligned units of analysis. It talks about the difficulties experienced by many citizens and denizens in Europe in terms of access to resources and services, but also of the traumatisation, despair, uncertainty, and alienation many of them experience in terms of opportunities for social participation in the light of austerity policies, migration discourses, and populist politics. However, it also raises questions around collective “bodies”, such as European states and the European Union, and the extent to which they can feel and experience harm, alienation, threat, and despair (as well as hope, joy and happiness). In the case of the EU it raises questions about its presumed role as a security provider, a security community, and/or a peace project onto which various myths, symbols, and imaginations are being projected (Manners 2010, 2013b). As the various articles in this special issue show, such “bodies” always exist as continuous works in progress involving a complex web of narrative imagination, perceived realities, and shared beliefs about the ordering of claims for unification and recognition, making the move between levels of analysis as outlined in much ontological security work an important catalyst for grasping collective emotions and their effects.

Psycho-, socio-, politico- ontological security

The 60-year old concept of ontological security has its origins in psychoanalysis, sociology, and political psychology; any understanding or application of the concept thus needs to take seriously these three psycho-, socio-, politico- elements. Writing in 1950 the psychoanalysist Erik Erikson argued that societies create the conditions for human growth through security, identity, and integrity:

In this book we suggest that, to understand either childhood or society, we must expand our scope to include the study of the way in which societies lighten the inescapable conflicts of childhood with a promise of some security, identity, and integrity. In thus reinforcing the values by which the ego exists societies create the only condition under which human growth is possible. (Erikson 1950, p. 251)

Drawing on the introduction of the terms “ontological security” and “ontological insecurity” by the literary critic Trilling (1955), the psychoanalyst Ronald Laing argued that ontological security occurs when there is an absence of “anxieties and dangers” where “identity and autonomy are never in danger” (Laing 1960, p. 39 and 41). In contrast Laing argued that ontological insecurity arises “with the consequent attempts to deal with … anxieties and dangers” where “identity and autonomy are always in question” (Laing 1960, p. 39 and 42). The condition of ontological security is closely associated with the “depressive position” of Klein (1975), which constructs self and other by accepting complexity without resorting to splitting and projection, while the condition of ontological insecurity is more closely associated with the Kleinian “paranoid-schizoid position” with psychic processes of “splitting and projection in which, in order to defend against anxiety, self and other are split into wholly good and thoroughly bad” (Cash 1993, pp. 107–110, 2009, pp. 95–96).

While the study of ontological insecurity was primarily within the fields of literature and psychoanalysis in the 1960s and 1970s, the concept slowly made its way into the field of sociology (Gibbon 1972, Kanter 1974, Heyman and Shaw 1978). In the 1980s and 1990s the work of Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck was important in bringing together the concept of ontological security with the study of risk society (Beck et al. 1994). For Giddens, ontological security refers to a person’s elemental sense of safety in the world where trust of other people is like an emotional inoculation against existential anxieties: “a protection against future threat and dangers which allows the individual to sustain hope and courage in the face of whatever debilitating circumstances she or he might later confront” (Giddens 1991, pp. 38–39 in Kinnvall 2002, p. 102). Similarly for Beck,

This all-encompassing and all-permeating insecurity is not just the dark side of freedom. What is important instead is to discover it as the bright side. The introduction of insecurity into our thought and deeds may help to achieve the reduction of objectives, slowness, revisability and ability to learn, the care, consideration, tolerance and irony that are necessary for the change to a new modernity. (Beck 1997, p. 168 in Cash 2009, p. 97)

In parallel to the sociological field was the work on ontological security within the field of political psychology (Renshon 1976, Diamond 1985). John Cash brought together psychoanalysis with the structuration of ideology to argue that, “Our ‘basic security system’ ([Giddens’] substitute term for the unconscious) has to be intact. Routinely it is intact and, as such, it guarantees our ontological security, an ontological security which critical situations disrupt” (Cash 1993, p. 82, 1996, p. 57). Cash went further to argue that

political conflict … endemically involves challenges to the ontological security of the subject and thus engages the complex field of thought, emotion and interest. In the popular phrase ideological conflict is always ‘a battle for the hearts and minds’ of subjects, or, as Gramsci would have it, for intellectual and moral, as well as political, hegemony. (Cash 1993, p. 104, 1996, p. 72)

Similarly, Catarina Kinnvall drew on Erikson, Giddens and Julia Kristeva to focus on the “sociopsychological aspects of category formation and the essentialization of the ‘other’” where ontological security and existential anxiety are used for “understanding the global-local nexus as psychologised discourses of domination and resistance” (Kinnvall 2002, p. 80, 2004a, p. 747, 2004b).

This theme was recently developed in Cash and Kinnvall’s (2017) discussion of ontological security and postcolonial borders in which they argue that the search for ontological security is intimately connected to a “national fantasy” in which imaginations of borders as bounded space often hinges on an obsession with the limits of sovereignty. “To reclaim control over this lost sovereignty and fulfil the national fantasy of homogeneity tends to involve diffuse attempts at governing securities, identities and histories” (Cash and Kinnvall 2017, p. 269). Here, the emphasis is on the indeterminate nature of ontological security as a need that actors believe they have in order for them to experience a notion of wholeness and mastery of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction to 2018 special issue of European Security: “ontological (in)security in the European Union”
• 2 Narrating Europe: the EU's ontological security dilemma
• 3 Breaking with Europe’s pasts: memory, reconciliation, and ontological (In)security
• 4 Political memory, ontological security, and Holocaust remembrance in post-communist Europe
• 5 Socio-psychological reactions in the EU to immigration: from regaining ontological security to desecuritisation
• 6 Brexit, existential anxiety and ontological (in)security
• 7 The market for ontological security
• 8 Countering hybrid warfare as ontological security management: the emerging practices of the EU and NATO
• 9 Anxious community: EU as (in)security community
• Index