Why states sometimes risk their material interests and even physical security to keep a certain identity narrative going? Think of Israel’s continued occupation of the West Bank, which generates not only constant low-intensity threats to Israeli citizens but also existential threats to the state of Israel through a constant recurrence of wars and delegitimising campaigns. Think of the refusal of neutral Belgium to grant German troops passage through its territory, resulting in a quick and devastating defeat as well as one of the greatest massacres of the First World War, also known as the ‘rape of Belgium’. Think of any other state which acted in a seemingly irrational way to defend its honour, dignity and a sense of healthy and continuous self despite the material costs involved. When individuals put themselves into danger to defend who they think they are, we are equipped with myriad psychological and sociological theories to understand such behaviour. When states behave in a similar way, we either tend to ignore such cases as aberrations, ascribe them to human error and irrationality, or find dubious rationalist explanations.
Despite often made prescriptive calls for clear-headedness in world politics, international political discourse abounds with reference to emotions. Decision makers routinely refer to their states as being proud, happy, angry, sad or surprised. This book is particularly interested in situations when states are overwhelmed with anxiety due to their inability to maintain their self-identity narratives. Anxiety as a feeling of inner turmoil in the face of uncertainty brilliantly captured by Edvard Munch’s famous painting which is embellishing the cover of this book. By drawing on social-constructivist approach to IR in general and Ontological Security Theory (OST) in particular, the point of departure in this book is that states, just like individuals, are often ready to sacrifice their physical security in order to maintain a healthy sense of self and hence fend off anxiety. States need stable self-identity scripts to keep cognitive control over their environment, define their interests and maintain a sense of purposeful agency.
Building on these important insights, this book makes two contributions to the scholarship on ontological security in IR. First, in order to conceptually strengthen the distinction between ontological security and ontological insecurity, the book develops the concept of critical situations. Drawing on the work of Anthony Giddens (1984, 1991) this book defines critical situations as radical disjunctions that challenge the ability of states to ‘go on’ by bringing into the realm of discursive consciousness four fundamental questions related to existence , finitude , relations and autobiography. In some cases, a critical situation might be mild and involve only one fundamental question, while in others ontological crises will be full-blown and involve all four of them. Either way, the result is the flooding through of collective anxieties which debilitates collective agency and leads to seemingly regressive, hysterical or even schizophrenic behaviour. In those situations, states will try, more or less successfully, to satisfy their ontological security needs by re-establishing self-identity scripts and a sense of calm that stems from daily routines.
Second, the book demonstrates that trust in the constancy of material environments is also a source of ontological security in world politics that is just as important as states’ relationship with their significant others. Regardless of how important for grounding of the self routinised international interactions might be, they are never fully controllable or predictable. States therefore need stable material environments as an additional anchor for their self-identity scripts. To assume this role, material environments such as core territorial areas for example, but also landmark natural or urban landscapes, need to be discursively linked to the project of the state self. Once this process is accomplished, material environments become ‘ontic spaces’, or spatial extensions of the collective self that cause state identities to appear more firm and continuous.
These two theoretical innovations, one related to critical situations and the other to the role of ontic spaces, will be illustrated in an in-depth case study focusing on Serbia’s ontological insecurity over Kosovo. The empirical puzzle at the heart of the case study is Serbia’s seemingly irrational but nevertheless relatively consistent behaviour vis-à-vis Kosovo since the breakup of Yugoslavia. Serbia’s aggressive policies towards Kosovo set into motion a process of Yugoslav disintegration with devastating ramifications for both Serbia and the entire post-Yugoslav region. In 1999, Serbia went to war with NATO over Kosovo, only to proclaim EU and NATO membership as its goal a year later. From 2000 onwards, all governments, from across the political spectrum, have balanced the policy of counter-secession and non-recognition with their attempts to push Serbia to the inner circle of the European society of states. They have done so despite the inherent incompatibility between the two priorities, as the vast majority of EU member states have recognised the independence of Kosovo and do not intend to either revoke their decisions or let another country with territorial disputes such as Cyprus join the EU. All this has only reaffirmed a belief that Kosovo is ‘the most expensive Serbian word’.
How can we account for the extraordinary consistency in the pursuit of policy that has achieved very little success and incurred great economic, political and reputational cost for Serbia and held back the region for over two decades? To answer this question, the case study methodologically relies on discourse analysis with the aim of uncovering the politics of representation and analyse both linguistic and material preconditions for what is being said or done (Neumann 2008). In the case study, I triangulate secondary sources such as books, articles and media reports with primary sources such as statements and speeches of government officials, legislation and government documents (i.e. strategies, parliamentary resolutions, etc.) as well as semi-structured interviews with key decision makers involved in the Kosovo policy.
The key argument put forward in the case study is that although Serbia’s Kosovo policy may seem irrational or even schizophrenic at times, it can be understood as an attempt to maintain biographical continuity in the face of secession of what is widely construed as the national ontic space. Thanks to the intensive discursive labour of a vast number of ontic-space builders operating since the nineteenth century, Kosovo has been constructed into a core geographical area that connects Serbia’s past, present and future of the national imaginary. As a sedimented structure which has been in the making for over a century, Kosovo’s ontic status in Serbia cannot be undone either quickly or easily. As a symbol, Kosovo constitutes Serbia as a political community by fusing glorious moments in its history and its darkest hours with contemporary trials and tribulations into a single collective destiny. In Serbia, Kosovo is a lens through which the polity sees the world and tells friends from foes. Metaphors of Kosovo as the ‘heart of Serbia’, ‘Serbian Jerusalem’, ‘foundation stone’, ‘holy land’, ‘iris in the eye’ and ‘cradle of nationhood’ overwhelm the contemporary Serbian political discourse. Due to its strong symbolic and emotional resonance, invocation of all things Kosovo is therefore the ultimate political argument in today’s Serbia which defines who or what is reasonable, patriotic and just, and who or what is not. For Serbia, Kosovo is therefore not just another piece of land but an ontic space, to which its master-narrative was anchored and then transmitted down the generations.
On the flip side, the prospect of losing Kosovo generates a deep state of anxiety in Serbia. Faced with such a debilitating state of mind of an interrupted and deeply undermined self, the priority for any political leader with an ambition to capture the national imagination becomes restoring ontological security and biographical continuity even if it comes at a price of physical insecurity and other material losses. In 1989, Serbia stepped up repression in Kosovo, destabilised the former federation and set off a series of claims for independence from other Yugoslav republics. This ultimately led to the destruction of Yugoslavia with disastrous consequences for most of its citizens, including the Serbs themselves. In 1999, Serbia’s brutal police and military operations in Kosovo led to NATO intervention and loss of control over the province, which was placed under international protection. In 2000, Serbia replaced the isolationist regime ruled by Slobodan Milošević with a pro-European democratic government, but its opposition to Kosovo’s claims to independence continued unabated. Tensions reached an apex in 2008, when Kosovo authorities unilaterally declared independence. Despite democratisation and Europeanisation, processes expected to bring Serbia to terms with the outcome of the Yugoslav disintegration, Serbia has been fiercely opposed to Kosovo’s claims to independence at a high economic, political and reputational cost. To protect its sense of self in the face of secession and thus fend off the looming state of anxiety, Serbia continues to walk the tight rope of becoming a European state without letting go its symbolic attachment to Kosovo. While these actions might seem irrational and self-defeating, they can be understood as desperate attempts to keep away a deep unease stemming from the loss of Kosovo.
The rest of the book is organised as follows. Chapter 2 discusses the existing literature on ontological security scholarship in IR and outlines the approach taken in this book. This chapter is divided into three sections. The first one discusses the present literature and identifies gaps. The second section develops a novel conceptualisation of critical situations. Drawing on the work of Anthony Giddens critical situations are conceptualised as radical disjunctions that bring into the public discourse four fundamental questions related to existence, finitude, relations with others and autobiography. The third section theorises the role of material environments in ontological security processes in world politics. The key argument is that material environments are turned into ontic spaces either through projection of state identity narratives onto material environments or introjection of material environments into state identity narratives.
Chapter 3 goes back into history to investigate when, how, why, by whom and to what effect was Kosovo constructed as Serbia’s ontic space in the first place. The construction of Kosovo as Serbia’s ontic space, as th...