Macedonia and NATO (original) (raw)
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This article tackles the issue of the NATO's post-Cold War identity crisis. More precisely, with the employment of the ontological security concept, it seeks to account for NATO's struggles to position itself in the new security environment that seems to be constantly changing. The overall argument is developed in three stages. First, I have conceived of international organization's identity through the purpose it fulfi lls. Second, this entailed the conclusion that a stable purpose renders international organization ontologically secure and, vice versa, absent or unstable purpose renders it ontologically insecure or in other words "anxious". In the third stage, I have made an inquiry into the nature of the behavior of the ontologically insecure organization through the combination of Jenifer Mitzen's exogenous ("role identity") and Brent J. Steele's endogenous ("intrinsic identity") accounts about identity formation. Accordingly, I have argued that the behavior of an ontologically insecure international organization is, fi rst and foremost, identity not interest driven behavior. These propositions were then put against the case of the post-Cold War NATO.
Review-Ontological Security in International Relations
2020
The state’s focus on physical security is nigh ubiquitous in International Relations (IR) theory. At least since the 1970s, when the late, great Kenneth Waltz’s argument—that “survival is a prerequisite to achieving any goals that states may have”—became a core element of defensive realism, IR scholars have found survival and security to be among the paramount aspirations of states subsisting in an international system often characterized by anarchy. Indeed, Waltz was echoing a sentiment already expressed in the English School by Hedley Bull, who says that “unless men enjoy some measure of security against the threat of death or injury at the hands of others, they are not able to devote energy or attention enough to other objects to be able to accomplish them.” This dialogue, which is extracted from Ontological Security in International Relations: Self-Identity and the IR State, a book by Brent J. Steele, an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Kansas, can b...
Ontological Security in International Relations: Self-Identity and the IR state
States pursue social actions to serve self-identity needs, even when these actions compromise their physical existence. Three forms of social action, sometimes referred to as ‘motives’ of state behaviour (moral, humanitarian, and honour-driven) are analyzed here through an ontological security approach. Brent J. Steele develops an account of social action which interprets these behaviours as fulfilling a nation-state's drive to secure self-identity through time. The anxiety which consumes all social agents motivates them to secure their sense of being, and thus he posits that transformational possibilities exist in the ‘Self’ of a nation-state. The volume consequently both challenges and complements realist, liberal, constructivist and post-structural accounts to international politics. Using ontological security to interpret three cases - British neutrality during the American Civil War (1861-1865), Belgium’s decision to fight Germany in 1914, and NATO’s (1999) Kosovo intervention - the book concludes by discussing the importance for self-interrogation in both the study and practice of international relations.
Ontological Security and the European Union Global Strategy
Revue des Sciences Politiques. Revista de Stiinte Politice, 2018
This paper analyzes the relationship between identity and security policies by critically engaging with the European Union Global Strategy (2016). It employs a conceptual perspective derived from ontological security, whereby identity is a socio-psychological construct that requires consistency over time and external recognition. The methodology of discourse analysis has been used to show how the meanings about the European Union's identity as security provider have been (re)articulated, which indicates the ongoing search for ontological security. The Global Strategy has proposed a more grounded vision for the European Union's international role, among which the move from democracy promotion to the fostering of resilience. The redefinitions were a necessary step to address the unstable foundations of the European Union's identity narratives, considering the failed expectations of the European Security Strategy (2003) in general and the problematic eastern vicinity in particular. However, the discoursive shifts within the Global Strategy are only a temporary solution and cannot reinforce the Union's ontological security in the long run. They have not surpassed the fundamental challenges faced by the European Union in its quest to become a credible security provider, affirmed by other international security actors and the empirical reality.
A POST-STRUCTRALIST APPROACH TO SECURITY: AN ANALYSIS OF NATO 2022 STRATEGIC CONCEPT
2. ULUSLARARASI HİTİT GÜVENLİK ÇALIŞMALARI KONGRESİ, 2022
One of the theoretical formations of post-positivist thought in International Relations is post-structuralism which became part of the literature in the 1980s. Post-structuralism claims a different position from the traditional realist and idealist perspectives in the field of security studies by offering the connection between national identity and security politics and the discursive character of the concept of security. Accordingly, the practices of security construct the national “self” by indicating the difference between itself and the “other”. In that sense, policy discourses are considered inherently social since the policy-making elite address the wider public sphere to institutionalize their understanding of the identities and policy options. Therefore, in order to understand the foreign and security policies of the actors involved in International Relations, the examination of the speeches and statements of policy makers, politicians or bureaucrats, the documents written by the institutions involved in foreign policy making has been an increasingly used as a method. In this context, official speeches, statements, parliamentary debates, diplomatic correspondence, interviews, newspapers, photographs and videos can be used in discourse analysis studies. The aim of this paper is to understand and situate NATO’s discourse within the framework of its recent Strategic Concept of 2022. In this framework, after the elaboration of concept of discourse and discourse analysis, the construction and hierarchical positioning of different actors in the text will be analyzed by asking “how” questions. In that sense, Roxanne Lynn Doty’s concepts of “presupposition”, “predication” and “subject positioning” will be used as analytical categories to provide a textual framework. The representational practices through which meaning are generated is crucial in this study. Accordingly, the discursive identities produced by NATO will be examined in order to understand the attachments to various social objects and subjects in international environment.
Relations between Lithuania and Russia: the Ontological Security Perspective
appears to be irrational within the (neo-)realist framework and thus in need of an alternative explanation. Finally, I will apply the ontological security theory to the case, in support of the argument that relations with Russia have from the very start been characterized by ontological insecurity, which stemmed from the incompatibility of historical narratives and resulted in the routinization of conflict.
'Not a heap of stones': material environments and ontological security in international relations
Extant scholarship on ontological security in international relations has focused on the significance of social environments for state identity. In this article, I argue that material environments also provide an important source of ontological security for states. In order to assume this role material environments need to be discursively linked to state identity through either projection or introjection. Once incorporated into state identity narratives, material environments become ‘ontic spaces’: spatial extensions of the collective self that cause state identities to appear more firm and continuous. However, ontic spaces are inherently unstable and require maintenance, especially during periods of crisis or transition. States bear agency in this process but they never achieve full control, as identity discourses are continuously contested both domestically and internationally. I illustrate these claims by looking at the role of the General Staff Headquarters in Belgrade, destroyed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1999, in the ontological security of Serbia.
Russia, Europe and the Ontological Security Dilemma: Narrating the Emerging Eurasian Space
Europe-Asia Studies, 2018
The aim of this essay is twofold. First, it seeks to examine how Russia and the European Union understand the emerging Eurasian space. We will do this by looking at how the two narrate the space, the use of power and each other. Second, we want to argue that the narratives at the heart of the conceptual and normative maps that guide their actions and behaviour create an essentially ontological security dilemma; that is, behaviour aimed primarily at enhancing confidence in the identity and continuity of a political community threatens the ontological security of other actors.
CONTEMPORARY MILITARY CHALLENGES/SODOBNI VOJAŠKI IZZIVI
The European Union, as an intergovernmental union, has been trying to create the European security identity as a reflection of the European security perception among all the Member States for more than two decades. In the implementation of this theoretical determinant in the pragmatic security policy, the question of identity at the national level and the understanding of the preservation of national security in the interstate conflicts of the European Security Area has emerged. One of the key segments of the security and identity issue is integrated in the basic interests of national security, and that is the preservation of the biological substrate for nation’s survival. The Republic of North Macedonia is facing this issue which will be discussed in paper through both the theoretical and practical aspects.