Culture and Security

Symbolic Power and the Politics of International Security

Michael Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134315529
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

This book examines the role of culture in contemporary security policies, providing a critical overview of the ways in which culture has been theorized in security studies.

Developing a theoretical framework that stresses the relationship between culture, power, security and strategy, the volume argues that cultural practices have been central to transformations in European and US security policy in the wake of the Cold War – including the evolution of NATO and the expansion of the EU. Michael C. Williams maintains that cultural practices continue to play powerful roles in international politics today, where they are essential to grasping the ascendance of neoconservatism in US foreign policy.

Investigating the rise in popularity of culture and constructivism in security studies in relation to the structure and exercise of power in post-Cold War security relations, the book contends that this poses significant challenges for considering the connection between analytic and political practices, and the relationship between scholarship and power in the construction of security relations.

Culture and Security will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of international relations, security studies and European politics.

1
Culture, strategy, and security

Recasting an historical relationship

Attempting to theorize culture and identity is a difficult task under any circumstances. But in the case of security studies the endeavour is perhaps particularly challenging. Traditionally, security studies appears to have had little place for questions of identity, or for broader forms of theorizing practice. In the theoretical vision that dominated security studies as it developed in the period after the Second World War, and that arguably continues to do so, states are taken as both the primary objects and agents of security. These states are held to be rational actors, deploying an essentially instrumental rationality as their primary form of decision-making. Power is understood largely in terms of material capability, while the anarchy of the international system provides the central context structuring security relations. In many eyes, these assumptions continue, for better or worse, to form what Colin Gray (1982) once called the ‘bedrock’ of strategic studies, and culture and identity are largely absent from and irrelevant for security analysis.

The continuing power of this way of understanding security is one of the first things that any attempt to put culture and identity at the centre of security studies must confront, and much of the field has over the last decade been preoccupied in doing so. One major strand of these enquiries has questioned the ability of rationalist and materialist theories to appreciate and theorize the impact of identity dynamics in security relations (including state action), and questioned whether a materialist conception of power is sufficient to grasp the structures and dynamics of contemporary security relations. Broadly speaking, this has been the approach of much of the most significant recent work in critical and constructivist security studies and international relations. A second path, more characteristic of the broader theoretical debates in IR from the late 1980s through the 1990s, stressed the limited and limiting meta-theoretical foundations of traditional conceptions of security, and their links to dominance of ‘positivism’ and an empiricist epistemology and materialist ontology. In this view, it was and is the search for a ‘science’ of security and international politics that privileges material phenomena in theory construction and that, by definition, excludes the intersubjective realms of culture and identity from analysis.¹

Each of these paths of enquiry has made significant contributions to broadening the agenda of security studies, and this chapter seeks to contribute further to this process. To do so, however, I suggest that a certain reframing of the origins and influence of rationalist and materialist understandings of security is necessary if we are to more fully understand the narrow vision of security and its continuing attraction and power. While rationalist understandings of state action driven by the simplistic adoption of a state-as-actor model, by naive assumptions about action dependent upon the ideas of homo economus (or homo strategicus), or by empiricist strictures concerning the correct foundations for social science certainly abound, the rationalist and materialist visions of agency and practice in security studies can also be traced to a deeper political lineage, a lineage with the relationship of security, culture and identity at its very core. Indeed, while rationalist and materialist views are conventionally contrasted to those which focus on the social construction of action, and while rationalist views of agency appear far distant from questions of culture and identity, this perception is deeply misleading. In fact, the roots of rationalist and materialist theories of security can be traced to understandings of the relationship between identity and security that developed early in modern liberal politics. A concern with culture and identity, in other words, is not foreign or opposed to the rationalist-materialist foundations of traditional conceptions of strategy and security. These foundations are in reality a consequence of a concern with culture and identity, and are a product of social practices reflecting these concerns and their relationship to the politics of security.

One of the most powerful moves of traditional security studies has lain in a denial of these origins. Through a process of reification, classical liberal visions of social practices – with all their incompleteness, complexities, contradictions, and political and ethical dilemmas – were transformed into theoretical postulates upon which objective theories could be built or, even worse, into simple statements of fact about the nature of human agency. The impact of this process has been to popularize a truncated rationalist theory of action, including state action. It has also directly contributed to the assumption that security must be defined primarily as state security. Broadly speaking, narrow visions of security are built upon a powerful but usually tacit construction of the relationship between this vision of subjectivity and conceptions of sovereignty that produce – as a conceptual a priori, not an empirical fact – the definition of security as state security and the condition of international anarchy as the determining context of security relations. Opening up this legacy helps clear away some of the more pernicious and powerful barriers to a fuller theorization of practice in security studies.

Security, knowledge, and the rise of the liberal sensibility

The background against the relationship between culture, identity, and security needs to be seen, and can be traced to what I will call the emergence of the ‘liberal sensibility’² in thinking about the politics of security, an historical attempt to construct a new ensemble of knowledgeable practices in response to turmoil and violence – the security concerns – of the early modern era. In this context, the idea of an individual subject calculating in a material context was part of a related set of practical transformations, an attempt to rearticulate both identity and epistemology in the service of new social practices conducive to peace and civil order. The apparent absence of a concern with culture and identity in traditional conceptions of security needs to be understood as the historical legacy of a conscious attempt to exclude identity concerns from the political realm. It is in part a consequence of broader cultural practices – what might be called a negative identity practice – that is a central element in the liberal sensibility’s construction of the place of identity in understanding the politics of security.³ The progenitors of this liberal sensibility were all too conscious of the importance of strongly held values and identities. But they saw them as perhaps the primary source of violence and insecurity in the early modern era. What they sought to do in response was to confute these beliefs in theory, to marginalize them in practice, and to replace them with new forms of understanding and political action.⁴ In short, they sought to transform fundamentally early modern political culture, and with it the politics of violence and the nature of security. When viewed against this context, it becomes apparent that rationalism and materialism are cultural practices, practices with the question of identity and the politics of security at their very core.

As Steven Toulmin (1990) has forcefully argued, the relationship between modern knowledge and security (or violence) was more intimate than is often acknowledged. Echoing the portraits of modernity painted by Dewey, Rorty (1979) and others, Toulmin finds the core of modernity in a search for and commitment to formal rationality, universality and, most particularly, a ‘Quest for Certainty’.⁵ Unlike those who treat this transition in purely intellectual or philosophical terms, however, Toulmin finds the genesis of this ‘Quest for Certainty’ in what could (with only slight violence to his ideas) be called a ‘Quest for Security’, an intellectual transformation spurred by the violent social conflicts of the time. In his words:

The seventeenth century ‘Quest for Certainty’ was no mere proposal to construct abstract and timeless intellectual schemas, dreamed up as objects of pure, detached intellectual study. Instead it was a timely response to a specific historical challenge – the political, social, and theological chaos embodied in the Thirty Years’ War.

(1990:70)⁶

For Toulmin, the dominant account of the rise of the modernist vision of knowledge, which portrays the process as an essentially intellectual endeavour, presents a profoundly misleading account of the emergence of modernity. Rather than comprising a disembodied intellect, or a self-evident method optimistic in its ability to advance objective knowledge for its own sake, the modernist vision emerged in a context of fear, violence and conflict. The modernist search for new foundations was more than a purely intellectual enterprise, because the articulation of an empiricist and materialist foundation for knowledge was as tied up in the question of politics in the seventeenth century as it was with questions of science.⁷ This is not to say that this development can be reduced to politics, but it is to say that to see this broad epistemological project purely as the outcome of an intellectualist paradigm shift (the rise of empiricism and ‘positivism’) is to misunderstand its genesis and structure. Rooted in the concrete dilemmas concerning the grounds of political belief, assent and order, the rise of the materialist-empiricist synthesis was located in a complex set of controversies which I shall attempt very briefly to trace by examining the issues of ‘conscience’ and ‘enthusiasm’⁸ at the heart of seventeenth-century intellectual and political conflict.

Conscience and conflict

Questions of knowledge, assent, and consent were at the heart of the relationship between conscience and conflict in the early modern era. As James Tully has pointed out:

The religious wars that swept Europe were partly a response to and partly the carrier of the rule of faith controversy. This was the great struggle over the ‘true’ faith that rapidly deepened to an intellectual battle over the grounds for rational belief or assent in matters of faith. This was the most important question in a person’s life not only because it involved eternal salvation or damnation, but also because the answer could bring persecution or the duty to take up arms in this world.

(1993:182)⁹

Even more importantly, as it seemed increasingly likely that theological disagreement was not only rampant but irresolvable, conscience became not only the ultimate (personal) arbiter of belief, but the object of belief itself. As Toulmin has argued, as the conflict became more and more brutal:

For many of those involved, it ceased to be crucial what their theological beliefs were, or where they were rooted in experience, as 16th century theologians would have demanded. All that mattered, by this stage, was for supporters of Religious Truth to believe, devoutly, in belief itself. For them, as for Tertullian long ago, the difficulty of squaring a doctrine with experience was just one more reason for accepting this doctrine that much the more strongly.

(1990:54)

The elucidation of a materialist-empiricist foundation for knowledge represented one response to this situation. By limiting discourse to the positive, phenomenal world (it was hoped and claimed), politics and society could be freed from the conflict which emerged from non-empirical claims of individual conviction and conscience beyond public demonstration and discussion. Claims of faith were to be separated from claims of knowledge and the latter were located in the phenomenal world, not in the realm of ‘essence’, the enthusiastic consciousness of the believer, or the faith-derived authority of rulers. To take an example from a figure often invoked in claims about the ‘anarchical’ nature of international relations, Thomas Hobbes’s materialism is driven – in part – by the concern that a belief in non-material entities is the high road to irrationalism and conflict. For Hobbes, mistaken knowledge foundations were a source of mistaken political beliefs and were at the heart of the conflict he saw around him. Reducing claims about reality, including claims concerning individuals, to material terms – to ‘matter in motion’ or ‘unencumbered selves’ (Sandel 1982) – was part of an attempt to liberate those selves from the violence which had come to attend a non-materialist politics in which belief in ‘powers invisible’ was a key source of conflict. By rendering the soul either a material substance or a nonsensical conceit, for example, Hobbes sought to marginalize the political conflict which he saw as inevitable if action was guided by a concern with salvation and the criteria of salvation were purely a matter of personal conscience.

Only by limiting knowledge claims (as opposed to private belief or faith) to the material realm could a public arena of discussion concerning the truth be secured. But more importantly, only in this way could a degree of liberty and security from the ‘enthusiasm’ of others be achieved. Hobbes’ limitation of the grounds of knowledge is spurred by, if not reducible to, a concern with religious toleration and a desire to remove the destructive conflict engendered by irresolvable questions of religious truth from the political realm.¹⁰ Moreover, a purely material understanding of the self (and self-understanding) would make possible a new set of political practices based on the (now rationally derived, not naturally given) universal fear of pain and death which provided a basis for a legitimate theory of sovereignty (the social contract) and obedience to the sovereign and the laws of nature.¹¹ The transformation of theory was intimately linked to an attempt to transform practices.

Despite their differences, Locke’s political project shares Hobbes’s concern with transformative knowledge practices, and also reflects the context in which governmental propagation of the good life had degenerated into conflict as a result of disagreements over the definition of the good itself. As such, it was also part of the broad movement that attempted to reformulate the ends of politics as a means of ending political conflict.¹² For Locke, the enthusiastic consciousness which knew that it held the truth on the strength conviction (and conviction of its own virtue) was sure to generate conflict and intolerance. But despite his attempts to respond to this conflict through the construction of an empiricist theory of knowledge, Locke is no naive empiricist. His vision of knowledge acknowledges the problem of assent to knowledge claims, highlights the issue of judgement, and is inherently uncertain and probabalistic (Tully 1993:192–5). Locke was fully conscious of the impact of emotion and belief on the process of knowledge; indeed as Tully brilliantly demonstrates, he gradually came to believe that purely rational accounts of (and grounds for) assent to knowledge claims could not be sustained. Judgements of truth are obscured by prevailing opinion, ill education, or personal passions. There is no direct access to the truth, nor any straightforward means of judging alternative accounts (Tully 1993:199–201).

Yet the recognition of the shortcomings of a purely empiricist conception of knowledge led Locke and...

Table of contents

• The New International Relations
• Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Culture, strategy, and security
• 2 Cultural strategies
• 3 The discipline of the democratic peace
• 4 From alliance to security community
• 5 Culture wars
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index