Culture and Security: Symbolic Power and the Politics of International Security

Culture and Security

In this innovative volume Michael Williams examines the role of culture in contemporary security policies, and provides 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 book 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. Moreover, Williams argues, 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. Williams also investigates 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. He argues 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. This book offers key insights into contemporary security politics and transatlantic relations, and will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of international relations, security studies, and European politics. Michael C. Williams is Professor of International Politics in the Department of International Politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK.

The New International Relations Edited by Richard Little, University of Bristol, Iver B. Neumann, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, Norway and Jutta Weldes, University of Bristol

The field of international relations has changed dramatically in recent years. This new series will cover the major issues that have emerged and reflect the latest academic thinking in this particular dynamic area. International Law, Rights and Politics Developments in Eastern Europe and the CIS Rein Mullerson The Logic of Internationalism Coercion and accommodation Kjell Goldmann Russia and the Idea of Europe A study in identity and international relations Iver B. Neumann The Future of International Relations Masters in the making? Edited by Iver B. Neumann and Ole Wæver Constructing the World Polity Essays on international institutionalization John Gerard Ruggie Realism in International Relations and International Political Economy The continuing story of a death foretold Stefano Guzzini

International Relations, Political Theory and the Problem of

Order Beyond international relations theory? N.J.Rengger War, Peace and World Orders in European History Edited by Anja V. Hartmann and Beatrice Heuser European Integration and National Identity The challenge of the Nordic states Edited by Lene Hansen and Ole Wæver Shadow Globalization, Ethnic Conflicts and New Wars A political economy of intra-state war Dietrich Jung Contemporary Security Analysis and Copenhagen Peace Research Edited by Stefano Guzzini and Dietrich Jung

Observing International Relations Niklas Luhmann and world politics Edited by Mathias Albert and Lena Hilkermeier

Communitarian International Relations The epistemic foundations of international relations Emanuel Adler

Does China Matter? A Reassessment Essays in memory of Gerald Segal Edited by Barry Buzan and Rosemary Foot

Human Rights and World Trade Hunger in international society Ana Gonzalez-Pelaez

European Approaches to International Relations Theory A house with many mansions Jo¨rg Friedrichs The Post-Cold War International System Strategies, institutions and reflexivity Ewan Harrison States of Political Discourse Words, regimes, seditions Costas M. Constantinou The Politics of Regional Identity Meddling with the Mediterranean Michelle Pace The Power of International Theory Reforging the link to foreign policy-making through scientific enquiry Fred Chernoff Africa and the North Between globalization and marginalization Edited by Ulf Engel and Gorm Rye Olsen

Liberalism and War The victors and the vanquished Andrew Williams Constructivism and International Relations Alexander Wendt and his critics Edited by Stefano Guzzini and Anna Leander Security as Practice Discourse analysis and the Bosnian War Lene Hansen The Politics of Insecurity Fear, migration and asylum in the EU Jef Huysmans State Sovereignty and Intervention A discourse analysis of interventionary and non-interventionary practices in Kosovo and Algeria Helle Malmvig Culture and Security Symbolic power and the politics of international security Michael C. Williams Hegemony and History Adam Watson

Culture and Security Symbolic power and the politics of international security

Michael C. Williams

First published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business # 2007 Michael C. Williams

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Williams, Michael C. (Michael Charles), 1960– Culture and security: symbolic power and the politics of international security/Michael C. Williams. p. cm. – (The new international relations) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Security, International–Social aspects. 2. National security–Social aspects–Europe. 3. National security–Social aspects–United States. 4. Politics and culture. I. Title. JZ5588.W55 2007 355’.033–dc22 2006017539

ISBN 0–203–41453–5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0–415–33397–0 ISBN13: 978–0–415–33397–9 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–203–41453–5 ISBN13: 978–0–203–41453–8 (ebk)

Contents

Series editor’s preface Acknowledgements

1

viii xi

Introduction

1

Culture, strategy, and security: recasting an historical relationship

8

2

Cultural strategies

22

3

The discipline of the democratic peace: Kant, liberalism, and symbolic power

42

From alliance to security community: NATO (with Iver B. Neumann)

62

Culture wars

92

4

5

Conclusion

120

Notes Bibliography Index

132 148 165

Series editor’s preface

Although it is possible to exaggerate the extent to which international politics has been transformed since the end of the Cold War, it is indisputable that the nature of Europe has changed in some fundamental ways across the intervening years since the United States and the Soviet Union brought the Cold War to a close. The speed with which East and West Germany reunited in 1990 was seen at the time to denote a development of seismic proportions but the speed, albeit at a much slower pace, of the ongoing expansion in the membership of both the EU and NATO is, from a Cold War perspective, no less astonishing. A region that was reputedly divided into two mutually hostile camps, de´tente notwithstanding, is now being knitted together into an economic and security community at a surprisingly rapid rate. It is true that the implosion of Yugoslavia and the ineffectiveness of the European response to the crisis represent a stain on an otherwise peaceful process; nevertheless the emerging new Europe remains an extraordinary and significant achievement. Theorists in international relations, perhaps unsurprisingly, are deeply divided about how to account for or even characterize this achievement. Realists have been constantly wrong-footed by the course of events in Europe in the post-Cold War world. They widely assumed after the demise of the Soviet Union that Europe would join together to act as a counterbalance to the United States, or alternatively, that Germany would come forward and play this role on its own. In either event, realists generally agreed that the transatlantic alliance would come to an end and that NATO would be dissolved. When NATO persisted, therefore, some realists argued that institutions are unimportant because they have no causal consequences for the behaviour of states, while others suggested that the United States, through NATO, was pursuing a strategy of reassurance in order to discourage the Europeans from developing a policy of counterbalancing. But in the wake of the Cold War there were also realists who argued that with the removal of the Soviet threat, old rivalries would resurface in Europe and the continent would once again be bedevilled by a security dilemma. In practice, a very different trajectory has materialized. NATO has been reconfigured by its members as a security community

Series editor’s preface

ix

designed to deter military conflict amongst its own members and to embrace former enemy states that are willing to adopt an identity compatible with membership of a security community. NATO, as a consequence, has transcended its former role as a collective defence organization that constituted an alliance against a common external enemy. The difficulties confronted by the realists as they wrestled with the dramatic changes that were taking place in international politics in the postCold War era provided an enormous fillip to the emerging constructivist school of thought. The new breed of constructivists aimed to unhinge the complacent certainties that they associated with realist thinking. What they wished to show was that the international structures that realists treated as material features of the world needed to be reviewed as intersubjective ideas that were shared by international decision-makers and then subsequently reproduced by realist theorists. The realists, in other words, formed part of a dominant culture that promoted a distinctive view of international politics in general and international security in particular. The end of the Cold War, however, created the opportunity to change the dominant ideas about security adhered to by international decisionmakers and, in doing so, transform the prevailing culture. Given this assessment, it is unsurprising that realists confronted so much difficulty as they tried to make sense of the new emerging culture in terms of ‘truths’ that were derived from the old established culture. There is no doubt that the constructivists have opened up an important new space for thinking about international politics; and in this book what Michael Williams wants to do is to take advantage of this space, but then move the argument on to a new level. From his perspective, and using security as his exemplar, constructivists have too often failed to take on board the full implications of their own arguments about the importance of culture. In particular, Williams wishes to destabilize the familiar constructivist complaint that realists fail to understand the world because they work from an essentially materialist and rationalist view of reality. The starting point for this book is that a materialist and rationalist view of security derives from a very deep-seated tradition of European thought. It is a mistake, therefore, to contrast constructivism with realism because constructivism must be able to embrace and account for a materialist approach to security. By the same token, constructivists must also be able to accommodate a materialist view of power and at the same time lodge this view within a much more expansive conception of power. Again, Williams argues that despite some important recent moves in this direction, constructivists have, overall, failed to develop a comprehensive understanding of power. This failure has particularly important consequences for any attempt to come to grips with the changing nature of security in international politics. From his perspective, for example, constructivists have not yet provided a comprehensive explanation for how and why security is being reconfigured in the post-Cold War arena.

x

Series editor’s preface

In an attempt to overcome these deficiencies in constructivism Williams draws on the theoretical framework and tools of analysis developed by Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist who located culture at the centre of his framework for understanding social action. Building on the foundations provided by Bourdieu, Williams shows how culture represents a crucial dimension of power and, as a consequence, it also informs the prevailing conception of what is meant by security. He then goes on to demonstrate the very wide-ranging consequences of adopting this distinctive cultural perspective on power and security. First, Williams reassesses the relationship between Kantian thought and the democratic peace theory, and he demonstrates that the relationship is more complex and interesting than is often recognized. His framework enables him to open up the links that exist between power, recognition and identity in Kantian thought, and to reveal their importance for any understanding of how a security community is constituted by the democratic peace process. Next Williams focuses on not only the persistence of NATO in the post-Cold War world, but more especially its expansion to illustrate the contemporary relevance of his ideas about democratic peace and the security community. He shows that the end of the Cold War not only created an opportunity for the members of the Western alliance to redefine their identity, but it also established a new form of cultural power for NATO that brought about a transformation of identity amongst the Eastern European states. Although Williams does not develop the argument, his framework can, of course, be applied just as effectively to promote an understanding of the consolidation and expansion of the European Union. Finally, Williams demonstrates that his approach has very important implications for foreign policy analysis and can help to account for the influence of the neoconservatives in the formulation of US foreign policy, especially since the initiation of the ‘war on terrorism’. By contrast, prominent American realists have during this period made unsuccessful attempts to redirect US foreign policy, particularly in the context of the Middle East, arguing for example, that the invasion of Iraq was doomed to failure and that the uncritical support of Israel has damaged US interests and endangered its security. Although Williams focuses on why the neoconservatives have proved to be so successful, his framework can also be used to reveal why the realists have failed to influence US foreign policy. Their rationalist and materialist approach to foreign policy and security fails to resonate within the prevailing American culture. Although realists are unlikely to accept this assessment, they unquestionably need to address the persuasive argument made by Williams that there is an inextricable link between culture and security that operates in national and international politics. Richard Little University of Bristol

Acknowledgements

I began working on the ideas in this book nearly a decade ago, and during this time have acquired a great many intellectual and personal debts that I would like to acknowledge. The initial thinking for this book, particularly the beginnings of my engagement with the thinking of Pierre Bourdieu and the implications of his ideas for security studies, was greatly facilitated by the time I spent as a research associate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen. The Director of the Copenhagen Research Program on European Integration, Morten Kelstrup, was a stimulating and congenial host, and my thanks go to him and to other participants in the programme. During this time, I also had sustained interaction with the work going on at COPRI, in particular with Ole Wæver, Barry Buzan and Japp de Wilde. It was a rewarding experience. Above all, however, my thanks go to Lene Hansen, whose intellectual contributions and personal warmth were truly wonderful. Many people have contributed to my attempts to think about the question over security in this time. Iver B. Neumann, my co-author in Chapter 4 of this study, was not only an excellent collaborator, but a challenging interlocutor. Keith Krause has played a similar role in my intellectual life for many years, and I look forward to this continuing for a long time to come. Alexandra Gheciu, from whose work on security I have learned a great deal, read the manuscript in its entirety, and provided a series of astute and helpful reflections, as did Vincent Pouliot, whose work promises to make a significant contribution to increasing the impact of Bourdieu’s work in international relations. My thanks go to all of them. My engagements with Bourdieu and with thinking about a ‘cultural field’ of security have also benefited greatly from on-going conversations with Didier Bigo, and my Aberystwyth colleagues Peter Jackson and Richard Wyn Jones, who provided both friendship and critical engagement in equal measure. But my greatest appreciation goes to Rita Abrahamsen, who has provided tremendous support and encouragement, as well as incisive and challenging criticism, throughout the process of writing this volume. Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to my step-mother,

xii

Acknowledgements

Wendy Bone, whose love and support over so many years has made almost everything else possible. Elements of this book have been published previously, albeit often in substantially different forms. I would like to thank the editors of the European Journal of International Relations for permission to draw upon parts of three articles: ‘Identity and the Politics of Security’, 4(2) (1998): 207–28; ‘The Discipline of the Democratic Peace: Kant, Liberalism, and the Social Construction of Security Communities’, 7(4) (2001): 525–53; and ‘What Is the National Interest?: The Neoconservative Challenge in International Relations’, 11(3) (2005): 303–37. In addition, Iver Neumann and I would like to thank the editors of Millennium: Journal of International Studies for permission to draw upon aspects of our joint article, ‘From Alliance to Security Community: NATO, Russia, and the Power of Identity’, 29(2) (2000): 357–87.

Introduction

Security is traditionally the realm of strategy and power. Indeed in the post-World War II era, it sometimes seemed that the study of security was little more than this. In the guise of ‘strategic studies’, a focus on the defence of the territorial state, military and material power, and instrumental calculation dominated to a point where it often seemed difficult to think of security in any other terms.1 The past two decades have seen the emergence of considerable challenges to this vision of security and security analysis. State-centrism, rationalist assumptions about agency and action, and narrowly materialist visions of structure and power have all been subjected to extensive and telling criticism. Similarly, the need to broaden the analytic and methodological agenda of security studies, while at the same time widening its scope to include issues of identity, human security, environmental security, and a host of other concerns, has generated a diverse and vibrant field of intellectual and political debate.2 At the heart of many of these controversies, naturally enough, has been the end of the Cold War and the evolution of security relations in the period since its demise. Those calling for a more ‘constructivist’ analysis in particular have argued at length and in detail that these events demonstrate clearly the insufficiency of narrow rationalist and materialist understandings of state action, and the need to develop more sociologically sophisticated theories of security that place questions of culture and identity at the centre of their analyses. The response to this call has been considerable, and an ever-burgeoning body of broadly social constructivist theory and analysis has come to occupy a prominent place in contemporary security studies. Yet it is hard not to notice that in the stress on norms, values, and identities that has marked this wave of analysis, the concepts of power and strategy have largely been left behind. It is perhaps not difficult to understand why this is the case. To invoke the concept of power in international relations is almost inevitably to risk being pulled back into the reductionist or (Waltzian) structuralist arguments that constructivism has been keen to avoid.3 Similarly, strategy has often been identified with essentialized actors and forms of rationality that constructivism has been at pains to

2

Introduction

criticize and to replace with more sociologically sensitive and contextually located understandings of action (Wendt 1999). Nonetheless, as a number of recent analyses have begun to point out, the absence of power in constructivist security analysis is both troubling and limiting.4 With the desire to move away from largely material definitions of power and rationalist visions of state action – and the claims of inescapable insecurity or conflict to which they are often, though not necessarily, yoked (Schweller 1994) – the crucial domains of power and strategy have become largely lost in constructivist security studies. These issues are not just theoretical. They have important implications for how we understand the recent history of security relations and their future trajectories. In many eyes, the decade following the Cold War was an interregnum, a period of calm and even of drift, when power and its imperatives took a back seat, and where the importance of norms and values, and the impact of culture, democracy and soft power were allowed briefly to take centre stage before being once again supplanted by the imperatives of Realpolitik and the dominance of ‘hard’ power in the new millennium. I will argue in this book that to view the post-Cold War era in these terms is deeply misleading. Power was not absent in the transformations of European security in this period, but neither can these transformations be understood within the categories of hard power espoused by traditional realist theories of security. Unlike those who stress either the dominance of norms and values, or the absence of power and strategy, I suggest that what took place in the 1990s was a reconfiguration of the ‘field’ of security where military and material power, while remaining significant, were repositioned within what might be called the ‘cultural field of security’ that privileged cultural and symbolic forms of power.5 Taking as a starting point the remarkable prominence of ‘culture’ in both the theory and practice of security over the past fifteen years, I argue that particular articulations of the relationship between culture and security have been and continue to be crucial forms of power in the production of security practices. Exemplified in claims that democracy and peace are inextricably connected, and in policies that seek to maintain, build and extend self-declared ‘democratic security communities’ such as NATO, these forms of power were essential to the construction of security relations in the aftermath of the Cold War, and continue to play important roles in security politics today. Grasping these transformations requires theories capable of placing the question of power at the heart of the construction of security practices, and that can incorporate both power and strategy within their purview without falling into the trap of once again reducing culture to either an ideological instrument, manipulatively and cynically wielded by rationally-calculating actors in the service of more basic interests, or to nothing more than an ideological rationalization covering more basic power dynamics.6 Both of these views of culture are easy to find in international relations; neither is adequate in understanding the power and practices of post-Cold War security.

Introduction

3

To develop such a position, I turn for inspiration to the theory of practice developed by Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s ‘structuralist constructivism’ provides a means of overcoming the divide between strategy as pure instrumentality, and visions of culture as ‘embedded’, norm- or rule-governed action that lack a sense of the strategic action of agents. In this way, it allows for the development of a concept that I term ‘cultural strategies’ which neither reduces strategy to culture nor divorces it from culture. Drawing upon this view of security practices, I argue that by defining security in terms of forms of culture, the field of security was transformed into one where cultural and symbolic forms of power became vital – and one in which they were dominantly possessed by Western states, societies, and security organizations. Through its appeal to culture in the new security context, and by invoking the triumph of Western culture, the universality of liberal ideals, values and institutions, and even the end of history, a new set of power relations became dominant. The remarkable ascent of ‘culture’ in security marks a shift in the field through which specific forms of power are realized and executed, but it does not mark the retreat of power.7 There are serious dilemmas in proposing to treat culture in strategic terms, and indeed to doing so within the language of strategy itself. To be clear, I am in no way suggesting a straightforward return to reductionist, derivative, or instrumental visions of culture that present it as a mere expression or tool of more basic, material interests. The criticisms of these views put forward across constructivist security analysis (and social theory more broadly) seem to me to have compellingly demonstrated the shortcomings of such approaches. Nonetheless, I do want to claim that a recovery of the strategic nature of culture is essential if one is to recover both the sense of agency and, especially, an understanding of power that has often been missing from constructivist analyses. These elements were at the heart of the practices and institutional developments of the 1990s, particularly the evolution of NATO, and they remain central in understanding American–European security relations today.

Structure of the book The book begins not with contemporary security relations or theories, but with a return to the past. In the first chapter, I seek to support the case for placing culture and identity at the centre of security analysis by demonstrating that the very idea that culture is somehow separable from security – that there is a ‘material’ domain of strategic relations largely separable from a (usually derivative or epiphenomenal) realm of culture – can itself be understood as an historical construction and cultural legacy with deep roots in Western political thought and culture. To put the point bluntly, conceptions of culture and identity are only apparently missing from materialist and rationalist visions of strategy and security. When viewed

4

Introduction

more broadly and historically, it becomes possible to see how these narrow visions of security are themselves the result of cultural practices and transformations. The rationalist-materialist vision of ‘interest’ that is often contrasted to constructivist positions, for example, should not be seen as the basis for a dichotomy between the two positions, but as a specific consequence of the formulation of ‘interest’ that emerged within a particular (security) culture of early modern Europe. In short, the materialist and instrumentalist vision of strategy that often dominates security analysis is a product of specific cultural (and epistemic) transformations, identity practices and political values. Recognizing this lineage demonstrates that an engagement with ‘culture’ is an inescapable dimension of the study of security. There is no retreat from the cultural turn in security studies towards a secure rationalist and materialist theory of state action so often associated with realism, for the simple reason that the very idea of such an approach, along with its epistemic claims, is itself an historical and cultural artefact – a cultural practice traceable to a particular historical context concerned with shaping the politics of security. To a degree, therefore, the debate between rationalist and constructivist theories over whether culture ‘matters’ in security relations is misleading. The question is not one of rationalist objectivity versus constructivist practices, but rather one of contending theories of practice, and ultimately one of shaping the politics of security. The second chapter seeks to outline a theory of cultural strategies drawing upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu.8 Using Bourdieu’s understanding of a ‘field’ of practice and his concepts of cultural capital and symbolic power, it is possible to discern how the relationship between culture and security was itself a key element in the rearticulation of the field of security, in the sense of both the academic/intellectual field of ‘security studies’ and the field of political practice. In particular, Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘habitus’ and field, and his introduction of the concept of strategy within a structural field of practice, provides a productive and challenging means of combining constructivist, structuralist and strategic understandings, without succumbing to a rationalist reduction of strategy. From this perspective, the demise of the Cold War entailed a shift in the field of security practices and the exploitation of a new set of generative possibilities already contained within the habitus of security actors and institutions, and wielded strategically in order to influence the distribution of capital and the structure of the field. I am not, to repeat, claiming that culture and identity suddenly came into security relations, or that they were wholly absent before. But I do claim that the specific developments in the field of security that took place in this period can productively be seen as drawing upon forms of cultural capital and symbolic power – and strategies of interest. In this process, the previous ‘game’ of military strategic calculation and balancing was downgraded via the valorization of the cultural field. At the same time, democracy in particular, and culture more

Introduction

5

generally, were corresponding reconfigured as key parts of the field of security. This was partly a result of what Bourdieu calls the habitus adjusting to a new situation; it was also partly a result of institutions seeking to reinvent themselves and establish their relevance in the new situation; but it was also part of the mobilization and exercise of forms of power. Chapters 3 and 4 use these conceptual tools to explore two dynamics that were central in the constitution of the field of security in the 1990s, and that remain powerful today. In Chapter 3, I examine the power dynamics of the ‘democratic peace’ through an examination of the thinking of its most famous proponent, Immanuel Kant. Kant’s ideas are significant not only because of their role as an inspiration for contemporary theorizing; a closer examination of Kantian liberalism reveals it can be implicated in processes of subject-construction and identity-formation that are shot through with power dynamics. Both within liberal states, and between liberal and non-liberal states, Kantian liberalism involves a reflexive process concerned with the production of legitimate forms of subjectivity that performs subtle yet powerful disciplinary functions. In this process, Kantian liberalism generates specific practices of identity and substantial, if often overlooked, forms of power that can become the basis of strategies exercised by dominant actors in the security field of the democratic peace. It is important to be specific about the nature of this liberal identity, since identity is sometimes treated as wholly oppositional, as inscribing (and even requiring) a clear division between self and other, between us and them. Such a reading of identity risks misunderstanding the exercise of cultural power in post-Cold War Europe. The democratic peace was certainly part of a process of reproducing a ‘we’ (that, as I argue in the case of NATO, was part of its attraction) but this Western identity was located within a broader field of (potential) inclusion. This was not a straightforward matter of altercasting, or of the relatively crude declaration of cultural superiority and inferiority. For what was constituted in this period was not a simple oppositional process of Othering, but the operation of a field of identity, a relational structure in which a form of inclusion was crucial. A key part of the power of the democratic peace lies in its articulation of an identity that any state could, and indeed should, aspire toward. While all states were in principle capable of inclusion, in practice not all were yet ready to be included. The power to determine what changes were necessary for them to become so, and the degree to which these had been successfully achieved, resided in a field of practice dominated (though by no means monopolized) by those who possessed the recognized status and knowledge (the cultural and symbolic power) to make such determinations. Seen in this light, the democratic peace is not just a theory: it was and is also part of the articulation of a field of security where culture and identity are key dimensions of power. If the democratic peace exemplifies the symbolic structure of the cultural field of security and key forms of power within it, the evolution – and, in

6

Introduction

fact, the survival – of NATO provides further illustrations of the reconfiguration underway. As has often been pointed out, and as was often mooted at the time, the end of the Cold War not only marked a new set of opportunities, it also presented challenges and dangers. Amongst the most pressing of these was the spectre of the dissolution of ‘the West’ itself. Today, it is sometimes easy to forget how commonly it was claimed that NATO would soon fade away, that Western unity had only been the product of a shared threat, and that now that the threat was gone the United States would turn its attention away from Europe, while Europeans would return to their old rivalries and antagonisms. John Mearsheimer’s formulation may have been extreme, but he was far from alone in claiming (and worrying) that we would all ‘soon miss the Cold War’. This was, as its participants recognized quite clearly, in part a crisis of identity – a question of who ‘we’ were, and whether or not the West could remain ‘The West’ without a defining opposition. In this setting, the cultural strategy performed two crucial tasks, providing a logic of unity inside the West, and facilitating a set of strategies for organizing the outside. These strategies were not developed in the abstract, nor did they gain power from the symbolic and cultural realms alone. On the contrary, the genesis and success of the cultural field of security was intimately linked to institutions – and particularly to the security institution of NATO. NATO was not just a tool of these broader transformations: it was both an object of them (one of the things that could be revalued and thus reproduced by and within a transformed cultural logic of security), and a crucial element in the success of these practices. Chapter 4 demonstrates how the articulation of this cultural field of security was linked in important ways to the positions of powerful security institutions and the challenges they confronted with the waning and disappearance of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. In particular, I argue that the strong focus on the cultural dimensions of security was a key element – a ‘strategy’, in Bourdieuian terms – in the continuation and transformation of NATO and its adaptation to the new security environment, while also constituting an important element in the Alliance’s ability to act effectively and to exercise specific forms of power in and over that environment. The post-11 September 2001 world has in the eyes of many marked the return of Realpolitik in international security – a hard-nosed, hard-power realism that has swept away the soft power illusions of the interregnum of the 1990s in general, and the Clinton administration in particular. While few can doubt that security relations have undergone significant (and often worrying) shifts over recent years, I argue in Chapter 5 that the cultural field of security and the realm of cultural strategies remains essential in understanding security relations today. To make this case, I turn to one of the most influential and certainly one of the most controversial schools of strategic thinking and security analysis abroad today: neoconservatism.

Introduction

7

The rise of neoconservatism in the United States can be attributed in part to its use of symbolic power and exploitation of cultural strategies to great effect. Indeed much of the influence of neoconservatism in security politics arises from these sources. Far from rejecting the cultural field of security in the name of a traditional realism of military power and material threats, neoconservatism plays explicitly upon the relationship between culture and security, and involves an attempt to revalue the field of security by treating the relationship between culture and security in even more sweeping and all-embracing forms. Far from being marginal, in this vision security relations are part of a broader cultural contest: a struggle over the fate of liberalmodernity itself. This struggle is not just a question of the international realm: it extends across the domestic and the international, forming part of a cultural strategy that has been crucial to the political success of neoconservatism in American politics and underpinning its influence in debates over American foreign and security policy. These strategies have important implications for security analysis and for the field of security studies. For one of neoconservatism’s key moves in debates over post-9/11 security policy has lain in its attempt to de-legitimize its critics – whether realist, liberal, ‘critical’, or anywhere in between – through the exercise of specific cultural strategies and forms of symbolic power. Cultural strategies are not, therefore, just something that analysts should study, they are also something in which security studies is enmeshed. In fact, I conclude that one of the reasons for the rise in popularity of culture and constructivism in security studies has to do with its affinities to the structure and exercise of power in post-Cold War security relations. The recognition poses significant challenges for thinking about the relationship between analytic and political practices, and the relationship between scholarship and power in the construction of security relations. At the level of both social and analytic practice, the relationship between culture and security, and with it symbolic power and cultural strategies, is essential to grasp.

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

Culture, strategy, and security

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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.

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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

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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

12

Culture, strategy, and security 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

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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 others neither to dogmatic reassertion of the need for such knowledge, nor to despair. Rather, in combination with a new ‘voluntarist’ theology it marked the emergence of a new ‘constructive skepticism’ (Rabb 1975), which embraced the concept of probability and sought a practical response to both scepticism and enthusiasm. Locke’s empiricism, which devalued teleological or innatist theories of knowledge (that a person had an innate capacity or disposition to know what was true in the face of competing opinions) and his commitment to voluntarism (that knowledge could only be probable, not certain, without limiting the creative power of God), meant that both traditional and enthusiastic claims to absolute knowledge were delegitimized and that a space was constructed in which individual conscience and inquiry could take place without devolving into accusations of nihilism, apostasy, or heresy.13 As Sheldon Wolin points out, classical liberalism rarely resembles the confident, naive portrait currently painted of it by both supporters and detractors. It was neither blithely optimistic, nor did it rely naively upon crude visions of ‘economic man’ with straightforwardly given ‘interests’.14 Characterized by ‘a profound respect for the limits of reason and the pervasiveness of irrational factors in man and society’, liberalism was, in Wolin’s nice phrase, ‘a philosophy of sobriety, born in fear, nourished by disenchantment, and prone to believe that the human condition was and was likely to remain one of pain and anxiety’ (1960: 293–4).15 The classical liberal combination of scepticism and empiricism, stressing the importance (and sometime the exclusive legitimacy) of material knowledge, was buttressed by an understanding of subjectivity and agency that stressed material self-interest and calculation as partial counters and

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Culture, strategy, and security

alternatives to what were perceived as destructive and conflictual understandings of social identity. Jettisoning straightforward visions of truth, and devaluing teleological or innatist claims that individuals (or certain individuals) had access to absolute truth, became a foundation for tolerance and the platform for an attack upon innatist (ontological) visions of social hierarchy and authority. These sceptical and voluntarist notions became key planks in the liberal platform against innatist (given) justifications of social identity and political privilege, and in the articulation of a liberal vision of equality and political right. As Stephen Holmes has stressed, self-interest in this early tradition was not only a strategy that sought to narrow the bases of social conflict, it was also a strategy that sought to broaden the grounds of moral and political inclusion. In Holmes’s words: Republican theorists in particular were prone to assert that it is ‘impossible for any Man to act upon any other Motive than his own Interest . . . in the larger Sense of the Word’. It is not difficult to see why. Self-interest is a profoundly egalitarian and democratic idea. Only a few have hereditary privileges, but everyone has interests. To acknowledge the legitimacy of interests is to say that all citizens, no matter what their socially ascribed status, have concerns that are worthy of attention. Far from being mean-spirited and selfish, this ‘rehabilitation’ of interest make it morally obligatory, for the first time, to attend to ‘the interests of the excluded’. (1995: 63)16 One can, as early liberals did and political thinkers have ever since, worry about the degree to which interest could provide an adequate foundation for moral consideration and action. But what should not be discounted is how in their origins the liberal understandings of self-interest were far from the economistic abstractions and ‘strategic’ assumptions they are often reduced to today. They were political principles and parts of practical platforms. A transformation of epistemic practice was seen as a means of transforming social and political and ethical practices. Materialism and empiricism were intrinsic elements in an assault upon various forms of innatism and essentialism; in fact it is probably not too much to say that materialism and empiricism can be considered epistemic ethical practices, justified not only in terms of knowledge but also in terms of their practical contributions and consequences. These practices constitute, in short, a negative ontology, a reduction of individuals to purely atomistic individuality, in the name of opposing innatist ontologies of privilege and traditional authority, and became an essential argument opposing the absolutist state in the name of universal citizenship and legal equality. In liberalism, the role of the state is not to proclaim an identity, but to disregard particular

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identities in favour of abstract universality. This universality emerges not from a lack of understanding of the importance of identity, but from a conscious exclusion of its significance from the political realm in light of the conflict it was seen to entail.17 Seen in light of this liberal lineage, rationalist theories of individual selfinterest, as well as empiricist conceptions of knowledge and materialist definitions of power, are not simply the products of an apolitical intellectual movement, divorced from social and political concerns, that provides the secure basis for an ‘objective’ social science. On the contrary, the classical liberal heritage from which these practices in part emerged, sought and represented a transformation of knowledgeable practices spurred by political and especially security concerns. They represented not simply a ‘theoretical’ innovation, or a naive vision of a natural evolution towards objective knowledge, but were part and parcel of attempts to construct new political institutions and practices within the state, practices that had the question of security in the broadest sense at their heart. The knowledgeable practices of liberalism sought to provide foundations within which political agreement could be obtained and social concord achieved. They sought, above all, to restore a foundation and provide stability to a culture wracked by political conflict and slaughter. The liberal vision of citizenship, the conception of individual security and liberty, and the constitutive political categories of the public and private realms in liberalism, are in significant ways constituted by an unwillingness to ask the question of identity. Historically speaking, this unwillingness was a conscious choice, reflecting a practical political stance, and emerging out of the historical context of the early modern era where a concern with the dangers and potential conflict arising from such issues had become paramount. For example, reducing political identity to abstract individuality got rid not only of ascriptive hierarchies of class, the most common liberal focus, but also ascriptive identities that were intrinsically implicated in the structure of violence. The liberal assault ranged from an attack on dogmatically theological politics, to the militaristic ideologies and identities of the aristocracy. Just as conflicts within societies were to be avoided by this strategy, so were those between them. As Tully has noted, ‘the practice of toleration was intended, inter alia, to undercut the religious motive for warfare’, but the ‘emptying’ of the liberal self also allowed an attack upon a second cause of conflict, the ‘Renaissance humanists’ glorification of warfare and the identification of military achievements with heroic virtue’ (1993: 239).18 Stripping away this conception of an heroic identity was part of an assault on militaristic aristocratic identities. Moreover, since a person’s identity no longer resided in their physical being (no longer literally was their being, ontologically speaking), their simple physical existence was no longer by its very existence a threat.19 Thus the individual body could be secured and conflicts of belief placed within the realm of personal conscience which became public in the non-physically violent realm of politics.

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In these ways, political violence was to be removed from the private or personal realm and the public, political realm was to be insulated from personal acts of violence.20 The categorical structure of violence was also universalized: private physical violence, either wielded by one individual over another, by one class over another, or exercised by a class which defined itself in part by its right to exercise private violence – duelling, for example (Kiernan 1986) – was delegitimized and its elimination from the public realm was undertaken. Citizens were to be formally equal and violence became (in principle and to significant if varying degrees in practice) institutionalized, rule-bound and centralized. The shift to abstract visions of the person (separable in principle from their religious, ethnic or class ‘identities’ or ‘communities’), was a move towards pacification. The liberal focus on rules and rights as opposed to ‘the good’ emerge not primarily (if at all) from an uncritical certainty concerning the universality of individual interests or a naive assumption of atomistic egoism. On the contrary, the stress on rules and rights as opposed to substantive visions of justice and community reflects a deep and abiding fear of what happens when ethics of ‘absolute ends’ leave the realm of personal conscience and enter the field of politics and the contestation for state power.21 As part of these transformations, ‘domestic’ security threats came to be articulated in terms of a threat to the state, threats which were defined in terms of material actions. What citizens thought (their political beliefs) and what they said (in the realm of public political discourse) did not make them threats subject to violence either at the hands of the state or zealous patriots.22 Defining threats in material terms (like all other phenomena) was held to allow a reasoned discourse surrounding them. To place the discourse of war and peace within the bounds of physical threat and the capacity for it was a pacifying move. It sought to remove a central source of social conflict and thus to secure individuals and the political order from civil violence arising from the ‘enthusiasm’ of different groups or individuals. Similarly, in the international realm, other polities could in principle be threats – something more likely if they were not liberal23 – but they were not necessarily so. Whether they were or not in this view became an empirical question: an issue of material military capabilities. The stress on instrumental reason and material capabilities (strategy, as it has come to be narrowly defined in modern terms) represented a new political practice. No other sovereignty was in essence or by its very nature a threat or challenge (consider the difference between this and the logic of religious conflict in the Thirty Years War). Whether they were or not was held to be an empirical question susceptible to the newly defined form of reasoned discourse in a public realm and capable, in principle, of practical coordination between states.24 Transforming the relationship between knowledge, identity and practice in these terms was part of a broader transformation in the ordering of political practice throughout the early modern period. As Jen Bartleson (1995) has brilliantly shown, it was entwined in the operation of a new

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form of political ‘technology’ that he has usefully termed mathesis, the transformation of social life into objects of knowledge, control and management. While the foundations of this transformation were extremely broad, one source of its impetus – as Bartleson notes, and Toulmin stresses – was an attempt to manage the violence of identity-driven politics. Seen in these terms, the classical mathesis of security politics – underlain intellectually by a commitment to materialism and empiricism exemplified in security politics by the ‘balance of power’ – represents not the triumph of an intellectualist movement called ‘positivism’, but a profound transformation in the political practices that played a central role in the constitution of modern states and societies. Nor were these shifts unrelated to state power. As Steven Holmes has argued, the successful growth of material forms of self-interest was essential to the generation of state power. Those states that were able to marginalize the identity dynamics underpinning religious and social conflicts achieved a greater degree of stability and a capacity for political consolidation essential in producing effective, centralized state power. In an analysis of Bodin’s views on toleration, for example, Holmes has noted how these transformations could be fused with raison d’e´tat: The very word toleration derives from the Latin for strength: to stand up, support, sustain. No surprise, therefore, that the doctrine of toleration could be incorporated smoothly into the political program of power-seeking absolutism. Religious liberality strengthens the state, makes possible an armistice among rival sects, and promotes the supremacy of the crown. (1995: 125) Seen in light of this lineage, the rationalist and materialist assumptions of traditional security studies are not just theoretical postulates. They are the product of an historical, cultural, and deeply political legacy. Far from being natural or objective in any scientific sense, they are the product of a conscious attempt to form and transform practices by promoting specific understandings of the self, conceptions of self-interest, and forms of knowledge (materialism and calculation) that would mitigate violence and provide solid foundations social order. This is not to say that security was the only issue driving these transformations. No doubt, developments in the natural sciences, in capitalism, in theology, and in numerous other social domains were also vital in this evolution. Yet this very diversity is part of the point. The ascendance of rationalist and materialist understandings of agency needs to be grasped as part of these social and historical processes. Far from being ‘objective’, these stances were part of a broad politics of security. Much of the resistance by traditional forms of security studies to broader theorizations of security practices arises from the continuing

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influence of this liberal legacy. To a degree, the attractions of materialism and rationalism in security studies – of visible, calculable forms of military power, and of action as a consequence of instrumental calculations built upon objective perceptions of these power relations by clearly identifiable state decision-makers – lie not only in the obvious importance of state authority and material capabilities. They are also to be found in the desire to render the world knowable, calculable, and thus to some extent controllable. It is this promise, and its opposite – the fear of a world not based on these practices – that is behind much of the suspicion toward constructivism in security studies. Culture, from this perspective, is the realm of belief and opinion – not knowledge; but much more importantly, it is also potentially the realm of emotion, of irrationalism, of anarchy and even fanaticism. Rationalist and materialist visions of security draw on powerful cultural, ethical, and political resources deriving from this legacy. Resistance to calls to broaden the analytic foundations of security studies thus arises not only from theoretical or methodological orthodoxies, powerful though these may be. It also arises from a set of claims about the relationship between the practice of knowledge and the politics of security deeply embedded in the liberal legacy. It is only a slight overstatement to say that this resistance is the reflection of a culture and a set of identity commitments.

Subjectivity, sovereignty and security A common criticism of rationalist theories of international relations is that they treat the state as a rational actor, akin to the individual person. As a result, it is argued, state-as-actor theories obscure the institutional dynamics and social processes that are central in the constitution of actual state action. These criticisms are well taken, and span a wide range of contemporary theoretical positions. But to come to terms more fully with the continuing power of narrow visions of state security, it is necessary also to recognize how this understanding reflects and draws upon conceptual moves well beyond the misleading analogy between states and rationally self-interested individuals. Perhaps most importantly, it is necessary to stress that the narrow vision of state security is both underpinned and legitimized by the ways that it has taken the limited historical construction of the liberal individual traced above and transformed it into a reified assumption. As a consequence, traditional security studies produces narrowly contractarian visions of political order that define the limiting conditions of security and that play an important role in the identification of security as state security. This reification of subjectivity, of individual agency, is a key dimension in the traditional limitation of security to state security through a specific construction of sovereignty. If atomistic, instrumentally rational individuals are taken as the basis for political analysis – as the ultimate ‘units’ comprising a state of nature – then it follows that political obligation,

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authority, and order are a priori circumscribed by the contractual authority (a rationalist view of the Hobbesian Leviathan or, alternatively, some anodynely utilitarian rendition of Locke25) that provides a structure allowing rational cooperation between these self-interested individuals. This vision emerges neither from a theory of the state, nor of the international structure, but from an implicit theory of the subject in the sense of the individual person: the modern representation of the individual as an autonomous rational actor confronted by an environment filled with other like actors. These others are a source of insecurity: hence the classic security dilemma and the popularity of state-of-nature analogies supposedly drawn from Hobbes or Rousseau. Whether this situation arises from the nature of the actors, or from the situation in which they find themselves (the traditional categories of debate between first, second and third image explanations) is here less important than recognizing the common foundation from which both possibilities spring: an assumption of methodological individualism in which all social action (cooperation and conflict) is strictly the product of the interaction of wholly self-contained, instrumentally rational, subjects.26 The state accordingly becomes the primary locus of security, authority and obligation, and contractual obligations between citizens represent the limit (underwritten by the authority of the state) of the effective coordination of collective action (or of community). The security of citizens is identified with (and guaranteed by) that of the state and, by definition, those who stand outside it represent potential or actual threats. Relations between states are thereby rendered purely strategic (or contractual) in the instrumental sense of the word, and this foundation provides the basis for claims about international anarchy and the possible variations on world orders. The declaration that the state is the subject of security, and anarchy the eternal condition of international relations, is thus premised not upon objective facts or structural determinations, but is grounded in a deeper set of claims about the nature of political subjects and their relationship to sovereignty. The ‘fact’ of anarchy is actually based upon an a priori claim about autonomous (liberal-rationalist) individuals and the kind of contractarian political order that these subjects necessarily require. At the international level, the essence of this conception is not simply a world of self-regarding states operating under the security dilemma, but the assumption of a particular form of individual rationality in state action as both the source and outcome of that anarchy. Via this process, the security practices of the liberal legacy are reduced to an abstraction in which contractual sovereignty, defined by the limits of the state, becomes the defining condition and limit of politics.27 Abstracting an a priori logic of sovereignty from its concrete historical and practical-strategic contexts, rationalist-materialist theories of security accept essentialized contractarian politics as a foundation, and deduce ‘anarchy’ from this basis. The claim that the resolution to the problem of anarchy in the state of

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nature, via the sovereign state, simply recreates the logic of anarchy at a higher (international) level is little more than the expression of this abstract logic in operation. Sovereignty is transformed from an historical practice into an abstract deduction, and international politics is reduced to a structure of anarchy on the basis of this abstraction. Sovereignty, defined in rationalactor/contractualist terms, becomes the precondition of order, and the only logical options allowed by this principle are either particular Leviathans (and international anarchy) or a global Leviathan. The consciously limited vision of subjectivity and political order found in early moden liberalism is thereby reified and transformed into the basis for an ‘objective’ science of state security, defined by instrumental rationality, and operating within a context of international anarchy dominated by material power.28 These conceptual moves – the reification of the liberal legacy and its transformation into a narrowly abstract conception of sovereignty – are key elements of the theoretical ‘bedrock’ of traditional, rationalist visions of security studies. The rational actor model of agency so influential in the evolution of the modern social sciences is a consequence of this reification of practice, not the basis for a cogent theory of practice. Treating as facts what are actually historically constructed understandings of both subjects and power, rationalist and materialist approaches then treat these as postulates that can be built into theoretical models of practice. These moves underpin the seemingly inescapable logic of state security, appealed to by those who assert their necessity. However, it is essential to recognize that this construction of state security as the essence of security is just that, a conceptual argument constructed on the basis of specific claims about subjectivity, sovereignty, and the inescapable logic of (state) security that follows from them. This vision emerges not only (or perhaps even primarily) from empirical observations about the centrality of states in security relations. It is underpinned at a deeper level by a set of conceptual claims – themselves founded on a reified vision of individual agency – about the necessary nature of security as state security. Once within this logic, it is very difficult to get out. But once it is recognized that what we are dealing with here are not natural necessities or simple statements of empirical facts, but rather conceptual necessities and political logics driven in part by reification of historical practices, it becomes possible to step outside the closed conceptual circle created by this logic of subjectivitysovereignty-security, and to examine security practices in their broader concrete reality.

Conclusion A clearer recognition of the deep structure of culture and identity at work in the traditional logic of state security allows for a better understanding of both its powerful attractions and the significant limits that it places on analysing security relations. Rationalism and materialism were not pristine

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theoretical premises. They were attempts to construct conceptions of identity and knowledge that would facilitate the operation of specific forms of political action, order, and authority. Equally importantly, they sought to provide security by mitigating conflict – by marginalizing or enclosing within new limits visions of identity and power that were viewed as irrational, violent, and tending towards perhaps inexorable conflict. What is more, these conceptions of power and identity became key dimensions in the construction of contractual visions of political order whereby security became identified with the state. In other words, the ‘narrow’ state-centred vision of traditional security studies should not be seen as standing in opposition to a broadly constructivist position. Viewed historically, its foundations lie in the construction of a specific politics of security, however much these foundations may today be misrecognized, denied, or forgotten. This recognition does not mean that states are not ‘real’, or that sovereignty and state power are not crucial and even dominant dimensions of contemporary security relations. They are. But this is a very different matter from saying that security must be reduced to the limits of a narrow contractual vision of sovereignty and a material definition of power. This move is not an empirical claim; it is a conceptually derived claim about the necessary nature of security driven by a reification of the liberal construction of agency and the politics of security. Far from being realistic, this latter move acts as an unnecessarily limiting constraint on both analysis and political imagination. Recognizing the constructed nature of the rationalist position opens up a clear space and a theoretical rationale for a more sustained examination of theories of practice in security studies. The next chapter seeks to overcome some of these limits by turning to the theory of practice developed by Pierre Bourdieu.

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Cultural strategies

The emergence of a broad range of constructivist perspectives has over the past decade and a half played an important role in stressing the centrality of culture and identity in security relations, and in putting these issues at the heart of theoretical debate. However, the development of this ‘constructivist challenge’ has perhaps inevitably also borne the mark of the intellectual context against which it emerged. Most strikingly, constructivist theory has until quite recently been largely silent on the question of power, stressing instead the importance of norms and values. Similarly, it has generally avoided questions of strategic action. As noted earlier, these absences are not difficult to understand:1 the identification of ‘power’ with material military power, its oft-asserted role as the determining factor in security relations, and the identification of ‘strategy’ with a narrow instrumentalism that takes for granted both the identity of actors and their rationality, certainly provides ample reason to avoid the concepts when trying to articulate a broader and more sociologically sophisticated understanding of security and state action. Yet one of the most debilitating consequences of these developments is that culture has often come to be opposed to ‘interest’, ‘power’ and ‘strategy’ – and as a realm of ‘norms’ or ‘ideas’ contrasted to traditional concerns of strategic and security analysis. As Chapter 1 sought to demonstrate, however, to see constructivism and rationalism as opposed risks accepting a misleading and constraining set of theoretical oppositions. Seen in their historical context, rationalist understandings of interest and materialist conceptions of power are constitutive practices, part of the historical construction of modern liberal politics. This recognition provides both an opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity lies in breaking down the rigid barriers between rationalism and constructivism that have often served to stifle rather than foster enquiry. The challenge lies in developing theories of security practices that are more theoretically and empirically comprehensive and that can engage with concepts such as power and interest without falling back into unhelpfully narrow analyses. Much of the most interesting recent work in constructivist theory and security studies has begun explicitly to broach these issues, and to argue explicitly for a return to questions of power in constructivist theory and security studies. To contribute to this process, this chapter draws upon the

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work of Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s work is wide-ranging and complex, and the survey here is by no means intended to be comprehensive. What I seek to examine are some of the ways that Bourdieu’s theory of practice (most particularly his views on the relationship between culture, power and strategies) can be used to develop broader understandings of security practices, and particularly to appreciate the ‘cultural strategies’ that have been powerfully at work in international security over the past decade and a half.

A structuralist constructivism Disputes surrounding the nature of culture and its role in accounting for action are, of course, among the most long-standing and fundamental controversies in attempts to explain social life, and this chapter makes no claim to resolve these issues. But if culture is to mean anything, it must in part imply that human action is neither wholly individualist nor spontaneous, and that social life needs to be understood in the contexts of rules, norms and structures that provide parts of its coherence and, often, its regularities. But there are key ambiguities in even this basic claim. Rather crudely put, is culture a domain of rules and norms that directly governs or determines the actions of agents? If so, then the difficult question arises of precisely how these cultural structures are translated into individual actions. Conversely, is culture a menu of resources that agents somehow stand apart from and choose between in order to further their interests? Here, however, we run into the much-rehearsed problems of rationalist social theory, ranging from the ontological status of agents as non-social, ahistorical beings somehow standing outside the realm of culture, to the problems of discerning how these agents come to understand what their interests are, and how they choose between different means of advancing them. These questions are of course only simple and partial illustrations of complex debates in social theory. They have also been the source of sustained and sophisticated recent discussions in international relations under the rubrics of the ‘agent-structure debate’ and on-going controversies between rationalists and constructivists (Wendt 1992; 1999; Wight 1999). In security studies, these have often devolved into debates over whether ideas matter, or whether culture is simply an ideological tool masking or furthering more basic interests.2 Bourdieu develops a nuanced and sophisticated approach to the broad sociological issues underlying these controversies, and has made important and influential contributions to debates at the level of both meta-theory and explanatory practice. However, since my concern here is not with social theory per se, but with the implications of a particular dimension of Bourdieu’s theory, I will leave aside a discussion of meta-theoretical questions (which could easily occupy a chapter or more on their own) and instead focus more narrowly on explicating the core elements of his theory of practice.3

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Bourdieu seeks to move beyond the divisions between agential and structuralist positions, all too familiar in international relations, to develop a theory of practice that envelops both subjectivist (or what he terms ‘phenomenological’) and structuralist insights, without falling into the dilemmas and reductions that have so often bedevilled social theory. What is required, he argues, is a third stage of analysis, one which seeks to grasp the ‘dialectical relations between the objective structures to which the objectivist mode of knowledge gives access and the structured dispositions within which those structures are actualized and which tend to reproduce them’ (1977: 3). In his own words, the position Bourdieu adopts is that of a ‘constructivist structuralism or of a structuralist constructivism’ (1990: 123) that attempts to link agency and structure in a comprehensive conception of practice. Constructivism, of course, stresses the ways in which human action is linked to the subjective constitution of social reality. But to Bourdieu this constructivist stress on the experiential constitution of reality by the agent needs to be supplemented by a similar focus on the structural elements which comprise that constitutive process. As he puts it, ‘No doubt agents do have an active apprehension of the world. No doubt they do construct their vision of the world. But this construction is carried out under structural constraints’ (1990: 130). A focus on the subjective constitution of reality thus needs to the supplemented by a three-fold structuralist corollary: First, the fact is that this construction is not carried out in a social vacuum, but that it is subjected to structural constraints, secondly, that the structuring structures, the cognitive structures are themselves socially structured, because they have social origins, thirdly, the construction of social reality is not only an individual enterprise, but may also become a collective enterprise. (1990: 131) In order to grasp this constitutive relationship between agents and structures, Bourdieu proposes a theory of practice comprised of six essential elements: the concepts of the habitus and the field, along with his reconfigured notions of capital and power, and interests and strategies. The six are, as might be expected, interrelated, a fact which makes is difficult to articulate them in a disaggregated and linear fashion. In what follows, I shall attempt briefly to outline the concepts and their relationships, and to illustrate them through a series of examples.

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Habitus and field Habitus Perhaps the most difficult concept in Bourdieu’s attempt to articulate the logic of practice is that of the habitus. The habitus is the semi-conscious (though not innate) orientation that individuals have to the world, which forms a basis for practice. As John Thompson has lucidly described it, the habitus is ‘a set of dispositions which incline agents to act and react in certain ways. The dispositions generate practices, perceptions and attitudes which are ‘‘regular’’ without being consciously co-ordinated or governed by any ‘‘rule’’’ (Thompson 1991: 12). The structures of the habitus are not universal, but are acquired through the occupation of specific social positions. Or, as Bourdieu has himself put it in a passage worth quoting at length: The representations of agents vary with their position (and the interest associated with it) and with their habitus, as a system of models of perception and appreciation, as cognitive and evaluative structures which are achieved through the lasting experience of a social position. The habitus is at once a system of models for the production of practices and a system of models for the perception and appreciation of practices. And in both cases, its operations express the social position in which it was constructed. (Bourdieu 1990: 131)4 The habitus is thus both individual and collective, applying to all those who share similar positions in terms of their acquisition of a particular habitus and occupation of a similar position within the social field. At one level, it can be spoken of in terms of the acquistion of particular conceptual frameworks or worldviews. But the concept is broader than simply epistemic. The habitus is the entire ensemble of relations to the the world, from bodily orientations (ways of standing, speaking, etc.) which Bourdieu terms bodily hexis, to the acquisition of a disparate but cohesive set of ethical precepts, behavioural dispositions, etc. As Thompson has nicely put it, the practical sense which is a product of the possession of a specific habitus is not so much a state of the mind as a state of the body, a state of being. It is because the body has become a repository of ingrained dispositions that certain actions, certain ways of behaving and responding, seem altogether natural. (1991: 13) Following Thompson, one can say that Bourdieu’s vision of the habitus is constituted by four general propositions. First, the dispositions that constitute a particular habitus are ‘acquired through a process of inculcation’,

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that is, they become ‘second nature’ through childhood experiences, through a ‘myriad of mundane processes of training and learning’ comprised of everything from table manners to ways of holding one’s body, to categories for acting and judging. Second, these dispositions are structured: they are not arbitrarily related but comprise a discernable structure of relations, and they are shared across a broader social structure. Third, these structured dispositions are also durable: they are ingrained in the body in such a way that they endure through the life history of the individual, operating in a way that is pre-conscious and hence not readily amenable to conscious reflection and modification. And last, these structured dispositions are ‘generative and transposable in the sense that they are capable of generating a multiplicity of practices and perceptions in fields other than those in which they were originally acquired’ (Thompson 1991: 13). Bourdieu adopts Wittgenstein’s criticisms of visions of practice that see it as the direct application of clear rules to discrete situations. The difficulty with such a view is that following a rule involves a determination of which rule applies in a given circumstance. Thus, following a rule in a given situation would depend on a prior rule determining which rule was to apply in that situation. This rule would itself, however, have to be decided upon by reference to a prior rule, and so ad infinitum. Logically, then, a strict model of rule-following seems to descend into an infinite and irresolvable regress. But as Wittgenstein argued, this dilemma only occurs if we assume that the logic of practice is identical to the logic of logicians – which it is not.5 In actual practice, such issues rarely emerge; they are ‘resolved’ practically for the agent. As Wittgenstein famously put it in a passage that Bourdieu adopts as the epigram to The Logic of Practice (1990: 25): How am I able to follow a rule? – if this is not a question about causes then it is about the justification for my following a rule in the way I do. If I have exhausted the justification I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do’. The habitus is a sociological concept designed to capture this dimension of practice, linking structure and agency, and overcoming the false necessity of choosing between various forms of structuralism and subjectivism. The habitus is a domain of rules, but in the ‘fuzzy’ sense of practical logic, and the concept is designed to expose the individual and social bases of agents’ appreciation of situations and rules of conduct. It allows the analyst to capture the importance of rules in social life while retaining the active capacity of agents to move creatively within its logic.

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Field The habitus both structures and is structured by social fields, and action is constituted by the relationship between the habitus and the specific field in question. Perhaps the best way to convey the notion of the ‘field’ is through the analogy of the game.6 A game, Bourdieu notes, can only function so long as it is consituted by rules, indeed at one level the game is the rules – it is inconceivable without them. But the rules do not determine the flow or outcome of the game, nor do they direct in a mechanical way the actions of the players within it. To exist, the game also depends on the players’ knowledge and acceptance of the rules and goals which comprise the game, for just as the game could not exist without the rules, so also it would not exist without players who through their practical relation to those rules bring the game into existence by playing it. In his words you can use the analogy of the game in order to to say that a set of people take part in a rule-bound activity, an activity which, without necessarily being the product of obedience to rules, obeys certain regularities. The game is the locus of an immanent necessity, which is at the same time an immanent logic. In the game you cannot do just anything and get away with it. And the feel for the game, which contributes to this necessity and this logic, is a way of knowing this necessity and this logic. Whoever wants to win this game . . . must have a feel for the game, that is, a feel for the necessity and the logic of the game. (1987: 64) Despite the regularities which they impart to much of social life, neither the habitus nor the field are fixed, nor is their reproduction mechanical, automatic or inevitable (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977). Indeed as practical structures, the habitus and field exemplify a continual process of reinstatement and transformation. A particular habitus does not determine actual practices, rather since the ‘habitus realizes itself, becomes active only in the relation to a field . . . the same habitus can lead to very different practices and stances depending on the state of the field.’ Second, the habitus as the product of social conditionings, and thus of a history (unlike character), is endlessly transformed, either in a direction that reinforces it, when embodied structures of expectation encounter structures of objective chances in harmony with these expectations, or in a direction that transforms it. That is, a field constitutes a structure of practices towards which different forms of habitus have different relationships of ‘fit’, of naturalness, ease

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and comprehensibility; or, by contrast, of foreignness and a lack of ‘feel for the game’. For instance, to have continually to stop and calculate the ‘correct’ behaviour in a situation, or what best favours your interest, is often a sure pathway to disadvantage or failure. The appearance of indecision, of not knowing in Wittgenstein’s words ‘how to go on’, of overtly conniving or calculatingly self-interested behaviour, or of clearly false, rote or imitative actions, is generally ineffective precisely because such actions are so transparently inept or obviously cynical and self-serving. Conversely, to fit with the situation – to have your habitus and interest aligned with the structure of the field – is a source of success. These outcomes are not, however, a consequence of individual character, though the orientations of the habitus can be transformed by awareness and learning, but of the history of the individual and the fields in which they are located and move. These differences in relation are sources of advantage or disadvantage in a given field, yielding divergent possibilities of success within it, but also acting as barriers to entry arising from both the objective structure of the field in terms of possibilities for success, and from agents’ self-exclusion from specific fields.7 Action is constituted by the relationship between the habitus and the specific field in question. The possession of a specific habitus inclines (though does not determine) the fields in which agents move, their ability to move in different fields, and the strategies they can successfully adopt. Thus both habitus and field act in a reciprocal relationship tending to reproduce regularities of behaviour. In these ways, the relationship between habitus and field is also a relationship of power. But like the habitus and the field themselves, these relations are not static. In fact, ‘not only can the habitus be practically transformed (always within definite boundaries) by the effect of a social trajectory leading to conditions of living different from initial ones, it can also be controlled through awakenings of consciousness and socioanalysis’ (1990: 116). An illustration In order to provide a sense of how such a perspective provides a foundation for the analysis of concrete practices – and to forestall too hasty a dismissal of this perspective on the grounds that it has little to say about ‘real’ security issues – I would like at this early stage to discuss briefly a small (and yet, I think, striking) instance in which the dynamics that Bourdieu’s theory of practice highlights are revealed with particular clarity in an account of security relations at the highest and most traditional levels: a report of the first meeting between US President Bill Clinton and the then Russian national security chief, Alexander Lebed. Bourdieu argues that the habitus is a source and locus of models of appreciation and classification, models that express both the position of the agent and its relative position toward that which it perceives. In short, ‘the habitus implies a ‘‘sense of one’s own place’’ but also a ‘‘sense of the

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other’s place’’’ (1990: 131). Think, he suggests, of an everyday social comment such as saying a piece of clothing is ‘petty bourgeois’. The key question, for Bourdieu, is ‘what are the social conditions of possibility of such a judgement?’ Far from being a simple observation, the judgement reflects an entire relational structure of social practices and positions. First, it presupposes that an individual’s choices reflect the classificatory models (in this case, taste in clothes) specific to their social condition. A person’s choice of clothing, then, can be understood as the practical outcome of their classificatory schema, a schema reflective of their social position. In Bourdieu’s words, ‘nothing classifies somebody more than the way he or she classifies’ (1987: 131). One adopts a particular set of classifications and the practical choices suggested by their accordance with one’s own social position and habitus. Second, these categories are broadly effective across a wider social field. Consciousness of these categories and their connections to the social field are shared by others and constitute a shared practical orientation which allows us to understand that a classificatory judgement such as ‘that’s petty-bourgeois’ presupposes that, as socialized agents, we are capable of seeing the relation between practices or representations and positions in the social space (as when we guess a person’s social position from his or her accent). Thus, via the habitus, we have a world of common sense, a social world which seems self-evident. (1987: 132) As we have also seen, however, the habitus is not simply a set of conceptual categories. On the contrary, it is concretely embodied in the physical orientations to the world, the ways of orienting oneself physically in the world, a physical orientation which Bourdieu terms bodily hexis. Bodily hexis is fundamentally linked to the structures of the social fields in which it is embedded and from which it emerges. It is a part of practice, a form in which the structures of the social field are expressed and practically engaged: ‘Bodily hexis is political mythology realized, em-bodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a durable way of standing, speaking, walking, and thereby of feeling and thinking’ (1990: 70). Discussing his anthropological studies of the Kabyle in Algeria, Bourdieu notes that in that culture the orientations of bodily hexis correspond to differential positions in the social field. They thus provide a resource which individuals can draw upon in executing social actions, but they also provide the constraining context in accord with which the practices of individuals are strongly compelled to conform, particularly as regards the relations between men and women. In his words, among the Kabyle the opposition between male and female is realized in posture, in the gestures and movements of the body, in the form of the opposition

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Now consider the comments of a member of President Clinton’s staff regarding the American Presidential delegation’s first encounter, in 1996, with the then Russian national security minister, Alexander Lebed. According to a published report: We were shocked to see how he reacted to the President,’ said a Clinton Administration official who asked not to be named, describing Lebed’s participation in a round-table discussion with Bill Clinton on his last trip to Moscow. ‘We went expecting a big, confident, assured man. He hardly spoke. He didn’t know where to stand. He had trouble even making eye contact.’ (Specter 1996: 46) The process behind such a declaration can be understood clearly within the analytic framework of the habitus and the field. Evidently, for the Clinton official, Lebed’s behaviour involved more than simply an unexpected set of actions. It is held to confer a social significance, prompting a set of judgements on the kind of person and political actor Lebed is in the eyes of the official. Clearly, a ‘big’ man does not act in the way that Lebed purportedly did. And so long as we assume that Lebed had in reality not miraculously shrunk in physical stature, it is clear that there is much more at stake here than an unexpected behaviour. What was ‘shocking’ was that Lebed clearly did not appear to be the ‘kind of man’ that he was supposed to be, that in significant ways it appeared he did not ‘belong’. That he didn’t know where to stand, and could not ‘look you in the eye’, reflects a series of judgements emerging out of the habitus of the American official and the field of accepted practice in which it operates. This is then directly and evaluatively applied in an appreciation of Lebed’s personal and political stature via an evaluation of his own bodily hexis. Equally telling is the way in which this observation was reported. Not only was the comment featured prominently in the journalist’s narrative, but within the body of the report itself the quote is highlighted, reprinted in large-size, differently coloured type, in a box set apart from the rest of the text. One need not read this as a result of an invidious design on the behalf of the New York Times to cast Lebed in a particular light. Rather, it indicates the degree to which the tacit understanding which the Clinton

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official drew from these observations would be similarly understood by the readers of the story. This shared aspect of the habitus and its role in making judgements on behaviour occurring within a given field is precisely what provides the foundation for the evaluation of the meaning and significance of Lebed’s actions by the administration official, and for the prominent place it was given in the public presentation of that significance. This simple example also highlights the ways in which the relationship between habitus and field does not operate as an equal or neutral structure. On the contrary they are structures of power and struggle, where differential positions and the judgements based upon them have social and political consequences. The structuring of a field in accordance with particular principles of action and operation, and the ability – via an acquired habitus – to move effectively in relation to them, is a central aspect of social (practical) success and struggle. Much of Bourdieu’s work has been devoted to examining these aspects of practice, and one of his most central contributions in this regard has been the concept of capital. Capital and power The social space of a field is structured not only by the practical functioning of the habitus; it is also determined by the distribution of what Bourdieu calls capital. Capital comprises the resources that agents can draw upon to act in a given field, and their ability to move in these fields is related to their habitus and to their capital within a given field and between fields. Each field is characterized and constituted by specific forms of capital, of what is valued and what provides power within the field. A field is therefore a ‘structured space of positions in which the positions and their interrelations are determined by the distribution of different kinds of resources or ‘‘capital’’’. The habitus embodies specific forms of capital. It also constitutes an inclination to express and recognize the forms of capital that operate within specific fields, and to orient oneself towards them in particular ways, providing both a way of adjusting one’s behaviour in conformity with one’s position in a specific field and, to a degree, contributing to the reproduction of one’s place in that field. Thus, for example, Bourdieu argues that different social classes will differ in their access to higher education not only due to the economic constraints they may encounter in gaining access to it, but also due to the structures of the habitus which incline them both by disposition and experience to see themselves as not cut out for that world. Similarly, those who acquire a habitus which does so incline them will tend to act on it. So, Bourdieu argues, social structures reproduce themselves; and so also we can understand how they reproduce relations of inequality and domination. Although it is important to keep in mind their dynamic and relational dimensions, these aspects can be represented symbolically as: ‘([habitus] + [capital]) + field = practice’ (Bourdieu 1984: 101).

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Despite the economic provenance of the term, Bourdieu argues that there are different forms of capital, each specific to a given field, but also potentially convertible across fields. As Thompson has summarized the idea, there are many different forms of capital: not only ‘economic capital’ in the strict sense (i.e. material wealth in the form of money, stocks and shares, etc.), but also ‘cultural capital’ (i.e. knowledge, skill and other cultural acquisitions, as exemplified by educational or technical qualifications), ‘symbolic capital’ (i.e. accumulated prestige or honour) and so on. (Thompson 1991: 14) A particular field will be structured by the operation and distribution of particular forms of capital, and the ability to move in that field is tied to an agent’s possession of the relevant forms of capital. Thus, for example, the academic field is structured through the distribution of particular forms of cultural and symbolic capital, and only secondarily through economic capital. Economic capital has traditionally been fairly limited in its direct impact on the functioning of the academic field: one cannot become a professor simply by having enough money. Central to the operation of the academic field are issues such as the extent and origin of one’s academic degrees, the relative prestige of academic positions one holds or has held, and the number and status of publications (themselves viewed in terms of cultural and symbolic capital, not economic return).8 To play the academic game is necessarily to operate in a field constituted by these dynamics and to confront the distributions of capital that structure that field. This is not to say that economic capital is unimportant in providing the conditions for success in this field, both in terms of providing the economic and cultural backgrounds that create a habitus attuned to success in the educational field, or in terms of having access to prestigious educational institutions and the resources and opportunities they afford.9 Similarly, the cultural and symbolic capital of institutions is by no means unconnected to their economic capital. But a focus on cultural and symbolic capital highlights how practices take shape in the relationship between fields and forms of capital, and are not wholly determined by a single form. Moreover, it allows an examination of how capital can be translated across fields, for example, how the accumulation of certain forms of cultural capital, such as specific kinds of educational degrees, can – in specific circumstances – be converted into access to other forms of capital, e.g. the ability of an Ivy League MBA to command a high price on the job market. A key concern for investigation accordingly becomes the forms and relations of capital that operate within a specific field, the ways in which they are related, and the processes of transformation and conversion which take place.10

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It is possible to argue that Bourdieu sees economic capital as the most fundamental form.11 He certainly insists that material capital is an essential element of all forms of power relations – when it is used as a resource, or even when it is used as a negative foil, a capacity denied or derided in order to valorize another form of capital. Indeed, I will argue in later chapters that this dialectic of material power and its denial has been essential to the functioning of the security field. What Bourdieu is clear about, however, is that economic or material capital is not the only – nor always the most significant – form of capital, and that its position, power and impact depends upon its relationship to specific fields of practice. Cultural and symbolic forms of capital are linked to forms of power. Specifically, Bourdieu holds that cultural and symbolic power is a power that is recognized; in his formulation: I contend that a power or capital becomes symbolic, and exerts a specific effect of domination, which I call symbolic power or symbolic violence, when it is known and recognized, that is, when it is the object of an act of knowledge and recognition. (1987: 111)12 Cultural capital takes many forms, but it can broadly be understood as ‘legitimate’ status or authority, whether deriving from personal charisma or social background (itself constituted within a habitus and a field), or conferred by institutional membership or organizational leadership. Symbolic power is grounded in symbolic systems, pre-eminently language. But it also arises from abstract symbolic forms such as knowledge systems and the capital generated by their possession. As Bourdieu is at pains to stress, however, the two forms of capital and power are often related in practice. This is particularly the case in his analysis of language, for while recognizing the power of linguistic systems,13 he argues that it is vital to understand that this form of power cannot be understood at the level of language alone. Instead, he stresses that: Symbolic power does not reside in ‘symbolic systems’ in the form of an ‘illocutionary force’ but that it is defined in and through a given relation between those who exercise power and those who submit to it, i.e. in the very structure of the field in which belief is produced and reproduced. What creates the power of words and slogans, a power capable of maintaining or subverting the social order, is the belief in the legitimacy of words and of those who utter them. And words alone cannot create this belief. (1991: 170) As I will later argue, this point is crucial in understanding the importance that Bourdieu attaches to institutions in social life, and is particularly

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useful in thinking about the role of security institutions in the post-Cold War era. At this juncture, however, I want simply to stress that neither the distribution of capital nor its valorization within or between fields is fixed. Indeed fields are characterized both by struggles over the distribution of currently recognized forms of capital and by struggles to change the social relationship by changing the structures of valorization within the field. While some forms of capital may retain their value both within and across fields at particular points in time, they by no means do so easily, fixedly or universally. The structures of a field, habitus and capital are in constant tension and potential flux. Yet the possession of a specific habitus and particular forms of capital serves to reproduce (though not determinately) the fields within which agents tend to move, their possibilities for moving in other fields, and the options for action which they are likely to adopt. Thus habitus, capital, and field act in a reciprocal relationship, tending to reproduce regularities of behaviour at the same time as they are continual arenas of struggle and power. Interests and strategies The concepts of interests and strategies are the final two elements in Bourdieu’s theory of practice. He adopts the terms interests and strategies to convey the capacity and realm of agency that structuralist accounts elide, and to reintroduce the notions into the domain of cultural and symbolic analysis where he feels they have been deleteriously absent.14 Perhaps most strikingly, Bourdieu develops a powerful critique of attempts to exclude notions of strategy and interest from cultural analysis. This stress on ‘interests’ and ‘strategies’ may seem at first glance to stand sharply at odds with the ‘constructivist’ vision outlined earlier. It certainly challenges aspects of constructivism in international relations, a position that has often been highly and rightly suspicious of such concepts due to their association with various economistic, rationalist or utilitarian forms of explanation.15 But the way in which Bourdieu uses the concepts of strategy and interest involves a significant departure from more conventional views. He does not view the manifest inadequacies of rationalist and utilitarian accounts of the strategic pursuit of interest as requiring a total rejection of the concepts. Indeed he regards the concepts of interest and strategy – sufficiently reformulated – as central to a cogent theory of practice. In this conception, interests and strategies can only be understood within the complex interrelationship of habitus, field and capital within which they come into being. A stress on the role of interests and their relation to rules does not constitute a return to rationalistic individualism because the very notions of interest and the structure of rules take place within the contextual structures of the habitus and the field. He thus discusses how actors can pursue strategies and advance interests without being consciously or instrumentally aware of doing so, i.e. how the adoption of a

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certain orientation need not be a rationalist or utilitarian strategic choice, and how this is central to the operation of forms and structures of power. For Bourdieu, interests must be seen as ‘socially constituted in and by the necessity of a field’, a view which needs to be clearly distinguished from an economistic vision. An ‘interest’ is that which motivates people towards its pursuit. While this definition may seem almost tautological, it is designed to stress the indeterminate nature of the concept, since it has so often been subject to an economistic reduction. There is no such thing as a generic or ahistorical interest. Rather, interests are always constituted within specific fields: ‘Interest thus defined is the product of a given category of social conditions: as a historical construction, it cannot be known other than by historical knowledge, ex post, empirically, and not deduced a priori from a transhistorical nature’ (1987: 88). Interests, then, always need to be seen in the context of the fields they are constituted within. Fields, similarly, should be viewed in terms of the interests which reciprocally make them continue to function. In this way, interest is at once a condition of the functioning of the field (a scientific field, the field of haute couture, etc.), in so far as it is what ‘gets people moving’, what makes them get together, compete and struggle with each other, and a product of the way the field functions. (1987: 88) While an interest is only given in and through a particular field, it is equally important that the field only continues to exist so long as people have an ‘interest’ in it, so long as they continue to play the game. When this ‘interest’ declines, so too does the field, and it is both an opening and a question for inquiry to examine how these social processes function, how new fields and interests are constituted and how old ones decline. At one level, this greatly expands the purview of ‘interest’, for in this view, unlike the natural, ahistorical or generic interest referred to by economists, interest is an investment in a game, any game, an investment which is the condition of entry into this game and which is simultaneously created and reinforced by the game. There are thus as many forms of interest as there are fields. (1990: 48) To return to an example used previously, to pursue an interest in the academic field is to pursue one specific to that field, not a badly disguised version of a strictly economic interest. The pursuit of recognition in the academic field may, for instance, be an interest in itself. The strategies to which this interest gives rise need to be seen in the context of this field-specific interest: consider, for example, an academic who accepts a lower-paying appointment at a prestigious university over a higher-paying one at a less

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prestigious institution.16 This leads, at one level, to a radically open vision of ‘interests’; but this openness is, of course, always constituted within the existing structures of habitus, field and capital. Strategies This conception of interest is related to a corresponding redefinition of the idea of strategy. Strategies concern the ways in which agents pursue their interests. They too, however, take place within the context of the habitus, capital and field, and their relevant interests. The concept of strategy is designed to stress the individual capacity for agency, for choice and action. But again, this concept, while representing a reaction against structuralist accounts, must always itself be viewed within the constructed structures from which it emerges and within which it operates. The universe of potential strategies (and indeed of potential interests) of a given actor is circumscribed – though not mechanistically determined – by the structure of the game and operation of the habitus, and the forms of capital possessed as they relate to the consideration and pursuit of interests and strategies. Field and habitus work together to incline towards a certain set of behaviours, behaviours that reflect both elements in the orientation of practical actions: Practical evaluation of the likelihood of the success of a given action in a given situation brings into play a whole body of wisdom, sayings, commonplaces, ethical precepts (‘that’s not for the likes of us’) and, at a deeper level, the unconscious principles of the ethos which, being the product of a learning process dominated by a determinate type of objective regularities, determines ‘reasonable’ and ‘unreasonable’ conduct for every agent subjected to those regularities. (1977: 77) Three other characteristics of this view of strategies are important to note. First, this notion of strategy ‘presupposes a permanent capacity for invention, indispensable if one is to be able to adapt to indefinitely varied and never completely identical situations’ (1990: 63). The game provides constant opportunities for the manipulation and reversals of strategies in order to further one’s interests; it is far from linear. Second, actors can pursue strategies and advance interests without their being consciously or instrumentally aware of doing so. Rather, this strategic action emerges out of dominant practices naturally, as an expression of an adequate ‘feel for the game’ through which the orientations of the habitus and the structure of the field yield strategies of practice which play the game to advantage without appearing to do so, and which indeed are more effective since they are not the result of an obvious strategy. Third, while specific forms of capital (and strategies) may dominate a given field, these domains are neither hermetically sealed nor permanently

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fixed. On the contrary, one of the most important dimensions of the struggle over a field involves how actors attempt not only to increase and use their stock of the dominant capital in the field, but how they can attempt to increase their power in the field by bringing capital from other fields into play. This overlapping of fields and the strategies that actors use in their struggles over the field and the forms of capital that dominate it are essential in grasping the complexities of practice, and in discerning the specific strategies that different actors adopt in light of their specific habitus and forms of capital they possess. By revaluing elements of an existing field, for example, actors may be able to draw more effectively on the capital they possess, and advance their interests accordingly. Bourdieu’s use of economic concepts is (intentionally) jarring in the field of cultural analysis. Yet he uses the language of capital, interest and strategy to highlight the ways in which the relations between habitus and field allow for the operation of social processes of distinction and the pursuit of interests that do not conform to economistic formulations of action, but that can nonetheless be understood strategically because of the way they reflect the different and unequal positions of actors within a field, and their correspondingly different capacities to act within it. Perhaps the most challenging and controversial point here is his claim that strategic action, while calculating, does not follow a rationalist model of instrumental calculation.17 Instead, strategies must be understood in the context of the habitus, and in relation to the relevant fields and forms of power operating in a given situation. As Bourdieu puts it, the vocabulary of strategy – which is indispensable to retain the active, constructive side of the most ordinary choices of the symbolic struggles of daily life, must not deceive us. The most efficacious strategies of distinction are those which find their principle in the practical, pre-reflexive, quasi-instinctual choices of habitus. (1987: 115) The most common, and most effective, strategies are those which are grounded in a tacit ‘feel’ for the game, which seem ‘natural’, true or obvious forms of behaviour because they accord closely with the structure of the game itself and with the particular actor’s position within it. In this way, the ‘naturalness’ of the dominant life-style (which makes it inimitable) is without a doubt the most secure foundation of self-valuation: in it, the monopoly of the scarcest, and at the same time most universal, cultural goods conferred by possession of economic and cultural capital finds a justification. Nature and the natural have always been the best instruments of sociodicies. (1987: 115)

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The structure of a field provides a set of common associations and expectations that gives social life much of the regularity it routinely exhibits. But fields are also arenas of power and contestation, and while relatively stable they are far from fixed. Agents can and do seek to modify their positions vis-a`-vis a field, adopting particular strategies in relation to it. Yet both these strategies and the conditions under which they are developed and operate are determined not wholly by the individual but by that agent in the context of a specific habitus, a social field, and a particular form and distribution of capital within that field. A striking illustration of this theme is found in Bourdieu’s analysis of the field of modern art. In his view, one of the defining features of artistic modernity is the claim to be a member of the avant-garde – to shock, and to push the boundaries of convention and acceptability in the name of art itself is a crucial form of capital and a strategy for success in the aesthetic field of modernity. To be anti-establishment, to ignore conventions and flout popular approval and monetary success is, paradoxically, an intrinsic characteristic of the field of modern art itself. To be anti-(strategically) instrumental is thus, ironically, one of the most long-standing strategies and conventions of the field of modern art – an interest-maximizing strategy that only makes sense (but that does make sense) within a specifically structured field characterized by specific forms of capital. The paradox, of course, is that the more an artist succeeds in this strategy, the more they risk becoming a popular and commercial success and so becoming positioned within a field of conventionality that will disempower them in some (cultural-symbolic) aspects even as they prosper (economically) in others. At the same time, these distributions are not fixed, and the field is capable of generating reverse strategies. Bourdieu illustrates this possibility through an incisive reading of the success of Andy Warhol. Warhol, he argues, succeeded in using the avant-garde structure of the field in a new fashion. By acknowledging the relationship and tension between art and commerce that is constitutive of the ‘field’ of modern art, and by making his art overtly, insistently commercial, Warhol was able to represent the previous definition of the avant-garde as old-fashioned. In effect, by taking artistic commercialization to its furthest point, he redefined himself as the avant-garde, as an artist who radically rejected the prevailing definition of art and commerce (of art as essentially anti-commercial and counter-cultural), and thereby placed himself at the leading edge both economically and symbolically. In effect, Warhol for a short time became the avant-garde by presenting the prevailing avant-garde’s anti-commercialism as hopelessly traditional and out-dated. For Bourdieu, this move illustrates the ways in which strategies are creative, and how actors can use the resources of the field to revalue that field, thus serving their interests and increasing their capital within it. Despite appearances, strategies and interests are far from absent in the artistic field. In fact, their apparent absence is part of the strategic structure

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of the field. Instrumentally materialist understandings of strategy misrecognize the artistic field, portraying it as ‘irrational’, ‘subjective’, or ‘romantic’. They also fail to see that materialist understandings of strategy and action are themselves intrinsic parts of the field of artistic strategy, providing foils whereby (for example) materialist forms of calculation driving crass ‘popular’ art are opposed to (and thus symbolically legitimate) the transcendent and ‘transgressive’ world of ‘true’ art. The idea (and strategies) of material self-interest is thus, from this perspective, one of the conditions that allows modern art to appear and present itself as ‘dis-interested’, as standing apart from such mundane interests and concerns. Yet what this conceals is the fact that disinterest is itself a strategy, a form of capital and power, operating within and structuring the artistic field as a whole. As I will argue in the next two chapters, the idea of a strategy of ‘disinterest’ is far from limited to the artistic field: it has played a powerful role in recent security politics. In these ways, Bourdieu argues, it is possible to move beyond the conventional oppositions of agent and structure, beyond the structuralist domination of the agent by the rules of structure, the subjectivist ‘legalism’ which sees agents as necessarily following given social rules, and beyond the spontaneous subjectivism which attempts to conceive of a totally undetermined will and choice. It allows us moreover, to hang on to the ‘healthy materialist’ idea (which he attributes to Weber) that ‘social agents obey the rule when it is more in their interest to obey it than to disobey it’ and to ask ‘under what conditions a rule can operate’ (1990: 76). But understanding any of this means that we have to break with conventional rationalist and materialist understandings of agents and structures, strategies and interests, and examine the dynamics of specific social realms through an analysis of the ways in which they are are constituted as particular kinds of fields operating in relation to specific kinds of habitus and forms of capital. The cultural field of security and security as a cultural field One of the most striking things about security – both as an analytic field and a policy discourse – in the post-Cold War era has been the prominence of ‘culture’. The pervasiveness of culture in security discourse was by no means new. Indeed as I sought to show in the previous chapter, even the apparent absence of culture in modern rationalist and materialist understandings of security can be explained in cultural terms, and the Cold War certainly did not lack in cultural or even civilizational rhetorics and claims (Klein 1992). Nonetheless, the prominence accorded to the relationship between culture and security in the wake of that confrontation is remarkable, and it is an indication of something new taking place. Drawing upon Bourdieu’s concepts, I suggest that important elements of security politics from the late 1980s up to today have involved a reconfiguration of the ‘field’ of security. In this revaluation, military and material

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power has remained significant, but it has been repositioned within a broader field, what might be called the ‘cultural field of security’. At the centre of this process was a reconfiguration of the field of security away from a concentration on material and military factors towards cultural and symbolic forms of capital. Cultural capital arises, as we have seen, from the recognition of the possession of cultural ‘goods’, while symbolic capital is the reservoir of symbolic systems and structures of perception and categorization, appraisal and appreciation that can be drawn upon as resources for this capital. Accordingly, to have both cultural power (arising from related claims to expertise or knowledge) and symbolic power (recognized position and authority) is a particularly powerful combination. By defining security in terms of forms of culture, itself a generative product of the habitus prevailing in Western security institutions, the field of security was transformed into one where cultural and symbolic forms of capital became vital – and one in which these forms of capital were dominantly possessed by Western states, societies, and security organizations. From this perspective, the demise of the Cold War entailed a shift in the field of security practices and the exploitation of a new set of generative possibilities already contained within the habitus of security actors and institutions, and wielded strategically in order to influence the distribution of capital and the structure of the field. The previous ‘game’ of military strategic calculation and balancing was downgraded via the valorization of the cultural field. Through an appeal to the centrality of culture in the new security context – by invoking the triumph of Western culture, the universality of liberal ideals, values and institutions, and even the end of history – a new set of power relations became dominant. The cultural dimension of security became a part of a new ‘strategy’ of strategy, forming the foundation of a new set of power relations and contributing to the exercise of power by those able to claim the new cultural mantle. The escalation of the role of culture marks a shift in power relations – in the field through which specific forms of power are realized and executed – but it does not mark the retreat or absence of power. In the next two chapters, I explore this cultural field and a number of its associated strategies, interests, and forms of power, through an examination of two broad themes: the idea of the democratic peace, and the immediate post-Cold War evolution of NATO. The idea of the democratic peace rapidly became one of dominant intellectual and policy discourses of the 1990s, and it retains a remarkable hold – as some of the justifications over the war in Iraq and recent American foreign policy orientations illustrate clearly. While the source of intense academic debate concerning its analytic status and empirical validity, the democratic peace is in many ways more interesting as a political practice than as an empirical claim. Indeed, the democratic peace can be viewed as one element within a broad strategy of cultural power during the period of its ascendance, as part of a process whereby the West appropriated the claim to represent democratic

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values, and asserted its own inherent peacefulness. In short, the idea of the democratic peace allowed the military conflict of the Cold War to be transformed into a cultural struggle, thus contributing to the exercise of specific strategies and forms of cultural power. In a similar fashion, a focus on the cultural strategy of security in the wake of the Cold War sheds light on one of the most striking and oft-debated developments of the 1990s: the continuing centrality of NATO. Despite widespread predictions that NATO was unlikely to survive the reduction in East-West tensions, the alliance both endured and expanded through the 1990s. In part, the surprising persistence and evolution of NATO can be explained by its central role in the production and exercise of symbolic power both inside and outside the alliance. As a locus of accumulated cultural and symbolic capital and power, NATO was a key institutional site in the articulation of a new cultural logic of security, a transformation that drew upon the habitus of the members of the organization. The alliance provided a uniquely powerful venue in which the new situation could be defined, policies pronounced, forces mobilized. In this way, NATO served its own organizational interests in continuity, and those of its members in maintaining unity and adjusting to the new security environment. Moreover, its continuity provided a considerable source of symbolic power for its members, and an instrument through which they could exercise the power of their cultural strategy over those outside the alliance. My treatments of these issues do not claim to be exhaustive; even these relatively narrow themes involve far more questions than I can possibly address here, and obviously there is much more to the evolution of postCold War security, and even to the cultural field of security, than a single study can convey. I adopt here an intentionally truncated view of Bourdieu’s theory of practice and especially of the constitution of the field, and do not attempt to trace the micro-processes, discontinuities and tensions involved in these practices. Moreover, there is no doubt that focusing on the cultural and symbolic realms alone provides at best a partial view of the field as a whole, and of its structuring actors, interests, and forms of power. The material realm, both in terms of financial capital and institutions (the incentives of aid, of access to trade areas or finance, the influence of other actors – especially the EU, but also the IMF, the World Bank, the EBRD, and private financial institutions), as well as the domain of material military power – would need to be factored into any full field analysis. Narrowing the focus to forms of cultural power and cultural strategy needs itself, therefore, to be seen as a strategy designed to highlight issues and dynamics that are central to the field, and to illustrate the insights that may be generated drawing upon Bourdieu’s inspiration.

3

The discipline of the democratic peace Kant, liberalism, and symbolic power

Immanuel Kant seems an unlikely candidate to have become one of the most oft-invoked figures in appraisals of international security in the last decade of the twentieth century. For one thing, he had been dead for nearly 200 years. For another, to the extent that Kant had made any impact at all on discussions of international politics, it was usually to be cast as a quintessential idealist, the author of an interesting but fundamentally misguided and certainly un-realistic (in both practical and academic senses) treatise on perpetual peace. Yet over the course of the 1990s, Kant became one of the most frequently mentioned thinkers in international security. With Perpetual Peace as their touchstone, numerous analyses declared that Kant had basically been right all along, and that the link between democracy and peace – and particularly the claim that liberal-democracies do not go to war with one another – constitutes one of the most important discoveries concerning the nature of security, and the one of the most important insights for its construction.1 It would be easy to dismiss this enthusiasm for Kant as just another illustration of idealistic hopes in the wake of conflict, dreams (as the familiar story goes) inevitably soon to be dashed by the return of power politics. Such a dismissal would, however, be deeply mistaken, not only because it overlooks the continuing prevalence of democracy and democratic culture in contemporary visions of security such as that of ‘democratic globalism’, but also because it leads to a misapprehension of some of the most important forms of power operating in post-Cold War security relations. Instead of opposing the democratic peace to power politics, or treating it simply as a fig leaf covering more mendacious motives, the democratic peace can perhaps most usefully be used as a lens bringing into focus some of the forms of cultural and symbolic power operating in this new situation, because it is itself a part of these forms of power. Exploring these dimensions of the democratic peace requires treating it not as an academic theory, but as a dimension of broader practices. The sudden popularity of Kant and the democratic peace was neither accidental nor incidental. Nor was it simply the rhetorical manipulation of a powerful cultural legacy – though this was certainly part of the attraction for scholars

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and, to a lesser degree, policy-makers. More fundamentally, the popularity of the Kantian discourse in the 1990s was due to its place within liberal forms power and strategies of identity, and to the ways in which these resources were mobilized from within existing practices in order to respond to the new and uncertain security landscape that began to emerge at the end of the 1980s. Unravelling this dimension of the democratic peace requires shifting attention away from a focus on Perpetual Peace, towards a broader understanding of the Kantian legacy. Rather than focusing exclusively on ideas about the nature and emergence of a pacific federation, it is useful instead to look at two related dimensions of Kantian thinking that reveal how ideas of the democratic peace contribute to the construction and exercise of practices they putatively describe. The first of these dimensions lies in the ways that Kantian liberalism contains subtle yet powerful processes of identity construction, and how the processes of mutual recognition with which these identities are intertwined play essential constitutive and disciplining roles in the development of political relations. These processes of recognition are not just sociological puzzles: they are overtly political practices, practices entailing and enabling the exercise of considerable power. The second element connecting Kantian liberalism to practices of power concerns its links to what Bourdieu has analysed as strategies of ‘disinterest’. As we saw in the last chapter, strategies of disinterest revolve around the capacity of agents to deny interested action, to seem to act in a way unrelated to, or even against, the apparent advancement of their interests.2 In this form, Kantian liberalism with its demand that rights and recognition be extended to others even when it is not in the material selfinterest of the powerful to do so, plays a subtle and yet important role in the broader strategies of disinterest adopted by the West in the post-Cold War era. The ability to present actions as arising not from the pursuit of the interests of the power or victorious, but as obligations derived from universal ethical or philosophic principles based in ‘disinterested’ moral imperatives, or from social scientific knowledge of the links between peace and democracy, provided important forms of power and strategy in the transformation of European security. Seen in the light of these two related forms of cultural strategies and power, the popularity of the Kantian peace emerges as both a reflection and a practice of power within the cultural field of security.

The power of recognition One way to open up the symbolic power of the democratic peace is to examine the debates over the role of identity and recognition in its construction. These two concepts are crucial for the democratic peace, for if the theory’s most basic claim is that liberal-democracies do not go to war with

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each other, then an obvious question becomes: how do they recognize each other as liberal-democracies? As John Owen succinctly phrased the issue: For the liberal mechanism to prevent a liberal-democracy from going to war against a foreign state, liberals must consider the foreign state a liberal-democracy. Most explanations of the democratic peace posit that democracies recognize one another and refuse to fight on that basis; but researchers never test this assumption. (1994: 96) If the question of recognition is at the heart of relations between liberaldemocracies, then rationalist theories which have often marginalized questions of perception, belief, and identity are intrinsically limited in their ability to capture the dynamics of the democratic peace (Risse-Kappen 1995: 497–8; Kahl 1998/9: 96–7, 132–4). Yet despite a consensus on the limits of rationalist explanations among those who highlight the question of recognition, there has been little agreement on how we are to understand this process. For Owen, the question of recognition is essentially one of the relationship between perception and belief. Liberal states, he argues, only expect pacific relations – and act accordingly to produce those relations – with states which they believe to be liberal like themselves. In this way, he claims, we can explain both how liberalism produces the democratic peace and how deviations occur.3 If a state fails to recognize another as a liberal-democracy, then it may go to war with that state even though an external appraisal might see this as a violation of democratic peace theory. Conversely, when states share the perception that they are liberal-democracies ‘like’ each other, pacific relations ensue. Owen finds the basis for this shared perception, for the recognition of like by like, in liberal philosophy, a set of shared beliefs which, he claims, has remained identifiably constant since the mid-nineteenth century. As he puts it, Liberals believe that individuals everywhere are fundamentally the same, and are best off pursuing self-preservation and material wellbeing. Freedom is required for these pursuits, and peace is required for freedom; coercion and violence are counter-productive. Thus all individuals share an interest in peace, and should want war only as an instrument to bring about peace. (1994: 89)4 These beliefs provide the common foundation for the recognition of liberal selves and liberal states because liberalism gives rise to an ideology that distinguishes states primarily according to regime type: in assessing a state, liberalism first asks

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whether it is a liberal-democracy or not. . . . Once liberals accept a foreign state as a liberal-democracy, they adamantly oppose war against that state. (1994: 95) The question of recognition also plays a central role in Thomas RisseKappen’s analysis of the ‘norms, rules and procedures embedded in the political culture and institutionalized in the political system’ (1995: 499) which provide the foundations of the democratic peace. In contrast to rationalist analyses which take the question of recognition for granted, Risse-Kappen argues that ‘democracies to a large degree create their enemies and their friends – ‘‘them’’ and ‘‘us’’ – by inferring either aggressive or defensive motives from the domestic structures of their counterparts’ (1995: 492). At the heart of this process is the way in which norms are externalized through ‘communication devices’ – shared understandings and meanings – which allow a mutual recognition between liberal states. As he puts it: Decision-makers in democratic polities who have been socialised in the norms governing liberal states are likely to communicate their intentions in the international realm by referring to these very norms. When they encounter fellow democrats, a collective understanding of these norms can be readily established, providing a common basis for further communication of peaceful intentions. Leaders of democratic states communicating their peaceful intentions to each other can always validate their claims by pointing to the peaceful resolution of conflicts inherent in their domestic structures. (1995: 501) This stress on the question of recognition deepens considerably analyses of the democratic peace. But both Owen’s and Risse-Kappen’s positions raise a basic question: what, precisely, do these decision-makers look at in deciding that they are part of the shared democratic ‘us’, and who gets to decide? What is focused on as ‘like’, and what is ignored? Even if one grants Owen’s claims concerning a centuries-long historical unity of liberal philosophic principles (itself, as I will discuss in Chapter 5, a highly contestable claim), the concrete institutions and practices which have been variously described (and self-described) as ‘liberal’ over the past century and a half have been dizzying in their variety, and often fundamentally at odds with each other.5 Similar questions arise from Risse-Kappen’s view. Again, what is focused on as ‘like’, and what is ignored? To take even the simplest examples, how, for instance, do countries with considerably different political institutions (e.g. parliamentary versus republican), politicaleconomic visions (e.g. social democracy versus market-capitalism) and cultural values (e.g. France and the United States), come to ‘readily establish’

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what constitutes ‘like’ democratic institutions and norms, and therefore matters, and which differences do not?6 And who gets to decide? These kinds of questions underlie Ido Oren’s insightful analysis and critique of the democratic peace. Like both Owen and Risse-Kappen, Oren argues that the question of mutual recognition – of common identity – cannot be divorced from the question of self-identity. But whereas Owen addresses this problem by asserting a fundamental (recognizable) continuity in liberal-democratic thought from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, and Risse-Kappen treats the process as one in which a stable selfidentity recognizes a similar self through a shared set of common communicative devices and an appeal to consensual processes of domestic institutions, Oren views the process as one in which the definition of democracy – and who is thereby seen as ‘like’ – is determined by the shifting position of those doing the categorizing. ‘Liberal-democracy’ is not, therefore, an historically stable philosophy easily recognized by liberal selves, nor is it a set of shared normative and institutional structures providing a stable and consensual basis for easy mutual recognition. On the contrary, the definition of ‘democracy’, and the recognition of others as ‘like’ democracies is neither obvious nor neutral – who or what is recognized as a ‘democratic’ shifts in relation to the position of the definer. For Oren, this is particularly clear in the case of United States. As he puts it: The values embodied in the current definition of democracy were historically shaped by the need to distance America from its adversaries. They are products, more than determinants, of America’s past foreign political relations. The reason we do not fight ‘our kind’ is not that ‘likeness’ has a great effect on war propensity, but rather that we from time to time subtly redefine our kind to keep our selfimage consistent with our friends’ attributes and inconsistent with those of our adversaries. (1995: 147) In this analysis, the recognition of states as ‘democratic’ (at the levels of both scholarly and popular discourse) represents the shifting domestic and international conditions of the state doing the defining. Far from a process of objective recognition of essentially ‘liberal’ structures, or consensual mutual recognition on the basis of common norms, the process of recognition is an intrinsically political process, one shot through with power. But while Oren’s stress that the ‘science of the democratic peace is an American social science’ (1995: 157) provides a very useful corrective to theories which have often stressed the insulation of the democratic peace from the dynamics of power, it does not explain how – and through what processes – this hegemony is exercised. More importantly, it also does not adequately explain the popularity of the democratic peace outside the United States, and risks presenting the democratic peace as a wholly

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American theoretical and political project put over on an essentially passive world. In sum, in its desire to locate the power relations at work in the democratic peace, Oren’s analysis unfortunately elides the relational aspects of recognition which have been one of the great strengths of constructivist analysis, and as a result, it ironically risks casting analyses of liberalism and the democratic peace back within the rather sterile confines of an idealist-realist dichotomy which a focus on the dynamics of recognition seeks to move beyond. While the question of recognition is thus at the heart of contrasting understandings of the democratic peace, the question of what is recognized, how, by whom, and under what conditions, remains controversial. My suggestion is that these questions can be productively addressed by enquiring more deeply into the ways in which recognition has been understood within liberalism. And it is here that a return to Kant is particularly enlightening. Specifically, what is recognized in Kantian liberalism is not a specific set of historical principles or normative-institutional structures, though each of these may certainly be important in given contexts. Rather, a fundamental structure of recognition operating within Kantian liberalism revolves around a commitment to a specific form of disciplined subjectivity. Recognition, in this view, cannot be reduced to shared political principles (classical liberalism) or normative and institutional congruence: it embodies a process of identity construction at the individual and social levels.7 Recognition is an ethical judgment in which a status of legitimate subjectivity is accorded to both the self and to others, depending on how well each is judged to have met the requirements of a particular process of disciplined individual and collective identity-construction. It is also a locus of cultural capital and a source of symbolic power. Recognition and respect Uncovering the power dimensions of the democratic peace requires a more sustained inquiry into the dynamics and divisions of liberal thought, for liberal theories of the democratic peace are based upon processes of recognition that run more deeply than being simply a question of how one liberal-democratic state recognizes another. Indeed, the theory of the liberal peace presumes as its foundation an ascending series of prior recognitions running from the level of the individual subject, to recognition between subjects, to recognition between collectivities. Roughly speaking, this process can be divided into three stages. First, it is posited that individuals recognize themselves as individuals, as materially embodied beings clearly delineated from other selves.8 These selves are able to recognize themselves as the bearers of rights, and the pursuers of interests.9 Second, it holds that these selves are capable of recognizing others as similar to themselves – as individuals, with rights, pursuing interests – and who on the basis of this common recognition form a government (a liberal-democracy) which itself

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reflects and recognizes these claims and foundations. Finally, at the international level, this ascending ladder of recognition reaches its apex when these prior steps provide the bases upon which liberal-democratic states recognize which states are and are not like themselves. Different ways of understanding this ascending process of recognition mark fundamental divides within liberal theory, particularly between its utilitarian and Kantian versions.10 Briefly put, utilitarians take the process of self-recognition largely as given, beginning with the concept of a materially embodied, self-interested subject, and asking how from this position structures of social organization, coordination and cooperation are possible.11 The Kantian position, by contrast, does not take the self for granted in this fashion. Nor does it take the process of recogntion – be it selfrecognition or the recognition of others – as given. Rather, Kant’s thinking represents a series of complex philosophical and sociological reflections on the conditions of recognition, the production of liberal selves, and the construction of mutual recognition between such selves. Seen in these terms, Kantian liberalism emerges as a political practice, as an attempt to construct a specific vision of subjectivity and politics. Incorporated within these processes of recognition are structures of inclusion, cohesion, and exclusion which constitute powerful – if often hidden – disciplinary dynamics within liberalism. Through an examination of the relationship between the concept of recognition and that of respect, Bonnie Honig (1993) has provided an extremely useful demonstration of the ways in which this relational construction of subjectivity is central to Kant’s thinking, and how it has significant implications for understanding the power entailments of liberal theory and practice which much of contemporary liberal theory (and theories of the liberal peace) have systematically obscured. By stressing the concept of respect, Honig demonstrates a tension between recognition and respect in Kant’s liberalism: recognition, for Kant, is not simply a matter of recognizing another human individual as a person, it is also a matter of judging that individual to be a certain kind of person – a person worthy of respect. At the core of Kant’s position is the claim that it is not the simple person as a material, self-interested being that is the object of respect. Individuals are capable of doing many things unworthy of respect, and pure selfinterest and the pursuit of material well-being cannot provide adequate grounds upon which we should respect someone or their actions. Self-interest or material satisfaction, for example, could provide a perfectly adequate rationale for murder; yet to ascribe moral worth and accord respect to a person who carried out such an action would contradict the idea of morality itself.12 Rather, what is central to respect for persons is not the recognition of their simple physical existence, it is the recognition of the moral law which they are capable of fulfilling. Full respect is only to be accorded to those who place a disciplined limitation upon their own desires and

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actions, and who by doing so constrain themselves to act in accordance with the categorical imperative and its demand that one will only that which without contradiction can freely be willed by all. As a means of illustrating this dimension of Kantian liberalism and its political entailments, I will draw upon this explication of Kantian respect, and its functioning in Kant’s best known treatise on international politics: Perpetual Peace.13 Honig uncovers three different forms of respect in Kant’s thinking, forms which she terms reverence-respect, teleological respect, and liberal respect (1993: 24–34). These distinctions are especially useful in demonstrating the disciplinary relations at work within liberalism. Through the term ‘reverencerespect’, Honig seeks to convey an experience whereby we respect someone not because they follow accepted rules per se, which might well be immoral, but because their actions embody a higher rule: that of the moral law. The moral law can be discovered through reason – the categorical imperative – but its experience as a feeling of reverence-respect highlights an important aspect of Kant’s views on morality. In Kant’s eyes, we feel respect for these actions, even if they break prevailing laws or norms, or do not directly affect our own situation. As Honig points out, this feeling is central to Kant’s understanding of moral practice since it provides an inspiration – an interest – in acting morally. It is a feeling which connects the rationally self-produced morality of the categorical imperative to the actions of others. As she puts it, ‘The rational feeling of respect creates an interest in obedience to the law and this we call the moral interest. And the capacity of taking such an interest in the law is really a moral feeling.’ All persons have this capacity, this moral feeling, insofar as they are, qua persons, conscious of the demands of morality (1993: 25). ‘Reverencerespect’, in sum, highlights the ways in which respect for persons depends not upon their simple recognition as persons, but for the ways in which the moral law in others calls forth our respect drawing upon the moral law in ourselves, and how this can be conceived as providing an ‘interest’ in moral behaviour.14 ‘Teleological respect’ for persons also reflects this potential for embodying the moral law. While not all actions are worthy of respect, Kant argues that we must retain the idea that individuals are capable of following the moral law, that they are not intrinsically incapable of so doing, thereby lying beyond the bounds of possible respect. A person thus has the right to claim recognition as a subject potentially worthy of respect by virtue of their humanity.15 But this claim is a double-edged sword because, since we are recognizing them in terms of their capacity to embody the moral law, individuals are not entitled to respect regardless of their acts. We respect persons to the degree that they strive to conform to the dictates of the moral law. As Honig nicely characterizes it: in contrast to reverence-respect, which is granted to the few people whose actions powerfully exemplify the moral law, teleological

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In this sense, respect for the person as a person is retained – no one is beyond redemption – but this becomes a category of judgement and responsibility. While it is the failing of the individual to live up to the universal moral law that costs the person our respect – emerging from an evaluation of their moral character – this respect can always be regained through reform. Honig’s final category of respect is ‘liberal respect’. Liberal respect is largely negative; it is the respect that we must accord even those who refuse to live up to the conditions of teleological respect. Each person as an end-in-themselves has a right to negative liberty – to be left alone – so long as they do not infringe upon this right in others. But this juridical respect is not the same as teleological respect. Nor does it extend beyond a person’s right to be left alone. When actions infringe upon the rights of others, claims to negative liberty must be assessed and perhaps circumscribed in light of such infringements. And it is precisely in the ambivalence of infringement upon others that a crucial ambiguity in Kantian liberalism lies, an ambiguity that – as I shall argue in a moment – finds a powerful political formulation in Perpetual Peace and in the status of Kantian liberalism as a practice of symbolic power. Unravelling the relationship between recognition and respect demonstrates how the two themes are closely and yet ambiguously linked in Kant’s liberalism. Recognition of others as human beings, as ends-inthemselves, is a basis for the negative liberty of ‘liberal respect’, and all are due ‘teleological respect’ as a matter of principle. But this does not mean that others are automatically due respect in its fullest sense. On the contrary, full respect is something which is due to others – which, Kant argues, we naturally feel towards others – only to the extent that they live up to the moral worth (the potential incorporated in the concept of teleological respect) intrinsic to their humanity.16 Treating respect and recognition in this way exposes a basic tension in Kantian liberalism. Although others have a right to be left alone, this does not mean that they are deserving of respect in the fullest (teleological) sense, for they may manifestly be acting in ways that degrade their humanity or deny their potential. This tension, of course, gives rise to many of the classic dilemmas of liberal politics: when, for example, can a person’s freedom be legitimately constrained (or their life intervened in) by the state in the name of the individual’s own good?17 While such tensions can be (and often have been) seen as marking a perhaps debilitating contradiction within liberalism, liberal constructions of the relationship between recognition and respect can also be viewed as

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possessing productive dynamics and consequences which are central to liberal social and political orders. It is this latter suggestion that I would like to pursue here. Kantian liberalism and the construction of disciplined subjectivity Unlike its utilitarian variants (or much of rationalist social science), Kant’s liberalism does not take a given subjectivity for granted. Crafting a self worthy of respect (both in the eyes of the self and in the eyes of others) is a practical accomplishment. As Honig summarizes it: ‘Individuals struggle endlessly, in Kant’s world, to fashion themselves into virtuous, respectworthy subjects. The ideal of virtue cannot be met by any man, but it provides the standard by which individual, cultural, and political orderings are judged nonetheless’ (1993: 39). This achievement becomes the criterion by which both selves and others are recognized as worthy of respect. In short, it becomes a criterion of moral judgment and identification, the delineation of inclusion and exclusion within the moral community. The relationship between recognition and respect allows us to gain a clearer view of how Kantian liberalism generates a conception of moral practice that is productive and disciplinary. Self-discipline is not only the basis of respect of both the self and others, it is also a central element of self-identity and of identification with others. What liberal selves recognize in both themselves and in others like themselves is this vision of the self and the commitment to discipline which it entails. While we are obliged to recognize others as individuals, we are under no obligation automatically to grant them full respect. On the contrary, those whom liberals respect, and with whom they identify, are those who exercise the self-discipline of adherence to the moral law which liberal individuals and communities recognize themselves as having achieved. The maintenance of this respect in both the self’s own eyes and in those of others who are members of the moral community acts as a disciplinary structure whereby the moral community is maintained and reproduced.18 This disciplinary structure operates not only within the moral community, but outside of it as well, where its power again lies in its ability to play productively upon the tension within liberal principles of recognition and respect. Principles of ‘liberal respect’ commit liberals to tolerance, to the stance that all individuals are entitled to live as they choose, so long as they do not infringe upon the rights of others to do so. Nor can these others be permanently excluded from the moral community: they remain – via their inalienable claim to ‘teleological respect’ – potential members. At one level, therefore, liberalism precludes a radically exclusionary moral community, a casting of others beyond the bonds of moral relationship. In this form, it appears to be disempowering, requiring actors no matter how powerful to recognize the claims and rights of others whether it is in their interest to do so or not. In this way, Kantian liberal principles have often

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played an important role in broadening ethical discourses and practices of moral inclusion, and it is undoubtedly true that this form of liberalism provides those others with resources to make moral claims – for their right, and rights, to be respected; providing them, in other words, with a certain amount of capital and power, and strategies to employ. At another level, however, this inclusive and tolerant stance allows the exercise of a subtle but very effective form of power by those extending tolerance and potential recognition. The liberal stance of moral inclusion is also part of what Bourdieu has identified as a strategy of disinterest. Basing its claims on the universality of right, and stressing how it is necessary to live up to this principle and extend these rights to others even if it is not to one’s obvious material or strategic advantage, allows a denial of selfinterested action. The extension of recognition and inclusion can thereby be presented as a demand of universal right in itself, as an obligation to be lived up to despite the costs that will be incurred by those extending the possibility of recognition – and in spite of their forgoing the obvious opportunities to advance their interests that could be gained by exploiting their material superiority in the pursuit of their narrower self-interests. In this process a ‘disinterested’ rationale for action is combined with the generation of moral authority by those willing to forgo the narrow pursuit of interests in the name of higher principles.19 The very structure of moral disinterestedness – in Bourdieu’s specific sense – is a source of power, setting in place a moral relationship where the refusal to follow a narrow or immediate pursuit of interest by the dominant results in their further accrual of cultural capital and symbolic power. The relationship between respect and toleration also places the liberal self in a relationship of moral superiority towards those who deviate from its norms and disciplinary practices. Those who fail to live up to the demands of liberal subjectivity may be tolerated, but this tolerance is consciously granted by liberals and deviation is permitted and judged on their terms. Tolerance is based upon the recognition by the liberal self that it ought to extend tolerance to those who fail to live up to the demands of the liberal norm despite their deviance, and that this toleration has limits. Moreover, this recognition and toleration is based upon the belief that all subjects should in principle adhere to the moral precepts of liberalism and the discipline they demand. The demand is, therefore, that those who seek full respect must exercise self-discipline and move towards the liberal norm, and the limits of toleration are defined by the degree to which the forms of life of these non-liberals do not impinge upon liberals and their societies. Non-liberal communities are thus always subject to being branded as irresponsible threats, to being excluded from liberal relations of community and respect, and potentially to being subject to coercion by liberals if their forms of life are deemed a threat to liberal structures. These dynamics of liberal discipline are clearly illustrated in Kant’s analysis of the relationship between the liberal ‘pacific federation’ and

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non-liberal states outside of it. Those who continue to exist in the state of nature, he argues, can be coerced to join the pacific federation even if they pose no direct threat to its members, because the very existence of nonliberal, undisciplined subjects can legitimately be viewed as a potential threat by liberals: ‘The state of peace’, he declares, must be formally instituted, for a suspension of hostilities is not in itself a guarantee of peace. And unless one neighbour gives a guarantee to the other at his request (which can happen only in a lawful state), the latter may treat him as an enemy. And in a revealing clarification of this claim, he goes on to argue that insecurity is not the same as injury, and that the lack of trust which liberals feel towards non-liberal states is an adequate justification for hostility towards them. As he puts it, man (or an individual people) in a mere state of nature robs me of any such security and injures me by virtue of this very state in which he coexists with me. He may not have injured me actively (facto), but he does injure me by the very lawlessness of his state (statu iniusto), for he is a permanent threat to me, and I can require him either to enter into a common lawful state along with me or to move away from my vicinity. (Kant 1970: 98)20 In this way, Kantian self-identity can easily define others as lacking in the moral worthiness required for respect and trust despite – indeed because of – their membership in the broad community of humanity. And this lack of respect can be linked to a perception of insecurity even in the absence of any direct threat or injury. The granting of moral worth and the ascription of moral responsibility are part of the same move within Kantian liberalism. Those who have lived up to the demands of liberal recognition, who have the self-discipline to grasp its meaning and fulfil its responsibilities, become the standard towards which others must move, and towards which they should desire to move. The failure to do so, or to want to do so, is a moral failing. Moreover, this failure of will and self-understanding testifies to a lack of moral responsibility in living up to one’s own humanity, and an unwillingness to fulfil the obligations of mutual respect that are the bases of trust and security. Part of the power of liberalism lies in the fact that this can be presented as a disinterested process of toleration, self-limitation, neutrality, and respect: all persons have a right to choose their own ways of living. But this hides the fact that this basic recognition can also imply a powerfully normalizing and disciplining set of judgements, an equally powerful process of communal inclusion and exclusion, and an implicit threat of coercive action.

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The security community of the Kantian peace In the conclusion to their path-breaking volume on Security Communities, Michael Barnett and Emmanuel Adler suggested two main agendas for future research: the first, into the relationship between knowledge and power in the social construction of security relations; and the second, into the links between liberalism, democracy and peace (Adler and Barnett 1998: 424–5).21 A further examination of the ‘Kantian’ peace can contribute to each of these agendas, allowing us to address questions of identity, power and recognition at the heart of the democratic peace. Specifically, this focus provides insights into three constitutive elements of a liberal security community. First, it suggests that part of what constitutes liberal recognition, and thus underpins a liberal community, is a form of disciplined subjectivity. Second, that the commitment to discipline within this community is pleasurably experienced by its members, thus providing (as Kant argued) an ‘interest’ in adopting and maintaining such behaviour – a dynamic supported by the existence of non-liberal structures to which the liberal community can be favourably contrasted. Finally, this position suggests that the declaration of oneself as a democratic security community embodying the liberal peace provides a source of cultural and symbolic power which the members are able to employ in relations to those who stand both inside and outside the community. Liberal identity, identification, and recognition As outlined at the start of this chapter, one of the key questions in research on the democratic peace concerns questions of identity and recognition, of what liberal states recognize in one another. From the perspective developed here, the relationship between recognition and identity in liberalism (and the liberal peace) needs to be understood as consisting of more than subscription to a set of general political principles, or a set of complexly varied concrete institutions. Each of these certainly may be important. But they are also underlain by the commitment to a specific form of subjectivity – of self-identity and mutual recognition – which binds liberal individuals within a disciplinary structure of community, and which underpins and is given expression in liberal-democratic norms and institutions. Recall that for Kant, a person is only a fully moral being when they recognize and act upon the moral law within themselves. It is the faculty of reason which allows the individual to abstract from sensuous desires and follow the dictates of the will alone in adhering to the categorical imperative. Kantian self-identity is therefore a process of self-discipline. The Kantian self recognizes the existence of anti-social, immoral impulses, and the attractions of narrowly self-interested, avaricious or crudely powerpolitical behaviour. However, it is the recognition and overcoming of these impulses which gives the self its moral worth. Analogously, the process of

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identifying what counts as adequately disciplined, respectable, forms of subjectivity and behaviour becomes central to the structure and exercise of power within such communities. This suggests that an important element in the construction of liberal community – of what liberal subjects recognize in each other – is a shared commitment to liberal subjectivity, to their common struggle to discipline and conceal the mendacious, unruly, violent and irrational sides of themselves.22 They do not simply perceive ‘like’ actors: they see moral agents engaged in a mutually recognizable struggle to create and maintain liberal selves and a liberal polity. Risse-Kappen is thus correct to call attention to the mutually reinforcing processes of common identity-formation within the liberal community, but this focus needs to be deepened by an enquiry into the constitution of moral selves within that community. Stresses on the common rule of law, the dominance of structures of abstract citizenship, etc., are not just shared institutional processes of ‘like’ liberal states. Indeed, as Oren has pointed out, given the differences between these structures, the process of seeing them as similar can only function so long as the participants agree not to look too deeply into their concrete ‘commonality’. Yet this fragile commonality is also supported by the sense of subjective commonality lying beneath the institutions. Again, it is therefore possible to agree with Risse-Kappen (and constructivists in general) that institutions express norms; but liberal political norms are not simply norms that individual subjects happen to ascribe to. They are norms based in, and are part of, a broader field of liberal subjectivity. One of the constitutive norms of liberalism is a norm of disciplined subjectivity. Based upon this vision of discipline and reason, the liberal self is not just a common foundation for action, but a common sense of what it is to be a self: a rational, ethical actor, and a vision of the broad structures of political life which follow from such a commitment. This shared subjectivity becomes a basis of both predictability and trust. Liberal agents, calculating in terms of rights and interests – and deriving their understandings of rights and interests within recognizably similar conceptual parameters – move within a world which, while neither certain nor wholly predictable, possesses stabilities of social perception and action that bind liberal agents together in structures of mutual intelligibility and recognition at a practical level.23 To give an example, the ‘rule of law’ is not simply an institutional fact or shared norm. Rather, the rule of law emerges out of a set of claims about knowledge and subjectivity which seek to delineate the political realm, and a disciplined commitment by agents to work within its limitations. In this regard, Kantian epistemology has a clear political outcome: linking a limitation of the claims of knowledge to the phenomenal world delineates (and insulates) a world of public political discourse from one of private belief.24 As William Scheuerman has nicely put it, ‘Insofar as a particular constitutional system can determine which issues should remain non-political (religion, for example) it can moderate

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and tame potential political antagonisms’ (1994: 42).25 Republicanism, as Kant stressed, is founded upon a self-recognition of the need for limitation and a corresponding construction of institutional limits: checks and balances that reflect a disciplined and disenchanted subjectivity.26 Liberal constitutionalism is, in this regard, underlain by an ‘epistemic community’ in a sense deeper than that usually conveyed by the term, and this epistemic commitment is linked to a structure of disciplined subjectivity in the constitution of liberal institutions,27 communities, and security communities. Mutual recognition on the basis of the institution of the ‘rule of law’ expresses and draws upon this deep structure, as do structures of recognition regarding liberal-democratic institutions as a whole. Disciplinary ‘interests’ An analysis of Kant’s thinking can also provide insights into the dynamics supporting a commitment to this form of discipline and thus into the constitution of liberal security communities and their cohesion. While there is a perpetual struggle within the Kantian self between the sensuous world of impulse and the moral realm of the will, and while Kant believes that it is always the will which must in the last instance be determining, he also believes that the affects and emotions are not wholly destructive in this process, and that they can provide support in the struggle. While Kant argues that we have a natural admiration for morally good actions (‘reverence-respect’, in Honig’s terms), he also argues that this is supported by a more reflective emotion: gratification at seeing (successful) efforts at self-discipline and moral behaviour reflected in our own actions, in those of others like us, and in mutual admiration on this basis of each for the other.28 Acknowledging the constructed nature of the moral self, and the extensive application of will which is required to achieve it, liberals come to recognize – and to value, admire and respect – the capacity for restraint, concealment, and discipline in themselves and in others.29 Individuals thus have an ‘interest’ in self-discipline: one grounded in both their individual and collective constitution as liberal subjects. Seen in this light, liberal action is not a straightforward outcome of a ‘liberal identity’ which individuals simply happen to have, it is a (self-reflexive) recognition of achievement, a pride in what ‘we’ have become, coupled with an awareness of the irrational, undisciplined selves (and societies) that we can be, and often have been. Contributing to this dynamic is the constitutive role which the past performs in the maintenance of the liberal community. Historically speaking, as was argued in Chapter 1, the spectre of a wilful, capricious and fundamentally irrational absolutism or an epoch of religious strife was the destructive image which provided the (productive) foil against which an emergent liberalism could contrast itself.30 In the context of contemporary liberal security communities – or, to be precise, the one institution that has

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been defined as such: NATO – this past is the realm of totalitarian irrationality exemplified in the Second World War. One of the most common refrains in the democratic peace (and in NATO discourse) is reference to a disastrous past that has been left behind, admiration for a present that has been created through the disciplined effort of constructing, maintaining, and spreading liberal-democratic principles and institutions, and hope for a pacific future that will follow upon their yet further extension. Consider in this light the representation of NATO provided by an ex-Secretary General, which is worth quoting at length: The Washington Treaty and the German Basic Law were drafted by people with a keen sense of history, the best and the brightest of their time. These were people who had seen the worst that men are able to inflict on each other. And yet these same people remained convinced that human progress was possible, and that failure could be turned into success – by drawing the right lessons and by creating institutions that would prevent a return to the past. Their guiding posts were certain fundamental values – democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law. These values are as relevant today as they were in 1949. Back then, they had to be resurrected from the ashes of a World War and upheld during the Cold War. Today in Kosovo, these fundamental values have to be defended against a policy of deliberately engineered hatred – a policy that seems to come from an era we believed was long behind us. (Solana 1999: 1) In terms of the continual rearticulation of the liberal security community, it is this shared accomplishment (not the simple existence of the community) that is consistently re-inscribed as a category of moral worth and similarity.31 And again, in this context, liberal self-identity and common identity engage in a mutually reinforcing process of recognition. Declarations of how NATO’s members have overcome their pasts and conflicts and have replaced them with liberal-democratic structures of cooperation are more than just self-congratulatory rhetoric or statements of fact. They are performative acts32 that have been central in reconstituting the identity of the alliance in the post-Cold War era, acts which carry within them structures of self and mutual admiration (recognition of the benefits which the struggle for discipline has wrought). In this way, they contribute to the reproduction of the community, and add to the pleasure which those inside feel regarding their accomplishment. Self-congratulation and fear act as powerfully reinforcing motivations. This is also a process involving the accrual and exercise of cultural and symbolic capital and power. Recognizing the ‘truth’ about the relationship between (liberal-democratic) identity and security is both a claim to a particular identity (one embodied by Western institutions such as NATO),

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a knowledge claim about how this represents the real history of the alliance (the legacy to be lived up to); and a claim about the need to maintain the peace by maintaining and if possible extending the democratic security community. Responsible selves are those who have recognized the truth of these claims, and who act to reproduce the practices and institutions that embody and represent them. What takes place in this process is an act of self-binding, a self-binding that takes place within a field structured by dominant forms of cultural capital and knowledge claims. What is more, this internal cohesion can be strengthened by the existence of external turmoil. The existence of those who do not choose well, who lack the moral discipline to construct liberal polities and a liberal peace, provides an ‘outside’ which strengthens the bonds of the liberal community. In Risse-Kappen’s analysis, this dynamic is treated in the following terms: The possibility to validate one’s claim of peacefulness through reference to one’s domestic norms also explains why the democratic peace is particularly characteristic of stable democracies. States in various stages of transition to democracy may still be met with suspicion given their domestic turmoil. (1995: 504) However, putting the issue this way risks overlooking the dual dynamic at work within liberalism. The existence of such a disordered ‘outside’ certainly provides a clear contrast confirming the benefits of the settled order within. But it also reinforces the commitment to the discipline of liberal subjectivity, reinforcing the visions of self-worth and mutual respect within, and providing a continual illustration of the necessity of liberal discipline. As Kant put it in a phrase that nicely captures this dynamic: We look with profound contempt upon the way in which savages cling to their lawless freedom. They would rather engage in incessant strife than submit to a legal constraint which they might impose upon themselves, for they prefer the freedom of folly to the freedom of reason. (1970: 102–3) The disordered outside thus confirms the moral uprightness and selfdiscipline of the existing liberal-democratic order even at the same time as the members of that order may legitimately feel fear, concern, and even moral obligation to those outside. This process of self-constitution, of ‘we-ness’ and the construction of ‘likes’ within the liberal community, provides a mechanism whereby the liberal security community is able to exercise a subtle yet potentially extremely powerful influence upon those who stand outside the community.

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At the heart of this power relationship is the way in which the liberal community both excludes and incorporates those who stand outside it. The liberal community does not derive its power and cohesion from a simple process of self/other inclusion and exclusion, or from the construction of external ‘enemies’, but from the ability to play across a security ‘game’ characterized by both inclusion and exclusion. At first glance, as noted earlier, the claim that all in principle are equal, and that all thus have a right (in principle) to join the community, might appear a weakness for liberal communities. It certainly seems to rob a liberal community of the right to limit its membership on whatever arbitrary grounds it might currently consider pragmatic, while providing outsiders with powerful grounds for demanding inclusion.33 But this fluidity should also not obscure the more fundamental fact concerning the constitution of the rules of the game, and the differential power dimensions of the field. For however difficult a situation this might provide for liberal communities, the granting of such a universal right allows for the exercise of considerable disciplinary power over those who stand outside. The granting of a status which appears to be wholly a ‘disinterested’ matter of right – and not of caprice or purely strategic calculation dependent upon powerpolitical dominance enjoyed by the liberal security community – can be transformed into a stress on the responsibility of those others to exercise that right in a legitimate way in order to be respected. By making membership in the community a matter of universal right, withholding entry into the community can be cast as the result of either the wilful unworthiness of these others, or as evidence of their as yet insufficient progress towards meeting the standards of discipline to which they ought to aspire.34 Either way, the onus is placed upon those outside to live up to the principles and actions that would merit inclusion – a process which they ought to recognize as their own responsibility. The failure to recognize and work towards this goal is evidence of a lack of self-discipline and moral responsibility on their behalf.35 This failure can be cast as all the more disappointing (and recalcitrant outsiders as morally/politically culpable), since liberal states had so conspicuously set aside the narrow pursuit of their material self-interest and advantage in favour of recognizing the claims of others, despite the latter’s manifest material-strategic inferiority. A hierarchical set of relations is thus developed. While potential entrants (applicants) are certainly allowed access to the ‘game’, it is only on the condition that they accept its rules, and they thereby enter into a field where the distribution of capital (both symbolic capital, and largely denied or mutually ‘misrecognized’ material capital, both economic and military), and the structures of power and available strategies, are already deeply structured in favour of the dominant players. Moreover, the transformations required of applicants in order to be worthy of recognition cannot be just rhetorical; mere lip-service paid to high-minded principles in order to gain admission to the community is not enough. While the existence of

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such behaviour cannot be discounted, it would constitute a basis for continued exclusion on the grounds that an applicant was not really the kind of state it claimed to be, but only a cynical manipulator of the goodwill and openness of the community. The extensive processes of education, legal reformation, and institutional transformation demanded of the candidate countries by both NATO and the EU are not just technical adjustments or elaborate rhetorical games.36 They are part of a process of socialization, and of power, since the correct performance within these ‘games’, in the Bourdieuian sense, demands that one truly enter into the game, and be invested in it in order to succeed.37

Conclusion The popularity of both Kant and theories of the democratic peace in the post-Cold War era does not mark the simple resurgence of naive idealism, the straightforward discovery of social scientific laws, or even the straightforward expression of a ‘dominant ideology’ of the powerful.38 Drawing upon forms of cultural and symbolic capital and exercising analogous forms of power, it is both a part and an illustration of the broader constitution of the cultural field of security. Far from being a simple empirical description or moral imperative, the Kantian peace also represents and illustrates a multi-layered identity strategy. Self-discipline and reform is demanded if one is to remain within, or to join, the security community of the democratic peace. The demand is not that actors give up their identities in order to become ‘like us’, and even less is it a demand that they share our understanding of who our enemies are. On the contrary, the call is for states inside – and especially outside – to recognize their true identities as part of a security community whose principles are chosen and freely accepted, not dictated. The call is to return to, or move towards, what one really wants to be (and should want to be): a liberal-democratic state operating within the agreed rules and structures of the community.39 The ends are those of freedom, justice, and peace in themselves. The power of this strategy lies precisely in its apparently uncoerced nature – in its specifically ‘disinterested’ forms – and it is all the more effective as a result. The status of the ‘Kantian’ democratic peace as objective knowledge, or as universal principles of right and obligation disconnected (and sometimes even at odds with) from the interests of those who promote it, are important elements of the cultural and symbolic capital and power at work in the restructuring of security practices. Dominant actors are recognized as restraining their narrow self-interests and refusing to maximize their strategic advantage despite their material superiority – though this is systematically ‘misrecognized’ by all, and the threat that they might do so kept off the agenda for the future. This restraint represents a symbolic politics of self-denial constructing what Bourdieu, with explicit reference to Kant, calls the ‘oracle effect’ (1991:

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209–11): a strategy whereby actors claim to speak in the name of abstract principles and values disconnected from their personal interests. Rejecting the opportunity to exercise their material superiority to maximize their own interests, and even incurring potential risks and costs by enlarging the democratic community, the dominant demonstrate an apparent lack of selfinterest. As a consequence, symbolic power is accumulated and exercised, as dominant actors are able to represent their strategies as arising from the disinterested promotion of principles of universal political right, and to portray those who fail to recognize this fact as mendaciously and untrustworthily self-interested. These strategies were in play not only in the cultural and symbolic dimensions, but also in concrete, material forms. In fact, one of the most revealing illustrations of the role of cultural and symbolic power in security relations can be found in the revaluation and transformation of the dominant security institutions of the Cold War. In this regard, no institution is more revealing than the classic Cold War organization: NATO.

4

From alliance to security community NATO with Iver B. Neumann

If the presence of Immanuel Kant in the debates over post-Cold War security is somewhat surprising, the place of NATO at the heart of these debates was clearly less unexpected. As the core institution of Western and European security over the previous four decades, the question of NATO’s role and relevance in the new situation was inevitably going to be at the heart of debates over the emerging order. Yet NATO’s continued and even increased centrality in this period was a surprise to many – not least amongst them many theorists of international relations. Many prominent realists, in particular, argued that with the collapse of its defining adversary NATO would soon dissolve, leading to John Mearsheimer’s famous warning that we would ‘soon miss the Cold War’. Clearly, however, NATO did not disappear as predicted,1 and understanding both the persistence and evolution of the alliance provides an important challenge for understanding security relations. In this chapter, I seek to draw upon the concepts of symbolic power and the cultural field of security to contribute to an explanation of the alliance’s continued relevance and role. As discussed in Chapter 2, from a Bourdieuian perspective, cultural fields are not free-floating. They are linked to material practices and, most importantly for my analysis here, to institutions. Institutions such as NATO are, in this view, not just sites for the coordination of interests or the reduction of transaction costs, as rationalist theories tend to stress. Institutions are also, and more fundamentally, sites for the production of identity, for the accumulation and retention of forms of capital, and for the exercise of cultural and symbolic power. In important respects, NATO’s persistence and its role in the postCold War security order can be understood in precisely these terms. To make this case, the chapter proceeds along three lines. First, I sketch an understanding of institutions and their relationship to discourses in the production of cultural and symbolic power. Second, I examine the ways that NATO played a crucial role in the maintenance of the West, as a site for the articulation of the security relations of its members in the new situation, and as an institution whose capital could be revalued in such a way that forms of power could be exercised by its members over their

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future actions. Finally, the third section examines the emergence of a narrative construction of NATO’s identity that provided a basis for the enlargement of the alliance while at the same time countering objections that this process would inevitably involve the redrawing of dividing lines in Europe or provoke a threatening Russian reaction. The core of these processes lay in the institutional mechanisms through which the alliance was able to mobilize its long-standing identity as the expression and military guarantor of Western civilization: as an organization whose essential identity and cohesion was based upon common cultural and civilizational – particularly ‘democratic’ – bonds, not primarily upon a shared military threat posed by the Soviet Union. This reconstructed identity provided a logic of continuity and action for the alliance which not only offset claims that it had lost its meaning with the demise of the Soviet Union, but also provided it with a motivating and legitimating vision of a new role: the consolidation of a broader European and ‘Western’ civilization which had been illegitimately divided by the Cold War. Rather than standing apart from a concern with threats and power, this discourse emerges in the context of threat, and itself constitutes a specific form of symbolic power. This field of power extended not only to those countries that had a desire to be part of ‘the West’, but even over that country that was during the Cold War – and long before – seen as the Other of the West: Russia. The reconstruction of NATO’s identity played a powerful role in the debates taking place simultaneously within Russia regarding its own postCold War identity. These debates were fundamentally concerned with the question of whether or not Russia was a part of Western civilization, and Russian reactions to NATO enlargement need to be seen in their context and in terms of the powerful influence which NATO’s identity claims played in structuring politically viable Russian policy responses. As a consequence of NATO’s reconstruction, the Russian leadership was forced to choose from only two roles for their country’s foreign policy. Either Russia could be an apprentice striving to join Western civilization, which would entail acceptance of NATO enlargement as inevitable and positive. Or, alternatively, Russia could be a counter-civilizational force, which would entail opposing NATO enlargement. The latter was the identity advocated by the communist-nationalist opposition, and so it was not a possible role to adopt for the Russian leadership, which sought to promote a transition to democracy. While the Russian leadership tried to retreat to an old role – that of a strategic nation-state trying to maximize its national interest in keeping its former allies from becoming allied to NATO – it found that this role was denied it by NATO’s insistence of its own new role as a security community. The vacillations in Russian NATO policy in the first half of the 1990s, that were extensively remarked upon both by Western and Russian commentators, are in important respects explained by NATO’s cultural and symbolic power, by its ability to specify the roles which Russia could

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legitimately adopt, and the unease of the Russian leadership in coming to terms with conducting a policy predicated on these constraints. In sum, NATO played a crucial part within the cultural field of security: the constitution of this field was crucial in the alliance’s continuity, but that continuity was equally central to the constitution of the field. The evolution of NATO was not separated from interest and power; it was both a reflection and a reconstitution of forms of interest and power, and these forms of power – cultural and symbolic – were essential elements in the evolution of NATO and the development of European security.

Institutions and symbolic power Security organizations cannot be understood simply as instrumental structures wielding material power. They are also sites for the production, reproduction, and exercise of cultural and symbolic power. At the conceptual level, a useful way of indicating the shift involved in this understanding of institutions is to treat the term as a verb, not as a noun.2 As a verb, ‘institution’ conveys an active process of constitution – think, for example, of the phrase ‘to institute a law’. As Bourdieu points out, understanding institution in this dynamic sense requires that we analyse the social field within which such a process of institution takes place, in particular the structures of recognized legitimacy and authority which make such a process practically possible and socially effective. To draw upon a legal illustration, when a judge in a legal system declares ‘I pronounce you guilty’, it is an act, not just a statement or an observation, and a whole series of social consequences follow from it. It is, to use Bourdieu’s nice turn of phrase, an act of ‘social magic’ (1991: 74–5): an ability to make something the case by saying it is so. This ability is not solely linguistic. While literally anyone could say the words, not just anyone can perform the social magic exercised by the judge. The ability to speak effectively is tied to the institutional and organizational structures through which the words are transformed into social acts: structures of expertise, authority, and legitimacy which are drawn upon, and instantiated, by the individual who has the recognized authority to pronounce the judicial decree and to mobilize the associated social powers on this basis. As Bourdieu has put it: A performative utterance is destined to fail each time that it is not pronounced by a person who has the ‘power’ to pronounce it, or, more generally, each time that the ‘particular persons and circumstances in a given case’ are not ‘appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked’; in short, each time that a speaker does not have the authority to emit the words that he utters . . . the success of these operations of social magic – comprised by acts of authority, or what amounts to the same thing, authorized acts – is dependent on

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the combination of a systematic set of interdependent conditions which constitute social rituals. (1991: 111) ‘Institution’ thus needs to be understood in the dual sense of a structure of authoritative symbolic forms and a related set of social structures from within which those forms may be authoritatively issued. These institutional loci of authoritative declaration must be recognized as legitimate both by the speaker and by those to whom the declarations are addressed.3 Power, from this position, needs to be understood not in the materialist sense, but as symbolic power: the ability to use symbolic structures of representation and the occupation of social positions from which they can be effectively enacted, and social and material power thereby mobilized. Both as ideational structures (dominant conceptions) and as institutions for the discernment of legitimate claims to know, organizations of knowledge and trust possess considerable power. Possessing the power to include and exclude, legitimize and authorize, institutions and organizations can wield power over those who stand outside them (who are excluded from their authorizing ability) and over those inside them, who must work within the parameters of the prevailing institutional form. Institutions thus act as fields of force in which power operates. In a significant way, organizations wield power over their members, but it is a power which these members will upon themselves and which, by their very subjection to it, allows them to exercise the power it provides. This understanding of institutions can be related to the analysis of ‘securitization’ developed by Ole Wæver (1995). For Wæver, ‘security’ cannot be understood as a concept with a fixed meaning, nor as a determinate social condition (e.g. ‘we are secure’). Rather, an essential element in understanding security policies and relations lies in the process whereby issues become ‘securitized’. In his words, this involves asking when, why and how do elites label issues and developments as ‘security problems’? when, why and how do they succeed and fail respectively? what attempts are made by other groups to press securitization on the agenda? and what are the cases of attempts to keep issues off the security agenda, to move below the security threshold or even to de-securitize issues that have become securitized? (1995: 226) This means that it is necessary to understand the ‘speech acts’ which accomplish a process of securitization. But there is more to security, or any speech act, than simply its enunciation. As Wæver notes, the central thing about security is not simply the linguistic and conceptual dynamics involved, but their position within a specific institutional setting; ‘security’, he notes, ‘is articulated only from a specific place, by an institutional voice’ (1995: 225).4

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A key element in understanding the politics of security is thus not simply the linguistic and conceptual structures involved, but their position within a specific institutional setting. The ability to ‘speak security’ effectively involves the ability to mobilize specific forms of symbolic power within the specific institutional fields in which it operates. Symbolic power here has two aspects: the utilization of a specifically dominant system of abstract symbols and concepts (language and knowledge); and the occupation of a socially recognized position of symbolic power from which it can be spoken. Language must be recognized as legitimate and authoritative to be socially effective; its power does not reside ‘in the intrinsic properties of discourse itself, but rather in the social conditions of production and reproduction of the distribution between classes of knowledge and recognition of the legitimate language’ (Bourdieu 1991: 113). Moreover, as Bourdieu puts it: The symbolic efficacy of words is exercised only in so far as the person subjected to it recognizes the person who exercises it as authorized to do so, or, what amounts to the same thing, only in so far as he fails to realize that, in submitting to it, he himself has contributed, through his recognition, to its establishment. (1991: 116) When security is seen in these terms, it becomes possible to understand it as an ‘institution’ in terms which broaden our understanding of the processes through which security policies become constructed, articulated and (potentially) politically effective, and the role of institutions (in the more formal, conventional sense) in this process. In modern society, the nature of legitimate knowledge is bound up with the role of institutions and organizations, and the different forms of symbolic power and social capital which they embody. Power here emerges not only from the ability to speak the right language (i.e. to use the accepted symbolic forms in the sense outlined above) but to do so in the context of having been accredited by institutions which have the power to confer that credibility. Thus trust and authority reside primarily not in the individual (at least not immediately, or per se), but more usually in the individual as mediated through their institutional accreditation. The authority which individuals are able to exercise emerges in this sense from their ability to draw upon the relevant institutional field and its associated organizations.5 It is important to remember, however, that while institutions are central to the constitution of fields and are sites of power within them, there is nothing fixed about their authority. Institutions can decline in importance either within fields or, more likely, as the field itself declines in relative importance in relation to other fields. Consider, for example, the considerable decline in authority of organized religion in many countries, and the concomitant diminishment of the church as a site of power.

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Security institutions in the more formal (organizational) sense of the term can thus be understood as realms and sources of symbolic capital and power. Legitimacy resides in the ability to speak the appropriate language and to speak it from a place of accreditation and distinction: and the higher that distinction, i.e. the greater the symbolic capital which it provides to the speaker, the greater the symbolic power wielded. ‘Security’, then, lies neither solely in the discourse or speech act, nor solely in the knowledge discourse, nor directly in the organization. It functions in the context of all three. Formal organizations may represent the concrete locus at which the other forms of institutionalization can be most clearly aggregated and transformed into more conventional manifestations of power. They represent the accumulated social capital of the group, capital which is expressed in and through the organization. Here situations can be defined, policies pronounced, forces mobilized. Performing the discursive speech-act of security is not, therefore, a form of ‘idealism’: it is a social accomplishment which can only be effective in the context of a corresponding constellation of social forces. Organizations are not powerful in themselves, but only in so far as they are constituted within fields. Only in so far as they can generate, maintain and deploy the social capital upon which they are based and can continue to do so in ways which accord with the desires of their members, can organizations maintain themselves as powerful and socially effective actors. In this regard, traditional realist declarations of the limits of organizations hold an important insight, but the lack of any cogent theory of institutions (especially in Waltzian neorealism) makes the many realist appraisals of limited further use.6 Strong organizations are underlain by, and embedded within, an institutional field which they may have a role in creating and maintaining. A sense of the limits of the power of formal organizations thus needs to be strongly qualified, since they may be elements in ‘fields of power’ which operate in particularly significant ways precisely because of the broad processes of ‘institutionalization’ which constitute them in the first place.7 As ‘expert systems’, security institutions can make a claim of trust upon their members and the public.8 But this means that part of the authority of their members (vis-a`-vis each other and their national publics) resides in their being members of the organization. An institution empowers individuals to speak on behalf of the group, but in conferring this power it also limits what can be said, and how.9 Organizations (and their unity and stability) thus have a value in themselves for their direct participants. It is not just that institutions confer an identity (and collective identity) on those who are their members; it is also that it confers upon those members an identity with power. Security organizations become repositories of symbolic capital, capital which can be drawn upon by their members (and thus wielded as symbolic power). This also means that the institution has a degree of symbolic power in itself, and when an international institution

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develops a high degree of capital in this regard it takes on a value in its own right and exercises a degree of ‘power’ over its members as a result. This dialectic of power allows us to avoid either rationalist or legalist views of institutions. Institutions function effectively only in so far as they serve the ‘interests’ of their members, but what these interests are is not given a priori or wholly exogenously, and the institution is not just an instrument for their atomistic pursuit. This provides a way of differentiating institutions along the lines of how much capital they have, of understanding some of the reasons why they work as they do, of understanding why some are successful and other not, and why some persist when more traditional understandings of security institutions might predict their dissolution.

Identity, narrative, and symbolic power One of the central claims of constructivist and institutionalist analysis is of course that identity and action are inextricably related. Rather than being fixed or intrinsically given, identities are seen as variable and as constituted through relational social processes. Perceptions of the situation in which actors find themselves and the courses of action which they view as reasonable to pursue are constructed in the context of their identities. In this regard, it is important to note, as Mary Douglas has pointed out, that ‘institutions confer identity’ (1986: 55); identities, we might add, that are tied to relations of power. A specific identity, especially one tied to claims of expertise and/or legitimate authority, is not only a source of identityconstitution, it is in a very direct sense a source of social power. Institutions confer identity not just in the frequently cited constructivist sense of who ‘we’ are, but also in the sense of authorized speech and representation. The two senses of representation – to be able to represent reality effectively and authoritatively and to be able to represent people (to speak from authority, in the name of others) – are linked. As theorists of the ‘logic of appropriate action’ have pointed out, this is a two-sided process and structure: the self-perceived identity of the actors is central to their understanding of what is appropriate action in a given situation, but the logic of appropriateness is also intrinsically social and relational – what counts as appropriate action is determined in the context of a social structure within which the actor is located, and on the judgement of others.10 A particular kind of action is viewed as appropriate for a given kind of actor in a specific situation. To be recognized as a certain kind of actor is to adhere to the recognized behaviour deemed appropriate to the situation, and thus to be a legitimate actor within it; and undertaking specific actions in that situation is equally a sign of being a particular kind of actor. Seen in this broadly social context, legitimate identities are inextricably bound to roles, and to structures of power. The linking of a certain kind of identity to a specific set of roles and its analogous forms of action,

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is a fundamental structure of social power. The capacity to claim such identities, and to grant or deny them to others, is a source of social power. The ongoing process of identity-construction and recognition is, as Erik Ringmar notes, particularly apparent during periods of fundamental change. When circumstances are shifting dramatically, when new identities are being formed and old ones seeking or being pressured to transform, then ‘the identification of beginnings, ends, sections and scenes is likely to be a task of paramount importance’ (1996: 77), and the structures and dynamics involved in these processes are often thrown into high relief. The process of change opens to question the prevailing identities of the actors, thus also opening to question the policies they should pursue in the emerging situation. One way of assessing this is to look at narratives. As Ringmar has put it, narrative conceptions focus on the ways in which identities are constructed, maintained and transformed through the telling of ‘constitutive stories’ (1996: 76). These narratives provide a context of meaning within which an actor’s identity, the situation within which they are located, and the actions deemed reasonable or appropriate to both, are knitted together within a coherent (if multi-variant and open-ended) whole. In Ringmar’s words: To create a presence for ourselves in time, first of all, is to locate ourselves in the context of a past and a future. . . . We can be someone today since we were someone yesterday and since we will be someone tomorrow. But the story not only creates a present: it also makes sense of it by inserting it into the plot which is our individual and collective lives. Our present has meaning since it relates to a beginning, to an end, and to the different sections or scenes into which the plot is divided. (1996: 76–7) Narratives of identity are by no means merely ‘private’ constructions. On the contrary, they are social and relational in at least two important senses. First, the narrative resources available to a given actor are neither infinite nor unstructured; they are historically and socially constructed and confined. Second, the social and historical delimitations on narrative construction are further reinforced by the fact that the successful embodiment of a given identity depends also on the recognition by others of the narrative itself, and of their acquiescence to its adoption by the particular actor involved. Put differently, it is not enough merely to claim an identity: for that identity to have a degree of internal stability (not being subject constantly to challenge) and for it to have a degree of social effectiveness (enabling the actor to act socially in accordance with the identity), the identity itself must be acknowledged as legitimate by others, and the adoption of the identity by a particular actor must be recognized by other actors.11

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Equally importantly, a period of transformation involves a struggle over the forms of identity and action which will be regarded as legitimate within the emerging order. In such a situation, the directions taken by actors will be a reflection of struggles exemplifying the symbolic resources available to them for the (re)construction of their identities and of their abilities to have those identities recognized by others. Different actors with different identities possess unequal capacities to engage in these struggles and to influence the structures of social knowledge through which practices are articulated. A central element in this process is the way in which organizations provide a locus for the accreditation of authoritative identities and for the articulation of claims. In the case at hand, NATO was a key site in the rearticulation of security and the securitization of culture in the wake of the Cold War.

Narrating NATO: security and civilization The end of the Cold War presented the members of NATO with threats and challenges to their security which seemed to render obsolete many of the traditional structures and strategies of the alliance and, in the eyes of many, to render obsolete the alliance itself. Yet in contrast to these predictions of imminent discord, inexorable decline and potential dissolution, NATO’s actual practices throughout the waning days of the Cold War and its immediate aftermath exhibited almost precisely the opposite of what the prophets of decline had predicted. Rather than fragmenting, the alliance exhibited a cohesion and public commitment to continued cooperation that matched anything found during the supposedly unifying conflicts of the Cold War, and which certainly stood in marked contrast to the discord so characteristic of alliance relations during the so-called ‘second Cold War’. How do we explain this cohesion? To begin with, the loss of the Soviet threat – the ‘other’ so often analysed in assessments of NATO’s identity and cohesion12 – did not mean that the alliance was left without a threat. On the contrary, what was so unsettling to NATO in the immediate postCold War period was not only the oft-declared uncertainty of the future, or the indeterminacy of emerging NATO-Soviet relations (though each of these figured prominently), but rather the worry that the future would be marked by something that the NATO member states knew all too well: the return of their past conflicts.13 As Ole Wæver (1996: 122) put it in a cogent appraisal of this dynamic, ‘Europe’s ‘‘other’’, the enemy image, is today to no very large extent ‘‘Islamic fundamentalism’’, ‘‘the Russians’’ or anything similar – rather Europe’s Other is Europe’s own past which should not be allowed to become its future’.14 Seeing the role of NATO in terms of its institutional and symbolic power provides a series of insights into the persistence of the alliance as a means of meeting this threat. NATO occupied a powerful symbolic position as a site where security could be authoritatively ‘spoken’ and collectively ascribed

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to by its members. The organization was not simply a convenient venue providing an established and effective set of organizational routines and capabilities:15 its status was an integral aspect in the rearticulation of the relationships of its members. The alliance acted as a symbolic marker, a rhetorical touchstone through which the threat of fragmentation and the return of the past might be countered, and securing NATO from this threat – maintaining the organization because its existence was a value in itself – became one of the central goals and political challenges of the alliance. This was readily affirmed by the participants themselves. The Brussels Declaration of March 1988, for example, begins with the heading ‘A time for reaffirmation’, and indeed the first sections of the declaration are concerned not with the new strategic situation, but with reaffirmations of NATO solidarity. Having ‘come together to reemphasize our unity’, the Allies declare that the foundations of NATO remain unchanged. ‘Our Alliance’, they state, ‘is a voluntary association of free and democratic equals, united by common interests and values. It is unprecedented in its scope and success. Our security is indivisible.’16 Such interpretations can themselves, of course, be seen as contributing to the very process they describe, and they are intended as such. As Manfred Wo¨rner noted in discussing the Brussels Declaration, ‘The Declarations by the Heads of State and Government were not just pro-forma displays of unity, but powerful reaffirmations of our basic principles as the basis for moving forward with the Alliance’s agenda’ (Wo¨rner 1988: 2). And as he explicitly argued elsewhere with regard to the centrality of the Atlantic relationship: Without a North American commitment, European nations would lack the element of reassurance that has allowed them to integrate and overcome historical animosities. In the words of one commentator, the United States remains Europe’s ‘pacifier’, without which Europeans would be tempted to renationalize their defence policies and return to the fragile military pacts of the past. (Wo¨rner 1991b: 7–8; see also Hansen 1995: 125)17 Without the solidarity of the Soviet threat to allow disagreements while largely guaranteeing fundamental unity in response to that threat, unity in itself became a practical goal of NATO’s members, compelling them to ever-greater statements of commitment and solidarity. To work outside NATO was to risk breaking the unity that it embodied, and to risk bringing about the dissolution it symbolically opposed. The end of the Cold War yielded not greater freedom and flexibility in security relations for NATO’s members; on the contrary, it bound them ever more tightly within the organization, and with every success in keeping the alliance together, those social pressures became more powerful, the bonds more secure, and the place of NATO in the emerging security order increasingly central.

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But if NATO was to play a key role in allowing its members to avoid falling back into the conflictual military policies which many portrayed as their fate, and was to ‘continue to be among the principal architects’ of the emerging security order, then traditional military conceptions of security and strategies of balance of power were directly counter to what was required. Indeed, it was the logic of these traditional conceptions that was drawn upon by those who held NATO’s collapse to be imminent. Here, a second set of factors accounting for NATO’s persistence lies in its possession of cultural and symbolic capital through which change could be transformed into continuity (and continuity presented as change), an argument which called for the alliance’s continuation and centrality rather than its marginalization. This transformation involved a rearticulation of the identity and history of the alliance. Increasingly, NATO became portrayed not as a conventional alliance defined by the existence of the Soviet threat and the Cold War, but as an organization whose essential identity and history is correctly understood as one of cultural, or even civilizational, commonality centred around the shared democratic foundations of its members. Identity and security: NATO as a civilizational structure Claims about the cultural and political nature of the alliance and the Cold War have always been part of NATO’s narrative. In the founding treaty, the signatories had declared themselves ‘determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their peoples, founded upon principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law’ (NATO 1949: preamble).18 Historically, these declarations had usually been subordinated to a more narrowly ‘strategic’ vision which identified security overwhelmingly with questions of the balance of military capabilities, exemplified, for example, in the 1967 Harmel report. In the post-Cold War period, however, these narratives achieved a new prominence. Indeed, beginning in about 1990, NATO documents began to downgrade the focus on the military nature of security and on the solidarity of the alliance in the face of an external Soviet threat. Instead, NATO is increasingly represented as a cultural or civilizational entity whose basic identity and history should be understood less in terms of Cold War military balancing and more as the result of a deep, enduring and profound cultural commonality.19 Perhaps the clearest expression of this shift can be found in the narrative which emerges concerning NATO’s own history in relation to the Soviet Union. In Secretary-General Manfred Wo¨rner’s 1991 assessment of the future of ‘The Atlantic Alliance in a New Era’, for example, the role of the Soviet Union is drastically downplayed: The Treaty of Washington of 1949 nowhere mentions the Soviet Union but stresses instead the need for a permanent community of

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Western democracies to make each other stronger through cooperation, and to work for more peaceful international relations. The Alliance has played a major role in reconciling former adversaries, such as France and Germany, in counteracting neo-isolationism within the world greatest power and in promoting new standards of consultation and cooperation among its members. All these elements would still have been fundamental to security and prosperity in Europe even in the absence of the post-war Soviet threat. (Wo¨rner 1991a: 5; see also Hansen 1995: 119–22) The London Declaration of July 1990 expressed a similar movement. In the new context, the Allies declared, we need to keep standing together, to extend the long peace we have enjoyed these past four decades. Yet our Alliance must be even more an agent of change. It can build the structures of a more united continent, supporting security and stability with the strength of our shared faith in democracy, the rights of the individual, and the peaceful resolution of disputes. We reaffirm that security and stability do not lie solely in the military dimension, and we intend to enhance the political component of our Alliance as provided for by Article 2 of our Treaty. (NATO 1990b: x2; see also Wo¨rner 1989b) And the theme was also strongly echoed by German Defence Minister Volker Ru¨he who argued in a widely noted article that the Alliance remains the strongest link between Europe and North America. Europe and North America’s political and strategic positions are based on shared values and common interests. It is this, and not the presence of an existential threat, that is the hub of the Alliance. (Ru¨he 1993: 130) Through this redescriptive logic, NATO was not rendered obsolete by the passing of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. Rather, NATO was now able to return to itself, and to move purposefully into the new situation by building upon its real historic foundations. The symbolic resources and institutional habitus of the Alliance mobilized to recast NATO in terms beyond those conventionally attributed to balance of power (or threat) visions of alliance politics, and to present itself not as outdated or in need of radical change, but rather as now being free to return to its natural state and to evolve on that basis.20 The Cold War, so often seen as NATO’s defining rationale and forging struggle, could now be presented as an unfortunate historical deviation, an anomalous period during which NATO’s true nature and identity was overwhelmed by a

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regrettable military necessity, the passing of which allowed NATO to return to its true historic role.21 Redefining security as culture The question of what security was (or, alternatively, who or what now constituted ‘threats’) was at the core of NATO’s post-Cold War dilemmas. Different answers to the question generated different visions of the future of the alliance, and when viewed through traditional strategic lenses none looked promising for that future. The rearticulation of the identity of the alliance, however, was integrally linked to a concomitant shift in its vision of the nature and conditions of security. Security, too, came to be reenvisioned in cultural terms. Positively, security is identified with the cultural and civilizational principles now held to be the foundation of NATO itself – themes captured in varying dimensions by the idea of the democratic peace. Negatively, threats increasingly became represented as emerging from the absence of liberal-democratic structures. In this vision, the challenge NATO faced was not as a particular state or group of states whose adversarial position is dictated by the geo-political logic of the balance of power. On the contrary, it was the absence of specific, democratic cultural and political insitutions that came to define the perception of security, and NATO came increasingly to argue that the greatest contemporary challenge is ‘instability’. The shift from a traditional conception of security focusing on military power and the balance of capabilities to a focus on issues of societal (in)stability and political-cultural structures is one of the most striking transformations in NATO’s pronouncements on security in the 1990s. In 1991’s ‘New Strategic Concept’, for example, the problem of security is portrayed in the following terms: Risks to Allied security are less likely to result from calculated aggression against the territory of the Allies, but rather from the adverse consequences of instabilities that may arise from the serious economic, social and political difficulties, including ethnic rivalries and territorial disputes, which are faced by many countries in central and eastern Europe. The tensions which may result, as long as they remain limited, should not directly threaten the security and territiorial integrity of members of the Alliance. They could, however, lead to crises inimical to European stability and even to armed conflicts, which could involve outside powers or spill over into NATO countries, having direct effect on the security of the Alliance. (NATO 1991b: x10) Equally tellingly, the solutions to these potential security threats are increasingly portrayed in ‘internal’ terms, that is, in terms of the problems

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of social and cultural dynamics. For example, in late 1990 the North Atlantic Council argued that having worked to overcome past divisions, our countries must now direct their efforts to avoiding grave economic disparities becoming the new dividing lines on the continent. All countries have the right to exist in security. In the midst of change, tendencies towards greater insularity must be resisted. We seek to spread the values of freedom and democracy that are at the heart of our transatlantic partnership so that past labels of East and West no longer have political meaning. (NATO 1990c: x2) The problem of security becomes defined largely as the emergence of specific cultural or civilizational structures. No longer is the prevailing understanding of the Alliance one in which states gather together to meet a military threat. Now, their ability to do so, to form an alliance which has overcome their past antagonisms and survived the vicissitudes of the Cold War, is ascribed to the kind of states they are and the kind of alliance that NATO is. Common defence remains a central theme, but it is systematically sublimated to declarations about the fundamental link between culture and security. Defining security in cultural terms not only reinforces the revised claims about the identity of the alliance and the reasons for its past success and future continuation. It also provides a basis for a new epistemic consensus about security: how it is to be achieved, what the threats are likely to be, and what should be done about them. In other words, it provides an epistemic orientation that is both linked to and supportive of the newly stressed cultural identity of the alliance. NATO’s cultural strategy: from inside to outside A central criticism of NATO’s continuation in the post-Cold War world was that as a military alliance it seemed bound to traditional military concepts and capabilities of limited use in influencing the emergent situation in central and eastern Europe. Certainly the alliance was not about to invade those areas, nor did it seem particularly well suited to foster the kinds of social transformations necessary in dealing with the kinds of ‘instabilities’ it had identified as the primary emerging challenges to European security. Moreover, the military identity of NATO was constantly referred to as a factor limiting the alliance’s potential to act positively in the new situation, due to worries about threatening Russia. With a transformation in its own identity and its portrayal of conditions of security, however, NATO not only transcended many of these limits, it also positioned itself as a uniquely powerful actor within these new contexts. This marked a revaluation of the field, without which the capital possessed by the institution, and the power it provided to its members,

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risked being dissipated. Via such a revaluation, however, this capital could be not only maintained – it could be increased and redeployed in new and effective ways. As the military expression of a cultural or civilizational structure that exemplifies security in itself, it became possible to portray NATO as transcending the limits traditionally ascribed to alliances. A narrative emerged in which there was no essential difference between those who are in the alliance and those who are not: no adversaries are necessary, all states are potential members, and no states are necessarily adversaries. The key mark of geopolitical delineation became the social and political structures, as well as the cultural attributes, of the states concerned. Security and culture became increasingly linked to the question of democracy, a theme which was itself becoming a powerful cultural narrative, whether in the form of grand speculations concerning the ‘end of history’ or in declarations about the ‘democratic peace’. Since the alliance was no longer an essentially military response to a geopolitical threat, but was rather the military and material expression of a value-based civilizational structure, participation in it and relations towards it were not portrayed in oppositional military-territorial terms. This allowed a symbolic de-territorialization of security and redefined NATO as a highly integrated cultural community. New members were therefore not understood simply as new allies in the traditional sense, but as societies which naturally belonged to NATO by dint of their political structure and cultural values. Enlargement is the extension of this community – welcoming those who share its pacific values and institutions. It is not directed against anyone, nor does it exclude anyone. As President Clinton declared, NATO’s success has involved promoting security interests, advancing values, supporting democracy and economic opportunity. We have literally created a community of shared values and shared interests, as well as an alliance for the common defense. Now, the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union want to be a part of enlarging the circle of common purpose, and in so doing, increasing our own security. (Clinton 1995: 3)22 Through this narrative, NATO declares itself the integral security dimension of Western civilization at large, and constructs a relationship to those who stand outside it that is importantly different from a balance of power logic. Crucially, this allowed critics’ concerns that dividing lines not be redrawn in Europe through the continued existence of NATO to be presented in such a way that NATO’s persistence and expansion becomes part of the solution to that problem rather than the cause of it. In the words of the Study on Enlargement, ‘NATO’s enlargement must be understood as only one important element of a broad European security architecture that

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transcends and renders obsolete the idea of ‘dividing lines’ in Europe’ (NATO 1994: x9). Finally, this transformation linked the alliance to powerful structures and strategies of liberal discipline (Gheciu 2005b). As we saw in Chapter 3, the right to determine what standards are to be met, and who is achieving them (or is on the way to doing so) represents one of the most significant structures of power embedded within liberal practices of neutrality and respect. This dynamic can be seen clearly within the processes of NATO enlargement, where three themes have been coterminous. First, the explicit rearticulation of the primacy of and respect for state sovereignty, both of individual NATO members and of those states which stand outside the alliance. Second, the claim that NATO is a liberal-democratic security community, and that no state is in principle excluded from membership. And finally, the claim that security must now be understood through a much broader, cooperative, agenda with liberal democracy at its core. Formal recognition is thus extended to all (states) to pursue their own directions, while at the same time the legitimate (respectable) course of action is clearly delineated. What is at work here is precisely the productive tension between ‘liberal respect’ and ‘teleological respect’ examined in the disciplinary dimensions of the democratic peace. All states are recognized (in their sovereignty, preeminently), but not all are accorded respect. Those worthy of respect are those who live up to the moral responsibilities of the situation, and who act in ways worthy of respect – in this case, those who move towards the structures demanded by the democratic peace and the liberal community. The criteria of recognition (of relations with NATO and potential admissibility to the alliance) are not the existence of a common enemy, but adherence to a shared set of norms and principles; and the status of non-members in relation to the alliance depends upon recognition of their progress towards these ‘universal’ (i.e. not solely NATOdetermined and dictated) structures. Those that do not move in such a direction may be tolerated (so long as they do not directly threaten the liberal security community), but they are not worthy of full respect – a status for which they bear full responsibility. Moreover, their refusal to adopt or move towards liberal practices makes them constantly prey to a logic of suspicion: to the charge that because they are not liberal they may in principle be viewed as potential threats regardless of their declared security policies or actual strategic postures. As Alexandra Gheciu (2005b) has demonstrated in compelling detail, these transformations placed NATO in the role of a ‘teacher’ for applicant states, a role with considerable power. But it is also important to stress, as she does, that this pedagogic power relies upon more than just a recognition that there is a valuable knowledge to be relearnt (of how to run a security sector along democratic lines, for example), or expertise to be shared. The very symbolic equivalence accorded to candidates as potential equals also underscores the disciplinary techniques of liberal power. Moreover,

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this equivalence can also be seen as part of a further series of strategies that Bourdieu analyses as strategies of ‘condescension’. For what is underplayed in this relationship, and is thus in a specific sense ‘denied’ and ‘misrecognized’, is the vastly unequal military-strategic (and economic) status of the parties involved. In Bourdieu’s analysis, this egalitarianism is not simply a hypocritical facade or a cynical ploy, nor is it simple magnanimity; instead, it is a strategy that places those granting the equivalence in a position of power. As he describes it, the strategy of condescension is one by which agents occupying a higher position in one of the hierarchies of objective space symbolically deny the social distance which does not thereby cease to exist, thus ensuring they gain the profits of recognition accorded to a purely symbolic negation of distance (‘he’s unaffected’, ‘he’s not stand-offish’, etc.) which implies the recognition of a distance (the sentences I have quoted always have an implicit rider: ‘he’s unaffected, for a duke’, ‘he’s not stand-offish for a university professor’, etc.). In short, one can use the objective distances so as to have the advantages of proximity and the advantages of distance, that is, the distance and the recognition of the distance that is ensured by the symbolic negation of distance. (1987: 127–8) By stressing that cultural similarities, however protean, were what really mattered in the relations between NATO and its potential members (and indeed between existing members in the ‘inside’ strategy discussed earlier), and downplaying material capabilities and contributions – in short, by not stressing the importance of military capacity and the vast differences between the different actors, at the same time that everyone realizes the inequality – it is possible to accumulate and maximize symbolic capital. By denying social distance, it is possible to create a symbolic field for the exercise of power.23 This has important implications for understanding the relationship between NATO and its candidate members. It is certainly true that the logic of inclusion – whether conceived of as a language game (Fierke and Wiener 1999) or as a combination of rules and rhetoric (Schimmelfennig 2002; 2003) – allowed candidate states to operate within the cultural field, and to attempt to develop resources and strategies to improve their positions within it by using NATO’s own logic and language of universality and inclusion to exercise a degree of power in relation to the alliance. However, it needs equally to be recognized that this field continued to be structured by forms of power and strategies dominated by the most powerful actors in the field.24 There was, and is, a field of struggle within the logic of inclusion, but declarations of equality, moral equivalence, or cultural solidarity should not obscure the fact that these declarations can be equally effective as strategies wielded by the dominant within fluid and contested – but nevertheless unequal – fields of power.

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Democracy or empire? Framing Russia NATO’s role in the revaluation of the field of security – in the structuring of the cultural field of security – gave it the power to represent itself as a security community, and thereby meet the challenges of alliance unity, revaluing its capital and facilitating the exercise of new forms of power both inside and towards potential members. Yet if symbolic power operated in these ways ‘inside’ and towards potential or candidate-members, it also had the power to define the roles which Russia could adopt in its evolving security relations with NATO, and to narrow drastically the field of politically viable options available to Russian policy-makers. In a powerful political move, Russian responses to enlargement were constructed as symbolic of Russia’s identity: as a test of whether its political trajectory was progressive – moving towards the West, democracy, and perhaps membership in the ‘pacific federation’, or whether Russia was regressing towards its imperialist past. Opposition to enlargement within the traditional categories of military security and national interest is rendered largely illegitimate by this move. If Russia is part of democratic civilization, then it has no good reason to oppose enlargement. Analogously, Russian opposition to enlargement becomes synonomous with a falling back from the path of reform, democracy, and a market economy. The cultural field thus provided a basis for diverse strategies that drew upon claims about Russia’s identity. To Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, ideas of the West’s ‘partnership’ with Russia were ‘premature’ not only because they were overly optimistic about the direction of political developments in Russia, but because they overlooked the continuing ‘centrality in Russian politics of an old issue, one that evokes the greatest passion from the majority of politicians as well as citizens, namely, ‘‘What is Russia?’’ Is Russia primarily a nation-state or is it a multinational empire?’ To Brzezinski, the choices dictated by the answer to this question are clear: ‘The bottom line here is a simple but compelling axiom: Russia can be either an empire or a democracy, but it cannot be both’ (1994: 72).25 While Brzezinski phrases this argument largely in terms of its consequences for the development of democracy in Russia, it is clearly linked to Russian foreign policy. Within this logic, if Russia is to be a democracy, it is illegitimate for it to intervene in almost any way in the affairs of its neighbours. Efforts by Moscow within the CIS to ‘rebuild some of the links that used to bind the old Soviet Union together’ (1994: 73), whether these be in monetary, economic, military, or even parliamentary realms, are portrayed as representing a ‘proto-imperial’ trend in Russian policy. In this view, any attempt by Russia to influence the surrounding states can be portrayed as proto-imperial and undemocratic. Addressing the issue of NATO expansion directly, Brzezinski writes:

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From alliance to security community That the expansion of the zone of democratic Europe’s security would bring the West closer to Russia is no cause for apology. An eventually democratic Russia should wish to link itself with a stable and secure Europe. Only then will modernity and prosperity become Russia’s reality. On this issue, propitiating Russian imperialists is not the way to help Russian democrats. The right course is to insist firmly that the gradual expansion of NATO eastward is not a matter of ‘drawing a new line’ – as President Clinton wrongly put it in January 1994 – but of avoiding a security vacuum between Russia and NATO that can only tempt those in Russia who are more than ready to opt for empire over democracy. (Brzezinski 1994: 82)

Despite Brzezinski’s oft-declared ‘realist’ credentials, the idea that Russia, as a state, has interests which it inevitably will (and has the right to) pursue, is transformed into a vision in which any attempt to do so is to be understood as an expression of an illegitimate imperialist resurgence. A truly democratic Russia, he avers, will not oppose NATO expansion; only a proto-imperialist one would. Lest it be thought that this presentation of the issue represented a marginal perspective, consider the argument of Steven Flanagan, a member of the policy planning staff and the US State Department involved in the enlargement process. In his view, ‘Any European states outside the Alliance would not be excluded by a geostrategic gambit; rather states would exclude themselves from the new collective security pact by their failure to realize or uphold the expanded Alliance principles’ (cited in Goldgeiger 1998: 89).26 And lest it be thought that such ideas represented only the rhetoric of specific US policy circles, consider the fact that as early as 28 October 1992, President Yeltsin had upbraided his foreign ministry for having become too attached to precisely this rhetoric: ‘I see in our current efforts to formulate foreign policy’, he argued, ‘the influence of an ‘‘anti-imperialist syndrome’’. We shy away from defending our own interests, apprehending that such actions would be criticized as imperialistic. But the only ideology the Foreign Ministry should follow is the defense of Russia’s interests and Russia’s security’ (Yeltsin 1992). However, articulating a vision of Russian ‘national interest’ as the basis of its security policy was precisely the option which NATO’s place in the new security field had effectively curtailed. The primary roles available to Russia were two. If it wanted a constructive relationship with NATO, it would have to become an apprentice candidate for inclusion in some form within the Western security community – a state which must be educated and socialized into the new order of which it may ultimately become a part. Conversely, if it chose an oppositional stance, it would risk being cast as continuing in the counter-civilizational neo-imperial role scripted for it by Brzezinski and others. The power at work in this framing is central to

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the evolution of relations between NATO and Russia. To understand the constraining power of this framing on Russian politics more fully, however, it is necessary to examine how it was interwoven with the debates simultaneously taking place within Russia concerning its identity and relationship to the West. Russian dilemmas: Europe, the West, and the new political thinking In order to grasp how Russian policy towards NATO evolved, it helps to recall the trajectory out of which that policy emerged.27 In Soviet discourse, NATO was universally termed ‘aggressivnyi blok’, the aggressive bloc. NATO was seen as an attempt by capitalist states to live down their intrinsic economic conflicts by fashioning an organization around the part of their relations which were to do with questions of war, and directing it towards the Soviet Union. Thus, Soviet analysis of NATO was a civilizational analysis, with NATO being seen as the unified (if historically doomed) expression of capitalist civilization. This understanding even had a specific linguistic expression – atlanticheskie soyuzniki – which was usually rendered into English as ‘Atlanticists’, but which translates literally as ‘Atlantic Unionists’. In the shift represented by Gorbachev’s new thinking, this linking of the West with an inevitably hostile capitalist bloc was replaced by the vision of the Common European Home. ‘Atlantic Unionists’ was replaced by ‘Europeans’ as the central concept in Soviet analyses of the West. Whereas the relationship to the former had been wholly oppositional, the point of the latter category was that to Gorbachev and his supporters the West as a unified bloc could be divorced from ‘Europe’. The ‘new political thinking’ accordingly framed the question of domestic reform as a question of Russia’s ‘return to Europe’ or, indeed, a ‘return to civilization’. Europe was represented as a civilizational entity to which tsarist Russia had once belonged, and to which the new Russia which was under formation should once more return.28 This delineation was centrally intertwined with issues of internal economic and political reform. To say ‘Europe’ in Gorbachevian discourse was also to say political and economic reform, and the state even declared 1987 to be ‘the year of Europe’, giving new emphasis to the need for wide-ranging European state-based cooperation. This shift in the ‘civilizational’ aspect of Soviet understandings, and its role in an attempt to rearticulate Soviet identity in relation to the culture of the West, can be found throughout this period. In his book Perestroika, for example, Gorbachev pursued this logic at length: ‘A tremendous potential for a policy of peace and neighborliness is inherent in the European cultural heritage’, he wrote, and ‘Generally, in Europe the new, salutary outlook knows much more fertile soil than in any other region where the two social systems come into contact’ (Gorbachev 1988: 198). Although the idea of two social systems (capitalism and socialism) was still present in

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this vision, the stress was on Europe as a cultural whole, a point that Gorbachev made forcefully, arguing that: Some in the West are trying to ‘exclude’ the Soviet Union from Europe. Now and then, as if inadvertently, they equate ‘Europe’ with ‘Western Europe’. Such ploys, however, cannot change the geographic and historical realities. Russia’s trade, cultural and political links with other European nations and states have deep roots in history. We are Europeans. Old Russia was united with Europe by Christianity. . . . The history of Russia is an organic part of the great European history. (Gorbachev 1988: 190) Indeed, Boris Pankin, who served as Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union from the 1991 August coup until the state fell apart, wrote in his memoirs that the country’s foreign policy at this time reflected an ‘obsession . . . with the idea of becoming a civilized state’ (Pankin 1996: 104).29 During the Gorbachev years and into 1992, NATO relations were framed largely in this context – as related to the general commonality between Russia and the West, but as separable from the Russian-European relationship. The EU was represented as a vital actor in the process of transforming the Soviet Union’s, and then Russia’s, relations with what was referred to in different contexts as ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’, and also in the domestic political and economic transformation of the Soviet Union and its former allies. Once the Warsaw Pact was dissolved and Gorbachev’s press spokesman proclaimed the ‘Sinatra doctrine’, by dint of which any former Warsaw country could do it ‘their way’, Russia’s foreign policy makers seem to have expected NATO somehow to atrophy, and a new ‘comprehensive security’ structure to emerge. This idea, too, had a long lineage. At the very beginning of his reform process, for example, Gorbachev had argued that: The process of de´tente should be revived. This does not mean, however, a simple return to what was achieved in the 1970s. It is necessary to strive for something much greater. From our point of view, de´tente is not an end goal of politics. It is needed, but only as a transitional stage from a world cluttered with arms to a reliable and comprehensive system of international security.30 This was the essence of the ‘internationalist’ or ‘liberal internationalist’ position in foreign policy. The ‘peak of this cycle’ of liberal democracy as the guiding light of Russian domestic politics, and when its ‘foreign and security policy more or less followed suit’ (Medvedev 1997: 75–6) was the first quarter of 1992. By late 1992, and throughout 1993, however, this position was in constant retreat, for three main reasons. First, the policy of a ‘return to Europe’ was dependent on Europe’s recognition of Russia’s role

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as a rightful and central European actor. As it happened, Europe refused Russia such recognition. European states saw Russia as a decreasing security concern, but they did not view it as a member of the European ‘community’. Second, it soon became apparent that rather than disappearing or being replaced by a ‘European’ security institution, NATO was actually consolidating and extending its role in European security. The development of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC), the increasing clamour of many former Warsaw Pact members for admission to the alliance, and the increasing delineation of security within civilizational terms tied to NATO, rendered this aspect of Russian policy increasingly problematic. Finally, the social and economic dislocation generated by Russian political and economic reform conspired to render the idea of a ‘return to Europe’ increasingly subject to challenge at the domestic political level. In the context of this tumult, the premises of Russian foreign and security policy were open to fundamental debate and, as De Nevers has put it: ‘With no agreement on Russia’s national identity or its corresponding interests, vital or otherwise, the debate over foreign and security policy became a deeper one over the nature of the state itself’.31 Against this background, Russian debates over relations with NATO developed along three trajectories whose overlapping and competing agendas were at the core of the dilemmas and determinations of Russian policy. At the heart of each of these positions were different visions of Russia’s identity, its relationship to NATO, and the identity of the West which the alliance had come to symbolize. Communist-nationalism: the counter-civilizational claim The view that Russia was faced with a stark choice between two roles was made by a number of Russians, including the Communist Party’s principal thinker on foreign policy and the Vice Chairman of the Duma Committee on International Affairs, Aleksey Podberezkin. Indeed, Podberezkin’s very point of departure was that a stark choice of foreign policy directions was being foisted upon Russia: The first holds that Russia’s national security points out a separate path for the country. . . . Another approach is oriented towards bringing Western values to Russia and towards her joining ‘the family of civilized nations’ at any price, because, as official policy tells us, there are no alternatives to this ‘joining’. (Podberezkin 1996a: 86) This view involved a rejection of the Western civilizational mantle claimed by NATO, and a concomitant rejection of enlargement in all its aspects. Here, expansion was presented as a hostile move which should be met by cultural consolidation on the part of Russia, including for many a

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consolidation of what they saw as the Russian cultural area, which might have included Ukraine, Kazakhstan and even the entire CIS. This was an answer in kind: what is seen as a civilizationist challenge is met by a civilizationist answer, drawing upon the civilizational quality of traditional Soviet opposition to the West. This shift also challenged prevailing directions of domestic reform within Russia. The previously dominant presentation of this question – where Soviet models for political and economic life were deemed obsolete, Europe was seen as a civilizational centre to which one should return, and political and economic reform were represented as the way to do this – was challenged from two main directions (Braithwaite 1994; De Nevers 1994: 11–12). The first was a revivified movement centred on previous communist structures: what was needed was a shaping up of old models, not the introduction of new ones. The second emerged from a nationalist position: what was needed was a policy which would maintain Russia’s strength and uniqueness in the face of encroaching globalization, and provide for a renewal of social stability and solidarity. Despite their differences, these competing parties found common cause and a mutual point of opposition: ‘Europe’, a symbol that united the legacy of both pre-1917 Russian nationalism and Bolshevik antipathy to ‘old capitalist Europe’. Also central to these developments was the emergence of mass politics in Russia. However well ensconced the new elites in Russia were, and however peripheral elections or even Duma politics are to Russian politics at large, it is a political fact in contemporary Russia that politics is also mass politics. Political programmes that presented the Soviet era as a total failure, as seventy years of barren history which now needed to be rejected wholesale in favour of a ‘Western’ model which had so long been an opponent and which now often showed little respect for the experiences of the Soviet era, and even for the new Russia itself, were bound to generate resistance. In foreign policy terms, these positions availed themselves of elements which had historically been part of Russian nationalist and communist discourse. Indeed, the entire operation of reorganizing the Russian Communist Party on a nationalist-communist platform may be viewed in this light, as when Zyuganov argued that ‘The empire is the form which both historically and geopolitically has been closest to the development of Russia’ (Zyuganov 1996: 223), and that ‘Soviet culture’ represented an important manifestation of this development. Russia is here cast as a bulwark against a Western civilization, whose essence is ‘extreme individualism, warlike atheism, religious indifference, mass mentality and mass culture, contempt of traditions and subscription to the principle of quantity before quality’ (Zyuganov 1996: 149). This position was also clearly articulated by the Podberezkin, who has argued that: NATO’s intense insistence on . . . gobbling up new strategic territory and showing its muscle outside the borders of an unstable state with

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an economy which is in tatters will, I think, not have a deterring effect on the people of that state. . . . [On the contrary,] The idea of once again being ‘a besieged fortress’ will knit the Russian people closer together than the many agreements and insurances by the West about peace and freedom. (Podberezkin 1996b: 64) More specifically, with a powerful reference to a founding moment in Russian history at the beginning of the seventeenth century when the state was so weak from internal squabbling that foreigners could invade it at their leisure, he claimed that the US was falling on Russia in its new ‘time of troubles’: The Partnership for Peace does not afford the participants any security guarantees, but offers a very useful cover under which Americans may organise their short-term military presence on the territory of the previous members of the Warsaw Pact as well as . . . fuelling the antiRussian atmosphere in these parts. (Podberezkin 1996b: 64) Russia should answer by ‘minimalizing the participation of its armed forces in peace keeping operations’ and rather concentrate on its own internal military reform (Podberezkin 1996b: 69). This, of course, was exactly the anti-Western, ‘neo-imperialist’ path of development that many in the West kept pointing to as one of the two main options for Russia’s future, and with which any opposition to NATO could be linked. The attempt by the communist-nationalist group to consolidate its political position through overt opposition to NATO enlargement, and the agreement of many in the West to this ultimately dualistic view of Russian alternatives, provided a focal point around which other discussions of Russian policy were continually forced to revolve. Westernization: support for NATO A second option was to continue to make the Gorbachevian argument that Russia’s natural home was in Europe. But this had now to take place in conditions which meant the acceptance of the equation of NATO with Europe, a situation fraught with ambiguities and difficulties. For example, Foreign Minister Kozyrev’s message to the first meeting of the NACC stated that: We seriously approach the issue of our relationship with NATO and we would like to develop, through all means available, our dialogue and contacts with this organization, not only at the political but also military level. Today we do not raise the problem of Russia’s accession to NATO but we are ready to look into this as a long-term political goal.

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And at a conference on ‘Foreign Policy and Diplomacy’ in February 1992, he argued that Russia wanted to proceed from cautious partnership to friendly and eventually allied relations with the civilized world, including NATO, the UN and other structures (Kozyrev 1992: 86). But as noted earlier, by late 1992 this foreign policy orientation was located in a domestic and international political context which was unfavourable. Given the absence of European recognition that Russia was a natural part of its civilization (De Nevers 1994: 23–5; Medvedev 1997: 78), and exacerbated by the change in NATO’s self-representation from a security concern to a communitarian expression of a unified Western civilization, it became ever more difficult to represent Russia as being a part of Europe, and yet to argue for a security structure outside of NATO, or to oppose the alliance’s enlargement. If Russia were to be a European country, then it had to accept the expansion of NATO. Russia could only oppose enlargement at the cost of seeming ‘unEuropean’, that is, uncivilized or proto-imperialist, and thus playing into the hands of those (especially in central and east European countries) who said NATO should expand with or without Russian agreement, since either one or the other proved that the process was needed. Russia either had to give in to the policy agenda of the civilizational argument and agree to expansion, or try to oppose expansion only at the cost of being cast as an untrustworthy and illegitimate state outside of the new European security community. The lack of a strong domestic constituency for the internationalist position, and the lack of tangible benefits from cooperation with the West, allowed opponents of the internationalist position to wield it as a powerful lever in domestic political contestation. As this tension was exploited by the opposition, its proponets were forced gradually to abandon the liberalinternationalist position. Kozyrev, who embodied this policy, came under consistent political attack, and like most others moved increasingly towards a ‘national interest’ position (Karaganov 1993). As summed up by Allen Lynch: The communist-nationalist political opposition to Yeltsin’s government at home quickly realized that the prospect of NATO’s extension eastward could be exploited so as to undermine the government’s nationalist credentials. In response, Yeltsin just as rapidly moved to close the rhetorical gap with the communists, so that there is no longer a serious difference between government and opposition on the issue. (Lynch 1997: 85)

The Russian ‘national interest’ A third option was to return to concepts of Russian national interest as a means of solving the problem of foreign policy in the absence of an

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accepted vision of Russian identity. As noted previously, in 1992 President Yeltsin had criticized the foreign ministry for being too tightly bound by the desire to avoid Russian policy being seen as ‘imperialist’, and had called for a focus on the national interest as an antidote to precisely this problem. And indeed, Russia’s new foreign policy concept, published at the end of January 1993, reflected the ascendence of this view. It argued that NATO’s military goals remained basically unchanged, called for increased military presence in the Baltic states and other areas of the former Soviet Union, and for interventions in Bosnia and other parts of the former Yugoslavia. Commenting on this document, the then chairman of the Supreme Soviet Committee on International Affairs, Yevgeniy Ambartsumov, responded that The important thing is that there is real evidence of a departure – in theory at least – from idealistic declarations in favour of a great measure of Realpolitik. I was glad to hear that politics should not be partisan, and hence ideologized, but should reflect national interests; the interests of the state. (Ambartsumov 1993: 9; see also De Nevers 1994: 30–5; Medvedev 1997: 78–9) A similar shift to the language of ‘national interest’ can be seen in direct Russian declarations on relations with NATO. As noted above, by 1994 Kozyrev’s position had shifted. While continuing to hold that Russia would continue to proceed from its ‘principled position’, that its ‘national and state interests in the world arena should be pursued through cooperation and not through confrontation’, and that Russia and the West could work together because they were ‘bound together by basic democratic ideals’, he also declared that: It should, however, be clear that a genuine partnership is an equal partnership. Our relations should be deprived of even the slightest hint of paternalism. . . . Partnership does not mean playing at giveaway. It means, on the contrary, close cooperation based on respect for the interests of both sides. (Kozyrev 1994: 3) In addition to a hardened attitude towards NATO enlargement, the primary initiative resulting from this stance involved a reinvigorated attempt to foreground the CSCE/OSCE in Russia’s European policy, a focus which had been central since the Gorbachev era. In the same 1994 NATO Review article, for example, Kozyrev stressed the importance of understanding that ‘The CSCE has won the Cold War. It expresses adequately the main idea of the development of our continent in the post-confrontation era’ (Kozyrev 1994: 4). NATO, he argued, was just one of the institutions of European

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security, and the NATO-Russia partnership ‘should lead not to a juxtaposition of NATO to other institutions’ (Kozyrev 1994: 4). This was not only an attempt to offset the emerging institutional dominance of NATO. It also reflected a desire to emphasize the only European security organization in which Russia was a full member, and – importantly – the only one set up in order to facilitate the participation of Moscow as a great power. But this policy option also ran into dilemmas. First, to return to the language of national interest with its connotations of great power politics and the delineation of spheres of interest was to adopt a strategy counter to that which had become symbolically and discursively dominant in Europe as a whole, and which – rhetorically at least – united NATO and the applicant countries of central and eastern Europe. To argue the national interest in such terms was inevitably to become open to the charge that Russia was reverting to its imperial past and that it represented a still dangerously unreconstructed state within an otherwise changed Europe. The dilemma confronting this national-interest-based policy was perhaps most cogently captured by one of the central Russian foreign policy intellectuals, Yuriy Davydov, who upbraided the foreign policy leadership for having overplayed its hand, and who spelled out the further implications of the predicament: It is possible that the announcements made by the Russian President and senior Foreign Ministry officials that the further expansion of NATO must not spread to the post-Soviet area may be (and probably will be) seen by the US and its allies as yet another attempt by Moscow to lay down a veto against the sovereign right of independent states. (Davydov 1998: 11) Second, to attempt to reassert the logic of Great Power politics within the context of the OSCE was to pursue the policy in a forum which NATO’s continuation and expansion had increasingly shorn of its overtly military dimension, and which had increasingly developed its own vision in a direction opposed to the concepts of power politics. And after NATO had redefined itself as being not an alliance standing in contradiction to the CSCE, but an institution fundamentally analogous to it, then Russian appeals to the CSCE as a forum either as an alternative to NATO, or as a place in which traditional Great Power arguments could be articulated, were bound to be doubly unsuccessful.32 This situation left those in Russia who did not want to give succour to the opponents of reform through opposition to NATO enlargement one real option: that was to accept it but on the best ‘national interest’ terms possible, and within terms defined by the democratic community argument. The other options – either a nationalist-communist opposition which would severely damage relations with the West, or an untenable form of

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Great Power logic within the context of the OSCE – were simply not plausible paths of policy for those in power in Russia. The remaining option was to fashion some kind of relationship with NATO, which is precisely what occured. But this put Russia at a clear disadvantage. As Vladimir Frolov expressed the dilemma: Russian NATO policy is being met with incomprehension both by the bloc’s member states and by our East European neighbours who have chosen to enter into it. Russia’s goals are not clear: Now it is partnership and even a special relationship; now all declarations about partnership only serve to cover up Moscow’s more traditional task of a gradual ‘shattering’ of NATO resulting in a weaker role for the US in European politics. . . . However, if NATO is a partner, then how is it possible to resist a partner? And if NATO is a partner, does not that mean that the Alliance is not a threat to Russia, and then it does not matter within which borders that harmless partner exists? (Frolov 1995: 61–2; also Davydov 1998: 4–6)

Conclusion The shift in the ‘game’ of post-Cold War European security was not natural or inevitable. It emerged in the context of extended struggle between differing ideas, institutions and interests. Nonetheless, the role that culture came to play in these transformations was no accident. Nor was it simply a cynical rhetoric. The cultural field of security emerged from within the habitus and institutions of security. Drawing upon much broader and deeper cultural and symbolic resources, it contributed to the solution of a number of key problems and furthered crucial interests, among them the future unity of the West, with its inevitable links to the future and fate of NATO, and the problem of constructing a future security order in Europe.33 The cultural strategy not only provided productive ways of addressing these problems, it also provided new forms of power through which these interests could be pursued and furthered, supplying a logic of continuity for the alliance and the cohesion of the West through forms of self-binding power exercised by the members over each other. Moreover, it provided a mechanism for the exercise of symbolic power towards the East: reconfiguring the field of security and placing the relationship between (democratic) culture and security at its centre, allowed a positioning of the eastern European countries as applicants, novices, or pupils gradually developing towards the standards set down by NATO, while playing a powerful part in defining the roles and actions of Russia. Bourdieu’s insights are particularly useful in uncovering how one can understand these processes in terms of strategy and interest but without falling into rationalist or utilitarian visions of either. His discussions of

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how actors can pursue strategies and advance interests against the background of a set of generative possibilities without reducing these practices to utilitarian understandings of strategic choice helps illuminate the politics and power relations surrounding the relationship between security and culture, while the concepts of cultural and symbolic power provide a degree of specificity beyond those approaches that reduce the processes to the operation of some amorphous form of ‘soft power’. The security/culture relationship as articulated in the post-Cold War era can be understood as a Bourdieuian ‘field’ – a product of both the pre-existing field, habitus, and institutions, but also a consequence of forms of capital, power, and their related strategies deployed to reconfigure the field. The prominence of the security/culture relationship is both a process and an outcome of these moves. In his well known critique of the ‘false promise’ of international institutions as a means of restructuring security relations, John Mearsheimer acknowledges that constructivist or critical theories provide a ‘fundamental’ challenge to traditional realist or neorealist positions. He claims, however, that this challenge is weakened by two debilitating flaws in the ‘causal logic’ of these alternative analyses. First, he contrasts the ‘materialist’ understanding of power characteristic of neorealism to a discursive conception of power, and implies that constructivist theory represents a contemporary form of ‘idealism’ which believes rather naively that ‘human beings are free to change their world by a collective act of will’.34 Second, Mearsheimer argues that even if one accepts the claims concerning the ‘constructed’ nature of political reality, one is still left with the question of why specific discourses prevail over others and how this is accomplished (Mearsheimer 1994/5: 41–2; 1995: 91–2). These are important challenges, and they point to questions of power that have often been incompletely addressed in constructivist assessments of security institutions. Early constructivist studies of NATO evolution after the Cold War seem to be cases in point.35 By examining the relationship between identities, institutions and the structures of symbolic power the preceding analysis has endeavoured to show that the role of culture and ideas was not opposed to the operation of power in the evolution of security institutions at the end of the Cold War. On the contrary, the role of NATO as a repository of symbolic and cultural capital, and its role as a site of authoritative enunciation and representation on security issues, was crucial in the operation of forms of cultural and symbolic power that helped shape the emerging security landscape. The narrative or discursive structures involved in these processes did not emerge instrumentally as a predetermined plan, nor were they simply the ideological rationalizations of some more basic interests or power relations. They emerged as practical responses to emerging situations, responses which drew upon the resources available in the different political contexts, and the relationship between these resources. But neither were these practical responses divorced from

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questions of threat and power. By revaluing itself, NATO was able to reverse the terms of traditional Realpolitik, to secure itself from a threat of fragmentation, and to exercise a form of power in the new strategic situation that went beyond what it could have achieved within the narrow logics of military power and national interest. Simply to reassert that in the end the process of NATO enlargement and NATO/Russia relations were still ‘really’ about straightforward material or military power relations is to miss the point. In addition to mustering its material resources, NATO was able to produce and draw on a set of new power resources, namely the power to forge a security community and the power to present Russia with legitimate roles on which it would have to draw, should it want to build a positive relationship with NATO. This in no way means that material power is unimportant, indeed it is doubtful that NATO could have played the role it has without its capacity for military strength, its links to powerful economic capacities, and its reputation for both. But NATO’s power cannot be reduced to this. Indeed the power and persistence of NATO in the post-Cold War period derived in considerable part from the ability to maintain its military dimension while at the same time combining that dimension with a powerful cultural and political narrative that overcame the challenges faced by a purely military representation of the alliance. Symbolic and cultural capital and power, and their associated strategies, were key elements in the persistence of the alliance, its evolution, and its role in restructuring European security.

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It might be tempting to conclude that the advent of the G.W. Bush administration, and especially the impetus provided by the attacks of 9/11, marked a clear end to the period and structures described in the last two chapters. In some eyes, and indeed in the declarations of some of the US administration’s most prominent foreign policy players, a return to ‘realism’, a stress on ‘hard’ power and the rhetoric of a harsh Realpolitik, were to be the defining marks of a new era in American foreign policy. There is little doubt that things have changed since the decade immediately following the end of the Cold War. However, while the security landscape of the past several years has changed in significant ways, the themes pursued in this study – the relationship between ‘culture’ and security, and the significance of symbolic power – remain essential in understanding the contemporary situation. One way to trace this evolution would be to examine the travails of NATO and American–European relations over the past five or six years, from the controversies over Kosovo and the conflicts in the Balkans, to renewed questions about the role and future of the alliance in light of the ‘war on terror’. However, instead of pursuing this line of enquiry, I would like instead to shift the focus somewhat to examine how an analysis of the cultural field of security, and the pursuit of cultural strategies within it, can provide significant insights into the evolution of American security policy since 11 September 2001. This can be illuminated by focusing on one of the most controversial developments in this period: the rise to prominence of neoconservatism. Neoconservatism, I would like to argue, does not represent a rejection of the cultural field of security. On the contrary, it is characterized in important ways by specific moves within the cultural field of security. As an expression of Cold War politics, a set of commitments and concerns encapsulated in the activities of the Committee on the Present Danger in the early Cold War and confirmed by its reemergence in the ‘second Cold War’ of the 1980s, many felt that neoconservatism was unlikely to survive the end of the US-Soviet confrontation and was fated rapidly to become an ‘anachronism’ (Judis 1995). Clearly, this verdict was somewhat

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premature. Far from fading away, neoconservatism emerged as one of the new millennium’s defining and most controversial perspectives on security and international relations, a position exemplified by neoconservative influence over the conflict in Iraq, and the policies of ‘democratic globalism’ espoused by the Bush administration more broadly. This reversal of fortunes poses an important and intriguing puzzle. Not uncommonly, the influence of neoconservatism in foreign policy is attributed to the machinations of a ‘cabal’ – a small group of intellectually likeminded and institutionally interconnected individuals who crafted a clear, if narrow, agenda for American foreign policy, and set about making it practice. The influence of this group, the argument goes, was given an unexpected boost by the events of 9/11. Strategically well placed within the policy organizations of the new administration, holding a common vision of the challenges confronting the US (especially in the Middle East) and possessing a ready-made plan for meeting those challenges, neoconservatives stepped into the policy breach or vacuum created by the shock of the attacks on New York and Washington, and were able to exercise an extraordinary influence on American policy (Halper and Clarke 2004). There is much to this explanation. Yet to understand more fully the persistence and power of neoconservatism, it is necessary to cast the net more widely, to examine the relationship between culture and security, and particularly the place of neoconservatism within the cultural field of security. As I have sought to show in the preceding chapters, the relationship between culture and security – and especially the linkage between democracy and security – had over the course of the 1990s become a vital part of the ‘field’ of security. Neoconservatism did not create this field, but it certainly had an impact in shaping it historically. For several decades during the Cold War, neoconservatives had stressed the centrality of values and culture – strongly (and often stridently) asserting that the East/West confrontation represented not a just a technological contest of military power but a struggle over values.1 With the end of the Cold War, this historical legacy, and its broader concern with the relationship between culture and the health of democratic societies in general, provided neoconservatism with a set of conceptual and symbolic resources particularly well suited to the new cultural field of security. While this may help explain why neoconservatism did not fade away, it does not alone account for its heightened influence. To explain this, we need to examine the specific forms of symbolic and cultural power, and the strategies to which they are related, that have enabled neoconservatism to play such a prominent contemporary role. At the heart of this capacity lies its ability to locate issues of security and foreign policy within a broader field of political culture; or, more specifically, to cast debates over security within a political field increasingly dominated by a concern with culture itself. Far from seeking the straightforward reassertion of the dominance of material power and military strategy and rejecting the cultural field of

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security, neoconservatism seeks to revalue the field of security by rearticulating the relationship between culture and security in such a way that the exercise of military force becomes part of a broader cultural narrative concerning the defence of liberal-democracy and the survival of Western civilization. As a consequence, neoconservatism has been able to construct its specific arguments within a debate over the fate of liberal modernity as whole and, perhaps most significantly, to tie its analysis of foreign and security policy to the broader ‘culture wars’ that have dominated much of American politics over the past couple of decades.2 The success of neoconservatism can thus be understood in the context of the broader cultural resources it has been able to draw upon, and the strategies that these enable within the cultural field of security. Linking questions of foreign policy to broader debates over culture in the United States, neoconservatives have been able to make both symbolic and organizational connections to other issues and groups in the culture wars. In these ways, its capital – both cultural and material – was increased considerably, heightening its resources and power. This has also given neoconservatives a decisive strategic advantage, in the Bourdieuian sense, over its opponents. In fact, part of the lack of success of traditional realist security studies in confronting neoconservatism arises from the cultural power and strategies of neoconservatives and from the relative incapacity of materialist, hard-power understandings of security analysis to engage with the cultural field within which neoconservatism operates.

Culture, security, and the struggle with liberal modernity It is, of course, difficult to characterize any broad intellectual and political movement without being accused of distortion, and neoconservatism (as its proponents rarely tire of reminding us) is a far from unified position.3 Yet despite differences on many issues and across generational divides, there are nevertheless also fundamental similarities and continuities. Neoconservatism can, in Irving Kristol’s words, be thought of as ‘a ‘‘persuasion’’ to use a nice old-fashioned term; a mode of thought (but not quite a school of thought)’ (Kristol 1983: 75; 2003b). Perhaps the most important theme underlying this ‘mode of thought’ lies in its struggle with the nature of politics in modernity. Unlike some forms of traditional conservatism, neoconservatism is not anti-modernist.4 On the contrary, one of neoconservatism’s most important arguments is that conservatism must confront the intrinsically progressive and forward-looking logic of political modernity. Modern politics places a premium on the realm of ideas, on ‘ideology’ in its broadest sense, because it is inseparable from competing visions of the future, the good, and how to get there. As Kristol puts it, modern politics is inescapably ideological in the sense that it consists of political beliefs that are oriented in a melioristic way – a ‘progressive’ way, as one says –

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toward the future. It is impossible for any set of political beliefs in the modern era to engage popular sentiments without such a basic orientation. In this sense, all modern societies of whatever kind conceive of themselves to be progressive. The rare exception, an overtly ‘reactionary’ backward-looking regime, is correctly perceived to be an absurd and transient, and usually nasty, anachronism. (1983: x) Ideology is thus the ground upon which modern politics is fought; it is, in Kristol’s words, an intrinsic and indispensable part of the broad struggle over ‘the key question: who owns the future?’ (1983: 253–6). Neoconservatism’s stress on the importance of ideas and the direction of political culture is, therefore, a direct consequence of its understanding of modernity as an epoch in which all political programmes and positions must cast their arguments and conduct their struggles in terms of these aspirations. Yet if there is no escaping the future-oriented, progressive cast of modernity, neoconservatism is deeply ambivalent about its possibilities, suspicious of its potential directions, and positively hostile towards some of its most powerful trajectories. The focus of much of this suspicion and hostility is, of course, ‘liberalism’. But neoconservatism’s relationship to liberalism is more complex than is often allowed. Far from rejecting liberalism tout court, neoconservatism seeks to develop an understanding of where liberal political thought has gone wrong, veering from its original, positive contributions to human liberty and progress to a point where, in the neoconservative view, it has become an obstacle and a threat to both. The neoconservative view of liberalism can be nicely illustrated by examining briefly its approach to the place of ‘interest’ in political life. The classical liberal idea that people have and pursue ‘interests’ is, they argue, an essential element in the analysis of modern societies; no cogent social theory can do without it. What is more, the idea of interest is also a valuable dimension of the ethical structure of modern societies. Like the thinkers of the ‘new Right’ such as Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, neoconservatives view the idea that individuals have interests (and that they should be allowed to pursue these interests) as an important moral principle, and as a bulwark of individualism, liberty and a market society. But if interest is essential in the operation (and analysis) of modern societies, neoconservatives see it as an insufficient basis for a healthy and viable polity. In fact, they argue that a recognition of the limits of interest as a foundation for social order is amongst the most important dimensions of political understanding, a dimension systematically obscured by liberalindividualist ideology that stands at the heart of the dilemmas and disorders characteristic of contemporary liberal societies. Here they part company with the new Right, as well as with the forms of liberalism they so strongly oppose, and develop an analysis of the pathologies of modern liberalism at three levels: the individual, the social and the political.

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At the level of the individual, neoconservatives argue, the reduction of action to nothing more than the pursuit of self-interest gives rise to a destructive combination of hedonism and despair. Lacking any broader vision within which to locate their lives, liberal individuals are driven by (often base) impulses and ephemeral self-gratification that ultimately renders life empty and ‘meaningless’. In Kristol’s words, ‘as the history of 20th-century modernism in the arts demonstrates, the pursuit of self-interest suffers the same fate as the pursuit of happiness: he who is merely selfseeking shall find nothing but infinite emptiness’ (1978: 254). Socially, this form of individualism is destructive of communal ties and values. It yields a debased public culture in which any sense of higher values or societal ethos is trampled by the relativistic demands of liberal freedom, and where public needs are undermined by wholly private desires and driven by a frenetic consumerism and commodification. Individual liberty and self-realization may be the honestly held and even well intentioned goals of this form of liberalism, but its consequences are anomie and degradation. Subjectivism in values and hedonism in desires erode the individual’s sense of self and the moral and social bonds necessary for the health of the social order, leaving a corrupted society lacking any viable sense of the public good.5 At the level of political institutions, the dynamics of a corrupted liberal society are mirrored in a destructive and debilitating pluralism. Portraying politics as nothing more than the pursuit of individual or group interests, liberal pluralism effectively reduces the state to nothing more than a vehicle for the furtherance of those interests. The consequent destruction of any cogent concept of the public interest breeds cynicism in and about politics. Equally importantly, it leads to a loss of belief in the value of the political order itself, and unwillingness to defend that order against those who would destroy it. If, as Kristol puts it, the value of democracy lies solely in its capacity to allow individuals to maximize their interests, there is no compelling reason why those individuals should defend that order if their interests might be better served by its destruction. A purely technical, managerial, democratic pluralism is not, he argues, theoretically inconceivable. What is inconceivable is why anyone should care for that order at all (1983: 50). Self-interest alone is incapable of generating an adequate vision of political obligation, of structures of social solidarity, or of commitment to the defence of the state or democratic values. Individually and culturally, it leads to hedonism, subjectivism, and cynicism. Politically, its expression is institutional pluralism: the reduction of politics to nothing more the competition for individual goods characteristic of narrowly defined interestgroup politics that only ‘generates discontent, cynicism, and ‘‘alienation’’ among the citizens’ (1983: 245). When politics becomes reduced to purely self-interested action, by individuals or organized interest groups, without a conception of the public interest that transcends a simple liberal plurality of interests, decline follows. Democracy, having been reduced to a technique

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for decision-making rather than a political value, ceases itself to be valued. Commitment to the political order – and willingness to defend it – decays. Neoconservatism’s criticisms of liberal modernity are hardly new. Indeed, as Kristol points out, for well over a hundred and fifty years now, social critics have been warning us that bourgeois society was living off the accumulated moral capital of traditional religion and traditional moral philosophy, and that once this capital was depleted, bourgeois society would find its legitimacy ever more questionable. (Kristol 1978: 65–6; see also Bork 1995: 135)6 By the late twentieth century, neoconservatives argue, this crisis has finally and indisputably arrived, and liberal modernity is increasingly experiencing in reality the crisis that its critics have for so long been predicting.7 Increasingly lacking in legitimacy, and bereft of any compelling theory of political obligation, the main challenge – indeed the main threat – confronting modern liberal societies is not economic crisis, or even external challenges: it is decadence. No clearer illustration of this point can be found than in an essay by Irving Kristol, dating from 1978, entitled ‘Capitalism, Socialism, Nihilism’. At this juncture – a period marked by the origins of the ‘second Cold War’ and the renewal of Committee on the Present Danger, and a time at which Kristol himself was deeply engaged in the attempt to ensure Ronald Reagan’s leadership of the Republican Party – one might well expect him to portray the greatest challenge in the United States (and to the West in general) as arising from the what Reagan was soon famously to dub the ‘evil empire’ of the Soviet Union. Yet he does not. Instead, Kristol draws upon his analysis of the crisis of liberal modernity to declare in ringing tones that ‘The enemy of liberal capitalism today is not so much socialism as it is nihilism’ (Kristol 1978: 66, italics in original). Without core principles that provide social meaning, cohesion, and direction, decadence is the spectre that haunts liberal-capitalist societies. Far from opposing this trend, capitalism simply treats it as another cultural phenomenon to be commodified and sold within a cultural marketplace driven by hedonistic desires. What is more, with its economistic and rationalistic biases, ‘bourgeois’ (liberal-individualist) thought is incapable of responding to this challenge, for in fact it never really could believe that self-destructive nihilism was an authentic and permanent possibility that any society had to guard against. It could refute Marx effectively, but it never thought it would be called upon to refute the Marquis de Sade and Nietzsche. (Kristol 1978: 68)8 The neoconservative critique of modern liberalism explains its hostility to the dominance of rationalism in contemporary social and political science.

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Indeed, it represents a reaction (albeit not the only one, and by no means the only alternative) against the reification of the liberal legacy of rationalistmaterialism discussed in Chapter 1. Although effective within certain narrowly bounded confines, in the neoconservative view rationalistic principles of political analysis are in fact manifestations of the defective political culture of liberal rationalism. As both a principle of individual action and a tenet of social analysis, the rationalist conception of self-interest underpinning much of political science today both reflects and contributes to the ‘self-destructive paradox’ of contemporary liberalism that threatens the achievements and possibilities of liberal modernity itself. As a consequense, ‘value-free’ political science is of little use to societies facing this crisis, since ‘being ‘‘value free’’, as they say, [it] cannot come up with any persuasive arguments as to why they should not act in this way’ (Kristol 1983: 64). As an intrinsic part of liberal modernity, rationalist social science is incapable of even seeing the crisis of modernity, not to mention rising to the challenge of meeting it.

Resources of reconstruction: the recovery of republican virtue The neoconservative reading of the crisis of modern politics is certainly grave, but it is not despairing.9 The crisis can be countered, and there are resources available to do so. In fact, a key part of neoconservative project is a recovery and mobilization of these philosophical and cultural resources, and one of its most important dimensions lies in its argument that modern politics contains both intellectual and cultural traditions that allow the corrosive aspects of modernity to be countered and its positive potential realized. There is, in other words, a future-oriented conservatism that can be built from a different and more adequate understanding of the past. Liberal virtues The first dimension of this recovery project involves a reexamination of the legacy of liberalism. Despite its often virulent rhetorical hostility to ‘liberals’ and ‘liberalism’, neoconservatism is not hostile to the liberal tradition as a whole. On the contrary, it argues that a proper appreciation of classical liberalism is essential in understanding the current malaise and a key instrument in overcoming it. This requires a reevaluation of the liberal tradition, stressing the divergence between European liberalism and the liberalism of the Scottish Enlightenment. At the heart of this issue lies the question of virtue. For neoconservatives, classical liberalism did not reduce individuals to rationally self-interested agents (and society to their interactions), but continued to assert the need for a sense of individual virtue and social mores in a stable, cohesive, and economically vibrant society. Appealing in particular to the thinking of the Sentimental School and of its most famous proponent, Adam Smith, Kristol argues that while the ‘modernist

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revolution’ dispensed with many classical conceptions of virtue, it did not underestimate the need for individual virtue or the importance of social mores. On the contrary, it argued powerfully that ‘the idea of ‘‘happiness’’ was not self-sufficient but rather had to be compounded with some idea of ‘‘virtue’’ to be viable’(1983: 149). This strand of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury thinking understood that new forms of bourgeois liberty could develop, and a society based largely around abstract law rather than traditional hierarchies and virtues emerge, only if it was clearly recognized that this depended upon the operation of forms of personal conduct and social norms that could not be derived from self-interest alone.10 The economic and political enquiries of the Scottish Enlightenment were thus inescapably also moral inquiries concerned with the nature of virtuous conduct as well as with the pursuit of self-interest, and with consideration of the public, as well as private, good. This realization is made all the more important by the fact that while Smith and many other classical liberals could often simply assume the existence of social virtues because they were functioning effectively at the time, the subsequent success of liberalism and capitalism – the combined activities of liberal intellectuals and capitalist commodification – have undermined bourgeois values to a point where the entire structure is at risk. Similarly, the rationalist bent of political science, and especially of economics, has lost the complexity of early liberalism and has largely disregarded its social and moral concerns. As an assumption, the ‘economic man’ of modern economics is certainly theoretically powerful. But it is lacking in historical and political wisdom. For all modern economics’ lauding of Smith, it provides a ‘vulgarization’ of his thought that lacks an awareness of the importance of ‘moral and political philosophy’ and the central role that culture and virtuous conduct play in his account of stable and viable modern societies, and even in economic growth (1983: 174).11 A recovery of the role of virtue in classical liberalism is thus one of neoconservatism’s most important concerns, providing a criticism of contemporary forms of liberalism that have fallen away from these roots and a powerful legacy to be reclaimed. Acknowledging the centrality of values and mores, appreciating the institutions of civil society, and giving them the respect and the support they are due, will go some way towards alleviating the problems created by modern liberalism without relinquishing or turning back liberal freedoms. Religious and communal bonds can and must be revivified, for these and the other institutions of civil society provide the social foundations of virtue that are the very bases of liberal freedoms, and of democratic governance. Indeed, it is the linkage between virtue and democracy, and a re-evaluation of the foundations of the American republic, that comprises a second key dimension of the neoconservative project of political reconstruction.

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Republican virtue Drawing upon the federalists, and upon modern thinkers such as Hanna Arendt,12 neoconservatives link the individualism and virtue of classical liberalism to the emergence of republican government. In this account, the political genius of the founders of the American republic lay in their recognition that individual virtue was not an end in itself; it was part of ‘civic virtue’, a process of fashioning selves capable of democratic selfgovernment. Far from taking the individual for granted, or seeing culture as nothing more than a marketplace of individual choices and desires, this tradition was solicitous of the individual self, and felt an obligation to educate it into what used to be called ‘republican virtue’ . . . [it] cared not merely about the machinery of democracy, but also about the quality of life that this machinery might generate. (Kristol 1983: 51)13 Here the liberal virtue of the Scottish Enlightenment was transformed into a public, political form and became the foundation-stone of the democratic political theory and practice of American republicanism. The concern of republican virtue was with ‘character’, with the kinds of individuals capable of self government, with the social conditions conducive to the creation of such individuals, and with the formation of individuals who also found their self-expression and fulfilment in the public sphere and in the pursuit of the public interest.14 The message of the American Revolution is that ‘a self-disciplined people can create a political community in which an ordered liberty will promote both economic prosperity and political participation’ (1983: 89). Republican virtue is not, for neoconservatives, an abstract idea: it is the core of the American idea. Seen in light of this reconstruction, the loss of individual and public virtue is not just a source of social dislocation, nor is decadence simply a matter of conflicting tastes or mores: they are threats to democracy itself, and to the United States as a political order. If virtue is a foundation of the Republic, then it is essential it be recovered if the Republic is to survive. In response to this threat, neoconservatism adopts a two-fold strategy. First, it seeks to rekindle individual virtue and to reconnect the individual to the community by showing how republican virtue is part of the national ideal of the Republic itself. In this endeavour, the founding of the American republic and the founders themselves become symbols of political mobilization: iconic figures and symbolic moments to be recalled and recovered, and rhetorical allies to be enlisted in an attempt to bring the contemporary Republic back to its first principles (Bennett 2000). Correctly recognizing the principles underlying the founding of the republic is thus a resource in combating its degradation.

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Second – and this is one of neoconservatism’s most striking and most important claims – understanding the foundations of the Republic allows for an ideologically compelling, forward-looking, and outwardly oriented form of American nationalism. The project of renewing the Republic by bringing it back to its foundations will not succeed if consists solely of a nostalgic, backward-looking patriotism. This is the path of traditional conservatism, which is incapable of creating an effective political platform in a modern era whose defining political logic is progressive and forwardlooking. A ‘patriotic’ affection for the political community is not enough. What is required is a commitment to ideals, to the meaning of the nation in an heroic sense capable of mobilizing individuals to virtuous action in the public sphere domestically, and in foreign policy internationally. To quote Irving Kristol once more: ‘Neoconservatism is not merely patriotic – that goes without saying – but also nationalist. Patriotism springs from a love of the nation’s past; nationalism arises out of hope for the nation’s future, distinctive greatness’ (1983: xiii). Nationalism, in short, is a necessary dimension of success in modern, ‘progressive’ ideological politics, for ‘in the modern world, a non-ideological politics is a politics disarmed’ (1983: ix). As neoconservatives are well aware, advocating the necessity of an ideological nationalism and a heroic politics of national greatness is likely to cause more than a little unease. Their resolution to the dilemma lies yet again in a return to the principles of the American republic and in an appeal to its exceptional form of nationalism. Founded upon a virtuous response and resolution to the dilemmas of liberal-modernity, the principles of the American republic underpin a form of nationalism that avoids the parochial and destructive tendencies of modern nationalism while retaining its political virtue and socially mobilizing potential. American patriotism is different because, as William Bennett puts it, it is a patriotism of ideals, not of the soil; and while it has become something of a cliche´ to talk of American ‘exceptionalism’, there is no ignoring the fact that the American nation itself was founded in exceptional circumstances and on an exceptional statement of timeless principles. Put simply, the United States was the first nation ever to base its very sense of nationhood on a set of universal principles derived from natural rights, as enunciated in its Declaration of Independence. (2000: 291) Some years earlier, William Kristol and David Brooks argued for what has come to be called ‘national greatness conservatism’ in almost identical terms, declaring that American nationalism – the nationalism of Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay and Teddy Roosevelt – has never been European blood-

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and-soil nationalism. It’s true that in the absence of a real appeal to national greatness, some conservatives are tempted, a la Pat Buchanan, to turn to this European tradition. But this can’t and shouldn’t work in America. Our nationalism is that of an exceptional nation founded on a universal principle, on what Lincoln called ‘an abstract truth, applicable to all men at all times.’ Our pride in settling the frontier, welcoming immigrants and advancing the cause of freedom around the world is related to our dedication to our principles. (1997) The idea of national greatness and its necessity is a key dimension of the neoconservative vision of the American national interest. The national interest of the United States is fundamentally related to the history, values and identity of the Republic itself, and ‘every profound foreign policy debate in America’s history’, Robert Kagan (2004) declares, ‘has ultimately been a debate about the nation’s identity and has posed for Americans the primal question ‘‘Who are we?’’’. In this view, security and identity are intrinsically linked, and the answer to this ‘primal question’ lies in a vision of the American republic as in its essence a progressive force, a nation embodying universal values whose greatness resides precisely in the fact that its founding principles are not limited to the United States itself. In this way, the struggle is not to move back to the past: it is to return to the past in order to recover resources that will allow the United States to move resolutely forward into the future. Answering this question in line with the values of the Republic provides a foundation for knowing what the national interest is, a vision of a future world order in accordance with those values and interests, and a politically mobilizing vision through which it can be conveyed. The American national interest, properly understood, is – like the United States itself – exceptional. But it is not unique. It is part of an historic mission that can and should be shared by all peoples; and it would be, if only virtuous governments could rule. The culmination of this logic is, of course, the promotion of democracy as part of a ‘muscular patriotism’ based upon ‘freedom and greatness’ (W. Kristol 2000: 36). Creating an international order of values is good for both America and the world. A policy of ‘benevolent hegemony’ makes sense precisely because ‘American foreign policy should be informed with a clear moral purpose, based on the understanding that its moral goals and its fundamental national interests are almost always in harmony’ (Kristol and Kagan 1996: 27; Bennett 2000: 303). This intellectual recovery mission is not an academic exercise: it is a key part of neoconservatism’s political strategy. For while these principles may require extensive philosophical excavation in order to be recovered from the later liberal tendencies under which they have been buried,15 they possess a second merit: they are what the majority of ordinary Americans know, and thus represent a cultural reservoir that can be tapped in the

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process of renewal and reorientation in American society, politics and foreign policy. However fragmented, the ‘bourgeois culture’ bequeathed in different ways by classical liberalism and civic republicanism is still, according to neoconservatives, the culture of commerce and community that most Americans subscribe to. This common culture (unrepresented and often derided by contemporary intellectual and cultural elites) continues to underlie the commitment to family and religion, to flag and country that ordinary Americans maintain. It is part and parcel of the republican virtue at the heart of the United States as a nation, and part of its greatness. These beliefs have been degraded by modern ‘liberalism’, and by the ‘adversary culture of intellectuals’ that sees opposition to the prevailing social order as a part of its mission and disparages common values and norms.16 Neoconservatism, by contrast, seeks to show that these principles and beliefs are not naı¨ve, but are profoundly correct. Kristol encapsulates this in a passage well worth quoting at length; in his words: Because this populism is bourgeois, the American people are simultaneously individualistic and communal in their outlook. They really do believe that there is such a thing as the ‘public interest’ – a res publica that is something more than the summation of individual interests. . . . And it is this sprit of bourgeois populism, until recently so inarticulate, that neoconservatism seeks to define, refine, and represent. To put it in somewhat grandiose terms: Neoconservatism aims to infuse American bourgeois orthodoxy with a new self-conscious intellectual vigor, while dispelling the feverish melange of gnostic humors that, for more than a century now, has suffused our political beliefs and tended to convert them into political religions. Our intellectuals may feel ‘alienated’ from the orthodoxy represented by the ‘American way of life’; they may feel homeless and hopeless in the world this way of life has created. The American people, in their overwhelming majority, do not feel so alienated, homeless, or hopeless. It is the self-imposed assignment of neoconservatism to explain to the American people why they are right, and to the intellectuals why they are wrong. (1983: xiv–xv) For neoconservatives, the resources of cultural and political renovation are thus to be found in particular strands of modern liberalism and constitutionalism, and a particular form of populism.17 The challenge (and the opportunity) is to recover these traditions of thought, to give them renewed intellectual vigour, and to re-link them to the cultural symbols, practices, and institutions of which they were once a part and in connection to which they might again gain life and power. This requires an intellectual endeavour to recover these traditions of thought, and a cultural and

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political strategy to ensure their prominence. Equally importantly, it requires a political leadership that can represent those ideals and mobilize political support by allowing the society to see its ‘populist’ values and identity reflected in the personal characteristics and policies of the leadership itself. Neoconservatism’s stress on ‘character’ in leadership and boldness in policy (especially foreign policy) is a product of this vision, and an important part of its lionization of Ronald Reagan and Theodore Roosevelt arises from what neoconservatives portray as their keen understanding of the need for American presidents to represent for (and to) the American people the greatness of the nation, and to demonstrate that it ‘owns the future’.18 What emerges is a remarkable synthesis. Drawing upon the tradition of virtue in liberalism allows for a conservatism that embraces the free market, draws upon the symbolic legacy of figures such as Adam Smith, and yet advocates a conservatism of values, ‘character’, and individual and civic responsibility. Patriotism and self-sacrifice can be redeemed by mobilizing the authority and symbolic power of the founders and federalists, and of the Republic itself, and can be turned into a dynamic and outwardlooking nationalist politics embodying universal principles. This conception of national greatness can mobilize all behind it at home, acting as a spur to virtue domestically, and as a guide and inspiration to vigorous and virtuous action internationally. Providing a philosophical justification for ordinary Americans, as well as a renovation of the principles of the Republic itself, neoconservatism also acquires a powerful symbolic and political resource: the claim to speak for that commonality and to represent it politically. Defining itself in opposition to academic abstraction, neoconservatism is able to contrast its claims to those of a distanced foreign policy elite which it opposes, paradoxically allowing neoconservative foreign policy elites to claim a powerful antielitism in popular discourse. More broadly, it is able to link the question of foreign policy directly to issues in domestic politics, and to place concerns about social and moral ‘decay’ within a vision of politics as a whole. This positioning gives neoconservatism a remarkable array of ideological resources to draw upon and, as I will discuss in a moment, allows it to make common cause across many dimensions of the political spectrum in support of its foreign policy prescriptions.

Security and the strategies of the culture wars For neoconservatives, the relationship between culture and security goes beyond the exigencies of contemporary foreign policy. As a question of political philosophy, it is linked to issues as old and fundamental as the nature of political modernity, the travails of liberalism, and the foundations of the American republic. As an issue of contemporary political practice, it transcends any absolute divide between domestic and foreign

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policy, incorporating issues as broad and contested as the prevailing social structures and moral standards in contemporary American life. In this vision, issues of security are systematically linked to questions of culture and identity, and the domestic to the international. The nihilistic and fragmenting aspects of modern urban society and culture must be countered by a reassertion of the values of the nation, and a restoration of the tradition of ‘republican virtue’. Strong, socially vibrant conceptions of both the public interest and the national interest are essential if a political community is to combat the corrosive acids of modernity. Attitudes towards the national interest are thus as much a concern of domestic political virtue as a dimension of foreign policy. Correctly conceived, the national interest and public interest become elements in a politically virtuous circle.19 A strong, morally cohesive society with a clear sense of the public interest provides a basis for the national interest. A national interest constructed on these lines will support the creation and maintenance of such a public. As both a product and a symbol of the public interest, the national interest not only provides a guide for policy abroad: it expresses – and in the process fosters and supports – the operation of political virtue at home. Indeed, the two are seen as inseparable. As Midge Decter put it with in reference to the neoconservative position in the 1970s and 1980s, ‘domestic policy was foreign policy, and vice-versa’ (quoted in Ehrman 1995: 57); or, in Robert Kagan’s more recent formulation: ‘There can be no clear dividing line between the domestic and the foreign’ (2004).20 Seen in this light, neoconservatism’s impact arises to no small degree from its ability to position itself within a broader field where culture is seen as the defining element of politics, and where a culture of virtue becomes the dominant field. As Thomas Frank has recently and wittily captured it, this is the politics of the ‘backlash’, a political field increasingly structured by a movement whose ‘basic premise is that culture outweighs economics as a matter of public concern – that Values Matter Most’ (2004: 6).21 A key dimension of neoconservative power in foreign and security power lies in its links to this broader cultural field. Drawing a homology between the international and the domestic, it represents the battle over values and culture as the essence of politics and security, and vice-versa. The cultural logic of security provides a reservoir of cultural power and set of symbolic strategies which neoconservatism is able to mobilize and exploit. The extraordinary stress that neoconservatives place on ideas (and, in certain contexts, even on political theory and the history of political thought) does not arise only from a conviction about the role of ideas in action, or from the fact that many neoconservatives come from highly intellectual backgrounds.22 By making ideas, their relation to culture, and to social and political order as whole what matter, neoconservatives have been able to locate their positions of foreign and security policy within the broader field of cultural politics in the United States, and to draw tremendous

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cultural and symbolic capital by so doing. At the same time, the concern with culture has allowed neoconservatives to make a series of links to broader political movements and interests on the American Right, links underpinned by the symbolic strategies of the cultural field of security. Within this field, neoconservatives possess powerful resources: forms of cultural and symbolic capital and power, that allow them to play a role out of all proportion to their actual numbers. This is not a cabal. It is part of a broader set of cultural practices where specific forms of cultural and symbolic capital provide power, and within which specific cultural strategies can be pursued to great effect. These linkages and strategies could be mapped across a wide range of issues. In order to indicate their breadth and power, I will in the remainder of this chapter try to sketch their operation in the creation of political alliances and strategies against political opponents. Unifying an internationalist conservatism If the waning of the Cold War posed a challenge for Western security policy in general, this was also true for American conservatism. While declaring themselves the key players in this drama, and crediting the assertive political and confrontational military policies of the Reagan administration with bringing about the dissolution of the Soviet Union, American conservatives nonetheless faced – and felt they faced – a profound challenge with the loss of the adversary that had for so long provided a rallying point. The responses to this situation were diverse. Some, like Jeanne Kirkpatrick, prominently called for a moderation of American foreign policy, arguing that with the great struggle of the Cold War over, the United States could return to being ‘a normal country in a normal time’. More strident and striking, if in reality less popular, was Patrick Buchanan’s ‘paleoconservatism’, which sought to combine a narrow vision of the American identity focused on the legacy of New England culture with a neo-isolationist foreign policy that put ‘America First – and Second, and Third’ (Buchanan 1990). Against this background of uncertainty and fragmentation, one of the achievements and attractions of neoconservatism lay in providing intellectual and rhetorical underpinnings for an internationalist conservative foreign policy capable of unifying American conservatism, and the Republican Party in particular.23 In their rallying cry for an ‘elevated patriotism’ that transcends both liberal-modernism and traditional conservatism, for example, William Kristol and Robert Kagan called for a return to the heroic vision of national interest as national greatness that would offset both a debilitating liberalism and an equally limited traditional conservatism based on a narrow parochial patriotism at home and isolationism in foreign policy, a policy they explicitly equate with Buchanan’s paleoconservatism. As outlined earlier, neoconservatives believe that because

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they operate within the ideological structures of modernity, conservative ideals must be progressive to be successful. From this perspective, Buchanan’s appeal to the rooted affections of traditional conservatism is both reactionary in its reliance upon nativist principles, and socially and politically ill suited to a fluid, individualistic, dynamic, progressive, modern world. Lacking a progressive vision, American conservatism will be consigned to the political wilderness. As Kristol and Kagan put it, without a broader, more enlightened understanding of America’s interests . . . conservatism will too easily degenerate into the pinched nationalism of Buchanan’s ‘America First’, where the appeal to narrow self-interest masks a deeper self-loathing. A true ‘conservatism of the heart’ ought to emphasize both personal and national responsibility, relish the opportunity for national engagement, embrace the possibility of national greatness, and restore a sense of the heroic, which has been sorely lacking in American foreign policy – and American conservatism – in recent years. Failing to do so will mean that ‘Deprived of the support of an elevated patriotism, bereft of the ability to appeal to national honor, conservatives will ultimately fail in their effort to govern America. And Americans will fail in their responsibility to lead the world’ (1996: 31–2). The appeal of neoconservatism is thus not only intellectual or ethical; it is also politically strategic. Providing a dynamic, forward- and outwardlooking ideology of foreign affairs that drew upon powerful themes in American culture, neoconservatism provided an ‘ideological’ (in Irving Kristol’s sense) foreign policy capable of unifying parts of American conservatism while at the same time providing a political vision and rhetoric capable of mobilizing public support behind that vision, and the (Republican) political party that espoused it. But the strategic dimension of this movement is broader than simply providing a unifying rhetoric for Republicans. Neoconservatism has been instrumental in promoting a political culture increasingly defined and divided by questions of culture and a politics of virtue and identity. In this domain, one of neoconservatism’s most powerful elements resides in its adoption of a specific representational strategy and a cultural politics of authenticity. To understand this, it is helpful to turn again to Bourdieu’s understanding of symbolic and cultural power. Representational strategies and symbolic power: authenticity in American culture Neoconservatism adopts two related representational strategies. First, that it has correctly diagnosed the dilemmas of American social and political life. This is at heart a knowledge claim, a claim to know the reality of American life. As we have seen, a considerable amount of intellectual

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labour and public proselytizing has gone into this venture. This knowledge is portrayed as different from the ‘elite’ knowledge and academic abstraction that, it is claimed, dominates contemporary American cultural, educational and political life. Neoconservatism, presenting itself in opposition to these positions, claims to represent the ‘common sense’ of the majority of Americans and to speak for ‘real’ America – not just in articulating the core values of the United States, but in giving voice to the majority of Americans who, although ignored by the dominant liberal culture, really do believe in these ideals. This is, therefore, not only a knowledge claim, it is also a social strategy. Valorizing the knowledge of ‘ordinary Americans’ and, by extension, those who speak for them, neoconservatism claims to represent the real America in both ideational and socio-political terms. This representational strategy has long roots. One of its clearest early declarations can be found in Irving Kristol’s credo of neoconservatism as the voice of the bourgeois populism that is the dominant but politically inarticulate perspective of the great majority of the American people. To repeat his rallying call, because this populism is bourgeois, the American people are simultaneously individualistic and communal in their outlook. They really do believe that there is such a thing as the ‘public interest’ – a res publica that is something more than the summation of individual interests. . . . And it is this sprit of bourgeois populism, until recently so inarticulate, that neoconservatism seeks to define, refine, and represent. To put it in somewhat grandiose terms: Neoconservatism aims to infuse American bourgeois orthodoxy with a new self-conscious intellectual vigor, while dispelling the feverish melange of gnostic humors that, for more than a century now, has suffused our political beliefs and tended to convert them into political religions. Our intellectuals may feel ‘alienated’ from the orthodoxy represented by the ‘American way of life’; they may feel homeless and hopeless in the world this way of life has created. The American people, in their overwhelming majority, do not feel so alienated, homeless, or hopeless. It is the self-imposed assignment of neoconservatism to explain to the American people why they are right, and to the intellectuals why they are wrong. (1983: xiv–xv) Over the past two decades, this is exactly what neoconservatives have set out to do. Neoconservatives seek not only a philosophic excavation of the genius of American politics (and the source of its current crisis) in the true American identity: they also seek to claim that neoconservatism is the representative of this ‘authentic’ American identity. Indeed, one of the key moves in contemporary neoconservatism has been to go beyond the philosophic arguments

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discussed earlier, and to show that their representation of America and authentic Americans really is the reality of contemporary America. In the process, neoconservatism seeks to acquire symbolic capital and exercise symbolic power. As Bourdieu has powerfully argued, one of the most striking aspects of symbolic power lies in the capacity to speak for a group, a capacity that also – as part of the very process – brings a group into selfconscious existence by articulating it as a group. This is the act of what he terms ‘usurpatory ventriloquism’, whereby ‘someone speaks in the name of something that he brings into existence by his very discourse’ (1991: 211). A telling illustration of this process can be found by looking at one of the best contemporary popularizers of neoconservative themes, the influential columnist David Brooks. In two bestselling books, Brooks has gone out to find the real America. In Bobos in Paradise, he invokes all the classic neoconservative themes to castigate and ridicule a new class – the ‘bohemian bourgeoisie’ – inheritors to the cultural but not economic politics of the left, who despite (or indeed because of) their elite educations and privileged positions are fickle, superficial, consumerist, rootless cosmopolitans – representatives, in short, of the self-indulgent ‘decadence’ that neoconservatives decry and of a liberal elite that they oppose.24 By contrast, Brooks’ recent account seeks to reassure his readers that for all their influence the ‘Bobos’ are not the real America. Instead, he finds that the authentic America exists in that most Bobo-derided of places: the suburbia found On Paradise Drive. Despite continual accusations of conformism and superficiality levelled against American suburban life, Brooks argues, it is in average America – amongst the ‘ubermoms’, the ‘workaholic’ corporatetypes, and the handyman dads – that American virtue remains secure. Contrary to the pessimists who see in America shallowness and decline, Brooks sees unity in an optimism about the future. In a clear shot at the Straussians (but also at Thoreau, Lasch, Tocqueville, and Bork) he argues that writers of this school – dissident conservative academics, mostly – argue that the noble American traits have been corrupted by intellectual currents coming out of France, Germany, and the universities, as if the American soul were such a delicate flower that it could be dissolved by the acid influence of Herbert Marcuse. (2004: 110)25 But the pessimists are badly mistaken. In fact, the true (suburban) America remains populated by sober, honest, family-oriented folks. ‘Picture’, Brooks assures us, ‘a typical American man going on the Internet looking for some pornography. In a few minutes, he can’t help himself, he’s clicked over to LendingTree.com, and he’s checking out the latest mortgage rates’ (2004: 113). Such fanciful homilies reinforce the message of the normality of hardworking, community-minded, family-oriented, authentic America that,

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neoconservatives assure us, lives in the suburbs and comprises the majority of the American people. But it is not only sober, it is also ‘idealistic’, drawing on a Puritan heritage traceable back to the early American settlers and an optimistic ‘vision of human fulfillment’. ‘What Americans share’, Brooks holds, ‘is an inherited sense that history has a story line; and that each of us, individually and as a nation, plays a role in bringing the story to its happy ending’ (2004: 121). While few Americans today buy the jingoistic exceptionalism of the past, they do continue to believe in American exceptionalism, the spiritual values that underlie it, and the sense of personal and national mission it yields. America is a bourgeois nation, ‘but unlike some other bourgeois nations we are also a transcendent nation infused with everyday utopianism’ (2004: 267). America, it turns out, is the solution to bourgeois flatness, to materialistic complacency, to mass media shallowness, because America with all its utopian possibilities arouses the energies and the most strenuous effort. America is the answer to insularity, to balkanizations, to complacency, to timidity, because America is a set of compulsions pulling people out of their narrow and trivial concerns and lifting their sights to the distant hopes. (2004: 279) A more ringing statement of national purpose (and the national interest), and America’s role in fulfilling it could hardly be imagined. The heroic and the ordinary are fused: a rejection of the malaise and decadence of liberal modernity is both the American ideal and the everyday reality of authentic American society. What Brooks has found in his travels is of course an America of ‘two cultures’ that looks exactly like neoconservative philosophy. This is hardly surprising, since Brooks’s position is only the latest in what is by now a fairly long line of analyses in this vein. For example, as Thomas Frank (2004) has incisively argued, the popular device of dividing American politics into ‘blue states’ and ‘red states’, of separating areas of effete, ‘liberal’, elitist, cosmopolitans stretching mainly down each coast, from ‘ordinary’, down to earth, solid, patriotic citizens in the ‘heartland’ of the nation in between, is largely a product of neoconservative thinking. In fact, one of the major sources for this vision of American politics was Gertrude Himmelfarb’s (2001) book One Nation, Two Cultures, which stated the basic theme at length.26 These positions are more than just analytic tools or empirical claims. By claiming to represent the people to themselves (providing a vision of what America ‘really’ is that, predictably, looks exactly like its theoretical exposition of the structure of American society) neoconservatism stakes a claim to speak for these people.27 This is both a powerful symbolic strategy, and a strategy of symbolic power. As Bourdieu has pointed out: ‘A whole series of symbolic effects that are exercised in politics everyday rest on this sort

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of usurpatory ventriloquism, which consists in giving voice to those in whose name one is authorized to speak’ (1991: 211). By claiming the right to speak in the name of the real America, neoconservative ideals are no longer just the ideals of a group of intellectuals: they are what is real, something that would be recognized if only America could get away from the influence of the liberals and intellectuals who ignore or disparage both the ideals and the vast majority of Americans who hold them, and if only someone could speak up for this silenced majority – precisely the ‘selfimposed assignment’ that Irving Kristol declared the key task of neoconservatism itself. In this fashion, neoconservatism not only claims the representational authority to speak for a group (while in the process seeking to create it as a self-conscious group), it also demonstrates a classic dimension of identitystrategies in which the claim to ‘authenticity’ – the ability to understand the ‘real America’ and to speak to it and for it in opposition to those who ignore or deride it, becomes the centre of political action. These conceptions of identity and structures of representation have been crucial in generating cultural capital and symbolic power, and in the impact of neoconservatism on foreign policy and security politics. The logic of the loss of virtue becomes a transcendent political thematic, as applicable to representations of foreign policy positions as it is to questions of domestic affairs. One of neoconservatism’s most powerful aspects has lain in its contribution to structuring the field of security within this specific cultural formation, and its ability to draw upon the cultural capital it confers and to exploit the strategies it allows. Casting political controversies within the language of virtue and values and linking them to the nature of the American identity provides a point around which a large range of positions and concerns can coalesce, and has been central to the role and influence of neoconservatism in American politics over the past decade. At the broadest level, it has allowed neoconservatives to create powerful linkages with other conservative constituencies, particularly the religious right, using foreign policy in particular as both an expression and an instrument in these cultural-political battles. Irving Kristol’s recent reflections illustrate this confluence with particular clarity. As he points out, the steady decline in our democratic culture, sinking to new levels of vulgarity, does unite neocons with traditional conservatives – though not with those libertarian conservatives who are conservative in economics but unmindful of the culture. The upshot is a quite unexpected alliance between neocons, who include a fair proportion of secular intellectuals, and religious traditionalists. . . . And since the Republican Party now has a substantial base among the religious, this gives neocons a certain influence and even power. (2004: 35)

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The relational positioning of neoconservatives within this cultural field of security, the structure of the field, and the positions of themselves and their opponents within it, has been an essential dimension of their influence. This positioning has also had a broader social and material impact, providing a basis whereby its arguments about the need for virtue, the decline of values, and the depredations of liberal elites can find common cause with a large number of groups, movements and organizations that share similar positions in American politics today.28 There are certainly important differences between neoconservatives and other forms of American conservatism, as well as between neoconservatives themselves. But these differences should not obscure the ways in which struggle over ‘culture’ and the politics of virtue provide a fundamentally unifying dimension across these political positions, and how the neoconservative linking of the politics of virtue with the nature of the American national interest and the security challenges it confronts has provided a basis upon which broad political alliances can be built and support generated.29 In sum, neoconservatives have achieved a certain ability to speak for – to represent – a reality: a set of values that, they assert, is the real America, and those people who are real Americans. Representing itself as standing against those who disparage these values and people, who deny their virtues, and who in doing so imperil America both at home and abroad, has provided neoconservatives, and the political right in the United States in general, with powerful forms of cultural and symbolic capital and power. Linked to the cultural logic of security, it has also enabled specific strategies against their opponents. It is to these we will now turn.

Strategies against adversaries The symbolic and cultural capital and strategies possessed and adopted by neoconservatism are crucial in understanding its engagements with competing visions of foreign policy. The ability to locate the politics of security within a broader field of cultural politics structures the nature of these engagements, allowing neoconservatives to draw upon the configuration of the field, the capital it possesses within it, and the strategies thus enabled. Neoconservative assaults upon competing positions in foreign policy analysis – realism and liberalism – demonstrate this clearly. The critique of realism Neoconservatism’s critique of realism emerges directly from the cultural logic and cultural field of security. The position develops along three reinforcing lines, and can again usefully be viewed through the lens of the national interest. First, neoconservatives argue that the endless debates and indeterminacy within realism over what the national interest is, reflect more than just the complexities of judgement, which neoconservatives

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readily acknowledge. More fundamentally, these debates are the logical outcome of an approach to foreign policy severed from values and a deeper understanding of the national interest as a necessary expression of those values. As a result, realism suffers the fate of modern rationalism as a whole, lacking any view beyond narrowly strategic material calculation, narrowly pragmatic judgement, or pluralist competition.30 This is not a resolution to the problem of the national interest in modern politics: it is a symptom of the decline of both intellectual and political life, a mark of decadence masquerading as objectivity. Second, a realist policy guided by traditional Realpolitik alone is ironically yet profoundly unrealistic. Unable to connect adequately to the values and identity of the American people, a realist foreign policy will fail to generate either the commitment or the resources necessary to ensure its success. Accordingly, in an early call for a ‘neoReaganite foreign policy’, William Kristol and Robert Kagan drew upon this theme to insist that it is already clear that, on the present course, Washington will find it increasingly impossible to fulfill even the less ambitious foreign policies of the realists, including the defense of so-called ‘vital’ national interests in Europe and Asia. Without a broad, sustaining foreign policy vision, the American people will be inclined to withdraw from the world and will lose sight of their abiding interest in vigorous world leadership. Without a sense of mission, they will seek deeper and deeper cuts in the defense and foreign affairs budgets and gradually decimate the tools of US hegemony. (1996: 28)31 Finally, instead of providing security for American society, a realist foreign policy actually contributes to its decay. Lacking a clear vision of the national interest that can be explained to citizens and connected to their values, realist foreign policy is of necessity often duplicitous.32 But mendacious policies abroad only further erode virtue at home, and a realist policy of the national interest actually exacerbates political cynicism and social decay within the state, as citizens either adopt a similar cynicism in their relations to the political system or turn away from it in disgust. As a consequence, the entropic and cynical tendencies that are at the core of liberal-modernity are heightened by a realist foreign policy. Realism paradoxically encourages a division between morality and foreign policy that mirrors the liberal divide between interests and ethics, and in the process undermines both. In sum, far from protecting the state, realist theories of the national interest actually endanger it, however advantageous their manipulative actions may appear in the short term. Disconnected from values, realism cannot give any content to the national interest beyond a minimal and ultimately ineffective and debilitating pragmatism, or a corrosive cynicism.

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A manipulative ‘realism’ will only lead to decline – incapable of pulling people with it and thereby gaining the necessary resources and support, it will either fail, or will have to resort to secrecy and manipulation, thus furthering in practice the social cynicism about values that it advocates in theory. Corrosive of support abroad and eroding virtue at home, it is ultimately ineffective internationally and destructive domestically. What is even worse, in this process realism actually deprives modern societies of one of the most effective means of mobilizing virtue and combating decadence – the idea of the national interest itself. By contrast, in the neoconservative vision the national interest can be used to counter modernity’s worst dynamics. A ‘moral’ foreign policy reinforces those virtues and values in the citizenry of the US, and helps get their support for pursuing a national interest which they can actually see as an expression of their values, and which they can identify with. In this way, realism removes the potential for the idea of the national interest, and national values, to be used as an effective form of political mobilization and reformation in support of a virtuous polity. The national interest thus needs to be recaptured from traditional realists33 in both theory and practice, so that it can become a substantive guide and mobilizing symbol in foreign policy, and contribute to political reconstruction at home. The assault on the ‘liberal left’ While neoconservatives have engaged in attacks upon the ‘cerebral cynicism’ of realism,34 they have also of course undertaken more frequent and vociferous assaults upon their defining opponents, the ‘liberal left’. Although I cannot enter into detail here, these attacks take two basic forms, each developing directly from the foundations of neoconservative philosophy outlined above. The most basic of the two is a further criticism of liberal rationalism and economism. Economic liberals, it is argued, suffer from the inescapable inadequacies of political rationalism – reducing everything to materialism, utility, and calculation they cannot grasp the importance of values and their centrality in politics.35 As a consequence, liberals also misunderstand the nature of international politics, transferring an already flawed model of domestic politics as institutional pluralism and liberal individualism to the realm of foreign policy, where it is even more inadequate. In practical terms, these formed a consistent theme in the criticisms of the foreign policy of the Clinton administration with its supposedly misguided ‘liberal internationalist’ faith in legalism and multilateral institutions.36 A second, more fundamental and more symbolically powerful dimension of the neoconservative strategy is its capacity to castigate left and liberal opponents by placing them within the logic of cultural decadence. As argued above, neoconservatism’s criticisms of liberalism are aimed not at the liberal tradition as a whole, but at specific forms of rationalism and subjectivism

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that are seen as leading liberal societies astray – particularly in the muchdespised and derided 1960s. Under the sway of these ideas, they argue, two apparently contradictory but actually reinforcing moves took place, and a host of evils were unleashed. The first saw a reduction of individuals to atomistic, materialistic subjects that provided a basis for schemes of rationalist social planning under the guidance of massive governmental intervention – developments that neoconservatives deplore in tandem with the New Right. But in the view of neoconservatives this process brought about more than a diminishment of individual economic liberty and the growth of a dysfunctional and costly welfare state; it also came hand-inhand with (and actually abetted) a breakdown of political community.37 Ushering in subjectivism and hedonism in values, reducing notions of the good to individual preferences, and viewing government as nothing more than a vehicle for the pursuit and satisfaction of individual or sectional interests, the American liberalism of the 1960s, neoconservatives argue, generated the contradictory rise of a manipulative cultural, governmental and educational elite – the New Class – which engages in projects of social engineering while at the same time actually undermining any viable conception of the public interest. Social and political solidarity were eroded, and anomie, decadence and decline set in. In domestic politics, they argue, the subjectivism of liberal individualism has led to political relativism, a denial of collective values and their importance, and a view that denies the worth of the values of the United States itself or that, even worse, sees these values as oppressive both domestically and globally. This decadent liberalism has led to a politics of ‘relativistic multiculturalism’,38 and the result is a cynically self-serving pluralism, a culture of national self-doubt and even self-loathing, and a spiral of social and political decline in domestic politics that is mirrored by weakness and vacillation in foreign policy. This connection is clearly articulated in Kristol and Kagan’s early call for a neoReaganite foreign policy. As they put it, the remoralization of America at home ultimately requires the remoralization of American foreign policy. For both follow from Americans’ belief that the principles of the Declaration of Independence are not merely the choices of a particular culture but are universal, enduring, ‘self-evident’ truths. That has been, after all, the main point of the conservatives’ war against a relativistic multiculturalism. (1996: 31) This analysis is given further historical and rhetorical purchase by identifying the liberal left not only with the new elites, but also with the ‘counter-culture’ of the 1960s, and the disastrous loathing of America and average Americans that it supposedly entailed.39 The logic of political conflict is here transformed into ‘cultural’ conflict – and political issues

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become susceptible to representations of where one stands in relation to authentic American culture and its values – and, by extension, how much one values the country, its culture, and the ‘ordinary’ people who make up the majority of its population; in short, whether one shares a concern to defend those values and virtues, or is instead part of a perfidious liberalism that opposes and undermines them. The politics of virtue becomes a defining fulcrum of political identification, representation and rhetoric. In this way, opposition to American foreign policy (or at least to the foreign policies that neoconservatives support) can be cast as part of a larger and longer struggle over whether one values America itself. Jeanne Kirkpatrick provides a good example of this strategy. In her representation, opposition to the Vietnam War did not arise from opposition to the war per se, but from opposition to American society itself. The struggle over security policy was, she argues, quintessentially a struggle over culture and, to her mind, a struggle of authentic American values against a ‘counter-culture’ that rejected those values. ‘The extremes of this counter-culture’, Kirkpatrick argues, had disappeared by 1976, but the residue was more lasting. Its effects on what has been called liberal politics were profound. The counterculture was much broader than the anti-war movement with which it was associated and, I believe, constituted a sweeping rejection of traditional American attitudes, values, and goals. The counter-culture subjected virtually all aspects of American life and culture to criticism and repudiation. (Kirkpatrick 2004: 236) In this rendition, foreign policy is an extension of domestic politics, and domestic politics is not only a struggle over values, it is a question of whether the nation itself is valued. As she puts it, if the United States was ‘the most destructive power in the world’, if we are ‘capable of genocide’, if we are a ‘graceless land’, then defence of our national interest could not be integrally linked to the defence of human rights or any other morally worthy cause. As long as the United States was perceived as a virtuous society, policies that enhanced American power were also seen as virtuous. Morality and American power were indissolubly linked in the traditional conception. But with the US defined as an essentially immoral society, valuing and/or enhancing power was perceived as immoral. Morality now required transforming our deeply flawed society, not enhancing its power. (2004: 236)

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Support for the expansion and exercise of American power is, in this view, a symbol of belief in the values and goals of the nation itself. Equally, this view provides an identity – authentic, righteous, patriotic and nationalist, yet not nativist – that, despite all its admirable qualities, is threatened (and even persecuted) by the machinations and misconceptions of ‘liberals’.40 It also fits remarkably well with certain conservative views of America’s place in the world. Just as ‘average’ Americans are victimized by a culture that systematically misunderstands them and attacks their lifestyle and values, so too America is victimized by a world that is irrationally, decadently, or perfidiously hostile towards it. Liberal weakness in foreign policy – the consistent plaint of conservatives that liberals at home always ‘blame America first’ – is a mirror of domestic politics. And both are part of a process of victimization that must be confronted and overturned. Indeed, a key part of neoconservative strategy has involved reversing the language of victimization, by arguing that it is, paradoxically, the (silent) majority of ‘real’ America that is being victimized by liberal elites and special interests. As Irving Kristol summarizes the point: It is not mass democracy that makes modern societies less habitable than anticipated, it is secular, ‘progressive’ liberalism – in its modern version, anyhow – that exacerbates our social problems, while creating a spiritual and moral void in with they proliferate as so many cancers. This secular liberalism is the religion of our elites – in academia, in our educational establishments, in our media, in our arts – but not the religion of a majority of the American people. This majority finds itself imprisoned within a culture . . . that disenfranchises its moral and religious sensibilities. (Kristol 1985: 57–8) In this way, neoconservatism seeks to reverse the symbolic field, (re)claiming a virtuous victimhood in the name of the majority domestically, and in the assertion of American power internationally. Indeed, it has become common to cast this conflict between ‘liberal elites’ and ‘real’ Americans in terms usually reserved for security politics and military policy.41 In contrast to liberal doubt, self-loathing and indecision, neoconservative foreign policy explicitly represents itself as committed to the defence of domestic virtue, a foreign policy reflecting American values and society, and a maximization of American power in the service of both. This is not just a process of wrapping oneself in the flag, but a more sophisticated strategy for the acquisition of cultural capital. Through a symbolic strategy of the recovery of the essential nature of American society – indeed of the political wisdom embodied by the Republic itself – philosophical sophistication and populism are combined, providing a reservoir of symbolic capital to be drawn upon and producing an effective repertoire of strategies for disarming opponents.

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Revaluing the field of expertise Finally, and of considerable importance for the field of security studies, this purportedly debilitating relativism and multiculturalism (or, conversely, cynical realism) is linked to a sociological understanding that associates it specifically with urban (often East Coast) cultural elites and academics. A wide range of critics are disarmed by this move. Portraying dissent as a mark of the legacy (and continuing perversions) of the counter-culture, or of a narrow and misconceived ‘realism’, for example, provides a powerful strategy disarming critics of neoconservative foreign policy prescriptions, allowing them to be cast as too self-absorbed, self-interested, and inattentive, too cynical, too rationalistic, or too lulled by the seductions of a comfortable but ultimately corrosive liberalism to recognize the depth and urgency of the issues at stake. In relation to academic critics of American society (and, by implication) foreign policy, this assault is strengthened by casting them as continuing contributors to the decadent ‘adversary culture of intellectuals’ (Trilling 1965) that was instrumental in creating the counter-culture, and that continues to form a bulwark of decadent, cosmopolitan, liberal-elitism. This is not just old-fashioned populism (though on occasion that certainly doesn’t hurt); it is underpinned by a broader set of claims about the sociology of academic life that views the adversary culture of intellectuals as part of the self-interested action of the academic field. By implication, behind the stance of intellectuals who present themselves as critics of the established order lie strategies of bad faith and cynicism, and large parts of this destructive university culture are only underpinned by the old-fashioned liberal culture that its critics hypocritically reject.42 This move permits neoconservatives a remarkable positioning in the field of ideas. Although a high proportion of neoconservatives are intellectuals – and are often part of what would be considered an academic elite by any standards – they are able to represent themselves as outsiders shunned and victimized by the same liberal intellectuals who purportedly dominate higher, and especially elite, education. In precisely the same way that ‘real’ Americans are unrepresented by this elite, so too are neoconservatives, and for the same reasons: for expressing what the people really know in a cultural environment dominated by self-interested, self-righteous, and yet culturally decadent elites.43 Neoconservatives thus present themselves as both fellow-victims and as the intellectual counter to this liberal hegemony, heroic guardians in the war of ideas, and advocates of authentic Americans and their culture. Defining itself in opposition to academic abstraction, neoconservatism is also able to contrast its claims to those of a distanced foreign policy elite which it opposes, paradoxically allowing neoconservative foreign policy elites to claim a powerful anti-elitism in popular discourse. This strategy is again able to link the question of foreign policy directly to issues in

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domestic politics, and to place concerns about social and moral ‘decay’ within a vision of politics as a whole. This gives neoconservatism a remarkable array of ideological resources to draw upon, allowing it to make common cause across many dimensions of the political spectrum in support of its foreign policy prescriptions, and to draw upon claims to popular appeal in response to elite criticism. It also lies behind the interesting and revealing spectacle of Richard Perle – a consummate Washington insider and career-long member of the foreign policy elite – claiming in the context of the war in Iraq, that ‘The more the elites here and in Europe holler, the solider the Bush support gets’ (quoted in Halper and Clarke 2004: 233).

Conclusion Important aspects of the longevity and power of neoconservatism emerge from its ability to tap into a cultural field of politics dominated by a concern with culture – a political culture where ‘culture’ has become a key symbolic resource. Neoconservatism has been able to fashion a powerful identity and to adopt a representational strategy whereby an elite can claim to speak for authentic, ordinary Americans, and to reach out to other disparate groups fighting the culture wars by casting themselves as allies in the same cultural struggle. In and as part of the same process, equivalences can be drawn between domestic and international issues. Concerns with ‘broken windows’,44 with the decay of communities, the rise of crime, and the erosion of moral values and social cohesion, all arise from the same process of cultural decline and accelerating decadence. And all are attributed to a relativistic ‘liberal’ culture, and to the rise of state structures promoting social policies that undermine individual and collective virtue. The logic of the loss of virtue becomes a transcendent political thematic, as applicable to representations of foreign policy positions as to questions of domestic affairs.45 The logic of political conflict is transformed into cultural conflict – and political issues become susceptible to representations of where one stands in relation to authentic American culture and its values – and, by extension, how much one values the country, culture, and ‘ordinary’ people of the country. Whether one shares a concern to defend those values and virtues, or is instead part of a perfidious liberalism that opposes and undermines them, becomes a defining fulcrum of political identification, representation and rhetoric. In this way, opposition to American foreign policy (or at least to the foreign policies that neoconservatives support) can be cast as part of a larger and longer struggle over whether one values America itself.

Conclusion

The question of power is necessarily at the heart of the study of politics, and at the centre of the study of security. Over the past decade, controversies over the nature of ‘soft power’ and its relationship to the traditional ‘hard power’ of military coercion have become a staple of foreign policy analysis and public discourse. In the preceding chapters, I have sought to show that a sociologically informed understanding of symbolic and cultural power, the idea of a cultural field of security, and an appreciation of the forms of ‘capital’ and types of strategy operating in that field can provide insights into the evolution of security relations over the past decade and a half. I do not claim that the cultural field I have sketched is the only relevant cultural dimension at work in these dynamics, that cultural strategies and the cultural field of security were the only important elements of this process, or that they operated autonomously from other fields and their associated (and sometimes overlapping) forms of power and interest. But I do hope to have shown that a focus on symbolic power and cultural strategies can illuminate not only the evolution of post-Cold War European security, but also important trajectories in contemporary security policy and politics. Drawing inspiration from aspects of the theory of practice developed by Bourdieu, I have sought to show that culture is not only essential in understanding security relations, but that it is possible to sketch a theory of cultural strategies, a theory that provides a way of thinking about ‘culture’ as a strategic resource, as a form of power, and as part of a field of contestation, that does not end up simply identifying an amorphous realm of ‘soft power’ or replicating long-standing and sterile claims that ideas and culture are either simply manifestations of more basic material determinants, or are little more than cynical rhetorical manipulations or rationalizations of more basic interests. The Bourdieuian path that I have drawn upon challenges a clear divide between material and ideational. Without reducing one to the other, it attempts to examine the ways that different forms of power operate; the ‘fields’ of practice that forms of capital and interest constitute and are constituted within; and the relationships, struggles and strategies that follow. There are no doubt difficulties in this project.

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Bourdieu’s theory of practice has been subjected to a range of criticisms, and there are undoubtedly shortcomings in both the brief outline of this theory of practice that I have sketched, and with the ways I have applied these ideas. But whatever its shortcomings, I hope that this study has shown that an appraisal of culture must be at the centre of security analysis, and to have suggested that such a concern by no means excludes a concern with traditional strategic concepts of interest, strategies and power – although these concepts require considerable reformulation, and especially a detachment from the narrowly essentialist forms to which they have frequently been reduced, if they are to play fruitful roles in the analysis of security practices. In broad terms, a focus on cultural strategies lends support to the core analytic claims of a constructivist approach to security. While social constructivism has rightly been criticised for ignoring or eliding questions of power, there is no necessary reason why a broadly constructivist theory need do so, and I hope to have shown that constructivism can (and should) put a concern with power at the heart of its analyses. Yet taking a more ‘strategic’ and power-oriented perspective on the construction of security practices also poses a number of challenges for constructivist theory concerning the relationship between the ‘cultural turn’ in security studies (and international relations more generally) and the broader cultural strategies involved in post-Cold War security relations.1 In an important analysis, Ido Oren has voiced a number of suspicions about the sudden popularity of culture in security studies and its relationship to political power and strategy. Through a detailed account of the political and institutional origins of earlier forms of ‘political culture’ research in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s, Oren demonstrates that this research was intimately linked to the American national security policy agenda. Far from being a neutral form of political science, research on political culture was driven, funded, and developed in close relation to the objectives of the US security establishment in the Cold War. The extraordinary popularity of political culture research in this period, he argues, can thus be seen as the culmination of a trajectory of preoccupation with winning and controlling the hearts and minds of people. It was a trajectory in which national security and scholarly agendas shaded into and fed one another, fusing into a single nexus along the way, beginning with the question of civilian morale during World War I, through ‘civic training’ and ‘propaganda’ in the 1920s and 1930s, through renewed concern with morale and propaganda during World War II and the early Cold War, leading to the question of winning the minds of the peoples of the emerging nations. (Oren 2000: 562)

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These close historical associations between the study of culture and national security policy lead Oren to wonder about post-Cold War claims concerning the link between culture and security and the place of social constructivism in this contemporary ‘nexus’. As he puts it in a reflection on Thomas Risse-Kappen’s (1996) constructivist account of NATO as a ‘democratic security community’: ‘Is the scholar in this case merely a disinterested observer of the production of these norms? Is he not, at the same time, engaged in the (political) act of reproducing state-sanctioned norms?’ (Oren 2000: 546). This is a question of considerable importance for the current phase of constructivist theorizing about security. Yet as Oren is well aware, there is a basic difficulty in drawing a direct link between the politicized ‘culture’ research of the 1950s and 1960s and that of contemporary social constructivism. In the earlier period, the links were clear: scholars such as Harold Lasswell and Gabriel Almond were personally linked to policy structures, as both consultants and directors of government-funded research programmes. By contrast, recent social constructivist research on culture and security is conspicuously distant from direct policy entanglements, and seems to have a much greater critical distance and neutrality. Does this mean that there is no link between contemporary analyses of culture and security, despite the clear affinities between many of their conclusions and the positions of the security organizations themselves? That social constructivist security studies are neutral, disconnected from political agendas and simply objectively and accurately mirroring security practices? A Bourdieuian approach may be of considerable help in unravelling this puzzle. If we treat scholarly analysis not as determined by political directives, but as taking place within a field of practice that contains academic expertise, policy-analysis, and institutions, we might suggest that the rise and popularity of constructivism, and particularly its analysis of culture and security, can in part be accounted for as a result of the fit between the policy dilemmas and the forms of (cultural) strategy that policy institutions adopted to resolve them.2 As I have argued above, in the face of challenges posed by the end of the Cold War to their continued existence and mechanisms of power and influence, these institutions developed ‘culture’ as a means of offsetting their potential fragmentation and rearticulating their strategic roles – a process particularly evident in the rise of discourses of the democratic peace, and in the increasing rearticulation of NATO as a democratic security community. Emerging to prominence at almost the same time as these shifts in institutional strategies were taking hold, social constructivism had what Weberians might be tempted to call an ‘elective affinity’ with the restructured field of security being produced by state actors – what it theorized (the democratic peace and NATO as a democratic security community, for example) dovetailed with the practices emerging in security politics. The concern of social constructivism with broader ways of understanding security, itself often emerging at odds with and in self-conscious

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opposition to the determinism and materialism of the Cold War, fit remarkably well with these shifting institutional strategies. The theoretical possibility of a move away from a militarized, threat-based, balance-ofpower understanding of security and security institutions that was central to constructivism’s early (largely meta-theoretical) claims found a strong resonance in institutional strategies that advocated precisely the same point at a practical level.3 This fit could then be presented by constructivist theorists as empirical confirmation of their theories. In this sense, social constructivism has correctly grasped important elements of this restructuring, but it has done so at the risk of a degree of naivety, for it has often failed to see the role that culture has played in a strategic shift in the field of security. Rather than tracing these developments as strategic practices, ‘conventional’ constructivism treated them largely as ‘facts’ – as either data for the construction of theory or as evidence for its confirmation. Thus social constructivism found empirical confirmation that security institutions really were exactly what they had claimed they must be on theoretical grounds: identity-based organizations in which culture (and especially the norms and values of democratic culture) played a crucial constitutive role. That NATO claimed to be a democratic security community was transformed into the social scientific discovery that NATO was a democratic security community. The issue here is not whether culture, identity, and institutions are essential in understanding security relations – clearly they are; the problem is that in simply presenting this research as a ‘fact’, and stressing norms and values, conventional forms of constructivism failed to reflect on the role which culture can play as a strategy and a form of power. Although the origins of this difficulty may well be found in the methodological context and controversies within which constructivist theory has evolved, particularly the desire to conform to certain views of the nature of ‘objectivity’ and legitimate social science that are key structural elements in the ‘field’ of international relations and political science, it also arises from the laudable desire to avoid the overly instrumental role to which culture has often been reduced in security studies. However, in rejecting the idea that culture and identity are simply ideological covers for more basic strategic interests, constructivism failed to develop an analysis of how culture and strategic action might be related. What is more, by explicitly not speaking of strategies and power, and to the extent that it treated the democratic peace as a social-scientifically verified fact and the democratic security community as a natural outgrowth of existing institutions, academic theory contributed in a small way to the symbolic power of these practices. In its failure to reflect critically on the relationship between its own analytic practice and institutional practices, social constructivist security studies risks unwittingly becoming a part – and partial legitimation – of those political practices and the power relations underpinning them. Seen in this light, the relationship between constructivist security studies and institutional strategies is not one of direct, personal links, but one of

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affinity with this field, and of a (largely misrecognized) participation in its production and reproduction. There is no need to attribute mendacity to this link between constructivist social science and institutional strategies. Even less is there a need to look for the kinds of direct links that existed in the 1950s and 1960s. All that is necessary is to recognize the way in which the extraordinary rise of constructivism corresponded with, and was aided by, a homologous shift in the institutional field of security.4 This raises important questions about the relationship between scholarship and practice. If security practices are constructed, the task of scholarship cannot be simply to mirror them – it must also be capable of providing an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of specific practices, and an appraisal of their consequences. This is not to say that all analysis is ‘political’ in some naive fashion; much less is it to argue that the world is can be made and remade through ‘ideas’. One of the strengths of a ‘structuralist constructivism’ is to show just how far a properly sociological analysis is from pure subjectivism, a facile relativism, or spontaneous views of agency. Nevertheless, treating security practices as practices highlights the need to consider the connections between theory and practice, the relationships between analysts and fields of practice (both those academic fields in which they are embedded and those fields that are the object of analysis) and the capacity of the analyst to contribute to a critical appraisal of those practices. In this setting, the broader question that constructivist studies of security must therefore confront is one of political judgement.

Judging discipline Acknowledging the role of power in the construction of the post-Cold War European security order need not lead to cynicism, or to a reduction of that order to an illustration of the supposedly age-old game of power politics often claimed under the label of political realism. As I have tried to show, the forms and sources of power at work in these processes cannot be reduced to the narrow focus on the primacy of material power that characterizes much of contemporary realism in security studies: they were in important respects symbolic and cultural. These were not capacities possessed by any single actor as resources. Nor were the practical transformations that evolved the outcome of some strategic master plan. Instead, these transformative practices emerged from resources existing and created in a broader field – forms of ‘habitus’ and ‘capital’ that actors possessed in specific contexts and that they were able to varying degrees to modify, appropriate, mobilize, and employ to structure the field of security. Power resided neither in the actors alone, nor in the structure by itself, but in the relations between the two. At work was a dialectic that provided different actors with varying amounts of power and differing possibilities for action, along with varying but nonetheless bounded strategies they could adopt,

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and which could be – and were – acted upon with varying degrees of success. Multiple forms of power and practice across different ‘fields’ were in play. That power was an intrinsic element of these practices also need not lead to cynicism about the merits of ‘security communites’. The practices constructing this order were certainly not divorced from power. Yet far from weakening the concept of a security community, this recognition may justify the view that these orders are stronger – if more complex and fluid – than a concentration on norms and values alone would support.5 Moreover, the forms of power exercised in these practices were certainly preferable to others that might conceivably have been pursued – to an attempt, for example, to create a military balance of power based on the proliferation of nuclear weapons that some suggested as the optimal policy direction. The practices of symbolic and cultural power no doubt entailed and enabled relations of domination and hierarchy – and one should not deny these dimensions or the possibility that other forms of security order might in the abstract have been preferable. But the practices as they evolved also excluded other more destructive practices of power, including the emergence of politics of division and enmity, and policies of remilitarization (or even extreme militarization) in Europe. Recognizing the fields of power that contributed to the constitution of the European security order also serves to highlight important limits of that order. As an abstract model, the disciplinary liberalism of the democratic peace is in principle expandable. But the norms and values of the democratic peace, even when placed within a broader structure of disciplinary power, were not the only source of the order that emerged throughout the 1990s. Disciplinary techniques were only part of a complex network of practices – habitus, institutions, and historically constituted forms of cultural and symbolic power were essential to its success – not to mention, of course, the links between these dimensions and material (both military and economic) forms of power.6 Putting power at the centre of the evolution of European security thus yields a more chastened belief in the extension of the security community, its permanence, or its easy transferability to other regions. As a constructed order, and one constructed in the context of powerful forms of capital and interest – not to mention existing habitus – the conditions for its production were and are highly specific. To note this fact is not to say that the structures cannot be extended; however, there is nothing natural or inevitable in their capacity to do so, and such expansion or transferability is dependent upon the structures of the relevant fields, and the related forms of capital, power and interest involved. While acknowledging the power dimensions of the security community points to its limits, it also serves to counter more doctrinaire declarations about those limits. In particular, treating culture and identity as practices with intrinsic connections to power can act as a barrier to viewing security relations through the lens of a cultural Realpolitik that yields essentialist divides between cultures or civilizations. Relations within and between

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cultural fields are fluid and contested. While shot through with power and struggle, they are also open and susceptible to transformation. There is, of course, no sense in which those transformations are easy, much less that they are inevitably ‘progressive’. Yet one of the merits of putting power back into the analysis of security and culture is that it removes teleological visions of historical inevitability and expansion, but also their alter-image: inescapable division and insecurity. In short, reintroducing practices of cultural power makes culture part of a political sphere of contestation instead of succumbing to a logic of falsely objectified essences, clashes of civilizatons, and the like. Conversely, taking seriously the roles played by recognition, respect and discipline in the social construction of liberal security communities also forces a consideration of the consequences of liberal practices. It is important, as an initial step towards such an assessment, to emphasize that the concept of discipline should not be seen wholly negatively. As even its most severe critics have acknowledged,7 disciplined subjectivity is essential to social life, and recognizing its ‘socially constructed’ nature by no means diminishes its standing.8 The goal of a certain predictability, stability, and trust in social action – both at the individual and state levels – which is one of the central goals of liberal subjectivity and its institutional expressions, should not be undervalued. Nor should liberal attempts to delimit the realm of ‘the political’ be lightly dismissed, in either their philosophic formulations or institutional structures.9 Certainly, forms of Kantian liberalism and the disciplined practices they entail are to be greatly preferred to the violent, irrational positions against which they define themselves, and liberal practices provide structures of social coordination and understanding of considerable benefit, at both the domestic and international level. But the attractions of the ‘Kantian’ position should not blind us either to the power dynamics which it entails, or to its potentially worrisome entailments. In addition to the well rehearsed arguments over the contested universality (and value) of liberal practices and their place and impact in a culturally diverse world, liberal structures exercise forms of power that their proponents are often ill equipped to recognize, a misrecognition that can easily lead to somewhat naive understandings of the forms and structures of power at work within a liberal order. Liberal security communities are not immune from the operation of power: they operate within structures of power which, while different from the materialist conception so common in international relations, nonetheless perform fundamental structuring and coercive roles within the security community and beyond. Equally importantly, a focus on the role of liberal subjectivity, recognition, and respect also helps account for some of the more notable dynamics within a liberal foreign policy. Among the most significant of these is the tendency which Michael Doyle, following Hume, has usefully dubbed liberalism’s tendency to vacillate between ‘imprudent vehemence’ and

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‘supine complaisance’ in international affairs (Doyle 1997: 265–76). This tendency can be understood, in part, as an outcome of the structures of moral adequacy, discipline, and respect which underpin the liberal vision. Casting security in terms of moral adequacy and moral deviance leads all too easily to the casting of conflicts in Manichean moral terms. One outcome of this is a strong form of moral mobilization: the potential tendency (not necessity) to represent conflicts as contests between the morally responsible, and the morally deviant or wilfully irresponsible and undisciplined.10 This tendency is strengthened by the claim that, since liberal structures and peace are mutually reinforcing, it is also in the interests of liberal security communities to foster liberal orders.11 The temptation to weld the liberal peace to a neo-imperial foreign policy is not difficult to discern; nor are its dangers. The principles of the liberal peace are not, of course, wholly negative: a concern with the well-being and security of others, and a commitment to their rights, is undeniably attractive in many respects. What is more, the politically mobilizing capacity of liberalism’s vision should not be underestimated, nor its capacity for positive action derided. As the situations in Kosovo – and particularly more recently in Iraq – have demonstrated, however, clear declarations of an ‘ethical foreign policy’ or a ‘muscular Wilsonianism’ are rarely in themselves adequate categories of political analysis. Nor can the emergence of a liberal social order be simply assumed once illegitimate constraints and forms of oppression and repression are removed.12 And it is here that a variant of the second tendency outlined by Doyle – that of Hume’s ‘supine complaisance’ – can emerge in a specific, slightly modified form. This is perhaps best conveyed by what Michael Ignatieff (1998), in a different context, has insightfully termed the ‘politics of moral disgust’. If disciplined responsibility provides both moral and ‘interested’ motivations for liberal action, then the failure of liberal interventions to yield the expected outcome can easily become cast as a result of the indiscipline and moral failing – the irresponsible fault – of those who were supposedly being liberated. Again, this is not to say that this charge is wholly incorrect. It is certainly vital to maintain a sense of the responsibility – of the effective agency – of those in whose name intervention occurred. The worrying dynamic of the liberal position is rather that the complex difficulties of such a situation will be translated into straightforward, moralistic categories which simply mirror those of the initial intervention. Thus, the difficulty in creating a stable, liberal social structure can yield a disenchantment overlain with an attribution of moral inadequacy on behalf of the communities concerned. Here, responsibility is thrust wholly on those involved in the conflict: it is their lack of discipline which is at the heart of the matter, and in the face of such a lack they neither can (nor, in its stronger versions, should) be helped. In such a light, sustained engagement becomes difficult, since the politically mobilizing potential of such claims is potentially just as strong as their counterparts

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within liberal theory, and their claims become stronger the longer the promised liberal structures fail to materialize. Conversely, this failure can become an almost open-ended rationalization for ever greater effort, for a stronger exercise of heroic will, and for the need to take ever stronger measures in order to bring about the necessary transformations. Here military power and cultural claims can become fused in a vision of a world order to be created, and the kinds of actors and actions required to create it. The tension between this view of the relationship between culture and security and the symbolic and cultural power exercised in the creation of the European security order throughout the 1990s is one of the most important aspects of security politics since 9/11.

Power in the post-Cold War order The cultural strategies at work in the ‘game’ of post-Cold War European security came with intrinsic limitations. Most importantly, they required the consistent valuation of symbolic and cultural capital as a unified democratic culture linked positively to military power. So long as the military dimension of security could be placed within this relational structure, a straightforward cultural strategy of equating liberal-democracy with security could be pursued, and pursued to great effect. But as early as the conflict in the Balkans, the tensions in this field began clearly to emerge, and in the post-9/11 era these tensions have become manifest in ways that both illustrate the functioning of the cultural field of security and that threaten its future. Perhaps the most striking expressions of this tension have been coming from the American strategic right, which has produced incisive appraisals of the tensions in the European/American security relationship while at the same time displaying a striking obtuseness about the nature of the European security order and the structures of symbolic power at work in the post-Cold War era One way of opening up these issues is to look a bit more carefully at one of the most influential assessments of the new security landscape, Robert Kagan’s Of Paradise and Power. At one level, Kagan’s is a relatively traditional realist analysis. Taking the strains between Europe and America over the conflict in Iraq as the backdrop, he argues that these strains are neither particularly suprising nor ephemeral. Rather, they reflect the fundamental shift in the international distribution of military power, and the fact that the United States does not need the consent or the cooperation of its European allies to exercise its power at a global level. The clashes of ‘strategic cultures’ between the two sides of the Atlantic, Kagan suggests, are at one level explained by this fundamental shift, and are not really ‘cultural’ – at least in terms of ‘national’ strategic cultures – at all (2002: 7–8). This is familiar realist fare, yet Kagan’s analysis goes well beyond a focus on military capabilities. The real core of the divergence, he argues, is that under the protective umbrella of US hegemony, Europe has developed

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towards a ‘postmodern’ politics of ‘paradise’ in which the exercise of military force is discouraged, and international cooperation the norm. In contrast, the US remains in a ‘Hobbesian’ world of ‘power’, ready, willing, and often required to exercise military force.13 The ‘European’ situation, Kagan argues, really is paradise; he does not discount its virtues by any means. However, he argues that in a world where the principles of paradise are not universally accepted, its borders – and the operation of the world order more broadly – must be secured by (mainly American, largely military) power. In this view, Kagan adopts some of the views of Robert Cooper, arguing that the world is now divided into postmodern, modern, and premodern areas, each with their own dynamics and requirements: in ‘postmodern’ Europe, the rules of paradise – cooperation, negotiation, institutionalization – apply. In the ‘modern’ and ‘pre-modern’ worlds, by contrast, ‘power’ – and the willingness to act by the laws of the jungle when in the jungle – continues to dominate. In Kagan’s view, the tensions in the strategic cultures of the US and Europe thus lie not only in America’s willingness and ability to exercise military power at a global level in the face of Europe’s unwillingness and inability to do so. They emerge also from the fact that the exercise of this power directly challenges the principles upon which the security culture of Europe has come to be based. Brief and sweeping as Kagan’s analysis is, it effectively highlights the way in which tensions between the military and ‘cultural’ dimensions of security have become crucial in American–European relations. And he is certainly correct to point out the tensions that emerge when military power is directly exercised by the West, when – to use the terms employed in this study – the tensions in the cultural field of security are brought to the fore by the explicit exercise of military force. Yet Kagan’s analysis also demonstrates the perils of working with too restricted an account of power, because this tension is between the application and operation of different forms of strategy and power; it is not not a tension between the principles of power and the principles of paradise. By generally reducing power to military power (occasionally mentioning, though failing to theorize, the importance of ‘soft’ power), his account fails to grasp the ways in which cultural power was essential in the reconstruction of security in post-Cold War Europe. It is simply not credible to blithely assume that the central and east European countries were part of ‘postmodern’ Europe in 1990. Indeed, the central and east European countries at the end of the Cold War looked to many like quintessentially ‘modern’ states, likely to generate ‘modern’ (i.e. militarized and conflictual) security situations. In fact, this was exactly the worry at the start of the 1990s when ‘instability’ in the region was one of the greatest fears and concerns of post-Cold War policy. In this case, the question of the transformation of the region into a part of ‘postmodern’ Europe and its concomitant integration within Western security structures becomes crucial. These transformations cannot be assumed; they must be explained. And as I have argued, at the core of this

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process of transformation was the operation of forms of symbolic and cultural power bound up with the civilizational logic of ‘the West’. Neoconservative (and some realist) positions present a dangerously misleading assessment of the security order of the 1990s and its lessons. For neoconservatives, the 1990s were the high-point of ‘liberal-internationalism’, a period that marked, in Kagan’s words, a ‘holiday from strategy’ (2002: 25), or as ‘eight years of sleepwalking’ in Charles Krauthammer’s (2005: 22) formulation.14 By contrast, recognizing the role of power in the cultural strategies of the 1990s provides an important counter to some of the most damaging representations about this era and its lessons for the future. For it was precisely the absence of overt ‘power politics’, unilateralism, and policies of military threat-and-coercion that made possible the transformations in European security that neoconservatives (and not they alone) now take for granted.15 The security order that emerged in Europe in the decade following the end of the Cold War was neither inevitable nor natural. It was not divorced from power; nor was it an act of pure reason or historical inevitability. Instead, this order emerged in a specific context with a particular and embedded set of institutional, cultural and symbolic resources and forms of power – one aspect of which was the ‘cultural field of security’. European security practices, and the American role in them, through the 1990s were not characterized by drift. The absence of an overt ‘power’ strategy and the exercise of direct forms of material-military coercion does not mean that strategies were not enabled and power not exercised. The ways in which actors located within (and to some extent constituted and enabled by) specific symbolic and cultural structures reacted to the new setting in which they found themselves can be understood ‘strategically’, as the outcome of a process of active construction. It cannot be reduced to any overarching grand strategy or predetermined plan, just as it cannot be explained as the straightforward result of some more basic material or structural determinants. As we have seen, the idea that this process was free from power has actually been part of the power exercised in the creation of the order – the very naturalness, and yet at the same time, the self-disciplined moral construction – of the move were both a reflection of dominant structures and part of the power exercised by dominant actors. This was not, as Kagan implies, a European ‘holiday from strategy’. It was, on the contrary, a sophisticated and highly successful strategy. To see this period as one of naive liberalism, an interregnum analogous to the 1930s, is profoundly mistaken. Although presenting this period as analogous to the inter-war period may be a potent political move (an effective symbolic strategy) within the specific cultural field of security politics, it is a misconception with important implications for understanding EuropeanAmerican relations. Misrepresenting the forms of power and strategy at work in these transformations, many neoconservatives misconstrue why so many Europeans find the emergence of unilateral, coercive military strategies

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under the Bush administration so worrying. This is not simply a result of political environments more sceptical about the exercise of military force. It also reflects a concern that a strategy of unilateral military dominance undermines and threatens to undo the effective operation of the forms of power and strategy that underpinned the remarkable transformation of post-Cold War Europe. The cracking of the unity of ‘the West’ is thus much more than a European-American concern. It directly threatens the maintenance and exercise of these forms of power and the order of which they are a part.16 Similarly, while attempts to mobilize a cultural logic of decadence against those sceptical or opposed to the war in Iraq represented a telling attempt to wield symbolic and cultural power, these activities had the simultaneous consequence of weakening the symbolic and cultural capital of the West as a whole. Mobilizing the themes of decadence, attempting to make support for specific policies tests of whether allies were really committed to democratic values, and deploying a language of ‘new’ versus ‘old’ Europe threatened to erode some of the most important resources through which the West had exercised power over the previous decade. As these ongoing controversies illustrate, the relationship between culture and security, and the role of cultural strategies in security relations, continues to be at the centre of international politics. Opening this realm to further analysis is essential if security studies is to grasp more fully the dynamics at work in contemporary security politics, and its own place within them. If power is inextricable from both politics and security, then developing a broader understanding of its forms, applications and implications is a key challenge for the future.

Notes

Introduction 1 Gray 1982 is a good illustration. For a critical reflection, see Booth 1997. 2 A small sampling in a huge literature might include Campbell 1998; Lipschutz 1995; Katzenstein 1996; Krause and Williams 1996; Huysmans 1998; Buzan et al. 1998; Wyn Jones 1999; Mutimer 2000; Croft and Terrif 2000; Booth 2004; Hansen 2006. 3 For an important correctives and contributions: Guzzini 1993; 2005. 4 In particular see Barnett and Duvall 2005, Bially Mattern 2005a, as well as the 2005 special issue on ‘Power and International Relations’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 33(3). 5 Though these forms of capital and power should not be seen as disconnected from material fields – both military and economic (as for example in the links drawn systematically between good security relations and economic policies and assistance by international financial organizations). I do not, however, enter into these issues here. 6 An excellent critique of these and other treatments of culture as simple ideology is Thompson 1990. For diverse considerations in IR, see Walker 1984; Chay 1990; Lapid and Kratochwil 1996; Weldes et al. 1999. 7 As will become clear later, I am not suggesting that these claims to culture were entirely new; as many commentators have pointed out, they have a long-standing status in cultural politics. At this juncture, I want simply to highlight their significance and the need to think about them within the strategies of security politics. 8 Bourdieu’s work is beginning to achieve some recognition in International Relations; important moves in this directions include Guzzini 2000, Leander 2002, Pouliot 2006a, and especially the work of Didier Bigo and the emerging ‘Paris School’ of security studies: Bigo 2000, 2002. Bigo, it should be noted, provides a particularly good focus on the practices of ‘security professionals’ in a way that I in this book do not. 1 Culture, strategy, and security: recasting an historical relationship 1 Smith 2004. More broadly, Neufeld 1995; Booth et al. 1996. 2 Elements of this section draw on the discussion in Williams 2005. 3 My argument here has affinities to Daniel Deudney’s (1995; 2003) analyses of republicanism as a negative practice of ordering which opposes both hierarchy and anarchy, embodying a stance Deudney calls ‘negarchy’. Just as international relations theory has tended to overlook this negative practice in the ordering practices of republicanism, I argue it has overlooked it in identity as well.

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4 Characterized by historians, in different ways, as the growth of ‘discipline’. For alternative readings of this process see Foucault 1977; 1985; Tully 1993; and Oestreich 1982. 5 For a broad exploration in international relations, see Rengger 1995. 6 A different analysis of this shift can be found in Koselleck 1988. 7 For a fascinating treatment see Shapin 1994. Clearly, the materialist-empiricist synthesis was neither a simple, nor the only, avenue pursued. As Toulmin’s emphasis on Descartes and Oesterich’s (1982) analysis of the rise of neostoicism demonstrate, the search for solutions was wide-ranging and often interrelated. My treatment here will also overlook significant counter-currents and inevitably involves a (sometimes high) degree of oversimplification and distortion. I hope, however, that a clarification of the general thrust of liberal modernity in the field of security studies justifies such distortions and omissions. 8 As Tully has noted, ‘enthusiasm’, the assertion of the absolute authority of the individual conscience (characteristic, for example, of radical Protestantism) was ‘used in a pejorative sense, and a massive attack was waged on all its forms, especially after 1660’ (1993: 187). 9 In what follows, I rely heavily on Tully’s superb analysis, but see also Baker 1952 and Rabb 1975. On Locke, see also Dunn 1969, and Dunn 1990, chapters 2 and 3 especially; and Ashcraft 1985. 10 The role of the ‘Independency crisis’ concerning the relations between church and state in Hobbes thought has been highlighted by Tuck 1989; see also Johnston 1986. 11 For a reading of Hobbes’s view of international relations which stresses some of these aspects, see Williams 2005. For an excellent reading of Hobbes and international relations, Malcolm 2002. 12 As Tully succinctly puts it, ‘the answer, from Lipsius to Locke, was that the objective of government is preservation of life, not religion’ (1993: 182). 13 Tully stresses the way in which the development of new visions of scientific knowledge based upon ‘evidence’, ‘proof’, ‘probability’ and ‘testimony’ was not sui generis but actually drew upon developed judicial procedures that ‘were gradually constructed in the context of the spread of the inquisitorial methods of justice throughout Europe from the condemnation of the trial by battle of 1215 to the great codification in the French ordinance of 1670’ (1993: 197). Shapin (1994) stresses the way these new knowledge practices were bound up with and drew upon existing social conventions, particularly ‘gentility’ and ‘civility’. On the relationship between religious and knowledge transformations, see Hooykaas 1972. 14 As Wolin (1960: 291) notes, ‘there is no grosser caricature’ of the views of classical liberalism than this; yet it is a view which turns up with distressing regularity in all schools of international relations theory. 15 The fear of physical violence continues to be articulated today as the core of liberalism; see Shklar 1989. 16 In this regard, the liberal exaggeration of self-interest had a political purpose, for ‘the postulate of universal self-interest appears as a subversive doctrine, designed to remove all flattering obscurity about the motives of kings, aristocrats, and priests. . . . To say that all individuals were motivated by self-interest was to universalize the status of the common man’ (Holmes 1995: 63). 17 Hirschman 1977 is perhaps the classic statement here; also important is Holmes 1995: 43–99. In addition, as numerous studies on the emergence of ‘possessive individualism’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth century have argued, the centrality of ‘property’ had less to do with the ideological justification of an emerging market society than with an attempt to discern and construct principles of political order and obligation, rights and practices, in response to turmoil and

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change. Property, as a ‘juridical concept of self-ownership’ was ‘moral, political and military, not economic. It is not concerned with the alienation of labour power but with political power (the power of self-defence). The individual as well as the state are concerned with preservation not consumption’ (Tully 1993: 82). On this theme see also Pocock 1985. For an interesting account of the confrontation between liberalism and ‘romantic militarism’ see Rosenblum 1987, chapter 1. For example, the passage of the Toleration Act in 1689 – in the wake of theological conflict – meant that, as Barlow (1962: 24) notes: ‘Henceforth, a man might be a citizen of England without being a member of the English Church’. As Carol Pateman, among others, has shown, early liberalism’s attitude towards women in these arrangments raises serious challenges to its adequacy as a whole. For an important reading of Weber in terms of liberalism see Bellamy 1992; chapter 4 especially. Here, of course, there is an abiding conflict in liberalism over whether ideas or specific actions constitute a threat, a problem related to the familiar dilemmas of determining intentions from capabilities that is so familiar in discussions of IR. While I will return briefly to this theme in the conclusion, it is again my goal here to explicate these liberal foundations rather than subject them to sustained critical evaluation. And less if they were, reflecting in no small part the shared epistemic and ontological principles of liberal states. Here lies an important connection to the liberal dimensions of the democratic peace, as I shall argue in Chapter 4. Or, to put it another way, it involved a fundamental restructuring of the politics of security. While a critical analysis of this development is not my intention here, it is important to note how a grasp of these foundations is central to such an appraisal. Abstract citizenship, hedonistic calculation, probabalistic reasoning, were all part of the rationalization of violence characteristic of the modern state and the way in which violence becomes deployed in transformed and potentially catastrophic ways. For a variety of perspectives, see McNeil 1982; Bauman 1989; Pick 1993. For an excellent antidote to such a view of Locke, and for an analysis that engages a number of themes raised here, see Tully 1993, in particular chapter 5, ‘Governing conduct’. See Walker 1997; this point is also made by Ringmar 1996, and Onuf 1998: 13. Elements of these practices – in particular the link between a materialist vision of power and a contractual view of government as attempts to secure the basic practices of liberalism and democracy, rather than as simple-minded assumptions, are nicely discussed in Held 1995, chapter 1. An issue most interestingly expressed in the ongoing debates between international historians and rationalist theorists of international relations. For an analysis that is interesting both for how it challenges the assumption of sovereignty and yet exemplifies the preceding commitments to it, see Krasner 1999.

2 Cultural strategies 1 Though they have been accounted for in a number of different ways; see Barnett and Duvall 2004; see also the essays collected in the special issue of Millennium on ‘Power in International Relations’, especially those of BiallyMattern 2005b; Guzzini 2005; Lukes 2005; and Schmidt 2005. For important broader engagements in constructivism and security studies, see Hansen 2006, Weldes et al. 1999; and Zehfuss 2002. 2 For a discussion, see Laffey and Weldes 1997.

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3 Bourdieu provides lengthy and detailed accounts of how agential (or what he terms ‘subjectivist’) and structuralist theories have tried to resolve this problem – indeed he sees the division of social theory into these two broadly opposing orientations as one of the major obstacles to developing a fuller theory of practice, and – interestingly – as itself arising from the nature of analytic or intellectual practice. 4 For a secondary analysis of habitus, see Brubaker 1993. 5 As Bourdieu consistently stressed, ‘the logic of practice is not the practice of logic’ – practice does not conform to a logician’s sense of a set of rules to be followed in a given situation. 6 That this analogy has limits is clearly acknowledged by Bourdieu, especially as regards the question of where the rules initially came from. 7 As one of Bourdieu’s favourite lines captures it, in the belief that engaging in certain activities is excluded because ‘that’s not for the likes of us’. 8 Bourdieu 1988 is his most extended analysis of the university field; but see also Bourdieu and Passeron 1979. 9 Bourdieu frequently and pointed argues that scholars would have a far better understanding of practice if they used an analysis of their own practices as a model for theorizing, rather than constructing models based upon particular visions of theoretical practice. 10 There are ties here to neoliberal debates over the ‘fungibility’ of power, but they will not be of direct concern to this analysis. 11 For such an argument, see Swartz 1997. This indeterminacy is one of the trickiest parts of Bourdieu’s thinking. 12 In Bourdieu’s words, ‘symbolic power is that invisible power which can be exercised only with the complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subject to it or even that they themselves exercise it’ (1991: 164). 13 For important treatments of ‘discourse’ in international relations, see Milliken 1998; Bially-Mattern 2005a; and Hansen 2006. 14 On the latter, see 1990: 48. 15 For a telling critique of rationalism on these points, see Katzenstein 1996; more broadly Shapiro and Green 1994. 16 This is not to say, as will be argued later, that interests and fields may not overlap in reinforcing and contradictory ways; indeed the analysis of a practice involves precisely these considerations. 17 Many critics have on this basis argued that for all his claims to the contrary, Bourdieu remains wedded to (or mired in) rationalist conceptions of subjectivity and action. It seems to me that such criticisms are largely misplaced when the importance of the quasi-conscious nature of the habitus is taken into account, though it must be admitted that this aspect is far from the clearest dimension in his thinking. 3 The discipline of the democratic peace: Kant, liberalism, and symbolic power 1 In a huge literature, see Doyle 1986; 1997; Owen 1994; 1997; 2005; Russett 1993; 1998; Barkawi and Laffey 2001. These claims have not been limited to the realm of scholarly speculation, with President Clinton’s (1993) declarations on the link between democracy and peace among the most oft-cited reference points. 2 As David Swartz has nicely summarized it, symbolic practices of disinterest deflect attention away from the interested character of practices and thereby contribute to their enactment as disinterested pursuits. Activities and resources gain in symbolic power, or legitimacy, to the extent that they

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Notes become separated from underlying material interests and then go misrecognized as representing disinterested forms of activities and resources. . . . Symbolic capital is a form of power that is not perceived as power but as legitimate demands for recognition, deference, obedience, or the services of others. (1997: 43)

3 It might be argued that formulating the issue as one of belief only serves to reproduce many of the rationalist dilemmas that Owen’s analysis seeks to overcome, but this is not an argument that will be pursued here. For a general treatment along these lines, see Laffey and Weldes 1997. 4 This definition is also essentially accepted by Kahl (1998/9: 111), as should be apparent, it also has clear links to the liberal legacy discussed in Chapter 1. 5 Consider in these terms the shift from ‘classical’ laissez-faire economics to that of Keynesian liberalism which has received so much attention in international political economy. See, for example, Polanyi 1946 and Ruggie 1982. 6 A point explored in Fendius Elman 2000. 7 For a contrasting, Hegelian-inspired analysis of this process of recognition in international relations, see Ringmar 1996. 8 While controversial, Macpherson’s classic characterization illustrates this basic move well. As he puts it, in liberalism the self has a ‘possessive quality’ which ‘is found in its conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities. . . . The human essence is freedom from the wills of others and freedom is a function of possession’ (1962: 3). Macpherson’s formulation has often been criticized, particularly as being centred too narrowly around the rise of capitalism, and I do not wish to defend it wholly. But it does usefully stress how a particular form of self-recognition lies at the heart of the liberal position, and exposes some of the links between the democratic peace and the classical liberal view of subjectivity and security discussed in Chapter 1. 9 The relationship between rights and interests, and the tension between them, is of course one of the core issues around which debates within liberalism revolve, but this is an issue which can hardly be addressed in this context. For an analysis of the historical emergence of this vision of the self, see Hirschman 1977; Bellamy 1992; and Holmes 1995. 10 For a useful discussion, see Dunn 1979: ch. 2. 11 This is clearly the path taken by most rationalist-materialist, neoliberal and neorealist theories in international relations. 12 This is the essence of Kant’s critique of utilitarianism and heteronomy in ethics. See Kant 1998a. 13 It should be noted that a sole focus on Perpetual Peace is an insufficient means of demonstrating the operation of these themes in Kant’s thinking as a whole. However, since this chapter is not concerned with an explication of Kantian thinking per se, but rather with its significance for thinking about liberalism and security communities, I hope that these illustrations from Kant’s most sustained work on international politics will provide useful touchstones for the broader argument. For broader analyses of the relationship between Kantian philosophy and international relations theory, see Williams 1992; Bartelson 1995; Franchette 2000; 2001. 14 Admiration for certain forms of civil disobedience or conscientious objection seems to capture this experience, as perhaps in the case of Ghandi or Mandela. 15 A despairing and self-contradictory denial of this potential is the position of a cynical Realpolitik which in Perpetual Peace Kant famously identifies with the ‘political moralist’ (1970: 117–21).

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16 As Kant puts it: ‘Humanity in his own person is the object of respect and he can demand this respect from every other man; but he must also do nothing by which he would forfeit this respect’ (quoted in Honig 1993: 29). 17 Yielding, of course, the classic dilemmas of liberal policy in areas such as education, welfare, and voluntary euthenasia. 18 Thus, ‘Teleological self-respect (and the self-control, concealment, and discipline it implies) is what the members of Kant’s community look for in others; it is the basis of their inclusion or exclusion of others from their moral and juridical community’ (Honig 1993: 32). 19 For an incisive and very suggestive analysis of the European Union along somewhat analogous lines, see Diez 2005. 20 Or, one is tempted to continue, if reform fails and movement is impossible – as in a world of territorial states it is likely to be – then coercive reform may well be necessary and justified. The logic of ‘regime change’ is thus by no means inimical to this form of liberalism – as the stance of a number of liberal commentators towards the Iraq war clearly demonstrates. 21 Similarly, Adler has argued both that ‘the democratic peace is about . . . the spread over the world of an intersubjective liberal identity’ and that ‘the ‘‘democratic peace’’ cries for a constructivist explanation’ (1997: 347); see also Kahl (1998/9: 101). 22 Or, as Kant puts it, ‘the true courage of virtue’ requires not just dealing with the machinations of others, but ‘facing the evil principle within ourselves and overcoming its wiles’ (1970: 124). 23 For an analysis of this predictability as a goal of liberal politics, see Scheuerman 1994: 69. For a subtle explication of the role of trust in liberalism, see the analysis of trust in Locke’s thinking provided by Dunn 1990. The historical importance of this predictability and stability in the rise of liberal capitalism is traced by Hirschman 1977, a theme which remains very important today. More generally, see Hindess 1996. 24 See, for example, Kant 1998b. 25 This understanding could thus be linked to the development of security communities as a process of asecuritization – a removal of issues from the politicalsecurity agenda – explored by Ole Wæver 1998. For an exploration within liberal constitutionalism see Holmes 1995, and for a very thoughtful exploration of the history of the early American republic as an aid to understanding the democratic peace, consult Deudney 2003. 26 A theme discernible in Kant’s famous reflections on the capacity of a ‘nation of devils’ to found a state ‘so long as they possess understanding’ (1970: 112–13). 27 As Schiera has put it in an interesting, if perhaps overstated, formulation and historical treatment, ‘Institutions are nothing other than the crystallizations of the many encounters between command and obedience that occur along the two paths of legitimation and discipline’ (Schiera 1995: S14). See also the classic treatment in Oestreich 1982. 28 As he puts it in one formulation, it is necessary that an individual be sure he has not infringed upon the ‘rights of man’ if ‘he wishes to enjoy the sweet sense of having acted justly’ 1970: 129–30. 29 The link between discipline and pleasure is, of course, also at the heart of much of Foucault’s (1977; 1985) thinking, a view influenced by Nietzsche (e.g. 1968: 216 [para. 19]); see also the discussion of this and related theme in Flathman 1992: 166–205. A different attempt to reassess the importance of pleasure in politics is Zizek 1991. 30 For an interestingly and revealingly analogous view, see Morgenthau 1946; and the insightful analysis in Huysmans 1998.

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31 On the role of a fear of the return of the past, in European security see Wæver 2000. For a strong assault on the processes of ‘forgetting’ (e.g. of Western relations circa 1945–55) which have been necessary to make this claim of seamless post-war unity viable, see Enzensberger 1994. A call to take seriously the role of emotions in international security is made by Crawford 2000. 32 This view thus has affinities to the analysis of security as a form of ‘speech act’ developed by Wæver and Buzan; see Wæver 1995; Buzan et al. 1998. A stress on performativity, it should be noted, is also central to Honig’s broader analysis. 33 Again, this is illustrated in the ways in which the applicant countries mobilized precisely this rhetoric in favour of membership in NATO, thus placing the alliance in a difficult political position. See, for example, the analysis in Goldgeiger 1998 and especially Fierke 1999, and Schimmelfennig 2002; 2003. Certainly, no field is static and no actor is completely determined or powerless within it. The claims of the legitimacy and authority of one’s representation of reality (epistemic authority), and of one’s legitimate claims to speak for and on behalf of others or in the name of knowledge or culture (or democratic values) is, by its very constitution, unstable and open to challenge. Claims to knowledge and representation – the possession of symbolic and cultural capital – can always be challenged, since both it and the institutions that generate it depend upon continuing social recognition. Bourdieu’s concept of the game, with its varying forms of capital and strategies, is designed precisely to capture this fluidity. As a relational field, the cultural field of security allowed even those subordinate within it to attempt – with considerable success – to reverse or revalue the field to their own advantage. 34 For an excellent analysis of how the theme of ‘civilization’ was mobilized in the creation of solidarity both within the alliance and in relation to those outside it (particularly the ‘candidate’ states) in the Kosovo conflict, see the cross-national study provided by Gheciu 2005a. 35 Kant’s phrasing is again indicative of the dynamics at work; as he puts it in relation to states that have not yet entered into the pacific federation: ‘We might thus expect that civilised peoples, each united within itself as a state, would hasten to abandon so degrading a condition as soon as possible’ (1970: 103). 36 As Bourdieu puts it, faith in the habitus of the field itself is a (tacit) precondition for entry into and successful action within it. This is most clear in all the small acts of the habitus: The countless acts of recognitions which are the small change of compliance inseparable from belonging to the field, and in which collective misrecognition is ceaselessly generated, are both the precondition and the product of the functioning of the field. They thus constitute investments in the collective enterprise of creating symbolic capital, which can only be performed on condition that the logic of the functioning of the field remains misrecognized. That is why one cannot enter this magic circle by an instantaneous decision of the will, but only by birth or by a slow process of co-option and initiation which is equivalent to a second birth. (1990: 68) Strategically, the universality and temporality of the democratic peace also allows for extension in both space and time: movement and expansion outwards and in an historical process. This allows for manipulation and gradualism, as well as inclusion, the idea that while the process is moving forward it cannot be assumed to be natural and must always be worked at. On the importance of tempo in the enlargement process, see Wæver 2000.

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37 This is precisely the stance adopted by NATO regarding the enlargement of the alliance. Even more revealing is the overtly ‘pedagogic’ nature of many of the broader programmes which the alliance has undertaken in respect to the Partner and Candidate countries. For an excellent and detailed empirical analysis of these practices, see Gheciu 2005b. 38 For an extended criticism of such approaches, see Thompson 1992, chapters 1 and 2 especially. 39 Specifically, it is by not excluding the others, but by including all (in principle) in the universal moral community, that power is exercised. If the outsiders were wholly outside, truly Other, there would be no moral relationship and no claim upon responsible selves to treat them in any necessary way. But by including them not by a matter of choice (which could be portrayed as a power play on the part of those granting the status, and thus rejected by the other: ‘we don’t want to be a member of your community and don’t care what you think’), but by making membership in the community a matter of universal right which can never in principle be extinguished and which can only be contingently be withheld as a result of the wilful unworthiness of the other – the onus is placed upon the other to live up to that inclusion. 4 From alliance to security community: NATO 1 The most prominent of these neorealist claims was, of course, Mearsheimer 1990; see also Waltz’s pessimistic view on NATO’s future quoted in Risse-Kappen 1996: 363. More generally, see Snyder 1991: 124–5; Walt 1987: 17–26; Katzenstein 1996; Risse-Kappen 1996; Duffield 1994; Hellman and Wolf 1993; Wallander 2000. Though it should be noted that many pessimists, including Waltz, were remarkably vague concerning just how long the ‘eventual’ decline and disappearance of the alliance might take. The literature on the evolution of NATO is voluminous; for broad treatments see Goldgeiger 1998, and Asmus 2004. 2 Contrast to John Ruggie’s stress that the term ‘multilateral is an adjective that modifies the noun institution’ (1993: 14). 3 At least in terms of the effective social mobilization; this does not imply that the accused in such a setting necessarily recognizes the legitimacy of the process, or the judgement. 4 The stress in this statement is somewhat narrower than Bourdieu’s, though Buzan and Wæver do acknowledge the possibility of alternative sites of enunciation, even if existing institutions usually possess a strong advantage in the competition for authority. 5 On modernity, trust and institutions, see Giddens 1990. Adler also points to this dynamic in discussing the conditions under which epistemic communities can become politically effective when he writes that it is necessary that ‘the community members are trusted as bearers of legitimate knowledge’ (1991: 65). But it is important to note that this trust must operate at two levels, both within the epistemic community, and between that community and its relevant social and political spheres; on these issues, see also Bigo 2000. 6 Interestingly, these issues were not unfamiliar to Hans Morgenthau, whose understanding of the relationship between mores, norms, and law was central to his appraisal of the limits and potential of international law. For a discussion, see Williams 2005: 187. 7 For two analyses, see Wendt 1994 and Weldes 1999. 8 Work on the domestic sources of international institutions (Barnett and Levy 1991) is relevant at this point. 9 Grasping the state as an institution rather than as a ‘unit’ or as an ‘actor’ in this sense is obviously crucial as well. There are connections here to analyses stres-

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sing meaning, the contextual nature of rationality and roles in foreign policy; see, for example, Barnett 1993; Hollis and Smith 1990. This focus on the narrative construction of identity could also be linked to a theory of action via the concept of roles and what institutional theorists have termed a ‘logic of appropriateness’. See March and Olsen 1989; 1998; DiMaggio and Powell 1991; Scott and Meyer 1994; and for a critique in IR, Sending 2002. See also Wendt 1996. For a variety of views on this issue see Nathanson 1988; Dalby 1989; Klein 1990; Harries 1993; Constantinou 1995; Mutimer 1996; Neumann 1999. The most emphatic prediction that this would be the case was, of course, Mearsheimer 1990. For an analysis that a process of ‘renationalization’ was taking place, see Honig 1992. See also Art 1996. For an overview of the situation in the early 1990s, see Menon et al. 1992. See, for example, Morgan 1993; though Morgan’s stress on the importance of cooperative and procedural ‘habits’ in the alliance might usefully be theorized in terms of practices. Similarly, Robert McCalla’s (1996) rendition of rationalist regime theory might be reinterpreted in Bourdieuian terms. To regime theorists, he notes, the persistence of NATO can be explained by the fact that its members spent forty-five years learning how to work as a long-term coalition through a sophisticated political and military structure. NATO members can thus be expected to turn first to existing mechanisms and procedures when confronted with new problems rather than creating new non-NATO institutions. The presumption is that actors will be disinclined to abandon sunk costs (political and economic) of existing institutional arrangements, turning instead to a mechanism (NATO) that already works. Developing new institutions or consultative frameworks entails start-up costs; NATO’s appeal is that these costs have already been paid. (McCalla 1996: 464)

16

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18

19

McCalla notes that NATO begins to ‘modify’ itself drawing upon the previously neglected Articles 2 and 4 of its charter. What his analysis, and others along these lines, fails to note is how this involves exactly the use of existing capital, and a process of its conversion, by NATO along exactly the kind of lines Bourdieu suggests. NATO 1988: x1–4. See also, for example, NATO 1990a: x20. This reaffirmation of ‘permanent principles’ pervades the conclusion of the Communique´. Similarly, 1991’s New Strategic Concept noted significantly that NATO ‘ensures that no single Ally is forced to rely upon its own national efforts alone in dealing with basic security challenges’ (NATO 1991b: x17). NATO’s insistent pledges of continuity and commitment act, in the words of DiMaggio and Powell, as ‘cognitive guidance systems, rules of procedure that actors employ flexibly and reflexively to assure themselves and those around them that their behaviour is reasonable. Far from being internalized in the personality system, the content of norms is externalized in accounts’ (1991: 21). Or, as stated by the British foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, in 1948, the Soviet challenge could only be met by: ‘organizing and consolidating the ethical and spiritual forces of Western civilization. This could only be done by creating some form of union in Western Europe . . . backed by the Americans and the Dominions’; cited in George and Borawski 1993: 475. See, for example, Wo¨rner 1988; 1989b; 1989c: 2. As McCalla notes, this concern was also driven by the desire of NATO to ‘undermine the efforts of the

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26

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OSCE and WEU efforts in this area’ (McCalla 1996: 459) and so combat the challenge which these institutions posed to NATO’s own position. I am conscious at this point of the danger of presenting this process in too instrumental a fashion, but I hope that the scope of the analysis compensates somewhat for the absence of a more detailed analysis of practices that a full field analysis would require. For an excellent step in this direction, see Gheciu 2005b. I am grateful to Vincent Pouliot for stressing this point to me. See also the very revealing discussion entitled: ‘What is NATO?’ (NATO 1996). See also the off-the-record account of the influence of Franklin Roosevelt’s postwar vision on Clinton’s aspirations in Walker 1997. Schimmelfennig (2004) captures certain dimensions of this process by appealing to Goffman’s concept of ‘shame’. My suggestion is that the structures and strategies involved are both broader and deeper. For an excellent, broader analysis, see Gheciu 2005b. The recent upsurge in the respectability of ‘empire’ in recent parts of AngloAmerican political discourse provides an interesting counter-point to this formulation, a shift in which the ‘civilizing mission’ of the liberal peace plays a key role. See also Flanagan 1992. Consider also Holsti’s words: The essential idea – it has not been contested – is that the ‘East’ will now become like the ‘West’. If it does – and this will be a very long-term and uncertain project – we may see develop a vast zone of peace, modelled on that of Western Europe. (Holsti 1994: 40–1. See also Ikenberry 1996)

27 Further analyses of the relationship between the West and Soviet domestic transformations can be found in Evangelista 1995; Herman 1996; Neumann 1996; Checkel 1997. 28 In the words of one commentator, if prior to 1985 the overarching object of Soviet foreign policy had been to strengthen the ‘positions of socialism’ at the expense of the West, by 1989 a new goal – to secure Soviet admission to the elaborate collection of institutions that constituted the Western economic and political system – had arisen to take its place. (Blacker 1993: 188) 29 See also Kozyrev 1992. Broader analyses of this position include Checkel 1997: 103–4; DeNevers 1994: 23–7; Neumann 1996: 180–3; Herman 1996: 310. 30 Pravda, 9 May 1985. 31 De Nevers 1994: 23. De Nevers’ account of the trajectories of Russian debate is in many ways analogous to that covered here, and provides useful detail. 32 On the OSCE process, see Adler 1997: 268–77. This also reflected the institutional battle, won largely by NATO, whereby the alliance was positioned as the core institution in the new security field, not as a military anachronism, and whereby other institutions such as the OSCE and WEU were placed in positions in the field subordinate to that of NATO. 33 Again, see the in many ways complementary analysis of the EU incisively pursued in Diez 2005. 34 Citing approvingly Markus Fischer’s claim that this is the case; see Mearsheimer 1994/5: 40; Fischer 1992: 430. 35 In Thomas Risse-Kappen’s view, for example, ‘the Western Alliance represents an institutionalization of the transatlantic security community based on

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common values and a collective identity of liberal democracies’ (1996: 395. See also Kahl 1998/9), and the enlargement process is seen as an extension of the ‘pacific federation’ of Atlantic democracies represented by the ‘democratic security community’ that is NATO. The end of the Cold War, he argues, not only does not terminate the Western community of values, it extends that community of values, it extends that community into Eastern Europe and, potentially, into even the successor states of the Soviet Union, creating a ‘pacific federation’ from Vladivastock to Berlin, San Francisco, and Tokyo. (Risse-Kappen 1996: 396) Enlargement, it seems, is in this view a natural and innately progressive outgrowth of NATO’s essential identity as a ‘democratic security community’. 5 Culture wars 1 See, for example, Berghan 2001; Storr Saunders 2000; my thanks to James Vaughn for bringing these works to my attention. 2 Treatments of the early evolution of neoconservatism include Blumenthal 1986; Dorrien 1993; Steinfels 1979; more recent studies are Ansell 1998, Friedman 2005; Gerson 1996; Schoenwald 2001. In terms of foreign policy, differing appraisals of the early period can be found in Ehrman 1995 and Sanders 1983; significant recent contributions are Daalder and Lindsay 2003; and Halper and Clarke 2004. 3 Indeed the question of whether there is such a thing as ‘neoconservatism’ or a neoconservative movement has itself become a source of contention as a dimension of broader debates over the direction and outcomes of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. For recent ‘neoconservative’ denials that such a thing exists, see Boot 2004 and Brooks 2004a, as well as the older discussion in Lipset 1988; a sharp rejoinder is Lind 2004. I will here focus on a specific philosophic/cultural strain within neoconservative thinking. There is also an important techno-strategic dimension, associated particularly with the Revolution in Military Affairs. I am indebted to participants in a PISP seminar at the University of Chicago for a helpful discussion of these issues. 4 For a treatment of conservatism in international relations, see Welsh (2003). 5 ‘A ‘‘good life’’’, Kristol comments, ‘has thus come to signify a satisfactory ‘‘lifestyle’’ – just another commodity that capitalism, in its affluence and generosity, makes available in a thousand assorted varieties, to suit a thousand tastes’ (1983: 117). For the fullest exposition of these themes, see Bell 1978. 6 In interesting ways, this stance reflects a criticism of a narrowly utilitarian or technical version of the ‘liberal sensibility’ surveyed in Chapter 1, thus showing how these historical issues possess considerable contemporary resonance and relevance. 7 In addition to the influences of capitalist commodification and liberal intellectuals, Kristol seems to trace this in part to the development of ‘urban democracy’ and a loss of the balance between rural traditionalism and urban experimentation that previously kept both in a creative tension (1983: 62–6). In any case, the ‘bankruptcy was inevitable, and we have seen it come in our own time’ (1983: 117). 8 For a very clear statement of the analogous Straussian position here, see Pangle 1983. 9 As Philip Selznick (1995: 23) put it, for Kristol, ‘irony is appropriate, but a sense of tragedy is not’. For a much broader reading of how e´migre´ political thinkers sought to come to terms with this broad crisis in elements of post-war

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10 11 12 13 14 15

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American political science, see Gunnell 1993; and Katznelson 2002. More broadly, see Hawthorne 1990. For a broader, non-neoconservative, account of the place of virtue in liberalism see Berkowitz 2000. See also the important studies by Hirschman 1977; Gunn 1969; and Pocock 1975. The latter point resonates with the position developed in Fukuyama 1995. Kristol 1978. For Arendt’s influence on Jeanne Kirkpatrick, see Ehrman 1995: 115, 117–18. This has also been a key theme of Straussian political theorists; see, for example, the divergent positions in Horowitz 1986 and Jaffa 1984, along with the criticisms of Wood 1988 and Drury 1997. For an exploration of this lineage, in a huge and diverse literature, see Howe 1997. As Irving Kristol phrases it, his is a recovery of an older liberalism: What we call ‘liberalism’ in the United States is now something quite different from the liberalism of the old Progressive-reform impulse. It is so different, indeed, as to have created a cleavage between those who think of themselves as ‘old liberals’ – and are now designated as ‘neoconservatives’ – and the new liberals who are in truth men and women of ‘the Left’ in the European sense of that term. (1983: 209)

16

17 18

19 20 21 22

23 24

Or, as he puts it elsewhere, ‘to become a neoconservative all one had to do was stand in place’. A key formulation of this theme, influential upon Irving Kristol and many other neoconservatives, is put forward in Trilling 1965; Ehrman 1995: 119–20, traces it to the influence of Joseph Schumpeter (1950). For an insightful analysis, see Lasch 1991: 412–532. This is not to say that these themes cannot also be found in Straussian approaches, as witnessed by the extraordinary popularity of Bloom 1987. The important point is to avoid reducing either to too-narrow approaches. A good illustration of the pervasiveness of this theme is Wattenberg (1995). On the importance of ‘character’ see Bennett 2000. As both Foer 2001 and Lind 2004 argue, albeit in very different ways, ‘national greatness’ neoconservatism has developed into a distinctly ‘ideological’ stance, separable from specific individuals. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the two most prominent journals founded by Irving Kristol were, of course, The Public Interest and The National Interest. There are, it should be noted, remarkable similarities here between this position and that espoused by the New Labour government in the UK. For a telling analysis of this dimension of Blairite foreign policy see Abrahamsen 2005. The phrase is from Wattenberg 1995. Though it must be emphasized that winning this battle of ideas is seen as crucial by neoconservatives, and they have taken it more seriously than any other constituency and have marshalled extensive resources in support of the project. To provide only one example, the American Enterprise Institute provides a home for scholars like Michael Ledeen – a PhD in philosophy and history, who holds the Freedom Chair, and writes on Machiavelli and the poet-politician D’Annunzio as well as on public policy issues. The intellectual roots of many prominent neoconservatives are traced variously in Halper and Clarke 2004. The role of Jewish intellectuals in the movement in particular is the focus of Friedman 2005. For a revealing discussion, see Caesar 2000. For Brooks, the ‘bobos’ are often (faux-affectionately, condescendingly) laughable; for the more ‘attack dog’ segment of the movement, such as Ann Coulter

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2003, they are risible and even ‘treasonous’. The evolution of the idea of a New Class, its adoption by neoconservatives, and some of its inherent tensions, is also assessed in Lasch 1991: 466–532; and in Kline 2005. 25 This divide between ‘Straussian’ and ‘Souza’ neoconservatives like Brooks has been acutely analysed by Lilla 2004. 26 In addition to being a prominent historian (of the Victorian ‘virtues’ in particular, 1992; 1995), Himmelfarb is also, of course, the wife of Irving Kristol and the mother of William Kristol. 27 In international terms, Brooks makes an equally revealing claim. Clearly contrasting America to what in the charged political atmosphere of the conflict in Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld had famously derided as ‘old Europe’, Brooks claims that: Middle Americans may not be contemplative or dark and brooding. We may not be rooted in a deep and mysterious past. But we do have our heads in a vast and complicated future, and that gives the American mind a dimension that is not easily understood or dismissed. (2005: 281)

28

29 30

31

The shifts from ‘middle Americans’, to ‘we’, to the ‘American mind’ are revealing, for as Bourdieu has argued, ‘The usurpation which consists in the fact of asserting that one is capable of speaking in the name of is what authorizes a move from the indicative to the imperative’, and as a consequence: ‘In the symbolic domain, takeovers by force appear as takeovers of form. . . . When an apparatchik wants to make a symbolic takeover by force, he shifts from saying ‘‘I’’ to saying ‘‘we’’’ (1991: 213). There are also, of course, important material dimensions to these alliances, particularly to the amount of financial support given to neoconservative thinktanks by wealthy patrons, and broader links to economic and media interests. A full field analysis would have to account for all these dimensions. For an early and still valuable analysis, see Sarah Diamond 1995; as well as Mickelthwaite and Woodridge 2004. Frank (2004) captures the tenor of these alliances with wit and accuracy. For a very interesting analysis, see Croft 2006. As William Kristol (2003b: 1) argues, for example, although ‘material interests and geographical and historical characteristics of nations’ are important, ‘The nature of a regime is crucial, rather than some alleged underlying, geographically or economically or culturally determined ‘‘national interest’’. The priority of the political order implies a morally informed American foreign policy.’ In Michael Ledeen’s notable phrasing: Whenever I hear policy-makers talking about ‘stability’, I get the heebiejeebies. That is for tired old Europeans and nervous Asians, not for us. In just about everything we do, from business and technology to cinema and waging war, we are the most revolutionary force on earth. We are not going to fight foreign wars or send our money overseas merely to defend the status quo; we must have a suitably glorious objective. We are therefore not going to stick by a government that conducts foreign policy on the basis of Realpolitik. Without a mission, it is only a matter of time before public opinion will turn against any American administration that acts like an old fashioned European state. Just ask Henry Kissinger. That is why I find the realist position highly unrealistic. (2000: 36)

32 The chief villain here, of course, is usually again Henry Kissinger.

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33 Or, for that matter, from its reduction to commercial interests alone, which overlooks the primacy of politics. See, for example, Kristol and Brooks 1997. 34 The phrase is from Michael Gove’s (2004: 278) description of Kissinger. 35 Or, for that matter, in providing the preconditions for successful market economies; see Kristol 1978, and from a different perspective, Fukuyama 1995. 36 For a neoconservative claim that realism, liberalism, and democratic globalism of the Bush administration have formed three clearly divergent approaches to the post-Cold War era, see Krauthammer 2005. 37 As Adam Wolfson (2004: 224) puts it, neoconservatives are not, unlike libertarians or the New Right, wholly hostile to the welfare state; in their eyes ‘The problem of the welfare state has less to do with political liberty than with the spectre of moral corruption’. 38 This also accounts for the fact that while in International Relations the concern with ‘postmodernism’ has been at most a marginal issue, for neoconservatives it has been an object of intense criticism as an exemplification of the heights of decadence. For a scholarly treatment, see Devigne 1994. 39 The power of this move was, of course, also clearly illustrated in the attacks upon John Kerry’s anti-war activities in the latest presidential election campaign. For an insightful analysis, see Frank 2005. 40 As Frank notes: It [the backlash] must have a haughty and despicable adversary so that its battle on behalf of the humble and victimized can continue. And culture – that infinitely malleable malefactor, upon which any evil design can be projected – is the only plausible oppressor left. Not only plausible. The existence of profound, all-corrupting liberal cultural influence is an absolute ontological necessity if conservatism is to make any sense. (2004: 136) This in many ways echoes the analysis of Lasch 1991. 41 Cataloguing culture war volumes along these lines could go on for a tediously long time; in addition to the prolific writings of, for example, Ann Coulter, the military/war metaphor is revealingly deployed in Maglis 2005. In its most extreme forms, the association is made between radical Islam and Al-Qaeda and the American Left, as in Horowitz 2004. In a cover endorsement for this book, former Director of the CIA James Woolsey writes Horowitz masterfully portrays the Hitler-Stalin Pact of our time. The totalitarian movements we defeated in the twentieth century have mutated. Now Islamist fanatics and today’s far Left make common cause to the same end as their predecessors – the destruction of freedom. 42 Perhaps ironically, there are certain interesting resonances here between the neoconservative vision of the adversary culture and the analysis of the academic field that Bourdieu develops in Homo Academicus. 43 This also comes wrapped up in the exploitation of a set of social structures. Casting university or media critics as immediately suspect members of a counterculture authorizes the demand that these critics be ‘objective’, since they are intellectuals who teach – and who can be charged with the public crime of corrupting the youth. Importantly, this is a charge to which many neoconservatives are not subject. Working in highly intellectual but privately funded think-tanks, they are able to wage the battle of ideas without concern for the niceties of liberal academic values which they so frequently accuse their

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opponents of traducing. This is a source of considerable structural power in debates, a very effective strategic reversal within existing fields of power. 44 The title of an influential 1982 neoconservative analysis of the relationship between the breakdown of social mores and crime and insecurity in American cities; see Wilson and Kelling (2004: 151–66); see also Kline 2005. 45 The degree to which this politics of virtue has come to dominate political discourse can be seen in Howard Dean’s express call for the Democratic Party to adopt a ‘values’ agenda. Similarly, in a recent issue of Dissent, Michael Kazin argues that ‘as in all attempts to revive the self-confidence and sharpen the purpose of the American Left, one needs to talk about the world in unapologetically moral terms’ (2006: 53). See also Jimmy Carter’s (2005) latest book, revealingly entitled Our Endangered Values. Conclusion 1 See also Bially Mattern 2005a: conclusion. 2 This is not to suggest that this was somehow an aberration, and that rationalist and materialist forms of realism were more ‘realistic’ – the same analysis can be applied to problem-solving forms of realism. 3 As in Alexander Wendt’s famous attempt to demonstrate that anarchy is what states make of it. See also Widmaier 2005. 4 One might suggest that, in Bourdieu’s terms, there was an ‘interest’ in this misrecognition, since it provided constructivists with significant capital within the academic institutional field. This is not, however, a speculation I will pursue here. 5 See, for example, the exchanges around Cox 2005 in Pouliot 2006b and Cox 2006. 6 There are a number of potential links here to diverse recent analyses under the label of ‘empire’ (Hardt and Negri 2002; Barkawi and Laffey 2003), or specific forms of global governance/governmentality (Larner and Walters 2004). 7 On this theme, see again the interesting interpretation of Nietzsche – often considered a paramount critic of liberalism and liberal subjectivity – provided in Flathman (1992: 187) As is well known, towards the end of his life Foucault also displayed an increasing appreciation of liberal principles and structures; for an interesting analysis see Miller 1994. 8 Indeed, it could persuasively be argued that a recognition of its constructed nature and ultimate ‘arbitrariness’ heightens – rather than obviates – the need for self-discipline, responsibility, and moderation in the maintenance of liberal political orders. On this theme, see again Flathman 1992 and Holmes 1995. I have traced this dimension of classical realism in Williams 2004; 2005. 9 On the sceptical tradition, see Popkin 1979. Again, Scheuerman 1994 provides a good overview of some of the issues involved. 10 Thus contributing also to the tendency to personalize a conflict and demonize the opposing leadership. 11 Consider the striking discussion of NATO’s role in Kosovo by its then Secretary General, Javier Solana: It is not simply moral outrage that gives us the strength we need to succeed. Outrage alone is hardly ever the basis of a sound policy. What makes NATO so united in this crisis is the fact that in Kosovo our long term interests and our values converge. For behind the plight of the Kosovars there is even more at stake: the future of the project of Europe. The conflict between Belgrade and the rest of the international community is a conflict between two visions of Europe. One vision – Milosevic’s vision – is a Europe of ethnically pure states, a Europe of nationalism, authoritarianism and

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xenophobia. This is the vision that has led to almost ten years of war in the Balkans. The other vision, upheld by NATO and the European Union and many other countries, is of a Europe of integration, democracy and ethnic pluralism. This is the vision that has turned Europe and North America into the closest, most democratic and prosperous community ever built. (Solana 1999: 2)

12 13

14 15 16

The ways in which this connects to the Bush doctrine of ‘democratic globalism’ are important. For an excellent analysis of the ways in which the failure of this expectation (and the frustrated attempt to rectify it) contributed to the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy, see Bellamy (1992). In foreign policy terms, neoconservative concerns with political modernity also underlie readings of the West as riven by a divergence between a ‘postmodern’ or ‘postnational’ Europe and a unipolar America (see, most prominently, Kagan’s Of Paradise and Power or, more concisely, William Kristol’s view that, ‘The European Union as a whole has embraced a view of the world that is postnationalist, post-historical, and extremely reluctant to use military force even in a just cause. The United States is different’). Old Europe, as a result, is seen as largely benign, although often irritating, and occasionally untrustworthy and even treacherous. Like postmodern liberals in America, however, it can become dangerous and debilitating if it leads to weakness abroad, and ultimately to danger, especially in a world where others are not postmodern (potential enemies, be they premodern or modern) and erstwhile allies are unwilling to meet the challenge due to their postmodern proclivities. In quite a remarkable leap, Krauthammer seems to portray the evolution of European security mainly as one of the (in his eyes, few) successes of the policies of George Bush Snr. For a good analysis, see Diez 2005. For a broad treatments, see Pond 2004 and Rhodes 2004. This has considerable implications for diplomatic practice that Kagan’s analysis fails to grasp. He notes, for example, that Europe effectively played on the US’s ‘liberal’ conscience to keep it engaged, and that this is ‘a sound strategy as far as it goes’ (2002: 41). But this fails to grasp the ways in which these liberal principles allowed for the extensive exercise of specific forms of power, even while constraining the exercise of other forms of power. For an important treatment of legitimacy in the international order, see Clark 2005.

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Index

academic field 32, 35–36 adversary culture of intellectuals 118, 145n Ambartsumov, Yevgeniy,on politics representing national interest 87 America 46, 105, 129; authentic, suburban 109–10; bourgeois culture still alive 103; and national greatness conservatism 101–2; remoralization of 115; rise of neoconservatism 7 American culture, authenticity in 107–12 American domestic politics 115, 116 American foreign policy 93, 102, 104, 105, 106, 144n; changes in 92; an extension of domestic politics 116, 117; neoconservative 107, 117–18; remoralization of 115; severed from values and the national interest 113 American national interest 110; exceptional but not unique 102; intellectual recovery mission 102–3, 103–4; as national greatness, a return to 106–7; policy of benevolent hegemony 102; recovery of an older liberalism 143n American national security policy agenda 121–22; since 9/11 91 American patrotism, a patriotism of ideals 101 American politics 7; one nation, two cultures 110 American Republic 100–101, 102 American society, assault on academic critics of 118 American–European relations 92, 129 anarchy 19–20 artistic field 38–39

Balkans conflict, and cultural field of security 128 behaviours, through field and habitus working together 36 beliefs, shared, perception of 44–45 Bennet, William, on American patriotism 101 bodily hexis 25, 29–31 ‘bohemian bourgeoisie’ (bobos) 109 Bourdieu, Pierre xi, 3, 23–41, 78; and acts of social magic 64–65; bodily hexis 25, 29–31; concepts of ‘habitus’ and field 4–5; on social classes and higher education 31; The Logic of Practice 26; and ‘usurpatory ventriloquism’ 109 Bourdieu, Pierre, theory of practice 120–21; elements of 24–39 Brooks, David 110; on the American mind 144n; Bobos in Paradise and On Paradise Drive 109; and the ‘bohemian bourgeoisie’ (bobos) 109, 144n Brzezinski, Zbigniew: on issue of NATO expansion 79–80; Russia, choice between nation state or multinational empire 79, 141n Buchanan, Patrick: ‘America First’ 107; paleoconservatism 106 capital 120, 124; economic 32, 33; and power (Bourdieu) 31–34; specific forms of embodied in the habitus 31; symbolic 67–68; see also cultural capital; symbolic capital capital and power, cultural and symbolic 57–58, 60 capitalism, and liberalism, success of undermined bourgeois values 99

166

Index

citizens, security of 19 classical liberalism 13–14, 15, 103, 133n; focus on rules and rights 16; and neoconservative thinking 98–99; the role of the state 14–15; selfinterest in 14; and threats 16, 134n Clinton administration, criticism of foreign policy 114 Clinton, President Bill: meeting with Alexander Lebed 28, 30–31; on NATO’s success 76 cohesion: internal, strengthened by external turmoil 58; of NATO 70 Cold War 39, 41; demise meant shift in security practices 40; ending led to threats/challenges to NATO’s security 70; rearticulation of NATO as a democratic security community 122; an unfortunate historical deviation 73–74 Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) 87–88 communist-nationalism, the counter-civilizational claim 83–85 conscience and conflict 11–18 conservatism: American 106, 107; internationalist 106–7 constructive skepticism 13 constructivism 7, 18, 122; and a concern with power 121; failure to reflect on role of culture 123; in post-Cold War Europe ix-x; and rationalism 22; structuralist 23–41, 124; see also social constructivism constructivist security analysis 1, 2 constructivist theory 22–23, 90 CSCE see Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) cultural analysis, Bordieu’s use of economic concepts 37–38 cultural capital 32, 33, 40, 90, 91, 111, 112 cultural field of security 43, 79, 89, 92, 120, 129, 130; broader constitution of 60; crucial part played by NATO 62–64; neoconservatism in 92, 106; repositioning of military and material power in 2, 132n; security as a cultural field 39–41; and transformation of NATO 6 cultural fields: linked to material practices 62; relations within and between 126

cultural power 40, 91, 112, 125; and democratic peace 40–41 cultural strategies 3, 7, 89, 131; and neoconservatism 106; a structuralist constructivism 23–41; theory of 120–21 culture 2–3, 90, 120; basic claims, ambiguities in 23; in constructivism 22; and security x, 104–6; security redefined as 74–75; security and the struggle with liberal modernity 94–98 culture and identity 9, 10 culture, strategy and security 8–21; conscience and conflict 11–18; security, knowledge and rise of the liberal sensibility 10–11; subjectivity, sovereignty and security 18–21 culture-security relationship 131; and neoconservatism 93 Davydov, Yuriy 88 decadence: cultural logic of 131; in liberalism 114–15, 145n democracy 46, 96–97; continuing prevalence of 42; or empire, framing Russia 79–89; liberal democracy, Russia 82–83 democratic globalism policies 93 democratic peace 40–41, 43–53, 54, 60, 76, 125, 136n; articulation of an aspirational identity 5; characteristic of stable democracies 58; and a disastrous past left behind 57; exploring dimensions of 42–43; liberal theories based on processes of recognition 47–51; question concerning the democratic ‘us’ 45–46; role of identity and recognition in its construction 43–47 democratic security community 77, 122, 123 disciplinary ‘interests’ 56–60 discipline: judgement of 124–28; pleasurable commitment to 54 disciplined subjectivity 54; essential to social life 126; a goal of liberal politics 55–56, 137n; Kantian liberalism and construction of 51–53; and process of selfconstitution 58–59 disinterest: strategies 39, 43, 52, 60; symbolic practices 135–36n

Index economic liberals 114 epistemology, Kantian 55–56 EU (European Union) 82; William Kristol’s view 147n Europe: emergence of coercive military strategy under Bush worrying 130–31; move towards postmodern politics of ‘paradise’ 128–29; and Russia 82–83, 84, 86; security practices post-Cold War 130 European security order 123, 128 European/American security relations, tensions in 128 expertise, revaluing the field of 118–19 field(s) 27–28, 35, 93; and capital 31–34; notion conveyed through analogy of the game 27, 40; revaluation of by NATO 75–76; structure of 38; struggles in 34; symbolic 78; see also academic field; artistic field; cultural field of security; cultural fields; habitus and field; security field foreign policy: liberal 126–27; realist 113; Russian options 83–89; see also American foreign policy Frolov, Vladimir, on Russian NATO policy 89 games, analogy of 27, 40 Gorbachev, M.: new analyses of the West 81; Perestroika, stress on Europe as cultural whole 81–82; and policy of de´tente 82; on Russia’s natural home 85–86 habitus 25–26, 28–29, 34, 37, 124; and bodily hexis 29–31; embodies specific forms of capital 31; a set of dispositions 25; small acts of 60, 138n; a sociological concept 26; a state of body 25 habitus and field 25–31; capital and power 31–34; concepts of 4–5; field 27–28; habitus 25–26; interests and strategies 34–36; Lebed’s reaction to President Clinton 30–31; strategies 36–39; structures of power and struggle 31; see also field(s) hedonism 96 Hobbes, Thomas 12 Holmes, Stephen, on self-interest 14, 17

167

Honig, Bonnie 48–50, 51; on liberal respect 50; on reverence-respect 49, 136n; on teleological respect 49–50 humanity and respect in Kantian liberalism 50, 137n identities: legitimate, bound to role and structures of power 68–69; militaristic aristocratic, assault on 15, 134n identity 69, 102; American, central to role and influence of neoconservatism 111; heroic, stripping away 15; liberal 5 identity crisis 6 identity, narrative and symbolic power 68–70 identity and recognition 54; role in construction of the democratic peace 43–53 identity-security relationship 9, 74 ideology, and modern politics 94–95 individuals: and modern liberalism 96; and other selves 47–48 institutions 66; acting as fields of force 65; confer identity 68; and symbolic power 62–68 interest 95–96; rationalist-materialist vision 4 interests and strategies 34–39; interest, Bourdieu’s definition 35; interests always constituted in specific fields 35; seen as central to cogent theory of practice 34 international relations 1, 2–3, 34; criticism of rationalist theories 18 interventions, worrying dynamic of liberal position 127–28 Iraq: strains between Europe and America 128; telling attempt to wield symbolic/cultural power 131 Kagan, Robert: Of Paradise and Power 128–29; on postmodern, modern and premodern world divisions 129; see also Kristol, William and Kagan, Robert Kant, Immanuel 52–53, 60; different forms of respect 49–50; Perpetual Peace 42, 43, 49, 136n; tension between recognition and respect 48–51 Kantian liberalism 5, 47; dynamic of liberal discipline 52–53; a political

168

Index

practice 48; and practices of power 43; precludes a radically exclusionary community 51–52; processes of identity construction 43; tension between recognition and respect 48–51 Kantian liberalism, and construction of disciplined subjectivity 51–53, 126; and coercive reform 53, 137n; crafting a self worthy of respect 51; and the practices of moral inclusion 51–52 Kantian peace, security community of 54–60 Kirkpatrick, Jeanne 116 knowledge 12 knowledge claim and social strategy 107–8 Kozyrev, A. 86; important to understand that CSCE won the Cold War 87–88; message to first meeting of NACC 85; on NATO and partnership 87 Kristol, Irving 100, 101, 111; on bourgeois populism in the USA 103, 108; on bourgeois thought 97; on criticisms of liberal modernity 97; on modern politics 94–95; recovery of an older liberalism 143n; on secular liberalism 117 Kristol, William, view of the European Union 147n Kristol, William and Kagan, Robert: on American foreign policy 113, 144n; remoralization of American foreign policy 115 Lebed, Alexander (Russian security chief), meeting with US President Bill Clinton 28; unexpected reaction to the President 30–31 liberal community 55; constitutive role of the past in maintenance of 56–57; exclusion and inclusion 59; inclusion, through principles and actions 59, 138n; process of selfconstitution 58–59; transformations required of applicants not merely rhetorical 59–60 liberal constitutionalism 56 liberal identity, nature of 5 liberal left, assault on 114–18; criticism of liberal rationalism and economism 114

liberal modernity: experiencing a predicted crisis 97, 142n; and neoconservatism 94–98 liberal peace, theory of 127; processes of prior recognition 47–48, 136n liberal political norms 52, 55 liberal politics, dilemmas of 50 liberal practices, of neutrality and respect 77 liberal respect 50, 51; tension with teleological respect 77 liberal security community(ies): contemporary, NATO 56–58; insights into constitutive elements of 54; not immune from operation of power 126 liberal self, and tolerance 52 liberal self-identity: and common identity 57; see also self-identity, Kantian liberal sensibility 10 liberal subjectivity 55, 126 liberal theory 48 liberal virtues 98–99 liberal-democracy(ies) 44–45; do not fight each other 43–44; Oren’s view 46 liberalism 20; American 114–15; contemporary, self-destructive paradox of 98; European liberalism, divergence from Scottish Enlightenment 98–99; recognition of liberal-democracies 44–45; secular 117; vacillation between imprudent vehemence and supine complaisance 126–27; see also classical liberalism; Kantian liberalism; modern liberalism liberals, misunderstand nature of international politics 114 Locke, John: empiricism and commitment to voluntarism 13; vision of knowledge 12–13 logic of appropriateness 68, 140n logic of cultural decadence 131; positioning of left and liberal opponents in 114–15 logic of inclusion, NATO and candidate states 78 logic of the loss of virtue 119 logic of political conflict, transformed into cultural conflict 115–16, 119 McCalla, Robert, on the persistence of NATO 140n

Index materialism and empiricism, in attack on innatism and essentialism 13–14 mathesis 16–17 military power, shift in international distribution 128 modern liberalism 103; alleviating problems caused by 99; at the level of the individual 96; at the level of political institutions 96; at the social level 96; neoconservative analysis of pathologies of 95–96 modernity, trust and institutions 66, 139n moral disinterestedness, as a source of power 52 moral failing, and Kantian liberalism 53 moral inclusion 51–52 moral law 49–50; a feeling of reverence-respect for 49, 56; selfdiscipline of adherence to 51; and teleological respect 49–50 moral mobilization 127 moral practice, conception of 51 morality, and the USA 116 multiculturalism 115, 118 NACC see North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC) ‘national greatness conservatism’ 101–2 national interest, realist theories endanger the American state 113–14 nationalism, in neoconservatism 101 NATO viii-ix, x, 61, 62–91, 138n, 139n; Brussels Declaration (1988) 71; civilizational analysis by Soviets 81; cohesion and public commitment at end of Cold War 70; continuation in post-Cold War world criticized 75; continued and increased centrality 62; cultural strategy: from inside to outside 75–78; cultural and symbolic power 63–64; as a democratic security community 122, 123; a disastrous past left behind 57; essential identity and history 72; evolution after the Cold War, constructivist studies 90–91; evolution and survival 3, 5–6; founding treaty 72, 140n; identity and security: NATO as a civilizational structure 72–74, 86; linked to powerful structures and

169

strategies of liberal discipline 77; London Declaration (1990) 73; ‘national interest’ in Russian relationship with 87; ‘New Strategic Concept’, portrayal of security problem 74; and the North American commitment 71, 149n; persistence of 41, 62–63, 70–72, 91, 140n; post-Cold War worries 70; potential new members could exclude themselves 78, 80, 141n; as repository of symbolic and cultural capital 90; represented as having cultural commonality 72; role in Kosovo 146–47n; in role of teacher for applicant states 77–78; and Russia 81–83; security and civilization 70–78; strongest link between Europe and N America 73; transformation of 75–78 NATO enlargement 142n; Russian reactions 63, 79, 86, 87, 88–89; study on 76–77 NATO-Russian relations 80–81, 91; in the Gorbachev years 82; Russian debates over 83–89 negative identity practice 10, 132–33n negative ontology, materialism and empiricism as 14 neoconservatism 6–7, 99, 107, 118– 19, 142n; and American national interest 102–4; approach to place of ‘interest’ in political life 95–96; assault on the liberal left 114–18; and bourgeois culture 103; centrality of values and culture 93; claims to speak for real American people 110– 11; critique of realism 112–14; early evolution 142n; and European security 130–31; and forms of symbolic and cultural power 93–94; hostility to dominance of rationalism 97–98; impact on foreign policy and security politics 111; and a internationalist foreign policy 106; links with the American right 106; not only patriotic but nationalist 101; and political modernity 94–95, 147n; positions of foreign and security policy in cultural politics 105–6; post 9/11, exercising influence on American policy 93; relational positioning, impact of 112; and the relationship between

170

Index

culture and security 93; remarkable positioning in field of ideas 118; as representative of ‘authentic’ American identity 108–9; republican virtue 100–104; resources of cultural and political renovation 103–4; seeks to revalue field of security 94; seeks to reverse the symbolic field 117; seen as the politics of ‘the backlash’ 105; stress on character in leadership 104; survived end of USSoviet confrontation 92–93; two related representational strategies 107–12 neoconservatism-liberalism relationship 95 neorealism 90 non-liberal states, justification for hostility towards 53 norms 52, 55 North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC) 75, 83 oracle effect 60–61 Oren, Ido 121; analysis and critique of the democratic peace 46–47 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) 87, 88, 141n organizations 67; providing locus for accreditation of authoritative identities 70 OSCE see Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Owen, John 44–45 paleoconservatism 106 peace, state of, to be formally instituted 53 Podberezkin, Aleksey: on NATO acquiring new strategic territory 84–85; on the Partnership for Peace 85; on Russia’s choice of foreign policy direction 83–84 political community breakdown 115 political culture research 121, 122 political identity, reduced to abstract individuality 15 political institutions, and modern liberalism 96 political practice, transformed during early modern period 16–17 political violence, removal from private or personal realm 16

political virtue 105 politics 98, 143n; American 7, 110, 115; international 114, 131; liberal 50; of moral disgust 127; and self-interested action 96–97; of virtue 116, 146n; see also American foreign policy; security politics possessive individualism 133–34n post-11 September world 6 post-Cold War era 2, 73; constructivist studies of NATO evolution 90; and European security 120, 124, 129, 130; NATO downgrading military nature of security 72; and security relations 121 power 22, 40, 66, 90, 125–26, 145–46n; American, support for expansion and exercise of 117, 129; cultural and symbolic 62, 63–64; fields of 78; institutional and symbolic and NATO’s role 70–71; liberal, disciplinary techniques of 77–78; politics and security 120; in the post-Cold War era 128–31; practices of 43; and security 8, 124–25; soft vs. hard power 120; see also cultural power; symbolic power power and identity concepts 21 power relations, and material capital 33 rationalism 18, 22, 23 rationalist social planning 115 rationalist theory of action, truncated 9 rationalist-constructivist controversies 23 Reagan, President Ronald 104 realism viii-ix, 112–14; deprives modern societies of the idea of national interest 114; encourages division between morality and foreign policy 113; manipulative, leads to decline 114; sufferers fate of modern rationalism 113 realists, predicted dissolution of NATO 62 recognition, power of: Kantian liberalism and construction of disciplined subjectivity 51–53; process of recognition 46; recognition as an ethical judgement 47; recognition of liberal selves and liberal states 44–45

Index recognition and respect 47–51, 77; relationship between 48–50; themes closely but ambiguously linked 50–51 reconstruction, resources of: recovery of republican virtue 98–104; liberal virtues 98–99; republican virtue 100–104 reification 9, 21; of practice 20; of rationalist-materialism, reaction against 97–98; of subjectivity 18–19 relativism 115, 118 representational strategies and symbolic power: authenticity in American culture 107–12 republican virtue 100–104; at heart of USA as a nation 103; restoration of 105 republicanism 56; American 100; civic 103 respect: in Kant’s thinking 49–50; nations worthy of 77 respect-toleration relationship, and moral superiority 52 reverence-respect 49, 56, 136n Ringmar, Erik 69 Risse-Kappen, Thomas 55, 58, 122; on the foundations of the democratic peace 45–46 Roosevelt, President Theodore 104 rule of law 55–56 Russia 79–89; 1993, new foreign policy concept 87; abandoned liberal-internationalist position 86; Communist Party reorganization 84–85; communist-nationalism: counter-civilization claim 83–85; development of mass politics 84; dilemmas 81–83; either empire or democracy, not both 79, 141n; foreign policy options 83–89; NATO seen as the aggressive bloc 81; NATO’s role in post-Cold War identity debate 63; obsession with becoming a civilized state 82; primary roles available 80–81; and the return to Europe 81–83; tried to retreat to old role of strategic nation-state 63; westernization: support for NATO 85–86 Russian ‘national interest’ 86–89 scholarship and practice, relationship between questioned 124

171

Scottish Enlightenment 99, 100 securitization 65 security 9, 10, 21, 40, 41, 74, 75; cultural logic of and neoconservatism 105–6; culture and the struggle with liberal modernity 94–98; defined in cultural terms 75; in European thought ix; and identity 102; and insecurity 19; issues linked to questions of culture and identity 104–5; and NATO 70–78; in the post-Cold War era 39; post-Cold War European 89, 120, 124; rationalist and materialist visions 18; rationalist-materialist theories 19–20; redefined as culture 74–75; and strategies of the culture wars 104–12; in terms of moral adequacy and moral deviance 127; understood as an institution 66; see also cultural field of security; state security security analysis 3–4, 121 security and civilization 70–78; identity and security, NATO as a civilizational structure 72–74; redefining security as culture 74–75 security community(ies) 125; liberaldemocratic, NATO as 77; power dimension of 125–26; see also Kantian peace, security community of; liberal security community(ies) security field 39–41, 89, 123; NATO’s role in revaluation of 79; and neoconservatism 93, 111 security institutions 67–68 security order, emerging, NATO’s place in 71–72 security politics 7, 66, 128; classical mathesis of 17; development of European security practices 130–31; important elements, late 1980s to present day 39–40 security practices 4–5, 60 security relations 2, 8, 79, 120; European/American 128; role of cultural strategies 131 security studies 1, 4, 8, 118, 124; agency and practice 9; attractions of materialism and rationalism 18; and neoconservatism 7; rationalist-constructivist controversies 23, 136n; theoretical vision post-WW2 8; traditional 17, 21

172

Index

security theories, rationalist and materialist 9 self-denial, symbolic politics of 60–61 self-discipline 56, 60; in Kantian liberalism 51, 52–53 self-identity, Kantian 53; a process of self-discipline 54–55 self-interest 14, 15, 17, 96, 98 Smith, Adam 98–99 social constructivism 121, 122–23 social life 38 social magic, in effective use of words 64–65 social power 68–69 social theory, rationalist 23 sovereignty 12, 18–20 the state, primary locus of security, authority and obligation 19 state security 18, 20–21 state-as-actor theories 18 strategic cultures, clashes of 128 strategic studies 1 strategies 40; against adversaries 112–19; characteristics of 36–37; of condescension 78; creative 38–39; and interests 34–39; most common and effective 37; overlapping with fields 37; representational 107–12 strategy: and constructivism 1–2, 22; a new political practice 16, 134n subjectivism 96 subjectivity 48–49; liberal 55, 126; reification of 18–19; see also disciplined subjectivity symbolic capital 40, 91, 112, 117–18 symbolic and cultural capital 32, 90, 112; linked positively to military power 128 symbolic power 40, 79, 90, 91, 93, 107–12, 120, 125; accumulated and exercised 61; described 33; exercise of towards the East 89; extent of 63;

and identity and narrative 68–70; and institutions 62–68; two aspects of 66 teleological respect 49–50, 77, 137n; and the moral law 49 Thompson, John, on habitus 25–26 threats 16, 74–75 tolerance, and liberal respect 51–52 toleration 77; in classical liberalism 12, 15, 17 Toulmin, Steven 10–11; and the modernist vision of knowledge 11, 133n; on those involved in religious wars 11–12 transformative knowledge practices, Hobbes and Locke 12–13 Tully, Jameson: on European religious wars 11; on John Locke 13; on new visions of scientific knowledge 133n USA see America ‘usurpatory ventriloquism’ 109, 110–11 violence 16 Wæver, Ole: analysis of securitization 65; on Europe’s Other 70 Warsaw Pact, dissolution of 82 westernization, support for NATO 85–86 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 26 Wolin, Sheldon, on classical liberalism 13 Wo¨rner, Manfred 72–73; and NATO’s North American commitment 71, 149n Yeltsin, President, called for focus on the national interest 87